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Lucian Freud 1922-2011

31/7/2011

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“I was offered a knighthood but turned it down. My younger brother has one of those. That’s all that needs to be said on the matter”
           -  Lucian Freud
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Can there have been a more astonishing career than that of Lucian Freud, who had several large families (reputedly 40 children in all) by various wives and mistresses and whose paintings sold not just for millions but tens of millions. 

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Bullet Train or Virgin Train?

29/7/2011

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In the last 10 days I’ve travelled 2,200 miles by train, mainly on the bullet train (shinkansen) in Japan, but also on the Virgin Train West Coast line. The bullet train is of course the envy of the world, whereas poor old Virgin took on the mantle of British Rail and has been the butt of many a joke ever since.

​But which is better to ride on? The first thing which hits you about the bullet train is that for us, it’s very expensive, about double the cost of an inter-city train. For that you get pretty basic facilities- no tables, no wi-fi, no buffet car (although there is a trolley selling coffee and basic snacks, which comes by every half hour). 


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The Missing

27/7/2011

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On our visit to Fukushima it was poignant to see household objects in the mud, a piece of pottery here, a kitchen knife there. What we didn’t realise when we were there is that the mud also contains human remains. In fact, the bodies of 8,000 of the 26,000 victims have yet to be recovered. This is one family’s story.

When the earthquake struck Mamoru Oikawa, a firman, was relieved to receive a text from his wife Emi telling him that she and their baby daughter were safe at an evacuation centre. But there was no chance for him to go to them as he had to work flat out responding to the crisis. When, four days later, he was able to snatch an hour to drive to the centre he found that it was no longer there: it had been washed away. Oikawa sat in his car, dumbfounded. “I knew they were gone”, he said, “I was dead inside. There was no crying or anger, only emptiness”. Since then he has devoted every spare minute to finding their bodies. Within days, he discovered the family’s black car, its windows shattered. Inside he found the baby’s car seat and a single tiny shoe. Later, he located what he’s sure is the baby’s pink-and-white-striped baby towel. His expeditions sometimes last 10 hours or more. With patient precision he plots the ground already covered on his map, gradually moving away from the evacuation centre in concentric circles, following the paths the waves might have taken.Weeks ago he thought he had found Emi. He and other searchers spotted the body of a woman lying face-down in the mud, as if some-one had pushed her there. Coming closer Oikawa realised it wasn’t her. Her hair was too white, the frame too small. (This story, courtesy of John M. Glionna, The Yomiuri Shimbun).
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The Hare with Amber Eyes

25/7/2011

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‘Be careful of the unwarranted gesture: less is more’
       -  Edmund de Waal- The Hare with Amber Eyes
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I’ve been saving up The Hare With Amber Eyes, which has been in the best-seller lists for much of this year, for my trip to Japan. 

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Raw Chicken and Other Stories

24/7/2011

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Not far from the Tokyo district of Roppongi is a brilliant little place called “The Parasite Museum”. It’s a museum to which my children were drawn by the description in the guide book of a man whose testicles were so swollen they touched the ground. Sure enough, there’s a photo of the unfortunate man, together with numerous other gruesome pictures, most of which relate to diseases caught through ingesting parasites from food that wasn’t properly cooked.

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Sunflower Seeds

22/7/2011

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The Japanese papers have a new kind of weather map, one which shows daily levels of radiation, rather than wind speeds and rainfall. The area which we visited on Tuesday had 2.60 microsieverts per hour at 9am that day, compared with 0.059 for Tokyo. We were on the edge of the exclusion zone, about 30km from the N0 1 Fukushima Power Plant and it can be surmised (although figures aren’t being released) that the radiation levels are even higher inside the exclusion zone.

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Fukushima, four months on

19/7/2011

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The road from Fukushima to the coast crosses a mountain range which is home to racoons, monkeys and wild boar, but precious few people. The people are all crowded on the coastal strip, or were before the tsunami, or 3/11 as it’s known in Japan, struck.
I’m with Kirstie Sobue and my daughter Jo in the fishing village of Shinchi. We are here at the behest of Mr Sata, the editor of the Fukushima Minpo to see how the money which we raised in the Lake District for the Tsunami relief fund is being spent. It’s an extraordinary scene. If you stand on the village boundary and look towards the mountains everything is normal, with green paddy fields and the occasional farmhouse on the lower slopes.; dense forest above. Turn around and look coastwards and there is total devastation. Only one building still stands, the old fish market- every other house and shop in what used to be a community of 700 people has been swept away. Every single person who was in the village when the tsunami struck was killed.
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There is a solitary simple shrine, hastily erected by the workmen who were sent to clear away the rubble. On it is a school badge which was found in the mud- it belonged to an eight year old girl who was caught by the wave and killed as she walked home from school.
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Patisserie Coin de rue

18/7/2011

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As a foodie film Patisserie Coin de rue will never rival Babette’s Feast, not least because the main character is an annoyingly petulant teenager, but it’s a feast for the eyes nevertheless. The film is centred on a patisserie in a Tokyo suburb, which specialises in making lovely cakes and pastries. It’s a Japanese film, made for a Japanese audience, although it will be seen in the west after winning the “Best East Meets West” prize at the Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier this year. The film is completely absorbing because of the glimpse which it gives into the way the Japanese treat food as art. It’s about creating food which looks beautiful and tastes exquisite. They won’t accept any compromise; they are entirely devoted to perfection.The art which they are practising may have its origins in France but it’s raised to a completely different level in Japan.
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There’s one thing which will strike any westerner watching this film as odd- the fact that although everyone in it spends their life making and tasting pastries, not a single person carries an ounce of surplus fat. Very Japanese.
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Tracey Emin

16/7/2011

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When I happened to allude, during a talk to some graduate art students, to Tracey Emin’s limited intelligence, my remarks produced a gasp of disapproval from the students. Tracey Emin was clearly their hero. Perhaps I was missing something, so I took the opportunity to brush up on her achievements by visiting her retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the south bank. The Hayward is a wretched building, ugly and disfunctional, one of the nastiest pieces of architecture there is. Tracey Emin’s retrospective is equally nasty. She has no artistic skills, to the extent that she can’t draw, or paint or sculpt. ​

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The Grevillea has to go

13/7/2011

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Garden designers have to take account of time as well as shape, colour and texture. This is because the shape and size of a plant will change with the seasons and from year to year. What looks good this year may be horribly out of proportion the next. Interior designers don’t have this problem. ​

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Artichokes with butter

11/7/2011

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Artichokes, like asparagus, sweetcorn and crumpets are one of those glorious foods which are perfect with butter- just butter and nothing else. We are now enjoying our first artichoke crop for two years, after missing out last year when the plants were cut back by the winter frosts. Why they escaped the cold this winter is a mystery.

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Five broken bones for a bowl of raspberries

8/7/2011

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Soft fruit needs lots and lots of rain and this year we’ve got it. The rain has already given us bumper crops of black currants and gooseberries- now its the turn of the raspberries. But we’ve had difficulty harvesting the crop because it’s no good trying to pick raspberries when it’s wet and there have been precious few dry spells. Margaret has borne the brunt of the picking because I tend to be out at work. ​

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A New Dahlia

7/7/2011

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This is a new Dahlia and I’m really quite excited about it. We have grown it from seed and it appears to be a totally new variety- a tree dahlia cross. It’s much taller than most hybrids, growing on a single stem to more than five feet. The leaves are unusually large, some measuring ten inches in length. ​

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Who killed our duck?

5/7/2011

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The three ducks who spend the summer in our garden aren’t our pets exactly but we feel as if they might be. They are wild enough to fly south every winter (we don’t know where) but at the start of every spring they are back and they’re tame enough to swim beside me in the pond. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been keeping an eye on the female as she sits on her eggs in one of our strawberry houses in the kitchen garden. This is her second attempt to raise a family this year.

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Leda and the Perfect Breast

3/7/2011

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For the last year a five ton lump of rock has been sitting forlornly underneath the stone arch in my garden. People have wondered whether it was a piece of abstract art. If it was, its message would have been so dull it would have been worthy of the Turner prize.

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The Wonderful World of Birdwatching

2/7/2011

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When I arrived at the Leighton Moss bird sanctuary I wondered if I’d stumbled across a Bill Oddie convention. Nearly everyone there seemed to have a beard, a pair of binoculars and a certain intense expression. This was my first visit to a bird sanctuary and the first thing I wanted to see was a hide. ​

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The Garden in June 2011

1/7/2011

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June has been rather cold and damp, perfectly normal weather, in other words, for the start of summer. The rain has been good for the soft fruits but the cold has been disastrous for the flower garden. We’ve had an excellent crop of blackcurrants and gooseberries. On the other hand, the seedlings which we planted for cutting flowers at the beginning of May have hardly moved at all. 

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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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