The first of some photos I’m sharing from the photoshoot about a month ago is this colour-saturated green, blue and pink photo of me sitting on a picnic table with my typewriter.
Those boots are so well-loved. They’ve walked me along the streets of Manhattan and London, probably also Bristol and Bath a couple of times. They are battered and broken in places, but they still feel fantastic. Which feels apt for the kind of comeback I’m going for in reengaging with blogwriting and ‘zhuzh-ing-up’ my website. (That’s a normal phrasal verb, right - “to zhuzh up” ? Meaning: to tidy up and make pretty.)
This time of year makes me think about New York and how beautiful the autumn can be there. We got a taste of that this year in London because it took quite some time for the temperatures to drop and for the normal, rainy-drizzly weather of September to finally set in - about a month later than usual. The early autumn golden light against golden leaved trees was quite something.
It’s at this time of year that I find myself wanting to do more reading, curled up under a blanket, with some scented candles lit on my mantlepiece. I got so lucky when moving back to London from Manchester. I mean, not initially. Eight months was a long time to be looking for somewhere to live while hopping around in short term places, but it was worth it since I ended up finding a room in a house full of actors with space for all my stuff (a miracle in itself, believe me) and still room to dance around on beautiful pale wood floors.
Sometimes things bring you right back to where you started. Or where you thought life was opening out to.
When I was 17, my family had all moved to the US and I’d stayed behind, living as a lodger with a family in a posh part of Bristol - Redland. It was an area filled with big houses and tree-lined residential streets and fancy lighting boutique shops along the nearby Whiteladies Road. I had a job as a waitress at one of the restaurants along that road and I remember having to wear a fairly horrible pink frilly-edged apron over an otherwise all-black uniform, serving big tables of families gathering for an important dinner or business associates meeting up to, um, … associate. I also remember having to carry a huge soup bowl in my hand while also bringing a plate of vegetables and almost running to the table to put them down because it was so heavy and a second longer of holding them might have resulted in the soup ending up on my shoes. Or worse still, a paying customer’s lap. I got told to smile more. Which was hard when feeling like you’re having to work your socks off just to go home with a bit of pocket money and a couple of doggy bags of left over apple crumble or bread pudding. (English cuisine, eh?)
Anyway, the fine details I recall about the house in Redland that I lived in for a year was that there were lots of plants (most draped over and dangling on bookcases) wood floors in the hallway and generally lots of hints of middle-class style that I’d not seen in my own home as a kid. It felt like I’d escaped the working class dark, patterned carpets (the ones that “won’t show the dirt”) and joined the cultural delights of the middle-classes. A bit like Rita’s first flat after leaving her deadbeat boyfriend in ‘Educating Rita’, it was a new world to me. I was ravenous for bookcases filled with books that weren’t hymnbooks or bibles. (Except the joke was on me - they were actually a very religious family too.) And most of all, I was enraptured by their piano. Because they had one.
Now, in very southwest London, I’m in an area that reminds me of that kind of wholesome, family-orientated, everyday affluence. The same kinds of wood floors, ornate windows, peephole-like attic or top floor corner windows and decorative porches and doorways. And the rooms have old fireplaces with huge mantlepieces over them. Of which my room proudly has one, too. As well as a huge built in wardrobe which - thankfully - also matches the wood floors with its framing, structure and colour. It is the complete antithesis of the IKEA-like mass produced, white wardrobes that are essentially chipboard with a minimalist, clean veneer on top. I do like the characterful style of my room. There’s not one white wall in sight, which is the polar opposite of my previous white box, art-gallery-like unfurnished flat in Manchester.
I don’t know what all this means. These waves of different stages of life in different cities and spaces, the passing fashions of interiors, affluent and not, and the timelessness of reading a good book at the end of the day wherever you are seem to be swirling around in my head like the stormy winds of this late October. Maybe I’m just too much of a luddite, or maybe there’s a bit of an old record player-loving hipster side to me that I haven’t addressed lately (and maybe this song reminded me of it). Who knows.
Either way, Nina Robinson and I took some pretty fun shots in September and I’m pleased that I get to show them off now.
Here’s perhaps one of the silliest and yet I like the fact that without even thinking I somehow ended up in an ‘I’m a little teapot’ pose. All in green.
Now if that isn’t a perfectly silly but beautifully childlike way to start from scratch again, I don’t know what is.
Happy Autumn.