Liz Moody's Dulwich Life

Liz Moody’s Dulwich Life is written by Anna Sayburn, inspired by Gainsborough’s portrait “Mrs Elizabeth Moody and Her Two Sons”. It imagines how Mrs Moody might live today.

Saturday 10 May

Phew, what a scorcher! Decided to take my new laptop into the garden to work this morning, as the successful businessperson I clearly am. After much bashing of the calculator, Sam and I worked out that we’d made £102 on the olive oil tasting party, assuming everyone stumps up. Thrilled, I rushed out and invested it in a very light and pretty little laptop I can’t pronounce the name of.
With a little help from my lovely boys, I managed to get it to work, and even to connect to the wifi thingy. Or possibly to next-door’s, but never mind. So now I’m, um, researching olive oil trends on Vogue.com and Net-a-porter, while drinking a nice cappucino (turns out Sonja knew how to use the Gaggia all along!). Mr M will be pleased.

Sunday 11 May

Ouch ouch ouch. Fell asleep in the sun yesterday; covered in blotchy pink patches. Still, birthday today! And I’m still 4 years younger than Mr M, as I pointed out to him this morning. To be honest, he could be 10 years older by the look of his baggy eyes this morning. He’s been working late again, but since the smoking ban it’s got really hard to tell how much late working takes place in the office and how much in the wine bar across the road. I used to be able to tell from a sniff of his jacket.
Anyway, he’d bought the lovely leather laptop case and gave it to me with a mournful smile. ‘Might as well enjoy it while we can,’ he said, bafflingly. Then he took me to Claridges’ for dinner and got preposterously drunk. He’s a very mysterious man at times.
Photo: thanks to Ben Werdmuller at Flickr.com (with CCL)

Gainsborough’s “Mrs Elizabeth Moody and her two sons” can be viewed until 5pm every day except Mondays at Dulwich Picture Gallery (Picture by Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery)