Birthday

Happy birthday to me! I absolutely love birthdays! Parties, presents, being the centre of attention and getting older; I love it all. My Mum made me some gluten-free granola and some vegan peanut butter snaps which was the best start to the day and also got me such a gorgeous card. My Dad paid for my car to get serviced which was my main present but also loaned me his amazing Canon camera for the day for all these photos! On my actual birthday I met some of my best friends and we spent the day at the Natural History Museum before going to the pub. I wrote a song about dugongs last year hence all the photos with the dugongs!

I also went out the week before with all my friends and was honoured that the lovely Jess from Jessthetics could come too! It was such a fun (and particularly bleary) night and it felt like Jess had been part of our gang for ages. I felt very loved by the amount of birthday gestures I received this year; flowers (in the photos!) and cake from the charity shop, more flowers and cake from my theatre group, cake and wine from work, homemade vegan birthday cake from Jess, cuddly wolves, polkadot dresses, posh glittery things, LUSH goodies and headdresses from my friends and an animal safari t-shirt (!!!!!!) (amongst other things) from James.

It sounds cheesy but the nice thing about growing older is having people to grow older with! I don’t have much family  or many friends from childhood so it’s fairly recently I’ve been able to appreciate how wonderful it is having close friends who you’ve known through multiple stages of your life. Pete (the tall ginger one) for example has been at every single birthday I’ve had since we met and we’ve gone from being two awkward teens to being two successful musicians running creative businesses (although still awkward every now and then!). I’m very grateful to grow up surrounded by inspiring and brilliant people every day and so lucky to call them my friends. :)

Saturday

Hello everyone! These photos are from last week when I spent a very rare Saturday off work and miracle of miracles; it was sunny! We headed to Tottenham Court Road, ostensibly to buy a banjo from Hobgoblin but in reality we just wandered around the local area, eating food (local cafe), buying food (Holland and Barrat), eating more food (Wagamamas), buying more food (Chinatown), eating more food (Haagen Dagz in Leicester Square)… it was a great day and I also came away with two recipe books from Waterstones. It was so bizarre seeing how rammed Oxford Street was on a Saturday! The nice things about working weekends is I take my days off during the week and exhibitions/food shops/cafes/public transport are all far quieter at 2pm on a Tuesday meaning I forget how busy London gets!

This is my new shirt (along with about 30 others) from the charity shop where I work once a week. I seem to return from every shift with 2 or 3 new amazing items which I couldn’t possibly leave behind. I already own about 4 other gingham items (although none in pink, so it’s justified, right?!) but this shirt is made from such a soft cotton I couldn’t resist. These are my favourite dungarees which I have had for about 4 years. The overall effect was a bit “farm girl” I suppose but whatever; it wasn’t quite warm enough for a t-shirt so this seemed a good in-between outfit!

Check shirt – Gap via charity shop, £2. Dungarees – Rokit, £20. Trainers – Comme des Garcons via charity shop, £6. Sunglasses – €4, supermarket in Greece.

Horniman

Whilst in Forest Hill (one of my favourite areas) last Friday, I decided to visit one of my top London museums, the Horniman. Lorisidae have been in my dreams of late and my primary goal was to find a specimen. I’ve explored the musical instruments and anthropology collections numerous times before whilst living in nearby New Cross, but my favourite gallery at the moment is the natural history section. They have some hugely informative displays comparing brain sizes and skeletons of different animals but I decided against any squeamish pictures. I’m going through a primate phase at the moment and am always awed by the gorilla skeletons (below) as at first glance it looks like a display of mismatched human skeletons. If Wes Anderson were to curate a museum gallery it would surely be the Horniman natural history collection. The thoughtfully laid out displays, pastel backgrounds and gratuitous use of ‘Futura’ font lend the gallery a certain Anderson aesthetic. Without my sketch book I happily wandered around taking photographs and scribbling notes on which animals to further research. There was such a feeling of tranquility and calm in the upstairs gallery especially and I spent about an hour alone, just me and the exhibits. After, I sat in the medicine garden listening to the wind chimes and thinking about all the thousands and thousands of creatures in the world, and how at one time we were all the same.