Puss Puss
“Ai Weiwei is a real cat lover; he has turned over his studio and home to the 30-ish cats who live with him, saying, ‘this is their place’.” So reads issue 1 of Puss Puss magazine, which on the basis of those words only I want to buy.
Roving reporter
Brixton Market and African homewares
I went for an afternoon mooch in Brixton Market at the weekend. Jill went eons ago and reported back. What took me so long? You don’t need me to describe the ins and outs, pros and cons of the covered market’s hipster-ification in recent years I’m sure. However the market was buzzing, and the mix […]
The Island Review
My friend Meg sent me a link to this short film a little while ago. It’s about a woman, a grandmother, who swims in the sea every day. I remember a similar woman in my childhood village. She’d walk past you in swimsuit and bathing cap, towel flung over her shoulder, and give you a […]
Wot no Pulp Fiction poster?
Last week we went to the launch party of a new book, House & Garden Fifties House by Catriona Gray, looking into the 1950s archive of House & Garden magazine. It’s full of delights, but Jill and I particularly enjoyed this feature, taken from 1959, about the design style of undergraduates’ rooms at Oxford and […]
Orf grid
I was amused to read Catherine Bennett in Sunday’s Observer writing a piece about the lack of progress in domestic appliance design. Why all the obsession over tiny developments in mobile phones, while the humble washing machine seems still as clunky, ugly and prone to break-down as it has been for decades*, she asked? It made […]