Category: Purchases

Walking

On By Laura MorganIn Flowers, London

Yesterday was National Walk to Work Day.  I didn’t manage to walk to work (I barely managed to get out of bed), but I did walk home, through some of the unloveliest parts of south London.  And yet.  There’s so much more you see when you’re at ground level – much more, even, than you see from the bus, which I have always thought of as a fairly intimate means of travel.  But I had never really noticed the war memorial at Stockwell, much less the lists of names engraved on it of Stockwell residents who died in the two world wars; including what looked like a whole family whose surname was “Burnley”, who I only noticed because Palace are playing Burney next weekend so the word jumped out at me.  But there’s a story behind every name, and they’re probably all worth hearing.

Anyway, including a brief stop at the war memorial, two even briefer stops to smell lilac growing in people’s front gardens (lilac coming second in my list of smells that make me think of childhood summers, the first being hyacinths) and ten minutes in MK One buying wedding outfit accessories (not my wedding, someone else’s), the whole thing took an hour and a half.  Which is…manageable.  I might even do it again.  But not today.

More maps

On By Laura MorganIn Stuff1 Comment

Strange Maps has a “news map” of the US today, with the size of the states adjusted according to how many news wire stories, from various sources, originated in each of them over a four-year period. Unstartlingly, Washington, New York and California are the three biggest news generators, and all three are vastly oversized in the map, although of course California is just really big, so it doesn’t increase as dramatically as the other two. I’ve never been to California, but I’d like to think that everything about it is just really big.

They link to an article in Science News which talks more generally about the art (or science, or both) of representing more than simple geographical facts using maps. It’s interesting, if you have time to read it.

All of which reminded me of that picture of the earth at night which is still one of the best things I’ve ever found on the internet. Apart from being – well, pretty, it gets more interesting the more you look at it. My favourite things about it are:

  1. How bright all the big cities are, but especially Paris and Tokyo
  2. How defined the Nile is – it looks like it’s been drawn on in a single brush stroke
  3. How empty Australia is
  4. The fact that North Korea is so dark that South Korea looks like an island. That one’s a bit terrifying, for various reasons, but it’s still interesting.

Adventures in shopping

On By Laura MorganIn Stuff
After my confident assertion that expensive bags are no better than cheap ones, my bright blue bag broke as soon as I tried to use it. I took it back and swapped it for the only remaining one, which is the same but bright yellow. It’s kind of…really…horrible. I’m going to use it every day and hope that I come to love it as you might the ugliest kitten in the litter, who may not be cute but whose ugliness is somehow adorable.

Edit: Horrifically, I’ve just realised that my purse is dark green, and the two together remind me ineradicably of my old school uniform. Bleuch. I mean, I quite liked it at the time, but it’s not a look I’ve ever yearned to recreate.

A profitable lunchtime

On By Laura MorganIn Reasons to be cheerful, Stuff4 Comments

…by which, obviously, I mean one in which I spent money, rather than earned it. Last year, when my income went up from “I can pay the rent and go out to eat” to “I can buy an iPod on a whim” (it’s since gone back to the first one), I decided that rather than spend £10 on boots that last three months, I would invest wisely in expensive but high-quality items that would last forever and end up costing me less money than the cheap version.

Well, it turns out that expensive boots (and bags, and clothes) don’t last any longer; they just cost more. So it’s back to spending £10, or in this case £5, on a new bag, which is bright blue and doesn’t go with anything, but that’s ok, because it only cost £5!

I thought I had done more shopping than that, but it turns out the rest of what I bought was my lunch. Well, that’s ok too.

Also, and not unrelatedly (the sun makes me spend money): it’s spring! I know I’ve said it before, but this time it’s properly true. I even had to take off my incredibly warm and deeply impractical fake fur coat while I was outside. You know, for a bit.

Daffodils

On By Laura MorganIn Flowers3 Comments
I’m not only going to talk about flowers here, but I bought some daffodils yesterday and they were all closed up, and this morning they had started to open, and it occured to me that daffodils are an underappreciated flower. You can buy a bunch of twenty for 99p, and they grow all over the place (there are some growing right next to the snowdrops on the unlovely patch of scrubland outside the Ritzy), and I think that’s why we take them for granted. A rose flaunts its beauty in an unabashed way, but there’s something very modest about the daffodil. And it’s no less beautiful for that.