The Convocation of the Fellowship

Royal Society ice sculpture.



I love stationary. Especially embossed stationary.





Prince William and Bryan Cox in a single day! I couldn't believe my luck!

Fountains in Hyde Park

This evening the boyf and I decided to walk home from the pub in South Kensington. As it was one of the longest days of the year, at around nine o'clock the sun was just setting and it was still warm. We found our way to these fountains, which I have never seen before (I admittedly still get completely lost in Hyde Park).

working girl

The last time I tried to put a photo of food on franbuckland.co.uk the idea (and photo) was shot down by the boyf. I'm inclined to agree; it's difficult to take good photos of food on an iPhone. Even this one, which looked great on screen, is a disappointment on Flikr.

I've got a busy work week this week, and for some reason have just been feeling a bit down. So I came home tonight and made myself Jamie Oliver's working girls' pasta, which always reminds me of home and being cooked for. It was completely delicious.

the orchid lives on

The boyf was convinced that the orchid was on it's last legs. But oh no! Look how the Orchid-Bio has revived it (and a rigorous watering routine of ten minutes of submersion of roots every Thursday evening!).



This photo, unlike most of those in this blog that were taken by my iPhone camera, was taken by an old Canon digital camera of mine. It is THE WORST camera I have ever had. I have to take a million photos on it to even get a hint of focus, or proper light exposure. The flash whites people out. I never use it and I think it has put me off photography for life. (Moan over.)

Fire alarm at St Paul's

Evensong at St Paul's Cathedral (for work, rather than religious preference) was interrupted by a fire alarm, allowing for a spot of photography and science celeb spotting (Melvin Bragg, Lord Martin Rees, Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and the Archbishop of Canterbury).

The Flap

Went back to the Flap this weekend for a bit of relaxation with the parents. I always love going to stay at the Flap because it is a beautiful house and mummy does like to fill it with nice things, like this lovely bunch of flowers and three gin and tonics with starflower ice cubes in them (check out as well my new stripy dress with a cornflower pattern hung over a chair).





This is Minka prowling about in the flowers with the grump on.




I tried to make some granola, but there was no apple juice, so this is as far as I got. It reminded me of Amélie Poulain plunging her hand into a sack of oats at the market.

And so it goes...

Since I have begun writing on this again, I now just want to blog EVERYTHING. Every book I pick up, every film I see, every photo I take. It is just exhausting. I thought I would do a bit of a round up of what's been going on reading-wise first, all in one foul swoop.

Wolf Hall has, as previously mentioned, fallen by the wayside. A quick précis, for those not in the know, this is Hilary Mantel's 2009 Booker Prize winner bumper history of Henry VIII's divorce from first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and separation from the Catholic Church, told from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from lowly beginnings to become chief minister. It is apparently novel in the fact that this telling doesn't paint Cromwell as some evil villain, but just someone who is a bit on the make.

Whilst I really enjoyed reading something a little out of my comfort zone (classics), I did find that this fell into a few of the pitfalls that I would expect a historical fiction to. By about half way through the book, there were so many characters I just felt completely overwhelmed by not knowing who anyone was (they all also had about three names each - there is another book I've read with a similar name issue but it escapes me for now). Really, I should have been warned by the comprehensive family tree in the front cover.

Although Wolf Hall is told from Cromwell's perspective, the reader is still treated as a bystander. Thus, while his speech is admirably quick witted and much appreciated, I didn't feel like I was really engaging with him as the main character in the novel. We didn't get 'let in' to Cromwell's mind, just watched events unfold. A high point was the deaths of much of his family, just because the emotion of the situation allowed for us to see the 'real' Cromwell, not just feel like we were watching his stellar career develop.

So, for now I'm putting it down, with the sense that if I pick it up again, I'll definitely need to re-read the first half to get a sense of what is going on.

I have also (kind of, although not as much, as I have read it before) failed with Angela Carter's Wise Children. This, however is not a 'stopped' book, but merely a 'paused' book, because I truly love it, it will be quite easy to pick up again, and I feel that rather than fall out of love with it I have just been momentarily distracted by something just as beautiful but startlingly different:



The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, picked up from a stunning Waterstones with a dramatic staircase (Emilie's Parisian one still wins in the best staircase stakes though!) in Birmingham whilst visiting Lucy. Despite my grumblings about Henry James in the below post, this is an unexpected delight, and will also merit another star for my laminated copy of the list (more of that later).