We should probably admit, before anything else, that none of us is any good at autumn. The clocks go back, it is dark by roughly teatime, and every year we make a solemn plan to use the long evenings for something improving, and every year we are asleep on the sofa by a quarter past eight. So this year we have given up pretending. What follows are eight perfectly good excuses to stay in, from brands that have recently joined us, offered in the spirit in which they are intended, which is to say entirely without shame.
Something to do very little in, beautifully.
Barbara Horspool spent years running clothing at The White Company and Jigsaw, and then started Mamu Dream with her daughters, on the entirely reasonable grounds that the hours after the laptop closes deserve as much thought as the hours before it. The brand is named, we are told, after the Mesopotamian goddess of prophetic dreams, which is a great deal of responsibility to place on a pair of pyjamas, and they appear to be bearing it with tremendous composure. There is cashmere, alpaca and washable silk, in robes, knitwear and sleepwear cut so that nothing ties, pings or buttons, which, as excuses for not going out go, is about as good as they get.
A candle in a pot you will not be able to throw away.
Every pot from St Agnes Candle Co is thrown by hand from Cornish clay, in a barn on the cliffs, and fired in their own kiln before the wax goes anywhere near it. Quality control is handled by a dachshund called George, and we have not been able to establish his methods, which we suspect is the point. The candle will burn away eventually, as candles tiresomely do, but the pot is yours for good, and it is a very difficult thing to throw out, should you ever be so heartless as to try.
A bath for people who take baths seriously.
The people behind Salt + Steam spent so long looking for the bath products they actually wanted that, in 2020, they very sensibly gave up and made their own, in a North Yorkshire workshop now supervised by a labrador called Harper. The bath salts come with refill bags, so the jar on the side of the bath never has to leave, a principle we would happily extend to most things. Two of the body scrubs are called Chai Latte and French Press, which seems a little cruel to anyone who has just given up caffeine, and we say that with real feeling.
A towel that means it.
Anorak make their towels at a weighty 580 gsm, printed with lobsters, crabs and kissing foxes, and the founders still have towels from their very first collection, more than a decade old, going strong in their own cupboard, which is a good deal more than we can say for anything in ours. They are designed with wild swimming in mind. We would gently point out that a hot bath is also a perfectly respectable use of a towel and, on the whole, considerably warmer. For the truly committed there are retro sleeping bags, which Anorak suggest for sofa surfing, a sport for which we have, if we are honest, been training all our lives.
A small piece of Scotland, in a tin.
The Stirling Candle Company is named after the castle in which its founders were married, which is a great deal more romantic than the way most businesses arrive at their names, and we include ourselves in that with some embarrassment. Everything is still hand poured in their Stirling studio. The Scottish Collection is the one to look at first, Ochil Gorse, Wild Highland Heather, Gloaming Skies and Coastal Breeze & Sea Salt, in travel tins small enough to post to someone who has moved away and is, one suspects, missing home a little more now the nights are drawing in.
Something for the one who has to go out anyway.
Somebody in the house still has to be walked, whatever the weather is doing, and it seems only fair that they should be warm about it. Wag & Wool make jumpers for them in British wool and Hinchcliffe lambswool, made in England by a business run by a mother and daughter in Brighton. There are matching beanies for whoever is on the other end of the lead, a level of coordination we admire enormously, from a safe distance, without ever quite finding the nerve.
Coffee for the afternoons that go on a bit.
Snake Bite Coffee roast in small batches in Beverley, and anything they cannot sell goes to people around the town for compost, beekeeping and scrubs, which strikes us as an admirably tidy way to run things and puts our own kitchen to shame. For the long evenings in particular there is a decaf, which we recommend warmly to anyone on better terms with sleep than we are.
Cashmere, for the member of the household who never pays for anything.
We should say straight away that a cashmere jumper for a dog is not, strictly speaking, a necessity, and we have decided not to let that stand in our way. Marla Primrose make theirs in 100% Mongolian cashmere, in a thick ribbed cable knit, sleeveless so nothing gets in the way, with a discreet opening for the lead. The model on their site is Hector, a standard dachshund, who wears a medium, which is exactly the sort of detail we find enormously helpful and very slightly moving. If the Wag & Wool jumper above is for the walk, this one is for arriving somewhere afterwards and being admired.
That is eight. We did consider a ninth, but it was a third candle, and we felt the point had been made. Have a browse of everything in candles and home fragrance, or the full list of new brands, and this year, for once, do let the evenings win.
