PARIS IS HAVING A HEATWAVE and it’s only 13°C here in the English countryside. We call it a British Summer, but London is fine and is nearly as warm as Paris (but not quite). The locals here seem content to wear light jackets even in late June, for everything is lush and green and everywhere there is a fury of roses (our Instagram Stories is filled with them)...
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WE HAVE BEEN spending much time in the English countryside, exploring all the utterly charming and quintessentially British villages along the way–ones with grand castle ruins and lively local pubs and ones with picturesque abbeys and lovely little stone cottages covered in ivy and surrounded by magnolias. We’re in the midst of sweeping changes and it’s all very exciting. Just a few more things need to fall in place before we know for certain and the waiting is the hardest part. Spring feels like the perfect time for grand changes.
If you think of the English countryside, two artists come to mind who, between them, painted some of the most famous English landscape scenes ever put on canvas. It is probably no coincidence that both of them—Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable—came from the same county of Suffolk in the east of England and both were entranced by its rural beauty.
YES, YOU READ THE TITLE correctly -- supermodel Kate Moss has ventured into the field of interior design, with her first project being a five-bedroom barn house in Cotswolds, in the English Countryside. The work is a collaboration with the design company YOO, and Katie Grove of Grove interiors, a close advisor to the model. Click through to view the supermodel's signature rock & refined style . . .
Still away and travelling through the English countryside, the Lakes, London and back again, and this quick article comes to you from a grand hotel room overlooking the city.
THIS WEEKEND we made it out to the riverside pub that is our favourite summertime place. Saturday was a warm spring-like day, so we were able to sit outside, although not for long, as it began to cool down around 4:00 pm. Before the pub, we stopped in at a patisserie that’s well-known in the area and picked up a delicious strawberry custard tart...
If there’s one thing authors love more than procrastinating, it’s praising one another. During the Renaissance, Thomas More’s Utopia got a proto-blurb from Erasmus (“divine wit”), while Shakespeare’s First Folio got one from Ben Jonson (“The wonder of our stage!”).
I believe in fully immersing myself in places when I live there. When we lived in Edinburgh, I embraced warm pubs on rainy days and long walks in the New Town.
I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable.
IT'S FUNNY that now we're back in the city, find myself still drawn to cosy cottages, especially stone ones like the one we left, or this one, yellow brick and covered in climbing roses. A four-bedroom manor house built in 1820, this listed cottage is located in Ampleforth, North Yorkshire...
THERE IS A LINE from a Bruce Springsteen song that goes: “I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face“⏤and while I don’t want to change my face, I do like to change my clothes (often), and my hair (sometimes⏤in fact, just last week). A friend once asked me if I changed my décor tastes to match where I happen to be living at the time (she was visiting us in Spain), and I realise that yes, yes I guess I do.
ON SUNDAY morning, I ate the worst breakfast of my life. We'd left the house just after 8:30 in the morning for a burdensome road trip that would take us five hours south for business. It was an unpleasant obligation, a necessary evil, even, but the drive up was fun, just the two of us. That is, until we pulled over at a Services along the way, somewhere near Sheffield, and stopped for what would be the worst breakfast ever.
“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive.” ―Ernest Hemingway
WE'VE BEEN in hibernation mode for the past few weeks now, many cups of coffee on chilly mornings, cashmere sweaters and puffer vests and tall leather boots making regular rotations on these wet, windy days. All is cosy indoors though, with candles and lamplight and there's something about autumn weather that's perfect for staying in and getting a lot of work done without being lured outside by sunshine and good weather. These days lend themselves to productivity and organisation and watching old films when the work is done ...
I am not a huge fan of aphorisms, but every once in a while I come across something that makes PERFECT SENSE and lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these words: Your energy is your currency. Spend it wisely. Invest it well. For the past week, I have been thinking a lot about where my energy is going and how I can spend it better and came to the realisation that still too much of my time and energy is spent on social media.
