Jane Brocket's Blog, page 4

a week of living colourfully: red

Inspired by wonderful titles such as A Year of Living Dangerously and a Year of Reading Proust, I'm doing A Week of Living Colourfully.

Using Instagram, has for some reason, made me see red (in a good way). Yesterday I noticed cherry reds in dahlias, treacle tins and real cherries, but I can tell from the number of red doors amongst my photos, that I've also been drawn to more bright, cheerful, welcoming reds that you can't walk past without noticing.

In Oxford (top) and Brooklyn, 

Preston,

Manchester,

Chichester,

and Hull, there are bright red doors which prove that living colourfully isn't difficult.

weekending

I always wake up on a Friday excited about the prospect of the weekend - even if I know I'll be working - and this morning was even better because I could fling open the windows and let in the sunshine and warm air.

Things I'm looking forward to this weekend:

:: Smelling these Gertrude Jekyll roses which have a beautiful, intense perfume. Simon grows them, I pick them.

:: Picking more roses - they are on a roll at the moment.

:: Reading something serious and hope I understand it. Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist is spare and thoughtful, and I've found some great insights about collecting and curating. But it's not a romp.

:: Reading the latest C20 Magazine. This has improved dramatically recently and has an excellent range of articles with great images. It's mostly very serious, though.

:: So I am also looking forward to reading something a little lighter, especially as I've just finished a number of pretty unsatisfactory/disappointing books, one after the other. I think it might be a Simenon (not light, exactly, but not highbrow).

:: Knitting socks with neon yarn. I'm playing with the colour clashes rather than knitting straight from the ball, which is adding extra brightness and lots of entertainment value.

:: Savouring the fact that one only school/university exam remains to be taken. Excitement is mounting, drumming is increasing, to-do lists are growing, and a return to the Matisse exhibition is imminent.

:: The usual things that make up a good weekend: newspapers, coffee, croissants, cake, conversation, and chilled wine.

Happy weekend.

fragments

Where can you find work by some of the best wood-carvers, architects, gilders, plasterers, carpenters, roofers, stonemasons, letterers, tile-makers, blacksmiths, lettercutters, mosaic-makers, engravers, painters, sculptors all in one place and for free? I still can't quite believe we can walk into a church and enjoy some of the most beautiful, astounding, colourful, intricate, simple, plain, austere interiors that exist. Even though I'm an atheist (and always have been), I love an open church door and am ever curious to see what's beyond it.

Today, I dropped into St Marylebone Parish Church for the first time because it was open (so many churches aren't), on my way to the Tube, and I had a few minutes to spare. It was built in 1817, has gleaming gilded angels high up around its cupola, a grand portico, lovely solid pews, a sweeping stone staircase up to the galleries, lots of plasterwork garlands and ornate decoration, a beautiful ceiling, and wonderful marble and mosaic floors.

But what I like best is something that isn't grand or spectacular or even as the original makers intended. Instead it's the simple fragments of stained glass that were collected after bombs blew out the windows and, in 1949, put back as borders around panes of plain, frosted glass. Rather than trying to make any sort of sense of the fragments, they have just been fitted in the besy way possible which means there are all sorts of juxtapositions of details and even body parts (not always the right way up).

The results give a post-war modern touch to an old building, a dash of whimsy amongst the seriousness, and a childlike, illustrated storybook look in which the narrative has been jumbled up.

It must have been a great commission for whoever put together the fragments.

But then again, churches always been repositories of wonder and beauty and skill and vision. Which is why I make lots of unplanned detours. 

connections

by Peter Liversidge at YSP

Is it? I read EM Forster's novels years ago and my reading definitley did not do them justice, but when I was having an unhappy time at university I did take the 'only connect' message out of Howard's End to extremes until I decided that a few disconnects and dead-ends and gaps were probably better for my overactive imagination. 

So when I saw this message at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park I didn't know whether to say 'yes', or 'no', or 'maybe', or 'rubbish', or 'those are nice letters and lights'. But after giving the matter some more mature thought, I've decided that many, many things are connected and that sometimes we would perhaps do well to recognise more connections. It took me years to see patterns in life as well as patterns in the visual world, and now I know how to spot them it's much easier to explain a lot of things and to understand why many things are as they are and how many things can be prevented.

This is very abstract, I know (blame the words above), but the connection to what I do here is that I am puzzling over all the connections we are making on the internet as opposed to connections in our lives. I will not go near Twitter so that world of millions of connections is shut off to me, but I've just begun to experiment with Instagram and, aside from the opportunity to mess about with photos and look at dozens/hundreds/thousands of creative images in a short time, it's also a way to make enormous numbers of connections very quickly. It's amazing really, but I do wonder if we would be better off connecting face-to-face and reading more books instead of suspecting that everyone else in the world is having a better, more more stylish, more beautiful life,  and finding ourselves passing instant judgement on a picture by 'liking' or withholding our 'like'.

I'll carry on with Instagram and Facebook because they offer different ways to connect and I'll see how it goes. But deep down, I question what, if anything, it's all for. I enjoy a world full of connections, but I don't want to lose sight of the meaningful ones.

live and learn

 

Red Cross quilt in Quilt Me!

Exams are tricky for those who aren't taking them - as well as for those who are. The older the exam-taker, the greater the stakes, the more the stress, the harder it is to offer any advice other than 'do your best'. As far as this year's exam season is concerned, the end isn't far off now that Tom and Alice are basking in post-exam freedom, and Phoebe is already planning her reading and baking, and wants to learn how to quilt and relearn how to knit. It's made me appreciate how wonderful it is when exams are a thing of the past and you are be able to carry on learning but without any tests or dissertations or qualifications hanging over the process. You can learn for the sheer pleasure of learning, and there is a great deal to be said for that.

Every summer for many years I did a couple of weekend workshops as a way of recharging my batteries and having some space to myself. I don't need this form of escape so much any more, but I still look at the courses mentioned in magazines such as Selvedge or those held at the brilliant West Dean. I'd also recommend the knitting and crochet workshops run by Jean Birch Leonard who has an interestingly creative background and knows a thing or two about what to do with yarn. And the tables have been turned as I am now teaching quilting workshops at Ray Stitch with the next one on 22nd June.

It's always nice to live and learn without any pressure. 

lido socks

In between reading about swimming and pools, I've been knitting socks with a yarn (07205) that contains colours I associate with lidos: turquoise water, royal blue tiles, fresh green grass, white clouds and lead-grey/deep blue skies. Every time I've picked up my needles, I've fancied a swim, so I thought I'd take them to a lido now that they are finished. My sock model was otherwise engaged in an A level exam, so these are my feet dangling over the beautifully warm water this fine, early summer morning. 

Hampton Pool is a wonderful place to swim and is particularly atmospheric and invigorating on a really cold day when the steam rises up. This time it really wasn't sock weather, 

but a swim at any time of the year merits a cup of tea and a Mars Bar from the tiny, excellent cafe - my swimming friend rates the breakfast very highly and we always try to sit outside on the terrace above the pool unelss it's totally brass monkey weather. I'm saving the socks till then, then.

ancient and modern

Blue Boar Quad at Christ Church

I've always liked the title Hymns Ancient and Modern and the way it brings together a whole world and history of hymn-singing which was something we did a lot of at primary school (it was probably one of the few ways to keep a class of forty children under control, and we had a fearsome piano-playing teacher who could turn you into stone with a stare if you giggled at words or someone else's out of tune singing). It came back to me yesterday as Simon and I went to look at a number of C20 buildings in various Oxford colleges on a C20 Society walking tour which could have had the title 'Buildings Ancient and Modern'. (There are a few photos on Instagram.)

 

Copper-covered Geography building

Led by a knowledgeable Oxford architect, we walked for hours and had privileged glimpses inside parts of colleges not normally open to the public (this kind of thing makes membership of the Society great value). We saw lots of concrete, masses of glass, plenty of Portland stone, and a mix of innovative, creative solutions, clever feats of engineering, and the occasional mistake and vanity project. It must be incredibly tricky to build in or close to some of the most beautiful ancient quads in the world, but some Sixties architects managed it, the best of whom I thought were Powell & Moya at Christ Church (here and here) and Arne Jacobsen at St Catherine's. 

Dining Hall, St Catherine's, Arne Jacobsen

But the whole ancient/modern theme ran deeper than the wonderful architecture, as I think this day was the day that we ourselves were classed officially as ancient by Alice and Phoebe who failed to see the appeal of the walk. It's been coming for a while with Tom and Alice going to university and now Phoebe not far off joining them, but it's only now really beginning to sink in that as from September (if all goes well), for much of the time we are going to be back in the situation we were in before we had children, only now we are 21 years older. The things we want to do and enjoy doing sound incredibly ancient to young ears and yet what's funny is that actually they are the same things we were doing pre-children - maybe we  have always been culturally ancient.

 Barbara Hepworth at St Catherine's

So the Now We Are Old list is growing all the time, and the best aspect of yesterday was the fact that we  still love doing stuff together.

 

One last thing on the theme: I was particularly enthralled by the wonderful, rigorous horizontal and vertical lines I saw in the C20 architecture, and the contrast between ancient and modern and how well they can work together was brought home by seeing Sean Scully extremely vertical/horizontal modern paintings  next to the Old Masters and medieval paintings in the beautiful, simple, classically influenced Christ Church Picture Gallery.

road of many colours

I'd like to live on a road of many colours. In fact, I wouldn't mind owning a road of many colours, a little like Oriel College which owns these houses on Oriel Street in Oxford.

Coming up with colour combinations would be such a good distraction from work.

I could live in a house which matched my mood,

or my outfit.

 I could have a burgundy house for when I feel like drinking Pinot Noir, 

 

 and a jade house for when I'm feeling jaded.

 

I could do road swaps with people in Bristol and Notting Hill, Aldeburgh and Tobermory, or even go international and exchange with streets in Buenos Aires, Reykjavik, St John's in Newfoundland, Stockholm and Mexico. It would be brilliant, in more ways than one.

smile

We watched a very good film about Nat 'King' Cole last night. I grew up with his records in the house and used to listen to them while I was babysitting my younger brothers and sister when Mum went out (which was often, so I got through a lot of NKC, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin). I remember she once told me that after my father died at the age of forty-two, she could hardly bear to listen to Nat 'King'Cole singing Smile even though the lyrics matched her resolve. I'm pretty sure she never listened to it again after my brother died a few days after his thirty-sixth birthday which was 25th May. This is the first year I haven't had to worry about how Mum is on this day, because it was always awful, utterly awful, thinking about what she was thinking, and knowing she would be trying to smile. Now I'm the one who can't listen to 'Smile'.

[the Yorkshire landscape seen through a sculpture by Henry Moore - my brother was a landscape architect and loved the north of England]

thanks

jammy buns

Just to say

madeira cake

thank you very much 

hazelnut meringue cake

for your comments and emails, for having a look at my Facebook page and Instagram photos. 

Thank you. Have a good weekend, perhaps with cake and books and fresh air and flowers.

(all recipes in Vintage Cakes)