Every so often a shop opening attracts my attention, like the sound of a champagne cork popping in the next room, or a bright pullulating firework in the distance.
All posts by surreyedit
Clarins Eau Dynamisante
There is nothing tentative about this perfume. It’s like hosting a party at your pulse points. Plucky notes include ginseng (so uplifting, very important for November), a fresh zing from aloe vera and an almost woody horsetail trail that synergize into a striking and energetic scent.
More Letters of Note Review
The Letters of Note family has expanded again!
I feel like an excitable gazelle clutching my copy of ‘More Letters of Note’: a beautiful book bursting with letters from favourite writers like Katherine Mansfield, Henry James and Sylvia Plath; a message from actor Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor; a curious note from Mozart to his wife Marianne… and that’s just for starters!
Rituals, Ritual
I like to alight from a hectic week by setting a scented candle alight.
Beef Up Your Soup!
Leftover food should not be an afterthought (especially when we’re talking about a particularly generous Sunday roast beef joint that I had for luncheon the other day.) Save what you can’t manage and allow to cool before refrigerating and livening up in a thick soup the next day. Dabble with a ladle, sluice your soup bowl and let flavourful frugality prevail!
Chocolate Spiral Biscuits
Some are busy spiralizing courgettes to make courgetti dishes (a portmanteau most succulent). Others use their spiralizers for carrots to bring style to quinoa.
So it’s with a cheeky felicity that I proffer these Chocolate Spiral Biscuits for your pudding bowls. (See? Spiral. Phonetically twinned!). Although that’s where the similarity ends.
Ticket to Tetbury
Westonbirt Arboretum
Day two of travels took me to Westonbirt Arboretum in Tetbury.
A Weekend in the Cotswolds
Ideally, all Autumns should be punctuated with a weekend away.
Mine was a quick trip to the Cotswolds.
The Sense of an Elephant – Review
Pietro is our protagonist who has recently taken a job as the concierge in a condominium in Milan, late in life. Although defining his character as merely a ‘concierge’ perhaps simplifies his role. He eagerly integrates into the occupants’ colourful lives in the flat: Poppi, (an aptly plosive) teasing and rambunctious lawyer; Paola and her autistic 20-something year old son Fernando. And, of particular interest, the Martini family: Luca, a doctor, his wife Viola and their small child Sara. In his capacity as concierge he has free reign to roam the corridors… and cross thresholds.