I am ashamed to admit that when I got the email from Simple Things magazine, I initially thought that it must be spam. I very nearly - VERY NEARLY - ignored it or deleted it. Even the ‘Dear Rachel’ that I could see in the preview wasn’t enough, as so many of the marketing emails I receive these days address me warmly by name.
So when I opened the email and saw that it was from Simple Things, they were running a feature about holiday journalling, and that they wanted to feature some of my art, I read it with mixed feelings of surprise, delight, and a sense of fear that I could easily have inadvertantly ignored them, entirely by mistake.
Do you know The Simple Things magazine? I’m actually a subscriber (another reason to think that the email was a marketing one). Their tagline is ‘taking time to live well’ and I always think that their pages are like the perfect, maybe perhaps a little idealised, antidote to urban life. This magazine has articles about things like mindfulness, growing plants, and dreamy photoshoots where impossibly beautiful friends all wearing linen sit in orchards having picnics, spreading homemade jam onto homemade bread and laughing together.
I would say it falls more into ‘aspirational’ than realistic. And frankly, there is no harm in that .Sometimes a bit of aspirational content is just what I want. During lockdown I gobbled up their content each month, and the pages took me far far away from the daily drudgery of cooking and home school, even if only for a moment or two.
In July, the magazine theme was ‘Drift’, and one of their articles … was about keeping a holiday journal. Hence their approach to me.
Naturally I stayed very cool and professional, and certainly didn’t reply immediately agreeing to be featured, with hundreds of exclamation marks, if that’s what you were thinking. I assumed that nothing was certain until it was actually in print, so whilst I did share the news with a few friends, I generally kept it under my hat until July, when the edition was in my hand, and I frantically flicked through looking to see if I was there or not.
I was! And it may not be cool to confess it, but I was genuinely so thrilled and pleased to see my work in print. I was featured alongside Jennie Maizels, whose holiday diary workshop I attended years ago, and which kick-started what has now become a whole stack of illustrated diaries that sit on my shelf in the most pleasing way you could imagine. I was very glad that they featured Jennie too, partly because I learnt about holiday diaries from her, so it seemed wrong to pretend I’d done it all myself. Also I was so flattered to be featured alongside her, as she has long been something of an illustration hero of mine.
If you like the look of these, do follow me on instagram, where you can find all my holiday diaries under the hashtag #rachelsholidaydiary. I’m hoping to film a few holiday diary flick-throughs too, and will be keeping another holiday diary this half term when we go away to North Norfolk, one of my very most favourite places in the whole world.