Jane Brocket's Blog, page 59

feels nice

 
My first book for children came out at the beginning of the month. It's part of a series of books I am writing for Millbrook Press in Minneapolis, and the next title will be all about colour (except, of course, it's all about color for the US market).

The first, though, is about spiky, slimy, smooth textures - and lots more touchy, feely things. It was huge fun putting together all the photos; I hadn't realised just how many photos of everyday objects and scenes I'd been taking since I started writing yarnstorm until I trawled my albums for these books. Even without any formal plan to write a series of children's books, I discovered I'd been photgraphing textures all along. (I think I knew I'd been doing colours for a long time.)

 

However, I did have to do some book-specific photography. When Danielle, who designed the book so brilliantly, asked for a new slimy picture, I cracked masses of eggs in an egg-box on a bread board on my bedroom windowsill 'studio'.. Unfortunatelt, the whole lot slid off the board onto the stairs as I was coming down, balancing egg boxes, board and camera. One dozen broken eggs with their shells are definitely super-slimy and thought of photographing the mess for the book,  but the light in the stairwell isn't ideal. Shame. Simon also knows that mud feels very oooooozy when it comes up between your toes because he modelled the muddy foot page when no-one else would stand in a patch of freshly and specially created mud on a very hot, sunny, dry day in the garden.

The book has had some lovely reviews, and I have to say this feels very good. There is one here on Kirkus Reviews, and one here on Booklist Online. The School Library Journal preview was also very complimentary, as was their full review which called the book a 'visual feast' which gives the reader a 'sense of intimacy and 'will work in either science or languages arts classroom. But just browsing and enjoying the lovely photos will appeal to younsters as well'.

It's available in the UK via Amazon and even though it comes from an educational publisher, it is just as suited to bookshops, local libraries and reading at home as it is to classrooms and teacher-led discussion.

bright monday

 

What an amazing bonus. A whole Easter weekend outside in the sunshine, reading, playing marathon games of table tennis, testing out Joshua Foer's tricks by memorising and testing each other on lists of trivia, and planning next year's bulbs.

 

It was also a weekend of Easter baking. Simon made a banana bread in a suitably ecclesiastical style using an extravagantly ornate bundt tin (recipe from Bake which includes brandy-soaked sultanas for a flavour lift). The first time he has ever baked something strictly according to the recipe; he likes to improvise and will not be told that baking is the least improvisational branch of cooking, and that the addition of sultanas/raisins/dried cherries/oats/honey will not automatically improve a cake/biscuit/flapjack/pancake.

 

Phoebe made the whopping smartie cookies from Eat Me! for visit to an outdoor swimming pool (heated) with friends. They looked so good and bright before they went into the oven, and came out bleached and huge. I put twopence coins on the rack (love the way they do this sort of thing on quilting websites) to show just how huge.

 

The tulips in the garden are already a memory, and we have only fast-fading splendour indoors now. Which is why I am making notes on what went well, what I would plant next year, and the varieties I'd like to try. I added up how many bulbs we'd planted (about 50/50 tulips to the rest) and nearly fell off my chair. Lots. Or maybe even more than lots. 

This was one of the last bunches of 'Sorbet', a very fitting finale to a hot season.

 

 

 

feeling the heat ii

Hot sticky buns. Hot sticky eaters enjoying the best hot cross bun recipe ever, in Baking with Passion by Dan Lepard. Showing admirable restraint for a change, I made the dough and baked half the quantity yesterday, and the other half today. The buns are whoppers, and we always feel duty bound to eat them very, very fresh (not taking any notice of old wives' tales about eating hot bread and the dangers thereof, as sticky buns are definitely best hot) so I decided that we needn't put ourselves under undue pressure this time.

feeling the heat

  

[parrot tulips - 'Orange Favourite', I think]

The tulips are fiery, bright, brilliant and hot. Unfortunately for them, so is the weather. This means they are romping through their season far too quickly and early; I see that the catalogue says that 'Florosa', which is at its statueseque peak today, usually flowers in mid-May.

 

I have a gloriously hot mix of red 'Sky High Scarlet', vermilion 'Avignon', and tangerine 'Orange Sun' (with 'Fantasy' parrots) which were emanating this warmth and richness at 9am. 

 

['Cairo']

I also found a little clump of 'Cairo' tulips crouching under some of the taller, more ostentatious sorts. This is the first year I have grown it, and I'll be planting it again in autumn. It is an exquisite bronze/marmalade colour with definite hints of brown, and fine markings that look as though they have been carefully etched on. It's unshowy yet quite beautiful.

 

They have pride of place in my 'specimen' vases (LSA Pablo vase @ £10) into which I put a few stems of particularly lovely tulips so that I can watch them in domestic laboratory conditions.

[I very much like the fact that I have picked 'Cairo' on a day when it is actually hotter here than there.]

 

pretty in pink

 

[Menton - pale peach, Florosa - viridiflora with green streaks, Fantasy - ice-cream pink parrot]

The pale peaches and pinks of the tulips surprised me today after a few mornings of hot, zingy colours. But in fact these tulips, picked at 7.30am when it was cool and fresh, turned out to be quite in keeping with the day,because when I got into London I saw acres of similarly coloured, uncovered flesh on show in the heat and sunshine. 

 

I made time to go to Cox Cookies and Cake, somewhere I hadn't been before. Wow, I know sex sells, but I'd never really thought that sex could sell cakes like this. The whole thing is very tongue in cheek and very well done with design reference to the surrounding businesses of Soho (flashing neon lights, night club interior, leather gear), and the cakes are ridiculously camp. I liked the Beef Cake and the Man Cake, but came home with a Bunny Cake and a Cherry Cake, but even these sound faintly suggestive and very un-Mary Berryish. 

afternoon delight

 

Just in case you thought it was all over. Not quite.

 

 

the purple petal and the peach

 

I decided I wasn't going to write a post, and certainly not a tulip post, this morning. That was until I went out into the garden where the birds were singing madly in the warm morning sunshine, and found the most gorgeous tall, stately, peach and purple tulips.

 

This is now one of my standard tulip mixes that I grow each year purely to see this glorious combination towards the end of the tulip season. The purple tulips are the unbeatable 'Queen of Night' and the wondrously peach tulips are mostly 'Menton' with a couple of other tall, orangey-coral varieties.

 

As usual I wasn't wearing a crinoline, but I did feel rather like a crinoline lady in her heavenly flower patch.

bonny, blithe, good and gay

 

Sunday's tulips have been in the house for two or three days, have opened up, and look quite amazing from above,

 

and from the side, and from a distance, and close up, 

 

and in the middle distance, and in a vase, and in a jam jar, and in a jug,

  

and especially all together on my kitchen windowsill, right now, this very moment. 

good show

 

Saturday morning is toast and jam, tea and newspapers, pyjamas and more tea, more toast and more newspapers, until we have had a surfeit of tea, toast, newspapers, and pyjamas, and decide to get moving. The usual mess of papers and mugs and sticky knives was made even more enjoyable by these tulips, fresh from the garden. We are onto hot oranges and deep reds, and I think this might be my favourite picking so far. 

 

And just so that for once I could see the flowers from the receiver's point of view, I asked Phoebe (in a T-shirt designed by her hero, Charlie McDonnell who, I agree, is very talented) to move for a moment from the newspapers, tea, jam and toast to show me the tulips. I'd go as far as to say it's a great show.

variation on a theme ii

 

Not my tulips, for a change.

Walking through Soho this morning, I came into Golden Square, a fantastically historic square which is currently bursting with tulips. Most municipal plantings of tulips use bog standard red and yellow tulips, as though nothing else existed. But here the three large beds in the centre of the square have each been planted very creatively with a single variety of tulip and a single companion.

So beneath the statue of George II in the central bed there are floppy white tulips underplanted with pretty white forget-me-nots.

  

On one side there are pale yellow fringed tulips underplanted with golden wallflower.

 

And, most striking of all, the third bed is full of vivid coral-pink tulips with deep magenta sweet williams which make it simply radiate colour.

I love this part of Soho for its cafes, street markets, fabric shops and the superbly renovated Marshall Street Baths. And of course I lingered for a while in Golden Square with a view of the tulips, a mug of coffee and a cinnamon bun at Nordic Bakery.