An indulgent Saturday

I went to this place yesterday, one my favourite places ever. I spent the afternoon happily traipsing around looking at vintage cake stands, green glass, Edwardian table linen and antique jewellery. I cooed over French grain sacks and one particularly fetching oak table. In Cafe Violette next door I had something called Chocolate Lover's Delight.

In the evening I caught up with friends in Oxford, where we went to this place and I had a Messy Jessie and a peanut butter milkshake. On the Cowley road we drank in pubs sticky with snakebite and smelling of stale goth. I am always more comfortable in these darkened hovels, in trainers. I am over 6ft 2 in heels. People make so much desperate effort in small towns.

I wondered down Walton Street in Jericho admiring the little terraced houses with their tiny doors. There is a bookshop there called The Albion Beatnik Bookshop. It was still open at 11.30pm. There was a man in a wizard outfit stood in the window. On a low wall someone had left not an empty can of Stella but an empty bottle of vintage cognac. In the Jude the Obscure, on the toilet door, I found a solitary piece of violently scrawled graffiti, stating simply I love him.

The Forest Floor

If you took out the past its best food from my fridge, all that would be left is parsley and soya milk. This is one of the things I feel most guilty about; the throwing away of food that I didn't get around to eating before it went bad. I'm not sure if it's as bad as giving in to the nagging voice that says "you better eat those brownies/that homemade bread/that stew, as you don't want to waste it". At least with the former you stay the right side of healthily curvaceous. And there is always Lea and Perrins. That never goes out of date. There could be a nuclear holocaust and Lea and Perrins would be the only thing to survive. Lea and Perrins and cockroaches.

These are new paintings completed this week. The top image is the slightly smaller sketch for the one underneath. The technique is called negative painting by most people. You paint around the shapes rather than painting the shapes themselves, and then build up layers. There is always a stage when you think "this is all going wrong" and the it suddenly comes together. I use it quite a lot in my work.

Look! I'm a domestic goddess!

This is chocolate and pistachio fudge, courtesy of Nigella Express. I have made it for the guys at work, it's sat next to me in a spangly bag by my desk. It would have taken all the will in the world to give it away where it not for the fact that this is the second batch, the first batch having been consumed stealthily by furtive fridge light over a period of four days last week. I now can't look at the stuff without feeling a little bit queasy.

Tonight is the last night in my flat before I decamp to my mum and dad's for four days. Tomorrow evening I  plan to be in my pyjamas, vodka and tonic in hand, watching Narnia. Merry Christmas you lovely people.

A stroll into the recent past to make a silly hat. With feathers.

I meant to blog about this earlier in the week but last Saturday I went to a workshop in Deddington to learn how to make fascinators. Deddington is lovely. I used to live there (with the useless ex). I lived in a small terraced farm cottage complete with beams, open fire, pokey corners and cobwebs. It felt, for a while at least, exactly how life should be. Deddington has a brilliant butchers and deli called Eagles, they sell a sort of cheesecakey affair called Jamaican Lime Crunch, slabs of bread and butter pudding, homemade brownies the size of house bricks and homemade sausage rolls which are, especially if you catch them just after they have come out of the oven, heavenly. Oh, and lobsters. Real live ones, in a tank, just inside the front door. Deddington is quite an upmarket sort of place really. I used to sit outside the pub on a Friday afternoon with my white wine and soda cataloging the smart cars that cruised through the market place. Black convertible Audis. The odd Porsche. Those loud, polluting twin exhausts.We used to call  it tw*t-watch.

Anyway, back to fascinators. Below are various members of my wayward family modelling theirs. Left to right, my cousin Katie, other cousin Gemma, aunty Jean (Beanie) and aunty Sarah (Cowbags). The workshop was taught by the talented and thrifty Mary Jane Baxter, she has book coming out too, which you can see here.

This is my effort. A bit Ms Marple but I like it. The little green rosette was made using a piece of ribbon and doing something to it called Petersham Pleating. FYI- it's really hard.

There are no photos of me wearing it because a) I take a terrible photo and b) it keeps falling off, my hair being too slippy for the clip.