The Milky Honey Way of SPUTNIK AND CERISE

Sound and Fury = Beautiful Fiction

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Wes Anderson in Asia #lunarnewyear2020 #straitsquaypenang #raisetheredlantern (at Straits Quay) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83oNk7HzXp/?igshid=1lreyl413tlx0

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Water lily garden from parent’s balcony #seritanjungpinang #penang #pavingstones #kyoto_style (at Tanjong Tokong, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83n6zWHCwT/?igshid=1kuc63aryxn38

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Reading The Academy Book Club’s February novel - memory, marriage, maritime love #joannanell #thelastvoyageofmrshenryparker #theacademyhotel #hivebooks #supportindependentbookstores (at The Academy (Hotel)) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83m4o8HffZ/?igshid=1rb32t3msvk2

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Leicas & cedar #leadenhall #moorgate #threadneedleshotel (at Threadneedles, Autograph Collection) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83l7PvH9PQ/?igshid=xk30zo50xw5p

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Accelerating into the Future #v&a #cars (at Victoria and Albert Museum) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83k_kKHazh/?igshid=vh3u1n83yuik

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Our Africa 2081 A.D. The Ikiré Jones man transported to Lagos of the future. #waleoyedije #ikirejones #newlagos #cars #V&A (at Victoria and Albert Museum) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83kWz2HJb3/?igshid=77ppj1h04ibl

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Sky light burns bright #homealone #bedroomwindow #flora #clouds (at Peckham) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83jrgTnZvh/?igshid=6597plh88mmt

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Souvenirs from Galle Fort & Palermo caught in notes of sunshine #galle #sicilia #palermo #wintersun (at Peckham) https://www.instagram.com/p/B83janInwK3/?igshid=bj91t5ie1rhe

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Chère Agnès, I first discovered you through your film Vagabond. It was 1985, I was a pale foreign student in an eternally sunny Southern California. Your film was so visceral it brought shade & shadow to my beach & surf student life in Irvine CA. And I fell in love with Sandrine Bonnaire - tall & handsome, with a face like Alicia Vikander and the womanly strength of Sigourney Weaver. After many boyfriends and broken hearts later at grad school Le Bonheur and La Pointe Courte showed me that love isn’t always just bittersweet. In Le Bonheur (1965) the happily married blonde wife Thérèse accepts her husband’s affair but then drowns herself the next day. Her husband grieves for his wife at first then two months later married his mistress and its happy family part two, Thérèse all but a semi-colon in the story. La Pointe Courte (1962) initially serves up the idyll that young married life in the Mediterranean sunshine of a fishing life can be. Until it all unravels amidst the quotidian hardships of the local fishermen and their families. Was the film a study of marital drama? A documentary about the fishing community? Or are both story threads inextricably linked? As a 19-year old cub reporter in Georgetown, Penang for The Star I sometimes played hooky from covering the courthouse (civil suits and property disputes can be soul destroying) by sitting on a bench in Gurney Drive. I imagined myself a tragic heroine awaiting rescue by a seafaring captain. In your film Cléo de 5 a 7, your self-centred protagonist Cléo is wrapped up in her own problems until she meets & talks to a soldier who’s just returned from the Algerian War. That must have put the daily lives of the young urban French into perspective for your viewers. Anyway, dear Agnès, I just want to say how inspirational you have been for me and I didn’t even know it until I saw illustrator Lucille Clerc‘s homage to you on March 30th, 2019. Je t’embrasse, June.

[sputnikandcerise]

Finding my Ikigai

Pleased to seat you’ says the dfs window lettering opposite me. I’m well-seated, thanks. In the practically empty Itsu across Tottenham Court Road.

Just finished Maigret at Christmas - Simenon was his cracking best but rather bombed in the last story. I have about four unread books on my night table to choose from. But now after visiting the graphic design Wellcome exhibition I’m bibliographically poised between The Shooting Party and Ikigai.

What’s that? It’s a little gem of a book picked up from Blackwells at the Wellcome. A book I hope will cure me from this cycle of life-long procrastination.

The end-note blurb says Ikigai is Japanese for a reason to jump out of bed every morning. And that everyone should have one. Reason, I mean. Well, at the moment I’ve lost my ikigai.

Maybe this book will help me get it back.

Off this seat now in Itsu and home to my sofa and my new book. Isabel Colegate’s Shooting Party will be perfect for the train journey home.

[sputnikandcerise]

Denmark Hill - Peckham Rye

I love looking into the gardens of these five or seven homes. Season after season, year after year these past five years - a budding shrub; oh is that a hawthorn; breakfast remains seen through a basement sky roof...

After leaving Denmark Hill station, wait a minute then turn left to see them.

Grey skies and a languid stretch of three days still lies ahead before i re-enter the eye of the storm.

[sputnikandcerise]

Happy New Year 2017. سنة جديدة سعيدة Buon anno. Bonne année!🎈 #hydeparklondon #londonisopen #winterwonderland (at Hyde Park)

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Light me up #carcassonne #citadel #languedoc #cite #cathar #violetleduc (at Cité de Carcassonne)

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Bear with me please #fortnumandmason #christmastime #christmaswindow (at Fortnum & Mason)

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This Prada window on New Bond Street one Christmas reminded me that on grey London days, nothing is more perkful than a palette of burnt reds, magenta, warm orange and copper pink. I found my colours at, of all places, the beauty counter of & Other Stories. Their Tattersall Fusion Complete Face Palette is my go-to, take-it-everywhere, must-have-in-handbag kit. Lightly dab some coppery pink eyecream over the eyelid, then dip a good eye brush to line lids in the glorious deep inky blue shadow. I recently discovered their lipstick in Luxor Red (reminds me of my holidays on the Nile in Egypt!), a touch of that on both lips and cheekbones, then finish lips off with the shimmery gold from the palette. If like me you never leave home without the YSL Touche Eclat, then you're singing my melody girlfriend! #mod #swinging60s #newbondstreet

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When we were kids - plantation life. Missing my bros Jeff in Kuala Lumpur and Mike in Oregon. #brothers #family #plantationlife #malaysia (at Nunhead)

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Yuletide greetings in the morning - love you mum, dad! And thinking of you both, ah mah and ah yeh who art in Buddhist heaven (at Nunhead)