The Critic Magazine

Labelled with love

WE INHERITED A FEW things from my aunt when she died in 2015: a framed sketch of Marianne in her 1970s prime, a seemingly haunted Bose stereo that began playing “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen when we plugged it in, and two old-fashioned A4 notebooks from the National Blank Book Company of Holyoke, Massachusetts.

It was years before I looked inside them and discovered that they contained labels from wines she had tried with little notes after them, like Sainsbury’s Gewürztraminer “slightly too heavy and spicy, £3.95”, and

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