Lonsdale Road is also such a vibe. With places like bakery and restaurant Don’t Tell Dad, Carmel, and spots where people are just sprawled out on the street, sitting on the pavement - it genuinely feels like Amsterdam or Paris, somewhere where sitting on the pavement is just a thing.

Bar Blondie on Lonsdale Road has been on my radar from the moment I saw that it was opening. I love a wine bar. And I love a wine bar that has been opened by an award-winning sommelier that makes wine feel a little less pretentious. And with the career credentials that Alexandra Price has - general manager and head sommelier at Bar Crispin (also a big fan), most recently head of wine at Michelin-starred plant-based restaurant Plates London - you know when she puts her name on something, you're not going in blindly. So yes, I was going to trek to Queen's Park for it.

It’s hard to pinpoint which occasion I’d suggest it for - I think that’s exactly the point. It feels like an any-occasion spot. Date night, a catch up with a friend, a birthday dinner - literally anything in between. It doesn’t feel tied to any one thing.

We were initially seated inside, but it was so warm outside we moved. Sun out, drinking a glass of their driest white wine, oyster in hand, catching up with a friend - that’s peak London summer.

Everything on the menu was something I’d put on my own menu if I ever could. Anchovies, focaccia, tuna crudo, black olive tapenade, heirloom tomatoes - the list goes on. I think the menu changes often so don’t take my word for the specifics, but either way, it’s deliciously simple in the best way. Their olive cake to finish was perfect.

I have to comment on the interiors because it’s a vibe, and I need to know the designer. The blue plates, the chess-board tables, the wine glasses - felt very Copenhagen-esque. The bar, the counter seating, the terrace and the main dining room all feel like slightly different experiences, but small enough to still feel intimate.

The thing about Bar Blondie, and the thing I think most people underestimate about branding full stop: it’s not about one good Instagram post or one nice website. It’s not just about whether every touchpoint tells the same story - it’s about whether every touchpoint holds the same standard. When it works, discerning people recognise it immediately. When it doesn’t, you simply don’t align with their standard.

Eating out in London is not cheap. It’s an effort too. So intentional online branding that reflects the same standard you’re meeting offline sets the precedent - it’s the deal you’re making with someone before they’ve spent their evening and their money on you. You can notice hat Bar Blondie has been intentional with everything, and it does pay off.

Their Instagram matched the website matched the founders’ credentials matched the press coverage - and then the room and the glass matched all of it again. Nothing undercut the promise, even in their first week of opening. That’s incredibly rare, because it’s so easy for places to feel flat. So bravo to them, and whoever their team is.

And this was such a nice touch - the receipt came with a little bookmark. That sort of thing goes a long way, and yes, I could not help myself but take it with me.

I’ll be back.

Hi, I'm India…

I'm 25, half French, half English, and currently living and building The Trendie Life. Which is really just my own life, built around my love for travel, culture, creating things, meaningful experiences and honestly, just having a good time.

I never actually set out to build a brand at all. I set out to build a life I enjoyed living. One where I didn’t have to choose between being ambitious and enjoying it. One where I could live and build at the same time without needing to justify it.

Simply, I’ve just always refused to live in a way that didn’t feel true to me.

There is no blueprint for this kind of life. It’s difficult to explain. And not everyone will get it, and that’s okay.

For a long time, I didn’t have the words for the way I was living and building, mostly because instinct alone doesn’t quite translate. And, instead of wasting valuable time trying to justify why I felt like I needed to be living to be building, and building to be living, I chose to create the language, the standard and the name for a life I wish existed.

Not just for myself, but so the ones who did get it could use it too. Because I needed something that gave me permission to have freedom without sacrificing my ambition.

And I’m really quite glad that I put myself into rooms that made me notice early that freedom without ambition is just as hollow as ambition without freedom. Both are forms of losing yourself, just in different directions.

My success metric is staying Trendie in a world that wants you to be trendy. In other words, leading with your taste over trends. Not chasing someone else’s version of success that might not be your own.

True luxury to me is knowing what’s true to you, having the freedom to choose it and trusting yourself enough to lead with it. It’s having the freedom and the conviction to leave when you want to, and stay when you don’t. It’s having a local take you around their city. It’s having a table full of people you love. It’s speaking to the person next to you and learning something. It’s going back to the restaurant you really enjoyed. It’s staying for one more because you can. It’s always leaving room for spontaneity on purpose.

Which is really just the good life - choosing to find ways to live richly in your life as it is, and experiencing it fully without losing yourself in the process.

I’ve come to call this Tasteful Hedonism®. The art of choosing to live hedonistically, but tastefully. Spontaneously, but intentionally. Living fully without losing yourself. Not choosing between ambition and enjoyment, but refusing to separate them in the first place.

Trendie is permission to follow your own trend, your own standard, your own taste when everything is trying to pull you towards everything but that.

Stay Trendie x

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P.s. here’s to 20,000 people following Trendie on Instagram.
I can’t quite wrap my head around it, when this was genuinely all for fun.

I like having a plan but following it loosely. Like having a handful of solid places that never let me down, gives me the room to stumble on new ones nearby without the whole night relying on it.

The strongest sign a place is worth it isn’t “yes, glad I went.” It’s whether you’d actually go back. These are the ones I’d take a friend to who hasn’t been yet.

This is my current list. Only share the following with Trendie people please.

Petersham Nurseries, Richmond
This really surprised me when I went because I didn’t think you could feel so out of London when in London. It feels closer to eating in someone’s back garden, somewhere in the South of France. I don’t think there is anything better than walking along the river in Richmond at golden hour on a warm summer’s evening and finding yourself here (by finding yourself I do mean you ideally have a booking because this does get booked up).

Highlights: the fact you can lose complete track of time and no one is rushing you out. People are still sat at their table at the end of the night, which is exactly the kind of place I want to be in.

Best enjoyed: this does feel like more of an occasion spot, or an intimate dinner with a group of friends. If someone took me on a date here, it would be an immediate green flag.

Boro Bistro, Borough

When in doubt, go to Boro Bistro. Borough can be a lot. There is SO much choice, and actually there’s only a few places I’d recommend. I’ve been coming here for years. It’s cosy in the winter, you can sit with a blanket and a glass of red underneath a heater. And in the summer it’s a vibe. Especially for a drink that turns into dinner or even a long lunch with some rosé. I don’t think I have ever not been served by a French waiter. I love everything from the Paris Match menus and the discotheque bathrooms.

Highlights: the bathroom. And the fact it still feels like a secret.

Best enjoyed: I’ve been on dates here. Celebrated birthdays here. Taken my friends who are visiting here. Simply just gone for a drink because it’s convenient and easy. And actually really quite reasonable.

Cafe Kick, Exmouth Market

A sports bar on Exmouth Market that quite literally feels like it’s been stripped from Paris and placed in central London.

This is as simple as it gets. It’s just a really reliable place to sit and have a drink with friends with a side of people-watching. There’s a lot of choice on Exmouth Market, and places I’m still discovering, but this is a great place to start.

Best enjoyed: date night if you’re looking for something casual but chic. A night out with friends at whatever time of the night.

Vesper, A candle-lit Bistro on Exmouth Market.

A candle-lit bistro on Exmouth Market. Simply, it’s not trying to be anything it’s not. It’s just Jackson Boxer doing what he does best, making somewhere feel effortlessly put together. One of the few people who can set the tone of making white table cloths feel casual. Stripping things right back, intentionally. You just know every single detail from the stems of the glass to the creases on the table cloth has been thought about. I’ve been to a few of Boxer’s openings now, Brunswick House is great, and combining a dinner there with The Black Duke on a jazz night is as good as it gets. Also Taq in Notting Hill is another example of how Boxer turns an ok restaurant into one worth going to.

Order: spring onion pancake, raw tuna, Cantabrian anchovy / fried potato pizzette, stracciatella, mortadella, pineapple mostarda / rigatoni, pea, pistachio, burnt lemon / mackerel, spring peas, raspberry & wood sorrel.

Highlights: the gooseberry margherita. The interior. The metal bar in the middle, and counter seating around it is a bit of me. It perfectly set the tone for a night of dancing at Koko’s, watching Sister Sledge (the best btw).

Best enjoyed: date night. Girls’ night. A pre-dinner before going elsewhere but also works for a random Tuesday or a Wednesday. Or when you simply want to see where the night takes you, it’s a good place to start. Exmouth Market for drinks before or after.

Sol’s, Bayswater

By day it’s actually a deli and café offering sandwiches and salads made with St John’s focaccia. By night it’s a small, intimate and effortlessly chic wine bar that fits only 30 guests. It’s walk in only so you have to go if you’re feeling lucky. If you know the feel of a Spanish wine bar this will feel familiar. They also have small plates to complement whatever you’re drinking. Perfect for a warm summer evening or for a cosy winter night. A short walk from Nela in Bayswater if you’re wanting to extend that date night past the aperitif.

Highlights: the countertop seating. I love that everyone is huddled up close to one another, sitting across the table from each other. And the fact we all have a love for wine in common is a beautiful thing.

Best enjoyed: perfect for a first date you’re wanting to impress if you’re wanting something a bit chicer than something like Vagabond. Or sharing a bottle with a friend and staying for longer than you planned to.

Waterman Arms, Barnes

Absolutely stunning for a summer evening by the water. Golden hour to be precise, but a long lunch here is also very trendie.

Highlights: the piri piri chicken to share was so succulent and delicious that I might just have to go back just to have it again. There is absolutely nothing better than being by the water and watching the sunset over the Thames, and it still being warm past 10pm.

Best enjoyed: this is great for maybe date 3 or 4 unless you’re head over heels after the first. Suits both a dinner with a friend on a Wednesday evening and a special occasion, whatever that may be. I love the neighbourhood pub feel and the fact the food is really bloody good too.

Substack said I’ve run out of space on this post, so PART 2 is coming shortly. Bear with me, but for now…

Whilst we’re keeping calm and carrying on, other cultures are staying exactly where they are, at the table, and actually enjoying it.

In Spanish they have a word for this: Sobremesa. Which literally means “over the table”. It’s the stretch of time after a meal is finished where everyone stays at the table, talking, often for as long as the meal itself took, sometimes longer.

By naming it, Spanish culture decided that lingering isn’t wasted time. But for some reason, because there is one and often multiple, this word doesn’t quite translate in the English language. Why you ask? Largely because we were too busy prioritising productivity and getting things done. And somehow that became more important than enjoying doing any of it in the first place.

Language is powerful, and when you have a word for something you protect it, you can create ritual around it and you can share it. When you don’t, there is little to no importance to it because it has no name.

If you’ve been to Spain, you’ll be fully aware that staying at the table is part of the culture. Lunch can last three hours and nobody bats an eye. Dinner at 10pm is not unusual, and leaving at midnight is not excessive. The Spanish day is literally structured around the table, it’s the main event, not something you squeeze in between things.

When I did a Spanish exchange at school when I was 13, I remember this shocked quite a few of my friends. Parents actually complained. It didn’t shock me as much. Growing up with a French parent, the table has always been social infrastructure, not just a place to eat. The meal is an event, not a transaction. But I do remember stressing about still being at the table at almost midnight on a school night. Even with my French side, I wasn’t completely at ease. That says something.

We’re uncomfortable staying a little longer.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we have a productivity obsession, a discomfort with stillness, a quiet social anxiety around overstaying. It’s not one thing. It’s factors like conditioning, culture, the way we were raised, all of it tangled together. You can’t fully untangle it, and you don’t need to. The Trendie move is to act anyway. To stay a little longer regardless of all the things telling you not to.

You can spend your whole life waiting for the conditions to be perfect. The right culture, the right word, the right conditions. The staying itself, the act, is what creates the permission. It’s not sequential, it’s not earned in advance. You do the thing and the permission follows from doing it, not before it. And it’s quietly radical.

Instead we’re spending our lives rushing past the texture of life itself. We move so fast we don’t even notice what we’re leaving behind. If anything we’ve confused missing out with missing out on the wrong things. We always feel like we should be elsewhere, and we don’t know how to arrive anywhere.

Sobremesa isn’t a Spanish thing. It’s a human thing the Spanish were wise enough to name and protect. The conversation that only happens when nobody has anywhere to be. The evening that stretches because it’s worth stretching. The moment you stop measuring time by what comes next, and start enjoying what’s happening now.

We leave before anything means anything.

Staying a little longer is often uncomfortable. More often than not, we don’t leave because we’ve had enough. We leave because we’ve convinced ourselves the next thing will be better. That we should be elsewhere. And the life that was waiting on the other side of that discomfort, richer, slower, fuller, we never quite get to it.

Trendie people know the difference.

When you practise staying a little longer you realise something quietly important. You are absolutely fine. And if anything, you’re richer for it.

Stay Trendie x

Notes on Tasteful Hedonism® is an ongoing series about what it actually looks like to live well. Not later. Not elsewhere. Now, in the life you already have. Tasteful Hedonism is pleasure with discernment. Knowing what brings you joy, choosing it intentionally, and refusing to wait for permission. These are the notes from someone still figuring it out.

Full stop.

The English language doesn’t have a word for what I’m describing when I say your own trend. Intuition loses most people immediately. The closest we get is taste. Knowing before you can justify it. Deciding before anyone can talk you out of it.

Everyone has taste. We’re just made to feel like ours isn’t good enough.

Somewhere along the way taste became associated with money, access, a certain postcode. And someone called that having good taste. So everyone who didn’t have those things decided they didn’t have taste at all. But that was never taste. That was exposure. More reps, more refinement, more rooms to walk into and develop the knowing. The faculty is, and always was, yours. Others might have just had more opportunities to use theirs.

Money buys exposure. It never bought taste.

The person who knows when something is enough, that’s taste. Unrefined maybe. Undeveloped in certain directions. But entirely real, entirely theirs, and entirely free.

You were born with preferences before anyone taught you to have them. The raw faculty exists before the world gets to it. And it does.

The Confidence Gap

The world needs you to be trendy. Which is exactly why no one’s going to tell you what I’m about to.

Here is a paradox nobody in the attention economy wants you to notice. The entire apparatus, the influencers, the algorithms, the trend cycles, the tastemakers, none of it actually wants you to have taste. What it wants is for you to have borrowed taste. Someone else’s knowing, worn as your own, requiring constant renewal. That’s trendy. Trendie is having your own. Because a person who knows exactly what they like and trusts that knowing completely is, from a commercial standpoint, essentially useless. You cannot sell anything to someone who has already decided.

We don’t actually need a lot. We need connection, ritual, presence. Things you cannot actually package. But we’re made to feel like we need 20 different beauty products and a routine to fix the thing that was never broken. And that gap is worth billions.

Which is why the question worth asking isn’t why people follow trends. That part is obvious and fairly forgivable. The more interesting question is why the confidence gap exists at all. Why is it that most people have perfectly good instincts and yet somehow cannot bring themselves to trust them without permission. And the answer, once you look for it, is everywhere. Like the film you won’t watch until someone tells you it’s worth your time. Or the self help book that makes you feel broken enough to buy the next one.

The gap is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is infrastructure. Carefully maintained infrastructure, because the moment it closes, the whole thing stops working. It worked through comparison, through rating systems that turned subjective experience into a score, through feeds that showed you what everyone else was choosing until your own instinct started to feel like not enough. And now, having spent years eroding your taste, the attention economy is trying to sell it back to you. Pre-packaged, at a premium price. Wellness got tired. So now it's onto the next profitable thing. Taste.

But you cannot buy taste.

Your taste is there. But maintaining it is a practice. And a difficult one in this economy.

The invisible string / gut instinct / taste.

Your taste is the thing that runs underneath every good decision you’ve ever made, every right turn, every moment that felt genuinely yours. It’s always there. You just lose sight of it. Constantly. Not because you’re weak or unoriginal but because there is an enormous amount of noise designed specifically to make you lose sight of it. I think about it like a piece of string. Lose it and you drift further from yourself. Follow someone else’s and yours disappears entirely. Every time you make a decision and back yourself, that’s you keeping hold of your string.

We just needed to be reminded. Often.

Following is the default. It’s how we’re wired. Socially, evolutionarily, culturally. We look to each other to know what’s safe, what’s wanted, what’s worth having. That instinct kept us alive for thousands of years and now it’s being used to sell us things. So not following isn’t just a lifestyle choice. It’s quietly radical. It goes against something deep and biological. Which is why it’s hard. Which is why most people don’t do it. Which is why the people who do are trendie without even trying.

None of us are really immune to this. I certainly am not. I still find myself checking reviews before going somewhere. Checking the Rotten Tomatoes score on a film I’m about to watch. Or asking Claude whether something sounds right. It has never been easier to get validation. We have every tool possible. But those same tools are what keep us questioning whether our decisions are good enough. What I try to practise is going anyway. Watching it anyway. Posting it anyway. Even when it’s much easier not to, and much more comfortable to sit through something you already know is good. It’s a necessity in this day and age to do it for no one else but yourself. If it was terrible, you know. If it was great, you know that too. Either way you’re refining your taste. And backing it.

Trendy vs Trendie

A trend is just collective approval moving in one direction at the same time. Enough people wanting the same thing at the same moment that it starts to feel like the obvious choice. Like taste, even though it isn’t. Following trends is outsourcing approval. Staying Trendie is not needing it. And doing the thing anyway.

Someone who is Trendie isn’t blind to trends. They’re culturally aware. They move with trends, but they don’t lose themselves to them. Because trends aren’t the enemy. They’re how culture moves. But a lot of it is noise. Things you don’t need, directions that aren’t yours. The real cost isn’t the money or the time, it’s what it does to your taste. Every time you follow something that isn’t yours you move slightly further from the thread.

That’s why Tasteful Hedonism is a practice. A constant returning. Your taste is the thing you keep hold of whilst you’re living fully. Lose it and you lose yourself. Tuning back in to what feels good, what feels yours, what feels true, that’s not a lifestyle choice. That’s how you stay in your own life. Anchored in taste that’s yours.

And the next time someone tries to sell you taste in pretty packaging, remember you already have it.

Stay Trendie x

DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a review in the traditional sense - I don’t really want to lay everything out so there is nothing left for you to experience yourself. That wouldn’t be Trendie. Your own experience of whatever place I’ve been to WILL BE DIFFERENT. So go and figure it out yourself, if you love it, hate it or you completely disagree with my thoughts on this spot. You do you. This purely serves as a reference point.

I'm not here to tell you everything - I'm here to tell you it's worth going. What you make of it is up to you.

ABOUT

Café Clément is the all-day restaurant inside St Clement, Nick Jones' new hotel at 180 The Strand - his first since Soho House, and if that name means anything to you, you already know roughly what to expect. Where Soho House was built on belonging, this feels built on something quieter. Taste, maybe. Or just the confidence that comes from three decades of knowing what people actually want before they do.

THE FOOD

The food - from Danny Bohan, formerly of River Cafe - is precise and unfussy. It’s not overly complicated, it’s just done really well. The food, from Danny Bohan formerly of River Cafe, is precise and good - sea bass carpaccio, marinated tomatoes, a dessert menu that actually takes itself seriously. But you're not really here for a foodie pilgrimage. You're here for the atmosphere, the feel of it. The inspiration. The decor. It just helps that the food is good too. Ordering oysters with a glass of white wine just felt like the right things to be doing. And I don’t think it was overly expensive. We didn’t order too much, and pretty much shared everything and had one glass of white wine each and shared a dessert. The bill came to about £78 for two people - and that included the 6 oysters, the sea bass carpaccio, the tomato salad, the steak tartare + bread and a tart and ice cream for dessert. Everything was delicious but also nothing like WOW omg I need to have that again.

Also, my taste is different to yours, so go and try it for yourself and remember that you have an opinion too.

THE VIBE

There is staff everywhere, but not in the way Soho House staff are - they’re all there but they seem to be trained to ignore you. Here you never have to look for anyone. They’re already there. And this is a crucial difference. It feels like old school hospitality is being bought back, and very much New York level service. It also just has a great feel to it, it’s exciting, it’s refreshing and the design, attention detail and textures are very well thought out. Nick Jones was also just chilling in the foyer, and I did think that was pretty cool to see him in the flesh - but definitely not the kind of place you ask someone for a photo.

IS IT TRENDIE OR JUST TRENDY?

In a city where restaurants live and die by the hype cycle, Clément doesn’t need it. You can feel the difference the moment you walk in. There is no desperation around here. Just people who understand hospitality, completely and have YEARS of experience to back it.

My branding brain was having a field day. Everything was considered without being too obvious. The little “c” places on things like the plates to the bathroom towels.

And when dinner is over, nobody is rushing you out. They’re asking you to stay. Bobby’s Bar - named after Nick Jones’ dog - is waiting for you if you want it. Again loved the branding of his dog used in things like the ash trays.

There is a lot of hype around this opening. But I don’t think it’s just hype. It has a serious foundation and I do think it will sustain itself - because it knows exactly what it is.

There’s a difference between something that’s having a moment and something that actually has substance. Trendy is fleeting. Trendie is the place that’s still full in two years because it knew what it was from day one.

Café Clément is the latter.

Somewhere between there and here, that got lost. Trying to sell something ordinary is a bad business model. It’s not a serious strategy. But I would argue otherwise. It’s the only thing we have left because everything we don’t have is being sold to us, and everything we do have is being sold back to us in better packaging. But what if no one could sell your life back to you? What if you just gave yourself permission to enjoy it.

We didn’t lose the Tuesday. We were just never sold it.

We are so practiced at postponing joy, so fluent in the language of later, that we needed the occasion to do the justification work for us.

The Good Life Is Elsewhere, Apparently.

When pleasure is not integrated into the fabric of our daily life we look for it elsewhere. We escape to it. We experience it through other cultures that never bought the productivity myth. That never accepted the idea that pleasure has to be earned through output first. That living well was always part of the work, not the break from it.

Why do you think La Dolce Vita works so well and makes us all want to get on the first plane to Italy? It’s the best example of making you feel like the good life is elsewhere. Another country. Another culture. Another version of your life that you have to travel to find. And we buy into it completely because we were never given the language or the permission to find it here.

But the good life isn’t just in Italy. Italy is just where it’s still visible. It’s well documented. If you speak to an Italian they would often say otherwise. Because to them it’s just their life. La Dolce Vita is what happens when you take someone’s ordinary life, strip out the context, the history, the infrastructure, the culture that holds it together, and sell the feeling to the people who need to be sold a better life.

La Dolce Vita is the perfect aspiration because it’s real enough to believe in and far enough away to keep chasing. It’s not a fantasy. There are parts of it that exist. I’ve seen it myself, eating at a local restaurant on a Monday evening, watching a family pass plates around and share wine at 11pm like it was the most natural thing in the world. And I’ve realised, this is something I could do back at home if I wanted to.

It’s easier in Rome but not impossible in London.

The point is to make your ordinary mean something instead of outsourcing it. Ordinary days make up most of your life. You will have many more Tuesdays in your own life than you will have elsewhere. And if you don’t add meaning to them, the only meaning you’ll have is the kind someone else sold you. And that meaning isn’t in your interest. It’s in theirs. And in their back pocket, likely going towards their next Porsche.

And you wonder why a lot of us are miserable. Not dramatically. Not in a way that’s easy to name or point to. Just quietly, persistently disconnected from our own lives. Going through the motions. Waiting. Always waiting. For the weekend, the holiday, the promotion, the relationship, the moment when everything finally feels like it was worth it.

And it never quite arrives. Because the next thing is always just ahead. And you’re perfectly positioned to be sold the next thing, ready for someone else to add meaning to your life.

The Real Investment

It’s actually a pretty smart investment. And it will save you a lot of time, money and effort. But mostly it will save you the cost of waiting for a life you’re already living.

The time you spent waiting for the occasion. The effort you put into earning the reason. The money you spent on the version of pleasure that came pre-packaged with permission. All of it in service of a feeling you could have had on a Tuesday for the price of a bottle and the decision that tonight was enough.

The investment isn’t the champagne. The investment is the permission. And once you have that you stop spending everything else trying to buy your way to it.

In this context, choosing to drink champagne on a Tuesday is giving yourself permission to enjoy your life as it is.

The Tuesday is radical because it has no product attached to it. Nobody profits from you deciding that tonight is enough. There’s nothing to buy. No occasion to upgrade into. Just you, deciding that this moment already means something.

That’s not a small act. In a world that runs on deferred meaning, creating your own is probably the most countercultural thing you can do.

Trendy vs Trendie

Waiting for someone to hand you the meaning. Borrowing someone else’s version of the good life. Getting on the plane to find something that was already here. Following the occasion because everyone else said it counted.

That’s trendy.

Deciding the Tuesday is enough. Opening the bottle for no reason other than it feels right. Making your own meaning in the undocumented ordinary. Living the version of the good life that’s already yours.

That’s Trendie.

The cost of waiting.

Nobody is going to hand you the meaning. And the only version on offer, the one that arrives pre-packaged with a reason and a ribbon, always has something attached to it. Always needs you to wait a little longer, spend a little more, achieve a little further before you’re allowed to feel it.

This is the opposite of living life on your own terms.

What living life on your own terms looks like is practising the art of drinking champagne on a Tuesday. It’s permission to enjoy life now, not later. It’s Tasteful Hedonism. Not excess. Not drinking for the sake of it or manufacturing joy out of nothing. It’s closing the gap between the life you’re living and the one you keep meaning to get around to. Integrating pleasure into your days rather than cordoning it off for the moments that have earned it.

It’s a practice. A constant tuning in. A quiet daily decision to show up for your own life as it already is. To stop treating the ordinary as the gap between the meaningful moments and start recognising it as the thing itself.

That’s why I say carry a bottle of champagne with you just in case. Not every day. Just more than you think makes sense. You’ll be surprised how good you get at adding meaning to the ordinary.

Stay Trendie x

Notes on Tasteful Hedonism® is an ongoing series about what it actually looks like to live well. Not later. Not elsewhere. Now, in the life you already have. Tasteful Hedonism is pleasure with discernment. Knowing what brings you joy, choosing it intentionally, and refusing to wait for permission. These are the notes from someone still figuring it out.

He slept worse. Ate worse. Podcasted worse. Didn’t get to the gym. And then, almost as an afterthought: “I could track all this on my Whoop, #ad, #sponsor, #investor.”

Bartlett isn’t the villain of this. He’s the most successful product of it. A man who has so thoroughly internalised the logic that he genuinely believes a glass of wine is a three day emergency. He’s not performing it. He really believes it. And he doesn’t even know it.

None of us are really immune to it.

There’s a version of this that gets told as an anti-optimisation argument. Opt out entirely. Go full hedonist. But that’s just the same trap in different packaging. Opting out is still letting culture decide how you live.

This isn’t about opting out. This is about opting in, intentionally.

And not in the way you think. Too much of it and pleasure disappears from your life quietly, without you even noticing.

In France nobody asks whether they deserve the wine. The aperitivo in Italy isn’t a reward for a productive day. The long Sunday lunch isn’t a treat you’ve earned - it’s just Sunday. Pleasure isn’t something these cultures schedule or recover from. It’s integrated. It’s assumed. The question was never what will this cost me. It was always just, what am I going to gain.

Most of us have felt it. On holiday somewhere warm, sitting at a table longer than we planned, drinking something we didn’t need to justify. And then we came home and forgot how to do it.

Because at home, pleasure has to be deserved. Earned. Logged. Recovered from. And that changes the relationship to it entirely.

Sometimes it looks like cancelling dinner because you have an early morning. Skipping the birthday drinks because it’ll affect your sleep score. Leaving the table early because tomorrow is more important. And slowly, without noticing, the things that make life actually good start disappearing from your week. Then your days. Then your hours. Until you have squeezed every last drop of pleasure out of your own life.

Because pleasure is texture. And texture is exactly what over-optimisation removes.

The things that feel good are almost always the things that interrupted the plan. The unexpected evening. Ordering the bottle. The stay-too-late. Pleasure lives in the unoptimised, in-between moments. That’s why you can’t track it, sell it, or schedule it. The moment you start optimising for pleasure you’ve already missed the point. It only arrives when you stop trying to control everything and just let Tuesday be Tuesday.

You’re not unhappy, but you’re not content.

I remember listening to one of Bartlett’s podcasts where he asks someone who works closely with him: “Do you think I am happy in my life?” The answer was honest. “Yes, but I don’t think you’re content. You’re always chasing the next thing, and I am not sure why.”

I’ve never forgotten it.

Optimisation can get you to happy. It cannot get you to content. Because there is always another metric. Always another gap between where you are and where you could be. That gap is the product. And as long as you’re inside it, content is impossible.

The tragedy is that discontentment isn’t loud. You’re fine. And fine is the most dangerous place to be because it doesn’t alarm you. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is ever wrong. You’re just never surprised, never derailed, never sitting somewhere you didn’t plan to be at an hour you didn’t intend to stay until. You’re never inconvenienced by something wonderful.

Memory doesn’t store the smooth parts. It stores the moments that broke the pattern. The texture. The edges.

Nothing really happens on a Tuesday. Until it does. And then you remember it forever. The bottle opened for no reason. The plan that changed at 9pm. The conversation that went somewhere neither of you expected.

Optimise everything and you remove all of it. Not dramatically. Just quietly, Tuesday by Tuesday, until one day someone asks what you’ve been up to and you genuinely don’t know what to say. So you say “not much” and move on. Even when it was everything.

The longest study on human happiness ever conducted - eighty years, thousands of people - found that the single biggest predictor of a good life wasn’t diet, exercise, sleep scores, or net worth. It was the quality of your relationships. The kind you build at long dinners on weeknights you didn’t plan. Exactly the kind you cancel when you’re optimising.

A life so optimised that a glass of wine breaks it isn’t disciplined. It’s brittle. And brittle is just another word for out of control.

No One Profits From Your Peace.

Every industry profits from you believing the good life is just out of reach. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just a business model. And it works because we keep believing it.

Tired? Product. Anxious? Programme. Can’t sleep? Supplement. Can’t enjoy a glass of wine without three days of consequences? That’s not a you problem. That’s a customer.

The really dark genius of it is that it co-opted the language of liberation. Self-care. Autonomy. Taking back control. But the control it’s selling you is control over yourself - which means the thing being controlled and the thing doing the controlling are both you. You become your own optimisation project. Your own worst critic dressed up as your own best coach.

When I first entered the world of entrepreneurship, Bartlett was probably my most listened-to podcast. A lot of his content is genuinely useful. But there is a subtle undertone that makes you feel like you should listen to every single episode, otherwise you’re already behind. I used to listen at 1.5x speed just to get through more episodes. I was looking at his model of success and thinking it was my own.

Ironically none of it made me sharper. None of it made me more focused. I was just more controlled. And in the process I was quietly optimising myself out of the exact things I was working so hard to protect. Freedom. Time. Real connection. The life on the other side of the ambition.

That’s the trap nobody warns you about. You can work so hard toward a life you want that you accidentally stop living it.

I’m not Anti-Optimisation. I’m Anti-Not Living.

Getting better wasn’t by tracking more or protecting more. It was by deliberately choosing to be in the uncomfortable situation. Saying yes to things I’d feel more comfortable saying no to. Choosing to listen to podcasts on normal speed instead of 1.5x. Doing the thing I was afraid of. Not measuring it, not logging it. Just judging it by the only metric that actually matters - how good a time I ended up having. Whether I was fine.

I always was. And I got better at knowing I would be.

The unoptimisable choice isn’t a risk. It’s a practice. The long dinner on a weeknight. The bottle opened because it’s Tuesday. The walk home when the tube would be faster. The right decisions give you confidence. The wrong ones give you stories, perspective, and a better sense of what’s actually yours. Both are necessary.

You don’t get equipped and then live. You live. That’s what equips you.

There are two ways to lose yourself.

The first is obvious. The person who never says no. Who goes hard every night, chases every high, stays out until the night stops meaning anything. It looks like freedom but it isn’t. Pleasure without discernment is just noise. When everything is an occasion, nothing is. The nights blur. Nothing accumulates. You’re always onto the next thing because the last thing didn’t quite land - and it didn’t land because you never really chose it, you just didn’t stop.

The second is quieter. The person who cancels dinner for an early morning. Who checks the sleep score before deciding whether last night was worth it. Who has optimised so thoroughly that a glass of wine on a Tuesday requires a three day recovery plan. It looks like discipline. It’s actually just a different kind of losing control - control handed over to a system instead of a person, to metrics instead of instinct.

The Tasteful Hedonist™ is neither.

She stays for one more drink because the conversation is good, not because she can’t stop. She opens the bottle on a Tuesday because it’s Tuesday and that’s enough of a reason. She takes the long dinner on a weeknight knowing exactly what tomorrow looks like and decides it’s worth it anyway. She works from the beach and meets her deadlines. She says yes slowly and means it completely.

So why aren’t more people living like this?

Because discernment doesn’t have a product. You can’t sell someone the ability to trust themselves. You can’t monetise someone who already knows what they want and why they want it. Every industry profits from you believing the good life is just out of reach. The Tasteful Hedonist is a terrible customer. She already has enough. She knows when to stop and when not to. She doesn’t need a programme to tell her she deserves the wine and she doesn’t need a tracker to tell her she shouldn’t have had it.

But there’s something deeper than that. Discernment takes practice and practice requires a period of getting it wrong. Most people never get that window. They go straight from being told what to do - by school, by parents, by Instagram - to being sold a system that tells them what to do next. The self-optimisation industry arrived at exactly the moment people were starting to figure themselves out and handed them a shortcut that wasn’t one.

And then there’s the visibility problem. The over-optimiser has a morning routine to post. The hedonist has a night out to post. The Tasteful Hedonist has a Tuesday that was quietly perfect and completely unphotographable. The in-between doesn’t perform well. So nobody sees it modelled. Nobody learns it exists. Nobody knows to want it.

That’s the gap nobody is filling.

And the reframe is actually quite simple. Rather than asking what something will cost you, ask what you will gain. Usually it’s everything and more, and the only person that can “track” it or “prove” it is you.

It’s actually the trendiest thing you can do.

Stay Trendie x

And honestly, the fact that I even feel the need to say that is kind of the problem. Think about how much cultural conditioning it takes to believe that quietly enjoying a glass of something on your own terms needs to be justified and is somehow worse than being ten pints deep at the pub on a Thursday night. One gets a disclaimer. The other gets called a “normal week”.

Understanding Pleasure.

Hedonism comes from the Greek word hēdonē which directly translates to pleasure. Not excess, not chaos, not someone face-down at 4am having lost their phone and their dignity. Just pleasure. Somewhere between ancient Greece and modern Britain, we decided that a word meaning the pursuit of pleasure should sound like a warning. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the culture we’ve built around it.

Pleasure can be simple. It can be a coffee in the sun. A good conversation that runs longer than it should. Sitting somewhere with nowhere to be for twenty minutes. A glass of something on a warm evening that doesn’t need to turn into anything else. It doesn’t have to be expensive or excessive or earned. You just have to actually enjoy it. And it’s subjective, what brings you pleasure won’t be the same as what brings me pleasure, and that’s the whole point. It’s yours to define.

A tasteful hedonist is simply someone who knows what brings them pleasure and has the discernment to choose it. And that’s not recklessness. If anything, it might be the opposite. The recklessness people associate with hedonism is usually what happens when pleasure is absent, too little of it, too rarely, so it comes out sideways.

That’s why I think hedonism is a good thing, when it’s tasteful. When you build pleasure into your days in small, intentional doses, you stop needing it to explode out of you on a Saturday night.

We constantly feel like we don’t have enough, or like we’re not where we’re supposed to be. If it’s not a night that ends at 1am it’s not a good night. People drink to get drunk, not to enjoy the drink. A drink on your friend’s doorstep because they have no room in their flat isn’t as good as being in a ludicrously expensive bar. It’s an all or nothing culture. We have no middle register. But I think most of us do have enough. We just never learnt how to enjoy what’s already right in front of us.

The Art.

So when I say the art of drinking anywhere, I mean this. A coffee on a bench before work. A glass of wine on a wall in the evening sun. A beer on a step with someone you haven’t seen in weeks. A negroni on a kerb because the bar was full and the kerb was better anyway. It’s the act of stopping somewhere that wasn’t designed for you to stop, with something in your hand, and deciding that right there is enough.

In Paris, this is completely unremarkable. People sit along the Seine with a bottle of wine and paper cups and nobody looks twice. In Amsterdam, two people on the edge of a canal with a bottle between them as the light drops, that’s just a Tuesday. In Rome, it’s an aperitivo that doesn’t need to become anything else. In Barcelona, it’s something cold on a balcony. These aren’t occasions. They’re not nights out. They’re just life in places that never separated pleasure from the everyday.

In London, the same act somehow feels like it needs justifying. And it’s not even illegal, in England there’s no blanket law against drinking in public. The fact that it still feels like it shouldn’t be allowed tells you everything. The restriction isn’t legal. It’s cultural. We police ourselves.

The £16 cocktail in the approved bar is pleasure you’ve paid for permission to have. A bottle of wine on a canal wall is pleasure you’ve taken for yourself. And I find it really interesting which one makes people more comfortable.

If you're reading this and thinking “I already do this" you're probably already a tasteful hedonist. You just didn't have the words for it yet.

You don’t need a comprehensive guide for Paris but it helps to have a rough idea of where to go. It’s very easy to get it wrong. When I say follow this loosely, I mean it because Paris is for getting lost in and stumbling onto places that don’t exist in any guide book.

Le Pain Retrouvé

A local boulangerie I discovered when I rented a studio in the 9th arr. I needed a cake for my mum’s birthday whilst she was visiting and stumbled on this. I grabbed some fresh raspberries from the market and bought some candles from the supermarché. And couldn’t forget the finishing touch, Champagne, bien sûr.

I have gone back pretty much every time I find myself in Paris. There is nothing about this place that says they’re trying too hard. It’s stripped back, unpretentious, incredibly simple but never lets me down. The cakes are low key, I think about 12 euros. The dark chocolate and pear cake is absolutely delicious. I have even gone just before my eurostar just to bring a cake back with me to London.

Andy Wahloo

I love this place. It’s super low key. Quite hidden in a way that you have to know where to go. This is my go to for a little pre-dinner drink. It’s perfect for early evening and I have it in my back pocket for whenever I need a bar I can trust to be good.

Cortado

I first stumbled on this coffee shop when walking around Le Marais area. I first noticed the branding and thought it was super trendie. The owners are spanish and you can feel it. It’s situated right by le Marché Couvert des Enfants Rouges, and opposite Chez Alain Miam Miam - supposedly one of the best sandwiches you’ll ever have. I’m yet to try it as there is always a slightly ludicrous queue. Love this street - and so do the people who decide to just sit down on the pavement apparently. There are lots of great vintage shops for to wander around.

Rue Princesse

Where the locals go. Known locally as part of the “rue de la soif” (the thirst street) along with Rue des Canettes and Rue Guisarde. It’s packed with bars, pubs, and cocktail spots. The street, especially in the summer, is packed with locals, students, and fêtards. It’s not touristy, it’s where Parisians actually go out. If you want to end up in a random Irish bar drinking tequila shots and still make it kinda classy, this is where you want to end up.

Marché Couvert des Enfants Rouges

There is nothing like a fresh oyster with a crisp glass of white wine in the middle of the day. When I’ve come here starving, it’s pretty overwhelming. It’s usually quite packed and if you’re not decisive about what you want to eat it’s a lot. However, the atmosphere makes it worth it.

9th Arrondissement, Rue des Martyrs

Full of small artisan shops, restaurants and cafés. Fresh produce, pastry shops, cheese shops, wine cellars. Oysters. This is the street I always end up walking down when I’m in Paris, even when I’m not trying to. It’s the kind of street where you go for one thing and come back with four.

Le Mary Celeste

I noticed this from across the street when we stayed at Hotel Sookie in Le Marais. We didn’t make it there that trip but I knew I’d be back. The people working here just get it. Spanish waiters, an Italian sommelier, it feels international but completely local at the same time, like a genuine neighbourhood spot. It’s the details that make a difference to me, the branded wine glasses, the postcard you receive with the bill.

Saisons Fromagerie

The first time I tried skin contact wine was here with a selection of the most delicious cheese. It was a summer’s day in June, mid afternoon. We hadn’t really eaten since brunch so we were happy to eat anything but this was special. I saved this address and made sure I’d come back next time I needed a selection of cheese. My family and I spent Christmas in Paris this year and I was not doing a Christmas in Paris without getting cheese from here.

Les Canailles

This is a place I adore in Paris. When I was in Paris with my mum a few years ago I had booked a table here as I was walking past it most days and wanted to give it a try. We had made a bit of a rooky error of eating a little too much for apéro but we didn’t want to sacrifice our booking. When we got to the restaurant we asked if we could just have a cheeseboard and some wine and they accommodated us like we were locals. We were sat next to two men from Madrid who were super friendly and we shared some wine with them as they spoke about their family. This was by far the best service you will get in Paris and I will never forget it.

Le Hibou

Saint Germain des Prés. I think I’ve been at least four times now. It’s very much a later dinner vibe. Sit on the terrace. If you don’t like cigarette smoke maybe don’t sit on the terrace but this corner spot is where the locals go. It’s been the start of some of my favourite nights. Ones where we’ve ended up speaking to the table next to us and ending up at an underground club.

Stay Trendie x

The trap is that work hard play hard feels like the alternative but it’s not. It’s the same thing with a weekend bolted on. You’re still earning the right to enjoy yourself. You’ve just given the reward a name. And you can never work hard enough. There is always more you could be doing. So the play part keeps getting pushed back.

That’s fine but it’s not very trendie.

I’m a little existential and maybe a little impatient. I don’t want to spend five days earning two. I don’t want to postpone enjoyment until I’ve hit some invisible target that keeps moving anyway. I want to enjoy my life while I’m in it, not after. And I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I think it’s honest.

Not everyone wants to live this way and that’s absolutely fine. We are all different. But if the extreme narrative is getting loud, slightly overwhelming and something feels off, sometimes it’s really quite nice and reassuring to hear the alternative that might just be a better fit.

What if enjoyment wasn’t something you get to eventually? What if it was something you practise now?

This is Vol. 1. The subject is permission. Because that’s where everything starts. Or doesn’t. That’s completely up to you.

Make the ordinary feel like something.

We have a weird all-or-nothing culture here. Ten pints or there’s no point. Saving money eating in or splurging when you’re going out. There’s no middle register. Everything is either practical or an occasion.

I grew up in a household where pleasure was very much ordinary. My parents would have a glass of wine at dinner, and it was completely normal. The bottle was never anything expensive but the ritual of it always mattered more than what was in the glass. The point was never the drinking for the sake of drinking. It was about marking the evening. It quietly said, this is worth sitting down for. Tasteful hedonism was very much around me growing up before I had the words for it.

The importance of this is really about making dinner together a non-negotiable. No matter how late it was. No matter what was for dinner, usually something incredibly simple. The point was that we made it matter.

Whatever your situation is, this is about having little rituals. Like using your favourite mug first thing in the morning. Lighting the candle even if no one’s coming. Open the bottle on a Wednesday. Laying the table even if it’s just you. Whatever your version of making an effort looks like, do it when there’s no reason to. It’s not about the thing. It’s about the ritual of doing it.

The ordinary moments are most of your life. If you’re not enjoying those, you’re not enjoying much.

The Trap: Thinking this is about the wine not the ritual.

Stop treating rest as a reward.

I’ll be honest, I still catch myself doing this. I am not the best at allowing myself rest. My work is my life and my life is my work so rest is hard to even recognise, let alone justify. The line between living and creating doesn’t really exist for me, so switching off feels like switching off from everything.

I’ve always been slightly envious of people who can binge watch something for hours and not feel a little guilty for not doing something “productive.” That’s their version of switching off and I respect it. As a creative person it’s not mine. I’ve never really known how to switch off. But what I have noticed is that some of my best ideas, my best work, my best thinking has come from the moments I wasn’t trying to do any of those things. Going for a run. Walking around aimlessly. Doing absolutely nothing with any particular purpose.

Which makes you think, maybe rest isn’t the opposite of building. Maybe it’s part of it. And maybe the reason we struggle with it so much is because we’ve been taught it has to be earned rather than just lived in.

The Trap: Even wellness got turned into a productivity tool. Rest and recover so you can go again on Monday. That’s not rest. That’s maintenance.

Don’t wait for the holiday version of yourself.

The one who orders the wine at lunch. Who walks slowly. Who sits in the sun without checking the time. Who doesn’t need a reason to enjoy a Tuesday.

I notice this in myself all the time. I come back from a trip and for about a week I still move differently. I eat slower. I notice more. I don’t rush. I feel like myself. And then London pulls me back into the pace and that version of me quietly disappears until the next trip. But that person isn’t a holiday version. That’s just me when I’ve given myself permission.

Live like you’re on holiday and you won’t need one as much.

Say yes often.

To the dinner. The trip. The thing you’ve never done before. The midweek plan your brain is already building a case against. Too tired. Too far. Too much on. Sometimes that’s true. But most of the time you’re just not used to giving yourself permission.

You almost never regret going. And if you do, you know not to go again.

Stop earning the weekend.

We treat Monday to Friday like something to get through and Saturday like a reward for surviving it. If you’re only living two days out of seven, that’s not balance. That’s a bad deal.

Stop explaining yourself.

You ordered dessert. You left early. You stayed late. You changed your mind. You booked the trip. You enjoyed the glass of wine. You don’t owe anyone a reason for how you choose to enjoy your life.

Stop calling it a guilty pleasure.

If it brings you joy it’s just a pleasure. The guilt is someone else’s, not yours.

Things you don’t need permission for but probably think you do.

You’re allowed to not have a five year plan. No one wants to tell you that the best plans are unplanned.

You’re allowed to change your mind. About the career. The relationship. The city. The thing you said you wanted six months ago. That’s not flaky. That’s paying attention.

You’re allowed to be ambitious and enjoy yourself at the same time. No one wants to tell you that you don’t have to pick one.

You’re allowed to leave something that looks good on paper. The job. The relationship. The plan. Paper doesn’t know how you feel at 7am on a Monday. It’s paper.

You’re allowed to have a glass if you want a glass.

You’re allowed to say no. Without a reason. Without an apology. Without a follow-up text explaining why.

You’re allowed to not justify yourself. Not the dessert. Not the career change. Not the Tuesday night out. Not the way you choose to live your life.

You’re allowed to care about how your life feels not just how it looks. You’re the one who has to wake up inside it every single morning.

You’re allowed to rest without being burnt out first.

You’re allowed to want less. That’s not giving up. That’s knowing what’s yours.

You’re allowed to want more. That’s not greedy. That’s honest.

You’re allowed to outgrow people. It doesn’t make you cold. Not everyone is supposed to come with you.

You’re allowed to be successful and still feel lost sometimes. Those two coexist more often than anyone admits.

You’re allowed to take longer than everyone else. Their timeline is not your timeline.

Permission isn’t something you’re given. It’s something you allow.

That’s Tasteful Hedonism. That’s Trendie.

Vol. 1. More coming.

This is a new problem, and to understand it you have to understand what it replaced.

For most of human history, taste was made by scarcity. You ate what was in season. You wore what your mother made. You read what was in the house. Constraint did the filtering, and you did not have to choose, because the choice had already been made for you. The people we called tasteful were the people who had escaped some of that constraint, who had access. Taste was a marker of class because access was a marker of class.

That world ended about fifteen years ago, and almost nobody has stopped to notice what ending it actually meant. The constraint that used to do our filtering for us is gone. The job has been transferred to us. And almost no one has been trained to do it.

This piece is about the skill that has to come next.

What most people have done, in the absence of training, is one of two things.

The first is to optimise. To turn life into a project of constant upgrade. Better routines, better habits, better metrics, better versions of yourself. Optimisation culture treats life as a problem to be solved and pleasure as either the reward at the end or the rest stop in between. It promises that if you can just get the inputs right, the outputs will simply come, and you will finally feel the way you have been trying to feel.

The second is to escape. To treat life as something to recover from. To live for the holiday, the weekend, the trip, the night out, the next thing. Escape culture promises that the real life is somewhere else, and the trick is just getting there often enough that the rest is bearable.

Both look like opposite responses. They are the same response, just in a different font. Both treat the present moment as something to either fix or flee. Neither teaches you how to actually inhabit it.

Somewhere in between the two, we quietly forgot how to feel. We track everything and sense very little. We have opinions about restaurants we have never eaten in and preferences shaped by people we have never met. We perform our lives so fluently that we have lost the ability to notice when something actually lands and when it does not.

And both, crucially, are very profitable to whoever is selling to you. Optimisation sells you the next product, the next plan, the next system. Escape sells you the next trip, the next high, the next version of being somewhere you are not. The economy of overwhelm needs you to keep moving. A still person is a difficult customer.

This is the world we are in. The constraint is gone. The filtering is on you. And the systems built around you are designed to make sure you never quite learn how to do it.

There is a word for the thing being described here, and it is the wrong word, but I want to use it anyway because it is the only honest one.

Hedonism.

We have been taught to flinch at the word. We hear it and we picture excess, indulgence, recklessness, decadence. We picture the kind of life that ends badly. The original Greek meaning is much simpler. Hēdonē means pleasure. Hedonism, at its root, is the practice of taking pleasure seriously. Of treating it as something worth attending to. Of believing that how a life feels is part of what makes it a life.

The reason we flinch at the word is that we have separated pleasure from intelligence. We have decided, somewhere along the way, that to take pleasure seriously is to be unserious. That a person who cares about how their dinner tastes, or how their evening unfolds, or whether the candle is lit, is a person who is not really getting on with the business of life. Pleasure, in this reading, is the thing you do when the work is done. Reward, not practice.

This is a category error and it is making us miserable.

Pleasure, taken seriously, is one of the sharpest forms of intelligence a human being has access to. It tells you what you enjoy and what you don’t. What is yours and what is not. It tells you when a room is right and when a room is wrong. It tells you that the celebrated restaurant is fine and the small place around the corner is the one you actually want to return to. It tells you, in the half-second before you have decided what to think, that the evening was about getting in and not about being there. Call it intuition if you want, but it shows up as a flicker, quick and easy to override. The flicker is information. Most of us have just been trained to ignore it.

A hedonist, in the old sense, is not a person who chases pleasure. It is a person who pays attention to it. Who treats their own responses as data. Who lets pleasure teach them what kind of life they are actually trying to live.

But hedonism on its own is not enough. Pleasure without discernment is just consumption in disguise. The optimiser and the escapist are both, in their way, hedonists. They are both pursuing some version of feeling good. What they are missing is the second word.

Tasteful.

To be tasteful is to be discerning. To filter. To choose. To know when to stop. To trust your own response enough to commit to it, even when the rest of the room is telling you something else. Taste, in this sense, is not an aesthetic. It is a way of knowing what is true for you.

Tasteful hedonism, then, is the practice of taking pleasure seriously and filtering it carefully. Of letting your responses guide you and refusing to override them. Of pursuing what is yours and walking away from what is not, even when what is not yours is what everyone else is queuing for.

It is the third position the culture is currently failing to offer. Not optimisation. Not escape. Discernment.

I want to be careful here, because this idea is easily mistaken for something it is not.

It is not restraint. Restraint is the optimiser’s version of taste, saying no on principle, even when you wanted to say yes. Tasteful hedonism is the opposite. It says yes, often and fully, and the only way to learn what’s yours is to keep saying yes until you can feel the difference between what is and what isn’t. You cannot know what’s actually yours without trying. Taste is not given. It is built, in the act of getting it wrong, noticing, and choosing again.

It is not minimalism. Minimalism is an aesthetic of less. Tasteful hedonism is indifferent to less or more. It is interested in right. Sometimes the right answer is the long lunch, the second bottle, the trip you cannot quite afford. Sometimes the right answer is going home. The amount is not the point. The fit is the point.

It is not slow living, or soft life, or any of the other lifestyle categories that have tried to sell people their way out of overwhelm in the last decade. Those work from the outside in, prescribe the right surfaces, the right objects, the right pace, and hope the feeling follows. Tasteful hedonism works from the inside out. Yes, it has a look. The candle gets lit. The wine gets opened on a Tuesday. But those aren't the practice. They're what happens when someone decides their ordinary life is worth paying attention to. The feeling comes first. The surface follows.

And it is not exclusive, despite the word taste making it sound that way. The privilege required to develop taste is real, and I am not going to pretend it isn’t. Time, exposure, the space to experiment, these are not equally distributed. But the practice itself is not gated. Intuition is not gated. The willingness to notice your own responses, to commit to the things that are yours and let the rest go, is available to anyone who decides to start. What is gated is the belief that your responses are worth attending to in the first place. That belief has been quietly worn down, by the algorithm, by the feed, by the constant suggestion that someone else’s taste is better calibrated than yours. It hasn’t been taken. It has been outsourced. And outsourcing is something you can stop.

A trend is just a direction. It is how culture moves. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is what we did to it. We turned trend into trendy and lost everything that mattered. Trendy is reactive. It follows without feeling. It chases without choosing. It flattened something honest into something disposable.

Trendie takes trend back to what it actually means. A direction, but one that is yours.

And it is rarer, because it is harder. It is easier to follow than to feel. It is easier to keep up than to step out. It is easier to be trendy than Trendie. Which is exactly why Trendie matters.

To be Trendie is to actually feel it. To notice when something isn’t right, even when it should be. To trust that feeling enough to act on it. To leave, to stay, to choose the place no one recommended. To be at a dinner table because you want to be there, not because it looks good. To let a moment be yours before it becomes anything else. Someone who is Trendie doesn’t ignore trends. They understand them, move with them, but don’t lose themselves through them. They live so fully and so genuinely that they end up starting their own.

Trendy follows. Trendie creates. Trendy is reactive. Trendie is responsive. Trendy is curated. Trendie is felt.

Trendy is fast. It moves with the room. It is exhausting because there is always another room. Trendie is slow. It moves with you. It compounds because every choice teaches you something about the next one.

Trendy is performance. Trendie is practice.

You can spend a life being trendy. Most people will. The systems built around us are designed to make sure of it. To stay Trendie, to keep choosing what is yours when the world is selling you what is everyone’s, is harder than it sounds, and more rewarding than it looks, and almost nobody is going to teach you how to do it because almost nobody profits from you knowing.

I have always been deeply aware of how short life is, not in a way that panics me but in a way that keeps me wide awake. Everything around us is getting louder and most of it is noise and we are so busy being busy that life is passing through us without ever actually landing. It is easy to get lost in it all when you are unanchored. I am not immune to any of this. I lose the thread too. I override my own taste, I get caught up, I forget what I already know. The difference is not that I have it figured out. The difference is that I have something to come back to.

Because the things that actually make a life feel good are simple and they always have been. Food with people you love. A morning that is not rushed. Work that means something to you. Feeling like your life is actually yours. None of these require an algorithm or a trend cycle or the bigger flat or the better job or the perfect conditions. You host dinner in your tiny flat because the people matter more than the square footage. You light the candle on a Wednesday because the Wednesday matters. You open the wine because it is Tuesday and you are alive and that is enough of a reason.

There is no cheat code to this. It is a practice. The practice is to stop overriding yourself. Trust your taste, notice when something feels off and when something feels right and lead with both. Not after you have checked what everyone else thinks, not after the algorithm has confirmed it. Lead with it. You will get some of these wrong and that is fine because taste is built in the corrections. What you will notice, after a while, is that your life becomes smaller in scope and larger in experience. You go to fewer places and remember the ones you go to. You know fewer people and know them better. You own fewer things and like the things you own. You say no more often and mean yes more deeply.

And it does not end there because the noise only gets louder and life only gets more complicated and you will keep changing. What was yours last year might not be yours now and that is not a problem, that is the practice working. Stay curious, keep saying yes, keep getting it wrong, keep learning. This is not something you complete. There is no end game. There is just the ongoing, imperfect, deeply human work of staying true to yourself in a world that would rather you didn’t.

Follow it loosely, or not at all. It is your life.

That is the practice. That is Trendie.

London has everything. But no one has any time to enjoy any of it. This isn’t necessarily a personal failure, it’s a structural one. No matter how many free museums there are, we will always say we don’t have the time. London is not slowing down any time soon, so it really is on you.

My observation: London is a city you have to consciously choose to enjoy.

Since living abroad in Amsterdam and Paris, and travelling as much as I possibly can, I’ve noticed how different London is culturally, especially when it comes to pleasure. In cities like Rome, Paris, Madrid, pleasure is so integrated you don’t even become conscious of it. You only notice it when you leave, and realise that back home, you actually need to create your own permission. Because no one is going to hand it to you.

In London, pleasure is earned, not integrated.

And yet I love London. If anything, I’ve made a conscious effort to enjoy it more. I have no immediate plans to move abroad, so I might as well. The way I’m doing that is living more like a European. Bringing as much of my french side into my everyday.

Enjoying life doesn’t mean you’ve got your priorities wrong. It just means they’re different. And I know what I’d rather.

Don’t skip Apéro.

We have a weird all-or-nothing culture here. Ten beers or there's no point. Saving money eating in or splurging when you're going out. We don't have a middle register. Everything is either practical or an occasion. Apéro lives in neither, it just exists between 6-9pm whenever you choose it.

Walk as much as you possibly can.

Yes, this is absolutely more doable when the days get longer and it’s not raining 24/7. London is pretty great, and you can’t see it from the tube. So walk as much as you possibly can, even if it’s getting up 20 minutes earlier and going for a walk, or getting off one tube stop before you’re meant to.

See your friends more.

When I lived in Amsterdam I was always doing something with people. The same in Paris. I do think being in a smaller city helps massively. Having a friend in South West when you live in Hackney is a bit of a bloody stretch. Not impossible, but the stakes are higher. What I would say is, make the effort anyway. No one is as busy as you think they are, and it’s always worth it.

Make dinner the occasion.

Growing up, dinner together was a non-negotiable. No matter how late it was. No matter what was for dinner - usually something incredibly simple. Food is important but it doesn’t need to be anything crazy. It was about the fact that we all stopped together, and shared it.

Lay the table even if no one is coming over.

It’s much easier not to. To light a candle. To lay a knife and fork down. But there is something about the act of making an effort that says: this matters. The meal matters. Even if it’s pasta on a wednesday night.

Open a bottle on a weekday.

I grew up in a household where pleasure was very much ordinary. A glass of wine at dinner was very normal. My parents always had a bottle open. And it was very normal. I have never seen my parents drunk, because for them pouring a glass is a ritual. The wine was never expensive but the ritual always was. The point is that tasteful hedonism was very much around me growing up before I had the words for it.

Take your earphones out.

Sometimes I purposefully don’t wear my earphones on the tube. I notice more, it puts things into perspective. The nurse who’s had a much harder day than me, the finance bro who is asking ChatGPT for dating advice, the old man who’s reading the paper. I’ll be honest, if the tube is not as busy I’d rather have them in because somehow it is weirdly comforting.

Plenty more where this came from. But this is a good start. Follow it loosely, or not at all, it’s your life.

I have spent more time saving restaurants than eating in them. I suspect you have too. And somewhere along the way we started calling that having taste.

We scroll, we save, we screenshot and we tell ourselves we are gathering something useful. But we are not actually living, and that is the cost nobody really talks about. Yes, doing the thing can be costly. But so is spending your time on the preview of it, and at least one of those leaves you with something real.

Real taste does not accumulate, it filters, and the only way to filter anything is to actually put yourself through it.

Taste has always been framed as something you buy into, which is convenient for everyone trying to sell it to you. It has historically been used as a social tool, a way of signalling belonging and maintaining distance, which is why the people who defined it had every reason to keep it feeling exclusive, inherited, and out of reach. The world does not particularly want you to have taste. It wants you to have preferences it can monetise, opinions it can aggregate, and an aesthetic it can sell back to you in a slightly different format next season.

Taste, real taste, is harder to package than that. You can have all the access in the world and still not know what to do with it. Money can get you in the room but it cannot tell you how to feel when you are there. That part is on you.

You can often notice that when people do not know what they actually want or actually need they buy things, because buying into the feeling is much easier than embodying it yourself. And an entire industry exists to make sure it stays that way.

So what do you do about it?

You have to actually go

Nobody is saying drop everything and live more fully. Life is expensive and complicated and most people are doing it in whatever increments they can. But the process begins in the moments you do get, ordering the thing, saying yes, speaking to the person next to you, staying too late, getting it genuinely wrong. The getting it wrong part matters more than people tend to admit, partly because nobody posts about it.

There is a particular kind of living that accelerates this. Hedonistic but paying attention, fully in and still noticing. Living and building at the same time. You are going for things and quietly, at the same time, refining them, because the appetite is what creates the material and you cannot edit a life you have not yet lived.

And then something feels off, not wrong exactly, just not quite right. You get the table everyone has been trying to get, the room is loud in the wrong way, the food is fine, and somewhere around the second course you realise the most interesting thing about the evening was getting in. Most people ignore that feeling, photograph the pasta, and tell everyone they loved it. Usually because they value trends over taste. But taste lives in that moment, the willingness to notice and then to move, to say “nope, that’s not for me”, even when that means admitting the thing everyone said was unmissable was not really for you.

It works the other way too. A recent example I can think of is before going to see Wuthering Heights at the cinema a friend sent me a terrible review and decided not to go with me, and it made me want to go even more. Not to be contrary, just because the more noise there is, the more important it becomes to form your own opinion. I went, I loved it, and even if I hadn’t, the judgement would have been mine. That felt like something worth protecting.

Discernment is the part no one really talks about

Preference is personal but unconsidered, and trend following is considered but not personal. Taste is what happens when the two meet, which is what I have always been trying to build towards, something that is both culturally aware and genuinely yours.

That distinction only sharpens over time, not through more consumption but through honesty about what actually landed and what did not. And this is not just about restaurants or hotels or places that look good in pictures. It is about anything you stayed in longer than you should have because it seemed right from the outside. The job that looked impressive and felt hollow the moment you were actually doing it. The relationship that made sense on paper but sat slightly off in a way you kept overriding. The friendship that was more about the dynamic than the actual person. The destination that used to feel like a discovery and now feels like a queue. You only know these things by actually going, and once you know them you cannot unknow them, which is inconvenient when everyone around you is still convinced it is worth it.

Knowing what you don’t need is not giving up

Modern culture locates taste in the choosing, the decisive well-documented act of selection, but that is taste as performance and performance is closer to aspiration than it is to anything real. The problem is that performance is also very easy to produce and very easy to consume, which is why feeds are full of it and why it is increasingly hard to tell the difference between someone who has taste and someone who has simply learned and mastered the visual language of it.

Real taste is quieter and less photogenic, and it is not restraint so much as the natural result of having tried enough things to understand what you do not need. Not borrowed, not performed, not served to you by an app that also knows what you watched at 2am and has strong opinions about what that says about you.

What you arrive at

Taste is not a collection but a conversation you have with your own experience over time, and what you arrive at is less a set of preferences than a set of refusals. The clearer those refusals become, the more precisely you are able to inhabit your own life.

That is the most countercultural thing you can do right now. Not the right reservation or the right reference or the carefully maintained aesthetic, just the quiet, ongoing work of understanding what is actually yours and choosing to live closer to that. Everything else is just content.

Anyone can fake taste. Very few people can live tastefully.

Maybe it is shared values. A shared sensibility. A mutual appreciation for good food, ritual, and taste, something I can thank my French side for. But more than that, I have always felt that Italians live well in a way that feels instinctive rather than learned.

It does not feel curated or carefully engineered. It is woven into daily life so deeply that it barely registers as a choice.

The slower pace. Recipes passed down through generations. A morning espresso taken standing at the bar. Lunches that stretch into the afternoon. We romanticise an idea of Italy, and while reality is far more complex, something still holds true. Pleasure is not something to earn, schedule, or postpone. It is folded into the day as it already exists.

It feels simple. And yet almost impossible to replicate.

The Packaged Ideal

Culture is not aesthetic. It is accumulated habit, climate, history, language, religion, economics. You cannot import the terrace without importing the structure that sustains it.

What reaches us is the packaged version. The edit. The exportable ideal. And we buy into it because it offers something we quietly lack: permission to live well without justification.

Just think about how successfully Aperol has sold Italy in a bottle. Sunlight, leisure, orange glow, all contained in something you can order at a London bar.

“The sweetness of doing nothing”

There is an Italian expression, la dolce far niente.
The sweetness of doing nothing.

Easy for an Italian. Incredibly uncomfortable for almost everyone else.

Outside of Italy, it does not quite translate. Especially if you’re British. That doesn’t make us bad or wrong. It simply means we’re different.

English language was not built to hold states of being in the way Latin languages are. It was built to resolve meaning quickly. To ask what something is for. To move forward.

We struggle with doing nothing unless it’s a holiday, a weekend, or something safely labelled as laziness.

We inherited a culture built on keeping calm and carrying on. Whether we accept it or not, that shapes how comfortable we are with stillness and pleasure.

Life now is organised around output, optimisation, and speed. Time is measured and justified. Even rest is expected to serve a function. Even pleasure is framed as a reward or recovery tool, something that helps us return to productivity. In that context, doing nothing does not feel sweet. It feels irresponsible.

But when Italians speak about doing nothing, they are not referring to laziness, they are describing presence. Allowing time to stretch without guilt. Being fully inside a moment that is not productive or impressive. That phrase exists because the culture protects it. The infrastructure holds it.

Optimisation and Accountability

That is not to say Italy has avoided modern life. It has simply resisted allowing optimisation to reorganise everything.

Pasta is a good example. It hasn’t been endlessly updated. It has been protected. Not out of resistance to progress, but out of respect for what already works.

That same respect applies to everyday rhythm. Long lunches remain. Shops close. Evenings stretch. Not because efficiency or optimisation was never considered, but because those rhythms serve something deeper than productivity.

I noticed this when we were out for dinner at 9.30pm on a monday evening. The restaurant we ended up in was full of locals, I had a large plate of delicious fresh pasta that was actually very reasonably priced and a glass of wine that was rather generous. The table next to us was filled with a large family, the grandparents were there too. Plates were passed back and forth. Food kept coming, and even past 10pm - shocking. And there was no sign of them leaving any time soon.

I loved it. Mostly because I’m not used to seeing that in London. And what stayed with me was how little explanation was required. No one questioned why we stayed so long, ate so slowly, or let the evening stretch into itself. There was no sense that enjoyment needed justifying, or that time had to be defended. In London, moments like this tend to come with an excuse or some form of reason. We explain why we deserve them. We frame them as treats. We save them for later. Even rest must prove its usefulness.

I don’t want to postpone enjoyment. I don’t want it to sit somewhere in the future, waiting for a holiday or a milestone. I want to live with it now, as things already are. And the truth is, I do. Rome just made me realise how much time I spend explaining that. Softening it. Making it sound reasonable. Translating something that, there, doesn’t need translating at all.

Our circumstances are different, of course. Italy isn’t perfect and London isn’t broken. But I have always instinctively prioritised enjoyment. Not in a reckless way. Not at the expense of ambition. I just never felt that building something meant I had to rush through my own life in the process.

Rome didn’t change how I live. It clarified it.

A reminder to live well now, not later. Not only when in Rome.

It has made me wonder whether what we need now is something different.

Bourdain came along when travel was mostly something you watched or read about. Critics, guidebooks and television shaped what places were meant to be like. Travel culture was polished and aspirational, and for many people it existed more as an idea than a reality.

Travel was not completely inaccessible, but it often felt out of reach unless you knew how to do it properly.

Bourdain pushed against that.

He used to say travel is not always pretty. That was not cynicism. It was honesty. He showed that travel was not about getting things right, but about experiencing it. The people, the food, the awkwardness, and the moments that were not polished to perfection.

He took travel off the pedestal and put it back at human level. By doing that, he made it feel less precious and less intimidating, which mattered at a time when access still felt gated.

The shift from access to too much choice

That is not the world we are in now.

Experience is everywhere. Movement is normal. Eating out is normal. Trying things is normal. If anything, it never really stops. Even when you think you are doing enough, there is always something else you could be doing. Another place. Another restaurant. Another trip. Another option that might be better than the one you chose.

Experience quietly turns into something you chase, rather than something you are actually in. Not because people are shallow or greedy, but because access exploded without coming with a manual for how to choose.

Bourdain did what was needed at the time. He helped lower the barrier when access felt intimidating. Now that barrier is gone. Access is not the problem anymore.

The harder part is knowing how to move inside it.

Taste inside abundance

Choice is great until it becomes overwhelming. At that point, taste becomes an essential tool for navigating too much choice.

Taste used to operate as a marker of status. It signalled access, exposure, and belonging, shaped by class, education, geography, and circumstance. When choice was limited, taste formed through constraint. Life did much of the filtering.

What has changed is not inequality, but abundance. For those living inside expanded access, experience is constant. Options rarely narrow themselves. Choice stays open longer than it used to.

So taste has shifted. It no longer functions primarily as a signal of status. It has become a way of filtering choice. A way of deciding, stopping, and letting something be enough.

Taste has not become pretentious or elitist. It has become necessary. It is not about knowing what is best, but about knowing when to stop choosing.

It is the ability to decide, commit, and enjoy without constantly second guessing yourself. And because no one really teaches that skill anymore, people feel overwhelmed even when they are doing all the “right” things.

Small moments of hesitation

I notice this in myself often, in small everyday moments.

Like leaving a social event early and questioning my decision. Or going to a restaurant and being asked where I would like to sit. Every option looks good. None of them are bad. Nothing is really at stake. And yet I still pause.

I look around for a moment too long. Window or corner. Inside or outside. I might ask what they recommend, not because I cannot decide, but because once I choose, the decision closes. Sitting down means committing. Letting the other options go.

And then, a few minutes later, the moment settles. Conversation starts. Food arrives. Nothing was wrong. There never was.

That small hesitation tells me a lot. Not about restaurants, but about how unused I had become to letting decisions be final. How often I kept my options mentally open, even after choosing. Not because I wanted the perfect option, but because I did not always trust myself to choose and then relax into that choice.

Tasteful hedonism in practice

In a world of unlimited choice, algorithms and artificial intelligence, choosing for yourself and letting that be enough feels quietly rebellious now.

This feels like a natural evolution of what Bourdain helped make possible. He encouraged people to move when access was limited. Now the challenge is different.

It is not about doing more. It is about knowing how to move inside infinite choice without losing yourself to it.

For me, this is what Tasteful Hedonism looks like in practice. Not excess. Not restraint. Wanting more, without losing sight of what is already here. Choosing, and then letting that choice land.

I care about living well. I am quite existential in that way. Deeply aware of how short life is and how little of it we are actually entitled to. I do not experience that awareness as panic, but it does keep me wide awake.

I don’t want to spend my life chasing a better version of it that I might never arrive at. This might be the best one I get. And if that is true, I would rather enjoy it while it is happening than always reaching for what comes next.

Learning how to be content, knowing when to say yes and when to say no inside that noise, is not complacency. It is a skill. And increasingly, it feels like a superpower.

Tasteful Hedonism, in that sense, is not about refinement or status. It is the ability to filter, decide, and know when to stop. To enjoy the life you’re in without constantly scanning for what comes next.

Sometimes, it starts with something simple. Sitting down at the table you chose, and giving yourself permission to enjoy it.

Stay Trendie x

For a long time, I lived for a future version of myself. I was always planning and preparing, always trying to do everything properly. I didn’t know how to enjoy my life as I was living it, or how to sit inside the journey while it was still unfolding. It felt quite literally impossible. I thought control was maturity, certainty was safety, and that if I could just hold everything tightly enough then absolutely nothing could go wrong.

For a while, that grip did offer reassurance. Life felt predictable and I felt as though I was doing it the right way. But holding on only works until you start relying on everything going to plan. When it does not, you begin to see how little control you actually have, and how much of your identity has been built around managing the uncontrollable.

Looking back, that unravelling taught me something simple but important. You cannot control outcomes, only how you respond to them. The things I had fixated on for years never arrived in the way I imagined, and when something began to feel off, I realised I needed to take responsibility for my choices instead of waiting for life to happen to me.

So I let go of control and deliberately went the other way.

I quit a perfectly stable job to become a chalet girl in Courchevel 1850, swapping certainty and a clear trajectory for something far more uncertain. It made very little sense on paper, but it felt richer in practice. I wanted to feel my life again, even if that meant walking away from what looked sensible.

For a while, carpe diem became the phrase I lived by, and in many ways it did exactly what I needed it to do. It pushed me to say yes more often, to move, to travel, and to leap rather than hesitate. Over the next two years I travelled to more than fifteen countries, lived in Croatia, Amsterdam and Paris, and lived out of a suitcase. By loosening my grip on control, I found myself more present inside my own life.

From the outside, it probably looked hedonistic, as though I was chasing pleasure for its own sake. People often said to me “you’re always on holiday”, and I felt a quiet need to explain that what I was doing was far more deliberate than it appeared.

I wasn’t just escaping my life, I was living it and building it at the same time. I was working and creating all whilst paying close attention to how it all felt. I was developing a relationship with my own taste in real time, not taste as status or aesthetics, but taste as sensitivity. I began noticing what genuinely fuelled me and what quietly drained me, what felt exciting in the moment but left me oddly empty afterwards.

I knew, for example, that I didn’t love cleaning toilets or making beds, but I loved what my ski season gave me. I loved the freedom, being in rooms with people I could learn from, commuting to work in a gondola rather than a packed tube, the ability to earn good money and the time to enjoy it, and the creative energy that came from documenting it all. Those details mattered far more than the job title itself.

I could easily have done five ski seasons by now if my chalet manager hadn’t said to me, very simply, “don’t do the same thing twice”. She was right. I did not want to keep replaying the same chapter just because it was exciting. I wanted to take what I loved from that experience and build something that could last.

Learning what actually felt good

Straight after that ski season, I moved to Croatia to create content for The Yacht Week. If you are not familiar with it, The Yacht Week is essentially hedonism packaged into a week long sailing trip with people from all around the world. It’s pretty much a floating festival.

People come for a week, but I was there for sixteen weeks because my role required me to be fully immersed in the experience. Creating iPhone content meant I could not observe from a distance. I had to live it from the point of view of the guest while also representing the brand and shaping how the experience felt.

I went to every party because that was part of the job, and while I enjoyed myself, I never fully lost myself in it. I was still working, still showing up with intention, and still aware that I was responsible for how the brand was being felt and perceived.

It was intense in ways I had not anticipated. Constant social interaction, late nights, eating out every day, and a social battery that never had the chance to switch off. I used to say “I just want a salad” because honestly in all the excess, I was craving a bit of simplicity.

Not because I was ungrateful or not enjoying myself. I was deeply grateful and aware of how fortunate I was to be there. But even in the middle of excess, my body and mind were quietly signalling what they needed.

With no one structuring my time for me, I had to find a rhythm that I could sustain, and that process taught me more than I expected. Like my ski season, it clarified both what I enjoyed and what I did not want forever. I loved the people, the travel, the creativity, and the absurdity of calling travelling and partying work, but I knew it could not be my entire life.

Choosing pleasure with discernment

At the time, I did not yet have language for what was happening, but something had shifted. I was not rejecting pleasure, and I was not chasing it either. I was learning how to enjoy my life with discernment by choosing what genuinely enriched me and stepping away from what quietly numbed me.

That way of living is what I later came to call Tasteful Hedonism.

Once I understood that distinction, everything began to change. When you choose pleasure with discernment, escape stops being necessary because your life no longer feels like something you need a break from. Instead, you begin building something that supports enjoyment rather than undermines it. You allow ambition and joy to coexist.

I still ask myself the same question. If I’m selling a yacht experience, why am I not on a yacht? If I’m selling a ski experience, why am I not in the mountains?

That question is what pushed me to start my own agency.

I had always wanted to work for myself, even if I had not yet worked out what that would look like. I had already been freelancing alongside my role and had used up all my annual leave. So I started looking for a way to keep working with the brand while creating space for other projects.

Eventually, I pitched the idea of taking my role freelance. Not because I wanted less responsibility, but because I knew I would do better work if I was trusted with my time. The work was never meant to fit neatly into a nine to five. It was meant to be lived.

They did not understand it at the time, but I did it anyway.

I was already freelancing for a fashion design agency that paid me more than my salary, and that final sense of self belief gave me the push I needed to set up Trendie Social, which has since grown into the wider Trendie ecosystem.

Staying in the middle

I don’t live by a rigid plan anymore. I trust my ability to notice what enriches me, what numbs me, and when I start drifting toward either extreme. Trendie acts as an anchor.

That is what I did not know how to do before.

Choosing pleasure with discernment taught me how to enjoy what is in front of me without constantly needing to escape it, and how to build something that supports that enjoyment rather than working against it.

I used to live by the phrase carpe diem, but over time it has shifted into something quieter and more personal.

Carpe your life.

Carpe diem is about the moment. It’s a leap. It’s reactive and brilliant for shaking you out of paralysis. But moments on their own don’t sustain you. They need somewhere to land.

Carpe your life is about building the thing that holds them. Making the highs last. Not chasing the next one but creating a life where enjoyment isn’t something you escape into, it’s something you already live inside.

Trendie grew out of this way of living, not as a brand idea but as a practice and a reminder to stay present, to trust your taste, and to build a life you genuinely want to be in.

I have lived at both extremes of total control and total surrender, and what I eventually realised was that the in-between is the sweet spot and a pretty great place to be. It’s the place where life feels good now while still making sense later, and where you do not have to choose between living fully and building something real.

That is where I am, and that is what I am building.

I was lucky enough to spend three weeks there this time last year and, as a creative, it genuinely refuelled my soul. It came at a time where I didn’t need distraction or stimulation. I needed grounding and a change of scenery.

January is always a strange time. We’re told we need to reset, overhaul, become new versions of ourselves overnight. New routines, new goals, new energy. But none of us actually have a reset button (We’re humans, not robots).

London can amplify that. It’s very easy to get caught up in the pace, the comparison, the constant sense that you should be doing more. I love London for so many reasons, but it does pull you into momentum without ever really asking whether that momentum still makes sense for you.

Cape Town does the opposite.

You’re surrounded by mountains, sea, endless nature. Things that are much bigger than you and whatever feels urgent at the time. Perspective returns very quickly. Your problems don’t disappear, but they shrink. You remember that there’s a world outside your phone, your inbox, your to-do list and london.

In London we have the Thames. In Cape Town, nature is everywhere. You can’t avoid it. And that does something to your nervous system whether you consciously think about it or not.

I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to work for myself and to be able to experience places like this. I don’t feel entitled to it at all, and I’m conscious that it could change at any point. I think that’s exactly why I try to experience trips like this properly instead of racing through them.

That means actually leaning into the food, the culture, the pace, the people. Sitting longer at breakfast. Letting days unfold without planning every hour. Enjoying better food, slower mornings, cheaper but better coffee. Small things, but they add up.

I’m not tied to working in London, and while I was there I worked from Cape Town. That change of environment genuinely shifted how I thought, how I created, and how I felt about my work. Mornings were slower. My thinking felt clearer. There was more space in general.

This guide came out of that time. Not from sightseeing or chasing recommendations, but from living there for a few weeks. From returning to the same places. Which ones I’d tell a friend to go to without hesitation.

Cape Town has a way of reminding you what matters if you let it.

I’ve marked places in a very simple way, mostly based on whether I wanted to go back or whether I’d recommend them to someone else.

• somewhere I was glad I tried
  ** somewhere I’d recommend to a friend
  *** somewhere I’d happily return to

Coffee / Breakfast

The places I went back to were the ones that felt easy. Good food, good coffee, easy.

Maggy Lou’s ***
I went here a lot. Always felt like the right choice and never disappointed. Also great to work from.

Kleinsky’s*
Great bagels, casual and buzzing spot.

Rosetta Roastery Cafe ***
When we stayed on Kloof street for a few days, this was our local and this made me fall in love with coffee so much more.

Pauline’s
Nice, easy vibe but didn’t stick with me in the same way others did.

Arthur’s Mini Super*
Less about the coffee and more about the vibe. Snacks, atmosphere, people coming and going.

Places I wanted to try:
The Strangers Club
Our Local
Espresso Lab
Convenient and reliable.

Dinner

Kiki’s **
Perfect for a date night, special occasion or simply because you fancy a nice candle-lit meal with a vibey atmosphere.

Clarke’s **
Loved this spot. The food was sooo good, and their sandwiches are delicious.

Fyn *
Very impressive, but more of an experience than somewhere I’d return to.

Blondie **
Drinks spot but also great for dinner. A vibey place with a DJ and great cocktails.

Places I wanted to try:
Belly of the Beast
Chef’s Warehouse
Tomson
The Athletic Club & Social

Things to do

Lion’s Head *
So worth doing, especially early in the morning.

Table Mountain *
Incredible, but timing and weather matter. Also go first thing.

Fitness:
Running first thing (it gets HOT in summer), Sweat 1000 classes, F45 classes***
A good way to keep some structure while travelling.

Takeaway on the beach *
Simple and very enjoyable. Sushi Box is great.

Clifton 2nd ***
Sunsets, swimming, and just letting time pass.

Cafe Caprice on a Sunday ***
If you know you know.

The Cape Winelands

If you can, spend a few days here. This was the highlight of the trip for me.

Stellenbosch

Worth going to the town itself, just to walk around. Beautiful streets, great boutiqye shops, great restaurants.

If you can get a table at Fat Butcher, go. My South African friend who’s lived in Stellenbosch her whole life said, “you MUST go there”. She wasn’t wrong.

We were slightly hungover because it was the day after the wine tram, and it was still incredible. The food, the service, the atmosphere. I’ve never been anywhere quite like it.

Table de Meye

Possibly the best long lunch I’ve ever had. Very much a bucket list thing for me.

It genuinely feels like eating in your friend’s garden. The one who cooks unbelievably well and makes it all feel effortless. Watch vlog here.

Vineyards

Delaire Graff and go for the view and a glass of wine, of course.

We did the orange line on the wine tram and stopped at:
Boschendal
La Cotte Farm
Babylonstoren
Noble Hill

Would go back and go to La Colombe if I could get a table.

Where we stayed

Our friends stayed at 7 Koppies Farm, which was amazing.

We stayed at Farmstead in Franschhoek, which was much more rustic and off grid. Fresh eggs, fresh bread, very stripped back.

Full disclaimer, the road to it had a river running through it. This took us by surprise and was actually hilarious. We were VERY lucky our Uber drivers found it funny rather than turning around.

If you go, don’t rush it.
And don’t try to do all of this.

Remember, this is a guide to follow loosely. Interpret accordingly.

Stay Trendie x

On self-doubt, embracing the chaos and learning to back yourself.

January is a weird one. And on top of that, being an entrepreneur in January is even weirder.

As someone who doesn’t have a perfect plan, and never really has, I feel the pressure more than any other month to suddenly have one. I think I’ve said “I need to get my life together” most days. Sometimes jokingly, sometimes not.

And don’t get me wrong, January does have its benefits. I really am learning to enjoy it and to embrace it. It allows you to pause. It forces you to look at things properly. To re-align, to prioritise, and to ask what you actually want to keep and what you’re ready to let go of.

But with that comes a lot of noise.

January has a way of amplifying certainty. Suddenly it feels like everyone around you is fully optimised and ready to go. New routines. New goals. New plans spoken out loud before they’ve even settled. You notice it everywhere. In conversations. Online. In the questions people ask.

And you’re still figuring out what you’re even doing, let alone where it’s going.

Yesterday I had one of those days where everything clicked. One of those days where you think, yes, I’m onto something. This makes total sense. I feel ready for it.

And then today I’m like… who do I actually think I am.

Welcome to the life of an entrepreneur.

That contrast is usually where the self doubt comes uninvited.

The reality is that I have no one telling me what to do. And yes, that’s a great thing in so many ways. It’s the freedom I wanted. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t also a struggle at times.

As an entrepreneur, you need the discipline of a manager, the patience of a long term thinker, and the self trust of someone willing to move without constant reassurance.

Some days that feels empowering. Other days it just feels heavy.

January makes that weight more noticeable. There is no straight path to this life. That’s part of the appeal and why I chose it in the first place. It’s fluid. It changes. You’re allowed to evolve without permission.

But it also means there’s no structure resetting itself for you. No objectives handed down. No clear KPIs. No sense of being folded back into something that’s already moving. It is all on you.

The art of backing yourself.

Sometimes I do wish someone else could back me other than myself. Someone to sit next to the idea, or quite literally inside my brain, and say, yes, this makes total sense. Keep going.

The reality is, wanting that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in what I’m doing. I think it just means I’m human. Most paths come with built in reassurance. This one doesn’t.

Self promoting myself, or giving myself a pay rise, doesn’t quite land the same as someone else doing it for you. It’s like clapping for yourself. Necessary, but it never quite hits the same.

So you learn to move without it. At first that feels unsettling. Then, slowly, it becomes a quieter kind of self trust.

And yes, people do love to romanticise entrepreneurship. But just like anything in life, it’s mostly made up of quiet days. Small decisions. A lot of sitting with uncertainty and not really knowing if you’re doing it “right”.

This is also fun. And it is a privilege. I’m aware that getting to sit with these questions at all is not something everyone gets. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier, but it does stop me taking it for granted.

Some days I wish someone else could carry the responsibility with me. Other days I recognise how rare it is to have this much ownership over my own life. Both can be true.

So yes, January is strange. The doubt is there. The pressure to have it all figured out feels louder than ever. But even when it feels pretty uncomfortable at times, there’s something very alive about it.

And honestly, I’m going to make them coexist either way.

The hardest part of living this way is not the living. It’s the explaining.

The Explaining

I don’t know how many times someone has looked at my life and quietly drawn the wrong conclusion. She’s always on holiday. She doesn’t have a real job. Must be nice. And I get it. From the outside, what I do doesn’t look like work in the way people expect it to. There’s no office. No commute. No neat job title that settles the conversation in three seconds.

When people ask what I do, there’s usually a pause after I answer. A head tilt. The polite silence that says, right… but what do you actually do?

The truth is I work constantly. I think about what I’m building every single day. I wake up with ideas and go to sleep with questions. But I also had lunch outside today. I also booked a trip last week because it felt right. I also lit a candle on a Tuesday for no reason other than I wanted to.

And somehow that’s the part people notice. Not the work. The lunch.

The Two Extremes

I think we’ve been trained to recognise ambition only when it looks like suffering. Long hours. Burnout. Sacrifice. A packed calendar with no gaps. If you’re not visibly grinding, you’re not visibly serious. And if you appear to be enjoying yourself, you must not be working hard enough.

On the other side, enjoyment only seems to look legitimate when it’s been earned. The holiday after the deadline. The dinner after the promotion. The trip after the big quarter. Pleasure as a reward, not a rhythm. Something you cash in rather than something you live inside.

Most people I know swing between the two. Grinding until they need to escape and then escaping until the guilt kicks in. I’ve done both. I’ve sat at a desk counting the hours until Friday. I’ve also spent sixteen weeks on yachts in Croatia wondering why I was craving a salad and a quiet evening.

Neither felt like mine. One was too tight. The other was too loose. Both left me reaching for the next thing instead of being in the thing I was already in.

The Middle

What I wanted was something in between. One where I could build something meaningful without losing my life to it. Where enjoyment wasn’t the break from work but the texture of it. Where I could be ambitious and present in the same breath.

And I don’t think that’s lazy. I think it’s actually harder than either extreme, because there’s no script for it.

Hustle has a script. Wake up early. Outwork everyone. Grind now, live later. It’s simple and it’s easy to follow because someone else already laid it out.

Escape has a script too. Quit the job. Book the flight. Find yourself somewhere else. It’s romantic and it’s easy to follow because it feels like freedom even when it’s just another loop.

The middle doesn’t have a script. There’s no one to copy. No aesthetic for it. No playbook that tells you how to build something real from a café while also being fully present in the conversation you’re having. You just have to feel your way through it. And I think most people would rather follow someone else’s script than trust themselves to figure it out without one.

The Filter

That’s what I think actually makes this way of living uncomfortable for some people. Not that it doesn’t work. But that it requires you to trust your own judgement about what a good life looks like. And that means being okay with the fact that some people won’t understand it.

The friends who chose the grind look at you and wonder if you’re serious enough. The friends who chose escape wonder why you’re still building at all. You don’t quite fit in either conversation. And at first that can feel quite lonely.

But over time it becomes a filter. The people who get it get it immediately. They don’t need the explanation. They recognise the rhythm because they’re looking for it themselves. And the people who don’t get it were probably never going to, no matter how many times you tried to justify a Tuesday lunch.

The Shift

I stopped explaining. That was the shift for me. Not because I don’t care what people think, but because the explaining was costing me more energy than the living. Every time I softened what I do to make it sound more reasonable, I moved a little further away from the thing I was actually building.

Trendie is what happened when I stopped trying to translate my life into other people’s frameworks and just started building my own. Not a rejection of ambition. Not pure hedonism. Something in between. Intentional, felt, and built to last.

I still don’t have a neat job title, and I don’t plan on having just one. My work sits between brands, content, and lived experience. I build things through how I live, what I notice, and what I care about. It’s not conventional, and it’s not always tidy or easy to explain, but it’s intentional. And it’s something I’m still figuring out as I go.

Trendie isn’t for everyone. It’s for people who care about what they’re building and how they’re living. Who want both and are quietly refusing to believe they have to pick.

This is me figuring it out. And inviting others to do the same.

Stay Trendie x