Summer is my very favourite season, and then Autumn. Only sometimes, I’m too busy lamenting the end of summer to fully enjoy the beauty of fall. But yesterday evening, walking through Little Italy, I happened upon the most majestic amber sky simmering above our grey town. And I was immediately reminded how easy it is to miss those skies, when we’re not paying attention.

Last week, while swimming, it occurred to me how utterly bizarre it is to be sharing a large tank of water with strangers. I thought about all our bodies –– fleshy, plump, boney, hairy ––  floating in the same salty water. I thought about how few other situations bring us as close to next to naked strangers. Saunas, beaches, Bikram, orgies. I like how swimming is both communal, and solitary. We’re in the same pool, but all moving to our own rhythm. Sometimes, when I see my fellow swimmers out in the world, on a streetcar or at the supermarket, I barely recognize them. How different we all look with our clothes on. We smile at each other, and walk on.

Please take a few moments today to wander through Jasper Conran’s exquisite Wiltshire home. “This house is built as a huge piece of theatre,” says the designer of the Palladian style home. Designed by James Paine in the 1930s, the house features a dramatic sweeping rotunda staircase and full-sized pipe organ made of wood, ivory and gold. “The acoustics in the rotunda are absolutely extraordinary. If you stand in the middle of the ground floor and sing, it has the most remarkable effect. The sound goes right thorough you.”

The best potters are the ones with a wabi sabi attitude. They embrace imperfections of the handmade, and accept and respect the fragility of the medium. Museums are filled with ceramics that have survived centuries –– other pieces crack before they get to the first firing. I’m learning from the dozens of binned pieces, that one cannot get too attached to a plate. Last week at the studio, while making room for my work, I carelessly broke another potter’s bowl. “I learned in my first session of pottery classes, that it is truly the practice of non attachment,” Adele wrote in response to my apology. “Each pot teaches us something.” On a shelf in my living room, sits the first bowl I made. It has a crack in it that renders it useless. But I keep it, display it, as a reminder of where I started and how far I’ve come.