THIS WEEKEND was a classic homebody one with slow mornings and late evenings. P stopped by the local delicatessen for a fancy loaf of bread for brunch and contemplated making Fideuà ...
THIS WEEKEND, finally ordered a new Mac Mini to replace my iMac, which has been running on the slow side for a little while now. Also ordered a fancy new white (non-Mac) monitor as well as a Lacie external drive and have been spending the first two weeks of this new year sorting through hundreds of files and folders and photos and taking stock, both literally and figuratively ...
WE ARE ONE week into Dry January and it's all workouts and spinach salads so far. Okay, well not quite. Our eating habits from the holidays haven't exactly been as they should be, but we're trying our best. On the weekend we had Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Brownie Party as well as a lot of other sweet things, so it's not perfect, but the Châteauneuf-du-Pape has been replaced by elderflower pressé ...
P MADE THE MOST delicious Eggs Benedict on the morning of the first day of the new year. It was sunny and beautiful out, which was perfect, as we had decided the night before that we would go a long bicycle ride in the English countryside on New Year's Day. We ended up in a quaint pub we'd been to a few times before, but always only outside in the garden. This time, we had the best seats in the place, right in front of the roaring wood fire ...
WOKE UP YESTERDAY morning thinking that it was Monday and thought about getting back on track after Christmas‘s excess of trifles and puddings and cava and far too much food and thought about Weekend Links and workouts. Of course, that was until I realised shortly after that it was actually Sunday, and then it was back to lounging about, a late breakfast and drinks in the evening by the fire.
TO SAY THAT it has been a strange week is an understatement (more on that later). It has been a week spent nearly entirely indoors and we're going a bit crazy. Christmas is now only five days away and the end of the year, a mere 11. It's strange how a year where not much happened flew by so quickly. It's a pensive, melancholic time, for many reasons, (one being that I hate endings), but especially since it feels like there hasn't been a proper holiday season in a very long time ...
YOU MAY HAVE noticed that aside from last week's Links and one set of articles on Monday, there were no new posts this past week. We spent the entire week in London, taking time off from everything and it was wonderful. We ate Italian food in Marylebone and discovered a wine club housed in bare-brick vaults and lit by candlelight ...
ON FRIDAY NIGHT enormous fluffy snowflakes fell furiously here in the countryside, covering everything in a mesmerising blanket of wet snow. You may have watched it falling on our Instagram Stories, for we knew we had to capture it as it would not last. Within an hour or so, the rain fell, and by morning, it was gone, but for a little while, things felt rather festive ...
ON SATURDAY a wild winter storm resulted in a rare red weather warning for parts of the UK. There were extremely hight winds, some places had a beautiful snowfall, while here it was just really windy and rainy and by 10:00pm Saturday night, we were sitting by firelight and candlelight and no wi-fi due to a sudden power outage ...
I READ AN article this weekend about the things you can do to increase your chances of living to 100 and felt smug that I was already doing many of them (Strength training? Check. Dark chocolate? Yes. A Mediterranean Diet? Of course.). The ones that I wasn't doing, I started immediately, buying a box of green tea and ordering a high bar to install in the door frame outside our upstairs home gym ...
I SEEM TO HAVE become fond of Esty once again, after not really finding anything there for years, and then, all of a sudden, ordering handmade soaps and avocado oil face creams, art and photo frames and even gold jewellery. There is also a soft hand-knit mohair sweater from Greece currently in my cart, as well as a beautiful wicker chandelier, and a small oil painting ...
A LITTLE LATE with this week's links (for the first time in a very long time), as have been busy with new projects and new content for TIG, including the Talking Points series. We've also been getting things ready at The Shop for the holiday season and organising things in general, for autumn always seems like the perfect time for such things ...
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE sipping drinks at sunset kind of weekends, the clouds tinged pink at the edges and a hazy light falling on the countryside and hills in the distance, causing P to remark that you could mistake it for Tuscany. I have been melancholic, of course, because I always feel this way when the days get shorter and the leaves begin to fall, but it's also kind of cosy and very romantic, our late nights now spent by the fireplace ...
THIS WEEKEND WE were glued to the news, trying to find more information about the missing van-life blogger Gabby Petito and the generally strange circumstances surrounding the entire case. Coincidentally, we had been talking about the whole #vanlife phenomenon which has swept social media the past few years, because P had been watching videos of tiny homes and the algorithm began throwing converted vans across his path ...
SUMMER RETURNED for two glorious days last week, so like all self-respecting Brits, we dropped everything to enjoy the late-summer sun while it was still here. We spent both days on long bicycle rides to places we'd never been before, including hiking to the most photographed tree in the county (it was even in a famous film once). We had drinks on pub terraces in the middle of nowhere and got sunburned and ate truffle oil garlic bread pizzas and basically had the most wonderful time ...