The Japlanning had been ongoing for a few years but the trip was delayed by Covid and other factors. Still, that gave us time to confirm fully that other potential travellers really did not want to join us and, crucially, to save up thousands of yen (¥215 to £1 atm which is incredibly favourable for us and fun to calculate conversions at pay points.)

We decided that as this was our first trip, we’d keep it simple with a Tokyo-Kyoto-day in Osaka-Tokyo itinerary rather than try to do too much travelling. I had a list of things I wanted to see and do: have an ekiben on the Shinkansen (bullet train), see some Hiroshige woodblock prints, buy Japanese fabric, sashiko needles, sumi ink, brushes for suminagashi and cyanotypes, gamble on gashapon machines (1 in 5 chance of getting the tiny piece of plastic/pottery you want, my sort of odds), improve my dreadful chopstick skills, eat ramen, soba, tempura, udon, gyoza, conveyor belt sushi, wander the side streets to see where people live, seek out displays of replica food, go on public transport, buy a knife for Simon, see a few shrines and temples, visit the one-book bookshop in Tokyo, find nice stationery, soak up everyday Japanese life in big cities. I managed all of this except the chopstick skills which are still appalling; I can feed myself with them, but it’s not pretty. (It still puzzles me that I can knit etc but not manipulate chopsticks.)

Phoebe had a list of her own which, fortunately, overlapped quite well with mine, although I didn’t have a head spa or manicure, I tend to fade in make-up and beauty aisles, and I think matcha is disgusting, like drinking blended grass cuttings.

I took a printed Rough Guide and she used TikToks she’d been collecting for a while, and I can confirm that old-fashioned guidebooks are just that: old-fashioned, outdated, and out of touch. By contrast, the places and recommendations Phoebe found online were brilliant, up to date, easier to locate. And it must be said that she used her phone to navigate impeccably some of the busiest stations in the world including Shinjuku Station, the busiest of them all, not to mention getting us round cities which have a very different address format to the one we are used to.

We missed out on just one thing, which was my fault because Osaka-umeda Station is not the same as Osaka Station (they are 300m apart) and I guided us to the wrong station. But it didn’t matter, we still got the cheesecake we came for which we ate on the bed in our clinic-style hotel pyjamas while watching Brooklyn 99. There’s only so much new culture you can take in in a day.

It was sunny, warm, then hot, we walked and walked, talked and talked, took off our shoes to walk on the lovely tatami mats in our hotel in Asakusa (no shoes allowed anywhere inside), drank great coffee, saw beautiful kimono, ceramics, calligraphy, collections of traditional crafts in museums, collected museum postcards (much better offerings there), visited the Fushimi Inari Shrine, the one with ten thousand vermilion torii gates and now I think of vermilion, traditionally made with cinnabar and a colour I have always loved, as my favourite colour of Japan.

We whizzed past Mt Fuji which was in grey cloud one way, white cloud the other, and I wondered how Hiroshige and Hokusai managed to get so many clear views of it (jk), as seen in the wonderful ukiyo-e in a vast exhibition in Kyoto (which also confirmed that Hiroshige is my absolute favourite Japanese artist).

We got back on Tuesday and already the lists and Japlanning for a return visit are taking shape. I knew very little about Japan beforehand, apart from some very reductive, simplistic stuff, so went with an open mind. And I can’t believe how much I loved it and how much I’d like to go back to this place of tradition, modernity, endless novelty set against centuries-old heritage, noise, peace, open spaces, closed spaces, lots of bowing, wonderful, smiling service, litter-free streets with complex tangles of cables and power lines overhead, wonderful old buildings and stunning modern architecture, and colour and complexity everywhere.

At the end of each day, Phoebe made a short compilation video to send home, and these are a few of them, used with her permission. They really do justice to an amazing trip.

Happy Sunday!

PS while we were there I reread Tokyo Express for the Japanese train journeys in 1958,

and John &Paul because it’s a great story and because The Beatles were in Japan in 1966.

[‘Pulling Threads’ (2025) by Eska Marsh, drypoint with carborundum]

This was borne upon me when I did an online drawing class with artist Eska Marsh (I really recommend Still Flower Drawing classes). When I say I “did”it, I mean I watched to see how Eska does it as I am absolutely nul at painting and drawing.

Eska specialises in drypoint with carborundum, a type of intaglio printmaking which is tricky and not exactly fashionable. The Met has a clear description of the technique. To summarise: a stylus or needle is used to scratch lines directly into a metal plate, and the metal scrapings on either side of the lines, known as the burr, hold a dense film of ink that prints as a rich, velvety black. Drypoint, however, is not a very practical [or commercial] technique for producing multiple images, as the delicate burr wears away so quickly that only a small number of good impressions can be taken from the plate.

[‘No Plaice Like Home’ (2025) by Eska Marsh]

But Eska has mastered drypoint and uses it to produce this wonderful mix of deep, dark blackness and fine, fuzzy lines.

[‘Studio Brush’ (2025) by Eska Marsh]

It works particularly brilliantly with the bristles of brushes.

[Teapot drypoint etching by Sophie Harding]

Sophie Harding, who paints with pure, joyful colours can also switch to making lovely, scratchy black and white drypoint prints of domestic objects on a big old press at Penzance School of Art (now under threat, hoping it can be saved).

[‘Self-Portrait in a Cap’ (1630) by Rembrandt]

It is generally acknowledged that Rembrandt was the first artist to fully exploit the potential of drypoint.

[Self-portrait by Rembrandt]

It is clearly perfectly suited to unruly curly hair, the texture of hats, and luxuriant, twirly moustaches,

[‘Head of a bearded man wearing a fur hat’ (c1754) by Thomas Worlidge]

and for anything fluffy, feathery, velvety, bristly, fuzzy, and furry. In fact, the more I looked at these etchings, the more I realised how often drypoint has been used to great effect on hats and hair.

[‘Anne with a Feather Hat’ (undated, mid-C20) by Augustus John]

Augustus John makes Anne look like a Grand Master with a very Rembrandt-ish hat.

[‘Le chapeau épinglé’ (1894) by Renoir]

And Renoir’s painting style translates perfectly into the soft, fuzzy lines of drypoint.

[Le Journal )1883) by JJ Tissot]

I’ve also been delighted to discover that Tissot was a superb practitioner of drypoint etching. I’ve always loved his full-colour fashionable people wearing ultra-fashionable in fashionable settings, and now I find that he could do this just was well in black and white. (Enlarge and you can see the lines.)

It amuses me that after making a tour-de-force like this, he gets the 3 in 1883 back-to-front (he was working in reverse).

I’ve also come across this print where the ss in his name is the wrong way round. Did he just run out of concentration after all that control and precision? I love mistakes like this, though, which are the kind of thing I’d do all the time.

[fluffy hat which would be ideal for drypoint, photo by David Hurn on the set of A Hard Day’s Night, 1964]

Drypoint etching has never been a widely used technique, so it’s interesting to see it being revived (there’s good talk by Eska Marsh here). Then again, black and white photography was sidelined for a long time after the arrival of new Kodak colour technology and the likes of William Eggleston. Yet many of the best Beatles photos are in old-hat black and white (many for b&w newspapers, I know), including Paul McCartney’s own Eyes of the Storm collection.

It was a deliberate and very astute creative decision to go against prevailing fashion to film A Hard Day’s Night in black and white - compare this to the saturated colour of Les parapluies de Cherbourg made in the same year. It undoubtedly contributed to the film becoming such a classic; as Samira Ahmed says (many times) in her BFI book, it gives it a 60s nouvelle vague feel, even though it’s as British as it gets.

HDN came out soon after the massively influential A bout de souffle (1960) - above - for which Jean-Luc Godard also eschewed colour, a decision recently reprised by Richard Linklater for his homage, Nouvelle Vague (2025) - below.

And ultimately, while I surround myself and create with colour, I consume in black and white every single day in the form of ink on paper, words on screens. Which just proves that colour can be all in the mind.

Happy Sunday!

PS I’m taking a break, and will be back in a few weeks.

Tulips in a Vase (c1923) by Louis Valtat

I’m not quite sure what came over me at tulip-ordering time last year, but this spring at the allotment we have a very limited number in a subdued palette.

It was partly that the price of tulip bulbs has gone up massively recently while the choice of varieties now available here has been reduced (by suppliers I buy from). No need to explain why when most of them come from Holland. I was also getting concerned about tulip fire which stays in the soil; we rotate the tulip beds, but if it attacks, it’s a costly and depressing business seeing all your tulips wrecked. (It’s happened a couple of times over the years.)

[‘Tulips in a Green Vase’ by Louis Valtat]

But this morning, Saturday, while planning what I’m going to write on the Persephone Post next week, I came across the work of Louis Valtat (1869-1952). I have fallen in love with his paintings of tulips (and anemones) and realised that vicarious tulip enjoyment can be a fair alternative to the real thing.

[‘Still Life of Flowers’ by Louis Valtat]

I don’t actually like many images of tulips - in art or applied arts - with the major exception of C17 Dutch flower paintings (good job we live near The Fitzwilliam with its incredible Room 17, which is crammed with them) and the fabric design by Josef Frank. There’s something about their shape which ends up being either over-stiff or lifeless when painted or flattened on a surface.

[‘Vase de Fleurs’ 1942 by Louis Valtat]

But I am transfixed by Louis Valtat’s tulips - and this is only a selection - because he has captured everything I love about them: colour, exuberance, elegance, movement, variety, liveliness.

[2021 exh at Connolly]

The same can be said of Oisin Byrne’s huge images of extravagantly floppy parrot and stripy tulips, the type of ‘bent back tulips’ The Beatles were looking through in ‘Glass Onion’, perhaps.

And finally, I’m happy to say that Phoebe has acquired the tulip bug and has grown these.

Sometimes, it’s just easier to let other people do the hard work.

Happy Sunday!

Life is happening elsewhere, in a full house.

Plus, I have

socks to knit,

a new book to read,

leftover linen to smock,

hot cross buns to eat,

competitive NYT Spelling Bee puzzles to complete (me vs Alice vs Phoebe),

and tulips to pick.

Happy Sunday!

As someone who guards her sleeping time closely, and is as far from a four-hours-a-night-superwoman as you can imagine, I’ve never quite understood why sleep is often regarded as a moral matter by some people. I mean, I understand where the lie-abed and lazybones epithets come from in this country - all those Puritans who saw staying in bed longer than you need to as a waste of time - but they don’t wash with me.

Le Lit (c 1892) by Toulouse-Lautrec is one of my all-time favourite paintings. I’ve loved it from the time I was enjoying long weekend lie-ins at Sheffield University, recovering from the horrible experiences of teaching practice, attempting to teach Russian and French to twelve-year-olds in mixed ability classes who were for the most part were not only not interested, but hostilely not interested. I needed to sleep, I needed a hideaway, a refuge, a bolthole, before I extricated myself from my own awful decision to teach (but not before I actually got my PGCE). This painting sums up all the safety, comfort, and oblivion of the sleep I sought.

[‘The Eiderdown’ (c1929) by Sydney Carline]

I’d already been a skilled sleeper as a teenager. My job in a fish and chip shop was perfect, because I only had to start work before the Saturday lunch-time chippy rush, so could sleep late then listen to Radio 1; as Paul McCartney has said, these are the best lie-ins of your life.

[illustration from Peepo! (1981) by Janet and Allan Ahlberg]

It’s rare now that I have a protracted lie-in - the skill has been damaged by motherhood - but this week I’ve had a couple, and am reminded that I don’t begrudge anyone time in bed if that’s how they wish to spend their free time (and as long as it’s not a passive-aggressive avoidance tactic). After all, as John Lennon said, it’s “only sleeping”.

JL was famously devoted to sleep, his bed, his bedroom. Maureen Cleave, the journalist whose article caused such a furore when it was taken up the wrong way in America and had such a lasting impact, described him as “probably the laziest person in Englan,”. Which, in my view, is pretty much libellous. It’s the old moral judgement again, and yet if anyone needed or deserved a lie-in it was JL and the other Beatles after the chaotic and manic years of Hamburg, touring, writing, singing, playing, making records and, in JL’s case, writing books. Lazy?

Worn out, more like.

In his defence of one of life’s great pleasures, he wrote I’m Only Sleeping which includes the kind of protestation I've made many times: “Please don’t spoil my day, I’m miles away,/ And after all, I’m only sleeping”. As he says, it’s not exactly a crime. But, to be fair, like Proust he could take sleeping to extremes (see Hunter Davies’ book).

[Proust’s bed]

JL says in just a few words what Proust, the king of lie-ins, says in many, many more. The opening of A la recherche consists of pages and pages of forensic examination of the space between being awake and falling asleep. JL, by contrast, cuts to the chase and describes it simply as “waiting for a sleepy feeling” when you “float upstream”. And you know exactly what he means, whereas with Proust you, the reader, are entering that limbo state and falling asleep as you read, baffled and lost.

JL is also “keepin' an eye on the world going by my window”. Just like Proust’s Tante Léonie, the narrator’s great-aunt, who is a classic C19 invalid and wields her power from her bed, knowing everything that goes on in the house and in the town of Combray. With her bed positioned by the window, she misses nothing.

[Katy in bed in What Katy Did, 1873 illustration]

(This reminds me of What Katy Did (1872) by Susan Coolidge, which I adored when I was young. Twelve-year-old motherless Katy is confined to bed after she damages her spine falling off a forbidden swing, but manages to run the house from her bed, be the fulcrum of the family, and - in a reversal of the usual narrative - becomes a better person for spending four years in bed (and a wheelchair). Maybe I had hopes for a similar conversion for myself.)

When it comes to paintings of women in bed and asleep, the majority err on the side of creepy Proustian voyeurism - the way he watches Albertine as she sleeps is deeply unsettling - and often simply an excuse for a naked female model, possibly two naked female models, and the kind of poses that no-one could possibly find compatible with sleeping.

[‘Patchwork’ (1980) by Louis Turpin]

This is much more the kind of thing I like. It conveys a sense of comfort, warmth, security - plus a wonderful patchwork quilt.

[‘The Sick Girl’ (1882) by Michael Ancher]

Sometimes a little convalescence/time in bed is actually just what’s needed. This is when you are not horribly ill, are starting to feel better, but still not up to full immersion in everyday life. Several times in my life I’ve recovered in hospital from illness/having babies (in France, Germany, and Belgium and not in this country where they turf you out as quickly as possible) and once aged eleven in a wonderful convalescence home, and I admit each time I’d become almost institutionalised and didn’t actually want to leave. But it’s even better at home with cups of tea, BBC Sounds, and plenty of books.

Earlier this week I had a convalescence day in bed and watched five episodes of The Other Bennet Sister which I am surprised I enjoyed. I get Austen fatigue at the mere mention of yet another adaptation, but what’s unusual about this is that the central character, Mary Bennet, is so awkward, gauche, gaffe-prone, self-conscious, and therefore a much more believable heroine than her confident, socially skilled sisters. Even after six episodes she’s still getting things wrong; by now in most narratives a magic wand would have been waved and she’d no longer be an ugly duckling. It’s salutary to have a un-self-possessed heroine. I like it.

I also finished Enough Said by Alan Bennett in which he praises Simon Armitage (Yorkshire/Poet Laureate) so have hoovered up the recommended All Points North (1999) and Gig (2008) and laughed a great deal and discovered that in many ways he is the natural successor to Alan Bennett. I enjoy the themes of his poetry books - blossom, cemeteries, windows - and am now walking the Pennine Way with him. Without even having to get out of bed.

Happy Sunday!

So once I’d broken away from compulsory reading lists, I made up for lost time. That’s not to say I haven’t been completely enthralled by Dickens, Proust, Trollope over the years, just that I’ve been more likely to read Persephone Books, Virago, Penguin Classics, and many other imprints’ titles by women.

However, it’s just dawned on me that recently I’ve been in the very enjoyable company of men.

[‘Leeds Bridge’ (1880) by John Atkinson Grimshaw]

I went to Leeds for the day a little while ago, and took Yorkshire: There and Back (2022) by Andrew Martin to read on the train. Trains being what they are in this country, I spent a lot longer on them than planned so managed to finish this excellent exploration of Yorkshire and Yorkshire-ness by a ‘Professional Yorkshireman’ (although the author makes clear he’s exiled in London so may not be entitled to claim this title fully). As York is another place where I could live quite happily (see also Lewes last week), Andrew’s chapter on the place where he grew up is full of good reasons to move there. He also makes a point of comparing and contrasting it with Leeds, which is where the very bright lights were for the other half of my family who lived in Pontefract. (York was definitely regarded as more cultural, historic and sedate, while Harrogate was for upmarket Christmas shopping. Wakefield, without a Bettys, was a useful but definitely less glamorous destination.)

[‘Boar Lane, Leeds’ (1881) by John Atkinson Grimshaw]

The book’s cover features this painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw who also painted ‘moonlights’ of Liverpool, London, Glasgow, and Scarborough. There’s a nice little exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery at the moment with the rather overblown title of “‘Don’t Let’s Ask for the Moon...’: Nocturnes and Atkinson Grimshaw”.

[Bette Davies and Paul Henreid, last scene, Now, Voyager (1942)]

The quote is from the famous line from the final scene of Now, Voyager (“Don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars”) but is entirely wrong in this context as you do get the moon, rather than the stars.

However, it is used brilliantly in The History Boys (play 2004, film 2006) by Alan Bennett. I’ve just watched this scene for the nth time and cried laughing for the nth time.

By coincidence, I’ve been wondering recently whatever happened to Alan Bennett, as they say in sneering tabloid articles which unearth the very much downward trajectory (and loss of looks) of once famous people.

And then I read a lovely interview with him in last weekend’s FT and realised that, far from stopping, he’s been writing all along - a play and a film - and now a new collection of his diaries has just been published. I loved the three previous collections and have referred to them frequently (he is so good on art and poetry). So now I am deep into Enough Said and marvelling all over again at his cogency and humour and memory. Plus he can be devastatingly cutting, self-deprecating, and funny. Especially about getting old.

[Oxbridge cleverness, 1964]

Alan Bennett is older than The Beatles but they and his comedy revue group Beyond the Fringe were huge around the same time in the 1960s.

[Liverpudlian cleverness, 1964]

This pair of photos is ripe for interpretation, and although it could be argued the two groups were running along parallel lines, in fact both were subversive and anti-establishment. One worked from the inside, the other from the outside. And there’s another overlap, in that Alan Bennett and the four Beatles never lost their northern accents. In fact, in one interview he tells of how they reduced the stigma of accents like his. “Metropolitan England used to have a metropolitan accent, which was the accent of the BBC, and the provincial accent was not really taken seriously. Until, I think, the Beatles altered that, in the sense that after around 1964, provincial accents became much more recognised and much more accepted.” (Not always the case, still, though.)

Waiting on my reading list is Another World by Melvyn Bragg, another state-educated writer, broadcaster, polymath with an astonishingly good memory and a wonderful northern accent (he is from Wigton in Cumbria). This is the second volume of his autobiography which covers his time at Oxford; the first, Back in the Day (2022), is affectionate and fascinating, but not all good-old-days up North warmth. He’s had far too mixed a life experience for that. A lovely pendant to Alan Bennett’s recollections of growing-up on the other side of the Pennines in Armley, Leeds. Needless to say, libraries play a significant role in both.

Melvyn Bragg also overlapped with The Beatles. In fact, he wanted - and got - Paul McCartney to be the very first guest on the The South Bank Show in 1984, thus setting out his stall, making it clear he was not going to be perpetuating any sort of cultural hierarchy. (He writes about this here.) He asked intelligent questions - unlike so many patronising interviewers in the 60s and 70s - and got intelligent answers. It’s still a good watch.

And in the end, of course, it doesn’t actually matter who wrote the book/s you enjoy - as long as something is written well. It’s just that the gatekeepers have so often been male and have favoured men, so there’s always an awful lot of catching up to be done with books by female writers.

Happy Sunday!

This sounds like a good idea. A way of stopping distraction and of using reading as a deflection from thinking and doing. Obviously, I don’t see books themselves as a distraction - I regard reading as a creative activity in itself - but it is true that it’s all too easy to carry on consuming crap as well as quality instead of stopping for a while and seeing what happens when things emerge the other way, when perhaps something which is being blocked gets unblocked.

The irony is that this week has been anything but a week of deprivation. But what Annabel and Phoebe say about self-imposed media abstinence or ‘deprivation’ (not a great word, I think, for this level of privilege) is pertinent in that I could now do with a week with no cultural stimulation in order to process everything.

[made by Phoebe, inspired by all day cake - you can see she has form with chocolate and that Edd’s book will be well-used]

Simon and I had the absolute pleasure last weekend of afternoon tea with Alice and Phoebe at an event tied to the launch of Edd Kimber’s Chocolate Baking Book. One of my life’s greatest delights is that our grown-up children are amazingly good company (and have amazingly good-company partners, too). So chocolate baking aside, and yes we bought books and chatted to Edd who is one of their baking heroes and extremely nice and down-to-earth, it was lovely just to be with them.

[Waffle Weave On Jacquard Loom (2014)]

I’ve read and been inspired by The Structure Library by Matilda Dominique based on her in-depth exploration of the waffle weave technique “approached as a sculptural, spatial, and historically layered structure”. Waffle face cloths and tea towels are part and parcel of everyday Swedish domesticity and are mostly taken for granted, but it is the weave itself which is the focus here. This book may be of more use to me than The Artist’s Way as I shall be having a small, one-weekend exhibition of my smocking in Cambridge in October. Don’t expect pretty Liberty dresses, though.

We went to see Tim Key live and have been thinking about his mixture of performance, comedy, and poetry ever since. I’ve read three of his books of poems (beautifully designed by Emily Juniper); they are baffling, surreal, rude, surprising, funny. I also loved The Ballad of Wallis Island (“soppy”, said Simon, “I don’t know what you mean”, said I, through my tears, and harrumphed off on my own for a second viewing). I like the way he lied about being at Cambridge so he could get into Footlights, studied Russian and loves Gogol (worth a listen), and defies categorisation. His “68-minute concert” as he says his Mum calls his 70-minute show, was brilliant. So very different to what you normally get under the heading of ‘comedy’. (Also, see “Sardines”, the first-ever episode of Inside No. 9.)

[‘The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas’ (1911) by William Nicholson]

For years, I’ve been drawn, like a magpie, to William Nicholson’s paintings of shiny things, so it was worth the arguments with sat nav to get to the exhibition at Pallant House.

[From ‘An Alphabet’ (1897) by Wm Nicholson and James Pryde]

Here’s someone else who would also not be pigeon-holed: a dandy in white trousers who made rough and ready woodcuts like those in early C19 chapbooks but who also painted elegant silverware and lustreware, did the illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit, designed book covers, and painted portraits. Naturally, he never got the recognition he fully deserved, instead being criticised as a very unBritish dilettante artist, too good at too many things. I actually think this also applies to Tim Key and is what allows him to fly under the radar and keep mixing it up. Interestingly, WN also had a sense of humour - unlike his son Ben - which in serious art circles is probably not part-and-parcel of being a serious artist.

[‘Daphne’ (190cm x 255cm, 2021) by Caroline Walker]

Elsewhere in Pallant House were paintings by Caroline Walker. Some huge ones of domestic and baby/child-related scenes, which were making people wonder how she had done the art and the babies. Her own artist’s way, I imagine.

On our way back - the Sussex and Kent countryside is so beautiful when you mistakenly rely on Google Maps to guide you along the most winding, long-winded route it can find - we had a walk round Lewes, somewhere I could imagine living (slightly renegade and free-thinking, a nice creative feel, so many unspoilt shop fronts often with original stained glass). Charleston in Lewes occupies the former council offices building and it’s an interesting stripped-back affair with nice old staircases and lift. Simon, by now more than ready for some cultural deprivation, sat in the cafe while I went to the Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun exhibition. I can’t say I love their art, but the exhibition has been a very well put-together by Damian Barr and tells a sad story of two poor Scottish artists, the difficulties of being gay at that time, seedy Soho, alcoholism, early deaths.

Ruined, like Brighton’s West Pier (1866).

[‘Cyclamen’ (c1937) by William Nicholson]

Bloody hell, no wonder I go back to William Nicholson’s luminous still-lifes.

So the coming week will be maybe/maybe-not, no promises, perhaps, who knows, a little more restrained. And with slightly more Beatles content. (Just a couple of hours of old radio and interviews this week, and I recommend this programme of clips of an articulate, reflective John Lennon who never sought or needed anyone’s permission to create and did everything absolutely his way.)

Although I did notice the flyer for The Beatles Return concert in Lewes on the door of The Tom Paine Printing Press (Monday hours “sporadic”). Another good reason to put it on the list of places I could live, and live my way,

Happy Sunday!

[Lana Grossa Meilenweit 6-ply Asia, chosen mainly for the inclusion of neon pink]

I have discovered that knitting socks with 6-ply wool on 3mm needles is exponentially faster than knitting with 4-ply on 2.5mm needles. Very satisfying, maybe a little too thick for everyday, but perfect for indoor socks (everyone takes their shoes off when going into a flat or house there).

[Christiane and Hermann Ritter in front of their hut - in good weather]

After so many readers recommended it (thank you), I read A Woman in the Polar Night (1938) by Austrian artist Christiane Ritter (“housewife turned polar explorer” arrghhh) who spent a year with her husband and a second trapper in a tiny hut in the far north of Spitsbergen (now Svalbard).

[one of Christiane Ritter’s paintings - a cheerier scene than some in the book]

It’s a classic, and probably the most honest and forthright account of the dark and the cold. (She also finds great beauty in the snow and mountains and light.) I discovered while reading that I would undoubtedly go mad during the months of the constant darkness of the polar night in a tiny hut further blackened by the constantly smoking stove. I’d be feeling for the non-existent light switch and losing my mind.

[Lana Gross Meilenweit 100 Piccatta]

Christiane takes her knitting, and keeps busy with sewing, darning, mending, washing, cooking, baking, and cleaning - as well as doing many of the jobs the men do. At one point she completely forgets how to turn a heel on a sock - again, this would drive me insane - and they unravel sock after sock in order to rediscover how it's done. There are two solutions: her husband Hermann’s “complicated system constructed on a geometrical formula” while Karl “simply and happily knits long tibes pulled together at one end". She doesn’t actually say whether she eventually remembers - just one of the unanswered questions I had as I was reading (eg their daughter? why bring the second man without warning her?).

[‘Snöa på’ by Anna-Clara Tidholm, my level of Swedish and my favourite book in the children’s section of the library. Great mittens.]

Svalbard is an Arctic step too far for me, but I was happy to be in Stockholm in cold weather and reading about even colder weather because I can confirm that the (tree) pollen season in the UK definitely started in February and the sneezing etc was wearing me out. Yet I have discovered that the Met Office is gaslighting thousands of hay fever sufferers by saying pollen season doesn’t start until March so there are no pollen forecasts before then.. (Even now they aren’t giving them.)

On the subject of snow, or snö (pron. the Hull way - snur - another interesting similarity Swedish has with northern English words and pronunciation), I saw these signs on many walls at eye-level. Se upp! To rhyme with ‘'‘ey upp!’ (I think all northern versions of this phrase should also be spelt with two ps). It means ‘look out!’, beware falling snow and icicles.

[local free ferry crackling through the last of the ice]

Mid-way through our stay, though, the snow and ice from the coldest winter for decades melted and disappeared almost overnight leaving the start of a new season with lovely spring light (but no flowers or leaves so no pollen just yet).

Tom sent me this book by Swedish writer Sverker Sörlin in January before we went to Tromsø and I love the cover - and the fact that it’s also called Snö in the English edition.

Then I discovered that there is a nice mini design trend of using vertical titles on Swedish books.

[photos taken in the wonderful Söderbokhandeln est 1927, same year as To the Lighthouse, hence V Woolf heading on website]

But I’ve just discovered a new book about Sylvia Plath published here which is also catching the trend. (Might read. Not sure.)

We’ve come back to an explosion of allotment daffodils.

And amaryllis in the kitchen which didn’t bother waiting for our return before putting on a show.

[John and Sean Ono Lennon, winter 1977]

Finally, I’ve recently read Wings by Paul McCartney and went to see the one-night-only showing of Man on the Run and have discovered that Sean Ono Lennon is a gentle, thoughtful, perceptive, and articulate contributor to Beatles history. I know virtually nothing about him, but admire the way he talks about the characters and legacy that could have completely overwhelmed him and his life in a negative way.

On that positive note, I’ll wish you a Happy Sunday!

[‘The Bakery’ (1887) by Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck]

It amused me this week in Stockholm when I was complimented on my Swedish when I ordered two filter coffees and two cardamom buns, because this is pretty much the extent of my vocabulary, and the phrases have been polished to perfection. (I can also say yes to ‘are you eating in?’, and no to ‘would you like a receipt?’.)

[Brocket Bun Lunch: filled walnut bread buns, cardamom bun, semla, refillable filter coffee]

Because being able to order buns and coffee is pretty much enough to get me by here. I know I’ve mentioned them before, but honestly they are one of the aspects of Swedish life I love most. (Although I have an aversion to the ubiquitous cinnamon which borders on pathological.) And this visit coincides with the acme of buns, the semla, a wheat flour bun flavoured with cardamom, filled with almond paste, and topped with whipped cream. It used to be eaten a Shrovetide treat, a kind of Bun Tuesday to our Pancake Tuesday, but the Swedish know it’s too much of a good thing to be restricted to just one day a year (unlike our flannel-like pancakes).

[‘Bread and Butter’ (1962) by Wayne Thiebaud]

But all sorts of bun and bread culture fascinates me.

[‘Harvesting’ (1915) by Zinaida Serebriakova - with enormous loaf]

When I spent ten weeks in Ukraine as a student, the thing that kept me going was black bread. (And maybe a drop or two of vodka.)

I know I’m not alone in getting very excited about French boulangeries full of fresh bread. When we lived in Germany our front door was down some steps from a traditional local bakery and in the morning the smell of fresh Sonnenblumenkernbrot (sunflower seed bread) and Roggenbrot (rye bread) would waft into the house and I’d realise someone else had been up most of the night, too. Him with his bread, me with my baby twins.

[shopping for white bread, ‘Shopping with Mother’ (1958)]

I grew up with bread from a brilliant local bakery run by a husband and wife, the way so many French bakeries still are. This being Stockport, they sold many excellent floury white breads. Who needs spelt and rye and einkorn when you can have barm cakes and Blackpool rolls and cottage loaves? Admittedly, I also adored their tiny individual Hovis loaves baked in little tins with HOVIS on the side. And their custard tarts and vanilla slices and iced buns. (Also nicely pale and fibre-free.)

[photo borrowed from here by the author of this great book on London’s ghost signs]

I always get a pang when I see a Hovis ghost sign or an old Hovis shop sign above what was once a thriving little bakery or cafe.I suppose I should be grateful they are still there at all, part of the archaeology of the high street and village.

Just as I still like seeing this corner shop, Hallmark’s Bakers & Flour Dealers Confectioners est 1870s, which was our second local bakery. We didn’t buy bread here, but it was this gold-on-black lettering which sparked my interest in shop typefaces and signs. It’s no longer a bakery, but I am so pleased the lettering hasn’t been taken down or covered up with a plastic fascia.

It’s interesting that there is a resurgence in small, independent bakeries in the UK - although they never went away in places like France and Germany - despite the ubiquity and cheapness of industrially produced bread and buns. (In Cambridge we are fortunate to have the Cambridge Oven.) This window is part of a scheme in Christ Church in Southwark which was rebuilt in 1959, but the first church there was built in 1627 and paid for by a local baker John Marshall. Two bakery models are represented in stained glass: the C17 traditional baker (actually now looking quite hipster/contemporary with his wood-fired oven) and the nearby post-war Sainsbury’s factory-style bakery. It’s one of my favourite windows in a favourite scheme in an interior which hasn’t been touched since it was built. Apart from some more recent additional windows sponsored by Sainsbury’s which I can’t say I love - they are nowhere near as good as this by FW Cole and Kenneth Bunton for J. Wippell & Co..

Of course, without bread and buns there would be no tea and toast, no good way to start the day, no way to ‘feed a cold’, no way to survive university. Tea and toast is also such a constant in the eight hours of Get Back that someone called it The Beatles Diet (although I’d argue this also included cigarettes and possibly pills).

George Harrison in particular is a tea-and-toast man. Just shows, you can have the world at your feet, and toasted white sliced bread might still be the best.

Happy Sunday!

I never had any intention of writing books. Then again, I had no career plan, so maybe it was more a matter of never say never.

I feel like a dinosaur when I tell people I started blogging in 2005, but it always reminds me that not only did it give me my big break with book-writing, yarnstorm actually got me writing. It was the immediacy, the direct contact with readers, and the not having to wait to be asked which made me dare to write.

Because it did feel daring, For the first few posts, and then I became addicted to the thrill of pressing ‘publish’.

Nevertheless, I still find it hard to say “I’m a writer” when asked what I do. Because I see it as just choosing images, typing words, and something appearing on the screen. Or the page. Because the blogging led to a fair number of books, many on the gentle arts - of domesticity, quilting, stitching, baking, knitting. I still like the ‘gentle arts’ as a phrase because these are things which should be enjoyable, easy-going, soothing, absorbing, and not bossy, with a right or a wrong way of doing things, or a feeling of failure.

Here’s an illustration of my approach. Around the time of my third or fourth book, I was contacted by a TV production company. The person explained that they were planning a show to find Britain’s best baker and would I be interested in hearing more about it? “Oh, no,” I said being high-minded but also totally honest, “I don’t see baking as a competitive activity”. Bang went any possibility of being involved in Bake Off. And I would say the same again today. The idea of someone crying because their chocolate cake has failed and they’ve been humiliated on national television is, for me, emphatically not what the domestic baking is all about.

This and my gentle art books all feel like a long time ago now. There have also been seven children’s books for an American publisher, a book on looking at stained glass, and these Substack newsletters since then. So I was surprised and delighted when the publisher of The Gentle Art of Quiltmaking (published in 2010) contacted me last year to say they wanted to reprint it. As much of what I write these days has a short existence, it is rather wonderful to think that a book written sixteen years ago still has plenty of life in it.

I’ve worked with a lot of editors. Indeed, with my first few books, virtually every one got pregnant and left half way through the process. But this time, I’ve been fortunate to have excellent continuity (tbh, we worked quickly) with Laura and Daisy at Pavilion, and I can’t emphasise enough how fortunate I am to have someone like eagle-eyed Daisy looking at my book.

We have updated it in places - introduction, resources - but the quilts and the instructions and the tone and the message have not changed. And it is also lovely to see that it hasn’t dated, that Kristin Perers’ amazing photographs and art direction still look wonderful, and the text still works. It has a new cover and the Hydrangea Quilt is doing great work once again. It will be available in mid-June and is already on websites such as Bookshop.org.

I’ve been remembering how the book came to be. I often used to think that writing had to take ages to be good - like Flaubert or Proust - but this one came out of a Simenon-style burst (he wrote books in eleven days). I was ill in bed and thinking about the type of quilt book I’d write, and just like that the full list of quilts and the whole outline of the book appeared on a piece of A4. So that’s what I made and what I wrote. And far from being the result of agonising and stress and trying my hardest to unravel my brain and wring out the thoughts and words - because that is how it can feel - this one flowed and almost sewed itself.

The quilts are still doing sterling service on beds and settees, here and in children’s flats, and the delight in seeing them looking good and keeping people warm and cosy never diminishes. Nor does the daft thrill of looking up my own book/s in the British Library or Cambridge University Library catalogues CUL (and hoping no-one is looking).

Talking of quilts, I read in the FT the other week that the makers of the forthcoming four Beatles films have been to a dealer on Abbey Road looking for quilts because apparently the Beatles brought them into the studio to make it homelier, and John and Yoko collected ‘vintage quilts’. News to me. The only one I’ve come across so far is the All You Need is Love ‘bedspread’. Maybe I need to look harder?

Happy Sunday!

[at the end of the jetty is a sauna and swim which four of our party tried 🥶🥶🥶🥶]

So last weekend we were in Tromsø, a small city (pop. c70k) which is home to the world’s northernmost brewery/McDonald’s/university/professional football team/cathedral (also Norway’s only wooden cathedral),

and possibly the world’s northernmost Antony Gormley figure (AG gets everywhere 🤦🏻‍♀️).

It’s a bit ironic, really, as I hate being cold, but with the accumulated years of reading about polar exploration (mainly Antarctic, to be honest) and imagining what it’s like to live in an inhospitable climate, I was more than ready to see the snow and ice and mountains for real, and well prepared with a properly warm outfit and properly warm footwear.

And I can report that the beanies I knitted for everyone - because, to our surprise, Alice and Phoebe and partners were all keen to come as well - did a grand job of keeping heads and ears warm in -10C. (I used one strand Sandnes Garn Double Sunday with one strand Knitting for Olive Silk Mohair. or Sandnes Garn Tynn Silk Mohair).

In the summer, I’d also read Alberta and Jacob (1926) by Cora Sandel, a novel set in Tromsø, and the meteorological, domestic, and emotional coldness were conveyed so vividly that I really wanted to see the town and the house where the author lived for five years (twelve years in total in Tromsø). It’s now the Perspektivet Museum and is still in the centre of town, not far from the harbour and deep fjord, and still mostly surrounded by the painted wooden buildings (now with blue plaques) where her various characters worked and lived.

A visit to the Polar Museum was obligatory. It is fantastically old-fashioned, stuffed with polar artefacts, animals, stories, and photographs which would require trigger warnings in Britain but don’t whitewash the history and realities of life in these regions. Outside is a bust of Captain Scott’s nemesis, Roald Amundsen who didn’t play by the British rules of polar exploration which mainly consisted of stiff upper lip, man-hauling, horses which died, and pemmican, whereas he used skis, skills, and dogs, and careful planning and training. He died in 1928 after flying from Tromsø on a search and rescue mission for the airship Italia.

[table runner stitched by Wanny Woldstad]

The museum also has a room devoted to Wanny Woldstad (1893-1959) who in the 1920s was the first female taxi driver in Tromsø and then the first full-time female trapper in Svalbard. According to the museum, she also managed to combine housekeeping, cooking meals, and cross-stitching mats with hunting, trapping, and shooting huge numbers of polar bears (during the 1934-35 trapping season, she baked 770 loaves - up to nine in one batch - and 200 Christmas cookies). Although she shared the domestic chores with her companion, you get the feeling he didn’t embroider or do as much as her.

This is exactly the sort of thing I am so curious about: how do you set up shelter and survive in polar regions? Tromsø itself is a C21 success story (but still relies on huge amounts of everyday items being brought in from elsewhere) and from the outside looking in is doing well. The houses and low-rise blocks of flats are a mix of old and new, the lights are on all day and the windows are large to catch all the available light. It huddles together on the opposite edges of the fjord, looks stunning, and there’s plenty happening.

And you can keep warm in modern ways. The swimming pool complex has all sorts of pools including a 50m one,

[Tromsøbadet photo]

but the best bit is just floating in the beautifully warm outdoor pool while admiring the views of mountains and a biathlon course, and watching planes land at the airport (about 3km away as the crow/twin-prop flies) and people zooming around on skis.

[triangular Arctic Cathedral (1965) in background]

You also need warm woolly jumpers, preferably a lusekofte, but you can always knit your own. Just like all the other towns we’ve visited in Norway, there is a fantastically well-stocked wool shop which required two visits, one to hyperventilate with excitement and take it all in, and one to buy a few balls of Sandes Garn.

And, as we’ve come to expect in Norway, there is a stunning, contemporary, warm, well-lit library. This one has was converted from a 1960s cinema; they took the futuristic hyperbolic paraboloid shell, inserted glass all the way up to give views over the town and the fjord, and created a phenomenal multi-level interior. Needless to say, it’s full of people reading and working and knitting.

[looking north in the afternoon]

But even with all this warmth and cosiness, and possibly because you know they are there and waiting for you, the cold, the light, the colours, the snow all draw you outside. My favourite polar explorer is Dr Edward Wilson, Scott’s right-hand man, a man of many talents who painted watercolours in Antarctica. I once went to see the collection in Cheltenham at the Wilson Gallery and was struck by the range of tints, the delicacy, and the beauty. To my delight, I caught a Wilsonesque scene of pink peaks and sky, and wondrous fading light.

{‘Midnight’ by Dr EA Wilson, painted during the Terra Nova expedition (1910-13) to Antarctica]

Oh yes, the light/s. One of the the reasons Tromsø has experienced a surge in tourism is the Northern Lights and so many people “chasing” them. It’s not what I was there for, but it amused me that you can pay a lot to drive miles - even into Finland - to sit on a frozen lake looking up at the clouds and not see a thing, but you can walk to the supermarket in Tromsø and see this:

To be fair, a faint aurora is often not obvious. To the naked eye, this just looked like a wispy cloud or vapour trail. It was Alice who spotted the possibility and it was only when we used our cameras that it showed up green.

Like so many places above the Arctic Circle, Tromsø used to take days to reach by packet boat or overland from the south, so it blew my mind that we could leave on an early flight and be back in Cambridge via Gatwick just after midday. But then again we are not proper explorers.

Happy Sunday!

PS I made my own Best Beatles playlist on Simon’s Spotify account to listen to whilst flying along the west coast of Norway with views of its snowy mountains and many of its 239,000 islands. He loves it when The Beatles intrude unannounced via his headphones. Not.

[urban travel “free from fogs, gales and tide”, seen in James Street Station via the Water Street entrance, an 1886 time capsule with a 150m ramp to the platform and a much-needed handrail]

Because despite a settee- and train-seat-based enjoyment of “country”, I’m a urbanite at heart. This much was confirmed when we spent thirty hours in Liverpool last weekend, and I got so much excitement and energy out of seeing the built environment, walking through the streets, looking up and around, and thinking about the man-made that I realised once again that I’m a city girl.

That’s not to say that I haven’t done my best to enjoy the rural, the rustic, and the Romantic. I love poetry and novels about the countryside by Hardy, Eliot, Keats, Manley Hopkins, and I love paintings of the non-urban subjects by Constable, Ivon Hitchens, Ravilious. I’ve placed myself in the countryside and many magnificent landscapes and done my absolute best to commune with nature and to convince myself that I could live on fresh air, greenery, and a novelist's/poet’s sensibilities. But take me to Liverpool - or any of our great towns and cities - and I’m immediately in my element and know that I could thrive there.

[‘The Liver Building’ (1959) - and the River Mersey - by Manchester/Lancashire artist LS Lowry]

Although I grew up relatively close to Liverpool - only 40 miles away - and the River Mersey connects it directly to Stockport, Manchester was always the epicentre of my urban life. So I never visited Liverpool until my twenties, and that was after dark and for a meal in the country’s oldest Chinatown. I’ve been a couple of times in recent years, but this visit was different because I was in a car and had a driver (thank you, Simon) and a very clear list of what I wanted to see beyond the city centre.

I’m fascinated by housing, houses, homes, the domestic. So an itinerary which took us round the Beatles’ childhood homes and significant locations was also a look at Liverpool’s urban and suburban development during the twentieth century and up to now. And the city is incredibly rich in all sorts of housing: Victorian, terraced, inter-war, council, estate, inner city, suburban, grand, small, brick, rendered, sandstone. I’m no planner, architect or sociologist, so I simply look at all this and wonder what it’s like to live there.

[Burnage, 1960s]

And I was amazed by how familiar it is. Parts of it look just like the areas of Manchester such as Burnage, Levenshulme, Longsight, and Ardwick that I know so well from childhood. The houses, the churches, the building materials, the roads, the estates, the trees, the bus routes, the whole thing. No wonder I had and have such an affinity with The Beatles and their music, I grew up in practically the same urban environments as them.

[25 Upton Green, Speke, L24, early post-war. George Harrison’s childhood home from 1950]

First we went to Speke, a vast housing estate on the SW edge of Liverpool. It was and is huge, the work of Sir Lancelot Keay (1883-1974) who did so much to shape post-war, post-Blitz Liverpool.

This is how Upton Green looked when it was newly built,

and this is it now. Virtually unchanged, apart from the cars where the children used to play.

Paul McCartney also lived in two houses in Speke, very close to George and mostly before they knew each other,

[ Paul McCartney’s home from 1955. 20 Forthlin Road, L18 (built 1949). I’m still wondering if a home can be described as proud]

but this is often glossed over in the rush to locate him in Forthlin Road (on a council estate also oversee by Lancelot Keay) which is owned by the National Trust, can be visited, and is therefore potentially more interesting and open to being interpreted to fit a sociological/class theory, just like John’s house (also NT).

[“Mendips”, 251 Menlove Avenue, L25]

Then it was over to Menlove Avenue which, in a bid to make John posh and anything but a “working class hero”, biographers and too many pop historians do their best to present as some kind of enormous baronial manor or villa because it has a name and a teeny bit of stained glass, as did so many thousands of inter war suburban semis. Because that’s what it is, as you can see. It’s slightly bigger than his bandmates’ homes, with more garden, on a road with four lanes of traffic and a lot of cachet at one end - the other end. But feel free to read all sort of class distinctions into this.

[9 Madryn Street, L8, Ringo Starr’s birthplace]

Moving closer to the centre we went to Toxteth and the inner-city area of Dingle (often ‘the Dingle’) where Ringo grew up. This is a fascinating bit of housing history. Madryn Street is one of the Welsh Streets, a grid of seven streets of terraced houses designed in the 1870s by the Welsh architect, Richard Owen, and all with Welsh names.

[Madryn Street, 2017, before refurbishment]

As late as 2017, they were condemned, boarded up, and slated for demolition. And then, after a huge outcry and energetic campaigning, four hundred houses were saved and many have been sympathetically renovated (the project is ongoing) and the streets transformed.

[Madryn Street now]

It makes me wonder again about the wholesale removal of so much Victorian housing in what can only be described as purges in the 1960s. I remember getting the bus into Manchester and seeing the absolute wreckage of the homes and communities which, with some imagination and a lot less arrogance from often corrupt developers, could have been regenerated. In a film made for the BBC in 1972, the architectural critic Ian Nairn discusses this (from 29:30) while driving from Stockport to Manchester along the route I used to take and showing the urban wastelands (“the Germans couldn’t have done it, the town planners have”). Liverpool has shown there are alternatives.

[now: 10 Admiral Grove, L8, Ringo Starr’s childhood home, with V for Victory above the front door]

When he was three, Ringo moved 150 yards from Madryn Street to Admiral Grove,

[then]

and this is wher he lived until fame, fortune, and besieging fans arrived.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney once considered writing a whole Liverpool album, but didn’t get much further than the brilliant Penny Lane

and Strawberry Fields (actually Strawberry Field irl).

But these two songs encapsulate so much of their early lives that much more would have been superfluous. They were suburban boys, hopping on and off buses all the time, changing at the terminus with the shelter on the roundabout, criss-crossing Liverpool to get to the Liverpool Institute, Lime Street Station, the Cavern, the Mersey Beat offices, Ye Cracke, the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, the School of Art, Gambier Terrace, the Anglican Cathedral, the Casbah in West Derby, and taking the ferry across the Mersey. Every single one of which we saw, apart from the last which now a morning and evening commuter service only. We drove down Penny Lane, past the Strawberry Field gates, and I jumped out to look at what was Quarry Bank School (now Calderstones School) where John went and rebelled. It was also important to see Dovedale Primary School (John and George plus contemporaries Jimmy Tarbuck and Peter Sissons), Woolton village (John and friends) and St Peter’s Church,

and the hall where John and Paul first met.

It was like a best-ever geography/history field trip. It meant I could create a whole Beatles map in my mind - and actually it would be good to get a huge real one of south and central Liverpool plus a little bit to the north east, and draw on all the connecting lines. It would be a visualisation of all the routes, networks, and coincidences which give rise not only to a phenomenon such as The Beatles but also the texture of many millions of sub/urban lives. This may very well be type of psychogeography, but as I do not wish to be known as a “psycho geographer “(the full word is too easily split in my mind), I’m not claiming it that way.

Instead, I’m just really, really interested in sub/urban houses and lives. And The Beatles.

Happy Sunday!

PS Municipal Dreams has several excellent blog posts on Speke and the Beatles’ childhood homes

It was built in 1992 and originally it was meant to be the first of a number of pyramids to create a Valley of the Kings in the North West. Not quite what you associate with a damp town famous for manufacturing felt hats. It sits right next to the M60 and, importantly for us, the junction where we used to turn off just before the viaduct to climb up the hill towards my Mum’s house.

[‘Motorways and Arches’ (2011) by Helen Clapcott]

The moment the Pyramid was spotted, one of the children would phone Nana excitedly and give the code: “put the kettle on!”. When we arrived a few minutes later, the kettle would be boiling, mugs lined up, and tea imminent.

[‘Pots and Kettle’ by Joan Eardley]

I’m a tea drinker, but only since Tom and Alice were born. From my teenage years onwards, I was committed to coffee (instant) but when I was pregnant, just the smell of it would have me heaving. I couldn’t drink tea, either (or eat anything really - I lost two stone while expecting twins) but as soon as that was over, it was tea all the way.

[‘Flask, candle and kettle’ (c1940) by Renato Guttuso]

So kettles have been integral to my life for decades. The one we have now is electric, although I’d like to have one which sits on the hob,

[designed by Sori Yanagi]

preferably this elegant Japanese kettle which heats up water very quickly and is a thing of smooth, gleaming beauty, but we have an induction hob and it wouldn’t work.

[Michael Graves (1985) for Alessi]

Plus, I might take my eye off a whistle-less kettle for too long. So a cheerfully noisy one, like the witty Alessi bird-whistle kettle, or a dull but practical one which switches itself off is required.

[‘Self Portrait’ (1958) by Jean Fleming]

But that doesn’t mean to say I don’t appreciate the style, status, and importance of the kettle elsewhere. I like this painting with Cornishware and Rayburn (?) and bentwood chair and washing and tea towels and bread bin all making the kettles an integral part of a ‘domestic symphony’ (see below).

These are the huge catering kettles which are in a friend’s kitchen - the way they are displayed en masse completely alters the way we see them - and the colanders - not as workaday utensils but objects of beauty which are are battered, worn, and still doing their job.

[Fakenham Gas Museum]

I feel a kitchen isn’t a kitchen without a kettle, which is probably why so many in museums’ domestic room recreations it’s as though someone has just popped to the corner shop for a packet of tea and a bottle of milk,

[St Fagan’s National Museum of History]

or bobbed next door to borrow a bowl of sugar.

Although I do like a well-used, well-polished urn (or samovar) like the one in the station refreshment room in Brief Encounter.

Tea has been a primary way of keeping people away from alcohol, and in the Potteries novels of Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns for example, many kettles sing on the ranges in small, Methodist houses.

[Measham Bargeware Temperance Motto Kettle c1880]

They were often shaped like, but perhaps not as decorated as, this temperance kettle.

‘Kettle’ itself is a great, old word. In Cambridge we have Kettle’s Yard and the Copper Kettle cafe. Kettle is also an excellent surname, as exemplified by the brilliant textile artist, Alice Kettle (who, I feel, should be married to conductor Simon Rattle and then they could hyphenate their names to make them extra-onomatopoeic). Then there is Ma and Pa Kettle (names invoked regularly by my Mum to suggest untidy family life). I love the fact that Ma is Phoebe Kettle and they have a son called Tom Kettle. (All three of our children with the Kettle surname.)

There aren’t many negative kettle connotations. Instead they suggest cheerfulness, elevenses, big mugs and pots of tea with biscuits and chat, respite, and sympathy, all of which are captured by Eric Ravilious in this old favourite, a 1939 design for embroidery for Dunbar Hay. Kettles appear in children’s books by Beatrix Potter, Janet and Allan Ahlberg and many more, symbols of a settled home life and secure, predictable domesticity (eg after Peter Rabbit’s near-death experience with Mr McGregor, so terrifying to me as a child that I couldn’t bear to listen to it).

Kettles are the epitome of ordinariness. As I’ve mentioned before, the Beatles were never far from a cup of tea and therefore a kettle which in the early days was the gas hob sort with a good strong whistle, like John Lennon’s own.

[photo by Dezo Hoffman, March 1963]

Here he is pouring a cup of tea in Paul McCartney’s home during a shoot to illustrate just what nice, clean-living boys they all were, neatly airbrushing out the wildness of Hamburg.

And this is how it looks today, complete with (slightly different) kettle

[‘Symphonie Domestique Américaine’ (c1923) by Preston Dickinson]

I think Preston Dickinson is right in his painting and the kettle is central to the domestic symphony - and harmony. Even his Precisionist style, usually applied to industrial subjects, works with the bulbous kettle overseeing all the other components. The kettle as queen of the kitchen.

Happy Sunday!

*The Pyramid has been in the news recently because, after years of being empty, it is now the Royal Nawaab Pyramid, a massive restaurant which can cater for hundreds of people. It was even reviewed - very favourably - by Jay Rayner in the Financial Times last year. Stockport is quite the destination now.

I may have noticed in passing and not given it much thought to the matter, but it wasn’t until Phoebe went to MoMA last year and reported on the sad lack and choice of postcards in the three shops there that I began to see a pattern of absence.

[‘Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit’ (c1620-25) by Sir Nathaniel Bacon - I have definitely sent this more than once, seeing it as the antecedent to Donald McGill’s saucy postcards]

It used to be that you could go to an exhibition or a permanent collection and, if you so wished, come home with half of it in miniature form for not very much money. You could then plaster your walls or pinboards with your own display of works in a fantasy exhibition. These could be added to or subtracted from, or you could do a complete rehang according to your personal whims and fancies. Or you could send them to friends and family with silly “saw this and thought of you” messages or more highbrow comments, depending on recipient.

This is the joy of postcards, and one we are in danger of losing. Not just because of the galleries’ and museums’ dearth of tiny reproductions which themselves have increased enormously in price, but also because it now costs so much to send a small piece of card measuring 4” x 6” through the post.

[‘Work’ (1865) by Ford Madox Brown]

I’ve been picking up postcards ever since I went to Manchester Art Gallery as a teenager and stood in front of ‘Work’ by Ford Madox Brown, mesmerised by the small areas of brilliant magenta he used (I now realise this is like Proust’s/Bergotte’s obsession with the “petit pan de mur jaune” or “little patch of yellow wall” in Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’). Sadly, you can barely make them out on a postcard-size reproduction, but I had one to remind that it this colour exists and is seared in my mind as one of the most beautiful in the world.

[‘Eating House’ (c1914) by Harold Gilman, in Sheffield and one of the paintings I used to visit as an escape from a miserable PGCE year]

I then continued buying postcards in Bristol and Sheffield and London and Moscow until I had a sizeable collection featuring London Transport posters, Camden Town Group painters, Impressionists, Bonnard, Vuillard, Pre-Raphaelites, Matisse - according to my evolving tastes.

After university, I travelled a great deal for work and would send a postcard to my late mother-in-law from every place I visited as a European brand manager for Malibu in the 1980s (the apogee of my career, some might say) including Austria, Holland, Andorra, Portugal, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia (as it then was), Bulgaria, and Poland. When she died, we found a shoe-box stuffed with all the postcards and I realised just how much these small missives coming through the letterbox had meant to her, a widow living alone and unable to drive. I’d found it amusing to surprise her with my latest destination and choice of picture - Lisbon! Vienna! Amsterdam! Sofia! Ljubljana! - but never imagined she’d keep them all.

These days I still love an art postcard, which is why I’d asked Phoebe to bring me back a couple from NYC. I have a friend I see only occasionally but who also likes sending/receiving postcards from exhibitions so we exchange thoughts and comments this way, and she too has noticed the gradual disappearance. Recently, we went - separately - to the display of Millais paintings at the National Gallery and coincidentally both looked for a postcard of “The Angelus’ to send to each other. No such luck.

[‘Five Hot Dogs’ (1961) by Wayne Thiebaud]

I’ve now started asking why there are so few postcards. At an exhibition of rugs in Stockholm I was told that the rights costs made them too expensive. Other places sell out quickly of the most popular images; this was what I was told when I wanted a postcard of Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes and it suggests they underestimated the demand for and popularity of pictures of pastel confections. I made do with a postcard of hot dogs which, the more you look at them, are verging on the saucy again.

[Butlins Bognor Regis, Lounge Adjoining Heated Indoor Pool by John Hinde - clearly asking ‘who needs the Costa del Sol when you’ve got this on your doorstep?’]

Apart from art postcards which are like bookshelves and a way to show off your amazingly brilliant and wide-ranging tastes, I love a good John Hinde style postcard (probably called ‘vintage’ and ‘retro’ on eBay). Like many people of a certain age, these garishly coloured postcards were a part of my childhood, sent from places like Blackpool and Bognor Regis and Bournemouth.

For years I treasured the postcard with a glamorous dancer wearing a real fabric dress which my Mum’s friend sent from Spain. And it was on a postcard that my best friend at primary school told me the sensational news that she’d had her appendix out in a French hospital while on holiday. Far more glamorous than Stockport Infirmary - of which there were sadly no postcards - where I had mine out the following year. Also, we must not forget the plain white Post Office postcards for less exotic and cheaper-to-send missives such as writing in to Blue Peter.

The small, defined, blank space of a postcard is the perfect vehicle for brief, concise communications; as The Beatles sang in When I’m Sixty-Four, you have to “indicate precisely what you mean to say” when “stating point of view”. This useful, once-speedy form of messaging is a much jollier analogue version of what has become the horror that is X. It can be used to simply say hello, confirm a meeting time, make a declaration, or to convey the classic “wish you were here”. With art postcards, I also relish the idea of being an art critic in a few words, a bit like the early tweets (which I never used) but so much more wholesome and without the fear they might go viral for the wrong reason.

I still buy too many postcards - far more than I send. Here are a few recent ones I particularly like, a mix of artists and places, bought and received. They include Stockholm, Hong Kong, Oxford, Copenhagen, a Ladybird Books exhibition, Hiroshige at the British Museum, Norway, Dundee, Carl Larsson, Peggy Guggenheim from Venice, Anna Ancher in Skagen, Harold Harvey in Penzance, Kristiansand, Swansea, the Fry Gallery in Saffron Walden, and the one which Phoebe sent from North Korea a few years ago (second row, second from right).

These days, I don’t have that many on the walls, but this is the view from my sewing machine.

Of course, the Beatles were themselves inveterate and skilled users of postcards; Ringo Starr even published a book called Postcards from the Boys (2004),

which included this famous one from Paul McCartney after a tense time in the recording studio.

And the lyrics to “Two of Us” (“two of us sending postcards”) reflect the fact that for years they all sent brief, often funny, affectionate, daft postcards to each other from all over the world.

I don’t think people are ready yet to abandon both art and picture postcards - you only have to look at how many are on sale in Cambridge to know that - and it’s not all bad news. Some galleries sill have lovely and extensive selections and there are still many thousands of art-lovers who want to take home something more tangible than a photo on their phone and that’s only ever possible if you can pick a moment when other photographers and selfie-takers are not in front of a painting.

Ironically, a postcard may be your only unimpeded view.

What do you think? Answers on a postcard, please.

Happy Sunday!

There is a bookshop in Ginza which opened in 2015 as “a Single Room with a Single Book”. It’s called Morioka Shoten and is a tiny place in Suzuki Building (1929), one of the few listed buildings in Tokyo. It has a plain, simple interior and very nice branding.

Each week, the owner Yoshuyuki Morioka sells multiple copies of just one book. Six days a week, he showcases one title. Of course, it’s not just the book which he is paying attention to, it’s everything about it. Because the book is just a catalyst, a jumping-off point for so much more. There might be an exhibition, an installation, an author’s talk, a workshop, a demonstration, an event, or all of these, to exploit what is contained in a single volume. It’s an opportunity to bring a book to life, to contextualise it, to be creative, go wild, have fun, and a radical way to rethink the concept of a bookshop.

To give an example, this is what was created for the week of Bless Vol 3: 176 individually printed tote bags, each representing a page from the book.

Now I’ve not been to the shop, so I am only going by what I’ve seen and read (eg here and here), But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and playing with the idea because it is genius. There is so much you can do with it, provided of course you have the money, time, resources, because to do it properly would take a lot of work. And it’s clear that making money from selling one book a week is not the point. The point to make it the star of its own show and to surround it with connections thereby demonstrating just how much impact and inspiration a single book can generate.

So I wondered what I’d do if I had the chance to run the place for a few weeks, and these are three books I’d choose:

[detail of ‘Pie Counter’ (1963) by Wayne Thiebaud]

First, I’d sell a baking book. This would be Sift by Nicola Lamb who writes the brilliant Kitchen Projects on Substack. Her recipes are very carefully tested and the results are delicious. I don’t even like pumpkin pie but her maple pumpkin pie, as made by Simon Goode, was incredible.

[‘Cakes’ (1963) by Wayne Thiebaud]

To exploit the potential deliciousness waiting to be made from the book, I’d borrow a couple of the totally fabulous Wayne Thiebaud paintings I saw at The Courtauld exhibition this week - or maybe I’d have to settle for prints to avoid insurance costs.

[detail of ‘Boston Cremes’ (1962) by Wayne Thiebaud]

I’d also have a copy of Laura Cumming’s exhibition review in which she relates a lovely story about her dealings with Thiebaud who was not only “a modern-day Chardin of the sandwich, damn fine coffee and cherry pie” but also a very nice man.

And as this is in Japan, I’d commission some amazing replica cakes, likes the ones we saw in the Japan House exhibition last year. There would be real cakes to eat, too, and a talk by Nicola Lamb. This would be a bit of squeeze - I know that her big events sell out - but we are keeping things very minimal here.

My second week would feature Smocked, a work in progress. By me.

[‘Smocked’ ideas]

I’ve been wondering how I could get my smocking into a handmade book (you could call it an artist’s book if you want, but this term induces creative paralysis in me). So I’ve been copying pieces directly on my very basic home photocopier to see what happens,

[riso prints]

and this week I did the same on the riso machine at LCBA. I know it would be technically more correct, maybe better, to scan or photograph the smocks then twiddle about with black and white conversions and Photoshop and stuff, but I actually really like just putting the fabrics on the machine’s flat bed and pressing the big green button. Someone had left the teal ink drum in the machine, and I was surprised by how much I liked the effects it creates. I also experimented with neon pink and aqua and overprinting, and decided I very much like riso prints. I’ll do more and bind them by hand into bigger books.

[‘instant’ books]

Or maybe just stick with instant books made from a single sheet of paper which open up to show a single image, like a poster, on the other side.

The walls of little shop would be covered with my smocking samples, and I’d display a few of the C19 smocks I’ve seen in the V&A collection. There’d be a smocking workshop, and a talk on “Smocking, Ancient and Modern”. Visitors could play with a Princess Pleater to produce their own pleated, ready-to-smock fabrics, and pick up and examine finished pieces to enjoy the wonderful, very satisfying movements which the pleating and smocking create. I’d install a riso machine for the week and in the background I’d be printing and binding new copies of the limited edition book, and single prints would be available (not sure if that’s allowed, but it’s my bookshop, my rules).

And I’d point everyone to the cover of Wings’ single Junior’s Farm because I knew I’d eventually find a Beatle wearing a proper smock.

My third book would be Arkiv: De ufullendte (2011) by Kari Steihaug, which translates as Archive: The Unfinished Ones. With its theme of incomplete, abandoned projects, it’s a title which should appeal to many makers, and probably bring forth an avalanche of unfinished knitting (aka “works in progress”, the term we use to kid ourselves we will eventually get round to finishing) which has been sitting in cupboards and bags and drawers for years.

[each item is presented on a graph paper background like this, with an explanation of why it wasn’t finished]

This clearing-out would be ideal, as the call for unfinished knitting plus associated stories mirrors Kari Steihaug’s method of collecting for the book.

[exhibition of Unfinished Ones at the National Museum of Art, Oslo]

Those supplied would be exhibited on the walls, and tissues for the often sad stories would be provided. There’d be a finishing/not finishing workshop, therapy wool and needles would be available, and I’d organise an author’s talk on, and I quote, “the poetry in imperfection and about directing attention to something failed and lost” and the “knitted projects {which] didn’t gain the role in someone’s everyday life that they were intended for…[but]…became carriers of time and thoughts, sorrows and joys, hope and dreams”.

[great story - easier to read here]

It would be a lovely week of loose ends, no regrets, and moving on.

Which leaves just another forty-eight books to choose for 2026.

Happy Sunday!

[furnishing fabric des 1933 by Ben Nicholson]

Christmas tally:

Six/seven people for 2/2.5 weeks, forty-six eggs in Phoebe’s baking, several kilos of coffee beans, ditto butter, nine hand-knitted beanie hats, three tins of Quality Street/Roses, twenty best-ever cardamom buns (Juno The Bakery recipe), one litre each chocolate/hazelnut/vanilla ice cream, 2 x litres blond chocolate ice cream by popular request, unknown quantities of double cream (best not to ask), approx ten sessions of duck-feeding, one (unofficial) half marathon and many more km in the run-up (pun intended), zero sprouts, two new aprons made and worn (one toddler/one grown-up), daily Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da singalongs, all the Only Connect and University Challenge Christmas specials (individual scores at home unrecorded, but not bad), Genius level of NYT Spelling Bee reached everyday (with occasional conferring), one Escape Room game cracked, one enjoyable Wake Up Dead Man viewing, 50% stay-up-till-midnight rate on New Year’s Eve, 0.5 Sophie Shawl knitted, one copy each read: Craft Land, Up in the Air, Under the Greenwood Tree, one daughter and her partner very much missed because they were in Hong Kong, at least a dozen 2026 travel plans hatched, zero sale purchases made (me), millions of laughs.

Phew.

Happy Sunday!

We have done the Annual Quality Street Count and, just for the fun of it, just to be gay, we did a Roses Count, too (on the left). A bumper year for QS strawberry creams, but yet another poor showing of green triangles.

[Theo, seventeen months, making wise music choices]

I have made sure we have Ob-La-Di, Ob-Bla-Da downloaded for our mini Beatles fan who has come with Tom and Zoë to stay for Christmas and New Year.

[Detail of ‘The Wheatfield’ (exh 1816)]

Much to my own surprise, I adored the Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain. I grew up with a print of ‘The Hay Wain’ on the wall at home and thought Constable was all a bit chocolate-boxy and just to be found on biscuit tins and in jigsaws.

[‘The Wheatfield’]

And because I hadn’t seen much else of his, I had no idea how brilliant he was. Just wonderful. All those amazing skies, trees, boats, horses, wheat fields, churches, steeples, hills, mills, and rivers plus tiny details of stooks, baskets, anglers, and a Suffolk smock-wearer.

[‘Rainstorm over the Sea’ c1824-28]

And weather. He also did quick-fire oil sketches and innumerable sky studies which are completely revelatory. Look at the glorious Howard Hodgkin-style brush-strokes here - so ahead of their time - and much more my sort of thing than the highly acclaimed and mystical Turner (and his mega-fan John Ruskin).

[US Army nurses’ billet, Churchill Hospital, Oxford 1943]

I went round the Constables twice with the Lee Miller exhibition and a cup of tea in between takes; I’ve just renewed my lapsed Tate membership and it’s exhibitions like these that make me pleased I did. I was also very unaware of much of Lee Miller’s work apart from her surreal period and, being much more of a realist, wasn’t terribly interested. But to see the arc of her career from stunning model to fashion photographer to war photographer to Cordon Bleu cook was fascinating, although her unnervingly unflinching eye made some of her war photographs difficult to look at.

I’ve enjoyed Wings by Paul McCartney for the story of how he rose from the ashes of The Beatles to reconquer the world told in these cleverly stitched together first-person accounts from the various people involved. I’m still not a big Wings fan, but I am a huge Paul McCartney fan with his insistence on Fair-Isle-wearing, tea-drinking ordinariness and a love of home as correctives to his fame.

This was the spectacular cake made by Simon Goode for the LCBA members’ Christmas lunch which is always fun and a good way to meet other bookbinders and book artists. This time it was Rahel Zoller who did her best at a workshop a couple of years ago to coax a book out of me, and Tilly of Tillman Press who, at the end of every year, makes a book with the title All the books I’ve finished in my head which contains all the ideas she’s had for books which she hasn’t actually made. So good to find I’m not the only one who has ideas, holds onto them for ages, and still they don’t see the light of day. And then you find they have migrated to someone else who just does it.

I have a Christmas/not Christmas jumper. I’m still trying to move from wearing grey because it makes me look like I’ve been rubbed out, so I have gone to the other end of the spectrum with pink, and when I say pink I mean pink. Pink to make you blink, not just wink.

Lastly, as someone who spends a lot of time looking for and at images, I have revelled in the analyses of the Vanity Fair photos of Trump’s team in the White House. People are so on the ball and funny and acute in seeing what’s in plain sight and what’s lurking behind the lighting and staging and posing, not to mention the references to historical photographs of diabolical figures. I’m not putting any on here, but just saying that my “favourites” are those of Marco Rubio looking like he’s in the naughty corner after being told off while wearing enormous clown shoes, and the way the top of Dan Scanvino’s head is cut off in his reflection in the table. Brilliant, subversive stuff. As Lou Reed sang, “You’re going to reap just what you sow.”

[‘Snow Storm: Sea Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth’ (1842) by JMW Turner]

And just because I loved the Constables so much, doesn’t mean I didn’t like some of the Turners. So I’m closing 2025 with this dramatic and completely unChristmassy sea-and-sky painting by Turner which I think makes a wonderful ‘compare and contrast’ subject with the Constable above.

See you in January.

Happy Sunday and Merry Christmas!

When I was in my last year at school, I had a boyfriend who was at Cambridge University studying Maths. I came to visit him a couple of times, staying in Emmanuel College’s Old Court which was built in the 1630s; he was a Scholar and shared an impressively large "set” with a huge fireplace but the bathroom facilities were still 1630s style ie non-existent. Amazing to think that at the time it was going up, John Milton was just down the road at Christ’s College and would have recognised it in the 1970s as being exactly the same.

When the boyfriend was busy doing big sums and playing tiddlywinks (a real thing, he won a quarter blue for playing against Oxford), I was free to wander all over Cambridge and explore the magic and beauty of the medieval lanes, buildings and colleges. But it was a much more modern place which made the biggest impression on me as an eighteen year old.

This is the interior of Heffers, the Cambridge bookshop which was established in 1876 and had several premises before concentrating on the Trinity Street site where it is still today, though no longer independent (it’s part of the Waterstones/Blackwell’s group). But just recently they took down the wonderfully unique metal shop sign with the 1970s lower case lettering and replaced it with a crappy one-size-suits-all Blackwell’s blue one made from what looks like plastic.

But, oh my goodness me, before the interior was compromised by all the gift stuff which is now obligatory in book chains, it was seriously the most wonderful, the coolest bookshop I’d ever seen. It was designed by Peter Lord using wood, glass, chrome, exposed concrete, sunken areas, and different levels and was, I thought, the ultimate in modern bookish beauty. I remember wanting to buy piles of suitably highbrow books but, not having much money, I bought slim volumes of poetry and that did the trick of making me feel like I belonged in this historic university town.

So I am not at all surprised to find out now that Heffers had a long history of holding exhibitions in the shop. It was very cutting-edge, too, with Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach and, in June 1978, an exhibition of coalhole rubbings.

Oh yes, people moved on from brasses in churches and took their heelball and paper into the streets to look for Victorian cast-iron covers, which even at that time, were disappearing. As several people mentioned in the comments last week, in the 1970s there was quite a craze for rubbing coalhole covers and Heffers were onto it (they also sold rubbing materials - no longer).

Lily Goddard (1916-2021), who was a textile designer, is perhaps the best-known exponent of this open-air art,

and it was her rubbings which went on display in the shop. A set of her London coalhole rubbings made in 1975 are in the V&A, and she wrote a book on the subject in 1979. I bought a copy of it, which is how I know about the Heffers connection, and it reminded me again just how brilliant abebooks is (despite being part of the big bad wolf mega company). How many weeks/phone calls/miles would it have required in the past to track down a second-hand copy of an obscure title like this?

I have also discovered a modern equivalent of Lily Goddard’s work: a collection of neon prints of rubbings of twenty-two London street covers bound into an oversize booklet. Overlooked was created in 2016 by Marina Willer at Pentagram Papers “to present these metal lids as impeccable pieces of industrial design, threaded throughout the functional fabric of a city…No two halves of one cover appear on the same page. The booklet’s size [A1], colours and mismatched rubbings highlight the level of detail and the individual quirks of each cover’s design”.

[via Salt’s Mill]

The rubbings have also been turned into even brighter, fluorescent screenprints (and bags and T-shirts). Interestingly and gratifyingly, the first series of the prints is also in the V&A.

[‘Black Hole’ (2017-18) by Alison Strauss]

The Overlooked pages include nice photos of people making rubbings of covers in the road and I notice there are no “Warning: Manhole Cover Rubber at Work” signs. Alison Strauss, who has created a series of looser, sometimes overlapping, mixed or collaged ‘street rubbings’ also addresses the question of working outside in an urban environment. She writes, “This body of work required me to work in public, drawing attention to my subject just by working on it. I had a sense of exercising/testing the ideals of public space as I conducted my odd and slightly suspicious looking work—kneeling on the sidewalk or in the street, scrubbing away with the puck-like crayons I made to cover large surface areas. It was also something of a public art education experience—at least one passerby had never seen a rubbing before.”

This aspect of taking rubbings is what has been exercising me as well for a while now, but in a passive way, ever since I started looking into the subject earlier this year.

Every time I walk to the station or The Cambridge Oven or to one of the nine (nine!!) supermarkets within nine minutes’ walk of our house, I pass/step on a reminder of my home town. The Needham iron foundry was established by John Needham in 1846 and in its heyday in the 1930s it manufactured covers for almost all parts of Britain and other countries, and employed thousands of workers. The plant closed in 1979, and yet the name lives on in the pavements of Cambridge (this isn’t the only example). It made me laugh when I first saw STOCKPORT under my feet - I just can’t escape. I’d love to do a rubbing of it, but I’m a coward about doing something like that at a very busy junction where cars, bikes, and pedestrians do not stop for red lights, let alone for someone on the pavement, scribbling.

The same applies to this lovely cast iron lettering on a wall on Kingsland Road which I saw in the summer and immediately wanted to cover with paper and rub. Instead, I just meekly took a photo and filed it in the To Be Rubbed category.

Much safer, at least for a beginner, is a trip to the London Brass Rubbing Centre which I visited this week, although the name is a bit an overstatement. It’s in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields and is really just a few shelves in a corner of the shop/cafe area with a number of replica brasses. You choose your “brass” which is priced according to size, collect a sheet of paper and a box of crayons, and away you go. I recognised a replica of Margaret Peyton and her brocade dress (above) from my newsletter two weeks ago so selected her. I’ve never done a proper brass rubbing, but I imagine it’s a lot more exciting to feel the cold metal surface under your hands, the original fine, firm lines and incisions, and the later smooth, worn areas, and to trust your fingertips as you move over it.

[first rubbing, bit wobbly and smudgy]

This was enjoyable, but it’s just not the same doing it in a cafe instead of an unheated medieval church or on a busy main road.

Talking of which, roads don’t get much more main and important than Abbey Road in London where, yes indeed, there is a Beatles manhole cover, a specially commissioned piece of road art to mark fifty years since the release of the Abbey Road album, just feet from the famous zebra crossing which was given Grade II listing status in 2010. It was installed in 2019 by Thames Water (I suppose we have to be grateful for small mercies where they are concerned).

And the nice people involved even made a film to go with it.

I need to get myself over to NW8 pdq.

Happy Sunday!

[my idea of Christmas shopping: forget the shopping and fatigue, and just have the lunch, afternoon and dinner. London Transport poster (1923) by Edward McKnight Kauffer]

You may have guessed from this that I don’t take Christmas planning very seriously. In my world, it’s still ages until 25th December and apart from having made a Christmas cake - more because we start eating it almost immediately - everything else can wait. I mean, when you read old novels or live in different parts of Europe, you see that it’s perfectly possible to start around the 24th. You could even leave it until the 25th and pretend that you still live in a time when when shops open, trains run, and the post comes on Christmas morning.

[Persephone Books chrysanthemums, the flowers the Provincial Lady takes to a friend when she goes to London to do her Christmas shopping]

Every year, I feel my hackles rising in the face of the commercial pressure, the nonsense about Christmas TV ads (as if they are some kind of deeply meaningful cultural phenomenon instead of a profit-making phenomenon), and the magazine and newspaper articles which are on the dictatorial side of bossy. “Time to recap Christmas dressing rules.” “If it’s Christmas, it has to be turkey”. Roast potatoes: “…it’s not enough that they’re there: they need to be perfect.” “You cannot, in all seriousness, even think of having a party without cocktail sausages.” (All seen in the last week.)

Gahhhhh.

[20th December]

Yesterday, I did a talk on “The Persephone Post Advent Calendar 2025” at Persephone Books in Bath. I write the Post every weekday, taking a theme or subject for each week, choosing an image a day, and adding some text. My extended Post advent calendar had twenty-six days, because I included Christmas Day and Boxing Day, the day I go “phew”. This is the photo I used for 20th December to illustrate the idea that it’s perfectly possible to have fish fingers for your Christmas dinner, if that’s what you want. We did in Germany when Tom and Alice were small, and they went well with a nice glass of Riesling. Plus, I don’t know what to do with a turkey, never having cooked one in my life.

So two (fish) fingers up to the bossyboots. Do what suits you.

[Shepherd skirt pocket goals]

In the December meantime, I’ve been sewing very complicated pockets on a Merchant and Mills Shepherd Skirt and swishing around in it still pinned at the waistband and planning about ten more because it is the best skirt pattern I’ve found. The sense of accomplishment when all the seams meet where they should and the pocket lies flat on the hip is quite wonderful. I imagine architects must feel the same - on a higher level - when walls and ceilings and floors meet at corners.

[Cary Grant sorting out the bishop’s dismal Christmas tree in ‘The Bishop’s Wife’ (1947)]

I’ve re-watched The Bishop’s Wife

and The Shop Around the Corner.

I called this research for my talk, but actually the brilliant Cary Grant and James Stewart and the rather breathy Loretta Young and loquacious Maureen Sullavan make such good pairings that you forget the Christmas themes and enjoy the bickering and repartee and romance (and slightly uncharitable thoughts about the boring, uptight bishop, played by David Niven). Although it has to be noted in support of my Christmas procrastination that in The Bishop’s Wife the tree only goes up on Christmas Eve and in The Shop Around the Corner the mad shopping rush is also the 24th.

While I’m watching old films, I’m going round in a mindless knitting spiral on yet another beanie hat and I only have to concentrate when it comes to shaping the crown. I love this pattern and am knitting each version with Sandnes Garn Double Sunday or Alpakka Ull held with a matching silk/mohair from Knitting for Olive or Sandnes Garn. (Admittedly, all procured in Stockholm, but I know that Oxford Yarn Store has both brands.) NB I don’t do the tubular cast-on it specifies, I just do the same, ordinary cast-on I’ve always done, and it’s fine.

I’ve read Entitled by Andrew Lownie, but only a little bit at a time otherwise I would have had a full-on apoplectic fit. We went to hear him speak at the Cambridge Literary Festival and there’s a lot more which we may or may not ever hear about the Windsor formerly known as Prince.

[Ferrybridge C Power Station]

I received and read the gloriously huge book on Cooling Towers. When I was growing up, the other half of our very small family lived in Pontefract and as a young girl I was staggered by the nearby Ferrybridge Power Station. The cooling towers were the biggest things I’d ever seen (up to 300 feet tall), and even more spectacular when water vapour billowed out of them. More recently I went to Beverley and driving home westwards I could see the Drax Power Station in the distance. It took me a while to realise they were miles and miles away and enormous, rather than much closer and smaller. But soon there will be no more cooling towers.

[Fiddlers Ferry Power Station, four towers now demolished]

I don’t know what the arguments are against listing, but they are beautiful structures - just like cast-iron gas holders - and if I were in charge, I’d keep a few so that they could teach children to understand perspective and scale and the meaning of ‘hyperboloid’.

[Phoebe contemplating an E de Waal vitrine in which “every little vessel is a breath, a rotation of time”. I see something different.]

Phoebe and I went to a small exhibition at Edmund de Waal’s studio to see work by his team.

I love Barry Stedman’s ceramics - sploshed, squished, handled, misshapen, uneven, and colourful - and wanted to see them irl. I also wanted to see what a very, very successful potter’s studio looks like. Well, all I can say is our eyes were out on stalks/our eyes were rolling.

[weaving by Eva Dennis at Cockpit]

By contrast, the now annual visit to Bloomsbury Cockpit Studios had us bobbing in and out of numerous small, cramped, often shared studios with a great, warm atmosphere and so many amazing makers. (I’m sure about 300 jewellery makers and weavers would fit into E de Waal’s studio.)

[This? Detail of ‘Vermillion and Mauve’ (c1928)]

And in Bath this weekend there was time spent deciding which Winifred Nicholson painting to hide under my coat and take home from a small exhibition at the Holburne. So utterly beautiful and clean and luminous, no doubt intentionally numinous, and exquisitely pure colours.

[Or this? Detail of ‘Still Life by a Window’ (c1927)]

To end, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who reads this newsletter and who said hello at Persephone Books. It is always lovely to meet readers, especially as I have the best. And welcome to any new readers, and hello from my resident band:

Happy Sunday!

[‘The Boys’ 5th Form Classroom’ (1918) by Edward Bawden]

Earlier this year I got all interested in brass rubbing. I’m not sure where this came from, as it’s the kind of thing I associate with earnest young Cambridge undergraduates in the 1950s in tweed jackets and bicycle clips with their balls of black heelwax and rolls of paper and copies of Pevsner touring the ancient Fen churches on their bikes and making rubbings of the monumental brasses.

[London Transport poster (1961) by Hans Unger]

Brass rubbings were once ubiquitous, like a TikTok craze but with greater longevity and less brainrot. A wholesome pastime, the sort of thing boys’ grammar schools and public transport encouraged. As in this 1952 film. As in the 1918 painting above by Edward Bawden; in this image, given the date, they are almost memorials to the old boys who are no longer there in the empty classroom. Maybe the question of how to commemorate the dead after the war was what rekindled the Victorian enthusiasm for brass rubbing?

[John Piper photo of brass work at St John the Baptist Church in Shottesbrook, Berkshire]

It certainly influenced a great deal of mid-century design and illustration with its similarly flattened, stylised relief prints, lino cuts, and firm, bold black lines. Much of John Piper’s artistic style, for example, owes a great deal to church brasses and brass rubbings, and the Tate has some of his lovely, beautifully lit photographs which capture the idea of the eternal rest of the people memorialised. As one reviewer of Frances Spalding’s biography of Piper (and his wife, Myfanwy) said, “His reputation…rested on the look he fabricated, a graphic look compounded of stage flats and wizened textures picked out in brass-rubbing black, ceiling white, royal blue and pillarbox red.”

Having realised how much I like both the wonderful, smooth, deeply insiced worn brasses and the negative version a rubbing can produce, I wanted to embark on a church crawl and have a go, but failed almost immediately. Very few churches allow people to do brass rubbings, these days. It damages them, they say, but I think it’s mostly to do with the usual health and safety concerns, since many of the brasses have been there, often underfoot, for centuries, so a bit of light rubbing isn’t exactly going to erase them. Worse still, is the fact that over time many brasses have been removed or stolen, leaving just an imprint in stone or on a wall. This 1518 brass was stolen from Itchen Stoke church in Hampshire in 2020 and is/was a lovely example of the directness and purity of the lines which appeal to me - just look at the lovely hands.

[C19 rubbing of c1603 brass in Chichester Cathedral, in the V&A]

And anyway, I’m sure how I’d feel about being caught in flagrante on my knees on the floor, with a big piece of paper taped over a monumental brass and what would probably look like child’s angry scrawl. Although, tbh I just love this rubbing which the cognoscenti would no doubt tut-tut at; with its wild, energetic marks, it looks incredibly expressive and modern. And although there is skill involved in getting a good brass rubbing, it can all get a bit prescriptive, method-wise. The Monumental Brass Society - which sounds like it belongs with the Village Green Preservation Society in the Kinks 1968 song - tells you to “rub in one direction only (preferably up and down, following the main lines of the engraving)”, instructions the rubber above took no notice of.

[C19 drawing of the C15 Thomas Peyton brass]

But if I could get over my anxiety about doing something for which I might get told off, I could set off for the day on my bike with my sandwiches and a flask of tea to Ishleham where there is this brass, a memorial to Thomas Peyton and his two fabulously dressed wives who are nearly two feet tall.

[detail of Margaret Peyton in a rubbing of C15 brass on the lid of a chest tomb in St Andrew’s, Ishleham, Cambs]

One Margaret wears a Venetian brocade dress while the other Margaret is in a plainer dress with a deep fur trimming, and both wear elaborate butterfly headdresses. Sadly, my talents do not extend to drawing a brass as an alternative to rubbing in order to record these superb depictions of C15 haute couture (more on this here).

In the summer, we did go somewhere nearer to us to have a look at what is claimed to be the second oldest brass in England. This is Sir Roger de Trumpington (1289) in the church down the road in Trumpington; the rubbing above shows the wonderful details and patterns but it now has a nasty plexiglass protective cover to deter any kind of scribbles and sparkly crayons.

And we also saw the amazing collection of much smaller, early C17 brasses in the Martyn Chapel in Long Melford. These are now cordoned off, so you walk round squinting at the floor to make out the members of the family and the two tiny chrisom/chrysom brasses, brasses which commemorate babies who died in their first month and/or before their mother was churched, so were buried in swaddling clothes. (If the mother also died, then the chrysom is shown as part of a memorial to the mother, often in her arms.)

And here’s another, like a little fish, which we saw in Lavenham.

Imagine this sort of memorialisation happening today. I think not. These brasses illustrate just how much our sensibilities around death and the visual culture surrounding it have changed over the centuries.

[rubbing late of C15 brass with a lady with 3 sons and 7 daughters in Orford Church, Suffolk]

Also, just how many children people had, and how many died in infancy and childhood. Thank goodness for vaccines.

There’s really not a lot of holding back in older brasses, which can sometimes appear quite gruesome and near the knuckle to contemporary eyes. This is a a shrouded skeleton, looking like a medieval X-ray, from a funerary monument (c1485) in Holy Trinity, Hildersham, Cambs. (I really do need to get on my bike and see these fine Cambridgeshire brasses).

It is very much one for Simon Armitage and his new collection, New Cemetery. I heard him discussing and reading from it on The Verb and being very clear that when talking about his father’s death he’d rather people used the words ‘dead’, ‘death’, and ‘died’, and not ‘passing’ or ‘lost’ (“as if I’d let go of his hand in the supermarket”). I, tto, cannot say ‘passing’ or ‘passed away’. Monumental brasses can be equally direct and non-euphemistic, which is perhaps part of their appeal.

It’s not just rubbings of grandees with ‘de’ in their surname and wimples and corpses and armour and dogs and lions underfoot. People have also taken rubbings of lettering on brass plaques, bells, gravestones, furniture. Arthur Bertram Ridley Wallis (1864-1931) appears to have been exceptionally prolific and inventive - if it came across a textured surface, he took a rubbing - and many examples of his zeal are now in the V&A (as above). He wasn’t always the neatest - this gives me hope - but he certainly got around the churches of Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

I’m sure he’d have got out his cobbler’s heelball (black wax) and uncoated/draughtsman’s detail paper at St Peter’s Church in Woolton in Liverpool. Not only was it at the church fête here that John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met in 1957, but this is also where one Eleanor Rigby is buried. Who knows if this is what inspired the name in the song, I’m just surprised no-one appears to have done a relief print of the inscriptions to take home instead of a photograph and an earworm.

Happy Sunday!

Footnotes:

• The title of the newsletter comes from the poem Church Going (1954) by Philip Larkin who may not have done much in the way of brass-rubbing, but was a great visitor of churches.

• I’ve discovered that Cambridge University Library has one of the best collections of brass rubbings in the country, so I have no excuse now to not pursue my new-found interest.

• “some brass and stuff” part ii next week.