Part of the reason I took a slightly bigger than cabin-approved suitcase to Japan was so that I could indulge in a little retail therapy if the mood took me. I was particularly looking forward to a) the stationery and b) the weird and wonderful 'only in Japan' type items. Here are a few of my favourite places.

For my birthday last year, a group of my friends bought me a six-month subscription to Not Another Bill and I couldn't have been happier. I had come across the company a number of times before, including at DesignJunction, and loved the concept but it had always felt that bit too indulgent to treat myself to a subscription so I was delighted that my friends decided to treat me instead.


The idea is simple: you (or your friends/family/loved ones) select at least three categories from a list that includes jewellery, homewares and crafts, and you will receive a surprise present in the post once per month. The gifts are always immaculately packaged, and include a personalised message that tells you a bit more about your present and the brand; sometimes you even get a discount to use on other products from the company. You can also provide details about your working schedule so they know when to dispatch the package to minimise the pain of trips to the post office.

So far, I've received five of my six gifts and I've really liked them all. They are all things I would have chosen for myself and, in fact, I did almost buy one of them — the Ham screen prints — at DesignJunction. Based on the presents I've been sent so far, it seems that my friends selected stationery, jewellery and art as my categories, which is, of course, what I would have chosen for myself.

My first gift was the Hay plissé accordion folder from one of my favourite Scandi brands. It was in a cute mint green colour and perfect for someone who likes Scandi style and organisation as much as I do!



Gift number two was a gold wishbone ring from Astrid & Miyu (astrid in Swedish and miyu in Japanese both mean 'beautiful'). I recently rediscovered a wishbone ring that my grandparents gave me when I was ten, but sadly lost it when I went bouldering, so I was really pleased to get a replacement. The ring is adjustable and super-stylish.



The third gift was the screen prints from Ham that I mentioned above. I love bunnies and I love the playful, minimalist style of these prints, so I framed two of the three in the set and hung them in the hallway of my flat.



Sticking with the arty theme, my fourth present was a small, quirkily shaped mirror from Haidée Drew. I've been wanting a small mirror for my hallway for those last-minute checks before leaving the house, and this fitted perfectly next to my blackboard. Unfortunately, it arrived a few days too late for the selfie competition my company was running!


My fifth and penultimate gift was another piece of jewellery, this time a cute bracelet called 'Nine Lives' from designer Susannah Fairley. The bracelet has nine tiny gold hearts —if you like, you can make a wish against each one, and when the bracelet falls off they will come true. I hope mine won't fall off for a while, though, because I like wearing it!




I still have one gift to come and I'm thinking about extending my subscription by a few months. Not Another Bill isn't cheap (prices start at £60 for a three-month sub), but the gifts are immaculately curated and really good quality and, as I said before, I've loved every one. Compared to a beauty box subscription, say, which will set you back £12 each month and will likely be filled with samples you either don't like or won't use, Not Another Bill is much better value. It's also a great way to discover new designers. The presents you receive will often be limited-edition collaborations between the designer and Not Another Bill and if you like what you see, there are plenty of other products to explore.

If you've heard about Not Another Bill before and weren't sure whether or not to take the plunge, I'd highly recommend it, both as a gift and as a 'gift to self'.

Last week, I revealed my Christmas gift picks for girls and for guys. Today it's time for my suggestions for stocking fillers and those often tricky Secret Santa presents. The price limit for all of these items is £15, but a few are under £10, in case your budget is a little tighter.

Stationery
1. Map and planner notebooks from Present & Correct. £7.50 each. I am a huge stationery geek, and thought that this pair of notebooks was really cool. One lets you plan out your week, simply and stylishly, while the other is divided into a grid section, where you can sketch out a map, and a section to mark in your itinerary. Yes, you could just use your Google Maps app, but there is something visually and nostalgically appealing about this low-tech option.


2. Pair of stripy notebooks from Quill London. £8.50. Quill London has great stationery and this pair of notebooks — one pale green, one pastel pink, both with metallic gold stripes on the cover — will look good on any desk or in any handbag.

3. Know-it-all pencils from Present & Correct. £11.75. I really liked this bright pink pencil set from Austique, but they were over my budget, so instead I'm recommending Present & Correct's know-it-all pencils, each of which highlights a useful fact. Perfect for the person with an answer for everything — or for the pub-quiz goer.

Food & drink
4. Custom-designed liqueurs from Alchemist Dreams. From £15. Alchemist Dreams lets you create your own liquer by selecting a combination of fruit flavours, herbs and spices. If you're uncertain, you can either pick one of their house blends or write a description of the recipient in a box and the Alchemists will seek inspiration from your words. You can also customise the labels, so this is a great personalised gift. A 200 ml bottle of your custom liqueur is £15.


5. Two-bag subscription to Pact Coffee. £13.90. I've sounded the praises on this blog before about Pact, a coffee subscription service that sends you a custom-selected bag of really good quality coffee for £6.95. As the coffee will usually arrive the next day, it's pretty convenient, and although I have a lot of other places to buy good coffee beans nearby, Pact does offer a great service. They will grind the beans for you, if you don't have a grinder, and their packs fit through most letter boxes (sadly not mine).

6. Clever Coffee Dripper from Clinton Coffee Company. £14.50. If the coffee lover in your life wants to take the next step towards coffee geekery, but isn't quite ready for an Aeropress, the coffee dripper could be a good choice. It makes a really good cup of filter coffee in three minutes — just add a paper filter, your coffee and some just-off-the-boil water, which filters through perfectly thanks to the ridged surface of the dripper. It will make an ever better cup of coffee if you use coffee from Pact, rather than a pre-packaged bag from your supermarket.

7. Christmassy treats from Hope & Greenwood: North Pole Party caramel-filled chocolates (£4.99) and Christmas Sweets Shaker (£6.99)*. In my family, no Christmas stocking is complete without a sweet treat (or five), and Hope & Greenwood have a great seasonal offering this year. The chocolate caramels are shaped like snowmen and Father Christmases, and the sweets in the shaker add a touch of retro that will go down well with the whole family: flying saucers, sugar mice, candy canes...well, you get the idea.


Accessories
8. Geometric leather purse from Luna & Curious. £14. A sleek, 10-by-15-cm leather purse with an embossed, geometric design. It comes in a range of colours: turquoise is my favourite, but the navy is also nice.

9. Happy Socks from Selfridges. £8. I like the idea of having socks in a Christmas stocking, and Happy Socks does have some lovely designs. Two pairs of socks in cute navy-and-red designs: one pair with big dots, the other with a contrasting toe and heel.

10. Arne Jabcobsen letter cup from Heal's. £13. I picked up one of these handle-less cups with the iconic, capital-letter design a few months ago, and use it to keep the pens on my stationery shelf in order. You could use it as a mug too, of course, as long as you weren't drinking anything too hot. You could also buy a few and spell out a word or a set of initials.


* I was sent these Hope & Greenwood products to try. The opinions stated here are, as always, honest and my own.

My first visit to Jack's Stir Brew, December 2003.

• Blue Bottle Coffee. 1 Rockefeller Plaza nr 49th St. Tucked in the bowels of the Rockefeller Center, the macchiato here is really good, although as it's a located in a major transport hub, you probably won't want to hang out for long. Website. Twitter.
• Tisserie. 870 7th Avenue bet. 55^th & 56^th St. I wouldn't rush out of my way to get coffee here (although they do use Stumptown coffee), but as it was just opposite my hotel on my last trip, it came in pretty handy when I needed a caffeine top-up. They also do great pastries. Mini-review. Website. Twitter. 
• Zibetto. 1385 6^th Avenue @ 56^th St. A tiny sliver of an espresso bar. Just enough room to grab your macchiato and a pastry. The coffee is fine — better than most of the Midtown offerings, for sure. Website.

Today was filled with many of my favourite things. This morning saw the second meeting of the South London Doughnut Running Club (SoLoDo RC, if you will). I've been doing a six-mile circuit of the Thames pretty much every Saturday morning since I moved SOTR, but when some of my friends heard that the reward for my virtue was a doughnut at St John Bakery on Druid Street at the end of the course, they wanted in.

Chocolate custard doughnuts at St John Bakery.

I went for a chocolate custard doughnut and it was pretty well-constructed, which meant that most of the custard ended up in my mouth instead of on the floor. Afterwards, we grabbed a coffee from Monmouth, and then went to sit on the Ropewalk. Most of my friends had Reubens and root beer from Monty's Deli, which they proclaimed to be the best Reuben they had ever eaten — and this group included North Americans. I only had £2.50 left and wasn't that hungry, which ruled out a lot of the food options, so I headed to Hansen & Lydersen, where some very good-looking open smoked salmon sandwiches were being lined up. "But I spent all my money on doughnuts," I said sadly when I found out they cost £3 each, to the amusement of the friendly stallholders and the other customers. They let me have a "small" one for my £2.50, and it was a good 'un.

Smoked salmon snack.

I also spotted a juice stall with the most puntastic names ever: The Fennel Countdown had the best name, while My Funny Melontine sounded the tastiest. Another day...



In the afternoon, I needed to pick up a few office supplies, which turned into a not-that-mini stationery haul. I made the mistake of going into the London Graphic Centre, and spent 20 minutes deliberating between the Starlet neon pink notebook with a mini-dot grid on the paper, from a brand called Nuuna, and a Paperways A5 notepad with a turquoise grid print. In the end end, I went for the Nuuna notebook, and I love its flexible, glossy pink cover. I also picked up a few coloured pens and a hot pink, magnetic, retractible paper cutter.



Heal's was having a bit of a refurb, but I did spot a collection of gorgeous handle-less mugs with letters of the alphabet — the typography was drawn by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen. I don't need any more mugs, but I thought it would make a great pen holder.



I also popped into Habitat with the explicit purpose of buying a bin for my bathroom. Naturally, I also came out with a bright turquoise candle and a blue clock for my kitchen. It isn't my fault my oven display shows the temperature not the time whenever it's turned on.

When it comes to finding interesting places in new cities, I have a few strategies. The first is to identify online a few independent espresso bars and, if time, boutiques and secret-speakeasy-style cocktail bars. This means that I can wander with a purpose, and usually, I will find other cool venues in the same area.  On business trips, when I know I won't have much time for exploring, I prioritise the coffee. Luckily, in Helsinki, a lot of the good places to grab a macchiato happen to be in the same area — the design district.

Pino, a fab Helsinki stationery shop.

So, armed with the addresses of the Kaffa Roastery and a stationery shop I'd found online called Pino, I headed off to the design district, which is in the south-west corner of the city centre. Pino sells beautiful stationery, as well as a carefully curated collection of stylish and often useful objects for the home. I told the sales assistant she needed to open a branch in London. I then had to try very hard not to buy all the things. I think I did quite well to only pick up a couple of notebooks (the pink ones in the haul photo below), some decorative tape and a geometric grey dish.

Stylish smoke alarms at the Design Forum.

I had heard about a Font Walk you could do in Helsinki and asked where I could pick up a map, but the Pino assistant pointed me instead in the direction of the Design Forum. They didn't have the Font Walk map, but they did give me a copy of a map of the design district. I didn't have time to do a very in-depth tour, so I focused on the streets with the biggest number of interesting shops, cafés and galleries. But first, I had a look around the Design Forum. Again, I was taken aback by the huge number of beautiful objects. My favourite was probably the most stylish smoke alarms I've ever seen. I wish I'd bought one, rather than restricting myself to a couple of vintage postcards.

The kitchen section at Peroba.

Next on my list was Peroba, a lifestyle boutique, with a jealousy-inspiring kitchenware section. The thing about all of these Helsinki stores is that they are relatively small, but every item has been carefully selected for its beauty and/or usefulness.

Lunch at Sis.

I had lunch at a café-deli called Sis. They have several branches in Helsinki, and I can only describe it as a much more minimalist version of Dean & Deluca. It's certainly the most elegant place I've ever sat to eat a sandwich (buffalo mozzarella, tomato and home-made pesto) and a blueberry juice! To be honest, though, it would be hard not to find somewhere nice for lunch or dinner in the design district.

WTF, Helsinki?

My final stop was a shop called Moko Market, which is a sort of upscale version of the home section of Anthropologie, but with a more carefully curated selection of products, and an integrated café-deli section (it also has an entrance into Kaffa, which is handy).

Moko Market. I could have spent the afternoon here!

I lusted over a beautiful turquoise desk and some very stylish outdoor furniture, but I wasn't sure BA would agree with me about appropriate quantities of checked baggage.






In the circumstances, I thought I was quite modest with my shopping: a few bits from Pino, some coffee  and single-origin chocolate from Kaffa, and a couple of postcards. When I'm rich and looking to kit out my home, I'll definitely come back to Helsinki. With a much bigger suitcase.

Helsinki design haul.

Yes, I know, it's still only November but although I'm a bit of a Scrooge when it comes to Christmas, I do love to shop so I've put together a short series of posts with my ideas of gifts for girls, gifts for guys and stocking fillers/Secret Santa fodder. Here's part one, with my present ideas for the ladies in your life (part two is here and this is the third part):

Jewellery
1. Personalised initial necklace from Allumer at Wolf and Badger. £45. This is basically three different necklaces because you get a solid gold letter charm and two chains, one blue and one dark grey, which can be worn together or separately. There are plenty of other initial necklaces on Etsy, many of which are much cheaper. Or if you're in New York, check out Market NYC for many fab (and reasonably priced) jewellery options.

2. Silver bird jewellery stand from Oliver Bonas. £14. I really need to get a jewellery stand as I currently use a sculpture of a hand, which doesn't provide enough hanging room for my many necklaces. This one also comes in a gold colour, which is only £8.

Bags and accessories
3. Starry night scarf from French Connection. £35. Scarves have recently become one of my "things" so this list wouldn't be complete without at least one.This scarf has a fun pattern, which would work for Christmas parties as well as brisk winter mornings. I also like this spotty scarf, also from French Connection, and this colourful dove print scarf from Oliver Bonas.



4. Exclamation mark tote bag from Alphabet Bags. £12. This would have been even better if they made totes branded with my favourite punctuation mark—the em dash—but exclamation marks are still fun, as are the bags in the typographic range.

5. "Live Colorfully" [sic] iPad case from Kate Spade. $50 (probably about £35). Because (most) Apple products are just too monochrome these days... This colour-blocked iPad case from Smythson makes a stylish (and much pricier) alternative.

6. Colour-changing London skyline umbrella from Squid London. £25. What better present for the crappy English winter than a monochrome umbrella that magically becomes colourful when it gets wet? They also do a New York version. Heal's have a pretty, colourful brolly too.

7. Dazzle dot Stevie bag in heather grey from Kate Spade. $345. It is perhaps fortunate that this light grey felt bag, trimmed with leather and 14k gold, and punctuated with colourful buttons, is an online exclusive and therefore not available in the UK because it's so damn pretty. The charcoal grey version is more widely available but doesn't have the coloured buttons.


Stationery
8. Cadre floral notebook from Paul Smith. £11. I had thought of including one of the Moleskine gift sets in this list but as I mentioned before, they are overpriced. This flowery notebook in autumnal/wintery colours is a much better—and more stylish—option.

Beauty, etc.
9. Glossybox subscription. £10 per month (plus P&P). Glossybox is a beauty subscription service where, for £10 per month, you receive five luxury product samples from high-end beauty brands (sometimes, you even get full-size products). It isn't as good as (or as cheap as) Birchbox, the US original, but so far Glossybox has been featuring some great brands (my boss, whom I talked into signing up, got three Dermalogica products last month). Oh, and they have just launched a version for guys.

My Moleskine NYC city guide is all fired up...if only I were ready to go! I'm only taking three days off work to go New York tomorrow morning but from the number of hours I spent in the office today, you would be forgiven for thinking I was going for longer. Now I just need to turn my control-freak tendencies from work mode to holiday mode.

J'arrive, NYC!

The easiest way for me to do this is by updating my Moleskine NYC city guide, writing down the addresses of new espresso bars, shops, restaurants and cocktail bars that might merit a visit. To make life easier for myself, I tend to record these in a Google Spreadsheet (which has the same tabs as the notebook--coffee, cafes, restaus, bars, shops, things to do, places to stay, places to avoid) and then copy them into the pending section of my notebook before a trip.

But to get myself in the mood for an NYC trip, I sometimes read some of my old NYC-themed blog posts; some of my favourites can be found in the Bex and the City tab. As for what I'm going to do on this trip, I haven't made a formal to-do list but I expect that it will involve most of the following (many of these are not new things for me):

• Go to directly to J. Crew. Do not pass Abercrombie. Try not to hand over more than $200. I find my J. Crew shopping is usually more successful if I haven't perused the website beforehand; however, I hope the pink skirt I like is still there, in my size and (preferably) on sale.
• After my J. Crew desires have been sated, I'll be visiting the new-to-me Kate Spade boutique. Oh, and on the subject of shopping, I'd also like to visit Market NYC, where I will probably buy yet another colourful necklace. 
• Check out some more new espresso bars from NYT's The Scoop list. Last visit, Bluebird, Think Coffee and Everyman Espresso were all new discoveries via The Scoop. La Colombe Torrefaction is on my to-caffeinate list and as I'm staying in Midtown, Zibetto will definitely come in handy pre- and post-Central park running. 
• Speaking of running, I will definitely do at least one circuit of Central Park; maybe two, unless I decide to run over Brooklyn Bridge on the second run instead.
• The High Line will, no doubt, feature at some point (unfortunately, I'll miss screenings of Strangers on a Train and Some Like It Hot).
• I certainly hope I'll be drinking an exquisitely mixed cocktail, preferably somewhere new like Mulberry Project; well, or my old favourite, Employees Only.
• I don't have any new restaus on my list since my last visit, but I would happily revisit Pulino's, Minetta Tavern, Five Leaves and Fanelli's.

Within hours of complaining about the lack of New York in my life on Monday night--literally within two hours--a trip to Manhattan did indeed materialise in a most magical manner, almost as though I have some kind of intertubes-based fairy godmother. Unfortunately, the news came slightly too late to stop me doing the first bit of clothes shopping in several months while in French Connection earlier in the day, although I did at least think out both purchases very carefully over the course of four days.

Thanks to my grandfather, I believed that yellowcumpinky-blue was a colour until about 1991. So, I was excited when, on a visit to the treasure trove that is the stationery basement at Gibert Jeune in 1990, I picked up a highlighter that had yellow, pink and blue nibs so that you could vary your highlighting colour depending on your mood. (Naturally, aged six, I had plenty of important documents and papers to highlight). If you took off all three lids at once, you could theoretically highlight in the mythical colour known as yellowcumpinky-blue. Of course, anyone who has ever painted will know, the closest real colour to yellowcumpinky-blue would probably be dishwater grey or muddy brown. And here was the hard lesson I learned: just because three colours are pretty by themselves, it doesn't mean that mixing them will make something pretty. 

I started thinking about this past disappointment because of this blog post I read recently, which reads something like, "there's probably no magenta. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The blogger explains, "The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence." Excluding yellowcumpinky-blue, the obvious answer, she writes, is magenta (a rose by any other name would look as pink). Maybe I just spent too much time with my Crayola set but I was wondering where Burnt Sienna, Chartreuse and Turquoise were. Of course, sienna, burnt or otherwise, isn't a neatly defined part of the spectrum of visible light (although I learned from the Crayola website that Burnt Sienna is one of America's top 50 crayons, its "celebrity" is Billy Crystal and its "music" is Brown Eyed Girl) and so it doesn't count a proper, fully fledged colour.

The English language has very many words for colours--which is probably why Pantone and Dulux are so successful--far more than most other languages. But even when you look at the basic words for colour in a given language, there isn't any kind of cross-linguistic uniformity. English has a relatively high number of colour words but from the basic colour terms, we have blue, while Russian has dark blue and light blue, but not just plain blue. Some languages only have four basic colour terms, some have only two (the equivalent of "black" and "white" but "black" often means "things that are dark" or even "things of a certain texture").

If any academic work pushed me in the direction of linguistic studies, it was Berlin and Kay's 1969 Basic Color Terms, in which the researchers report a hierarchy of colours that allows you to predict which colours might be found in a language. Does our language determine how we perceive colour? Or does how we perceive colour determine our language? They found that the order was thus: two colour terms = black/dark and white/light; three colour terms = red; four colour terms = yellow or green; five colour terms = yellow and green; and then come blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey, in that order. This hierarchy is the reason I can never remember the order of snooker balls.

According to Moleskinerie (the blog that never ceases to dissuade me that my life will only be complete once I have one of each type of Moleskine in each of my residences and my place of work), in order to brighten up the dull, depressing days of February, from next month I will be able to buy coloured Moleskines. Sensational stuff, I know, given that those neat, black covers and the creamy, smooth paper are the main identifying points of a Moleskine. They will also have a new mini size (the smallest is currently pocket-sized, although too big for my feminine pockets), and I know that I will end up buying at least one.

I'm not quite sure from where I acquired my stationery fetish (and in particular, my notebook fetish) but one of the high points of my youth was going into my father's office and being able to raid the stationery cupboard. Sad, perhaps, but true. Similarly, one of my earliest memories was going to Gibert Jeune, a series of Quartier Latin bookshops and stationers in Paris, when I was about four, and being allowed to choose a selection of pens and some posh notebooks in which I could create my own "books" that had surprisingly ambitious titles and plots like Sunshine and the Coral Flowers. That was before I discovered Creative Writer, though...

Even now, although Moleskines remain my notebook/diary/DIY travel guide of choice, par excellence, I am frequently tempted to cheat: Rhodia, for example, does a nice, little, squared, tear-off notepad that I keep by my bed for when I have a Eureka! moment, and I have a slim Apica notebook that I don't use but was too pretty not to buy. I always wanted a Smythson notebook with their pretty, leather covers, silver-edged pages and cool titles like "Me, Me, Me" (a red notebook) or "Blondes, Brunettes, Redheads" (a navy blue address book) but a) they were too expensive and b) the pages are very thin and not ideal for use with a fountain pen.

Perhaps this was really why I used to keep a diary, as well as travel scrapbooks, catalogues of cool places I liked, random lists, bad poetry I'd written, and so on - I liked to buy notebooks and all of these activities gave me the excuse. Since the acquisition of my mini-laptop two years ago, I write less and less manually, which is a shame because give me a Waterman and a smooth-textured notebook and I could while away happy hours. The bitch was typing it all up onto my computer later for ease of reference and editing...

After months (just over seven) of deprivation, I am finally returning to my first love, the Big Apple. My use of love tends to be restricted to things that really merit this weighty word: basically to Google and to New York City (and around the time of my first visit to New York (circa 1995) I was still into Yahoo (shh; don't tell anyone!)). Yes, I really do love New York more than any other place in the world and I am sure that my 12th (ish) visit will be as memorable as every other trip.

So, what's so great about New York? Well, of course there's the shopping and the bagels and the restaurants and the fact that the city is so diverse (take 5th Avenue, for example, that at its northern extreme, is in the heart of Harlem, then moves down through Museum Mile (the Met, the Gug, etc.) bordering Central Park, through the flashy department stores and shops in Midtown (Saks, Abercrombie, big Barnes and Noble), past the New York Public Library and the Empire State Building, right down to Washington Square Park (NYU central), where it ends by a marble arch in midst of lovely Greenwich Village with its brownstone buildings and cobbled streets). Maybe it's the Village itself that wins me over with its independent bookstores (Three Lives and Co. being by far the best for the selection and service) and coffee houses (Jack's Stir Brew, just down the street from Three Lives and Co. and run by a part-time Broadway actor (Jack) is easily my favourite) and pleasant side streets in which one can happily spend hours wandering and wondering.

But then, don't most cities have these things? There seems to be something magical about New York - its very New Yorkiness (conceptually speaking, there no necessary and sufficient conditions, just the very essence of the place) - that wins me over every time. Even the taxi ride into the city from Newark (industrial wasteland) can't detract from the frisson of excitement I feel at the first stolen glimpse of that famous skyline: the Empire State, tallest once again, and, of course, my favourite building: the Chrysler.

On the other hand, maybe I am linking the memories I have with experiences I have had in New York while there with friends and family. My family holidays are always fun and usually result in lots of great meals out and family banter. S and I got together (officially) in New York almost four years ago now, in a little Starbucks near the Empire State. In a very circular fashion, it was also the last holiday we took together (along with my family) before we broke up. Then there was the last trip, the week before my birthday last November. This was a spontaneous visit: my parents were going anyway (Dad on business, Mum for the ride) and once I had got a job, Dad suggested I checked out BA for flights and I ended up going too for three short but full days.

The acquisition of my Moleskine New York City Guide has made planning trips a lot easier and I have already filled in lots of restaurants, shops, coffee houses, bars, museums and assorted other places, all organised by location with my colour-coded system. A few planned activities this trip are:











1. Apple Store, Soho to acquire iPod Nano for the gym (black, naturellement).

2. Three Lives and Co. for the purchasing of new fiction, to be digested at Jack's with coffee.

3. Kate's Paperie to stock up on gorgeous paper for all of my belles lettres (oh for the days of epistolary communication à la Dangerous Liaisons...).

4. Walk over Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan, hopefully early enough for sunrise.

5. Grand Central at 5 p.m. on Friday to lose self amidst the commuters.

6. Dean & Deluca at Rockefeller Plaza for passable cappuccino and delicious breakfast while watching Good Morning America being filmed next door at NBC studios or at the Soho branch for the most amazing deli and cake selection (it even makes me want to cook).

7. The American Museum of Natural History - for the amazing space show.

8. Breakfast at Balthazar in Soho (must remember to book on behalf of la famille).

That's plenty to be going on with - I'm sure I won't manage the full list and that I will do plenty of things not on the list. Our hotel - the Shoreham on W.55th between 5th and 6th Avenues - sounds very cool (minimalist chic, awesome bar, 24-hour cappuccini, great location) and my brother and I are sharing a suite. Now I just make sure I'm SFU on Thursday morning.

A special guidebook, ideal for those who travel, whether to see the sights or for work, as a way of a organising your trip and to preserve it for your memory and your records. Perfect for those who live there, as a way of organizing the things they know and need about the city they live in. Each notebook has an elastic closure, 228 pages, with up to 44 pages in colours and have a sewn binding. There is an inside accordion pocket and three ribbon placemarkers, each in a different colour.