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...
TIME AGAIN for another Life Lately, and these past few days and weeks have felt rather busy, especially following the enforced hibernation of the lockdown years, which are beginning to feel like a million lifetimes ago now. There was an early morning train ride to Edinburgh at the beginning of the month and another to Glasgow the following day; and then all the way to the south, nearly as far as Wales just last week...
P SENDS me texts such as How much bay leaf (I was making refrigerator pickles) or Do you want a mini quiche when he's out picking up bits and pieces at the shops. I love these texts, with their lack of punctuation and misspellings, because they very much showcase how he prefers to get things done, and get them done quickly, rather than worry about the small details when he knows I'll know what he means.
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 ...
Thyme is a restored historic Southrop Manor Estate dating from Roman times in Gloucestershire, a county in South West England that comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean
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 ...
Recently, P introduced me to Raindrop, a web extension that organises everything into tidy folders. In it, there is a folder where I keep TIG article ideas and that's where I remembered the home of English designer (and son of the late Terence Conran), Jasper Conran's, home in Bridport, a market town in Dorset, England ...
AT THE BEGINNING of the summer, P & I bought folding bikes and on every sunny day over the past few weeks, we went on as many bicycle rides along the English countryside as we could, often ending up in charming, cosy pubs, places with names like The Wallace Arms and Rose & Crown; The Black Bull and Robin Hood. On one trip, our longest, we went from the city all the way to the seaside ...
I READ SOMETHING recently that stated that the sales of colour cosmetics dropped 33% in 2020, and that sales of cosmetics overall dropped by 15%. While I did buy a few new eyeshadow palettes during that time despite not having anywhere to go (perhaps it was for the odd Instagram selfie), I did actually reduce spending on these items ...
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 ...
I AM NOT sure why―when it happens every year―I am so unprepared for winter. The cold. The dampness. The continual overcast skies. And most of all, the darkness. Yes, the days have been, happily, incrimentally longer every day since winter solstice, but tonight, the sun still set 4:17pm. 4:17pm! On Sundays, everything moves a little more slowly ...
We are city people, P and I. Before Valencia and before Edinburgh, we lived in a huge metropolis filled with millions of people. We barely knew our neighbours in the tall building where we lived, and the ultimate luxury was having an elevator all to ourselves on the way up to our condo after a long day at work in an office complex in the west end ...
WE ARE MAKING GOOD progress with fixing our archives and 2018 is nearly complete. It's a long, tiresome process, but as we're in Lockdown 2.0, we have nothing but time. In fact, the past two weeks have been a flurry of activity, perhaps due to the lockdown, or perhaps because the days have been so grey and overcast and nearly all of the leaves have fallen off the trees ...
Oneohtrix Point Never, a.k.a. Daniel Lopatin, has released a fantastical new video for “Long Road Home.” The single appears on his upcoming album Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, out October 30th via Warp.
Co-directed by Charlie Fox and Emily Schubert, the clip features a courtship between two demonic creatures who become one in the end — an homage to Georges Schwizgebel‘s 1982 short Le Ravissement de Frank N. Stein.
RECENTLY ON INSTAGRAM, we posted an English countryside cottage (above) that captured the imaginations of thousands. Many of you asked if it was the cottage from the 2006 Nancy Meyers film, The Holiday. It is not (although there are similarities), as Rosehill Cottage from The Holiday sadly doesn't exist, its exterior built from scratch in an empty field on a hillside overlooking the town of Shere.
