WE HAVE AN unexpected bank holiday today due to the queen's funeral, which marks the end of what has been a whirlwind of non-stop activities leading up to this point, all exhaustively covered by the media. Things reached peak Britishness on Wednesday of last week when Sky News set up a live cam so that we could watch people queue in real time ...
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ON WEDNESDAY of last week, while in a book shop, discovered a new little photo book by a photographer named Steven Ahlgren called The Office (Hoxton Mini Press), which essentially began when the author was a disenchanted banker working in an office in Minneapolis. Inspired by a 1940 painting by Edward Hooper titled, Office at Night, which he would view frequently at the Walker Art Center, Ahlgren decided to leave office life behind to become a photographer. The photos, taken over a ten-year period between 1982-1992, chronicle a view of corporate life that can either be seen as tragic and sad, or heartfelt and thoughtful, depending on your own experiences with this world ...
BY NOW YOU'VE heard of Quiet Quitting, as it's been mentioned by every major news outlet for the past month or so. Like everything these days, it's a term that's attributed to a Gen Z TikTokker and it means no longer going above and beyond at work, but doing only what you've been hired to do and nothing more. In other words, common sense. It's the way I've handled all of my jobs, long ago when I had actual jobs and hadn't started TIG yet.
Casa Milà is a Modernista building in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was the last private residence designed by architect Antoni Gaudí. Built between 1906 and 1912, the building was commissioned by Roser Segimón and her second husband Pere Milà in 1905 with the intention of living on the main floor and renting out the rest of the apartments, hence the Casa Milà, the new home of the Milà family. The building is popularly known as La Pedrera (the stone quarry), in reference to its unconventional rough-hewn appearance.
Read recently that hot rollers were making a comeback, but for me, they never went away. I've been using them for ages, ever since I realised that using the fancy large-barrel curling iron (we call them tongs here) was far too much work and took too long. The only trouble is, now that I have a whole head of icy caramel highlights, I've been looking for heatless methods to curl my hair or at least add body without the heat damage. Here are a few other methods I've been experimenting with at home...
WHEN WE FIRST launched Belgrave Crescent in 2014, we created so many editorial stories for our new products that sometimes entire shoots would lie waiting on memory cards to be reviewed and processed. Sometimes some of these images would never see the light of day. Here, on a chilly beach in Scotland at sunset, in a satin playsuit and wellingtons ...
WHEN I WAS little, I would tell anyone who would listen that the my favourite colours were pink and purple. My little sister (who was always by my side) would chime in that she liked blue and black. Being unabashedly girly, I never favoured those colours and wore a steady wardrobe of preppy pink for as long as I could. Fast forward to the future and black would be a firm wardrobe staple, but blue, well I never ever really took to it⏤that is perhaps until now?
OUR FACES are golden on noses and cheekbones, our shoulders bronzed from the past week of hot summery weather. Just as we promised, we spent every single day outdoors, working on camp chairs in new exotic locations throughout the week and ending with dinners on the back terrace on the weekend. Once, we even had a barbecue along the river, our first and possibly only of the summer?
A FEW MONTHS ago I turned a tall shelf on its side to use a console, leaving the now vertical shelf spaces below for storage. It looked good on top, but the spaces below looked cluttered, so I thought about getting a curtain made to hide everything. I was thinking about how, in European kitchens, the lower cupboards are often covered using curtains instead of cupboards, and always liked the idea for its versatility: just change up the fabric from a stripe to a floral for an entirely new look, or swap linen for silk to go from casual to formal ...
ON THURSDAY and Friday of last week, we took a quick trip to Glasgow to take care of a few things. On Thursday night, after we got back to the hotel, it was late and rainy and a terrible night to decide to go traipsing to the West End to try to find a place to eat. We ended up at Rioja, a tapas restaurant in Finnieston ...
WHEN PEOPLE think of Ibiza, most think of a party place of nightclubs and late, late nights. The island is definitely known for its nightlife, but there is also another side to Ibiza: charming quiet villages, sandy beaches, yoga retreats, boutique hotels, restaurants and shops, and even secluded coves along the coast.
WE HAVE BEEN eating salads and chick peas and tofu and taking many vitamins (especially B12) and tomorrow, it will be a month since we've had any alcohol. It's a reset of sorts, and it's been good to get things back on track after so many hot summery day indulgences. Last Wednesday we went up to Scotland to visit P's 94-year-old grandmother and on the way home, stopped for dinner in a small town in Cumbria that we'd been to once before, but only briefly ...
JUST A FEW SNAPSHOTS of the things we've been up to this past July, including a quick trip to Edinburgh that ended up taking longer due to the heatwave, so iced coffees on the morning of the day that we were supposed to return home; pink English roses in the bright June sun and Sweet Potato, Ginger & Garlic Tofu Stew (with Lime and Spinach) ...
TWO WEEKS AGO, when we were in Edinburgh meeting up with P's brother, I got terrible blisters on my feet wearing the new espadrilles I'd ordered a few days earlier. I was really surprised (and a little confused) because I've had many pairs of espadrilles before and none of them ever gave me any trouble. I thought that maybe I should have broken them in more before the trip, but then I read recently about how many people have been having similar foot trouble getting back into regular shoes again after three years of wearing slippers, trainers, and other comfortable footwear during lockdown ...