Cornflower

The kindness of strangers: Mr. Cornflower in Chicago

     My schedule gave me a spare hour and a half between meetings and I decided to go to one of the world's great art galleries, the Art Institute of Chicago. But I got held up and then losing my sense of direction completely ended up walking all the way round the block (the entrance I wanted to use is closed because there's a lot of building work going on), so I'm rushing up the front steps with barely twenty-five minutes left.

I buy my ticket and present it to the lady in uniform. With so little time I know exactly what I want to see: "Could you tell me where the Mary Cassatts are please?" She looks at me and at the bag I'm carrying. We both look at the cloakroom where there is a queue of people. She says quietly "You'd better leave that behind my desk and come through." It turns out that what I want is across the far side of the building, and getting there (partly because of the building work) involves several tricky turns and changes of level. But her instructions are clear and five minutes later I am standing in front of the painting I particularly want to see.

 

 

I know there is something sentimental about this and I don't care. In a foreign country, four thousand miles away from our own children, who are all well past the stage of needing to be bathed, I look at this image of love and innocence until it begins to blur a little. The gallery is closing, and more slowly now I retrace my steps. I pick up my bag from the lady at the gate, and thank her, but my throat feels tight and the voice unusually high-pitched. I go out into the Chicago sunshine, light-headed with a sense of release.

Miss Brodie's Edinburgh

     I thought anyone reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  (for the Book Group) who isn't familiar with Edinburgh might like to see some pictures of the city, just to set the scene, so I'll begin today with a view from out of town.
     Miss Brodie and her girls spend a lot of time at Mr. Lowther's house in Cramond, and these shots were taken a little way along the shore from there, dodging the showers, and looking across the Forth and the famous Rail Bridge to Fife.
"The rain had stopped and was only now hanging damply within the salt air. All along the sea front Miss Brodie questioned the girls, against the rhythm of the waves, about the appointments of Teddy Lloyd's house, the kind of tea they got, how vast and light was the studio, and what was said."

Co-ordination

   Surrounded as I am by books and yarn, I'm playing the idle game of co-ordinating reading and knitting, so here are a few examples from the current tottering book pile and the similarly growing yarn collection.
Not as obvious from the picture as in the flesh but the pale aqua of the jacket of Victoria Hislop's The Return, a dance-themed novel set in Spain, is a great match for this Shetland yarn (though there's precious little flamenco to be found in Lerwick, I imagine).


The black lace of the Kidsilk Haze scarf might suggest a fichu or shawl from Richardson's Pamela though would it inflame Mr. B, if worn by the eponymous heroine?


The sea greens and blues of this skein pick up on the maritime cover of Lloyd Jones's The Book of Fame,

  while the massive hedge on the front of Kipling's Selected Stories is perfect with the scarf in Posh Yarn Sophia "Undergrowth".

Carrots and sticks

      

I feel like a puppet whose strings have been cut and I'm about to go 'flop'. Our school term ended at lunchtime today so now there's the prospect of eight weeks without early starts, afternoon pick-ups, chivvying re. prep., and so on. I have a couple of little projects in mind to tackle with my 'extra' time, but for now I need to clear a few things off my desk (in fact, I need to clear everything off and clean it!!).

    Of course, being in more relaxed, holiday mode can mean that nothing gets done, so I was interested to read  Margaret's comment the other day where she mentioned that she uses 'carrots' to make her do her chores quickly, and anticipation of the pleasure that awaits her is all the greater. I think that's a very sound method.
    So, as I have a good book to finish and another to begin straightaway, I must go and get my duster!

Friday flowers

     I hope to write a more wordy post later, but for now, some roses: the dark crimson one is Tuscany Superb, the creamy pink at bottom left, Maiden's Blush, and the small pale pink one, Brenda Colvin.
    

 

Le rouge et le noir

    Knitting goes on apace with a couple of scarves on the needles to go with the recently finished mitts (all for a charity sale of work later in the year).

    'Wicked' Kidsilk Haze for the Airy Scarf from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts

and the rest of the cherry BFL/silk for something short and sweet using the horseshoe pattern from the mitts as the central motif.

And for no reason other than that the black one looks a bit gothic,  - and I like it - here's Waltz in Black!

 

Just reading

    Whenever a parcel of books arrives it's a cause for excitement - I look at the contents as treats in store and can't wait to make a start on them. Today's batch is no different, and time is of the essence here as the review deadline looms so I've told Mr. C. not to expect meals cooked, shirts ironed or my usual sparkling wit and repartee for the next few days because I'll be reading.

    Here's what I've got to look forward to: Victoria Hislop's second novel The Return is set in Granada and moves between the present day and the 1930s; this is "a dramatic story of pain and passion in a country divided by war". I've recently read a book about the tango (Lloyd Jones' Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance), but this time it's flamenco which is at the heart of the story.

    Then comes The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson. This is fiction based on fact, taking its starting point in 1946 when Errol Flynn's schooner was washed up in Jamaica during a hurricane. Flynn was so enamoured with the place that he bought an uninhabited islet and made a home there, and the book - "a tale of passion and recklessness" - imagines the rest. This is "an unabashedly frangipani-scented, wholly satisfying, armchair holiday of a read"!

    Next a debut novel: The Truth About These Strange Times by Adam Foulds. This is about an unlikely friendship between ten-year-old Saul Dawson-Smith, who is training for the World Memory Championships, and Howard McNamee, on the run from his memories of a murky Glaswegian childhood. It sounds intriguing, especially as The Sunday Times describes it as "extremely fine....written with a wonderful clarity and precision".

    Lastly, another Lloyd Jones: The Book of Fame. Again, a mixture of history and imagination, and here's the blurb: "In August 1905 a party of young men set sail for England...Together they make up the All Blacks, an unknown rugby team from New Zealand. Far from home, weary, bedazzled and a little lost, they had come to show the world what they could do. What they didn't know was that they were bound for fame". (And I love the cover!).

Potter's wheel

     In the olden days of television, when there were only two channels, the BBC closed down every evening with the National Anthem and there were hours in the day when nothing at all was broadcast, brief gaps between programmes were filled with the test card or short, restful films of rural England, a Scottish mountain scene or the famous "potter's wheel". Viewers could enjoy a few moments of peace and fascination watching a pot being thrown or be transported to some bucolic idyll while waiting for the next scheduled transmission.

    Today's post (my 700th., so the statistics tell me) is in similar 'intermission' vein. I'd expected to have some books to talk about but they haven't arrived yet, so instead I'll 'fill in' with a link definitely worth following (and my thanks to Jane for mentioning this). Anyone who is interested in knitting, typography, textile design and history, art and much else besides should take a look at this fabulous website (go back to the January posts and begin at the beginning). I've spent hours there already, marvelling at the creations and wandering off at a tangent to look at many of the things referred to. It's the sort of content I was talking about in this post the other day, so I'm delighted to have found it.

Cherry ripe

     I'm not good enough to be a perfectionist! I've had to settle for these pictures even though they just aren't quite right for colour, but since finishing these mitts this morning I've photographed them indoors and out, in full sun and Edinburgh greyness and try as I might I can't get them 'just so'.

In real life they are a luscious dark cherry red with a beautiful sheen, set off well by their black mohair trim. The pattern is of course Cranford Mitts by Jane, available from Natalie, and this time the yarn is Fyberspates Scrumptious 'Cherry' edged in Kidsilk Haze 'Wicked'.

 

Lustie symmer

     I'm reading Liza Dalby's East Wind Melts the Ice, a book to be savoured, not rushed. Taking the form of an ancient Chinese almanac, it is a series of essays for the year, combining reflections on oriental culture - and contrasting them with the author's western life - nature, literature, horticulture and more.

    

Here's a snatch from the introduction to the "Summer" section of the book: "Chinese summer is the time when the cool, dark yin ethers pull back into the depths of the earth. Yin continues to diminish and retreat till the summer solstice, just as the yang reaches its apogee. The earliest definition of summer in chinese is 'the time when the myriad things flourish'. Everything the emperor did in this season was meant to encourage the crops to grow. In fact he had to be careful not to overstimulate the already powerful yang ether....At the same time, he had to guard against prematurely invigorating the yin. 'Cum, lustie symmer! With thy flouris', wrote the Scottish poet William Dunbar in the fifteenth century. The Chinese would have agreed".

And a short piece on Wisteria (mine is passed, so no pictures of it, unfortunately; the philadelphus will have to do): "For years I thought the English word 'wisteria' was derived from a botanist named Wister. I felt the name wonderfully appropriate.....How lucky for us that the flower and the name of the person commemorated are so syllabically congenial - misty wistful airy wispy mists of Mr. Wister's wisteria. Now I discover that he wasn't a botanist, he was a professor of anatomy, and his name was Caspar Wistar, not Wister. The genus ... was named in his honour posthumously ... Casparia might have been almost as good". 

   Musings like this complement the author's scholarly approach to fact beautifully, and it is a very absorbing collection of writings, prefaced by this most apt quotation from Sei Shonagon's tenth century "Pillow book": "I set about filling my notebooks with odd facts, recollections and other things, including the most trivial stuff. Mostly I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and worthwhile, but my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects. I am sure that when people see my book they will say, 'It's even worse than expected - now you can really tell what she is like'." A bit like this weblog, then!

Hanging on the telephone

    

I had to call a mobile phone company yesterday and while I waited to be put through to a member of staff heard the following welcome addition to the usual options menu: "If you don't like the music you're listening to, press 1". I did so and was given these alternatives: "For Norah Jones, press 2, for Jools Holland, press 3 and for Classic FM's "Relax" album, press 4". I went for the last one and got a Rachmaninov piano concerto which sounded as though it had been recorded at the top of a mountain in a gale. Maybe this is some ploy of the putative "Extreme Romanticism Society", taking their cue from the Extreme Ironing practitioners ("combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt" - I love it!). But to get back to Sergei played, as it were, on the Beaufort Scale, is this some film version of the piece or was it just interference on the phone line? Either way, it was better than the usual "hold music" (see last week's experience).
    There is immense scope for originality in telephone answering services and companies of all types could do well to explore it. I heard of one business which uses a recording of the actor Leslie Phillips saying his suggestive and seductive "Hello" to great effect - no-one could hang up after that. Or how about Blondie's "Hangin' on the telephone"? - it strikes an ironic note and is better than a lot of things. But surely they could come up with something more interesting and enjoyable than the bland and irritating stuff usually played. Anyone got any ideas for what would be perfect to listen while hanging on?

Just blown in from the Windy City

     Mr. C. has spent the week in Chicago and has just blown in, bearing generous gifts (very nice ones, better than his offering from Monte Carlo!). While there he enjoyed an architectural cruise - skyscraper spotting - on the East River, a visit to the Art Institute (I hope he'll give us a guest post on that when he's got his breath back), and an evening at a White Sox game. He fitted in a bit of work as well, it must be said.

   A question or two about these baseball fellows: is an individual player called a "Sock"? Why were some of the White Sox wearing black socks, and if the White Sox play the Red Sox and it rains, does the dye run and do they all end up pink?

Who says I don't take sport seriously?

They must have heard me

    My long-awaited Penguin Classic has arrived! I've got six weeks to read and then review Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, Samuel Richardson's eighteenth century bestseller, and a quick dip in suggests I'm going to enjoy this epistolary novel. Here's what the blurb says: "Richly comic and full of lively scenes and descriptions, 'Pamela' contains a diverse cast of characters, ranging from the vulgar and malevolent Mrs. Jewkes to the aggressive but awkward country squire who serves this unusual love story as both its villain and its hero". Intriguing.

          

Outside catering

     

     Dovegrey's having a Russian day, talking about Helen Rappaport's book Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs with the author herself, and I'm flattered that she's asked me to do the virtual catering for this event! While the samovar's been coming to the boil down in Devon, I've rustled up some imperial finger food.

      These are Russian Tea Biscuits: the thumbprint hollows are filled with chopped roasted hazelnuts and after baking they are dusted with icing sugar. Other versions omit the cocoa powder I used here and have the nuts mixed into the dough itself, but these have worked well and would be perfect with tea.

      When the sun is over the yardarm and the vodka's being dispensed, zakuski are the thing to eat. I'm not sure that you could call this zakuska authentic, but a tiny new potato filled with soured cream and lumpfish roe "caviar" makes a change from blinis.

Alan Davidson in North Atlantic Seafood says "zakuski would be laid out very formally on a table, often in a room set aside especially for this purpose and adjoining the diningroom....The company would assemble round this table, propose toasts, clink glasses, down the first glass of vodka in a gulp and quickly follow it with a bite of herring or a caviar canape. This is an excellent sequence; the vodka cleanses the palate, leaving it fully prepared and stimulated for whatever follows" - in today's case, a discussion of the events of 1918.

    Right, I've done the dishes and hung up my pinny, so I'm off to join in the conversation chez Dovegrey!

    

  

    

Vivid

     I managed to bag some Eva 4ply silk/cashmere in Sunday's Posh Yarn sale. This is "Portal" and very beautiful it is. When I opened the package (which arrived yesterday, by the way, so incredibly speedy service - thankyou, Dee!) I actually gasped. What my photographs don't reproduce anywhere near accurately are the extraordinarily vivid shades of blue and green which you see 'in the flesh'. Here's where my lack of skill with the camera lets me down because try as I might I can't quite show you the intense emeralds, jades and turquoises as they are. Think of the depth and iridescence of peacock and kingfisher feathers and you'll be on the right lines. And it's wonderfully soft, too!