In Which David Considers Goliath
This week, I have been in South Africa visiting family and friends and old haunts. At this time of year it is beautiful here, with near endless blue skies and sunshine to warm the shoulders and make a body happy but not overwhelm it. Locals have been muttering about there being a nip in the air but after months of being buttoned up inside a heavy woollen coat, it is bliss, sheer bliss, to wander around with bare feet and legs with impunity.
Today I took a break from sorting out personal affairs (an hour and a half in the bank, three hours queueing in the traffic licensing department) and drove with my parents into the rolling, temperate hills of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in which I grew up. We stopped for lunch at the wonderful Cafe Bloom in Nottingham Road, where we bumped into Mick and Sally Haigh, a ceramicist and botanical painter respectively, who own and run the cafe with Sally’s mum, Wendy.
Mick’s work is particularly popular at the moment and you may recall a post I wrote a couple of years ago about the hand-built wattle-and-daub studio, in the depths of the hills, from which he dispatches his whimsical pieces to destinations around the world. It seems demand has continued to grow, for today he spoke about licensing a factory in Singapore to produce the work on his behalf for a foreign retailer.
It is the classic case of small-scale meets serious retail, isn’t it? You can see why the situation has Mick and Sally – both concerned about craftsmanship, fair and ethical trading, consumption and climate change – scratching their heads. What started off as a desire to live a simple life in the country by running an organic, vegetarian cafe, throwing pots and painting has grown into something much greater than they might ever have imagined. Short of working 24 hours a day and seven days a week, meeting a large retail order on their own would be impossible. Training local assistants has had mixed success in the past and the Singaporean factory, already set-up with extremely skilled labour, access to raw materials and commercial connections, can deliver an excellent product quickly and efficiently to meet demand in the US and Brazil.
Tricky, isn’t it? Short of abandoning all notions of export, what would you do? We moved on to apple and cinnamon tart before buying a gorgeous knobbly platter from the Easter collection stacked up on display behind us. ‘Do find one with his stamp on it,’ my mother said.
PS Don’t you love the aloes in those blue jugs? I nearly bought a jug myself but visions of a run-in with a Lufthansa official at check-in put me in mind of something smaller and more robust.
PPS I have changed my mind about fiddly watermarks for the time being – see previous post. Right now I am all about karma. Must be the sunlight.
Fabric, follies and fumbling boys
Years ago, in a university English department that was shaded by leafy jacaranda trees in summer, the most earnest and cleverest of boys (it was always the boys) would push their glasses against spotty bows, call upon notes made feverishly in the small hours and make grand pronouncements that generally included words like ‘intertextuality’. Being broadly less studious, I’d roll my eyes and gaze out at the mauve blossom in the neighbouring courtyard, for the belief was that if a flower fell on your head you’d pass all your exams…I stood beneath a lot of jacaranda trees that year.
However, in the same very, very loose way in which I approached most of my English essays back then, intertextuality popped into my head earlier this week while I looked through the website of St Jude’s . I had come upon this pretty fabric, ‘Painswick’, designed by Ed Klutz:
Do you see those lovely follies clever Ed has drawn? Well, they come from here, Painswick House, which has a rather fun garden in the Rococo style. At this time of year it is full of snowdrops and is a pleasant place to spend an afternoon, as we did last weekend. Of course, it is impossible to visit the garden without noticing the follies, particularly those which are painted a stark and rather hard white…perhaps the colour is historical but Ed has done them rather a favour in this fabric. Also, in the small orchard, there ‘grazed’ several fibre-glass sheep which looked realistic from afar but on closer inspection brought to mind the MPs’ expenses scandal of some years ago. Duck houses are so passé these days, don’t you know?
This, my favourite folly, not painted white, was tucked away in a woodland walk. It made a super focal point at the end of the long walk, which I’m tempted to call an allée, but I don’t think it’s quite that.
And a few flowers
You might notice a faint watermark on these pictures. It’s an experiment inspired by the current infatuation with Pinterest – I’ve noticed that, in most cases, by the time an image has been repinned for the third or fourth time, all attribution has been lost. I’ve resisted this kind of labelling in the past because I felt it seemed selfish, miserly even, but I’m going to give it a go and see how I get on.
A Date with Laurie Lee
Thick mist this morning. In the garden, a spider’s web, heavy and sparkling with dew, suspended from the knobbly branches of a rose bush.
At lunch I stepped out and bought a copy of Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie, which is something I read as a child and have meant to revisit ever since I moved out west to Gloucestershire. Stroud of course has a terrific farmer’s market on Saturday mornings (I am a dedicated follower of Windrush Valley goat’s cheese) and Slad, the village made famous by Lee, is only a few miles further up the valley. These days the area is more of a hide-out for celebs than home to young ragamuffins. If I am not mistaken, Lily Allen was married in nearby Cranham, while Damien Hirst is reputed to be fond of Lee’s old local, The Woolpack. But here’s a beautiful paragraph from the first few pages of the book, in which Lee describes the water that comes out of the pump in the scullery of his new home:
…It came out sparkling like liquid sky. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly bubbles in the air. You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground. Substance of magic – which you could tear or wear, confine or scatter, or send down holes, but never burn or break or destroy.
About a year ago Fella and I walked from Stroud to Painswick via Slad. The route took us up hill and down dale, past watermills, through woods and along muddy ditches, with stops for sandwiches and coffee from the thermos now and then. Gorgeous. We ought to do it again soon now that spring is almost here.
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.]
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