Blog Archives - Slow Life Blog from the Lake District

Jamie Oliver’s “15” at the Sawrey Hotel

27/1/2011

“To connive at the killing of animals, while being too lily-livered to kill them yourselves is despicable”

- John Seymour- ‘The Fat of the Land’

Jamie Oliver’s mission to take young people off the dole and then turn them into chefs isn’t just a stunt for a TV show. Long after the TV series has ended Jamie continues to recruit young trainees- except that now there are 28 rather than 15.

The farm is sold at auction

27/1/2011

The farm has been hemorrhaging money. When I bought the farm five years ago my bank manager asked me whether it would “wash its face”. “Of course”, I replied “once I get the hang of things”. The truth must be that I never quite did get the hang of things because the more we did, the more money we lost. Here are two examples of the difference between the dream and reality.

A Birth Day Celebration

25/1/2011

Now that Midwives has taken over from Downton Abbey as everyone’s favourite, the usual questions are being asked about how authentic these tales of childbirth in the old days really are. They should ask my mother, whose story of the day she had me proves that life then is about as far removed from how things are today as you could imagine. There was no pain relief and no attentive Dad, but she did have a bottle of Champagne on hand.

The Winter Fireside

25/1/2011

“I put up a petition annually for as much snow, hail, frost or storm, of one kind or another
as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which
attend a winter fireside, candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea maker,
shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor whilst the wind and rain
are raging audibly without”.

- Thomas de Quincey- Confessions of an English Opium-eater

Adele- Make You Feel My Love

24/1/2011

Both my younger daughters are learning the guitar and are practising with Make You Feel My Love. They think the song is by Adele and were horrified to learn that it is by the dreaded Bob Dylan. “Dreaded” because they have spent a good part of their young lives begging me to turn Dylan off whenever I play his records. Dylan will welcome the boost to his coffers- will he ever get round to spending any of it? Adele’s cover version of Make You Feel My Love has re-entered the top ten this week, making it the first song in chart history to make the top ten four times in the same chart run, having moved 78-24-44-76-102-4-11-20-17-27-19-9-12-9-21-31-26-33-31-27-7.

John Seymour- The Fat of the Land

22/1/2011

Is it possible to give it all up and subsist on five acres? So many people, including me, longingly dream about it- but John Seymour did it. His book, The Fat of the Land begins with this paragraph:

“Here we all sit, Sally my wife, Jane who is five and a half, Ann who is two and a half, and Kate who is seven (days), a mile from a hard road, with no electricity, no gas, no deliveries of anything at all except coal, provided we take at least a ton, and mail, and the post woman gets specially paid for coming here.

Un Homme, Une Femme et Un Chien

22/1/2011

I liked the film ‘Un Homme et Une Femme’ so much as a young man that I went to see it 7 times. The simple love story, directed by Claude Lelouch, was a sensation when it first came out and won 2 Oscars and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but is forgotten now. It’s French through and through and all those years ago I thought the two stars, Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant impossibly romantic.

The Urethra Postcard Art of Gilbert and George

18/1/2011

There’s a fun half hour to be had at the Gilbert and George exhibition of postcard art at the White Cube gallery in St James. The exhibition is of dozens of collages of identical size, each consisting of 12 postcards arranged in a square with a thirteenth in the centre. The postcards have been collected over the years either from telephone kiosks, where they usually have something to do with transexual sex, or from shops selling tourist tat, where the theme is London and the union flag.

Anne Hardy

17/1/2011

After admiring Anne Hardy and Clarisse d’Arcimoles’s pictures at the “Newspeak: British Art Now” exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery I was pleased to have the opportunity to see them in person this evening at a talk about their art.

This year a billion photos will have been taken, instantly, without much thought, in many cases using something we would not recognise as a camera.

Countryfile

16/1/2011

Countryfile got in touch with me after seeing this blog. They wanted to know if I could really survive without using a supermarket. Good God, is it really so outlandish? I’m sure that Grange isn’t the only small town with no supermarket, but lots of good independent small shops. Living in Grange makes it easy for me to keep my pledge and I was chuffed that Countryfile did some filming in Grange to prove the point.

The World’s Largest Garden Feature

15/1/2011

The rain has been relentless and the north of the county is under water again. Nothing new there. But the most dramatic pictures come from the other side of the world, from Queensland, where entire suburbs have been drowned. These suburbs must have been built by supreme optimists because the lowlands of Queensland are forever being submerged.

The Rules of the Road in Japan

13/1/2011

One of the great mysteries of a visit to Japan is why the most efficient nation on earth has the most hopeless taxi drivers. They seem to spend half their time asking people the way. One of the reasons is that house numbers do not run consecutively, they run historically- that is in the order in which the house was built. Thus No 1 Tokyo Road can be a mile away from No 2 Tokyo Road.

Chiltern Seeds

9/1/2011

“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today”
- Indian Proverb

One of the special treats to look forward to at Christmas time is the arrival of the new Chiltern Seeds catalogue. “Chiltern” is a little misleading as they are based just round the corner at Bortree Stile, Ulverston. I think it’s the best seed catalogue there is. It’s the only one I need. Chiltern Seeds are the best not only because they have an eclectic selection and are completely reliable, but because their catalogue is a joy to read. Here are a couple of typical extracts:

The Killer Cup of Tea

8/1/2011

Surely there’s nothing more innocuous than a tomato, and yet until the mid-nineteenth century it was thought to be poisonous and too dangerous to grow in a garden. It’s fascinating to read in Victorian gardening literature how attitudes gradually changed. By the end of the century eating a tomato was thought to be as harmless as drinking a cup of tea.

Except that tea was, for a time, thought to be a dangerous drug. This quotation is from the medical journal, the Lancet, in 1872:

Cesaria Evora Remembered

8/1/2011

Like Amy Winehouse, she was compared to Billie Holiday, and like her she had an addictive personality – in her case to men and cigarettes – and like her she died in 2011, although she managed, just, to reach her allotted three score years and ten. But unlike Amy Winehouse, dying was not the best career move available to her. Cesaria Evora only became famous outside her native Cape Verde Islands when she was 50 and already a grandmother.

Bono and Madonna

5/1/2011

Apropos of nothing, these stories, first about Bono and then about Madonna are as revealing as they are amusing:

At a pop concert in aid of a very worthy charity Bono proclaimed: “Every time I clap a child dies in Africa”.

To which a member of the audience shouted: “Well stop fucking clapping then”

The Hungarian magazine Blikk interviewed Madonna. The questions were asked in Hungarian and then translated into English.

Wild Asian Ass

4/1/2011

Doing the crossword, even if you’re not particularly good at them is one of the greatest pleasures of the Slow Life. There was a time, in days when I seemed to have more leisure, when I always did the cryptic crosswords in the Times and the Telegraph but nowadays it’s the Times 2 crossword, always preceded by the Polygon and the Codeword.

The Victorians and Climate Change

3/1/2011

My reflections (30th December) on Robin Lane Fox’s historical perspective on climate change prompted me to check on what the Victorians were actually saying on the subject. One of the best primary sources is gardening magazines, of which the liveliest was Shirley Hibberd’s Gardener’s Magazine. In the early 1870’s there was a craze for subtropical gardening, much as we have experienced in the last ten years brought on by a series of mild winters. The Gardener’s Magazine tackled the subject head on in their editorial on March 30th 1872. Here’s an extract:

The Archers- Bring Back Hannah

2/1/2011

The 60th anniversary edition of the Archers was a humdinger which left me emotionally drained. The Archers is of course an integral part of the Slow Life. I have to confess I’m an intermittent rather than a devoted listener. I catch as much as I can of the omnibus edition on a Sunday morning, usually on the way to the farm and I always tune in if I happen to be in the car when it’s on. It doesn’t matter if you miss a few episodes- the characters are more important than the story line.

About Slow Life

The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food, which are “good, clean and fair”, and extend them to life in general.

Here in the Lake District, the air is clean, the pace is slow and the atmosphere is calm. If we don’t grow food ourselves, we can buy it in friendly small shops, where you know the quality is going to be the best.

This blog is a celebration of the Slow Life, with forays into the world of design, music, the arts, gardens, and my particular weakness, Japan.

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