David Hockney has long used collage in his art – building large composite panoramas of great American landscapes (desert roads, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite…) from photographs in a four-year break from painting in the early 1980s…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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James Attlee invites us to savour the long nights of winter – their rare darkness and the too-easily-forgotten light of the moon.
For those of us who live in northern latitudes, one of the first signals of the changing of the season makes itself noticed at the end of August. Before we have reconciled ourselves to letting go of the summer, which may well give the impression of only just having arrived, the evenings begin to grow shorter. As September advances, even as we enjoy what may be some of the warmest weather of the year, darkness encroaches further, a forewarning of the long nights of winter waiting just offstage. What could there possibly be to celebrate in this shortening of daylight? Our hearts militate against rising for work in darkness, only to be greeted by darkness again as we leave to make our way home. After all, we feel like saying, we are human beings, not moles! We deserve a little more daylight than this…
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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…
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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…
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