AFTER WHAT meteorologists have been calling the wettest May in 160 years, the rain finally stopped, perfectly in time for the Spring Bank Holiday weekend. We spent as much time outside as we possible could, both of us getting blinded by the sun, which we hadn't seen in months, both of getting a little sunburned, so unaccustomed was our skin, despite being coated in SPF30 ...
If you’re an overthinker, you’ll know exactly how it goes. A problem keeps popping up in your mind – for instance, a health worry or a dilemma at work – and you just can’t stop dwelling on it, as you desperately try to find some meaning or solution. Round and round the thoughts go but, unfortunately, the solutions rarely arrive.
P'S BIKE IS in a storage unit in Spain, and has been for the past two and half years, so during the lockdown that was 202o, I sold my Buckingham Black Pashley Princess Sovereign to a woman in London. We had been hoping to buy two folding bikes in their place, but did not anticipate all the folding bicycles in England to be completely sold out for an entire year...
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 ...
IF YOU HAVE been reading for a long time, you will know that it is a tradition, every year, around this time, for us to post one Lasting One Last Longing Look at Summertime. Last year, during lockdown, may have been missed ...
BRIE AND PEARS at a picnic by the seaside at sunset; wicker lamps and wicker bags and sun umbrellas flapping in the breeze; Lisbon kitchens and wide-legged pants; summer sweaters with city shorts and trolleys full of lemons... These are the things of far-flung places but also of summertime, our very favourite time.
THERE ARE TIMES when you want a small quiet place for dinner that only you know, but then there are other times when you want a busy, trendy place, perhaps for a late lunch or an early dinner, to see and be seen. CoCo restaurant falls into the second category.
TUCKED AWAY on the Côte d'Azur (the Mediterranean coast of southeastern France) lies Château Saint-Victor-la-Coste, one of the most idyllic places to while the hours. A vacation complex comprised of three cottages and one suite (in a 16th century castle), all available for rent, the Château is situated in the old village of St Victor la Coste (an equal distance between Avignon in Provence and the market town of Uzes in Languedoc) where you will find a boulangerie and épicerie
LA POSTA VECCHIA is a five-star luxury boutique hotel located in the coastal town of Ladispoli, about forty minutes outside of Rome on the historic Via Aurelia, a Roman road that was constructed in approximately 241 BC. House in a 17th-century villa and surrounded by 15 acres of Italianate gardens, the hotel overlooks the Tyrrenean sea and shares a coastline with villas and castles, small towns and beach clubs ...
THIS MORNING, accidentally overwrote an entire website that had been working on for days, completely wiping out all of the content. I was distracted and had no business clicking around and hitting “okay” to big decisions while not fully focussed on what I was doing.
IN GERMAN, the word lebensfreude refers to the joy of life, the love of living and enjoying life's pleasures, and the appreciation of the beauty of existence. An optimistic and positive term, the word reflects a happy and contented attitude towards life.
Well, that was fast. In November, the public was introduced to ChatGPT, and we began to imagine a world of abundance in which we all have a brilliant personal assistant, able to write everything from computer code to condolence cards for us. Then, in February, we learned that AI might soon want to kill us all.
THIS INSTALMENT of Style File features model Sara Ramén, who was born in Australia to a Swedish father and a French mother. She credits her heritage for her affinity with these cultures, despite growing up in Perth. Ramén began travelling on her own around the world as a model in her late-teens with Marilyn Agency and Storm Models, living many different places, including Paris, London and Sydney.
I AM WRITING to you from my brand new desk, which is actually an enormous solid oak dining table that arrived from Paris this morning. It is enormously heavy and makes a dramatic statement in the dining-area-turned-office and I’ve been googling how to make the back of a computer look nice (or at least tidy), as that’s what you see when you first enter the room, when your dining table is now your office.
Do you remember life before podcasts? Yes, obviously, is likely to be the short answer. Podcasting is still a relatively youthful medium, after all. In fact, it is exactly 20 years this month since the format’s invention: Open Source – a politics and culture discussion show hosted by the journalist Christopher Lydon – debuted in the summer of 2003, and is widely considered the first ever podcast. (Not that it was actually called podcasting at that point; the term was coined the following year by Ben Hammersley in an article for the Guardian.)