Country Garden

Driving through the countryside, you peer through the green privacy hedges and elbow your boyfriend in the ribs and say 'hey, look at that one', pointing at another beautiful country mansion, set back from the road, covered with large windows and ivy and architectural curiosities. Then you see a village cricket bowler run towards his batsman, watch the ball hit for six and call the score for the benefit of everyone else in the car, interested or otherwise.

Sometimes, if you are lucky, these hidden houses are open to visitors, and you can drive up and explore their gardens all you like. It's an addiction surprisingly simple to cultivate on a hot spring day with little else to do.

This garden wander was the weekend of the wedding – my royal blue velvet blazer adds a touch of unintended regency I think. It was an outfit I wore all around London too when I went to visit this past weekend. In true royal fashion, it's an outfit that likes to be leisurely both in the city and in the countryside.

Details

As I sat on the floor scrubbing the skirting boards, about an hour or so after Ben had looked at me pityingly to say that on his list of things to clean, the skirting boards were quite far down, I realised that I'm definitely quite obsessed by the little details.

I've mentioned my appreciation of clean lines and subtle detailing before, but I hadn't realised the extent to which it ran. Lately, I've been chasing these geometrics and little details around with my camera, and these pictures are the result. I took them in Ben's parents' house a weekend or so ago (an early seventeenth-century house is full of fine details – beams, uneven walls, tiny doors – it has them all).

Aside from my recent detail fanaticism, a few other things I have been enjoying this past week are this man's skill at photographing people (found via his photographs of a riot that happened nearby this weekend) and this website's free stream of the new Fleet Foxes album, which I find a little too much at times, but perfect at others.

Linen

'I don't really mind where we go, I just like old things.' I said, last Sunday, on the warmest day of the year. We went to Hampton Court Castle, a 15th-century castle within its own gardens – a vista around every corner.

This garden, with its high red brick walls was almost everything a Frances Hodgson Burnett girl might wish for – walls too high to see over and wrought-iron gates – all that was missing was the secrets and the mystery, and a bit of overgrowth. The colossal entrance fee did little to help the mystique along, but old couples sat grumpily drawing on benches, and around every hedge was a different conversation to eavesdrop on.

I came across this dress entirely by surprise in a charity shop a week or so ago. It has been so long since I found anything worthwhile that I'd almost given up trying. It's French linen, and has a very pretty line to it. The wide pleats are perfect.

The label tells me that it comes from Cannes, which conjures film festivals and swishing along promenades and harbours with a little dog and stiletto shoes. As I possess neither, I stick to my gentleman's flats and add a headscarf, and pretend anyway.

Year

Last week marked the year anniversary of the beginnings of this blog. I, after a year of trying to be a freelancer and occupying my sudden unusually large amounts of free time with blogging, was up to my elbows in work, and didn't notice. Or rather, I did notice, I was just too busy to do anything to celebrate it.

When I started writing this blog, I had just quit two jobs in two months. The former I had done for nearly three years, the latter, three weeks. I cried both times I gave notice - I'm not awfully good at quitting..

The day after I quit my second job, I spent a whole day reading blogs, being amazed at the ingenuity of them, and poring through their archives like a person obsessed, (Fieldguided, Lulu Letty & Liebemarlene in particular, I recall). I felt terribly guilty about not having achieved anything that day, and decided that the only way to legitimately spend my time reading blogs was to write one myself. Then I'd feel like I was achieving something.

I kind of think, after a year of blog post induced galavants around the countryside, obsessive photograph taking, and time spent finding ever more inspiring blogs to pore through, that I have.

Little World

My world has been decidedly little this past month, as I work to my April deadline, although it has been expanded briefly by watching programmes about Space, such as the BBC's 'Wonders of the Universe', of which the above is a screen grab. I don't know what the iPlayer rules are if you are elsewhere, but if you can catch it, it is completely fascinating.

I've never been much into the Christopher Kane school of printing the Universe onto dresses, but looking at these pictures made me think a little more favourably about pattern. I'm usually a girl of clean and simple lines, but these sweet 1950s dresses have made me think again. Pair pattern with clean colours and it almost cancels out the busy.

1. Dress: River Island 2. Shoes: Vena Cava x Tenoversix 3. Hat: Asos 4. Polish: Topshop

1 Dress: River Island 2. Vintage French Leather Bag: BoMode on Etsy 3. Shoes: Repetto 4. Lipstick: Mac

Pastel

The credits of 'Never Let Me Go', the recent film adaptation of Kazuro Ishiguro's novel, were incongruously light and pretty, for a film that in essence was exactly the opposite. Pastel colours with sweet white text, sandwiching a very good, but fairly mournful film.

It's spring (or almost at least) and my long-awaited spring magazine editions are all arriving in the post and summer shoes are becoming ever more tempting although still impractical. (I have bought some already, to my shame).

The Gentlewoman arrived through the letterbox this week - it's a magazine fascinating to the touch: the paper textures differ all the way through, with cheaper paper weight alongside the most expensive glossy within the most unusual, almost plasticky covers. Oh Comely promises some beautiful illustrations and very pretty editorials alongside some sharp features, which are also incongruous cased within such pretty pastel colours.

Writers of Letters

From Ciaffi, on Etsy

I haven't received a letter in years. I once sent a letter to Bunty, the Enid Blyton-appropriate magazine for little girls who enjoy tales of boarding school girls thwarting crimes. I wrote to its 'Pen-Pal' page.

Unexpectedly, my letter was published, and I had a flurry of paper in reply from all sorts of places that to me seemed to be beyond exotic. I was particularly delighted to receive one on green paper (Green paper! How foreign!) from a Bunty girl in Singapore and I had a pen-pal for a few months after that, I think, until things petered out and we both lost interest in the endeavour.

Pencils, from O-Check, here.

Seashells note set, from The Paper Apartment

I wonder if little girls still write letters to penpals, or if the very concept is anathema to these new, Internet days when any unknown correspondent is a threat. Benjamin works almost exclusively by email, and can't remember how to lay out a letter. Working in the old-fashioned world of publishing, I send quite a few, but never any away from the office.

In an email, the date is always unforgivingly embedded and it matters not at all where you were when you sent it – you can pick up a reply wherever you are. I haven't received, or sent, a personal letter in years – but I do remember how exciting it is to get one. It made me wonder if simple things, like having your address or general location right-aligned at the top, with the date below, and even the fun of curly flowing cursive, will soon be forgotten.

If anything can encourage me to send a letter, or encourage anyone else whose knowledge of letter and card writing is slowly evaporating, it is having beautiful materials with which to do so.

I imagine letter writing, like blog writing, can have the added benefit of improving writing style. I recently read a fascinating article on the use of cadence in writing, the knowledge of which could do the same, I guess. It is here.