Grateful Friday

Well peeps on this glorious Friday in March, I'm grateful for:

1. Lush weather: everything seems beautifully simple and real in the sunshine. It's been gorgeous ALL week and I've been enjoying cycling in a slow breeze.

2. The maintenance guys at work: who kindly pointed out that there was like no air at all in my bike tyres, and instead of just laughing at an inept girl, one of them ran off to get a pump and rectified the problem there and then! What good service, and I didn't even have to flirt like I usually do at 'Mend a Bike' in Fulham.

3. Canapes: generally underated small snacks. If they're done well, as they were last night at a book launch in the city they are just yummy. Think warm mozarella and fig wrapped in parma ham and drenched in lemon juice... lush.

4. My ridiculously overpriveleged life: this week I managed to go to Paris for the day, attend a private view of the Renoir landscapes at the National Gallery, eat aforementioned canapes and free wine at a book launch (at which I shook hands with a famous politician). I woke up this morning and realised that perhaps this is what it feels like to be grown up at last.

5. Gertrude Stein: she's one of my heroines, seriously, even though she's well and truly dead as a dodo I love love love reading her candid and affectionate portraits of the modernist art scene in Paris. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a beautiful autobiography of her own life as an American in Paris in the 1920s. Friends with Mattisse, Picasso, Renoir, Braque and countless others, she brings to life a Paris that belongs in books.