The Hammersmith & Fulham Greenfest   June 16, 2008. Posted in Environmental, Organics.

Aaron and I went to check out the Green Festival on Sunday. There was games, food, stalls and music. I really wanted to go to buy some herbs for my window boxes, but there was a lot more to see and do! It was a really nice relaxing day of relaxing in the sun. We also entered the raffle for a bike, but it went to someone else so now the hunt is on for a second bike.

Greenfest One very interesting thing to see was a man doing Pole Lathing (bodging). This is a very old practice, which is not very common at all these days. In medieval times, woodmen used to go to a forest, setup camp, use the appropriate trees and turn chair legs right there in the forest. They’d then leave them stacked up to dry and move on. When dry they would be collected and taken to the closest village where someone would make the seat of the chair and assemble for sale.

Unfortunately the “greenness” here is a lot of marketing and not very much more… if the council really wanted to do something serious for the environment then diverting food waste from the rubbish would be the best thing they could do. They encourage that households have their own compost bins, but this is a city where most people live in apartments!

Comments (0)

Flower festival   June 14, 2008. Posted in Gardening, Knitting.

Today we ventured south of the river to Mortlake. We’d seen a poster for a church festival with a plant stall, so we were on the hunt for cheap plants for my wee garden.

scarecrows at the flower festival The festival was really more of a flower arranging exhibition. Each community group in the area had done a flower arrangement as a fundraiser for the church maintenance fund. My favourite was one that incorporated some pots and gardening equipment. The kids had done a scarecrow family. I managed to pick up some good plants for the grand sum of £3, the posh little lady on the stall thought it was great that I was a young person getting into gardening so she discounted some of them for me!

We walked back to check out the boutique shops on the way and I found a wool shop!! They are surprisingly far and few between in London, the biggest ranges being in John Lewis and Liberty but both of those are really only selling luxury yarns like Rowan (which is significantly cheaper here than in NZ, but it’s still luxury wools at luxury prices!). Anyway, this wool shop has a good range and also some discounted ones so I might be going back there!

Comments (0)

Connected again!   June 13, 2008. Posted in Random stuff, Travel.

Our new iMacWe have our mac, we have broadband, we’re connected again!

So now for a very very very overdue blog updating session. Thank you to everyone being patient with me, and for all of the “where have you gone?!” emails - it’s nice to know you’re thinking of us! I really missed updating my blog, it’s nice to be back :-)

My garden So now we’ve come to London and I’ve started work… we’ve found a small but good flat in Hammersmith/Shepherd’s Bush and it even has a sort of garden hee hee! A very cool thing about this flat is that in the lounge one of the couches does fold out to a double bed, so that means if you’re coming through London just let us know and you can stay! Aaron’s been busy job hunting and temp working, and sorting out all the flat details like borrrring bills and stuff. :-) So that’s all kinda boring aye, just normal life stuff, but we’ve done some fun things too…

Portabello markets Jonny and Naomi stayed with us for a week, and they’re going to stay for another week very soon - it’s nice to see some familiar faces again! While they were here we visited the Portabello Markets in Notting Hill. The night before we did they insisted on watching the Notting Hill movie, but the movie and the reality are very far removed. I love it in the movie how he’s a struggling book shop owner, not making any money, and yet he lives in this house that would be well over £1m! :-D

Artwork on the Tate Modern We also visited the Tate Modern where I had another art geek out over modernism. It is totally amazing to see Mondrian’s works in real life. When you see them in a book they are so flat and blocky and simple which fits with what he was doing as the leading minimalism artist. But in real life you can see all of the layers, the individual brush strokes, the complexity and the humanity of it - which is beautiful to see.

Guys from No.10 Salvation Army We’ve been hanging out with Andy & Liz, Zander & Carla and Tim & Lucy from the Sallies a bit. Andy works with some of London’s homeless at No. 10 Regent Street. Living on the streets here certainly sounds a lot rougher than at home, but it is also amazing to meet some of the people that have gotten out of that. One of the ladies, Victoria, has written a book about her journey, and it’s currently being translated into English (she’s German).

Iron and Wine concert One weekend we went to an Iron & Wine concert. It was very cool, and it’s just amazing how many concerts and things to see and do there are here. We’ve been a bit limited in terms of £s so haven’t done a lot of that, but it will be good now that the flat setup bills are done and pay starts coming in. So it’s been a few movie nights and cups of tea with Andy & Liz, Zander & Carla and Tim & Lucy instead.

Oh and I’ve made a cat friend! His name is Marcel, he lives down the road but he goes around the neighbourhood to say hello to everyone. He likes sitting on our windowsill meowing until we give him pats :-)

Comments (2)

My photos

On Flickr