Dear readers,
Wherever you find yourself reading this in the world, I hope your autumn is as vibrant as the streets of London. Hyde Park is already blanketed in crimson and gold, the air already crisp enough to warrant buttery soft cashmere jumpers for the rest of the year. The months between October and April are my most inspired times, both while at home in England and travelling to our most treasured corners of Europe. The pen simply swims in the fleeting enchantment between autumn leaves falling and waking up to white alpine mornings in Austria. With unpredictable months ahead in the pandemic, I’m anchoring myself and our travel traditions to reasonable expectations going into winter. The second wave is fastening its grip on Europe in an unsettling way. Good health, endless tea and a cosy home remain the highest joys.
I noticed quite a few new readers this past week, so this note is wishing you the warmest welcome! My name is Kortney Gruenwald. I’m a writer, a Londoner, in the whirlwind midst of finishing my first novel series and bringing this magazine to life. While fiction is my heartbeat, not every magical finding can make it into the novel storylines; the creative need to filter these experiences into a narrative that captures the enchantment of Britain and Europe is the marrow of The Modern Jetsetter magazine. To capture the stories steeped in British elegance, modern sensibility and Europe’s continental grandeur, so these cultural narratives comfort your homes and imaginations for years to come — to hold, to read, to feel the emotional texture of country and continent.
Blanketing my non-writing, non-magazine hours with autumn comforts has been so essential to staying balanced. Properly sunken into my English life, the comforts double as the energy. It’s the magic of writing another world in the mornings, the disappearance of time. It’s an energising coffee date with an interviewee or publishing contact. It’s the time between the first cup of Earl Grey — with a controversial splash of milk — and the fifth. It’s the dewy ramble between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park at sunrise. It’s that mystical time spent with pen, paper and meditation before screen. It’s correspondence with my dearest friends around the world. It’s living in wooly jumpers most days, each having a memory attached to no-frills country shops in the Cotswolds, or the Lake District. It is grace to slip away for afternoon tea on a weekday, the humble dance of pleasure and duty. It is spending most evenings curled up in the armchair with my grandmother’s old blanket, dissecting timeless films and novels from the greats, searching for the threads that transcended time. It is the gentle daily edit of life, only allowing space for depth and what electrifies the heart at a cellular level. It is belief in the power of story. It is pressing all this joy against the uncertainty. It is not only accepting the once foreign-but-pretty concept of taking life one day at a time, it is acknowledging that is likely where the magic was all along.
xx Kortney