jane brocket

aglow

The nasturtiums are aglow. The dahlias are aglow. The chillis are burning brightly as they turn a beautiful shade of fiery red. Even I feel aglow as I contemplate all this autumnal glowiness. 

 

Did you know that nineteenth century scientists believed that nasturtiums contained phosphorus and that they emitted light when they were in shadow? And that if Degas had been allowed to name them, the artists in Paris who became known as les Impressionistes would have been called les Capucines (French for nasturtium) and that the bright flower would have been their emblem? Ah, what a missed opportunity.

(Even as I was taking photos of my nasturtiums in a jam jar, the camera was overwhelmed by the super-vibrant colour and glow that made it diffcult to pick out the lines and contours of the flowers. The scientists may have been proven wrong, but the eye still says they were onto something.)

 

I know all this now because I have been reading the catalogue of the Impressionist Gardens exhibition. And I have been to see the fabulous nasturtiums painted by Fantin-Latour, Monet, Caillebotte and Guillaumin in the exhibition itself.

 

Edinburgh isn't the most glowing city ever. In fact, much of its appeal lies in its subtle gloominess, overcast skies, elongated - almost etiolated - buildings, and grey sea-and-stone location.

 

But even Edinburgh was emitting brightness and basking in soft sunshine on Sunday, and on Monday, when it was typically cloudy and wet on my return visit to the exhibition, I couldn't help but feel that the gallery is the place to go for some glow before the exhibition closes. 

 

It is undeniably spectacular. In very grand, temporarily colourful rooms are about 100 paintings of flowers, gardens, parks, potagers, fields and orchards which fill the space with richness and warmth. It's wonderful to walk round a busy exhibtion and to listen to so many visitors exclaiming with delight. It just doesn't happen with terribly highbrow or conceptual or modern art that you hear people sighing with pleasure, and enthusiastically discussing their favourite picture, the one they would hang up in their own home. It may be popular, middlebrow stuff, but everyone in there was aglow, and that's a nice, warm feeling. 

s.j.a. brocket was here?

No, Simon hasn't been out late at night spraying his initials on walls. This is next to the St John Ambulance Brigade HQ in Richmond. They are to be seen at every rugby match Tom plays at school - a very reassuring presence.

 But I do sometimes wonder where he goes on his long bike rides...

little details

 

It's often the little details that amuse and delight, and transform a place visited into a lasting memory.  Instead of paper tickets in the museums and galleries of Helsinki,visitors are given stickers to wear. Each one has its own design and it took me a couple of visits before I realised that people leave their stickers on a large board or box by the exit, thus creating a fantastic stuck collage, like a temporary collective memorial to individual visits. This is from the Design Museum, and the board on the way out of Kiasma is also suitably artistic.  

[Both places are highly recommended. I also went to the Museum of Finnish Architecture which I found fascinating; the displays there went a long way to explaining why Finnish architecture works so well. The Ateneum is worth visiting for the huge and splendid staircase and grand rooms, but I did find the paintings by Veikko Vionoja too mournful for my taste. It amuses me that the website shows one of two or three truly light and uplifting pictures in the exhibition - the rest were seriously dull and dismally lit.]  

beautiful in the eye of the beholder

 

someone to watch over me

[the most famous figures of all outside Helsinki Central Railway Station, a station after my station-loving heart]

I suppose it's no coincidence that I first came across caryatids in chapter 13 of Dr Zhivago, had to look up the word in the dictionary (not too many caryatids in Stockport) and have been noticing them ever since. The Russian connection is partly what interested me in visiting Finland in the first place as the histories of the two countries are closely linked.

Many of the buildings in Helsinki have wonderful external details and in fact the place is full of beautifully designed details - even the door handles are often little works of practical art - and there are plenty of genii loci presiding over the city.

These more menacing figures are on the Pohjola Building, famous for its stonework, amazingly enough designed by the same architect who was responsible for the fabulous railway station, Eliel Saarinen.

 

I also found some male caryatids or atlantes; I liked the way they all look as though they are washing their hair.

 

And here are the travelling Buddy Bears posing as colourful atlantes. 

They all remind me of the lovely Ella Fitzgerald song.

buns, books, baths, and buildings

 

[detail of monument]

A last-minute decision to go to Helsinki for three days was a very good one. 

 

[Neoclassical/Modernist Parliament House]

It turns out that I like Helsinki very much. It has many of the conditions I consider conducive to a civilised way of life. Finland's literacy rate  is spectacular, and there are books galore. My very first stop was the Academic Bookshop where I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the building and the number of titles. But more than that, I could see from what is being published in Finland that there is an unusual level of respect for and interest in Finnish culture. Design, architecture, local guides, knitting, sewing, food, gardens, literature, art  -  there are all sorts of specialist local books, proportionately far more than in bigger, more densely populated countries where the mainstream tends to prevail. So I could have bought books on city allotments, pioneers of Modernism 1930-1950, knitting with leftovers, local bread, saunas and sailing, and I could have created a whole library on Alvar Aalto. I was in my element or elements, because there is also a lovely cafe in the bookshop where they sell delicious almond buns.

 

[somewhere to read a book]

Buns are, it seems, an integral part of daily life in Finland, together with coffee (are coffee and literacy rates linked, I wonder?). It is so good to see an uninterrupted tradition of local specialities; in Britain we threw the bread out with the bathwater and are now backpedalling to rescue and restore our baking heritage. But in Helsinki there are buns galore: almond buns, butter buns, cinnamon and cardomom buns, plus lots of fabulously dense and chewy rye bread.

 

[Functionalist Post Office]

One little problem with Helsinki, though, is that it's a very expensive place for many things. Much as I would have liked to bring home all the books I looked at in the comfy chairs in the bookshop, I couldn't afford to. But I did buy a copy of Wuthering Heights as I ran out of reading material after sinking into a deep reading mode. By day 3 I'd re-read two of my very favourite books, Waterlog and The Haunts of the Black Masseur (probably no coincidence that they both have excellent titles) brought as a complement to another affordable theme in addition to buns and looking at C20 buildings: swimming.

 

[Olympic Tower]

I'd discovered that the Swimming Stadium was still open for a few more days, so took my cossie and did some lengths in the amazing open-air pool that was built in 1938 but not used until 1952. (The Olympic Stadium itself was worth a visit anyway; the iconic tower is not to be missed and for 2 euros you can go to the top and make yourself feel sick by looking down at the now tiny stadium and the the miniature figures swimming in the pool below).

 

[View of the Olympic Stadium]

I also checked the ladies' days at the amazing Yrjonkatu Swimming Hall where costumes are optional and therefore worth discarding (who wants a wet swimsuit in their luggage?), and swam several times in the peace and quiet of the beautiful surroundings. I also noticed the absence of chlorine in both pools which are ozone-purified and what a huge difference this makes to eyes, skin, hair and swimmies (if you wear them) - chlorine will seem positively toxic after this. In fact, quite a few things appear toxic after a visit to such a fresh, vibrant, creative, modern place.

surreal but nice

I have a friend, M., who enjoys days out just as much as I do, but her tastes are quite different to mine. Where I am a member of the Twentieth Century Society, her idea of architectural heaven is Strawberry Hill. She favours all the tasetful shades from cream to duck egg blue on the Farrow & Ball paint chart, while I adore the sweetshop choice of Dulux paints. She won't have a washing line of any sort in her garden, whereas I see my old-fashioned line (one end of which is tied to a free-standing netball post which threatens to fall over if I overload the line) as an essential part of my garden's character. Despite all this, we always enjoy ourselves immensely when we go out, each marvelling silently at the other's weird tast, no doubt.

Our most recent jaunt reminded me of the line in Notting Hill when the Hugh Grant character tells the Julia Roberts character that meeting her was 'surreal, but nice'. M. wanted to see the Surreal Friends exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery before it closed so we decided to have make it a day out in Sussex. I can't say I like Surrealism terribly, and I can't say the paintings spoke to me in any deep and meaningful way but my goodness, the Pallant House Gallery is quite wonderful, has a brilliant collection of C20th art, and is partly housed in a fabulous early C18th house, and partly in a very beautiful modern, brick and tile-clad extension. And it has a fantastic cafe/restaurant which we just squeezed into as it was packed with locals (as was the whole gallery - something that was particularly pleasing to see).

In addition to the surreal-but-nice gallery, we made a detour to the West Dean cafe (a very scary lady sat us on what felt like the 'naughty bench' outside the cafe because we arrived five minutes before opening time), visited the Eternal Maker housed, surreally, in an old bus depot building, and drove the long way along B-roads so that we could admire the beautiful Downs scenery as seen in the  exquisite and not at all surreal watercolours of Eric Ravilious. 

The very next day, I travelled twenty miles to see The Illusionist (absolutely entrancing - but still a little surreal to see an animated Jacques Tati transposed to a remote Scottish island then Edinburgh) at the Curzon Richmond - a lovely little cinema - and afterwards was standing by the lights in the middle of the main road in Richmond when who should happen to drive past but M, waving madly. Surreal. But nice.

magic wands

 

Years ago, I was admiring the fabulous poppies (Papaver somniferum) in my late mother-in-law's garden, and lamenting the fact that I was having no success with sowing them from seed. She had very green fingers, and told me I shouldn't bother with seed trays etc, but just take some of her dried seed heads, wave them around in the garden in September, and poppies would appear the next spring. I did so, and they did so.

Today I've been picking the beautiful, sculptural heads of poppies grown this way in my literally gone-to-seed 'triangle' and waving them like magic wands, scattering seed around the garden and onto a sheet of newspaper, and remembering Allison's sage advice about poppies - and plenty of other things.

rich in birthday wishes

If the number of calories in a birthday cake were equivalent to individual birthday wishes, Simon would be completely inundated by the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook carrot cake made for him by Phoebe. It came out looking just like the picture, and fairly innocuous at that. But as she went along with the weighing and measuring, she became aware that the calories in the sunflower oil, walnuts, butter, cream cheese, sugar and the rest were adding up at an alarming rate.

Happy Birthday, Simon. 9780 times over.

say when

 

Sometime it can be hard knowing when to say 'when'. As someone pours the wine or serves the food or cuts the cake, do you pretend for the sake of politeness or image that your thirst/hunger/greed is minimal, and squeal 'when!' in a nanosecond? Or do you hold your breath, watch the level/pile/slice get higher and larger, and expose your true appetite by waiting patiently before triumphantly declaring 'when'?

I'm making hexagons for my crochet blanket and although the pattern I am following says I need to make something like 56, I'm still not sure when to say 'when'. I laid them out on the floor in colour lines and realised that I'd already exceeded 56 and hadn't said 'when' when I could have done. As a result I am overproducing and trust that I'll say 'when' when the blanket, like the glass of wine, plate of food, and slice of cake, is the right size.

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