My Japan Shopping Tips

Part of the reason I took a slightly bigger than cabin-approved suitcase to Japan was so that I could indulge in a little retail therapy if the mood took me. I was particularly looking forward to a) the stationery and b) the weird and wonderful 'only in Japan' type items. Here are a few of my favourite places.

A Gift That Fits the Bill

For my birthday last year, a group of my friends bought me a six-month subscription to Not Another Bill and I couldn't have been happier. I had come across the company a number of times before, including at DesignJunction, and loved the concept but it had always felt that bit too indulgent to treat myself to a subscription so I was delighted that my friends decided to treat me instead.

The idea is simple: you (or your friends/family/loved ones) select at least three categories from a list that includes jewellery, homewares and crafts, and you will receive a surprise present in the post once per month. 

The gifts are always immaculately packaged, and include a personalised message that tells you a bit more about your present and the brand; sometimes you even get a discount to use on other products from the company. You can also provide details about your working schedule so they know when to dispatch the package to minimise the pain of trips to the post office.

So far, I've received five of my six gifts and I've really liked them all. They are all things I would have chosen for myself and, in fact, I did almost buy one of them — the Ham screen prints — at DesignJunction. Based on the presents I've been sent so far, it seems that my friends selected stationery, jewellery and art as my categories, which is, of course, what I would have chosen for myself.

My first gift was the Hay plissé accordion folder from one of my favourite Scandi brands. It was in a cute mint green colour and perfect for someone who likes Scandi style and organisation as much as I do!

Gift number two was a gold wishbone ring from Astrid & Miyu (astrid in Swedish and miyu in Japanese both mean 'beautiful'). I recently rediscovered a wishbone ring that my grandparents gave me when I was ten, but sadly lost it when I went bouldering, so I was really pleased to get a replacement. The ring is adjustable and super-stylish.

The third gift was the screen prints from Ham that I mentioned above. I love bunnies and I love the playful, minimalist style of these prints, so I framed two of the three in the set and hung them in the hallway of my flat.

Sticking with the arty theme, my fourth present was a small, quirkily shaped mirror from Haidée Drew. I've been wanting a small mirror for my hallway for those last-minute checks before leaving the house, and this fitted perfectly next to my blackboard. Unfortunately, it arrived a few days too late for the selfie competition my company was running!

My fifth and penultimate gift was another piece of jewellery, this time a cute bracelet called 'Nine Lives' from designer Susannah Fairley. The bracelet has nine tiny gold hearts —if you like, you can make a wish against each one, and when the bracelet falls off they will come true. I hope mine won't fall off for a while, though, because I like wearing it!

I still have one gift to come and I'm thinking about extending my subscription by a few months. Not Another Bill isn't cheap (prices start at £60 for a three-month sub), but the gifts are immaculately curated and really good quality and, as I said before, I've loved every one. 

Compared to a beauty box subscription, say, which will set you back £12 each month and will likely be filled with samples you either don't like or won't use, Not Another Bill is much better value. It's also a great way to discover new designers. The presents you receive will often be limited-edition collaborations between the designer and Not Another Bill and if you like what you see, there are plenty of other products to explore.

If you've heard about Not Another Bill before and weren't sure whether or not to take the plunge, I'd highly recommend it, both as a gift and as a 'gift to self'.

Bex's Guide to NYC: Top 10 New York Espresso Bars

It’s been almost nine months since my last trip to New York, but I’ll be back again in just over three weeks. I’ve been going through my New York Moleskine City Guide, updating it with a few new places to try, but as it’s been a while since I’ve rounded up some of my New York favourites, I thought I’d put together a few best-of posts.

I'm sticking to the essentials: today, I’ve picked my top ten places to get a double skinny macchiato; next week, I’ll highlight my top ten burgers; and finally, I’ll list my top ten cocktail bars. When I’ve finished, I’ll put together a Google Map of the whole shebang. So, without further ado, here are my top ten independent espresso bars in NYC; where there are multiple branches, I’ve listed my favourite.

Bluebird (East Village). A gorgeous place to sip a very good macchiato, especially on a sunny weekend morning. 72 East 1^st Street @ 1^st Ave. Mini-review.

La Colombe Torrefaction (NoHo). Great coffee served in beautiful cups. This is usually where I come to buy beans to take home. 270 Lafayette Street @ Prince. Mini-review. Website.

Ground Support (SoHo). In the summer, you can take your expertly made coffee into the sun-filled courtyard, but it’s just as good  perching at one of the long, wooden tables indoors. 399 West Broadway @ Spring. My last visit. Website.

Everyman Espresso (East Village). Sometimes I don’t feel hip enough to drink my macchiato here, but there’s a cool artsy vibe (courtesy of the adjacent theatre) and the coffee is excellent. 136 East 13^th Street bet. 3^rd & 4^th Ave. Mini-review. Website.

Cafe Grumpy (Chelsea). They wouldn’t serve me an espresso to go, but that’s only because they know their stuff. Besides, when an espresso is this rich and chocolatey, it needs to be savoured, not gulped on the go. 224 West 20^th Street @ 7^th Ave. Website.

Joe (West Village). This was the first proper cool indie espresso bar I discovered in NYC, some six years ago and I’ve been back many times since then. They have a bunch of locations now, but the Waverly Place branch is great for people-watching. 141 Waverly Place @ Gay. Mini-reviews here and here. Website.

Think Coffee (NoHo). Great coffee — they even offer triple shots — and a nice selection of bagels and other light bites. This branch is a little studenty, but handy after a busy afternoon of shopping in SoHo. 248 Mercer Street bet. 3^rd & 4^th St. Mini-review. Website.

Birch Coffee (Flatiron). Good coffee, a tempting food menu and trivia questions at the bar. What more could a girl want? 5 East 27^th Street bet. 5^th & 6^th Ave. Review. Website.

Bowery Coffee (NoLIta). A recent discovery. An industrial-chic espresso bar housed in a 100-year-old building on Houston Street. The double macchiato is a little too milky for me, but the coffee tastes great. 89 East Houston Street @ Bowery. Review.

Jack’s Stir Brew (West Village). The first place I found in New York that serves great coffee — almost a decade ago. Go for the stir-brew coffee, though, not a macchiato; there are better places for the latter. Oh, and say hi to Jack if he's there, and not on stage somewhere. 138 West 10^th Street bet. Greenwich Ave. & Waverly Pl. Mini-reviews here, here and here. Website.

My first visit to Jack's Stir Brew, December 2003.

These places don’t make my top ten, but it can be tough to find good coffee in Midtown, so if you’re in a bind, try:

• Blue Bottle Coffee. 1 Rockefeller Plaza nr 49th St. Tucked in the bowels of the Rockefeller Center, the macchiato here is really good, although as it's a located in a major transport hub, you probably won't want to hang out for long. Website.
• Zibetto. 1385 6^th Avenue @ 56^th St. A tiny sliver of an espresso bar. Just enough room to grab your macchiato and a pastry. The coffee is fine — better than most of the Midtown offerings, for sure. Website.

Part 2: Top 10 New York burgers
Part 3: Top 10 New York cocktails
Part 4: Top 10 New York experiences

Saturday Grazing and Stationery Shopping

Today was filled with many of my favourite things. This morning saw the second meeting of the South London Doughnut Running Club (SoLoDo RC, if you will). I've been doing a six-mile circuit of the Thames pretty much every Saturday morning since I moved SOTR, but when some of my friends heard that the reward for my virtue was a doughnut at St John Bakery on Druid Street at the end of the course, they wanted in.

Chocolate custard doughnuts at St John Bakery.

I went for a chocolate custard doughnut and it was pretty well-constructed, which meant that most of the custard ended up in my mouth instead of on the floor. Afterwards, we grabbed a coffee from Monmouth, and then went to sit on the Ropewalk. Most of my friends had Reubens and root beer from Monty's Deli, which they proclaimed to be the best Reuben they had ever eaten — and this group included North Americans. 

I only had £2.50 left and wasn't that hungry, which ruled out a lot of the food options, so I headed to Hansen & Lydersen, where some very good-looking open smoked salmon sandwiches were being lined up. "But I spent all my money on doughnuts," I said sadly when I found out they cost £3 each, to the amusement of the friendly stallholders and the other customers. They let me have a "small" one for my £2.50, and it was a good 'un.

Smoked salmon snack.

I also spotted a juice stall with the most puntastic names ever: The Fennel Countdown had the best name, while My Funny Melontine sounded the tastiest. Another day...

In the afternoon, I needed to pick up a few office supplies, which turned into a not-that-mini stationery haul. I made the mistake of going into the London Graphic Centre, and spent 20 minutes deliberating between the Starlet neon pink notebook with a mini-dot grid on the paper, from a brand called Nuuna, and a Paperways A5 notepad with a turquoise grid print. In the end end, I went for the Nuuna notebook, and I love its flexible, glossy pink cover. I also picked up a few coloured pens and a hot pink, magnetic, retractible paper cutter.

Heal's was having a bit of a refurb, but I did spot a collection of gorgeous handle-less mugs with letters of the alphabet — the typography was drawn by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen. I don't need any more mugs, but I thought it would make a great pen holder.

I also popped into Habitat with the explicit purpose of buying a bin for my bathroom. Naturally, I also came out with a bright turquoise candle and a blue clock for my kitchen. It isn't my fault my oven display shows the temperature not the time whenever it's turned on.

A Whistle-Stop Tour of Helsinki's Design District

When it comes to finding interesting places in new cities, I have a few strategies. The first is to identify online a few independent espresso bars and, if time, boutiques and secret-speakeasy-style cocktail bars. This means that I can wander with a purpose, and usually, I will find other cool venues in the same area. 

On business trips, when I know I won't have much time for exploring, I prioritise the coffee. Luckily, in Helsinki, a lot of the good places to grab a macchiato happen to be in the same area — the design district.

Pino, a fab Helsinki stationery shop.

So, armed with the addresses of the Kaffa Roastery and a stationery shop I'd found online called Pino, I headed off to the design district, which is in the south-west corner of the city centre. Pino sells beautiful stationery, as well as a carefully curated collection of stylish and often useful objects for the home. I told the sales assistant she needed to open a branch in London. I then had to try very hard not to buy all the things. I think I did quite well to only pick up a couple of notebooks (the pink ones in the haul photo below), some decorative tape and a geometric grey dish.

Stylish smoke alarms at the Design Forum.

I had heard about a Font Walk you could do in Helsinki and asked where I could pick up a map, but the Pino assistant pointed me instead in the direction of the Design Forum. They didn't have the Font Walk map, but they did give me a copy of a map of the design district. I didn't have time to do a very in-depth tour, so I focused on the streets with the biggest number of interesting shops, cafés and galleries. 

But first, I had a look around the Design Forum. Again, I was taken aback by the huge number of beautiful objects. My favourite was probably the most stylish smoke alarms I've ever seen. I wish I'd bought one, rather than restricting myself to a couple of vintage postcards.

The kitchen section at Peroba.

Next on my list was Peroba, a lifestyle boutique, with a jealousy-inspiring kitchenware section. The thing about all of these Helsinki stores is that they are relatively small, but every item has been carefully selected for its beauty and/or usefulness.

Lunch at Sis.

I had lunch at a café-deli called Sis. They have several branches in Helsinki, and I can only describe it as a much more minimalist version of Dean & Deluca. It's certainly the most elegant place I've ever sat to eat a sandwich (buffalo mozzarella, tomato and home-made pesto) and a blueberry juice! To be honest, though, it would be hard not to find somewhere nice for lunch or dinner in the design district.

WTF, Helsinki?

My final stop was a shop called Moko Market, which is a sort of upscale version of the home section of Anthropologie, but with a more carefully curated selection of products, and an integrated café-deli section (it also has an entrance into Kaffa, which is handy).

Moko Market. I could have spent the afternoon here!

I lusted over a beautiful turquoise desk and some very stylish outdoor furniture, but I wasn't sure BA would agree with me about appropriate quantities of checked baggage.

In the circumstances, I thought I was quite modest with my shopping: a few bits from Pino, some coffee  and single-origin chocolate from Kaffa, and a couple of postcards. When I'm rich and looking to kit out my home, I'll definitely come back to Helsinki. With a much bigger suitcase.

Helsinki design haul.

Yellowcumpinky-Blue

Thanks to my grandfather, I believed that yellowcumpinky-blue was a colour until about 1991. So, I was excited when, on a visit to the treasure trove that is the stationery basement at Gibert Jeune in 1990, I picked up a highlighter that had yellow, pink and blue nibs so you could vary your highlighting colour depending on your mood. (Naturally, aged six, I had plenty of important documents and papers to highlight). If you took off all three lids at once, you could theoretically highlight in the mythical colour known as yellowcumpinky-blue. 

Of course, anyone who has ever painted will know, the closest real colour to yellowcumpinky-blue would probably be dishwater grey or muddy brown. And here was the hard lesson I learned: just because three colours are pretty by themselves, it doesn't mean that mixing them will make something pretty. 

I started thinking about this past disappointment because of this blog post I read recently, which reads something like, "there's probably no magenta. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The blogger explains, "The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence." Excluding yellowcumpinky-blue, the obvious answer, she writes, is magenta (a rose by any other name would look as pink). Maybe I just spent too much time with my Crayola set but I was wondering where Burnt Sienna, Chartreuse and Turquoise were. Of course, sienna, burnt or otherwise, isn't a neatly defined part of the spectrum of visible light (although I learned from the Crayola website that Burnt Sienna is one of America's top 50 crayons, its "celebrity" is Billy Crystal and its "music" is Brown Eyed Girl) and so it doesn't count a proper, fully fledged colour.

The English language has very many words for colours — which is probably why Pantone and Dulux are so successful — far more than most other languages. But even when you look at the basic words for colour in a given language, there isn't any kind of cross-linguistic uniformity. English has a relatively high number of colour words but from the basic colour terms, we have blue, while Russian has dark blue and light blue, but not just plain blue. Some languages only have four basic colour terms, some have only two (the equivalent of "black" and "white" but "black" often means "things that are dark" or even "things of a certain texture").

If any academic work pushed me in the direction of linguistic studies, it was Berlin and Kay's 1969 Basic Color Terms, in which the researchers report a hierarchy of colours that allows you to predict which colours might be found in a language. Does our language determine how we perceive colour? Or does how we perceive colour determine our language? 

They found that the order was thus: two colour terms = black/dark and white/light; three colour terms = red; four colour terms = yellow or green; five colour terms = yellow and green; and then come blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey, in that order. This hierarchy is the reason I can never remember the order of snooker balls.

Berlin and Kay worked out these "basic" colours by having native speakers of different languages pick from a selection of coloured chips the chip that was, say, the reddest red (although no colour terms were actually used). Although speakers of a language might know different numbers of words for types of red (or be able to distinguish different numbers of separate colours within a class of reds), they generally tend to agree on the number of "focal" or basic colours. Mum and I still can't agree whether the bracelet I sometimes wear is green or yellow but most English speakers would probably agree that while this is green, this is yellow.

I found this topic fascinating and tried to weave it in to several essay questions in my final year exams, most notably my History of the Italian Language paper. I spent over a third of my essay on the evolution of the Italian dialects talking about how bizarre it was that some Italian dialects preserve an almost Latin-like system of basic colour terms (with one word for blue and for green) while in others, the word for blue does not exist, even though there was a perfectly decent word for blue in Latin. This meant that these dialects had carelessly manage to lose a basic colour term over time and this retrograde evolution was certainly not expected. (The 1980 study about this was published by Kristol in Language: Color Systems in Southern Italy: A Case of Regression.)

Speakers of those dialects of Italian would still be able to talk about the sky, of course, and about other blue things by using noun-based compounds: sky-coloured eyes, eyes like the sea, a chocolate-coloured jacket, etc. To some extent, we do the same in English, but we can at least say "sky blue" rather than "sky coloured"; alas, the latter isn't very satisfying when given in answer to the question, "What colour is the sky?" Conversely, answering "grass green" to the question, "What colour was the traffic light?" might seem to flout Grice's Conversational Maxim of Quantity: it doesn't matter how green or what kind of green the light was, only that it was green, most of the time.

This post has been a surprisingly tangential trip down memory lane and while I don't really care whether or not magenta is a "real" colour, I was interested to read Henrik Zollinger's 1984 paper in which he argues that turquoise may eventually evolve into a basic colour term; the references list a whole range of other turquoise-themed research. As turquoise is by far my favourite colour, I like this idea better than the Great Magenta Hoax.

New York Countdown

After months of deprivation, I am finally returning to my first love, the Big Apple. My use of love tends to be restricted to things that really merit this weighty word: basically to Google and to New York City (and around the time of my first visit to New York (circa 1995) I was still into Yahoo (shh, don't tell anyone!)). Yes, I really do love New York more than any other place in the world and I am sure that my 12th (ish) visit will be as memorable as every other trip.

So, what's so great about New York? Well, of course there's the shopping and the bagels and the restaurants and the fact that the city is so diverse (take 5th Avenue, for example, that at its northern extreme, is in the heart of Harlem, then runs down Museum Mile (the Met, the Gug, etc.) bordering Central Park, through the flashy department stores and shops in Midtown (Saks, Abercrombie, big Barnes and Noble), past the New York Public Library and the Empire State Building, right down to Washington Square Park (NYU central), where it ends by a marble arch in midst of lovely Greenwich Village with its brownstone buildings and cobbled streets). 

Maybe it's the Village itself that wins me over with its independent bookstores (Three Lives and Co. being by far the best for the selection and service) and coffee houses (Jack's Stir Brew, just down the street from Three Lives and Co. and run by a part-time Broadway actor (the titular Jack) is easily my favourite) and pleasant side streets in which one can happily spend hours wandering and wondering.

But then, don't most cities have these things? There seems to be something magical about New York — its very New Yorkiness (conceptually speaking, there no necessary and sufficient conditions, just the very essence of the place) — that wins me over every time. Even the taxi ride into the city from Newark can't detract from the frisson of excitement I feel at the first stolen glimpse of that famous skyline: the Empire State, tallest once again, and, of course, my favourite building: the Chrysler.

On the other hand, maybe I am linking the memories I have with experiences I have had in New York while there with friends and family. My family holidays are always fun and usually result in lots of great meals out and family banter. S and I got together in New York almost four years ago now, in a little Starbucks near the Empire State. In a very circular fashion, it was also the last holiday we took together (along with my family) before we broke up. 

Then there was the last trip, the week before my birthday last November. This was a spontaneous visit: my parents were going anyway (Dad on business, Mum for the ride) and once I had got a job, Dad suggested I checked out BA for flights and I ended up going too for three short but full days.

The acquisition of my Moleskine New York City Guide has made planning trips a lot easier and I have already filled in lots of restaurants, shops, coffee houses, bars, museums and assorted other places, all organised by location with my colour-coded system. A few planned activities this trip are:

1. Apple Store, Soho to acquire iPod Nano for the gym (black, naturellement).

2. Three Lives and Co. for the purchasing of new fiction, to be digested at Jack's with coffee.

3. Kate's Paperie to stock up on gorgeous paper for all of my belles lettres (oh for the days of epistolary communication à la Dangerous Liaisons...).

4. Walk over Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan, hopefully early enough for sunrise.

5. Grand Central at 5 p.m. on Friday to lose self amidst the commuters.

6. Dean & Deluca at Rockefeller Plaza for passable cappuccino and delicious breakfast while watching Good Morning America being filmed next door at NBC studios or at the Soho branch for the most amazing deli and cake selection (it even makes me want to cook).

7. The American Museum of Natural History - for the amazing space show.

8. Breakfast at Balthazar in Soho (must remember to book on behalf of la famille).

That's plenty to be going on with - I'm sure I won't manage the full list and that I will do plenty of things not on the list. Our hotel — the Shoreham on W.55th between 5th and 6th Avenues — sounds very cool (minimalist chic, awesome bar, 24-hour cappuccini, great location) and my brother and I are sharing a suite. Now I just make sure I'm SFU on Thursday morning.

Moleskine NYC

As a massive fan of stationery in general and Moleskine in particular, you can imagine my delight when I discovered last autumn that the company had just brought out a range of Moleskine City Notebook — the guidebooks you write yourself. 

These are absolutely perfect for someone like me who loves to write travel diaries and to make notes of shops, restaurants and places to be revisited and who ends up buying a new guidebook every time she goes back to a city. The City Notebooks all have maps, notebook pages, removable sheets, tabbed pages and all sorts of other wonders. According to the Moleskine website, they are:

A special guidebook, ideal for those who travel, whether to see the sights or for work, as a way of a organising your trip and to preserve it for your memory and your records. Perfect for those who live there, as a way of organizing the things they know and need about the city they live in. Each notebook has an elastic closure, 228 pages, with up to 44 pages in colours and have a sewn binding. There is an inside accordion pocket and three ribbon placemarkers, each in a different colour.

You can, for example, use the included tracing paper to mark out cool walking routes you have taken. You can choose which categories to include in the tabbed sections (shopping, bars, museums, parks, etc.). And most importantly, you can add to it each time you go back without having to start a completely new holiday diary. This is something you can keep in your bag at all times and make a note of anything worth going back to.

Unfortunately, last year they only had European city ones and although I do like Paris a lot, I don't go there very often anymore. Deprived of the New York Notebook, I bought Paris anyway and of course, have not yet bothered to fill it in. However, yesterday, in an event worthy of being entered into my Google Cal, the Moleskine New York was released; admittedly, not to any of the bookshops out here in the Sticks but I intend to have a look the slightly more metropolitan Oxford at the weekend and if I still have no luck, I shall either go for Amazon or a London trip.

Now all Moleskine needs is to have electronic notebooks (oh, the irony!) and then they can have some nice Web 2.0 tagging and categorisation... Maybe next year, eh?