THE THING ABOUT MOVING in to a new place is that if you get it just right, it far too cosy to leave. This weekend, we ordered in a perfectly spicy curry from the best Indian restaurant in the area and stayed in, enveloped in the cosy-ness of the cottage.
IT’S FUNNY HOW one can see the humour in a debacle after it is over. On Monday, after a comedy of errors, managed to lock us out of the cottage after having only been there for three days. Neither of us had our keys, wallets and phones, but at least had the the rental car, so all was not completely lost…
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.
THIS WEEK’S LINKS come very late, for on Sunday night, we found ourselves spontaneously off to the south of France and decided to take (a very rare) few days off. The city was dripping with late spring sunshine and the skies were a blue that are only characteristic of the Mediterranean. We wandered the city streets, had long and leisurely lunches over wine, slept in late and rarely looked at our myriad social media accounts or any work at all, really, which was pure bliss. It was the closest we’ve come in a long time to unplugging it was magnificent. Now we’re back at the office (remotely), refreshed and excited to get back to work…
THERE IS A BOWL of orange blossoms on my desk exuding the most astonishingly lovely scent. We picked the blossoms from the orange grove in the gardens yesterday, as had thought I might make orange blossom water.
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)...
WE HAVE BEEN waiting for plans to finally progress and have been staying at our hotel for so long now, the staff have been referring to us as “residents”. And all of this waiting has me thinking about the concept of time, especially since beginning the book Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian physicist known for his work on loop quantum gravity theory and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander.
Stephen Hawking once said, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change” and seeing as we’re on the brink of a massive change, these words will certainly be put to the test. Things have felt in a state of flux for the past few weeks now and we’re looking forward, at the end of all of this, to a few moments of calm, for a little time away, but mostly, for fresh starts and new beginnings… One thing is for certain, now more than ever, we know that nothing can happen to us as long as we’re together. This love is forever.
LATELY HAVE BEEN thinking about a lot of things―love and life and the things that matter most. But also about phones and social media and the attention economy and all the many, many articles have read about the dangers of all three...
WE PAINTED THE LIVING this weekend, Farrow & Ball’s Middleton Pink, and it turned out to be rather disastrous. We ended up having to pick up new paint the next day and repaint everything, despite all my research pointing to the colour being pale powdery perfection, the prettiest and most delicate pink. We’re not certain what went wrong, but perhaps a combination of the wall texture and room lighting were to blame in making the colour appear a vivid candy floss pink that somehow even managed to clash with the fireplace mantle, which is cream. Décor misadventures aside, everything else was rather perfect, with sunset walks and Spanish wine in the last golden light of day; old stone houses and English roses and roaring fires and the feeling of being really very happy.
WE HAVE RECEIVED a million notes and emails from you about the TIG newsletter, which has been on an unintentional hiatus due to technical difficulties for the past little while now. Far from forgetting about it when you no longer recieved it, you told us that you loved receiving article updates and missed it so and could we please fix it now?
IN THE MIDDLE of an actual hardcover book (after a long series already this year), but on a whim, decided to pick up the new Amazon Kindle Paperwhite this weekend, despite being an analog sort who still loves the feel of actual pages to turn and still uses notebooks and a pen everyday for to-do lists.
At the time of writing, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris is on fire, its iconic spire, made of wood and lead and built during a restoration in the mid-19th century, confirmed collapsed. The 850-year-old medieval Catholic cathedral on the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris...
