the princess diaries: layer cake

When I was growing up on Long Island, the worst thing you could say about your best friend behind her back was that she was 'such a princess'. The funny thing about my friend Lizzy is that she really is a princess. And I didn't know it for the longest time, simply because she never mentioned it. We've been friends for a while - I actually met her sister, Maria, first - and they are such sweet sweet girls. Maria's a brilliant painter - she's interning in NY at the moment at the UN. I can just relate to how both sisters, as different as they are in some ways, feel about things. About the things that matter.

And it was only after a while that we both happened to mention that we're bloggers. And even her blog name, DUH, The Princess Diaries.. STILL didn't get it. Her surname sounded familiar and vaguely European.. anyway she does her posts through an online magazine called Finch's Quarterly, along with people like Kevin Spacey, Emma Thompson and John Malkovich. And she's also producing a book based on her Diary.

We met on Monday morning at the most charming Russian cafe on Walton Street called The Merchant's Yard. I had a really frothy cappucino - almost more like a hot chocolate - and this yummy layered cake made of thin crepes with sour cream and cinnamon.




Lizzy is the perfect friend: kind and smart and a great sense of humour and joy for life, a real girl's girl, and we talk about the things that matter to us, which is rarely fashion, come to think of it. It's only at the last minute, when I sometimes take some photos, that I might ask 'who made that?' (In the case of her boots, for example, Vivienne Westwood). It can just as easily be H&M. On sale.







After we went our separate ways I walked from Knightsbridge through Green Park, all the way to the Strand to meet Jen and friends @ the Savoy. It occurred to me as I passed Buckingham Palace that Lizzy and Maria are actual princesses, but my life is so strange and everything is so random that that thought passed as quickly as it entered my vacuous head.



I trailed a woman for a while because I thought her skirt was interesting - and somehow it felt vaguely Russian. While we were at the cafe, I asked the man who made our coffees where he was from and it turns out, near Vilnius, an area that is now Lithuania. My grandmother, my mother's mother Anna, was from there, and, it turns out, so was Lizzy's great grandmother.




Such a small, yet perfectly formed, world.