jane brocket

bath

[Royal Crescent]

There are plenty of good things in Bath. Baths. Bath buns. Books. (Topping & Company is one of the best bookshops we've ever visited. Packed with good books, beautifully laid out, and a fine pot of tea for customers who are clearly going to be in there for a while.)

[The Circus]

We've just had a few days strengthening our leg muscles with plenty of urban hill-walking, going from amazing Georgian crescent to amazing Georgian crescent, via the amazing Georgian Circus.

[The Circus - chimney pots]

I read The Sack of Bath and pointed out to Simon the desecrations of the 1970s Bath town-planners, while marvelling at what is left. I was also set to read Northanger Abbey for the first time since I yawned my way through it at school when I was 12 (as a newly formed feminist, I couldn't understand why Catherine put up with all the restrictions placed on women, and didn't just break out of polite society and make her own way in the world without kowtowing to the social expectations of her time and milieu).

[The Circus]

But I was completely waylaid by David Hockney thanks to Topping, and Bath which is surrounded by wonderful landscape and boasts some spectacular trees, proved to be a good place to read about Hockney's paintings of and views on trees and landscape. It's a fascinating book  with beautiful illustrations and great colour quality (just found this interesting review by Margaret Drabble). So I only read the first chapter of Northanger Abbey, but can confirm it's a lot better and funnier than I remember.

[enormous trees in the centre of The Circus, dwarfing the guided tour group]

I still have no idea, though, how the sedan chair carriers coped on those hills, ferrying ladies in sprigged muslin gowns up and down between the Pump Room, Upper Rooms, and the high houses of of the high society. I imagine they must all have had legs like Sir Chris Hoy. I'm very thankful we can all just walk now.

 

capital cake: newens/the original maids of honour

10. The Original Maids of Honour

Although we live in an age of cool cafés with sleek surfaces, minimal decor, and delicious but downplayed cake, there is still a place for the unchanged, unapologetically and charmingly chintzy tea room done with panache and very good cakes.

 

The Original Maids of Honour Cafe opposite Kew Gardens is one such place. Named after the historical local speciality - a small custardy, flaky pastry tart (£2.80, worth tasting even though they disappear in two or, at most, three bites) which dates back to King Henry VIII’s time - it is a marvellous cafe-cum-bakery which flaunts its olde worlde style with dark wooden furniture, swirling carpets, rose-patterned curtains, copper kettles, and plenty of knick-knacks.

Customers come here for the showy cakes and treats they might have read about in books starring Billy Bunter and William Brown, or perhaps dreamed of eating while on a strict diet. There are cream buns, cream slices, cream horns, éclairs, fruit tarts, meringues, and plenty of cakes by the slice (coffee and walnut, orange, lemon, chocolate, fruit), all of which are made on the premises and have a good, old-fashioned taste and solidity. The waitresses' black and white uniforms, and the indestructible, sturdy metal Kardomah/Lyon’s Corner House-style tea and coffee pots tell you that this place isn’t planning on change.

The customers are a mixed bunch of locals and tourists, young and old, and it’s all rather genteel and pleasant. It is deservedly popular at weekends when the very good value, ‘full English’ breakfasts are served. The only gripe is with the very steep mark-ups; the price difference on cakes and food sold in the bakery section and served in the cafe may make some visitors think twice before eating in. This is a shame, as there is nowhere else in Kew/Richmond with such character, history, and huge cream buns, but of course you can always take a big box of cakes home with you.

Cake: £2.80 - £3.95 (eat in)

Cup of tea: £2.00 (pot £3.20)

Coffee: £2.00 (pot £3.20)

Afternoon tea: from £6.95 per person for a Cream Tea

288 Kew Road

Surrey

TW9 3DU

Tel: 0208 940 2752

Website: www.theoriginalmaidsofhonour.co.uk

Open: Mon to Fri 9 – 6, Sat and Sun 8.30 – 6

And a slice of culture: the cafe is opposite Kew Gardens. It is not far from Tikki, and is pretty close to London Welsh rugby ground in one direction and Kew Bridge Steam Museum in the other. Richmond, with its park, riverside, cinemas, theatre, and Virginia Woolf connections, is a short bus ride away.

 

phoebecakes

When you get to my age and someone calls you 'babycakes', it's bound to make you laugh, even though you know it comes with a smattering of teenage irony. Especially in a text from Alice or Phoebe saying something like 'thanks, babycakes'  or 'see you later, babycakes'. The first time I received a babycakes text, I did the classic Travis Bickle 'you talkin' to me?' reply as it's it not a term that is commonly used in messages to mums. Now, I love it.

So there was only one possible title for this post. 

Happy birthday, Phoebecakes.

[Cake made by Phoebe, whirly candles from Lola's in Topshop]

google gugel

My first ever Kugelhopf. Or Gugelhopf. Or Kougelhopf. Or Gouglof. Or any number of regional German, Austrian, and French variations. I'm calling it a Googlegugelhopf as I found a basic recipe on the internet, compared it to a couple more in my recipe books, and  made what I hoped would be a reasonably authentic version.

It's a cake-bread in which yeast is the raising agent, but due to plenty of butter, sugar and eggs, it tastes more cakey than bready. It's absolutely delicious, and has a lovely texture - not as dry as some of the shop/cafe Kugelgooglegugelhopfs I've eaten in Germany and France. It also has a subtle but distinctive flavour that comes from raisins soaked in brandy (kirsch is also an option) - it's amazing just how much difference 125g/4oz of alcoholic dried fruit can make.

It's baked in a traditional 'gugel' tin (these days we generally call them Bundt tins) and the icing sugar is crucial in enhancing the ridges and swirls as well as the taste. This first attempt may be blessed with beginner's luck, so I'll make sure I eat plenty of it, just in case. (Simon is in New York at the moment so can't help.)

[There wasn't much light in the house when I came to take a photograph, so I took it outside and found there was just enough low, pale, cake-flattering light.] 

tawny

[8.45 today]

Tawny, butterscotch, bronze, sepia, caramel, copper, rust, and bronze are the colours of the moment. Not just on the trees and in the landscape, but in garden fashion. I'm probably a few seasons behind, but I am seeing coppery-tawny tulips for sale and, according to the gardening pages, everyone who's anyone in the gardening world seems to be planting T. 'Cairo', T. 'Brown Sugar', and T. 'Burnished Bronze' this year.

So it is with great satisfaction that I picked some truly tawny flowers this morning - I never knew I could be 'on trend', as they say. The autumnal sunflowers are getting smaller and smaller, but they are very 'now' in their colour. And hidden away, tangled up in other plants, I found a long length of trailing nasturtiums with the most toffee-coloured petals I have ever seen. As usual, I have no idea of their name because I was so late with seeds (again) that I just opened all the packets I hadn't sown, mixed them up in a bowl, and broadcast them around the garden. The nasturtiums (definitely not 'Tip Top Mahognay' or 'Mahogany Jewel', I know that much) are distinctly brown and plain in the shade, but burst into a fiery copper when the sun catches them.

I'm taken by the fact that these colours are different, they may just be a passing fad. Although there have always been bronze and copper chrysanths, I'm not convinced these colours will be lastingly popular on spring and summer flowers. (It's only recently that the trend was for deep purple, blackish plum, and aubergine shades which were great novelties at first, but can now appear rather funereal when planted too enthusiastically.)

But for today, tawny can be my favourite colour.

footnotes

[books downstairs - very sorted]

The title is ironic, especially after my recent thoughts on the complexities of academic writing. I always think that one of the great joys of blogs (as both a reader and a writer) is that you don't need abstracts, footnotes, bibliographies, and appendices. (I'm wondering if anyone knows of any good blogs that are literary, written from an academic standpoint, but without the impenetrable vocabulary and extra bits and pieces?)

:: A couple of postscripts on my 'What the Dickens' posts. Chloe of Oxslip kindly sent me a link to the Penguin Classics Charles Dickens readathon, which sounds like a literary decathlon with a pentathlon, marathon, and heptathlon thrown in for good measure. I really hope they make it to the last page of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. What's refreshing about the readathon posts so far, is that the responses are so enthusiastic and natural - no hint of posturing or point-scoring, just honest-to-goodness gut reactions.

:: Just when I was beginning to wonder if anyone would get round to it, Philip Dodd on Radio 3's excellent Night Waves (anything with Matthew Sweet, who often presents this, is worth listening to), cheered me up enormously by asking Claire Tomalin some of the questions that have been floating around in my mind. Thank goodness someone has at last broached the question of the dark side.

:: I wrote and published a post about nostalgia last week, prompted by seeing Midnight in Paris, a film about the pleasures and pitfalls of nostalgia. However, when I was in the middle of re-editing it, I pressed 'cut' instead of 'copy', and lost seven-eighths of the post. In the spirit of the subject, I decided not to regret something that was now in the past. But I was still cross with myself. The film is pure escapism - Paris never looked lovelier etc etc - but it's also funny and clever, and a lot more nuanced and layered than more recent WA films. WA also manages to remain ambivalent about nostalgia, rather than wallowing in it.

:: Downton Abbey has gone barmy. By the end of last night's episode, I was beginning to expect French and Saunders or Victoria Wood and Julie Walters (or all four) to wander in and send the whole thing up. It might have been better if they had.

:: And I'm still wondering why chefs feel they have to pose for photographs like this.

 

 

readability

[bookshelves in the hall - awaiting sorting]

Another year, another Booker brouhaha. Another fuss about who wins, who judges, who argues with whom. But who cares? It's a well known fact that most of the novels on the list will only sell a few hundred copies - maybe more if they make the short list - and that only the winner will ever sell in its thousands. This year, however, the proceedings have been enlivened by a debate about 'readability' and whether it is compatible with literary excellence.

Well, of course it is. As if impenetrability, convolution, obfuscation, and verbal posturing could ever trump clarity, fluency, subtlety, and deft use of language (not to mention those old-fashioned virtues of plot and characterisation). I don't subscribe the Clever, Clever School of Novel-Writing, but I do like a really clever novel, one that demands and holds my attention, that opens up a new world and a new way of thinking and seeing. It doesn't have to be over-researched (you can see where the joins are when a novelist won't let go of hard-earned historical details) or under-written (so many modern novels are cool to the point of frigidity), but anything that has come from a fertile, flexible imagination and is written in a continuous stream of creativity will always be more readable than a piece of prose that tries too hard.

I think some on the Booker panel are confusing readability with low-brow. It's as if anything that is easy can't have any artisitic or literary merit. It's an opinion that is influenced by academic criticism which is couched in language that is used to impress but not elucidate. It must be much harder to write a really convincing and illuminating piece of serious literary criticism in simple, direct language, which is why we have this mad lexicon, most of which no-one truly understands (hermeneutics, exegesis, diagesis, mimesis all have everyday substitutes).

It has become a sign of weakness to admit to liking readable books. We are supposed to put away our childish, Enid Blyton reading habits, and move away from books that suck us in on the first page and hold us in their thrall until we reach the last. Yet there are plenty of readable books that are also 'hard' and 'difficult' which succeed in doing this. And there are many wonderful, not-so-difficult books that are the epitome of readability, yet I would never class them as less worthy or less excellent, simply because the prose flows and we are swept along by it.

People really do care about readability. They also care about good books, and want to read the best of contemporary fiction. But we are being short-changed by literary snobs who think they know better and encourage this elitist nonsense. Give me a Dorothy Whipple or an Elizabeth Taylor any day while I wait for more literary prize-winners to become readable.

what the dickens ii

[supermarket roses in the kitchen]

Just so you know, I am standing on a metaphorical soapbox as I write this.

Last night I went to hear Claire Tomalin talk about Dickens, the subject of her latest biography. The event (part of a publicity tour for the book) was at the Southbank Centre which, it turns out, is quite the place to be on a Tuesday evening in October. The place was buzzing, and the room in which the talk was held was full; I admit I was quite surprised to see how many people had turned out for Dickens, as I have often wondered just how many people read the novels these days. It seems to me that there is a great appetite for the TV and films versions - none of which I can ever watch with much enjoyment as nothing ever comes close to the characters and scenes Dickens conjures up in your imagination. It's ironic really, that I find they are all too odd and exaggerated to work well on screen, and yet the Quilps and Squeers and Mrs Jellybys and Gamps are all brilliantly recognisable in the theatre of the mind.

But this was a talk about Dickens' life and it made me realise again that it's old, well-trodden ground which doesn't always yield satisfying or conclusive results. I felt distinctly uneasy when the discussion with questions from the audience turned to unknowable subjects such as Dickens' view of his mother, his sexual relations, his levels of self-awareness. It was uncomfortable listening to the conjectures about the private life of someone who died 140 years ago (I get even more disenchanted with such discussions when the subject is Shakespeare). It's strange that we want to have the answers because these are things we feel we ought to know in order to make a better judgement. Goodness knows what we would find out if Dickens were alive today;  the public sense of entitlement to knowledge about a writer's private life exceeds all reasonable boundaries and I doubt he would emerge smelling of roses, no matter how well-behaved he was in reality.

But does all that really matter? When I was studying English literature at school, it was a period when the academic fashion was to disregard the life and concentrate on the work. So we never knew anything about DH Lawrence's torrid love life, we just about knew of Keats' consumption, the link between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was never mentioned, and we were never even told that Thom Gunn was gay. I think maybe the pendulum had swung too far at that time as I agree some background knowledge is useful, but I still feel it's the work that counts. Even Claire Tomalin admitted that she knew the media would concentrate on Dickens' domestic arrangements (yawn) at the expense of the whole picture, and had prepared herself for the inevitable questions.

I also think all this focus on the life is a way of deflecting attention from difficult, demanding books which contain so much more that is of relevance today than the biography (unless someone suddenly comes up with a cache of letters or a hidden manuscript, the story is pretty much closed). The books are vast, fluid, far-seeing, amazingly relevant yet at the same time utterly Victorian, and they deserve a good, new discussion for our times.

And now I'm jumping down off my soapbox and going to put the kettle on. (Unlike Mrs Gamp, I don't keep spirits in my tea pot, though.)

[Dickens is kept on the bookshelves in the kitchen, with many of my 'best' books on baking and cooking, Antarctic exploration, the Pre-Raphaelites, Gee's Bend quilts, and Stanley Spencer. A heady mix.]

 

 

north and south

One of the things I like most about living in the south of England is the sunshine. I honestly don't think Keats could have written his Ode to Autumn in Stockport (where I come from). There's not much in the way of 'maturing sun', 'warm days', and 'rosy hues' up there at this time of year, but I think poets with a bleaker vision such as TS Eliot and Larkin would have had a field day with the place. It's grey and damp - so damp that it was ideal for making the felt hats for which Stockport was once famous. (It now has a hat museum.)

It's hard to believe that 200 miles can make such a difference. But anyone who has driven north up the M6 will know that as soon as you get to Staffordshire it always starts raining, the temperature drops, and you need to put on (extra) socks and a cardigan, and find an umbrella  in preparation for your arrival. The only time I can remember Stockport in full sun was the summer of 1976, but then the whole of the country was basking that summer.

When I moved down here, I was amazed by the difference in climate. It's just warmer and sunnier, and although we get a good ration of greyness, it's nothing like the seemingly immovable, leaden greyness of Stockport. The last few days bear out why I like the cissy south so much: we have long beams of golden light that show up the spiders' webs and dancing dust, an explosion of nasturtiums and late roses, deep purple grapes and fiery red chillis, and a true feeling of autmnal mellowness.

I'm not saying there aren't many good things about the north; the sense of humour, the brisk, no-nonsense attitude, the fish and chips, the way everyone says 'laff' and does it a lot, the art galleries and theatres, the hills and valleys, are all part of my growing-up years. But these days I'm a southern softie when it comes to the weather, and as I sit here in the Keatsian sun with late flowers outside in the garden, I know I'm still northern in my soul but very southern in my skin.

[I should have said yesterday that the reason the quilt was in a cupboard is that my publishers ask me to keep projects from books in good order for at least a year after publication so that they can be used for events or loaned out to shops and exhibitions. Otherwise, as one of my 'best' quilts (in other words, favourite) it would have been out and about a long time ago.]

cover model

Do you remember when you were little, how you used to have 'best' things? Not best as in 'Sunday best' or 'best shoes', but as in 'best' doll, 'best' troll, 'best' sweet, 'best' colouring pencil. In other words, the one you liked most, the one that felt special and had to be kept in a safe place. The Hydrangea Quilt is still one of my 'best' quilts and I keep in a cupboard, though goodness why. When I got it out yesterday to photograph it on the autumnal afternoon sun, I realised that the problem with anything 'bes't, is that you tend not to enjoy it as much as you should because you are so worried about spoiling it.

This is the quilt on the front cover of The Gentle Art of Quilt-Making. It was inspired by the colours of hydrangeas - all shades of pink and plum and turquoise and inky blue - as seen in profusion in Normandy and Brittany, and in single specimens in suburban gardens in the UK. 

It was a chance to play with a different colour scheme and to use some Japanese fabrics which were just outside the usual shades of blue. I also used some very large designs which cut up brilliantly; one Philip Jacobs' floral design gave three different types of squares when cut fussily.

I'm delighted that the quilt is featured in issue 7 of the incredibly successful Mollie Makes magazine in a photo I took at the amazing location we used for many of the quilts in the book. I am so impressed with this publication; it would definitely have been my 'best' magazine (on a par with Jackie and later Petticoat) if only it had been out in those days.

So the quilt is now out of the the cupboard, and is staying out where I can see it. After all, it's the only superstar cover and magazine model quilt we have, so I might as well flaunt it.  And it won't be used just for 'best'.