She was from Paris. She’d been a real head turner in her prime but now she’d been abandoned half way up a mountain. Coco lived in the valley, just a few miles away. It was 1957, 12 years since the war had ended but France was still recovering. Coco, like many in rural France, was living hand to mouth. He kept a few chickens and a small flock of sheep who grazed on steep pockets of land near the base of the Vaucluse mountains. It was Coco who’d discovered her, a deep inky blue beauty with a claret interior. But Coco didn’t love her for her looks. The Lincoln had broken down near Grenoble and was left stranded at Albertini’s garage, until Coco towed her 20 miles south and flipped her on to her roof in a field. It was her chassis he was after, it would make a perfect trailer for his tractor. Years later, Coco’s friend Marie-Hélène took Gerry to look at the car. Gerry was visiting from England, he’d grown up with a dad who spent weekends buffing the family’s Mark 10 Jag – and Gerry had inherited his love of cars. This number plate is Gerry’s memento of the old Lincoln, he also took a pair of Bakelite door lock stalks that he plans to make into earrings for his girlfriend Louise.
16 Mar 2016
‘She honed her humor to its most economical size.’ Dorothy Parker’s writing, though apparently effortless, wasn’t so. She was meticulous, slicing away until there was no fat. But this sparsity and wit meant she was often dismissed as trite. At parties ‘fresh, young gents’ would demand she say something ‘funny and nasty’ like a performing seal, but her shyness with strangers rendered her mute. Critics denigrated her poetry as ‘flapper verse’; 30 years of work in The New Yorker, as opposed to some little literary magazine, only confirmed her as unworthy of the status afforded to some of her contemporaries. She was as critical of herself as her critics were of her – ‘Wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words’ whereas ‘Wit has truth in it.’ Her obituary gave her the acclaim she was due, quoting her ‘bright black authenticity’. It’s these characteristics that attracted Tony to her work, and prompted him to buy a signed copy of her first volume of poetry, ‘Enough Rope’. He identifies with her conviction, her acute wit, the economy of her work, it’s beauty and it’s utility – conveying feelings with understated power.
19 Feb 2016
Simon found a seat and spent a couple of minutes going through emails, then another ten minutes reading and re-reading an email from a client – this meant he had the rest of the journey to contemplate being fired. An hour later as the 452 rattled off down Ladbroke Grove, Simon was being beckoned into his boss’s goldfish bowl office. Simon had moved to London at 19, he ‘let the breaks off in a big way’, and spent 10k of his grant on drugs, he had no choice but to defer his degree. He took stock, cleaned up and returned to college. He graduated with a first, walked into his dream job and within 3 years was an associate, trusted to run a team and cover for a colleague who was on holiday. The cover this time involved a quick site visit and a request to encourage the client to keep to the original scheme of concrete floors in their basement. Simon dutifully did as asked, meeting with the client’s PA on site and following up with an email reiterating the recommendation to use concrete. The reply arrived swiftly, ‘If I want my floors covered in muesli with shag pile carpeting on the walls that is what I will have.’ clearly the client did not want concrete, clearly he was incensed to be patronised by someone with such ‘an obvious lack of experience.’ He magnanimously offered to ‘draw a line under this – I assume drawing lines is well within your skill-set.’ Simon has framed this email. It was a lesson in not dictating to clients and the catalyst to setting up his own practise, a practise which studiously avoids the ‘spoilt rich’. Simon has just finished designing his own house, he held off on the shag pile carpeting for the walls and chose concrete instead.
08 Feb 2016
They met for tea every Friday, but each time, just as the second brew was ready, Lorna’s lunch hour was over. For the first of these meetings she’d spent a considerable time choosing what to wear. Anders arrived on a beat-up old bike in a grey sweater peppered with moth holes – and Lorna resigned herself to having made another friend, a dear friend, but just a friend all the same. Their conversation was always easy, meandering from Japanese cooking to Chinese medicine to Lorna’s Amatsu exams to the flavour of the steak and wine Anders had ordered after an abstemious week on a Buddhist retreat. It was this refreshing absence of earnestness that Lorna, a self described ‘spiritual but no nonsense Yorkshire lass’, loved. Their tea dates evolved into date dates and they moved in together. Every night they had tea, laughing over the increasingly naff aphorisms – ‘nafforisms’ on the tags of their herbal Yogi. One uncharacteristically balmy London night, Anders returned home with flowers and Prosecco. He made a lovely, lazy supper of leftovers and they sat out in the garden. By 10pm Lorna was sleepy from the booze, she said she’d skip their customary tea and head for bed. Anders suggested she get ready for bed and he’d make tea. So Lorna sat outside in her pajamas while the kettle boiled. Anders read the tag on his tea ‘ “Truth is everlasting”…what does yours say?’. He smiled as she read out, ‘After drinking this tea, would you like to marry me?’.
01 Feb 2016
Gustav and Edith collected eggs from their chickens, grew vegetables and harvested honey from their bees. They were both deeply practical. This extended to Gustav’s job, he was a toolmaker. At home he used a vast barn to store hay, logs, chicken feed and an array of the tools he’d made, each one hooked onto a panelled wall, hanging over it’s own wobbly, painted shadow. From age 5 Carolin would make the short walk to her grandparents’ on her own, she’d head for the barn to find her grandad. It was a labyrinth of different levels, seemingly growing new rooms with each visit. She’d follow the gentle percussive hammering until she found him. He’d be bent over, bathed in a beam of light from a hanging lamp in an otherwise dim corner of the barn. There was a utility to much of his output, he built pens for the chickens, lean-tos to protect logs from the rain and hives to house the bees. But sometimes his arms would reach up to collect something from a dark shelf, and the pool of light cast on the work bench would reveal a rocking horse or a turreted castle or an engine pulling a trio of carriages.
24 Jan 2016
The bus was empty when it arrived. Emily’s was the first stop. The 7 miles to Towcester took 50 minutes as the bus snaked through the countryside, stopping at every village to pick up more school kids. The return journey felt even longer, by the time she arrived in Weedon Lois, Emily’s legs had welded themselves to the sticky leather seat. It was 1976 and Emily had just turned 15. She’d asked for a radio for her birthday so when she opened her present she had to hide her disappointment. It was a radio, but a 30 year old radio. It had been her father’s. It didn’t have FM and the Bakelite was the same dull red as her school bus. Emily’s dad, sensing her mood, said the radio had served him well. And so it came to serve Emily well. ‘It became quite a friend’, with the isolation that came from living in a small village, the radio gave her solace. At night she listened to Annie Nightingale. A few years later she left home for University St Andrews. Her halls of residence was a cacophony of fancy stereos playing Pink Floyd, Ultravox, Dire Straits and David Bowie. If you listened hard you could just pick out Grinderswitch’s ‘Pickin’ The Blues’ introducing the John Peel show on Emily’s old Murphy radio.
11 Jan 2016
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