It's always curious when you realise two separate trains of thought are actually joined up. I started the weekend thinking about how spring and autumn are like two bookends. Spring is about beginnings, colour and shape emerging from the slowly warming earth, autumn is nature going out with a bang, flaming colours falling as the earth starts to cool and the days shorten. I started experimenting creatively with ways to respond to the colours around me, in my garden, allotment and the streets that join them. I stopped, it wasn't working. Then I bumped into a good friend that had just bought a DVD called 'Advanced Style', a film made by photographer Ari Seth Cohen and film maker Lina Plioplyte. I bought it too. It's an inspiring documentary about women in New York aged between fifty and one hundred years who don't see 'maturity' as an obstacle to looking amazing. In fact they are all avant grade in their approach to their looks, wonderful characters i...