Drink, Shop & Do is a charming café at the Kings Cross end of Pentonville Road. Everything in it is for sale; there's cake, cocktails and serviceable food (see this
review) and they run
craft events - knitting, book binding,
pearl-necklace making. Ha ha ha. Yes. Anyway: they also play fantastic music. Go - it's lovely.
Liberty's collaboration with Parisian shop of wonders
Merci, and very lovely it is too. In store and
online. Images nicked from
Wee Birdy because I didn't have the energy to email the press office - (sorry, R - hope you don't mind).
Via her own website (click the first link), which is a total visual feast.
More one-stop shopping, this time from Pedlars. There's masses more on their website - this is just stuff I especially like.
(Except someone's pointed out that the tip of the girl's hair looks like a BEAK, and that it therefore looks like she's got a possibly-not-very-alive swan draped around her shoulders, ew)
Now Panic And Freak Out
mug, £9.50.
Christmas-pudding flavoured
lip gloss, £3.50.
I love this.
Moon in My Room is a wall-mounted light that behaves like the moon - it passes through twelve different phases, or it can be set manually to behave like the real moon. £34.50.
I've just come back from three days in Marrakech. I went to a party for the re-opening of the very grand La Mamounia. It was completely incredible - said party was full of Hollywood A-list and José Carreras sang to us by the swimming pool. But mostly it was incredible because the newly revamped hotel is so *amazingly* luxe. (Tragically - wrongly, frankly - the private jet/giant suite thing is not representative of my life - I went as somebody's guest). There are better pictures than mine on the hotel's own site, but look, here was a bit of our bedroom:
and here's the indoor pool by the giant and astonishing spa. It has a bed in the middle of it.
Aaanyway: what I wanted to say was, if you're going to Marrakech - which you should, as often as possible, because it's one of the best places to visit relatively cheaply (via Ryanair) - then you need this book, which absolutely made my trip. It's all very well wandering round the souks getting lost and buying tea glasses
or lamps
or shoes
(and getting cross because the Berber souk sells tortoises all stacked up in tiny cages with no room to move, ditto geckos) but if you want to venture slightly further afield - there are fantastic shops in the New Town, for example, but you wouldn't stumble across them unless you knew exa
ctly where you were going - or want to know exactly what souk to head for for the one man who has exquisite bags rather than tourist specials and sells them from a hole in the wall, then you need this:
which I've mentioned before but which really is unbelievably well-judged and helpful.
Here's the Amazon link (easiest way of getting it - it's from a US publisher). Read
My Marrakech, too - Maryam, its author, was one of the researchers on said book, can take you shopping if you book her in advance and is doing up a guesthouse that looks like it'll be heaven to stay in. She also has
a shop which you can buy from online.
And that is all. I'm sitting at my desk watching the pouring rain and feeling as though the whole thing was a lovely hallucination.
If you liked the
Nina Dolcetti shoes I wrote about recently, and if you like fashion and cake and amazing houses, you might want to check out Tart, a series of shopping and lounging Saturdays at
David Carter's insanely gorgeous, seventeenth-century, insiders' secret
40 Winks (pictured; it's also a two-bedroom
hotel, described by German Vogue as "the most beautiful small hotel in the world").
The first one is this Saturday, the next on 12 December, and then on into January and February. Cakes from
Vintage Patisserie, hair and makeup from
Lipstick and Curls, clothes from
Vintage Secret, shoes by Nina Dolcetti, who'll also be taking commissions, plus milliners, jewellery, lingerie, massage and cocktails. 25 places available per Saturday, £60 a head, 2-6pm. Call 020 7790 0259 to book a place, or email
reservations@40winks.org. Women only.
(If the dates don't work, 40 Winks also hosts Bedtime Story nights - literary pyjama evenings; call or email for details. A little bird tells me that someone Very, Very Famous has agreed to do one next year; get on the mailing list).
I write books, and things for The Sunday Times. But I wanted a place to stick other stuff I like, and Posterous is unbelievably easy to set up. So here we are. Yet another work-avoidance strategy by me. You can follow me on Twitter, too - I'm @indiaknight. I know, right? The interwebs: where the fun never ends.
