I’ve been looking for a quiet place to write away from the distractions of home (think snacks, endless wifi and a wild peacock so loud I’m quite certain he’s heralding the apocalypse).
Here’s a good list of quiet places to write in London, but my doctor flatmate alerted me to a little known gem perfect for this purpose.
Hidden behind this slightly forbidding façade is a lovely medical library, complete with wood-panelled walls, padded chairs and thick wooden tables.
The only sound you’re likely to hear is the soft tissue of medical students’ heads hitting those thick folders of notes in desperation. There are lots of power points and large tables in comfortable alcoves on two floors (possibly three, I was too scared to venture into the basement).
It’s centrally located, between the St Paul’s and Barbican stations, and unless you’re a medical student there’s no wifi access, so perfect if you lack discipline like me.
Just mumble something about proliferative retinopathy if someone asks you why you’re there.
Do you have a favourite writing space?
Where: St Barts Hospital, London. Walk into the central courtyard, then follow the signs to the Robin Brook centre. The library is to the right next to the entrance.
Opening times: Monday-Friday 9am to 9pm and Saturday 1pm to 8pm during term times. Opening times vary during the holidays.
It’s sublime. Just go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time. Where all your weaknesses of character and blemishes of personality and whatever else torments you fades away. Just doesn’t matter.
Maurice Sendak on making books and pictures. Video here.
I think I mentioned somewhere I’m currently taking the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course. It’s been a wonderful experience, if you are the sort of person who thinks stubbing your toe repeatedly against stray bed posts, strumming your face with a cheese grater or flushing your own head down the toilet is wonderful. It has been, I think, the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, this daily facing of my own foibles and inadequacies, this constant fight against apathy and self-loathing.
This week, we were treated to a presentation by author Jojo Moyes, who recently won the popular vote of Richard and Judy’s book club for her novel Me Before You. She was an eloquent, funny, and inspiring speaker, and this, I think, was the gist of her message:
Just sit down and write the damn thing. And turn the stupid internet off.
She recommended Freedom, a piece of software that locks you out of the internet for your own good, but I am not brave enough for it yet. Besides, I need the internet for research. See the image above for proof – all of these searches were for the book, apart from maybe “carrot coconut cake Hummingbird” and (ahem) “Adam Brody”, which was entirely fellow CBC student Sarah’s fault.
If you’re after insight into writing and publishing, want some book recommendations, or simply like to shed little tears in pleasure at other people’s well deserved success, go check out Jojo’s blog. It is lovely.
NOW GET OFF THE STUPID INTERNET.
What a strange day I had yesterday. One minute I was enjoying exceedingly strong coffee at Workshop Coffee, the next I was doing this:
Sewing bunting. At Kensington Palace, no less.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a view of the fortified wall that protects Will and Kate’s private apartments. From the inside. Pretty grim, isn’t it. It’s crying out for the living wall treatment.
The bunting is the work of my friend Natalie Ryde, who was an artist in residence at the Palace in the run up to its reopening to the public earlier this year. She produced some beautiful, characteristically colourful work based around historic fragments of wallpaper revealed during renovation of the palace.
Doesn’t she look sweet? This is her “Stop taking pictures and get sewing bunting, punk!” smile.
Don’t know whether it was something in the coffee, but by the end of the day we’d finished two fat spindles of bias tape and worked our way through most of the giant piles of fabric triangles. I was ready for a nap on the very inviting Kensington Palace cushions, and wondered idly if I could maybe sneak one out.
The bunting, produced by local primary school children during workshops with Natalie, is destined for the “Jubilee – a view from the crowd” exhibition opening at the Palace on the 24th of May, exploring Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897.
Hand stamped vintage cutlery, perfect for the spoon thief in your life.
£7.50 from Goozeberry Hill’s etsy shop.
I also want the “Mrs and Mrs” forks and “Everything stops for tea” spoon.
I knew I had a better story for the World Nomads travel writing competition.
Last year I went to Koh Rong island. Ageing Korean buses through the Cambodian countryside. Sugar palm trees and paddy fields, thin cows and sleeping dogs on the road. Karaoke blasting over the air conditioning. Shared pineapple from a plastic bag. A moto ride winding through Sihanoukville hills. 3 hours on a rusty ferry. Tree houses swaying gently in the wind, sand like icing sugar. The great mass of a buffalo swimming towards me, in the encroaching dusk, the bulge of its eye as it strains against the rope, how quietly it moves through the warm, clear waters.
I’ll write it another day. But in the meantime I’ve made a little video – all filmed on 35mm on my Lomo Kino. Hope you like it.
There’s an old cherry tree in the Jardin des Plantes, stubby and gnarly like an old woman with its branches reaching all the way down to the ground. For a few weeks it blooms in the Spring. If I were 16 again I would skip class to go there and kiss boys and have not a care in the world.
“There’s an exhibition of neon at La Maison Rouge,” said my sister between two mouthfuls of chocolate cake.
This is how I found myself wandering through several rooms full of brightly lit sticks after a long, bracing walk along the Canal St Martin.* Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the invention of neon lighting, the exhibition features over 100 pieces from the 1940s to the present day. Here, a Camerounian hair shirt hangs limply in a halo of pink light. Turn a corner and you’ll find a broken up poem in a glass cabinet. In another room stands a chamber of red lights, receding away into nothingness.
Is it the odd layout or the (un)savoury fumes emanating from the pop-up Rose Bakery stand? For a medium that is so colourful and brash, the exhibition falls unfortunately flat, with a certain whiff of art school mixed-media brief about it. The standout piece was ‘Untitled’ by Jason Rhoades, a joyful and exuberant installation of neon words describing the female sex. Collected at the artist’s studio in LA during parties called “Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé”, the words are strung up on cables and electrical devices hanging from the ceiling.
Queef. Sushi Taco. Sagging bacon cones. Worth the price of admission alone.
If the bright lights get too much you can retreat to the comfort of the video projection area, and watch neon tubes falling one by one from the ceiling of a sordid empty room. Soothing.
*If this sounds delightfully Amélie-esque, let me redress your impression, reader. It is arguably the most shit-strewn stretch in Paris, and that is saying something. As an added bonus we were also followed by street cleaners intent on pressure hosing said doo-doos in our general direction. Non merci.
When: 17th February – 20th May 2012
Where: La Maison Rouge, 10 Boulevard de le Bastille, 75012 Paris
Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 11 am to 7pm, late-night Thursday until 9pm
The ourangutan sits slumped at the walnut dining table. It’s obviously been a bad night. There are broken plates everywhere, stuff spilling out from the slack-hinged cabinet against the wall. The geese – they’re fucking huge, the sort of thing that could peck your eyes out just by looking at you – are still partying hard. No one knows who invited them. The camels are so high they’re eating the house plants, and the lapdogs have fashioned robes out of some cashmere scarves. There’s talk of karaoke.
Drug-fuelled hallucination? Perhaps. This was the scene in one of the windows at the newish Hermès Rive Gauche store near the Lutétia. I love me a good Hermès window. I think that if I were horrendously rich I would want to live like this, in a riot of thick woolen carpets, taxidermy and leather saddles. I’d move from room to room swaddled in silks and cashmere, rinse my teeth in Champagne, and get minions to strew dead leaves and black pearls the size of my fist on my path. I would be, in fact, Leila Menchari, the designer who has been doing Hermès’ windows since 1977.
In my unspent youth I worked at Hermès, in the flagship store on the Faubourg St Honoré. Several times a year the blinds would be drawn, the windows shielded from the prying eyes of the public. “She’s here”, we’d whisper, and there was an unspoken rule that She should not be disturbed. Apparently when Leila came she would lie in the window displays, behind the closed blinds, reclining languorously with a glass of champagne in one hand. She would say:
Je cherche ma muse.
I’m looking for my muse.
This newer store is really quite lovely, a bright open space moulded by large yurt-like structures, set against the mosaic walls of the swimming pool it used to be.
There’s a florist so you’re greeted by the sweet smell of fresh flowers when you enter, a café (completely empty when I went, cakes looked delicious from afar) and a book section that featured this gem:
Bestiaire du Gange, a ridiculously beautiful bestiary screenprinted by hand in India on thick grainy paper. More pictures here and here. I wants it. I needs it. I lusts for it, still, 10 days later. It will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine.
Where: Hermès Rive Gauche, 17 rue de Sèvres, Paris 6ème. Métro Sèvres-Babylone
Tip: The Hermès stores are a little bit intimidating from the outside, but the staff is always unwaveringly friendly. If sweaty American tourists in shorts with bumbags full of crumpled euros can shop there, anyone can.
Back in 2009, which seems like an eternity and three lifetimes ago, my imaginary friend Emma and I decided to have a go at selling rude teatime treats at Craftacular. We sold out and yet didn’t make a penny, thanks to our complete lack of economic sense.
However! Cruel Tea is now back, this time thanks to the busy knitting bees at Cambodia Knits, a fantastic social enterprise working with marginalized communities near Phnom Penh. They provide paid training in knitting skills and believe that employment is an empowering way out of poverty, especially when that employment is fairly paid and works within the constraints communities face.
I’ve been working with them over the past few months to produce some new cosies, which you can now buy at the Cruel Tea Etsy shop. I hope it’s a success – I’d love to continue supporting Cambodia Knits with more orders.
Also check out Cambodia Knits’ own range of hand knitted monsters and animals.
It is not a good idea to walk into a cake shop when you are hungry, tired, and grumpy. Emma and I had walked half way round Paris secret filming for Facegoop. It was cold, it was windy, and we needed pastry.
We flopped into the empty Sadaharu Aoki eat-in shop, in the strangely desolate no man’s land of Port Royal. We smiled at the Japanese… what were they really? Waitresses? Salesladies? Fearsome cake guardians? They did not smile back. We hesitated. We looked at neat biscuits in clear cellophane wrappers. We admired the framed live moss on the walls.
Eventually the waitresses deigned to acknowledge our presence, and this was our reward: a classic millefeuille and the Cassis Chocolat, a sort of fruity opéra with a crunchy hazelnut chocolate layer.
This thing was just for kicks. I’d remember its name if it hadn’t temporarily blinded me with a pure sugar hit, but there were definitely raspberries, wild strawberries and pistachio cream involved.
I have to say I was a bit disappointed by the cakes, which were slightly bland and no match for the exquisite box of petits fours we’d demolished sampled on another trip, but which only seems to be around for Christmas.
The boutique is still worth the détour, if only to cackle mercilessly at the neat hapless French husbands looking desperately for the signature green “masha” pastries, a haunted expression in their eyes.
Where: 56 Boulevard Port Royal, Paris
Website: http://www.sadaharuaoki.com
Tip: The seasonal collections look beautiful, but the classic salted caramel tart and sesame éclair are the real winners.
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