Dr Sally Bayley.

Tea shops encourage the telling of intimate things. A tea shop rendezvous automatically creates intimacy and sympathy; over tea and teacakes you are ushered into a feminine world of secrets and confidences. Tea is as much about looking concerned and interested as it is about quenching thirst or having a sit down. Children’s author, Shirley Hughes understood this when she wrote the classic children’s story, Sally’s Secret, in which small girls practise passing the sugar and milk over tea. Tea outside, in the case of Hughes’s charming story, tea at the bottom of the garden, is the beginning of a vital relationship of trust and intimacy between Sally and her next door friend, Rose. Sally and Rose know they like each other because they can make tea together, nicely.

When you go out for tea you have to be nice; certainly this is what your mother would have told you. Only nice people go out for tea. Remembering her Edinburgh childhood, the Scottish writer, Muriel Spark, draws upon the patois of Edinburgh’s Morningside ladies delivering solemn auguries on the weather and marriages in Mcvittie’s tea room on Princes Street where she was taken by her mother after an energetic shop. ‘Niverthelace’, said the respectable Morningside ladies gathering in close across the table, ‘despite what he might say, we know better.’ The Morningside ladies are the equivalent of Macbeth’s witches hovering over their cauldron, chanting and churning and stirring up fate; making a recipe for the future. What they don’t know isn’t worth knowing. Spark’s reminiscence reminds us that tea shops are places for telling those who think they know something, that you know something better. Vital bits of information can be stirred in with the sugar, stories can be told and information gathered.

Mcvittie’s, like the English Lyons Tea Rooms that opened in the eighteenth century, were places where women could gather in public and form company and conversation: tie social knots. In the eighteenth century women had to be chaperoned, but by the twentieth they were going it alone in the microcosmic world of the tea room. The novelist of social manners, Barbara Pym, brilliantly captures the tea room lady sitting alone at her isolated table listening into the intimacies of others: a fly feeding from crumbs. Tea, she tells herself, is cheaper and better for her than alcohol; and in the tearoom she can spot other species of existence, their habits and their markings, their manners and modes of behaviour.

Going out for tea is as much a matter of social anthropology as it is refreshment. Miss Marple visits tea rooms for both and often gains a clue or two. People tell one another things over tea, especially women. She relies upon this fact. Over tea she can learn a great deal of history. Tucked away in the corner by the window, she watches the population of St. Mary Mead pass by. Tea rooms are also viewing stations, cosy observation towers.

At nine o’clock and five o’clock the corner of my local tearoom is filled with the familiar form of a gentleman reader. He always has a book in hand and he always looks up when I pass by. We notice one another. I wonder how much his choice of chair has to do with wanting to be noticed. He reminds me that coffeehouses, the sort frequented by James Boswell (Child’s coffeehouse in the City, the exclusive club for gentleman readers and Parliamentary speakers), no longer exist. Where do men go when they want to read and look at passing ladies? Where can the lonely or distrait find comfort and intimacy outside their front room? Perhaps this gentleman goes to a tea room not to be alone, but to strike up conversation. Perhaps he has something to tell. I should go in one day and pull up a chair at the adjacent table. I should put on my interested look.

On Monday the sun shone so I cycled home slowly on quiet roads, tipping my face to the sky. The evening air was dry, a constant warmth broken only by the breeze. As I reached home, clouds gathered low and dark and the breeze strengthened to a wind – the sunshine was to be short lived. But the brevity of that half hour made it all the sweeter; its rarity investing it with more value, forcing me to pay closer attention, to remember it as clearly as possible.

When short is done well it is all-absorbing, its impact staying with you far longer than its own length might suggest. Short can be punchy and poetic, and the best should be celebrated – a shot of concentrated knowledge, atmosphere, feeling, understanding.

WATCH – IL MONDO PERDUTO, VITTORIO DE SETA

In these ten documentary shorts, Vittorio De Seta chronicled the pre-industrial world of southern Italy in the 1950s, each capturing a way of life – of fishermen, farmers, miners and their communities – in little more than ten minutes. The films are beautiful, shot with careful framing and in colours that only film (as opposed to digital) can achieve. What speaking there is (and there is remarkably little) is in Italian, and there are no subtitles, but no matter – the pictures, music (work songs sung by those being filmed) and ambient sound tell us all we need to know. De Seta was a trained architect from a wealthy family, but he filmed most of these shorts himself, capturing the details of manual labour and peasant-living with intimacy and understanding. You can buy the re-issued films on DVD here, but they can also be found on YouTube (links listed here).

READ – VOICE OF AMERICA, E.C. OSONDU

Short stories can tend to compensate for the lack of room in which to develop character and landscape by over-egging their descriptions, leaving little room for the reader’s own imagination. This is particularly the case when it comes to writing about Africa, a continent that still struggles to escape the blanket of stereotype and expectation that covers it whole. Osondu’s stories somehow by-pass this, addressing his Africa (mostly Nigeria, occasionally Sudan) through the lens of its relationship with America. His writing is unsentimental and funny but tragic too, full of hard truths and distorted dreams. In 2009 Osondu won the Caine Prize for African Writing. This year’s shortlist has just been announced; you can read their short stories here.

LISTEN – THE POETRY ARCHIVE

T.S. Eliot said that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. This is never truer than when it is spoken out loud, even more so when the readers are the poets themselves. In 1999 the then Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and recording engineer Richard Carrington fell to talking about just this. In the knowledge that poetry was originally an oral art form, they decided to dedicate themselves to obtaining, preserving and restoring recordings of poets present and past. And so The Poetry Archive was begun. The site contains readings old and new, short and long but they all have one thing in common – they offer a unique insight into the heart of a poem that only the poet who wrote it could ever provide.

DO – SAY ECHDOE

The Welsh word for ‘the day before yesterday’. Why use four words when you can use just one?

Image: A still from Vittorio De Seta’s Lu Tempu Du Li Pisci Spata, 1954. Watch it here.

Jon Day finds a taste for wild country food.

There is a cottage in the South Downs with a small valley of a garden, sunk below the brows of the surrounding hills. It is right on the wood-pigeon flight path – at dawn and dusk hundreds of birds cruise along the tree line, finding or leaving their roosts in the dense copse behind the orchard at the bottom of the garden; taking off with an explosive rattle of leaves and branches, landing with a series of exhausted coos. In the undergrowth, lords-and-ladies stand proud like fluorescent orange hand grenades jutting through the leaf-litter, startling and incongruous. Behind the copse is a field, and in the field a dynasty of rabbits dig the ground to pieces. The farmer who owns this land is always happy for someone to take a few for the pot.

This time he’s asked a man who owns ferrets to come and flush them out. The ferret man does the job in exchange for a few rabbits. He covers the entrances to the warren with nets before sending his quicksilver charges underground, like pouring brown silk into the earth. We wait. The rabbits burst from their burrows and he pounces on them. He offers me a headless rabbit, its blood scattering from the neck and thudding like dried corn in the dust by my feet.

Rabbits are easy to skin and butcher. Like bananas they seem almost designed for the purpose. The soft down of their bellies succumbs easily to a sharp knife; the offal springs freely from the gap with a flick of the wrist (be sure to retain the kidneys and liver). It is best to do this when the rabbit’s still warm. Keep the skin, which you can tan by scraping, washing and massaging slowly as you sit by a fire.

On the way home I pass a pheasant, dead by the side of the road. I’m sure it wasn’t there when I came this way earlier. I sniff it. It seems fine. I put it in my pocket and cycle off.

‘None but the adepts know what a pheasant is’ wrote Jean Brillant-Savarin in his chemico-gastronomic treatise The Physiology of Taste; Or, a Transcendental Gastronomy, ‘they only can appreciate it.’ Brillant-Savarin felt that most people ate their pheasant when it was far too fresh: ‘It is especially good when the pheasant begins to decompose’ he concludes, ‘an aroma and exciting oil is then produced, like coffee, only produced by torrefaction’.

But the well-hung pheasant has fallen out of fashion. The old stories of people hanging their birds (always by the neck) until the maggots fell freely from their guts seem repugnant to modern sensibilities. Still, I hang my bird for three days before plucking it, gutting it, and putting it in a pie, along with the rabbit. The meat is almost obscenely dark and rich, and complements the rabbit’s lean oiliness. Later, I eat the rabbit’s kidneys on toast, with lots of butter and some wilted nettles.

Painting: ‘Still Life with Pheasant’, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, c1750.

Timothy D’Offay, of Postcard Teas in London, delivers the first in a series of tea tasting notes. This time, the first flush of spring.

The signs of spring for most people are the leaves returning to the trees, daffodils and blossom blooming. For a tea merchant it is the arrival of the Darjeeling first flush tea from the foothills of the Indian Himalayas.

The tea plant is a member of the evergreen camellia family so it never sheds its leaves, but in winter when temperatures drop tea bushes stop producing shoots (or flushing as this new growth is known). In spring, as the weather becomes warmer, young leaves appear packed with the sappy vitality of spring. This new foliage heralds the beginning of the first flush season, which in Darjeeling usually runs from mid-March to early May.

First flush teas tend to be quite light and green which accentuates their spring floral aromas and gentle vegetal flavours, characteristics you might also find in a Chinese green tea. The link is the plants: while most Indian tea (and most black tea) is made from a larger-leafed tea camellia called Assam, the original plants in Darjeeling came from a smaller-leafed Chinese variety. Indeed the background of the Darjeeling area is very cosmopolitan – an amazing mixture of Indian and British influences as well as the Gorkha culture (the majority people in the area) and a sizable Tibetan community too.

If you love Darjeeling tea enough to consider travelling there (definitely worth it), you should try to stay on a tea estate. Goomtee and Makaibari are good choices but if you have the time and the money then Glenburn Tea Estate offers both lots to do and complete tranquillity as well as some of best first flush teas in Darjeeling. Any time from now until the monsoon arrives in June or early July is a good time to visit, as is late September and October.

For those unable to visit this year, there is always a cup of Darjeeling tea to enjoy. To brew a sweet cup of first flush you should use the same temperature of water you would with a Chinese green tea – about 80 or 85˚C. Using boiling water will bring out the astringency in the tea so should be avoided. Good quality first flush teas will also infuse several times if the liquid tea is completely poured off the leaves between infusions.

This year’s first flush is a little late so you’ll find the 2012 first flush with us (and in any good tea shop) later this month (keep an eye out here).

‘Build a boat from a city’s waste, take it to the source of the city’s river – the river without which the city would not exist – and row the boat back.’ This is the Hudson River Project, a film (and enterprise) by Antony Crook and James Bowthorpe that intends to connect, to join the city with the natural world from which it came. Why should the two be seen as separate?

To learn more, and to help fund the film, visit the Hudson River Project website.

The lengthening evenings and prospect of a long Easter weekend leave us unable to think of much else at present than getting out of town and out of doors. There is something about the changing of the clocks, the moving so consciously from one season to another, that re-focuses attention on the world around us. It’s as though the new, expanding light gently makes us aware again of our place in the larger world, shows us what we’ve been doing that is unnecessary and reminds us that the best work is that done with modesty, without distraction and with singular intention. While we re-orient ourselves in this way, here are some other people and things whose simplicity of focus we admire.

READ – BOOKS BY LEONARD KOREN

An architect by training, Leonard Koren also publishes books, consults at large companies on design and marketing, has published magazines and worked on music videos. At first glance he doesn’t seem to have a particular focus to his work – until you read his books. Influenced greatly by Japanese philosophy and design he creates books that hone in so closely on a single subject that they become a world within themselves. Yet still they remain modest, taking each subject addressed back to its barest essentials. Undesigning the Bath is a reaction against overdone luxury interiors; Gardens of Gravel and Sand a meditation on just that (going so far as to exclude distracting rocks from the pictures of perfect gravel gardens). Koren’s defining book though, is Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, it celebrates all that he holds dear – humble aesthetics and beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and unconventional.

WATCH/LISTEN – A SUNDAY IN HELL/SLOW COAST

Cycling is a twice-daily escape for those of us lucky enough to be able to ride to work. Two periods of time in the day where the distractions of technology cannot reach us (unless we are foolish enough to risk accident for the cause of our telephones). But for some cycling becomes an all-encompassing pursuit. Nick Hand spent two summers cycling around the coast of Britain, meeting working people and recording soundslides of them as he went. The result is well worth a listen. Some take their passion for cycling further and spend the spring crossing continents to take part in race after race. A Sunday in Hell is a documentary of perhaps the most dramatic of these races – the Paris-Roubaix challenge, where much of the latter portion of the ride takes place over narrow cobbled tracks – choked with dust or slick with mud, depending on the weather. The 1976 film immerses itself in the atmosphere of the race, looking at it from all angles (the participants, organisers, spectators, a protester and mechanics) with calm observation and beautiful cinematography.

SEE – WIESE, ANNE SCHWALBE

More than anything else this Easter I would like to lie in the grass and allow my mind to wander. By a river perhaps, with friends and family around, good food and drink to hand. Tempting me to this is Anne Schwalbe and her photographs of meadows. The Berlin-based photographer excludes everything from her square frame but the soil, grasses and flowers (and sometimes snow) beneath her feet. The photographs feel richer for this concentration; they are not narrative but immersive and speak of a child-like curiosity for even the smallest patches of ground. Looking at such a small space in such detail somehow allows the mind more freedom, to explore and imagine without restriction, and then to return easily to that which is most important to you, whatever that may be.

Photograph: Wiese III 2009, by Anne Schwalbe

Three recipes full of fruit and spice ready for Easter (or any other time you fancy) from baker brother Tom Herbert, of Hobbs House Bakery.

Hot Cross Buns

Dough

680g strong white flour

a big pinch of sea salt

30g fresh yeast (or 15g of dried)

70g organic golden caster sugar

80g soft butter

15g mixed spice

270ml of warm water

1 organic egg

Fruit

80g sultanas

80g currants

the chopped zest of 1 lemon and 1 orange

Crossing mix

100g strong white flour

a pinch of salt

a pinch of sugar

a knob of butter

100ml water

Bun wash

1 eggcup of boiling water

2 tsp of sugar

1 pinch of mixed spice

Method

Grease and line a high-sided baking tray with grease-proof paper. Weigh all the dough ingredients into a big mixing bowl and stir together with a wooden spoon and firm hand. Once the dough has come together turn onto a flat surface and knead for 15 minutes, until your dough is smooth and vital. Gently work in the fruit and zest then nestle your well-worked dough back into the big mixing bowl. Cover and repose in a warm place until it has doubled in size, or for 30 minutes, whichever is first.

After this, cut the dough in half, then divide and divide again until you have 16 equalish pieces. In the palm of your hand, firmly round the pieces so they stand pert on your baking tray, a finger’s width between them. Again, cover the buns and leave in a toasty place until they have doubled in size: 30, 40, 50 minutes. Heat your over to 210˚C.

Whisk together the piping mix ingredients in a jug, ensuring there are no lumps, and pour into a piping bag. Cross the buns by piping a lattice of the mix across the length and width of the tray. Bake the buns. The very moment they have golden tops and bottoms whip them out and brush with the bun wash.

Serving suggestion: eat while still warm from the oven, smothered in butter and, if you please, marmalade or jam.

Easter Biscuits

Ingredients

100g organic golden caster sugar

100g soft butter

1 organic egg

150g plain flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

2 tbsp milk

a tiny drop of oil of cassia or 1 tsp mixed spice

80g currants

Method

Heat your oven to 200˚C and put greaseproof paper on a big baking tray. Beat the sugar and butter together until soft and fluffy, then add the egg and whip until fully incorporated. Fold in the flour, baking powder and spice. Gently mix the lot together whilst adding the milk (tweak your quota of milk to yield a roll-out-able dough). Lastly, knead in the currants.

On a floured table, roll your dough to about 5mm thick then stamp out your biscuits with a cutter and lay on the tray. Bake until the edges just start to turn golden and they have the tiniest bit of colour underneath (about 12 minutes) – remove immediately. Sprinkle with caster sugar while still hot, then allow to cool.

Simnel Cake

Cake batter

125g soft butter

125g organic soft brown sugar

3 small organic eggs

170g white flour

a big, three fingered pinch each of baking powder and mixed spice

a small pinch of ground cinnamon

1 tbsp golden syrup

1 shot of brandy

150g marzipan

Fruit

125g sultanas

125g currants

125g glacé cherries

the chopped peel of 1 orange and 1 lemon

Decoration

250g marzipan

apricot jam

1 beaten egg

Method

Heat your oven to 150˚C. Grease and line a 7″ round cake tin. Beat the butter and sugar together until soft and fluffy then slowly meld in the eggs by whipping at speed. Once the eggs are fully incorporated, cast the flour, spices, golden syrup and brandy into the mix and beat thoroughly so that the batter you have is lump free. Gradually stir in all the fruit.

Pour half of the mixture into the tin and level it off. Cover this with 150g of marzipan, rolled out to the width of a little finger and cut to fit the tin. Add the remaining cake mix on top, smoothing it down with a slight dip in the middle, allowing for the cake to rise. Bake the cake for an hour and a half, or until a skewer comes out clean when pushed into the centre. Remove the cake from its tin and leave to cool on a wire rack.

Once cool, brush the cake with the apricot jam, then roll out two thirds of the 250g of marzipan and cut to fit the top of the cake. Make 11 faithful apostle balls with the last of the marzipan and set them around the circumference of the cake. Paint with the beaten eggs then singe the top-most bits under the grill or with a blow-torch.

Serving suggestion: eat on its own, with a cup of tea, or with a slice of mild tangy cheese (Gorwydd Caerphilly works very well). If you can’t eat it all at once this cake will last for years!

Photo by Nick Seaton.

A round-up of the best recent posts on the outstanding (inspiring and helpful) interiors blog, Remodelista.

We have long been admirers of Aesop, of their products, philosophy, aesthetic and of their shops – each one of which is designed by a different architect. It seems Remodelista are great fans too, posting about Aesop’s new shop in the Paris Marais back in January. From Paris they moved to Japan, with a series of posts on tea houses (our favourite wasn’t in Japan at all, but the Czech Republic, it was no less lovely for that though) and one on the best Japanese soaking tubs (quite different to our baths – bigger, deeper, more luxurious, and usually made of cypress wood that smells wonderful when filled with steaming hot water). From baths to Bees, and a novel way of using left-over timber to create impromptu hives in disused corners of London, and to the great heights of New York City where they found a surprise garden of grasses (good for Bees again) atop a seven-story office building. Most recently they posted about the wonderful San Cristobál Stables in New Mexico, designed by Luis Barragán. It is the antithesis of English schoolgirl riding stables, full of sunlight, water and colour…

‘Designed by Ciguë, Aesop’s new boutique in the Marais is a minimalist space featuring white concrete walls embedded with rows of metal saucers (repurposed plumbing pipe caps) that hold products in orderly rows. As in all Aesop stores, the space is part laboratory, part art installation…’ Read more here.

‘If one day you find yourself in the Česká Lípa district of the Czech Republic, look for a pine forest. And a calm, dark lake shaped like an “S.” On its grassy shore sits the Black Teahouse.

Built for a family that wanted a peaceful, contemplative spot on the southern edge of a garden, the teahouse, completed last year, is actually the third variation of an unostentatious style that architectsDavid Maštálka and Lenka Křemenová developed after they traveled together to Japan while still students at Prague’s Academy of Art, Architecture and Design. In Japan, they drank tea in traditionalchashitsu and were intrigued by the challenge of how to update the rustic vernacular to create what Křemenová describes as a modern “micro-space, beautiful and cozy and comfortable to stay in for hours.”‘ Read more here.

‘The ofuro, a traditional Japanese soaking tub, is a straight-sided tub deep enough to immerse a human in hot water. Traditional ofuro are made from Hinoki wood, a cypress found only in Japan, prized for its piney scent, anti-bacterial qualities, and longevity.’ Read more here.

‘Even before Marni Majorelle planted a roof garden on top of an unusual seven-story office building in downtown Brooklyn, it was a foregone conclusion the other tenants would use the space as a living laboratory.

“It’s constantly in flux; sometimes people are raising vegetables up there, and there’s even a sauna that’s not complete yet,” says Majorelle, founder of garden design firm Alive Structures, which as a fifth-floor tenant in the Metropolitan Exchange building shares roof rights with an eclectic mix of furniture makers, bio technologists, “green” architects and artists. “That metal structure? Somebody just put that up one day. Every year, the roof takes on a whole new look, and sometimes that look is chaos.”‘ Read more here.

‘When I was introduced to the work of Mexican architect Luis Barragán, I couldn’t understand why anyone would think of modern architecture as a cold discipline.

Looking back on my architecture training, one of my fondest memories was artist Lauretta Vinciarelli’sGraphic Arts class, where she asked a roomful of Columbia undergraduates to render the captivating work of Luis Barragán on paper. Fifty pink Prismacolor pencils and a term later, I was on my way to becoming an architect.’ Read more here.

Teahouse photo via A1Architects. Grass roof photo courtesy of Alive Structures. San Cristobál photo via flickr.

Following Jon Day’s appearance as Country Mouse last month, Thomas Marks now takes to the streets of London as Town Mouse, eagerly watching clocks for the coming of summer.

The clocks change this month, and London shrugs off its dark winter. I have always loved that active verb, ‘change’, since it lets me imagine the clocks flickering into life, adjusting their own mechanisms before they retune the mood of the capital. Out of Mean Time comes the kind light of summer: the hour’s leap forward seems so enigmatic, when I hesitate over it, that it might just as well be some trick of natural magic. Each year, it draws my thoughts down the river to Greenwich, to the meridian line – and to the unfathomable way that time fans out from this city.

You’d think it cause for precision, being the place that the world sets its watch to. And yes, a version of this city scurries to keep up with itself, like an urban white rabbit: making its train, over-timing, flexi-timing, clocking in and clocking off. ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’, bellows T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, reminding us that even our leisure hours are often regulated, even regimented. I think of this when I pass the jagged Olympic countdown clock in Trafalgar Square, ticking off the seconds until the Games begin. Its obsessive accuracy makes it look like it wants to bully time to speed up.

I know no city as dense with clocks as London; not only on stations, hotels, and public buildings, but projecting or protruding from old cafés and pubs, from curiosity shops and, like a black joke, from the funeral parlours we otherwise try not to notice. The more I clock all these everyday clocks, the more outlandish their timings prove to be: many are so wayward that they might as well record imaginary local time-zones, while others have stopped altogether.

On Upper Street alone, I count five clocks telling different stories. The clock tower of St Mary’s, Islington has broad dials on three faces: walking south, it steals a few minutes on passers-by, as if pressing them to scuttle onwards toward the heart of the city. But head-on or facing North, its stopped clocks show both a quarter past nine and just turned three – and since it could be morning or afternoon, they seem a warrant to slow down, to dawdle or drift into daydreams. It’s no surprise, when you think about it, that London’s most famous nursery rhyme finds a chattering imaginative life in the acoustic timekeeping of the city’s churches: ‘Oranges and lemons, / Say the bells of St Clement’s’.

Other clocks give me pause each time I glance up at them, their designs an invitation to linger. This is especially true on Euston Road, where the stocky yellow train-shed arches at King’s Cross abut the flighty Gothic fantasy of St Pancras. The St Pancras clock-faces, on their prominent tower, have elegant spirograph patterns; their geometric perfection seems at odds with the immense irregularity of the building. I admire this, but it’s the King’s Cross clock that makes me smile. The building is devoid of ornament, except for a perky Lombard-style clock turret. Three wavy strands of iron spread out from the centre of each of its dials. It looks like a clock with five hands – two straight and the others buckled. The clock may keep precise, railway time, but its design speaks of time’s magic.

Photo: King’s Cross clock tower by Mira66

On Radio 4′s Front Row earlier this week Andrew Stanton, the film-maker behind Toy Story, Finding Nemo and other such Pixar wonders, was asked by Mark Lawson whether the opening scene of WALL-E was too bleak and frightening for a film aimed at younger children. Lawson had barely finished his question before Stanton shot him down for making the ‘fundamentally wrong’ assumption that his films were made with any particular demographic group in mind. Why would that even be necessary? He continued ‘I never thought the Beatles were trying to guess my demographic, I never thought Picasso was trying to test who the audience might be…’ After several minutes in this vein, it was clear: Andrew Stanton’s only priority is to make films that he believes are good, regardless of what others might think. He has absolute faith that if they are good enough, the rest will follow.

This is refreshing. The world is all too full of research into “customer bases”, focus groups, talk of target demographics. So much better to allow the creative imagination its freedom, link that flight to a drive to produce something really good – and trust that quality will find its own constituency (or, if you must, market). In a world full of commercial pressure and seemingly set (and unimaginative) paths to success it’s so easy to deviate from such single-minded purpose. There’s a sort of gravity, as enterprises find success and expand, that pulls creativity towards mediocrity, risk towards security. This must be resisted!

Here are some good things around at the moment from artists who follow their hearts – or their art – rather than the dollar.

SEE – PAOLO ROVERSI, THE WAPPING PROJECT BANKSIDE

Every published photograph taken by Paolo Roversi is remarkable, though he rarely strays from his very recognisable style. His preference is for black and white or dimly glowing colour, often shot in low light, intentionally blurred, a faintly dishevelled girl against a simple studio background. Despite a haunted, antique appearance each new image seems just that, new. Each is a fresh insight into the character of the person in front of Roversi’s lens, their relationship with the photographer, into his use of light and film, and into their respective dreams. He tends to shoot using an old large format camera – the sort that requires a black cloth over the photographer’s head – and uses (increasingly rare) Polaroid film. His work is all his own, unmistakable – though there are perhaps echoes of Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville there. If you can’t make it to London to see the exhibition, the National Portrait Gallery has a good (though short) audio tour of his work which, combined with google image search, is a workable alternative. To 31st March 2012

WATCH – GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

Martin Scorsese’s lucid double-feature-length documentary on George Harrison comes from a long-held admiration for the so-called quiet Beatle. The film lightly charts Harrison’s life – from his beginnings in Liverpool to his post-Beatles life as an artist, film-maker, philanthropist, seeker – weaving together honest and frank interviews with Harrison and his closest friends, performances and unseen home movies and photographs. Scorsese has absolutely the right intuition toward Harrison and has consequently made a rare film: one that bypasses all that is obvious and instead sees directly to the heart of its subject. Those of us who missed this intimate and affecting documentary when it was shown on the BBC last year- or who, like me, would like to see it again – can now download it from iTunes.

LISTEN – LEONARD COHEN, OLD IDEAS

The septuagenarian back in the recording studio and as wry and insightful as ever – or more so, his years adding clarity, detachment his aperçus. Years as a boho poet and songwriter, years as a Zen monk and now back on the road, his spare and quiet output never anything but entirely true to himself. I watched him from a front row in London performing to a sold-out O2 arena, seeming occasionally slightly shaken by the ferocity of the audience’s adoration. What’s not to love? Apart, perhaps, from the arrangements – which occasionally sound as though composed, cheesily, on a home organ. But then he’s only ever made one really well arranged record – his third, Songs of Love and Hate. It doesn’t matter – the fact that he means what he does shines steadily through.

Photograph: Natalia Vodianova by Paolo Roversi