jane brocket

bulb

When I moved in with Simon 24 years ago, I promptly took over his garage with pots and pots and bowls and bowls of bulbs for forcing. Never had I come across such a good spot; I'd been forcing bulbs under my bed in rented rooms for the previous couple of years (a good indication of just how cold they were) but now I had all the dark, cold space I needed for hyacinths, tiny narcissi and even tulips. There was no question of Simon getting his car in there - it was more a matter of 'love me, love my bulbs'. (Not much has changed and Simon is still putting up with the bulbmania each autumn.)

We didn't stay long in the flat that went with my bulb garage but that first year produced an amazing array of indoor bulbs that seemed to go on for ever, and took up all the surfaces when they came indoors. I've never since quite reached those dizzying heights, but I have forced bulbs in every subsequent house we have lived in. This year I have found the second-best place, a mere 11 years after moving into this house. It's the cold, dark entrance space behind the front door which is never used as front door as we use the back door as our front door because the front door is always blocked by wellies and coats and shoes. This year, however, it is blocked with vases and pots of hyacinths and paperwhites. So little do we use this small space, that it was only when I was looking for some shoes yesterday that I suddenly saw just how much the bulbs have grown since I hid them there a few weeks ago.

There is nothing to beat the thrill of seeing something you have sown, planted or just sat above water start to grow. These fat 'buds' on the hyacinths tell me that all is well with nature (you can never be sure) and that my bulbs like their new forcing place. And now, after a quick photoshoot, they are back in the cool darkness, putting out more white roots that stretch down then curl round the vases and force the green stalks upwards. It won't be too long before I can bring them into the relative warmth and watch them flower. Amazing.

I've been reading Bulb by Anna Pavord (one of my tulip gurus, together with Sarah Raven) and it has some of the best pieces of practical advice about forcing bulbs that I have read. Plus the photos are brilliant, and the descriptions make you want to plant every bulb in the book.

happy and sad

 
[cheap and cheerful roses for a grey indoors day]

One of the great things about using your hands rather than your mind for work as I have been doing today is the opportunity to listen to good, thought-provoking radio. I tend not to listen to programmes as they are broadcast, but save them up for a bumper listening session (and even Desert Island Discs can now be heard on 'Listen Again' which saves a lot of sitting in the car outside supermarkets or even the house). This way I can weed out my less favourite Radio 4 programmes and the Archers (I have never listened to a whole episode and feel now that I am about 30 years behind) and pick out the gems.

Today's listening has had me thinking about happiness, optimism, pessimism and - often underrated as a philosophy - realism. There was Martin Seligman (a self-confessed pessimist and a depressive) on All in the Mind talking very persuasively about optimism and Dr Julie Norem on the same programme countering with the equally interesting idea of the defensive pessimism. Then there was Julia Donaldson on Desert Island Discs demonstrating movingly how happiness and sadness can co-exist in one very fulfilled and interesting life. (And here is another good reason for listening to DID in private: the programmes often make me cry and this one did.)

We know that 'the devil makes work for idle hands', but I need Radio 4 to combat the devil making work for an idle mind. And, like negative thinking, it works.

10 things i love about you

1) You take fridge-grazing to epic levels and then complain that there is nothing to eat in the house. 

2) You dye your hair a lovely shade of glossy chestnut brown, and part of the bath and bathroom floor, and the bath mat and two towels and a pretty camisole top.

3) You make wonderful flapjacks and wonderful messes in the kitchen. (Which, mostly, you clear up.)

4) Your bedrooms have colourful strata of clothes and books and schoolwork which I think you find geologically interesting.

5) You take no notice of threats of black bin bags and removal of all said strata from rooms.

6) You come with your old Ma to see Michael McIntyre at the O2 and laugh at the same jokes.

7) You won't tell us the meaning of new, rude words and phrases in case we are shocked.

8) But you are shocked when we watch The Thick of It.

9) You have selective blindness/deafness/amnesia which prevents you picking up glasses, cups, cans/hearing requests to help/forgetting you might, by accident, have agreed to do so. We put it down to age but then, unwittingly, demonstrate the real thing.

10) You keep us young but make us feel old at the same time. Quite a feat.

And you come to the top of the Rockefeller Center with me and make me feel on top of the world.

stitching inspiration

These are two of the designs in the 'Gentle Arts' range of cards by Woodmansterne that feature my photographs. I haven't done any machine embroidery for while now, but still have several drawers full of gleaming Madeira and glittering Gutermann threads waiting for me to do it once more. I got them out last night for Phoebe who is producing a stitched design for Art at school and who needed to supplement the meagre school rations; together we oooohed and ahhhhed over the glorious colours and I suddenly had a real desire to stitch rows of cakes and fruits and vegetables all over again.

As if the sight of my colour-matched boxes of threads wasn't enough, today I watched the Talking Threads programme featuring Linda Miller. Linda taught me all I know about machine embroidery (I attended several day and weekend courses with her a few years ago); she makes the most beautiful embroideries and is also one of the nicest people I know. Her personality shines through in the programme which is also a really useful and informative introduction to Linda's personal style of stitching. Watch it and see.

(Linda also has a warm and chatty blog.)

an apple a day...

 

 ...brings colour into your life.

The excellent Women's Room blog has a link to most amazing set of pencils I have ever seen. How much fun can a girl have rolling a mouse over virtual pencils to find out their brilliant names - and all while eating an apple?  I reckon I would need at least a hundred of those pencils to colour in a picture of what I'm eating...

ravelry revels

I've decided that Ravelry and Revels are similar in more ways than their spelling and play on words. Revels were a big part of my youth; my friends and I would buy a bag or two and take guesses as to which flavour was coming next (they are all anonymous in the bag). Most of the time we'd get something we really liked - a strawberry or orange cream or a toffee - but sometimes (and these were the ones you wanted to avoid) we got the stinkers, the coffee or the peanut. It was like Russian roulette with confectionery, but the worst that could happen was that you would have to spit something out.

I've been on Ravelry for two years now; I use it as a resource, a quite unique and rich resource. I love the fact that you can search a pattern and see dozens or hundreds of versions, or look for a yarn and see what fantastic things knitters are doing with it, or look up a knitter you admire and see what he or she is up to. These are the orange and strawberry cream Revels moments.

But then you suddenly come across a coffee cream or peanut moment - and the forums seem to have a particularly high count of these. I'm still taken aback by the levels of negativity and bitchiness (the phrase 'stitch and bitch' was never more apt than on some of the Ravelry threads) that these 'discussions' give rise to. Of course, I do my best to avoid them (like my least favourite Revels), but sometimes I am caught unawares and quickly have to move away or log off completely to take away the nasty taste in my mouth.

I suppose you could argue that there are plenty of people who like peanut and coffee Revels, just as there are plenty of people who like (revel in?) a good, anonymous bitch and a large amount of bile with their knitting. But really, I'm sure it doesn't taste good to anyone. 

So I'll keep using Ravelry, but wish someone would come in and tell everyone to play nicely otherwise they, like the yukkiest Revels, will be evicted.

benchmark

On a walk today I found this lovely resting spot at a bend in the river. It may not be the most preposessing blue bench in the world, but it is perfectly in keeping with its surroundings, especially when the sky and river are the same colour. 

This is a beautiful stretch of the river at Runnymede with the Magna Carta Tea Rooms in one of these Lutyens-designed lodges (run through the NT photos to see them) where you can get a fine cup of tea, a slice of Victoria Sponge Cake and an outdated copy of Hello! (with photos of various locals) to read while you recover from the walk and the weight of history. 

sock snap

On Monday I took a few photos of my new box of socks. It says a lot that I hadn't taken the socks out of their box when they arrived; instead they stayed on the wide windowsill where I do much of my photography so that I could admire their spotty loveliness. There also happened to be some balls of yarn on the same windowsill and, by chance - or perhaps not - they matched my socks. So more photos were taken. Who, I asked myself, would not do the same?

Well, it turned out there was an answer to that question which proved me right. Because yesterday evening I was having a read of some of my favourite blogs, and look what I found on Vanessa's blog. It's wonderful how great minds of knitters and spotty sock-wearers think alike.

PS Don't leave Vanessa's blog without making a detour to see her masterpiece of colour and crochet.

woolfish

Still feeling Woolfish, I went up to town yesterday. Of course, I never normally 'go up to town'; I 'go into London', but I do like this expression when used by Virginia (and many a provincial lady in many a novel) when she visits London to go to a Picture Palace, a concert, a library or to carry out a few 'commissions'. Like Virginia, I travel by rail, and yesterday passed through Richmond Station where she used to catch trains ('non-stop' if she was lucky), and gazed at the river as we crossed Richmond Bridge, looking at the path where she and Leonard often walked.

Once 'up', Virginia was always meeting friends such as Clive or Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant or Katherine Mansfield, and frequently bumped into Lytton Strachey or Maynard Keynes on the street. I was also there to meet a friend; Alison is someone whose blog, knitting and creativity I have admired enormously for years and luckily, like those in Virginia's circle , she is more than happy to meet somewhere we could enjoy a treat. Virginia at al were often to be found in London cafes and tea rooms (ices at Gunter's sound particularly good), but Alison and I met at Ottolenghi. (If there had been a Bloomsbury Ottolenghi in 1919, I'm quite sure it would have attracted the Bloomsbury set. )

Virginia would go up to town for spectacles or books, or the occasional purchase of clothing (always mentioning the colour, as in an 'apricot coloured coat' or a 'ten and elevenpenny blue dress'). Like her, I found a place where the 'shop women' are 'charming' (not 'superb' and frightening); Jigsaw is the place for me and I found a pink satin-lined, veryVirginia/Vanessa coat which made me look quite artistic (I like to think) but I couldn't afford it. I wished I could put it in a novel instead, as Virginia would no doubt have done. Instead, I treated myself not to books or a concert, but to some gorgeous yarn (colours: Black Cherry and Blackcurrant) from Loop. I like to think Virginia who liked knitting - as someone pointed out in a comment on the previous post - would have approved of my colour choices, or at least their names.

As it grew dark, I headed home. My day up in town ended a little like Virginia's on 15 February 1919: 'Then I had tea, and rambled down to Charing Cross in the dark [except I rambled down to Angel], making phrases and incidents to write about. Which is, I expect, the way one gets killed.'

  ***

Virginia Woolf is one of the best London companions I know; seen through her eyes, the west of London becomes an even more special and interesting place. I find Dickens does the same for the City and the east of London. Hmmm, time to plan a Dickensian day of pubs and oysters and punch and Pickwickian jollity...

what to read at dusk

I am always painfully, acutely aware of the fading light at this time of year.  I really do not like the fact that the lights have to be switched on as early as 3pm, that the children come home in the dark, that I can't take photos after lunch, that it seems like ages till spring.

But this year I am determined not to see the waning light as a negative hole in the day. Instead I'm thinking of it in poetic terms, such as 'half-light' (WB Yeats), or the the 'violet hour' (TS Eliot) or 'dusk, 'gloaming', 'twilight' and 'crepuscule', and engaging with it rather than denying it from behind drawn curtains. And, funnily enough, it is Virginia Woolf who is reshaping my view.

I picked up a copy of the Selected Diaries last week, wishing once again that the 5 volume set was as easily available as it once was (when I was reading library copies I should have been investing in my own volumes as I went along). VW's diaries are simply wonderful, but what has really struck me in the last few days is her way with the weather and the light. I've been reading entries for October and November and the sparse but beautiful details of her afternoon walks with Leonard by the river or in the parks near Richmond, returning home to tea by the fire.

That's the way to do it, I see now. I need a fire, good books, gentle lamplight, tea and cake or crumpets. But first I need the walk (with or without my own Leonard), the bite of cold, wind or rain to make me appreciate the coming indoors. Then, and only then, will I be able to wax lyrical about the dusk.