Sunshine and saints alive

It’s stinky sweaty hot in London right now and its been this way for several weeks. Frankly, if it carries on any longer we might actually have to start calling it a summer. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Only in London could pubs and flower
baskets seem such natural companions

It’s been a strange, busy, exhausting couple of weeks – the heat not helped by the cold I seem to be coming down with – or the fact that Lovely Boy and I have finally called time on London, having made the humongous decision to go back to Sydney at the end of October. I sobbed telling work, absolutely well and truly lost my shit about it. There was not a single toy left in the pram because I love the people I work with and I love my job (case in point: they were amazing and supportive and inspired and wonderful.)

Casual tourism...

...Otherwise known as Life on the Monopoly Board.

Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery by night

So much about London drives me absolutely insane and a large part of that is the gall to be so completely insanity inducing one minute, and just so insanely in-your-face impressive the next.

Take today.

Carols at St Martin-in-the-Fields

The weekend festival of festivities continues today. Still wilfully ignoring my stomach bug, not least because this afternoon we're off to Feast, a pop up Christmas banquet in an old disused building in Islington where food will clearly be unavoidable... The terrible teenage girl in me would see this set of circumstances as a fortuitous silver lining but I'm an adult and so I'm pretending otherwise. Actually, the down-to-my-last-10-pounds-before-payday adult that I really am sees it as a shocking waste of money.

But enough with the slightly impolite discussion about stomach bugs and what happens when you feed them...

Christmas markets and frozen toes

Anyone who knows me knows I love a good market - flea market, antique market, food market, craft market - I love them all. Mostly because they encourage my unadulterated love of treasure hunting, or "looking for tat" as my lovely husband calls it.

The chance then to re-visit my old (and still favourite) neighbourhood on Wednesday night AND to pay a visit to the Columbia Rd Christmas markets while I was there was too good an opportunity to pass up...

A pop-up invite and a very posh dinner.

It started with a pop-up invitation the likes of which I'll probably never receive again.

Actually, it started a couple of weeks before that, when we interviewed the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset for a film for the website. Thanks to a confluence of art world activities, all sponsored by the same luxury fashion brand (one of them: my job; another one of them: the Fourth Plinth Commission) I found myself in Trafalgar Square nearly a week ago exactly to witness the unveiling of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's newest work for the square, Powerless Structures, Fig.101.

Exhaustion thy name is Full Time Work

I am zonked. I should be in bed right now and know I will regret it in the morning but I've just finished up the last of my NPG work and LB is cooking us a late light dinner while I fight the urge to rest my head on the keyboard.