Cornflower

Reading lists

Looking at Matisse the other day reminded me of this book of short stories by Elspeth Davie which uses a detail of his painting "Conversation" on its cover. I re-read the title story just now: "The man who wanted to smell books" imagines a future without the paper book and the visit of a book-sensualist to an electronic library.

It makes a suitable introduction to my list of good reads for this year, so in no particular order, here are what I might pretentiously call the "Cornflower Blues" (that's Blue as in the award sense rather than the melancholic, I hasten to add, as all these have given me great pleasure).

I love Alexander McCall Smith's work - apart from anything else he makes me laugh so much, and the book pictured above has given my family our most quoted line of the year:"Oh no, Herr Professor, it was the wrong leg!" There is now a considerable 'Sandy canon' to choose from but my four from the last few months are "Friends, lovers, chocolate", "Dream Angus", "Blue shoes and happiness" and "The finer points of sausage dogs".

Here's a suitably dark picture for Susan Hill's terrifically chilling "The Woman in Black" - don't pick this up (likewise "The Mist in the Mirror") if you are alone. Two of her Simon Serrailler detective novels, "The Various Haunts of Men" and "The Pure in Heart", have been added to the Hill section of our shelves and more of her work will be on my list for 2007. She is simply a very accomplished writer.

I can rely on Pesephone Books for quality and integrity and the re-discovery of writers who should never have become overlooked. This year's haul includes Diana Gardner's "A woman novelist and other stories", Duff Cooper's "Operation Heartbreak", Norah Hoult's funny and compassionate "There were no windows", Barbara Noble's poignant "Doreen", Marghanita Laski's beautifully judged "The Village", Molly Hughes's memoir "A London child of the 1870s", Helen Ashton's sad "Bricks and Mortar" and the incomparable Dorothy Whipple's "They were sisters".

Into "Miscellaneous" come the following titles, some of which are new books, some I've revisited and some I've come to through recommendations from various channels, which goes to prove, I suppose, that it is worthwhile to post a list like this! Charles Palliser's "The Unburied" was finished just this morning, and I am so glad I stuck with it when it got a touch heavy-going as it is very cleverly constructed and quite gripping. Mollie Panter-Downes's "One Fine Day" has had a post all to itself so I needn't say more. Gwen Raverat's memoir "Period Piece" was a joyous piece of writing. Molly Keane's "Good Behaviour" was worth revisiting many years on from first loving it. I 'd only ever encountered James Hilton through the films of his books but I was intrigued by "Lost Horizon" and cried at "Goodbye Mr. Chips". I came to "March" by Geraldine Brooks with high hopes due to her superb "Year of Wonders" and I wasn't disappointed. I've written before about Christian Miller's "A childhood in Scotland" and Margaret Elphinstone's "Light", but they must be on this list, and this year I discovered Edith Wharton through the short but intense "Ethan Frome".

What's next? There is already a promising pile of new books waiting for me and I want to go back to some old favourites (which I don't often do) as well as filling one or two very wide and glaring gaps in my reading thus far. That's a lot to look forward to, (she said gleefully)!

Cheesecake

 

Seasonal food: a friend very generously gave us a whole Cropwell Bishop Stilton which we have been enjoying over the last few days. I've been admiring the veining which has a dendritic quality, I think, and is a wonderful example of the cheesemaker's art.

We eat the cheese on its own or with nuts and Port, but as it is an exceptionally creamy Stilton, mild and non-acidic, it is especially good with Christmas cake, and the one we made some weeks ago has turned out well.

It is a family tradition that, with the exception of Santa and the little tree, all other cake decorations are handmade, so the excess icing becomes a sculpting medium from which appear models of the dogs, and for some reason (once pertinent, now lost in the mists of time), a figure of Michael Palin.

By this stage, the snowman, the igloo and Mr. Palin

have been consumed, and only Bess and Mollie remain.

 

100 not out

I have reached my first century - posts, that is, not years - which both surprises and pleases me. When I began Cornflower in September I had little idea what would go into it, who might read it or whether I could sustain it. Four months on I have regular visitors and kind souls who leave comments, and I get enormous enjoyment from putting it together.

It has made me, quite literally, look at things in a new way: a progression of sorts which is welcome and very healthy. I am excited by the visual to a degree I was unaware of before, and I hope that enthusiasm is evident here. Communicating interests in this manner is wonderful as I find so often that chords are struck, kindred spirits encountered, shared passions discovered. Reading other people's weblogs (and the comments left for me here) has given me access to much of value which I might not otherwise have found, and this 'cross-pollination' is in turn inspiring and stimulating.

As to family life, one reason for Cornflower's existence is to record, for our benefit, some of the things we do and how we do them. So often family photographs are of the holiday snap variety, capturing a moment and valuable for that, but failing to include the 'furnishings' of a life. The pictures I've taken for this site allow me to appreciate in a wider sense what I have and what is so easy to take for granted. If they amuse or please others along the way, then that is good.

Some generous visitors have said that they find things to lift the spirits on these pages. If that is so, I am truly delighted, and my family - who are now used to the camera as constant companion and meals being late because I have to finish a post - will be pleased as well!

A sincere thankyou to all the readers who have brought Cornflower this far.

Colour on a dull day

It is early afternoon as I write but there is no light in the sky. Looking out all I can see is drabness, the garden overlaid with grey, a day seeming dead before its time. The antidote to this gloom is a shot of colour, and thanks to a Christmas present, I have it here.

Matisse was descended from generations of weavers and grew up surrounded by textiles. The colours, patterns and textures of cloth influenced his visual imagination and provided inspiration for his work to a greater degree than any other source. He lived (and travelled) with a vast collection of pieces from scraps of fabric to couture clothes, Persian carpets to ethnic embroideries, and this book - which accompanied a major exhibition on the subject - shows how his 'working library' of textiles led to his astonishing use of colour.

 

Silk samples from Bohain-en-Vermandois in Picardy, northern France, where Matisse grew up.

Detail of an Ottoman or North African velvet jacket.

Detail of a Parisian couture dress (taffeta), 1938.

Matisse spotted this length of cotton toile de Jouy in a Paris junk shop while travelling on a bus. Did he guess when he saw it how much it would feature in his work?

Still-life with Blue Tablecloth, 1905-06

Still-life with Blue Tablecloth, 1909

Still-life with Geraniums, 1910

Pansies, 1918-19

Seville Still-life, 1910-11

Motif-feuille, c.1950

Matisse found his vocation relatively late, having been given a paintbox by his mother when he was convalescing from a bout of pneumonia. One of my Christmas presents was a box of paints......don't hold your breath!

Simple pleasures

Guests have departed, the pace slackens and post-Christmas there is time for a little 'time off'. I am knitting and reading (and would do both together if I could), and sitting on a sheepskin rug, as pure as snow (no Elinor Glyn here).

The yarn is the Posh cashmere I wrote about the other day and the pattern is one of the simple ribbed socks from this lovely book by Nancy Bush which was a Christmas present.

My reading matter is Charles Palliser's "The Unburied" which I almost gave up on a while ago. It demands - and repays - concentration, and I had neither time nor attention enough to give to it for the first hundred or so pages, but having stayed with it I am well and truly involved and enjoying it very much. I'm glad I persevered.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have things to do.

Cornflower Christmas present

Have a look at this (with the sound on):

Happy Christmas!

Tagging along

I have been 'tagged' by Natalie at The Yarn Yard and by Wanda at Fiberjoy so that makes me "it", I suppose, which means I have to reveal six weird things about myself and then tag six more people to do the same. Now, I think we might define "weird" loosely in this context so as to include, "slightly strange", "eccentric", a trifle "odd". My thesaurus adds : bizarre, creepy, eerie, funny, ghostly, grotesque, mysterious, spooky, uncanny, unearthly and zany, but how far along those paths I tread I couldn't possibly comment. Those who know me may have their own opinions.

So, here we go.

Strange tastes: like Natalie, I enjoy cheese and marmalade. It used to be Dairylea with Rose's Lime Marmalade for breakfast, now it is often cheddar and blackcurrant jam on toast. I follow my father in this - he put marmalade on his boarding school sausages to make them palatable, and to this day he is "Marmalade King", consuming as much as my mother can make. (It occurs to me that taking photographs of a packet of cheese and a pot of jam and putting them on a website is more weird than actually eating them together.....)

Strange habits: I am obsessive about my pens. Apart from a fountain pen I use a particular type of fine-nibbed cheapo pen and I get mad when anyone takes one!!! I label them so everyone knows which room they belong in and woe betide any person who uses one of mine and doesn't put it back in the right place immediately. (Someone who shall be nameless nicks them frequently to do the Times crossword and rarely replaces them. You know who you are - buy your own supply!)

Strange past: I was once interviewed by John Humphrys. I was around nine or ten at the time and hadn't done anything to merit a grilling by the scourge of the "Today" programme, but with some classmates was quizzed by him on the whereabouts of London on a map of the British Isles (we Manx people were always a touch disconnected from the mainland); my little bit wasn't broadcast. Just as well. I still remember the tie he was wearing and how he sat on a school desk with his hands under his thighs and swung his legs as he waited to do his stuff.

Strange powers: I practise Reiki healing, and occasionally do it for non family-members who've lived to tell the tale and come back for more.

Strange dreams: I wake up exhausted every morning. I seem to do more when I'm asleep than in my waking hours and have extraordinarily vivid nocturnal experiences.

Strange tastes, part two: I've always had a thing about earth. I am a Virgo, which is an earth sign, and I need to have my feet on the ground. During each of my pregnancies I spent hours repotting plants, tasting soil on potatoes, (some mineral deficiency, perhaps?) breathing in the scent of compost, and I still find the smell of damp earth intoxicating. I am always happy in greenhouses. And I love being out in the rain.

I hope these signs of weirdness don't scare anyone away as I'm pretty normal, really. Now I have to leave this tag in the comments of six fellow bloggers and ask them to take up the challenge.

Here goes:

Fidra Books, Sarah Salway, Random Jottings, Dovegreyreader, Kelly's Green, Pillow Book Blog

Mug shots

It is midwinter, and I feel the call of hot chocolate. I actually stopped by Marks & Spencer this morning with the sole purpose of buying cream to spoon on top of the chocolate which I shall be making this evening ..... I'm a woman with a mission and no-one better get in my way! What I'm talking about here doesn't come from a sachet; it's not thin and watery and insipid, nor is it particularly milky. It is intensely, fragrantly dark, rich and luscious. To paraphrase the advert, "This is not just hot chocolate, this is generous quantities of Green & Black's Organic 72% cocoa solids Cooks' Chocolate, melted with the gentle heat of the Aga's warming plate and blended into full fat milk until smooth before being laced with brandy and garnished with West Country Extra Thick Double Cream". To be drunk with a guilty but happy expression while sitting in Cholesterol Corner.

The mug it's to be drunk from is almost as important as the contents - nothing 'fine' will do as I reserve that for tea which I like to be very weak. But properly strong coffee and chocolate demand a robust presence in earthenware, or a generous shape at least. The Emma Bridgewater ones here are used for our breakfast coffee every day, and the labrador theme seems to dominate:

The children have their favourites, too. Alice, sophisticate that she is, alternates between Bunnykins and Penguin Books -

William, who while on CCF army camp got a taste for very strong sweet tea and then mixed it with coffee to invent "Toffee", goes for something plain in masculine black -

 

Harriet is a hot choc girl, (though she takes it without the sinful additions), but she likes hers in a small Nicholas Mosse mug which we bought for her in Ireland complete with her own mini whisk for mixing:

I know of at least two places here in Edinburgh where top class hot chocolate can be found, and they are Plaisir du Chocolat and Centotre, but for me the 'best of the best' award has to go to Angelina in the Rue de Rivoli, Paris, where the 'chocolat Africain' is unbeatable.

However, as darkness falls on this (almost) shortest day of the year, my own fireside with my chunky Tamara Hedderwick mug full of deliciousness will do nicely.

Reading room

Imagine having no books. Imagine bare shelves, nothing on the bedside table, no other world to slip into when this one seems uncomfortable; no facts and figures to refer to, no knowledge to be acquired by the simple turn of a page. Imagine being a child without a picture book, a story book, a text book; no spark to set the imagination alight, nothing to inspire and inform.

Now think of a school with barely two dozen books in total and all of them held under lock and key because they are so precious. No library, no literature, no classroom collections, no quiet reading corner.

Susan Hill writes this morning on her blog about the charity Room to Read, which was founded by Microsoft employee John Wood when he discovered such a school in Nepal. With the help of her readers, Susan will be supporting this charity during 2007, and she asks for suggestions as to which particular area of its work any money raised should go to. John Wood says that world change starts with educating children, and providing books, libraries, schools and scholarships is his way of achieving that vitally important aim. Do visit Susan's blog and the charity's own site and read more about what they do.

We are fortunate in being able to buy books whenever we wish and to have access - through shops, libraries, the internet - to more titles than we could ever read. As a result, perhaps we take books for granted, but others cannot do so. At university I did some reading for a fellow student, a blind girl who relied on her guide dog to get her from place to place and volunteers to read aloud law reports and journal articles to her. So much of the information she required to absorb was unreachable by her without the use of another person's eyes and voice. The National Library for the Blind makes an increasing amount of literature available to blind and partially sighted adults and children. Think of the hundreds of people queuing outside bookshops for hours for the release of the latest Harry Potter volume and then think of a blind child waiting for the arrival of a scarce braille copy in order to find out how the story continues, and you quickly see the point of their work.

With the massive high street presence of the big book chains and the ability to pick up a bestseller along with our bread and milk at the supermarket, we are used to instant gratification in book terms. A moment or two spent looking at the work of Room to Read and the NLB makes me consider that to many, a book is a luxury, a rare commodity, and as I wait for yet another Amazon order to arrive, I find that a sobering thought.

Christmas sums

Ivy +

ivy +

Scots pine +

lavender + rosemary +

hebe + choisya +

skimmia + dogwood =

Displacement activity

I ought to be.... buying and wrapping presents, cleaning the house, planning meals, doing the laundry, making gift tags and decorations.... but I'm sitting stroking yarn instead. Not any common or garden fibre, you must understand, but sockweight cashmere from Posh Yarn which had to suffer the indignities of association with sale catalogues (cue a fit of the vapours!) as it came through my letterbox this morning. The colour  is called "Crocus" so for that reason and its obvious pedigree, I imagine it accepted the journal of The Royal Horticultural Society, which was its other temporary bedfellow in the postman's sack, with rather better grace.

Its poshness is beyond doubt - in an aristocratic hierarchy it would be at the ducal end of the scale, and while it looks bluer here than it really is, its subtle variegations are a true crocus-purple. I'd like to begin working with it right now, but I must be firm with myself and adopt a "look but don't touch" policy. Perhaps I should put it on display in a glass case or arrange it out of reach beyond red boundary ropes supported on brass stands. It deserves to be treated with the utmost respect and due deference, so I shall carefully re-wrap it in its tissue paper, don my mob cap, drop a quick curtsey and go and get the hoover out, (if you please, m'lady).

Taste & style

I run the risk of syrupy sentimentality with this post. The occasion of decorating the Christmas tree involves the annual re-discovery of so many 'treasures': worthless, occasionally tasteless bits of stuff, collected over the years, but all of them holding some significance for us as a family.

In B.C. days (that is, Before Children) we went for a red and green theme, using silk and velvet baubles, and yards of ribbon -

With toddlers around, the pretty things were moved higher up the tree,

though the unbreakable papier mache balls [how do you insert accents?] could stay at low level. Through the nursery and early primary school years, various semi-abstract Santas and salt dough stars made it home,

along with a selection of  handmade crackers, fairies and angels (a much younger Harriet made the one in the foreground using paper doilies and a piece of net curtain; in typical brotherly fashion, Will remarked today that it resembles Munch's "The Scream").

We bought these beautifully crafted wooden decorations in Switzerland this summer, so they are getting their first outing on the tree and will remind us of a wonderful holiday in Wengen, but the old faithfuls are on display too, a little gaudy and sparkly perhaps, but contributing to the overall effect in their own inimitable way.

Somehow, questions of 'taste' become irrelevant when applied to a family Christmas. We are not window dressers in a posh department store, nor are we decorators in a chic hotel; 'style' doesn't matter. Although I have tried to banish tinsel from at least one room of the house (though some may be sneaked in when my back is turned), my view is that you should use what is important to you , and if a grouping of plastic Santas on a cotton wool snowscene were to materialise (as has been known in the past) then, actually, I wouldn't mind at all.

Dickensian mittens

When I first entered the legal profession I worked in a fine building in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town. Though the reception area was quite smart and clients were always seen in grand rooms, behind the genteel facade office accommodation for the minions was less glamorous. Not far beyond the front door the thick carpet gave way to linoleum, high-ceilinged rooms were heated by ancient, puny gas fires, and the tiny kitchen was scruffy in the extreme. However, not so many years before I worked there, conditions were positively Dickensian, and older members of staff regaled us with tales of coal fires (no doubt there was a 'boy' or 'odd man' to keep them stoked), high sloping desks and ledgers in which entries were made with quill pens.

 

Although we used computers, much of our work involved reading title deeds, many of which were written in elegant script on vellum, impressed with a silver 'stamp'. Legal language was satisfyingly archaic and - naturally - incomprehensible to those outwith the profession. We talked of Instruments of Sasine, incorporeal moveables, infeftment and other esoterica while about us the paint peeled, the stone stairs showed their years of wear and leather-bound law reports gathered dust in the library.

The apprentices and clerks of old might have appreciated a pair of these mittens (Bob Cratchit-style, updated). Harriet saw the pattern for these wrist and handwarmers in Joelle Hoverson's "Last minute knitted gifts" and asked for them in alpaca silk. They took around a ball and a half and hardly any time, and the spiral rib has worked well. The colour is lime green, though different light and camera settings have reproduced it variously:

My old firm has moved now to modern, purpose-built offices; centrally heated, technologically up to the minute, and probably somewhat soulless. No mittens needed there, unless as fashion accessories.

Winter green

It is wet and wild here this morning, but I ventured outside to see what greenery the garden offered for cutting.

I found ceanothus, choisya, pieris and ivy; also a few mahonia flowers and a single astrantia.

I took a sprig of viburnum x bodnantense for its almond scent, some red stems of dogwood, and 'arranged' everything in a jug:

No skill involved, little time and it's all free.

Eskimo day

When I first watched the television film "Eskimo Day" by the brilliant writer Jack Rosenthal, my children were aged seven, five, and one and the prospect of university admission for them was a long, long way off. Ten years on, and this week we have assumed the roles of the parents so cleverly depicted in that film, as we accompanied our eldest child to Cambridge where she undertook a testing stage in the application process: the interview.

Just like our fictitious counterparts, we were the nervous ones, while Alice, the candidate, was remarkably calm and took everything in her stride. We delivered her safely to the college gates yesterday morning and then we left her, as our job was all but done. While we browsed in bookshops and walked in the crisp wintery sunshine, Alice was analysing texts, discussing poetry and explaining her passion for literature, and after we had anxiously watched the clocks and repeatedly assured each other that she was bound to be fine, we were waiting for her when she emerged  - exhilarated - some hours later.

It remains to be seen whether Alice will be offered a place, (to have got this far is a major achievement of which we are all very proud), but the words of Maureen Lipman's character in the film as she watches her son go through the college portal reflected our feelings. "He's leaving us", she said.