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This is a random bush on campus, and I’m afraid I have no idea what it is. Although this looks rather like a hydrangea, this bloom is much smaller, about eight cm across, and the bush is much bigger and bushier, with fewer blooms on it than a hydrangea would have.

I love white flowers, and loose and soft flowers, like these ones. I like things that look fairly natural and unforced, unmanipulated. Of course, having no idea what this is, it could well be some weird artificial hybrid never seen in nature, but I like it any way.

This is a little pewter object that we found in a flea market in Glasgow. We don’t know what it is, although the shape seems somewhat religious to me (although the shell is not, I suppose). It’s beautifully made, and doesn’t seem to have been used, but then, pewter never really looks used.

It’s a lovely, odd, unintelligible thing.

This is Tulketh Mill, just up the road from us, and clearly the most important building in the neighbourhood. It was a cotton mill, the largest and most modern in Preston when it opened in 1905, but it didn’t last long as such. THe cotton industry went into decline after world war one, and by the 1960s the mill had shut down. It was converted into a distribution centre for Littlewoods, a clothing catalogue company, and then in 2005 was turned into a call centre for a mobile phone company, which is what it still is. They’ve been building a kind of strip mall along the Blackpool road frontage which will house a couple of restaurants and a Tesco’s I believe.

The Tesco’s is sneaky. When we first moved here there had just been a fight to prevent a Tesco’s opening up across the road from the mill, which had been won by the anti-Tesco’s campaigners, led chiefly by the Booth’s supermarket a few blocks away. Since then, the Booths has become less a supermarket than a convenience store, doubling the amount of booze it stocks and severely limiting the amount of fresh and raw food. Personally, I’m hoping for the Tesco’s to bring some competition back.

Prescription sunglasses are one of the things I really can’t do without. I hate bright light, and even in England the sun is too much for me. I can’t function very well without glasses of some kind, so prescription sunglasses it is.

These are new, I left my old ones in restaurant in Liverpool a few months back, and couldn’t get them back. They were old, though, and the script gave me a headache, so new ones it is. These are pretty funky – they’re purple on the inside of the frame, and unfortunately, have a bit of bling on the arms, but less than most frames these days. Why does everyone assume that all women want to wear rhinestones on their glasses, anyway?

The royal crescent. With seagull. The Georgians loved symmetry, and everything had to be symmetrical. I feel rather subversive taking this sweep of the crescent from one side, with the grass looking a bit lopsided, as though the seagull might slide down to the right.

This is a sculpture of some Roman emperor on the rebuilt walls of the old baths in Bath. It was sculpted by an Englishman in the late nineteenth century, almost certainly using a local model, because that is an English profile if ever I saw one.

We grew up reading Tove Jansson, who my mother absolutely loved. It was years and years before I ever met anyone who had ever heard of the Moomins, but recently, they seem to have undergone something of a retro-revival. This is a coaster from a funky scandinavian shop in Bath (I also bought a moose for my key chain), and one of my favourite drawings from the books.

Bath is obsessed with Romans. It was once a Roman town, and when the fashionistas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rediscovered it, they brought with them their obsession with classical culture and architecture. So Bath is a classical Roman town, rebuilt by English people out of local limestone. There’s a lot of angular pediments and sculpture, like this one, slowly crumbling away, because limestone is not marble.

We have a handkerchief-sized garden, and it doesn’t get a lot of sun. It’s also very windy.

So, Martin uses the kitchen windowsill as a kind of greenhouse, and then moves everything outside to sit in the sun when we get it. So this is a patch of garden with all the currently-growing juvenile plants, and the ancient watering can that Martin collects rainwater in.

Among the seedlings here is catnip. I have my doubts about its long-term survival, personally, but Martin doesn’t seem worried that he’ll look outisde one day to discover Oliver has torn up everything to get at the ‘nip.