Bits & Pieces

What bliss to have four straight days at home -- again. I've been doing all the things I like to do: first of all, mooching round a few charity shops. I went in Oxfam, which I don't often do these days as they've got so posh and expensive. But my luck was in as I found this:

It has an eternal calendar and a little key. I've given it to my daughter.
     Then I had a shot at making something I've been meaning to try ever since Natalie Portman was seen with one at the premiere of Black Swan -- a bag made from an old book.

Mine's not as sophisticated as Nat's but I'm quite pleased with it. I followed a tutorial on YouTube and, funnily enough, when it got to the really really tricky bit, the person's shoulder just happened to obscure the view, so you couldn't see them tussling with the second half of the lining. However, I managed to wrestle it into place.

Then I had a go at framing a picture. It was just a little drawing I'd done and not worth paying a framer to do it, so I just cut a mount myself.

The frame's too heavy for the picture, really, but it was the best one I had to hand. It was only a try-out anyway.
     Now I'm off to cook polenta and peppers for tea. Still several hours of this nice day left so I'll see if I can wring something else out of them.
     The excitement of our third Postman's Knock postcard swap is dying down, although there are still a few postcards to be posted about. I dream about postcards now...

The joy of long weekends

I'm really settling in to this lovely long weekend -- and there's still another day of it to come. I'm long past the must-do stage, past the might-as-well-do stage as well and am bedding down into the why-not-try level.

So I've done a little doodle to experiment with sealing things onto paper with gel medium. Everyone else in the immediate family has reacted with exaggerated horror at my picking up feathers on our walk today, as if I was going to be bringing bubonic plague into the house. I've always picked up feathers and don't think of them as particularly dirty or bacteria-laden -- perhaps they know otherwise.

     For our walk we went to the Sundon Hills, which for somewhere so close to Luton is absolutely gorgeous (nothing against Luton, but you know what I mean -- it's surprisingly unspoilt). This field was absolutely full of cowslips and clumps of speedwell. If anyone from my area (some of my Postman's Knock friends) should have happened to see a hunched hobbling figure this afternoon, it could well have been me, as the walk found all my weak places (legion) and nobbled them. I was rather pathetic and only got through the last third or so by imagining I was on one of those Red Nose Day celebrity challenges across the Kalahari or some such ("Fearne Cotton is plodding up behind me, Gary Barlow is just up ahead...").

Egg hunt

Eggs ready to be hidden

Two sets of clues waiting to be written

Let the hunt begin!

Housewife

I've been reading a copy of Housewife magazine from August 1950. My copy has no cover, sadly, but above is the cover of the September 1950 issue. It's a magazine I found at my mum's, which no doubt once belonged to her mum (the book alterer) and is full of cheerful 'modern' articles for young mothers coping with the tail end of rationing such as 'Need they quarrel?' and 'Furnishing an Alcove'. The cookery pages have nine 'ways with gelatine', which is about eight too many, in my view.

     In my search for amusing apercus about this magazine, I have discovered Lady Moira Combe, wife of Sir Ralph Combe and, as such, probably not short of a bob or two. She seems not to have been able to resist the lure of the celebrity endorsement as she appears in this issue of Housewife telling us her 'tea-time rule', which is serving Meredith & Drew biscuits. The ad copy tells us a little about Lady Moira: 'Her hobby needs only minutes. Since childhood she has collected elephants of all sorts and sizes from tiny ones, little as a lipstick, to mammoths over two feet high!' There is some sort of odd subtext going on here, I'll warrant...
     I went searching online for Lady Moira's elephants (to no avail) which is when I discovered that she was quite the Carol Vorderman of her day when it came to endorsements. As well as M&D biscuits, she also signed up for Californian Poppy perfume and Silvo polish. I wonder how much she was paid?

Here she is from an earlier era on the cover of Country Life with her daughter Estelle.

Also amusing me in Housewife are not one but two adverts for lotions to put on your toddler's hair to make it go curly. Curly Top is 'guaranteed harmless', but how did it work if it was not a kind of crude perm lotion? "My little girl is now 10 months old and her hair, which I quite thought would be absolutely straight, is now a mass of lovely curls, thanks to CURLY TOP."

I guess the appeal of Curly Top herself, Shirley Temple, was still strong in 1950.

     The final thing to catch my eye in Housewife was this ad for Spirella's corsetry service. The Spirella factory was -- is -- just up the road from here in Letchworth, and it's a wonderful building:

Last weekend I found a copy of their in-house magazine, Threads, on a charity stall in Hitchin market. It's the October 1961 issue, but the corsetry fittings are still going strong and by this time the company were being very proactive, going into women's workplaces to demonstrate "the importance of well-fitting foundations for the working woman". Here they are in a Leicester factory ("Machines were stopped half an hour earlier at lunchtime for the women to see, of all things, a demonstration of Spirella service")  where the wonderfully named Mrs Dewsnap takes a no-nonsense approach to bosoms:

Mrs Dewsnap demonstrates the importance of not being able to bend at your workstation

Elsewhere in the magazine there is news of Spirella births ("Baby Susan took her parents by surprise when she arrived nine days early"), deaths ("The death of Miss Eva Jones (Corset Assembly) came as a shock...on holiday on the Isle of Wight...") and marriages ("Dorothy Dellar (formerly Corset Assembly) became Mrs Hankin on September 9"). I was gripped by the story of Miss E Bristow, "a well-known figure in the Garment Service Department", who retires at the end of October. "Singing is one of Miss Bristow's great interests... With a little more encouragement from her family Miss Bristow might have tried singing as a career... She sang over the public address system at Spirella one Christmas some years ago...."

Miss E. Bristow -- lost to the world of showbiz

Notebooks tamed

I've just completed my little project to number all my old notebooks. I was intending to scan some pages from them, but half an hour spent riffling through random jotters has convinced me that I am mad, self-obsessed and better off keeping my weirdness to myself.

   'Oh, that's disappointing,' I hear you cry, 'we were looking forward to a glimpse into your strangely uneventful life where one of the highlights of your written account of yourself is a list of "Ruth Rendell novels read".' Oh, go on then, if you insist.

     This is a page from notebook no. 2, compiled during my last year at school and while I was spending the year before university as an au pair in the suburbs of Paris. The family I worked for had an odd set-up. Both the parents worked, so they had me and also a kind of vampire home-help who never slept. Mme B had three low-paying jobs to make ends meet: she worked nights in a hospital, she took in dressmaking, and in the mornings she came to my French family's house to clean and to spend the 10 franc coin that they left out each day on food for the evening meal for the five of us (M. et Mme G, their two kids and me). This was very little money and our diet reflected this. Mme B would buy, say, potatoes and eggs, or pasta and a tiny lump of cheese, and then it would be up to me -- me! -- to make it into a meal in the evening. At this point I was a 17-year-old schoolgirl from Yorkshire whose mother hated cooking and whose greatest culinary achievement to date was a cold pork bap.
     However, the French family only had themselves to blame if they expected me to put food on the table every night. Mme B would tell me what to do -- 'peel les patates, boil les patates, fry les oeufs' etc -- and I would try to turn out a passable meal. I remember I used to struggle to drain pasta. It was bad.
     The list above represents the things I learnt to 'cook' which I actually liked. As this list contains such French delices as raw tomatoes filled with cold boiled fish and yoghurt with grapes, I think you can imagine what the less successful meals were like.
    In fact our bad diet had one dominant effect on all of us: it gave us terrible constipation. A few pages on in the same notebook is a list of 'Things to Pack for skiing, 8th February 1980', which includes this item:

I knew enough about the magic of fibre to have got myself a huge box of bran from the local health food shop (I can still remember the French for bran: son). One evening I was bold enough to get my giant box of sawdust out and start tipping it into the yoghurt I was having for pudding. Monsieur et Madame G stared at me for a while. Then I remember that Madame asked if she could see the box. She studied it for a while then went to get a yoghurt. Soon all three of us were munching down bran at every opportunity, so, if nothing else, I take credit for having saved that family from the nightmare of les problemes de transit.

A Day at the Fair

I've had a day out at the London Book Fair today. If only the fair consisted of piles and piles of lovely vintage books, as in the picture above. Alas it does not. It is ultra-slick with massive stands put up by the big publishers that are just like big offices, full of execs beavering away trying to do deals. You can't wander onto them to look at the books or anything. There is a constant hubbub of voices which is at exactly the right pitch to activate my (very) partial deafness (ie too much time listening to John Peel on giant headphones as a teenager) so I spent the whole day feeling slightly out of it.
     It takes place at Earls Court and this is what it looks like:

There are many stern young women guarding the entrances to the stands and lots of middle-aged men in serious need of haircuts pulling little wheelie trolleys round. The food costs an arm and a leg and there aren't enough places to sit down. 'Why do you bother going?' I hear you ask. Good question. I did manage to spend most of the day feeling somewhat alienated and had to retire several times to neglected corners to have a read of my book, but I had some meetings in the afternoon with our US distributors and with our sales representatives, all of whom are extremely nice, and after that I felt more human.
     Funnily enough, one of the things you can't do at the fair is buy books, but I did manage to buy one, unexpectedly. I was admiring a gorgeous book on vintage packaging on one of the smaller stands where you can actually look at the wares. I asked the person on the stand whether they had a catalogue, so that I could track the book down later (it was a Spanish publishers). She said, no, but I could buy the book now if I wanted to and she knocked a few quid off the price. So it's mine:

Now that I'm home and looking through my carrier bag of free bookmarks and obscure catalogues, I feel more generous towards the whole event and am glad I work in this industry (you can be in no doubt that it really is an industry after a day at the book fair).

1977 -- like it was yesterday

I've finally started doing something I've been meaning to do for months, which is putting all my old notebooks in order and numbering them. I've always had a notebook on the go and I've accumulated over thirty of them, dating back to early 1977, when I was fourteen.
     These are just cheap books full of random notes, not diaries, although some of them contain diary-like accounts of holidays and other experiences. There are two from when I was a teenager and then, sadly, there's a gap of about ten years (although I also have diaries which do fill in some of those years).
     So I've only got a little way in to the numbering exercise, but the first notebook is full of things that fascinate me. I can remember writing them and living the experiences they refer to, but at the same time they seem to reveal a strange, obsessively organised creature that I don't fully recognise as myself.

This is my record of the charts for the week ending 30 January 1977. The tracks with the asterisks are the ones I recorded off the radio onto a C46 cassette. David Soul was my idol and gets red pen. Actually it's only the top 19, I see.
     It's funny because it wouldn't be long before I was obsessed with the Tom Robinson Band and Stiff Little Fingers and the Fall and wearing a railwayman's donkey jacket and collarless white shirts all the time. But here's a couple of pages from a five-page record of my wardrobe at the time:

The key at the end explains that a heart symbol means 'best in section', a coloured dot indicates items that make up an outfit and a cross means 'on loan from Mum' (the shame!). This was the era of tunics worn over polo-necks and this was virtually all I wore at the time. I like that I've included the fabrics of some of these clothes -- I remember adoring the feel of towelling tops, which regrettably I didn't keep just for the beach. Courtelle and cheesecloth are also very redolent of this period for me.
     The eggs are designs for decorated blown eggshells, which was something I was really into at that time. There are 38 egg designs in total in this book.

This is me wearing the 'sailor motif t-shirt' mentioned in the clothes list. I'm pretending to drink beer on holiday in Corfu with my mum.

     The notebook reveals my appalling diet at the time. And also my great enjoyment of this bad food. Above is my lovingly prepared list of what I was going to take on a school trip to Cambridge -- about a 200-mile journey, but, still, FOUR pork baps! It would not have done to forget the crucial implement for eating the creme caramel.

Here's a little shopping list for goodies. Mmm, lamb n'mint sauce  flavour crisps. Not quite as good as tomato ketchup flavour, but not half bad. I must have gone into a daydream over the crisps as I haven't filled in the final item.
    Finally, here is the most damning evidence of my piggy lifestyle and lack of fashion flair: a page dedicated to preparations for a special school meal:

We were having this meal in the evening, but nonetheless I planned to have a 'light tea' at 6pm. And I don't suppose the grey tights with blue sandals won me many admirers. Blue mascara. blue eyeshadow, lip gloss, blusher -- so funny! I haven't worn make-up for years now.