"I was in Helsinki when the founder Riittaa Immonen died & in the window of the Marimekko store they had replaced the bright fabrics with a simple black screen."

My mum is the one who introduced me to the prints of Marimekko & as I followed in her footsteps with a slight obsession with fabrics & prints every time we spot the famous red Marimekko poppy (including oddly, the other weekend, as a curtain to the changing room in a charity shop in Bath) we share the same "Ooooo Marimekko" noises. Because there's something just so... right about their prints. In the way Liberty's are wrong, but work. Does that make sense? I guess it's cause they're Scandie, hence being able to offhandedly publish a free newspaper with a whole page dedicated to well laid out repeated white kitchenware. Newspaper picked up on my brief Cheltenham escapade from this shop.

Lovely.

So the day finally arrived & after running some errands I went into Rise, an independent, because I still feel guilty about fueling Alex Turner's demise into a drug addled Chung bubble. I was actually pretty disappointed. *SHOCK* I mean, Arctic Monkeys have never been huge on album artwork, it all kind of went downhill since the first album (as you can see by the disc gif I made, I think I might be getting addicted to gifs) & when I got it home & dug out the other three I realized just how similar it is to Humbug, down to the weird eerie desert photo in the center. But this review by the ever lovely Alexis Petridis pretty much says everything that needs to be said, with better references. I still can't listen to Don't Sit Down 'Cause I Moved Your Chair though... I skip it every time. PLUS there will be 2 reviews of it in the next issue of SWEAT, one by George my Arctic Monkeys virgin friend & the *hardcore fan* that is me. What do you think? Are you gonna buy it? It's almost worth it for the awesome photo of Max Helders (my now favorite Monkey) in skates & a helmet. Or do you not care at all?

In other news I'm extremely excited! They have managed to produce antimatter for about 16 minutes! Plus Paul Dirac was mentioned in the guardian, which if nothing else, is awesome news for those with his equation that predicted antimatter tattooed on their arms. *ahem* It basically means they can look at it a lot closer, get a wider range of data & try & get some averages about it's behavior & where the fuck all the antimatter from the beginning of the world went. My money's on a parallel universe! You can read the article here.

Also feel the need to re alliterate - having spent so many posts on this blog explaining my varying states of depression - that I am extremely happy at the moment. This weekend has been lovely. It was Max's birthday & because me & Jesus are cheapskates & basically the same person, we spent £2.50 on the joint present of a cactus, then spent the whole night worrying it was a shit present. Max loved it, so did Cat even though she got stung (is that the right word?) by it almost immediately, opps! We, The People was good & I fell into bed, avoiding after parties like the plague & in fact fell asleep on the phone. Oh well. Now I need to do some physics revision & figure out if it's possible to set up a projector onto my bedroom wall... err... I'll explain on Thursday. This was a longer post than I intended it to be.

Sorry!

I may be extremely hungover, but I have enough clarity to understand how amazing these photos are (source). I kind of adore Kanye West, even though I feel like I shouldn't. Anyway everything is lovely, isn't it? It's been sunny for a couple of days & Max liked his birthday Cactus from last night (also he liked his party, hence the headache) even though I was having second thoughts & thinking of buying this instead when I saw it at work. The "Knowledge Retailer" selling drug books? Mind fuck or what. Going to see The Streets tonight, well excited. Two festivals in Bristol on one weekend? Maybe we are just the best city ever... Or maybe that's just the sound of summer becoming official. Also this week shall be awesome, I will have it no other way. Off to drink some orange juice as par Amber's holy hangover cure advice.

Peace.

Pricey: (L-R) Timney Conical Shell Print, Timney Collage Print, Ted Baker Bird Cage Print
Cheap: Dorothy Perkins 50s Floral Print, Oasis Floral Print, New Look Peacock Print


That time of year again where my pale skin & ginger hair have to bear the brunt of *summer*. So the plane/train tickets are booked & I'm going to be beside the seaside for at least a week, & when I went swimming this week I realised that all my bikinis are bandeau & therefore annoyingly liable to shrink whilst swimming. So begins the hunt for a non pornographic, non flash prone, understated, nicely printed, not too expensive bikini. I only need a top really, but they look so nice together! I'm not sure if this is breaking my nothing new resolution as I didn't really think about it at the time, but maybe it comes under underwear? So, wish me luck on the highstreet tomorrow! It's like going into the wilderness...

One of my latest physics revision displacement activities has been drying the rose petals from our garden, I meant to press them but actually the colour came out beautifully when they were dried. If you are anywhere near Bristol in the next week or so I completely insist you go to Ashton Court & round the back of the mansion to the Rose Garden. They're all in bloom & so frickin beautiful! My airing cupboard is full of multicoloured petals waiting to crisp... It also smells amazing & they're so different, I never knew roses came in so many varieties! It also helped when these little girls ran through picking rose heads off & sprinkling the petals, sacrilege but gave me perfectly new petals. GO.

Oh & hello to all the new followers recently. I had another displacement activity of going a bit comment mad, discovering loads of awesome new blogs, so hello! & welcome! & of course I love all the other readers too, so much! New or not.

L.O.V.E

Last Friday was the 40th Anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act & seems like a good as time as any for Release's newest campaign for better laws on drug legislation. As you can see there's a glitterati of celebrities & important folk signed up to be associated with the campaign, mainly because it's headline is about decriminalizing possession rather than anything to do with the controversial subjects of reclassification and legalization.

As I've written about before on the blog, I feel pretty strongly about the failure of the drug education & legislation in this country & around the world. Whilst it is great that this has got into a national newspaper - the Guardian obvs - still we're discussing the minor subjects in view of avoiding the bigger ones. Today also New York has released it's new Global Commission on Drug Policy but have come out against any change to their laws & I feel the UK government will take the same line. With Rupert Murdoch & his followers & against "mad lefties" & well, science.

If we allow the government to continue only releasing drug figures when for some reason unconnected to anything they've done, the drug use (by their estimation) goes down. & to keep painting people who believe the drug laws need to be changed as being "mad lefties" & hippies; then there's no way to get the unfiltered message across. In the early months of the Tory-led coalition in the UK they gave over a House of Commons debate to David Nutt (the fired scientific adviser to the last Labour government) & others, including Caroline Lucus who made some great points based around a trial run in Brighton of which I forget the name... Anyway, unless like me you have a penchant for BBC Parliament you probably didn't catch anything about it in any of the newspapers or media because whilst our politicians are kept in line by businessmen they are unable to have any real opinions that go against them. So let David Nutt's comment above ring in our ears & be fucking ashamed we never listened to him in the first place.

Discuss.

More gif magic, I don't know why but I just prefer it. This one's slower you can see every outfit yay! So, this is the silk shirt dress thing by Privatsachen that I showed you yesterday. Turns out it was the perfect thing to wear um...swimming. Which I did today. Worn long either buttons on the back or front I do look a little like an escaped mental patient but I really like the way it looks belted & tied, what do you think?

Also I've been bombarded with amazing things from around the internet today so here's something political that made me feel a little better about the world I live in, something so fun I wasted hours of my life playing it every ten minutes or so just going: this is so weird! And something strangely beautiful that makes me want to buy lots of ice lollies...

Enjoy!