I was in London to go to a private view for my friend Mark Pembrey. He does fantastic things with typography and printmaking, and he had an exhibition at Woolfson and Tay, a bookshop in Bermondsey. For some reason, I was expecting it to be in an old quaint building on a market square, but Bermondsey Square turns out to be super modern. In fact they were filming a reality show there, where various famous people had to run a restaurant/hotel. There were quite a few bored looking locals standing around outside the restaurant window to see if they could get a peek of anyone famous. The bookshop’s great anyway (although wonderful bookshops are always painful when I’m broke) and I had a better time at the private view, chatting to Erika, Mark, Zoe and our teacher Graham than I ever would have had standing around outside a tv set.
In between, I met up with Vicky and two other girls from her illustration course, and we mooched around interesting shops and ate some (always fantastic) ice cream at Gelupo and oohed and ahhed over art books we can’t afford.
These paper cutouts are about a centimetre tall. You could buy them in a laser-cut postcard to punch out yourself, but each card was £15. I couldn’t find them on Magma Book‘s website though, so I have no idea who the designer is.
I also loved this badge and button map of the UK & Ireland by Vicky Cockell in the Festival Hall shop. There are lots of little in jokes in the choice of badges. Yorkshire is marked with a Kes badge, and Waterford with a “I cracked the Crystal Maze” one. I would love to own it, but it costs £250, and I have much more neccessary things to do with £250, so I’ll have to stick to admiring it.
Also, me & Vicky shared a starter at dinner that was amazing. It was slices of polenta, topped with creamy sauce and sliced mushrooms and herbs. I want to cook it for myself now.
Also, I was in the supermarket with Tukru the other day, and they had a vending machine that sold Hello Kitty charms of starsigns. I put some money in, and joked that if I got Capricorn, my starsign, then it was obviously a mystic sign that my luck was finally turning. I did get Capricorn on the first go!