It was a conscious decision rather than a forced one, although I do admit that my weekly trips to Singapore conveniently do not count as travelling in my head. If you can take a bus there, it feels more like commuting than wandering.

The book is Dior Scarves. Fashion Stories, published by Thames & Hudson, and it explores decades of scarf design from the house of Dior. It is one of the most beautiful books I own. The pages are exceptionally thin, almost tissue like, which somehow makes the experience more luxurious because there are so many of them. You turn one page and then another and another, and it feels endless. Scarves upon scarves, each one telling its own small visual story.

What I love most about this book is the sense of freedom in the designs. You quickly realise that a scarf does not need to be rigidly structured or overwhelmingly intricate to be impactful. It does not always need to be engineered with mathematical precision. Sometimes it is simply one flower, placed with confidence, and that is enough. Sometimes it is a bold sweep of colour or an expressive illustration that feels almost spontaneous.

Many of the designs appear hand painted or hand drawn, and that human touch is unmistakable. You can see the softness of the brush, the slight irregularities in the line, and the life inside the composition. There is warmth in it. There is personality. It does not feel overworked or digitally perfected.

As someone who spends her life thinking about prints and patterns, I find this deeply inspiring. It feels very close to what we believe in. Florals that are not shy. Patterns that are allowed to breathe. Motifs that carry emotion rather than just decoration.

This book is a reminder that flowers never go out of fashion, and neither do patterns. They evolve and reinterpret themselves, but they never disappear. They simply return in new colours, new scales, and new moods, ready to be loved all over again.

Then I started Chinese brush painting.

This is only my second session, and I can say without exaggeration that this is one of the most humbling things I have ever attempted. It looks free. It looks expressive. It looks like you just flick your wrist and magic happens.

It does not.

There are rules. Very precise rules. You have to manage the water in the brush, the amount of ink, the balance between the two, and sometimes even load the brush with a gradient so that a single stroke carries light and dark at once. You have to think before the brush touches the paper because once it lands, that is it. There is no correcting. No layering. No going back in to fix a wing that suddenly looks like a potato.

The second you hesitate or do not fully know what you are doing, the painting reveals you immediately.

It demands full presence. You cannot multitask. You cannot be distracted. It is deliberate and focused in a way that feels almost meditative. That intensity is exactly why I love it.

My Laoshi is extraordinary. When he demonstrates, I honestly do not understand how one person can know so much about how plants grow, how leaves curl, how fruit hangs from a branch, or how birds balance in the air. His understanding of nature is phenomenal. Watching him paint is an absolute pleasure.

As for me, my birds are a problem. They refuse to cooperate. They do not look like they can fly. They barely look like they want to. The flowers are not too bad, and my latest pomegranate is my favourite so far. At least the pomegranate looks confident.

The class is every Saturday, and it has quietly become my favourite day of the week. It is a challenge, and I am not naturally good at it. But I love that. It reminds me that even when you have painted your entire life, there is always something new that can humble you and make you start again from the beginning.