misc.

The second part of some brass and stuff can wait a week or so as I’ve not had enough time to finish what I started writing. Instead, it’s been a nice, full, flibbertigibbet sort of week, flitting from one thing to another.

[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!