It has been a labour of love. I am exhausted. I was up till midnight last night and still working on them into the afternoon today. Let us pray they come out well. Each one is unique, each one has its own personality and reason for being. They include travels to Currango, a conversation at Camp Cove with my furniture friend on minimalism, mine and my friends travels to great ski resorts, the winner of our scarf design competition, a new work by Clementine Chambon, my homage to Hachmang’s cafe speedster, a return to old work with the sirens, a chance afternoon light and I stopped for a photograph in Thredbo with homage to Hiroshige, and, finally, some Sumos in Shiga Kogen.

This was our most ambitious design yet in my opinion. The inspiration for the design came when I spotted a scarf in Hermes at the Haneda terminal of Tokyo on my way back to Sydney. It had a series of scenes, some were postcard like, about 34 from memory when I counted them, of places around the world with whimsical line hand sketches, or so it seemed, one can’t know if it is all by computer these days, and it just had a wow factor, and to be honest, Hermes even now, even when I firmly believe our double prints are superior in results, even though our brilliance in colour can often be more vibrant, and our base cloth softer and more supple, still, even then, I bow to Hermes, they are the kings of the silk scarf.

A customer of ours, one of my best in fact, had a terrible health scare and spoke about it on his handle. In dialogue with him he told me to stay on top of my health. But it reminded me of The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, in the sense that you feel empathy for the person but you kind of concurrently are just very happy it isn’t you. In the end, as Clive James often said “nobody gets out of here alive”, yet each of us tries to not think about our own extinction too often because, as Irvin Yalom once wrote, it’s like staring at the sun, and if we look too intently it will blind us.