Slow Life Blog from the Lake District
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Drink More, Live Longer

28/3/2012

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As it happened, I was sharing a bottle of wine with a surgeon when the news came through that the government plans to impose a minimum price on a bottle of wine. The surgeon was utterly scornful of the government’s strategy. A sensible policy, he explained, would be to encourage people to drink more wine, not less. All the medical studies have shown that people who have a few glasses a day have a much lower incidence of heart disease and live longer (not to mention are happier, although the research doesn’t cover happiness) than teetotallers. ​

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The Tokidoki Wing Chair

25/3/2012

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This chair is gorgeous. It’s by Tokidoki and is covered in a faux-suede fabric with a typically Japanese print which manages to be cute, sexy and grotesque all at the same time.
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I love the expression Okey-dokey. It’s used in Scotland more than here and conveys the warmth and friendliness that you find north of the border; it’s so much nicer than O.K. This is why I like the name Tokidoki, although I’m told that it’s pronounced with a short “o” and that it means “sometimes”. But to me it’s Tokidoki, to rhyme with Okey-dokey.

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Hokusai – The Japanese Hockney

24/3/2012

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​“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.

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Ringo says the Victorian Aviary Garden is Fab

23/3/2012

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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.”

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Ke$ha ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’

21/3/2012

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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 Amnesty International, who, appropriately, have also just celebrated their 50th anniversary.
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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.
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Hockney’s Retrospective

19/3/2012

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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. ​

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Our Olympics Story on Inside Out

17/3/2012

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The One Show have been toying with our Olympics story 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.
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Canada Geese on Lake Windermere

15/3/2012

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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. ​

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Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules”

13/3/2012

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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.

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10 Years with the National Gardens Scheme

11/3/2012

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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. ​

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Ruskin’s Proserpina

9/3/2012

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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”.

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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.
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The 500th Slow Life Blog

7/3/2012

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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.

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The Gardening World Cup – Mr McGregor’s Garden

5/3/2012

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The team at Ten Stories High achieved an astonishing £630,000 worth of coverage in the English language press of the Gardening World Cup in 2011, much of it centred around interest in Mr McGregor’s Garden. But our little slice of the Lake District was also a big hit with the media in Japan, the highlight of which was a feature on Japanese TV. Most of the filming, including all of the aerial shots, took place before the artefacts which were held up in customs, such as the antique pump and the stone trough, were placed in the garden, but the planting was all in place and the cameras captured it beautifully. As the Japanese would say – “Kawaii”.
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The Wind Follies of Walney

3/3/2012

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“To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine- despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a percentage point worldwide”
              -Matt Ridley, The Spectator

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World Enough and Time – Christian McEwen

1/3/2012

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A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping…We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savour of our food”
              -  Thoreau
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In theory Christian McEwan and I should be soul-mates. She’s written a book called “World Enough and Time”, which is about slowing down and she has the crossword addict’s love of words. She delights in finding “significant” anagrams, such as Listen/Silent, Begin/Being and Busy/Buys. She derives enormous pleasure in a game where you take away the first letter of a word to form a new word, such as making laughter from slaughter; here from where; earth from hearth and yes from eyes.

She’s a writer, a teacher and a poet, and years of research have produced a cornucopia of literary and poetic allusions to the Slow Life. 

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    ​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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