I’ve been making paper flowers again, and I came across some beautiful inspiration in the form of Leendert Blok‘s botanical images. Photographed over a century ago, his daffodils, hyacinths, dahlias, irises and gladiolas (to name a few) have an ethereal quality to them. Given how new colour photography was at the time, the richness of colour, texture and light really is astounding. It’s this blue parrot that took my breath away; wrinkled and fragile, snapped in an instant.

This time last year, I was doing so much collaging that I actually considered trading in clay for paper. Playing with paper, and all the flowers that sprang out of that time, was the diversion I needed from the laboriousness of clay. I am very much back in the mud now, and enjoying it, but I still want to keep paper arts in the mix. So, my goal for this winter, is to produce paper replicas of every vessel I make. We’ll see whether the paper vases inspire the clay ones, or the other way around. “The beautiful life,” scribbled my eight-year old on a piece of thick orange paper yesterday. “Let’s see what hapen’s.” Below are artist, Nadia Gallardo‘s 365 paper bottles.

Here we are, a decade into 2023, awaiting a polar vortex that will feel like -50 with the wind chill. Given that my feet are my locomotive, I have to be prepared. Heated jacket, check. Balaclava, check. Gloves, snow pants, thermals, check. It’s all down to the armour. I learned this the hard way when I spent my first winter here permanently cold in designer Mukluks and a flimsy puffer. I remember going to the cinema to watch the Shipping News (how à-propos) and walking out to a blizzard worthy of a Pulitzer. It was such a shock. Two decades on, I’m ready for it. And if you’re ready for it, let’s meet at 9 a.m. for a walk?

Stephane Salvi’s paintings have all the things I love to see in an artwork; crude, unfettered strokes, exuberant colour, and childlike naivety. Some of them are so simple and raw that my eight-year-old could have made them. Only she didn’t, and Salvi did. Interestingly, it’s Black Flower (below) that I am drawn to the most; an absence of colour accentuates the endearing simplicity of shape and form.

My children are embarrassed when I wear a balaclava, so I’m quite sure that they’d cross to the other side of the street if I rocked up at school pick-up in this one. Handcrafted by London-based textile designer, Kamila the balaclavas are a gorgeous explosion of colourful beadwork and pattern. Some look like coral, others like lichen, and this one here reminds me of the snow and ice formations we saw in yesterday’s storm. As for the one below, it’s fireworks over London Bridge.

Since my late teens, I’ve lived with an anxiety disorder that –– let’s use house guests as a metaphor –– spans from the in for a night, sleeping on the couch, you’ll barely know I’m here sort to the kind that comes for a week and stays for two years. After a while, you start to discern which one you’re making the bed up for. I’ve done a fine job of minimizing my anxiety disorder to the outside world –– that was how I learned to deal with it –– to the point that very few people know that I have one. All those years of minimizing it has cost me vital years of an alternate solution; accepting it. There is a day, as the wisest of owls, Anaïs Nin said, when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk to blossom, and when that day comes, we have no choice but to be honest. Honesty is scary, and surprisingly freeing. It helps to try it out on people whom you trust, who’ve been honest with you, too. One honest conversations begets another. And so begins a chain reaction to something so liberating you wonder why it took you so long to blossom. The house guests still come, they likely always will. My hope is that they don’t stay quite as long. Guests, like fish, start to smell after three days.