Savage London? Now there’s an oxymoron for ya over here in civilized England - unless you’re talking Celts, Football hooligans, or shoppers on Saturday morning fighting over a trinket on Portobello Road.

I came down to Portobello Market this morning for two good reasons…to see what I could see and find what I could find…and one self-aggrandizing one: to shoot a “shopping the world” segment for Homescapes’ web-site.

Regular visitors to our site might have noticed that we’re always tweaking to try and keep current in the big wide world of the net. So, since Beau and I are always getting razzed about the “we travel the world so you don’t have to” line in our commercials, I decided to bestow a few pearls of wisdom from the road on how you, too, can do it yourself the way the natives do. In this case the savage Londoners at the Portobello Road Market.

Portobello Road Market is one of those hustley-bustley kind of traditions aimed squarely and democratically at EVERYone’s pocketbook. There’s stuff for locals and tourists alike. I went there with my friends Joe and Gina. Joe’s in London working and Gina, as of two months ago, is a local so that kinda proves my point (though it’s a bit of a cheat to poll one’s own friends).

I tried to get them in the shots, but I didn’t want them to “act” so it was harder than I thought to get candid footage. Gina was on a quest for a black pashmina (which seemed like a long-shot in Spring) and luckily she found one, so keep your eyes open for her video debut when I get the video uploaded.

Speaking of Spring (and self-aggrandization), I was emailed the other day by an editor from an industry magazine asking about trends, and I rattled on about this and that. I always get a little nervous about that kind of thing, I mean after all, what do I know really? But y’all know I’m not lacking opinions so I gave mine. One of the things I’d noticed at the trade shows was how even though the retro thing of big bold color and patterns was still going strong, it was morphing more and more toward a softer, more feminine look. (I mean heck, we’ve even done that with our web-site backgrounds if ya hadn’t noticed.) And lo and behold, right there in a store window, I saw that trend going strong over here too.

Phew. I may not always be clever and original, but at least in this case I wasn’t wrong.