Month: May 2026

323: the 80s called and they want their stilettos back

This weekend I am housesitting for a friend slightly deeper into the forest than where I live, and right now I am being extremely indulgent and binging the new series of Rivals. It’s glamorous, glitzy, glossy and all those words that used to be applied to the shiny side of the 80s. David Tennant chews the scenery as a baddie (named Baddingham), Alex Hassell poshes it up as Rupert Campbell-Black, Aidan Turner and Danny Dyer sport ludicrous moustaches. The sheer quantity of hairspray in use would have dissolved the ozone layer if it still contained CFCs. There are horses, dogs, champagne, canapés, polo, pools, lots of sex and scandal. Equal opportunity nudity is the order of the day, which is unusual. Quite frankly, I am loving it and it’s perfect escapism at a challenging time.

Katharine Parkinson as Lizzie and Danny Dyer’s moustache, Rivals. Belongs to Disney +, not me.

I’ve been a long time fan of the books it was based on too – or at least the first six or seven. When the late Jilly Cooper moved her focus away from the parents to the new generation they went rapidly and disastrously downhill. Dame Jilly, for all her many talents, was not down with the youth or indeed the common people. The written ‘cock-er-nee’ accents – which the youth even sported in deepest ‘Rutshire’ for some reason – are atrocious. Teenagers are stroppy and witty, rather than stroppy and monosyllabic.

The book series is campy, over the top and entertaining and the TV series is shaping up to be equally so. Danny Dyer is sweet and charming as Freddie Jones, and Katharine Parkinson makes a lovely Lizzie. I was given a subscription to the Times online recently and it’s my new favourite thing – the magazine has been stuffed with articles about the show’s costume and stars.

I’m also loving the Times puzzles, especially Quizle and Picle and access to thousands of crosswords. I can’t do the cryptic ones though… Picle is challenging my non-existent geographical knowledge. Plumping for Southampton instead of Cape Town and Mongolia instead of Romania were my low points, but I recognised the Pierhead Building in Cardiff straight off. The daily quiz has way too many sports questions, however. An unexpectedly excellent present.

Other things making me happy this week

  • Getting the Creative Studio into order with the help of a Dymo labeller and a LOT of Ikea boxes, and showing it off to some of our funders at an event on Wednesday.
  • The play benches being installed ready for the opening on 5 June
  • Putting my adult programme on sale – starting with an urban sketching session with the brilliant Wilson Yau on June 20th
  • An indulgent pedicure on Saturday, with sparkly red toes to show for it
  • Not the heatwave. The sun is nice but it’s wayyyy too hot.
  • The long weekend

That’s it for me for the week – Rupert C-B is about to get in trouble…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon – Mizuki Tsujimura

Water Moon – Samantha Sotto Yambao

322: four seasons in one day

I don’t know who’s in charge of weather at the moment but I’d like a word, please.

As an eternal weather optimist – despite, or perhaps because of my Dad at the start of every August holiday day in a caravan in Ceredigion informing us that ‘this isn’t rain, it’s sea spray!’ – I am frequently and catastrophically underprepared for May. Especially this week, when each day has opened onto glorious – if chilly – sunshine and by lunchtime has descended into chaos via hail, rain and high winds. There was a hard frost on Tuesday morning. My colleague was wrapped up in the only winter woolly she hadn’t put into storage in a fit of optimism the previous week. I was back in double layered tops to work on site and my poor Community Gardener was alternately drowning or freezing.

Luckily I haven’t had to go outside much, but on Wednesday afternoon I did have to leave the building and head to the Wellcome Collection with some of our new welcome team on a field trip. It hailed and rained on us on the way there and then we left in glorious sunshine.

The idea was that they’d do some research into how other venues welcomed visitors, whether they were accessible, how easy it was to find their way around and so on. We looked at the Coming of Age exhibition, which included a video clip of Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager and a copy of Game of Life. I’m always slightly disturbed to see parts of my life on display in a gallery…

It was nice to spend some time getting to know the new welcomers before we open – once we open it’ll be harder to have these moments as we’ll all be a lot busier! It feels pretty hectic at the moment, watching all the objects and art go into the galleries and trying to unpack the Creative Studio. Still – we open on 5 June (tickets are available) and my adult workshop programme goes live on Monday including opportunities to try Urban Sketching, comic creation, urban garden design, Botanical Illustration and Printing Your Festive Cards. Test events are underway and feedback is great – it’s all happening!

This, of course, also means press activity and we welcomed a team from the One Show on Monday. I was in jeans and a t-shirt with mad hair and not enough make up, having been under the impression that I wouldn’t be involved…and then people pointed cameras at me while I was introducing the space and an activity. Oh dear. We had a class of Year 2s from a local primary school in and they were so excited by the Quentin Blake Gallery – seeing actual small people in a space was pretty exciting for us too, though, and I can’t wait for them to see the rest of the building.

Things making me happy this week

  • Dinner at the Corsinio Lounge in Caerphilly with Jen on Friday – a good catch-up on politics, people and other important stuff.
  • A banana Biscoff chorus bun. Bliss.
  • Toby Carvery, people watching over a roast
  • Apple TV’s update of Time Bandits with Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. Great fun.
  • The Times’ Picle and Quizle puzzles
  • An evening at the Dead Canary for cousin Sal’s diamond birthday on Saturday – seeing cousins and Jen again
  • A walk with Thing 2 on Sunday down the rhododendron path to Epping, where we ran into Sue and had a cup of tea and a chat

That’s it from me this week – hopefully next week will include an evening at the Postal Museum (tube strikes permitting) seeing the Jolly Postman exhibition with Rhiannon.

Same time next Sunday….

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

We’ll Prescribe You a Cat – Syou Ishida

Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

The Chibineko Kitchen – Yuta Takahashi

House of Flame and Shadow/A Court of Thorns and Roses – Sarah J. Maas (Audible)

321: what were you thinking, people?

This blog post comes to you from sunny Essex, where the locals have seriously let me down in the last few days. Apparently the 43.9% of people who turned out to vote on Thursday (the largest turnout in decades in the county) were all the people who have confused the local with the national and who think voting Reform is a good idea.

I should have known it wasn’t going so well when there was a queue at the polling station for only the second time in the 13 years I have lived in the village. The last time was Brexit, and look how well that turned out. I wonder whether they were the same people who turned out to vote again? And – just a thought – if they’d bothered to vote and take any interest in all the other elections, they’d have more of a clue about what might actually be about to happen in the county? I think I can guarantee that the hotels won’t be closed on demand and that the potholes won’t be fixed any quicker than they are being already.

The elections did give me the chance to go and do something new with Thing 1, who has never voted before – she was interested in the results on Friday, and followed them through the day. I think she’s now considering leaving the country.

I voted tactically in the county council elections, for a man who has done more to divide the local area, waste taxpayers’ money and generally make a show of the local council. I feel slightly grubby for doing so, but needs must when the devil drives as someone much wiser than me once said. He is, at least, better than the alternative but it was a real rock and a hard place choice.

Plotting to move back to Wales and the sanity of proportional representation is underway.

A night at the Empire

On Wednesday night Amanda and I went to Hackney Empire – another gorgeous restoration by Tim Ronalds Architects, who are our architects too. We had tickets to see the historian David Olusoga and his show ‘A Gun Through Time’ – a strange premise but a fascinating talk. He spoke about the Brown Bess, the Short Magazine Lee Enfield, the Thompson machine gun and the Maxim machine gun. He discussed the developments that made them possible, the impact that things like the ‘Tommy Gun’ had on criminal activity in the US during prohibition and the rehabilitation of the weapon for use in the Second World War, and the long, long history of the Maxim which is still in use in Ukraine today shooting down drones, and being used in the trenches.

We had dinner at Bone Daddies in Old Street beforehand – tonkotsu and sour cherry soda – and were impressed by the jar of hair ties on each table which seems like an excellent idea.

Other things making me happy this week

  • Lunch and a good catch up with Shivs at the Garnon Bushes on Saturday afternoon – so lovely to sit sand chat in the sunshine
  • My new team member starting on Tuesday, the garden being planted and my fabulous producers sorting all the materials in the learning centre on Friday while I wrestled with a training module for our volunteers on our safeguarding policy
  • The return of the sunshine today, especially as the tumble drier remains out of action
  • Salad. I like salad in the summer.
  • My left hand being stable enough to pick up my crochet hook and yarn again
  • The lovely people who reached out to me across WhatsApp, various relatives, FB and the actual telephone after last week’s post. I am fine, thank you, and I love you all for caring.

That’s it from me for the week then – next week I’ll be back in Wales for a birthday and another catch-up with a friend, and I’m very much looking forward to both.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Big Empty – Robert Crais

Diary of a Rock’n’Roll Star – Ian Hunter

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe – Seishi Yokomizo

Mornings With My Cat Mii – Mayumi Inaba

320: navigating murky waters

This weekend I’m coming to you live from halfway up a mountain in Wales again, which is rapidly becoming one of my favourite places to be. I’ve been here since Thursday and am making the most of a long weekend before the madness of pre-opening hits. We announced last week that we’ll be throwing the doors to the Centre open on 5 June – tickets are on sale, celebration planning is underway and it’s all happening…

A bit of mental getting myself together is sorely needed, I feel. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that there’s a lot going on in my life these days. The biggest change is that I split up with my partner in March and we are navigating our way through what sharing a small house, five children, five grandchildren and three temperamental felines looks like now. I hate to use the term ‘conscious uncoupling’ à la Gwyneth Paltrow but essentially that’s what’s happening at the moment, after 22 years together.

People keep telling me how brave I am to have made the choice, and one or two have offered to help me negotiate the weird world of dating apps. I have thanked them and declined – I spend enough time hearing about the terrible people on these apps that the mere thought fills me with horror. Of course there are some nice people (like my friends) and successful relationships that have come from these apps, but they are few and far between.

Navigating both situations simultaneously has been tricky at times, to say the very least, and I’ve been extremely grateful for the support of friends and family – offering beds and emotional and other support, while recognising that there’s no easy solution. This is just as well as the doctor already has me on the maximum dose of my antidepressants….

The hardest part of all these things is telling the children: while they’re all in their mid to late teens it’s still inevitably going to be a big change in their lives. Thing 2, being an MI5-level investigator, interrogated her father within minutes of the event and wormed the situation out of him despite an agreement to tell them together at the right time. This put her in the position of knowing something her brother and sisters didn’t, which wasn’t fair on her, and meant that we had to tell the others sooner than I would have liked.

Thing 2 takes a while to process things and now is beginning to ask questions like ‘are we going to have two Christmases?’. That’s nine months away so I don’t want to make any assurances, of course, but what do you say? At 17 she’s incredibly perceptive and sensible which in some ways is great but in others…not so much…

Thing 3, being a 15 year old boy, took it very much in stride – at least I thought he had, until one evening when he said ‘why are you sleeping in the living room, mum?’. When I reminded him that his father and I had split up, his response was ‘oh yeaaahhhh!’. Perhaps he just wasn’t listening to his aged parent as usual.

Thing 1 was mostly angry and upset, and didn’t speak to me for several days other than in monosyllables. I told her the news when she was with one of her older sisters so she’d have support. Their father spoke to the oldest one over the phone. Both the Timeshare Twenty-somethings have been incredibly supportive – I still get to be their step mum and Granny K which is lovely. I think they’re just used to me now.

As the unmarried, unstable daughter my next biggest worry was telling my parents that my relationship has failed at the age of 52. It’s daft the things that you think about at these moments – I know that all they ever want is for their children to be happy and I very clearly wasn’t. London sister explained the situation to them and I phoned them the next day. They were, of course, supportive and wonderful as always and at my age the ‘balance and options’ conversation with Dad is taken as read.

I don’t know what the next steps are, but I do know they need to be carefully navigated. A previous boss, now a valued friend and mentor, talks about moments like this as being swimming in murky water: being able to see what’s straight ahead but not knowing what’s under or around you. This seems apt.

Things making me happy this week

  • Dinner at Caravan in Granary Square with Amanda on Monday, and this week we have an evening with David Olusoga to look forward to.
  • Moving all the learning materials and kit across to the new Creative Studio and buying storage crates to put things in. For someone whose alignment in D’n’D is always chaotic (and mostly good) my love for a good storage solution can’t be underestimated.
  • More sunshine than rain in the forecasts.

And now I am off to appreciate the weather while it lasts…same time next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

Kathy Reichs – Evil Bones

Jonathan Kellerman – The Ghost Orchid/Open Season

Ian Hunter – Diary of a Rock’n’Roll Star