Or at least of those things, jaded and happy on the 22nd December, that we could remember…
A is for avaaz – giving the good people, the millions of ordinary people, a real voice. A great thing. www.avaaz.org
B is for Barry the Barber – a Geordie in Spitalfields via New York, great haircuts & beard trimming, good chat, good vibes. www.barrythebarber.com
C is for Christmas, still wonderful, longed for, magic, restful and festive in the right measure…
Alexandra Harris tells us about her favourite place, though she struggles to choose just one… Places are a huge source of pleasure in my life: mostly rural, mostly English, not too wild, preferably with signs of the past close to the surface. I know there are people who skim through Thomas Hardy’s descriptions of Wessex in order to get to some plot, but I’m the sort of person who skims through the events in order to get to the descriptions. I think I’m happiest when looking at a view. But how to choose a favourite place? They all have their moods and seasons; recent discoveries can be thrilling while the old haunts do their fair bit of haunting…
Lara Smrtnik
Last weekend we went to Harvest at Alex’s… Initially lured by talk of good food plus talks and demonstrations by the likes of Mark Hix, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jay Rayner and Alys Fowler, we thought Toast would fit in well…
One of our daily internet rituals (one that accompanies our regular checks of facebook, news sites, twitter, google reader… the list goes on) is a visit to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. One of the simplest websites we’ve ever come across, it presents a single new picture of the universe and brief explanation of the picture each day. It has no home page and does not have a particularly handsome design. Yet, unusually for the world wide web, it manages to create a moment of space and perspective each day. A chance to sit and wonder at, to learn about the world (and beyond) without leaving your desk…
Last week we packed our bags and moved to the Wilderness. We arrived on Tuesday, with two vans full of our favourite outdoor things – deckchairs, firebowls, storm lanterns, blankets… – to install ourselves near the lakes of the Cornbury Park Estate, and in the tents of the very first Wilderness Festival. We hefted boxes and carried piles of blankets, attached lanterns to bamboo poles and hung them from trees, arranged deckchairs, put up bunting and washing lines, decorated stages and projection screens, and late at night allowed ourselves a swim in the lake (four girls in matching polka dot swimwear) then warmed ourselves around our very own firebowl…
For those of us based in London our forthcoming trip out of this wild city and into the Oxfordshire countryside will come as a welcome relief. The cause of our exodus has been planned for some time however – Wilderness, a new festival run by the same people as Secret Garden Party, asked if we wanted to join them in their celebration of arts, music and the outdoors, and we saw no reason to refuse…
Jon Day.
Over the hill, through a gap in the trees, Coniston Water spins itself out into the distance: a blue ribbon of water glinting in the spring sunshine. It isn’t the largest or the deepest of England’s lakes, but it might be the most tragic, and from here it feels like the most mysterious…
Jo Craven.
It’s worth noting that foraging isn’t only for those with hedgerows at hand – there are urban foragers who marvel at the finds on Highbury Roundabout or in Richmond Park.
We talk to Alastair Sawday, founder of the Special Places to Stay guidebooks and the new luxury camping website Canopy & Stars, about his childhood spent in trees.
We’ve heard that you liked building inventive tree houses as a young boy… My first ‘tree house’ was actually more of a den – a few planks up in the canopy with a rope ladder for my friends and me to scramble up and down…
Jo Craven.
The last time I remember being as ‘in’ to trees as I find myself right now was a good three decades ago when I was maybe six years old. In those days making leaf pictures or helicoptering sycamore seeds from between finger and thumb were all in a day’s fun. Then as a teenager, I was regularly co-opted into constructing never-ending log piles with my dad – vainly trying to emulate the so-neat ones he’d seen outside Austrian chalets…
