Dr Sally Bayley.

‘Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea’, so begins Henry James’s novel, A Portrait of A Lady. James’s novel begins with tea and ends in cross-cultural despair: a young American woman, Isabel Archer, running back to a tyrannous husband in Rome. Culturally, socially and personally speaking, Isabel fails to translate herself. She lacks any real ceremony and, in turn, any real dignity; instead she resorts to desperate duty. Her order of being, her personal and cultural choreography, is never her own.

And yet, James’s novel begins with a grand sense of ceremony. The implements of tea and its splendid setting come together: on the lawn of an English country-house in the middle of a summer’s afternoon. Tea gathers up character and place and turns it into a story. The language of this unfurling story is exquisite and carefully placed; there is a delicacy to its ceremonial delivery. It begins with an old man with a cup in his hand. The cup is unusually large and of a different pattern from the rest. It is painted in brilliant colours. The man drinks from the cup warily, holding it close to his chin; he turns his face towards the house. James’s language turns the narrative, told through tea, into something exquisite and curious. We long to be part of it. James passes around the cups of his narrative with great care. In his novelistic world we are special guests invited into a special ‘part’ of the afternoon: those hours between five and eight when time stretches into an eternity and life seems filled with infinite possibility.

The interval of tea time is magical and transformative. It is also creative, a time for devising new things. Virginia Woolf wrote her diary just after tea, in the hours between four and six. In those dusky elastic hours leading up (in winter) to twilight, she could write and think more fluidly. Tea gave her permission to reset her creative mind. As a friend of mine reminded me, his household came into a new order whenever anyone made tea. Suddenly, doors opened and people previously scattered – a father and son watching the same television programme in separate rooms – came together. Tea quite literally made a family.

As a ceremony, tea is a great bringer of order. The Japanese tea ceremony, Ocha, is a way of summoning what we might call mindfulness. Here, serving tea is an ordering device, a way of figuring reality. Ocha asks for focus and absorption; it is a careful and subtle dance between utensils and their mover, and there is a finely delineated, aristocratic way of doing things. Tea-guests must have a privileged view of their tea-things, and so the sight-lines of the guests of honour, the Shokyaku, must be sensitively aligned. Guests should be able to see and reach things easily. In the Japanese tradition, the tea-maker becomes a Prime-Mover of the tea universe, a divine dancer. Making tea is equivalent to making the world over again.

Fifteenth century Japan saw the birth of Teaism as a way of making the everyday beautiful. The tea ceremony, with its insistence on careful order, reflects a moral geometry which young children, with their play tea sets, instinctively know. Where you put the milk jug, the saucer and the cup in relation to the cake is as big a question as where you position yourself in relation to others and to the world.

Bombay Beach is a film set apart. Where most documentaries show us events as they really happened, give us facts and carefully sign-posted opinion, Bombay Beach weaves fact with imagination, pure observation with choreographed dance, reality with dreams. And in doing so finds a truth much greater than simple fact.

This is a film about the American Dream. Set in a decrepit 1950s Californian resort town (the Bombay Beach of the title) perched on the shore of a polluted inland sea, it follows Red, CeeJay and Benny – three men, of very different ages, with very different dreams. Red is an ex oil worker who now scrapes a living bootlegging cigarettes, he lives in Slab City, a gathering place for junkies and drop-outs, and wants nothing from life but to be left alone, to be free. CeeJay is a black teenager who has been sent away from LA in fear that he may suffer the same fate as his cousin, and be shot dead by warring youths. Benny – with whom it is impossible not to fall in love – is a child with a loving but alarming family and heavily medicated bi-polar disorder, who wants little more than to be normal, and to get to ride in a fire engine.

Through the lives of these three characters, through her own imaginings of their lives as dance, and with a soundtrack by Beirut’s Zach Condon and Bob Dylan, Director Alma Har’el paints a magical, dream-like picture of freedom, community and beauty in a desolate and hopeless world.

Here is an exclusive clip:

Bombay Beach is showing in cinemas around the country. For more information visit www.bombaybeachfilm.co.uk

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.

D is for, sigh, hopefully, the effectiveness of the Durban accord.

E is for employment. We don’t like self congratulation but occasionally need to reassure ourselves – so, whatever else we do, good or bad, like it or not, we provide jobs for 160 or so people.

F is for fireside. By which we’re looking forward to sitting over the next week or so.

G is for Grayson Perry, a fresh breeze through the art world: profound, funny, unpretentious. Or Gorwydd Caerphilly cheese made by our good friends the Trethowans in Wales. Utterly delicious.

H is for The Harrow and the Harvest, Gillian Welch’s new album. Quiet, serene, gorgeous. And for the Hannah Barry Gallery, doing more and more good work in Peckham and beyond.

I is for good investigative journalism, as in the work of Nick Davies at the Guardian.

J is for Japan, where we spent three wonderful weeks last January; our affection only strengthened by the country’s amazing resilience in the face of real disaster.

K is for The Killing II. Maybe not the most convincing of twists and turns in the plot – but the Scandi Noir atmosphere! The casting! The photography! The knitwear!

L is for Leonardo da Vinci at the National. So crowded but, with patience and gentle use of shoulder and elbow, one can find oneself two feet from some of the world’s greatest paintings – and then the crowd disappears, quietude asserts itself – just you and the painting remain.

M is for Maltby Sreet Market in Bermondsey – a great, quieter alternative to the now overcrowded, over-touristed Borough Market.

N is for the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, generally for its great, under-acknowledged art collection but particularly for its brand new, world-class modern art galleries.

O is for Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots. Bad things have happened – are still happening! We need protest!

P is for PJ Harvey – and particularly for her latest, Let England Shake.

Q is for Quality not Quantity, a precept close to our hearts. : )

R is personal so please excuse us – Rachel and Nat’s wild, wonderful wedding in May. Long live love.

S is for smoked salmon of unbelievable deliciousness from Hansen & Lydersen. Smoked in Stoke Newington where Ole keeps a piano in his smokery.

T is for – of course – Toast. Which, working here, we love – occasionally to the point of exasperation; and now, just before Christmas, to the point of (happy) exhaustion.

U is for the Universe which, we learnt on an In Our Time (BBC) podcast, is 13.7 billion years old. And, between the age 36 and 37 seconds, expanded from being smaller than a proton to being larger than a marble. And has been growing ever since…

V is for Voices Across The World: curated by Orlando Gough, the brilliant composer, at the end of July. Singers from around the world, performance, video art, extreme karaoke – all over the Royal Opera House last July.

W is for Wales, of course. And also for Andrea Arnold’s new, beautifully shot film of Wuthering Heights.

X is for Jamie XX’s remix of Gil Scott-Heron’s (already fad but sadly final) album I’m New Here.

Y is or the great Yohji Yamamoto’ exhibition at the V&A. Wondrous clothes, improbably wrought but functional, elegant, imaginative, technically astonishing, culturally resonant.

Z is for… zzzzzzz. Which is what I’m going to do when I’ve finished this list and knocked off for the year.

A great big thank you to you all, an enormous Merry Christmas – and all very best wishes for 2012.

TOAST xxx

Image: Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin and Child (‘The Madonna Litta’), about 1491-5. © The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. 2011. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets

Alexandra Harris tells us about her favourite place, though she struggles to choose just one…

What and where is your favourite place to be?

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. Here’s my shortlist:

- My garden (which isn’t mine at all), especially when the aquilegias suddenly shoot upwards and burst into flower in May.

- Oxford Botanical Garden, where there’s something new in flower every week of the year.

- Wolfeton House in Dorset, where the gatehouse can be rented from the Landmark Trust.

- Going West on the A35 – not the road itself, obviously, but the sense of moving through that ancient, secretive landscape, with Wareham and Purbeck away to the South and with barrows and tumuli on either side.

- A small corner table in a noisy café with good coffee and all the papers, particularly The Quarter in Liverpool where I wrote most of Romantic Moderns, thanks are owed to everyone there.

- Pulborough Wild Brooks, close to where I grew up in Sussex. That’s the oldest and the strongest allegiance, so that’s the place I’ll choose.

What does it look, feel, sound and smell like there?

The Wild Brooks to the south of Pulborough (and stretching across to Amberley) are part of the flood plain for the River Arun. When the fields flood in winter they become a serene, unknowable expanse, cool and white under grey sky. For most of the year you can walk across the fields and through a complex system of banks and ditches, trying not to disturb the cattle.

Do you go to this place for a particular purpose? What do you do when you are there?

This is where I walk with my father, whenever I’m in Sussex. It’s also where I used to walk with my best friend as a kind of ritual every summer, Easter, and Boxing Day.

There are hundreds of variations on the basic route (my father knows them all), but my favourite begins by the tiny church at Wiggonholt. The name means Wicga’s thicket in Old English, and there’s still a bit of a thicket there, though the path drops down through a lovely open field studded with Ragwort which attracts the moths. This area has been tamed and inhabited for a very long time. There was a Roman villa at Wiggonholt, and several larger ones close by, along the course of Stane Street.

The land is now managed by the RSPB, and you can make detours into the hides, but I’m more a land-watcher than a bird-watcher. I like breaking through from the hedged paths and farmland out onto the bare marshes, and hearing a cow cough in the distance. That sound means peace to me (though I’m quite frightened of cows when they’re standing across my path). A cow coughs in the evening air at the start of Between the Acts; I’m not sure if that novel made me love the sound, or whether the sound drew me into the novel.

What is it about this place that makes you love it so?

It’s the grass as well as the cows, especially in low light which throws into relief the different textures. Rabbit-chewed hummocky ground gives way to the tall grass and reeds along the river. There’s the sense of expansiveness and vast sky which you get in the fens, but here it’s on a more domestic scale. You can look across the plain towards Pulbrough, where the houses climb a little way onto the hill. It’s like the harbour for an inland sea. And there’s that magic time heading homewards in the late afternoon when you see the first few lights coming on.

Photograph by Tristram Biggs, found via Flickr.

Jess Trethowan.

Almost exactly a year has gone by since I wrote the first Diary of a Cheesemaker and so once again, I am sitting, looking at a beautiful autumn-scape of trees on the turn, berries and beautiful sunlight. I can see the cows munching away on the rough ground. It won’t be long before they go inside for the winter months and begin their silage diet, which produces that lovely creamy milk we so value for our Christmas cheeses.

We have had an eventful year at the farm. Kim gave birth to Rufus, the newest generation of cheesemaker. And so the dairy has had to find its feet somewhat as Kim was such a linchpin in the cheese-making and maturation, in talking to customers and organising for the cheese to go out to our buyers.

We also won our first award for Gorwydd Washed Rind. Essentially our classic Gorwydd, but once made, pressed and brined, Maugan washes it with a salt solution once a week, every week for three months. This develops a mould called B-linens that takes on a golden orange colour, a stark contrast to the usual velvety grey of the original Gorwydd. The taste and texture of the washed rind is also distinct – being slightly more pungent in flavour and silkier in texture. The Irish washed-rind cheeses such as Ardrahan, Gubbeen and Milleens have always been held in very high regard so to be placed in amongst some of the most established and beautiful of these cheeses means a great deal to us.

Maugan and Kim only make one of these cheeses a week as we struggle to make even enough of our mainstay, Gorwydd Caerphilly. At the moment the only place we are selling the Gorwydd Washed Rind (GWR) is in our Bristol shop, though this has been a great place to sample it and gauge regular customers’ reactions. Perhaps in the New Year we’ll begin to make some more, once the Christmas rush is over…

The other opportunity we get to see what people think of our cheese (and of the other cheeses we sell in our shop) is at the tastings we hold throughout the year. These take many different forms and ‘pop up’ in a great many inspiring venues. This year, we’ve run them in a beautiful church, a wine cellar, a cookery school, on a boat and in the Bath Toast shop!

Our next event, Autumn Cheese School, is going to be in a vintage marquee and a cider barn in an orchard at the foot of a wonderful Somerset walled garden. Cheese School brings together cheese lovers and cheesemakers, brewers, bakers, wine experts and, in this case, apple experts too. We spend a whole day, tasting, talking, learning, eating, drinking and having fun. It is about reminding people where real food comes from, how it’s made, and by who. It is also about giving people the confidence and the tools to taste and understand flavours and textures in a way they may not have done before.

The Walled Garden is a magical place, with a restaurant run by The Ethicurean, a group of extraordinarily talented people. We love the fact that we will be surrounded by produce and, most particularly, by apples. Most of the apples will have been picked and pressed by the end of October, but their fragrance will linger in the cider barn, where we’ll be demonstrating how cheese can be made at home in the kitchen. We’ll also spend a lot of time looking at how the cheese and British apples – such as those grown in the walled garden: Peasgood’s Nonsuch, Laxton’s Epicure, Tom Putt, Ashmead’s Kernel, Blenheim Orange – make the perfect pairing.

These events are important to us because they reassure us that our slow and artisinal product and approach is still highly valued. A great relief in these increasingly technologically-focused times… Join us sometime?

Trethowan’s Dairy also be hosting an evening of cheese and beer tasting with Bermondsey’s brilliant Kernel Brewery at our Notting Hill shop on Thursday 27th October, 6.30 – 9pm. Tickets cost £10 and include all cheese and beer samples. To purchase your ticket please call the shop on 020 7229 8325 (Mon to Sat 10am – 6pm, Sun 11am – 5pm).

Dr Sally Bayley.

When I was eight years old my grandmother taught me how to make tea. It has proved to be one of the most vital lessons of my life. Tea, in my household, was radically inclusive. Making it was my first lesson in socialising… In a house swarming with adults and children, you never made tea just for yourself, it was a community affair and took place in the depths of a large dark brown pot whose bottom seemed limitless. I peered down its deep dark shaft and thought of those striking miners I had heard about on the television and wondered if they were striking for more tea breaks as well as better pay.

Tea, I quickly learnt, had its own proportions and theory of relativity. You couldn’t cheat the pot of its essential start: ‘one per person and one for the pot’. My grandmother was talking in numbers of tea leaves, in numbers of spoonfuls of tea.  It was the essential maths of my childhood and my first lesson in the social art of proportional representation.  Tea is a natural socialist. It works better when shared; it doesn’t do well with prime numbers. Fortunately, I came from a large family where tea was drunk like water. The brown teapot was our version of the Victorian hearth: a source of warmth and a symbolic centre. Tea burned away in the corner of the kitchen, next to the electric kettle, generating its own warmth. In the winter I held the tea pot as young girls now hold hand-warmers. It was a comfort blanket, a transitional object, and it was the primary relationship between me and my grandmother. Tea crossed the generational gap as I was later to learn it crossed several others.

Marcel Proust associated tea drinking with the fluid pour of memory. Tea and a madeleine cake was the sensual stimulus that prompted the words and images of the past to come back. At the heart of Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is the delicate ritual of dipping cake into a cup of tea and watching it dissolve. The disintegrating cake suggests the layers of the past melting away as Proust’s narrator reaches back to gather up – or perhaps sip up – his past. In Proust’s novel, tea is a way of bridging the gap between past and present. Tea, in other words, is a reassuring and abiding present.  Tea is always there.

In my childhood home, tea was also a cross-generational conversation; a conversation turned into a social ritual. By making tea I learnt good manners. As my grandmother reminded me, you always thought of others before yourself. You might put the kettle on out of habit, but it was a way of starting a conversation; of reaching out. Tea was the household habit that prompted the question, ‘Fancy a cuppa?’ It was a primary social question and an induction into good manners.

Tea is also an essential leveller of difference. It can be a great social common denominator even in the most extraordinary circumstances. Over tea and cake, Lewis Carroll’s Alice learns an important lesson in how to conduct herself in the face of the most unsettling eccentricity. Carroll’s Mad Hatter’s tea party is an exercise in how to remain civil even when faced with the oddest of behaviours, the most unpredictable of responses. One can still pour tea and pass the cake. In Alice in Wonderland, tea is the only language Alice can really understand. It is what connects her to the real world above, before she fell down the rabbit hole. It is a form of social continuum. Tea is all the recognisable manners and social codes she can find in Wonderland.

‘Make sure the water is boiling’ my Grandmother said, and warm the pot first. Making tea is a methodical and careful process. It can’t be rushed. There are stages or steps before you reach that epiphanic moment of pouring what you hope is the perfect blend:  a dark golden colour about as dark as a light ale. The first pour is like shaking hands with a new acquaintance. You mustn’t be nervous; just remember your manners and keep a strong sense of occasion.

Returned from the seemingly never-ending school holidays, our Englishwoman finds respite from New York City in regular inter-state trips away.

It is largely blamed on the tradition of harvest days but the twelve-week (or more) summer holiday enjoyed by children throughout New York reaps nothing but havoc, headaches and ultimately feral children. In my mind it has more to do with keeping the lucrative Summer Camp business afloat, not to mention keeping those taxes down as few people want to be paying over the odds for other children’s education. One thing I can be sure of is that we will have moved back to the UK before these horrific holidays have been brought in line with the rest of the world.

We (child and myself) are fortunate enough to be in a position to ride out most of the summer humidity back in Europe. This year we managed to tour for nine weeks and I filled my spare suitcase with plenty of treasure both of the edible and inanimate kind to ease me back into New York life. We then return to spend the bulk of August in New York and were in town for both the recent earthquake and the fizzled out hurricane. Last year was more dramatic as we witnessed a tornado that whirled down our very street, tossing the garden chairs into a neighbour’s yard and hurling a branch through my son’s bedroom window. As I said, the summer holidays are chaotic.

The final weeks of August leading to Labour Day in early September (a hazy mirage signifying the return to school and life as we once new it) are made bearable with the thought of weekends away, munching my way through the boxes of French Fancies I have brought back from the U.K. and reading the 8 copies of The Lady which have backed up in my absence.

On moving here one thing I was excited about was touring these States. I love few things more than packing a small suitcase for a three or four night trip. The taxi journey to the airport is generally the most stressful part of the trip, closely followed by the taxi journey from the airport back home. On a recent trip to Newark airport we were collected at 5.15am. Having piled in the luggage and booster seat we then re-stated where we were going (having already done so at the time of booking) the driver set off. At the first set of traffic lights he turned round and said he did not know the way and would drive us to his brother’s house who would probably know. We favoured being deposited back at the cab headquarters where waited for another car to arrive whilst the clock ticked far slower than our hearts. The journey from the airport back home is as much of a puzzle and I have now vowed to learn the route myself. Coming back this summer I was taken on a tour of parts of Brooklyn I had not seen in my four and a half years here. The cost of this added treat at 1am U.K time was astronomical and not appreciated.

Our first stateside trip was booked as we faced our first long winter here. I had read of a little beach house south of St Augustine in Florida that was owned by a branch of the Mellon family. It was to offer a little interruption to the long, cold spell ahead. We flew south to Orlando and picked up our open top car. Freedom and warmth. The beach house was cosy and vintage in décor: unravelling wicker furniture, rag rugs and patchwork quilts. It was quirky right down to the little pet gecko that popped out of the bath overflow to peak at you. The fear those peeping eyes wrought meant that baths had to be taken in pairs! The house came complete with a lookout on the roof where we took breakfast and lunch. There was little to look out at except the endless empty beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The trip was a great success with the exception of the very cold weather for which we were not dressed nor the house heated (emergency parcel from Toast would have been gratefully received) for the last two days and notably nights. All three of us huddled in bed together to keep warm. We have had interrupted nights ever since. This was three and a half years ago and a pivotal moment marking the down turn in my quota of beauty sleep.

As a young girl I had coveted a copy of the National Geographic showing glorious photographs of the grand houses of the Battery in Charleston. Charleston had been top of my US visit list since time began. We paid our respects during the month of May when the Gardenias were in full bloom and the heat was tolerable. It was the search for accommodation that proved rather perplexing. It was at this point that I realised the reverence or maybe prissiness that surrounds antiques in this country. It also confirmed the misconception that the US is universally child friendly. The hotels I tried to book were in the fabulous Charleston houses complete with authentic antiques. As it turned out none of these were willing to accommodate a three-year-old boy who, as I explained, was perfectly house-trained and was already living amongst antiques, soft furnishings and paintings. But I was unable to guarantee that he would not touch the Grand Piano and we found ourselves in the centrally located Marriot with roof top swimming pool and car park. Both of which, as it turned, out were worth their weight in gold.

In any case there was barely a moment to spend amongst the fitted wardrobes and coordinating fireproof fabrics of our room. Charleston offers so many pleasures to a lover of architecture and interiors, not to mention history. The ghostly Drayton Hall (above), the charms of the Joseph Manigault and Nathaniel Russell Houses. And for the more complete picture with the slave quarters intact and on view the Aiken Rhett House. I was in house museum heaven – something which is sorely lacking in NYC.

I had imagined we would also pop to Savannah whilst in Charleston. I soon realised that the distances in the United States never allow you to just pop. What looks like a short drive on the map inevitably turns out to be a four-hour journey. Savannah still awaits and I hope with a six year old who now takes piano lessons we may be looked on more kindly.

Virginia truly stole my heart. We flew (a lovely short European-style one-hour flight) to Richmond and then drove to our hotel in the countryside to the north of the State capital.  It was the end of August and a little steamy but still the colours were vibrant greens.

On the agenda was a visit to Colonial Williamsburg. A University town, this is the beautifully restored 18^th Century former Capital of Virginia. It is on the edge of being a living theme park with everybody period clad, from fife and drummer soldiers to auctioneers. Thomas Jefferson even holds a daily talk at the Museum. The absolute gem in Williamsburg is Bassett Hall. This very unassuming frame house was the home of John D Rockefeller Jr and his wife Abby. It was their efforts, enthusiasm and money that preserved Williamsburg as it is today, a project that started in the 1920′s. Abby Rockefeller was an avid collector of folk art and a truly sensitive decorator with a keen eye for understated beauty and comfort. A tour of this enchanting house is what you need before embarking on a quick whizz around the town. Once you have admired those fabulous paint colours and pretty gardens you have got the gist.

We also briefly stopped by Jamestown and then took the ferry across the majestic James River over to Scotland. Such reassuring names! The banks of this wonderfully wide river are a scattered with splendid Plantation Houses. By now a pretty circumspect tourist, and not at all interested in too many guided tours especially when the guide is dressed in crinoline, we opted for Brandon which, centuries on, is still an operating farm. The house was deserted and the car park empty. With the last remaining information pamphlet in my hand we made our own way through the beautifully laid gardens leading down to the river. Quite breathtaking. The Palladian-style house was supposedly designed by Thomas Jefferson. To whom we would make a pilgrimage the following day.

Jefferson’s Monticello (above) is picture perfect. Perched, as the name suggests, on a mountain overlooking Charlottesville and the University of Virginia (which Jefferson both founded and designed). The air was clean and the view remarkable. The house itself is a testament to Mr. Jefferson’s brilliance, whatever his misdemeanours may have been. It is wonderfully light and airy, yet still small and rather cosy. It is delightfully laid out internally using as much common sense as appreciation for the aesthetic. I should gladly return.

One epic flight, during which time I could have travelled all the way to London, took me instead to visit Los Angeles (twice now!). I appreciate L.A. for the clear, luminous quality of the light. Also the people do seem more friendly and relaxed than in N.Y. Due to my husband’s work commitments my boy and I were left to roam by day. L.A. without a car can be challenging, but there is a bus stop in Beverly Hills at which my boy and I waited for the long bendy bus to Santa Monica. We certainly raised a few eyebrows stepping aboard.

We were heading to the Annenberg Community Beach Club. We were the only ones on the bus who were, and without doubt the only people ever to get there by bus and the ensuing twenty-minute walk. This club is open to daily ticket holders and lies on Santa Monica beach in the grounds of the destroyed mansion of Marion Davies (mistress of James Randolph Hearst). All that remains is the swimming pool and a guest-house. The historic pool has obviously a million tales to tell. We spent a very pleasant day and I was able to enjoy a guided tour of the guest-house, designed by the architect Julia Morgan, thanks to a packet of Skittles a fellow party member gave to the small boy.

With a car a trip to the nearby city of Pasadena is an absolute must. Here you will find the renowned Huntington Garden and Galleries. So much of the best of Europe is to be found here; rooms filled with paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough and so forth. The Norton Simon museum is also a must, its rooms filled with Degas bronzes amongst so many other fabulous things that it is difficult not to be blasé. My little boy has now pretty much run out of fingers to count the number of fourteen-year-old Degas dancer bronzes he has seen; but here he spotted her naked as well as in a tutu.

Finally in Pasadena the magnificent Gamble House, built in 1908 for the family of Procter and Gamble wealth in the American Arts and Crafts style (a fusion of Asian and Alpine in this instance), should not be missed. A contemporary clad tour guide awaits at the elaborate Tree of Life Tiffany stained glass front doors. We are told this is to avoid anybody knocking on it. It seems you cannot take common sense for granted here. In all house museums you are actively encouraged to hold on to the staircase handrail – in this house it was well worth it just to feel that wonderful piece of wood that steps up with each tread. It is left to your own common sense to breathe and move your eyeballs; everything else is absolutely not allowed and spelled out at length.

The opportunity to travel and explore has been a veritable perk of being Stateside. It is always a relief to venture out of New York City and should be done regularly on doctor’s orders. That New York is representative of the US at large is an easy mistake to make. It is a relief to find that it is not and that NYC is in a category all by itself.

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.

So on Tuesday night we arrived late at night on site (a little delayed by the ’69 VW breaking down on the M4) and were greeted by the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside at Alex James’ farm.

We teamed up with Rocket to produce the Chef’s Table – a gorgeous place to dine and try a three course menu developed by Yotam Ottolenghi, Stevie Parle, Emily Watkins and Valentine Warner. The food was enjoyed in the surroundings of the Toast restaurant, with our house&home products providing a brilliant backdrop to such a fine meal. We ranged beeswax candles across the tables, planted a tin bath with herbs and marigolds, hung a curtain of cutlery against one wall, strung twig chandeliers from the roof and light bulbs from branches of beech trees… Every detail was perfect.

As evening rolled into night we moved to the music stage. Fat Freddy’s Drop being the highlight for the Toast team… hands down. Then afterwards the party moved backstage where Alex and his friends celebrated his wife’s birthday sitting around Toast firebowls wrapped up in our vintage blankets.

We even created a little piece of Toast in a boutique bell tent…. Crisp cotton sheets, blankets and soft reindeer skin to bury beneath, warm rugs underfoot, and storytelling under the light of a storm lantern…

The festival had a really laid back feel and there was lots to see over the weekend. Daylesford ran a cooking school, Charlie and Lola were there to entertain the kids, and there was fun fair that all could enjoy. It felt like a great village fete, only better!

So, next year, will Toast be at Harvest? With such wonderful food in such great surroundings, I do hope so. Do you?

Photographs by Jamie Stoker.