Psychologists will have you believe that the quickest way to evoke the past is to play the music you listened to between the ages of fourteen and twenty, otherwise known as ‘music of your life’. The Rolling Stones, Robert Palmer, Bruce Springsteen – possibly Engelbert Humperdinck if that was your thing – will all evoke […]
Month: June 2010
With love from lovage
I’ve been given a fabulous book – The Alice B.Toklas Cookbook, first published in 1954. Alice B. Toklas, the lover of writer Gertrude Stein, was an eccentric cook. But Gertrude and Alice’s dinner guests were the likes of Matisse and Picasso, so the originality stakes were high. When Picasso popped round for lunch, Alice decided […]
Plum jelly and hot baths
It’s village fete season – the time for jam-buying, second-hand book swapping and cake-making.I bought grapefruit marmalade and quince jam – a jar of blackcurrant jelly was thrown in for good measure. My neighbours, who know I can’t be trusted with anything in the garden, got to the fete early and bought me two courgette […]
Spinach tart and homework
I’ve rescued a heap of Victorian homework from a London junk shop. Signed ‘John, 1848‘, every sheet is lined with miserable aphorisms. ‘Caution is the only protection against imposing‘, ‘Venerate sacred institutions‘, ‘Nominate the just‘. You get the picture. Weirdly, having rescued one batch of ancient homework, I immediately found a whole heap more in […]