An Update

My pieces for the fashion show got thrown away by mistake after the event - somewhere their carefully folded edges are covered in baked bean syrup...

Still, they would have sat around the house gathering dust so perhaps it is better that they were destroyed on a high. Anyway, I promised photos so there they are (click to enlarge).

In the meantime I have crossed the channel and visited Paris. While I will always find cities dusty and draining, ending each day with an outer film of pollution that I cannot shake off, I loved it. It felt different, French-ness tangible, the lines of trees typically graceful, the typefaces cluttered and with little continuity. I could live there, I think, but I would miss wandering into my own expanse of grass (of my garden, not a public park) and lying on it face down without feeling surrounded, and I would find it odd to live in a place where my bare feet on the floor of my home were held several storeys above the pavement. I like being safely on the ground, I do not wish to be stored away. Then again, the idea of an enclosed space is appealing, like a houseboat where I could sit on my bed and have everything at arm's length.

And then of course I've been home. I made a cake into a theatre, watched a fictional bereavement, felt compassion for the mother of a sociopath, advertised a comedy, followed the lives of twenty-five children, seen the end of the universe, listened and laughed to French voices, contemplated fear in a fallow field, eaten Thai food, been immersed in a world of purple horses and geometric faces, and thought about rain falling.

(made my sister a birthday cake, watched a film, reread "We Need to Talk About Kevin" by Lionel Shriver, finished a poster for a friend's play in Edinburgh, watched Child of our Time and Doctor Who, had Rupert to stay, visited the Tim Walker and Wyndham Lewis exhibitions, rewritten an old story. Even the ordinary can be revolutionary.)