Oh Comely magazine issue 3 by oh comely magazine

issue three nov / dec 2010 ÂŁ4

ATP concerts proudly presents

THE FLAMING LIPS performing

The Soft Bulletin

plus ver y special guests

DINOSAUR JR performing Bug DEERHOOF performing Milk Man FRIDAY 1 JULY 2011

ALEXANDRA PALACE LONDON Tickets on sale from www.atpfestival.com â&#x20AC;˘ www.seetickets.com and in person at stargreen (www.stargreen.com)

TICKETS ON SALE FROM

www.atpfestival.com � www.seetickets.com

oh comely keep your curiosity sacred liz bennett, des tan

theo brainin, beth davis, rosanna durham, gemma lacey, dani lurie, agatha a nitecka words martyn barnes, victoria beale, beth blum, jenni emery, jane flett, connie han, novak hunter, faye lewis, alex orchard-lisle, ellie phillips, luke ryan, vicky sparrow, erin spens pictures stefany alves, steph baxter, hector durham, kim martin, shane mccauley, henry mccausland, florencia prats, kate pulley, amy lea tinkler, adelaide turnbull, ben wright advertising steph pomphrey, steph@ohcomely.co.uk. feedback and lost property, info@ohcomely.co.uk. submissions, words@ohcomely.co.uk or pictures@ohcomely.co.uk. oh comely, issue three, nov/dec 2010. Published by Adeline Media Ltd six times a year. B101 Studio 12, 100 Clement’s Road, London, SE16 4DG. 020 8616 2464. Printed in the UK by Buxton Press, www.buxtonpress.com. Cover image by Kate Pulley. www.ohcomely.co.uk Contents © 2010 Adeline Media Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission from the publishers, although conscientious and beleaguered fair users can relax and have a cup of tea. The views expressed in oh comely are not necessarily those of the contributors, editors or publishers, or the authors’ mothers. ISSN 2043-9857.

An afternoon in the park with Johnny Flynn. Photo: Agatha A Nitecka.

on the cover

we took snaps of what we love with disposable cameras, page 34, played with a box of pretty clothes, page 68, drew our childhood memories and mistakes, page 26, swapped our deodorant for baking soda, page 124,

and cooked a fragrant thai meal, page 118.

art

fashion

18 monsters of folk Drawing the stuff of fairy tales.

58 memories of green An afternoon of sunshine and cycling in the park.

20 johnny flynn 24 carl newman 26 something found Five illustrators draw their childhood discoveries. 32 never compromise Whatever happened to angry female icons? 34 picture imperfect We sent you some disposable cameras and this is what happened. 44 the optimism of flossing The philosophy of refusing to clean your teeth. 48 a history of wealth Seeing Austen, Tolstoy and immigration law through the lens of inequality. 54 frank turner 56 intoxicated by the everyday Director Remi Weekes watches dog-walkers and tower blocks.

66 caycee black A ballerina and designer shares her dance-inspired pieces. 68 stay a while Playing with a box of clothes, backstage with singer Dawn Landes. 78 audio and verses Dawn Landes isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just a rodeo sweetheart. 80 how to wear a dress Falling back in love with fashion.

114 20

102

90 118 110

people

and

82 wool, clay, felt and steel Artists who subvert the crafts they love.

110 handmade Brightonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s friendliest craft collective teach us something to make.

90 things are different now Long journeys and family secrets: times when life changed forever. 96 some like it hot Tristram Bainbridge has never stopped playing with fire. 100 life in detail Finding the perfect moment in the mundane.

114 i lost my possessions and i feel fine Life after losing twenty years of hoarded belongings. 116 stand up for motherhood Janet Balaskas changed childbirth in Europe. 118 spices for december Indulgent, but not in a cupcake way.

102 thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a bar in my cupboard The quest for the perfect sip of home-brewed beer.

124 no sweat What happens when you swap deodorant for baking soda.

108 food for thought By the people in York.

128 feeling peckish? This quiz will tell you what to eat right now.

One of our friends lost her camera one evening. It wasn’t expensive, but it was a good-ish one that you wouldn’t want to lose. By some miracle, someone handed it in and she got it back. It was all in one piece and just as before, except that on the memory card were photos of drainpipes. We wondered who on earth had taken them, and why they were so interested in drainpipes. This made us curious about what people found interesting. What different things did they see when they looked at the world? We gave out lots of disposable cameras and waited to see what people would take pictures of. Then we sent the cameras off to be developed and got back tight little rolls of negatives. We carefully scanned them in strips of six, and had a look at what had come out. We didn’t find any drainpipes, but the results were intriguing. We discovered other things along the way: writers’ stories, realising life wasn’t as they thought; drawings of what people found; and some perfect moments in an ordinary day. What have you discovered?

contributors some people who helped to make this issue

Martyn Barnes is a chef at a top London restaurant. “From a young age I have worked in kitchens. The banter is great. You can have good fun working as a team in a kitchen environment, which is important to help balance out the manic and stressful side of the work we do. People often ask me, ‘Is it like working in Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s kitchen?’ Sometimes, but it can be much more volatile. I came to London when I was 17 after completing my training at college. I put my best little suit on, printed off my CV and walked around London, handing them in to restaurants I believed to have a good reputation. I was offered a job the same day and have been developing my skills ever since. Food is what I do.” Martyn Barnes’ Thai recipes on page 118 are some of the best things we’ve ever tasted. No exaggeration.

Ben Wright, who draws under the name Ben Zen, is a 25-year-old designer and illustrator from Melbourne, Australia. “I take my sketchbook everywhere, and am either drawing, or thinking about drawing, most of the time. I make pictures from pencils, watercolour and gouache that I hope encourage people to use their imagination and find joy in the simpler things in life. I plan to travel to Europe in 2011 where I hope to explore the French countryside, eat lots of cheese, and draw like there’s no tomorrow.” We fell in love with Ben’s wistful, delicate watercolours straight away. You can find his painting as part of our illustration feature on page 26, where we asked five illustrators to draw something they discovered. His work also accompanies Ellie Phillips’ tale of lost possessions on page 114. There’s more of Ben’s work at benzen-illustration.blogspot.com.

Stefany Alves is an 18-year-old photography student studying in London. “I tend to photograph my surroundings and moments in my daily life or that of people around me. I’m interested in fashion and fashion photography. Besides that, I have a passion for music and interior design and other things related to art in general. I have a personal blog called the Public Diary, which is a distraction for myself. The blog is updated with my photography, fashion pictures, drawings, music and words about my days or things reflecting on my mood. It’s simply a online public diary I share with people from all over the world who have similar interests.” You can find Stefany’s photography accompanying Victoria Beale’s piece about angry women writers on page 32. There’s another of her photographs on page 123. The Public Diary is found at stefannysite.blogspot.com.

Theo Brainin is a writer and editor from London. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing four days from now. That’s not true most of the time, but next week I’m leaving town to try my luck with family in New York. Hopefully I’ll still be writing and taking pictures, which are my hobbies. I like photographing people out and about. Occasionally it’s not mutual, which is awkward. I’m a compulsive buyer of cameras and lenses. My writing is mostly about politics, but I’m taking a break from that to ghost-write a bar mitzvah speech by my aunt’s dog. I may have to read it out on his behalf. It wasn’t my idea.” Theo wrote a fascinating feature about global inequality, which can be found on page 48. His meticulous editing can be found throughout the magazine. He also scanned in hundreds and hundreds of negatives for the disposable camera project on page 34. Thanks, Theo.

special deliveries letters that made us smile

When I was young, I had a doll knitted by my great aunt Kathleen, a very wrinkly lady who smelled of boiled sweets and Nivea. The doll was a soldier, who I imaginatively called Soldier. He held pride of place among my other soft toys: White Rabbit, Snowy, Panda and Bear. One February, when I was three, I took him with me to see the crocuses at Kew Gardens. Soldier was very excited to be in London, and decided, rather than looking at the flowers, he would head off to try and get to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. We were in one of the big greenhouses when I discovered Soldier was missing. I was inconsolable (and noise does travel in a large building made of glass). Nothing could stop me crying. Not even the Penguin bar in Mum’s pocket. Soldier was gone. It was a long walk back to the train station. My yellow wellies dragged heavily along the pathways through the gardens. I swung the gloves hanging from the end of my coat sleeves, wondering if Soldier had met Alice. The Penguin bar wrapper crinkled in my pocket. Then just before the exit I saw him, standing cock-eyed against a tree. He looked tired.

Dear oh comely, When I read the description of your magazine and the idea of lost property, I thought of my partner Gerald. I’m Australian, he is French. He’s in Australia for one year to study. In a way he’s ‘lost property’, floating, out of his element amongst the footy shorts, mullet hairstyles and uber tans in Brisbane. Also busy working out ways to navigate the multitude of types of coffee one can order.... Lost Property: A Parisian Architect in Brisbane

I never did find out if Soldier had made it to Buckingham Palace. I was too cross with him to ask. I didn’t take him on another adventure for quite some time after.

Regards,

Sally, Hertfordshire, winner of our Young and Lost Club story competition

Cherie

what we listened to

what we ate

what we did

The Origin â&#x20AC;&#x153;made not manufacturedâ&#x20AC;? craft fair

Cycling in France

Scrabble Sunday at End of the Road

Cake by Michelle Wibowo at the Experimental Food Society Spectacular

Taking portraits at Standon Calling in Hertfordshire

pretty lovely some things to brighten up your home on a nice cold day drop a line to free@ohcomely.co.uk by the start of december if you’d like the chance to get your hands on any of these goodies

Draw yourself a dream with this illustrated pillow from Angela Chick, an illustrator and textile designer from Brighton. Angela says that she aims to tell a story through her designs and that she makes super-soft cushions “so that people want to cuddle them.” The good news is that we have one to give away, so you can try those cuddles out for yourself. Write in to free@ohcomely.co.uk for the chance to win. Visit Angela’s website for more fluffy decorations and drawings: www.angelachick.com.

The Cardboard Book Project is a wonderful idea from Jemma Foster. She wrote and illustrated twelve stories and turned them into hand-painted books made from recycled cardboard bought from Buenos Aires’ cartoneros (cardboard pickers). For every book sold in the UK, another is donated to the Abuelas Cuentacuentos (Storytelling Grandmothers) programme, which invites elderly volunteers to read to children in the poorest parts of Argentina. We have a copy of Jemma’s story The Mid Wife to give away to one of our readers, so write in for the chance to read it yourself. For more information on the project, or to buy the books online, go to www.thecardboardbookproject.com.

Owls. They have round faces, make funny little sounds and, from what we hear, they are quite wise. What’s not to love? Included in these DIY owl brooch kits by Wollies are all the materials needed for the crafty ornithologist to make their own feathered friend. Creator Ollie Freuler encourages crafters to embroider their own designs and send in photos when they’re done. We have two kits to give away, so write in and you could soon be making one of your very own! Find more nature-themed treasures at their online shop: folksy.com/shops/wollies.

Ah, afternoon tea: the best of all the tea times. Designer Jess Broad agrees, which is why her company Cuppa Tea And Cake is full of delightfully tea-themed handmade treasures. As a self-proclaimed “maker of nice things,” Jess screenprints and sews totes, cushions and tea towels, as well as jewellery and stationary. We love this cute polka dot bunting. It’s perfect for hanging in your garden to ward off the winter chills with its sweetly pastel tones. We have two sets to give away, so write in to free@ohcomely.co.uk to win. You can peruse Jess’ creations on her website, cargocollective.com/cuppateaandcake.

My Paper Crane is the brainchild of Heidi Kenney, maestro of all things crafty, stuffed and adorable. Heidi has been creating memorable plush characters since 2001 and has just published a book of festive crafts for kids called Every Day’s a Holiday. Her work includes fuzzy toy donuts, stuffed xylophones and the cutest tearful toast you’ve ever laid your eyes on. Heidi has kindly given us this cute ‘used tissue’ plush to give to our readers. Just make sure not to blow your nose on it! You can find Heidi’s colourful characters at www.mypapercrane.com.

Here’s a miniature moo for you by Quernus Crafts, the home of small and quirky polymer clay animals. All handmade by Kirstin Miller, these little critters come signed, monogrammed and wrapped in a box, along with a certificate and their own unique name. Visit the QC website for a cavalcade of little creatures, including Star Wars cats and psychedelic snails: www.quernuscrafts.co.uk. Kirsten has given us two of her ‘wee beasties’ to give away to our readers: a big-horned highland cow and an adorable little sheep. They usually retail at £10 each but can be yours if you drop us a line.

Step back to a glamorous age with this sweet vintage-inspired hat, lovingly hand crocheted by Mel P Designs. Mel Paton knits beautiful bows, scarves, ascots, gloves and even iPod covers in a plethora of pretty colours. All her pieces are made with eco-friendly, cosy yarns such as pure Australian wool and alpaca, so they’re perfect for snuggling into on those chilly days. We have this hat (RRP £16) to give away to one lucky readers— simply email free@ohcomely.co.uk to be in the running. Visit Mel’s online shop at etsy.com/shop/melpdesigns.

If C is for cake, then F is for fish and chips! What better place to showcase the edible alphabet than these illustrated plates from Just Noey. Created by Londonbased designer Parul Arora, Just Noey features a range of beautiful and original ceramic tableware, including the wonderfully postcard-esque Post-a-plates. We’re giving away one of these mouth-watering Alphabet Plates (RRP £22) to our readers. Let us know if you’d like one, and tell us the letter you would like. Visit her website at www.justnoey.com for more tableware fun.

Carly Simon once sang, “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee.” Maybe this is what Lucy Selina Hall had in mind when she painted these delightful cups. Lucy is a Suffolkbased illustrator and ‘critter creator’ who designs and makes a wide range of pretty items including plushies, dinner sets, coffee tables and sofa covers. She admits that she thinks “having a pet cloud would be amazing” and has given us these cloud cups so you can be closer to having one too. You can see Lucy’s other delightful critters at www.lucyselinahall.com.

Footloose and fancy free? Your feet will adore a pair of fabulous shoes from cult brand Irregular Choice. From the glittering uppers to their pretty, printed soles, these shoes are made for showing off. Irregular Choice have a wide range of colourful, unique shoes, from heels and flats, to boots and trainers. They even have a range of vegetarian shoes for the animal-ethical shoe buyer. Irregular Choice have offered one of our lucky readers the chance to win a pair of shoes of their choice, up to the value of £100. Have a look at their extensive collection at www.irregularchoice.co.uk and email us for a chance to win.

Illustration for Just Now, a short story about sisterhood and grief.

monsters of folk aleks sennwald draws fairy tales and pop culture heroes interview dani lurie Aleks Sennwald is a freelance illustrator with a flair for the fantastic. Her style is sweetly pensive, saturated with images of heroes, animals and monsters that bring to mind memories of a folk tale you’ve never heard. She’s lived in Colombia, Italy, Switzerland and France, and is based in New Jersey. Having moved around so much my whole life, and coming from a family of nomadic people, I have a tendency to carry ‘home’ around with me. It’s less a place to me and more of an abstract idea combining the different places I’ve lived in and experienced. My work often features characters from pop culture. It’s mostly a fun exercise to redesign popular characters and put them through my own personal filter. I feel that pop culture is usually just as much a part of people’s daily lives as anything else. To me, drawing Galactus or Batman is just like drawing a tree or a landscape. My work’s been described as “alluringly dark.” I think I might just have the tastes of a depressed 8-year-old. I’m heavily influenced by fantasy stories and fairy tales, and I use imagery and themes from them as a personal language to say whatever it is I want or need to communicate in a given piece. Every piece I do has some part of my personal story in it, whether I put it in consciously or not—probably less so with commercial work, but sometimes I’ll see an ad I illustrated a while after I did it and notice that what was going on in my life at the time influenced me more than I realised. Even if it’s just that the characters look cold, and that’s when the heat in my apartment was broken, or a field I drew looks just like the one behind my childhood home. I’ve always wanted to study planetary geology, so if I wasn’t an illustrator I probably would have ended up doing something in that field. You can see more of Aleks’ illustrations and read her blog at www.aleks-sennwald.com. Self-portrait.

songs for the wilderness johnny flynn longs for space to wander words rosanna durham, portraits agatha a nitecka

There’s a verse in Kentucky Pill, on Johnny Flynn’s latest album, that goes like this: “Did you punch all those clocks? Did you seal up those time bandits? If you’re playing on the swings, you can’t be in the sand pit.” These words seem to express a quiet argument that Johnny Flynn has always had with the music he loves. He feels his time has been pick-pocketed. When I meet Johnny, he’s wearing Emmy the Great’s guitar on his back. (“I borrowed it six years ago and she’s never asked for it back,” he explains, not doing much to diffuse talk of cliquey folk collectives.) Talking about his packed schedule, he says, “I think I managed to feel that I had some kind of nomadic attitude towards time, even through school, that I might always have some power over where I’d be and when and how I’d do things. I find it hard to fit into that now, whenever I have time there is always something I have to do.” On how he feels to have his time set out for him, he says, “Really depressing.” Time is a conflict that’s been with Johnny for quite a while. Aged six, he won a music scholarship to a local private school and soon began learning to play the piano, trumpet and violin. But he resented the fearsome, compulsory timetable of practice. “You know when you’re a young kid you don’t want to spend all your time playing music. And also I was a choral scholar so I had to do that as well. We didn’t really have any playtime and that carried on until I was 18. It was a very structured, classical musical education.” A spirit of discontent, he confesses, balanced this musical routine out. “I wasn’t the hardest working music scholar! I was pretty rebellious.” One of the reason Johnny’s life has turned so busy is the success of Been Listening, the album he released this summer. It’s a potently successful follow-up to A Larum, his debut from two years ago. Bluesinflected vocals, and the instrumental sound provided by his band, The Sussex Wit, have turned this softly-spoken musician into a great success. Flynn was born in South Africa, but grew up in Hampshire and South Wales. The country upbringing left its mark on the songs he writes:

his band takes its name from the line of an old English folk song. Johnny was once better known for acting than music. He’s a member of Propeller, a Shakespearean theatre troupe. Most notably, he played Sebastian in Twelfth Night at the Old Vic, just before he was signed by Transgressive Records three years ago. Johnny’s acting is compatible with his music, he feels, but not his musical career. “The two never work so well together in practice. Maybe on an emotional level—on a calendar they don’t. You have to be endlessly available to have an acting career.” The schedule of a musician isn’t sympathetic to jobs that may last six months and require lots of waiting around. In 2007, Johnny had worked solidly on acting since leaving drama school seven years earlier. Then he got a record contract. “My music managers don’t quite get it,” he says. “I say I’d like to do some acting, and they’ll reply, ‘Well, there’s going to be a month free next year.’ It doesn’t really work like that.” Life before Johnny Flynn and The Sussex Wit does sound freer and even more nomadic. But perhaps what Johnny misses most is the chance to wander at will. He travels more for work more than anyone else he knows, he says, but touring is a far cry from travelling for pleasure. “There’s a big difference. On tour you can’t ever really get lost, physically or emotionally, because you have to present yourself on stage every night. You always feel that you have to be at a certain level of unbreakable. You can’t just do what I would do when I travel, which is just wander off into a wilderness.” He regrets that travelling has become ordinary. “In a way it’s sad. Those first few times when you take off on a trip, and it’s really amazing, and it changes you, that’s a good thing. But now, it’s far more normal for me to be travelling, rather than not.” The last time Johnny headed into the wilderness was just before going into the studio to record Been Listening. He took off and went walking in remote Northern Spain. “I just went. I took a one-man tent, some walking boots and one change of clothes. The only living things around me were wild horses and eagles soaring above. I was just knocked over.” He walked along an old pilgrimage path called the

Camino de Santiago and savoured the isolation and escape. “People don’t take that way much because it’s really mountainous and it’s not very well preserved. That’s why I did the walk. I wanted to give myself this rich or even quite empty experience before going into the studio to record the second album.” Been Listening bears the mark of Johnny’s fondness for the wild. Songs like The Water, a duet sung with Laura Marling, charts an ethereal river journey. Others like The Prize Fighter and The Heiress recall folk tales where love is won and lost in a battle. But it’s not only his lyrical songs that narrate journeys. In Spain, Johnny took his camera for company. “I took quite a few photographs. I took the photograph that’s on the album cover, of the trees. I took that when I was walking in Spain.” Back home in London, he passed the photograph to his artist friends, and asked them to paint or sculpt something in response to it. “I wanted to give it to people. I’m into quite collaborative things with artwork stuff. Most of my close friends are artists; it’s one of the most exciting things for me.” None of the artwork went to waste. On the small poster that comes with the album, Johnny is photographed surrounded by these small-scale creative offerings. Something similar happened with the A Larum album cover. “There were two drawings, one was an etching and the other was a drawing, that people had brought along to gigs. I like the idea of taking the relationship you have with the audience a bit further.”

Johnny is fond of communicating with his audience in unconventional ways. I first saw him play at the Nine Muses festival in Oxford where he interrupted his set by reading a poem out loud. The half-drunk audience was enraptured. Words both spoken and sung are central to his music. “The music of the lyrics informs the melody,” he tells me. “I wrote from quite a young age. It wasn’t really diary keeping, it more like verse, what other people call poetry I guess. It was quite musically formed, had rhythm and the meter of the verse. They could be songs. It didn’t take much to take then to the next step.” Compared to his first album, Been Listening has a very different sound. You can grapple with labeling it as more instrumental, or more confident, but the answer might be simpler. As he puts it, “I’m starting to experiment a bit more with scoring music for its own merits, then writing words to fit.” Johnny’s lyrics are still where his musical edge lies, yet there’s no single subject that he tackles or writes about. He’s a little thrown by the question of an underlying message. “I’ve never really had this discussion before, about an overriding theme. I do feel quite politically motivated, not in the Westminster political sense. I have a personal manifesto. I think my political state is, through the songs, to journey inward and for that to be a valid thing for people to do. Performing is a sharing experience—very spiritual, if that is the right word.” His own spirituality has changed from “argumentative atheism” to something more exploratory. “When I was 18 that fell apart complete-

ly, and it was replaced by an interest in spirituality and religions. More and more I’m not afraid of religions at all. Some times I’m afraid of the people but not the religious teachings themselves.” He draws biblical and religious narratives into his lyrics, using them as a familiar touchstone to communicate with the audience. “They’re like the first moral lessons that you’re handed as a kid. For me now, Jesus and his parables and Sufi texts and Buddhist writings, are really interesting things to explore and define lots of issues that are around,” he says. The layered history of the texts gives a richness to their associations. “They do it in the most succinct way because they are the things that people have projected onto for thousands of years, so they are sometimes the most helpful thing.” Like his manifesto of introspection, the heart of Johnny’s music lies within. “I have a weird relationship to music. I would go through periods of time of listening very voraciously to loads of stuff and I’d be really into one particular thing or one particular record. But when I’m recording I think generally I feel like I’ve done all the listening and I’m creating a new universe.” “My musical digestive system takes a while to process things, having consumed all these other things,” he says. Johnny is happy chewing the musical cud. He’s not a reactionary or impulsive creator. There isn’t any constipation involved, it seems. “It’s slow but we get there in the end. You put all this stuff in and you leave it a couple of years and then it comes out.”

Self-portrait.

you can always fall back on stringing guitars carl newman and ten years of the new pornographers interview dani lurie, photo hector durham

Ten years ago, Carl Newman strung guitars for a living. Working for an acoustic guitar company in his native Vancouver, Canada, his job was “string ‘em up and set ‘em up”. He hated it. But between the stringing and setting up of those guitars, he was also writing songs on them that would go on to appear on Mass Romantic, the first album from the New Pornographers. It was the break-out success of that album that set him free from his reluctant day job. That was a while ago now. These days, Carl ‘A. C.’ Newman writes and performs music full-time, both with the New Pornographers and his own solo outfit. He’s standing in the back lot of Dorset’s End of the Road festival, aged 42 years old with a ginger muzzle and a beer in his hand. He took some time to chat about song writing, moving to the country and alternative career moves. The New Pornographers’ new record is Together. After the release of the last album, Challengers, you said in an interview that the next one was going to be the definitive album. Really, did I say that? I must have been drunk. So I was wondering, did Together live up to it for you?

I don’t know. I have absolutely no perspective. I just say that every time. For about the last seven years, every time somebody says, “I really like this record,” I go, “Wait til you hear the next one, man! The next one’s gonna be the best.” It’s my stock line. How do you think the progression works for each album, then? Is it just getting better and better? It’s hard for me to say. It’s hard when you’re a band and you clearly have a style you settle into. Sometimes I find myself fighting it. I know there’s a kind of song that people like us to do and we fall into it because it’s easier. But I don’t want to do that. So on a record like Challengers, I was trying to move away from that as far as possible. But with Together, I think I started moving back into it. I finally settled in and said, “Let’s just be the New Pornographers.” Maybe it’s just me, but every time I’m listening to another band, I always want to sound like that band. I’ll be listening to the National and go, “We should start sounding like the National.” Or Animal Collective. I think, “I want to sound like this!” But then you realise that’s stupid. Why would you imitate another band? You might as well just stick with what you do. So were there any bands when you were writing Together about which you were thinking, “Oh, I wish I could sound like them”? Not really. I’m listening to more records now than I was back then. I had just moved away from Brooklyn and we had a one-bedroom apartment there. You know, where you don’t even have enough room for your records. We’ve just moved to Woodstock, New York, last year. So I now I have all my records in this area, and it’s made me listen to a lot more music. Do you find your songwriting process has changed since moving? Does the environment affect the way you write?

Carl’s friend Blaine Thurier sketched this doodle of Carl and himself and their friendship.

No, but I think it’s going to. I don’t know if it’s happened yet in Together, because I’d only lived in Woodstock for a month or two when we recorded it. There wasn’t enough time for me to become a full-on woodsman. But I don’t think we’re going to magically start sounding like Bon Iver on the next record, just because I live on some acreage. We’ll see.

Yes, it’s true.

It’s been about ten years since your first album was released. What do you think you’d be doing if it wasn’t music?

Y’know, one of the members of Pavement, Steve West, he became a stonemason. They were curating All Tomorrow’s Parties a few month’s back, and he did a stonemasonry workshop in the courtyard. Which is pretty cool.

I don’t know. I feel so lucky because I didn’t really have a back-up plan. I mean, I just had a shitty job that I hated, when I was working on the first record. What were you doing? I worked at this place called Larrivée. They made acoustic guitars. For the last year, I strung ‘em up and set ‘em up, and I would play them. So I wrote a lot of our first record while I was just at work. That was my revenge on my last employer. It seemed like the ultimate ‘fuck you’—not only am I quitting, I’m quitting because of all these songs that I wrote on your time. That’s pretty funny. Yeah, it is. I feel very grateful. I remember in 2001 when I quit my job, and I looked at my bank account and I thought, “I think I’ve got enough to live off for a year. I can make it to 2002.” And then things kept going on. I still do that. I still think, “How long can I survive if it all ends right now?” A couple of years ago, I thought, “Holy shit, I might have a regular career here.” But we’ll see. I gotta make enough money to last me til the end of my life, because I’m unqualified to do anything else. Hector: You can always fall back on stringing guitars.

Hector: You can write some more songs while you’re working. Yeah. I think I’m going to become a woodworker. Now that I live out in Woodstock, I’m going to get a craft. Become a crazy old guy.

Really? We’re playing the Belle & Sebastian ATP in December—Bowlie Weekender 2. It’s going to be awesome. I actually have tickets to that. I’m very excited. It’s Minehead, right? I’ve only ever been to Camber Sands. I hated Camber Sands. It’s such a toilet. I hear Minehead is better. But you know what you have to do? Go to the water park. I don’t know about you, but it’s the only festival I’ve ever been to where there’s water slides and a wave pool. It’s just amazing. Yeah? And there’s just lots of skinny, pale indie kids… That’s me. …in their swimming shorts. I’m a skinny, pale, indie man. That’s slightly different. I’m not that skinny actually. But pale. Pale and indie, yeah.

something found

illustrators, their childhood memories and mistakes

illustration ben wright

There used to be a small, intricate wooden box tucked inside the old hutch in the dining room. I remember my dad taking it out one afternoon and showing me how to open it. It was a puzzle box, the kind that looks like it has no opening. He took the box and slid the secret panels, one on each side, little by little. It seemed to take hours as the panels only moved a tiny bit at a time. But eventually we slid the lid off the box, and I let its contents tumble to the ground: a jumble of time-worn skeleton keys. I sat on the floor and studied each key, imagining that they opened doors all over the world. When my dad wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there, I would sneak the puzzle box out of the hutch and work it open myself, just to sit and stare at the keys. But one day I pushed the panels too hard, and the secret workings broke. I put the broken box with the trapped keys back in its place. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know where the box is now, but I suspect it is locked in a chest in the basement. I used to hide the key to that chest in an unfinished wall. The wall was plastered over and I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember if I ever took that key out.

illustration alli coate

This piece is actually about death. My inspiration came from the memory of me as a child comprehending the concept of mortality for the first time. When confronted by the idea that people simply cease to exist on this planet, I remember the inner voice of my head asking, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Well what did you think happened?â&#x20AC;? Honestly, I thought people grew and grew until they were giants! I immediately realised that this was a silly conclusion, because we would see giants everywhere if that were the case. I used this imagery to create not a moment of understanding, but a fanciful depiction of that false notion in my young head. Portraying the childhood perception seemed more interesting to me than the shattering of these beliefs. It would have been like painting a bubble being popped. In the end, the bubble was much more interesting than its destruction.

illustration lauren minco

Lost. I had lost it, but now I have found it again. Fun. Fund. Find. Found. I have found my childhood. What I really mean to say is I have rediscovered my childhood. I discover every day that I am slowly reverting back to a child-like state of mind. Where are my toys? Want to join me? You say you are three? I am thirty-four and a half. I cannot hold up that many fingers but I am told that is a serious age. Can you help me find my pens and ink and watercolours? They were picked up from the floor and now I cannot find them. It is okay. We will just make-believe. Have you seen or heard the talking forest creatures around here? They say there is a river of pink lemonade just over that hill. I plan to jump in. If I find my watercolours I can use a blade of grass to paint by the river. I will dip the tip into the stream and paint pink lines on my face. Face. Fade. Fan. Found. With these pink whiskers I will fool the animal creatures into adopting me as one of their own. The animals are like children. To play with them you have to look and act like one. No longer am I lost. I have found the friends I am looking for. Friends. Fronds. Fond. Found.

illustration justin winslow

As a child I was a semi-keen astronomer, determined to learn the name and location of the constellations. Eventually, to my delight, I was given a telescope, which we would drag out to the garden and stand in the freezing cold trying to focus on a star, any star. Despite the unexpected trickiness of using a telescope, I never stopped hoping that I might discover a new star and name it after my dog. I never discovered anything, but I had a wonderful time looking. As well as the usual wavering constellations, we saw shooting stars, dim planets, and once a bright trailing comet. I found the telescope this summer in my garage, looking dusty and sad. It was a complete surprise. I never succeeded in my ambitions and now I lack even basic astronomical knowledge. I had forgotten that I was ever interested in astronomy, but finding it brought back the wonder of using it for the first time.

illustration katie harnett

never compromise in praise of writing’s unfashionable icons words victoria beale, photo florencia prats My favourite novelists are repressed homosexuals who write in roundabout, elegant prose. Henry James and E. M. Forster are funny in a muffled way, prodding staid characters towards tragic or comic conclusions respectively. A vase or an engagement may be broken during the course of the plot, but no one gets unnecessarily continental or teary about it. When the novels finish, no matter what’s gone on with the groundskeeper or the Italian sleazebag, it is made perfectly clear that peace, and aching desperation, will resume normal service in the English countryside. My preferred fiction could be a function of how hysterical I was at the time of my life when I read the most. As a lip-biting fifteen-year-old, the last thing I needed was the complete poems of Anne Sexton or the DVD box set of My So-Called Life (although Clare Danes is dreamy). So I prescribed myself a literary pep talk in the form of Henry James’ Ambassadors, and tried to ignore my tugging yearning for Courtney Love EPs. In the last few months I have been a drifting graduate, and I thought I could rely on myself, with the grace of maturity, to be sensible. Keep my head down, apply for jobs at chi chi book shops patronised by Helena Bonham Carter, and doodle nooses in my copy of the Metro. But instead my bi-polar harpy tendencies have screechingly re-revealed themselves. I find myself obsessively reading volumes of essays, articles and autobiographies by angry, arrogant women writers, especially the genius Julie Burchill and the irresistibly self-centred Elizabeth Wurtzel. These writers are show-boaters: verbose queen bitches who found their style early and exult in it. They are both intellectuals and pop culture fiends. Wurtzel can as easily summon a reference to Edith Wharton as Bruce Springsteen; Burchill ricochets between Graham Greene and Jonny Rotten. Both were discovered early: Wurtzel by winning the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award, Burchill with her famous crayon-penned Patti Smith review to the NME aged sixteen. Both have retained the entitled air of prodigies, no matter what their later vulnerabilities. The reason that these writers appeal to me so much at this utterly unsettled period of my life is their unshakeable and justifiable faith in their ability to write better than most everyone else, even when their relationships (in the case of Burchill) or their entire lives (in the case of Wurtzel) are cracking up. There may be points in her memoirs when Wurtzel is curled up on a bathroom floor in a ripped-up LBD, jonesing for ten different illegal substances at once. But no matter how deathly depressed she gets, she never for a moment doubts her vocation, or the happiness and focus that it brings her. Julie Burchill is less nuanced in that she seems never to have doubted herself in any respect at any point. But this attribute, this absolute self-belief, which makes other aspiring journalists roll their eyes and say, “Well, I guess somebody’s got to,” when I tell them of my love for Burchill, this is precisely what makes her so unparalleled. In an essay on her formative years entitled Nature, Nurture or Nietzsche? Burchill writes, “I sprawl there, sucking my hair and sorting my cocktail Sobranies; there are only three things that I want to do—be famous, sleep with an American Jew and take drugs—and then, God, you can kill me. But please, not till then.” It is this, these perfectly evoked memories, this ironical sending up of all ambitious adolescents everywhere that I want to convey to more on-trend readers when they rag on Burchill’s hyperbole or effortful contrariness. To distill it, what makes these women so admirable and unusual is that they never had to grow up. Never had to grow up, or go through what is conventionally understood to be growing up: abandoning some of your wilder aspirations, and settling for a life a little more reined in. They were born precocious, employable sassmouths and so they remain. Even in describing an absolute mental crack-up, Wurtzel never misses an opportunity to demonstrate her literary credentials, her way with a phrase: “There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.” This is what any woman my age should be aspiring to write—not titteringly amusing columns about holiday disasters or bitchery about Taylor Momsen, but gut-felt and funny prose that never apologises.

picture imperfect eight disposable cameras, eight views of the world

Lucy, 21, art student. My snaps are of the things that are sometimes overlooked and forgotten. I’m glad they’re still there. Without them I’d be a bit dull. Each thing is something that I wouldn’t like to lose. Some of them are sentimental and vital, but some are silly bits. I guess that the icing on the cakes is what makes them tasty, and worth having! These photos are the icing on my days.

Rachel, 20, English and philosophy student. Growing up and studying in a city that has such significance in the canon of English literature has inspired me in so many ways. This is Edinburgh in the way I recognise it, embodying the literature that has been produced here. A lot of my photographs are of places in Edinburgh that recognise the old and the modern great literary figures who wrote here: the Writers’ Museum, Sir Walter Scott’s monument, and even the café where the first Harry Potter was written! Many pictures are of the best bookshops in the world, places which have inspired me to write, books which have changed my life, and of course my own creative endeavours. Doing this little task has really made clear to me just how much I love what I do, so for that I am very, very thankful.

Joseph 15 and Simeon 13. Some of them were a bit silly, I don’t really know why I took them: the photos of the coco pops and the flies on the flypaper. We took some photos of the farm and the tractors, because it’s not something you’d find just anywhere.

Brijesh, 38, freelance photographer. I shoot frequently with a Holga. I grew up in this house in Buckinghamshire, so itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a special place to create images.

May, 59, musician and sandwich maker. I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t talk about what the photos were about without seeing them. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the joy of a camera. You take the photos and you wait and see what you get back

Hector, 21, mathematics student. These were all taken on one lazy afternoon spent wandering around with the dog, not far from where I live. Not having walked around some of these areas before, the architecture provided refreshing inspiration. Delilah is a standard poodle from Lancashire and it took her a while to get used to the city, but she loves it now.

Andrea, 49, arts administrator. I am passionate about food: growing it, cooking it, eating it; art; water, sky, beaches; street markets, neighbourhood bars and local shops. The great things you find by stepping off the beaten track. My happy snaps are a Saturday stroll through the things and places I like best, starting at my local farmers market for my weekly food shop, a quick check on my allotment before some dance steps on the South Bank, meandering past the Thames, drifting down back streets, a coffee stop at Scooter Caffe, winding up with time to browse the ICA bookshop before a gig.

Sophia, 24, farmer. I spent the last few years helping my parents run their stud farm, where they breed racehorses, in the wilds of Yorkshire. It is a place and lifestyle that breeds its own kind of entertainment. (Though there is internet access, one has to check the oil levels before crankstarting the dial-up modem.) So a usually inane object like a large or misshapen conker becomes something worth picking up and adding to the treasure trove that is my coat pocket. Autumnal sunsets are occurrences I can afford as much time as I want, though requiring plenty of patience and layers. There are daily tasks, but much depends on the season and a lot of time is spent fixing problems that inevitably arise. This means few of my days are spent in any one fashion, though most will involve dealing with various animals. The photos show what I came across that piqued my interest as I bumbled around one day.

the optimism of flossing some things to think about when you clean your teeth words beth blum, photos agatha a nitecka

Everyone hates flossing, but for me it’s an especially embattled activity. This is not just because I don’t want to do it, which goes without saying, but because it is the occasion for a daily encounter with the fact of my mortality. We are all familiar with the gruesome scene: string held taut and cutting into index fingers, tender gums twisted into a compulsory grin. Lately, leaning into the bathroom glass, I’m overcome with disdain for the naïve optimist peering back. After all, who’s to say that I’ll even live long enough to reap the benefits of this routine?

One. Humans survived for centuries without floss. This is always one of the first anti-flossing arguments to come to mind. There’s something about the skeletal appearance of teeth that makes one think enviously of Cro-Magnon man, and the advantages of his shorter life. He was probably never forced to hash out with his imaginary future self just how much of his present pleasure he was willing to spare. Flossing is yet another mixed blessing of our unnaturally prolonged lives.

Even the most seemingly neutral acts are loaded with consequence. Every cigarette smoked or vitamin chewed is an implicit argument about how to experience time. Airmiles, investing, exercising, wearing sunscreen: how many everyday activities would grind to a halt were we to shed the fiction of life’s stability? More than simply a safeguard against dental decay, flossing is a contract with the future, a deal done with mortality. Choosing to floss means rejecting the romance of destructive behaviour and embracing responsibility.

Though the toothbrush has been around since the fifteenth century, flossing was only invented in 1815. American dentist Levi Spear Parmly introduced his patients to “the waxed silken thread, which is to be passed through the interstices of the teeth, between their necks and the arches of the gum, to dislodge that irritating matter which no brush can remove.” When floss became commercially available in 1885, it was advertised as having the capacity, with regular use, to “add ten years to your life.” So I’m not too far off when I say that flossing is nothing less than a matter of life and death.

I have spent enough time flossing over the years to come up with some objections to the flossing imperative. Here, then, to go against mounting health advice to the contrary, I present to you four reasons not to floss, or at least, four points to mull over as you do.

Over the years, marketers have invented all sorts of futile and desperate gimmicks to make the idea of flossing more palatable, from little individualised plastic holders of all shapes and sizes to electric homeflossing machines. But these inventions are missing the point. It is not

the discomfort of holding the string but the enforced sequentiality that makes the experience of flossing intolerable. Patiently traversing each interstice requires the faithfulness of Penelope with her threads. Much of my flossing conceit has been devoted to cursing modernity and yearning nostalgically for a better time, when flossing hadn’t been invented and humans could actually enjoy their lives. Then recently I came across some startling footage that put a wrench in my pre-flossing ideals. It’s a video of a macaque monkey in Thailand teaching her offspring to floss with a piece of human hair. The hair was dropped by people visiting a nearby Buddhist shrine. So much for my prehistorical flossing utopia! Maybe Cro-Magnon man knew about floss after all.

thing bad occurs. The Stoics elevated worrying into a philosophy of life. Today, we pathologise this kind of excessive worrying, and label it neurosis. But for the Stoics, hypochondriacs like Woody Allen might have represented the greatest and most enlightened state. Would a philosopher like Marcus Aurelius have bothered with floss? On the one hand, a Stoic would want to avoid at all costs being caught off guard by an unforeseen cavity or a toothache. Then again, it seems that someone who had really taken praemeditatio malorum to heart would be too busy anticipating real catastrophes to think about a comfortable old age replete with receding gums and plaque decay. Three. Self-discipline is for joggers.

Two. There are more important things to worry about than flossing. Ancient philosophy can be a great resource for anti-flossing justifications. For instance, whenever you find yourself bogged down with small concerns, you can always find recourse in the Stoical practice of praemeditatio malorum. It literally means death premeditation and is the art of anticipating future misfortunes. The Stoical philosophers thought that most of our unhappiness in life comes from being taken by surprise by an unforeseen disaster. They argued that if you can train yourself to expect misfortune, you’ll be less thrown off if some-

For those who are skeptical about the positive-thinking industry, even our most venerated contemporary philosophers can be mined for arguments against floss. These philosophers haven’t yet caught on to the tyranny of floss, but they do like to critique flossing’s sinister cousin: jogging. The same loophole applies to jogging as to floss: the slightest reminder of life’s precariousness can quash any steps towards admitting its utility. The un-athletic thinker can take up arms with contemporary

theorist Slavoj Žižek against that ‘bad’ bodily discipline that views “jogging and body-building as part of the New Age myth of the realisation of the Self’s innermost potentials.” She can read with self-justifying glee the philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s description of the jogger “foaming at the mouth, swathed in the sounds of his walkman,” ready to rip off your head if you get in his way on the street. For those who love philosophy but still want to exercise, I would recommend the pessimist Schopenhauer. Only with Schopenhauer does it appear possible to be a nihilist and exercise. He observes in his Wisdom of Life: “LIFE IS MOVEMENT… When people get no exercise at all, as is the case with the countless numbers who are condemned to a sedentary life, there is a glaring and fatal disproportion between outward inactivity and inner tumult… Even trees must be shaken by the wind, if they are to thrive.” It is permissible to take care of the body, you might say, so that we can go on lamenting its existence with the mind. Four. We are all going to die. Maybe soon.

And even you will come to this foul shame, This ultimate infection, Star of my eyes, my being’s inner flame, My angel and my passion! Yes: such shall you be, O queen of heavenly grace, Beyond the last sacrament, When through your bones the flowers and sucking grass Weave their rank cerement. —Baudelaire, A Carrion. The point is not to adopt a morbid stance but to have a little irony about one’s daily routines. Next time you are flossing, ask yourself if you really want to sign away your present for an imaginary future dentition. But also know that even the most stoic philosopher trembles before the toothache.

Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. New York: New Directions, 1989. Baudrillard, Jean. “AMERICA - Excerpts 1” London and New York: Verso, 1998.

It’s one thing to floss, like the macaque monkey perhaps, to remove a poppyseed or a piece of grass stuck between your teeth. This kind of self-care is driven by circumstance and necessity. But it requires a unique blend of expectation for the future and abdication of present pleasure to floss when no poppyseed is there.

Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. New York: Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2007.

People spend their lives “gaping after the future,” as Flaubert says, only watch it overtake them as they pedal furiously on their stationary bikes. And so, lest our flossing-guilt grow too extreme, lest we start measuring money in bottles of acai berry drinks and jars of retinol creams, we should remember Charles Baudelaire’s words for a little perspective:

Ring, Malvin E. “Dental Floss is a Great, Underappreciated Invention.” American Heritage.com: History’s Homepage.

Danner, Deborah D and David A Snowdon and Wallace V Friesen. “Positive Emotions in Early Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2001. 80.5. 804-813. Flaubert, Gustave. Qtd in Timothy Chesters’ “Flaubert’s Reading Notes on Montaigne”. French Studies: A Quarterly Review. 63.4 (October 2009). pp399-415.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. “The Wisdom of Life” in The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Trans Belfort Bac and Bailey Saunders. New York: Tudor Publishing Co, 1933. Zizek, Slavoj. “Afterword” in The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Ranciere. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2009.

a history of wealth the unequal vision of branko milanovic words theo brainin, illustrations dani lurie

A map of the world, distorted so that territory size is proportional to share of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wealth.

Each figure on the back of the whale represents 1% of the world’s population. The illustration divides the world’s population from richest to poorest into groups holding 20% of the world’s income. 77% of the world’s population, represented by orange, is needed to make the first block.

Branko Milanovic is a man who views the world through inequalitytinted glasses. That much is evident as, over a pot of earl grey, I find myself discussing Anna Karenina and Jane Austen with the World Bank economist. “Of course, the main story is love. But money is there all the time, just not so much that readers focus on it. Vronsky—we know he is a Count, he is rich, but we do not see how much richer he is than Anna Karenina’s husband.” We are sitting in a café in Oxford, where Milanovic is explaining to me how, in the course of two love interests, Anna stood to improve her living standards 150 times over. The upshot, together with a similar look at Pride and Prejudice, is that in today’s less unequal society marriage should be more about love than wealth. To make the point, he has unearthed every reference to money in the novel, and has at his fingertips statistical data on nineteenth-century Russian income distribution and average government wages. It’s an observation that stems from an obsession with inequality and its effects—an observation that, being just a little unkind, could only have come from an economist. Milanovic’s forthcoming book, the subject of our tête-à-tête, sets out to tell the hidden story of inequality in everything around us: from Tolstoy, to the financial crisis, to the rise and fall of nations. It is a different way of looking at the world, one that is at times illuminating, yet at others frankly unsettling. “I think inequality is seen much less than it should be,” he says, sipping his tea. That might seem an odd remark. After all, it is often on the lips of politicians and it fills its share of column inches. Awareness is often coupled with inaction, but we are (at least we like to think) aware. It is not, Milanovic explains, that we don’t talk about it. Rather it is that people like him don’t seem to. There is an apparent dearth of economists working on the topic. Funding is much more readily available for research with ‘poverty’ in the title. “The main reason is political. Inequality as a topic is not popular because it raises too many uncomfortable issues. Study of poverty is to some extent the price that the rich are willing to pay for their wealth. They want to show that they are concerned with the plight of the poor. But poverty studies never raise the issue of the legitimacy of the income of the rich. Whenever I say there is inequality, ipso facto, I raise the issue of the legitimacy of upper class income.” It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it is something that Milanovic has encountered throughout his life. At the University of Belgrade, he had to pull strings just to have economic inequality accepted as the topic of his dissertation. At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he claims that he was often asked to switch the word ‘inequality’ for ‘poverty’ in the titles of his work. Even the World Bank’s flagship report on the issue used the rather tamer ‘equity’ in its name and, he bemoans, emphasised the more palatable problem of equality of opportunity.

The consequence is that, if you meet an academic working on inequality, they are more likely to be a political philosopher than an economist. Having dabbled a little in political philosophy at university, that suits me, but Milanovic believes there are downsides. “I get invited to quite a lot of these political philosophers’ conferences, by the nature of what I do. But they really have very little information about numbers—about actual inequality, and how it has evolved. I mean how unequal countries are, how they become unequal, whether they were historically unequal and so on.” He prefaces his criticism with the almost comic defence that some of his best friends are political philosophers. Nevertheless, the implication is that the focus has been too much on inequality as an injustice in of itself and not enough on the far reaching effects that it has throughout the world. If we take Milanovic at his word, we should be concerned about this because, beyond nineteenth-century novels, the effects that he uncovers are far-reaching. His view on the financial crisis is a case in point. We are used to hearing the events following 2007 explained in terms that the newsreaders themselves probably fail to understand, but the broad strokes of Milanovic’s version are much simpler. They also start a few decades earlier than expected. At a whirlwind pace, he explains that in the United States during the thirty years leading up to the crisis, the top one percent of the population doubled its share of national income—from 8 percent to nearer 16 since the mid 1970s. What this amounted to was a situation of rising inequality, with stagnating incomes for the lower income classes, and a wealthy elite with more money than it could possibly spend. It’s a situation that, in terms of the figures, “eerily replicated the situation that existed just prior to the crash of 1929.” The key point is that it really was more money than could be spent. There is, as Milanovic puts it in the book, “a limit to the number of Dom Pérignons and Armani suits one can drink or wear.” As the wealthy ran out of things to spend their money on, they saved it. The wealthier they got, the greater the pool of money being saved rather than spent. “But they didn’t just put it under their mattresses. They looked for financial outlets.” The problem, Milanovic contends, was that there were only so many legal opportunities to invest, and with the savings of the wealthy growing as inequality increased, returns began to dwindle. The result was a perfect storm of aligning interests. The middle classes lusted after the lifestyles of the rich, while the ballooning and increasingly reckless financial sector threw money “at anyone who would take it.” Politicians, unable to resist such easy electoral bait, were the final piece of the puzzle. Imagining himself, perhaps, as a US Senator, Milanovic turns to a rhetorical crowd of hapless middle-income voters: “Yes, we know that your wages have not gone up. But—lets pretend that they did. So use credit cards, borrow. And you don’t have to make any down payment for your house.” The politicians, as he puts it, “opened the floodgates on loans,” through deregulation. Allowing the poorer classes to live for a time in illusory affluence, politicians laid

the foundation for riskier and riskier investments—a foundation that we now know sat under a house of cards. When people inevitably began to default on their loans, it collapsed. The tacit implication of this analysis is that, in a world where some people have more money than they can spend, and others spend more money than they have, we should redistribute if we want to avoid crises. Pressed, Milanovic agrees; “If there was greater redistribution, or at least if these top incomes had not risen as much, we would not have had this problem.” So there you have it: never mind subprime mortgages, the real culprit was entrenched and rising income inequality over the last thirty years. It’s an explanation that I can’t possibly assess the merits of, but one that seems intuitively plausible. Milanovic’s view is gaining increasing currency, with several similar articles following the publication of his own in May 2009. There are myriad other phenomena that Milanovic examines through the lens of inequality. One that resonates, perhaps because he spent many years there, is the division of Yugoslavia. It is again a story of inequality, this time between regions. Milanovic makes the case that with rising regional inequality, aggravated by ethnic conflict, the unity of states is seriously threatened. He says the same of the collapse of the USSR, though in Yugoslavia’s case the problem was acute. “We’re talking about differences to the range of six or eight to one in a small area.” It is a worrying picture—because today both the European Union and China are marked by rising regional inequality. A whole chapter of Milanovic’s book asks whether China will exist in 2048—something I’d always thought quite indubitable. But then the chapter begins with a reference to Andrei Amalrik, who at the peak of Soviet power in 1970, wrote an article titled Will the Soviet Union Survive in 1984? In hindsight, we can say that it would, but only for another seven years. What becomes apparent with this international outlook is that the world is a staggeringly unequal place. Milanovic describes the world as being carried upon the backs of whales. It is a reference to early creation myths that saw the world as a flat plate carried by giant creatures: elephants, turtles, or in this case whales. In Milanovic’s imagery, the whales are the world’s poor. The image, which will be familiar to Terry Pratchett fans, stems from a graphical representation of world inequality that he has produced. Dividing the population from richest to poorest into groups holding 20 percent of global income, he places them, in blocks, into a pyramid. The slope is very sharp indeed. A full 77 percent of the world’s population is needed to make up the first 20 percent block. The 20 percent of income that sits atop the pyramid is held by only 1.75 percent of the population. The world is a more unequal place than any nation within it and is, according to Milanovic, “more unequal than at any point in history.” What makes this picture all the more disturbing is the fact that a person’s place in this order is down to blind chance. Analysing the data at his disposal, Milanovic found that, on average, eighty percent of differences between incomes were determined at birth. Sixty percent could be explained simply by the country a person was born in. There is, in effect, a glass ceiling on income for all but those born in the right place to the right parents. This is why he describes citizenship as ‘fate’, as far as income is concerned. The significance of citizenship is so great because we live in a world of borders and controlled migration. We hear frequently about ‘outof-control’ migration in the press. Yet at the current rate, he notes, it would take over two hundred years for just ten percent of the world’s poor to relocate to rich countries. Those who desire to migrate dwarf the number actually permitted. The rest either accept their effective entrapment, or migrate illegally. At flashpoints around the world, the cost is measured in human lives. Milanovic writes emotively of the harraga, or ‘burners of papers’—young men, mostly from the Maghreb, who destroy their documents in the hope that European authorities will not know which country to send them back to. It is a

risky ploy—Spain expels over 100,000 illegal immigrants a year, and those are the lucky ones; countless others drown attempting to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. For once, Milanovic is short of statistics. There is, he says, a “conspiracy of silence from both sides.” In the book, he writes quite simply that “nobody has an interest in mentioning them, counting them, even acknowledging that they existed and died.” For a moment, it is difficult to respond. Then, the obvious question comes. “Do you think the world would be a better place without borders?” At first, he equivocates, focussing on the economic efficiency of unrestricted immigration. There is, he says, very little doubt “from the economic point of view.” There are problems with getting rid of them too: “the issue of culture homogeneity and absorption,” the prospect of “emptying out large parts of the world.” But pushed, he admits that, while he wouldn’t press a button deleting the world’s borders in an instant, he’d certainly turn a dimmer switch. It might seem unthinkable but to Milanovic it is at least a distant hope. “In 100 years, 200 years or 500 years, what seems to us a very normal division of the world into ethnic groups and borders, becomes obsolete and strange.” Milanovic seems comfortable dealing in factual, rather than normative matters, but this is a notable exception. It’s also an indication that, were they to talk a little more, economists and political philosophers could do a great deal to reduce global injustice. We end our conversation talking about the man widely regarded as the greatest political philosopher of modern times, John Rawls. His 1971 magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, set the stage for contemporary discussion of inequality. Milanovic surprises me again. “Rawls says that injustice is any inequality that cannot be shown to be to the advantage of the poor. I think that’s an extremely strong statement, and I agree with that statement.”

once I was an anarchist musician frank turner is getting angry again words faye lewis

“What a question! I’d say they’re certainly forerunners in the punk world. I suppose that American Idiot was a big political album, so … I’ll say yes to that.” The question that punk folk troubadour Frank Turner is struggling with is whether he thinks Green Day are still forerunners in the political punk world. Turner supported the Californian trio in June—a bit of a weird mix given his acoustic-focussed output of late, I suggest. As he diplomatically puts it, before the show he was hoping not to be “showered with bottles of piss.” Happily, the former Million Dead frontman tells me he’s been pleasantly surprised by Green Day fans, a number even claiming to be familiar with his music. For those who can’t say that, Turner’s rise began as a vocalist for the post-hardcore band Million Dead. When the group fell victim to interband politics and split in 2005, Frank found that, although he wanted out of band dynamics, he didn’t want to stop touring. He struck out on his own with a stripped-down, folky style, and emerged as a songwriter of talent. Three solo albums later, his songs are marked out by heartfelt lyrics and poignant melodies, and retain a punk intensity. The Green Day gig marked a new high, with a crowd of over 12,000. Political songwriting, if anything, links Green Day and Frank Turner. Frank’s oeuvre is coloured by his political views. He’s happy to admit these have changed. “I’ve written a few songs about disillusion. I’m a very autobiographical writer. I used to be quite a kind of starry-eyed anarchist and am no longer, alas. I ran headfirst into reality, and reality won. So I’ve written a number of songs about that.” It’s a mournful thread that runs through songs like Once We Were Anarchists, or Live Ire & Song. Nowadays, Turner describes himself as a libertarian, rather than an anarchist. That doesn’t mean he’s been tamed, rather it has given him new things to be angry about. “I found a raging passion for politics has re-emerged in me in the last few years. Sons Of Liberty, on my last album, was a song addressing that.” Surprisingly, Frank didn’t vote at the General Election. Is that, I ask, a remnant of his anarchic past? A refusal to engage with the system?

Self-portrait.

“No I wasn’t able to vote actually, I wasn’t in the country for the election. I knew I wasn’t going to be and tried to sort out a postal ballot but apparently, eight weeks is not long enough for the council to sort one out.” He’s clearly pretty peeved about it. “I think democracy is important. I mean, there is always the problem that we’re faced with the choice of a selection of different bastards but it’s a right that a lot of people died for in living memory, so it’s worth exercising.” You might wonder exactly which party an ex-anarchist libertarian could have voted for anyway. Surveying the result, he’s happy to pour equal scorn on the big three. “I’m in two minds about it. I’m extremely happy that Gordon Brown is no longer our Prime Minister and that the awful, awful shits who were governing us are no longer in office. I think they were deeply evil people who were careless with our constitution and our civil liberties and ruined us with their economy. But I think Cameron is an odious media construct and I think the Liberal Democrats are just so awful, I have not the words. So, yeah, it’s all negatives.” There is one cause Frank can get behind: dismantling the work of the last government. “I’m interested in this Repeal Bill that’s been discussed, I think that’s a fantastic idea. One of my problems is that the mindset of politicians is just to make more laws when in fact we need less. So the idea of having a bill to kind of erase much of the last 13 years of nonsense is a good one.” Politically, Frank Turner is hardly a shining beacon of optimism. He isn’t a negative person, though. In fact, he strikes me as someone thankful for his place in the world: “There was a time when I was first doing solo stuff after Million Dead broke up when it was a lot of hard work for not masses of return. There were moments when I faltered in myself. “But you know, I stuck with it and now I’m incredibly privileged and lucky to do this thing that I love for a living. I get to travel around the world, I get to not have an office job. These are all things to be grateful for.”

intoxicated by the everyday remi weekes can’t stop filming life words alex orchard-lisle Remi Weekes doesn’t take compliments well, it seems. I’ve just told him that his latest short film, Exhale, should have won the Best Newcomer Category at this year’s Rushes Soho Shorts. He looks uneasy. In fact, he says, he didn’t even go to the festival. “If I’m honest, I’m extremely competitive,” he explains. “My biggest memory as a child is getting really pissed off losing at Monopoly. No one could talk to me; the night was over for me. So when it comes to things like the Rushes, I try and step away. I just want to make stuff and enjoy the process.” Remi has been making things as long as he can remember. “I’ve always had a roll of sellotape in my hand and been sticking things together. Then I spent a lot of time in my room, just writing. They were all rip-offs of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps.” He’s not sure exactly what made him into a director. “Sometimes I feel I haven’t lived long enough to see things in context yet. But if my childhood shows anything, it says I’ve always had an impulse to make something.” These days, aged 23, he’s making things with more fluency. Exhale, which he wrote and directed, is a piece of eloquent, understated filmmaking, sparse on dialogue but rich in experience. It shows Joel, a

17-year-old boy, finding out he is HIV positive. The film features an extraordinary performance from Charles Mnene (Fallout, Shoot the Messenger). Remi enthuses about Mnene and his co-star, Malachi Kirby. “They are really amazing. You get different actors in the world. Charles is the kind who uses different versions of himself as a springboard while Malachi Kirby is the complete opposite. He’s a chameleon.” One thing that’s always fascinated me about Remi’s work is its versatility. Along with film projects like Exhale, there’s his energetic music video, New Style, made for the rapper, Shystie. It’s a burst of incredible colour, playing with very bold fluorescent 80s wear. Then there’s Tell No One. It’s a blog of lo-fi experiments made with director and animator, Luke White. The blog is ironically titled. It’s a defiant gesture against the tendency every artist has to keep their work locked away until it’s perfect. “You cling onto things, you spend ages not doing any work and wasting time because you’re waiting for this perfect moment to show this idea. We just say, let’s put it out there and hopefully it will be for our benefit.” It seems to have worked: they’re showing with eleven other video artists at the Guggenheim Museum in October as part of their collaboration with YouTube. In this kaleidoscope of film projects, a common thread emerges. Running through both Exhale and New Style is the London backdrop. Remi is inspired by London. “I’m biassed, I’ve lived my entire life here. London’s my baby. London is a really awkward bunch of people, really bafflingly confused people that make writing intensely intoxicating. You just have to look out of your window and there’s someone doing something strange to your Coke can in the corner.” At the moment Alexandra Park, near his home in North London, is influencing his writing. “Dog-walkers and joggers, how the middle

Self-portrait.

classes strategically communicate with each other in park situations is interesting. The park is a good place to explore the chaos of this city.” He draws his friends into his filmmaking—“They’re lovely people, they’re so inspiring. We’ve talked about my friends who write and make films, but others of my friends don’t do anything but party, which is so interesting. So diverse, so exciting.” It’s not just the people. It’s also the city’s landscape. “I love a good building. Like when I came up here to meet you, I just thought these houses look really nice. I love streets where all the houses are grand, big and bold and beautiful. I’ve recently become a fan of tower blocks and estates. I think, in the next few years’ time, we’ll really appreciate them much more, which we don’t do ever. I think they look really beautiful. Some of the of the old 60s ones, the really tall ones, even like the dodgy estates in Elephant and Castle—I think there’s something quite powerful.” It isn’t just the bold, the leafy and the beautiful that excites him. “I was listening to an interview with someone who designed a tower block in Elephant and Castle and he was talking about how he wanted to take a normal English street and literally just turn it on its side. It’s an interesting way of looking at tower blocks.” Behind his variety, there is the sense of someone burning with restless energy. “I don’t go out much, I don’t do as nearly as much as I think I should be at my age,” he admits. “I don’t relax. I’m always tense, I’m always doing stuff. I guess I relax when I’m watching a movie but not even that. I’m of this modern generation where there are four things running at the same time, I’m watching a movie but I’ve also

got my smart phone, my laptop, facebook all running at the same time. It’s so hard, I have to answer emails really quickly so I pause the movie.” I tell him this is a tragic way to live. He agrees, but it’s why he loves cinema so much, sitting in the dark uninterrupted. “This is why cinemas are more important now than ever,” he says. It’s an industry Remi feels privileged to work in, almost uncomfortably so. “When you’re working in a creative industry, it’s a privilege. No one has the right to say they’re a filmmaker or make money from it. It’s something you have to earn.” “Last year I went to Uganda to film a documentary for some people. I always hated telling people what I did, because you get the same glazed over expression because for most people in the world, success is being a doctor or a lawyer, something amazing like that. To call yourself a filmmaker, it’s a bit backwards, trivial.” He almost seems to have a sense of shame about his profession. “If you come from a global country like this and your parents are helping you, paying for university and college you should be a doctor, a lawyer, something amazing. To say, no, you are a filmmaker, it is cheeky for a lot of people in this universe.” “It is scary, to put all of you into that and to fight this recession. There are lot of people who want to do it and a lot of people who are very good at what they do, and there are a lot of knock-backs and rejections. There are some days when you think, ‘What am I doing? Shit, should have done a worthwhile degree, got a proper job.’” Remi thinks he’s pretentious. I tell him he’s not. He disagrees. I think Remi gets the satirical side to life and art.

memories of green photography shane mccauley styling gemma lacey hair and make-up elias model rebecca kinder

green cardigan: goat / denim skirt: asos / trainers: onitsuka tiger / tights: tights please

denim shirt: prps / scarf worn as skirt: firetrap / tights: h&m / boots: swear

cardigan: insight / jumper: farah / jeans: american apparel / boots: irregular choice

red beret: accesorize / checked shirt: insight / denim waistcoat with horse: rokit / t-shirt dress: lna / tights: tights please / bike: push

caycee black makes clothes to move in interview gemma lacey Caycee Black is a designer, ballerina and painter based in New York. Last year, she launched her own label to critical acclaim. Her collections are dramatic yet elegant, and draw inspiration from painting, dancing and old movies. I’ve always danced, but when I was younger I had a dance teacher who had been a professional and I saw how it had changed her. It’s a short-lived life and I knew I’d lose my love for it if I chose it as a career. Now it gives me a place to escape to, and I’m still able to keep it in my life. Does it have an impact on how you design? I think it does. Everything in my collection is really comfortable and that’s important. It needs to feel good on the body. I also tend to include dance-inspired pieces. There is always a bodysuit and I often include open-backed leotards as it highlights the most beautiful part of a woman. I am affected a lot by the way fabrics drape and recreate the fluid, graceful style of dance costumes. I often play with asymmetry in skirts to give this effect. I grew up watching a lot of old dance movies, so I often think of dancers like Martha Graham or Susan Farrell. Susan is one of my favourite dancers—she almost seems to float. The colour in those films was really important too; they have lots of surreal moments where everything is tinted with cellophane colours. Is there anyone now you’d like to see in your collection? I always used to like the 90s rocker girls, but there’s no one with that edge about now. I guess it would be someone like Kelly Osbourne. She’s still got a spirit but is more palatable than before. Carey Mulligan is adorable too. Aside from dance, where else do you get your inspiration? It can come from anywhere. I am constantly taking photos, so they’re often a starting point. I have huge collections of them, which I tend to tack up all over my wall. I sometimes then interpret them in paint-

ings. Then the textures created in the paint can begin to suggest fabrics, and it goes from there. I had a picture of some tulips, which became completely abstract when I painted it. I liked that something so clean became so textured and gained a depth. I work a lot with my friend Jenny and we merchandise the sketches to ensure the collection works together. I have to want to wear it. My name is on it and I want to be proud of it. A lot of the response to the collection seems quite emotional. Where do you think this comes from? I am definitely emotionally led. I take pictures all the time and I love that I can snap an image of some graffiti or decay and then rework it into something beautiful. It’s a nice way to transform things. My spring/summer collection next year is very personal. I made a film, which I shot back home in Texas. I’ve lived in New York a long time now, so the film was almost exploring what my life could have been there. You don’t know if the model is in a film or a dream, which is how I feel when I go home. I like to interpret each collection as its own film or story. For this year’s autumn/winter collection, I shot the lookbook to give the sensation of the model as a performer. Each shot captures moments when she is off-stage and about to perform. I wanted to explore her faces as a woman and show her in a candid way. You seem to have such a strong vision for your own line. Have you always known you would have your own collection? Not at all. I hadn’t planned this. I worked for Anna Sui, Tibi and Club Monaco previously. It was great working for other designers at first, as I learned so much about what sells and how to merchandise a collection. It really helps you grow in your mind; I became a very different designer to the one I was when I graduated. When I was working for other people I painted a lot at home, as a way of fulfilling a need for creativity and finding my own voice. I had a project with friends which didn’t work out, but what I learned from that was that I could see my art being an integral part of a collection. It became about me creating something with my art and using my experience in a positive way. Starting my own line has been a really organic process. I think the most important thing is learning to listen to yourself. Everyone does things differently, and if you listen too much you can get confused.

Self-portrait.

stay a while

dawn landes before she goes on stage photography agatha a nitecka styling dawn landes and adelaide turnbull

vintage prom dress: beyond retro / shirt: bdg

pink cut-out dress: beyond retro

shearling vest: topshop / boots: vintage

fringed shoulder piece: beyond retro feather shoulder piece: topshop / floral print sweater and peg trousers: anthropologie

black skirt with applique detail: anthropologie / white flower mesh jumper: american apparel

audio and verses dawn landes isn’t one of the girls words erin spens

You’d have a hard time dismissing Dawn Landes as a creative type who can’t sit still or keep time. Well, she did blow into the room a little late for our interview, but she’s fresh-faced and beaming even a nightmare tube journey. At the Barbican, she settles into her chair and pulls up her knees, one of which pokes out of a tear in her jeans and has doodles scribbled across it. She’s performing later that evening. “I need some wine,” she says, asking around for a bottle opener. “I know I need one on a key chain. You just can’t keep track of those things on the road.” I imagine there aren’t many things Dawn Landes can’t keep track of. Dawn is not a songbird. She’s every bit as pretty and playful as you’d expect, but you’re more likely to find Dawn in a production studio flipping switches and fiddling with levers, than on a tree-swing in a floral dress. Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Dawn moved to New York in 1999 to study, but found herself drawn to the city’s production studios. “I’ve always written songs, but I started interning at a production studio and dropped out of school because I enjoyed it so much. I just always wanted to be in the studio.” She’s worked in some of the best production studios in New York City, alongside the likes of Philip Glass and Nico Muhly. Her own music career started when she began to record her own songs after hours. Four solo albums later, Sweet Heart Rodeo combines poised delivery with mature songwriting. A self-professed tomboy, she’s constantly surrounded by guys—in the studio, on the road, or at home with husband and musician Josh Ritter. Dawn laughs, “I did a tour with Tift Merritt, a country singer and I had bought these heels. She was asking me about them and I flipped them over telling her I thought they were tap shoes or something because they had a little star on the heel that made noise. She was like, ‘Oh honey, that’s just the heel of the shoe—you need to take those to a cobbler and get them fixed!’ And I thought, ‘Holy shit, I’ve showed this to like 10 guys and they all agreed with me they were tap shoes!’ I’ve had a very bad mis-education in some things!” Dawn Landes isn’t lucky and she’s not lazy either. She didn’t come from a musical family nor did she have a serendipitous experience of ‘making it’ in music. Instead, she spent the first years of her career

going to festivals and asking the musicians she looked up to if they could give her some advice. And she still does, it seems. “I recently wrote to Linda Perry from 4 Non Blondes. I wrote her a letter because it’s really hard to find women who do music and know the production side of things! I want to interview her.” In a world where people rely on their contacts and a little bit of luck, I can’t help but think how refreshing it is to know that Dawn, who’s doing rather well for herself these days, still writes letters to people she looks up to. “Everywhere I went I found a mentor because I want to learn. I always want to keep learning.” How did she do it? Dawn Landes isn’t a push-over, but you’d never know it by looking at her: a slight-framed, wispy-haired singer with a sweet smile. And you’d never know it by listening to her music—a little folksy with a clear and winsome voice. But Dawn does what she wants. “I’m really independent that way with music. With the smaller things like, ‘Do these shoes work?’ I’ll ask people, but with sound I make my own decisions,” she says. “Knowing the production side of things helps a lot. I did it out of necessity because I was such a control freak that I didn’t like anyone telling me what I should and shouldn’t do.” And that’s how she approaches the creation process, as well. “I’m very solitary when I make something. I won’t play it to anyone before it’s done. I guess if it’s not totally perfect I don’t want anyone to hear it.” She’s writing songs in French at the moment, part of a longterm loveaffair with the country. She says, “My worst fear is that I’ll finish it and no one will be able to understand what I’m singing or it just won’t be as beautiful as it is in my brain.” It’s comforting to know that her definition of perfect doesn’t include any tricks. “I just do my stuff,” she says, “what I love and what I know.” You can rest assured that when you click play on Dawn’s most recent album, Sweet Heart Rodeo, the next thirty minutes of your life will sound exactly as she wants it to. The person who wrote and sang the lyrics is the same person who agonised over the levels and tracks. There’s something to be said for feeling like you’re in safe hands, not just pretty ones.

how to wear a dress my on-off romance with fashion words jenni emery, illustration beth davis The Christmas I was five years old, a perfumed auntie kissed my cheek and gave me a skirt. Quite a departure, the kiss and the skirt both, in a serious household where books and playdough were the order of the day. The skirt was a bright circle of scarlet velvet with a ribbon waistband that tied at the back. It was of no obvious educational value. There was a net underskirt which tickled and whispered as I walked and, just above the hemline, three appliquéed satin hearts, cool and smooth to the touch of my hot, besotted little fingers. Many years later, the winter I moved to London, I spent a month’s rent, saved in pound coins in a jam jar, on a pair of cowboy boots. Soft powder blue pigskin, buttercream on the inside, the pointiest of pointy toes, and a nut brown Cuban heel. Ah, young love. I heart fashion forever. Ten years, three babies and two dress sizes later, things have changed. I have become a woman who chooses her clothes according to their washing instructions, elasticity and ability to withstand baby vomit. (Avoid navy.) Parenthood has made me ferociously pragmatic. Why would I wear a cape that pins my arms so tightly to my sides that I can’t catch a toddler leaping from a climbing frame? What use is a beautifully embellished clutch bag that won’t hold my keys, let alone flapjacks, a Thomas the Tank Engine book and a spare nappy? Truth be told, I am also a little intimidated and harassed. Fashion is a hard taskmaster and I lack the discipline and fitness to keep up. I’m hot and bothered, puffing and panting at the back. Getting dressed has become an opportunity for humiliation. Besides, I’m not sure I even like fashion very much these days, with its ‘must-have’ bossiness, its silliness and its disdain for the female form—the female form that gets pregnant, grows old, goes south. And yet. You know how it is with old flames. You know they’re no good for you but you still fancy them rotten. That red skirt, those cowboy boots. Both bring an indecent shiver of pleasure when I think about them. I feel a little bit sick, a little bit grubby, a little bit guilty. But I just want them. Badly. So, I was shy and careful at first. Just a skinny belt in glossy aubergine leather, smelling of a new school satchel. Then a slouchy boyfriend cardigan in soft dove grey, perfect for drinking tea and reading the Saturday papers. But things are hotting up now and I fear there’s no going back. Biker jeans which make me swagger and smile, a silk print blouse with a pussycat bow, foxy tapered camel trousers, preppy knits, sensible brogue-y flat boots and utterly un-sensible buckled high ones. There’s no denying it; I am head over heels in love all over again. Please don’t get me wrong—I know my love is unrequited. I hope I’m a little wise this time around. Fashion does not heart me. It will not make me feel good about myself. It will not alter the cut of this season’s peg-leg trousers the better to flatter my chubby arse. Fashion is wholly disinterested in me as a person. But it does love ideas and stories. It pursues a vision, captures the moment, is passionate and surprising, bold and sometimes beautiful. Fashion is transient and that’s precisely its attraction. It flings a fairy-tale my way and moves on. It offers a slice of another life, tempting as a plate of cake. And this, I think, is the point. Fashion is, above all, fun. Most mornings I wake early to my two-year-old daughter’s chatter. Surrounded by the entire contents of her wardrobe, she is a giggling vision in front of the mirror, talking earnestly to her clothes, shaping and reshaping her face, utterly delighted with who she will become today.

wool, clay, felt and steel artists and the crafts they love interviews rosanna durham

Miya Ando working with a sheet of steel in her Brooklyn studio. Photo: Lauren Ward.

Freddie and a Knitted Home of Crime tea cosy. Photo: Peter Sharp.

Freddie Robins is an artist who challenges our perception of knitting as craft. For Freddie, knitting has always had an edge of violence. Her work, Knitted Homes of Crime, takes traditional tea cosy patterns and uses them to make copies of the houses of women who killed people. Before practising as an artist, Freddie co-founded the knitwear designer Tait and Style. She lives and works in England. We have very set expectations of knitting. It’s normally associated with elderly people and women knitting something out of nurture and love. I’ve never thought of it like that. When I relax I don’t knit. I go to my studio and knit, and I love doing it, but it’s work. My godmother was the most amazing seamstress and maker. She’s the one who introduced me to knitting. I loved the movements you made with your hands. I liked the way that you work with the colour of the material. I like the way that it grows from just a being a yarn into something three dimensional and always really liked the patterns, I always felt very comfortable with numbers, the way the numbers give you a real thing. With my work, I like the contradiction that it looks like a garment but you can’t wear it. You want to touch it but you’re not allowed to. And I quite like that thing where I’m the only one who’s allowed to touch it—through all the making, touching every single bit of it, and then it goes to an exhibition and no one else can touch it. There’s something about that that I really like. Knitted Homes of Crime is what I consider my most successful piece of work so far, conceptually and technically. I’ve got some old patterns for these houses, cottage tea cosies, which represent everything I hate about domestic life because they’re so nice and cosy and warm and friendly and benign and idealistic. So I really like the way I’ve been able to contradict and contrast that to the horrific crimes that the women who were living in those houses committed in them. My work has always had a feminist slant to it, and I have a lot of interest in women who kill, who are going against what we consider women should be doing. Women who kill are doubly damned, once for killing, once for daring to kill as a woman. We’re meant to be nurturing and loving and lovely. I found crimes I was interested in, particularly where the woman had used a nurturing process, like cooking, to kill. It is women’s preferred way of killing. But it wouldn’t suit me because I try never to cook. I went to the address and photographed the house, and then made a pattern. A friend’s mother knitted the houses for me. Every month I would send her a house and she’d be shocked by it. Wonderful. She’d send the pieces back to me and I’d stitch them together and maybe

embroider bits onto it. But it has been slightly frustrating, because people often ask me to knit them tea cosies. That’s not what I want to do. People still can’t get away from the process. It’s a bit like asking a painter to come and paint your house. There is something about knitting that can express frustration. It might be the only way for someone to express themselves. Because it looks like you are being productive and nurturing but you are working through your frustration. My self-portrait, Craft Kills, was to do with how knitting is normally seen as a very passive thing, completely powerless. How would it be if knitting became something that was dangerous, something illicit? It was a self-portrait and I was looking at a lot of works relating to Saint Sebastian. Instead of being crucified by arrows, I’m being crucified by needles. I was thinking about how it would be if craft was seen as a much more aggressive medium, like painting can be seen or sculpture can be seen. They don’t have these preconceptions of being nice media being done by nice people on Sunday afternoons. The It Sucks piece was an expression of the intense emotional discomfort I felt about becoming a new mother. It’s a traditional hand-knitted Shetland lace christening shawl, with the words “It sucks” woven across the middle. When I had my daughter, I found it incredibly difficult. That state is so frightening. It’s massive physical and emotional vulnerability that I found completely overwhelming. It Sucks relates directly to the early motherhood. It completely sucks. It’s a nightmare. I was also looking at the Shetland lace shawls. Women still knit them today and earn not very much money and that sucks too. So again it was a play on words. I did have a knitted wedding. But it was a performance; it wasn’t my work. I didn’t have any fantasy about being a knitted bride. I curated a show at the Pump House Gallery called Ceremony. We wanted to have a live project space. One of the groups we invited was Cast Off, Rachael Matthews’ project. She said she’d take up residency and do a knitted wedding. The whole thing completely took off. Rachael was overwhelmed by the amount of knitted objects that came. There was a knitted cake; there was a knitted knife to cut it with. We walked through an arch of giant knitting needles, like it was some military wedding. The popular press really tapped into it with headlines like, “These people love knitting so much they had a knitted wedding.” I’m sometimes described as an anarchic knitter, but that’s not my term. I do what I do and what feels right for me and the right way to express things and I’m always amazed at how conservative the rest of world is. I was in a show called Deviants, and I enjoy that title but I never think of myself as that deviant. It amazes me. If you really wanted me to be anarchic I really could.

Ian McIntyre is inspired by the history of British manufacturing. His tool of choice is the jigger jolly, an obsolete ceramics machine, which he uses to create deceptively simple and utilitarian tableware. The innovation in his work lies in its detail: folds of clay left visible, haphazardly-finished edges. The rough finishing reveals the processes by which the jigger jolly moulds the clay under its pressure, creating work that could only have been made on that machine. I’ve collected everything, from coins, to stamps, to matchstick boxes. I’m just really interested in objects, how they look and feel. What I had no idea of when I was younger was where the things came from: who made it and how it was made. That’s what I’m trying to communicate now. Industrial ceramics are perfected to a point where you can’t actually tell how they’re made. There’s no relationship; you can’t understand how it’s made. I’m trying to add a dialogue to the pieces, and ultimately some sort of attachment. Because it’s mad that this is basically a bag of mud, taken straight out of the ground, very little done to it. It’s so elemental. You dig your clay out of the ground. That’s one of the amazing things about ceramics. The process I use in my latest project is called jigger jollying. The jolly is like a potters wheel. It replaced the potter’s wheel, and pressure casting and injection molding techniques have now replaced the jolly. The company that makes the jolly has now gone under. I get my machines from a company in Stoke-on-Trent called Pebblevale. They’re basically liquidators. If you go to Stoke, although there are still a lot of thriving places, some of the factory buildings are just devastated. Because one of the beautiful, and I suppose the really sad things about the ceramics industry, is that it’s so labour-intensive yet they still have to produce stuff in industrial volumes.

Ian McIntyre in his studio with the jigger jolly. Photo: Des Tan.

The head of the jolly spins round and a mould goes on top. It then spins round really quick and you put a profile on top, which is the internal shape of the plate. ‘Jigger’ is for doing flatware like plates and ‘jolly’ is for doing hollowware. Normally what would happen in production is that the clay would spill over the top and the edge would be trimmed. My project was about spreading the clay and letting it make a finish in a way that’s natural to the material. So what you get when you look at it, the rippling and the folding, is only possible in ceramic and on these machines. It’s about trying to find an inherent value to the jolly to give the process and the material more value. I’m really interested in where things come from. I like the inherent colour of clay. I don’t use colour, I try and just do a clear glaze. I just let it be, really. It’s about controlling the material but also letting it have it’s own say. I’m looking for perfection in imperfection. I feel that anything I touch is never perfect, so it’s almost trying to do as little as possible. I can’t really control the outcome. This project is a little rebellion really against the sterile, clinical capabilities of the machine, and it’s trying to put a bit more humanity back into it. But not through the physical mark of the hand because the smudge of a hand is not perfect, whereas if the machine presses something, and it rolls out at the edge, and I say, “I don’t quite like that fault,” then it’s nothing to do with me. It’s just what the material wanted to do. More than the maker, I suppose I am looking at the mark of the machine. The machine is really appealing as a designer, that what it produces can be appreciated and owned on a large scale and at an affordable price. With the maker you are restricted to your own ability, and a very small audience to view the work, whereas for me I really want accessible objects that anyone can own. Ultimately, I’d like the tableware to be made in a factory, it would be brilliant.

Bita Ghezelayagh with two of her Iranian shepherd’s felt cloaks. Photo: Sueraya Shaheen.

Bita Ghezelayagh was born in Italy, grew up in Iran and trained as an architect in Paris. In 2003, she began tracing the history of the Iranian shepherd’s cloak. Bita uses the cloaks to draw attention to the declining tradition of felting in Iran and to explore her memories of revolution and Iran’s war with Iraq. She divides her time between Iran and England. Coming from a traditional family, I had to learn how to sew, how to knit, how to do crochet. I was expected to. Every girl from a traditional family had to know how to use her hands. It wasn’t just sewing, but knitting, cooking and being able to be creative inside the house. I can’t remember somebody using felt in my family, but I come from a very traditional family, I’m insisting on that. People underestimate felt. Felt is an amazing material. The more I work with felt the more I am in love with this material because it gives you a huge opportunity to create what I have in mind. It’s a very faithful material; it’s very natural and it comes from rural parts of the country. In England and Scotland it’s still used. And in Central Asia and the Caucus. Felt is still very alive. It’s very resistant and historically it has a huge value. In Iran now, felt is used for doormats in rural areas and in the capital Tehran. Nobody is interested in having a piece of felt in their house. You couldn’t even find shepherds wearing it today, they switched to wear plastic and brands like Nike and Puma. My work uses a type of shepherd’s cloak that I found in eastern Iran. It’s an old traditional felt dress that has disappeared now because people stopped making them. About seven years ago I started travelling around Iran and I went to very traditional, rural places and little towns where felt makers still existed. But when I returned two years later I discovered that these same felt makers were just shutting

down, and the sons of the felt makers did not want to continue the fathers’ tradition. In one of my journeys, I was in a bazaar in Khorasan province in eastern Iran and I saw one of these shepherd’s cloaks. I started to collect them. They were pieces of art for me and I reinterpreted them to give me more space to add my own ideas. During the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, lots of young Iranian men went to war and died. They were given keys to hang around their necks, as a symbol of the key to paradise. I embroidered symbols like keys that come with the slogan, “Martyrdom is the key to paradise.” I was amazed by this slogan. The other cloak was embroidered with tulips and I wrote the slogan, “From the blood of each martyr one tulip will grow.” My symbols were very related to the beginning of the revolution and the war. My embroidery was very inspired by Turkmen designs because they are very contemporary and angular, amazingly strong and beautiful. I used many old Iranian symbols on my cloaks. And tales, yes, lots of tales. 1001 nights. 1001 keys. 1001 tulips. 1001 pictures of a martyr. Sometimes I feel as if I’m in a jail, full of old and historical, political and meaningful and meaningless symbols and unfinished work. It’s like a jail for me. I see no freedom at all. The necks of the cloaks are very narrow. People ask me why I don’t make the neck on the cloak more open so you can wear it! It makes me upset to hear them. I’m not a clothes designer. For me they are like a statue or a canvas. If somebody wanted to wear them I would be very angry. When I put them on the stand, they are alive. I love it when you’re able to walk around them and feel them and touch them. The galleries don’t like it but they have to touch them. Felt is an alive matter, like pearls. It’s an organic, grown material. It needs to be touched, it needs to be worn and you have to touch it and bring it out and use it.

Miya Ando is a Japanese-Russian artist working with steel. She uses only two-dimensional sheets of steel, using metal finishing techniques to layer, polish and prime the surface. The finished pieces convey a meditative and minimalist environment. Miya lives and works in New York, and recently completed a 40-foot installation in a women’s shelter in Kentucky. My mother’s family is Japanese and I was raised in a Buddhist temple. So at first I wanted to be a nun, but that path is impossible for someone like me who is racially mixed. I’m half Russian. My father worked on cars and I spent a lot of time in the garage when I was young. I watched him braze and weld and always thought it looked like hanabi firecrackers, or sparklers, that you hold. This delighted me and it helped me be comfortable working with fire. I work with steel and metal finishing. Working with steel has been part of my family tradition. In Japan, my family made swords before they were Buddhist priests. You have these stories about master sword makers. The names of these swords are so intense, like, True Child of Pure Heaven. And often you find Buddhist markings on swords, as well as prayers and pictures of deities. That type of thing was always interesting. I like the idea of working with a material that exists in many cultures. Steel is used all over the globe and although there are different alloys and forms—corten, hot-rolled, cold-rolled etc.—steel is steel. For the most part it’s an industrial material used for many things; it’s not a rare or particularly unusual alloy. I went on a pilgrimage into the world and learned everything I could about metalworking. I was an apprentice in Japan. I lived in Taiwan.

Photo: Anthony Gamboa

I was in Mexico watching people weld with car batteries and wire hangers. I worked as a blacksmith. I worked as a jeweller and in minimum wage jobs to understand about steel. It was a five or six year journey and a soul-searching for me. I was kind of a vagabond. Everyone who loved me was just deeply concerned. But I had a plan and knew in my mind that I wanted to learn something that I couldn’t just take from school. You can’t really take a class in metal-finishing for the purpose of artwork. I like to solve problems such as, “How do I make this steel become a mirror or like a cloud, or like water, or feel ethereal and permanent at the same time?” I enjoy the notion of transforming an industrial material into art via finishing. I use chemicals to change the colour of the steel and with different types of sanding, patina and pigments. It’s a layering of all these things. Working with fire, acid, sanding and lacquers, all these rigorous, intense things are a good way to stay focussed. The materials and processes are unforgiving and have very short working times. This appeals to me. I love to see something put forth that is refined, quiet, distilled and focussed. I think of making as playing, but also as a form of concentration, meditation and thinking. My works aren’t Buddhist art works but in my soul and in my heart I really believe in trying to get at truth, and trying to provide a place of harmony and a contemplative field for people who are viewing the works. I live and work in Brooklyn. I really love New York. The energy is fantastic. But there’s not so much influence from the outside, for me. I have been working on the same body of work since the start of my career. I’ve made works in metal-framed warehouses, with no windows or with natural light, in various cities and situations. All the works are the same: introspective.

things are different now when i discovered t h i n g s w e r e n’ t a s i thought photos kate pulley

When I was twelve, I made a list of Criteria for Adulthood. They were things that, once I’d achieved them, I’d be a real grown-up. It went: one, like sprouts; two, understand what the whole kissing thing is all about and why people do it so much; three, learn to use lipstick like a real person. I’m almost trained as a doctor now and the check-list hasn’t improved much. I still don’t like sprouts and the less said about lipstick the better. I think I may have got the kissing thing, so that’s a start. The feeling of responsibility used to be unbearable. Just the word ‘doctor’ gave me palpitations. Doctors were people who knew what to do. How could that be me? I still couldn’t eat sprouts. I felt like a terrible fraud, constantly in danger of discovery. In my first year of practical training, a nurse started her request with, “Doctor—” and I heard myself explaining in a terrible panic that I was a student and I couldn’t do anything and please could she ask someone else? There was a pause. “Oh,” she said. “I was just going to ask where the toilets are.” Learning to become a doctor involves a set of alien skills. Some are mundane. Small talk becomes all-important. You begin collecting useful banalities gleaned from other students and doctors. Others are frightening. The first time you penetrate someone’s skin with a needle feels like an unbelievable transgression. The first time you cause pain and have to continue causing pain for a necessary procedure feels like an unforgivable act. Yet people forgive you, people thank you, and gradually you feel more comfortable with the unthinkable. A hospital is a place where normal social rules are suspended. You lose boundaries in your normal life, too. The stereotypical doctors’ conversations are not meant to be disgusting—we’ve just forgotten that some things shouldn’t be discussed over dinner. Part of the strangeness is that your knowledge is far in advance of your personal experience. I’ve advised mothers about pain relief in labour, yet I have no children; I’ve discussed sexual difficulties with couples, but I have never been married; I’ve counselled in depression, yet I have never lost a close loved-one. The nearest I’ve got to being a carer was watering some tomatoes for a month for a friend. It’s your body, but I’m the expert. My advice is valid and good and true, yet while I know everything about it, I know nothing at all: a horrible dichotomy that takes forever to get used to. The distance between your personal and professional life is an unimaginable gulf which you slowly grow into as you get older. I look forward to that very much. It used to dog me: the idea that one day I’d wake up and just become a real grown-up, with relevant grown-up mad skills. Everyone older than me at medical school seemed a gaping chasm away from my own state of neurotic wreck-titude. One day, I thought, I’d wake up and I’d be a real doctor. It didn’t happen that way, of course. I suppose a better way of thinking about it is like learn-

ing to ride a bike, or to swim. For what seems like forever, you flail about wildly begging people not to let go, knowing you could never go it on your own. Then almost without realising it, you start peddling on your own. You disdain armbands. And then one day, you’re cycling a 30-mile round trip and you can barely remember how it all happened. Next year, you can call me ‘doctor’, and though I still don’t know how to drive a car or handle make-up like a Real Person, at last I feel ready to say, “Yes, how can I help?” knowing that I can, and will. And that’s exhilarating.

words connie han

We’re talking about self-discovery. My seven-year-old says you don’t discover who you are until you’re on your deathbed. “When you’re very old you go, ‘This is who I am. I’m this type of person.’ A few minutes later you’re another type of person. You’re a dead type of person.” So self-discovery doesn’t cease at 25. At 25 you’ve come a long way but you still have a long way to go—out of your comfort zone and into situations where you’ll act intuitively and discover who you are in the process. “I thought I knew exactly who I was at 52,” says my neighbour. “I looked after the family. I made a roast on Sunday. I never drove or dealt with the money. I left all that to my husband. Then my sons left home and a year later my husband died, and I sat in front of the telly and I thought ‘I have absolutely no idea who I am anymore.’ I didn’t know how to be without my family. I mean, you can’t cook a roast for one. So I took an evening class and I’ve become quite independent in my 60s. Sometimes I think my husband wouldn’t recognise me, especially when I’m doing 90 up the motorway.” There was a point when I thought I knew who I was too. I was a shy type of person, wasn’t I? I was always in the back room wearing a cardigan. At school I didn’t talk much. I just wrote things down and handed them in. I hoped to be discovered that way. But I wasn’t discovered. I was largely passed over. I tried to tackle it head-on. I spent two hours a week for two years in a group therapy full of introverts, trying to overcome my shyness. Nobody spoke. The only strides I made were that I became more comfortable with group silence. I also became analytical about yawns, coughs and people opening windows. Then I had kids. I’m standing in front of 34 children and I’ve told them no way can they have a party bag until they’ve put their coats on. In the end, it’s often the real experiences that move you on, rather than the therapy. Suddenly I had to push myself forward so that my child had a voice. Because if you don’t demand a second opinion, your child’s illness might go undiagnosed, if you don’t approach other parents at the school gate, your child won’t get invited to their houses and, if you don’t run a great birthday party, the kids might not come back next year.

“I don’t have those Hollywood self-discovery moments—moments of closure and moving on,” says my friend, “I love the idea of it but I don’t function like that. Of course there’s love and heartbreak: feeling you can’t exist without him and you can’t get out of bed and then months later you suddenly think of him and you go, ‘How funny. None of it mattered!’ In moments like that you discover you can survive pain.” I would still rather write things down than say them, and I am better at it. That may not change, but then again, before I become a dead type of person, maybe I’ll discover that I’m a talker not a writer. There is still time.

words ellie phillips

I was eleven when I first found out I had a sister. Breakfast in our backyard on a Sunday and my mother freshly returned from a ‘business’ trip to the East Coast, where she’d gone to meet the daughter she’d given up for adoption 26 years earlier. The early spring sun was dripping through the trees as she told us and I saw tears glistening in my older brother’s eyes. Being eleven, I think the enormity of such a revelation passed me by initially, but I’d never seen him cry before and the sight was sufficient to set me off too. In the years since, I’ve always found our tears hard to explain. That is, there’s no strict emotion to which they correlate. It wasn’t sadness, or joy, or pain. Rather, it was something more subtle, a shift in family dynamics that I could only dimly perceive. The secrecy of the trip seemed fitting, though. Up until this point nobody knew about the child except for mum’s best friend and my father. Despite being only 21 when she fell pregnant, she had kept it hidden from everybody: her parents, her nine siblings, the baby’s father. She simply wore increasingly loose-fitting clothes for five months and then departed, telling everyone she was going on a trip to New Zealand. Instead she used the money she had saved up to go travelling through Europe and took herself to Ballarat until the baby was born. She even arranged for pre-written postcards to be despatched from New Zealand at regular intervals. Not much gets past my mother. I can’t imagine what the isolation must have been like for her then, stuck in the country without family and friends, waiting for a child to be born just so that she could give it away. It must have been very lonely, but for mum that was the only possibility. Being raised a Catholic, and dealing with the mores of the time, abortion was never even a consideration. Neither, evidently, was staying with the father. Despite years of gentle prodding, mum has never told anyone anything about who he may have been, but for the faintly ridiculous fact that he was a “ski enthusiast.” Not even my sister knows who the man was. Mum didn’t feel she could reveal it to her own family either, although not for the reasons one might expect. When she finally did tell grandma, in 1996, the day after mum had herself met her

daughter for the first time, grandma’s reaction was a tear-choked, “Why didn’t you tell us? You know we would have raised it as our own”. But for mum that was the exact reason she hadn’t. Always poor, Irish immigrants, grandma would have been looking after seven children of her own at the time. In all likelihood she would have been pregnant too, with her second youngest. So my mum left. Aptly enough, my sister was born on April Fool’s Day, 1968, after a full day’s labour. She was whisked away before my mother could lay eyes on her and was adopted out to a farming couple in northern Victoria. So, to return to the question of those tears. Shock was part of it surely, but I think it was something deeper than that too. I think it was a reaction to the sudden humanisation of my mother, the realisation that for the first time in my life she wasn’t a semi-abstracted deity, but was, rather, just a person, frail and fallible, with a history and secrets and a life beyond my seeing. But every child has moments like that, it seems: those points in time when they realise that their parents exist in the same order of being as everyone else and so have to rearrange their love accordingly. It’s a fall from grace, of a sort, but most of growing up is. Yet in the absence of that sheen of invulnerability, one’s parents suddenly become a lot more interesting and vital. Rendered human, it’s possible to see with some clarity what it is that actually makes them remarkable. I don’t pretend to understand the full scale of what giving away her baby meant to my mother, nor how she resolved it all in her own mind. But by any measure it’s an incredible set of decisions to have made, and to have lived with. In discovering them, I can only look on in quiet wonder at the woman she came to be.

words luke ryan

I come from a city big in population and small in mindset, expansive in size but limited in opportunity. Capital of its state, yet three hours by plane to the next major city anywhere in the world. Fresh out of university, I couldn’t find the motivation to use my degree for over two years. There were three universities pumping out film and television graduates into a tiny job market, and I felt like my options were hopelessly narrow. I got tired of going to the same bars, trying to avoid the same faces every week. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew in my heart that I needed to leave. I wanted to do something drastic, to make a bold statement to no one but myself. All I’d ever I known was the Australian heat, so with the youthful strengths of naïvety and idealism at my back, I booked a ticket to London by way of the deepest Siberian winter. I said goodbye to my friends and family, unable to tell them when I’d return. I cried on the plane to Beijing, for them and for myself, knowing in my heart that from this moment onwards nothing in my life would be the same again.

I’d never felt any temperature below zero, so I didn’t know what to expect. I thought perhaps the cold would be numbing and any difference below -5°C would be unnoticeable. I was horribly mistaken. It was 36 degrees the day I left Perth. Hours later, it was -2 when I landed in China. I walked the back streets of Beijing while the locals stared at me. I was wearing a fraction of the clothes they were, shielded from the frost by wide-eyed disbelief at an entirely new world. By the time I reached -30 on the frozen shores of Lake Baikal, I was questioning the wisdom of my holiday destination. But only briefly. The world began to show itself. I saw things I’d only known from television and magazines. I blacked out with a hangover on the Great Wall of China and learnt something about priorities. In Ulan Bator, I saw snow fall for the first time in my life while I play-wrestled a Mongolian outside a bar. I went dog sledding and ice skating in a country that looked black and white instead of blue and brown. I shot vodka with scarred men who’d lived through the Soviet Empire, and in the dingy third class cabin of a Trans-Siberian train, drank warm beer with bright-eyed Russian students who’d grown up under capitalism. I came to St. Petersburg, my final stop before London. On the night before I was due to fly for my new home, I came back late to my hostel and met a young local whose name was Igor, but also Gary. We chatted in broken English, he explained that his dad owned the place and a group of his friends were out the back. He invited me to join them. I stayed up with them until 6:30am, talking to Gary and his friends about my hopes for a new life and the memories of my old one. We laughed and told stories, they explained who they are and what their lives were like. I declared my admiration for a beautiful young woman named Jiana, and asked if she would fulfil my dream of a kiss from a Russian girl. She smiled and allowed me to lay a kiss on her cheek. Eight thousand miles from home, I found great comfort in the realisation that for all the world’s cultural and historical disparity, people really aren’t so different. We might have varying ideas on how to conduct ourselves and achieve our goals, but the vast majority of us want the same thing. I said goodnight and went to bed, and when I rose the next morning to check out there was a note left for me at reception. After five years in London, I’m reading it now for only the second time. This is what is says: “Novak, it was really nice to meet you. All the guys told me you are nice, funny, kind and smart person. I think so too. I hope you will start your new life with success. I’m sorry if the beer was bad that night. I hope we will drink some much better later, maybe in London or somewhere else. Jiana likes you. She will send you a message. To sum up, it was really nice to talk to you that night. “Best wishes, Gary / Igor.”

words novak hunter

some like it hot tristram bainbridge has never grown out of playing with fire words rosanna durham, illustration henry mccausland

Tristram Bainbridge has a spectacular hobby: fireworks. I’m curious, to begin with, about the first time he made a firework. “I’ll get arrested for this!” he says. “You can’t make fireworks legally.” It’s not a good start, but an old law that permits the making of certain explosives saves our interview. “There’s a legal loophole,” he tells me, “You can make up to 100 grams of low explosive for experimentation.” As it turns out, Tristram doesn’t so much make fireworks as put on large firework spectaculars. His first “serious visual display” was when he was 17. “I found these wheel arches from a tractor in the forest, covered them in towels soaked in paraffin and set fire to them. The flames took the shape of the arch. I thought that the fire was more interesting than anything else, just fire itself in shapes you can manipulate and create.” It’s this delicate control of fire that he enjoys. Despite the proverbial association of fire with unpredictability, he explains that, with fireworks, “you know exactly what’s going to happen.” If they behave unpredictably, it’s a sign that something has gone horribly wrong. His research into the manipulation of nature took him back to the seventeenth century, and he became fascinated with how people contained fire in elaborate structures. “There it really plays a trick, because it looks like a really uncontrollable fire, but you can turn it into a cube—and I did, a cube of fire, which is not what they would have done in the eighteenth century, but they would have done highly intricate designs, which would spout fire in very decorative and ornate patterns.” He describes seventeenth-century versions of Catherine Wheels, measuring 10m in diameter and driven around by huge fireworks. These ‘fire machines’ are rooted in a bygone era of aristocratic extravagance. “It’s a very European thing. It comes from the festival tradition. You’d get fireworks for civic and royal pageants, welcoming royals into the town or birthdays, births and weddings.” It’s a tradition that extended into British courtly life. He explains, “They always had fireworks on Thames, and in the 1680s for the Stuart court, and then in Vauxhall Gardens in the 18th Century. But the big firework display that we think about was for George III.”

This display was instantly infamous. It celebrated the victory of the Battle of Lauffeld in 1747. “It was a huge fiasco at the time, because it cost thousands and thousands of pounds to build this huge structure in Green Park. It had the one fatal flaw of fire displays; it went on for too long.” Tristram explains that the risks his forebears took were extreme. “There were two competing teams of firework ‘setter-offers’, one Italian and one English. Half of it burnt down and two guys were killed. Usually on the big displays someone would get killed. They did things that were just incredibly dangerous, like have trails of gunpowder, or use kilos and kilos of gunpowder that shot fire up into the sky to about 50 metres.” Tristram found an original souvenir print from the George III display recently. Similar to posters and festival merchandise, the print was sold to the spectators on the night. “They’d make a print of the display, so the artist would have to pre-empt the fireworks and draw it all in perfect symmetry.” Tristram’s print shows us a very different world of fireworks than we now know. “Today it’s very different from the early displays. Now you can turn the night sky into a sea of light and colour. They’re usually very spectacular but they can be a bit tedious. The more interesting ones focus on the sculptural, on the ground level. I rarely do things with colour; it’s usually just silver or gold to highlight things. Colour just mucks things up.” Tristram admits that he might be biassed against colour. “I’ve been perverted slightly by the primary sources of early firework displays, which are prints. They’re always either black or white.” One of his largest displays was inspired by an even earlier tradition: mystery plays. These were very early medieval plays, telling the story of the Bible. “They’d have the story of the creation and the fall and it’d be very, very emotional and a spectacle. It’s very visual and that’s what I tried to create.” At an anniversary event at his school, Tristram was asked to perform. “I hooked onto that and did a huge display of fire. It focussed on four fire sculptures with theatrical things going on. The first one was all about creation: it had earth, heaven and hell. A big hell mask came up, with fiery stakes and fireworks.”

A commemorative print of Danish fireworks celebrating the signing of Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

A 1749 firework display celebrating Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s victory in the War of the Austrian Succession.

Tristram Bainbridge’s 2006 circle of fire display marking the 750th anniversary of his school.

A fascination with historical explosives is a curious hobby by anyone’s standards. “It was a childhood delight in fireworks and the paraphernalia of the explosives, which is exciting when you’re 10 and I just never grew out of it.” His father was a set designer and family occasions always had a theatrical edge. His dad built large set structures in the back garden for the children’s birthdays. “I think one time we had a pirate ship. He built a cannon and some sails.”

It’s made from saltpeter and charcoal. You can get them from garden shops. They’re all fertilisers. It’s a low explosive, so it doesn’t detonate. Low explosives just burn very quickly.” High explosives, on the other hand, burn faster than the speed of sound. Tristram, fortunately, hasn’t had many accidents. “I’ve had a few burns. If you have an accident with fireworks, it usually means death or serious maiming. So you’re very, very careful all the time.”

It was on Bonfire Night that the family really went to town. “My Dad was very enthusiastic. I went with him to buy fireworks. We’d choose them very carefully and I’d list the ones that we bought and what types there were. I always tried to work out how they were made.”

With all his tinkering, you’d be forgiven for thinking Tristram has plans to be a professional pyrotechnic. “I did some work with a fireworks company. It’s incredibly hard work, and I could see that you’d lose the joy of it a little bit. It’s almost impossible to make a living out of it.”

Before he started making his own, Tristram tried to restore the burntout firework duds that he’d carefully salvaged. “At the end of one Bonfire Night, the morning after, looking at all the duds, and all the packaging, I took them all in and I cleaned them all up and I remade them to make them to look like they were real again. I cleaned out all the innards, and I put new film around the outside to make them all look shiny, and I put pink tissue paper on the top and a green fuse,” he says. He paints an obsessive picture of a strange scene. “I’d just have the duds, the inside tubes that look like sticks of dynamite, all over my room, with little Chinese writing on them. So it looked really funny.”

Tristram would rather keep it as a thrilling pastime. “There was a wedding, where I was just running around dodging flames in a kind of fireproof jumpsuit, setting fire to things and playing with the suspense of the audience. I think the audience gets a lot of enjoyment out of seeing me almost get my ear blown off. Wondering, ‘Is it finished yet?’, me pretending it’s all done, walking away, and then something goes off in the back with a big bang.” He sounds gleeful just talking about it.

Making live explosives was clearly the next step. By the time he was 14, Tristram had started to make his own gunpowder. Before long, he was putting his gunpowder to use. “I compacted it into a tube, and that’s a firework, essentially. A fountain. And it was very pretty.” “I had many failed attempts. Anyone can make explosives, I mean, it’s not that hard. Gunpowder is a very easy and basic explosive to make.

“The best thing I ever did was a circle of fire. Just the scale of it was amazing. It was 110 meters of fire in a circle, made up of 8-foot sections. I organised quite a complicated trough system filled with sawdust soaked in paraffin that burnt for about 10 minutes. It was the most dramatic thing—a whole year’s worth of preparation.” Tristram is now training to be a furniture restorer, but fire remains a passion. “I still get the excitement every time I light a firework. Wandering up there, and everyone’s looking at you, and you just light it. It’s great.”

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life in detail there’s beauty in the moment if you know where to look words jane flett, photo stefany alves I have become very excited of late about the idea of ceremony, about making the moments count. James says this makes me sound like a Buddhist, though if I am, it’s a Buddhism that involves a lot more Prosecco and camembert than the standard texts. Anyway. We’ve been trying to trick ourselves into making the mundane memorable, with a sorcery of stolen moments, polaroid memories and discounted liquor. It’s been working out pretty well. The trick is to take something ordinary and make it special, through a penchant for detail and a pause for breath. Don’t just eat dinner: take it outside, and suddenly the act of refuelling has become something noteworthy. However, this isn’t enough. Ceremony requires going the extra mile, so find a wind-up gramophone and place it on the grass. Or a transistor radio. Or a barbershop quartet. Find a camera and a quilted patchwork blanket; wear tweed. You don’t need a £100 Fortnum and Mason prepared hamper, but you probably do need a teeny-tiny salt shaker with the holes taped up so it doesn’t leak in your bag, some form of wicker container, and a parasol. For drinks, the art of ceremony doesn’t actually require expensive champagne to toast its genius; it’s possible to buy 50p glass flutes in Oxfam, drink white cider on the grass, clink glasses and pretend. Pretending is central to the whole idea. Pretending that actually all moments are equally amazing and the journey is as good as the destination and we don’t care that we’ve just missed the last bus home, because this is an opportunity to grab tequila beer from the off licence and be set loose across the giddy city! (No, I wouldn’t rather just be home in bed, be quiet, hush.) Through ceremony, it’s possible to give pause to the moments that normally pass by unnoticed, in transit, wished away. To use details as markers on a memory, as a hook, like pins in a map. And ceremony is something so easy to create for someone else; to sear chunks of life onto their memory forever, hand them moments wrapped up like precious parcels in blue tissue paper, to keep. One November, we flew to Paris on a whim. We were drunk, Ryanair was cheap, it was 1am and the flight left at 7. We arrived with no plans and plenty hangover, and after a nap in a park we fortified ourselves with red wine and began a stumble around the arrondissements. At one corner, we realised that just through that archway we would come across the Louvre pyramid, all shimmering and glistening with glass, tadaa! Dai had never been to Paris before and we were thrilled at the thought of him seeing it—more so, in fact, than excited about seeing it ourselves. So we didn’t just walk over, we covered his eyes and guided him to a point with picture-postcard perspective, put the wine in his hand and uncovered. Click. From this a plan was born, not just to explore the city but to reveal it to someone as a series of distinct and beautiful things. We covered the whole of Paris with Dai in his blindfold, presenting him with landmarks with a flourish. Click: he is sat at a table with a small French beer at the bottom of a hill which spills upwards to the glowing white Sacre Coeur, the blindfold comes off. Click: we are lying on the ground looking up at the wrought-iron ceiling of the Gare du Nord, while the trains and the city grumble all around. Click: opposite the Moulin Rouge, the neon wavering like tracer-trails, a bottle of raspberry champagne, the screaming siren of a fire engine stuck in traffic. And on, and on, until finally, click: laid down underneath the straddle of the Eiffel Tower at that moment on the hour where it sets off fireworks within itself and all the lights crackle through it at night. Wow. I don’t have a single photo of that trip but I have snapshots in my mind, strung out like pearls on a necklace, of each of those moments (which became, in regarding them, momentous). This sort of ceremony, this utter concentration on a person and a moment which can make an ordinary moment something special, can make an already special moment perfect. So, this is what I’ve been doing. This is the secret. I’m not sure if it can count as any kind of philosophy or religion, but that’s beside the point. It’s fun. Go on. Raise libations to the details of life, even if your libation is white cider, so long as you notice. Spread the blanket out on the grass. Pause for breath. Cheers.

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t h e r eâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a b a r i n my cupboard an illustrated guide to brewing your own pint words novak hunter, illustration dani lurie

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The Domesday Book of 1086 was an expansive recording of English lives in the Middle Ages. It documented, among many other things, 43 commercial brewers operating in England, and that the holy men of St. Paul’s Cathedral brewed 542,512 pints of ale annually, much of which was drunk by pregnant women and children as a safe alternative to unsanitary drinking water. Now, almost a thousand years later and less than two miles from St. Paul’s, I will attempt to create beer in my flat above a kebab shop in Bethnal Green with a bunch of plastic equipment ordered over the internet. My experience in brewing was limited. As a teenager, some friends and I had tried to circumvent underage drinking laws by building our own still and making bootleg whiskey. After a few weeks of research, construction and distilling, all we had were a few sad brown droplets and a sobering knowledge of how poisonous badly-made spirits can be. That was my one and only sojourn into the world of homemade alcohol, so I had some concerns. Making beer involves carefully mixing ingredients at the correct temperatures, allowing lots of time for fermentation and conditioning, and the sanitary vigilance of a surgeon to ensure the mix doesn’t contaminate. I’m not good in the kitchen and my flat has no real way of controlling the temperature during summer. I’m not patient and I can barely keep myself clean, let alone all the gear required for making alcohol. I seemed to be lacking most of the fundamental virtues required for success, but I yearned for the satisfaction of getting drunk on something I made myself.

The Ruby Ale Day One A big box arrived at my house with a picture on the side of a happy couple, laughing and drinking beer. They were my new role models. The kit included everything I needed to create 40 pints of ruby ale, so I set my stereo to classic rock and began the task of deciphering the instructions. There were bits and pieces of all kinds of stuff, but I found that all you really need to make beer is a massive bucket with a lid, a huge mixing spoon, ingredients and sanitiser, and something to store it in once it’s ready. The most difficult part is ensuring everything is totally sanitary. Any germs that get into the wort (the unfinished beer mix) can completely ruin the flavour, so it’s important to boil, clean and sterilise everything like a maniac. I was so paranoid that I decided not to use tap water. Instead I self-consciously carried 30 litres of water back from the supermarket, looking like one of those people who obsessively avoids drinking tap water. Making basic beer from a starter kit is pretty uncomplicated. I emptied two cans of malty-smelling goo into a 27-litre fermenting bucket, added some hot water, lots of cold water, and yeast. Mix it, find a place with a stable temperature, leave it there for two weeks. Easy. I had the sneaking suspicion that anyone else could have done this quickly and efficiently, but it took me two hours and made an enormous mess. I stored the malodorous bucket in the corner of my bedroom and waited for the tell-tale bubbles of fermentation to start coming from the pressure valve on top.

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Day Three The bubbles never came. Had I added the yeast while the water was too hot, killing the poor little yeast cells? Was the temperature too high? This was during the hottest part of the summer. Had I left a vital ingredient out? The variables of my experiment were starting to feel beyond my control. For all I knew, I was lovingly watching over nothing more than a bucket of stinky brown water. The suspense was killing me. The idea of carrying a stillborn beer baby to full term wasn’t filling me with joy, but some small hope came from a few scattered bubbles and a weird scummy residue developing around the top of the bucket. Day Fourteen I was desperate for some clues about what was happening in my bucket. There was no sure sign I was on the right path, but it was time for second fermentation anyway. This is the point when you transfer the wort to a second, sealed container and add sugar to re-start the fermentation. The more sugar you use, the higher the alcohol content. Pressure in the container builds up, and hey presto, your brew gets bubbles. My kit came with a big, solid plastic keg. Childhood memories of my dad’s exploding homebrew bottles were still vivid so I decided to store the keg in a box, wrapped in bin liners, lest the building pressure create a beery time bomb. It turned out to be a wise move. Within a few days the tap on the keg had started to leak and there was two inches of pungent ale in the bottom of the box. Day Twenty-One After watching it sit quietly and leakily in the corner for another week, I couldn’t take it anymore. I carried the keg to the bathroom, balanced it above the bath and slowly released the valve. To my disbelief, a sudden, powerful torrent burst forth and sprayed everywhere, smelling like alcohol and foaming like ale. The relief was glorious. I filled a pint glass and carried it up to the roof, where I sat with a book and watched the sun set over Bethnal Green Road, ruby ale in hand. A little thin and watery, but not bad for a first attempt. I had a feeling of accomplishment, like the one you get from assembling an Ikea shelf. It was time for something more challenging.

The Raspberry Lager Day Twenty-Two Every fruit beer I’ve tried has been just a little too sugary and fizzy for my tastes. I wanted to make a fruit beer that tasted true to its beery roots but was just sweet enough to brighten up an afternoon in the sunshine. I scoured online homebrew forums and found plenty of techniques, but they were written by beer nerds and looked more like scientific experiments than recipes. Even my brewing-expert buddy Brad had never tried it before. I was breaking into no-man’s beer land, solo. So I improvised. I’d use a light pale ale kit as a foundation, low on alcohol as the sugar in the fruit would boost the content anyway, and easy in flavour so it wouldn’t clash with the massive quantity of raspberries I planned on dropping into it. Nearly every assessment I’d read online complained that no matter how much fruit

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you add, it’s never enough. Most recipes called for 250, maybe 500 grams of fruit. I was going to take it to the next level. I set up the kit just like before, sans fruit, and left the bucket fermenting in the corner next to the keg. I now had 50 litres of beer fermenting and conditioning in my bedroom. I was running a brewery.

of contamination and mould growing on any floating pieces of fruit. As I carried the raspberries from the hob to the bucket I developed a Howard-Hughes-style germ paranoia. I could see them in my mind’s eye, building homes and raising disgusting little families on my cherished beer.

Day Twenty-Seven

Day Thirty-Six

My girlfriend is an avid ale drinker and totally supportive of this adventure, but I’m not sure the same can be said for my flatmates. Despite repeated offers, they continue to politely decline invitations to try my ale, which is still sitting in the keg, conditioning. I’m not sure they trust me, which is possibly fair seeing as my trepidation throughout the process wasn’t filling anyone with confidence. Or maybe they’ve just heard too many stories about pungent and explosive homebrew kits.

The fruit sat in the wort for five days while I fretted, praying my beautiful experiment wasn’t going to become a giant fuzz-covered 27-litre Petri dish. That didn’t happen, although the raspberries were starting to disintegrate. I fished them all out, sterilised the shiny new bottles and began the long process of siphoning beer into them. Then, I added more sugar to begin the second fermentation and carbonation within the bottles. Too little sugar and not enough pressure means it won’t carbonate enough, but add too much sugar with too little space at the neck and they’ll detonate.

The hesitation is starting to concern me a little, as I’ve invited a big group of friends to the park for a tasting session when everything is ready. I’ve decided to make an event of it, so I’ve ordered 36 excellent Grolsch-style bottles and begun to create my own labels. Day Thirty-One The lager didn’t seem to bubble during fermentation either, but it did stink. This was an unpleasant relief: something was clearly working. I bought 2kg of raspberries and immersed them, Louis-Pasteur-like, in water just below boiling point. The sterilising is a big issue with fruit beer. Boiling fruit releases pectin, the gelling agent in jams and preserves, which will turn your beer cloudy. Personally, I quite like that, but if it’s not your thing, adding an enzyme like pectolyase will deal with pectin and remove cloudiness. On the other hand, not adequately sterilising runs the risk

Day Forty ...ish More than once during this period I came home late at night with friends, totally wasted and desperate for more beer. We’d crack open a bottle, admire its beautiful orange hue, then hammer it back. I’d wake up with no memory whatsoever of its taste, but with vague recollections of words like, “Oh man... That’s alright!” Also, to my surprise, the ale was starting to taste as good as I’d hoped it would. I was starting to get confident. The tasting session is getting closer. The pressure is on, and I’ve started thinking about a label design for my creation. Only after days of brain-racking and scribbling did I look to my family crest for inspiration, and I finally started some serious drawing. Soon all that remained was to get the labels printed and meet my friends with a brave face and a sincere request for brutal honesty.

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The Test Day Sixty-Five I arrived early to find London Fields grey and sparse. My friend Fiona and I cracked open our first drinks just seconds before it hit, and suddenly there we were; just the two of us, being rained on in an empty park, holding half-empty glasses of beer with a spine-crunchingly heavy backpack full of bottles and ice. Things were not looking good. A cab was hailed, and we regrouped in my lounge room as the guests and their opinions trickled in. “Wow, this tastes really good” and “a veritable liquid wonderland.” Who’d have thought. More honest, I suspect, were Josh, who thought it could have been fruitier, and Dani, who commented that the foam on her beer was sort of yellow. Des said it tasted more like cider than beer, but I wasn’t supposed to quote him on that. Sorry Des. Then Christy was almost poisoned because I didn’t tell her the beer was made with raspberries, like the ones she’s allergic to. Sorry Christy. My hopes had been modest. All I’d wanted was to make something drinkable and to avoid ruining everything. In the end I had two decent batches of beer and the satisfaction of seeing a circle of my friends happily drinking it. To my taste, the ale was great after ageing and the fruit beer was a little less bubbly and slightly sharper in its flavour than I would have liked, but still worth drinking, with a mild fruitiness and 4% alcohol. With the right precautions, it’s easier than you’d expect. With a final cost of around £150 for everything (fruit and bottles being the big killers), it wasn’t all that cheap, but after the initial outlay your costs go down, with most good-quality beer kits costing less than £20 for 40 pints. On my schedule for next summer: homebrewed cherry beer, minus a crisis of confidence. And if I can do it, so can you.

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food for thought the people of york tell us what they had for lunch and the naughtiest thing they did as a child portraits amy lea tinkler

Rich. Seafood tagliatelle for lunch. “I shaved off my brother’s right eyebrow.”

Hayley. Toast. “I was really late for primary school once, so I lied and said that my mum had taken sleeping pills.”

Kerry. Chinese for lunch. “I used to suck dry roasted peanuts and put them back in the bowl.”

Charlotte. Pizza and wedges. “I tied my brother up in a sleeping bag and threw him down the stairs and he split his lip open.”

Laura. A boots meal deal for lunch. “Nothing, I was a perfect child.”

Giles. Mexican casadia. “I locked a boy in a kennel with a very, very angry Doberman and left him.”

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Lilly. Nothing, I’m fasting. “I stole hats, particularly berets. I used to live in Paris.”

Alex. Pizza for lunch. “My brother threw one of my Barbies into the river, so I bit him.”

Laura. A cup of tea and a cupcake. “I stole my granddad’s tobacco and tried to smoke it.”

Laura. Mozzarella and tomato panini. “I climbed up the chimney.”

Jenny. Beer. “I stole 50p from my mum for pick ‘n’ mix. When she found out, I packed my bags in ten Asda carrier bags and sat out on the street curb waiting for someone to take me away.”

Sebastian. A hotdog for lunch. “I used to take my hamster for days out in my pocket.”

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handmade brighton’s craft collective talk acrylic moustaches and papier-mâché fox heads words and photo beth davis

Handmade Co-operative sits about halfway up St James’s Street, on a road that characterises Brighton nicely with an assortment of swish delis, off licences, boutiques, special interest adult shops and pastelhued houses leading down to the sea. ‘Co-operative’ is defined as “mutual assistance in working towards a common goal,” which captures Handmade’s ethos perfectly. The shop operates as a number of small spaces for rent. The profits go directly back into the shop, to which everybody contributes time, energy and the odd baked good. Through the shop, fledgling artists and designers are given a platform from which to launch themselves, and customers are presented with a glorious collection of unique and sensibly priced hand-crafted objects. On the potentially last sunny Saturday of the year, I pulled up a tiny wooden stool and spent an afternoon with Kirstin, Angela, Yannik and Lynne and talked craft, unprintable belly button anecdotes and their neighbour Barry. They’re the foursome at the heart of the operation, sharing a pool of crafting talent, love of the sea and a mutual dislike of Art Republic. Handmade started as a craft fair run by Kirstin at Brighton’s Komedia, after finding other craft outlets a bit fuddy-duddy and generally unappreciative of the acrylic moustaches she was making. “I thought there must be loads of people doing similar things and wanted to create some sort of outlet for that.” The fairs were a success, with about thirty stall holders. “Then after one of the fairs, I received an email from a strange lady with a sweet shop who wanted to do something a bit different, and was wondering whether I’d be interested in turning the fair into a more permanent thing.” That strange lady turned out to be Lynne, and after two highpowered business coffees to talk the idea over, they went for it. Around the same time, they also gained illustrator Angela, who sells her work in the shop, and Yannik, who doesn’t, but not for lack of ‘gentle’ encouragement by the other three. They’d both been looking for studios to work in, and were lured by the potential of the space under the shop. Starting as they meant to go on, converting the shop was a group effort. “Starting up was really fun, with everyone coming in on their days off or after work to help clean and paint. Georgina, one of our artists made the sign, and a carpenter friend made the scrupulously accurate shelves in return for free meals.” The shop opened its doors in April this year with a party that spilled out into the street, and now has about 28 Brighton-based artists renting a space, “although the basic criteria is that you just need to really

like Brighton.” Spaces are rented by the month and change often, but the driving force is always something verging on a nurturing thumbsup. Everyone is encouraged to personalise their display and make it their own. “The brilliant thing about the set up is that we can always take a couple of bits from people to see how they sell, which if they do, will hopefully encourage them to take a space for longer,” says Lynne. “When you’re starting out, it’s just nice to be given a chance by someone. Most of our artists aren’t doing this full time, but hopefully the shop will act as a launch pad for them.” This approach also accounts for the glorious diversity of the stock, which made it near impossible for me to hold anyone’s eye for too long. “At the end of the day, we’re not here to make a profit. We take 25% commission, but everything goes back into the shop, which gives us the freedom to try out things that are a bit mad and unusual too.” Hence papier-mâché foxes’ heads sit next to necklaces made from bits of old clock and frilly robot-print undies, while analogueloving fanzines and screen prints keep beautiful pheasant feather head dresses company. (“That’s Pippa—the feathers come from her parents’ farm.”) The work is constantly changing, which means that the shop verges more on being a working gallery than just a retail space. It has already inspired the kind of stories that make the hairs on your arm tingle. The Handmade group tell me about the people who bought a space for a friend’s birthday as a way of encouraging him to keep up the good work. Then there was the lady who came in after her husband died to offer his stamp collection to an artist who uses them to make brooches, because she’d rather they went to a good home. The shop has gained a loyal and seemingly far-reaching following. “Germans love this shop, absolutely love it.” What next for the collective? “If this could be our day job it would be amazing,” they agree, “But we’re still trying to figure out the best way of making that happen. The shop isn’t really big enough for everything that we want to do at the moment, but there’s definitely the demand there to enable us to grow.” And the basement space below the shop seems to be key to this. “We want to open up downstairs as a sort of interactive, indie-factory, because at the moment it’s empty save for our neighbour Barry’s fishing videos,” says Yannik, “But it has this amazing potential as a screen printing studio and workshop space, or as somewhere to run craft nights and events using everyone’s individual talents.” “Or just throw really good parties from” adds Angela. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for one that calls for a pheasant feather headdress.

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handmade’s guide to brighton’s best bits

paper scrap notebook

We asked the enterprising foursome for their guide to some of Brighton’s best offerings. “There are five things you’d enjoy doing on any given evening, and at least two bands that you’d want to see every week.”

These instructions will show you how to make a lovely notebook from paper scraps and photographs. You’ll need a glue gun, a craft knife or guillotine and a selection of papers.

Marwoods Cafe. “A lovely, quirky cafe with mannequin-handed door handles, toy soldiers and a garden, plus an overwhelmingly enthusiastic owner and a creative-type clientele because of the studios upstairs.” Red Roaster. “The best coffee in Brighton and just down the road.” Taj. “An Indian and ethnic food store with masses of spices and unusual ingredients for when you’re feeling adventurous, and amazing vegan treats.” Infinity Foods. “Well, one of the best bits if you’re vegan. Actually, being vegan in Brighton.”

words angela chick

One. Choose your selection of papers. These could be left over from different craft projects. You can choose whether you want all one size or a mix of different sizes, which can sometimes be quite inspiring. The more variety, the better. I like to use a variety of tracing paper, graph papers, different colours and textures. You can also throw in some envelopes for good measure. These will allow you to store little bits in your notebook. Two. Once you’ve got all your materials, you can decide on size. I try not to do any smaller than A5. If you want a uniform shape or size, use a guillotine or craft knife to cut all the pages down to the right size.

The Tea Cosy. “The most amazing collection of Royal Memorabilia you’re ever likely to take afternoon tea amongst, although don’t forget your p’s and q’s—they’re pretty strict.”

Three. Find a good solid surface to work against. Shuffle your papers and tap them down against the solid surface until they all line up along their left edge. Using a hot glue gun, squeeze strips of glue in a zig-zag pattern along the flush edge. Keep going over it until you’re sure you’ve got all the left edge covered.

St James Pub. “For rum tasting and Thai food served with a winning smile.”

Four. Leave to dry completely before using. It’s very helpful to use bulldog clips to hold the book together while it dries.

Sunday Market at the Marina. “Like a vintage car boot sale. Pretty expensive but good for a mooch—although it starts painfully early. Barry from next door can usually be found there by 7am.”

Five. If you want to give it a cloth cover, cut a piece of fabric large enough to cover both the front and back, leaving enough for the spine and apply to the book simply by gluing it on.

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stuffed faces

crisp packet jewellery

words yannik eilers

words kirstin stride

These cheeky props can be made from any face that catches your eye.

This is a bit of nostalgia from my younger years. All you’ll need is an empty crisp packet and chains or fittings for the bits of jewellery you’d like to create.

One. Draw, print or find an image of a favourite face. Two. Cut out two bits of fabric in the shape of the chosen face. Three. Lay the face over one of the fabric shapes and, using a sewing machine or needle and thread, sew along the features and lines you want to highlight. Four. Sew the two pieces of fabric together with the face facing in. Be sure to leave a gap at the bottom. Five. Turn it inside out and stuff your face with stuffing or scraps of fabric. Sew up the end, and you’re done!

One. Find an empty packet of crisps. Personally, I think the squarer the packet the better, and foil packets don’t work well. Feel free to eat the contents to create the empty packet. Be as careful as you can not to tear the packet when you’re opening it, as it will look much better once shrunk. Two. Make sure the packet is completely empty of crisps and crumbs. Three. If you’re making something that needs a hole, such as earrings or a necklace, create one in the packet about the size of a five pence coin, wherever you think is best. Four. Pop the bag on a baking tray and flatten it out as well as possible, then cook in a preheated oven (250°C) for around 6 mins. Different packets have different effects, some getting smaller than others, so do a bit of experimenting. Five. Remove the packets from the oven. If you want to flatten any curled edges then use a wooden spoon or spatula. Leave to cool for about 5 mins. Once cool, the packets become like plastic, so you can use them as whatever you fancy!

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I lost my possessions and I feel fine sometimes all you need are the memories words ellie phillips, illustration ben wright Therapists say the unconscious is the mind’s “cupboard under the stairs” where our traumas, embarrassments and most private memories are stowed. I once had an actual cupboard under the stairs rammed to the door with, among other things, three broken shower heads that I felt sure I’d need again one day. “What’s in that cupboard?” my boyfriend wanted to know. “Nothing,” I said, fearing exposure. I felt as if the cupboard under the stairs were my actual unconscious. One day we sold my flat, packed up all the furniture and boxed up the stuff until we found a place to buy together. For six months we rented places with other people’s furniture and clean forgot about the things that had taken us each twenty-odd years to accumulate. In six months I didn’t need the three broken shower heads. In fact, I never thought about them. When we came to retrieve our effects, we found that the storage unit was full of water. We opened dripping boxes and found kitten-heels flecked with green mould, a sodden handbag with added moss, smeared photos which looked as if they’d been chewed and spat out, pictures with mushroom detail, rusted jewellery. The Complete Gore Vidal was a damp, corrugated sculpture. Wuthering Heights was a wet flannel. At the back of the unit was our funguscovered double bed and three broken shower heads, now mildewed and black. I had no idea that water could leave such a variety of traces. It was awesome. The smell was unforgettable too. Sweet and musty. After a while we just stopped opening the boxes. We paid someone to dump the lot. Now we had nothing. We told our friends about The Great Damp. They were horrified. They looked at their bursting closets and drawers and shelves and tried to imagine how it would be without everything. “Terrible. Devastating. Empty,” were the words they used. It traumatised our downstairs neighbour. Gave him nightmares. “I dreamt I lost all of my pictures last night,” he said, staring with horror around our clear walls. “I had to go downstairs and touch them to make sure they were still there.” “We’ve become one of those families without books,” said my boyfriend. “We have a child who won’t know who we are because he will have no idea what we’ve read.” And our son would never know what we looked like at college. He would never idly flick through his parents’ quaint paper photographs of long ago house parties, festivals and holidays abroad. And without the visual prompts his parents would forget that these things had ever happened. We would forget this person and that person. The water would have erased our memories too. So why was it that I felt nothing but relief? Instead of the devastation and emptiness that people insisted I should feel, it was as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders— like a tortoise without its enormous shell or a car that stops towing its trailer. There was a lightness to life. I was free. Four years on and I’m still relatively free, although the stuff does creep back if you let it. You may open my cupboard under the stairs, though. You’ll only find a vacuum cleaner in there.

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stand up for motherhood how europe’s women took back childbirth interview vicky sparrow, photo theo brainin

If you’re over 30, your mother very likely gave birth to you lying flat on her back in a hospital bed. Birthing pools were unheard of; squatting or walking during labour was unusual. But in the meantime, something changed. It’s now the norm for women to be able to move spontaneously in childbirth, rather than lying on a bed as a patient. You’ll find a dedicated birth centre in many hospitals with pool facilities and space to move. What made the difference was the Active Birth Movement, which started in 1981. I went to see Janet Balaskas, its founder. Our meeting place is the Active Birth Centre in North London. The floor of the room looks like a rough mosaic: eighteen burgundy mats arranged in an oval with one light purple one running down the centre. Heavily pregnant nudes adorn the walls in black and white. The mats surrounding us wait expectantly for the eighteen-strong yoga class of mothers-to-be. Janet is an active birth practitioner, a yoga instructor, an activist, the author of nine books, the organiser of the Active Birth Conferences and a mother of four. This is how her campaign began. I got pregnant. I knew absolutely nothing about pregnancy or birth. I was living in London at the time and what I found out pretty well appalled me. I thought, “My god: is this what having a baby is all about?” It was a vision of hospitals and complications and problems and difficulties. I wasn’t scared, I just thought there’s got to be something going wrong here. I’d always thought of it as so natural to have a baby. Our bodies must be designed to do this, all the other mammals are. So I was really quite shocked to see that it was all really medicalised. We no longer see our female relatives, our mothers, our aunts, having babies. They disappear off into a hospital somewhere and come out with a baby. The whole of childbirth needed to be humanised in some way. I think, essentially having a baby is a perfectly normal part of a woman’s life. So after I had my first child, of four, I went to the Wellcome Library and the V&A in London and asked for anything they had on childbirth. The most startling thing to come out of all the research I did was to do with the actual posture of women in labour and birth. In our culture, it’s lying down in bed. In a more or less stranded, passive position, like a patient. I called that ‘stranded beetle’: like a beetle on its back. I thought that this is just such a disempowered position of surrender. Whereas if you look at the history and the ethnology of childbirth, from different world cultures, from around seven thousand BC, you’ll find that birthing and labouring women are always depicted upright. Whether you’re talking about India, Japan, South America, China, Europe, you’ll find visual records of upright birthing women. There are some really beautiful images out there.

I also looked up anatomy and I could see that a woman’s pelvis is beautifully designed to accommodate a baby, and for the baby to come out. What the upright birthing positions do is harness the help of gravity. The point is, really, that a woman needs to be free in labour. Free to get off the bed, to stand, squat, to move around, to choose whatever positions make her feel best, and to make as much or as little noise as she wants. She just needs to be able to let go and let it happen. We’re lucky enough to live in a country where women do get heard. If we really insist that we want to give birth off the bed then we’re going to get there in the end. This is what I and my colleagues were fighting for in the early eighties. We did have some opposition from the conservative side of the medical profession. We decided that we had to have a huge organised demonstration. In the end, five to six thousand people came to our Birthrights Rally. We were amazed, and we realised that there were lots and lots of people who were really interested in this, and lots of midwives supported it. Many midwives campaigned for change within the hospital setting, too. I then organised two international conferences held at Wembley. It was quite a big thing to pick up the phone and say, “Hello, is that Wembley Conference Centre?” but I had confidence in it. And we were all really driven. It was very much related to the Women’s Lib movement in a way. Active birth felt like the empowerment of women to be in charge of their own births and to resist being robbed of their experience by the medical profession. Not that I’m down on the medical profession. Obviously, they offer women amazing back-up for when things don’t work out so well. But most women want to be in charge of their own birth experience whatever happens. Women lost control over childbirth as they lost the upright position. The active birth movement was about liberation of women in childbirth as child-bearers and mothers. The movement has just spread from woman to woman. If one woman has an amazing experience, she tells her friends. There’s nothing more powerful than a woman-to-woman revolution. It’s called active birth because the other style of managing it all medically was called active management, and so I went, “Oh no no no. Active birth.” An active birth makes a profound impression upon anyone who sees it. First of all the baby is always in fabulously good condition. They’re alert and they’re healthy and they’re not drugged. And the women, even though going through the active birth is a big journey, feel truly exhilarated. Sometimes they feel like they’ve had the best experience of their life. That’s not unusual. Having a baby can be one of the best experiences of your life.

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spices for december martyn barnes cooks us dinner words rosanna durham “The recipes are based on very traditional Thai cooking techniques. They are fun, fast and easy to do; you can use them as a base to get creative with Asian food. They use ingredients in a way which captures the flavours and textures and boosts them with the original flavourings. Thai cooking is based on three main flavours: hot, sour and sweet. So you can adjust these depending on how you prefer it by adding less or more sugar, chilli and fish sauce. “You can find mooli (or Japanese radish) in Asian food stores or most big supermarkets. But if you can’t get hold of it, you can substitute with cucumber or carrot, as these also have a firm texture and subtle flavour. For the curry, you can use any fish as long as it’s firm and fleshy, like cod or salmon. Even seafood like prawn or lobster would work well. “ Rare beef salad with fragrant herbs Martyn’s salad did for my taste-buds what the morning’s first coffee does for my sanity. The excursion equivalent to this dish would be going for a walk along an Irish coastline and seeing colours that you didn’t know existed. Yes, this salad felt utterly indulgent, but not in a cupcake way. The ingredients weren’t crowded out by each other. The beef, tender and delicious; ginger, basil, coriander with a really clean, clear dressing. Serves four.

For the beef 600g beef (fillets or sirloin) a red chilli, crushed 100ml soy sauce 2 tbsp sugar a little vegetable oil salt and pepper For the salad 10 cherry tomatoes, quartered a papaya 100g mooli (Japanese radish) a green mango a bunch of sweet Thai basil a bunch of mint a bunch of coriander 50g bean sprouts For the dressing juice of one lime 200 ml coconut milk a red chilli, crushed fish sauce 2tbsp soy sauce To garnish 2 or 3 spring onions and a red chilli, all finely sliced

One. Cut the beef into oblong-shaped potions—about 150g per portion. Season with salt and pepper, and rub with a little oil. Sear on each side in a hot pan for just a few seconds, to seal and lock in the flavour. Two. Crush the chilli to a pulp in pestle and mortar. (You can also crush the chilli for the dressing while you’re at it.) Make the marinade by gently heating 100ml soy sauce in a pan. Add the crushed chilli and 2 tbsps of sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Three. After you’ve sealed the beef, add it to the marinade and leave in the fridge for about an hour. Four. To make the salad, shave the mango, mooli and papaya using a potato peeler. Cut the cherry tomatoes into quarters. Pluck the mint, sweet Thai basil and coriander, leaving the leaves whole. Five. Mix all the fruit, the tomatoes and the bean sprouts together in a bowl, and then add the herbs gradually to taste. Toss gently. Six. For the dressing, mix the lime juice, the soy sauce and the fish sauce into the coconut milk. Add the crushed chilli. Remove the chilli before serving—or earlier if you don’t like it too spicy—by passing the dressing through a sieve. Seven. Remove the beef from the fridge and cut it into fine slices. Add about a third of it to the salad with a little of the dressing. Toss again and arrange the rest of the beef on and around the salad. Eight. Drizzle a little more dressing over the salad, then garnish with a finely-sliced chilli and the spring onions and serve.

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Monkfish curry with lychee, cherry tomatoes and green beans Martyn’s monkfish curry tasted of heaven in a bowl. Visually, it was an essay in white, with everyone’s favourite vegetable (the potato), lychee, and monkfish lovingly cut into similar-sized pieces. It tasted spicy, but not too spicy. I’d make it spicier, in fact. Des and I wondered what lychee would taste like with the monkfish, but it cut through the rich coconut, was not overbearing or too sweet, and made us savour the dish even more. The monkfish practically dissolved into the curry and onto our tongues. We ended up fighting, in a polite and mannered way, over the remaining pieces. If I were to describe the taste more logically I’d say: creamy coconut balanced by spice; mild, tender fish pieces; bearably sweet lychee; juicy halves of cherry tomatoes; crunchy beans, soft potatoes. The coconut milk and the chilli base was the most enjoyable aspect for me. I felt a better person for having eaten the curry. Serves four.

For the sauce 2-3tbsp red curry paste vegetable oil, for frying 2 red chillies, finely chopped 50g ginger (galangal), finely chopped 800ml coconut cream 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped 30g palm sugar For the rest a whole monkfish fillet, cut into bite-sized chunks 10 cherry tomatoes, halved 12 lychees, peeled, de-stoned and halved 400g baby potatoes, peeled 200g green beans 2 tbsp fish sauce juice of one lime a few leaves of Thai basil, to garnish

One. To make the curry sauce, heat a little oil in a pan, then add the red curry paste. Cook thoroughly for 10 to 15 mins on a low heat. Two. Add the chilli, ginger and garlic. Cook these out with the paste for a further 5 mins. Three. Add the coconut cream and bring to the boil. Then, add the palm sugar and let it dissolve. Four. While the sauce is cooking, prepare the potatoes and the beans. Cut them into chunks and boil, in separate pans, until cooked, then drain. Six. Bring the sauce to the boil, then drop in all the other ingredients. Bring the curry back to the boil. Seven. Cook until the fish is firm and white. This should take about 2 or 3 mins. Eight. Garnish with Thai basil and serve with rice on the side.

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subscribe This bottle cap oh comely was made by Robson Cezar, an artist from our studio. You can have an oh comely of your own (in magazine, not bottle cap form) every two months. The easiest way is to subscribe. It’s £18 for a year, and you’ll get six shiny issues through your letterbox. Visit www.ohcomely.co.uk/subscribe or write to subs@ohcomely.co.uk. Robson made this design when we were giving out disposable cameras, and one found its way to him. “I took pictures of things that I make in my studio, lots of photos of bottle caps. Coming from Brazil, I am familiar with the culture of making things out of trash. In the past I have also collected thousands of toys and plastic bottles and transformed then into art. “I like the idea that people look at my work and recognise familiar materials. In Brazil toys are expensive, so I was amazed to buy so many cheaply here in England. The Brazilian notion of dar um jeitinho, to find a way to exist—that is my task as an artist here in London.” Robson is always looking for more bottle caps, so if you have some spare, you can mail them to the address written on the back of this issue.

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issue four is out on the 16th of december We love snooping around other people’s bookshelves. It’s like getting lost in someone else’s world. You find Terry Pratchett’s Colours of Magic tucked away next to Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, and then a long out-of-date Best Sights of Eastern Europe that somehow got lost among the Complete Works of Shakespeare. We’d like to create a long bookshelf of our own. It won’t have our books on it. It’ll have yours. We’d like you to sketch us a selection of the books on your bookshelf—the books that have meant something to you recently. There are no restrictions: trashy crime fiction, Anglo-Saxon epic and the Theory of Ordinary Differential Equations are all fine by us. We’re looking for honesty and, above all, passion, in your book-drawing choice. Please draw your books in profile, so that you can see the spines, and with a flat edge along the bottom. A single shelf only. No whole bookcases please. Include a hundred words about which books you drew. Send them to bookshelf@ohcomely.co.uk, by the 21st of November. All files should be sent as high-res images. See ohcomely.co.uk/bookshelf for more details.

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no sweat it’s not always sweeter on the other side words connie han

Dove Invisible Dry, £2.05 I must confess, I’ve never been adventurous with my armpits. Puberty was a very confusing time and I didn’t need the added complexity of trying different deodorants. All I needed was not to smell, and Dove has always been my weapon of choice. This review therefore may be slightly biassed. Black dress. Dove Invisible Dry claims it is “black dress approved.” All I know is that, besides leaving little clumps of white residue all over unsuspecting black dresses, it does the same thing to your pits, which makes that little-black-dress elegance a little more unattainable. Sniff test. I enjoy the smell of Dove. I associate it with cleanness, happiness, and the joy of having finished with puberty once and for all, but it is very strong and synthetic. Mind you, it covers up BO perfectly. A 20-minute cycle ride up the hill later, and my pits are clammy, but unbowed. The boyfriend sniff test. I despise articles which rope in boy/ girlfriends for cameo appearances, especially ones that use cutesy initials. However, no one else was going to get that close to my armpits after a bike ride. “Relatively offensive,” was the verdict in this case. Thanks, boyfriend. Conclusion. Effective and easy to use, but lacking in a certain je ne sais quoi. Force of ha’pit. 6/10

Pitrok Crystal Deodorant, £4.69 Pitrok Crystal deodorant is made of ammonium alum, which is ammonium aluminium sulphate by another name. This is important because the back points out it doesn’t contain aluminium zirconium or aluminium chlorohydrate—but this deodorant does in fact contain aluminium. So if dodgy research rocks your boat or if aluminium irritates your skin, this is not your baby. Which is a shame, because its name is so good. Black dress. Some aluminium compounds can stain clothing, but this crystal only applies to wet surfaces, so unless you are caught in a tropical downpour while needing to apply deodorant immediately, your clothing is probably safe. I also tried it out on my dress and I can tell you it is 100% black dress safe. Sniff test. A 20-minute jog shows this is not a great antiperspirant, but it is an excellent deodorant. You’ll be clammy, but not whiffy. TBST. Really nice. “You smell of you, but less so.” Unsure whether this is a compliment or not, but let it go. Conclusion. This was my personal favourite. It was scentless and easy to apply. Although it is expensive, it looks like it would be long-lasting, so it may turn out to be better value in the end. The thinking woman’s crum-pit. 9.5/10

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Sure, £1 “Women’s nutritive.” This was the cheapest of the big brands, and I was intrigued by its nutrifying claims. Nothing on the back explained how it was going to nourish my pits, but its air of mystery was just too enticing. Black dress. No residue despite numerous sprays. Sniff test. I accidentally sprayed this into my face so I got a true noseful. It’s powerful stuff, but once it’s on, it blends perfectly with BO to provide an almost totally neutral atmosphere of cleanliness and wonder, even after a 45-minute cycle trip to the shops. TBST. “Nice” and not too strong. Conclusion. I once had a mix-up with a friend concerning whose deodorant was whose, during which we accidentally produced one of the most underrated pieces of rapid-fire comic banter ever to have escaped the London stage. It went: “Am I Dove?” “No, you’re Sure.” “Are you sure?” “No, I’m Dove.” Genius. A sure bet. 9/10

Tom’s of Maine, £3.99 “Nature’s original deodorant stick—improved with hops.” Tom’s of Maine is one of those all-natural concoctions that promises not to do you any harm whatsoever. Its ingredients include witch hazel, matricaria flowers, hops, water, kittens, sunshine, and peace in the Middle East. Plus, anything that is improved with hops is irresistible. Like beer. Black dress. No residue on clothes. However, it is sticky. Very sticky. This stickiness only lasted for half an hour, but I put it to you, gentle readers, that you have no idea how very, very long half an hour can be when you are trying to unpeel your arm from your own torso. Sniff test. The stick itself smells very faintly of lemon sherbert. Disconcertingly, once on, it smells strongly and persistently like gone-off cream, and it gets worse with exercise. While it’s a plus to not smell synthetic, be warned that if you ever scratch your armpits your fingers will smell of sour dairy FOR EVER. Good antiperspirant. I think it was better than Dove, though clamminess is hard to quantify. I did, for a second, ponder getting some blotting paper, but then realised that would be far too disgusting. TBST. Not impressed. “It smells weird.” I begged him to elaborate. “It’s like BO, but weird BO, alien BO, like you’re a sweaty, smelly alien.” I suggested that perhaps I smelled like a delicious beer. At this, a fleeting look of sadness passed over his face. “Not a chance,” he said. Conclusion. The stickiness and the weird smell at the beginning really put me off, but this is a good deodorant and antiperspirant. A worthy contender, and it may work for you. Mainely acceptable. 6.5/10

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Alcohol, vinegar, and essential oils You can apparently knock together a reasonable deodorant out of bits and bobs round the house and, rapidly running out of deodorant budget, I decided to improvise. Alcohol is an astringent which closes your pores, and it also acts as a carrier for essential oils. The only clear alcohol in the house was gin. Vinegar works by creating a low pH environment which BO-bugs dislike. As I didn’t have any vinegar, I replaced it with lemon. I always knew that G&Ts were the answer to all of life’s problems and time has proved me right over and over again. Black dress. Essential oils can stain clothing and acids can bleach. A few drops made no difference to my dress, but I imagine prolonged use and sun exposure may have an effect. Also, this is the deodorant most likely to rub off onto clothing, so beware. Sniff test. Almost no effect in reducing personal odour, but it does wreathe it in a pleasant aura of alcohol and fragrant oil, so that whenever I lift my arms I feel as if I might be in an open-air brewery on a pleasant summer’s day. TBST. “Nothing but BO. Seriously. That’s all I’m getting. Lots of it.” I beg him to try a little harder. Can’t he smell the tea-tree and the lemon? Doesn’t he feel like he’s in an intoxicating summer wonderland? Apparently not. I do not suggest you try exercising. Conclusion. I suspect that if spritzed over baking soda, the two might form a formidable odour-fighting team: the Yoko to soda’s Lennon: the Watson to soda’s Crick. On its own, however, this is a sad, sad mess. The Robin to soda’s Batman. Tis pit-y she’s so smelly. 4/10

Baking soda Apparently my experience with baking soda as toothpaste (see issue one, Minty Fresh) has not put me off trying it on another area of my body. The same principles apply here as for toothpaste: baking soda is bactericidal, which hopefully means the bugs that munch on your sweat won’t get a chance to produce the foul odours of doom. Black dress. Using baking soda as a deodorant involves making a paste. This doesn’t come off badly on clothes, unless you smear it across them, which I did, in which case it does. Don’t worry, when you’re not sacrificing your wardrobe to science, it’s probably fine. Sniff test. Baking soda doesn’t have any scent, on or off. Once on, it does a surprisingly good deodorant job—for a while. Inevitably though, the tiny tendrils of stinkiness become great big massive baobabs of extended metaphor and that was a sad, sad time for all. Re-apply regularly to prevent this. The less said about exercise the better. TBST. “You smell of you, but more so. Quite a bit more so, actually. Actually, there’s quite a lot of BO, isn’t there?” However, he remains surprisingly positive. “At least it’s not alien BO.” Conclusion. Much more successful than the toothpaste attempt, this was a surprisingly good deodorant. However, as an antiperspirant it is not very good, and you have to re-apply regularly to keep the deodorising effect. The pits. 5/10

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Lynx, £2.89; Tesco’s own, 85p Men. I found it hard to choose between your deodorants, so I’m doing a mini-view of Lynx Dry Dark Temptation (not part of my boyfriend’s seduction arsenal) versus Tesco’s own brand (very much part). I chose Lynx Dry Dark Temptation because it claims (1) it is chocolate scented and (2) it is “approved for hot encounters.” How could I resist? Black dress. Both Lynx and Tesco leaves a white mark (easily rubbed away) on black dresses. This may or may not be a concern to its target market. Sniff test. Lynx smells nice. It doesn’t, however, smell anything like chocolate. Tesco’s smells of deodorant. Both are only reasonable as antiperspirants or deodorants, but perhaps that is because their target users want the chance for a little BO to seep through to prove how long they have been at the gym, sculpting their guns. Boyfriend test. I’m not hugely impressed by either, but the blind test decision is unequivocal. “Oooh, nice!” he says enthusiastically about the Lynx-pit. “I like that. Yes. Mmm. That’s great.” About Tesco he isn’t so sure. “Um. Does it smell floral?” he ventures. When asked which one smelt more manly, he points towards the Lynx-pit sans doute. Now the key question. Does he think women are more likely to do the wearer of the Lynx-pit or the Tesco-pit? He isn’t sure, but “I know which one I’d do.” Men, you have your answer. Wear Lynx and you will only attract similar-minded men. Conclusion. Leave them both alone, wash more often, and start talking to women as if they are human beings, and you’ll do much better. Unless you want to attract my boyfriend. Lynx: the stinks effect. Tesco: not a lot of help. 5/10 for both.

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You need ... a strawberry sandwich.

I am Nigella Lawson.

Flicking through the pages of your favourite magazine, you feel a tiny grumble in your tummy. Are you ready to let a flow chart dictate your snack choices?

You’ve seen all the snacks, you’ve tried them all. You’re weary of the world and its foolishness. Either that, or you are Nigella Lawson, in which case I’m frankly surprised, overwhelmed and gratified. Either way, this will perk you right up. Take two slices thin white bread and butter them lightly. Slice strawberries thinly and layer on bread. Sprinkle over with sugar. Eat. Swoon with delight.

Yes. No.

Good choice. Don’t you think there’s nothing more soothing than relinquishing your responsibilities and letting someone else make all those difficult decisions for you?

Sorr y, I’m just not interested.

Oh, all right then.

Seriously, you’re missing out.

Casual snack ing is for the weak.

I wish I could, but I can’t. Just reading that sentence has made me feel relaxed, toasty warm and a little sleepy.

I can never relinquish control. I am the CTRL to your Alt Delete.

Maybe it’s nap time as well as snack time?

Oh boy!

You need ... milk and cookies, and a siesta. Seriously, these take no time at all. Take 50g sugar and 100g butter. Cream. Add 2 heaped tsps of cocoa powder and 150g flour. Blend. Form into little balls and squish with a fork. Bake at 180°C for 15 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes. Eat with a tall cool glass of milk. Get tucked into bed by your favourite person. Enjoy.

words connie han, illustration steph baxter

I wish. But I have jobs to do, people to see, and work to finish.

You need ... a peanut butter and jam sandwich. You long for a time when things were simple, life was easy, and jam formed the basis of all your nutritional needs. In short, you need to regress. Proust’s madeleine has nothing on a pb&j. The peanut butter must be crunchy, not smooth, the jam should be strawberry, and the bread should be thick cut and white. Variations on a theme: Nutella and banana; custard and sugar; a 900-page novel filled with nostalgia and regret.

Are you saying you’re so busy, important and uptight that there is no room in your life for casual snacking?

I’m so wired, I haven’t slept or eaten for three days. I’m starting to hallucinate that I’m a bear. HELP ME.

You need ... garlicky cheese on toast. You need savoury comfort, nutrition and a lie-down in a dark room. These will do just the trick. Don’t be limited to just toast—pitta, bagels, buns, and other dough-y delights are just as good. Top them with chopped garlic, grated cheese and Worcestershire sauce. Take some time off. Have some sangria. Learn to dance salsa. Emigrate to Spain. Start a little restaurant somewhere. Thank me later.

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