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1 week ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
How is your week going? Mine is hectic. The weather here in London is dreamy - vibrant blue skies, long sunny days and gardens in full blousy bloom (see photo taken from my study at 7am this morning) ☀️But I’m somewhat chained to my desk due to it being exam marking season. I ran a large music department in a top London school for almost 10 years and have seen many talented students through A Level Music and beyond to top UK Music conservatoires, Oxbridge and even NYU.
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3 weeks ago | 
chezhanny.substack.com | Hannah Ashe
These past weeks have been full of reflection. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just passed a milestone birthday, or maybe it’s because summer is approaching and I want to get all my ducks in a row before I take a little break? Either way, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want from my work. This month, I will start a short but extremely busy period of exam script marking.
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1 month 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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2 months 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.