Helen’s 2024 Christmas missive
For friends old & new
In advance of eating and drinking all the things, a reminder that there’s still 25 percent off an annual subscription (ends 23:59 PST on Christmas Day).
We’ll do a highlights reel/year-in-review early next week, but until then we’d like to make a couple of recommendations that are entirely unrelated to lawyering, novels, trials, or commentary.
For a few years now, I’ve been getting my annual Christmas hamper (pic of one such item below) from this outfit, Forman & Field. I had vaguely heard of them in connection with the 2012 London Olympics and knew they’d been based in London for many years, but that’s all.
Years later, I had some Forman & Field smoked salmon at a friend’s dinner party and was absolutely sold. Their artisanal food is of high quality, including the best mince pies I’ve ever eaten. Even better is their selection of English fizz and cider brandy—so good I suspect they’ve been reading
over at Drinking Culture.
For his part,
of this parish in his role as C-Drama aficionado recommends Fangs of Fortune, made by the same people who did My Journey to You. Says Lorenzo: “Fangs of Fortune has lots of humour in it. Also, really vile villains. Part of the interest for me was how the villains pushed my buttons.”More widely, Lorenzo says “anything rated 8.0 or above on MyDramalist is pretty well guaranteed to be good.” Chinese-speaking audiences are discerning and alert to propaganda from any direction, while C-Drama as a genre (or group of genres really) has the entirety of Chinese literature and folklore on which to draw.
And now, Merry Christmas everyone!
Merry Christmas to you both. I'm looking forward to next year's publications, and hopefully managing to join one of your Chatham House calls. Anyway, I've opened the family-size box of chocolate biscuits, so I must go and eat the whole thing before anybody notices. It's tradition.
Merry Christmas Helen. Our Christmas Eve tradition is sushi and shrimp. My wife and I were musing how we came to that, her mother hailing from German with all their traditions.
I recommending The Holdovers as a new holiday movie, hilarious and sad all at once. Not depressing in anyway, but the timing of things really makes it an enjoyable viewing.