Hullo,

This is the latest I have ever issued a Fem Friday! We moved house today and it took longer than I thought it would. NB I know it always takes longer than you think it will. Let me know if you want recommendations for a removal firm in London though! We were delighted with ours, and thank you to the friend and subscriber who recommended them.

ANYWAY in anticipation of this event I looked up some stuff about Edith Wharton because were you aware that Edith Wharton wrote a big book on interior decorating?

Wharton and Codman took a reformist stance, suggesting that clients stop treating the interiors and the exteriors of their houses as separate projects and start seeking more simplicity and less ornament. Wharton had an opportunity to play architect and decorator herself in Lenox, Massachusetts, where (with the help of professionals) she built the Mount, a Georgian mansion with a cascade of beautiful gardens. She wrote to her sometime lover Morton Fullerton, “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth… ”

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/edith-whartons-houses

Then I stopped thinking about interior decor and private lives and we turn instead to this article on a woman who is running a restaurant in a refugee camp in South Sudan:

A restaurant like Rosa’s relies on those outside business owners to bring literal currency into the economy. Cash is scarce in Yida, and most of the settlement’s residents are largely self-sufficient. Beyond the outsider entrepreneurs, only those who work in cash businesses as traders or vendors — or those who happen to luck into an NGO position and earn a stipend — have money, and can shop or dine in the market. When I visited, all the money Rosa earned went directly back into supplies and ingredients for her fledgling operation, but she hoped to eventually earn enough to improve her family’s quality of life.

http://www.eater.com/2016/8/17/12511486/yida-refugee-camp-restaurants-south-sudan

Also on public spaces, it might just be that it's a heightened emotional time for me but I cried on reading this article on a piece of public/performance art about holding hands:

For the past five years, I have been touring Walking:Holding, which takes one audience member at a time on a walk through their town or city, and invites them to hold hands with six different individuals along the way. The hand-holders are local participants who range in age, gender, race, sexuality and background. The idea is to give people an opportunity to experience their hometown from someone else’s perspective; and to see what can happen when you share an intimate act with a complete stranger.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/aug/18/radical-art-of-holding-hands-with-strangers-rosana-cade-walking-holding

Okay it's late but I hope you enjoy it, I'm going to eat a curry now.

Alex.