THINGS I {LOVE}, OCTOBER...

I'm doing away with the "like" for October; this month it's actual love. Maybe it sounds all swishy, but then some of these things are pretty swishy themselves. Beware that I'm about to gush massively about girly stuff.

My first love is: matte velvet. I've never been that drawn to shiny things. The walls of my flat are painted in flat eggshell, the woodwork is matte enamel paint - I'm just not a gloss type of person. Perusing the new Chanel nail colours for autumn I was not convinced by Quartz and Peridot: not very flattering to my skin tone and very reminiscent of the metallics from Urban Decay and Hard Candy in the nineties, which wasn't that long ago. . .was it?! OK, maybe I'm ancient, but I've seen all that before.

By far the best offering is the mat velvet top coat - it's also in its way a frugal chic purchase as you can use it on top of any nail polish and it will turn it completely matte in seconds. Hours of fun, you have no idea. First of all I was doing a kind of French reverse manicure thing over oxblood red, keeping the half moons shiny with matte tips - then I went for just matte. It makes the polish look like it's fused to your nail, which is somehow very smart. More matte nails here. (D.V. would be so into it - you know she claimed in her memoirs to have been the true unsung inventor of commercial nail polish.) Then if you put hand cream on, it turns a kind of burnished half matte - let's call it satinwood if we're sticking with the Dulux theme - but you can just put another coat on to re-mattify it. I think I've already used half a bottle, which by the way is also extremely handsome to look at, being matte black. I also bought the Chanel Rouge Allure Velvet lipstick in La Somptuese - a matte brick red. But if I wallop on a highly pigmented lipstick like that, I just look like Cruella de Ville or a goth - so I smudge it on lightly with my finger. This is the first Chanel lipstick I've bought since they brought out the click release opening and I don't care what anyone says: design matters. It's so pleasing to use - the iPhone of lipstick case design.

Girly onslaught over.

My new winter peacoat from. . . my family friends' attic, where it had been hanging for 30 years having been bought as part of the school uniform for their son's short lived attendance at boarding school at the age of 12. It was a mean, horrid school so he got out of there fast, and the coat was never worn. Possibly noting that I wear navy every day, they thought I might like it and they were right.

Mat topcoat AND old/new/old button = efficiency.

Being a boy's coat, rather than a man's the proportions are perfect and the cuffs just hit on my wrists. When I had it dry cleaned it lost a button so I changed them for the buttons that came from the WWII military great coat D's mum gave me years ago in Italy. (I sadly had to part with the coat, but I kept the beautiful buttons.) So happy with my new old winter coat with the old new old buttons.

Sewing helper

Bill Cunningham New York. It's frustrating to write about films here, because release dates differ so drastically worldwide and people are reading from all over. I know this film was released months ago in the US, but it doesn't have a release date in the UK until February 2012 for some bizarre reason. I was able to watch it yesterday, and again this morning. It's hard to even put into words, but honour, ethics, kindness, joy and singular vision are the ones I wish I could arrange into something coherent to describe Mr. Cunningham as seen in this documentary. This film was so moving and poignant. It had me in pieces.