Cornflower

Children's corner

Yesterday's rain-soaked post reminded me of this picture by Henriette Willebeek Le Mair. The print is titled "Raining, still raining", and the little girl's back speaks eloquently of her longing to go out to play! A little bit of searching through the wonderful Bridgeman Art Library collection revealed that the picture is also known as "A Voyage to India" and was one of the illustrations for A Gallery of Children by A.A. Milne. Here is what the Amazon catalogue says about it: In 1923, Henriette Willebeek Le Mair was commissioned by the Colgate Soap Company to do 12 pictures for use in advertisements. A.A. Milne agreed to write a series of short stories, or what he described as "a fanciful elaboration of each picture", so that they could be published in book form. Intriguing. So is the little girl in the picture looking forward to her voyage to India to escape the miserable wet weather, or is she pining for her family who have perhaps gone without her? We shall have to read the story to find out.

Here are some more of her beautiful and delicate pictures, all illustrations to nursery rhymes and the like and taken from our well-thumbed copies of three of her books:

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A note on Carl Larsson:

When I used this Larsson picture to illustrate an earlier post, many people commented on how lovely his work was. I am indebted to a kind reader, Barbara, who has found a source for Larsson cards - have a look here.

Raindrops keep falling on my head

I have written here before of my fondness for rain. A strange taste, maybe, but there is something about that dense, closed-in sky which is like being wrapped in a blanket, while the sound of the rain (even the 'shush' of traffic on wet roads) is musical, and the way the wetness brings out the colours in everything - just think of a stone and how vivid its greys and duns can be compared to its dull dry state.

It is very wet indeed here today, and seeing the showers reminded me of a favourite rainy quote and set me searching for others. Perhaps an unlikely source for a mention of precipitation is Agnes Jekyll's charming  Kitchen Essays, in which under "Breakfast-time Suggestions" she says "there are... some bright spirits who can irradiate the gloom of the most cheerless morning even as 'the lark who meets the rain halfway and sings it down'." I love that image - I wish I had a picture to reflect it, but the camellia showing the first signs of colour will have to do:

Charlotte Bronte would have been well acquainted with harsh weather and she makes use of it in the opening lines of Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.....the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre and a rain so penetrating that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question."

How about some Browning ("Porphyria's Lover"): "The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake. It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake."

Or Swinburne: "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."

"Soft refreshing rain."

And Portia's famous speech from "The Merchant Of Venice" : "The quality of mercy is not strained, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath..."

Have a nice day!

Lilies

A taste of the times

Part of Friday's haul at the supermarket was the wherewithal [I like that word] to make Lindsey Bareham's Chinese white fish with coconut rice, the recipe for which you can read here. When you start off with such vibrantly coloured ingredients, the appetite is well and truly whetted. Even in preparation the aromas were inviting: from the zing of the lime to the less obviously assertive but distinctive coriander, with my old favourite, plenty of spring onions -

lots of ginger,

and unctuously rich creamed coconut.

I might tone down the soy sauce a little the next time, but the blend of flavours with the smokey sesame oil is just right.

This is one to come back to again and again.

Soap opera

Positive thinking. Wasn't it J.M. Barrie who said that the key to happiness was not to do what you like but to like what you do, or words to that effect?

I decided to adopt this attitude when I had to haul myself away from talking about books and reading yesterday to go to the supermarket.

"Look at what you're doing in a different light", I told myself; "see 'the big shop' (and the big shop, for that matter) not as a chore but as a pleasure - an adventure, a search for delightful things. " Bear with me, dear readers, because I can tell you that the strategy worked.

As I ventured forth in 'Fruit & Veg', pausing to pick up some flowers on the way, I looked at all the produce ranged in the baskets and racks with fresh eyes. I saw not just the means to boost our vitamin, mineral and fibre intake, but colours, flavours, textures and shapes - a still life arranged for my and my fellow customers' delectation, no less!

After a minute or two of browsing appreciatively I must have been exuding a new kind of energy as a member of staff saw me struggling to open one of the flimsy little plastic veg. bags and offered to show me the best technique. "Thankyou so much," I cried, amazed at this service (I could say cynically that perhaps he just wanted me to hurry up and move out of his way, but remember I'm being positive here so I'll settle for his being genuinely helpful); "It's a pleasure, madam", he said, and I went on my way a happier soul.

I skipped on round the shop (you may laugh if you wish), taking an interest in the most basic of items, examining packaging for its stylistic merit, looking closely instead of just barely seeing - as is so often the way with a task like that, and the whole experience was a lot more enjoyable than it usually is.

It was one of my intentions when I began writing this blog that I would try to bring out the best in the ordinary, as so much of what we all do is, perforce, 'ordinary'. So yesterday's little exercise in donning the rose-coloured spectacles was quite successful. But if you've no glasses to hand, you could always use my  'Redcurrant and Cassis Soap':-

Thankyou, Waitrose.

Page 69

Reading a Financial Times article on "how to navigate a world crowded with books - and live to tell the tale", I was intrigued by something - new to me - called the McLuhan test. The idea is that when you pick up a book in a shop, ignore the dust-jacket, the critics' comments, etc. and just read page 69; your response will tell you whether or not to buy it. As I write this I have a washing machine beeping irritatingly in the background demanding to be unloaded, and a family due home in a few hours' time expecting me to have visited the supermarket and filled the fridge, so there's no chance of a saunter into town and a browse round Waterstone's. I can but test the test on books I already own.

Our shelves are full to overflowing and there are many there I haven't yet read - N.B. the article says "those who are 'truly cultured' are 'capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more'", so that's alright, then. I picked a few at random and turned to p.69.

Tove Jansson's The Summer Book and Muriel Spark's The Complete Short Stories failed to pull me in.

More compelling were Great Expectationsand Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life.

The bait was well and truly taken for Jennifer Donnelly's A Gathering Light and Trollope's (no, I've never read him!) The Warden.

I checked p.69 of Sarah Bryant's excellent The Other Eden which I've just finished and greatly enjoyed, and it, too, hooked me. And then I read the first page of each of the books I've mentioned and found my reaction was the same as to the later page. So what does that tell us? Just begin at the beginning?

Around the world in eighty days

It would seem obvious that the time taken to cross the Atlantic varies according to the method of transport used. Concorde did it in around four hours, I think, and passengers could somehow get "there" before they'd left "here" due to time differences. In the days of the gracious ocean liners the journey was slower, more leisurely, and to be enjoyed rather than endured. Then there are the yachtsmen, the rowers, people in canoes, and so on, who spend weeks at sea. Little did I know when I took out a subscription to America's "Interweave Knits" that they would be employing the 'message in a bottle' method of despatch for their magazines - or so it seems.

The saga of acquiring these sacred texts of the knitting world is a long one, but suffice to say it involves many email messages, sent by me, and very few replies. However, my long wait has not been in vain as three copies of IK arrived in the last few days. One, according to the postmark, took only four days to get here (positively supersonic) but it was a replacement for the one which was posted in December and took seventy five days (did they make someone swim across with it?). And just for good measure, the Spring edition turned up under separate cover but alongside the Winter ones.

Thanks to kind Natalie at The Yarn Yard, who had a similar experience recently, I also have a copy of the Fall edition, so my collection is building, but I have no need for the second Winter magazine so, if you'd like it, please get in touch and I'll put it in the post - maybe best not to try to send it back across the Atlantic, but within Britain might just be feasible.

After all that, do I have the energy to knit anything?

Newby a la mode

Eric Newby's name is synonymous with travel writing. A lesser-known phase of his life was his time spent, as it were, in ladies' clothing, which he wrote about in his lovely memoir Something Wholesale . Joining the family firm for want of anything more suitable to do, he spent the post-war years as a traveller in couture, and his often hilarious experiences as the innocent abroad are recounted in this book with an air of bemused detachment.

He found himself up against (often quite literally) some formidable women in the rag trade from the exacting Scottish buyers who wanted 'bullet-proof' tweed and funereal black chiffon, to 'traditionally built' Manchester matrons ("We like our pudding in the North"), to the dressmakers who insisted on doing things their own way : "Paris says beige".

Newby describes the immense impact of Dior's "New Look" quoting Harper's Bazaar from May 1947, "Ankles are regaining their old magical quality", and a buyer at a Liverpool department store, "That Dior should be shot".

The Epilogue sees Newby returning to Paris in 1985 to view the spring collections with senior editors from British Vogue. He comments on the vast cost of even the simplest of dresses and the morality of spending that sort of money on clothes, but then he points out that couture is an art form - without wealthy clients to keep it going, great skills would be lost, the textile industry would decline and the world be poorer for it. Thinking back to the seamstresses in his own firm's workroom he remembers the girls wore "expressions of incommunicable satisfaction."

Hellebores

Is it the hellebore's rose-like flower which appeals, or is it their blooming presence at an otherwise barren time of year? These pictures don't show the extraordinary colour range they come in from blackish purples to delicate pinks and bleached limey greens, but they do illustrate, I think, the plant's surprising delicacy.

North American readers may like to visit the amazing collection which Barry Glick kindly alerted me to here.

Good intentions

Once upon a time, Liberty had a branch here in Edinburgh, in which they sold - along with beanbag frogs and other essentials - fabric covered notebooks. Ever the optimist, I bought a couple in their sale hoping they would transform my kitchen. I didn't expect that it would be their decorative value that would make this silk purse/sow's ear shift; it would be the discipline required in using these books which would turn the hitherto 'quick pasta supper' into a meal of industry and integrity, fit to be recorded for posterity.

First up came

For some reason I have written no recipes within its Tana lawn covers but instead have listed what we ate, and like all good diaries it was started with great enthusiasm ... and then it tails off. So I see that we went from onion tart to marinated monkfish, carrot and tarragon soup to olive bread and brown rice pudding (that sounds a bit 'worthy', unlike the chocolate rice pud I make nowadays), and pork in cider to ricotta cheesecake.

The demands of a baby who never slept meant nothing more was written for about a year until we moved house and I restarted my little record, despite being surrounded by packing cases and visitors. I see I managed a whole six days (kedgeree with cardamom and lemon, Emmental omelette, sticky toffee pudding and almond biscuits...). Later, fired with enthusiasm by the installation of the Aga, off I went again with slow-roasted chicken, lamb stew with olives and chilli and cinnamon apple cake. The last entry is from almost eight years ago; I hang my head in shame.

It isn't that we don't cook 'properly' anymore (all the food shown on this site is very 'real'), but the book got pushed to the back of a shelf and forgotten about, and catering for the various family likes and dislikes was hard enough without keeping up the diary alongside.

My other Liberty purchase was also to do with food, but on a grander scale.

According to "Guests & Menus", we have only ever entertained twice in almost twenty years of marriage. Not so. One of the two occasions listed was when three male friends came to dinner and we managed an impressive five courses, and the other was a family dinner at which the guests included Hector, my parents' dog. (I see we ate seatrout en croute, so presumably he was happy).

Today my record-keeping is done on these pages, rather than on thick cream paper ones, and the ability to photograph what we eat has led to more of an emphasis on the visual, rather than the bald facts. Either way, these logs (and many others like them) may one day form an important resource for social historians. I don't suppose that thought occurred to me when I passed over a William Morris patchwork bear and chose my books instead.

A ripping yarn

Between burnishing the bell-pull, adding to the pile of ironed business shirts and generally eliminating dust today, I was reading (in strict twenty minute slots, of course) Sarah Bryant's gripping novel, The Other Eden. I liked this book - it kept on drawing me back from the chores to finish it - and although I feel it could have benefited from a stricter editorial hand, it was good reading. In short, it's an allegorical, gothic, romantic piece alluding to "Rebecca", "Jane Eyre", "The Secret Garden", "Snow White, Rose Red" and more, and if that hasn't left you breathless then the male lead in the form of the Russian concert pianist, Alexander Trevozhov, certainly will.

When a writer has a character say "Don't worry, Elenka. What could possibly happen in a few hours?" you just know you have to fasten your seatbelt and hang on for the rest of the ride. Yes, perhaps too much of the plot occurs in dreams and dreamlike states; maybe there are too many abandoned mansions with dark secrets, too many locked doors and shuttered windows, questions of mistaken identity and family mysteries to be solved, but it's fun and it satisfied this reader where "The Thirteenth Tale" did not.

Musical references are scattered throughout the book, and it helps to be broadly acquainted with piano music, especially Chopin - with a nod to Rachmaninov -, and a contrapuntal reference to Bach. If Alexander had been mine I'd have had him playing Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz", but the writer's choice was Chopin Etudes, and the G minor Ballade which, crucially, "never answers the questions it raises".  And there you have it in all its unresolved, imagined intensity. Would you "Adam and Eve it"?

Elemental, my dear Watson

A piece of Perthshire.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

It's the weekend

I sometimes wonder whether relaxing is a skill I don't have. Am I alone in being unable to enjoy 'time off' without feeling the pull of the laundry, noticing the dog hairs on the carpet, or reminding myself that I shouldn't really be sitting down at all, and certainly not with a conscience pricked by the sight of domestic neglect?

Housework is never-ending; dirt may be banished temporarily, the ironing basket emptied, the pantry shelves filled, but there's never a time when it is all, definitively, done, and it can be hard to accept that, to put up with the less than perfectly clean home, the long 'to do' list. So I fret, and leap out of my chair in the middle of a row of knitting to wield the hoover, or swap the book I'm reading for a duster [yes, Mum, I do dust ... occasionally ...], and I have been known to abandon the computer in favour of a tin of Brasso and a polishing cloth. But then on the other hand, I like to do things besides washing, sweeping, tidying and buffing all day. The trouble with this dichotomy is that it means I inhabit a housewifely no man's land -  belonging neither to the obsessively dutiful/spotlessly clean group, nor to the creatively driven/'take us as you find us' bunch.

What to do? Enjoy your weekend, and I (with one eye on a novel and the other on the grime) shall try to enjoy mine.

Through a glass, brightly

Innocent pleasures: mango and passion fruit sorbet. No fat, no sugar, no guilt.

Custard glasses.

Whisk two egg whites to firm peak stage. Fold into 8 fl.oz. of Innocent Mango and Passion Fruit Smoothie. Freeze. Beat when semi-frozen and freeze again.

Serve.

Hearts

Rebus Valentine, American, c.1760.

Heart textile design, American, 1950s.

Pink and blue hearts, textile design, American, 1930s.

Voysey textile design, c.1898.