Back to School

They say the wanderer returns.   And they’d be right.

Unlike the many millions of children returned to school last month – with leaden feet and poet sighs – I make my homecoming altogether more gladly.*

What of my travels? 

For those fortunate to call San Francisco home – or simply those who have clung onto the side of a cable car the morning after cocktails at Rye and Bourbon & Branch – it will be little wonder that I have fallen quite hopelessly in love with your eccentric, hipster city.  Let’s whisper this, but it may even have replaced New York in my affections.

More, Napoleon suggested – in a moment of uncharacteristic spontaneity – that we take a week in Paris.  This explains my somewhat later-than-promised return to blogging, but – after dating the same man for longer than even she believes – a girl has to seize every opportunity for romance and shopping on Avenue Montaigne.

Especially when it means giving a two-finger salute to the nine-to-five for another week.

The normal service of life will always recommence, however, and this first post finds dedication to my favourite class of wanderer. 

The Fashion Editor. 

Traversing the four capitals of the fashion globe, the nomadic and heavily caffeinated editrix provides a sartorial masterclass better than any of those evidenced on the catwalk. Without tire. Without faux pas. And she does it all in knife-edge heels.

Truly the kind of wanderer, then, that mere amateurs like me aspire to be.

{ *Even though London seems not to have received the memo that camel is the colour of the season and has impatiently, precociously fast-forwarded into the oppressive grey of winter.}

|The Fashion Spot, Tommy Ton for Style.com|

Short Change

After seemingly endless days of packing – three Mulberry cases for me, one knackered rucksack in its dotage for Napoleon – the boy and I are abandoning our corporate hamster wheels and succumbing to wanderlust.

There’s a clue to our holiday destination in the vintage picture above.

I shall return here – loquacious as ever and excited for the international fashion weeks – in tens days.  You’re all invited.  Bright eyes and bushy tails will be the dress code.

I’ll see you then, x

A Love Restored

As a young-un, my family home nestled quietly amongst the verdant and rolling hills of North Yorkshire.  It was a quaint and wholesome childhood – rather like something depicted in a Hovis commercial –  interrupted only ever by annual pilgrimage to the Mecca of culture and sirens: London.

In being transported from the slumber of my rural solitude, those long train sojourns – replete with bottomless bags of boiled sweets and games of ‘I Spy’ – seemed heady and deliciously exotic. 

A quote attributed to Thomas Wolfe reads ‘One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years,’ and, for me, he may well have spoken of London.  I adored her from the first moment of our meeting. 

One particular memory from my childhood has me bundled like a sardine on the tube – melting in a heat unbeknownst even to Hades.  I curiously looked around at my unsmiling carriage companions and pondered why they seemed miserable. 

‘I won’t care to be so unhappy when I live here,’ I had thought. 

It was a childish quixotism borne of days filled with wonderment: whether they were spent visiting the theatre, quaking in my little patent-leather Clarks shoes at the Tower of London, taking tea (well, orange cordial) at Fortnum’s, giggling at the penguins in London Zoo or, one of my most favoured activities, shopping at Browns.

Whilst the adults played dress-up, I would sit beneath the rails – the scent of newness and wealth all around and so different to the thin, smoked air outside – and romanticise the day when I would finally be old enough to belong to London.

That day seemed so faraway…

The Great Wen can be a cruel mistress and there are times when my love for her fades. Times when, amidst the crucible and merry sing-song of seemingly a million languages, I long only to hear a friendly Northern voice. Times when, on observing my own, I startle at how softened it has become. The intrepid girl, who only ever saw wonder in the teeming metropolis, seems lost to me.

After six years of cohabiting, even Romeo and Juliet would have squabbled and so – as any trashy self-help book might advise – I make every effort to rewalk childhood steps and ‘date’ my city.  I escape to the penguins once more.  I smile cheerfully at passing strangers. And, of course, I flee to Browns for the sanctuary and soothing of retail therapy. 

Voyaging through the underworld of London, there may be occasions when a child alights upon my face and meets with only a look of sadness from her carriage comrade.  However, if I were to be sporting these Nicholas Kirkwood shoes – exclusively designed for the Brown’s Future Collectables capsule and worn by Sarah Jessica Parker during the SATC2 press junket – something tells me that she would instead find greeting with my smile.

Even better?  They may just make everyone else smile, too…*

* Either that, or I’m headed for a mugging.

|Browns|