It’s been a week of stupendous beauty, starting on Thursday of last week. Graham, Steve’s dad, was stuck in London because of ash, so came to stay with us for a few days and decided he wanted to go to Bristol. We spent a lovely day wandering around the city centre and along the waterfront and observing all the identikit Conservatives having their ( Read more... )

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It’s been an incredible couple of weeks, vintage-wise. Last Tuesday I paid my weekly visit-slash-pilgrimage to the Age Concern in Cowley, not necessarily to buy, just to bask in all the retro packaging and melamine dinnerware and Crimplene dresses and embroidered teacloths and handbags and books and bits of fabric and jewellery, and to visit my ( Read more... )

Yes, I like shopping for old things. And since I got to England, I’ve gone a bit crazy. The quality of vintage clothes and things is so much better, and they’re so much more common than in NZ. Part of the reason I love these things is absolutely that I wish I lived in a more beautiful time. Not simpler, because every decade has its own problems, ( Read more... )

We’ve just returned from a day in London (my nose is tres sunburned, silly me) to find a lovely card from Gran saying that she enjoys this blog and is disappointed when there’s nothing on it for days in a row! Hi Gran! And sorry! My absence is never because I’m unwell, just lazy ( Read more... )

Just back from Paris - what do you say about Paris? It’s Paris. It’s difficult whenever you go to a place which has such mythology surrounding it to experience the ‘real’ place - not the tinsel-bedecked plastic-model faux-‘culture’ hung in the window for tourists ( Read more... )

I went out yesterday and trawled a few charity shops and jumble sales, spent £5 and got nine DVDs, a brooch, a couple of vintage traycloths and two books (one of which was Where's My Cow? by Terry Pratchett, for my 33 year-old husband. He was delighted.)

( My vintage finds )

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking hard about work, wondering whether to chase a high-powered book job or even just freelance writing and editing. I’d basically decided that I wasn’t going to look for work, because I’m loving Oxford so much; the history, the culture, the books, everything. For at least the next two months, I decided, I ( Read more... )

Oh, invisible blog friends. Save me from myself. I have fallen in love with VogueIt’s not the actual clothes I want - I’d have to sell the house and possibly throw in Steve to afford a wardrobe like that of many women in Vogue (a custom-made Chanel suit, for example, is US$100,000). It's just the idea of personal style, of having the right clothes ( Read more... )

I haven’t written for what seems like ages, but there’s lots going on. Most interestingly, it looks like with a lot of scrimping and saving, I can accompany Steve on his conference trip to Washington DC in October. Yay! Given that practically every book I’ve read this year has been a biography of an American politician, six days alone running ( Read more... )