Survival kit for two extremely tired people
Not one single thing in this box is for the baby. He gets enough. This is for the two people doing the night shift — roughly 4,800 miles of chocolate, beer and bath stuff, hand-picked from our two home countries.
M&S Collection
The grown-up one. Dark milk chocolate — richer than milk, kinder than dark — cut through with zesty Italian blood orange oil. Snaps into individual squares, which is a lie you can tell yourself about portion control at 11pm.
M&S Single Origin
Cocoa from Fairtrade growers in the Dominican Republic, made into a properly creamy milk chocolate with a long caramelised-butter finish. This is the everyday hero — the square you eat standing at the counter while the kettle boils.
Marks & Spencer started in 1884 as a market stall in Leeds — Michael Marks' Penny Bazaar, where everything cost a penny and the sign read “Don't ask the price, it's a penny.” Thomas Spencer put up the money. 140-odd years later it is the shop Britain uses to say “I made an effort.”
You do your normal shopping somewhere else. You go to M&S for the good stuff: the Christmas dinner, the thing you bring to someone's house, the treat you buy yourself after a hard week. In 1998 they ran an advert with slow-motion melting chocolate pudding and a velvet voiceover insisting “this is not just a chocolate pudding…” and the country has never fully recovered. Brits still say it, unprompted, about a sandwich.
So when a British person hands you an M&S bar rather than a supermarket own-brand, that is not a snack. That is a gesture. And there is no M&S in the United States — which is rather the point of putting it in a box and flying it to Texas.
Uiltje Brewing Co.
A classic Belgian-style wheat beer, brewed crisp and cloudy with orange peel, lemon peel and coriander seed. Refreshing but with proper backbone at 6%. Serve it properly cold — 5–7°C — which in a Texas summer means straight from the fridge and drunk with intent.
Loose Cannon Brewery
Rich, smooth and fragrant — malty and biscuity up front, with a fresh bitter finish and a floral aftertaste that hangs about. A proper English session ale: the kind you drink slowly while doing nothing in particular, which is the entire luxury being offered here.
Literally “to catch a little owl.” It's the Dutch way of saying “to take a nap.” Kiki's countrymen named a brewery after it, and we cannot think of a phrase more suited to the next six months of your lives. Catch as many little owls as you possibly can.
Bubble Bar · Limited Edition
“The jack of all bathes.” Swirling orange autumn bubbles with uplifting lime oil, crisp juniperberry, geranium and a little lavender. It smells like the good half of October and it is, hands down, our favourite thing Lush make.
Massage Bar
Lush's gentlest massage bar — made for bellies that have been busy. Murumuru and shea butters (a lower melt point than cocoa butter, so it goes soft in your hands), with organic lavender, neroli and chamomile blue oils to calm skin and head at once. Designed to be safe at every stage of pregnancy and just as good afterwards, when skin is still recovering. 96% of Lush's testers said their skin felt hydrated and supple.
Shower Gel · Bestseller
The famous one. Lavender flower infusion with warm, vanilla-ish tonka and soothing oats — the scent Lush built an entire cult following on. People buy the Sleepy range specifically to get babies (and themselves) to sleep, which makes it almost aggressively on-theme for this box.
Lush started in Poole, Dorset in 1995, run by people who used to make products for The Body Shop out of a flat above a hairdresser's. Everything is handmade, dated and signed by the person who made it, none of it is tested on animals, and a lot of it comes with no packaging at all — “naked,” as they insist on calling it.
If you have ever walked down a British high street you have smelled a Lush from about forty metres away, whether you wanted to or not. It's a national landmark you navigate by nose. These three are genuinely the ones we buy for ourselves — the bubble bar most of all.