Picture of the day: Santa Monica Farmers Market haul

Easter Saturday: Venice & Santa Monica

We stayed in Venice for just two nights at JK’s ex-pat brother’s US home, as a prelude to three days of proper holiday at Ojai Valley Inn & Spa in the hills above Santa Barbara. The pale blue painted clapboard house is huge, everything I had thought a beach house should be, with glass walls to the yard, baths so deep I could sit practically submerged, and a kitchen that paid homage to the gods of cooking: Sub Zero, Viking et al.

We decided Saturday was errand & pottering day. We wandered through Santa Monica, buying vegetables & fruit at the Farmers Market, before lunch at Urth Caffé on Main Street. Sad to report, it was execrable. A revolting omelette, composed of a rectangular raft of pallid, rubbery egg with a few (good) mushrooms entombed therein, and some greasy cheese smeared across the top was redeemed only by some delicious toasted sourdough. At the very least, I had hoped for some good people watching, but the clientele was, in the main, badly dressed twenty somethings, stroppy teenagers and a few skinny twiglets pushing food around their plates.

We hit upon Urth Caffé mainly because it was a block away from Yoga Works where JK was booked for an afternoon session of bend & contort. I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to do less than expose my malcordinated, morgue-pale, English body to a room of bendy Angelenos, so headed down the street to get my nails painted a lurid shade of candy pink in homage to the trashier side of LA.

Parking myself at a café with my laptop to await JK’s release from yoga hell, I was somewhat reassured by the gentle progression of Lycra-clad, wobble-bodied yoga aficionados heading into the studio for the next class. Another of my preconceptions shattered: apparently LA’s entire population isn’t composed of malnourished stick insects after all.

Good Friday: San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles

I was a grumpy cow by the time I picked JK up from Long Beach airport on Friday evening. The day had started well with breakfast from here,


followed by a gentle drive through magnificent countryside from San Luis Obispo to La Purisima Mission just outside Lompoc where I investigated the restored Mission with its eerie, deserted church in a suitable frame of mind for Good Friday.



After stopping for three pints of picked-that-morning strawberries from a local farmer, I headed down to Santa Barbara on a fantastic drive through farmland and over the mountains, but the 101 was backed up for miles through SB and, after we cleared the traffic, my sat nav point blank refused to navigate me down the coast road, sneakily taking me back on the sodding freeway even though I had specifically requested no motorway routes.

Concrete highways make me fractious. And traffic makes me antsy so, even though night was falling, I took myself back to the PCH, with a white knuckle drive down the winding coast road through Malibu and into Santa Monica. That when I really started to thank my lucky stars that I am a confident driver as the roads widened into six lanes, seemingly filled with Kamikaze drivers with no road sense and zero driving politesse.

My sat nav route involved multiple lane changes through a web of linked roads and, at one point, took me from a far left lane across five lanes of speeding traffic to a right hand exit in the dark with just 800 yards notice. I was tempted to shut my eyes, flick the indicators and just go for it. Common sense won out, and I just trusted that no one would hit me as I shot across the lanes of traffic and onto the exit ramp at speed.

More shoes....

These are the other shoes I bought: petrol blue fringed suede $24.99 at, yup, Payless. I have to say that these don't look like disposable fashion to me. Kudos to Payless.

Picture of the day: Big Sur. 0630hrs

Sea meets sky.

Wednesday: Driving Big Sur & A Secret Mission

I’d love to be able to tell you all what I got up to in Big Sur on Wednesday night, but then I’d have to kill you. And, if I didn’t then my editor might. So, all I’m saying is that I spent the night in the most extraordinary place in the most extraordinary way. And when the piece is published maybe I’ll direct you to it. Maybe.

I left San Francisco a little later than I had planned in the afternoon, after yet another morning working in Sausalito library, detouring via L’s office and the post office to pick up my parcel, before burning down the 101 to Salinas, where I cut back through to the PCH. I was concerned that I otherwise I'd hit the coast road at the top of Big Sur too late at twilight, and I didn’t fancy those twisting roads and sheer cliff drops to the sea in the dark.

These three shots were taken along the PCH from at various points from Salinas to the lower end of Big Sur.

Picture of the day: A real, live (out of focus) Easter Bunny

I was complaining that we had had no Easter action today, and then on the way to the hotel spa I caught a movement in the rosemary bushes that line the pathways. Out hopped this Easter Sunday bunny. Enormously pleasing,

Happy Easter internets.

My new espadrilles

Thank you internets: I took your advice and purchased these espadrilles for the grand total of $20.99 from Payless Shoe Source. And, extremely unusually, I am actually modelling them for you, having bullied poor long suffering JK to take a photograph of my legs.

It did originally show my rather fab nautical navy short shorts, but as I have (a) streaky fake tan* and (b) a scabby knee where I fell over (yet again), I thought I'd spare you the full horror.

*Yup, this morgue-white colour is the colour of my legs AFTER an application of fake tan. There is a reason why people can tell I am English just from looking at me.

Picture of the day: Naciemiento-Fergusson Road, Central Coast, California

I drove Naciemento-Fergusson Road, the pass over the top of the Santa Lucia Mountains, on Thursday. This is the view from the cloudline on the narrow, un guard-railed, heart-attack inducing road.

When the The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men Gang aft agley *

I try so hard to be efficient and organised, yet it doesn’t always quite work out that way. Take my cunning plan to mail my luggage ahead of me in two parcels to California. This would have been a brilliant idea - if it had worked. Sure one parcel arrived, but the other has gone astray, with the tracking number telling me only that the parcel was accepted for mailing in New York ten working days ago.

This evening it was updated to say my parcel was misrouted. GAH. To put it into perspective, my sister mailed me a package from London on the same day which took just four days to arrive in San Francisco. Shame on the United States Post Office for being so outrageously USELESS.

I was in too much of a packing whirl to write a list of what I packed in each parcel, so I was pleasantly surprised when I picked up the smaller one in SF to discover my fake tan, suntan lotion, hiking sweater, all my party dresses and a couple of good books.

Unfortunately, it would appear that I had mailed everything I needed for later on in my trip in LA in the big gone astray parcel: that’s most of my bras, all my smart summer shoes (including my YSL heels), another pair of jeans, a huge bottle of Frederic Fekkai conditioner, my stone leather Janet Collin handbag, evening bags, my pearl necklaces & the rest of my books. It’s been like playing bloody Kim's Game trying to remember what’s in there.

I’m presuming that the parcel will arrive in San Francisco eventually and, as I intend to drive back up there in a few weeks, it is not the end of the world to be without it all right now.

However, I do have a couple of very smart dinners & lunches in LA the week after next and I have just one pair of shoes that aren’t these, moccasins, flip flops or hiking boots. I am VERY loathe to spend real money on new shoes when I already have more lovely shoes than a girl has any right to own, and am on a shopping moratorium, so I had a quick squint at the Payless website and came up with these two super-cheap options.

To wear with this dress, I thought these would work ($12.99!!!!):



And to wear with my navy blue cotton short shorts, these espadrilles ($22.99):

What do you think internets?

* The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

From: Robert Burns, To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough

Picture of the day: Hearst Castle fountain

Imagekind: Buying art on-line

It’s inevitable that spending time in San Francisco means that I will be talking tech stuff with my friends here. It’s a world over which I barely skate back in New York, so it’s fascinating to be directed to sites and technologies by people who really know what they are talking about.

Amongst the several websites that have been recommended to me I rather like Imagekind. Although I must admit to a vested interest as I have an artist friend, Tim Aldridge, lurking on there.

It works as a portal for any artist to sell prints of their work in any medium, be it photography, fine art or well, anything. They claim to be the world's fastest-growing art site, with over 750,000 high-quality images for sale, from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists. Imagekind make their money from myriad framing, glazing and paper options. Prints can be ordered in many sizes, and the site is emminently searchable by anything from artist name to the colour of the image.

But the reason I like it is from the artist's point of view, rather than as a consumer. In this climate it can be difficult to sell expensive canvases, so using Imagekind can make an artist's work available to the widest possible online audience, at a more affordable pricing structure.

Image: Butterfly by Tim Aldridge.
Print available to buy here

Tuesday: Time out for rain in Sausalito

Just in case you thought California was all sun, sun, sun...I awoke on Tuesday morning to pouring rain and swirling fog over the hills of the Marin Headlands.


I didn't sleep well - it may have had something to do with a raccoon climbing in through the open first floor window of my bedroom - and the rain wasn't conducive to sightseeing, so I spent another day in Sausalito library working. I've learnt not to expect either cellphone coverage or internet access in this part of California (at least not in the remote places I choose to stay), so I am taking the opportunity to get some serious work done before I head back down the PCH to Big Sur.

A Tiger In The Kitchen: My Year of Eating Ferociously

From the moment I arrived in South East Asia aged nineteen, I didn't stop eating and could happily spend the entire day eating from all the different food carts in the Singapore hawker centres. Then I needed to learn how to cook laksa and roti canai and all the rest, so headed to the kitchens of the childrens homes in Singapore and in Malaysia where I volunteered. Leaning over the shoulders of the long-suffering chefs, I stuck spoons in soups and asked hundreds of questions

Cheryl Tan, an old fashion writer colleague of mine in New York, grew up in Singapore, & is similarly obsessive about the food of her youth. And, also like me, spends her time in New York eating her way around the city's restaurants and cooking up a storm at home.

She's just started up her first blog A Tiger In The Kitchen: My Year of Eating Ferociously where she intends to document her food adventures. She writes beautifully, so do go take a look.

Monday: Marin Headlands

Monday night: I’m sitting in the vast, high ceilinged living room of the Hi-Marin Headlands hostel, situated in a National Park, just a few miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a white clapboard building, whose provenance as historic accommodation for Fort Barry officers is apparent in the regular shaped rooms and long, low exterior.

The sky is fading to a translucent petrol blue outside and, through the long black cross-barred windows, framed by undrawn floor length, white linen curtains, I can see the silhouettes of the towering trees outside. There are lambent yellow glass pendant shades hanging on iron chains from the ceiling, and pleated calico shaded standard lamps are pooling light in the corners of the room.

I am curled up in a corner on a wide, squashy olive slub cotton covered sofa, The Cure’s Disintegration album is playing through my laptop headphones, and there is a paper bag of chocolate chip cookies just within reach.

I could sit writing here for hours.

Sunday: Marin Headlands

Sunday. After an indulgent brunch with lovely L, I spent the afternoon in Mill Valley, Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, catching up on ten years’ worth of gossip with D, an old friend from England, who now lives here with his beautiful wife and S & J, their two fabulously entertaining children.

I was supposed to be staying at the Ritz-Carlton San Francisco Sunday & Monday but, with my head in pieces from jetlag, a blown up car engine and the pressure of navigating myself through many hundreds of miles of driving, I managed to give them the dates of next weekend when I am in Venice Beach with JK, not this one.

Not my cleverest move ever. I was in two minds about what to do instead. It was 7pm, & my choices were narrowed: everywhere I tried was full & I didn’t want to harass any of my friends in the City late on a Sunday night.

So I decided to give the glitzy hotels a miss this time, & headed back to the Golden Gate Bridge, over which I had driven only half an hour before, and booked myself into the HI Marin Headlands hostel. It’s reached through a long, narrow single-lane tunnel and then a twisting drive through bright green hills on the very edge of San Francisco Bay. It’s only a few miles, and twenty minutes from San Francisco itself, yet surrounded by rolling hills, upon which deer graze. It’s hard to compute that we could be so close to an enormous city.


I did intend to move location on Monday, but there’s no internet access or Blackberry coverage at the hostel which meant that I spent the entire day writing and playing catch up on email at Sausalito library just down the road. It was so late by the time I finished that it made sense just to check back in again, before heading back over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco on Tuesday.

Saturday. San Francisco.

I’m staying with my darling A’s older sister lovely L whilst I am in San Francisco. She & B, (away with their daughter for Spring Break), live in beautiful Noe Valley on the south side of the city, full of Victorian clapboard and pastel painted houses. It’s lovely to get a chance to spend time with L, whom I have always liked very much on her visits to England, and I’m thrilled to get a chance to hang with her properly.

We can barely speak on Saturday morning after the shenanigans of the night before, so L’s friend T drives us to Sunset for Vietnamese as stage one of the old people’s recovery programme. This is a good start but I am still feeling distinctly ropey. L opts for a chiropractic session, and T drops me off in Golden Gate Park at Herzog & De Meuron’s glorious De Young museum so that I can catch the final weekend of the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective.

I can’t say I particularly feel like battling through Saturday afternoon crowds of gawping museum goers, but I feel that my fashion editor credibility would be strongly impaired if I failed to see the exhibit while I had the opportunity. I’m glad I made the effort: the clothes are extraordinary and I suddenly realise from whence the influence came for my mother’s staggeringly chic Seventies and Eighties wardrobe.

It's just a shame that the show is badly muddled and there is barely any signage or captioning#. I presume that many of the embroideries are by Lesage, but there's no information beyond the barest details. They might just as well have plonked the mannequins in any old order and dumped the captioning for all the sense the show made as a uniform whole.

I’m very happy to leave fashion behind and go back to Noe Valley for a restorative nap. Later, along with D, our (female) partner in crime from the night before, we do manage to drag our sorry asses into town for the Battle of the Bay stand-up quarter-finals to see their friend Sheila wipe the floor with her competitors. We eschew the after-party and crawl home (not before I manage to mislay the valet parking ticket).

Liberty London Girl news: Inclusion in The Online Fashion 100

Well, this is exciting! I've just received an email to say that Liberty London Girl has been included as one of just four independent bloggers in The Online Fashion 100, an ebook list of the 100 most inspirational, interesting and influential people behind the UK's online fashion industry, which is featured today in The Independent (UK).

Vogue.co.uk describes it thus: "The Online Fashion 100 features entrepreneurs, bloggers, marketers, photographers, ecommerce managers and the most powerful online editors working today"

I do feel a bit of a fraud being on a UK fashion list as, although I am a gen-u-wine fashion editor & writer, since LLG started up in 2007, it has always strayed from the fashion path, being a repository for my thoughts on everything from food to hotel reviews as well as giving a window into the world of the fashion editor. And, of course, although I am English through & through, I do live in America.

Still I'd like to give a big thank you to Leon Bailey Green who complied the list, and congratulations to the three other independent bloggers who have been included. It can be hard getting your voice heard as an independent blogger, and I am mighty proud to be keeping company with these superstars:
My beloved Queen Michelle of Kingdom of Style
Rebekah Roy of Stylist Stuff
The UK's biggest supporter of emerging designers: Susannah Lau of Style Bubble

San Francisco. Friday: Recapturing My Lost Youth

I am a few days behind with my California adventures: most of the places in which I stay do not have Wi-Fi or Blackberry coverage, which means I am playing catch up with writing & posting most days.

So, San Francisco. Friday.
I first visited the city when I was nineteen with my best friend Caz. We landed from Hawaii on the last leg of our round the world GAP year trip, and spent several days here before embarking on a Greyhound odyssey which would see us finally end up in New York before flying home. I remember a little of that stay: vintage shopping in the Haight & buying a Technicolor striped top that I wore with black cycling shorts and which made me look like an angry wasp on acid (but which I thought the absolute dernier cri), the obligatory walk over the Golden Gate Bridge and a particularly grotty hostel somewhere Downtown.

I came back again a few years later in 1994 for an extended summer under the auspices of BUNAC, who arranged a J-1 working visa for me. I got my first bylines writing about the San Francisco music scene on a long since defunct arts newspaper, & maitre d’ed extremely badly at Ariana, a very upmarket fine dining restaurant which promptly folded owing me all my wages. It probably didn’t help that the barman slipped me a shot of tequila every time I walked back from seating guests. I loved it here so much that I considered sacking my final year of university and staying here permanently.

My father talked sense into me, and I returned to England. Fifteen years later, I’m back in San Francisco again and, within eight hours of my arrival on Friday afternoon, I find myself rapidly cycling back through the years at a warehouse party on Potrero Hill. From the sheets of cardboard gaffer taped over the concrete floors and the slightly ropey visuals projected on the walls, to the thump thump of the techno and the slightly glazed look on the shuffling dancers’ faces I might as well be in 1994 again.

Four cocktails to the good, I bounce straight onto the dance floor with unabashed glee. And then burst into tears. It just all feels so heartbreakingly, unbearably nostalgic. Every time I look around the room I expect to see the faces of all my friends, not just those I hung out with here in San Francisco fifteen years ago, but all my beloved English friends, with whom I have danced at parties, raves, weddings and festivals, in clubs, squats, fields, warehouses, forest clearings, beaches and hangars from Newcastle and Leeds to Berlin and Barcelona. I realise those days are long, long behind me. Fortunately my swishing hair hides my face as I continue to dance and to cry.

Then I find myself kissing D$, one of L’s rather good-looking male friends and am cheered up immensely.

I do not feel very well the next day. At all. It becomes abundantly clear that the main difference between me in 1994 and me in 2009 is a lack of party stamina. My legs ache from toe to thigh from dancing in platform wedges on a concrete floor, rather in than the Ellesse trainers which were standard party gear back in the day, and just four or five drinks is enough to have induced a whole tribe of pixie blacksmiths to have taken up residence in my cranium.

Moxsie: a new on-line home for independent designers

I’m not the slightest bit surprised that the only area of retail growth right now is on the internet. I buy everything I can on-line. In fact, on-line shopping could have been designed specifically with the procrastinating freelancer in mind, the one who prefers to spend her hours playing on the internets, rather than constructively pitching stories and doing paperwork.

I did most of my shopping for this trip on-line. From the sleeping bag I needed for a story in Big Sur and my California guidebooks, through to the pepper spray I promised my mother I would buy and my new summer shoes, it all arrived blissfully at my front door, cheaper than in any real world shops and requiring no outdoors action on my part.

My latest discovery from my hours of, um, research, is on-line fashion retailer Moxsie. I’m fed up with logos and brand names; I want to support younger, independent designers, who think carefully about how their clothes are made and whose quality of make matches up to the quality of their designs. Which is why Moxsie appeals: they only sell product from independent clothing, jewelry, accessory and shoe designers.

I’m rather liking these elegant and simple sunglasses by Cassius eyewear, from New Zealand based designer Jason Ng. He launched the label in August 2008, naming each limited edition (300 in each style) design after an architect. They’ve got proper scratch-resistant, UV400 lenses and make a pleasant change from over-priced, logo’d up sunnies. These are the Pawson frames:


These are the Corbu:

I particularly like that, in addition to supporting independent designers, Moxsie donate a portion of its proceeds from each purchase to a charity, chosen by the shopper from a list including The Hunger Project, Dress for Success & Save The Children.