love and other planets

I was introduced to this three minutes and sixteen seconds of gorgeousness from Adem, through Guy Garvey's Finest Hour, the best radio show out there. Tune in to 6 Music on Sunday nights at 10pm to hear an eclectic mix of beautiful music, and of course, an update of what Sir Patrick Moore was up to on that particular date in various different years.

because it's nearly pay day

A morning spent at Waitrose, an indpendent bookshop and the Antiques Emporium is time well spent, but hard on the bank balance. This old (I'm assuming wartime?) advertising beauty is officially going to have to reside on the floor propped against a wall until I somehow magic some more wall space.

cool cartography

My lovely secret santa, http://pingo-and-me.blogspot.com/, knowing my penchant for all things geographical, brought me this amazing scratch off world map for Christmas. It is now gracing my bedroom wall, making me nostalgic about the places I've been, and bothering me about all the expanses of gold that are just screaming out the be scratched off. Better get planning...

2010

the house one has never entered...

"One is inclined to take many things for granted, roads and buildings, roofs, windows and doorways, the walls that shelter strangers, the house one has never entered, trees which are like other trees, pavements which are no more than cobblestones. But when we are distant from them we find that these things have become dear to us, a street, trees and roofs, blank walls, doors and windows; we have entered those houses without knowing it, we have left something of our heart in the very stonework. Those places we no longer see, perhaps will never see again but still remember, have acquired an aching charm; they return to us with the melancholy of ghosts, a hallowed vision and as it were, the true face of France."

Les Misérables - Victor Hugo (1862)