Jane Brocket's Blog, page 58

still on tour

 

The Grand Provincial Tour is looking better all the time thanks to your suggestions. I now realise I need to add in lidos, outdoor pools and good swimming spots for physical refreshment, and the chance to consider the art and galleries as I swim very gentle lengths. I also need to research independent and second-hand bookshops in the gallery towns because you never know what literary gem you might discover whilst on tour.

 

I am relying a great deal on the art galleries and museums to supply the requisite cake, biscuits, buns and scones, but I think I may also need to go further afield to find truly excellent baking (particularly any local specialities), which means compiling lists of, and visiting, notable cafes and bakeries.

 

This isn't the first Grand Tour I have thought about but not executed. Simon and I have often talked about hiring a camper van and setting off for France with lots of novels, maps and guidebooks. because he fancies following the Tour de France one year. In his mind's eye he sees himself in small, dark cafes, chatting with the locals in unintelligible but totally fluent French over a pastis until the moment that the Tour sweeps through the town at which point they all rush outside to watch, then file happily back into the cafe for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, in my mind's eye, I see myself using all the French food vocabulary I have ever learned in local markets, squeezing and sniffing fruit and cheese, and buying more dahlias than will ever fit in the camper van. I then work my way through Elizabeth David's books on French cooking (no matter that I have only one tiny gas ring in the van - I am sure Elizabeth would not have let that stop her), and together we spend each evening sitting outside eating delicious food, drinking local wines, and watching the sun set.

It's amazing how many of you said 'do it, do the Grand Provincial Tour'. It seems lots of us love the idea of going on tour as a sort of grown-up Inter-Railing adventure but with a proper bed at the end of each day, and yet very few of us manage to do it. Adulthood is nothing if not a huge restriction on our time, but at least Tour planning and imagining is almost as enjoyable.

grand provincial tour

 

[Andy Warhol]

I've read so much about the Grand Tour that young, rich, well-connected young men used to make in centuries gone by. These tours were like upmarket, expensive gap years filled with art and culture (their parents hoped) and I'm sure the young bucks had a high old time bumping into old friends in places like Florence and Vienna, flashing letters of introduction via the old-boy network, and generally being high class Englishmen abroad.

The idea of treading the same well-worn path as everyone else through the galleries, drawing rooms and ruins of Europe doesn't really appeal to me, but there is a variation of the Grand Tour forming in my mind which I would very much like to do. It's not exactly posh and classical, but it would be a wonderfully educational and formative tour.

I would like to take a week off to travel to the provinces of England. No glorious capital cities, no famous excavations, no fencing, riding or writing poetry, but instead lots of amazing paintings in provincial art galleries in interesting towns. Because it seems there is this summer a cornucopia of lovely exhibitions in some of our very best smaller galleries up and down the country.

So I would start off with Warhol in Southampton as I think it's best to challenge any prejudices and preconceptions early in the tour.

 

[Lucienne Day]

Then I would move on to Chichester to see Robin and Lucienne Day and to consider their enormous contribution to domestic design.

 

[Vanessa Bell]

Next stop would be Brighton for the Radical Bloomsbury exhibition, because Vanessa Bell is one of my favourite artists and because the Royal Pavilion is a sight to behold (very Grand Tour).

 

[Stanley Spencer]

Then I would move northwards to Warwickshire to see the incomparable Stanley Spencer in what promises to be a great exhibition (what he called his 'pot-boiler' garden and flower paintings are quite brilliant).

 

[Eric Ravilious]

Next I would cross the country in order to catch the Ravilious in Essex exhibition in the very historical town of Saffron Walden (with a detour to visit Audley End).

 

[Henri Fantin-Latour]

After Saffron Walden, I would travel up to Co. Durham to the Bowes Museum to see the glorious flower paintings by Fantin-Latour et al.

 

[Ford Madox Brown]

I would end the tour in the familiar surroundings of Manchester City Art Gallery; in order to fit everything in, I would ask them to have their Ford Madox Brown exhibition ready for me even though it doesn't open until September.

I would also take in as many tea rooms as a girl can manage in a day, plus any interesting gardens in the The Yellow Book. The more I think about it, the more my Provincial Tour looks very grand indeed.

 [Inspired by the Spencer and Fantin-Latour exhibitions, I have selected paintings according to a floral theme, not by what is on display in the relevant galleries. However, I couldn't find the flower detail I was looking for in one of Ford Madox Brown's paintings, so chose a beautiful little painting of his son instead.]

 

daisies are my silver*

 

Each spring, taking absolutely no notice of fashions and colour trends, I buy a new pair of Birkenstocks. Long before the brand became big in Britain and ever since I had Tom and Alice in a German hospital where virtually all the doctors and nurses wore (often blood-spattered) Birkenstocks and looked so damned comfortable, they have been my shoes of choice. I wear them indoors in winter and all day long in summer. I find it difficult to understand why anyone would want to wreck their feet and feel uncomfortable in 'killer heels' but then, apart from a brief, mad love affair with Biba, I've never really got the whole idea of being told that some clothes/looks are 'in' and others are 'out'.

This year's new Birkies are silver. They twinkle and sparkle in the sun and go with every colour of nail varnish I own. (I have read that this season's nail colours are neon. I like it when my personal tatses coincide with what's available in the shops.) They look very nice off my feet in a daisy-filled square in London while I wait for Simon in a meeting and read about Radical Gardening before going off for a very charming afternoon tea at the nicely bohemian Bea's of Bloomsbury where the baking is fantastic. (We got there just as the scones had come out of the oven - they were the best we have eaten in a long, long time.)

Daisies, Birkies, old rhymes and radical gardening, afternoon tea and freshly baked scones: some things should always be in fashion.

[The Women's Room is very on-trend (it's their job) and the place I go to find out what I should be doing, but there is also much more including some excellent writing about the joys and other things of being the parents of teenagers, and lots of good stuff about what's happening in London.]

*As in the old children's song/rhyme:

Daisies are our silver,
Buttercups our gold:
This is all the treasure
We can have or hold.

small portions

 

Although I'm all for big appetites and extravagance, I like to be reminded that good things can come in small portions.

:: A teaspoon of very cold lemon curd (I use Nigella's very easy recipe in How to Eat) straight from a jar in the fridge is sublime. Especially with a cup of tea as a variant on the old Russian habit of  having a spoon of jam with a glass of tea (one of my favourite domestic details in nineteenth century Russian literature).

 

:: A long short story or a short novella is a treat for a rainy afternoon or a quiet evening. The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow is gripping; it's difficult not to rush the reading in order to find out how the mystery is revealed and resolved. It has surprisingly modern themes for someone who is perceived as a stalwart of Victorian fiction, and is just right for a single reading gulp.

 

:: A little £1 pot of pansies from Petersham Nurseries. I couldn't bring myself to buy plants at twice or even three times the price of their Columbia Road counterparts, and the tiny pots of pretty, nodding pansies were probably the cheapest plants in the place.

 

:: A 75p postcard from the V&A. I wanted to splurge on the Frederick Sandys catalogue raisonné after seeing this painting again at the excellent Cult of Beauty exhibition. The painting has some of the most exquisite flowers I've ever seen in a painting - at Proserpina's feet - and I would happily take just that portion of the canvas and frame it. (The exhibition is very lovely and all 'utterly utter' as they said at the time, with a good number of 'bored ladies' as Simon describes the Rossetti stunners, and plenty of images of a very mournful-looking Janey Morris.)

Instead I bought the postcard because it made me laugh. It was part of the Punch-led lampooning of the Aesthetes and the joke that they tried to 'live up to their tea-pots'. Not something that ever troubles me, although I couldn't possibly live up to my tea cosies.

 

:: I bought a small pack of very thin Clover quilting pins to go in a tiny pincushion made by Susie of Duxhurst Quilting. I love the dinkiness of the cushion and spend too much time arranging the pins by colour. 

 

:: I have seen and felt the very short and slim books in the new Penguin Great Food series whose covers are beautiful. I don't really like short collections and selections as it's all down to the editing and I feel I should be making my own choices (and how do you condense someone like MFK Fisher or Samuel Pepys?) but if they sold the covers on their own, I'd have the lot. (Good article here.)

sunday best

 

If I had a silk pleated Fortuny dress to match this gorgeous poppy,

 

and a velvet wrap in the same shade as this iris,

 

I would wear it on Sundays to visit gardens like this.

I would step through the gap in the wall into the normally secret vegetable garden at Petersham Nurseries to visit this and the rest of the gardens at Petersham House which are open very occasionally for the National Gardens Scheme (NGS).

 

I would admire the roses (so early), the iris (ditto) and the stupendous herbaceous borders filled with alliums, aquilegia and tulips, and wonder at the beautifully planned palette and plant mix.

I would gaze at the beds of frilly lettuces and wonder at the absence of anything nasty and pesty.

I would imagine playing croquet on the immaculate lawn, taking tea in the little yew-surrounded sitting area, swimming in the long, thin, blue outdoor pool, and owning a stylish nursery on the other side of the wall where there is a long, thin raised bed for growing stripes of bulbs and annuals, flowers, herbs and sweet peas.

 

Not to mention having a few enormous glasshouses large enough for whole rose plants to be arranged in enormous glass jars.

 

And I would make sure that I, in my Sunday Best, with Simon in whatever shorts and T-shirt outfit he chose to put on that fine Sunday morning (let's be realistic), would make time to choose from the most spectacular array of home-made cakes I have seen for a long time.

 

We would choose something suitably vegetably and earthy such as parsnip and maple syrup cake (it does taste of parsnip but, surprisingly, it works) and carrot, coconut and chocolate cake, and sit in a glasshouse with our pot of Darjeeling and consider the way the other half gardens.

 

The thing about the marvellous NGS is that you can do just that. Even if you don't really have a Fortuny dress. 

real life models

 

Two weeks today on Saturday 21 May I'll be at Loop from 2 - 4 pm for a knitting book event. There will lots of projects from the book on display for general seeing, touching and examination, and Phoebe will be modelling the slouchy hats. She is very disappointed that she can't wear them until the book is well and truly launched; they have been in a safe place for months but I did let her take one, plus the big woolly jumper and a scarf to Dorset for a weekend with strict instructions not to lose them or drop them in the sea. As she also wore a pair of hand-knitted socks, her friends were beginning to think that maybe I'd knitted Phoebe, too.

There will be books (10% off) and cakes in a shop full of beautiful yarns and knitting inspiration. And a real life me. Do come.

[On Saturday 11 June from 1 - 3 pm my real life model and I will be at Mrs Moon in St Margaret's, near Twickenham. We shall be baking for the event and Phoebe will be doing her best supermodel impression, provided she agrees to get out of bed for a lot, lot less than $10,000. (More likely nothing.)]

publication day x 2

 

[my photos]

After thirty-odd years of knitting, I have written a knitting book. Today is the official publication date for The Gentle Art of Knitting, but I am told that the books themselves may be a few days late getting to the warehouses.

Although I'd knitted for years, I'd never really thought about it too deeply, except for agonising over pattern, colour, sizing, and whether I'd ever wear the finished garment. But knitting was the obvious subject for experimenting with a blog after three years of libraries and essays for an MA and then PhD (now on the shelf). This was the very first time I'd ever written freely and without a brief, without reference to what other people had written before me, without footnotes or bibliographies, without teachers' red ink or a brilliant supervisor's clever suggestions. 

 

And I found I enjoyed writing about knitting, thinking about knitting in different ways, examining the knitting process. In the course of doing so, I came to see that what I enjoyed most about it were the colours, textures, rhythms, and beautiful stitches. I also realised that there was no point knitting stuff that was going to spend the rest of its life in a bag in the attic, so it was about time I started knitting stuff that I could see and use on a daily basis.

So the Gentle Art of Knitting is very gentle: no anxiety, no complicated charts, no strictures. Instead, it's a mix of practical, charming, colourful and whimsical patterns in lovely yarns. There's much more text than is usual in a knitting book as I wanted to write about different aspects of the whole knitting process and experience. There are no ' musts' but lots of possibilities and ways to make your knitting your own rather than simply following a pattern.

 

The book was photographed at one of my favourite places in the whole world, a place like Royal Holloway where I have been able to change the way I think and see, imagine, read, create and write, long after I'd thought such changes were possible. Lucky me, not only to have the perfect location, but also the perfect photographer in Christina Wilson (who also has an excellent blog which is packed with great recommendations for London, Manchester, Spain and quite a few other places, too). So although the knitting book is not my first book, in many ways it's the one that feels like it was always there - very well hidden for years - waiting to be written.

To celebrate publication day, and while we wait for the book itself, I am republishing the whole of my original blog, yarnstorm, exactly as it was on the day I put it into storage. Here it is.

one more for the road

 

We have a new baker on the block. Simon is getting into his stride with recipes, cherries, sultanas and bananas, and is very definite about preferring fancy cake tins to ordinary, straight-sided ones. Phoebe claims he didn't do this all on his own because I greased the tin for him - this from the girl who says she is going to employ me full-time when she is older just to grease her baking tins and do her washing up. I wonder if she senses competition?

Me, I was just pleased to get just the right tablecloth to match the sunflower cake shape. I know my place: greasing, laying the table, washing up...

cake central

 

Just like London buses, cakes arrive on this blog all at once.

I'm quite happy to let other do what they like to celebrate royal weddings, but as we are hosting Phoebe's French exchange student we thought it would be good to have a group of Phoebe's friends and their partners over on Friday as there was nothing else being organised due to most people's appointments with the goggle-box.

In the event, it became something of a garden party, with thirty-odd teenagers outside somewhere, but not always visible. And the baking was suitably royal garden-partyish, too.

 

It was all done by Phoebe and friends. Phoebe made the large blue cake, inspired by one we'd seen on Ancient Industries, always the height of good taste. (Of course, Phoebe never misses a chance to make a colourful impression and, when sliced, the cake showed layers of sponge and bright blue icing inside.)

The spectacular pavlova (above) was the creation of Eloise, who was clearly channelling the same blue/red/white flag look. (It tasted delicious. Tom went out at one point to buy some cricket whites, came back to find it had all gone, and was disgusted with us for not saving a slice for him. No chance. He should know by now never to go shopping when there's a pavlova about.)

 

Eloise and her French student also made these gloriously glittery buns which I'm sure rivalled anything served at the palace. (That's her mum's fab cake-stand. We have cake-stand envy.)

And Hattie, Alice's friend - Alice managed to sneak in seven or eight friends, too - made two dozen expertly, swirlingly iced little cakes.

 

Simon added the final très petite pièce de résistance in the centre of Phoebe's cake:

 

It is lovely to see the level of expertise and creativity that these teenage bakers display. I admire their willingness to experiment with shape and decoration, the way they take simple ideas and make them look special, and especially the way they know that no matter how good something looks, it should always taste great, too. And these did.

 

going for broke

I could have been holding a fortune in my hand. If only I'd been born a few hundred years ago and had the presence of mind to label the bulb then propagate it, this flower could have brought me untold riches. This is a 'broken' tulip, or one affected by the 'tulip breaking virus' (TBV) which is spread by an aphid, but in the seventeenth century no-one knew about aphids and these 'broken' tulips were regarded as strange and very precious.

The flower should look like this (above), a normal 'Fantasy' parrot tulip which is a beautiful soft pink. But a few days ago I picked a single 'broken' version which looks very different (below), like a swirling mass of raspberry ripple ice cream. The virus has broken the colouring; I like the way it's broken into the two colours that make pink, as though somewhere in the bulb there's a little ink cartridge that hasn't quite mixed the inks properly.

 

These days we are told to destroy all virus-infected tulips because they are made weaker by the virus which spreads quickly to other bulbs and host flowers. But at the height of tulip mania, these 'broken' tulips were precisely the ones that created and wrecked many Dutch fortunes. People paid ridiculous sums for a single bulb and it was cheaper to buy an exquisite  flower painting than it was to buy the real flowers.

Every year I get a broken tulip or two and they always fascinate me. These days it's possible to buy virus-free 'broken' and even the formerly very rare Rembrandt tulips which are now healthy as a result of careful breeding. I also grow quite a few of these (Sorbet, Rem's Favourite, Zurel), but nothing beats getting a truly virus-broken flower, even when I know they are not the healthy sort.

One day I will get to the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society Annual Show to see the wonderful Old English Florists' Tulips which are just the same as those in the old Dutch flower paintings, and to find out if I am sitting on a fortune.

[There's a very readable scientific article about broken tulips here, and Anna Pavord gives a full history of tulip mania in The Tulip.]