The World Examining Works

Thoughts on English Food

 

For some reason people used to enjoy being rude about English food --probably because until somewhat recently lots of people boiled everything to death. Nowadays English food is rather splendid and enjoying something of a Renaissance.

To start with the traditional cuppa. Here at M&S on Oxford Street. Note the asrounding blandness of the color scheme. I had already eaten the miniature cookie that came with it --just like in Belgium.

More reviving tea. Here the kettle has boiled on an Aga. Note the all-important teacosy.

Rosie has a great selection of tea pots for all occasions. What  a jumble of china from low to high from swanky shops and from estate sales.

Good heavens! We used to have the Rector, Mr.Porter, to tea once in a very great while. How splendid it would have been to have the right teapot to hand.

Breakfast tray. Weetabix (my poor brother is Peter Wix --so guess what he was called at school....) Marmite.....Yum.

Apples decorate the church for Harvest Festival. If anyone needs to know how to pick apples and store them, I can supply information.

Lunch. A pork pie! Ham. Branston Pickle. Beans and beets from the garden. I think the cucumber came from a shop.

And last of all --  supper the piece de resistance: Toad-in-the-Hole. A splendid one. Gastronomic bliss!

 

My story Jane in Winter is rather full of traditional English food.

 

Snapshots from Wiltshire

 

A snowstorm raging, so looking back at pictures of England.

Photos taken October 21st.

Lots of vegetation....

a woodpile waiting for winter

a house with a church behind it.

Old windows

and a stream

and a pathway

leading to an orchard

 

 

On a different note Robert's work featured here.

Grass and Leaves and other Important Stuff

 

So many photos from Wiltshire. Rose hips

and plants on the terrace

and out where the grass garden will be.

And apples in dew

grass long in the meadow

and extra sweet rather small blackberries.

Garden chairs too wet to sit down on

and cyclamen above the haha.

Half timbered cottage in the village

and a bike blending with the Virginia creeper.

 

Foreign Details: File under Overload

 

Travel is meant to broaden the mind. I think it just confuses me. I just got back from England where I spent the first half of my life, but is now almost a foreign country. I'm overwhelmed by echoes from the past.

A shop in Spitalfields -- Jack the Ripper territory --where I never ventured as a child since the buildings were black as your hat. It's now rather chic.

 I search for typically English things: here a roller towel -- something that doesn't exist in America.

Here a poster of where my brother worked for many un/happy years and charming lampshades by Cressida Bell.

I go on a bus through Picadilly Circus where large numbers of people are rushing about as people do in cities....

but some of them sit.

Normal life: invitations and CD's and socks.....

not to mention the Aga and the teacosy

and my friend Rosie's piece de resistance: Toad in the Hole. Bliss.

And another roller towel with more jolly color than usual.

The next day I go to the Imperial War Museum where one is bombarded with so much information the mind reels.

A bus from The Great War recalls Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Here technicians work on a plane from the Second World War....

and children make notes....

Here a horribly bad photo of Edith Sitwell from the current Cecil Beaton show....so I think I'd better stop and go and look for more roller towels, and maybe have a nice cup of tea.

 

On a completely different note: Urban Intersections opens at The Quidley Gallery today featuring one of Robert's paintings. Do go if you are in Boston.

About Nothing in Particular/Domestic

Nice billowy clouds after a night of storms. 

Two kinds of salvia and some oregano snipped on the roof where the tubs are running rampant. Beach basket awaiting an outing. It came from Essouira by the seaside in Morocco.

Breakfast and a jug from where we used to go to the beach when I was six.

Absurd yellow breakfast from the other day (on top of a drawing block).

Lemons for iced tea --the ideal summer drink -- on a napkin again from Maroc.

Same lemons before in a bowl......

which sits near the desk and the chair..... and so it all circles around: the past and the present and the idea of home. And the TV blares something silly about aging skin  -- then shows us people in Syria whose homes are blown up -- so the trivial seems sweeter than ever.

 

 

Bookish

 

Rosie said, "You should read Barnaby Rudge." So I got it down off the shelf where it had resided in untouched splendor amidst all the other Dickenses that I had had shipped out from England long ago.

The spine was much faded but the illustrations were lovely. The pace of the opening was somewhat slow  --as it could be before Twitter and all that -- but the typeface was tiring so I went all 21st century and downloaded the novel for 99c onto my Kindle....

Then I started looking at all the illustrations in all the other hitherto untouched volumes.... Note the fug of smoke and wonderful long pipes.

 

and came upon poor Little Nell looking pretty damn abject. In my laziness, I had always sort of assumed that the books came from my father's family who lived in Kent so was surprised to discover who had really been the first owner.

Here is the rather grand bookplate of my grandmother Gretchen's favorite brother Leslie who died young of diabetes as people did in those days.

So I turned to my greatgrandmother Sarah Bayley's little date book where she recorded his life. 

I half wondered if I should give all the Dickens away, but realise now that I probably won't even though I doubt I'll ever read them.

 

Stuff We Keep and Stuff We Throw Away

 

 

A friend brought me this cotton boll from Alabama. I think it is very beautiful though I rather doubt I would have thought so if I had to pick cotton. I digresss.

On Saturday we were helping with a stall at a flea market and I was looking round our spare apartment for stuff to get rid of.

This character, Mr Samuel Worsley, who has lived in my desk for some years, had this  miniature done in 1821 . He seems to have lived in Orwell in Suffolk and looks a little like Wordsworth.

He was almost certainly married to poor Sarah ( above) who died aged 55 years. Where he looks bland beyond bland, she seems rather pinched and miserable. I cannot imagine how they came into my mother's possession unless they were relatives of some distant sort. However, I do not feel I can ditch them to the tender mercies of people who will feel even less connection to them than I do.

Item: two slightly sentimentally sweet French prints of children playing with animals. Kate Greenaway meets toile, much beloved by my grandmother.

I can't ditch those either.

 

 

Wet Day in Hampshire

 

A day of teeming, interminable rain

which reminded me of the opening line of Jane Eyre......"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day"

 Even a local rabbit looked damp and despondent.

So we sat in the drawing room and played Scrabble as Spring looked on

as did Summer

and Autumn. History does not relate what happened to Winter.

 

The next day the rain had abated enough to allow for a walk in the woods

though everything was terribly soggy.

London Skies

 

After the sweltering heat of New York (100'F) yesterday

 

the cool of England is a welcome respite --other than geting soaked to the skin in a downpour sans raincoat. The "Shard" which is just being completed near London Bridge Station is not quite as exciting as the "Gerkin" --extreme right.

Tower Bridge looks much as ever above the rather dull 1950's housing in the foreground.

I put this picture in because of the aeroplane up above the clouds. I hate planes. 'Nuff said.

Here you get two Shards and a roof deck......

and a bit more of the same.....

It is meant to rain on and off for the next week.

I feel quite at home.

 

The Uses of Enchantment: A Collaboration

Snow in the woods on the sort of day when wet clumps of it fall down your collar. The artist's hand is sprinkling the snow.

When I knew I was going to do this post, I asked Susanna to send me several photos she partucularly liked. When they arrived I asked her if she had read Bruno Bettleheim's The Uses of Enchantment which is all about C.G.Jung and fairy tales and archetypes and things like that and she said she hadn't. Gosh!

We were talking last summer about the children's stories I was writing and how they could be illustrated. Here her niece Annabel stands at the edge of the water.....

Here Annabel stands like a wood nymph on the stump of a very old tree whose gnarled roots stretch deep into the earth. The stuff of fairy tales indeed.

This is a photo of Susanna's that I hadn't seen before where the old lady conceals her face behind the wisdom of the owl.

And last  Annabel's little sister Ellie dons the mask of a wolf......

Susanna and I have the same sort of sensibility, I think. The same love of myth and mystery. Her photo is on the cover of my story Jane and the Essex Serpent.

 

We'd like to give two copies of the book away in conjunction with this post and Susanna's post. If you would like a book, leave a comment on one of our blogs. If you visit both blogs you double your chances ....