Jane Brocket's Blog, page 66

why stop at one?

 

Who's to say a girl should have only one birthday cake?

 

And who's to say a Mum can't show more than one of photo of her daughter's fine cake-decorating skills?

 

Great cake, great party.

flower stalls

 

On Berwick Street, opposite The Cloth House (number 98). Nothing to do with Ronnie Biggs as Simon quipped when he saw the photo, but was he on the right track (ha) and I do remember the flower stall outside Waterloo Station owned by the Great Train Robber, Buster Edwards. He must have been pretty audacious to set up shop outside a train station after what he did. It used to give me quite a start to think I'd just walked past a very famous criminal on my way home. By train.

leaves

 

I'm not convinced they are as intense last year, but the leaf colours are spectacular at the moment. Gazing from the train window it's worth concentrating hard on enjoying them, because it only takes a few gusts of wind and the painting-by-numbers look of the landscape changes all over again. I often wonder how pre-photography artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites who took forever to paint a single leaf managed to remember how a whole tree looked long after the leaves had gone and they were only a fraction of the way through the painting. Much better to be a David Hockney who gets his huge huge canvases done super-fast outdoors, or paints them on the computer/printer, or takes lots of Polaroids. (Bet he likes Hipstamatic.)

 

There are even a few roses still out, the marigolds seem to be having an Indian summer, and it's hard to believe outside will be so bleakly empty soon.

(I have found the perfect reading matter for this season, though. Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris is just the book for now with its descriptions of artists such as Ravilious and Piper who captured wet, windy, cloudy Britain weather so perfectly. It's packed with references and commentaries on all sorts of 1930s and 1940s culture from art to music, gardening to cookery, guidebooks to poetry, is wonderfully dense yet readable, and ideal for when the clocks have gone back and the heating is turned on.)

twin books

Looking at what I've read recently, I see the books fall neatly into pairs. Maybe I'm thinking about twinny things a great deal at the moment, or maybe every book has its very own soulmate somewhere on a bookshelf, a natural complement with one title enhancing and informing the other. So here are my twin books.

Knitting pair

 

I do not want a dog, have never wanted a dog, and Phoebe knows she'll have to wait until she leaves home before she can get one of her own. But Best in Show by Sally Muir and Joanna Osborne makes me laugh and want to knit one; in fact, I think this is the perfect solution to wanting a dog for Christmas and may even appease Phoebe.  I've seen the knitted dogs that were photographed for the book and they are quite wonderful (love this photo), and the whole book is utterly inspired.

More Last-Minute Knitted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson is also just what I need to make me more generous, although I would find it very difficult to give away some of the projects in here. This is another stunning book from Joelle and the Purl team, with lots of wonderful ideas, yarns, photos, extras and colour (the Bright Stripes Blanket is fantastic). 

Windswept pair

 
It wasn't intentional, but I read two very windy books recently. The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens swept me along so quickly that I read it, breathless, in just over a day. This is riveting stuff, and I was immediately and completely hooked by Monica Dickens' style which is at its gloriously funny-yet-sad best in the opening chapter set in a Lyons Corner House.

Wuthering Heights is, of course, the most madly windy, wuthering, murthering book ever written. I didn't enjoy it at all when I read it as a teenager - I was horrified by the terrible tempers, shouting and anger - and never went back to it until I needed something to read in Helsinki and decided to go for a classic. I have always had difficulty understanding why books are banned (Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance, did not seem appalling to me when I read it for the first time), but with Wuthering Heights I began to see why it might have shocked mid-nineteenth century readers with its very odd doubling of names and roles (back to my pair/twin theme) and strange relationships that most definitely fall outside the Victorian norm. This time, though, I was amazed by Emily Bronte's imagination and exploration of deep, dark themes. (The Madwoman in the Attic has a very good chapter on the book.)

Indie pair

 
I am fascinated by the current growth in independently published books. It's an obvious spin-off from the internet, and the idea of taking publishing matters into your own hands is one that interests and delights me. 

 

Brooklyn Diary and From Orchards, Fields, and Gardens are both the results of creative collaborations and are young, fresh and different.  I hope we see much more like this in bookshops as well as on websites. It is possible; I saw quite a few off-beat, locally published books in Finnish (not the most widely-spoken langauge) in Helsinki which proved that even a small market can sustain lovingly produced indie titles.

Wicked pair

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was the obvious book to read in Edinburgh, but what a shocker she is. Never mind Maggie Smith and her wonderful style and vowels in the film, the true Miss Brodie is far more dangerous and is, I reckon, closely related to the Mitford sisters. This is a crystalline book in that it is perfectly structured, faceted and frighteningly clear.

New York pair

 
A recent visit to New York took on a 'bright lights, big city' feel (although I have never read the book, I love the title - and Jay McInerney is a wonderful wine writer) as I saw NY at its twinkliest nightime best from the top of the Empire State Building with the Chrysler building looking like a huge, sparkly tiara. Manhattan Skyscrapers (new, third edition) was my bedtime reading so I knew what to look up at to every time I went out. And Quilts was the homelier, indoor twin of this book (I often wonder what is going on in all those rooms in all those huge skyscrapers), the one that soothes and brings life back down to a human scale. The exhibition is excellent.

Meanwhile, our own real-life twins continue to provide much entertainment. 

 

going, going, gone

 

cakely inspired

 

We didn't watch much of Nigella's latest TV series, but we did catch a few choice moments. Enough to see that her fairy lights must cause one of the biggest ever National Grid power surges when she switches them on, that she's cut down on what Alice calls her 'murder glances' direct to camera  (sadly - those were true highlights), and that she's still using memorable phrases to describe her actions and cooking.  Our series favourite was 'citrusly sodden' which referred to a pudding over which she'd squeezed oodles of orange juice, but we are easily pleased and jumped on any mention of 'studded', 'globules', 'partyfied' and 'gorgeous, golden, gleaming gloop' with great alliterative glee.

 

Yesterday, Phoebe made her birthday cake. As she was in full Nigella-mode (great gobbets of butter, mountains of dusty flour, gloopy eggs, cascading sugar etc etc) I feel I should  describe her creation as  'cakely inspired'. Which indeed it was: five layers, five colours, a whopping amount of buttercream, a handful of Rainbow Nerds 'tumbled' (as Nigella would say) over the top, and plenty of gasps when it was cut. 

 

All Phoebe needs now is a million fairy lights and a TV camera.

 

trolly dolly

 

When I was about ten, I had a small collection of trolls who lived in the large bottom drawer of an old dressing table. The drawer was fully furnished and decorated with cardboard settees and beds, fabric rugs and carpets, hand-drawn pictures, and all sorts of thoughtful little extras to make their apartment as deluxe as possible. (As toilet rolls and cereal boxes were my main materials, I can look back now and see that this was possibly my best ever effort at interior design and that I was certainly well ahead of the time with my economy, recycled chic.)

 

Underneath their outfits, all of which were made from squares of bright pink, lime, purple and orange felt bought on Stockport market, each troll had a discernible appendix scar made with a real scalpel. My best friend was the daughter of a vet and, like me, had had her appendix removed, and together we performed many successful operations with the scalpel that probably belonged in her father's surgery.

 

I've been making Suffolk puffs recently and I love the way they are transformed when you pull up the thread and they turn into a little 'puff'. But just before they close fully, they look like mini shower caps. I made so many and had the same thought so frequently, that I decided to see how a few would look as caps rather than puffs. Out came Phoebe's trolls (my trolls were saved for my sister who never looked after their home and health the way I did) and out came the felt for their towels and on went the Suffolk puffs. I draw the line at making them a home and checking out their appendixes, but I have to admit that the sight of them all lined up took me back to the days when I was a happy trolly dolly.

turkish delight and treasure hunts

When I was little I spent a lot of time with my nose buried in books, mostly borrowed from the library. I don't know quite how I did it as I was quite an independent soul and I didn't have much of a plan, but I somehow managed to read a huge number of British and American classics. This may partly have been because of the way I moved crabwise with my head to one side looking along the shelves until I came across likely looking titles. But it was also because I listened to my Mum when she talked about the books she'd loved as a child, which is how I came to read some very un-60s and -70s books such as Little Lord Fauntleroy, What Katy Did and Milly-Molly-Mandy. I loved anything with a good story, strong characters, plenty of pace and plot, but nothing remotely fantasy or sci-fi.

All this reading provided the starting point for my two books based on children's classics: Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer (2008) and Ripping Things to Do (2009). Although I covered titles by British and American authors (and a few from Australia), both of my books included references to a number of British books that aren't particularly well known in the US. But Meg at Perigee Books wasn't worried about this, and had the wonderful idea of putting together a US edition with a collection of pieces from Cherry Cake and Ripping Things that concentrate on the books that are well known in America and are as well loved and popular as ever.

So this is what she did, and Turkish Delight and Treasure Hunts is the result (also my first Kindle book). It contains a selection of delicious food moments and recipes based on the lovely things that children in books eat, and lots of practical stuff about the wonderful things they do. It has reproductions of orginal illustrations and a new introduction, but apart from that nothing has changed. It's still a celebration of great stories that continue to transport, entertain, educate and delight children all over the world.

There's a video of me talking about the book here, filmed when I went to New York, finding it hard to believe I was in the offices of Penguin, publisher of so many of my favourite childhood authors, with my editor.

 

 

bulb ritual

  

It's not so much the ritual of planting spring bulbs (which has just begun chez Brocket) as the ritual of taking a 3x3 photograph of the most beautiful bulbs of all. I realise that every year I line up nine hyacinth bulbs and photograph them purely because they look so lovely and are so obligingly photogenic. They sit snugly in the palm of my hand, feel smooth and papery, and have an amazing pearlescent sheen that shimmers in the late afternoon light. These are 'Purple Sensation' which have a bronze cast to their deep beetroot red colour. It almost seems a shame to plunge them out of sight, six inches deep in black compost.    

So I snap them before I put them to bed and tuck them up for the winter.

toy story

 

It's all very well having a style, such as my own photographic style, but it's not much good if it can't develop. Times change, cameras change, people change, and it would be odd, nay perverse, to stick to something simply because it's what you know best. And, of course, any acquired 'style' is never acquired overnight; it takes a long time of trial, error and experimentation to get to the point where something appears easy, natural, instinctive, and individual. In the meantime, plenty of bright ideas are abandoned, while something that might seem trivial or unimportant turns out to have a major impact on a style.

 

I don't experiment much with cameras in the same way that I always eat the same pizza in Pizza Express (the 'Soho' with chilli oil), mainly because once I find something I like, I don't like to jepoardise my enjoyment by taking risks with the menu. But, every now and then, I try something to keep my palate up to date, to test out a new flavour, to jolt myself back into appreciating what I know and like.

 

It's very similar to having new toys at Christmas, when old favourites are thrown over in favour of some shiny, noisy, wacky new object which is played with manically for a couple of days until the owner realises it simply can't replace his old favourites. But you never know, one Christmas might bring a new old favourite. And how did I ever find out that the 'Soho' pizza is so good if it wasn't for trying something new?

 

My new toy is the Hisptamatic app. I've played with it non-stop for two days, and play is one of the best ways I know of testing and exploring and finding new ways of doing things. Who knows if it will have an impact on my style? All I know is that it's a brilliantly clever toy that isn't losing its appeal yet. Not when it makes lettuces and fennel and water and sky look so textured and deep, and makes me look through a lens not darkly but differently.

[all photos taken yesterday morning and already I see a big difference between these and Saturday's photos]