Rejections are a fact of life. Rejection comes in friendship, work, creativityโฆ and my god does it come hard and fast when you're trying.
Porto: A Digest
Four days is enough to see Porto well. It's a city for shopping, walking and chilling - ideal for a city break.
Podcasts: The Ultimate Edutainment
What podcasts do I recommend, and what makes a good podcast to me?
My Journey To Breakfast At Tiffanyโs
My first encounter with Breakfast At Tiffanyโs was Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy and rhinestones. Like a lot of little girls, I had the calendar and the costume jewellery and a battery-powered vintage-looking alarm clock that had the Robert McGinnis poster emblazoned on it in technicolour - one that I kept long after it stopped functioning... Continue Reading →
Classical music: how to get into something difficult
Thank god for teens on Spotify. Their knowledge on so many topics is as lacking as mine, whether weโre talking about classic 80s hip-hop they weren't there for or Romantic classical music when they're not sure if romantic is an era or a mood. The beautiful thing about the teens, though, is that even if... Continue Reading →
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I feel like a badly drawn picture of a girl Bent out of shape, losing features in the swirl Or the dot of the Impressionist brush Something about being such a beautiful mess is a headrush I feel like a child's illustration of a woman My features indistinguishable from others I could embody a Picasso;... Continue Reading →
The โBright Young Thingsโ Cinematic Universe
In the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, the same characters crop up over and over again - whether itโs Bridey (the priggish elder brother from Brideshead Revisited) falling for Adam Symesโ faux fashion hacks in Vile Bodies or Linda Radlett being a minor character in Polly Hamptonโs book, the British scene of the... Continue Reading →
The Joy in Something You Werenโt Seeking
Do you ever find yourself researching something so strange that you stop and wonder what brought you here? I find that itโs almost a daily occurrence for me: whether itโs finding a stack of books on the history of various astrologies (whatโs more surprising, that I needed it or that itโs a surprisingly well-covered field?)... Continue Reading →
‘Gilded Glamour’: A Met Gala Digest
Another instalment in my annual review of the Met Gala looks.
Why Am I Rewriting Phantom of the Opera?
In re-writing Phantom of the Opera, I am trying to connect with a Sensibility that I found in the original, marrying modern writing practices with the emotion and tension of the original, and expanding Lerouxโs seminal work into something a modern reader might enjoy more, but which also connects to the Romantic ideals of a past conception of literature.