Happy Christmas

The skies have been blue over Tillypronie, and a pale frost hard on the ground. Today there is the lightest dusting of snow, like icing sugar, but the dark earth is still visible below. Yesterday I walked down to the river, which runs deep and swift, filled with last week's torrents of rain; and then to the frozen loch, where last summer's lilies lie beneath the ice, their leaves motionless, as if held in time like Sleeping Beauty in a glass casket; and in the garden the berries are bright as a fairy tale...
Up here in the hills, it is good to feel one's small place in a vast landscape; to feel a true sense of perspective, where mountains are so much greater than ourselves.

A Christmas nativity at Migvie

There's nothing like a carol concert to make you feel Christmas-y, and yesterday was one of the best; the children from Logie Coldstone school came up the icy path to Migvie church to sing and dance and make merry. It's six months since we got married there, when the long summer days made December nights seem very distant; and the weeks have sped along too quickly since then, turning all at once into dark midwinter. But inside the church, there was much good cheer, with a warm message from the minister who married us (lovely Mr Ribbons), followed by mince pies, Scottish shortbread, and mulled winter Pimms for the grownups.
I'm now contemplating the return to London, and the rush to finish the March issue before Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, here's a link to the online piece I wrote for Bazaar about the Chanel show in Edinburgh earlier this month.

The January issue of Harper's Bazaar...

... is out tomorrow. It feels scary, as well as exciting, like having the first draft of a new book published... which I hope you might find intriguing, as an insight into developing ideas. Regular readers of this blog may very well recognize themes and motifs from previous preoccupations and pieces of work (Chanel, Vreeland, Dior, et al; the landscape of art and fashion, and an exploration of how understanding the past is a way to move forwards). Anyway, here's a peek from behind the scenes of the cover shoot. And there's lots more inside the magazine, including a Titian detective story by Hannah Rothschild, and a wonderful memoir by Tanya Gold. Please do let me know what you think...