Dear Santa...

Dear Santa I have been good most of the year, so i am giving you 3 months notice to save up to leave me these Gucci dresses under the tree..

Seeing Red at the Opera Garnier restaurant, Paris

Francoise Hardy Le Temps De L'amour

Last year lots of design blogs wrote about the new restaurant at the Opera House In Paris, and so I'd be a bit late to the party if i wrote a design report/building history/conversion post, instead you can find them on sites like this...design boom blog. After visiting last week for breakfast (dinner was too expensive, and breakfast is the best meal of the day anyways, breakfast there was pricey too, but affordable, the honey was the best I've ever eaten, and besides,you can milk it and sit there for ages) I realised something was missing from the blog write ups that I had read...no one had mentioned the toilets, and how could they not have?! I think its essential when you get to visit a well designed hotel/restaurant/public building to take a trip to the bathrooms to see if the good design continues, and here it was AMAZING. The space is divided into three sections-cublicles in a private room on one side for women, the same on the other side for men, and a shared hand washing/mirror area. The toilets themselves were painted out black with a red light and were a bit nightclub style spooky for me, but the vanity unit/sink was the best designed piece of bathroom furniture ever; some sink units look really well designed and sleek but designers don't always think out how they work and the handsoap goops out over the counter top, or the taps splash water out at you and you can't put your handbag down anywhere without it getting soaked, but here they had thought of everything, it looked ACE and it was ACE (or form was equal to function if you want to be more eloquent about it); as you hovered your hands over the sink unit the water came out from underneath and the whole unit changed from glowing white to red, this kept me entertained way more than it should have, then, the drier worked in the same way, blowing up heat from below (very handy and more elegant for discreet emergency hair drying incidences than bending over under a standard drier), the only thing they didn't manage to integrate into it was the handsoap, which came out of traditional style units, which was a bit boring, and it was a shame that they were probably made to put up small signs saying "hot water" just incase some idiot tourist sued them for a burnt hand; but i cant really hold those against them because overall they were cool as hell.

On a "what i wore" note--i wore my new red peplum skirt, peplum top (i didnt think i could pull off a peplum but i'm giving it a go anyways), and red brogues with my blue satchel, so pretty much, I camouflaged into the interior, which is always a good thing in my book.

Paris when it sizzles

Steps us to the top of the Sacre Coeur
Petit Dejuner at L'opera restaurant
"I'll be special and I'll be rare, i'll be noticed because i'll wear a smile and a ribbon in my hair.."
Overpriced eclair
This man REALLY wanted a shot of that lamp-post
Cooling down in the Catacombs
Flowers outside a church

Last weekend I went on my second trip to Paris, It was good to go back and skip all the main tourist things you feel like you have to do the first time round. This time I went to a huge flea market with endless stalls of old magazines, badges, taxidermy, clothes and postcards and came back with two weird jugs; I went to a flower market that also sold birds and bunnies, ate a lot of ice cream and steak, found some of the cats that live in Montmarte cemetery and went on a midnight shopping trip to Sephora-a whole store full of make up and perfumes but didnt buy anything after inhaling too much expensive but overpowering perfume and feeling sick. I did some tourist stuff like climb to the top of the Sacre Coeur which was knackering but worth it, visited Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde's graves, which were disappointing and felt a bit tacky, and went down to the catacombs, which was nice to get out of the 35 degree heat,but felt weird, its just wrong for your skull to be buried seperate to your leg, plus I didnt see anthing other than skulls and leg and arm bones ( its too long since i studied biology to know the real words) so, where did all the hips, hands and feet go?

Hydrangea: flower of choice for Snappy and Snow

Travel rug tartan and camoflage (Pimping out my ride)

I always wanted my first car to be a ford capri, or a fiat 500 (preferably 1970s) but sometimes you have to accept that you can barely parallel park a city car, and that you're not strong enough for the lack of power steering, and that the person you are sharing the car with wants something sensible, and annoyingly, sensible always wins out. And so I will wait patiently for my mid life crisis when hopefully i will have enough money to be ridiculous and buy my un-drivable car even if it is just to drive to the supermarket. Shopping for a modern car was depressing, the reason i love vintage cars the most is for their interiors, the patterned fabrics, huge steering wheels, leather trims. It makes me sad when people dismiss interior design, when they say that the design of a space doesn't affect the user, they are so wrong. I don't know anything about the car industry, but i do know that today's interior fabric choices of grey or black is depressing when you have to spend so much. Nothing excites, nothing has any personality, can someone please take inspiration from past car interiors and do something new? My new car's interior is black, its plastic,its boring, and so i am pimping it out, with a tartan travel rug to start with.

 Living in Scotland, I don't feel like i can wear tartan anymore in fear of looking like an American tourist, back in the early 90's, when i lived in England and was starting to buy my own clothes, tartan made some sort of brief comeback (i think it was the john paul gaultier influence) i had a pair of proper travel rug pattern trousers that i loved, alongside 2 tartan pinafore dresses that i used to wear over long sleeve silky satin shirts, i dont think i could get away with the trousers now but i wish i still had the dresses, i would get someone to upholster all the car seats in matching tartan and travel around camouflage style, so it would just look like a floating head and hands driving the car. It reminded me of a scene from the film "garden state" where the main character gets a shirt made for him to match his mum's bathroom wallpaper.

A few of my favorite things...

Making a (very wonky) ombre cake, serves 12, will be consumed by 2, going to have to do a lot of running this weekend.... Does anyone else live in a really old flat where nothing is level meaning that all cakes come out lopsided, or is it just me being a rubbish baker?....

The Kurt Geiger shoe sale, problem is, you can never stop at one pair, even if you know the most wear you will get out of them is when sat at your dressing table spraying perfume and fixing your make up.

Feeding deer, I wish deer were domesticated, I would have this one thanks, he was really greedy, I think we'd get on.

The Owl and The Pussycats aerial show