JOY PARADE No.48
Correct Modelling Poses for Lightening Storms! Picnic Blanket Shorts! The Flammable, Elnett Majesty of Joan Cusack's Hair!
Pssst! If you are reading this via an email, the JOY PARADE might be a smidge too long for you to see all of it. If so, just click the title and it’ll take you to where you can read the whole thing with your eyeballs online!
OH HELLO!
How are you?
To be honest, I am no longer a human, I am simply a bag of wilted spinach. The heat this week has me crumbled to dust. I was up very early the other morning - practically at dawn! - to let the hounds out and it was already 28°. I flung the door open and was immediately hit in the face by the sun brandishing what felt like a scorching hot wok.
This has been me every five mins from that point onwards.
Have you all been coping? I’ve had to set up camp in the living room to sleep the last few nights because I’m currently hiring my bedroom out for use as a kiln. It’s quite fun to camp out downstairs but the dogs think I have lost my mind, which may not be too far from the truth.
Most of my week has been spent no further than 0.05mm away from a fan and thinking about ice creams, but let’s have a look at some of the other things that have gone on…
Does anyone know when the next heatwave will be? Because whenever it is I’m going to be moving into the M&S petrol station shop I popped into the other day. It was so air conditioned and so cold that I came out with not only the bottle of water I went in for, but 3 toes affected by frost bite and a bout of hypothermia. Would 100% recco
Do you remember the other week I told you about the man working in the fish and chip shop I walked past during the last bit of heat we had and he was working merrily over the boiling vats of oil in a black, roll neck sweater? Well, I stumbled past again the other day, gasping in lungfuls of soupy air in 32°sun, and you’ll be glad to know that he has transitioned to a much more seasonally appropriate outfit of a thick, jumbo cord, long sleeved shirt with a ribbed, long sleeved T-shirt underneath…
I’m thinking (as a concerned citizen) of hiring a task force to do a raid on the building and force him into some airy seersucker.
I’m sorry Washington D.C - you haven’t been the only ones dealing with a Reflecting Pool Situation™️ this week.
The sunshine caused my goldfish’s (Princess Diana) tank to bloom suddenly with grubbiness and discolour and I had to do an emergency clean out of it. Now, during a heatwave I tell you what you really want to be doing when your skin is already a boil-in-the-bag packet of rice and you are parallel to a nervous breakdown from the scorching temps outside and in, and that’s chase a bloody goldfish around a tank with a Tupperware bowl and an old ladle to evacuate her so you can scrub her home clean.
It was worth it though to see her happy face when she was returned to her sparkling abode. She’s been splashing about cheerfully ever since, humming the Changing Rooms theme tune.
Do people who go out running at lunchtime in the middle of a heatwave know they don’t have to do that? Sitting in your house with all the curtains drawn with an ice cream on the go and a copy of Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery IS an option available to them.
Did any of you get storms this week? I know there were some fantastic and terrifying lightening strikes that I would have liked to have witnessed from a safe and rubberised distance.
Lightening always makes me think of the time when I was in primary school (Year 3) and we had one of those storms without rain or really any thunder, JUST lightening. The flashes kept going off and my brain didn’t realise what was happening. I thought someone was outside taking paparazzi style photographs of us through the window so I sat up straight and kept smiling brightly and fixedly like a Miss World contestant. At one point I even posed looking casually over my right shoulder in the style of a cardigan model I’d seen in my grandmother’s Woman’s Weekly.
I had to get some cash out of an ATM this week so ducked into a bank to do so and to hide, briefly, from the SKIN SCORCHING sun. As I tripped up the steps and through the double doors I heard the sound of loud bleating.
“BAAAAAAAAA!”
It stopped me in my tracks and I actually looked around in case a lamb was following me into the bank to open an ISA. Catching sight of me looking confused, one of the staff smiled over, comfortingly. “It’s not sheep,” she said. “It’s a rook or something…”
And she pointed to the ceiling.
Then she nodded in a decisive sort of way as if all was now clear, but actually everything was perhaps even less clear than it had been...
Do rooks regularly hang out on the roofs of bank buildings, Old-Macdonald-Had-A-Farm-ing it for attention? If so, I think it needs to form part of the national conversation.
During the day this week (and because of the heat) I’ve whipped off my dogs’ collars to give them a bit of air around their necks. Every time they tip tap into the room I’ve taken to being scandalised and exclaiming: “EXCUSE ME, SIR? EXCUSE ME, MADAMES? I think you’ll find the nudist beach is over THERE!” And then point to another room.
RIGHT, now we MUST start our JOY PARADE. If he has to wait any longer in this heat, the one man band I’ve hired is going to be face down on the sizzling tarmac.
1. We start AS ALWAYS, with our BEHOLDING! and EXCLAIMING!
First up, My HYDRANGEAS! Now, what’s happened here is that I got so excited to show you them, I forgot to actually take a photo so you’ll have to use your imagination. They look like the sort of thing E the Queen M would have worn whilst graciously inclining her head at the opening of retirement village for greyhounds or something…
Thrilling!
Next LOOK! at these sunflowers!
What I like best about these are their chocolate fudge brownie centres surrounded by those mango sorbet petals. DEEPY CHEERING!
2. YES, DAVID BOWIE! LEGS, HUNNY!
Am coveting those made-from-a-picnic-blanket shorts!
3. I do not want to accept your Microsoft Teams invite. I want to be dancing with my entire being on street corners with complete strangers.
The unbridled JOY of it!
4. I am absolutely enchanted by these glass food pieces created by Japanese artist, Miwa Ito.
SO brilliant and so delicate and so FUN!
You can also watch her at work (incredible!) making a glass fried breakfast here!
Mind-boggling!
5. Joan Cusack has been in the news recently because she voices Jesse in the new Toy Story movie. I think this is a good oppo for us to just settle down for a few mins and really get stuck into the make up and hairstyle choices that were made for her in the movie Working Girl.
BOLD.
6. The colours and textures and patterns here are just terrific! Those green, cross-hatched slacks in particular are wonderful!
7. I made this White Bean Caprese Salad the other evening and it was PERFECT for the weather.
I used Bold Beans beans because they are very delish but also you can use the jars (washed, labels removed- obvz) for sweet peas that will set your hay fever off chronically but you’ve become VERY Devil May Care about that.
(Also, please don’t think for a second that I’ve been cooking up a storm this week. One meal consisted of a Magnum ice cream, a G&T and a scream with my face buried in a cushion re: the climate crisis.)
8. This dance number is enormously jolly!
(I won’t show this to the man in the fish and chip shop as I think the next stage of his bonkers outfits for wearing in a hot kitchen will be this thick velvet tailcoat.)
9. These little bird paintings by Unity Coombes are exquisite. They are available to buy individually but how could you split them up? They need to be kept all together on a wall of perhaps a summer house or an airy boathouse that opens up to views of a river.
More here
Paintings for sale here
11. This is an ideal set up for a quiet, secretive corner of a garden- an artfully distressed swan bench and a judgemental, wine swigging goddess.
PERFECTION.
(‘Judgemental, wine-swigging goddess’ would be superb on a business card.)
13. I know this is probably the very worst thing to eat in a heatwave, but these BLAST FROM THE PAST crisps are really terrif. They are SO salty and SO vinegary that you could definitely use them to embalm something in a pinch.
14. How instantly cheered would you be when you picked up your Maeve Binchy to find this bookmark peekabooing from between the pages?
Available here.
15. Here is the latest in our semi-regular series “Nuns Up To Something ™️” and this one is particularly WONDERFUL!
FINALLY…
Now, this wasn’t going to be our finale song this week because we had a 1970s masterpiece last week, HOWEVER… this is… it’s… well, it’s THIS…
I present to you the Village People’s IN THE NAVY as you have never, and I really mean NEVER seen it before…
Key points to look for:
The lead singer’s side ponytail.
The backing dancers wearing leggings/support hose that are absolutely, without doubt made from kitchen foil.
Not one of the musicians actually playing their instruments -especially the pianist who is operating that baby grand like he is a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy from an episode of Goosebumps.
The geography teacher playing the bongo drums who has no idea why he’s there but is having a delightful time.
Thank you for reading this week’s JOY PARADE and thank you all for your terrifically kind and enthusiastic response to the cover reveal for my new book on Thursday. I’m so glad to have it out in the world and terrifically excited for you to read it later in the year. As a reminder you can pre-order it here in the official PIGEON POST store, or at your favourite indie, chain or online bookshop.
I hope you have a lovely Sunday. What are you all up to? We have a birthday here - my 24ft tall (and still growing) Middle Neph turns 18 on Monday, but the festivities begin today. How he is 18 I don’t know because it seems like it was only five minutes ago that I was standing at his nursery classroom door, patting him down - airport security style -to find what items he was trying to liberate that day…
He is an excellent person and still up there amongst the most eccentric people I know. One of my fav things was when I picked him up from infant school one afternoon and discovered he’d had a substitute teacher. When I asked him what she was like it took me a moment to realise that the description he was giving me was of The Gruffalo.
Another time, his class had been incubating eggs and he came rushing to tell me they’d hatched.
Me: Oh! How lovely! What did you do with the little chicks?
Middle Neph (aged 6): “Well, I told one that Tupac had died…”
However you are spending your day, I hope it’s really lovely.
I’ll be back next Sunday with JOY PARADE No.49. In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed this JOY PARADE I would simply adore it if you were to prod the heart button ❤️ below and do please follow me on Instagram (I’m mralextsmith over there) and also subscribe to and share this newsletter to all your chums.
Thank you so much!
In Tearing Haste,
HEAD PIGEON.
Alex, Joy Parades are my ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE read of the week. And when things are particularly difficult, I re-read them and revel. And instantly feel better. Thank you, thank you.
I’ve only just started following you, and after reading that you’d whipped off your dog collars as they were too hot for the steaming weather this week, I thought ‘well well, I didn’t think he would be a vicar’. Then I re-read it, and all fell into place. V much enjoying, thank you xx