She stood out from the crowd. I spotted her in the distance, on a road close to where I live, as she strolled along hand in hand with her man. As she drew closer I could better see what she was wearing: a simple well cut coat, tailored cropped trousers, classic shoes with small stacked heels and a scarf softly draped around her neck. She was simply dressed and yet she looked totally stylish and totally chic. As I passed her by I could hear her speaking in French to her companion.
♥ Field Trip
Filed under Musings
♥ Coffee in Dublin//Five: The Winding Stair
In an increasingly homogenous world what often best defines and sets a city apart (aside from architecture, ambiance, culture and language) is its collection of one-off shops which seek to echo some aspect of that city’s uniqueness. Dublin’s much loved bookshop The Winding Stair, which sells both new and second-hand books, is a gem of a shop that manages to evoke the ghosts of Dublin’s rich literary past and yet remain grounded in the 21st Century. The bookshop is on the ground floor of a building on Ormond Quay, in the centre of Dublin; the equally well-loved Winding Stair restaurant is on an upper floor.
♥ Brief Break
If you have landed on Just Add Attitude for the first time I hope that you will stay for a while and explore more. If you are a regular reader can I once again say THANK YOU for reading my miscellaneous musings and please keep clicking on.
I am taking a very brief break from blogging but will be back *on air* next Monday. Would that I were going away somewhere lovely; the mundane truth is that I have a slew of things to catch up with and I am in the throes of the annual horror that is preparing my tax return for filing. Mine is a very simple return but I still find it hair-tearing-out-stressful. Wish me luck.
I hope you have a great weekend and if you are celebrating Halloween on Monday have fun.
Talk to you next week.
Filed under Musings
♥ I Like Mondays
Mondays get bad press; Monday is after all the day that signals, for most people, a return to the quotidian grind. When it was first released I used to listen mindlessly to the Boomtown Rats number one hit, penned by Bob Geldof, ‘I don’t like Mondays’ and it was only the oft-repeated refrain ‘I don’t like Mondays’ that impinged on my consciousness, so I wrongly assumed the song was about Geldof”s dislike of the first day of the week.
Filed under Musings
♥ Baking: Biscuits
I don’t buy biscuits. I simply don’t because I might simply scoff the lot. Plus there is the vexatious question of dubious ingredients in some shop bought biscuits (think additives and trans fats). However I do have a sweet a tooth so I occasionally bake a batch of biscuits. These vanilla biscuits are one of the first things I learnt to bake many years ago; they are beyond easy to make and if you exclude the cooking time the making of them takes just five minutes. You should get about twenty from this recipe.
Filed under Recipes
♥ Favourite Shops//Liberty
Liberty is by far and away my favourite department store. Aeons ago when I lived in London, Liberty was a short bus ride from home and I took it so much for granted that I could pop in to browse when the mood took me. It was great deal larger back in the day when I lived close by but fortunately the essence of the store hasn’t suffered from its shrinking.
Filed under London, Shops/Shopping, Travel
♥ A Question
‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’ said Alice of Alice in Wonderland fame. It is indeed eerie how we change imperceptibly each day, moulded into someone different, as ever-changing experiences impinge upon our lives. Scary too is the rate at which our faces alter and although the features may be a constant, a glance in a mirror will show you a reflection that is a notably different from the one you saw a decade ago.
Filed under Musings
♥ The Waters and The Wild
As I was driving around Connemara, when I was there on a short break last month, I often stopped the car to get out and gaze in wonder at the surrounding scenery. As I looked at many magnificent combinations of mountains, lakes and the sea the refrain from William Butler Yeats’s poem The Stolen Child kept coming to mind. It is still, many weeks later, circling unbidden around my brain. The refrain is:
Filed under Musings
♥ Chanel: 31 Rue Cambon
I find it difficult to explain the why and the wherefore of my fascination with Coco Chanel and the brand she created. When I mull over this fascination I sometimes wonder if Chanel is either simply a monumental marketing triumph or more complicatedly a form of Jungian archetype and part of our collective unconscious. That is not to detract from the magic the brand creates or to underestimate how much and how enduringly Coco Chanel, in her time, changed the way women dress. Gone were the restrictive clothes of previous periods and she introduced many style classics: the little black dress, striped Breton tops, long ropes of pearls…
Filed under Chanel, Paris, Shops/Shopping, Travel
♥ London Lunch: Rose Bakery
Whenever I am in Paris, for more than a few days, I try at some point to head to the Rose Bakery for lunch. The Rose Bakery at 46, Rue des Martyrs is a bakery/café/shop which sells and serves uncomplicated, flavoursome and mainly organic food at affordable prices. A throng of hungry and subsequently happy diners have beaten a path to its doors since Anglo-French couple Rose and Jean-Charles Carrarini opened it in 2002. A London outpost opened in 2007.
Filed under London, Paris, Restaurants/Cafés
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Just Add Attitude 