- like George Harrison who wore a jacket from Granny Takes a Trip in the ‘Golden Lily’ design by William Morris, whose wife Janey was famously close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a very uncomfortable way.

[bored stunners in ‘The Bower Meadow’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in Manchester]

But it wasn’t the fashionable Rossetti paintings I liked best; Simon them summed up much later when we went to see a DGR exhibition at the Walker in Liverpool and he came out saying that all the women just looked bored. Instead, I preferred the atmosphere and colours in Millais’ ‘Autumn Leaves’, the amazing wood shavings in Holman Hunt’s ‘The Shadow of Death’, the beautiful surfaces in Frederick Sandys’ ‘Vivien’.

But most of all, I liked ‘Work’ (1852-65, above) by Ford Madox Brown and often stood in front of it, transfixed by this novel in a painting

featuring a hero navvy, a Classical god in Victorian Hampstead,

and a cameo appearance by Thomas Carlyle who, FMB makes clear, had very different philosophical ideas about the meaning and and value of work (dignity, moral imperative) to those who are actually digging to install a water main (money, beer, food).

Although I then moved on to the C20 with the Camden Town Painters, Matisse, Dufy, and later to British inter-war and post-war art, I went back in time when I studied for an MA in Victorian Art and Culture at Royal Holloway. This was when the children were little and my wine trade work did not fit in with nursery, school, and school holidays. It turned out to be the one of the best things ever for many reasons, not least because it somehow loosened me up creatively and led me to start writing my blog soon after ditching a short-lived PhD on Dickens.

I wrote one of my MA essays on ‘Work’ which fitted in with my renewed enjoyment of Victorian genre paintings, another much-derided art category which I find absolutely fascinating and sometimes fascinatingly awful. This went hand-in-hand with the novels we read for the course which often contained mini-masterpieces of descriptive writing, word pictures which matched the contemporary visual culture. I’ve just read The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow who uses rooms with mantelpieces and hearths, fire-screens and curtains, shadowy figures and corners in the same way artists were doing in order to tell her story. And last week I read Peter Ackroyd’s rather ho-hum biography of Wilkie Collins, whose father was an artist, but he does say, “His novels resemble a series of pictures rather than a sequence of scenes".

[‘‘Woman’s Work’ A Medley’ (1861) by Florence Caxton]

But back to ‘Work’. And more to the point, women’s work. In the form of ‘‘Woman’s Work’ A Medley’ by Florence Claxton (1838-1920), painted in 1861 as a direct riposte to FMB’s ‘Work’ (1852-1865) which was first exhibited in public in 1865. This means she must have seen it sometime after its initial completion in 1855 (FMB famously spent years on his major paintings).

‘Woman’s Work’ was in a private collection until 2024 when Manchester City Art Gallery managed to acquire it, which is exactly as it should be. We’ve just made a special trip to see it hanging right next to ‘Work’, and how I wish it had been there when I was writing my MA essay or, even better, when I was in my teenage ‘Work’ phase and a noisy, class-disrupting feminist at an all-girls school which I felt was not feminist enough. Because, as this excellent description and commentary says, “This painting, probably one of the earliest images of the feminist movement, still resonates today”.

[“Women’s noblest station is retreat”, quote from ‘Cato’ (1713) by Joseph Addison in which ‘retreat’ means the domestic sphere]

It’s a direct imitation in shape and framing of ‘Work’ but very much smaller; she “employed the arched top format primarily used by male artists for important religious, political and moral statements, to scrutinize the position of women in England”.

[detail]

It’s tempting to assume this is because she worked on a daintier, ladylike scale more becoming of a creative woman (think embroidery, crewelwork, stitching men’s slippers, making eye-straining beaded reticules) but I think it’s more likely that this was how she preferred to work since she was also an extremely talented, sharp-eyed, satirical cartoonist and illustrator for publications such as The Illustrated London News.

[detail]

The depiction of so many masculine stereotypes in oil ie the serious medium, was bold, original, and daring, and its significance not lost on its audience when first shown.

This “decidedly disagreeable application of art” (1861 review) is “designed, it appears, to symbolise in one group the tyrannical repression by which Man keeps back the energies of Woman”. Well, it’s not a matter of “appears” as it very much does.

[PETITION “I cannot dig; to beg I am ashamed” (Luke 16.3), by the skirt of the woman knocking on the door]

While the (male) critics could recognise and be affronted by Florence Claxton’s references, the same cannot always be said of today’s audiences. Nevertheless, even in the mid-C19, in a reversal of the writer using painterly techniques, the artist often had to provide words to explain the full meaning of a painting. So the 1861 accompanying text on Woman’s Work is still valuable LONG BUT IMPORTANT QUOTE COMING UP:

‘The four ages of man are represented: in the centre youth, middle age, and old age reposing on an ottoman, infancy being in the background; all are equally the objects of devotion from surrounding females. The ‘sugar plums’ dropping from the bonbon box, represent the ‘airy nothings’ alone supposed to be within the mental grasp of womankind. A wide breach has been made in the ancient wall of Custom and Prejudice by Progress – Emigration - who points out across the ocean. Three governesses in the foreground, ignorant apparently of the opening behind them, are quarrelling over one child. Upright female figure to the right is persuaded by Divinity, and commanded by law, to confine her attention to legitimate objects. Another female has sunk exhausted against a door, of which the medical profession holds the key; its representative is amused at her impotent attempts; he does not see that the wood is rotten and decayed in many places. An artist (Rosa B--) has attained the top of the wall (upon which the rank weeds of Misrepresentation and prickly thorns of Ridicule flourish), others are following. The blossom of the ‘forbidden fruit; appears in the distance.’

[Rosa Bonheur (1822-99) making her escape via art, the only woman who has breached what looks like an animal pound or a hole dug by men, with perhaps Florence Claxton holding onto her skirts and coming up behind]

It’s crammed with clever, witty details which mirror those of Ford Madox Brown, especially the written messages. I used my camera to enlarge the many tiny words and phrases, but really you need a magnifying glass (they said there was one there, but I didn’t see it) or, better still, a full guide to reading and deconstructing the painting. It really deserves its own pamphlet to emphasise how amazingly audacious Florence Claxton was; this is her only work in oil, painted at the age of 22, and is in direct contrast to all the men painting angels in the house, fallen women, decorative women, flirtatious women, saints, sinners, and young female nudes masquerading as Classical subjects. And only one art gallery in the world has both works/Works, so Manchester should be shouting about it.

[‘The Choice of Paris: An Idyll’ (1860) by Florence Claxton]

By the time I’d finished with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the MA, I had very mixed feelings about them, often verging on repulsion. Again, if only I’d known about another work (above) by Florence Claxton which would have given me a very different perspective and not Ruskin’s adulatory one which is so often quoted. This, too, needs to be fully ‘read’ with a magnifying glass in order to appreciate how clever, funny. acerbic, and pomposity-pricking she could be (it is also small, approx 27cm x 38cm). It sends up the very serious Pre-Raphaelite artists and is densely allusive; I like way the “‘truth-to-nature' concept that formed the basis of most Pre-Raphaelite art is parodied by the man examining the surface of the outside wall with opera glasses”, to quote the V&A (the image can be enlarged on the website).

Florence Claxton does not even merit a mention in the massive books written by men on Victorian art, but now there’s a perfect chance to do some work on Woman’s Work/women’s work and make up for lost time.

Happy Sunday!

Thank you to Anne Pessala who alerted me to Florence Claxton’s painting earlier this year. Sadly, Anne, the gallery still does not have a postcard of it.

I also found this useful blog post on Florence Claxton.

We did. Good old Ramsgate was our base for a few days this week. We stayed in AWN Pugin’s fancy house there seventeen years ago with four teenagers who played hide-and-seek in the extravagantly neo-Gothic rooms while we read about his obsessions and descent into madness, surrounded by his complex patterns and all-over surface decorations which, it has to be said, can become enervating.

This time we stayed in the Presbytery which is squeezed in between his church (dedicated to his own name saint and where more is more is more) and The Grange. I felt quite sorry for the priest Pugin intended it for; it’s as though he ran out of ideas (unlikely) or money, or decided ungenerously the priest should live a more ascetic life than his patron. It’s not surprising that it was occupied by a community of nuns in the late C20 before the Landmark Trust took down the partitions, restored it, and added one of the best LT book collections I’ve come across.

It proved to be a great place to stay, and there is much to enjoy in Ramsgate.

It’s a close-run thing, but blue plaques here outnumber fish and chip establishments; I imagine owners of places without one must feel left out. Everyone, it seems, was here in the town’s heyday. The Duke of Wellington, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen visiting her brother, Darwin studying barnacles, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dickens, naturally, and his good friend Wilkie Collins who gets two plaques in prime seafront positions marking where he and his two “irregular” ménages stayed.

[‘View of Royal Road, Ramsgate’ (1886) by van Gogh]

Van Gogh is also a two-plaque visitor; in 1886, he taught for a couple of months in a boys’ school (one plaque) and stayed in a house opposite in the handsome Spencer Square (the other). Karl Marx came to Kent coast several times, including Margate in 1866 to recover from persistent boils, and later to Ramsgate for his health (very persistent boils, maybe). He has a plaque on a house with appropriately red steps, and his daughter, Jenny, has one nearby, too.

[‘Room Overlooking the Harbour’ (c1879) by Tissot]

James Tissot came and painted his muse Kathleen Newton, away from London society gossip about their arrangements which were, like Wilkie Collins’, not quite comme il faut. Shackleton stayed with with Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills, his very rich patron and benefactor who helped fund his expeditions. In return, he named a glacier in Antarctica after her.

And everywhere there is so much good early C19 architecture: little side streets, curvy bow windows, verandahs with nice ironwork and plenty of anthemions, terraces of different balcony and roof heights with lots of jolly character and none of the cool, rational elegance of Bath terraces. The street names are straight out of old school history and geography books: Albion, Wellington, Plains of Waterloo, Paragon, Adelaide, Madeira, Artillery, Augusta, Balmoral, Bengal, Brunswick, Clarence, Colombo, Cumberland, Nelson. History is inscribed all over Ramsgate.

The town also has one of the very best collections of C19 and early C20 shop fronts, some with lovely gilded or leaded lettering, tiles, stained glass, mosaiced doorsteps. Thankfully, new businesses are leaving the old signs and not messing with the plate glass, wrought iron, and nice details which give high streets their character.

[‘Ramsgate Sands’ (1851-54) by William Powell Frith (useful background here)]

Ramsgate is no longer what it was, a gateway to the Continent and a destination for thousands of day-trippers, holiday-makers, and blue plaque people. Old Ramsgate is captured in this painting which, if you see it once, you see it a thousand times in reproductions and engravings as it’s the most famous image of the place and full of social commentary. There’s a huge one in the enormous Royal Pavilion Wetherspoons (largest one in the country, 1903, Grade II listed, interior inspired by the Little Theatre at Versailles) which is a good place for a (refillable) cup of tea with a view of the sea, a vast, well-researched collection of prints and paintings on the walls, cheerful staff,

and, outside, a very rare Edward VIII letter box (fewer than 200 made).

As the painting indicates, the trains to Ramsgate used to deposit visitors straight onto the Sands at the Harbour Station which was closed in 1926. These days, though, the railway station is stranded, over a mile up a steep hill from the beach, harbour,

fish and chips and fun (and with an uphill slog at the end of the day). A very strange decision and one which no doubt contributes to the difference in popularity with Margate where the station still tips the crowds out practically on the beach. It makes me wonder if snobbery about day-trippers, as happened in Scarborough (explained by Andrew Martin in To the Sea by Train), influenced the decision to site it here and thus make it unattractive to them. If so, it worked. A shame for the town which is now suffering in parts from beyond-the-end-of-the-line neglect. The station itself, now used more by commuters because of the fast line to London, is a light-filled Neo-Classical design, built in 1926, and with a fine and well-buffed parquet floor. “A delightfully airy seaside essay in symmetry” as Tim Dunn says, Grade II listed, by E Maxwell Fry before he went full-on white Modernist

[‘Ramsgate’ (c1824) by JMW Turner]

Turner also came to Ramsgate (no plaque!) but of course he’s far better known for his association with Margate, which also has a 1926 railway station by E Maxwell Fry but it’s right next to the beach - no such social snobbery here - and therefore has a much more fun seaside feel.

Maybe The Beatles sensed this, as in July 1963 they had a ‘residency’ at the Winter Gardens: two houses on six consecutive nights, nine songs, less than half an hour in all, Bob’s your uncle.

[Hockney window installation (2026) at the Turner Contemporary, looking out at a Gormley figure]

We made our first visit to the Turner Contemporary which was underwhelming and disappointing. There is an Antony Gormley figure outside. Of course there is, he gets everywhere.

And we went to Folkestone to see the old Folkestone Harbour Station which stirred memories of catching the ferry to France from there during my disastrous university year abroad. Today, it’s a beautifully done walkway and you can go all the way down the Harbour Arm looking at the nicely preserved parts of the railway,

have a coffee and read books about railways in the old signal box,

[‘Another Time XVIII’ (2013), one of two Gormley figures in Folkestone]

clock up another Antony Gormley (see what I mean), and - as we did - eat mussels and chips in an old railway carriage overlooking the sea.

[former pork butcher’s premises, Folkestone]

As in Ramsgate and Margate, there are some lovely old shop fronts, stained glass lettering, and fascias. And the occasional surprise.

Good old Thanet.

Happy Sunday!

I don’t cope well with extreme heat these days, but can knit while watching the athletes get even hotter than I feel.

I’ve also been reading this wonderful book. I love its precise, analytical approach to making log cabin squares, and the immense possibilities these create.

And I read Mrs Oliphant for the first time; these two novellas are, on the surface, classic Victorian stories but in fact they resist the usual stylistic and narrative arcs of women’s lives and actions, and are totally gripping. She also creates wonderfully vivid images in the style of C19 genre paintings (I don’t have details for this one but it captures the significantly deep shadows in the Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow).

I wandered round the extensive Henry Moore Studios and Gardens touching the sculptures and wearing mismatched shoes. Someone said they liked my sandals and I looked down and realised I’d left the house like this. Not intentional or a statement at all. I told you my brain was fried.

Mind you, so is Simon’s. He loved this tapestry of a Henry Moore ‘tractor’ - then we discovered it’s actually called ‘Two Reclining Figures’ (1981 from 1961 artwork). No matter, it still looks like a jolly tractor.

We made a quick visit to Bedford to see the extremely good Noel Carrington exhibition, full of wonderful Puffin Picture Books, before it closes.

I admired the beautiful Dame Alice almshouses (early C19),

and decided I didn’t need to spend £60 on a lavish George Harrison book in the very good second-hand bookshop, although I’d like to read it.

On what I hoped would be the coolest day of the week, I went to see the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain. Maybe it’s because I’m fried but I didn’t really embrace it; I wonder if he is the art historians’ artist, because his genius did not communicate itself to me. Plus, too dark, too much grey. (Joking. Half-joking.)

[‘Audition’ (1999) by Hurvin Anderson]

But I did enjoy the Hurvin Anderson exhibition: the scale, the colours, the patterns, the underlying complexity.

And we had another swim at the Jesus Green lido in the morning of the hottest day of the week which then gave me permission to then retire like a Victorian lady to a darkened room.

I’m cooling down a bit now. Thank goodness. Maybe I’ll also be able to think straight again soon.

Happy Sunday!

[Proust: fifth Beatle?]

[Paul McCartney: second Proust?]

Quite a while ago, maybe two years, he challenged me to write about them both, to bring them together and explain what it is I enjoy so much about two apparently totally different cultural phenomena, icons who were iconoclasts. In short, why I love them both.

This is the background to my twin passions.

[‘Portrait of Madame Monet’ (c1874) by Claude Monet whose Impressionist style influenced Proust when describing the Normandy coast]

At the end of 2019, I decided that 2020 would be the year of reading Proust in French. The deal with myself was to read a minimum of ten pages a day in order to finish by the end of the year. Little did I know that Covid and lockdowns were on the way so I wasn’t the only one reading A la recherche du temps perdu. My self-appointed task suddenly looked a little too modish for my liking - I’m not a joiner - but I carried on and finished in December with a couple of days to spare. I don’t know what happened to other readers; did they just fade away midway though a long sentence or simply fall asleep every time they opened the book?

A year is a long time to spend with a single author and work, and a very long time with one as long-winded, prolix, and difficult as Proust can sometimes be. But I found that months and years later I’d still be remembering with great clarity certain parts and scenes and details. Because, despite the longueurs, it’s an amazing mix of themes, beautiful writing, very funny jokes, and wonderfully sustained figures of speech. I kept returning to the heavily annotated pages and enjoying them all over again, and even thought about putting together a collection of Proust’s Best Bits, a kind of commonplace book devoted to the colours, flowers, fabrics, trains, church belfries, the seaside, clothes, asparagus, hawthorn, alliteration and assonance, art history, and yes the effects of eating a madeleine with a tisane.

But a year is nothing compared to how long I’ve been listening to The Beatles. I was told that when I was very young, I used to kiss Paul McCartney’s face when it appeared on the television. I first became aware of them at the time of their early huge hits and they were there in the background even when I was too young to be a screaming fan at the concerts. I had some catching up to do in my teens, and the double red and blue and white albums were my main education - obviously I only went tricolore/colour-coded - until I started filling in the gaps with other LPs later on. At university I even once went to a fancy dress party as a Beatle; I had a long, thick fringe which helped, my flatmate and her boyfriend made me a cardboard guitar, I painted on a moustache, and no-one knew it was me.

The Beatles on CDs were the soundtrack to the school run for many years; after Tom and Alice went to senior school and it was just Phoebe and I in the car, we’d belt out the early songs with emphasis on the Liverpudlian vowels as a good, joyful, noisy way to start the day.

And that’s how it still is. I have a Beatles Best Bits playlist for the car, but with a more eclectic selection of tracks because I’ve grown to love much of the later, cleverer, more inventive music,

although nothing can beat Eight Days a Week for a pick-me-up with energetic clapping.

You’d think it probably isn’t possible to bring these two enormously influential phenomena together without it becoming a basic ‘compare and contrast’ school essay. Especially when you are dealing with approx. 1.3 million words printed on up to 3,000 pages versus three or four minutes music with a few lines of words, hardly any photos of Proust vs bazillions of the Beatles, two feature length films - whereas, as far as I know, Proust was never in a cinematic romp being chased by screaming girls, Paris vs Liverpool, pampered, well-connected, moneyed, society background vs not.

But I’m beginning to think it is. I can see clearly now why I am obsessed with both - not because of their differences, which are, in brief,

one gay writer, virtually unread in his lifetime

vs four heterosexual men who were, at their peak, the biggest names in the world and whose creations were adored by millions.

It’s actually the opposite, because of what they and their work have in common. Moustaches. Provincial life. Early rejection. Total lack of sportiness, despite the tennis racquet air guitar. Being reduced to common cultural denominators,

such as fridge magnets,

[what?]

and food packaging.

And the fact that in early drafts of Du côté du chez Swann, it was going to be toast and not a madeleine which led to the epiphany.

Maybe the lads from Liverpool who were usually fuelled by endless round of toast in the studio, were also dipping little sponge cakes into their tea to take them down memory lane to Strawberry Fields? (Drugs, more like, but that’s another story.)

So this is what I’ve been thinking about all week, making notes and lists. A perfect subject to muse on while knitting, driving, swimming*, and in my favourite musing place, the bath.

Challenge accepted.

Happy Sunday!

*this week we made our first-ever visits to the unheated Jesus Green Lido (opened to hardy swimmers in 1923) in Cambridge. It is 100 yards long so there is plenty of time to think about John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Marcel during each length.

[harvest jug featuring Ceres, goddess of agriculture, 1797, in the Bruton at Bideford]

What I didn’t realise is that I could have collected something cheap and ordinary: sardine tins, paper bags from shops, fruit labels, train and bus tickets, even stamps (I did try that but disliked the fiddliness of sticking them in my album and gave up after a few German stamps from my pen-friend). I’d have loved to know about collections of ephemera and folk art like those of Peter Blake and Enid Marx and could have done with someone like Jake Tilson who has amassed an incredible amount of everyday objects to use in his art, books, and installations, to show me the way.

[Some of WA Ismay’s collection of 3,500+ pieces of C20 studio pottery, now at York Art Gallery]

In many ways, not being a collector isn’t a bad thing. I suspect it can quickly become an obsession, and when I see photos of people’s huge collections which have taken over their living spaces, it makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.

But, and of course there’s a but, I still wouldn’t mind a little collection. If I had the means, I’d quite like a few jugs. These would not be fine, precious jugs from the likes of Sèvres or Meissen, but commonplace, characterful, loved, used, and functional jugs from provincial potteries.

[jug by Irena Sibrijns]

I’ve come to prefer jugs to vases. A jug has more than one use whereas a vase can really only ever be a vase, even if it’s holding paintbrushes or rulers. A jug can be used for “frothing milk” as in novels by George Eliot, or lemonade or custard or booze, but it can also moonlight as a receptacle for flowers (and lots more). I also like the way a jug can have a mouth, lip, waist, shoulder, neck, belly, foot, and at least one arm; it has so much more character than a vase. It is a sociable, sharing vessel, as Ezra Shales points out. He has written published a wittily titled book on ‘pitchers’ and the article also includes many other interesting readings of jugs. (Having said all this, I have a few very precious-to-me vases which are therefore excluded from my sweeping statements; these include a concrete one which was a present from Tom and Zoë, and several made by Phoebe.)

A while ago, we stayed in North Devon and I became fascinated by the history of harvest jugs made locally, fine examples of which we saw in the brilliant Burton at Bideford, in a town long associated with traditional slipware pottery.

[‘Harvest Feast (Farmer’s Glory)’ (1934) by Gwen Raverat]

These big earthenware jugs made from local red clay were used to hold large quantities of cider or ale at festivals and feasts, and had images, texts, and commemorative details incised or scratched into the pale clay slip by the sgraffito method. They are the kind of thing I’d like to think appears in Adam Bede:

“But now the roast beef was finished and the cloth was drawn, leaving a fair large deal table for the bright drinking-cans, and the foaming brown jugs, and the bright brass candlesticks, pleasant to behold. Now, the great ceremony of the evening was to begin—the harvest-song, in which every man must join.”

I’m fussy, though, and wouldn’t want a harvest jug just for the sake of it (a problem with a collecting obsession, I imagine), one which is over-decorated and/or badly worn and difficult to decipher, as some of the old ones can be.

No, I’d want the very best, including a good example from North Devon, like this 1837 jug (sold for £3,375 in 2012) which, as this article says, was “crafted with no eye to future value and simply expressed the sentiments of the age”. All the more reason to like them.

I’d also have one by Harry Juniper (b 1947) who is still at work in Bideford,

and one by Christina Serra Delmar, a contemporary maker who uses the term

“harvest jug” quite loosely but marries the traditional techniques with beautifully clear and graphic patterns and images. It’s not a lot to ask - just a few thousand pounds - for this part of my jolly jug collection.

Because I wouldn’t be a harvest jug purist. I’d also be happy to add in a few other jugs which were once cheap and commonplace, but which are now also way beyond my means. Sunderland lustre ware appeals because the lovely range of iridescent pinks and bright, jolly transfer colours,

the terrible spelling mistakes, the things people commemorated in the past -

lots of railways and bridges and ships, this being Sunderland and the Tyne after all - and the nice bulbous shape of the jugs. Although Sunderland at one point had sixteen potteries producing lustre ware, it later became a style rather than a specific origin.

This, too, has been reinvented for the modern age by Sussex Lustreware.

[Folding Tea Towels (2025) by Brita Granström]

Brita Granström often includes a traditional lustre ware jug in her lovely domestic images. In an ideal collecting world, these would also be a part of my collection.

[Lyndsey Graham’s collection of mocha ware, as seen in her gallery]

I’d also love a shelf full of mocha ware jugs (and mugs). Mocha ware has a huge range of decorative possibilities, so there is no one particular type I’d collect, although I’m drawn to the cat’s eye circles, the organic and no doubt unpredictable dendritic or seaweed patterns, the stripes, and the classic palettes. It was mass-produced, utilitarian pottery, and the mugs and jugs were used in Victorian pubs and taverns; many surviving examples show serious signs of wear with cracks and chips, so those in good condition are no longer cheap.

It originated in the Staffordshire potteries in the 1700s, and the name derives from the pattern that which looks like the natural markings on the semi-precious moss agate, which was known at the time as ‘mocha stone’ (it also looks like a tree, hence ‘dendritic’). The word ‘mocha’ applies only to the decoration, so the jugs I’d like to collect could be both creamware - another collecting possibility - and mocha ware.

[c1820]

Sadly, it is also currently the most sought-after of the three jug types I like so much, and is being collected by artists, designers, and people with money and good taste who are sending the prices sky-high. (In 2023, I went to this exhibition of very beautiful mocha ware in fine condition and tried to estimate its value. ‘A lot’ was all I could come up with.)

Ben Nicholson had several jugs in his studio which appeared time and again in his paintings (there’s a useful Pallant House exhibition publication), including this early c19 mocha ware jug as seen in Striped Jug and Flowers (1928). I imagine there must be enough material to write an extensive ‘jugs in paintings’ book which would be a wonderful read.

There is, though, one type of jug I would not collect, and this is the Toby jug. Specifically Beatles Toby jugs, of which there are many, too many some might argue. These are by Royal Doulton and the four of them sold for £6,000 in 2021. I need say no more. Except that, clearly, I was never cut out to be a proper collector.

Happy Sunday!

Maybe it was the sunshine, the warmth, the upcoming school holidays, the people sitting outside with their coffees and cakes, the lovely planting which is maturing beautifully at the new Interchange, but Stockport felt refreshed and colourful. A far cry from the permanently grey skies (In My Little Town could have been written about it, if you substitute ‘grey’ for ‘black’), the never-ending rainy Sundays, and the teenage ennui which was only relieved by going on the 92 bus to the bright lights of Manchester.

[Stockport Viaduct as painted by LS Lowry]

I know our primary school did their best to educate us about our town, but all I can remember is that the population was then 144,000 and that people who come from Stockport are Stopfordians. So it’s perhaps not surprising that I never paid attention to the unusual multi-level topography of a town built on a red sandstone cliff, the enormous and beautiful cotton and hatting mills,

[Merseyway aka “the precinct’“, 1970s. I see a strong resemblance to the Lowry above]

the giant concrete culvert which allowed the precinct to be built over the River Mersey, and the variety of hills and vales and brows and cobbles. All this was simply the backdrop to what I wanted to escape from.

I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with the place ever since; literal and metaphorical clouds have often descended around Stafford when driving north up the M6. But I’m ready for a reset. It’s not you, it’s me, sort of thing. So now I can go back and be fascinated by all the things I disliked and felt hemmed in by, and enjoy the wonderfully varied buildings, the positive results of recent investment and regeneration, the energy, the openness and friendliness and daft humour of the locals.

I can even appreciate the phenomenal Broadstone Mill (1903-07) where, after the spinning of fine Egyptian cotton had ended, I once had a horribly dreary holiday job packing anoraks for mail-order catalogue enlivened only by ‘Come On Eileen’ on the radio. It’s very close to Reddish South Station, famous for being one of the least-used stations in the UK with a ‘parliamentary service’ of just one train in each direction on Saturdays only. Not exactly the stuff of tourist guidebooks, but still.

Stockport was a cotton town, but I don’t think my love of textiles stemmed from this at all. I was oblivious to its cotton history and to the fact that, because of the available water power, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had become the great centre for power loom weaving. Instead, I just got on with my French and Russian - both useless in the context of my home town but sellable elsewhere - so that I could make a run for it at the age of eighteen.

Ironically, one of the places I liked that wasn’t in Stockport was Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, the futuristic theatre (1976) in the round inside the old Cotton Exchange (1874, remodelled 1921), at one time the “largest [cotton trading] room in the world”. The last cotton trading figures on the board are still there and date from 31 December 1968, before it closed forever.

[‘Threading the Needle’ (n.d.) by Robert Lillie (1867-1949)]

And yet, it turns out that a love of cotton must somehow have been transmitted to me from the very start, maybe in the soft water. Cotton is my textile background and the thread which runs through my post-USSR sales, post-drinks marketing, post-wine trade work life, as well as my creative life. In retrospect, it’s amusing that I was a graduate trainee at Courtaulds which had made its name with black mourning crape (crimped silk gauze) but then in the early C20 pioneered the production of “artificial silk” ie viscose/rayon which transformed the company into the world’s leading producer of man-made fibres.

I’d already decided as a teenager that I disliked synthetic fibres for all sorts of reasons, mostly based on empirical and uncomfortable research. Acrylic knitting wool came in great colours but almost sliced your fingers off if you tried to break it with your hand, it melted in the university tumble-driers, and it had no wicking properties so wearing a chunky acrylic knit was like being a human hot dog. Viscose creased like mad, seized when washed, and had no thermal properties. Acetate was slippery and shiny and clung because of static, melted when ironed, and frayed easily. Yet there I was, selling 40-foot containers of these three fibres to the Soviet Union, going to Moscow once a month, visiting mills in Lithuania and Belarus, touring the Courtauld factories in Spondon and Coventry, and generally wondering where my life was heading. (Slough, as it happens. No cotton there, only Mars Bars.)

[‘Mother and daughter, threading a needle’ (1834), surinomo woodblock print illustrated by Onishi Chinnen]

Even now, after so much exposure to synthetics, basic, natural, lovely cotton still feels like a treat to wear and to quilt and sew with. The day after I was in Stockport with my sister, I got the bus to Manchester with my best friend from junior school who lives close to where we grew up. We went to the Whitworth, which I’ve mentioned before but will say again, is the most beautiful gallery - bright red terracotta Edwardian neo-Jacobean meets 1960s Scandinavian cool meets C21 glass and steel and brick - with a fantastic collection of textiles (and art).

[‘Suruga-chō’ (1856) by Hiroshige]

We actually went to see the wonderful exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints - Hiroshige once again proving he is the master and that his peopled scenes are often not a million miles away from LS Lowry - so didn’t know about the Entangled and Woven exhibition which had just opened.

It’s excellent, with many pieces made with cotton, but we were completely bowled over the work of Komi So whose chosen thread is hand-spun somisa made from hanji (Korean mulberry paper). It has the most beautiful natural colour, similar to undyed, unbleached cotton, as seen in People of One, Continuum, thirty-five garments which ‘trace the trajectory of a person’s life cycle, from birth to death’. It is so simple - a rack of clothes - yet breathtakingly lovely.

[where my bank account still is, the C15/C16 Underbank Hall]

It made me see that the threads that bind us to textile origins for life are strong and varied. Despite everything, I’ve never not been proud to say that I’m from Stockport, and to explain yet again that no, it’s not the place where the tide never comes in, that’s Southport. I also realised that the cotton thread running though my life has high tensile strength: it’s not been cut, it’s not snapped, or even frayed badly, although it has been tested many times.

As I arrived at Stockport, I saw the Stockport Music Story artworks in the railway station underpass. For ages, I’d thought The Beatles never played in Stockport, but this is because on their 1963 ‘engagement list’ for 13th June, Offerton appears to be in Manchester. As a result, it’s always the latter which is repeated. To make matters worse, there are no photos of the concert. Classic. My home town has been erased from Beatles history - until now.

[ABC in Ardwick, Manchester, November 1963]

This new knowledge happily establishes a new thread which further ties me to the Beatles who also came from a cotton city - Paul McCartney’s father Jim was a cotton salesman - and played many cotton towns including Manchester, Preston, Blackburn, Oldham, and Nelson.

AND STOCKPORT.

Happy Sunday!

Apart from a little desultory sock-knitting and jam-making, the last two months have been unusually unproductive. Japan, jet lag, Stockholm, illness, convalescence, a full house, and over-heating have all led me to wonder if in fact I’d ever get my creative energy and curiosity back. Maybe I’d used it all up, maybe I just didn’t care, maybe I actually quite fancied spending the rest of my life reading light literature on a metaphorical chaise-longue

asking Simon to peel me a grape.

I even got a little worried. All this sunshine, and I didn’t feel like making cyanotype prints. All the plans I had for a cool linen wardrobe, and every day I was wearing the same two Merchant and Mills Dress Shirts I made six years ago (perfect for feels-like-40C-days). All the plans for binding all the papers and printed material I bought back from Japan, and they sat in a neat pile on my desk. I guess the convalescence bit actually took longer than I’d imagined.

Then all of a sudden I stirred. I got my scissors out and made a M&M Camber dress last Saturday to wear the following (hot) day and the familiar feelings of enjoyment and accomplishment and time well spent came flooding back.

I bloody love making things. I can still remember being a child and the sheer, unadulterated delight in producing something which either stayed together and/or performed a function and/or looked like it was supposed to and/or as I’d imagined it. Then progressing through a whole raft of teenage crazes (which reminds me, I want to try macramé again) and later settling into knitting and baking and

growing bulbs, then adding in quilting and more recently bookbinding and smocking.

It’s really very simple for me. I do these things because I enjoy them. They are a constant, always there. Always ready to be picked up.

Since the dress, I’ve made a a pair of Bob Pants, more apricot jam,

got my cyanotype kit and paper out and turned more than just the paper blue, as usual.

I also read a very intense book about embroidery and stitching which threw me into confusion and made me question what I do and how I view what I do. This is not the first title of its kind that I’ve read, because I am always keen to read about domestic and textile subjects. I feel I owe it to the authors who are writing seriously about subjects which have until recently been dismissed and disregarded for obvious reasons, and I am genuinely curious to read books that are about rather than how-to titles.

But, oh my goodness, these often-academic and very-of-the-moment books can contain a world of stitching and sewing which I just don’t recognise. I’d feel bad about naming names and the titles of books which have bothered me the most, so I won’t, and the issues may very well arise because I am simply not understanding, maybe everyone else views textiles in a different way and I’m the only one out on a limb, maybe they were “just not written for me”, to quote Ann Patchett.

I started sewing and making when I was very young. My Nana died when I was just eight, my widowed Mum was busy bringing up four children and working as a primary school teacher, and there were no other crafty, creative relatives or friends. So I was on my own, teaching myself from books, making it up as I went along, just working out processes. My bedroom was my studio where I tried out every sort of 1970s craft I could. I was messy and adventurous and experimental - and at at my happiest doing it all. But I never felt I was part of a ‘community’ of makers, and I never felt a kinship with the makers of the past. Which very much puts me at odds with the current discourse around domestic pastimes and stitching in particular.

It seems to me that there is an assumption in contemporary books and articles that the pleasure and satisfaction of stitching comes from being a part of a wider movement, which is often often political/queer/historical/meaningful. No longer can you just sit and knit and listen to the radio (or, indeed, nothing), you can’t just thread a needle and do some embroidery or needlepoint, you can’t just choose and cut up and piece fabric to make a quilt, without it being deconstructed and reconstructed as some way of dealing with trauma, violence, oppression, the patriarchy, struggle, isolation, shame. I’m overstating the case, I know, but I come away from these books wondering if I should feel guilty (I don’t) about not doing stuff for and in a ‘community’, and why I don’t position myself as part of a much longer history of stitching.

[Raspberry friands, recipe in my book]

The fundamental point of difference is why I stitch and knit and quilt and smock. I do it all because, as I said, I love making things, especially functional textiles and nice things to eat. These activities are an important part of my life, and I simply don’t get these new angles: domestic sewing as an act of “resistance and defiance*” in which “every piece of needlework, every loop of thread is connected to the past” coupled with the indignation that the names of most female needleworkers have been lost over the centuries (the same applies to the majority of of stained glass makers, carpenters, stonemasons, letterpress printers, skilled craftspeople, male or female).

(* NB I’m talking about the lone domestic stitcher, but obviously there are important exceptions eg suffragettes’ banners, Palestinian embroidery, Gee’s Bend quilters and more.)

Being something of a cynic, I also question whether all this is a very contemporary way to approach thinking and writing about domestic crafts, and whether there is an element of jumping on bandwagons by authors and publishers (see also colouring-on, mindfulness, maybe even mending and repairing going the same way).

My strong response is itself a reaction to the overstatement of importance and the wildly conceptual meanings applied to threading a needle and stitching. Because, in the end, these are simple skills which millions of people can and do acquire. By all means turn them into something much more significant and complicated, but please don’t assume everyone thinks likewise or include me in that ‘community’. And please don’t ‘instrumentalise’ it (I understand the verb but it’s not one I like) as per an article I saved which is by philosopher Julian Baggini about not doing things for the process and for their own sake. He says,

“I haven’t even begun to exhaust the list of activities that have become routinely instrumentalised. Among those we could add are gardening, playing sport, camping, swimming, campaigning, volunteer work, baking bread, crafts, keeping a diary, laughing, saying “thank you”. We increasingly ask not what is good about them but what good they can do for us. And by “good” we mean health, wealth and worldly success.”

There is nothing more dispiriting that picking up a book on one of your favourite subjects, only to find that all the joy has been sucked out of it, that it’s been turned into some anti-something protest or a crusade, that it’s been weaponised, politicised, and presented in language you just don’t get. Oh yes, I’m rattled.

Then I think of the Beatles, specifically Lennon and McCartney who, when interviewed, would not discuss their writing process or or analyse their songs, and found it amusing and baffling when interviewers quoted highbrow stuff about culture and “aeolian cadence”. When asked in 1963 about sport and hobbies, John replied, “The only sport we do bother with is swimming. We don’t count it as a sport… And hobbies are just writing songs.” Would that more people had hobbies like this.

Paul was equally dismissive and down-to-earth. In the film Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years you can watch this exchange:

Reporter: What place do you think this story of The Beatles is going to have in Western culture?

Paul McCartney: You must be kidding me with that question. Culture? It’s not culture.

Reporter: What is it then?

Paul McCartney: A good laugh.

A good laugh. I rest my case.

Happy Sunday!

[urban idyll, digging up grandad’s potatoes with Tom at the allotment, photo by Phoebe]

We moved here nine years ago, and even though we sometimes still feel new to the place, we have made our home here. So here for summer are nine things I love about living in Cambridge.

[C for carbon and also Cambridge]

1. You can go to the pub and sit next to someone with part of the periodic table tattooed on their forearm. There is also always the possibility of catching fantastic snippets of conversation about arcane or esoteric or just bizarre subjects. And it’s not just in the pubs that you get good conversations; one of the things which struck us when we moved from Old Windsor was the way people here are always happy to chat in bookshops, cafes, and the swimming pool. The queue for the brilliant organic vegetable stall at the Sunday market is particularly good for exchanges of leek/celery/spinach/beetroot recipes.

[‘Poplars’ (1891) by Monet, in the Fitzwilliam]

2. There is a huge amount of free art. The Fitzwilliam is beautiful and has a wonderful collection, although they have just started charging for the main exhibitions. It also has old-fashioned glass cabinets, some of which hold my very favourite C12 Korean celadon ceramics.

   

   [‘Still-life of Dahlias, Chrysanthemums and Begonias’ (1912) by Vanessa Bell in the current exhibition at Kettle’s Yard]

   Kettle’s Yard exhibitions are free and there’s masses more in the house if you are prepared to pay. (As an aside, I don’t recommend the cafe there). The Women’s Art Collection at Murray-Edwards College is good and it’s nice to see inside the architecturally interesting 1960s buildings, the Robert Cripps Gallery in the lovely new Magdalene College Library is worth a look, and there’s the neo-Gothic-meets-William Morris “Painted Church” (occasional open days), plus masses of sculptures around town and in college gardens, and a buried Antony Gormley, if you must.

   

3. It’s flat, so it’s easy to cycle or walk everywhere and therefore perfect for a lazybones like me who dislikes even the gentlest of inclines. Even better is the fact that it’s possible to walk or cycle in different directions and see vastly different things: the medieval town centre, fens with cows grazing, remains of the castle, good swimming spots (water quality permitting), colleges with very different styles, punts and paddleboards, a Botanic Garden, a whole new town, and the high-tech West Cambridge site. The paths are good, and there is safety in numbers. There are a lot of cyclists in Cambridge.

   

   4. History everywhere. A few years ago, I started a PhD on a stained-glass designer who, for a while in the early 1930s, lived on the tiny St Botolph’s Lane and was responsible for a huge amount of fantastically camp, often wildly inappropriate post-war memorial windows which did not suit the sober churches and cathedrals and chapels (as above) for which they were commissioned. He was also a very close friend of Guy Burgess and other Cambridge Spies and their associates. Sadly, walking past his house and being inspired by my proximity to his old haunts did not equate to writing the actual thesis.

5. Oodles of noodles and medjools. Mill Road is the flip-side of Cambridge, a characterful, slightly bohemian, down-to-earth street with independent supermarkets, delis, places to eat, pubs, charity shops, and offshoot roads of C19 terraces which housed workers and artisans. The tiny Noodles Plus has a huge fan-base (many of whom are prepared to queue) and the supermarkets nearby have the largest selection of medjool dates I’ve ever seen.

   

6. Railings. I know, I know. There can’t be many people who’d spend summer in the city just for the railings, but the railings here - many of which are listed - come with lovely backdrops of gardens, colleges, houses, terraces, and Victorian buildings. My favourites are those on Trumpington Street which run parallel to Hobson’s Conduit and the Botanic Garden. They are 19C, sturdy black wrought-iron, and great for leaning on to look at the heron which often appears in the Conduit, or to scan each way for a glimpse of the elusive kingfisher, or to admire the large messy platform nests built by coots. (See also nice wrought-iron/cast-iron balcony railings and anthemions.) And if you think railings are recondite, try the street lights in the historic city centre. We have Grade II listed Richardson Candles from the 1950s which are based on a 1951 Festival of Britain 1951 design and are unique to Cambridge. There were once 120, 56 of which were wall-mounted, but are now down to about half of that. According to Historic England, the city was the last UK city to have its own working custom-designed, post-war street lights. So now you know.

7. The railway station. It’s long and low and a mile from the centre, but not too far from our house, and it’s a joy to travel to and from. It was built in 1845 and although the fifteen-arch porte-cochère has been enclosed, it’s still mostly unchanged and elegant on approach. It has the third longest platform in the UK at 470m which makes it a challenge to know where to sit when catching a train from London if you don’t want a half-kilometre walk to the exit. It also has the nicest, most helpful ticket office staff. There’s an M&S in the station, plus a Pret, a Greggs, a Gails, and two small supermarkets in the station square, so a traveller can always be well set-up with a coffee, a pain au chocolat/sausage roll, a magazine and a newspaper, like something out the heyday of rail travel.

[‘Old Silver Street Bridge, Cambridge’ (1959) by Gwen Raverat]

[James Norton filming ‘Granchester’, King’s College Chapel in the background]

8. Living here is often like living in a painting or film or TV series or novel or Bloomsbury Group biography. It’s full of material for the imagination when walking and wandering eg thinking about Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, and female students not being awarded full degrees until 1948 (vs 1878 at UCL). See Dr Ann Kennedy Smith’s Substack for lots more on women in Cambridge.

[Statutory tea-break, Abbey Road, September 1963, by Norman Parkinson]

9. The Cambridge University Library music library. (Non-University readers can get a pass.) This is where I go to read about The Beatles in books I can’t afford/find anywhere else. I love the CUL (1934) which was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for also Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and Battersea Power Station, and there are very clear similarities. The music library, though, is like a self-ruling separate kingdom, and is both stuffily warm and coldly unwelcoming. Nevertheless, I put up with being told to face the librarians even though there are chairs which face the other way. Maybe they don’t trust someone who just requests books of photos by Terry O’Neil, Robert Freeman, and Norman Parkinson. I did order a book on The Beatles by a self-consciously intellectual musicologist and didn’t understand a word. Maybe it showed on my face.

Cambridge in the summer. Or all year round. Not bad. Not bad, at all.

Happy Sunday!

[‘Basket of Flowers’ (1924) by Raoul Dufy]

Retired, my foot.

Slightly busy with life stuff: a full house, Theo’s 2nd birthday party, hose pipes and watering cans, digging up potatoes and counting strawberries, making bread, watching England at the World Cup 🫣, reading favourite books (Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Coming to Tea, Peepo!, Ten in the Bed, Cockatoos and Mr Magnolia), pretending the supermarket trolley is a speedboat, making Theo laugh by saying stuff badly in Swedish, watching him learn two languages at the same time, showing him the cows in Cambridge, buying more Spot books in the wonderful Topping’s in Ely, wishing I owned an original Raoul Dufy flower piece.

[we drove past it last year: Quarry Bank High School for Boys, now Calderstones School]

Also: asking myself whether it is too nerdy to go on a John Lennon School Tour, abandoning a couple of recent, well-reviewed books without a shred of regret (no guilt involved), lining up a few good exhibitions to see incl LS Lowry at the MK Gallery, Ravilious et al at Holburne, and Horrockses dresses at the Harris in Preston (if the stars align I could combine this with a JL School Tour…), looking forward to a quick trip later this month to Stockport which is very much in the news due to Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism (it is working in Stockport), enjoying the prospect of a Prime Minister whose vowels are the similar to mine, wondering what the world record is for the biggest meringue as we have accumulated about forty egg whites in the freezer after making a LOT of ice cream, recommending the excellent Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry to Tom and Zoë who also found it extremely good, and enjoying having everyone here.

Happy Sunday!

[From a sheet of studies, woman lying ill in bed (1641-42), by Rembrandt]

As if on cue, my body took this literally and decided that it, too, would retire. Just temporarily. So I’ve been ill for two weeks with something that I could have sworn was Covid but wasn’t and then bronchitis, with lots of mandatory bed rest and antibiotics and grapes, followed by this week of extremely hot, sloth-like convalescence.

{‘Selected Grapes’ (1981) by Patrick Caulfield]

I’ve said before that I have loved the concept and reality of convalescence ever since I had a planned operation in the school summer holidays when I was ten. I was too ‘mature’ to be in a children’s ward, so I was put in a very hot - it was August and even Stockport was sweltering - women’s ward which was slightly weird but I was too ill to really notice much. I do remember having two new gown-up nighties from M&S for the stay, so obviously dressed the part. I must have looked ten going on seventy.

[Douglas Bader’s flying escapades were far more interesting. ‘The Nurse’ (Ladybird, 1963)]

I was also so full of drugs that my Mum remembered arriving at my bedside as I was reading Douglas Bader’s autobiography Reach for the Sky upside down. (Perhaps it was my unusual reading choice - I was obsessed with Douglas Bader - which made them think I’d be better off in an older ward.) Once DB and his legs and exploits had been despatched, a kind neighbour brought me a copy of The Wool-Pack by Cynthia Harnett which immediately became one of my all-time favourite books,

and this was followed by the Molesworth books which made me laugh so much it hurt and I was scared I’d split my stitches.

The best bit about the whole painful episode was that after a week or so I was moved to a convalescent home for a further week. I shared a room with a woman who was forty - not much older than than my Mum - and already a grandmother, something which blew my mind as I’d always thought grandmothers were old.

[‘Gladioli’ (1930) by Adrian Paul Allinson]

The room had big French windows which opened onto a lovely garden (just how I imagine the setting of Someone at a Distance), and an uncle came to visit with an enormous bunch of gladioli from his garden, my first-ever flowers. I still adore gladioli. What was not to like, as they say? It was the most lovely way to be between hospital and home, illness and recovery, being cared for and back being one of four children, three of whom did not give a damn about my drama.

[‘Woman Lying on a Bench’ (1913) by Carl Larsson]

But to go back to reading when ill or convalescing. Together with grapes, it’s one of the few perks. Especially when a screen hurts the eyes, and radio programmes make you fall asleep, and podcasts are too long and gratingly chummy when you’re not in the mood. As a result I’ve read a great deal, as wildly varied as the books I read as a ten year old. No Douglas Bader this time, but a book which featured the author’s step-grandfather Field Marshal Montgomery to whom I am, in an unusual and convoluted way, related by marriage. (My great-grandfather fathered my Nana in an upstairs-downstairs fashion: she was illegitimate but his mother gave her her maiden name and whisked Alice away to an ‘orphanage’ she’d built in the grounds of the Hall. Alice was not the only ‘orphan’ there as my uncle - see above - came a little later. Waldo (a suitably raffish name) died at Gallipoli and in 1927 his widow Betty married Monty.)

[‘The Restless Image: a discrepancy between the seen position and the felt position’ (1975) by Rose Finn-Kelcey, on the cover of Marion Coutts’ book]

I’ve also been immersed in memoirs, having started with On Memoir by Blake Morrison then What Did the Deep Sea Say? by Marion Coutts (beautiful cover, too abstruse for me), Fathers by Sam Miller (a very different world to the one I grew up in even though our family had a very similar secret), and I Remember by Joe Brainard (genius structure, great remembered details).

‘Untitled (Pansies)’ (c19700 by Joe Brainard]

On Memoir is to be recommended to anyone who enjoys biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and anyone who is writing something along these lines or thinking of doing so. It’s an ‘A-Z of Life Writing’, not only full of wisdom and advice from a tutor/poet/memoir-writer, but also a great source of recommendations (this is where I found Sam Miller’s and Joe Brainard’s books). There’s a lot which resonated with me. Here are a few of my favourite bits:

“There’s no sin in honesty; don’t be afraid of having your say”

“I’m interested in the idea of confession as a desire to redefine what’s shocking - to show that what society deems shameful…is actually normal and worth attending to rather than hiding away”

[seeing in: Philip Johnsons’ Glass House (1948-49)]

“no one wants a memoir with net curtains: we do want to see in”

plus three loud cheers for his dislike of the use second person narrative, ‘you’ rather than ‘I’. As he says, “Speak for yourself! Don’t affect to to know how I think and behave! Leave me out of it!” and quotes Morven Crumlish: “You are having ideas, actions and habits attributed to you, with the understanding that you are in the same clique as the writer.” It’s precious and affected. And over-used (good pun haha).

And when my eyes can’t take more pages and print, there’s been the World Cup.

Not so much the actual football, more finding out about the enormous American stadia (can you see anything at all from the top tier or does it all look like a game of Subbuteo?), countries like Cape Verde and Curaçao, the philanthropy of Mohamed Salah, the art of taking penalties, and enjoying the fabulous amount of neon colours being worn. Electric fuchsia kits and boots - oh yes, please.

Finally, despite reducing my screen-time, I did of course read every single comment on last week’s newsletter as well as the emails sent separately. Thank you. They made it worth sticking my neck out. It was so good to read your stories - all those tears on the day after the Brexit referendum* - and to feel surrounded by Europhiles.

Happy Sunday!

*which was only ever advisory and not legally binding, and no I cannot let go of that, even after ten years

Note: this was written last Monday, before Thursday’s Makerfield bye-election result which has cheered me enormously.

*******************************

Oooh, I am so close to letting rip here instead of at the breakfast table where Simon and I have a ‘state-of-the-world’ discussion every morning over coffee, toast (me) and ultra-healthy piles of muesli, porridge, raisins, seeds, yogurt, honey, fruit (him).

[Proust’s ‘Balbec’]

Now, I know that not everyone who reads this is as pro-Europe as me; a few times I’ve been the unintended recipient of an email criticising a newsletter (tip: always check the ‘to’ line before slagging someone off). But I am unswervingly and totally pro-Europe. I has summer jobs in France, studied Modern Languages, travelled all over Europe with work, lived in Germany for three years, in Belgium for three years, had twins in Frankfurt, another baby in Leuven. I feel European, our children are European, our grandson is Swedish-British-European, two of our children’s partners are EU citizens. But we are not. And it kills me on an increasingly regular basis. All that has been lost, for the sake of what?

I’m not just talking about stuff like passport queues with questions which were never asked before (why are you visiting, how long for, where are you staying). It goes very much deeper than that, and comes down to the thing I hate most of all, people having power over others, deciding what they can and can’t do, where they can and can’t travel, work, have families and good lives.

I sound like a broken record when I say that while things were not perfect before Brexit - when are they ever? - they were pretty fine Europe-wise. We had innumerable freedoms, so who in their right mind would actually think it a good thing to take those away from others, from themselves?

[Cabourg]

The whole of Europe on our doorstep, all those opportunities, all those connections and networks, for everyone. Je m’en fou, said a lot of people. Thus wrecking plans and studies, impacting families, undermining livelihoods, almost obliterating the learning of languages in schools and universities, making what was previously perfectly easy and doable now nightmarishly complicated and often impossible.

[Honfleur]

This truth-bomb is always ticking behind my usually carefully non-confrontational, non-controversial Substack newsletters, but last weekend it exploded. I read that Farage has started a Substack (in his name, who knows who writes it?) and my stomach churned. I know it’s all virtual and not in the real world, but the degrees of separation between me and him suddenly collapsed and it’s as though we are all in a big virtual Substack office building and he could actually be my neighbour, and people visiting his office could wander down the corridor and put their head round my door for a quick squiz at what I’m doing.

[Le Havre, not offices, but you get the idea]

It may sound overdramatic, but I really, really do not want to be in the same office building as Farage and his supporters. I’m now wondering how Substack will react to his “essay” which is appalling (I’ve had a look, because I need to know who my fellow office-workers are). Words do not fail me, but they are unprintable here. Will Substack now go the way of Twitter/X?

As a result, I’m on the verge of metaphorically chucking my phone and laptop in the fountain like Anne Hathaway does in The Devil Wears Prada.

Because I see Simon filling the decking with hostas, tomatoes, agapanthus, and geraniums, Theo squishing Play-Doh and endlessly reconfiguring his Duplo train set, Zoë teaching him Swedish songs, Tom running round Sôdermalm and leaping into the water on his way back home, Phoebe sending a photo from an Italian supermarket of a jar of Amarena cherries for making ice-cream (but can’t bring it back in hand luggage, because, you know), Cian getting his jiu-jitsu black belt, Alice making chocolate cake from Edd Kimber’s book, Wilson making the best chicken katsu curry this side of Tokyo, and I think this is the way it should be, the way I like it. Analogue, creative, sharing, making, doing. Not virtual, divisive, negative, intolerant.

Well, it seems I let rip. It’s not a bad thing, because self-censorship as a way of avoiding alienating or offending readings is only good up to a point. And this subject goes very deep, and is part of who I am and why I write as I do.

I keep thinking of how The Beatles refused to play to segregated audiences in the USA, and how they were amazed that anyone would think this was OK (“we just play to people”), and how easy it was for them to say no. And, as a result, more and more acts and performers did the same. Well, if I don’t say quite simply that Farage and his views are edging dangerously ever-closer and Brexit is a disaster, then my silence makes me complicit.

Happy Sunday!

I know it’s an updated edition of a golden oldie - first published in 2010 - but it still feels nice to see my name on the front of a beautiful new cover. I’m extremely pleased that Pavilion decided that The Gentle Art of Quilt-making hasn’t aged badly, unlike avocado bathrooms, perms,

[March 1967]

and some of the Beatles’ personal fashion choices, and decided the book is worth reprinting.

[Tulip Field Quilt - in the book]

What’s lovely is that I don’t look at the quilts in the book and think, what was I thinking? I still like them all as much as when I made them.

[Russian Shawl Quilt - in the book]

In fact, I’m still making the same sort of quilts which involve lovely, colourful fabrics and simple shapes. My philosophy remains unchanged: minimum effort, maximum impact. Plus enjoyment in the making and the using.

[obligatory quilt/foot shot]

This is my most recent quilt, made for Alice and Wilson who have just bought their first flat. Wilson embraces a classic architect’s aesthetic, namely minimal, black, white, clean lines. The antithesis of mine.

However, Alice loves pink and lilac and purple. As I certainly wasn’t going to spend my time making a black and white and maybe grey quilt, I decided to combine both of their tastes. It’s very simple with big squares of bold floral designs, a favourite Kaffe Fassett design on the back, and a stripy binding.

So out it comes this Thursday, 18th June. There won’t be much fanfare; I’ve never had/been given an official book launch yet, not one, so why break the habit of a publishing lifetime? But just knowing it’s in bookshops, on bookshelves, in libraries, being read and, I hope, inspiring, encouraging, reassuring quilt-makers, is enough. Almost. We may be going wild with a celebratory pizza and a Lucky Saint.

Happy Sunday!

[Greek No 4 Plate XVIII, The Grammar of Ornament]

The first I bought purely because of the title but couldn’t understand a word.

[Hackney]

The second is what I think of when I see an anthemion.

Not your average word, I know, but one which is important to me. As I get older, I worry about losing my memory, or bits of it. I’m not too concerned about losing memories plural, as they go and are replaced anyway and the weirdest ones stay and you have no idea what will remain and what will disappear. But from time to time I do get bothered about my memory itself. Particularly when a very specific word escapes me. In my mind I can see exactly what the thing is, but the word to go with it? Please wait and it’ll come to me eventually.

[palmette, Lensfield Road, Cambridge]

There is a good reason I hold onto ‘anthemion’, an ancient Egyptian and Greek motif. Sometimes is it used interchangeably with ‘palmette’ but there is a distinction between the two. They are both stylised, but the fronds of an anthemion, which is often taken to mean honeysuckle but actually means flower, tend to curl inward, while the frond of a palmette, inspired by a palm, are flat or curl outward.

[former Birmingham Provincial Bank (1903), 90-92 High Street, Leicester]

A few years ago, I started properly noticing anthemions on buildings and railings and decorative schemes, and was intrigued enough to look them up and thus to acquire a good new word. I like them because they are a touch of creative but restrained flamboyance, like stencils or paper cutouts, on otherwise often sober buildings such as late C18 and early C19 terraced housing where their playful, organic shapes on repeat enliven façades.

[Grecian Chambers (1865-68), Sauchiehall St, by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, Glasgow]

Elsewhere they bring a touch of early C20 cinematic exoticism with whiffs of Greek and Egyptian Revival architecture.

[Stockport War Memorial and Art Gallery (1925)]

But one day when I was visiting Phoebe in Zaragoza where she was worked for a while, I went to the art museum and saw several examples from old buildings. But could I remember what they were called? Even though I’d rolled the word around my tongue and brain for so long? Not a chance. I sat down and almost cried. I then resorted to searching for it on my phone (of course I now can’t remember which search terms I used in order to find it), and vowed not to forget it.

[listed piers with “tall semicircular headed Soanian anthemion panel to each facet” and nice railings, too, all 1820, Raby Gardens, Bath]

And sure enough, I may forget ‘shallot’ or ‘flint’ or the name of the child in front of me (jk, kids), but anthemion now comes back every time. The power of brain-training or something, I don’t know.

[Pot Office (1937), Llandrindod Wells]

And each time I see a new one, I enjoy the variation on the theme and the fact that I can identify it.

[Lewes]

Sometimes, though, there’s a whole collection to be seen, like patterns on a a piece of lace or ribbon. It was when we were in Lewes recently that I began noticing the same anthemions on various cast-iron balconies and thinking that someone must have done a good local trade in these at one time.

[Lewes]

I did a little digging, and found this enlightening article which explained that, indeed, “huge quantities of them were made and distributed from around the mid-18th century until well into the 19th century. In fact, over this period, it was one of the most popular balcony designs used on Neoclassical style buildings”.

[Adelphi balcony panel by Robert Adam (c1775), V&A]

The anthemion balcony railing was first made for the Adelphi development of fashionable terraced houses (1768-82) on The Strand in London designed by the Adam brothers and they were made by the Carron Company. “The…development was highly praised and…the patterns of the balconies themselves were also widely copied. The anthemion motif became one of the most popular motifs for ironwork well into the 19th century”.

[Riviera Theatre (1926), Buffalo]

There are also many more C19 anthemions outside the UK; Buffalo is chock-full of them because many buildings are either in, or influenced by, the Greek Revival Style (1820-60).

[Washington Square North]

Greenwich Village, too has some fine anthemions looking like fancy fans or tiaras or feather-filled headpieces.

[Seiko House (Ginza Wako), (1932), Tokyo]

In Japan I spotted these more complex balconies on this famous landmark building by Jin Watanabe, a leading inter-war architect. In some ways, the anthemions are lost in all the curlicues which is a shame - I prefer stand-out, focal point anthemions.

And here are some lovely anthemions and palmettes (I’m quoting Historic England) on tiles in Woolton Baths (opened 1893, closed 2010) where John Lennon and friends swam in school lessons, and where he and Paul McCartney learned to swim.

It’s not so much my marbles I’m worried about losing, as my anthemions.

Happy Sunday!

PS another lovely recondite word I have stored in a safe place in my memory is obbligato thanks to reading about Alan Civil who plays the French horn on The Beatles’ For No One

However, the bleariness and lethargy have been very conducive to doing what I maybe should have done before we went: research. The same way I don’t read full reviews of film and books in advance, it’s been more instructive and personal to collect impressions and thoughts there, then to look things up properly here. As a result, I understand better and appreciate more what we saw and experienced.

My research has included:

• origami and this brilliant company’s pre-printed sets (eg these poorly made but enjoyable attempts)

• investigating small and narrow architect-designed houses and flats, looking at the quality use of concrete (thank you, Wilson), and spending too long on Never Too Small

[Kyoto speciality ekiben]

• the history and variety of ekiben (train bento boxes), utterly fascinating and visually stunning, now often collectors’ items (for a certain type of collector). “An interesting anecdote is that in Tokyo Station you can buy regional ekiben from all over Japan so if you’re having an affair with someone in Tokyo and your partner thinks you’re in Hokkaido you can return home with the correct bento box from Hokkaido as a gift - a ruse well known enough that it’s even used in novels.”

• manhole covers/urban art, good reasons to look down as well as up

• a potter’s apprenticeship in Japan. I am in awe of Florian Gadsby’s work ethic and skill - his book (his photo above) has been sitting on a shelf since it was published, but now was the right time to read it. The Japan bit sounds incredibly intense

• traditional roof tiles (kawara) in Kyoto which often look like scrolls or little Hokusai waves lapping over roofs (I admired many but didn’t photograph any, sometimes just wandering and looking is enough)

[one of my favourite displays of replica food in Kyoto - that’s a rice-filled omelette on top on which the ketchup is always in the same place]

• more replica food. This is the shop we went to and bought astoundingly realistic sushi and eggs

• literature; I’ve just read The Waiting Years (1958) by Fumiko Enchi, an excellent recommendation from Fran at Persephone Books. And now, because of the cover which features part of a matchbox design, I want to know more about old Japanese matchboxes. Japanese packaging, traditional and modern, is endlessly fascinating and wonderful

[seen at a flea market in Ginza]

• the ultra-cool shirts and suits

The Beatles wore onstage in Japan in 1966 not long before before they abandoned their matching outfits forever.

Happy Sunday!

Some extra info for Jan and anyone planning a trip to Japan:

• do the customs and registration forms online before arrival to get a QR code for a faster passage through the airport

• get an eSim card for your phone (I used Ubigi)

• download a Suica card onto your phone. It’s like an Oyster card but so much better; we put ¥5000 on ours - less than £25 - and that covered all our metro and bus fares and even a return train journey to Osaka from Kyoto, and I spent the last few ¥ on two tiny tubes of toothpaste in a 7/11 store (they accept Suica)

• Phoebe recommended setting up a Monzo account and using the card to avoid incurring exchange fees - definitely worth doing

  

  [Phoebe’s gacha collection]

  

  [mine]

• take some cash as there are some cash-only eating places and you’ll need ¥100 coins for gacha “gambling” if you are so inclined (there’s always a machine which converts bank notes to coins by the gashapon)

• book tables online at peak times in popular places eg Kura to avoid queuing (Kura = brilliant sushi conveyor belt fun in beautifully designed interiors). Two more cheap chains with great food: CoCo for katsu curry (you can order up to 1kg of rice should you wish)

  

  and Ichiran ramen where you eat in a solo booth and the food appears from a behind a bamboo curtain

• Muji has an incredibly refreshing yuzu squash soda (yuzu was my favourite drink flavour discovery)

  

  [Hokkoh fabrics at Nomura Tailor]

• The best fabric/haberdashery shop was undoubtedly Nomura Tailor in Kyoto - superb range of quilting and dressmaking fabrics at a fraction of the price here, and a buying system which must be followed. We also went to Tomato in Nippori Fabric Town in Tokyo which was particularly good for quilting /craft fabrics

• The fabled Itoya in Ginza in Tokyo was lovely and fabulous and has a wonderful range of chiyogami (many more than you can buy here), but we decided the best stationery place was Kyukyodo in Kyoto, a seriously beautiful shop (not far from Nomura Tailor). Also sells a huge range of calligraphy and other brushes

• Across from Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design there’s a lovely bookshop which is good for the Cochae origami packs, books in English, and children’s books

• I had a hanko stamp made here in Kyoto. (There are other places which make them)

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!