THE WEATHER has been beautiful, so on both Friday and Saturday, we took our new folding bicycles out for very long countryside rides through hilly landscapes filled with roaming sheep and giant bales of hay framed by rambling stone walls covered in moss that have been there for hundreds of years. There were castles and viaducts and cosy country pubs along the way where we would stop for a drink and mingle with the locals ...
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THIS PAST WEEKEND was filled with sunlight and pink roses and late, late nights. We ate crab cakes and went for long countryside walks and took a bicycle ride to the pub up the hill overlooking the river. We read books and listened to the rain in the evenings and drank red wine to old music ...
WE'VE JUST RETURNED from some time back in Edinburgh, where we revisited old haunts, found new ones and had a prosecco picnic in the park. We ate great food and had to deal with the change our old hometown has undergone in the six years that we've been away. It was bittersweet to see some of our old favourites closed down and some under new management and changed drastically ...
P'S BIKE IS in a storage unit in Spain, and has been for the past two and half years, so during the lockdown that was 202o, I sold my Buckingham Black Pashley Princess Sovereign to a woman in London. We had been hoping to buy two folding bikes in their place, but did not anticipate all the folding bicycles in England to be completely sold out for an entire year...
THIS WEEKEND we watched the 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. Directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Wes Anderson, it follows two brothers dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s. We both really liked it and ended discussing it for a quite awhile afterwards. We watched another Noah Baumbach film awhile ago, A Marriage Story, and I am beginning to realise that I really like his wistful, slow, snippet-in-the-life storytelling style.
IT FELT STRANGE and wonderful to see fashion filling our social media feeds once again, after so much time away. Some shows were projected to our screens in the form of live video streams, some were artistic films, while others still were small live shows in front of Parisian audiences for the first time in ages. Fashion always makes us dream, which is a lovely thing during these uncertain times, and dream we did. Here are a few of our favourite settings, thoughts, and looks from the Fall 2021 haute couture season ...
IN THE SECOND week of May, just after the Bank Holiday, we decided to spend some time back in London. We normally visit several times a year, but since 2020 was the year of the Great Lockdown, the last time we had been was the May previously to meet up with a friend from Spain—it was hot then and perfect for traipsing about. P had heard that there would be a heat wave this time around
YESTERDAY WE went on a long bicycle ride in the countryside, up and down hilly roads past wild roses and babbling brooks all the way to the castle ruins. It's only our third or so time out on our new folding bikes, and I've discovered that I have an unrealistic, romanticised version of what it might be like to go riding in the countryside: I would wear pretty things and not get hot or tired and arrive at our destination looking perfect.
The Château de Versailles, the royal residence where Marie Antoinette lived, was once a modest hunting lodge built by Louis XIII in 1623. His son, Louis XIV, extended and transformed it when he installed the Court and government there in 1682, creating a magnificent palace that is now renowned throughout the world. Over the course of more than 100 years, a succession of kings—including Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI—continued to embellish the palace up until the French Revolution. Now considered one of the finest achievements of French 17th century art, the Palace of Versailles remains a cultural symbol of royal splendour that has been listed as a World Heritage Site for 30 years.
I HAVE BEEN coming across so many wonderful interiors on Instagram lately: first there was the French country house yesterday morning, and now today, this wonderfully chic Brooklyn apartment belonging to Mallory and David (and their three cats) @reserve_home.
WE HAVE BEEN reminiscing about our former life in Spain and all the summer mornings spent eating sandía on the back terrace in the sun, the terracotta tiles warm under our bare feet. We've been craving gazpacho, which is proving difficult to find here in the English countryside ...
THIS WEEKEND I decided to try Gigi Hadid's recipe for Spicy Vodka Pasta that everyone has been raving about. It's an occasion when I actually cook, for I don't do it often and it normally never turns out (which is why I don't do it often). P is the one who makes all the gourmet meals now that we live in the countryside and don't have access to takeaway food delivery services ...
WHEN I FIRST began putting together this instalment of Life Lately, had actually disabled the entire TIG Instgram account (as in, removed it from the internet) and deleted the app from my phone—hence the title. Also took time off from Twitter at same time and reclaimed all of the EXTRA hours left from those two alone to catch up on reading (currently reading this book). Recently, in our triweekly articles series, we had included two very interesting articles on this very topic: The Case for Deleting Everything and America Offline, both of which had confirmed my restless feelings and urge to be extremely and wildly social media-free.
AFTER WHAT meteorologists have been calling the wettest May in 160 years, the rain finally stopped, perfectly in time for the Spring Bank Holiday weekend. We spent as much time outside as we possible could, both of us getting blinded by the sun, which we hadn't seen in months, both of getting a little sunburned, so unaccustomed was our skin, despite being coated in SPF30 ...
FELL DOWN a beautiful internet rabbit whole on my way to this place, the French country home of Cordelia de Castellane, the artistic director of Dior Maison and Baby Dior. Located an hour north of Paris, the five-acre estate dates back to the 15th century. de Castellane and her husband used to rent a small cottage on these grounds from the family friends who owned the property, long before it became their very own.
