Tess dresses revealed!

Hooray! Only a few days now till the launch, and the Tess catalogue page is live. You can view a preview of all the dresses in the Spring Collection ... so pretty. I have the gold Doris (from the Cocktail selection) and the floral Margaret (bottom right).


Attempting to look nonchalant with an enormous bow on my head. Not easy.

Congratulations, Theresa! Can't wait for the launch.

May Day!

Friends of ours hosted a May Day/late Easter lunch yesterday, complete with mimosas, fruit punch and a slightly more grown-up version of an Easter Egg hunt (mini bottles of spirits instead of the eggs!). It was one of those swelteringly hot spring days that means fans on at full blast, fly-swatters at the ready and plenty of iced water.

Roxie!

The Easter baskets, ready and waiting for the hunt.

Cassiday being a Southern Belle.


Me and Jeffrey (Geoffrey?).


A very Americana lunch! Ambrosia salad and devilled eggs ... and there was delicious fried chicken, too, among other things. I contributed my homemade mac and cheese.
LOML looking dapper.

Jeffrey enjoying a scratch.

One of our gracious hosts, Aaron, restraining himself from reaching for the fly-swatter.


It's a little early for Cinco De Mayo, but I loved the Mexican art on the walls.

A spring celebration demands a spring-like vintage skirt.

Roxie making a bid for the fried chicken.

Happy May, everyone!

The Fear

Currently, I am reading The Fear by Peter Godwin; an account of the atrocities in Zimbabwe over the last few years. It begins with the controversial 2008 election and its aftermath, when Mugabe's government refused to release the election results. This election also spawned a campaign of violence, surprise surprise, against opposition voters, known as Operation 'Who Did You Vote For?' I highly recommend it as an insight into the past couple of years ... as not all of these stories made it onto international news.


Peter Godwin has been a personal hero of mine since I read Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, which made clear to me for the first time the horrors of the war that had taken place in Zimbabwe before I was born. It ranks up there with Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight in the list of lyrical, vivid Zimbabwean memoirs.