Ten Things To Look Forward To
It has been so warm recently that I went out in shirt sleeves for the first time in months yesterday. Probably a little optimistic for this time of year: a few people stared and for an awful moment I wondered if I had dressed myself properly.
However, in the spirit of warmer weather, a wish list for S/S 12:
- Dutch bike on which to ride elegantly while wearing skirts
- Few more camping trips, including one to Cornwall, already booked, and one to Pembrokeshire
- A little sunburn. I know it is very unhealthy but I feel cheated if summer passes without it
- Trip to France/Italy/Vietnam/New York (any or all)
- Handful of parties
- Bit of wild swimming. Fella has offered to marry bus routes with suitable looking spots on the OS maps but a couple of afternoons beside the ponds on Hampstead Heath will suffice. Anywhere outside without chlorine
- Suffolk Fizz. Gin, elderflower fizzy, splash tonic, lemon, mint and ice
- Peonies and smelly roses. Predictable but lovely, nonetheless
- String of really warm nights on which to sleep with all the windows open
- Victoria sponge, as light as a cloud
[Image appears v low res. I must have typed 7.2 instead of 72 late last night.]
Organic Culture Jamming
Little note in my inbox today drawing attention to a feature about guerrilla gardening in this weekend’s South African Sunday Times, a paper for which I write occasionally. It’s a great story about the movement gathering pace around the country, with traffic islands and neglected municipal land being planted with various indigenous species in the true spirit of the practice.
And yet I always feel a twinge when I read features about guerilla gardening. One sticky summer night at the end of 2005, in one of Durban’s boozers, a friend, a proper journalist at the local paper, announced that he needed stories to fill pages on a supplement. Having spent the afternoon trawling the net on my rather less dangerous and time-pressured magazine job, I proposed guerilla gardening, having just found Richard Reynolds’ site. My friend bit, Richard was gracious enough to answer some questions and a week or two later we ran the piece. Here’s the pic we used, taken in my parent’s vegetable garden (still on trannie with the slim edge of the film just visible):
At the same time, I forwarded the link to an old London friend who had (forgivable) connections to the Mail on Sunday. The MoS paid him a finder’s fee, he paid his tax bill, Richard was ‘found’ and the rest, as they say, is history. There are books, YouTube clips, probably a TV programme and, the best part, many, many more abandoned urban spaces put to better use.
Upon reflection, however, the arguments around guerilla gardening highlighted for me the luxurious approach to land use wealth affords. In South Africa, as on a global scale, a gulf divides those who have and have not. In a new, multi-racial, middle-class suburbia, as in other affluent neighbourhoods around the world, sprinklers irrigate immaculate lawns, hosepipes fill swimming pools and rubbish bags – set out on pavements each week – bulge with supermarket packaging, while verges remain untended.
At that time, my daily commute took me past a fast-expanding informal settlement that had become one of the first ports of call for rural migrants entering the city. Hand-built, wattle-and-daub shelters had sprung up on either side of the motorway: land was at a premium and so was food. In the mornings, as I prepared to spend the day behind a computer, women planted up the verges not with flowers but with maize, beans and squash as a means of survival. They didn’t need a brand, a book, or a social media campaign to validate their activities – they just did.
I am not sure what the conclusion is, today, as I live on the other side of the world, where it is easy to get caught up in a wildly consumerist economy. Ought we not to be planting flowers beneath lamp posts to foster bee or butterfly activity? Surely not, but perhaps sowing beans is a better idea. Ought I to mobilise the other tenants in my building to give over our little-used lawn, which cannot be built upon, to vegetables? Probably. Ought I to consume less? Most likely, but that still won’t stop British supermarkets throwing away perfectly good food simply for it having reached a manufactured sell-by date. Ought I to be wearing a hair shirt? I am certain those at London Fashion Week would say absolutely not.
Adventures with a Piping Bag
Finally, a Friday night in. I know this sounds rather selfish, given that there are probably lots of people who’d love to have a Friday night out but still. With wet hair wrapped in a towel and a face-pack somewhere or other, I am enjoying the empty flat, a gifted scented candle from Molton Brown and requisite mug of Earl Grey. In a little while I’ll shuffle off but I did want to put up this before I went.
First off, cake! It may not look like much but I am ridiculously proud of it. Friends have won awards for campaigning, investigative journalism, others are fantastically clever at numbers, archiving digital histories or advising governments and the UN on socio-economic policy … but this, dears, is pure art, courtesy a piping bag from Lakeland.
The piping bag was bought by mistake over Christmas and, unable to be returned, (trod on the box, lost the slip), it has been waiting to be used ever since. Normally I don’t have time for fiddly baking and recipes must adapt or die but on this occasion Nigella’s Devil’s Food Cake and a bit of pink icing made it into the office. It was actually eaten. A word of warning: it is very difficult not to get carried away with a piping bag, whatever its application, I imagine.
And, in a continuation of the rather accidental pink theme, ‘Three-fruit Marmalade with Kettle’…
Coming from South Africa, it feels a bit peculiar to be making marmalade at this time of year, instead of June or July. I have a couple of my mother’s old jars bearing sticky labels marked ‘July 2010′ or similar but, whatever the date, it is immensely satisfying to hover above a cauldron of orange peel and watch it bubble away on a grey day. Certainly fills the house with a wonderful, citrus fragrance, which I am sure goes some way to keeping the ghouls and the beasties away.
My grandmother, a home economics teacher in her day, was a great marmalade maker and she must have taught dozens of people the trick in her 97 years, not least Mavis Slatsha, my aunt’s very dear and beloved housekeeper, who passed away a little ago. Granny’s ratios of sugar to cooked fruit are now passed on to me from my mother and perhaps, one day, I’ll be able to share them with family, too.
When I go away somewhere, I like to buy a jar of local preserve or honey, keeping on the labels for as long as I can as a reminder of a special time. EU regulations facilitate this greatly although the jar in front once contained special honey from Suffolk. This year, an audit revealed an embarrassment of jars; far, far to many for marmalade, so perhaps something with elderflower or raspberries in the spring…
Weekend Inspiration
I must direct you to a great article about cut flowers that appeared in FT Weekend earlier this week. No doubt it was written with Valentine’s Day in mind but I was especially interested in it because I had just flown over frozen bulb fields on the way in and out of Amsterdam. Fella and I had gone over for the weekend. I’m reluctant to say ‘on a mini-break’ because isn’t that very pre-austerity Britain and Bridget Jones? Also, I understand the latest installment in the Bridget Jones saga is something like Bridget has a Baby, in which case there is no chance of any mini-break happening at all, so weekend it shall be. Also, it wasn’t for Valentine’s Day – it was simply the soonest, most affordable weekend available. I digress. You can find a most interesting and informative article about cut flowers and smart new florists here.
We made a point of not seeing all the attractions blessed with holy water by the tourist office but instead wandered from street to street imagining what it would be like to live in that great city. I had fun upgrading my Afrikaans to Dutch, which is a bit like moving on to Web 2.0, while Fella re-lived childhood holidays that seem to have involved a lot of chips with mayonnaise and vla – custard to you and me – for breakfast.
Also, the canals had frozen over, something which happens only very seldom these days, so the Amsterdamers were in a jolly mood. And it was freezing, which demanded a couple of warming Indonesian curries here and there.
I loved the architecture, children being pulled along in sleds, clear skies and jet trails, a lighter, friendlier mood, the quirky shops around the Nine Streets, hot chocolate, seeing a variety of marijuana called ‘Durban’.
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