106th Post - February Overview

Finally, here are my recommendations for February, hope you enjoy them and find them interesting to watch, listen and eat. In the meantime, February has a lot to offer especially in London, so head this month and take in all the best new events, exhibitions and best events in the capital.

There’s an old poem by Neruda that I’ve always been captivated by, and one of the lines in it has stuck with me ever since the first time I read it. It says “love is so short, forgetting is so long.” It’s a line I’ve related to in my saddest moments, when I needed to know someone else had felt that exact same way. And when we’re trying to move on, the moments we always go back to aren’t the mundane ones. They are the moments you saw sparks that weren’t really there, felt stars aligning without having any proof, saw your future before it happened, and then saw it slip away without any warning. These are moments of newfound hope extreme joy, intense passion, wishful thinking, and in some cases, the unthinkable let-down. And in my mind, every one of these memories looks the same to me. I see all of these moments in bright, burning, red. To me, love is one of the most powerful feelings in the world, it makes you crazy, its makes you do things you never thought you would do, it makes you feel things you never thought you could feel, it can make you so happy, confused, sad, beautiful but most of all love to me is RED.

Kew Gardens

Exotic flowers, wild meadows and a walk among the treetops in leafy west London

There’s an impressive 250 years (and counting) of history in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but they’re also paving the way for the future with not one, but two national bases for research into botanical studies. While you’re strolling through the Victorian Palm House or seeking out the luscious flora (including the giant, stinking Titan Arum in the Princess of Wales Conservatory), scientists are working away in offices and laboratories behind the scenes. 

Nowadays the Gardens stand at a whopping 300 acres, but they started out a little more humbly in the back yard of what was once the royal palace – favoured most by George III. There’s loads to see here, whether you like green stuff or not. The grand Victorian glasshouses remain a favourite with visitors, one of which (Temperate House) holds the record for the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse.