The Jane Campion interview
We're in a restaurant eating oysters. Jane Campion says to me, 'What I am trying to do is to keep space for the unknown.'
Tall, healthy, with great presence, and a solid hold on reality, Jane Campion is a believer in energetic emptiness - maybe it's her yoga training that keeps her mind as well as her body supple.
'The unknown is frightening. If you spend all your time in front of the TV or on the computer, you can avoid your mind.'
»
Continue reading "The Jane Campion interview"
about Anne Lister
'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.'
When Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 it is certain that Anne Lister's reading of that opening sentence would have included herself - and not as the wife
Anne Lister loved women. Born in 1791 to a military family, she later inherited Shibden Hall, two miles outside of Halifax, and knew that she needed a wife.
»
Continue reading "about Anne Lister"
Peter Ackroyd - Thames: Sacred River (FT Book Review)
I have lived on the Thames twice - once in London in a warehouse on Shad Thames, before that place had any of its elegant or edible associations. There were no restaurants and no apartments, only the river, from which, at various times, I hauled Roman tessera and Elizabethan clay pipes. My second river-run was in Oxfordshire, on the tributary the Windrush, abundant with delicious but scary foreign crayfish, chucked in and left to multiply, so the story goes, by a careless chef, somewhere near Bray.
»
Continue reading "Peter Ackroyd - Thames: Sacred River (FT Book Review)"
Glyndebourne (The Independent)
Glyndebourne is more than a night at the opera; it is music for the rest of your life.
Forget fancy. Forget toffs. Forget silk bow-ties and Jimmy Choos; you'll want to wear those anyway, probably in the same outfit, but if you prefer Goth leather or something you sewed for yourself the night before, you won't be made to feel out of place.
»
Continue reading "Glyndebourne (The Independent)"
Food 2 (Daily Mail)
What are you having for supper tonight?
I shall be eating crayfish from the river at the bottom of my garden, served with mayonnaise made with eggs from my own hens. The eggs will do double work in an egg, bean, and tomato salad, with the tomatoes just ripe on their vines, and picked lovely and warm, not supermarket chilled. I'll make a big green salad from my loose leaf lettuces, add a few chopped spring onions, and throw fresh basil and mint and parsley over the lot.
»
Continue reading "Food 2 (Daily Mail)"
Good Housekeeping
It doesn't take a genius to work out that children love to play shop; they never say 'Let's play supermarkets!'
Some kids have never been inside a small old-fashioned grocer or deli, and yet their imaginations tell them to set up a makeshift counter, sell goods on one side, and buy them on the other side. It's so deep within us that science might discover a gene for it.
»
Continue reading "Good Housekeeping"
Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings
In 1995 I had enough money in the bank to buy a studio flat in Notting Hill. I was living in the country, and I thought a fashionable broom cupboard near Paddington Station would be a good idea for London trips.
Some god who enjoys a practical joke must have overheard my thoughts, because the next day a friend in Spitalfields, East London, called me to say that the 1780's house next to hers could be bought for exactly the same price as the dinky Victorian bedsit I was nosing around.
»
Continue reading "Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings"
Food (Daily Mail)
When Napoleon called Britain 'a nation of shopkeepers', he intended it to be an insult, forgetting another of his famous phrases, 'an army marches on its stomach.' John Bull beef proved superior to French boeuf, and Napoleon met his Waterloo. How times have changed in the food wars.
I am passionate about food. I would rather not eat than eat badly. My friends have a joke about how I always take my own cooked sausages and an apple on the plane, but it was when I took my sausages in my Prada handbag to the Bridget Jones premier that they began to worry.
»
Continue reading "Food (Daily Mail)"
Food (Evening Standard)
My parents bought their first (and last) house in 1947. That was the coldest winter of the twentieth century. Mrs Winterson said the snow was as high as her upright piano, and that before my Dad and his pals pushed it indoors, everyone on the street came out for a sing-song and a plate of rationed mince pies.
It was nearly Christmas and the war was over. My Dad, who had been in the D-day landings, was back at work at English Electric. He liked the job because they let him make Christmas tree lights when things were quiet, which was most of the time. He swapped his red and white flashing snowflakes for extra food for their first Christmas together. They shared a rabbit bred on their allotment, stuffed with apples and cooked in cider.
»
Continue reading "Food (Evening Standard)"
Philip Pullman (Harpers & Queen UK)
As I drove through the Oxfordshire countryside to meet Philip Pullman, I was thinking about Satan. There is much of Milton's Lucifer in Pullman's Lord Asriel, and writers tend to attach themselves to their characters, just as humans and their daemons are attached to each other, in the His Dark Materials trilogy. How much of Lord Asriel would I find in Mr Pullman?
First of all I had to find the house. I went into the local post office, where I was courteously given directions, then asked 'Are you from the film company or do you want his autograph?'
»
Continue reading "Philip Pullman (Harpers & Queen UK)"
|
feed
