London, and then home

and a little bit of work stuff at the end

I didn’t take almost any photos except of my son - but I don’t put my kids up on the internet…so this is the only photo I have of our trip and it was taken by my son from the top of a double-decker bus which was one of the things on his checklist. Enjoy the interesting framing, the London weather on full display, and an actual black taxi. I feel that this is, in fact, a seminal photo of that fine city :D

Well hello, I am back. Have been back for almost two weeks but honestly it takes me so long to sort everything out and pick up work again that I haven’t had a moment to get into this space.

We went to London, which was the first time I’d been there in 25 years. I spend a significant chunk of time in London as a kid, because my stepfather was English. Back then, in the mid-80’s, London was amazing to a kid who grew up between a hippie commune on the top of a remote mountain on the mid-North Coast of NSW, and the unbelievably deathly white middle-class place that was Canberra at that time. The UK was, the first time I went, in the throes of Thatcherism and miners strikes and London was frenetic, angry, vibrant, full of amazing live music and punks and all sorts of stuff. The moment I figured out that the intro to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasure Dome had been recorded in the (now-defunct) London Zoo, was one of many highlights. My stepfather was the then-editor of Art Monthly Magazine. He had no money but a number of very wealthy friends and colleagues and so it was that I split my time in my first visit to London between the Working Man’s Hostel in Islington (full of Irish blokes who taught me to play pool - I was for a significant portion of my misspent youth a very good pool player, thank you crusty Irishmen), my stepfather’s basement flat, also in Islington (which smelt like dank earth) and someone’s borrowed enormous house in Hampstead Heath. London smelt like the Underground, warm crusty bread, and dirty snow, and it sounded like ska and reggae and Frankie Goes to Hollywood and a song called ‘I wanna be a cowboy’, which actually came out during my second trip and which I always thought was a song that Ronald Reagan had written to sing to Margaret Thatcher. Such was my grasp of politics at 12. I was dead right, to quote Adrian Mole, who was the other big discovery, along with The Young Ones, and hamsters. I was not allowed to bring a hamster back to Australia, which broke my heart. And I saw Ghostbusters and got a Walkman and when I got back to Australia just about everyone in my entire primary came up to ask me about seeing Ghostbusters at the movies. This was a time when American releases would hit the UK several months after their US debut, and would make it to Australia months later. I feel often like I was born in an entirely different era, so remote from now that it could almost be a different world. But it isn’t.

London in the 80’s is seared into my brain because it was so unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life up til that date.

We didn’t end up living there permanently, something I was sad about for years but now extremely grateful for. I have a clear memory of my mum asking if I wanted to move to London. I loved the museums (especially anything to do with the Black Death, I was an extremely morbid child), I loved Trafalgar Square with its pigeons, I loved the whole of Hampstead Heath, the squirrels which I didn’t know were an invasive species, the whole place felt like something magical, although clearly so many people were doing it super tough at the time. But I couldn’t handle the weather, the way the sky sits just above your head for months and months of the year, the cold, the rain, the very short days. Even here in France which is warmer I have real issues with the months of January and February and I wish they could be removed from my life, or even better, I could just hibernate for eight weeks.

So we didn’t move, although I’m sure the final decision wasn’t made just because I didn’t like the weather. Instead my stepfather moved part-time to Australia and started up Art Monthly Australia, and I continued my schooling in Canberra, where I thought about slitting my wrists approximately six times a week until I turned 17 and fled to Melbourne, having applied to any university anywhere that wasn’t Canberra.

(Round about now, someone will contact me and tell me that they live in Canberra and it’s lovely. Yes, I know the very barren extremely white heroin-ravaged fake town I grew up in has transformed into a leafy green middle class haven, good for you, I last visited briefly in 2015 to see the National Gallery, where large chunks of my childhood were spent, and I have zero plans to ever visit again, the very name makes me shudder and taste the bile that binge drinking vodka in a bus shelter at 2am can bring on. Ugh.)

And then I went again to London when I was 25, and the least said about that the better. I had been living in Turkey at the time, on the Asian side of Istanbul and thought to escape for a while to take up my working visa in London whilst I was still young enough. But I intended to go there via Paris so that I could meet some distant relatives, and whilst I was in Paris applying for my visa, one of France’s legendary strikes occurred, this time over petrol prices. It started with tractors blocking the highways. and then shutting down the airports, and by the time I was due to leave it had engulfed the neighbouring countries and moved over to the UK. So I got stuck in Paris for much longer than I had planned. Much to the horror of both myself and my extremely conservative Catholic French family.

By the time I got to London I was already exhausted and missing Istanbul. Having last visited as a bourgeoise-adjacent child, it was a big shock to find out the real prices of things and to have to work to afford to eat. Two jobs as it turns out, one of which was hilariously at the British Medical Association in Euston, entering all the registered doctors in the UK into the first ever computer data-base using little cards that had been sent out to each and every one of them. Some of the cards simply came back with ‘dead’ or ‘has dementia’ scrawled across them, and I remember ringing one clinic and being shouted at because I was apparently supposed to magically know that the doctor in question had died years before. I was staying with an old family friend, a man whom I had loved in my childhood, who used to show me how to make collages and who lived in a beautiful house in Cambridge. By the time I returned, his life situation had changed, he had become a very bitter alcoholic, and staying with him was terrifying. If I went to the toilet at night he would emerge from his bedroom and shout at me, so I ended up peeing into plastic bags and sneaking them into the toilet when he left for work. Not being able to afford to eat properly, I survived on a diet of chocolate (for energy), cabbage (to evade scurvy), coffee (to stay awake), and cigarettes (to not feel hungry) and I lost a shocking amount of weight. I stayed until I saved up enough money to get out of there and then I got out of there.

But this trip to London was delightful, although London has changed so much it was almost totally unrecognisable. I did however manage to find my way still around the streets that encircle the British Museum, the area where my stepfather’s offices used to be and where I spent so much time as a kid. I took my son, who turned ten whilst we were there. I know I am biased but he is an utterly delightful person and an awesome travel companion. He’s also very well read, he showed me the ceiling of the Natural History Museum which is beautifully painted with large pictures of plants that were economically useful to the UK in the 19th century, and seeing people sketching in the V&A he asked if he could do the same and so we went and found a stool and he sketched Japanese swords, appropriate because he is obsessed with manga. But he did draw the line at the National Gallery - unfortunately for me because it is hands down my favourite gallery in London and I know so many of the paintings, it’s like visiting old friends. ‘Mum, is this all paintings? I hate paintings’. I tried to point out lots of things to him, the use of glazes and washes and the symbolism and all of that stuff before realising that I was channeling my painting restorer mother who dragged resentful childhood me through so many galleries they all became a blur. So I knocked it off, and left him sitting on benches reading manga comics whilst I went through the nearby galleries. The first bench was opposite The Arnolfini Marriage. The second bench was right in front of The Ambassadors. But the third time I left him I utterly forgot to note what it was in front of and got lost in a maze of smaller galleries all of which seemed to lead to somewhere else. I started panicking, racing through the Dutch flower paintings, past the Klimt portrait, heart beating, imagining having to tell a guard that I had put my child on a bench somewhere in this maze, when all of a sudden I came across him, calmly engrossed in his manga, surrounded by tens of people studying the painting behind him, a recent portrait of King Charles.

We ate lots of things we can’t get in the part of France where we live. We had ritzy expensive Japanese for my son’s birthday because he had never tasted it and because I swear manga comics have done more for the dissemination of Japanese culture than anything a tourism bureau could ever dream up. But my highlight was from several market stalls in Hackney where we were staying (NOT in an Airbnb, they are on the BDS list and I won’t be using them again) - a chickpea rollup stuffed with curried paneer, dribbled with tamarind sauce, consumed with fresh coriander, and washed down with fresh-pressed sugarcane juice. We ate it on a bright beautiful day sitting in the London Fields park, watching everyone being rather wonderful, whilst just near us several people were giving massages for Palestine, their massage tables set up under trees, and I’m happy to report that there was quite a queue.

In fact everywhere we went the solidarity with Palestine was hugely visible. Bless Londoners, I loved them 40 years ago and I love them still. I’m glad I didn’t move there as a kid, and absolutely couldn’t live there now, but I just find Londoners kind of fabulous. And I love all the accents. Although for the first few days I kept replying to questions like ‘do you want sugar’ in French, which was disorientating, and even weirder was that for those same first few days I felt really shy about speaking English, like I might get it wrong. It felt so bizarre being back in an English-speaking environment. And embarrassingly, several times I had to ask a person speaking to me to repeat their question, in one case three times, as I simply couldn’t understand what was being asked. This is especially weird because this never happens now to me in French. All of this served to highlight for me how much I have adapted to living in France. I still work mostly in English, and I insist on speaking English to my son in order to keep his grammar and syntax intact, but all my real life adult interactions are in French and all my friends who live nearby are French and none of them speak English. Sink or swim.

I got to meet two fabulous people whilst I was there. The first was the person whose invitation kicked me into organising the trip, the Australian writer and cartoonist Kaz Cooke. This was a huge fangirl moment for me, because Kaz’s cartoons and writings were such a radical departure from what we were fed as teens in the late 80’s - she has always been a staunch feminist, completely on the side of us chicks, and I remember thinking how cool Hermione the Modern Girl was when she first appeared in the Dolly magazines of my teens. Her book for teenage girls, ‘Girl Stuff’, is so totally recommended, I gave a copy to my daughter when she was 10, she is now 21 and has left home and left the book here, and on numerous occasions I have found her little brother reading it, which I think is fabulous. Kaz herself is simply a delight, and it was absolutely worth all the travel just to hang with her. We spoke about everything under the sun, she talked to me about writing a book, gave cartooning lessons to my son, and even did a little cartoon for my daughter who was incredulous when I told her who we were going to see in London.

The other person I met IRL was Aja Barber, who is simply stunningly glowing in the flesh, and who was as warm and as lovely as I thought she would be. She went out of her way to come and meet us on the final night we were there, braving ridiculous squally rainstorms and flocks of pretentious coffee-swilling tossers to come meet us. We of course discussed lots of things to do with work, ie. how much we hate instagram, but mostly about what supporting Palestine had cost us. We both almost started crying talking about what the last two years would have looked like for everyone, especially for Palestinians, if all the people who could have said something had said something instead of protecting their own arses, because make no mistake, it would have been radically different and that is on everyone who was and who remains publicly silent. I lost a lot of my savings, which was a decision I took in November 2023 - that was why I knew I could ride it out - both of us are very social media savvy in our own ways and we knew exactly what would happen to us when we started speaking out, and sure enough it did. But Aja lost so much more, things which maybe would have seen her close to financially secure. And she still doesn’t regret it. And now is the time I tell you that she is now almost totally dependent on her Patreon subscribers, and she is about the best value you could possibly hope for, and if you can, you should be supporting her. She is also the only, and I mean the only, person I see having the discussion about sustainable fashion and including actors from non-Western countries. Those are the discussions we need to be having. You can subscribe to her Patreon here.

And then we took the Eurostar back to Paris, and the train to Toulouse to pick up the car and the dog and visit my beautiful friends in the Gers. And we came home.

And I have to say that it was a wonderful trip but I am so happy to be home and I am quite content to not leave again for many many months, or years even. It is summer here now, and whilst we are in the middle of a freak heatwave, summer in this part of country France means amazing fresh produce, chilled wine, and happenings, dances, bands, organised walking tours, kayaking, swimming every evening in the Creuse which borders our village, eating homemade pizza at the local guinguette whilst the kids play pingpong, drinking pamplemousse rosé and dancing until 1am at a neighbouring village’s soirée moules frites. Something I have come to really love about here is simply how much everyone likes being with each other. Every single village regularly has get-togethers of some sort to which all neighbouring villagers also attend. Saturday night there were so many events just in a 20km radius that we couldn’t get to all of them. Country France is not Paris, to me it is far more wonderful and magical than Paris, and I feel like I have landed in precisely the right spot, this idyllic hidden part of the deep country, where there is nothing much to see, where nothing ever happens, and everyone likes it like that. I feel increasingly that I am about the luckiest person in the world, to have this place, my house even in its unrenovated state, my small family, the friends I have made here, and peace and safety. I wish this for everyone, everywhere. And I wish it to continue here.

---

Work things. I am once again made nearly invisible by that evil clown platform, Instagram, but will keep posting there regardless, do try and comment on my posts if you see them, I know it’s boring to be asked this endlessly, but it makes me visible. I will temrporarily have to stop putting politics up in stories to see if that redeems me (honestly it is the most boring and ridiculous dance we creators with consciences are having to do to stay afloat on that damn app).

I did a drop of sheets on my website last Friday, including the largest sheet I have ever found (274cm wide!!), several really beautiful hemp numbers, and a very fine pure linen sheet with a huge and extremely delicate embroidered monogram. No-one saw my announcement post so they are still there. I also discounted and moved a number of things over to the sale category - some of those have sold but some of them are still available. And at 11am tomorrow I will do a small story sale. In fact I am going to try to do a small story sale every day this week, and I thought to alternate the times between 11am and 4pm my time (Paris time) in order to give both Antipodean and North American people a chance to see things as they go up. I am aiming to do this but I must also point out that it is insanely, crazily hot inside my atelier rooms at the moment, they are on the second floor and we are into our second week of 30+ degree temperatures (very very unseasonal for this part of France), so I will iron as much as I can and keep trying to do small daily drops.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for being with me, and have a wonderful day wherever you are.

xxH