VINTAGE DESK IDEAS

COUNT DOWN

I made this for a friend of mine last year. She had just moved into her own apartment at the age of thirty, after moving around quite a lot. I stole the saying from a song...I don't remember which. Sometimes you meet someone and you know their heart is set in stone in a very specific place, and your home won't ever be theirs. 

LIFE ONLINE

Since moving back to Cape Town, I really miss having a good selection of furniture on offer. Living in Germany made me take weekend trips to IKEA for granted. As long as slow-walking couples, dreaming of imagined futures, and toddlers with tantrums could be avoided, life was good. I now also miss my weekend trips to flea markets or buying cheap second-hand furniture online.

Goodness me. Lifestyle products are expensive in Cape Town. I long for the sleek, clean lines of a Swedish-inspired design and I promise I won't laugh that it's mass-produced and a mere facsimile, at a shop whose brand pushes a fictitious Swedish lifestyle. 

Most of all - I miss online shopping. It's best summarised by a conversation with my brother:

TO RETURN

The Weary One 

By (the most awesome!) Pablo Neruda

The weary one, orphan 
of the masses, the self, 
the crushed one, the one made of concrete, 
the one without a country in crowded restaurants, 
he who wanted to go far away, always farther away, 
didn't know what to do there, whether he wanted 
or didn't want to leave or remain on the island, 
the hesitant one, the hybrid, entangled in himself, 
had no place here: the straight-angled stone, 
the infinite look of the granite prism, 
the circular solitude all banished him: 
he went somewhere else with his sorrows, 
he returned to the agony of his native land, 
to his indecisions, of winter and summer.