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…
‘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…
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…
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…’
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…
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…
and a VERY Happy Birthday to our co-founder and Managing Director, Jessica Seaton.
Painting: ‘Daffodils and Celery’, Lucian Freud, 1947-48.
In the first of what we hope will be a regular column, Jon Day embarks on new adventures as Country Mouse, so named after the Aesop fable The Town Mouse & the Country Mouse. Our Town Mouse, Thomas Marks, will make his first appearance soon…
On the shelf above my desk I keep my small collection of found objects: a piece of razor-sharp flint; the tail of a squirrel; a rabbit’s skull, light and brittle as parchment. Pride of place is a malevolent aged jaw, six inches long, curved like a scimitar and spiked with several lethal-looking teeth. It is the jaw of a pike. It must have belonged to an enormous fish; certainly double figures, maybe a twenty or thirty pounder. I found it one spring morning on the banks of a lake in Oxfordshire, though how it got there I’ll never know. Who, or what, could have caught such a fish?
