I'm back!!!

Well we got back 2 days ago, but the first day back at work is always a crazy one with lots of email answering (of which I have managed about half so bear with me if you haven't had a reply yet!) and order posting.

The holiday in Lanzarote was wonderful and I managed to get lots of reading done. I don't get nearly enough time to read and it is one of my favorite things. The thing I love about holidays is that you can take time to sit back and read a book pretty much none stop from cover to cover and get really absorbed.

It wasn't all sitting about though, we did lots of walking and swimming and hired a car for a day to take in some sites and re-visited the old home of Spanish artist Ceasar Manrique. It's a place I have been twice before and I blogged about it a while back when I found some postcards I bought on a previous trip to the island. You can read that post HERE!


The house was almost empty of visitors this time around and I got to take loads of photos. Lanzarote is a volcanic island and much of it is volcanic rock so everywhere has this landscape of hard black rock that has solidified en route to the ocean. The rock has natural 'bubbles' that would have been full of gasses when the lava flowed from the volcanoes but are now like caves and dips in the landscape. Ceasar Manrique built his house using these bubbles and knocked passages between them, filled the bottoms with concrete and created a wonderful living space that fuses the natural world with more contemporary living.

It was wonderful to see it without there being hoards of other people around (probably not so wonderful for the Lanzarote tourist trade however...!) and really get a feel of it. I don't normally pay much attention to architecture but this place has something different which I think is the stark contrast of plant life and rock and the way that the house kind of sinks into it's natural environment. It is somewhere I don't think I will ever tire of looking at anyway!!

So on with the long post (!): After our sunshine hols we headed off to All Tomorrow's Parties at Camber Sands which was BRILLIANT as usual. I have been really looking forward to it as my favorite musician of the moment Bon Iver was playing which made me rather over excited for the weekend!!! We managed to stumble into the large stage when he was sound checking and got a taste of the show to come which was such a magical and full sound and definitely my favorite show of the weekend. I saw Justin Vernon in the merch room afterwards and hovered to say thanks for the wonderful show, but he was busy selling records and I got shy...

My other favorites were Shit and Shine - a crazy wall of sound with 5 drummers and spooky rabbit masks and also a band called Dirty Projectors who made music that seemed to come from every which way with beautiful harmonies and angular sounds.

Anyway it was a fun weekend as always, with the weather boiling and lots of laughing and after this long post I'm going to leave you with this:


I will be posting again later today about the exciting additions I have coming up for the store so stay tuned!!