My little house of ideas

Living room
Kitchen

A pot full of shells: we collected the shells off a beach in Normandy, thinking it would be nice to create a collage with them to hang in the kitchen. If I used a pretty thick and deep frame, I could stick 3 or 4 of them in a row and maybe find some pebbles that would fit inside the bottom of the frame.

Tea tasting: I bought a book about tea and a set of 3 tea samples when we were in Hong Kong last year. The little book was all about how to make good tea, the different types of tea and where they came from. The idea was to learn about teas the same way you can learn about wines.

Bedroom

My Nike shoes: bought in Barcelona last year, they're the kind you can hook up to your ipod and keep track of your runs with. At the time I was already sceptical I'd actually ever get around to using that function...

The Rasterbator: a really neat programme I discovered a few years ago and wanted to use to create a huge poster for the wall behind our bed. You upload a photo and the programme generates a "dotted" version of it, any size you like. Really cool results.

Office

My sister's saxophone: when she left on her round-the-world trip last year, I asked if she could leave me her saxophone. I've often wanted to learn to play.

Photo albums: I bought a really big photo album ages ago, wanting to make big print-outs of my most artistic photos and collect them in the album. There's also a cute album we bought in Thailand with a wooden elephant on the front for our best pictures from our trip. And the scrapbook Diana made for me when we went to France on our road trip.

Scanner and slides: I managed to reduce my father's huge collection of slides (I'm guessing several thousand) to about 250 that I kept. I wanted to scan them all as they are in poor condition, and use the photos to create a picture book. I also wanted to document my father's life in some way, so his stories wouldn't disappear with him, but it's such a vast task.

Psychology book: I bought what looked like a basic introduction to psychology, to see if it really was a direction I would be interested in as a career.

My bookcases: probably too many subjects to list. All things I was/am interested in: photography, wine, underwater archaeology, reiki, yoga, natural food, travel, hand reading... A lot of them unread.