Savouring Simple Daily Pleasures

The Luxury of Looking After Yourself

There is something wonderfully indulgent about climbing into freshly washed bed linen with a good book while rain taps softly against the windows.

No plans. Nowhere to be. Just that delicious feeling of knowing the evening is entirely your own.

For me, these are the moments that remind me that self-care doesn't have to mean booking an expensive treatment or spending an afternoon at a spa. Sometimes it is as simple as freshly washed hair, clean sheets and taking the time to apply your makeup without rushing. Investing in quality supplements and good nutritious food.  Spending 30 or 40 minutes stretching or practising yoga. Other times, it might be a little splurge — like the massage I've booked for tomorrow.

I think the real luxury is having the freedom to choose what feels good to you.

Self-care doesn't have to cost a thing

We often talk about self-care as though it comes with a price tag, but some of the loveliest rituals are completely free.

A quiet evening at home can be incredibly restorative. Putting your phone away, making a cup of tea, changing into your favourite pyjamas and settling down with a book can feel like a reset button after a busy week.

Even washing your hair can become a small pleasure when you stop treating it as another task to tick off your list. Take your time. Enjoy the warmth of the shower. Let your freshly washed hair dry while you potter around the house.

And there is something particularly lovely about getting ready when you don't have to be anywhere.

Applying makeup slowly, rather than frantically trying to get out the door, changes the whole experience. Put on your favourite products, take your time with them and enjoy the little ritual of it.

Self-care can simply be not rushing.

Make the everyday feel a little more luxurious

Sometimes it isn't about buying anything new; it's about changing the way we experience what we already have.

I love arranging my beauty products so that getting ready feels a little more spa-like. Decanting things, tidying bottles, displaying the products I actually use and keeping everything clean and organised can make an ordinary bathroom feel surprisingly luxurious.

Then there are those tiny sensory pleasures that cost almost nothing.

A spritz of a favourite fragrance.

Fresh towels.

A candle burning while you get ready for bed.

The first page of a new book.

Clean pyjamas.

Freshly laundered sheets.

These little moments are easy to overlook because they are ordinary. But perhaps that is precisely what makes them so wonderful. We don't always need a grand gesture to feel cared for.

Turn your shower into a treatment

A shower can be much more than something you squeeze into between everything else.

Every now and then, I love turning it into a proper at-home treatment.

A luxurious body scrub, warm water, freshly washed hair and a favourite soap can make the simplest shower feel like a mini spa appointment. Occasionally I'll use a shower steamer too, as I received a box of them as a gift I'm eeking out to last.

There is something deeply satisfying about exfoliating, rinsing everything away and stepping out with soft, moisturised skin.

And if you have a little more time, why not put on a face mask afterwards?

You don't have to spend an hour on an elaborate beauty routine. Even fifteen minutes can feel like a pause button.

The bubble-bath kind of evening

Then there are evenings when only a bath will do.

Run the water, add bubbles or salts, put on some music and leave the outside world where it belongs — outside the bathroom door.

A bath doesn't have to be productive. You don't need to listen to a podcast, answer messages or learn something while you're in there.

You can simply soak.

I think we've become so accustomed to filling every spare moment that doing absolutely nothing can feel almost rebellious.

Sometimes self-care is allowing yourself to be gloriously unproductive.

At-home treatments can be surprisingly satisfying

There are also plenty of beauty rituals that sit somewhere between everyday pleasure and a proper splurge.

I love doing little treatments at home, whether that's using red light therapy, tinting my own eyebrows or giving myself a longer-than-usual skincare routine.

There is a particular satisfaction in knowing how to do some of these things yourself. Not only can it save money, but it means you can build them into your routine whenever it suits you. We live out of town, so sometimes having to go somewhere a drive away takes the luxury out of the experience.

And there is something quite lovely about becoming your own beauty therapist for an evening.

Put everything you need within reach. Make yourself comfortable. Turn the bathroom into your little treatment room.

You might be surprised how luxurious home can feel.

Choosing where to spend

Of course, there are times when spending money on yourself feels completely justified.

The trick, for me, is deciding what is actually worth spending on.

Tomorrow, I've booked myself a massage — and I already know I'm going to enjoy every minute of it. Even getting there.

There is something different about having someone else take care of you for an hour. You don't have to prepare anything, perform the treatment yourself or think about what's next. You simply lie there and let someone else do the work.

For someone else, that might be the hair salon.

For another person, it might be getting their nails done.

It could be a facial, a pedicure, a beautiful piece of skincare or something completely unrelated to beauty.

The point isn't that we should all spend money on the same things. It's about working out which experiences genuinely make you feel cared for.

I'd much rather occasionally spend money on something I really look forward to than constantly buy little things that don't actually add much to my life.

A massage I will remember feels far more luxurious to me than another bottle of something sitting unopened in the bathroom cabinet.

There is no right way to self-care

Perhaps the most important thing is that self-care doesn't need to look a particular way.

It doesn't have to be expensive.

It doesn't have to be aesthetic.

It doesn't have to involve candles, silk robes or a perfectly organised bathroom.

It can be a $0 evening curled up in bed with a book.

It can be a bubble bath.

It can be tinting your eyebrows at home.

It can be taking twenty minutes to do your makeup when normally you only have five.

It can be washing your hair and enjoying how lovely it feels afterwards.

It can be your favourite fragrance sprayed onto your wrists simply because you like the smell.

Or it can be booking the massage you've been thinking about all week.

Self-care is really just a way of saying: I matter too.

And perhaps on a rainy Saturday night, with fresh sheets, a book and nowhere else to be, that can be enough.

Tonight, I'm choosing the simple version.

Tomorrow, I'm choosing the massage.

Both count.

Savouring Simple Daily Pleasures

For most of my life, I have regarded napping with a certain suspicion.

A nap felt like wasted time. An indulgence. Perhaps even a small sign of weakness.

I was not a napper.

Even as a brand-new, thoroughly sleep-deprived parent, when a precious window of opportunity appeared and someone suggested I sleep while the baby slept, I resisted. There were things to be done. The day was already too short. Surely sleeping in the middle of it was somehow cheating.

And then, of course, there was the aftermath.

I would wake feeling groggy and disoriented, inevitably craving something crunchy and sugary — cookies, chocolate-covered Scotch Fingers, anything that could deliver an immediate little jolt of comfort. Then I would worry that the nap had ruined my sleep for that night, which seemed to confirm my long-held suspicion that naps were more trouble than they were worth.

So I simply didn't nap.

For decades.

Perhaps it was partly inherited. My mother is not a napper either. My father, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoys his naps. Given the opportunity, he will happily settle into an armchair and disappear for a while.

My husband is much the same. If time allowed, I suspect he would happily take an hour-long nap every day.

Although the girls and I have mercilessly ribbed him for years about the startled way he wakes from one — however gentle the intentions of the person attempting to rouse him.

There is something wonderfully universal about a sleeping man suddenly returning to consciousness as though he has just been summoned from another dimension.

And then there were my grandparents.

They were professionals.

Every afternoon, my grandfather would make a little nest for Grannie. In winter, she would be tucked up like a fragile little bird beside the hearth; in summer, he would find her a shady spot in the garden. They called it forty winks.

It was simply part of the rhythm of their day.

No guilt. No productivity anxiety. No checking the clock and calculating whether they had somehow squandered an hour.

Just rest.

I think I am finally beginning to understand it.

Now that my girls are grown, I find myself at home in the quiet more frequently. The house has changed. There is less rushing, less noise, fewer demands pulling me in ten directions at once.

And every now and then, after a productive morning, I find myself with an afternoon that has nowhere in particular to be.

So I nap.

Intentionally.

I don't collapse into bed exhausted or accidentally fall asleep in front of the television. I actually prepare for it.

I prop the dress pillows on the bed behind me so I can nestle into them. I pull the throw blanket from the end of the bed over myself. I silence my phone. I put a book nearby.

And then I lie down for thirty or forty minutes.

That's it.

Thirty or forty minutes of absolutely nothing being required of me.

Sometimes I don't even sleep deeply. Sometimes I simply drift in that delicious space between waking and dreaming, where the body becomes heavy and the mind finally stops trying to organise the next thing.

And the sounds around me become part of it.

Our stream babbling outside.

Birdsong.

Rain on the roof.

The distant hum of a mower.

The steady ticking of the clock.

And, if I'm particularly fortunate, the rumble of one of my cats, who has apparently decided that my nap is an invitation to join me.

Cats, naturally, are experts at this.

They have never once looked at a sunny patch of floor and thought, I really ought to be doing something productive.

They understand instinctively what I have taken most of my life to learn: rest is not something you earn only after everything else has been done.

Rest is part of life.

There is something almost ridiculously luxurious about a nap when you allow yourself to fully surrender to it.

Not luxury in the expensive or extravagant sense. There is no hotel suite, cashmere robe or champagne involved.

This is a quieter kind of luxury.

The luxury of time.

The luxury of silence.

The luxury of knowing that, for half an hour, nobody needs anything from you.

Perhaps that is why I still feel a tiny flicker of guilt sometimes.

Thirty minutes can feel enormous when you have spent a lifetime measuring your worth by what you accomplish in those thirty minutes.

I still occasionally wake from a nap and have that fleeting thought: Shouldn't I have been doing something?

But I'm learning to let the thought pass.

Because I am doing something.

I am resting.

And when I get up, I often feel better for it. Not always perfectly refreshed, not magically transformed, but softer somehow. More patient. More present.

Perhaps the greatest surprise is that the nap itself has become less important than the permission I give myself to take it.

I am learning that self-care doesn't always have to be worthy or disciplined or productive.

Sometimes it can simply feel wonderful.

Sometimes it can be a little indulgent.

Sometimes it can be forty winks beside the fire, just as it was for my grandparents all those years ago.

And perhaps there is something rather lovely about finally becoming good at something my father and grandparents understood all along.

I think I am finally a napper.

And honestly?

It's sheer quiet luxury.

Savoring simple daily pleasures

There is something rather wonderful about getting dressed up, heading out for the evening, meeting friends for good food, and then settling into your seat to watch a live performance unfold in front of you.

This week, I had exactly that pleasure. A meal with friends, followed by Agatha Christie’s The Stranger at the Pump House Theatre. And somewhere between the first course and the final twist, I found myself thinking about how much — and how little — the world of entertainment has changed.

There is a particular magic to a theatre that you simply don't get from watching something on a screen at home.

The Pump House has that feeling of anticipation that seems to belong especially to live theatre. You find your seat, look around at the people gathered for the evening, hear the conversations and laughter, and then there is that lovely moment when the lights begin to go down. For a few hours, everyone in the room agrees to suspend reality and enter another world.

And with Agatha Christie, you know you're entering a world where something is not quite as it seems.

The pleasure of a good whodunnit

I have always loved the particular thrill of a whodunnit.

There is something delicious about being given clues and then trying to put them together before the characters do. You find yourself watching everyone a little more closely. A glance becomes suspicious. A seemingly innocent comment suddenly feels significant. You start changing your mind about who you trust.

And, of course, there is the inevitable moment when you think you've worked it all out — only to discover that you haven't.

That is part of the fun.

But watching a Christie story performed live adds another dimension. You are not simply consuming the story; you are sharing the experience with a room full of other people. You can almost feel the collective concentration as everyone tries to solve the mystery.

There is laughter, surprise, suspicion and that wonderful little ripple that goes through an audience when something unexpected happens.

It is entertainment, certainly, but it is also participation.

A glimpse into another world

What I particularly enjoyed about The Stranger was the way those little details of another era kept revealing themselves.

The language. The manners. The expectations. The relationships between men and women. The assumptions about what was respectable, what was acceptable and, perhaps most importantly, who was expected to have the power.

The world of Christie’s stories was shaped by a society in which men generally held far more social, financial and domestic authority than women. There were strong expectations around marriage, behaviour, reputation and a woman's role in society.

Some of those attitudes can feel almost quaint to us now. Others make you stop and think.

Because while society has changed enormously, not all of those old assumptions disappeared when the decades moved on.

We still see echoes of those social norms today — in expectations around gender, in who is assumed to take responsibility, in whose voice carries most weight in a room, and in the subtle ways people are judged differently according to whether they are men or women.

That is one of the fascinating things about revisiting stories from another era. They become little time capsules.

You can enjoy the plot and the drama while simultaneously noticing the social world in which the story was created.

And sometimes those little reminders of the past are more thought-provoking than the obvious ones.

From the dining table to the theatre

Perhaps that's also why the whole evening felt so satisfying.

It wasn't just about seeing a play.

It was about the pleasure of getting together.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about sitting around a table with friends, eating beautiful food, talking, laughing and taking your time. We spend so much of modern life rushing from one thing to another, eating quickly, scrolling through our phones and filling every quiet moment.

A restaurant meal followed by live theatre feels different.

You are deliberately creating an evening.

You are making space for conversation. You are enjoying food not simply because you need to eat, but because food is part of the experience. You are sharing stories with people you enjoy. Then you move from the restaurant into the theatre and share another experience with a room full of strangers.

It is such a simple pleasure, really.

Good food. Good company. A story. A comfortable seat. The lights going down.

Sometimes we don't need anything more complicated than that.

How entertainment has changed

It is fascinating to think about how differently we entertain ourselves now.

Entertainment has become almost endlessly available. We can watch films and television whenever we want. We can pause them, rewind them, binge an entire series in a weekend or have an algorithm recommend something else before we've even decided whether we enjoyed what we just watched.

We carry music, films, books, games and social media around in our pockets.

There is enormous freedom in that.

But there is also something quite lovely about entertainment that requires you to leave the house.

Theatre asks something of us. We have to be there at a particular time. We can't pause it. We can't go back and watch a scene again. If something happens on stage, it happens once, in that moment, in front of us.

And that makes it feel alive.

Perhaps that's why theatre has survived all the technological revolutions that were supposed to make it obsolete.

Theatre has something technology can't quite replicate: presence.

There are real people on a real stage, performing for a real audience, and everyone in that room is experiencing the same thing at the same time.

The little reminders of a different era

One of the pleasures of an evening like this is noticing the details that transport you somewhere else.

The costumes. The language. The social etiquette. The relationships. The assumptions that the characters make without even questioning them.

They remind us that the way we live now isn't the way people have always lived.

Our own social rules can feel completely natural because we're surrounded by them every day. It takes a story from another period to make us notice just how much of society is constructed around expectations.

And perhaps that is one of the unexpected gifts of a good play.

It entertains us, but it also holds up a mirror — sometimes to ourselves, and sometimes to the world we have inherited.

An evening well spent

Walking out of the theatre after The Stranger, I was left with that particularly contented feeling that comes from having spent an evening well.

There had been the anticipation of the meal, the pleasure of eating beautiful food with friends, the atmosphere of the Pump House, the excitement of the performance and the delicious uncertainty of trying to work out the mystery.

For a few hours, we had stepped away from the noise of everyday life and into somebody else's story.

And perhaps that's what I love most about going to the theatre.

It isn't just about being entertained.

It's about being transported.

It is about sitting in the dark with a room full of people and allowing yourself to wonder, suspect, laugh and be surprised. It is about encountering a world from another time and recognising both how far we've travelled and how many old ideas still linger around us.

And then, when the lights come up, you step back into your own world — perhaps seeing it just a little differently.

Good food, good friends, live theatre, and a mystery to solve; a picturesque setting and driving home over the harbour bridge with the city glittering in the harbour's reflections. 

What more could you ask for from an evening?