Like a Mirage

There are five weeks to go before we vacate our West London flat.

There are five weeks to go before we leave this place and already it feels as though being here is hardly real. I've been taking photographs of all my favourite places, trying to somehow grab hold of it before I'm back at the other end of the earth and can't just pop down to Portobello Road for the morning.



I know I've mentioned this place a few times before but I love it. It's the closest market to our place and the one I've spent the most time at, wandering through the great vintage clothing section, eating at the Grain Bakery vegetarian place, visiting my favourite shops.




The Spice Shop is wonderful. It's this tiny closet-sized shop packed with little bags of spices and its smell is deep and rich and even though it is the smell of a million curries mixed together, the smell is not awful, it is like a dark corner of a forest.

My other favourite shops are down the road from the Spice Shop - Books for Cooks and the Travel Bookshop. Books for Cooks is entirely a shop for cook books and out the back they test recipes. There's a cafe where you can eat their latest testings. I had tea there with mum when she was visiting. The Travel Bookshop is the bookshop that Hugh Grant's shop in the film 'Notting Hill' was modelled on. It's a great bookshop, with creaky wooden floors and big high shelves of books and a very good section of London books.

Today I bought a 60s tin from an antique shop and wandered home to show it off to Lauchlin.

It might have been the last time I'll see Portobello Road for a very long time.