“It Isn’t Spring Until You Can Plant Your Foot On Twelve Daisies.”

Hi! I'm going to be in London visiting family at the end of June for a week and was wondering if you had any cool recommendations (museums, bookstores, etc.) I've already seen all the main parts of London like Buckingham Palace and Big Ben and the London Eye, but I want to see if I can find any cool hidden gems :)

hi, hello, hi -- london is soooo massive there's no end to the things to see... these aren't hidden gems but they're a bit different from central, the west end and all that, a bit more like places where people who live in london go

columbia road flower market

broadway market

brick lane

peckham rye lane

brixton village

borough market

galleries

peer

maureen paley

whitechapel gallery

raven row

south london gallery

across these spots you will find fab cafes, food and bookshops like brick lane books, libreria books, books peckham, bookmongers, round table books and so on.

ACHILLES AND THE LONDON BOY:

Photo Board

Center: James Leicester

Left: Diana Mayor

Center: Henrik Olsen

Left: Theo Fraser, Center: Alexander FitzDonald

Center: Alexander FitzDonald

Left: Theo Fraser, Right: Alexander FitzDonald

Left: James Leicester, Left Center: Henrik Olsen, Right Center: Theo Fraser, Right: Alexander FitzDonald

Back: Diana Mayor, Front: Alexander FitzDonald

Left: Alexander FitzDonald, Center: Theo Fraser, Right: Diana Mayor

Left: Alexander FitzDonald, Center: Diana Mayor, Left: Theo Fraser

His pillow was wet with salty tears and his eyes were swollen from crying as he woke up. His chapped lips stung with the taste of saltwater. Diana called him.

“What time is it,” he asked, his voice cracking. He hoped she would think he was just tired. She did not.

“It’s just about 8 o’clock. What’s wrong?”

He didn’t say anything but simply hung up. He walked to the South Meadow again, slower than last time. He did not see Theo next to him. After a few minutes sitting at the bench next to the field, he heard a voice behind him.

“You’ll be late to chapel,” it said quietly, worried. Theo popped up in front of him. He tried his best to smile. Theo did not mask the concerned expression on his own face. He noticed a stray tear right under Alexander’s eye, and knelt down to wipe it away. The feeling of his hand on Alexander’s face made his skin tingle. He started to smile honestly. Theo sat down next to him quietly.

It started to rain, and Theo stood up from the bench.

“We’ll be late,” he repeated simply. Alexander walked behind him to chapel.

THE ARCHIVES

Prose and Poems:

Poems

A Poem About Rain

Icarus Also Flew

An Ode to Rays of Sun

To learn that

Jealousy

Eyes

Women

A Pretty Little Message to Myself

She

An Ode to Pools of Moonlight

A Poem of Many Poems

If I Don’t Love You

Achilles and the London Boy

Sunlit Gold

A Flower-Scented Morning

Hungover on Tears

A Magnolia Tree Kiss

“What is happiness?”

Giulia’s New Book

Meeting Diana

Giulia’s Diary:

Personal

Giulia Has a Crush

Linguistics, My Beloved

Last Book That I…

Flowers and Vanilla and Sunlight

Mornings

Goodbye, Achilles and the London Boy :(

Book-Related

Sense and Sensibility

Butterfly Bookmark

Emma

History Class Advice

Giulia’s Predictions 1

Giulia’s Predictions 2

The Secret History

Camilla Macaulay

Odds and Ends:

Quotes

A Book I’ll Never Write

To define is to limit, darling.

Books and Forests

The Secret History

“Goodness, you magpies.”

“It’s nothing.”

Everything was bathed in celestial light.

“But how,” said Charles…

That was a cozy night, a happy night…

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

My heartbeat trembled in my fingertips…

The wind was up…

Shades of Eton

Unworldly airs of ancient romance that…

The Iliad

Anguish gripped Achilles…

Other

I Loved My Friend

It isn’t Spring until…

Vive vita tua, nam morte tua morieris.

Photos

Books and Tea

Notes Scrawled in Margins

Tweed Blazer Outfit

Books and Flowers

Academy on the Hill

Home Screen

Italian Dialects Alignment Chart

Good Morning, May

The Secret History

Giulia on Pinterest

Pink Flower

Joseph Leyendecker Illustration

Joseph Leyendecker Illustration II

Photo Boards

Achilles and the London Boy

First Photo Board

First Photo Board, Labeled

ArtBreeder Photo Board

Day 2: Favorite Poem

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There’s nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began—

I loved my friend.

- Langston Hughes

(Here’s a gorgeous article on the poem)

To write is to cradle myth & memory both & emerge with the fact

of your flesh. I praise the first book that touched me because it was beautiful,

because it was written by a stranger born looking just a little like me & that made him beautiful, & in it

I find every person I’ve loved into godhood tunnelling through the page & beyond the echo

of those precious trees allowing breath: their shadows blurring into a wave, rich & urgent, to greet me.

— Natalie Wee, from “Self-Portrait as Pop Culture Reference,” Beast at Every Threshold

She read books like she ran into the woods, each tree consuming her slowly as she disappeared into the green.

She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married

Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell

we had been late for coffee