Slow Life Blog from the Lake District
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me

Why I Love Japan Part 3 – Feeling Safe

31/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
There was a massively thick copy of the Yellow Pages next to the Gideon Bible in my hotel room in Miami. It turned out that the reason for its excessive bulk was that there were more than 100 pages devoted to adverts from lawyers. There are over a million lawyers in the States and I’m sure there’s enough work for each and every one of them. It’s a reflection of the difference in the way of life between America and Japan that Japan has only 25,000 lawyers.

Read More
0 Comments

Why I Love Japan Part 2 – The food

30/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
“Japan is like an oyster. An oyster dislikes foreign objects: when even the smallest grain of sand or broken shell finds its way inside the oyster shell, the oyster finds the invasion intolerable, so it secretes layer after layer of nacre upon the surface of the offending particle, eventually creating a perfect pearl. In like manner Japan coats all culture from abroad, transforming it into a Japanese-style pearl.”

Read More
0 Comments

Why I Love Japan Part 1 – Hospitality

28/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
“Japanese people are compulsively, touchingly, almost painfully kind and welcoming to foreigners”
​

~Richard Lloyd Parry –  ‘Japan: Three Cities’

​Who wouldn’t be nervous going to a place where you can’t even begin to understand the language or read the signs and where the population has the reputation, gleaned from countless films, of being fearsome at worst, strange at best. 


Read More
0 Comments

Roses in December

27/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture

Picture
You don’t expect to see much flower power in a Japanese garden at any time of year and so to come across a rose garden in full bloom in the middle of winter was quite something. I found this lovely surprise at the Fukuoka Botanical Garden, which is set high above the city in the Minami-koen Park. The display consisted of several dozen varieties of floribunda and hybrid tea roses, all in full flower and in perfect condition. It gets as cold in Fukuoka in winter as it does in England and they had snow here yesterday, so conditions are hardly ideal. Mind you, should I be so surprised, after being taken aback by the quality of the roses which were supplied to my garden at the Gardening World Cup here in October. The Japanese love their roses, and they certainly know how to grow them.
​
The roses shown are Rosa Meigronuri “Gold Bunny” and Rosa Meiridge “Charleston”.
0 Comments

Sushi Christmas Cake

25/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
The Japanese love Christmas and there are Santas everywhere – we saw 30 of them assembled on the river bank in Kyoto (goodness knows why) and Colonel Sanders dressed as Father Christmas outside KFC. But Christmas Day isn’t a public holiday in Japan and we took advantage of a normal train service to take the shinkansen to Hiroshima and visit the A-Bomb museum. ​

Read More
0 Comments

The Moss Temple Garden (Koke-dera) – Is this the best garden in the world?

24/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
The monks may not be as unworldly as they seem. They’ve created a mystique around the moss garden which surrounds the Temple of Fragrance in Kyoto by making all visitors apply for a permit in writing at least a week in advance and then charging a fee (or ‘donation’ as they put it) of a whopping £25 (3,000 yen) a head. The going rate for a temple and garden in Kyoto is £4. I reckon they rake in a cool £4m a year.

Read More
0 Comments

Living it up in Pyongyang

23/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
The rules of the hotel in East Berlin required everyone who used the pool to wear a bathing cap, but they said nothing about bathing suits so the tall blonde swimming alongside me wore a bathing cap and nothing else. The pool was where the Stasi girls hung out during the day. Later, they were in the hotel’s night club hoping to snare another victim. If, like me, you were single with no secrets to sell there was nothing to fear.

Read More
0 Comments

Bert Jansch Remembered

21/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture

The photo on the album cover showed a painfully thin, unlovely young man holding a guitar. In contrast to all the other albums on display, no attempt had been made to show a pretty picture. “If a man as ugly as that has made a record, his music must be good” I reasoned, and bought it, without hearing a note of his music first. This was pretty reckless of me because it cost 32s 6d, which, as my pocket money was only £3 a term, was nearly half of everything I had.

My teenage instinct turned out to be spot on. Bert Jansch’s first album was one of the best folk/blues records made. I became such as fan that I even persuaded my school to invite him to play at a concert. Heavens knows what the dour Glaswegian made of the posh public school, or of the boy who followed him into the gents and got him to sign his album.


Read More
0 Comments

Boy’s Own Gardening – Part Two

19/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
A blow torch with a 14 inch flame (the Tarantella) is the next best thing to a flame thrower, but if one of those isn’t at hand to get rid of the weeds, how about a dose of sulphuric acid? As even Bart Simpson knows, the trick with sulphuric acid is to add it to water, never the other way round. If water is added to the acid, heat is generated with the result that steam and acid shoot into the air, with horrible results if they hit your face.​

Read More
0 Comments

Boy’s Own Gardening – Part One

17/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Is it any wonder that men (by which I mean grown up boys) confine their gardening to the lawn nowadays?
​

There’s no doubt about it, gardening was more fun in the old days. You didn’t just venture out with a spade or a trowel; if the mood took you, you could use a stick of dynamite or a blow torch instead. 

Read More
0 Comments

The Psychedelic Cactus

15/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
My thanks to the RHS for recommending a mind blowing plant. The plant is Lophophora, a type of cactus. This is how the RHS Journal describes the effect of eating the dried fruit of the plant:
​

“The result is a feeling of ideal content, the mind remains self-possessed, but there is an intoxicating orgy of glorious visions in which are seen the most marvellous colour effects”

Read More
0 Comments

Salmon Leaping – Otters Snacking

13/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture

Picture
When, after swimming several thousand miles, Atlantic salmon reach the Riverside Hotel on the River Kent, they are within sniffing distance of their final destination. It must come as a shock to them to find their way blocked by a weir, which they can’t swim over- they have to jump. None make it at the first attempt and nothing pleases visitors to the Riverside more than watching them try and try again until they finally make the leap over the top.
​
From there it’s a quick sprint to the spawning ground at Kentmere. Or it used to be. For now, a new hazard has arisen, just above the weir, where a family of hungry otters are waiting to grab the exhausted salmon. Otters are nocturnal creatures, rarely seen, but here at the Riverside there have been numerous sightings this autumn. One lucky guest saw an otter pluck a salmon from the swirling water and settle down to eat it on the river bank. Other guests have seen two new offspring of the otter family playing on the base of the piers to Stramongate Bridge, directly in front of the hotel’s restaurant.
If you can stay at the Riverside, who needs Autumnwatch?
0 Comments

Kevin McCloud’s Little Boxes

11/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.


          - From “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, sung by Pete Seeger

Read More
0 Comments

Attack of the Trip Advisors

9/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Hoteliers have been gloating since Attack of the Trip Advisors went out. The programme followed a bunch of seriously odd characters as they went about the country on a mission to find fault with whichever place they stayed at, after which they would post nasty reviews on TripAdvisor. It made for very entertaining TV, the funniest of the weirdoes being Ricky, who took his Gran with him on holiday. ​

Read More
0 Comments

Compost Capitalism

7/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
No trip to London nowadays is complete without a visit to its latest tourist attraction, the tented village of St Paul’s.  I was delighted to see that it has a gardening theme, with a large sign above the tents proclaiming “Compost Capitalism”.
​
My first impression was how small it is – not so much a village as a hamlet, with no-one around.

Read More
0 Comments

Gerhard Richter

6/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
“It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedgefundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and olligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self regard”
              – Charles Saatchi

I enjoyed the coincidence of being at the party to launch Charles Saatchi’s latest collection “Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany” at the same time as he launched into an attack on his fellow collectors who, as he said, “circulate in a giddy round of glass-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another”. 

Read More
0 Comments

The Scunthorpe Problem

4/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
I got a message from Mozilla today (they’re the people who run Firefox) asking me to sign a petition against the “Stop The Piracy” bill.  So I did what all researchers do and got onto Wikipedia to find what it was all about.  It’s a bill promoted by the owners of the copyright of things like music and film, and it’s opposed by all the search engines. Google are up in arms because the bill may finish off Youtube and it’s not long since they paid $1.6 billion for it.

Read More
0 Comments

Shooting Turkeys

4/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
It being that time of year we spent the morning shooting turkeys. To get a clean kill you need to aim for the eyes, but more of that later.
​

I’m with my youngest daughter Sara who, at 13, is one of the junior members of the gun club. It’s perishing today, but there’s a glimmer of warmth in our hide from the wood burning stove and we are sustained by bacon barm-cakes (this is Blackburn) cooked on a brazier under a canvas shelter outside.

Read More
0 Comments

Christopher Holliday’s ‘Houses of the Lake District’

3/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Christopher Holliday, the garden designer and writer, will always have a special place in my affections because of his generosity when I first started on the garden here at Yewbarrow House.  He had a rather famous and very splendid garden just down the road from me, which inspired me to have a go at mine, and Christopher not only encouraged my new-found enthusiasm but helped me with the design.  When Christopher’s latest book “Houses of the Lake District” landed (with a thump – its massive) I happened to be looking at “Gardens Old and New” by Avray Tipping, which was published in 1900. ​

Read More
0 Comments

Cumbria Life Food & Drink Awards 2011: Low Sizergh Barn Farm Shop – The Carrier Bag Kings

2/12/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Hot on the heels of Appleby Creamery Organic Brie winning the prize for ‘Best Cheese’ at the Fine Dining Awards, its retailer, and my favourite food shop, Low Sizergh Barn won the Cumbria Life award tonight for the county’s best Farm Shop. The citation spoke of their amazing tea shop and their range of 2,000 products, but the best thing of all about Sizergh Barn, which nobody mentioned, is their magnificent policy on carrier bags. ​

Read More
0 Comments

The Garden in November

1/12/2011

0 Comments

 
We were tidying out the garage in September and I came across a couple of bags of daffodils which we hadn’t got round to planting out last year.  They felt rather soft, but we put them in the ground anyway, just in case.  And guess what, they’re not only alive, they’re already producing shoots – it’s been so warm they think it’s spring!
​
In fact it’s been so mild this November that the hellebores have come into flower and the wall flowers haven’t stopped flowering. The echiums have been doing well and they’ve continued to grow during the long warm autumn, so that, after four years of failure, I’ve got some hope that they’ll have enough strength to come through the winter.  And because there’s been so much more colour and life around than is usual at this time of year I’ve made a slideshow of the garden in November.  Still bleak on the whole, so the music, appropriately, is Jacque Brel singing “Ne me quitte pas”.
0 Comments


    ​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.

    Archives

    June 2017
    December 2016
    August 2015
    May 2015
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009

    RSS Feed

Home   |   About Me   |   Contact Me

Jonathan Denby's Slow Life blog from the Lake District

© Copyright Slow Life 2020. All rights reserved   |   cookie policy    |   Site by Treble3
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me