fun times

The last few days have brought a cheering amount of nice things, laughs, and fun.

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!