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1 week ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
Today is my 40th birthday 🎈I’m celebrating it in France with my husband, in a way that befits all of the things I love. Over the past weeks I’ve been adding to a list of notes on things I have discovered about life and myself in my 40 years of existence. Many of these would have been very useful to have known 20 years ago, but I guess that’s the point. I’m excited to find out what I might learn about myself in the decades (hopefully) to come. Here goes. Everything merges: work, life, creativity.
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2 weeks ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
I’ve written and scheduled this post in advance because when it arrives in your inbox it will be Sunday morning and I will (hopefully🤞🏻) be in France, gently unwinding into a slower pace of life for a special week.
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3 weeks ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
Hello, and happy Sunday. I wrote on Wednesday this week and therefore wasn’t going to post today, but then I realised that there had been quite a lot going on and I felt compelled to write about it. In case you missed it, you might like to take a listen to this lovely interview I had the pleasure of doing recently with . Lara studied law and worked in this field for a long time.
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3 weeks ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
It can be difficult to give yourself permission to do something just because. But. I’ll let you into a secret. Once you start giving yourself this kind of permission, it gets much easier. On Saturday we went to the Grayson Perry exhibition at The Wallace Collection in London. The exhibition is Perry’s response to the museum’s collection. It is outlandish, fun, bold and extremely thought provoking. I left wanting to rush home and pick up a pen and draw.
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4 weeks ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
It’s May. That means I’ve reached the month of my 40th birthday and I’m in the mood to celebrate. It’s not my birthday until the end of the month, but the celebrations will, I hope, last for a while. So often I see/hear people lamenting the ageing process or expressing their terror or fear of turning a new number, especially if it begins with a different digit and ends in a 0. But I don’t feel that way. There’s no terror, there’s no fear.
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1 month ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -48:06Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. From time to time, I interview a podcast guest and we really, truly just click. The conversation flows (usually with me over-excitedly interrupting too often) and we could continuing talking for far longer than the allotted time. That’s exactly what happened when I interviewed Lara Hayward several weeks back.
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1 month ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
It has been a strange couple of weeks. A significant portion of the strangeness can be attributed to some challenging goings on in my teaching job which have meant that for the first time in my life I have been striking. Itās not a nice situation. If youāve been reading my ramblings for a while, you will know that alongside my interior design business - Hannah Ashe Interior Design - I have a part-time teaching job. Perhaps one day I will be able to leave the teaching behind, for good.
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1 month ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
I bought a pond. Well, a galvanised steel tub that is going to become a tiny pond once I’ve finished researching how to set it up and which plants will work best to attract the wildlife I want to encourage in my garden. Two things inspired this. Firstly, I recently read ’s excellent new book One Garden Against the World and in case you don’t know Kate’s work, she is passionate about encouraging people to install ponds in their gardens.
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1 month ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -39:16Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Helen Ridley is an illustrator, specialising in live illustration, who has carved out a successful career by following her instincts and doing what feels right. I found Helen’s mindset to be inspirational and I hope that, you too, will be interested in her methodical, yet highly creative approach to freelance life following redundancy.
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1 month ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
Time is a gift. I learn this to be true more and more as I get older though it is fair to say that as a 39-year old, child-free woman I have a reasonable amount of it. Especially since leaving a full-time job (despite now having my finger in all of the pies, work wise). But, that said, I have come to a point in my life where I prioritise gifting myself pockets of time. It allows me to be me.