London Love

Here are two little things which you might not know about me.

1:: I like to be creative and make things.

2:: I have a tendency to start one thing then start something else and not get the first thing done because I've got distracted. Some days I feel like I leave unfinished business in my wake, a stream of things behind me waiting to reach completion.

Some time ago, about a year ago in fact, I saw this idea of making a string of paper hearts. Beautifully simple & aesthetically pleasing.

Determined to recreate this idea, I went into a charity shop in search of a map that I could cut up and make into hearts. I asked the kind lady whether they had any in stock and she said, 'No'. Then remembered with slight embarrassment that she had thrown a very old copy of a London A-Z away just a few minutes before I arrived. Sheepishly, the kind lady removed the said map from the bin and said, 'it's yours if you want it.' It was perfect. As it had been classified as rubbish, I was offered the map free of charge, but I felt that would be a little bit like stealing from charity, so I paid the princely sum of 20p and walked away with a big smile on my face.

Fast forward 365 days, give or take, and I find myself at home with an unexpected day to myself, due to snow. Ah the endless possibilities of things to do! I attempted making a cushion which went slightly wrong. Not horrendously so, but not quite how I envisaged it. Being the slightly impatient person that I am, I didn't undo all the stitching and start over, I moved along to the next thing that needed to be done, leaving the poor cushion in my wake.

Fifteen minutes later, I had a string of stitched paper hearts hanging on my wall.

365 days ago, I had not met a man who goes by the name of John King, but I had found a little treasure of a map. A London A-Z, showing me roads and parks and churches in black&white print, of a city I hardly knew.

Little did I know that 365 days after I started cutting hearts out from this map, I would have been to London more times in the space of 7 months than I had over the course of my lifetime, all because I came to love John King, a boy from London, living in Bristol, who likes to go back to his home city.