THE NEW OVEN was delivered last week, and it's been sitting in the middle of the kitchen for days, as P thought he might get electrocuted if he installed it himself after watching one too many Youtube videos advising the hiring of a qualified electrician if you don't know what you're doing. I had a feeling it wasn't as complicated as he was making it out to be, but we tried to ask around anyway to see if anyone knew any electricians who could do it on short notice ...
JUST STARTED watching Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Le mépris this weekend and will tell you if it's as good as everyone says. If you've been at The Shop recently, you'll know that we've been busy⏤we just opened a new print shop (with many more pieces to come!) and have added beauty products to our line-up. They're vegan, organic, and handmade in Auvergne.
AT THIS MOMENT, the room smells like cool and smoky autumn air after a cosy bonfire. We're burning Embers & Ash, one of the new fragranced candles that arrived today and it's strange trying out a different scent from Gardénia, our longtime favourite and the only candle we've ever burned for years. But it's a nice change and it's definitely cosy ...
ON THURSDAY and Friday of last week, we took a quick trip to Glasgow to take care of a few things. On Thursday night, after we got back to the hotel, it was late and rainy and a terrible night to decide to go traipsing to the West End to try to find a place to eat. We ended up at Rioja, a tapas restaurant in Finnieston ...
WE HAVE BEEN eating salads and chick peas and tofu and taking many vitamins (especially B12) and tomorrow, it will be a month since we've had any alcohol. It's a reset of sorts, and it's been good to get things back on track after so many hot summery day indulgences. Last Wednesday we went up to Scotland to visit P's 94-year-old grandmother and on the way home, stopped for dinner in a small town in Cumbria that we'd been to once before, but only briefly ...
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 ...
IT'S BEEN WILDLY blustery for days now, leaves blowing everywhere and here, cosy with candles and a fire all weekend long. We watched an old Italian giallo film from the sixties. It wasn't nearly as good as Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) but it was entertaining and interesting, as I'd never watched anything in that genre before.
WE SPENT MOST of the weekend doing art. P took up architectural sketching with markers and pens a few weeks ago, and I've been working furiously on a few new pieces/projects over the past few days. We'll be adding our favourites to The Shop and I've just discovered a wonderful printing place in East London that will handle all the prints of our work ...
ON WEDNESDAY of last week, while in a book shop, discovered a new little photo book by a photographer named Steven Ahlgren called The Office (Hoxton Mini Press), which essentially began when the author was a disenchanted banker working in an office in Minneapolis. Inspired by a 1940 painting by Edward Hooper titled, Office at Night, which he would view frequently at the Walker Art Center, Ahlgren decided to leave office life behind to become a photographer. The photos, taken over a ten-year period between 1982-1992, chronicle a view of corporate life that can either be seen as tragic and sad, or heartfelt and thoughtful, depending on your own experiences with this world ...
OUR FACES are golden on noses and cheekbones, our shoulders bronzed from the past week of hot summery weather. Just as we promised, we spent every single day outdoors, working on camp chairs in new exotic locations throughout the week and ending with dinners on the back terrace on the weekend. Once, we even had a barbecue along the river, our first and possibly only of the summer?
WE JUST DEACTIVATED the TIG Twitter account a moment ago after thinking about it for awhile. It seemed like a good way to remove a bit of chaos from our lives while we figure out the best direction to go from here, and we might even get a little time back from our mornings ...
WAS READING an article about 7 great but notoriously hard-to-finish books and realised that I'd started most of them, but actually did finish one them⏤Thomas Piketty's 2013 masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century⏤all 600 pages of it, and enjoyed it so much that I'd considered picking up his follow-up while at Waterstones recently. Last week we introduced new candles at The Shop and we had no idea that they would be so wildly popular so soon after launch. Today, two new scents have arrived, just in time for upcoming festivities: Cranberry and Chestnut ...
WE HAVE AN unexpected bank holiday today due to the queen's funeral, which marks the end of what has been a whirlwind of non-stop activities leading up to this point, all exhaustively covered by the media. Things reached peak Britishness on Wednesday of last week when Sky News set up a live cam so that we could watch people queue in real time ...
BY NOW YOU'VE heard of Quiet Quitting, as it's been mentioned by every major news outlet for the past month or so. Like everything these days, it's a term that's attributed to a Gen Z TikTokker and it means no longer going above and beyond at work, but doing only what you've been hired to do and nothing more. In other words, common sense. It's the way I've handled all of my jobs, long ago when I had actual jobs and hadn't started TIG yet.
