wax paper packages tied up with... stickers.

Now that I have reached a hiatus in my studying I am really pleased to announce that I am reopening my etsy shop. It is fully stocked with sets of note cards featuring both French and Hebridean photographs, the two different landscapes that have whispered to and soothed my soul in the last few years. 

I spend a lot of time doubting that I know what it is I'm supposed to do with my life but making things - actual things that people can hold and feel and treasure - is the touchstone that I always come back to. The world is messy and overwhelming and worrying and bringing together something, anything, into a small physical form that makes sense and brings calm and shares an idea or a thought or a feeling that can be held in someone's hands... that brings me unspeakable, if fleeting, peace. 

Note cards probably won't change the world (I mean they might, I feel like there's potential for a note card-based revolution. Ideas on a... note card) but they can probably change the course of someone's day. Frame them, gift them, write some words of love onto that deliciously lush card and pop them in a parcel to a friend who needs to know that you care. Also, they're just really pretty. You probably can't get yourself physically to a Hebridean island or to the south of France terribly easily but I hope that these sets will bring a little of those places to you. 

Details - each set contains five different photographs, taken be me, and printed onto the heaviest, most delicious matt card I've ever seen. They're packaged in wax paper envelopes and sealed with a kiss a nice shiny sticker. 

They are for sale in my etsy shop and will be dispatched on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, in keeping with island postal services. 

Paths and unsettled souls.

Perhaps there are betters times and places to walk off an unsettled soul than the wilds in November, but I don't know them.

I don't know of a better place to trip and stumble and swear and cry and shout profanities into the echoing expanses of moor and sea and sky.

I don't know of a better place to crouch in the heather, seeing the universe, not in a grain of sand but in a clump of moorland, colours and layers and depths and intricacies, worlds of which you know nothing because you're just too damn big.

I don't know of a better place to follow paths you and no other human made, paths that lead through and to nowhere or maybe to the exact place you need to be.

I don't know of a better place to stare into water and see nothing but the above mirrored back to you, or the first few inches of below, swimming and rippling and distorting.

I do not know of a better place to come home to. Maybe they exist, but I do not know of them. This is the place I know.

2016 (ish)

I have spent this afternoon looking through the photographs on my hard drive, the ones I took with my 'real' camera this year, and picking out my favourite and best. Curating them, one might say, if one were an arsehole.

When I say this year's photos, I mean the ones I took of my home and my family - not the work ones of which there have been maybe not as many as I would like but more than I might have expected from a year living on Craggy Island in the remote and beautiful Hebrides. I had naively planned to do a stock take and recap of my work work once I bashed out a quick' 2016 In Photos, The Personal Ones' but four hours later  I'm seeing in triplicate, my computer is starting to overheat and my fingers are as cold as a witch's tit. And apparently we have a party to get ready for.

To be honest I can't really say that this is 2016 in photos as there is so much of this year that escaped capture on anything other than my phone (it's all there on instagram if you want to have at it  - the storms and employment fluctuations, the trips off the island, the birthdays and anniversaries and first days of school, then starting college and the immersion in my course that followed), rather this is bits of 2016 in photographs, the rare occasions when I took my real camera out.

Let's call it a year of dry days, three changes of address, Lyra figures out she can swim and the progression of a top knot. That works for me.

 I know that on a global scale 2016 has been a bit of a shit but if anything maybe it can remind us to hold on to the beautiful moments ahead, because however fast our journey in that handcart may be the moments of mundane magic, of everyday miracles, of the golden light will be there too.

I wish you all a wonderful New Year. Thank you for sharing this last one with me. x