On Saturday we headed off down to Brighton to see what we could see, not clocking the fact that it was Brighton Pride weekend. What gave the game away was the gorgeous looking biker clad men with a certain air of Village People about them at the train station, oh they were such good fun.  We hit trouble with a delayed train and didn’t arrive until nearly midday and trotted off down to the beach to find ourselves in the middle of the biggest carnival I have ever been in.  Apparently there are 160 thousand people that come to Brighton on this weekend.  It was the best of times, the music, the atmosphere, the vibe, the colour, it was just wonderful.  Here are a few pics of the day, we got home at nearly midnight, absolutely exhausted and just a little bit sun burnt. 

Hubby and I have longed to go to Buckingham Palace for quite some time when the exhibition Fashioning a Reign, 90 years of style from the Queen’s wardrobe, came up and gave us the shove we needed to get our tickets booked.  We decided to book for a morning slot to begin before the changing of the guard finished and that was a very good plan, the Palace starts to heave at 11.30 and then one is shuffling along in a very dense queue.  The other problem that one needs to remember is there is no public loo at the Palace until the end of the tour and then its a good few steps away from the Palace, so you need to be prepared for that, we took 2.5 hours to get around, but I can imagine that when it is as busy as we saw it, that it can take considerably longer.

So, I did a bit of research and found the nearest loo was only 300 yards away, not in St James park as most people say, we walked up Buckingham Palace Road, turned right into Palace Street which is nearly opposite the entrance to the Royal Mews, then walked past the Pheonix Pub turning right into Cathedral Walk and then one walks straight into a shopping arcade with Marks and Spencers on the left and the public loo’s are a couple of feet after that, if the public loos are shut Marks and Spencers have some very good loo’s in their downstairs cafe.

Anyway back to the visit, your channeled through airport styled security and then start your wonderful walk around the State rooms with the aid of a free audio tour.  I loved every second of it, I’ve wanted to know what Buckingham Palace looked like on the inside since a very small child, so it was a big dream come true and what’s more as we had our tickets stamped we can go back as often as we like for year.

The dresses were as you might imagine amazing, I particularly enjoyed the tailoring depending on designer and era, the seventies styles were for a Queen I think quite a statement. But then our Queen has never shied away from a little bit of colour or a statement head piece.  Of course the one dress that made all who saw it gasp was the Coronation dress, heavily encrusted with pearls, crystals and sequins in floral emblems of the Commonwealth and I can assure you how every woman looking at it wondered how it would feel to wear such a dress, how it would move, how much it would weigh, how Queenly we would feel and we all gave a deep sigh as we left the display knowing that we would never, no matter how much we wanted to, own a dress such as this.

We had coffee and cake after the tour, very nice, paper cup, nice cake, £17.00, ouch. The second time we went we took our salad sandwiches and coffee and had a mini picnic sat on one of the Queen’s benches admiring her garden and chatting to one of her many security staff.

Next time we will pay to do the garden tour, but until then here a few snaps, of course there is no photography allowed in the Palace.

Hubby and I decided to take ourselves off to Camden Lock for the day. It is the second time I have been, we spent the whole day and I think we have only just scratched the surface of it, the sights, the smells the sounds, it is a busy place to be.  I still think we have only just scratched the surface of it, enjoy.

The tomatoes are starting to come good. Some of the yellow ones are ripe and are absolutely delicious. But firstly one lone cucumber which was delicious, we are not sure why we we don’t have more fruits, we have the blossom but no fruits, we have tried self-fertilising but it hasn’t worked. But the toms are coming good. Soon I will stop paying silly prices for a few punnets of tomatoes a week and gorge myself senseless for a few weeks, I can easily eat the best part of a pound a day given half a chance, they go in every meal and every snack!  By the time the season has finished I am all tomatoed out and the winter tomatoes that come from abroad hold no appeal at all and if that is not a measure of how we should be eating seasonally I don’t know what is.  However given enough of a glut I will store some, my favourite way is to slowly oven roast them, very slowly over a few hours until they become the sun blush tomatoes that I love and then bag them up and freeze them, using their concentrated flavours in soups and stews in the dead of winter, it certainly wakes your taste buds up I can tell you. Hubby was coming home from the physiotherapists a few weeks ago when he spied this, the biggest Fig tree you ever did see, perched in the yard of a builders merchants surrounded by wooden pallets.  When he came through the front door he was quite breathless he could hardly contain his excitement as he told me about it, hubby does like the odd fig, preferably in multiples of 3 or 4,  and if I don’t issue strict instructions to save me some from our small tree they disappear like sweeties down a childs throat. Oh look how full it is, absolutely drenched in figs.  I think we will be walking this way every week now whilst at the same time wondering how to get some down.

1. First of the home grown tomatoes, warm, juicy and sweet.

2. A gorgeous salad sandwich made with my own home made wholemeal bread, with just a touch of Heinz salad cream to add a little sweetness followed by a home made heavily fruited wholemeal buttered scone and a flask of coffee in the gardens of Buckingham Palace .  The sun was shining, the birds were singing and there wasn’t a blade of grass out of place, just perfect.

3. Home grown cucumber sandwiches and home made scones and iced coffee while admiring the sights on a Routemaster heading for Trafalgar square.

4. More salad sandwiches and scones gobbled down quickly in the roof garden of John Lewis, Oxford Street before anyone complained.

5. Home made banana cake and home brewed coffee in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts while admiring the mechanical art.

Leadenhall Market flutters into my instagram feed fairly frequently and so has been on my to do list for what feels like forever.  Hubby and I’s plans to go and see the roof gardens of Kensington fell through at the last moment and we were just pondering what to do in the persistent drizzly rain when we decided that today we could just wander around Liverpool Street and see what we could see. Firstly a shot of the Gherkin as we walked past a courtyard. Quickly followed by a shot of a facade being preserved for a new building. You can see why though, just so beautiful. And then we found ourselves in Leadenhall Market at which point I wished I’d bought the big camera, but you can’t always carry that around all day. Isn’t it pretty?  Apparently Leadenhall Market dates from the 14th century and was originally a meat, game and poultry market and stands on what was the centre of Roman London. This beautiful ornate roof structure was designed in 1881 by Sir Horace Jones who was also the architect of Billinsgate and Smithfield Market.  Then in about 1990 the market was transformed into this architectural beauty that we see today. (thank you wiki) It’s certainly very popular with the city types, the cheese lunches with very nice wines did look good. It was lovely exploring, There was a lovely pen shop to explore, and various avenues to explore. It is quite small really, but such a treat. And when we came out we explored a little further but it was till pouring with rain and we couldn’t find anywhere dry for our picnic lunch, when I had a bit of a brain wave, the sky garden must be very close and sure enough, just down the road we found this. Our very own Walkie Talkie, we walked around the building to see if we could enter and they were full up so couldn’t admit us, so we hopped on the no.15 bus, a very old route master which took us all the way to Trafalgar Square and ate our lunch on the way, it was great fun sitting on a tiny red double decker bus as it trundled along in and out of the traffic, there was even a proper conductor who came around and checked your tickets! (oyster card)  We then had a little wander around Trafalgar Square and hopped on the no.9 to take us to the Royal Academy of Arts to see David Hockney’s latest work on portraits, which of course was wonderful. And we came across Spyre by Ron Arad RA a kinetic sculpture which each segment moving at a different speed which ensures that it never repeats the same posture once.  It also has a camera on the tip so you can watch what it is filming on the big screen in front.  Quite amusing and quite beautiful but also just a little bit scary.  And I have no idea why Sir Joshua Reynolds is wearing a sash of flowers, it is most becoming though.

Whenever we go to London Zoo our first port of call is always the Penguins.  I just love ’em, their comedic ways, their bustling energy, their basic sunshine happiness.  Penguins are adorable and if I could adopt one, and not just in a postcard once a year kind of way, I would.

I came across bullet journaling in May from this video, Bullet Journal and wondered at the simplistic beauty of it. So I thought I would try it in an old journal and it worked really well.  It organised us in a way that we had never as a couple been organised before, we have been married 27 years and I have no idea how we have bumbled along so far without this in our lives. We are, as the Americans might say, now on the same page.  And whats more is we seem to get much more done, not just in a domestic way, but in pleasure seeking ways too. It is everything you want it to be because you are not constrained in any way by space or ideas, they are all of your own.

I have tried in the past the more decorative approach of bullet journaling, but I prefer the simplistic bullet points that it gives, I have my Erin Condren to pretty things up in my life and to play with stickers, washi, photographs and postcards of our days out, the bullet journal for me is a simple way of organising and keeping track of our lives and the things that need to be done and that we enjoy.

I’ve just set my new bullet journal up in a bright orange (a girl has to have a bit of fun) Leuchtturm 1917 A5 in graph paper using my Cross fountain pen in Prussian Blue ink from Diamine.  The Leuchtturm doesn’t bleed with a fountain pen although it does shadow slightly, the reviews make interesting reading between a Moleskine and Leuchtturm’s online.  But before I go on, you can set up your own bullet journal in any notebook with any pen.

First you need to set your bullet journal up, see the video above for that, it is simple and just takes moments. I’ll show you some of my pages, These are ‘things’ that we are aiming to do in August. And these were our plans for yesterday. This is what I want to keep track of this month, some are for health reasons, some financial, some domestic, its simply what I want it to be. We are eating vegan about five days a week, (why vegan? because otherwise we will add half a pound of cheese) and I wanted a place that I can store ideas that I know I can knock up in half an hour when we get back from a long day.  These are all tried and tested and quite yummy. And then just a few ideas that I’ll add to on things that I would like to do one day.

See simple, I just wanted to share, its really changed our lives and in such a good way.

Usually when I travel to Islington I alight from the tube at Angel and go straight to Loop and not much further apart from to the pub for lunch and to be honest I am really happy with that plan. But I knew there was more there to explore, now I haven’t photographed everything because there is too much, but a few things that caught my eye, its a great place to just wander for the afternoon after wool or knitting books have been purchased. Heading down Camden Passage colourful items for sale are placed in the street ready for your inspection giving this area very much a trendy market feel.  And if I were heading home for the day the temptation to pick up a piece of spanking fresh fish would be greatfrom Moxon’s fishmongers. I must say it smelt extremely fresh, just the ozone from the sea. We had a little look in Home and Pantry as we tootled along, it was a very cute shop. And of course we couldn’t not stop at Loop, the holy grail of gorgeous yarns. Just look at all the pretty yarns, I picked up a knitting book I’d had my eye on for a while, Botanical Knits 2 by Alana Dakos and then I trotted off happy as could be to continue with our adventures. Look at this cute shop, such fun. We found a gorgeous park to eat some lunch as I’d carefully packed some home made pasties for lunch. And then we found a pub, The Queens Head and we felt like we had entered a time warp and hopped back a century or two, fortunately the beer was still good. And the fireplace was incredible. It dated back to the 17th century and depicted the Greek myth of Diana and Actaeon. After refreshments we carried onto the Polish pottery shop, I love this pottery and could spend serious amounts of money on it, its such a fun kitchen styled pottery.  Having finally decided on a pretty lasagne dish, which I will photograph with a lasagne in one day we headed home.  And even then pretty things caught our eyes as we trundled towards the tube, one of which I just had to photograph, a lovely little basement garden, so pretty and unexpected. The owner came home as I merrily snapped away, doesn’t that always happen, and showed us a glimpse of her back garden which was just lush.

This did make me smile as I exited Angel Islington. How did that come about?,  but it kinda works. Bravo.