I was going through some old papers and I came across a magazine clipping that resonated with me as much today as I’m sure it did ten or so years ago, when I cut it out of a magazine. Maybe it was for different reasons, but I was thankful that I had kept it. It’s a passage from Alison Adburgham’s, View of Fashion. “And sometimes, something more emerges after the main assignment is completed. At the back of the mind here have been stored some small but treasured vignettes. It is as with the child’s suitcase at the end of the seaside holiday; after the clothes have been unpacked there is underneath a collection of cowries and cockles, dried seaweed, pieces of coloured glass worn smooth by the waves, a piece of cork, an uninhabited sea-urchin, a mermaid’s empty purse. So are the impressions left, not by the dress shows themselves, but by the people in the bars and the bistros, girls on motor scooters, the children’s balloons in the Tuilleries, the pictures in the Jeu de Paume, the shop windows, the smell of Gaulouises, garlic, and Arpège, the dim interior seen through an open window, the concierge in the courtyard sunning herself on a kitchen chair, the lovers in the Vert Galant disregarding the world in their island garden. All these things suddenly fall into a pattern, and fashion is part of the pattern, and the pattern has meaning because it is quickened by ordinary, everyday life.”

Is this jumper following me, of am I following it? It’s the sleeves that have me swooning most of all. It’s never too late to splurge on a winter woolly. As we know too well, April can bring spring one day, and winter the next.

I see the flowers, they’re delightfully springy, but what I’m really looking at is the mustard pulley on that girl. I love the volume in the sleeves, and the chunkyness of the cable knit. The colour is one of my favourites. Soon enough, we’ll all be in flip flops and woolly sweaters. Soon.

It’s always a little adventure, to delve into a handbag I haven’t used in months, years. This morning I found one in the laundry hamper –– goodness knows why I put it there –– filled with coins, pens, Bermuda dollars and prenatal pills the size of kidney beans. It was last used in 2014, I’m pretty sure. I also found a scrap of yellow paper, with my husband’s notes the week after our first baby was born. “Ask the doctor about swaddling.” Very often, I find an order of service slipped into the pocket of a bag. I love to re-read the poems and passgaes the couple chose. Velveteen Rabbit. Winnie the Pooh. Sometimes, I’ll find an old lipstick, a shell or some sugared almonds at the bottom of a bag. And once in a while, I’ll discover a pair of earrings or a ring I haven’t worn in years. I like to go through old receipts and business cards, notes to myself, and scribbles from my kids. I toss most of it, but there’s always a gem or two to be found.