Penrith to London




I've been listening to The Walkmen a lot in the last week, since introducing a friend to their music, and today's 3 hour train journey home felt like a perfect opportunity to disappear again into their very particular world — where it's always 5am, and your senses are filtered through the dawn's alcoholic fug, as you stagger on to someone's house after a raucous night of shouting and dancing, with ears ringing and your still excited mind unwilling to give in to your body's pleas for rest.

Then eventually back at the after party, whiskey clutched in hand, huddled in a corner with an old friend — someone who knows you better than you even know yourself — you have a passionate but slurred conversation about your lives lived and loves lost, the party doggedly carrying on all around you, lurching in and out of rhythm and your consciousness. That's what their songs mean to me, always world-weary but filled with a huge amount of love and generosity for the people who make us what we are, and the experiences we share with them.

I've always loved them, but the song embedded below, New Country, from their latest album You & Me feels particularly poignant to me at the moment, its initial message of optimistic exhilaration for the weightless possibilities of the new, cut through with both trepidation and a sadness for things past.


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Xx, Cumbria




I've just been on a trip to the Lake District to see my friend Dan. The weather was pretty shit on Sunday so we decided to visit the Cumbrian coast, him for the first time in years, me ever. There's not much of interest there, excepting of course Sellafield nuclear power station, but what we did chance upon was a place called — according to my iPhone, that is — Xx. Here's a screenshot of Google maps showing us in Xx, and a photograph of the locale from across the bay.

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Petit déjeuner

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Edward Green

Some fly shoes from the 1980s. The tan/green/yellow oxford brogues are doing it for me. Actually, on second thought, the tan/yellow/brown monks are the ones.

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Via Sandwell District's ever beautiful and mysterious blog

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I never really got Helmut Newton's work when I was younger, I think in my twenties I just didn't have the experience to understand all the sex as power stuff and the allure of danger. But now the older I get, the more it makes sense to me — I think I'm getting dirtier with the years.

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Watch it all the way through.

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Nautical chic for spring

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A beautiful drawing, such personality conveyed with a real graphic economy of line and proportion. Scanned from one of my favourite books, the Longman English Larousse, 1968. A combined dictionary and encyclopedia, it was my pre-internet reference for any information or fact needed, I can't ever remember not having this book within arms length from the sofa or bed at any point of my life. There's some really good imagery, it seems like the editors randomly chose which entries were deemed necessary to be illustrated. The lovely maps of oceans that I've been using with my mixes are from the same source, but strangely, there isn't one of the pacific...

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