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 ...
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 ...
SOME OF YOU are still processing the fact that we are not updating the TIG Instagram account regularly anymore, and if you’re one of the many people who have tried to leave us DMs, unfortunately, we will not get them. A few of you have also emailed to request that we enable comments for articles again, so you’ll be able to leave us messages here instead, if you like ...
It's 9:00 o'clock on a Saturday night and I'm listening to P's grandmother on the phone telling me about a program she's about to watch on channel 5 called Meghan: The Climb to Power (or something like that). We've just had the most wonderful dinner of cod filets with a parmesan parsley crust and Moules-frites. There's a bottle of cava chilling in the refrigerator ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
WE HAVE BEEN glued to the news detailing the events unfolding in Afghanistan with shock and horror, feeling so sad for the Afghan people desperately clinging to airplanes trying to escape a country that has descended into chaos once again. Sometimes this job is difficult because we know you come here to see the beauty in the world ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
IT IS A BANK HOLIDAY weekend here, so today is essentially a holiday, but since we feel like we've been holiday-ing quite a bit already in these last summer weeks, it felt good to get back into routine with Weekend Links, workouts and other Monday essentials. This weekend, also finished the Sylvia Plath book I was reading and have started on David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, a much more difficult read, for certain, but an important one, I think. The weather has turned chilly with cloudy skies and showers, and soon it will be cable knit jumpers and tall leather boots in place of white denim and espadrilles ...
IT HAS BEEN TWO weeks since we took a break from updating the TIG Instagram account, and since then, we have received so many notes and emails from you saying how much you love stopping by the site again. We have so many more wonderful things to share with you here, but things are a little sporadic at the moment due to summer festivals and sunny days ...
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 ...
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 ...