I’ve always had a thing for dungarees. Here’s a selection of some of the pairs I’ve had:

1. Topman dungaree shorts - this is a pair I miss every summer! 😭
2. Black Carhartt WIP - I bought the same ones again the other week!
3. Levi’s - another good pair
4. Blue Carhartt WIP - there was something nice about the rigidity of these

Current status: constantly refreshing my inbox to look for delivery updates 😂

I finally decided to get a real camera again after years of relying on my phone.

I went for the Panasonic Lumix L10, and it seems promising so far, but there are definitely a lot of buttons and options to learn. I seem to have forgotten pretty much everything about how to use a camera!

I don’t necessarily think I will take better photos with this camera than my phone. I know I’m the limitation, not the camera. What I’m hoping for, though, is photos that look a little bit more like photos, without the phone magically compensating for everything. I also think it will make me a slightly more intentional photographer.

And, tbh, I like the idea of being the type of person who carries an actual camera around! 😅

See below for some photos from my commute this evening, with everything just on auto-auto. No edits or filters.

Read more

For a treat, you can’t beat a cinamon bun and Pucko chocolate milk in Scandi Kitchen.

And it was a lovely autumn day for a walk in Regents Park after.

After brunch today, we went browsing a bit for inspiration for furniture for the new flat.

I have always liked the S 32 dining chair by Marcel Breuer, but sadly they are a bit too pricey 😿

It would be very easy to get carried away and spend all my money on furniture!

It’s been a while since I went to the theatre, so I was rather excited to go and see My Neighbour Totoro the musical last night.

And what a treat it was! I sat absolutely fascinated, my mouth open, through most of it. The set design was incredibly clever, whether it was buildings being put together before our eyes or just some cornfields passing by.

I loved how the stage workers, if it’s fair to call them that, were sometimes part of the play, sometimes puppeteers and sometimes just doing what stage workers do.

And the puppets, of course! From the huge Totoro to a flock of chickens. I didn’t think they would do the cat bus, as it seemed too hard to me, but they did!

Definitely go and see it before it’s gone!

(but give me a week of this and I will probably change my mind! 😛)

Edit: Q.E.D. 🎉

After this post, I might have exhausted the mirror selfie blog post concept for a while 🤣

It’s been a while since we went on a proper day trip, so after a bit of googling, we decided to head to Rye.

This medieval town is just an hour from London and turned out to be well worth a visit. Very picturesque and not too crowded, with lots of cute old houses lining small, cobbled streets. It’s fascinating, too, that it used to be a seaside town, but the sea is now 2 miles away!

I particularly enjoyed the view from the tower of the 900-year-old church, a beer in the garden of the Ypres Castle Inn and a nice lunch at The Union Rye.

A very nice day out!

• On an overall level, life has felt a bit in limbo while we’re waiting to complete the purchase and move into our new flat. Living in a temporary place makes everything feel like one big procrastination! 😤
• I kept spending time playing around with my blog and vibe-coded several new features: a photo archive, dark mode, comments on posts (but you’ll have to email me your comments, and I post them 😅), site search, a publishing calendar on the archive page and a custom 404 page.
• I did do a trip, to Sweden, working remotely for a week and taking another week off. I enjoyed nature and my little boat, before it was time to go back.
• Speaking of travel, I spent hours creating a map of the places I’ve been to.
• It was good fun going to see the recording of Live at the Apollo.
• I switched to using Kagi as my search engine, paying a subscription fee to get real search results instead of ads.
• The best meal I had was at Poon’s in Somerset House.
• I did a bit of shopping, getting myself an iPad again, a new bag for my EDC and some dungarees. I also bought not one but two pairs of JNCO jeans, which I consider the start of a little collection, with pairs three and four already planned.
• I rebooted my wardrobe, with the goal of moving from my almost all-black outfits to something more relaxed. It was a fairly thorough process, creating a plan and then a final list, before shopping to plug the gaps and finally doing the switch-over.
• I also posted about my minimal-ish iPhone setup, my wish list, my little projects, and how I budget.

And now I’m really excited that autumn has arrived. It’s always been my favourite season! 🍂

Hopefully, a normal service will resume soon 🤞

A nice autumn day in photos:

1. Tried Beringer’s, City Island for brunch. Nice food and very convenient, since it’s close to home.
2. We’re hopefully getting close now to exchanging the contract on the new flat now, so we went looking for a new kitchen.
3. We were planning to go to Epping Forest, but there was no Central Line, so we ended up in Greenwich instead
4. I learned that the Prime Meridian by the observatory hasn’t been the actual prime meridian since 1974. The real one is 102 metres from there!
5. From Greenwich, we walked south across the heath to get to Blackheath, where we took the bus back home.

Don’t worry, this is not a fashion blog (as you most certainly can tell! 👺) and normal programming will resume, but I had a couple of people tell me today: “I’m so used to you wearing all black that I was thinking, ‘Who’s that?’ when you walked past”.

It seems my goal not to always wear all black has been successful, and about time, too!

Thank God for the good old masking-tape-inside-the-leg-opening trick to prevent colour transfer!

I have posted the target list before, but that didn’t include specific items, so here’s the actual list of items:

Read more

Photo evidence of me not wearing all black anymore 😆

The OOTD is loose mid-blue jeans, an olive sweatshirt over a white tee, and grey trainers with white socks. The jeans and sweatshirt feel refreshingly colourful for being me! 😅

Today’s main task was to go shopping for Carhartt dungarees. Unfortunately, they didn’t have my size — just one size up and one size down — so I ended up placing an online order when I got back home instead.

I can’t deny I’m super excited to get a good pair of dungarees again soon! 😊

Yesterday, we ended up leaving home too late to be in the mood for our usual Saturday brunch routine. Instead, we decided to do lunch at Poon’s, a Hong Kong restaurant in Somerset House.

We chose the 3-course set menu, which changes daily, and were served chicken soup, char siu pork, mushroom salad, and vegetables. It was all very nice, and the quality felt very high. It was also nice to sit at the counter and watch the chefs at work.

We will definitely come back for more.

One thing I enjoy is going to TV recordings, as I find it very interesting to get a behind-the-scenes look. Sometimes, everything is as you expect it would be, and sometimes, it’s quite different. Sometimes you get big celebrities, and sometimes you don’t. Either way, it’s free entertainment.

Read more

• You can make UI elements less transparent after they made them transparent last year.
• You can make the clock on the lock screen smaller after they made it bigger last year.
• Genmoji is a bit more reliable, but buggier in other ways.
• You can AI-manipulate photos in ways that make them no longer representative of the photo you took.

Plus, Siri is allegedly less rubbish, but it’s been bad for so long it’s hard to care.

That’s it? 🤨

End of rant.

On an evening like this, the view while waiting for the DLR at Shadwell is not too bad.

1. Schnitzel at Fischer’s in Marylebone on Friday night. Very nice.
2. Checking out SCP’s new store in Clerkenwell on the Saturday.
3. An impressive amount of dim sum at Dumpling Legends in Chinatown on the Sunday.

One of my little projects to get ready for autumn is rebooting my everyday carry (EDC), and I think I’m done enough for a trial in the real world.

Here’s what I will carry, starting with my commute tomorrow.

Read more

So many places still to go!

This map took surprisingly many hours to create and involved a huge array in Python, but it was a nice and relaxing task 😌