Dreaming

My pal (pictured) and I took the day off yesterday to swan round Notting Hill and eat cake. Everything feels like a film-set there: girls cycling around with bunches of flowers in their bicycle baskets, the candy-coloured houses, second-hand bookshops and boutiques of organic cotton, overpriced babygros. If there were more students and odd people it would be a mini Brighton.

The Oxfam bookshop in particular is brilliant. I found a great 70s craft book- while today's are all about beautiful photography and teaching you how to cast-on, this one was properly hardcore - welding, stained-glass making, carving a 'torso' out of a lump of tree with a chainsaw. And all in grainy black-and-white step-by-step.

Oh and the houses. Huge sweeps of wedding-cakey white stucco and rainbow-painted mewses. My friend and I decided she would run an esoteric record store and I would run a shop selling ribbons and cake and we could live there and write zines. One day...

Conversations

Two men on the bus on Sunday night, late twenties, sartorially challenged, munching their slack-jawed way through bags of crisps and bottles of Lucozade. One has a carrier bag full of cans of Grolsch. They are discussing the ladies they are going to woo this evening:

Man 1: Harriet's going to be there
Man 2: What's she like?
Man 1: Rank. Big tits.
Man 2: You going to do her?
Man 1: Yeah probably

Lucky Harriet!

Second conversation - in a lift with two staffers on one of the nation's favourite women's magazines. One says to the other: "Is the models size 00?". They then launched into a conversation about how which of them is a size eight and which a six.

What is this country coming to, etc...

And another thing...

I am in Bust! Check out page 38 x

Snow!

Snow snow snow! Snow snow snow snow snow!!

Quite amused by the inhabitants of Clapham South, which was closed this morning, marching around in the snow, blonde highlights and rugby collars wilting, bellowing into their mobile phones about how "one snowflake and the British transport system grinds to a halt...!" I however have made it to work- am quite enjoying the anarchy and chaos. London is quiet, slow, misty, from up here in the rooftops every chimney and cornice is padded with white.

For a break from the tempests outside, I have been reading (well, devoured in two days) Love Me by Gemma Weekes. I rarely buy a book straight from the reviews - am too cheap to fork out on a hardback usually - but I am glad I did. The lurid and cheap-looking cover goes to show you should never buy a book by its etc as it is gloriously evocative of grubby Hackney and steaming, sexy New York, sticky-sweet with hip hop music, Caribbean food, rum, sex, carnival colours, lust and desire.