ABOUT TIME! I know.

A new short shift for my TVR and a rare birthday in Oxford (not at RBG Kew)Hi everyone,I meant to post this ages ago!You know me...lol...life gets in the way.As a matter of fact, so did a certain orange maniac.Can you believe it? On the one day I go into London and visit Kew...the one day which has happened every year for the past 15 years, the orange one comes to town.Nevermind the though of tainting my special day, the traffic getting into and out of London was enough for me to back out of my tradition.So we went into Oxford instead.The first place we stopped in was my most favourite store Scriptum.Scriptum is so amazingly beautiful. It's like a little jewel box of papers, inks, pens, beautiful journals, vintage books and every other kind of old world library fancy your little heart desires.After having spent a very long time there, we headed off to lunch at our friend Will's restaurant The Vaults Garden Cafe . This is an amazing place in the old vaults under St Mary's church. Will makes the most delicious organic food.After lunch and a lovely chat with Will, we went to the science museum to see the ancientThen off to the Ashmolean Museum of art and archeology in a huge building with five floors to explore. You could easily spend days and days there and still not discover everything there is to see.Actually, the reason I wanted to come here today is because on the third floor the Ashmolean has special exhibits which they change every few months. Right now they have a large and beautiful exhibit called America's Cool Modernism, and it features early 20th-century modernists. There was a no photo policy :( but there is a small link here with a little video from the Ashmolean site.I couldn't help it. I bought the book with all the paintings on exhibit. It's just so inspirational.In other news, I'm back in my TVR.Man, I love this car!However, it does have its challenges.One was the old and clumsy shift which took all my strength to push it down and wrench it into reverse.So this spring I bought a bespoke short shift and Robert and I installed it.Out with the old!and in with the new.That's better. Now it feels like a racing car.I took it for a test drive and I love it to pieces. So much easier to shift.(I must admit to feeling a bit silly when I put it into first instead of third because of the very short distance between them and tried to drive off in a sexy yeah-I'm-all-that-in-my-hot-car sort of way in front of the local village gas station crew, and the car goes "splutter, clunk, clunk", you tend to find first gear really quickly after that! LOLAnd then Robbie did the sweetest thing.I took off the bespoke silver top of my gear shift because it had the previous owner's initials on it and was thinking of what I wanted to replace it with, when R made me a disk made from a real Williams Formula 1 car Inconel exhaust, which has actually been in an F1 race and that's why it changed to all those rainbow colours.Then he stamped out a beautiful scrolled V freehand with a pin punch.Lucky girl.That's me.