I had an aunt who never married or had children. There were suitors. Tennis partners that had been around for decades. They would often be at her house when we visited, dashing, and with stories from how they had met during the Second World War. But there were parts of her interior life that nobody was allowed access to. Even my dad, her brother, was always annoyingly ill-informed. But then he wouldn’t have made it on to a list of life’s big sharers.

Myrtle worked in the media. Her job was sending stories by telex, a skill – speedily and accurately dispatching information – that she had learned while working for the Royal Air Force during the war. I always liked being around her. She did her own thing. And one of these things was travel. 

While my parents were securing the use of a caravan in Wales or perhaps – hold on to your hats – a cottage in Cornwall, Myrtle was heading to the airport. India, Canada, South Africa; off she would go. And I cheered her on because, as a young boy, I knew that she would bring me a souvenir from her travels. From Canada – I guess I was about eight – she gifted me a piece of varnished bark from a pine tree that had two plastic bears glued to its surface. A vignette from the wilds and clearly the best thing in the world when you’re eight. From India there was a snake charmer’s flute made from reeds and a dried gourd, a carved wooden elephant and a fan made out of peacock feathers (divine but not something that any young lad could use in public).

Myrtle purchased fancier things for herself that would find a place on her sideboard or bookshelves. And there they still were when I was a man, her gentleman callers long gone, and she was sliding into dementia. When the time came to clear her house, I kept her photo albums, filled with pictures from her travels in the late 1940s and 1950s. And I kept some of the souvenirs that had been sitting in the same spots for years. Items that, to the end, I hope, offered her a way to go back to a place and time that had long since receded over the horizon. I now have the white alabaster Shiva from India, a stone mountain goat from Canada, a woven bowl from South Africa. And while my gourd cracked long ago, so to speak, I still have the elephant and a tiny wooden giraffe.

The meander down memory lane this week has been in part promoted by another round of letting go. Neither me nor the other half have any parents left, both had child-free aunts who died (old age, not poisoned for the inheritance) and we’re both prone to sentimentality, so our garage is rammed with boxes containing things that nobody needs but which are hard to throw away. Stuff that just lingers. But this time we’re going for it. This week his aunt’s childhood teddy – bald, blind and with stuffing exiting the seams – has been given away for free to a woman who says that she offers bears a second chance at life. An ornamental decoy swan that belonged to my mother has also flown off to a new home after 16 years in a box. Ebay, Freegle, we’re on it. But those souvenirs from the 1970s and 1980s are going nowhere.

Last week I wrote about my visit to the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, about this place that houses a church, synagogue and mosque, and about its spiritual potency. I left out the bit where I went wild in the gift shop that’s run by the design company Fount. It has lots of nice things made in the UAE, including a series of simple wooden animals. I bought the oryx, which is now standing majestically on the kitchen table but might have to bunk up with the elephant in the coming days.

I know that it really makes no sense, forcing a swan and a bald bear to move out one minute, then guiding an antelope into the house the next. But I blame Myrtle. The souvenir is much maligned but, like her, I see in them a way of reaching back to a place and a moment. And perhaps, in my dotage, a way of looking up at a shelf and connecting to a different time.

In the internet age, it’s usually easy to pinpoint the origin of a trend (writes Alexis Self). Much was made of Rihanna’s Guo Pei “omelette gown”, worn to the 2015 Met Gala, and the effect that it had on the popularity of yellow. Since then, trend cycles have quickened in tandem with download speeds, to the extent that someone declaring a particular garment the new omelette gown at breakfast might well have egg on their dress come dinnertime. But among all the ephemeral mauves, brattish greens and millennial pinks, one colour has quietly come to dominate the fashion-scape. I am referring, of course, to brown. 

Now, like a member of parliament before a debate, I feel that I must declare an interest: I am a big fan of brown. Taken out of context those seven words might alarm but one glance at my summer wardrobe should steady your pulse. For in among the tobacco cords and marron moleskins of autumn-winters past are liverish linens and khaki kecks. Conversations with my colleagues – a near universally fashion-conscious bunch – reveal a similar predilection for the warm-weather brown. And when anecdotal evidence matches the runways and billboards, a trend’s afoot.  

This piece first appeared on monocle.com. Click here to read on.

For Monocle’s July/August issue, we took a global tour to find the newsstands stocking a compelling roster of print publications and serving as valuable community hubs. Here’s one that’s worthy of making headlines. 

Launched in Barcelona in 2019, News & Coffee now brings first-rate print media and quality single-origin brews to nine locations across Europe. Each kiosk has settled into its neighbourhood, including London’s King’s Cross.

News & Coffee can be found in Granary Square inside a Paperhouse, one of four kiosks designed by the London-based Heatherwick Studio in 2002. Over time these booths had lost their original purpose but the arrival of News & Coffee returned the Paperhouse to its intended function. “The conversation we had was, ‘How do we feel about bringing paper back into the Paperhouse?’” says Gautier Robial, one of News & Coffee’s three founders.

Granary Square provides a moment of calm in the bustling capital. In the warmer months it comes alive with children running in and out of fountains, live music and open-air cinema programmes. For Robial, this lively environment is the secret to the kiosk’s success. 

“People are rediscovering the joy of stopping by and having a chat while they wait for their coffee,” he says. “The newsstand is at the crossroads of so many layers of society, some that we don’t always notice. I always say that we have the same role as a public bench.”

To read more about the news kiosks taking a stand for their communities, click here. 

In Taiwan, a good night’s sleep doesn’t come swaddled in down or fluffy comforters (writes Clarissa Wei). For generations, many Taiwanese preferred to sleep on wooden platforms or bamboo mats – hard, unyielding surfaces believed to keep the body aligned and the spine in order. Anytime my father gets back pain, he skips the bed and lies directly on the floor for a few nights. Ask around and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: “soft beds make for sore backs”. That’s the ethos behind Sleepy Tofu, a Taiwanese mattress start-up that’s winning fans with a firm touch.

The branding hinges on a simple idea: tofu comes in textures – from silken to extra firm – and so do mattresses. Its original model is already considered hard by global standards, featuring a hybrid construction with high-carbon steel pocket coils, Italian latex and low-rebound memory foam. But even that wasn’t quite rock-solid enough for the brand’s discerning clientele, so they went a step further. The Well-Done Sesame Tofu is a mattress so dense that it comes with a note to buyers: “This bed is extremely firm – use with caution.” Made with military-grade impact foam – the kind used to cushion missile casings – it’s shockingly rigid, built for those who believe that true rest begins with full spinal alignment. It contains 2,000 coils, far more than the average Western mattress, which typically ranges from 300 to 800. So firm, they say, that it rivals the floor – albeit with rather more finesse.

All the mattresses are produced in Taiwan and tailored to the island’s sticky subtropical climate. Graphite-infused foam wicks heat, tencel covers stay breathable and reinforced edges make getting in and out of bed a bit easier. Now shipping internationally to the US and Japan, Sleepy Tofu has global ambitions. But at its core, the brand reflects a distinctly Taiwanese sleep philosophy – one that favours alignment over indulgence. In a market saturated with promises of plushness, the brand is making a firm case for something different.

“One of the finest and most complete examples of its genus ever found”; “combining strength, speed and adaptability to hunt effectively across a range of environments”; “an exceptional specimen, which boasts a remarkably complete and fully articulated skull” – I’d be flattered to be described in such terms at my age, let alone at more than 150 million years old (writes Henry Rees-Sheridan). But that’s the approximate age of the juvenile ceratosaurus skeleton, a toothy predator of the Late Jurassic period, that’s up for auction at Sotheby’s New York on 16 July. 

Somewhat surprisingly, the market for dinosaur skeletons isn’t limited to palaeontologists and nine-year-olds. Sotheby’s pioneered natural history auctions with the sale of Sue the tyrannosaurus rex in 1997. Sue was snapped up in less than 10 minutes with an $8.36m [€7.13m] bid from Chicago’s Field Museum, beating out the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. This now seems quaint, as the price of fossils has since risen largely beyond the reach of public institutions. In 2024, Sotheby’s sold Apex the stegosaurus to a hedge-fund manager for $44.6m [€38m], a record for a dinosaur fossil.

Apex is currently on loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it’s on display to the public as part of a four‑year loan agreement. Many private buyers lend their fossilised purchases to museums for public viewing and study but palaeontologists are concerned that the influx of private money into the fossil market is damaging their field. Private ownership discourages research by scientists wary that access to the specimen could be withdrawn, devaluing any papers that they publish on it. We can only hope that Sotheby’s specimen – the only juvenile among the four ceratosaurus skeletons known to exist