Episoder
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Are you a one book at a time reader, or a multiple books at the same time reader?
This is one of the topics we pondered.
Come join Lisbeth and me as we ask each other this and other questions, and we talk about books, our shared fascination for castles and ruins, and and we both agree about what is the truest luxury.
Lisbeth also shared some thoughts around what she calls “the many faces we have throughout time” (such a beautiful sentence that I had to make it into the headline for this podcast episode), one face as a child, one as an adult, as a spouse, and then when we are retired, how to reconcile ourselves with the face of that phase in our life. And also, we talked about how we all need to feel useful.
And you get to learn a Swedish word: Fika!
Lisbeth reads
Faust by Goethe
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
No Angel by Penny Vincenzi
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
Marie Antoinette’s Head by Will Bashor
The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham
Jorunn reads
Beartown triology by Frederik Backman
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (and will soon read Elizabeth and Her German Garden)
The Lost King of France by Deborah Cadbury. In the podcast recording, I mistakenly called this book “the lost prince” but that is an entirely different novel, The Lost King of France is about the young son of Marie Antoinette.
And of course we talked about food
Regarding the Spätzle we talk about (the ultimate comfort food if you ask me), here is a link to a recipe for Käsespätzle. Which is Spätsle with cheese, for those moments when the mouthwatering, melt-in-your-mouth deliciousness of plain Spätzle isn’t enough. It’s like macaroni and cheese, but better... And if it sounds daunting because you don’t have a Spätzle maker, look up this link for some really handy tips on how to make Spätsle without one.
How to connect with Lisbeth
Her blog is called The Content Reader and you can also find her here on Substack.
This podcast episode is free, so please share it with others who might enjoy listening!
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You don’t want to miss this episode if you would like to get inside tips on how to use dye to tweak the colours of natural fibres. Tiffany Henschel is my guest in this podcast episode, and I am in awe of how she performs miracles with dye, on delicate fibres like merino wool and silk, and she shares her inside tips in this conversation.
Tiffany uses Jacquard dye for delicate fabrics like wool and silk. For other fabrics, there is Rit dye, and also the ever popular dye that you can use in the washing machine, Dylon.
Tiffany is a True Autumn. In our conversaiton we talk about how to consider the original colour of a garment when dyeing it.
Another of Tiffany’s tips is to repurpose fabric belts as headbands:
Books that have made an impression on Tiffany
M L Longworth - A Provençal Mystery series, mystery books set in Provence
Quiet by Susan Cain
Mindset by Carol Dweck
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Evening loungewear
This was such an exciting topic that I have devoted a whole special post to it in great detail, available on July 5 for all paid subscribers!
Books that have made an impression on Jorunn
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal
How to connect with Tiffany
Tiffany is on Instagram. Look her up there, her Insta ID is @tiffanyhenschel. Click your way into to Tiffany’s style board on Pinterest, which she talks about in the podcast episode.
How to connect with me:
You can find more content from me and lots of stuff about simple and efficient dressing with Scandinavian simplicity here.
Would you like to be a guest on my podcast?
Write a DM to me here on Substack or click here to write me an email
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A conversation with Jenny Cundy, born in England, now living in rural south-west France.
Listen to Jenny tell how she met her husband Bob Cundy and became his assistant as they traveled the world creating documentaries as freelance film photographers and how they ended up settling in a small, remote village in France.
Bob passed on a few years ago but Jenny still lives in the old farmhouse that she and her husband restored, where she leads a busy life dividing her time between her large garden, her tiny pond with two frogs, costume sewing for the local English theatre and she is always ready to lend a helping hand to friends.
She recently decided to take up painting again, something she hasn’t done a lot of since photography became her career. And it is never too late, she has started taking painting classes.
Our conversation moves between reminiscing and talking about books we have read and what we both love to cook.
And clothes. For a fashion aficionado, she is very down to earth (I think gardening does that to people).
Her favourite accessory is scarves. And she always wear a curated collection of interesting bangles and bracelets.
I couldn’t resist asking for a selfie with Jenny before I left, displaying our matching sun hats in her sun-drenched courtyard:
Perfumes
We discovered a mutual love of luxurious scents, and discussed our different taste in perfumes.
Jenny’s favourites: Guerlain Mitsuko (the vintage edition), Guerlain Shalimar
Jorunn’s favourite: Frederic Malle Superstitious
Books
Jenny recently finished River Kings by Kat Jarman. In the same vein, she recommends The Ancient Paths about the Celts by Graham Robb.
She is presently reading Night and Day by Virginia Woolf.
After we turned off the recording, we returned to the topic of Virginia Woolf and Jenny talked about Virginia Wolf’s book Flush - A Biography, which is about the beloved dog of Elisabeth Barrett Browning. Barrett Browning loved her dog so much. Here is her poem called To Flush, My Dog. I hereby add Virginia Woolf’s book about Flush to my reading list, and thank Jenny for her time, it was such a wonderful conversation!
Connect with Jenny via her photos
To see some of Jenny’s food and people photos, they are available here.
How to connect with me:
You can find more content from me and lots of stuff about simple and efficient dressing with Scandinavian simplicity here.
Thank you for listening. This post is public so feel free to share it with someone who might be interested in quiet conversations about books, rescue chickens and other things that makes life worth living.
Subscribe to Nordic Simplicity, to dress like you mean it, feel like yourself and find out why cat sniffing and gardening is better than shopping for clothes:
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“We didn’t mean to have five cats, but we do”.
My kind of woman.
Cate Linden may be known to you as a colour analyst, style coach, and she also recently started training other colour analysts. Listen to our conversation where we explore the lesser known sides of Cate Linden.
Cate and I go way back. We met in New York at a colour analyst conference more than a decade ago, and we have kept in touch ever since, and together we publish videos on YouTube with colour analysis related content. Besides both of us being colour analysts, we have several things in common, among them is a love of cats, but it turned out during this conversation, as with most other deep conversations, that there were several things that we did not know about each other.
Enthusiastic polyhobbyist
Cate has many hobbies, and we found that the best phrase for this condition is “enthusiastic polyhobbyist”.
Amateur = someone who does what they love
What we also talked about is how wonderful it is to do something just because you love doing it, whether or not you are good at it! What a pleasure it is to look at these joyful paintings that Cate has made. They sparkle with creativity and colour, just as she sparkles in this photo of her.
By the way: We did not make up the phrase “enthusiastic polyhobbyist”. At comes from the movie The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the exentric painter.
And: Wain painted cats. Lots of cats. A coincidence? I think not.
Books and poets that have made an impression on Cate
The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler
Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez
The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Grilled Cajun Shrimp
Ingredients:
2 lbs raw shrimp, peeled and deveined
For the shrimp:
Cayenne pepper
Black pepper
Salt
Tabasco or Crystal
Worcestershire
Fresh parsley, minced
For the butter sauce:
2 sticks butter
Juice of 2 lemons
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, minced
Cayenne pepper to taste
2 tsp salt
1/4 cup white vinegar
4-5 dashes worcestershire sauce
4-5 dashes hot sauce (Tabasco or Crystal)
1 tsp fresh black pepper
Directions:
Sprinkle seasonings onto the shrimp and rub them in with your fingers.
For the sauce, melt the butter in a medium saucepan and add the remaining ingredients. Taste and adjust seasonings accordingly. Let the butter cool slightly (you don’t want to cook the shrimp), then pour the mixture onto the shrimp (an 8x8 dish works well for this).
When ready to grill, thread the shrimp onto pre-soaked wooden skewers and grill for 2 minutes on each side, basting generously with the butter sauce as they cook.
Excellent served with grilled vegetables or a salad.
How to connect with Cate:
You can follow Cate on Instagram (highly recommended) and for style coaching and colour analysis, you can find information and get in touch with her on her website.
How to connect with me:
You can find more content from me and lots of stuff about simple and efficient dressing with Scandinavian simplicity here.
Would you like to be a guest on my podcast?
Write a DM to me here on Substack or click here to write me an email.
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I am not only interviewing strangers. Sometimes it is lovely to sit down with a friend and listen to her story too. This is Sigrid. She is one of the coolest people I know:
My friend Sigrid Fangel who lives in the same town and we spent the better part of an hour chatting at my kitchen table.
But before we sat down, she lured me into the sea with her.
What we talked about
Sigrid is an avid chillswimmer, she swims in the sea all year. As I am fascinated by the weirdness of this strange sport, I asked if I could join her. And before you could spell goosebumps, I was swimming around in seawater, learning how to breathe calmly even though the water is only 10 degrees (Celcius, not Fahrenheit). And I survived, and grudgingly had to admit that it was strangely invigorating and I might actually do it again with her. Chillswimming will not dethrone my favourite hobbies of drinking wine and reading a book while looking out at sea, but interestingly enough it did not scare me from doing it again.
We also talked about being scared and doing it anyway, and about anxiety, and about finding your own style by just becoming yourself, and of course we talked about chickens. As one does.
The darker side of Norwegian culture
Janteloven - The Law of Jante, the unwritten Scandinavian societal norm. The Author Aksel Sandemose wrote about a fictional town called Jante, and the rules of conduct according to the Law of Jante are:
* You're not to think you are anything special
* You're not to think you are as good as we are
* You're not to think you are smarter than we are
* You're not to convince yourself that you are better than we are
* You're not to think you know more than we do
* You're not to think you are more important than we are
* You're not to think you are good at anything
* You're not to laugh at us
* You're not to think anyone cares about you
* You're not to think you can teach us anything
It’s basically a crash course in How To Acquire Impostor Syndrome. This is a part of Norwegian culture that we are not particularly proud of……
Books we talked about
Unquiet by Linn Ullmann
The eighth life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
On The Calculation Of Volume by Solvej Balle
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In this episode, my guest is Fiona Moss, whom I met when she came to Oslo for a colour analysis appointment, and we discovered we just had so much to talk about so I ended up inviting her to be a guest on my podcast, so we could continue our conversation on Zoom.
Rescue chickens
Fiona lives in England, and she loves animals. Among other fascinating topics, she introduced me to the concept of “rescue chickens”, which I have never heard of before she told me about it:
Obviously, a rescue chicken is a hen that has been rescued from an egg farm to live out the rest of her her life in pleasant surroundings instead of being put down when she is not laying enough eggs. A marvelous idea. Fiona has told me that she gets new rescue chickens, she nurses them back to health, and slowly introduces them to life in the green grass of her spacious garden, teaching them to live as a chicken should live, not in crowded conditions with 24-hour lighting. I will let you listen to her tell about it. it absolutely makes me want to adopt a rescue chicken or three. Look it up! The website of BHWT, the organisation that she gets her rescue chickens from, is this one.
For the love of vintage Scandi items
Fiona has an Etsy shop called WhatFionaLoves and you can find that here. The images are so beautiful, and if you love Scandinavian home decor it will have you drooling.
Books that have made an impression on Fiona
The books she talk about in our “fireside chat” are these ones:
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, by Margareta Magnusson
The Year of Living Danishly, by Helen Russell
Heiða A Shepherd at the Edge of the World, by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir
Later in our conversation we talk about books that inform/entertain/inspire/comfort me, and Fiona mentions the author Michael Morpurgo.
Books that I mention in this episode
Some of the books that I mention are: River Kings, by Kat Jarman. All That remains, by Sue Black. The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer. Seaside Donkey, by Hannah Engelkamp. Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition, by Beau Riffenburgh.
Enjoy listening to Fiona and check out her Etsy shop and the books she mentions. I have already decided to add all three books to my summer reading list.
How to connect with Fiona:
This is her on Substack, and this is the WhatFionaLoves Etsy Shop. You can also find her on LinkedIn.
How to connect with me:
You can find more content from me and lots of stuff about simple and efficient dressing with Scandinavian simplicity here.
Would you like to be a guest on my podcast?
Write a DM to me here on Substack or click here to write me an email.
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This podcast episode is a conversation with Michelle Adams. We had all kinds of internet problems while recording, which involved Michelle having to migrate through various rooms in her house in order to get a stable signal that allowed us to talk without the Zoom connection freezing, or the sound breaking up. Thankfully, Michelle has the patience of an angel, and I got to use this recording as a very useful practice in editing. I managed to edit away the worst stakkato noises of where the sound started breaking up, but the sound quality definitely leaves something to be desired here and there. Any disturbance in sound quality is entirely a result of my lacking ability as a sound engineer.
Michelle is what she calls a woman “of a certain age”. And one of the things we touch on in the chat is how old do you have to be to be “of a certain age”?
We also talk about books (of course), and also discussed parakeets, cockatiels and chickens as pets (as one does), and chatted about being introvert and how lovely it is to interact with the resident dog and other wallflowers instead of circulating in the crowd engaging in small talk.
We also talked about why I became a colour analyst, and we debated what Michelle shall bring on an Alaskan cruise. Sadly I will not fit in her suitcase.
Michelle reads a lot on Substack and here are her favourites:
Living Small - Laura Fenton
Southern Voice - Beth Yarbrough
Wildhood Wanted - Kristi Keller
Four Corners of the Southwest - Jan Spell
Nordic Simplicity (of course) - Jorunn Hernes
What Michelle is reading right now:
Inspire (NLT) Bible: The Bible for Creative Journaling from Tyndale Publishers
Books that have made a lasting impression on Michelle:
East of Eden- John Steinbeck
The Cask of Amontillado- Edgar Allan Poe
Macbeth- William Shakespeare
We talked about being introvert and here is the system she mentions:
Florence Littauer, who writes about 4 primary personality types: Choleric, Sanguine, Phlegmatic, and Melancholy. Her book is Personality Plus.
How to connect with Michelle
Michelle has her own substack! You can find it here.
How to connect with me:
You can find more content from me and lots of stuff about simple and efficient dressing with Scandinavian simplicity here.
Would you like to be a guest on my podcast?
Write a DM to me here on Substack or click here to write me an email.
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This is me, Jorunn, introducing my podcast.
Put down your cup of tea and submit a suggestion for someone to interview on the podcast (it could be yourself)!
And brush the toast crumbs off your sweater and request a topic to address. Just drop me a note either by email or as a DM here in Substack.
I promise I will put down my cup of tea, gently lift the cat from my lap and do a happy dance just because I will be so happy to hear from you.
Get full access to Nordic Simplicity at nordicsimplicity.substack.com/subscribe
