Jane Brocket's Blog, page 48

best of times

Unlike Janus, at this time of year I don't really go in for a great deal of looking backwards and looking forwards; I just go with the present, hoping good things turn up. But when I decided, as I did at this time last year, to use some of the huge number of photos I've taken but not shown here, I saw that there's an arc to the year. It probably mirrors the arc of growing, then fading light, the feeling of moving into the outside world, then retreating into the domestic world. I suppose each of my years have a similar trejectory, but this is never planned.

One of the best opening sentences to a novel is that of A Tale of Two Cities. While this year the world has seen some pretty awful times, there have been some good times, too. On a personal level the latter are what I choose to write about here; I'd be lying if I said there hadn't been some of the bad (not worst, though) times over the last seven years of blogging, but these are not what propel me to write.

So here are the best of times for 2011.

 

[January, fuzzy magnolia bud, reassuring the world that spring will come.]

[February, Valentine's message, taken during research trip for cake app which unfortunately didn't happen, despite Simon's best efforts to eat his way round London's best cakeries.]

 

[March, colourful houses in Kentish Town looking like Mexican/Luis Barragan buildings, thus saving me a fortune in fares to see the real thing.]

[April, home tulip festival - plenty more where these came from in the April archives.]

[May, holiday in windy Dungeness, marvelling at the hardiness of those who live and garden there.]

[June, the Queen Mary Rose Garden in Regent's Park had spectacular roses and posh designer deckchairs, and an awful lot of rain.]

[July, New York's spectacular newest skyscraper which undulates and sparkles and almost causes temporary blindness. Balanced by a visit - my first - to low-rise, brown Brooklyn.]

[August, mother-of-pearl evening sky in Spain, accompanied by the sounds of donkey, pigs, hens,  teenagers, and beer bottles being opened.]

[September, new school year, new university year, old-fashioned cake.]

[October, on the way to a very cold exhibition of Antarctic photos, struck by the contrast in scale between these enormous trees in St James's Park and the apparently minute children beneath them, chasing one another.]

[November, knitting inspiration to tempt me while I write about other subjects this year.]

[December, everyone at home, Tom's first iPad drawing. Five reclining bodies out of shot]

Thank you for reading in 2011.

Let's hope there are plenty of the best, not the worst, times in 2012.

 

clean and bright

Every year on the 26th of December, I wake up feeling as though I should be singing Edelweiss. It's one of my favourite days in the calendar. Christmas is over, the year stretches out ahead, clean and bright, and I am very happy to greet it.

There is a wonderful feeling of freedom, freshness, and opportunity. Christmas acts as a plug in the annual cycle, and once it has been pulled, the year can flow again. For me, Boxing Day is the best bit of the season...

...along with eating home-grown chillis on Christmas Day (picked on Christmas Eve), experimenting with nail art, reading Cherry and the wonderful account of Christmas in the Antarctic, watching 'Downton Abbey' return to form (you could almost hear the pantomime-style audience participation up and down the country as Matthew got a cold knee), and enjoying a brilliantly weird Fritz Lang film which mixed up Freud, Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester, and Blue Beard to great effect.

And now it's time to get out and about. Lots to do, lots to look forward to.

christmas convention

We don't have a conventional Christmas. We have some conventions, though, but I guess they might be viewed as pretty unconventional.

No Christmas decorations, no cards, no turkey (I've never cooked one in my life). A few presents for immediate family, a false tree, and whatever we feel like eating (last year curry, this year Mexican). Sometimes Christmas is with family, sometimes on our own. We are very flexible about the whole thing (one year we took a last-minute holiday in Lanzarote), and this is something that perplexes people who like their Christmases to contain the same elements every year and to be a little more predictable.

But our Christmas would not be Christmas without the annual Quality Street quality control exercise. (In my view, never as good since they discontinued the gooseberry cream.)

I can still remember the very first time I tipped out an entire tin of Quality Street and rummaged and sorted, lined up, and counted. All those years years ago, it seemed almost bad behaviour to handle so many chocolates, and it felt great. 

This morning Phoebe and I carried out the end of year chocolate quality control. Our tin contains a shameful lack of orange cremes, orange crunches (a mere 5), and 'purple ones' (when did QS go so hip and Friends-ish?), and far too many coconut eclairs (renamed to make them sound more appealing, I suspect). But of course in order to do the whole thing properly, in the same way Charlie Mc Donnell does with Wine Gums, we need about five more tins. Maybe next year we break with our convention of having just one tin...

Whatever you choose to do, we wish you a very happy Christmas.

 

scenes from a provincial life

[LS Lowry and Stockport Viaduct (1960s)]

I grew up with LS Lowry. Not literally, of course, but as part of the wall furniture at home, part of the art education at school, part of the local culture, part of the way we formed a visual narrative of our Northern surroundings.

My Mum has always loved his paintings, and we had prints of 'The Children's Playground' and 'At the Seaside' at home. I just absorbed them without thinking. I accepted the limited range of colours, the elongated chimneys, stylised mills, 'matchstick' men, skinny dogs, white-grey skies, red brick terraced houses as part of my world, because they really did depict scenes from our provincial life. Those buses, buildings, places, and fogs were all there when I was growing up. I never doubted the veracity or worth of Lowry's work because to do so would be to deny reality.

[Second view]

Yesterday we approached the amazing viaduct in Stockport and saw pretty much the same secne that Lowry is contemplating in these photos. Not much has changed; the air might be clearer, the hats no longer part of everyday dress, and the buses now have automatic doors, but Lowry captured provincial Northern life in all its grimy glory in a way that is still instantly recognisable to those who grew up in the north west.

[LS Lowry Stockport Viaduct (1969) Tate Collection, but in the basement or somewhere where it can't be seen by the public]

Simon and I went to see the Ford Madox Brown exhibition in Manchester in the afternoon. It was gloomy and wet, the streets were packed with people, many of  the magnificent Victorian warehouse and office buildings were covered in soot (still) while others that have been refurbished gave an idea of  how energetic and ambitious the city must once have been in the nineteenth century. It was unmistakably a scene out of a Lowry painting.

The exhibition was good but not great. FMB is at his best when he paints from life  (so his scenes of provincial Hampstead life, and his portraits and landscapes are wonderful, with mind-boggling colour and detail), but as soon as he moves away to historical and literary subjects, he is no longer a true original.

[LS Lowry 'The Playground' or 'The Children's Playground', 1945. One of the prints we had at home when I was growing up. ]

By contrast, Lowry was a true original. He never compromised, was never  tempted to paint grandiose, set-piece subjects, but stuck doggedly to his own style and choice of subjects. And I think that it's for these reasons that his paintings remain largely out of sight. They are mostly either in private collections, or in storage. Only places like The Lowry and a few provincial galleries celebrate Lowry (there are some on display in Manchester - we saw them yesterday and the modest but utterly unique scenes made much more of an impression than half of the FMB exhibition.)

The Tate owns 23 Lowrys but keeps them away from the public gaze. Far be it for me to suggest reasons why or to touch on the subject of snobbery when Sir Ian McKellen and Noel Gallagher did that on behalf of all Lowry-lovers in an excellent programme earlier in the year. This article (and this) gives the background, and is very good apart from one thing: the author is very much mistaken when he says that Lowry's vision no longer 'tallies with our experience of northern life today'. I'm tempted to say he must be a southerner. That, or he hasn't been to Stockport or Manchester on a grey December day recently.

new food ii

Phoebe's first-ever chocolate roulade. Actaully, our household's first-ever chocolate roulade. Made to this recipe, but as I'd thrown away the printed recipe and Phoebe had thrown away the greaseproof paper before she began the rolling part, she didn't follow the instructions, and simply rolled it up without making any cuts or using the paper to help.

Before this, she'd left it overnight covered with a damp cloth, and it was fine 24 hours later. The sponge has a dense, moussey texture, and is very chocolately and very good, especially with extra cream. (We also decided some black cherries in alcohol would be pretty brilliant with it, too.)

She's now looking for a more difficult challenge, so she's planning a Baked Alaska. It's clear she was born at the wrong time, as she's obviously a child of the Seventies.

Part of my New Food at Christmas Challenge is to photograph the results with my new camera. I'm playing with blurring at the moment (obvs not the technical term), while I decide which new recipe I'd like to try. So much more enjoyable than worrying about Christmas.

truisms

[first attempt, looking like savoury Toblerone]

Persephone Open Days are always worth going to.

The shop looked lovely yesterday, all cosy and twinkly and smelling of  spice and wine. I felt lucky to be sitting there, surrounded by books and good cheer, talking to people and eating mince pies. So my next truism is obviously:

It's a pleasure to meet people who read the blog and my books.

Thank you to everyone who came and said hello. It's fascinating to find out more about who reads and why, to exchange recommendations, ideas and suggestions. I inevitably come away feeling so encouraged, and delighted to have such an interesting group of readers. It was lovely to see some readers I've met before, and to meet others for the first time.

So, although

blogging is enormously enjoyable,

sometimes you can't beat a good, old-fashioned conversation with a real person.

Unfortunately,

You never have a camera with you when you need one.

Not quite true on this occasion. I remembered the camera but forgot to take the photos. That's what happens when you having a good time. Plus, I couldn't have captured the twinkle.

However, as Tom came home yesterday, I know the following truism to be very true:

Students bring home inordinate amounts of dirty washing.

Tom managed to cram more items of dirty washing into a holdall than even Mary Poppins could get into a carpetbag. He brought home two relatively small holdalls containing 137 things to be washed. I know because I counted them all out of the bags (after they had exploded as I unzipped them - one contained 90 items), but I refuse to count them all in and out of the washing-machine. I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity. I worked out that if I did wash it all and charge him at luxury hotel rates, I'd be earning a fortune. I need to consider a career change.

[second, slightly off-centre]

But now that he is home, it's time to wheel out our tried-and-tested family truism:

The Christmas holidays are a time to learn how to make new foods.

Last year it was onion bhajis on Christmas Day. Today Tom has been on a sushi roll. These are his first ever attempts (I was sous-chef), and he has been galvanised into making them by the discovery at university that two little pieces of sushi cost £1. These are made with salmon, tuna, cucumber, and sesame seeds, and he worked out he made £15-worth with just 250g of sushi rice.

[third, just right, and Goldilocks would be happy]

So there we are. I'm going to wash clothes for a living, and he's going to make sushi to sell. Somehow, I don't think that's a truism.

the chore law

When I don't work all day long, I wonder how I do work all day long. The minute I stop, my days are filled with all sorts of humdrum, mundane stuff like supermarkets, washing, taking the car for a service, ticking important things off lists (buy printer paper, buy printer cartridge, complain about the price of printer ink: somewhere in the region of £1,500 per litre). That's without cooking and housework and picking up teenagers, and not even including anything social. But the funny thing is that I also do all these things when I'm working.

I sometimes think there is a law of physics which is eluding the scientists, and it's to do with the expansion of chores and activities to fit the time available. It explains the way that a to-do list can be compressed, like solids, into a much smaller amount of time if I'm busy, but also how it can, like gas, expand to fill every waking hour of a day if I'm not. Maybe I do things more quickly when I'm working, but surely the washing machine can't go any faster and the pasta won't cook in less time? Or maybe I do stuff without noticing I'm doing it, because my mind is somewhere else, in another mental dimensions. It's just one of the many mysteries of the universe, and when Brian Cox has finished explaining the Higgs boson to us all, perhaps he could turn his attention to the Chore Law.

I've found hand-stitched hexagons to be a useful way of passing one dimension of time while I consider the possibilties of different dimensions of domestic time. I sometimes say I'd really like to try something and although I might have been sincere in my expression of enthusiasm, the moment passes and is gone. But the hexagon idea stuck and now the lounge has a honeycomb pattern which is gradually creeping over the carpet. It's making slow progress, and I can't find any short cuts. I tried, but I haven't found of way of speeding up the process of cutting out paper hexagons, cutting out fabric hexagons, pinning then tacking one to the other before hand-sewing them together into flower arrangements. (I'm not even thinking about how long it's going to take to remove the papers and threads, add a back and quilt it all. I'll need a very large expansion of time in my average day for that.)

But it's extremely enjoyable, and I can make hexagons while I listen to radio programmes about some of my favourite subjects (eg Radio 3's series of essays about Antarctica, and the Radio 4 programme about Ted Hughes in which you can hear his mesmerising voice as he discusses and reads his poems).

[Today is the 100th anniversary of Amundsen's arrival at the South Pole. When you think about how isolated polar explorers were 100 years ago - no contact with the outside world for months on end - it would seem there have been several centuries of technological innovation since 1914.]

 

spiky, slimy, smooth, ruby, violet, lime, spotty, stripy, swirly

All available at the Persephone Books Open Day this Thursday, 15th December, 10-8, where I shall be selling copies of my three children's books (they aren't available here except via Amazon).

(If anyone has heard of Tana Hoban, they will know why I am so delighted with this review of Spotty, Stripy, Swirly:

"...the Tana Hoban of the 21st century. At least that's how I dub British crafty blogger Jane Brocket. Color photography may date to a certain extent, but Tana Hoban's books still circulate like nobody's business. Like Hoban, Brocket has an eye for concepts and she complements each one with lush photography."

Full review here - and 'spotty' would be in the title here, too, as it can be used to describe both teenage complexions and something that is patterned with spots. Another review from the same website here.)

Just one thing. I'm not exactly the embodiment of my work or book titles. I'll be in plain grey.

 

the way they were

I have this photo on my desk at the moment. We don't have many family photos around the house so it's a nice surprise to come across this every so often when it falls out of a pile of papers. I thought I'd put it here so I can be sure of finding it in the same place for a change.

Oh, and I've just found another in a different pile. A slightly later, more smiley one. They haven't really changed that much (although Phoebe does go out with a cleaner face these days and Tom no longer has fair hair).

a fortnight in november/december*

You can cram quite a lot into a fortnight. I've been ill. I've had a birthday.  I've learned how to use a new camera (used to take these photos). There have been three photoshoots and eleven days of preparation. We've adjusted to being four in the house. Tom has been home for a night and about five loads of washing. I've seen The Deep Blue Sea (fantastic and depressing), read Hockney (fascinating and funny), been to a concert  the hear Phoebe play the drums, and I've trawled a huge number of university websites.

This is because Alice has left university after a very unhappy and miserable time. But in the past fortnight she has turned her life round. She has applied for zillions of jobs and been offered three (she's doing a seasonal job until early January when she starts a full-time one), she has redone her UCAS form and is reapplying for next September, and she has started to smile again. The gap year won't be a gap yah but we are sure it will be a good year. (And we have learned that some universities will be shockingly bad value for money when they start charging £9k a year in tuition fees.)

I have another photoshoot tomorrow then I take a break. And I am looking forward to it so much that even the idea of making a hand-stitched hexagon quilt is beginning to appeal in a way that it has never done before. Just the thought of sitting, listening to the radio, needle and thread in hand, and a pile of hexagons waiting to be turned into a honeycomb pattern, makes me feel it could be worth doing. Plus  it's a million miles away from personal statements.

Oh yes, and I have made raspberry and almond slices and bought a wonderful vintage hand-made hexagon quilt top made from all sorts of pretty but very slippery viscose fabrics for a very bargain price.

 *For a different account of a fortnight, I recommend A Fortnight in September.