“From the age of five I have had a mania for sketching the forms of things. From about the age of fifty I produced a number of designs, yet of all I drew prior to the age of seventy-three there is truly nothing of great note. At the age of seventy-two I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish and of the vital nature of grasses and trees. Therefore at eighty I shall have made progress, at ninety I shall have penetrated even further the deeper meaning of things, at one hundred I shall have become truly marvellous, and at one hundred and ten, each dot, each line shall truly possess a life of its own. I only beg that gentlemen of sufficiently long life take care to note the truth of my words”.
Hokusai, Aged 72
The Hokusai exhibition at the Oriental Museum in Durham is on at the same time as Hockney’s retrospective (See Hockney’s Retrospective) He’s best known, of course, for ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ (shown below), which has been reproduced so often in our newspapers following the tsunami of last March. But the fascination of the exhibition is how, just like Hockney, who is now 74, this great artist continually developed and reinvented his art. Hokusai didn’t reach the venerable age referred to in the quotation above (he died aged 89) but he didn’t let old age diminish his talent or inventiveness.
In an earlier posting (See Max, aged 5, catches a fish and eats it raw) I warned of the dangers of eating live octopus, as the tentacles can attach themselves to the inside of your mouth. In this drawing, from the Hokusai Shunga (or Spring Pictures) collection an octopus is seen enjoying an altogether different feast.
The headline in the evening paper was “‘Chelsea Garden is Fab’, says Ringo”. Our intrepid local reporter, Katie Robinson, got this scoop, and she also nailed Piers Morgan, Gloria Hunniford, Judith Chalmers and Jayne Torvill amongst others. This is the video which Katie took at the time and which has only just become available for this blog.
Here are some of the choicest quotes:
Piers Morgan
“This to me is a quintessentially English display.”
“This is Britain at its best.”
Ringo Starr
“I think it’s really cool actually, I do. And I do love the mosaic.”
Judith Chalmers, TV Presenter
“It’s absolutely wonderful”
Richard Caring, owner of the Ivy, J Sheekeys and Annabelles
“By far the most beautiful thing I’ve seen”
“I’ve got a little 18th century house down in Devon, and there’s an old walled garden behind it that this would just be perfect for.”
50 years ago today Bob Dylan released his first album, which he called ‘Bob Dylan’. The event passed me by at the time, as I was too young at school, but I soon caught up. Since then, I’ve bought every album he’s made, as soon as they were released. Fanatics like me also buy covers of his songs by other artists, in the hope (which is rarely realised) that they will prove to be better than the original. We have just been treated to an album of 73 covers in aid of Amensty International, who, appropriately, have also just celebrated their 50th anniversary.
The songs on the album include Adele’s version of ‘Make You Feel My Love’, which has competed with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Halleluja’ as one of the most covered songs of the last two years. The difference is that while Dylan kept his publishing rights, Cohen signed his away, so that Dylan is raking it in, while Cohen gets nothing and has had to go on tour again, just to make ends meet. A girl who, on account of the dollar sign in her name, is probably as clued up as Dylan, has produced one of the memorable songs on the Amnesty album. The version of ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’ by Ke$ha is easily as good as Adele’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’. The irony is that Dylan pinched the tune and most of the lyrics, but will still rake in the royalties. Leonard Cohen will be weeping.
Us (pronounced uz) Yorkshire folk are unbelievably proud of the fact that the world’s greatest living artist has returned from California to live in Yorkshire and that his retrospective at the Royal Academy is dominated by scenes of Yorkshire. It’s barely credible. The queues to get in are immense and I’d have gladly spent an hour outside in the rain for my ticket, but I was treated by my cousin Nikki Mallows (nee Gresswell) who not only shares Hockney’s Yorkshire genes, but his artistic genes as well. I’m used to seeing Nikki’s work on the R.A.’s walls so it was no surprise that she had access to a secret stash of tickets and she whisked me in before giving me a Masterclass on Hockney’s life and work and art. She didn’t mind at all that a fair proportion of the crowd latched on to the fact that something special was going on and surreptitiously followed us, hanging on to her every word.
Hockney is of course fascinated by the tricks, techniques and artifices which have been practiced by his predecessors, as far back as the Renaissance. It’s a natural progression of that interest for him to use the latest technology in developing his own art. One of the best rooms in the retrospective shows films shot from 9 cameras mounted in 9 different places on a jeep as it travels very slowly through some of the scenes shown in his paintings. And some of those paintings were created on an iPad. Nikki showed me how to make an iPad Hockney using the “Brushes” app. Here’s one she did earlier. The creativity of these two great artists leaves me speechless.
The One Show have been toying with our Olympics story (See here and here) but the baton has been picked up by BBC1’s Inside Out and Ed Hanson, in a brilliantly edited piece, got several Lake District tourism operators, including myself, to lay bare the government’s hypocrisy on the subject. I was pleased to do a follow up interview live on Radio 2’s You and Yours (Link to interview) and several newspaper interviews. This government, like its predecessor, is only interested in the public perception of their policies, and so, who knows, the more we can show them to be muppets, the better chance may have of getting something done.
This year I’ve lost three very dear friends. They had an annoying habit of waking me up early in the morning with their squabbling but I’ve fond memories of our long relaxing swims together on sunny afternoons. They would spend the winter in warmer climes, but return without fail in the early spring. Except for this year. I’ve no idea of their fate. Perhaps they didn’t make it to their haven in the south, perhaps they perished on the way back. Or perhaps they simply tired of the unremitting sadness of their life in Grange over Sands. Every year the female (she had two mates) would produce a dozen or more ducklings; every year her newborn fledglings would be taken within 48 hours of their birth by one or more of the several predators at hand – a cat, a crow, a magpie or a jay.
The cruelty of the natural world came to mind when I read of the campaign by a band of sentimental fools who have said they’ll boycott the Lake District in protest at the National Park’s decision to cull some of the Canada Geese who are getting too numerous and are causing environmental damage around Lake Windermere. The protestors don’t understand that if you live in the countryside, death is an everyday occurrence. Here at Yewbarrow House I’ve seen a peregrine swoop down and kill a wood pigeon, leaving blood and feathers all over the lawn; I’ve seen a cat grab a baby rabbit and kill it by repeatedly smashing its head on the stone path; I’ve seen the baby ducklings picked off one by one by a jay. The countryside isn’t for the squeamish, and it might be a good idea if the protestors, the next time they come to the Lake District were to open their eyes and see what is happening all around them.
Michael Pollan is getting there, but he hasn’t yet taken the logical step of telling his readers not to shop in supermarkets. Perhaps this is because he’s American, and there’s nowhere else to go. Isn’t there? His latest book, “Food Rules”, which expands on the advice he gave in his excellent “In Defence of Food”, recommends that you shop in the periphery of the supermarket, and stay out of the middle, on the basis that most of the fresh produce lines the walls, while the processed stuff is in the middle. He also says “get out of the supermarket whenever you can”. Come on, Michael, this is pathetically feeble – the logic of everything you say is never to go near the place.
But there’s a lot of fun to be had in his list of rules for healthy eating. Here are some of them:
2. Don’t eat anything your great grand-mother wouldn’t recognise as food.
11. Avoid foods you see advertised on TV
18. Don’t eat foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.
19. If it came from a plant eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.
20. It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
21. It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles)
40. Be the kind of person who takes supplements – then skip the supplements.
57. Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.
Once a year those who open their gardens to the public under the Yellow Book scheme are given a lunch when they have the opportunity to meet up and swap horror stories. At today’s lunch, at Rydal Hall, I was surprised and delighted to be given a trowel to celebrate the fact that I’ve completed 10 years with them. This makes me an old hand and I’m sometimes asked to give a word of encouragement to a first-timer. Funnily enough, newcomers are always worried about being criticised or told off by a member of the public. That never happens. The British are too polite or too hypocritical to say anything to your face, and actually that can make you complacent – I’ve long since stopped worrying about doing the weeding before an Open Day.
What do I remember about my ten years of garden Open Days? The most vivid memories are of the days when things went wrong. When Margaret’s helper with the teas didn’t turn up and I had to spend the entire day at the sink, washing up; when it poured down all day and no-one came (this has happened several times); when a very large lady lost her footing climbing up the steep path from the entrance gate and I watched in horror as she rolled down the banking and lay motionless in a heap at the bottom (she didn’t move until the ambulance arrived, and having played dead for fifteen minutes, turned out to be unharmed).
Our Open Days have always been family occasions, with my kids selling tickets on the gates (and Sara sometimes putting on impromptu shows with her friends for the visitors) and Margaret doing the teas. There’s no doubt who has the cushiest job, as all I have to do is chat to the visitors and remember a few Latin names if I’m asked the name of a plant. Now that I’ve been given a trowel, Margaret wonders if it might perhaps be a hint, and was there anyone there at the lunch who could explain to me what it was for, and how to use it?
As an object it’s exquisite, but I can’t decide whether it’s the smell or the feel of it which is more beautiful. The smell is of old leather which has matured for 130 years. The feel is of soft, warm, worn calf-skin. The book has finely tooled binding embossed with a leaf in each corner and with gilt edging to the paper. The whole is a book by John Ruskin published in 1882 with original plates drawn by the author, some of which are hand-coloured.
The book is Proserpina, which has the wonderful sub-title “Studies of wayside flowers while the air was yet pure among the Alps and in the Scotland and England which my father knew”.
I ordered the book through High Barn Books of Gressingham, Lancs, via AbeBooks. The AbeBooks website, which is essentially a directory of second hand bookshops, gave me a choice of 349 copies of Proserpina, ranging in price from a paperback copy for £3.26 to a first edition for £492. I ordered my leather-bound first edition, slightly scuffed, sight unseen, at £45. It’s without a doubt the best thing I’ll buy all year.
It’s taken 29 months to reach the 500th Slow Life blog posting, which is an average of 4 a week and about 150,000 words. Slow Life began as the story of our quest for self-sufficiency; we were sunny optimists then. Now, we are older, wiser and a good deal poorer. It hasn’t been difficult to stick to our pledge never to shop in a supermarket, but the farm has had to go, and with it all the animals, leaving us only with our vegetables, which have the great advantage that if they look sickly, you don’t have to call out the vet.
Looking back over 500 Slow Life blogs it’s striking how we’ve been swept along by events, by the opportunities to take part in TV programmes, by the chance to design gardens for flower shows. The gardening shows have led to a close association with Japan, where everyone strives to live the Slow Life, with varying degrees of success. There’s no doubt that the ideas behind Slow Life are also becoming more popular in the UK. The Slow Food movement (http://www.slowfood.org.uk) recently announced that their membership has increased to 30,000. Less than one tenth of the RHS, but moving in the right direction. Everyone is striving to improve their work/life balance, and when I get the time, I will do too.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials Thoreau
The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food and extend them to life in general. Here in the Lake District where I live with my wife and three daughters, we have a garden where we grow our own food. We know full well that this is an inefficient and expensive way of organising our lives but we do it because we enjoy it and because it forces us to eat healthily and in season. It is slow, because gardening is all about patience.
The principles of Slow Food are "good, clean and fair" - 'good' means that the food should be of good quality, 'clean' means that it should be free of pesticides or harmful chemicals, 'fair' means that when you buy from a farmer, you pay him a decent price. Supermarkets and the large chain stores routinely break all these principles, which is why we, as a family, don't use them. Slow food means also taking the time and trouble to cook the food yourself and to take pleasure in eating it with your family and friends. I like the idea of extending the principles of Slow Food to life in general with the aim of achieving a good work/life balance.
This blog of my Slow Life is mainly about my garden in the Lake District, but also about my hotels, where I earn my living, and about the occasional forays, which my Slow Life allows, into the worlds of design, music and local affairs.
There's also quite a lot in this blog about Japan and the Japanese. This is because I admire their way of life and the fact that the Japanese, more than any other nation, are trying to embrace the Slow Life, even to the extent of having Slow Cities.
