The places I've been

Every summer I order prints of my favourite photos from the past year and put them in an album. I do this because I am a grandma who doesn't fully trust the digital age. And because I love nothing more than to bathe in the nostalgia of looking through old photographs. This summer, due to a Photobox mishap, I ended up with duplicates of all my prints. Rather than throw the spare ones out I decided to recycle them by making collages of some of the places I've been in the last year.

N o r t h c o t t  M o u t h ,  C o r n w a l l   +   G o r r a n  H a v e n ,  C o r n w a l l   +   M u d e f o r d ,  D o r s e t

I m p e r i a l  W a r  M u s e u m ,  L o n d o n   +   B r o c k e n h u r s t ,  N e w  F o r e s t   +   B u s h y  P a r k ,  L o n d o n

T h e  B r u n s w i c k ,  B l o o m s b u r y   +   M o n o c l e  C a f e ,  M a r y l e b o n e   +   C e n t r e  C o u r t ,  W i m b l e d o n

B l o o m s b u r y,  L o n d o n   +   S o h o  G r i n d ,  L o n d o n   +   P o l l o c k ' s  T o y  M u s e u m ,  L o n d o n

S h a r d ,  L o n d o n   +   S t  P a u l ' s  C a t h e d r a l ,  L o n d o n   +   m y  o l d  f l a t ,  L o n d o n   +   P a r a d i s e  H o u s e ,  B a t h

M u d e f o r d ,  D o r s e t   +   a  c o f f e e  s h o p  i n  E a l i n g ,  L o n d o n

And here is a playlist of some of the songs I associate with these places:

Everybody's Talkin' / Harry Nilsson

Red Moon / The Walkmen 

Janey Don't You Lose Heart / Bruce Springsteen

Closing Time / Tom Waits

Every Time The Sun Comes Up / Sharon van Etten

Buckets of Rain / Bob Dylan

A Lion's Heart / The Tallest Man on Earth

Come to the City / The War on Drugs

Dancepack / Volcano Choir

Wildwood / Steve Gunn

New Blue Feeling / White Denim

Atlantic City / The Band

It's A Beautiful Morning / The Rascals

For Today I Am A Boy / Antony and the Johnsons

Lake District ferns and fells

Last summer I spent a bit of time in the Lake District. The dramatic wild beauty of this piece of the north west seems almost unrelated to the England I'm familiar with - an army of neat three bed semis patrolling a patchwork quilt of tidy fields. Though the lakes themselves are relatively placid (fun fact: there is actually only one 'lake' in the Lake District - Bassenthwaite - the rest are 'waters', 'tarns' or 'meres'), they sit always in the rugged dark presence of the surrounding fells. These fells are both sinister and stunning. The terrain feels very old; once you get walking all signs of modern day civilisation are replaced by a sense that this environment belongs to another age. Then you reach a summit and see the land spread out all around, and if southern England is a patchwork quilt, the Lake District is that same quilt thrown over some slumbering gargantuan, ancient beast.

Not all walks have to conquer summits though. There is a walk where you zigzag your way from Stair to Buttermere, following a narrow path which skirts along the sides of fells. In and out you walk, tracing their bulky diameter. The fells rise sharply up one side of you and fall away the other, down to streaks of water which slip under and over the land. You wade through ferns and purple heather, jump across waterfalls, disturb the peace of the sheep who call these hillsides home, and descend through woods, past a churning ravine. The finish line is the pub in Buttermere.

 

moments from home

I'm going home tomorrow. It's been three months since I moved to the city centre. "Home is a state of mind," I keep repeating to myself, and there is some truth in it. Home is a feeling, a group of people, an occasion, a sort of nostalgia. A house might not be a home; sitting at a bus stop with a loved one might be. There's something tangible there too though. Home is an emotional space, but it's usually also a physical one. Something constructed out of thoughts and senses and moments. And roast dinners.

Something wicked this way comes

autumn 2013

The fog falls thickly and smoothly in the early hours and I wake up and walk through the graveyard. All is still, grey, heavy. The path's crossed with preserved cobwebs turned with moisture a glowing silver. Behind hedges and fences and other boundary markers lies a ghostly abyss.

I feel like an extra in a horror film. It's pretty cool.

These photos were taken last autumn but it was foggy again last week, so this is still topical, right.

Bath I: paradise

A big house at the top of a hill overlooking Bath. Almost too beautiful to believe. A drawing room, a garden speckled with pink and purple flowers, a tunnel of gently fragrant wisteria. Bacon for breakfast, a four poster bed, Molton Brown in the bathroom, fresh milk and proper sugar cubes. It was a 21st birthday celebration, a present from my mum, and we were spoilt rotten.

Florence III: green spaces

there's not much green space in Florence (boo) but that just makes it all the sweeter when you come across some.

a little rose garden, so unassuming it could just be your neighbour's backyard, sits just below the piazza michelangelo, overlooking Florence to the north. there are lots of colours and not many people. it's calm.

and there are the Boboli gardens, sadly a little dilapidated, but this kind of adds to their charm. the dark heavy tree-lined pathways full of magic, crumbly statues dressed in weeds and vines, pathways leading to nowhere. a bank of wildflowers. the old rococo Kaffeehaus affords excellent views over the city.

Florence I: exploration

Early one morning we fly to Pisa airport and then an ungainly square train rattles us eastwards to Florence. We feel sticky, hot, crumpled from our 4am start. A tiring navigation of Florence’s narrow streets and cobbled walkways awaits us, but by lunchtime we have crossed the Arno, dodged at least twenty scooters, climbed four flights of stairs and are lying in blissful collapse in our apartment for the week. 

We discovered the apartment through Airbnb (a super service for reasonably priced, lovely accommodation in all kinds of countries). It is wonderful, the sun in residence most of the day. The walls are white, the ceiling high, and the floor old oak. In the morning we are woken by the singing of Italian bin men, in the evening I watch a man in the apartment across the street prepare fresh pasta for a late supper. I never tire of the view of rooftops, of seeing the sun fall across them as night falls. We’re located south of the river Arno, a few minutes’ walk away from the crowds of tourists and tack, in the streets of Florence where the locals live, where there are lots of supermercatos and you can hear local children playing noisily in the elementary schools at lunchtime. 

Ponte Vecchio would be lovely without the crowds, street sellers and tack that cheap travel and tourism have brought. It is a good spot from which to survey the river though; that wide expanse that cuts cleanly (though with murky waters) through the buildings of Florence. We cross the bridge every day and learn that there’s a fine art to walking over it quickly.

Wandering the streets of Florence becomes a favourite pastime of mine. I love looking up to see shadowed, shuttered buildings rise up either side of me in brown, orange and white. There is so much to look at that we don't feel the need to visit every single museum and gallery. We walk past interesting signs, old typography, hidden rooftop gardens and cafes. There are little dark shops full of curious objects. I see boxes of flowers at every window ledge, pushbikes and scooters at every junction. There are good pizza places and not-so-good pizza places. Secret bakeries, statues old and new and so many lovely old cars. I miss the trees and green spaces of London like crazy, but for now I am content to explore the cobbles and corners of Florence.