Sitting pretty

It’s got to spring (finally) so people have once again started doing that lovely, community-spirited act of leaving any bits and pieces they don’t want outside their homes for people to pick up. At least, I hope that’s what happened here or I just lifted someone’s chair.

Drenched from a downpour and with sagging foam, the throne has seen better days and smells a bit of damp dog, but I think it’s ace.

This forms part of my new favourite hobby – junk shop trawling. Post on that upcoming.

Now to learn how to revive old furniture…

Profanity

The brilliant ‘Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England‘ has been my bedtime reading of late. You can tell a good book by the number of corners that you illicitly turn down to mark passages that  simply cannot be enjoyed just once.

I’ve just got to the section about the basic essentials of day-to-day life, specifically language. Apparently they were a lot coarser in their speech back then:

If you find yourself speaking English with the locals do not be surprised if their language gets a little rough around the edges. Just as fourteenth-century place names are direct descriptions of localities (for instance: ‘Shitbrook Street’, ‘Pissing Alley’), so daily speech is equally straightforward and ribald. In telling his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes how one ardent lover pursued the married woman whom he fancied and ‘caught her by the cunt’. At another point in the same work, Chaucer has his host declare to him ‘your shithouse rhyming isn’t worth a turd’. Daily language is direct and to the point. So if someone slaps you on the back in a hearty way, and exclaims ‘your breeches and your very balls be blessed!’ do not take it amiss. It is a compliment.

By coincidence (or because I’m subconsciously searching out rude words?), I also this week came across an article on Time entitled ‘Nine Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Swear Words‘. It’s to coincide with the release of another wonderful-sounding book, Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing.

It’s interesting to note the root of our most charged swear words changes with social habits and acceptable behaviour. Most of our worst profanities in modern English are to do with genitals, poo or sexual orientation and their sophistication depends largely on how much of the Profanisaurus you have read. It was different back in the day:

“The sexual and excremental words were not charged, basically because people in the Middle Ages had much less privacy than we do,” Mohr explains, “so they had a much less advanced sense of shame.” Multiple people slept in the same beds or used privies at the same time, so people observed each other in the throes of their, er, natural functions much more frequently – which made mention of them less scandalous.

Society might have become more refined since medieval times and done away with the communal toilets, but modern folk less straight talking? The researcher clearly hasn’t ever been on a girls’ night out.

Compliments slips

I’m an avid sender of postcards and letters and always have been. On a whim, a friend will get a little dispatch through the post.

My friend Bryan has been the lucky recipient of some of these but always used the excuse of me not having a permanent address as reason to not return any. When I informed him of the new shack, this arrived.

It’s amazing. Mr Bingo and his Hate Mail are hilarious, so hilarious that every print run sells out within weeks.

“Now you owe me 70 postcards,” Bryan told me.

I’m no artist and could not hope to compete with the wit of Bingo, so instead I’ve opted for the polar extreme of badly-sketched compliments slips.

Facing 30

Everyone keeps banging on about this 3o milestone. Even my bank manager on the phone the other day was teasing me in a phone-call about my onset old age. I don’t know why. Wild [time travelling] horses couldn’t drag me back to my teens; twenties – meh. Bring it on, decade #4.

But still, these milestones do focus the mind for many. A friend, a few years advanced of me down the track of life, once told me the list he had sketched out of ‘things to achieve by the time I’m 30′. Have kids, own a property and have an established career were I think on there.

They’re not on mine. It’s much more banal. Wanna see? Here goes:

• Cook a roast dinner. I’ve participated in the preparation, I’ve taken charge of roasties, but I’ve never cooked a full roast dinner in my life.
• Run a marathon. Everyone needs goals. My next one is to do 10km in less than 45 minutes and run a marathon. Let’s not talk about the looming ultra.
• Er… I think that’s it. Does that make me woefully unambitious or content?

Obviously this is distinct from the bucket list. That is a whole other kettle of fish (and has a lifelong deadline). Not that socially-engineered deadlines are any good for you, as Fraisse’s Psychology of Time conveniently tells.

Comical

The house has inherited an amount of what I term ‘Dead Lady furniture’, which is ace, retro and oaky, but does make the place look grown-up. In an effort to combat it, balance old with new and inject a cheap splash of colour, I thought I’d wallpaper. My medium? Comics.

The first flush of enthusiasm you get in a new house was my main catalyst, but as the old paper had been ripped down in a fit of drunken tomfoolery, bare plaster walls acted as a sturdy incentive too.

Old wallpaper. Monstrous. 

The canvas.

A bargainous £8 will buy you many, many comics up at Forbidden Planet (have a look for the £1 bundles, sensibly limited to four per customer), a shop from which I must swiftly extract myself or risk spending hours and hours browsing the manga and graphic novels.

…Unpick all the staples, pick out your favourite pages and colours…

…cover your table with a bin bag (wallpaper tables are for pussies), get happy with a brush and start sticking the pages up to please your eye. Anything with a ‘kapow’, ‘kwoom’ or ‘nnnn!’ gets priority in my world.

There are all sort of hints and tips on the art of wallpapering but they don’t apply to comics. I found it most effective to smooth the pieces down with the ball of my hand – trying to get bubbles out with a sponge quickly starts to rub the ink off.

The end result. It’s bold, but I think I like it.

New toys.

New toys.

Bye bye weekends.

Paperman: cute

Some lovely animation, courtesy of Disney.

God, I miss Broadband

It’s been two weeks. Two long weeks since I’ve had ready internet access at home and – while I wish I could tell you it was liberating – it’s been a crippling short-coming.

It has, however, meant that I’ve established a list of my favourite places to go for wifi and endless coffee. So much coffee that I’ve had jitters and motor-mouth at various times.

Here’s a map for you:

View Larger Map

I wasn’t the first. Mine isn’t comprehensive so if that leaves you hanging, try this one:

View Larger Map

I’ve never felt so powerful

Back when I was 13 and working in the salubrious laundry of a nursing home, one of the cooks – impressed by my domesticity and obsession with neatly folding and organising the laundry cupboard – told me that I’d make a good wife someday. I’d clearly managed to keep my [lack of] cooking prowess under wraps.

This weekend I took a drill and put some shelves up in the Palacette. They’re still on the wall some three days later and look to last the distance. I’ve never felt more powerful.

I made and fitted my own Roman blinds, fixed my Swiss army knife, balanced and bled the radiators and tuned the telly. I’ve got a jar opener and I’m happy to take the bins out.

Why would I want a man?

Rarrrr.

­­­­—–

For those of you that don’t know, I’ve spent my usual roaming outlay on a little house in Bristol clipping my wings temporarily in the process. Obvious aside from the Iceland and Suffolk adventures which I may presently rhapsodise about retrospectively. Only temporary but that will likely see this blog morph into a new form, a more domestic, local one, I daresay bordering on the mundane. Apologies in advance.

This is my latest adventure and I’m learning every day. 

The makings of a top birthday weekend

Fascinating facts: part 7

• Mary Queen of Scots was the first woman to play golf.
• The modern game of conkers is believed to have evolved from an earlier version played with snail shells and was first recorded in 1848.
• The average oak tree sheds 700,000 leaves each autumn.
• In the next 40 years we will need to produce as much food as we have in the lsat 8,000 years.
• Half the world’s population has seen at least one James Bond movie.
• Pueblo Indian women could divorce their husband simply by leaving his moccasins on the doorstep.

Tubular

I’m late to the party here by some years but these London offices are so cool they have to be shared. Anyone venturing East in London in the last few years may have noticed a few stray Tube carriages roosting above the brickwork. Village Underground in Great Eastern Street became the new home of four retired Jubilee line trains in 2007, born of a need for cheap office space (for creatives, naturally) and a passion for reusing before recycling. Today they’re home to 50 musicians, artists, writers, designers and film-makers.

That’s just on top of the building. The warehouse below is a cultural centre for gigs, concerts and exhibitions.

If you like these, you can tap into a whole honeypot of similar cultural centres through Trans Europe Halles. I feel a tour coming on…

Components of the perfect Sunday

(Plus a roast.)

Woke up to this

Then headed down to the river path, one of my happy places

Sunday papers

Kicking through leaves

Autumn colours

My favourite tree, the spindle tree

Dream tents

Who says you can’t travel from the comfort of your own desk? Surely part of the joy of travel lies in the planning, the anticipation? I think so, which is why I spent some of today drooling over these ‘back to nature’ bubble tents in France.

Not for the faint-hearted, but a delicious way to envelope yourself in the forest, field, mountain or spring location you find them in. Attrap’Rêves (dream catcher) near Marseilles and Sky River outside Loir-et-Cher are two unique hotels that offer guests the chance to sleep under the stars in a small, cosy – well – bubble. Some are partially opaque, while true exhibitionists can enjoy fully transparent versions.

Following the modern trend for tents that aren’t really tents, the hoteliers have filled the interiors with plump beds and soft furnishings. Some even have jacuzzis. Their designer, frenchman Pierre Stephane Dumas, said they are ‘unusual huts for unusual nights’. They don’t come cheap at €189 upwards per night but they’re supposed to appeal to your eco side, leaving a minimal footprint on your surroundings.

All I can think about is the stars.

Bubble hotel, the ladylike version.

Pumpkin

Can’t decide which is my favourite pumpkin of the day. Villafane Studios lead the pack…

This one…

Or this one?

Lisbon’s street art

Turns out Lisbon has been turned on to street art for some time. I spent time wandering around taking it in. Some are crude and scribbly, others are on an epic scale and use entire buildings as blank canvases. The Crono project is a large scale urban art project encouraging world-class artists to jazz up derelict buildings. Parts of the city have been designated as Galeria de Arte Urbana, authorised for painting.

Here’s a little gallery to whet your appetite.

And a map in case you want to cruise around and check it out yourself.

View Larger Map

Needlework

The domesticity continues. A few weeks ago I came over all Austenesque and decided to make a belated wedding gift for my sister Sarah and new brother-in-law Dave. I wanted to give them something considered, something symbolic, a labour of love. After three 6-hours shifts of stitching it by the light of the moon (this only the last stage in the improvised process) I wished I’d never started the b*stard thing.

But here it is, a quilt, crafted by my own fair hand from fabric bought in Nepal that I really would have liked to keep for myself. It’s imperfect, it’s wonky, but it was made with reverence. If that’s not sisterly love, I don’t know what is.

How to make a (very simple) quilt:

You will need:

- 6m fabric of your choice

- 6m complementary cotton fabric

- about 3.5m 20mm wadding

- 9m ribbon

- 9m haberdashery cording

- 2 reels of cotton thread

What to do:

1. Take a 6m run of your fabric of choice. Cut it in half, stitch together down the long side and iron the seam flat. Do likewise with a 6m run of complementary fabric for the reverse side. Tempting though high-gloss satins are, they’ll slide right off the bed so use cotton.

2. Take a big piece of wadding (I used 40mm thickness but half of that would be more than enough) 3m x 2m. You may need to sew a couple of widths together to get the right square. Sandwich it between your two runs of fabric.

3. Pin and tack the three layers together. Tack liberally and make sure the thread tension is high. You need everything to stay firmly in place when you start sewing the ‘grooves’ in.

4. Meanwhile take a pretty ribbon, one that picks up a colour in the fabric. Get 9m to be safe. Take 9m of haberdashery cord and fold the ribbon around it, pinning along the full length.

5. Sew along the full length to seal the cord inside.

6. Measure an even border around the full width of the quilt. Measure and mark evenly spaced lines between these borders (the stripes made this a hell of a lot easier). Sew the whole fabric/wadding sandwich through to create ‘grooves’. You’ll need to manhandle the whole lot through the sewing machine. My advice – roll and squish.

7. That done, work your way around the edge, folding the fabric on each side, tucking it in towards the wadding to create a clean edge and pinning the ribbon cording between them. Fix with pins, many many pins.

8. Sew the cording in place by hand with tiny, neat, blinding stitches. Remove all traces of pins and tacking. Voila!

Halloween dog parade in New York

It’s hard to pick my favourite of this year’s halloween dog parade costumes, but this Boxer dressed as Mr T is up there.

Halloween dog parade in New York – in pictures | Life and style | guardian.co.uk.

God bless Glasgow

This…

…plus this…

…equals seven of these.

#good read

Just finished my latest book. It’s so good it must be shared.

Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran is a story set in 1970s Iran and tells of the relationships that develop between a neighbourhood group of teenagers, circling around two best friends: Pasha and Ahmed. The description and explanation of Persian culture is absorbing. The author is Iranian by birth and uses the book to describe some of the cultural differences he remembers when he moved from Iran to the USA aged 19. He remembers how odd he found Western funerals given that Middle Eastern cultures are so outwardly emotional, illustrating how readily they tend to cry or express feelings. He provides an intoxicating account of the rich comradeship of a small neighbourhood in the capital.

All this set in the political scene of the 1970s where there was strong anti-American sentiment for the foreign power’s support of the reigning Shah, and therefore tacitly his secret police and reign of terror. America had supported the Shah in arranging a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minster in the 1950s. Paradoxically, many Iranians in the story are yearning to leave for the safety and educational prospects of America.

It’s great. Should definitely feature on your ‘must read’ list. I think I’m adding it to my ‘top ten favourite books ever’. Ooooh, there’s your next blog.