Tara Ward watches Meghan Markle’s new Netflix lifestyle series and finds herself held hostage by a rainbow fruit platter.
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Meghan Markle wants us to find love in the details. The Duchess of Sussex’s new lifestyle series With Love, Meghan debuted on Netflix earlier this month and immediately shot into the New Zealand top 10, proving that even this corner of the Commonwealth loves a detail too. Every episode sees Meghan Markle invite a guest over for a special event – a kids’ party (without kids) or a game night (in the middle of the day) – as she showers them with hospitality. Meghan Markle loves making people happy and she wants to show us how to make people happy too. The secret? Just make them a rainbow fruit platter.
We’ve had Meghan Markle the television star and Meghan Markle the princess, and now With Love, Meghan seems to be heralding the era of Meghan Markle the tradwife. But this isn’t Meghan Markle in her own kitchen, because instead of using Meghan and Harry’s multi-million dollar Californian home, With Love was filmed in a property down the road. The garden is spectacular, the kitchen immaculate and it comes with thousands of jars, bowls and baskets for Meghan to gift to her pals. Just as well, because Meghan Markle is all about the little things.
When I began watching, those little things made me roll my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head and into Meghan Markle’s freshly baked focaccia. Every moment in Meghan’s kitchen is an opportunity for joy. The burden of domestic labour? She doesn’t live here. Instead, Meghan Markle finds so much pleasure in the ordinary that at times it’s like she’s an alien who just landed on Earth and is trying to become human. “What is the taste? What is the smell? What is the music you’re playing? Is that just as inspiring?” Meghan urges us to consider, as she prepares to… chop up fruit and make a rainbow out of it.
As Meghan makes a semi-circle from grapes and blueberries, birds begin to sing. “I love birdsong!” Meghan announces. “How fun!” she squeals after dipping donuts in glaze. She describes building a balloon arch as “a fascinating adventure” and when her friend Mindy Kaling comes over, Meghan shows her how to use a cookie cutter to make sandwiches into star shapes. She is literally smooshing two bits of bread together and calling it a moment. “It’s a real delight to be a present parent,” she says. Her kids are nowhere to be seen.
After watching four episodes that included Meghan Markle making tea by putting a teabag in water and leaving it outside for hours – on purpose – I was exhausted and bewildered. I needed one of her refreshing facecloths that had been dipped in chilled lavender water and rolled onto a platter, especially after Kaling asked why things taste better on a tiered plate and Meghan replied it was because you were literally elevating the food. Meghan kept reassuring us she was aiming for joy rather than perfection, but it was hard to look at those tiny tomato ladybirds arranged on a piece of crostini cut on the bias and believe her.
But by episode five, something happened to me. Maybe the show improved or maybe I became completely numb, but I found myself Googling “hemp hearts” and wondering what flowers I could put into ice cubes for the dinner parties I’ll never have the energy to throw. The show’s clean, neutral palate soothed me, Meghan’s calming voice had me hypnotised. I sat in awe of how she fried bacon without ruining her white linen shirt, and dreamed about how she froze her food scraps in water and gave it to her chickens. I cooked a meal that would have definitely been improved by a sprinkle of dried flowers. I even wondered if I should buy a dehydrator.
Maybe Meghan Markle was right. Maybe the little things do matter.
By episode seven, I couldn’t look away. I was being held hostage by a rainbow fruit platter and some supermarket carnations. I couldn’t relate to a single thing in this series and yet I started to think about what I would do with Meghan Markle if she invited me over. She would probably take me into her bountiful garden and show me her enormous heirloom tomatoes and I would tell her about how this summer it took me five long months to grow four pathetic cherry tomatoes. I would cackle at my many inadequacies and my new BFF would laugh too, softly like a Californian zephyr breeze, though a sadness in her eyes would hint at a touch of disappointment.
By episode 10, I decided that after a fun day of freezing food scraps together, Meghan Markle would send me home with a generous basket filled with vegetables she spent all morning harvesting. The next morning, I would wake at sunrise to find her in my garden, secretly sprinkling compost from her copper-lidded compost bin and reading individual hand-written notes aloud to each of my vegetables, making them feel valued and important so that next season I could build a beautiful harvest basket of my own.
“If you take a little bit of time, it will be noticed and appreciated,” Meghan Markle would tell both me and my cabbages, while I hoovered down her gift of a jar of her homemade strawberry preserve. After I spilled the jam all down my white linen shirt, we would hold hands and I would thank her and she would thank me and we would be friends forever. We would write “bready or not” on my own pantry blackboard and then I would remind her: “we’re not in the pursuit of perfection, we’re in the pursuit of joy”.
There would, of course, be birdsong.
With Love, Meghan streams on Netflix. Birdsong is everywhere.