New year, new start
And so it is that I’m back. After leaving you on a cliff hanger in May last year, promising Irish holiday snaps and Chelsea thoughts, I’ve fallen off the edge of the earth, swum my round and have popped up – ta da – in the new year. I am, once again, your loyal blogger, here to rescue you from an online malaise like a St Bernard appearing to fallen climbers with a barrel of brandy around its neck.
The big news is that I have moved from my beloved Brixton to the heart of Gloucestershire, in order to take up a lovely job in a town which I’m sure has the highest incidence of Barbour jackets in the land. And Hunter Wellington boots. And jodhpurs. And riding crops. Actually, I think I’ll stop there before my fella gets any ideas.
[Have you noticed that I have started a lot of sentences with 'and'? This is because I know I would never get away with that at work, so I am taking as many liberties as I can this evening before the frisson of grammatical rebellion wears off.]
I have intended to overhaul this blog for sometime now and part of what was putting me off posting was my complete and utter failure at mastering CSS – not something to which one can readily admit given the current taste for social media. Every time I looked at my dashboard my heart would sink and I’d sign out faster than you can say Twitter. If you blog yourself I am sure you will recognise that feeling.
However, onwards and upwards as they say. This is a new year abounding with virtual possibilities, even if they do come via Elance. So in that spirit I leave you with a few shots taken over the past month or so, to keep you going.
Firstly Christmas in beautiful Suffolk where at this time of year the landscape seems to exist in a series of horizontal planes, both inside 17th-century cottages where right angles are few:
And out on the fields, where, if it is not reeds, it is barley and wheat that grow on the county’s expanses (can you sense my shivering in the blur of this picture?):
And even in the vegetable garden…if you squint your eyes a bit:
And then onto a hoar-frost, taken before Gloucestershire received buckets of snow and while I was still enchanted by the ice and the cold.
And another couple for good measure:
She’s Here!
What I loved about this spring day (yes, she’s here, spring is finally here):
Putting bed linen out on the line to dry for the first time since, er, October, and leaving the sun and wind do their work.
Making lemon cupcakes with two twelve-year-olds and realising that it doesn’t matter if the icing isn’t perfectly smooth, or that the sponge didn’t rise as much as it ought to have done. Together, butter, sugar and flour will taste good no matter what you do to them.
This year’s first tulips.
At the end of the day, a man leaning out of a top floor window and having a fag.
Hearing a delivery man wish a customer well with her pregnancy.
The deep-plum leaves of a prunus against a sage-green wall.
To the west, the sun setting over a hundred chimney tops, which made me think of this:
Spring Forward; Fall Back
The clocks went back here last week but I’ve yet to change the time on my mobile phone. It’s not through negligence. Oh no. It is, in fact, a cunning plan through which I hope to deceive myself into going to bed at a more reasonable hour and waking earlier, in the hope of achieving a head start on the day.
Does it sound desperate? Probably. Admit me to the Maudsley if you wish; I do not care, since so far it’s working rather well, especially so in the mornings when, half asleep, I look at the phone and think, ‘Oh, goodness! It’s eight-thirty. Get-up-get-up-get-up’.
The shower is usually turned on by the time the cogs have turned sufficiently for me realise I’m an hour ahead, by which moment it’s too late – I’m out of bed.
Export Quality
Very pleased to see that the new Anthropologie store – it’s an American chain, it’s ok not to say shop, I think – on Regent Street is almost complete. I can’t wait for it to open, especially since one of my favourite ceramicists, Mick Haigh, has been working like mad since March to complete an order for it.
Mick lives with his wife, Sally, and young son in a hamlet surrounded by exquisite hills tattooed with forest and farmland in the depths of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa. He works from a tiny wattle-and-daub studio that he built at the bottom of the garden with his son and, if you look carefully, you can see their handprints on the mud walls of the building.
It’s about as close to stardom as anyone in the valley wants to get: property rarely comes up for sale and, if you didn’t know where you were going, you could miss the turn-off to the cluster of houses and paddocks and carry on driving for forty or fifty kilometres, before reaching a dead-end at the foot of the Drakensberg mountains without seeing anyone except, perhaps, a Zulu herdsman on horseback.
Yet over the past few years Mick’s ceramics have beaten a path from that tiny studio to the local post office and to the world beyond: Cape Town, Johannesburg, New York, Paris, Eindhoven, Stavanger, and now Regent Street.
In the small cafe Sally runs in the nearest village there is, propped up against some of some of Mick’s pieces, a note from Terence Conran inviting him to dinner, although Mick, I expect, would be happiest left to make pots in the valley.
“I work with mud: pale mud, dark mud, any kind of mud. I’ve never planned anything – it’s just kind of happened for me,” he told me in an interview I wrote for House and Garden magazine earlier this year. I think it’s an example of globalisation at its best.
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