1. Walking in Richmond Park in the snow (okay, it wasn’t much but still, Londoners can get excited about even the most minimal amounts of the stuff).
2. Popping into the V&A, their Christmas tree was cool and the Winnie the Pooh exhibition was rather nice. It’s always inspiring to visit exhibitions about authors and illustrators, to see how they worked. Seeing the original pencil drawings by E. H Shepherd made me appreciate more how brilliant the art work alone was, particularly his amazing drawings of trees (which were based on trees drawn from life around Ashdown Forest). And did you know that when colour was added to the Winnie the Pooh illustrations, that E. H Shepherd also did that? He was in his 90s by that point and couldn’t see very well, so they printed blown up copies of the original illustrations and he added watercolour washes to them. I know that quite a few people would be horrified at the thought of still working in their 90s but I think, if it’s something you love doing, that it’s brilliant.
3. I’ve developed a real taste for Robinson’s Crushed Lime and Mint Cordial, particularly with sparkling water. It’s like rolling around in a mint patch in your garden.
4. I loved this podcast interview between James O’Brien and Jon Ronson. I think James O’Brien is brilliant and I adore Jon Ronson’s stuff, so I thought it was a very inspiring interview, definitely worth a listen if you’re familiar with Jon’s work.
5. My big ‘spring clean’ of the flat continues and I finished the living room, the bathroom, the hallway and ‘the cupboard under the stairs’ this week (we, being a ground floor flat, don’t have stairs but we have a cupboard tucked in under our upstairs neighbours stairs and it’s the closest thing we have to an attic). Getting everything organised feels lovely but the problem, at the moment, with everything being in its place, is that our storage is now crammed and with a lot of the shelving being quite high up (to make maximum use of our wall space), the number of things that have fallen on me, this week, as I’ve tried to get something out, getting a book or a spice jar or a pad of paper, in this flat, is like playing Jenga.
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