Dubai Chocolate – you know you’ve arrived when the local bar in Settignano is offering Dubai chocolate brioche

burning off in peacetime

not

burning of in wartime

perfecting the art of snow shoe-ing and friendship 🌸

the girl calls it random acts of diggery 😂🐾

Filippino friend and food in Firenze. 🌸

no longer a project, the dining table makes it our home 🌸

The market is never just a place to buy and sell. People watching, chance meetings and a great day out! Grazie Arezzo!

a walk in the southern Apuane, light and dark corners of the valleys, marble landscape economy and history.

Grazie a Graziano per una buonissima esperienza nelle montagne

music is the most abstract of the arts. the relatedness between the medium and the subject is distant. with visual art, the medium and subject both rely on light to be perceived. construction drawings are another type of representation. Counter intuitively construction drawings often do not appear to represent the thing to be constructed. They also rarely communicate issues around the construction process which are only perceptible by someone who understands the visual code. on a daily basis with my work I see beauty in these drawings. particularly the quick ones which have a mixture of computer generated line work hand sketches notes . construction drawings for coordination are quite banal but when I step back from the work and think about all that these drawings enable the graphic, they contain a certain magic and every drawing is loaded with significance

Tuscan coastline near Castiglioncello. reminds me of Wategoes

sass and tude in Livorno. not on the tourist map, great city though.

mornings are very calm. Firenze, and perhaps all of Italy, gets started slowly and gently

it doesn’t get cuter than this

Monte watching “La Dolce Vita”. this was the first film in Italian she watched. She liked it more than Napoleon

found this at st. ambroggio markets today. Graziano told me last week of a saying from his home town, Imprunetta, that was from the tradition of making bricks. Sienna, the most intact medieval city, is almost entirely made with clay brick.

the trigger warning says “contains upsetting scenes”. they are not wrong. i feel upset, angry and helpless.

Puccini looking very much at home. perhaps that was the idea for the relaxed pose in armchair with pipe. Only Lucca, his home city, can claim this. Smart art.

What you do with stuff washed down by the floods. Saw and sand and call it street furniture.

Just arrived. Samples of glazed ceramic tile from Fornace Brioni, traditional maker of artisanal ceramic tile from the po valley region of northern italy. Sublime colour range. two types of glaze, matt (smaltati apache) or glossy (smaltati lucida).

Foto un architettonico di particulare di teatro romano a Fiesole.

Photo of an architectural detail of the Roman Amphitheatre in Fiesole.

I judge places by the proximity of wild places to the city centre. I feel so happy around urban weeds.

I remember reading the newspaper before I knew how. Time and again running my eyes over the black ink – mouthing each letter – forming words – searching for the meaning – slowly acquiring vocabulary through context. Until. Bang. I understood a sentence. Then a paragraph. The memory of that thrill raises the hair on my neck till today. Now, I’m getting it again. This time in my second language, Italian.

I cried this morning.

Small theatre. Three skits on relationships over the ages starting with the Ancient Greek “Madea”, followed by 19th Century “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen, and ending with the modern Napoletana play “Filumena Marturano” by Eduardo de Filippo, with part played brilliantly by friend and world famous actor, Graziano. Proceeded by dinner with Kirrily and friends DJ and PJ. Monte, absent.

Weekend road trip with K, DJ and PJ, and Monte of course. Lunch overlooking Grieve in Chianti. Walks through a medieval hamlet. Very good times.

View from the NatureCulture design studio on a Friday afternoon. Start of summer. a big week. a good week. natureculture getting stronger. new workflows. project submissions. Collected a few good payments. All the good things. Good wins. still, looking forward to weekend. Time with close friends. Family.

Ape. Italian for bee. Bc that’s the sound of these little three-wheeler workhorses.

Slopes of Fiesole. Enormous villas with gardens. Olive groves and forest. Firenze, the river valley city. Cradle of the Renaissance.

Little buses squeezing through the centro storico. Firenze is remarkably good for public transport, bicycling, and walking, of course. Not needing to own a car is luxury higher than any set of fancy wheels.

Reminiscing on my winter commute. Not the place, the season. Riding past this old mill in the summer now. After an earlier 20 years in the hot-dry lands without plants and rainfall to express the seasons I now feel sensitive to the incremental changes. So much for Mother Nature to pack into only 52 weeks! Busy busy.

Tavolo is Italian for table. Change only one letter from tavolo to tavola and the meaning expands exponentially. Tavola can mean many things depending on context. Here, tavola means a beautiful time sharing food and good times with friends, family and pets. Yes, pets allowed! These are the best of times.

signing the new MOA. two new partners for natureculture. great start for the new brand. awesome bunch.

The lion and the man are locked in desperate battle for survival. seemly. look closer. the lion is all fury, maybe fear. The man strangely exhibits no fear no fury. What’s going on here? this isn’t any kind of taming of the wild story., at least no wildness separate to ourselves.

well well well, back to the future. who would have thought i’d be back in the matrix. verdaus’s office at Dubai Dry Docks.

fairy tale Christmas!!! first time my girl visits London and it snows!!! thank you uncle G xxx

a spin along Coolamon Scenic Drive in JD’s new set of wheels. love of his life. haha.

thanks ST for helping me set up a new and great life chapter. feeling grateful for your support.

only in mullum. even though i don’t spend much time here where i grew up, its hard not to love the place.

i never expected to live next door to the QE2. icon of an era. now languishing in Port Rashid. apparently a developer bought it with the plan for a floating hotel and it didn’t work out.

doing my bit for diversity – my HIIT class, and me

bound for bne. looking out over the landscape i’ve lived in for the last 14 years. being up here puts things in context. happy to be heading home, as temporary as it is.

gulf arab shop front

found this old photo of mum. she was so sassy. still is.

model of town square including one of our projects.

what’s left when someone leaves

reflecting on the city i live in and coming to the conclusion it is what it is. most of what im looking at here don’t exist 14 years ago when i arrived.

kb, soul sista. catching up after many years. k’s beaming as always. worships the good in everything and everyone and full of kindness