i know what you did last saturday...

with march way into its course and the days getting a little brighter there's been a lot of plotting around the house of what to do for rike's birthday and where to go for the party. not that this needs that much discussion but after we sorted the birthday do (you guessed it) at the stables today i found our little darling and her friend happily on the phone discussing horse prices with a number of owners all too willing to get a commitment out of a not-quite-twelve-year-old. and on my desk is a beautiful list of livery charges for various london stables. you have to admire the skills even if you want to run away from the idea screaming...

spring concert spree!

spring concerts everywhere and almost any night now our little darling is out with her horn or as a singer in some rather splendid concerts, so far by lms, scb and hahc, with more to come. it is amazing how well some of these young people and children play, sing or even write the music themselves. and always great when the conductor wears a cowboy hat that comes all the way from el paso (trust me...) 



oh dear - another year...

happy birthday, brother!

my own private fashion week

with london fashion week in full swing and the streets around somerset house and the college awash with fantastic looking people i was acutely reminded that i too once dabbled in hot garments - or so. over to google and the results are above. no more traces of jane&john, the company i was 'chief designer' for (or untrained but eager to learn as i remember it) but this hopeful posting on ebay with one of the jackets i at least partly designed (the other part was probably stolen from a better jacket by a proper company). which means the jacket is also likely to be more than 25 years old as jane&john didn't survive their move from a small hand-to-mouth dye shop to much larger premises with 200 seamstresses around 1984.

it was good fun most of the times even if it included long nights since without formal training i had to try out the pattern I was expected to hand in the next day. and even then it happened more than once that the head seamstress, who had been assigned to make the sample from my pattern, would come with a funny looking piece in her hand, holding it up with a puzzled look, "is that really what you wanted it to look like??" 

easiest way out of this dilemma was usually to put the blame firmly on the cutter, who as a musician had even less experience but was in desperate need of the money and who, as my flatmate, had organized the job for me. totally bored by the work and resolutely unwilling to co-operate he didn't last very long with jane&john but, folks, this was probably a blessing in disguise as good ol' kai later made it big as frontman of the german rockband fury in the slaughterhouse....

so for a while it was all fun and visiting fashing shows in munich and dusseldorf was great, and i'll never forget the pride when one of my master pieces was in the shop window of one of hanover's largest fashion stores. but once the routine started to set in it was clear that it wasn't meant to be. i didn't have the drive to push for new stuff all the time nor the willingness to properly learn the tools. nor the patience to discuss fashion every waking moment, and so i returned ruefully to my kafka seminars...

  



and the name is: john boy



folks it's still raining cats and dogs, so it might be just as well to have another story from animal kingdom and announce the arrival of john boy, or so we think he'll be named if the happy parents in hanover's dieselstrasse finally can agree on it...

having recently lost the ever so lovely murphy and currently even without cats it is time that this household gets the critters back in. little john boy just fits the bill: heartbreakingly cute yet cheeky, you can actually see him gnawing on cornel's shoes or stealing the sausage from the fridge, just as every respected boy should do. and if there are a few tricks he doesn't know yet we're sure nino and leon will teach him. so - stick to the name, guys. after all your most used line can be "johnny - be good!!!"    

coriander has one of her moments

the sheer fact that i find a few seconds to write here is already a sign that things are on the up and that the darkest of all winter days are behind us. in fact we had a couple of lovely rides today with the horses playing up in the windy school (rike's horse selica nearly went through the roof when a piece of wood flew around outside) and later home i even spent a few moments in the garden, though more to inspect the damage rather than doing any work...

the cats have also already caught up to the sunnier days and have started to find those spots in the house again that get sunlight for a few hours. coriander (pictured) in particular has great talent to find the cosiest places and as you can see, defends her rights viciously against the other two.

rike was fast this morning with her camera and caught the little (or indeed not so little anymore) rascal in our bed. so pleased to see how relaxed this cat is now - she was after all left to die in a rubbish bin as a little kitten and barely alive when rescued.

such fun to have her - just don't try to get near that duvet...

un-bee-lievable

great news from the school front: our little bee rike has participated in her first ever spelling bee across the 240 kids of year 7 and actually won it, therefore also adding another round of points for her house team. not only did she have the nerve to sign up for such a daunting thing but she managed to get a long list of words right that probably even her clever mum wouldn't have done that easily without a dictionary...must be from her father's side...

(or was it because below is her favourite training material??)



(click here for a nice training site from the times)