January 2012
2 posts
Have just returned from a few lovely days in Bath. Normally when I go on holiday I try to pack as much as possible into my days, soaking up as much of the place I am in as I can. Instead, this time I wandered and meandered and sat and drank tea, and gave plenty of time to stare at beautiful places like this:
And this:
I am exhausted, but relaxed, and finally appreciating the good that not...
Feeling pretty chilly.
Once again it has been an inordinately large amount of time. Apologies for infrequency.
This Christmas has been the busiest ever, seeing friends, old and new, running backwards and forwards between my house and Cambridge on an increasingly frequent basis, eating a lot of amazing food, procrastinating over essays, baking, drinking, playing Sopio, and occasionally...
December 2011
1 post
1 tag
Oh, hey, I didn’t see you there…
I would like to pretend that I’ve been so quiet recently because I’ve been writing on here a whole lot, but that would be a lie (although I have been writing a bit, so read that).
Instead I have been caught up in the Christmas world of retail, which at best is busy, and at worst, completely mental, learning to play Sopio and feeling cold...
November 2011
7 posts
5 tags
I have been a little quiet of late. Things are getting busy in the run-up to Christmas. One thing I have been doing recently though is starting up this transatlantic baking blog with my Canadian friend Jordi. We are writing about all of our baking experiences, good and bad, and today I have been making maple cheesecake (which I’ve yet to taste, but man, it smells amaaazing - so you can read...
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A few days ago now, a couple of large heavy books landed on my head. This was mostly my fault (the book has to accept some responsibility), and perhaps the only real hazard of working in bookselling (apart from paper cuts). A trip to A&E followed, because I was incoherent enough to provoke my colleague to ask me if I’d been smoking weed as well as being hit by a falling object.
...
October 2011
21 posts
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Finished ‘The Blind Assassin’ today, very good. I will read more Atwood when my book pile is a little smaller. Now onto ‘The Joy Luck Club’ by Amy Tan. After which I will be making a conscious effort to read all my DFW books. I’m lending my copy of Infinite Jest to someone who I have a vague hope might read it - I was flicking through it last night, looking at all the...
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Today I tried baking with cups for the first time. It is truly an alien concept to not be putting ingredients onto scales and knowing the exact weight of each ingredient as I add it to the mixture. I thought that using cups would result in some kind of disaster due to lack of exact measuring. The good news is that it didn’t.
I made berry-walnut upside down cake, from the lovely magazine...
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Have you ever spent time around embarrassing... →
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Do More Of What Makes You Happy
On the 17th October every year I make resolutions. A list that for most people would be written at the end of the year is, for whatever reason, not what I do. I always feel like things change more in autumn than they do in January - on 31st December it’s the middle of winter, and it’s the same on 1st January, but on a randomly selected October day such as the 17th, the seasons are...
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listening to the Drive soundtrack. It is so cool. I need to start listening to it when I’m driving instead of Ke$ha. Yes.
Today I’ve been reading about modernist and postmodernist theory, which is something I find incredibly boring. Art theory is something I’ve never really got into - every time I have to read about it, I just switch off. So for the time being I’m...
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This evening I Wrote Something and thought...
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Isn’t it a shame when someone makes a film of a really good book you read recently and casts Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock in leading roles?
I’ve been watching the trailer for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book narrated by a young Jewish boy named Oskar, whose father died in the 9/11 attacks. Part of what I found so brilliant about the book was Oskar’s eccentricities -...
After gaining a more acceptable work-life-internet balance over the last few weeks, I have now decided to return to this.
About a week ago, I sat at the top of a hill on Dunstable Downs reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. The sun was beginning to set, and there was a chill in the air. I watched the planes land at the bottom of the hill, and realised it was the most balanced and happy...
September 2011
6 posts
i am giving up on this for the foreseeable future in order to spend more time on the following:
reading
baking
writing music
photography
it has recently occurred to me that there is little point in trying to disconnect yourself from the internet whilst simultaneously writing on the internet about how difficult it is to disconnect yourself from the internet. counterproductive I think is the...
the other night I accidently killed a spider that was crawling on me whilst I was asleep.
I have not been sleeping that well recently. I believe these two things to be unconnected.
in other news i have been playing a lot of sudoku and spending vast amounts of time in the library sitting with people who breathe too loudly. yep.
just found out Judy Blume has a blog. this is really exciting.
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Moments of Time
I was watching this video earlier, and it got me thinking about what I’ll think in 8 years time when I look back on what I’m doing now.
I suppose the beauty of the internet is that I can already look back on myself from quite a few years ago and see what I wrote then. I don’t know if the kind of things I write about now will determine anything about how I see myself when...
hello there.
This afternoon I had to phone BT and spoke to the grumpiest woman ever. There’s nothing more annoying than calling a call centre, and then having to speak to someone who’s fucking miserable as well (I mean, I get why they’re miserable, but srsly). The problem still isn’t solved either, and I don’t believe it will be, but whatever. After that I was...
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August 2011
30 posts
raspberry struesel cake = success
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We Are The Tide
Yesterday was spent in London. Went to Columbia Road, and bought a cupcake. Then to SoHo for lunch and seeing the Hummingbird Bakery (which was really cool, especially the packaging for their takeaway cupcakes).
To Covent Garden and the London Transport Museum shop, which is pretty awesome - I bought a diary for next year (way too early I know) which has an underground map on the outside and...
Tokyo Police Club cover Kelly Clarkson's 'Since... →
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Today feels like autumn.
I’ve lived in the same house my whole life, and we have 3 apple trees - all cooking apples. Two of them are visible from my bedroom window, and so I associate what stage of growth the trees are with what season it is. This afternoon I went outside to pick up apples, and later I’m going to make an apple pie. An abundance of apples is something that is...
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Just doing some research whilst watching NCIS: LA. This probably means I’m not concentrating fully on either of them.
I now have 4 days off work, which means I can spend a lot of time trying to write my essay and moving from library to coffee shop to library so I don’t get complacent about working (I have to change place every couple of hours or I lose concentration. Fun fact).
...
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For some ridiculous reason I signed up to NaNoWriMo yesterday. So it looks like I’ll be spending November writing a 50,000 word novel. As well as everything else.
This will undoubtedly be another Infinite Jest incident.
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Oh holiday, you are a strange and unfamiliar thing. After realising on the way to the airport that I’d forgotten my Italian phrasebook, I spent the last 5 days trying to convince people that I spoke more Italian than I do, which led to embarrassing moments such as staring blankly at a woman who was asking me if I wanted pane (or bread), and holding up six fingers when I had to tell the man...
i have returned. and instead of sleeping right now like i should be, i am staring at my computer screen and contemplating watching an episode of NCIS: LA after a technology-free week (which was pretty cool).
i’ve now decided i can’t be bothered to write any more than that right now, so news + photos will appear later today.
In 12 hours I will be on a flight to Venice. In a few minutes I am going to turn off my Blackberry and leave it on my desk where it will sit unused for the next 5 days.
Holidays are the best.