Later, when he looked back, he was to think of this as one of the happiest times of his life...

...when anything was possible, and his heart was not broken, only fractured.
-Anthony Capella, 'The Food Of Love'

Well, lately I have really been living...

Last Friday, I went to London with the Mama. We had chocolate cake with strawberries and pomegranate lemonade in the sunshine, sitting outside of the Camellia Tearoom on the fifth floor of Kingly Court...

...and pre-theatre dinner at Fortnum & Mason's, the department store of my heart. The restaurant was breathtaking - turqoise and gold, with handsome Italian waiters to hold out your chair and sweep napkins onto your lap - and the food was pure heaven! How I long to live there! Then I saw the fabulous Anna Friel as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It was far more true to the book than to the movie - in the end, the cat was abandoned in the rain and Holly flew away to Brazil, and dear Holiday Golightly was played a lot more hard-hearted than Ms Hepburn. It was different, but wonderful!

At the weekend, I absquatulated to a friend's pink house in a rose garden in Portsmouth. Our first afternoon was as glorious as only the dying days of an English summer can be, and we stayed on the vast and utterly deserted beach until sunset, swimming to a sandbar far out to sea, and standing on a beach in the middle of the ocean [can you see my friend walking around on it?]:-

The rest of the week was spent toasting sandwiches on the seashore and marshmallows over midnight bonfires [before, alas, being pursued inside by torrential rain], cycling home over the sand at sunset looking for purple shells, playing gang-Piggy In The Middle and Irish Snap, and getting lost whilst lingering behind in the village trying on beautiful dresses and munching wild blackberries on the beach as I somehow wound my way back!

Our host brought along two strangers to us all - his girlfriend [whom we could rant and rage about in frustrated bewilderment], and his oldest friend, whom we fell instantly in love with and could gush endlessly about. Doesn't it prop the heart up again to meet a boy who is genuinely kind, genuinely funny and truly sincere, with whom one can stay awake until 5am talking after only two days' acquaintance?

I've also been inspired by an interview with Vivienne Westwood in the London Fashion Week issue of Elle:

"Stand out! It's heroic to stand out. My clothes have always been heroic... So much of modern fashion is ordinary... First you have to know who you are - or want to be. Then you have to use your clothes to tell your personal story. And be confident. I've never worried about what other people are wearing or what they think of me. I'm only interested in how I want to look and feel. You have to cut a figure. Step off the treadmill of fashion."

So, who are you or who do you want to be today? For now, I'm definitely thinking the girl equivalent of...

I want to be a Merry Maiden, dancing all night with my darlingest friends and the fireflies in a secret glade behind the waterfall, celebrating our fight against the 'Phony King of England'... can you imagine being any happier?

I would love to be courageous and a kite flyer, someone so fabulous that they could live in Fortnum & Mason's as naturally as Amanda Harlech occupies a suite full of Chanel couture at the Paris Ritz...

...late of autumn, and a reader of books...

...making magic out of sad things and a handful of whimsy and dreams...

...a girl who lives in a cottage where every inch of the outside wall is covered with sunflowers, and the rooms are full of fairy lights..

"Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people."
-Rainer Maria Rilke