jane brocket

25

This is why I am glad I married Simon.

I thought I was buying 25 'Mount Hood' daffodil bulbs. But by mistake I went on the wrong page for that variety and bought 25 kilos. I didn't realise what I'd done until a huge sack of bulbs arrived. When, feeling pretty stupid, I phoned to tell Simon, he didn't call me an idiot, or say that I shouldn't expect him to help me plant them, or that I should send them back. No, he just laughed and laughed, and said that it looks as though we'll be having lots of daffodils next spring. 

Next year we will have been married for 25 years. It won't be our silver anniversary, it will be our daffodil anniversary. 

busy daisies

My 'busy daisies' which are not lazy as they work quickly to cover fabric. They are stitched with lazy daisy stitch and French knots, and are inspired by the most common-or-garden flower to be found on vintage hand-embroidered tablecloths. I don't make a plan; like self-seeded flowers, they just bloom where they find a space.

They can be found in The Gentle Art of Stitching which will be out any day now.

sweet

It's so obvious. Sweet Tooth is the perfect title for a baking book.* Sweet, in fact, as the cool ones say.

I spoke too soon in my earlier post; Lily Vanilli's book has so many recipes I'd like to bake that I can put my own book back on the shelf. I began this morning with the Pink Grapefruit, Almond and Brown Sugar Teacakes. The slightly bitter, zesty pink grapefruit works beautifully with the sweet frangipane sponge; when eaten while still warm (no-one was prepared to wait), the cakes are sticky and very delicious.

A couple of Sundays ago we stumbled upon Lily's little bakery off Columbia Road and brought home some Bakewell tarts and brownies so we knew we liked her style. Her book not only has the perfect title, it's full of fabulous recipes and takes the adventurous baker a little further  into sweet techniques. The hard candy 'jewels' and sugar shards are top of Phoebe's list, and I want to make the mini-Bakewells so I don't have to wait for a Sunday to eat them.

And the colour of the book cover is just lovely; when it's shut, it looks like a very unusual layer cake.

* so good that there are two new books with this title, but I don't suppose they do clever things with sugar in Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth.

personal space

[where I work]

After almost five months of one teenager or another at home, I can't quite believe that on Monday I won't have any interruptions or distractions or requests or chat during the day, and that I'll be able to occupy my personal space, well, personally.

Tom moved into a flat with friends a week or so ago and has been doing a week's work experience (an 'internship' in CV language), but is now a full-time student again. And, as of yesterday, Alice is at university. She decided to give it another go; as soon as she left the first one, she reapplied for this year and got a place at a university that should suit her far better. She held onto it even though she wasn't sure until quite recently whether she'd be going. She was then offered a room in her first-choice hall of residence, and things just came together. With the minimum fuss she got ready and went off, and now she's a student. She has had a fine gap year, earned a living, proved herself to be extremely well suited to the world of work, gained lots of new skills and friends, and now knows she's very employable. Plus, she saved lots of money so won't be a penniless undergraduate. And now we just wait and see how things go.

In the meantime, we have two newly very clean and tidy bedrooms. You lose a couple of teenagers, but gain some space. And, lest we become too fussy and houseproud, we still have one messy one at home to keep things real.

baking energy

For a while after finishing Vintage Cakes, I suffered definite cake-fatigue. The book contains more than ninety recipes and I made every single cake you see in the book. Each shoot required nine or ten cakes to be ready to photograph (no baking on the day, too much else to do), so the run-up to each one was full of shopping, testing, experimenting, making, icing, decorating, finishing. I've never bought so much butter, sugar and flour in my life, and I got through dozens and dozens of eggs, gallons of cream, catering size bags of icing sugar, many jars of jam, and inordinate amounts of glacé cherries and dried fruit.

There were plenty of disasters (one Angel Food cake which looked great when it came out of the oven sank horribly and ended up looking like a deflated rubber ring), but also plenty of successes and new discoveries. Phoebe was my helper (but she couldn't come to the photshoots because of school), recipe-tester, decorator, and calming influence. She also knew what to do with all the leftover cake. She put it in tins and bags and took it on the coach to school. The coach has about four times as many boys as girls, and the boys were brilliant cake-eaters, although the girls at school also did their fair share to help out. I kept getting messages via Phoebe about who liked what best - and it was often surprising; one boy loved the French madeleines, while Phoebe surprised herself by liking the parsnip cake.

For several months after finishing the book, I craved savoury, salty, spicy food, and couldn't face cakey, spongey treats. But now I'm over the cake-fatigue and I'm starting to think about baking again. Today, I just fancied making something small and tasty so I looked through a few books for ideas, before realising that all the recipes I like are in my own book. So Alice and I made raspberry friands (page 108) - sweet, damp, almondy cakes which will not be going on the coach tomorrow. 

reaching for the sky

When I was ten, I was very ill with life-threatening complications of appendicitis. I had to go back into hospital later that same year to have the appendix removed, but this time I was fit and healthy before the operation and could plan what to take in with me to read afterwards (I had to stay in quite a while). I don't know how I'd come across it, but I took Reach for the Sky (1954), a thick biography of Douglas Bader, an ace fighter pilot in WW2 who spent time in Colditz Castle after several attempts to escape from previous holding places. What fascinated me, though, was the fact that he'd lost both his legs (one above and one below the knee) in a flying accident a few years before the war.

Reach for the Sky is also the name of the 1956 film about Bader which stars Kenneth More as the eponymous hero, but it's nothing like as good, exciting and detailed as the book which enthralled me. The descriptions of the pain of learning to walk again on tin legs put my post-operation pain into proportion, and I enjoyed imagining knotting my bed sheets together to escape from Stockport Infirmary in the same way that Bader tried to escape from a German hospital. (The Germans had enormous respect for Bader. When his plane was shot down over France and he had to bail out, he was forced to leave behind one of his legs which was trapped in the cockpit, but the RAF were given safe passage to parachute in a replacement leg for him.)

So when I see my very tall sunflowers growing upwards, the phrase 'reach for the sky' always comes to mind and makes me think of Douglas Bader who didn't let the loss of two legs prevent him from flying. Apparently, he was an intense, competitive, and difficult man (even before the accident) and nothing like the mild-mannered and terribly polite Kenneth More film version. But the real Douglas Bader was an inspiration to me as a ten year old; I can still recall reading the descriptions of his stumps rubbing against the first horrible pair of tin legs as he learned to walk again (he got better prosthetic legs later), and I was astounded by his sheer determination to fly after the accident. So although I left hospital minus an appendix (but I did take it home with me in a jar), I gained a new hero.

(Until a couple of years ago, there was a beautiful pale pink tulip called 'Douglas Bader' and I used to grow it for the connection and because it was lovely. Ironically, it wasn't very tall.  Unfortunately, it's no longer available.)

west dean

Curly details in the room.

Timeless English view from the room.

Portrait of the benefactor as a young man, hanging in the corridor outside the room.

Extravagant staircase: tapestries, oil paintings, animal heads, enormous chandelier - the usual sort of thing you see on your way up and down stairs.

Crochet at West Dean.

I got lucky with my room this time. It had a high ceiling, tall shutters, an enormous fireplace, a gold-framed mirror, and a wardrobe that could hide a family of five. It was on the plush corridor, no doubt where the family or the poshest guests stayed when it belonged to the James family. It was only half the size it once was - it's been divided into two - but it still offers a flavour of country house weekends with roaring fires, billiards, croquet, and walks in the rolling Sussex countryside.

West Dean is a cracking place for a short creative course (the list is extensive - even I fancy blacksmithing and willow-weaving after reading it). There is the house itself, the surreal art, the facilities, the library, the food (you never go longer than a couple of hours without some form of sustenance), the tutors, the space and fresh air outside, and the renowned gardens opposite.

I've just spent a couple of days crocheting with Lucinda Guy who is very nice, and very good at crochet and teaching crochet. As always with West Dean, I have come back full of inspiration and creative energy. And plans to make our staircase a little more exciting.

anna karenina

[my first copy of the book with my favourite cover, a detail of The Major's Wooing (1848) by Fedotov]

I first read Anna Karenina in the back of a Securicor van. The kind that has a driver and second-man in helmets, and an unseen 'backman' inside with a radio and the money, and goes around picking up and dropping off at banks and offices and high street businesses. I was a backman for the summer after I left school and, once I'd got the hang of the phonetic alpahabet and found the emergency siren on-off button, it was actually incredibly boring. Occasionally, if we stopped at a working men's club, the frontmen would put a meat pie in with the boxes of money, and I was once let out of the van to see the biggest vault and largest pile of banknotes in Manchester, but otherwise as long as I knew where we were and what the next stop was, I could doze or read as much as I liked. I chose to read, because the drivers had a nasty habit of waking you up with the siren.

So I read Anna Karenina (the copy above). I'd just done A level Russian and was about to go to university to study Russian. I read it with pure pleasure, and I was swept away. It instantly became my favourite book and, more seriously, informed my personal morality forever. I loved and disliked Anna in equal measure and saw the abandonment of her child as her primary sin. I disliked Karenin but admired his goodness. I saw Vronsky as nothing but trouble, and I wanted to live happily like Kitty and Levin but without the backbreaking scything. I found it hard to condemn anyone outright, and was as conflicted as Tolstoy about the rights and wrongs of the main characters' actions, but deep down I decided the passion was too destructive to be worth it. 

Three years later, I read the same copy of the book, by now covered Blue Peter-style in sticky back plastic, in India. This was after three years' immersion in the Russian classics, Russian history and language, Russian/Soviet politics, and being part of a small, oddball department full of enthusiastic lecturers and students. I couldn't take much with me, and I chose Anna Karenina to go in the backpack. I read it on the trains between Delhi and Agra and the beaches of the south, and it gave me just as much pleasure as before and I found a much greater depth this time (though it was very odd to be reading of snowy Moscow in searingly hot temple towns).

[full painting]

So Anna Karenina carries a lot of weight with me. I still think it's one of the best books ever written. I've seen several of the film and TV adaptations but find that the usual treatment reduces the massive scope of the novel into just yet another story of doomed love. I wasn't sure how I'd find the new film, whether Keira Knightley would be able to carry off the title role, and I'd seen some of the mixed reviews.

But I thought it was brilliant. It is clever, creative, visually wonderful and, what no-one has said so far, incredibly Russian. No-one has pointed out the fact that Tom Stoppard is Czech by birth and has translated the work of many Central European playwrights and must, therefore, be well placed to capture the great vitality and energy of Tsarist Russian society. So the film feels and sounds and looks authentic. It also has a great dramatic quality; at times I felt as though I was in a theatre watching a play, something that usually irritates in a film but is impressive here. The lighting is always beautiful, and the costumes, jewellery, and hair are exquisite. Even the ball works (without fail, it's the scene I like least in any period drama, esp. anything from Jane Austen) because Joe Wright doesn't do the usual thing but turns it into something you might see done by Bolshoi Ballet dancers. The only dud note is the casting of Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky, mainly because he is simply too young. Vronsky needs to be older, more dangerous, more worth throwing your life away for. But Keira K was a revelation; she's becoming a seriously good actress now that she's older, and can be controlled and majestic, or energetic, girlish and charming as the scene requires.  

It's quite something for me to disagree with newspaper reviewers by rating a film more highly than they have (if anything, when I don't agree it's usually because I think less of a film), but this Anna Karenina does justice to the spirit of Tolstoy's book and, at the same time, it creates a stunning film-play from the text. I would happily watch it again, just as I would happily read it again.

bella bella

I'm still making quilts, still enjoying looking for and using lovely fabrics. I'm just finishing writing my second quilt book which won't be published for a while yet, and it contains about twenty quilts which have been great fun to make. But I don't have plans to stop making quilts once the book is handed in. Oh no. In fact, I'm as enthusiastic as ever, especially as there are so many beautiful fabrics around. 

I've just bought some of the new Lotta Jansdotter collection, Bella, which is fresh, clean, modern, zingy, simple yet very striking. I love Lotta J's aesthetic; it's the kind of look I feel I should aim for - then I glance around and think 'no chance, far too late'. But that doesn't stop me seeing the amazing number of possiblities in the designs; the collection is very cleverly put together and you really don't need any extra fabrics, except perhaps a plain white to enhance that crisp, airy, Scandinavian feel.

I made a quilt recently with Lotta J's first collection Echo (also from Windham, one of my very favourite fabric companies). That, too, was a revelation to work with as I found it was difficult to go wrong using only her fabrics. But I was amazed at how quickly it went out of stock. Not long after it was launched, I bought enough for a quilt, but when I was looking for more fabric for the back, the selection of designs available was vastly depleted (especially here in the UK). It made me wonder once again why quilting fabric companies insist on letting their best-selling fabrics go out of print after one run, and replacing them six months later with a brand new collection.

I know there might be good economic reasons for this constant emphasis on the new, but I 'm not sure why so many enormously poopular and successful collections are never reprinted. Why not keep the 'classics' in print as book publishers do? Why generate all that creativity and hard work but deny the results the opportunity to sell as well as they deserve to - and would, given the chance? It seems mad not to keep reprinting the bestsellers just as Liberty does with its Tana lawn, Marimekko with its huge poppies, and Sanderson with its cabbage roses (and I don't see William Morris' designs disappearing). If a pattern is good it will appeal for a long time, long after other not so lovely collections have been and gone.

Interestingly, there are some signs that things might be changing. The wonderful 'Flea Market Fancy' collection by Denyse Schmidt is now available again as a legacy reprint, and Westminster Fibers have brought back some of Martha Negley designs in a classic collection. But these are only two out of a huge number of collections that deserve to stay in print. It pains me to think that Lotta J's Echo fabrics are already a thing of the past, and that the same fate awaits her bella Bella collection. And,while I'm at it, could someone please arrange for the much-missed 'Lille' collection by Kaffe Fassett to be reprinted?

 

vintage cakes

[my photo of the shot that's on the book cover]

My book Vintage Cakes is available now. Here and here and here and here, and  in all good bookshops. It's full of tried-and-tested favourites and classics: large cakes, small cakes, cake-tin cakes, elegant cakes, everyday cakes, and celebration cakes (there are over ninety recipes from all over the world). I'm thrilled with it, and hope you like it, too.