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...
