Oh Comely magazine issue 4 by oh comely magazine

issue four jan / feb 2011 ÂŁ4

Diana in the mountains above the snow line in Andorra. Photo: Crista Leonard.

oh comely keep your curiosity sacred liz bennett, des tan

beth davis, rosanna durham, gemma lacey, dani lurie, agatha a nitecka words victoria beale, jane flett, connie han, faye lewis, ellie norris, valerie pezeron, ellie phillips, luke ryan, zoe savory, vicky sparrow, erin spens pictures steph baxter, leah bernhardt, tom bingham, yelena bryksenkova, jonathan cherry, angela chick, david galletly, lene johansen, nikoline lander, crista leonard, ellie niemeyer, rachel clare price 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 four, jan/feb 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 portrait, Georgie Wass, by Agatha A Nitecka. 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.

on the cover

102

we took pretty pictures above the snow line, page 44, found out what happens when you meet the neighbours, page 84, made lanterns out of old tin cans, page 116, wondered if home cures can fix a cold, page 124,

and shared our favourite family recipes, page 102.

art

fashion

18 dogs and cats holding hands illustrated animals who fall in love

44 winter dreaming warm knits when the mountains are filled with snow

22 don’t call yann tiersen a composer amélie’s songwriter is more than a soundtrack 24 crying wolf two illustrators fight it out on paper as predator and prey 28 mind’s ear the orchestra that plays what you say 32 I’m sorry, mum, I can’t hear you over the new kanye too many phat beats, too little time 34 the gallery under the ground art to amaze london’s tube travellers 38 falling apart and walking on africa united’s director on her road to recovery 42 happiness is for x-factor winners and tax exiles it’s the less sunny moments that count

56 your kid sister a sleepy sunrise photo story with singer maia vidal 60 to make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee my boyfriend keeps offering to pluck my chin hair 62 food for thought by the people of birmingham 64 the junk shop recycled fashion isn’t just for hippies, in manchester’s fashion boutique 66 sadie in t-shirts cute shirts and woolly socks

32 56

122

112 66

people

and

74 how hard can it be? 24 hours to make something from scratch

102 home is where the food is these are our favourite family recipes

82 the place where I am happy where the martinis make me just the right sort of tipsy 84 the world next door what happens when you talk to the people down the road? 92 the science of kissing pheromones and marine biology 94 can I borrow a cup of sugar? this is jonathan cherry’s excuse for photographing the neighbours

112 so long, casiotone owen ashworth is heading home 116 canny crafts four things to make with those empty chopped tomato tins 118 spin us a yarn we asked the folk from folksy to tell the tales behind their creations 120 I can’t run but I can walk faster than this the art of survival, from the favelas 122 the neurotic women’s club do you worry that you’ll die alone and be eaten by alsatians? 124 do home remedies ever work? any excuse for chicken soup made by someone else 126 bookshelves illustrated furniture, drawn by you 128 read this quiz the right book is out there somewhere

We all wonder about the people who live on our street. Who lives behind all those silent houses? What do they do on their days off? What are the dark or the happy secrets behind all those closed doors? And why have we never got round to speaking to them before? But we have a confession to make: the prospect of knocking on the door filled some of us with dread. When you’ve been living next door to someone for eight years without speaking to them, breaking the silence is awkward. We found ourselves scrabbling around for things to say. Should we ask for advice on the garden? Invite them out for a pint? We should have talked to Jonathan Cherry first. He photographed his neighbours in Stourbridge, a suburb of Birmingham. He moved back home from university and thought it was time to get out and explore. His line was, “Can I borrow a cup of sugar?”

Nikoline Lander, who lives in Northern Norway, took this photo while she was staying in Denmark over the summer.

contributors some people who helped to make this issue

Connie Han is a trainee doctor and sometime writer. “I live in a state of constant terror. Pancreatic cancer. Thermonuclear war. Crossing the road. This is why I love reading: if it gets too scary, you can read from the back. This is also why I love writing: I make all the rules. Sadly life doesn’t work that way. So I do things that terrify me constantly: travelling alone, practising medicine, crossing the road without holding on. No big deal, you think, because you’re normal. I’m the girl who has an escape plan in case velociraptors invade her house. The secret is to use mirrors to your advantage. The bastards can open doors. We need all the help we can get.” Connie endured six colds in succession while putting six home remedies to the test. You can see the results of her suffering on page 124. She also helps you decide what book to read on page 128.

Crista Leonard is a photographer. “I’m a mountain girl. I grew up between Andorra, France and Switzerland and now I live between Barcelona and Andorra in the winter. A winter without snow is torture. I love Earl Grey and Kusmi tea, antique porcelain, old cameras and that old-fashioned sense of manners that makes one feel special but never excluded. I’m obsessive about music. This week’s favourite is Tamaryn and it’s on repeat as I clean and scan negatives. I think travelling and reading are two of the most important things to broaden one’s mind, although I often get distracted and daydream obsessively. I like to think that my photos are a direct consequence of the obsessive daydreaming, but it’s also a way of documenting a feeling that might evaporate over time.” Crista went into the snowy mountains of Andorra and shot a wintry fashion story, page 44. Her dream-like photos can also be found on pages 56 and 81.

Erin Spens is a writer and designer living in London. “I grew up in Iowa City, in the middle of America, and I’ve lived in New York City, Istanbul and now London. Having lived in these amazing places, I have become totally entranced by different cultures and cities around the world. I love finding the things that separate us: the different foods we eat, our music, language and faith. Even more I love to find the things that we have in common: our need to love and be loved, our dreams, the importance of family, and love for our homeland. I’ll be in Sarajevo for the month of January exploring and writing about creativity there. It’s these sort of things that get me out of bed in the morning.” Erin had a chat with the director of Africa United, Debs Gardner-Paterson, about the journey of making the film, page 38.

Leah Bernhardt is a 16-year-old photographer. “I was born on August 16th, in a little town outside of Chicago, and ten days later my parents took me back to their home located on the largest island in the US Virgin Islands, St. Croix. I’ve spent the last 16 years here: sleeping, studying, attending social events, riding horses and, only recently, taking pictures. I was always into art, but could never draw or sculpt well enough to be considered the artistic type. And that, in a way, is why I ended up with a camera in my hand. Hopefully it will put me into a career, or at least off the island and into the real world. We’ll see.” We were surprised to find that Leah picked up a camera only nine months ago or so. You can find Leah’s photography next to Ellie’s story of a texting club for women who live alone, on page 122, and also on pages 42 and 60.

special deliveries from the post bag

Frinton Press collaborates with creators on innovative, appealing and just, well, nice things in a screen printed medium.

To be involved in Calendar Cards, an on-going numerical typography project in collaboration with Fedrigoni and Screentec, and other up-coming exciting projects follow our blog to be the first to see the briefs.

Pop into our group show at Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes, 32-36 Kingsland Road before 10th January to see our recent collection of artworks and wrapping paper. Free screen printing workshops will be held 28th November, 12th December and 9th January. You are invited to make your own stencil, screen print it yourself and have it published in the project book!

Find us on Facebook and Twitter. frintonpress.blogspot.com Join our mailing list by emailing â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;subscribeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to frintonpress@gmail.com

what we listened to

what we ate

what we did

an independent magazine party hosted by stack magazines

a long weekend awake at the twin peaks marathon

childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s halloween parties with our little cousins

the handmade and bound artbook and zine fair

last issueâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s celebratory meal at an ex-squat

pretty lovely cosy things for winter nights drop a line to free@ohcomely.co.uk by the start of february if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like the chance to get your hands on any of these goodies

A little birdy told me that winter is the ideal time to put up a birdhouse, so why not gain extra brownie points from mother nature and ticks in your bird-spotting book by putting up one of these lovely handmade wooden bird boxes by London Clay Birds. Each box is designed for the particular habits of four of our native feathered friends (robin, wren, blue tit and great tit) and is prettily embellished with its respective bird. They are made using 100% reclaimed material and cost ÂŁ35 each from www.londonclaybirds.co.uk, but we have one wren-friendly box to give away to a lucky reader (or wren).

Get it together in 2011: The Go! Team are hitting the road. The Brighton-based sextet is back with a third album, Rolling Blackouts, which hits UK shelves on January 31st. Known for their mix of indie and garage rock, hip hop and old-school samples, the Go! Team have been a hit since their fantastic debut album Thunder, Lightning, Strike hit ears and dance floors across the world. To celebrate the release of their new record, the band will be touring the UK, from Glasgow to Cardiff, throughout February. We have a pair of tickets to give away to their show on the 8th of February at Heaven in London. Send an email over to free@ohcomely.co.uk and you could be the one shaking your tail feather to their enigmatic beats. You can find the tour dates online at www.myspace.com/thegoteam.

We’re certain there’s a joke here somewhere about being a wolf in sheep’s clothing but we’re just not quite sure what it is. What we do know is that these cosy animal hoods by Merrimaking are the most adorable way to ward off the cold that we’ve ever come across. The hoods are available in a choice of (fake!) animal and lining, or there’s the opportunity to commission something original. Their favourites have included a cat to match a pet, a llama and a deer. Working with an emphasis on reclaimed fabrics gives each piece a charm and personality of its own. The hoods start at £20, and you can find out more at www.merrimaking.co.uk. For now, we have a lamb and a wolf to give away to two lucky readers, so email in and let us know which one you fancy. It really is all good in the hood.

Coo over this sweet dove t-shirt, and set your heart a-flutter in this vest by St Pauls Lifestyle. They say they are a “quintessentially English romantic with a punky touch,” inspired by the equally romantic values of creativity, music, history and beautiful things, which we like very much. The t-shirt and vest cost £25 and £44, and are available from www.stpaulslifestyle.com. The good news is that we have a few to give away as a token of our affection, so email in and let us know which one you would like. You can see St Pauls t-shirts in the fashion story on page 66.

He loves me, he loves me not... Be a glover, not a hater with this manly tattooed oven mitt by Stuart Gardiner Design! Stuart first picked up the pen at the tender age of five in order to draw Superman’s logo, although these days he is more likely to be found drawing seasonal veg in his East London studio for his dashing range of textile products and prints. The hunky double-sided mitt is available from www.stuartgardiner.co.uk, but readers can email in for the chance of winning one.

How to Drink was written by Victoria Moore to be the book she had always wanted for her own kitchen shelf—a compendium of delicious beverages to sip, slurp, sup, and quite possibly hiccup your way through. With everything from how to make a proper cup of coffee, to perfect picnic drinks, afternoon (G &) tea, and the charmingly named mint-julep, the books snazzily designed pages will ensure that orange squash never quite cuts it ever again. It’s inventively illustrated with pieces of old woodblock type. How to Drink is published by Granta, but raise your glass, as we have a few copies to give away to thankful thirsty readers. Cheers!

Beep beep! This cute sewn gameboy brooch is guaranteed to charm rather than vex your fellow passengers on a morning commute. For anyone who’s ever dreamt of a little log cabin in the woods on a grey winter’s day, this beautiful wooden tree pin is the perfect way to keep the thought close to your heart. Little Peche is the work of Staffordshire-based designer Maxine Turnock, who uses traditional techniques such as knitting, felting and embroidery to create wistful and whimsical jewellery inspired by her love of all things handmade, vintage and wooden. We have a gameboy brooch and this elegantly embroidered cameo to give away to the first reader to reach level four, or just email in. See more of Maxine’s work on the equally lovely www.littlepeche.com.

No, wait, don’t tell us. Okay, we give up. Shall we put the kettle on instead? Now hours of teatime fun can be yours with this odd one out tea towel by Cheapskate, which also doubles up as a handy tool for keeping the cat off the quiche. Cheapskate himself is a keen tea-drinker, music maker and vintage enthusiast, all of which you can find out more about on his website; see www.iamcheapskate.com. The jaunty screen printed towel comes in a special Gocco-printed box and costs £10, but we have one to give away to nimble-fingered readers, along with some stylish Subbuteo badges.

Please don’t get us wrong. We enjoy a stick of rock candy and a “kiss me quick” hat as much as the next person, but when it comes to Brighton, we’d much rather have something nice from Handmade Co-operative. The not-for-profit shop operates a number of small, rentable shop spaces in order to provide local artists and designers with a platform to work from. They also present customers with a unique collection of wondrous hand-crafted objects to enjoy, making it the retail equivalent of a winning thumbs-up. You can read more about St. James Street’s friendliest foursome in oh comely issue three, or on their blog at handmadeshopbrighton.blogspot.com. They’ve kindly given us a collection of goodies to give away to one lucky reader. Write in to win a pair of Kerrie Curzon’s thrillingly frilled knickers, a handful of handheld mirrors by Saffron Reichenbacker and this endearing wooden necklace by Kirstin Stride. Wish You Were Here!

With their own relationship built on three years of long-distance correspondence and mix tapes (Wichita Lineman, Bis and the Spice Girls), Atherton Lin can certainly vouch for the power of the playlist. Now living and working together in East London, Jamie Atherton and Jeremy Lin make stationery that tells a story, such as these beautifully illustrated blank CDs. Designed to encourage the sending of this most lyrical of love letters, they come ready to go with a card and envelope—all you have to do is choose the music for your friend or sweetheart. Each disc is home-printed in England on a standard CD-R and packaged in its own recycled card sleeve. You can buy them from www.athertonlin.com for £4 each or £15 for the complete set of five. We have a few to give away to the sentimental hearts who email us at free@ohcomely.co.uk.

Triangle, by Julia Pott, is a portrait of her friends in New York.

dogs and cats holding hands julia pott draws stories of love interview valerie pezeron Julia Pott makes exquisite animated music videos and short films about anthropomorphic animals trying to cope with tricky relationships. Her sweet, surreal style and pithy phrases make for a well-observed combination. Among others, she’s made a music video for White Corolla by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, who we talked to later in the issue. I used to tell people I wanted to be a cartoonist for Disney. I don’t think I really knew what that meant but I guess I did always want to be an animator. I definitely wanted to draw. My great money-making scheme as a kid was redrawing the Beano from cover to cover, and then selling it to my parents for 30p—not so lucrative! My mum was a great influence on me in terms of drawing. She tells me that from a young age she could see that I was more visually-oriented than most, always asking for the blue book with the yellow spots, rather than the title of the book. Whenever I had a bad dream, she would encourage me to draw it out, so there’s all these gnarly sketches by a 4-year-old me of sharks ripping off limbs, plane crashes, and being squashed between cars. Every night before I went to bed we would write a story together about a scuba-diving secret agent who was trying to defeat the evil king Trident and in the morning I would illustrate it. I represent people as different animals, depending on what sort of person I see the animal character as. My recent illustration, Triangle, was a portrait of a few of my friends in New York and it was interesting to see people’s reaction to their chosen animals. One friend thought I’d made him too chubby! I’ve finally gotten my obsession with bears out of my system and now I really like yetis, wild boars and whales. If I were an animal, I’d like to say a tiny soft kitten but a wild boar would be closer I think! I’m very clumsy and scruffy and ever so slightly Self-portrait by Julia Pott.

man-ish. People tend to call me a bull in a china shop! When I made the animation My First Crush, I had this huge crush on a guy who I ended up snagging as my boyfriend. When I had the crush I felt like a crazy person and I just started interviewing people about their experiences with that sensation. With the animation Howard, again it was personal. I have always ended my relationships because I can’t see myself spending the rest of my life with that person and I wanted to make a film that looked at that. I loved working on the Decemberists commission. It was 20 minutes of footage to be created in two months, which was insane. I don’t think I slept, or took more than a 30-minute break the whole time. It culminated in me and the assistant director Robin Bushell being flown out to LA for the screening and when the Decemberists performed in front of this huge screen, which was showing my work, I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest! They say it takes about a year after graduating to make a name for yourself and that’s definitely true. I see a lot of people who graduate just getting jobs in bars to support themselves, but not drawing in their spare time. They just tend to stop drawing altogether, which is so sad. You have to keep drawing. I love Estonian animation, especially Priit Parn. I love the work of Igor Kovalyov, Jeremy Clapin, David O’Reilly. It’s great to sit in front of Looney Tunes and Animaniacs and come away feeling ridiculously inspired. I’m moving to New York next October and then I think I’ll just freelance direct as an animator. Maybe buy a little house in new England when I’m old and haggard with a tiny dog. I wouldn’t mind winning an Oscar. You can see more animals as people at www.juliapott.com.

23 Self-portrait by Yann Tiersen.

don’t call him a composer yann tiersen is more than a soundtrack words faye lewis portrait des tan Yann Tiersen talks like a storyteller. He speaks quickly and fluently, like the sort of man who loves walking into a room and telling stories. The first story he tells is about the music that, nine years later, he is still best known for: the soundtrack of Amélie. “I think Amélie was a good opportunity to open the door, because it wasn’t a soundtrack, it was just a compilation of my first albums.” But he’s ambivalent about its impact on his career: “It was good for encouraging people to check out my albums. Some others were a bit more lazy and were focussed on the soundtrack and on the movie. Those people are sometimes surprised or disappointed, but I think they were into my music for not really good reasons.” The tracks were the choice of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director, he explains, and only included “tiny parts” of his albums. Tiersen’s oeuvre is more experimental and takes more risks. There’s a noisier element, a borrowing from post-rock, even though you can still hear the sweetness that suffuses the soundtrack. And then there are the lyrics. If there’s something he hates, it’s the label of ‘soundtrack composer’. “Two things that I really hate; it’s like ‘soundtrack composer’ and even ‘composer’ because I’m not a fucking composer. When I started making music, I made my albums with acoustic instruments like mandolin, guitar and some strings but it was because it was after the 80s when I had spent all my teenage time listening to a lot of electronic stuff. It was like a rediscovering of acoustic instruments, more a reaction to the 80s, like a lot of bands. So sometimes when people say that about me, I don’t know what to answer, because it’s completely wrong.” The energy in Yann’s tale-telling springs from a fine responsiveness to people and places. One theme that runs all through his latest album, Dust Lane, is Palestine. The lyrics of one song are simply the country’s

name spelled out over and over again. He was moved by a gig he played last year in Gaza City in a school that had been bombed. “I was really shocked by the gig, so in all of the album there is this world climate. Lots of tensions and everything. Gaza touched me a lot. It’s one thing to read it in the newspaper and to see the footage on the TV. To be in Gaza and to see the reality, and that people are living there, is something else. It is almost a normal city. It’s even more horrible in a way, because you’re aware of this reality and normal life.” It’s not always politics. Sometimes vivid introspection inspires his music. Yann describes an experience he had while flying to the Faroe Islands. When the plane was in the middle of the sea, an inexplicable swell of emotion overwhelmed him. The moment spurred him to write Amy, the opening track of Dust Lane. With this album, Yann feels like his music has ended up where it was always heading. “I think if you’re listening carefully to all my albums, it’s like building the thing to Dust Lane, which is like the album I’ve wanted to do since the beginning.” The first impulse that nudged Yann towards music was the power of performance and spectacle. “It’s really strange. The first thing that took me into music was actually sort of a happening in the 70s, not a theatre, but a gig. And I was very young, maybe four, and I was really amazed by the light. And I think it was really a typical 70s thing, but I just remember lights. And it was like ‘Whoa!’ There were some strings and guitars with that, so I was like ‘Yeah! I want to make music.’” At the age of 10 or 11, he was blown away by the noise-making potential of four people with guitars. “Suddenly I remember discovering a band at school (but I don’t remember which band) and realised it was four people making more noise than a full orchestra. And it was like, ‘Whoa! I want to do that!’” Later, when he was 15, a friend of his worked on a radio station, and the pair of them managed to do “a really crap interview” with New Order. He laughs, remembering boasting about it to friends. “It was really great. I remember the next day at school: ‘I met New Order!’” At this stage, Yann’s work bears unavoidable hallmarks of sadness: the deaths of his mother and a close friend have left their mark on the tone of Dust Lane. “It just happened during the album, so of course it’s inside the album,” he says. But there’s a resolutely positive note to his outlook. “It’s more about enjoying life. It’s not really about death. I think when you lose people you just say, ‘Fuck! I have to enjoy life.’”

Self-portrait by Soju Tanaka.

crying wolf two illustrators meet on paper as predator and prey interview rosanna durham Frinton Press are something of an artistic matchmaker. They are screen-printing specialists who bring creators of all disciplines together to collaborate on screen-printing projects. “The projects aim to be functional, usable objects as well as decorative artwork,” they say. The hope is that artists can use this work to find new opportunities to have their work recognised and collaborate with people outside their usual network. Before going on holiday this summer, Frinton Press asked illustrators Soju Tanaka and Benjamin Phillips to have a conversation. Hardly a matter of tea and a chat, Frinton instead wanted the illustrators to meet on paper through six drawings. Their only instruction to was to choose either the role of predator or prey and to draw in a single colour. Ben took on the role of predator, drawing in orange and Soju the role of prey, using blue. They alternated which of them drew first. Soju is a Japanese-born illustrator currently working in London. He likes drawing weird creatures and “making a little queerness with them.” Ben is also based in London, and he’s worked for publications such as the Big Issue and the Drawbridge, and also the band Peggy Sue. Rosanna: Can you describe each other’s work for me? Ben: That’s a bit of a mean question! Soju’s work is very loose and playful, fun. It’s very imaginative. Soju: Ben’s is darker than mine but we both do funny and quirky things using characters. Ben: A lot of the stuff that I do is semiautobiographical and relating to family and friends.

Self-portrait by Benjamin Phillips.

Soju: Basically, I always try and do something happy in my illustrations. Rosanna: This is the Frinton Press’s first illustrated conversation. How did you both become involved and who thought of the predator and prey theme? Soju: During my internship at Frinton Press, they had this idea for illustrator conversations. They wanted to do a new project by me and another artist. I knew Ben a little bit and I liked his work, so I suggested him for the project. Frinton asked me to think about some opposite themes like west and east, or strong and weak. Predator and prey was one of them. Ben didn’t have much choice in choosing the theme. Ben: I had very little choice in the whole thing! Soju: I first suggested Ben as an illustrator since I couldn’t guess how our illustrations could work together. Your work is very different from mine. Ben: We both use materials in quite a different way. Like you hold the pen differently. I think your style suited the prey and mine the predator. I worked more angularly and scratchy and your lines are more smooth and fluid. Rosanna: Was the battle just fought on paper? Or were you communicating away from the drawing process as well? Soju: We were talking! Ben: There was a bit of banter but we didn’t meet up at all. Rosanna: And was it difficult to share the space of one drawing? Ben: It was a hard project because you don’t want to make the other person

upset with the way that you’ve drawn all over their image and you don’t want to change what you’re intending to produce. The way Soju portrayed the prey didn’t always make it feel so suppressed; it wasn’t always weak. Sometimes the prey was strong and not always the underdog. In the fifth conversation, I did a character hiding under the ground and Soju drew little pixie fairy guys taunting my predator from above. Soju: And people can imagine what happens after that... Ben: There is some vulnerability in being the predator. There’s always vulnerability in doing bad things, not that I’d know anything about that! Soju: Even though prey is a sad thing, I tried to enjoy it. Rosanna: Did you mind being asked to act as a predator, Ben? Ben: I found it odd in the beginning. I wondered if I should just scribble over Soju’s images and mess them up like a predator. I started by thinking about how Soju might interact with my drawing. But planning went out the window and he reacted in different ways to what I thought. It was a case just doing something and waiting to be surprised. Soju: On my first drawing, I was trying to leave space for Ben, but then after that I didn’t really care. You did lots of things that I didn’t even think of. Ben: It’s not a project that was dictated from the start in any way. We were left to do what we wanted to do. I actually laughed about the direction that something was going in when I was drawing. It’s nice when you get excited because you know that you might get a reaction from someone. Soju and Ben’s collaboration, Predator and Prey. Soju is the prey, in blue, and Ben draws as the predator in orange.

mind’s ear the orchestra that plays the song in your head interview rosanna durham The best way to understand the Mind’s Ear Orchestra is to see them in action. It is a music group where the audience is in charge. The group invites anyone from the audience to come out the front and give the musicians a scrap of melody, an idea —polka dots!—or a full tune. Anything, really, that they want to see played. The group then improvises alongside or around their volunteer, turning the scraps into a full piece of music. Gemma Storr set up the Mind’s Ear Orchestra in early 2010 to help non-musical adults fall back in love with music. The Mind’s Ear perform at festivals, nightclubs and even to groups of corporate businessmen, making people proud of the tunes they sing in the shower. Why is the Mind’s Ear called an orchestra? When I saw you perform at Camp Bestival there were only eight musicians. Because in its full capacity it would be an orchestra with eighty musicians. Eighty was my ideal size but one of the things we haven’t included yet is the machine. The machine’s so you can direct it from the front. Some people are great at standing up and some other people are like, “Oh, I don’t know what to do.” And the idea is that anyone can have a play on this. So, if you don’t know what to do, there would be a bunch of wooden levers and stuff to control pitch and genre. It’s a massive toy. So anyone can be a conductor, and anyone can be a composer. Everyone is anyway, they just don’t know it yet.

They’ve got Madonna in their head, but they’ve got their own version of it that they’ve been singing for years. I met this guy in a bar once, before Mind’s Ear had been set up. I was talking about the idea to a friend and the owner of the bar said, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Not everyone has musical ideas.” And I was like, “People do. People do think, ‘Wouldn’t it be really cool if…’ or ‘I have this melody.’” So in the bar, this guy who was having lunch turned around and said, “I’ve got a song! It goes (Gemma sings, grandly and tunelessly): ‘Where’s your favourite movie star? Bet you’ll never get her in your car. Get her in your car.’ He said, “I’ve been writing that for 25 years and I just don’t know what comes next. What do you think should come next?” And I thought, that’s totally it. We’d be able to fill in the gaps of his song. I love that you weren’t freaked out. I was actually really glad because I needed proof that everyone has it. Wasn’t there a story about a cheese song at the Thames Festival?

Well, you have ideas, right?

Yes! There was a girl in the audience and she’d written a rap called the Cheese Roll Rap. So we played her a hip-hop backing track and she performed her rap to it. It was really good. She’d never done it with music before. She’d done it as a poem. There was this amazing line that went: “Cheese and ham don’t work together. Cheese and cheese don’t work together. There’s mozzarella and Gorgonzola. Most of all there’s Gouda! Gouda!” And with the whole audience were singing “Gouda! Gouda!” It was really cool.

But not everyone has that many ideas. Do you agree? Although lots of people have Madonna tunes stuck in their heads.

Do you think involving people who aren’t musically trained creates a more innovative of sound?

That line intimidates me!

As soon as you know what you’re doing, you can’t ignore the rules any more. What you start to write and what you start to create becomes predictable, because you’ve learnt how it should go. But if you don’t know the rules you can’t play, so you can’t create anything that’s high quality. Anyone who knows how to play and has done the scales, knows how it should be, so they can only ever rebel against the rules. They can’t write as if they had never known them. But then there’s all these people who can’t play anything at all, and are writing things that are totally crazy in terms of conventional stuff. So the idea is to bring this virgin idea, and a thousand years of experience between those eighty musicians and bring it together to make something that is genuinely new. I remember you mentioning someone who asked you to play Handel. Well the whole idea is that it’s completely inclusive, so it doesn’t matter if you do know about music, you should still get a chance to have a go.

Are they? Absolutely. It’s harder than anything else you have to do because you’ve got to be able to invent something and get it right. You’re in costume, so that must help. The costumes are great. Our violinist came up with that. She wanted shabby, plastic chic. But as an installation it’s quite emotionally involving. It’s not emotionally draining because it’s really honest, but it’s terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. And everyone in the audience is terrified as well because they’re not convinced it’s going to work. So when it does come together, it’s a good high. What kinds of musicians play in the Mind’s Ear? How did you find them?

I get really frustrated with there being lots of projects like this for kids to have a go on and not for adults. And you get loads of adults that are really a little bit bitter about it. They’ll push their kids to have a go but they’ll be like, “I don’t know anything about music. I’m not really interested in it.” And they totally are. But because no one has ever listened to them, you’ve got to find a way to sneak it in.

I was looking for more of a personality than specific instruments in the first place. I needed people who were really brilliant at playing by ear, and also people who like to compose themselves, who were quite creative, if possible. I knew that I needed them to do just a straight free improvisation within boundaries. Say if someone wanted to come up and read a story, I wanted them to be able to listen. It should be something that a musician is doing all the time but they have to be able to be constantly listening to what’s happening around them. And also I needed people with a vast variety of styles.

How do people react to the show?

Do these people exist?

We’ve only ever had one person who had a bad experience of doing it. Well, it wasn’t bad, but she came out and said she felt intimidated having all those people listening to her. She really enjoyed the experience but she found it quite emotionally challenging. And it is. You’ve got thirty people actually listening to what you’re saying and that’s uncomfortable. But it’s emotionally challenging for the musicians as well. In fact, it’s great for them, because they get to actually please the audience directly rather than writing something for them and hoping they will like it. When we did the first trial of it, I got all of the people I could get together in a week to come round. The main thing that we got back from the trial was that it’s joyful. Because there’s great risk involved in it and the person who stands up is terrified and the musicians are terrified.

They do, they do. There are some people who are just geniuses! You don’t necessarily want to have eighty musicians all the time. I did that because I wanted to develop a language to train musicians with, so they could go out and do it on their own. Because every musician gets a lot out of doing this. It’s pushing them in ways they need to be pushed. So I’m really excited about trying it with lots of different players. I wasn’t really expecting the first set to stick about because I haven’t paid them anything yet. But it turns out that it’s really good fun, so everyone wants to stay. You really ought to look up the Cheese Roll Rap on YouTube. (We laughed a lot.) You can also find the Mind’s Ear Orchestra online at www.mindsearproject.com.

I’m sorry mum, I can’t hear you over the new kanye a portrait of a music-downloading life, late 2010 words luke ryan photo ellie niemeyer From having the initial thought through to hearing the first notes, I can reliably get an album of music in less than 60 seconds. I am a member of two membership-only audio torrent sites, know of at least three full-album download blogs and two rapidshare search engines and I am part of an email-based list of dedicated music sharers that regularly clocks 8000 posts in a given month. Or to put it another way, these days procuring an album of music takes less time and effort than it does to make a piece of toast. It is rapidly approaching the point of cliché to point out that this surfeit of availability is shifting the dynamic of our relationship to music. For some more than others: these days I find myself downloading at least 1GB of music a fortnight, which roughly equates to 10 hours of music to slog through every fortnight. You know, in addition to working, sleeping, eating and other times when it’s not really appropriate to be listening to music. (“I’m sorry mum, I can’t hear you over the new Kanye. But you would totally love these phat beats. Yes, I know I’m white.”) In contrast to the perhaps one album I would buy every couple of weeks in the pre-digital era, you’d think something has to give. And it does: attention. You see, so often this music is being downloaded simply because it’s been passed your way, or it received an okay review on Pitchfork, or you saw some passing reference to it, or you had the casual thought, “I wonder if you can download the soundtrack to the entire Super Mario Bros franchise?” and it turned out that you could. Not that you should, mind, merely that you could. What can I say, the Cave Theme is a classic. By following the quirks of impulse, we suddenly find ourselves lacking any necessary investment in the music just procured. These days, it’s not simply that an album lives or dies on its merits, it’s that entirely meritorious recordings pass by unnoticed simply because it’s not within the capacity of our brains to fully appreciate the amount of music we’re being exposed to. So, in true stereotyped Gen Y fashion, it would seem fickleness has become the defining characteristic of our musical age. Or so would be the cynical answer. Certainly I can see how the half-lives of my musical passions grow increasingly brief. And how an album I adore for a short while might nonetheless still vanish into the deeper recesses of my iTunes library, never to be heard from again. And the way I find myself clasping to particular songs, like small points of calm in the flood, listening to them over and over again while the rest of this audio maelstrom sweeps on by. But, for all of their fleeting nature, the scale of these passions seems still undiminished. These days infatuation might only stay for a fortnight, or a week, or a single evening, sat melancholy and drunk and staring into the falling rain while the one song presses against the void, or even just a single moment in time. But however brief their duration, while these flashes of music punctuate our lives, they still provide all the majesty and solace and significance that we seem to have found in sculpting sound. There’s something primaeval about all this. Even if the sources of music have changed, and are changing so rapidly as to render an exact description of our musical culture almost impossible, the mere fact of music, of the way it soundtracks and illuminates our existence, all this is still true. Music remains a peculiarly human syndrome: fundamental, contested, celebrated but almost definitely not going anywhere.

the gallery under the ground art to amaze london’s tube travellers words liz bennett, portrait des tan

When I was thirteen, a cruel trick of geography left me with a 90-minute journey to school in central London. What bothered me in the end was not the crowds, nor the smell nor the aggressive passengers, but the tedium. As with any commute, the nostalgia of trips to the National History Museum evaporated very fast. I was never bored or geeky enough to compile a list of my ten favourite platforms, although I did collect tube maps. But if I had, Gloucester Road station would have always been a candidate. The District Line platform is grand and glamorous even, in a Victorian way: high arches of brick, empty dark spaces, orange floodlights. And I remember clearly when the chicken-wire animals arrived. They were huge, and they filled up the alcoves on a disused side of the tracks. How exciting they were! And lit with coloured lights: a giraffe, an oryx, a rhinoceros. To me, peering out the window of a packed commuter train, they seemed impossibly exotic. They reared out of the dark spaces of Gloucester Road like movie stars. I watched out for them each morning. I didn’t realise at the time, but the wire animals were Underground Safari by Kendra Haste, the first ever project by Art on the Underground.

the artist Jeremy Deller took on the challenge of persuading Piccadilly Line drivers to read out to customers selections from a book of quotes. “There is more to life than increasing its speed,” one goes. “Hell is other people,” is another. The latter seems particularly relevant. It’s hard to pick, actually, from their wealth of previous projects. If you look them up, you’ll find a myriad of different media: audio, posters, maps, moving images. Art on the Underground, it appears, uses every part of the journey to nudge the sleepy, pre-coffee, post-hangover commuter into noticing something. It’s an impressive display of cunning and realism. I remember being compelled to stop in a busy concourse and snap a poster with my phone. A line had been crossed. Someone, somewhere, had just done something remarkable. Art one, apathy nil. Given the rich invention of their work, it was somewhat incongruous to find Art on the Underground a lumbering and bureaucratic beast to deal with. The experience was exactly as you’d imagine trying to interview and photograph part of a terrorist-spooked government department, which is, of course, what they are.

This is how it began: quite humbly, with a single empty platform. Ten years later, Art on the Underground straddles all 275 of the network’s stations one way or another, and runs projects that edge their way into every part of the tube traveller’s journey. If you’ve been on the Jubilee Line lately, you might remember digital screens on which an invisible hand sketches a face in pencil at lightning speed. These sketches are Linear, the work of Dryden Goodwin. He made 60 portraits of Jubilee Line staff, drawing them as they worked. According to Art on the Underground, “Linear evokes both a physical and emotional mapping of the Jubilee line.”

We talked, at last, to Tamsin Dillon, the head of the programme. Tamsin trained as a curator at the Royal College of Art, and joined Art on the Underground in 2003. In keeping with the process, her responses were, at first, cautiously institutional. The impression was of someone who had been sensitive to the minutiae of Transport for London bureaucracy for a long time. But she did let her guard down enough to describe her favourite stations. “I’m quite fond of some of the stations on the outer limits of the network. There are some beautiful stations on the north end of the Piccadilly Line—those, for example, designed by Charles Holden. And on the north end of the Northern Line where there are these little stations that are like rural retreats and they’re beautiful little things. They are very otherworldly.”

On a pocket-sized scale, twelve artists have exhibited designs on the front of tube maps, which churn out 15 million copies a year. In 2008,

Like its audience, Art on the Underground exists in an uncomfortably tight space: wedged between the expectations of customers, artists,

Transport for London bosses, and tube workers. The first purpose of the programme is to enhance the customers’ journeys, she explains. “We wanted to try and figure out how, on a very tight recourse, to reach people. We want to add a wow factor, give them something that takes them away from the tightness of journey that they’re on—the crowdedness perhaps. I suppose I’m frustrated that so many people don’t engage with the opportunity of art; they don’t necessarily go to galleries.” She’s firm in her conviction that art is an integral part of life, and art on the tube is a perfect way to make this ideal into reality. “Being able to present work by contemporary artists offers us that as an opportunity. They can still take it or leave it, but they can find in that encounter something new. By offering that opportunity, we may take our customers into a different realm, momentarily, that may lead them to something else. Or not.” Then there’s the artist. It’d be stereotypical and unfair to say that the average artist was thinking only of the art-lover wandering through a gallery. But the commuter, chewing a morning doughnut and filling in the Metro’s puzzle page, makes a very atypical viewer indeed. Tamsin explains that she prefers to commission new works, rather than use ready-made pieces as the early Art on the Underground did. “It’s about how they use it as an opportunity to make new work in this extraordinary environment. Their work can be seen by millions of people who don’t look at art every day, and it may be a new experience for them. We want to make sure that the artists we’re choosing can take that on board and deliver that.”

Around stretches the vast expanse of the world, Simon & Tom Bloor, 2008.

The artist also has to adapt to the requirements of Transport for London. Jeremy Deller’s original idea was to suspend all recorded announcements for a day, to encourage staff to communicate with customers directly. Unsurprisingly, this was vetoed by the managers. “There are rules and regulations about what we can and cannot present,” says Tamsin, “and they’re to do with political agendas, explicit nudity, the obvious things really. Other than that, we want to give our artists a broad take on what we want.” The final element of the situation that Art on the Underground navigates is the Transport for London staff. The extent of this was a real surprise. One example Tamsin gives is an auction TfL held in October 2008. For the centenary of London Underground, 100 artists were commissioned to make a piece incorporating the roundel. That’s the iconic symbol of London Underground: the circle with a line through it. Art on the Underground printed two copies of each: one for their collection and one to auction on eBay. “A hell of a lot staff actually took part in that auction,” she tells me enthusiastically. “We made sure they all knew about it and I think they were quite excited about owning an artwork that reflected the organisation that they work for and are very proud of.” The involvement of the staff is something that has grown up alongside Art on the Underground. “Over the years, we’ve understood how important it is to actually engage with the LU staff and we’ve developed strategies to actually do that.” One of the most risky examples, of course, was Deller’s Piccadilly Line quotes project. “Jeremy is a very interesting artist because one thing that he did was an instruction to us really, and in order to make his project happen it meant that we had to engage with those staff in a one-to-one way and make them take this on board. And then, how would we know whether or not they were actually doing this unless we actually got feedback from the people who heard it?” She explains how the timing of Deller’s project chimed in, as it happened, with a TfL initiative to persuade staff to talk to customers if the train was stuck in a tunnel, for example, rather than play them recorded announcements. “It’s about human contact. I think Jeremy wanted to exploit that. I think his project was a humorous way of

Untitled, Yinka Shonibare, 2008.

acting in difficult conditions.” The feedback, she says, was great. “It also means that we develop a good relationship with them and that customers are reminded that this place in run by humans.” It seems that Tamsin’s job is an act of persuasion. Like the artists playing with the roundel shape, Art on the Underground operates within very precise limits. Yet it manages to create an artistic experience out of the congested meeting of underground workers, commuters and TfL regulations, an experience that perhaps couldn’t happen any other way. I can’t help thinking that Jeremy Deller’s first, censored idea wasn’t half as interesting as the project that he eventually executed. TfL gives up valuable ad space and employs expensive staff to create something with no purpose other than enhancing customers’ journeys. Art on the Underground’s job is to make people happier: an anomaly in the world of financial cutbacks, and a welcome anomaly at that. Long before my commuting began, I remember the sense of adventure the tube held. I was sure the names of the stations had special meanings. So I’m curious about Tamsin’s first experience of the tube. She didn’t live in London as a child, but she remembers the odd visit. “I do have, like many people I’m sure, some very strong memories of being on the tube. We must have come down two or three times with my family, and we all got onto a train and my dad was on the wrong side of the doors when the train left the station. I must have been quite young, but I remember being really terrified. We went down this tunnel, and my mum was really calm. Like, “Oh yes, he’ll just get on the next one.” I just couldn’t understand how we were going to actually meet up with him again.” I realised that it’s become rarer these days to be stuck in a tunnel on my section of the tube without someone explaining the problem. Perhaps the tube has grown a little more human, while being just as crowded. London Underground Party, Peter McDonald, 2008.

falling apart and walking on debs gardner-paterson talks about the journey of filming africa united words erin spens portrait des tan

I met Debs Gardner-Paterson five years ago in New York City. Walking through Grand Central Station, she told me that her background was in film but she wasn’t doing much with it. Her body was still recovering from a horrific car accident she had been in about 15 months earlier. She must have thought that the seriousness of the crash wasn’t coming across, so she stalled in front of the ticket machines and pulled up her shirt so I could see her stomach. The sight knocked the breath out of me. It looked like someone had taken a machete to her stomach. The scars were still standing well above her skin and dark red. She was serious when she said the doctors didn’t think she would ever walk or talk again. I kept reminding myself that it was the same Debs I was sitting in front of last week as we talked about her first feature-length film, Africa United. Debs was just back from the Rwandan premiere where she sat next to President Kagame and the first lady. She laughed about the dread that overcame her when she realised there was a joke about President Kagame wearing condoms in the opening few minutes. “I leaned over and said, ‘Sir, I just want to apologise in advance for what’s coming.’ Thankfully he, along with the first lady, laughed and laughed.” After the car accident, Debs had decided that directing would not be the shape of the future. “I just put film down, didn’t even think about it. The overriding emotion was ‘Oh my goodness I haven’t been a good enough friend or sister…’ and in the end the only thing you take with you is people, the only thing you leave behind is people. You know ambition shouldn’t be all about work. I guess it changed my idea of legacy.” She had been working in the film industry, but not in jobs she felt would lead to directing. “And then I was in the car accident. It was a real slap in the face, so I just thought, ‘Oh screw film, it was never going to happen anyway!’” It wasn’t until New Years Day 2007 that she woke up and thought she had the energy to do something again. “At first I thought, ‘I’ve been out of the business for so long I don’t have any contacts any more.’ But actually when I sat down and thought about it, I realised I had loads of friends who could help me out. I just needed the right story.” Debs’ mother was born and raised in Rwanda, and she remembered hearing about a school shooting on the radio when she was there visiting her grandma. “It really impacted me because a few months before that there had been a school shooting in Scotland that got

international press—essentially the same thing that happened in Rwanda but in Rwanda it only went out on local radio.” And that’s how it all started. She filmed her first short, We Are All Rwandans, for the princely sum of £2,600. The film was shown at festivals around the world, and even picked up a few awards. It’s been used by the UN in Mexican schools to educate pupils about the possibilities of non-violent resistance. But it didn’t get into a single UK film festival. “There’s quite a strong feeling that there’s only one or two ways to get things done in the UK. For example, to go from shorts to feature films you have to be taken in by one of the UK commission offices and your shorts have to do really well in UK festivals.” “It’s important to not be afraid of going through different channels, not being afraid of making your own way. I like that a lot about Americans. In the UK you get the sense there isn’t enough room for everybody, even though there is.” Nonetheless, it seemed that a feature-length We Are All Rwandans could be Debs’ big break. It had attracted attention from a few producers, and they offered money to develop it. But she wasn’t convinced. She felt there was a different story that needed to be told. “We took We Are All Rwandans back to Rwanda with a thing called Hillywood, a group of people who take a massive inflatable screen around the countryside showing films. They showed We Are All Rwandans, and in the capital it went down really well. People loved it and thought it was important. When we got out to the rural audiences, people were like, ‘Please show us something else. Please. Please make a comedy or something else!’ You could just feel it in the space: a heaviness. It was obvious they still live every day in the aftermath of the war. That feeling really stuck with me: it was really, really hard.” Instead, Debs pitched the idea for Africa United. It’s an altogether more upbeat story: the film follows three children on a journey by foot from Rwanda to see the World Cup in South Africa, tracing their path through seven countries. Kick-started by private investment, Pathé picked up the film in July 2009 and by February 2010 they were shooting. In a short four years, Debs had gone from her first short to a feature film released in cinemas nationwide. The leap from short films made for a daunting first day on set. “It was so scary! I mean, these huge South African crew guys show up on

Debs filming scenes for Africa United in South Africa. Photo: Nick Wall.

the day, and they’re saying all these technical terms and I’m standing there thinking, I have no idea what you just said, but the whole time I have to be in control. It was seriously scary for a while. I knew it would be difficult, but I had no idea... I just had to keep telling myself, ‘I’m good at what I do, I’m the best person for this job, and this movie is going to be brilliant.’” The crew was vast, and learning how to manage them unearthed some strange truths. “One evening it started pouring with rain and I had a feeling we wouldn’t be shooting the next day, but didn’t know it would be a flash flood. We woke up the next morning and went to the set. It was totally demolished! Now, in my experience when you come up against something like this, everyone pulls together, so I went into “how do I fix this” mode. I looked around at all the crew and no one was doing anything. “Then it hit me: they are all waiting for me to freak out. They need to see the director totally freak out because we were all thinking the same thing, ‘Man, this is bad, this really sucks.’ So I half-faked a meltdown and it was amazing: everyone pulled themselves up and worked to find a solution. It was the weirdest lesson I learned in the whole process. I was the director and everyone was looking for a ‘director response.’ They needed me to freak out so they could fix it.” That’s to say nothing of the pressure of a four million dollar budget. “The irony is that four million isn’t that much money to do what we wanted to do,” she explains. “Our budget falls right smack-bang in the middle of that area where you’re not supposed to go. The advice is that you either make a film for under two million or over ten million, otherwise it’s hard to make your money back.” As if to prove industry wisdom right, Africa United didn’t break even. Asked whether this has been hard, she replies, “Yes and no. Pathé has

been great about not putting pressure on me as a director to stress about that. They said every film is a risk, and this is a risk they wanted to take.” The joy of seeing a story grow legs and walk balances the pressure and the stress. “I love it, and the amazing thing about the set is that you’ve got 150 people there and the only reason they are there is because they believe in it and they want to make it come to life. Directing, you don’t put your hands on anything—it’s just all in your head. The blueprint comes from your brain. It’s so odd.” I asked Debs how often she felt that what she’d done matched up with what was in her head. “Never. Every day is crushingly disappointing: ‘I cut that too soon’ or ‘We should have done that first’ or ‘We missed that shot’ or ‘The light wasn’t right’ or ‘I should have given him that note.’” Debs doesn’t think that it’s the length that does it—her shorts were “such kick-bullock scrambles” that she was never able to perfect them. “I guess the closest analogy is whether it’s easier to feel satisfied with a 2-page poem or a 400-page novel? The market is very rare for a poem, and it’s clearly more possible to lovingly craft something that’s shorter, and every element relates more strongly to the other elements in a shorter thing. In a feature-length film every moment can’t hang on every other moment. You just have to go with the flow.” Seven years ago, Debs sneaked into the awards night for the British Independent Film Awards by faking a press pass. Now, Africa United has launched UK-wide and premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Debs has even been nominated for a BIFA for Directorial Debut. Clearly it’s been an incredible five years. Looking at Debs as she told her story, it seems to me that while she still has the scars, she won’t need to fake the pass any more.

happiness is for x-factor winners and tax exiles it’s the tough moments that matter words victoria beale photo leah bernhardt A recent study carried out by Harvard psychologists reached the unsurprising conclusion that living in the moment, especially if that moment involves sex, is what is most likely to make us happy. Pedants or, as I call them, soul-mates, were reliably speedy in pointing out inconvenient truths about the study. One such objection was that the study’s sample only included iPhone users, who were randomly prompted by a downloaded application to message researchers on what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how happy it made them. The demographic of those likely to download a psychology research app and take the time to complete it would surely be an extremely narrow sampling, although there would probably be some overlap with the demographic of those likely to leave snarky quips in online comment sections. A question raised by the survey that passed with less comment was the actual desirability of the happiness described. Exuberant sex is always a worthy aim, but focusing exclusively on the present is a murkier principle by which to find happiness. Certainly, if you live in a glamorous four-floor Highgate fortress complete with fauxhemian furnishings and a hurtling career trajectory to match, why concern yourself with anything other than your antique dildo collection and child’s tuition fees? But if you’re at a slightly less settled stage of life, constant gnawing fear for the future and teary nostalgia for the past are often the sole motivating factor that keep you checking the job, dating and Ask The Magic Eight Ball websites. Often the times when we are furthest from this state of tranquil happiness are when we show the best of ourselves. Having your future sledge-hammered and your past tainted by being fired from a job or dumped by a partner is so often a better motivator than any number of Erin Brockovich re-watches. Even as you’re suffering the aftershocks of your life collapsing inwards, facing visions of a bankrupt, lonesome future-you, the emotional sucker-punch gives you a reason to change everything for the better. A reason to start up that independent children’s bookshop, take that Lebanese cookery course, or, in Kathyrn Bigelow’s impressive post-break-up case, win an Oscar. There is a reason why most twenty-somethings working in low-paid, dead-end jobs, such as fruit picker or resort Disney princess, have a glazed air about them. It’s because they’re thinking back happily on that time at university when they rode a trolley into a graveyard, or mind-choreographing their victory dance for when they win an MTV Award. Happiness is an emotion best kept brief for anyone under the age of thirty who isn’t a billionaire or having a retrospective of their work. The human tendency to obsessively rake over the past and plot the future is possibly our brain’s way of telling us to pick up the pace, because Willow Smith is releasing another single any day now. Constructing a life around top ten lists of things to do, books to write, people to marry is no doubt a blood pressure-trashing existence. But deciding you’ve done enough for one lifetime is the equivalent of nailing yourself into the coffin early with a good book and a supply of choccie biccies. We all deserve occasional twinges of satisfaction when we get to spend a lazy day lying in bed with a pretty girl or boy, saying arch things about Tory policy and spooning. But for every hour of afternoon delight there should be an evening spent agonising over the ending to a novel, because all-day happiness is rightly a state reserved for babies and Mariah Carey.

dress: h&m / long gloves: diane von furstenberg / leggings: h&m / boots: zara

winter dreaming photographer crista leonard stylist lene johansen assistant alida bea model diana lundgren clothes gallery, andorra | gallery.ad thanks jasmine lilleby | coba hats

dress: diane von furstenberg / headband: tandem

cardigan: vintage / beanie: coal / leggings: h&m

coat: vintage / shirt: proenza shoulder / jeans: cheap monday / shoes: vintage

jacket: marc jacobs / shirt: element eden / bow: vintage / jeans: cheap monday

shirt: proenza shoulder / jeans: cheap monday / shoes: vintage

your kid sister sunrise with singer maia vidal photos crista leonard

to make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee my boyfriend keeps offering to pluck my chin hair words ellie norris photo leah bernhardt I was single all through uni, and one thing that nagged me was this question: “What do people in relationships know that I don’t?” It never seemed fair. Not only did people in couples get a relationship, they also got bonus life experience and the chance to pass around “oh you’re single you wouldn’t get it” looks. It was unbearable. After uni, somewhat to my surprise, I got a boyfriend. Some time later, this is what I found to be the answer: chin hair. I know it isn’t just me who is prone to the odd hair. When I told my mother I planned to write about my chin hair she stared at me in horror. Surely I could never write about such a topic! “But everyone gets chin hair!” I exclaimed. “I don’t!” she retorted. “But you do get moustache hairs!” “I pluck them out and no one knows they even existed.” I wish I was one of those women who is always immaculately turned out, whose chin hairs are so fleeting they never even existed. But sometimes I’m too busy to eat anything, let alone pluck anything. That’s when the chin hairs arrive: curling under the chin discreetly, just about invisible to the unobservant eye. My boyfriend’s eye is not unobservant. He takes perverse glee in discovering the hairs. He likes to count them and inform me of their current number. “There are six, by the way. So, if you’re plucking them, remember that. There’s six.” He likes to offer to pluck them for me. He seems quite keen on the idea: “I am the most appropriate person to do this. I’m your boyfriend and your chin hairs don’t bother me, and I have a great attention to detail.” It’s true, he does have excellent attention to detail. He’s tried to document their existence photographically, but that didn’t go down too well. Most of all, he likes to quote a poem by Emily Dickinson, the 19thcentury American poet. The poem—the only one he can remember, I suspect—goes like this: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,— One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do If bees are few. It’s a beautiful poem. That’s not the hair version of course; that’s the real version. The hair version is shorter. It’s just: “To make a beard, it takes one hair...” It’s short, but it tails off into meaningful silence. The meaningful silence means that my one or two stray hairs have transformed me into a bearded woman. He likes to stroke my chin and say thoughtfully, “mmm, beard,” and compare to it favourably to Bill Bailey’s. This was my discovery, the pinnacle of my un-single knowledge: chin hair doesn’t matter. I felt as if I’d prepared for an exam, only to walk in and find that everything I revised was irrelevant: totally, laughably irrelevant. So irrelevant that the examiners are rolling on the floor clutching their sides in helpless laughter. I always thought that hair in certain places was something no relationship could tolerate: everything had to be plucked and smooth with no suspicion that a functioning follicle had ever been there. Hairy legs in winter were the luxury of the single lady. I’m sure not all men find chin hair amusing. My boyfriend is rather an extremist, and maybe he’s come to so despise the popular obsession with an ideal appearance that he’s more likely to find the reverse interesting. Who knows. He’ll probably run off with a toilet enthusiast with a halitosis problem and a real beard. Until then, there’s something funny about the realisation that there’s someone who will offer to pluck your chin hair, though as revelations go, it’s something of an anticlimax.

food for thought we ask the people of birmingham what they had for breakfast and about their last nice surprise photographer jonathan cherry assistant shealan faere butler

Amber. Water. “I was given a free bottle of vodka.”

Yasmin. Frosties for breakfast. “My boyfriend surprised me with flowers.”

Jamie. Eggs on toast. “Meeting you!”

Sharon. Porridge. “I received Beauty and the Beast on DVD.”

Ursula. Porridge for breakfast. “I had a baby.”

Marie. Toast with peanut butter and jam. “My 21st birthday in Amsterdam—my brother paid!”

Lusiana. Chinese food. “I visited Cardiff and was pleasantly surprised!”

Brad. Nothing. “I was dumped and wanted it to happen.”

Katie. Nothing. “I got £177 of tax back.”

the junk shop

It sounds like you’ve always been an inventive dresser.

recycled fashion doesn’t have to be beige interview zoe savory

Yes, my mum let me dress myself from about three years old, so I just wore whatever I wanted and I think I did look a little bit crazy. Still do. I’ve had my hair every colour under the rainbow. I’ve had it red, pink—blue was the worst one because it went a bit, well, grey. But it’s a way of expressing myself and I enjoy it. Fashion’s not supposed to be a chore. It’s about having fun. When you put on a mad dress, it makes you look at the day differently. You think, what am I going to do today in this mad old purple dress?

Centred around a homely and haphazard little bazaar in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, Junk Shop is a thriving social enterprise and a stepping stone for local designers hoping to make it in recycled fashion. Charlotte Keyworth is co-founder and a very busy woman. When I meet her, she’s in the middle of directing a fashion story for Junk Shop’s publicity and the shop is bustling with people. After we find a corner out of the way of the crew, I’m curious about the aim behind the shoot.

So, talk me through your design process. Where do you begin?

When people come here I want them to have fun and to have memories of being a child and going to their grandma’s house and rifling through her old clothes and jewellery. We try to show off what we’re about, so we can draw people in who would never normally visit a recycled fashion shop. This shoot was partially inspired by Indian goddesses—we have the goddess of earth and the goddess of art and music—but we’re mixing it in with the dressing-up theme that was in the Alexander McQueen show. We’re using these dresses we made out of net curtains and I turned this old men’s shirt into a playsuit for a woman, so she can ride the bike or dig the garden or go dancing in it. It’s fun to play with things and turn them on their head in that way.

It’s hard to say exactly where I begin because it’s a bit of a combination of pragmatism and having a flash of inspiration but I suppose it is important to let the fabric guide me. I have a rummage through all the stuff that charity shops can’t sell and that’s where I get most of my fabric from. You have to work with what you’ve got when you’re doing recycling and think about how much you can get out of one type of fabric and what’s the best way to use it. I enjoy it. It really pushes me. I suppose, as they say, necessity is the mother of all invention. A lot of my ideas, though, come from nature, culture and traditions. Manchester is such a multicultural city and that’s what I love about it, and I hope that I can reflect some of that diversity in my clothes. I’m really interested in myths and symbolism, too. Take, for instance, this Egyptian beetle t-shirt I’ve been making. The beetle was thought sacred in Ancient Egypt, it’s symbolic of new life, renewal. The models and the photographer you’re using in this shoot got the gig by responding to a notice in your window. You run

Self-portrait.

sewing courses and you stock collections by aspiring young designers who walk into your shop. It looks like it’s important to you to harness new talent. Yes, definitely. It’s so important to me because I remember when I left uni and I couldn’t find a job in fashion. I was working in a clothes shop and designing on the side and there seemed to be nowhere in Manchester that would take my clothes. Dan, who founded Junk Shop with me, used to go round quite a number of shops with my stuff and it was only a handful who showed any interest. Probably ninety percent of the people whose designs we stock in here have just come into the shop with their own designs and ideas, and I’ve just guided them through what their strengths are, what our customers like, what works. I think it’s really important to have these opportunities for young people. How is fashion going to evolve and get more exciting in this country if there’s no outlet for young designers? Of course, it’s great for me too, because I love fashion and I love meeting new people with new ideas. You seem to have quite a community here. Yes, we’ve been very lucky in that way. We first set up with a little shop in Didsbury about five years ago and it’s really nice that so many of our customers have enjoyed it and, in a sense, come along for the ride. Lots of the people coming to our classes have shopped in Junk for years, and there’s this kind of warm, friendly atmosphere, which is nice. But it’s important to us to make sure we include a wide range of people. I did a class last night and there was a girl who was eighteen and a woman over fifty doing it, so it’s a nice mix of ages. And we were contacted by the Salford Foundation a few weeks ago to run

a course for young people at risk of dropping out of school, which we’re really excited about. What’s really nice is when we can sell a brooch or a headdress that was made by one of our customers or by someone who came to one of our classes. Are there any unusual characters in this community? Oh, yes. Have you seen all the lampshades we have around the place? We have a crazy lady who comes round all the shops in this area selling old lampshades. And there’s a lady called Maureen who stops by selling all sorts of barmy things. In fact, I’m worried I might turn into Maureen one day; I see a bit of myself in her. I like collecting stuff, I’m a bit of a hoarder like she is, but her whole house is just full of stuff. She had a shop once. That’s me in a few years’ time, isn’t it? Maureen should be a warning to me to start getting rid of more things. But the thing is, I always throw something away and then a few weeks later I think, “Oh I need that thing! Where is it? Oh no, I put it in the recycling bin, it’s gone. “That’s frustrating. But we had to get rid of some stuff recently, so we went to a tip in Manchester—it’s the biggest tip there is—and it was like going to see the future. It was just piles and piles of rubbish everywhere and it was so depressing. I just kept thinking, if we don’t sort it out, if we don’t save things where we can, the whole planet’s going to end up looking like this. It’s just horrible horrible horrible, you should go and see it. No, thanks. You should, though! But that’s my aspiration for this whole venture, that we inspire people to re-use old things instead of buying new things. So many people think recycled fashion is very boring and brown and a bit hippy, which it can be, but not here, it isn’t.

sadie in t-shirts photographer agatha a nitecka model sadie phelps | elite london

sadie wears â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;love, love, love!â&#x20AC;&#x2122;, a t-shirt by Luella, and socks from tabio

sadie’s long vest is ‘constantly yours’ from st pauls lifestyle with socks by tabio

the lace socks are by tabio, and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;tea partyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is from st pauls lifestyle

sadieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s red t-shirt is from marc jacobs

‘love me’ socks from gap

sadie’s ‘konichiwa’ t-shirt is by truly madly deeply

‘friday i’m in love’ is from altru apparel

how hard can it be ...to make something in a day? 24 hours of coffee, pizza and tears interviews liz bennett, rosanna durham illus rude

An illustration by Dani Lurie at the start of our own 24 hour challenge.

draw a 24-page comic Nat Gertler has something of the aura of a motivational speaker. He has the ebullience of someone who’s created something very successful by accident and wishes everyone else could be that lucky. In 2003, he planned to hold a one-off 24 hour comic event in a comic store to promote a collection of 24 hour comics edited by Scott McCloud, the American cartoonist. Scott had sketched the original 24 hour comic as a dare with a friend, Steve ‘Glacier’ Bissette, infamous for the slow pace of his comic style. Nat’s event turned out to be more like a simultaneous 50-comic-store event and 24 Hour Comics Day is now in its seventh year. This was an accidental thing. It was meant to be one store, but the opportunity presented itself to me. It was one of those times when you’re surfing along and this big wave comes up, and you can surf it or you can avoid it, and I rode it. This year, it’s more than doubled in number. We’re talking in the thousands of people. Somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000 pages of art get made at this thing. I should also note that I thought I was doing this one thing, and then immediately after the event, people starting contacting me saying, “That’s great, when’s next year’s?” I went, “Next year? I have to do this again?” But of course I did. The atmosphere varies from store to store. Some places are very quiet and intense and everyone’s working on their pages. At other places, they’re eating, there’s music going, everybody’s chatting and having a good time. It’ll vary over the course of the night. At times it’ll be upbeat and at times it’ll be: “How you doing, how you doing?” “Oh, I’m three pages behind on my schedule.” Everybody’s getting intense. Then, the food comes in and that perks everybody up! You need lots of infusions of food. Some people get done happily, and someone

will sit there and say, “I’m not going to make it.” And everybody will laugh at them and go on doing their very intense work. I’ve also found that, with people doing 24 hour comics alone in their room, there are much darker stories—3 o’clock in the morning and you’re alone at home going, “Why am I doing this?” There’s definitely a bleak point somewhere in the middle of the night. When I came up with the idea of having Scott edit a book of 24 hour comics, I realised I couldn’t approach him with it until I’d walked the walk myself. I did one of those 24 hour comics alone at home myself, and it is kind of dark and it’s about time. When you’re thinking about getting something done in 24 hours it’s a topic that’s on your mind. So I did a 24 hour comic, did it digitally. One of the original rules, which no longer applies, is that you have to send a copy to Scott McCloud when you’re done. So I dropped my copy off at his doorstep— because we were living in the same county at the time—at the end of the 24 hours. This year, I did a hand-drawn one. I’m not much of an artist, but I did enough to tell the story. I have a daughter who just turned six yesterday actually, and I asked her for a title. You have to go in without a story plan, and see what comes up. That’s a way of making sure that it’s not something I’ve planned: getting some last-minute information the story is built around. I asked my daughter for a title, and she said, “karate princess.” I was writing for her to read it, so it wasn’t going to be a dark, sombre and bloody karate princess. A fun little story. Actually, karate princess turned out to be 22 pages. I was getting near the end of the story, so I did a 2-page back-up story about my one-year-old son, Ben. So he gets to be in it as well.

A 24 hour comic is very good practice for artists and writers who are used to knowing what they’re going to do next and never quite getting around to it. I can stare at a screen for an hour with the next sentence for something already in my head and not type it. At 24 Hour Comics Day you don’t have that luxury. You’re forced to accept what you do, and often you’ll find that you’ll end up with a certain grace, like not over-working things. It’s got its own little quirks. It’s got a beauty that comes from working rapidly, doing everything in a short sequence so you’re in the same mood and the same mode. There’s some truly beautiful work done and material that would not be done in any other way, I think. For a lot of people this is the first time they complete a comic. They’ve been drawing a page of that or this, but this shows them they can complete something. Your first one may not be the greatest comic, but then you can say you’ve done a comic and your next one will be better. One of the great things about having 24 Hour Comics Day is that people spend a lot of time saying, “24 hour comics, that’s a great idea, some day I gotta do that,” and ‘some days’ go on for ever, you know that. There are plenty things in your life I’m sure that some day you’re going to do, and you haven’t and you probably won’t. And 24 Hour Comics Day is like, “Okay, here’s the day. Do it.” People like the excuse for doing something crazy. Staying up 24 hours eating pizza and drawing is an experience with no other excuse. Don’t worry about not being a comic artist! Draw stick figures well enough to communicate what you’re thinking about. When you’re done, for better or worse, you’ll have had an experience.

Nat Gertler, above, and intense concentration at the first Comics Day in 2003.

put together a magazine “Hustle.” “Comeback.” Longshot’s first two issues had more than enough sparkle to fill a professional high-brow quarterly, but the production of both issues was, in fact, packed into an eye-wateringly tight schedule: 24 hours for submissions; 24 hours for selection, editorial, curation, lay-out, design and completion. At noon on Friday, the theme is announced and by Sunday night the finished magazine is uploaded onto the print-on-demand website MagCloud. We talked to co-founder Sarah Rich. Longshot. There was a great possibility that we would fail. Either we would fail to complete it or we would fail to make something good. It was really gratifying when people actually saw the magazine and got it in their hands, looked at it, read it. The feedback was really positive and people liked it and were impressed at how much could be done in 48 hours. We chose to do it all in 48 hours, because we wanted to try to see what we could achieve in a weekend when we and our friends weren’t at work, so we announce the theme via Twitter on Friday. We wanted to invite people to do something creative that wouldn’t be a burden in terms of their time commitment, although there’s not too much sleep that happens. We wouldn’t want to do it unless it was fun. The magazine world has been a pretty tough place for the last few years and it’s exciting for people to be a part of a magazine production process that’s actually just fun. There wasn’t a lot of stress. Actually, it certainly is stressful but, broadly speaking, you’re not really under the weight of this feeling that you’re in a challenging time. This project points towards the future and I think it gives people a lot of optimism about what’s possible. People have been very interested in it because crowd-sourcing and user-generated content are buzz concepts. People understand that there’s value in inviting your community to participate, but it’s scary to actually do it because people are afraid that they will lose control of the quality. I feel really good about the quality of the content that we’ve put in. We have a lot of really talented crowd-sourced contributors. One of the best moments, for both issues, was seeing the cover design for the first time. At some point around two or three in the morning on Sunday, we’re all exhausted and working really hard, one of the designers says, “OK, we’ve got a cover option.” Everybody gathers around the computer and it somehow suddenly feels like: wow, we’re making a magazine. It always gets real at that moment. It’s definitely a very collaborative process. Everybody who shows up, participates. During the 48-hour period of production, everyone is pretty much on equal footing. We put our full trust in the content and we let everybody make decisions and give their input. It’s not hierarchical: it’s a very improvisational process and everybody’s a part of that creative improvisation.

Someone’s breakfast, made and forgotten. Above, Mat and Sarah discuss the entries. Photos: Heather Champ.

It doesn’t cost anything really to produce the magazine, because we don’t have to do a print run. We wanted to pay contributors, so we decided we’d give everybody a percentage of whatever we made from the sales so everybody who contributed did in fact get paid, although it was only about eight dollars per person after the first issue. It was more of a symbolic gesture, but I think it was a meaningful gesture to say we’re not asking you to give us free content. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful for this to become a thriving business, but I don’t think that’s in the immediate future. For now we don’t want to force the project into becoming a big money-maker because that could crush its creative spirit. The fundamental essence of the project is its creative spirit so, while we can, we’re just going to produce it for the creative rush and see where it goes.

design and film a 60-second ad Last year, 20 teams of young film-makers came together to make a 60-second ad for the Institute of Contemporary Arts. They had just 24 hours to brainstorm, film and edit their ideas. The challenge was put on by HYPtv, a talent agency that connects artists, filmmakers and designers with business. They coorganised the challenge with leading ad agency M&C Saatchi. The co-founder of HYPtv, Dave Osborn-Cook, talked about making an ad in a day. The 24 hour ad challenge was an experiment really. I don’t think anyone should have been expecting too much out of the end product, but the results were amazing. There was a hell of a lot of organisation. I think we had over a hundred teams who entered and we selected 20 teams of roughly six people. We judged them on various criteria. When it got too professional we said, “That’s too good,” and they weren’t included. Some production companies were sending in stuff but we threw those out, since they didn’t need the competition. We gave the teams literally 24 hours. From the M&C Saatchi building at 9 am in the morning, they had to deliver the films at the ICA on the dot at 9 am the next morning. It was a blind brief based on the idea of ‘Now’. It was good enough for film-makers to make a film, and for creatives to get concept out of something that wasn’t too tight. We spent an hour briefing the teams on what they should and shouldn’t do: be careful of the police; be careful where you film; don’t get killed; don’t jump over bridges; don’t be over-ambitious and listen to everyone. After 24 hours, all the teams came back and we watched the films. We filled the whole cinema. It was great. The judges sat at the front of the stage and discussed what the entries were like. Their work was seen by some great judges. Patrick Bourgogne, the editor of Creative Review, the designer Peter Saville, Sophie Fiennes the filmmaker and then Alan Yentob. It was a fantastic panel. On the day, Peter Saville dissed the whole of advertising. He looked so world-weary and he said to everyone, “I hate advertising.” And we were like, “Ah, don’t say that because we’ve got these guys in and it’s the start of their career.” Alright, so he’s a bit of a creative genius, but that was a downer. But Alan Yentob was great. The teams were knackered because they hadn’t slept, but everyone had delivered on time. There were a few jeopardy moments, a few arguments that would have made great TV! The winning team had scrapped their first idea at midnight. So they had just that night to shoot, but they won. Their film caused a lot of controversy over the next few weeks. It was called the Staring Man and it was about being in the moment. What they filmed was one guy’s face and his expression. He takes in a breath at the beginning of the sixty seconds and then lets it out at the end. You almost miss that if you’re not watching it closely. It was completely hypnotic. You see the lights of the traffic going on behind him. Some people think it was too abstract, that it was too up itself and too pretentious. Personally, I thought it was fantastically well-shot and observed. What creative people do just fascinates me. And what the judges loved was that it was like a true ad. It broke a few moulds. In the ad business, clients now expect things a lot sooner than they used to. I’ve been in the business for 20 years and I’ve seen the difference. Normally you get a couple of months to think of a commercial. These days, I’m afraid you don’t get that. We’ve done stuff from start to finish in two weeks. That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to test people’s ability to cope under pressure. It was just a fantastic event and we want to do the competition again next year.

Teams are briefed at the opening ceremony, above, and the panel of judges decide the winner.

break the bounds of technology The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is less about hacking in the traditional sense, and more about using any scraps of technology and software to hand to create something fun and totally new. Its free brief and endless scope make it, in some ways, the most creative of the four. The only rule is that whatever is created has to be made on site. We talked to Tarikh Korula who, along with Daniel Raffel, organised the Hackathon for the members of the technology start-up blog, TechCrunch, in New York this year. Did you see the Social Network? It’s not like the hacking scene in that, where they’re doing shots and trying to break into some computer. There’s more like a community vibe to it. Staying up late is part of the culture and lifestyle of hacking. You kind of work until five or four in the morning on some idea, and you’re drinking coke all night, just wired and, like, communing with the circuits. So there’s that quality to it. It’s a bit like Woodstock for nerds. The idea for a hack day came from a guy named Chad Dickerson. He was working at Yahoo about five years ago and the goal was to have a very loose, time-specific event where you could get developers together to be more creative. Within corporate culture, developers don’t get a chance to flex some of their more creative muscles. It was a way of having fun with a bunch of nerds. The time limit really helps to lower expectation. If you only have a few hours to put something together, the stakes are pretty low and you just want to show something funny or cool or delightful or silly. All of those sorts of adjectives are allowed to exist in a short time frame. It’s about just having a loose structure. Most computer scientists or software engineers don’t see themselves as artists. It’s about people who don’t normally see themselves in a creative light discovering that they are quite creative. But is there an artistry to it? Here’s the thing, one of the definitions of art is that it doesn’t have any utility, so if you’re making useless shit, maybe that’s art. There’s this playful atmosphere around that makes people say, “Well, how useless can we go with these things?” There is an inherent silliness in a lot of software developers. They like Monty Python. There are parts of that culture that are just very silly.

Daniel and I participated in the first public hack day in 2006 and we created an internet set-top box in a very small jewel box. Because it was so small the channels on the TV were really silly, they had three colours, and they could only show a little text. We taught classes for how to make these things, and we open-sourced the software and the hardware, and some of the people who took the classes continued to develop it. Now there’s a second version of that hardware, and we don’t really have anything to do with it any more, other than loving that it’s still going. More recently, one of the companies that presented at the Hackathon actually got funded by investors. This is a bunch of guys who did a hack in a weekend, and now they’re a funded company. There was also a group of hardware hackers here in New York who made something called Mr Stabby Phone. It was a big robotic arm they’d taken out of the dump and they hooked up a cell phone to it. You could call it and it’d do different things. I’m quite sure that that didn’t get funded, but it won the hearts and minds of people in the hack day. The concept of investors is interesting, isn’t it? To be honest, hack day started in corporate America, at Yahoo. The story of where these came from is not that a pure group of core software artists put together this cultural thing that’s been subverted. That said, if you were to talk to Chad, he would say that putting this thing together at Yahoo was incredibly difficult and required a lot of not telling his bosses what they actually were going to do. Because when they found out, they completely flipped out. Luckily, Chad had already got press for it in a major blog, so they couldn’t say no. But if he had asked for permission it would never have come off. A long story short, I think there’s a balance there. The creative and silly side of the software industry has always been there. But it’s also to let the folk who work on this meet some people who might be able to give them a job. What we were imagining was that different cultures and different folk could meet and find some common ground. A lot of software developers would like to do it for a living—they just like to work on stuff that they think is cool. So if they can get help doing that, that’s great. That’s what they want.

receive something beautiful in the post Holiday snaps are funny things. Looking through some old facebook albums, I found a picture of myself and some friends in front of a swathe of gorgeous rural Italy. We’re smiling broadly but we, or I at least, were on the verge of tears at the time. We were all exhausted and hopelessly lost, trying to find a youth hostel hidden deep in the Roman countryside. In the next issue, we’d like to share the stories behind your holiday-snap smiles. We’d like you to send us a photograph and tell us a little about it. What’s interesting about the photo? Where are you? What does it reveal? What does it hide? Send the photos to holiday@ohcomely.co.uk by the 23rd of January. Include a hundred or more words telling your story. We’re looking forward to seeing the photos and imagining what went on. We’ve shared around each other’s, and Rosanna’s choice of holiday photos is very revealing. All files should be sent as high-res images. No kisses at the camera, please. Issue five is out on the 15th of February. With a subscription, we’ll post one straight to your door. It’s £18 for a year, and you’ll get six issues through the letterbox. Visit www.ohcomely.co.uk/subscribe or write in to us at subs@ohcomely.co.uk. If you’re buying one for someone else, we’d be happy to send either them or you a card to say hello.

the place where I am happy not quite the martinis, the company or the smell of lobster words jane flett illus yelena bryksenkova I am sitting at the bar at El Quijote beneath the Chelsea Hotel, on a high-top stool with my feet dangling. My feet look good because they are in new red and black leather cut-out boots with pencil straps around the calves. I have been looking at my feet all day in window panes since I bought the boots in the Salvation Army store on East 23rd Street. Every time I catch a glimpse, they make me smile. The boots are equal parts foxy and ridiculous. The barman makes drinks so strong they don’t fit into a martini glass. They are pure liquor. He waits with the cocktail shaker until the cherry is barely floating, and then tops it up back to the brim. He gives us free calamari and talks in an accent. He is pleased with our choice of drinks. Sitting at the bar at El Quijote makes me happier than almost anything else in the world. The room is suffused in a soft dim lighting and all the tablecloths are perfect and white and starched. There are fixings cast in burnt gold and men who wear cufflinks. It smells like lobster. Sitting at the bar I do not need to prove anything to anyone in the world. There is nothing sordid. The barman folds a clean white paper napkin underneath my drink where it overflowed. In the bathroom, the sinks are inlaid with porcelain patterns and paintings of flowers. I am warm and safe and slipping gently into a diffusive drunk—a drunk which is padded at the edges and does not throw up in subway cars. When I drink at the El Quijote, I feel like a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. I am debonair and beautiful and my feet dangle from the bar stool. I can say anything I please. I am safe as a work of fiction and I talk about my life in grandiose and abstract terms. Chris feeds me forkfuls of squid and I hold forth at the bar, and the stories I have take on epic and heart-wrenching dimensions. I realise everything I am saying is True. I fold the room warm and close around my shoulders and think about the starched corners of handkerchiefs dabbing at the corners of eyes. Perfect white corners left moist and blackened. I think of myself as an old, old woman living in the Chelsea Hotel. I will come here every night and drink a Manhattan; I will subsist on lobster. They will know my order and they will keep for me a small table in the back corner, because by then my days of sitting at the bar and swinging my heels will be long gone. Though I will still eat the glacé cherry as I finish my drink and look carefully at the barman through my heavily made-up eyes. If I ever live out this fantasy, I know when I walk past the line of bar stools I will think back to these days when everything seemed so epic and intense and I will chortle. By then I will have lived through so many things that this time will be a distant and faded curiosity, like an old diary entry where the ink has faded away. I will look at the tears and finger-biting joys and shake my head at how foolish life is. Then I will turn back to my overflowing drink, and sip it quietly until my entrée arrives.

the world next door w o u l d nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; t i t b e n i c e t o meet the neighbour who scares pigeons in his underwear?

photos agatha a nitecka

We all have neighbours and every one of us gets curious about them from time to time. All except the hermit who listens to 19th-century recordings on his gramophone. And thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not you. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been thinking about how strange it is that we often live in such close quarters with people who we know nothing about, and thought it was time we said hello. We asked some people to go and meet their neighbours and to tell us what happened. We then asked three illustrators to venture onto Google Street View to capture where the relationships played out.

knocks on the door illus david galletly

Edinburgh, EH9. I live next door to a young family. They moved in a few months ago and I’d never spoken to them. Feeling particularly sociable one Sunday, I went over to introduce myself. They were friendly enough and everything seemed fine. Then one day I overheard them talking about the “weird neighbour who drinks a lot showing up for no reason.” So much for neighborliness, especially as I don’t drink.

Pontypool, NP4. I have a neighbour who digs holes in his backyard. Lots of them. I thought it was time to say hello, maybe even get an answer to the ‘hole mystery’. No one answered the door so I went around the back and peeked over the fence. On closer inspection, I noticed that my neighbour was lying in one of his holes. Slightly concerned, I called out to him to ask if he was okay. He told me to fuck off.

West London, W8. My neighbour is my landlady. She’s always seemed nice. I visited her and had a cup of tea. She says she’s worried about me, and that I remind her of her grandson, which is why the rent is so cheap. It’s not.

Devon, EX22. My neighbours keep chickens in their backyard. I’ve always wanted to keep some myself, so I went over to meet them under the pretence of gaining some insightful tips on the noble art of hen-keeping. I ended up staying for hours in their house, lavished with tea and spiced German Christmas cookies as we chatted about everything from living in a van to the joys of commuting, and how nice it would be to find a Ming in the attic. When I left, I realised that I had completely forgotten to ask about the chickens.

Aberdeen, AB15. I went over to my next door neighbour’s house to introduce myself. I rang the doorbell. No answer. I returned the next day to try again. I rang the doorbell. Again, nothing. I waited a few minutes and tried again. Same result. I reasoned that they must be away and I’d try again another time. That evening, I noticed one of them sneaking out of the house.

chance meetings illus rachel clare price

North London, N1. I met my neighbour while coming home from work. We had a chat and both professed to want to meet the other. He insisted on having a pint. A few weeks later, still nothing. Fail.

Oxford, OX4. I’m fascinated by one of my neighbours. He’s German and looks almost exactly like Johnny Depp. He passes me at the library pretty much every day, and there’s the same exchange, “Hi, how was your day, fine.” I made an effort to meet him, stalked the library, etc., for three days. Nothing. Bumped into him at a party randomly. Success!

North London, N19. I live next to a Greek family. I decided to meet them when the grandad, I think, came back at 4 am and banged on the door after he forgot his keys. I got invited for a meal at the end of the week.

Manchester, M30. I saw my neighbour walking and offered to drive her to the station. We had a nice chat.

West London, W11. We bumped into each other on a staircase. His flat was directly below mine. It’s very unusual for me to get attracted to someone straight away. The last time something similar happened, it was eight years ago and it turned out to be the most important relationship I’ve had. When I felt it again with my neighbour, I thought he must be pretty special. Before I knew it, we had suppers together, drank wine, played the guitar, read poetry out loud in the middle of the night, and looked after each other’s cars and plants whenever one of us was away. I killed his hydrangea—I’m not good with flowers at all. Before long, I had fallen for him. But, as it goes, he never fell for me. Living so close to someone you have feelings for, when they don’t have any for you, is quite uncomfortable. In the end, I moved house. We haven’t seen each other since.

strange connections illus angela chick

Haywards Heath, RH16. My neighbour has a lot of plants, so I posted a small wrapped book about plants as a gift. I haven’t found the courage to speak to them yet.

North London, N10. My first encounter with the old couple next door was when we had just moved in. I was standing on the flat roof outside my room and a man addressed me from their garden, describing us as having a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ encounter (as I was on a ‘balcony’). Their introduction to my parents was a lot more formal, with a typed note through the letter box, inviting them round for tea. No further teas followed, although every few months the woman knocks on our door with some home grown veg. They don’t answer the door after dark. I tried to speak to them but, perhaps unsurprisingly, no one answered.

Bournemouth, BH5. My neighbour sits at a pub all weekend talking to the other regulars. He’s there at ten in the morning and is often there when I get back. Turns out he’s an old film director from Spain. He wanted to show me all his old films some time.

Greenwich, SE10. I said hello to a nice-looking old couple. It turns out they’re horrible loud-mouthed racists. They constantly tried to talk to me, then chased me. I avoid them now. They apparently bad-mouth me constantly these days, and think I killed their cat.

Birmingham, B10. I introduced myself to my neighbour: an old man with a walker. It was a bit awkward; neither of us knew what to say. Two weeks later, I saw him in Sainsbury’s looking lost. I asked him if I could help him and he said, “Yes, could you get something from the top shelf for me?” He smiled and thanked me. I talked to him until the checkout, where he bought two packs of chocolate and gave one to me.

South London, SE5. I have a neighbour who shares a balcony. I woke up one morning to find they’d weeded my plants, perhaps worried about spreading weeds. There was a dandelion with an especially fine head that I’d been cultivating, and I was sad to see it go. I lived in terror of meeting them, but by the time I’d mustered the courage, they moved out.

the science of kissing sheril kirshenbaum talks love and marine biology words liz bennett illustration tom bingham

I’ve been talking to Sheril Kirshenbaum about kissing for about 45 minutes, but she’s the most animated when we get on to the topic of tumours in turtles. Someone contacted her about some new research into this just yesterday. “I looked at his paper. They discovered something completely new and it’s really cool. They did something called spatial mapping with turtle populations in parts of the world where they were getting this tumour, and then they realised that it was this chain of events that started from agricultural run-off.” She’s just been explaining the benefits of scientists from different disciplines working together. She goes on: “It’s a whole process that he had no intention of discovering, and it was only through finding a virologist to work with as he was solving this mystery that he managed to put the pieces together and said, ‘Wait, wait, now I understand a little bit more about tumour formations in turtles. But it has applications to humans, and when we talked to these cancer researchers...’” She trails off. “It was just so cool, and I think we need more stories like this.” Sheril is a science writer and research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s worked as a legislative science fellow in the Senate, tackling energy, climate and ocean policy. It’s clear that the experience has left her frustrated about the way science is handled in the public sphere. “It is frustrating,” she says. “In the Senate, science was really treated as a special interest, whereas really science is central to so many of the really important issues. But instead we often had scientists who couldn’t really communicate why they were there and why the issues mattered. And then you have a lot of pseudoscience. People come in with a particular agenda and they can be articulate and funny, and they might not be there for the right reasons.”

The book traces the history of kissing back as far as 1500 BC (“You have these references in the Vedic Sanskrit texts which don’t quite say ‘kiss’, but one says, ‘The young lord of the house repeatedly licked the young woman.’”). It also explores what goes on in your brain when you lock lips with someone and why, as some new research by the psychologist John Bohannon suggests, the memories of your first kiss might be even more vivid than the memories of your first full sexual encounter. Does she think the book will help change people’s attitudes to science? “I don’t expect it’ll change the culture. Maybe it’ll get a few more people thinking about science in their own lives. Often, science practitioners are seen as the crazy mad scientist or the really socially awkward geek, so here’s a way to talk about science in a way that’s approachable and fun.” There’s a desperate need right now to get people engaged and listening on scientific topics, she explains, and laments the slide of society towards scientific illiteracy. “Everyone who’s voting really makes a difference. We’re losing an engagement with science and we’re becoming a culture that fills itself up on reality television. Which is fine, but there’s a lot of big stuff out there that we need to be thinking about and integrating into what we do and how we live.” Her issue at the moment is ocean acidification, which ties in with her own background in marine science. The ocean, she explains, absorbs carbon dioxide just like the atmosphere, and atmosphere change is making the oceans more acidic. “It’s a huge elephant in the room. It’s really bad. And every time I do a class now, I ask, ‘Who in the room has heard of ocean acidification?’ I might get one or two hands, and I’m thinking, god, this affects survival of species right across the food chain and we just don’t know about it.”

This led Sheril to tackle a topic that is hardly the policy issue of the moment: kissing. It started with a whimsical blog post she wrote around Valentine’s Day 2008 for an online science magazine. To her surprise, the site traffic spiked and the comments and questions never stopped coming. She became the go-to person for kissing questions. So the idea that she write a book on the topic suggested itself quite naturally.

But she’s hopeful that a “scientific communication renaissance” may be on it’s way. There’s a flood of young people with science PhDs at the moment, and dedicated science posts at universities are getting fewer and further between. “We have this great opportunity right now, because they have the expertise, they’re looking for ways to use it, and at the same time we need people who are trained in science to be able to write and to be able to speak publicly. There are so many other ways to contribute that are considered a non-traditional path, but are more and more and more relevant to the way we live now.”

“Initially I thought, well, kissing isn’t quite my field, but then I thought to myself that it’s something that my best girlfriends would be interested in. It’s something that’s so indelible in our lives, and yet we don’t spend too much time thinking about why we do it. It’s a great behaviour to start exploring, and talk about how research happens.”

The Science of Kissing by Sheril Kirshenbaum is out in January. She ends the book with a statement of intent: “If there’s a single message you take away from this book, I hope it will be this: Don’t give up on romance.” But there’s a far more passionate message behind it: Don’t give up on science.

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can I borrow a cup of sugar? jonathan cherry gets to know his neighbours portraits jonathan cherry, from the series greenlands

Jonathan Cherry is a photographer from the Black Country, just west of Birmingham. He grew up in a small town called Stourbridge. These photos are from the series Greenlands, portraits of his Stourbridge neighbours. “Greenlands is an exploration into English rural town life,” he says. “I came back home to Stourbridge from university in 2009 and was struck by the lack of a sense of community in my local area. Borrowing a cup of sugar from a friendly neighbour is sadly becoming a thing of the past. So I decided to get out, explore the area and photograph people in my neighbourhood. I was interested in how well we actually know our neighbours. My line was, ‘Can I borrow a cup of sugar?’” “Don Beck (pictured) goes to my church and used to play golf with a friend of mine, although he doesn’t play it any more. He’s got heart trouble and is retired. It took a while to organise a date to photograph him, as he’s quite busy. During the day he might be gardening and having tea or he’ll drive places and visit people. Don’s wife June does all the baking. When I was over at their house I tried one of the scones that she’d baked and it was delicious.”

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The four favourite home-baked goods cakes 42% cupcakes 39% batters 37% biscuits 29% (Percentages of people who made them in the last year) 28% of people in the UK bake something from scratch every week.

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“Lydia’s older sister was my first girlfriend and so I’ve known her for about eight years. I’ve seen her grow up. She’s sixteen now and she’s matured a whole lot. She’s really natural to photograph. We work together at Pizza Express, so we talk about that and we just talk about life.”

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“This is Jenny, the mother of William (opposite) and Daniel. I think she’s got lovely eyes, so I try and work with that. I know William and his older brother Daniel through playing football with their dad Ben.”

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“I’ve known William and Daniel for quite a while now so they’re quite comfortable around me and it’s pretty easy to just photograph them. On the day I went to photograph them, I got out in the garden and said, “Okay guys, pick up your swords!” William and Daniel fought for a while; Daniel would chase William and he would get scared and hide. William stayed perfectly still while I photographed him and after I was done he ran off and continued playing.”

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“Barry used to have a border collie and we had one of his puppies when I was younger. We’d buy dog food from Barry for a fiver. I’d walk over to his house with my dad and collect the food. It’s funny to remember. I thought his garage was like a shop. He always reminds me of my dad. He’s quite a talker. I went to borrow a cake tin the other day and I sat down with him and we were talking for about an hour. After half an hour I did think, perhaps I should go and bake that cake. The other day he saw me cycling past his house with my dog, who was running alongside the bike. He said the police had once stopped him for doing the same thing with his dog. But what he didn’t tell me was that he’d been riding a motorbike.”

The most popular dog names in the UK 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Max Molly Sam Meg Ben Holly Charlie Oscar

The most popular food-related dog names in the UK 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Branston Chips Mustard Pumpkin Noodle Peanut Brie Ketchup

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home is where the food is every dish has a story interviews rosanna durham portraits des tan

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amalia’s american brownies words rosanna durham These brownies have followed me around my childhood from birthday parties, to family picnics via trips to the beach. I used to help my mother bake them, stirring the sweet batter with a long wooden spoon and staring through the oven glass watching them cook. The recipe is taken from the cookbook of a legendary New York food store called the Silver Palate. This is a tweaked version with more chocolate and vanilla added and less baking time. My mother is American and although she’s spent a number of decades in Britain, she is gently unimpressed by the place. She taught me that the whole of England’s landmass fits into New York State. On brownies, her mantra is that “the chocolate makes the brownie.” True to form, whenever she travels to the USA, she’ll smuggle back Baker’s chocolate in her suitcase, professing that the stuff is better than anything available in England. Since the proof is in the pudding, I’ve come to agree with her. If you’re not travelling to America any time soon, and don’t have Baker’s at hand, use unsweetened chocolate with 100% cacao. When I made them for oh comely, it was the first time I’d attempted them alone. A little over-pleased with the results, I gave my mother one to sample. “There’s a slight caramel taste to them, Rosanna,” she said. “Did you use brown sugar instead of caster?” I was guilty as charged. Be sure to follow the recipe.

Ingredients 230g unsalted butter 140g unsweetened chocolate, 100% cacao 4 eggs 450g caster sugar 3 tsp vanilla extract 115g plain flour

One. Preheat the oven to 200 ˚C/Gas Mark 6. Grease and flour a 9 x 12 inch baking tin. Two. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a saucepan on a low heat or in the top part of a double boiler. Don’t let the mixture burn. When melted, set aside to cool to room temperature. Three. Beat the eggs and sugar until thick. Add vanilla extract. Four. Fold the cooled chocolate and butter into the eggs and sugar. Mix together. Sift the flour and fold into the batter. Mix well. Five. Pour the mixture into the baking tin. Bake for 5 minutes at 200˚C/Gas Mark 6. Turn the oven down to 180˚C/Gas Mark 4 and bake for 20 minutes. Six. Let the brownies cool in the tin before cutting them into squares and eating them.

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my buba’s cholent words dani lurie My buba, or grandmother, grew up in the East End of London in the 1940s. Back then it was primarily a Jewish area, bustling with synagogues and kosher delis. By the 1950s, the Jewish population had mostly migrated to the suburbs, making way for the next group to settle. You can find that legacy today in the few beigel shops that nestle between the curry restaurants and chic cafés of Brick Lane. My buba tells the story of a traditional dish called cholent: a warm, stodgy casserole-type dish, made of meat and vegetables. It is the ultimate comfort food. She talks about Foxing’s Bakery, which sat at the top end of Bursalem Street, off Hessal Street market, where she lived. It was open every day of the week except Saturdays on account of the Jewish Sabbath, the weekly day of rest that runs from sundown on Friday until the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday evening. Jewish religious law dictates that nothing should be ‘created’ or ‘destroyed’ on the Sabbath, so observing it means not turning anything on or off, including stoves, ovens and other kitchen equipment. Obviously this poses a problem for the making of delicious hot meals that can be served at the traditional Saturday family lunch. That’s where cholent comes in. “Between four and five o’clock on Friday nights, there’d be people lining up the street outside Foxing’s, holding pots of all sizes, waiting to make their way into the bakery. The pots were full of an uncooked ensemble of meat, beans, carrots, potatoes and onions covered in batter. The patrons would hand in their pot and receive half a ticket. The other half stayed with their pot, which would be put in the enormous ovens and left to cook slowly right through the night. At noon on Saturday, the big children would be sent down the street to pick up the pots. I would see them all marching along, ready for lunch, their mouths watering. “For Orthodox Jewish families, who would not light a fire on the Sabbath, this gave them a hot meal on a cold day. This is my mother’s recipe for cholent. She would make it in our own oven and, when we awoke on Saturday morning, the smell went right through the house. We couldn’t wait for lunch. I’ve never forgotten the taste. From an early age, I learned how to make this food of the gods by watching her do it.” This recipe serves ten. Cholent can be made in a slow-cooker instead of an oven but you’ll need to make the quantities proportionately smaller. My buba also says: “The amounts depend on how many people are there at the table to eat it. It’s hard to make a small cholent because it would dry up in the cooking. The best time to put it in the oven is at six o’clock in the evening, to be eaten for lunch the next day.”

For the stew 1 whole large potato for each person 1-2½kg beef 1 piece of brisket or chuck (a fatty meat) 500g dried butter beans 3 onions, chopped 5 small carrots, whole water or beef stock to fill the pot salt and pepper, to taste bay leaves and black peppers in a muslin bag (optional)

For the batter 6 large eggs 375ml vegetable oil 750g plain flour 1 small onion, grated salt and pepper, to taste 500ml water

One. Preheat the oven to 200˚C/Gas Mark 6. If you’re using a slowcooker, preheat to 120˚C. Have a large, oven-proof pot ready. A ceramic slow-cooker pot works well even if you’re using the oven. Two. Put the chopped onions and butter beans into the pot and the potatoes around the edge, making a well for the meat. Add the meat and brisket. Cover over with carrots. Three. Season with salt and pepper. Add bay leaves and black peppers in a muslin bag. Four. Fill up three-quarters of the pot with water or beef stock. Five. Now make the batter. Beat the eggs together with the vegetable oil. Six. Mix in the flour, then add the grated onion. Season with salt and pepper. Seven. Stir the water into the batter. The mixture should be liquid but firm. Eight. Spread the mixture over the cholent, covering all the ingredients and making a lid of batter. Nine. Cover the pot with silver foil or brown paper tied with string. Put into the hot oven for one hour. Ten. After one hour, turn the oven heat down to 120˚C or just below Gas Mark ½, if you’re using a gas oven. If you’re using a slow-cooker, leave cooking at the same setting. Let the cholent cook overnight for 12 hours. If you have halved the ingredients, cook for 6 to 8 hours. Eleven. Halfway through the cooking time, or in the early morning if you’re making it overnight, check to see if the pot has run dry. You may need to top it up by adding more water.

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aunt mary’s rhubarb pie words beth davis My family isn’t really one for ‘foodie’ memories and traditions. Aside from the typical Sunday roast, I remember tea-time as corned beef, bread and butter and ‘fishes’ in evaporated milk—more commonly known as tinned peaches. Other notable memories tend towards disaster, such as the blue chicken stir-fry that arose from a rogue splash of food dye and an impromptu trifle whipped up from stale birthday cake, sour cherries and a ruinous slug of sherry. Delicious. So you can see why my hopes for a revered family hand-me-down are pinned on this recipe for Aunt Mary’s Rhubarb Pie. Aunt Mary is in fact my Grandma, but knowing her as such it was a fair while before I made the connection and realised that the Mary it referred to was her. And so for a long time ‘Aunt Mary’ existed in my head as a vaguely fictional character somewhere between Mrs. Beeton and Aunt Bessie. The pie itself is a gorgeous pastry-based concoction that I remember from family lunches, but that many more remember from the various social engagements it has appeared at in my Grandma’s varying capacities as minister’s wife, local artist and long-standing member of the W.I. Both sweet and sharp, it’s pleasingly easy to make but tastes amazing, and also gives you the excuse to tell people that rhubarb is in fact a vegetable, not a fruit. Serve it hot or cold—with Bird’s custard, preferably—but either way it’s definitely at its best made with rhubarb at its brightest electric-pink, for the simple reason that you can’t beat a hot-pink pie.

Ingredients 225g ready-made shortcrust pastry (or pastry made with 225g flour) 680g rhubarb 3 level tbsp flour 225g granulated sugar 1 egg

One. Preheat the oven to 220 ˚C/Gas Mark 7. Two. Grease a medium-sized oven-proof dish. Roll out two thirds of the pastry and line the dish. Three. Wash the rhubarb and cut into small cubes. Four. To make the filling, mix the sugar and flour together in a separate bowl. Whisk an egg and add it the mixture. Beat thoroughly. Stir in the fruit, then pour the filling into the prepared pastry case. Five. Roll out the remaining pastry and cut it into strips about 1 cm wide. Twist the strips carefully and lay across the filling to make a lattice. Wet the ends with water and press lightly onto the pie edge. For extra-shiny pastry, brush with a beaten egg before cooking. Six. Cook in the preheated oven for about 35 minutes, until the rhubarb is soft and the pastry is golden.

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pippa’s pudding words jenny evans The origin of the dish isn’t as romantic as I might have hoped for! My mum, Pippa, was having dinner at her friend Gill’s house. They had this really nice pudding for dessert so she went home and made up her own version. The pudding has been a success at many family gatherings. She has made it for dinners and parties at her office, where they have renamed it ‘Killer Pudding’ owing to the proportions of cream and sherry involved.

Ingredients a small chunk of dark chocolate 350-500ml double cream 2 packets of choc chip and hazelnut cookies—I’m told Maryland is best sherry—my mum found it hard to specify a quantity but at a guess I would suggest a couple of glasses, perhaps even three

One. Put a few biscuits on a plate. Pour on a bit of sherry so it soaks right into them, but try to avoid actually drowning them. Two. Whisk the cream until it’s fairly stiff. Three. Put the soaking biscuits into the bottom of a deep pudding dish—a soufflé dish is ideal. Spread a layer of cream on top of the biscuits. Four. Repeat the process of soaking biscuits and layering with whisked cream, until you’ve used up all the biscuits. Don’t be afraid to compress the layers as you go along to fit in more. Five. Finish off with a slightly thicker layer of cream to give a clean white finish to the pudding, then scatter shavings of dark chocolate over the top just before serving. It can be eaten straight away but it’s even better if kept in the fridge overnight to marinate.

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so long, casiotone owen ashworth’s cat doesn’t recognise him any more words dani lurie portrait des tan By the time you read this, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone will be no more. The band, affectionately referred to as Casiotone or CFTPA, is the solo music project of Owen Ashworth. Since its inception thirteen years ago, he has recorded five albums and a string of compilations, EPs, splits and singles. Ashworth began making music exclusively using the band’s namesake; that is, on small battery-operated keyboards. He’s since moved on to include synthesisers and other instruments, but the music has never lost that endearingly lo-fi, electroindie sound that has won the hearts of fans and critics. The songs themselves are best described as character studies, vignettes of people too smart for their own good, often lonely and lost in their own lives. Liberal arts college graduates frequently feature, aimlessly shuffling through their twenties via one-night stands and café jobs. Beneath witty lyricism, the songs seep regret, missed kisses, middle class poverty and achingly unrequited loves. The sweetly bipbop keyboard tones and catchy drum-machine-led melodies soften the blow of what might otherwise be the saddest songs you’ve ever heard. Owen Ashworth is in London, one of the stops on Casiotone’s final tour. The 33 year-old, Chicago-based musician is burly in a checkered shirt, his face framed by a beard and Elvis Costello glasses. You could place him against a forest backdrop with an axe, and it would seem fitting: a poster boy for the intellectual woodsman. It doesn’t help the association that there’s a red-tinted lamp next to him that fills the room with a Twin Peaks quality. There’s a quiet stoicism to Owen. He speaks in measured tones in his West Coast American accent. He’s friendly, and humble to compliments about his music. You know he’s heard it all before but you still get the impression that he’s genuinely appreciative. It’s been a long journey as Casiotone, he explains. “From the time I was 20 til now, I feel like a pretty different person. I’ve been doing this one thing for thirteen years and it’s been really great. I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot more things than I really had any initial aspirations to. It didn’t really occur to me when I started out that it would possibly last this long. It’s been great but I feel like…” He pauses. “I still really enjoy making music but there’s a lot about the music business and the day-to-day upkeep of having a musical project that I find really exhausting. It takes me away from what I really like about music, which is making songs. I love writing, I like recording. That’s kind of the point. It’s incredibly flattering and validating to meet people who like the music, but I feel like there’s so much I’ve gotten jaded about.” You get the sense of someone who’s weary for a chance to step out of the music business and back into what he really loves: music for its own sake. After years on and off the road, it’s no surprise Owen wants to go home. “I’d like to spend more time at home. I kind of feel like I’ve been in this weird time capsule or coma for a really long time, where I’ve been on tour so much that I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of my personal

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Self-portrait by Owen Ashworth.

life. I mean, I love travelling but I can’t do it forever. It’s crazy. And my life is fucking falling apart otherwise. I mean, my cat doesn’t even recognise me. I hate how little direct involvement I have in the lives of my friends and family. I just feel like it’s time to just buck up and be a real person.”

figure I’ve had some really great experiences with my music for the last thirteen years and I want to quit before I hate it. I feel like I had a lot of these experiences and it’s stupid to think that it has to go on forever. There are other things that I’m excited to do, so it feels like a good place to stop.”

Part of the strain has come from Owen’s fiercely independent approach to managing his own career. He’s never had a manager, and he’s carried all the weight of his own decisions. “I’m glad I’ve done a lot of things on my own, and it feels good. I feel very proud of what I’ve accomplished. But I don’t want this to be my whole life. I feel like I have other interests and it feels really shallow that so much of my time is focused on this one thing.”

So what will Owen be doing once Casiotone is over? Since dropping out of film school in his early twenties—the popular tale being that he started writing songs because it was a cheaper way to tell stories than having to buy film—he’s mused on different career paths, although has never made a commitment. At one stage he thought about becoming a barber. “There was a while when I was cutting my friends’ hair a lot and I was like, ‘I’m okay at this,’ but the idea of actually having to go to beauty school or whatever it is doesn’t really appeal to me.”

It seems that most of the contention comes from working within the industry. “Honestly, I’m kind of disgusted by the music business and the industry of music,” he says. “It’s just not a game I really want to play in the end.” Casiotone may be over but Owen isn’t quitting music entirely. There’s a new music project waiting in the wings: Advance Base. “It was the name of a meteorological outpost in Antarctica in the 40s. I read a book about it and really enjoyed the book, and I just like the idea.” The new band name is also nod to Advance Base Battery Life, a collection of singles and compilation tracks that he recorded as Casiotone between 2004 and 2007. “I kind of like the idea of there being sort of a string or connection that will make the transition a little easier.”

“No pun intended, but I’ve got all these hair-brained ideas. I guess I’m kind of finicky and I have these flights of fancy of things I’d like to try doing.”

Owen plans to play shows with Advance Base but is adamant that he’ll be touring a lot less. He won’t be turning into a recluse either.

His latest idea is to open a food cart in Portland with his brother, with whom he shares a passion of food and cookery. “We’ve been sharing recipes for a long time. It just seems like an accessible plan right now.” He describes the growing movement in some parts of America for small, portable food carts that sell freshly-cooked, high-quality and inexpensive food straight to the public. He admits that he doesn’t have a business head—he just wants to cook—which is exactly why he finds that kind of accessible restaurant business so appealing. He hopes to strip away some of the “bureaucracy of the business part of opening a restaurant.”

“I’m not going to drop out of society. No, I think if anything, I just want to be more involved in my own life and just be home more. I

Owen talks passionately about his own speciality dishes—“collard greens egg rolls”—and his particular love of Southern American ‘soul

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food’. He sets mouths watering with the description of his mashed sweet potatoes “with coconut milk, five spice, ginger and maple syrup.” He even reveals the recipe for a simple but effective peach cobbler that his grandma used to make. “I really like cooking for people,” he explains. “I feel like it’s a different kind of creativity. I’ve found when I’ve been frustrated working with music, I’ll just go cook something elaborate. There’s something really comforting in putting together the ingredients. I feel like there’s a real order to it but there’s also a lot of room for creativity. It feels very practical sometimes.” It’s different, of course. “Making music is such an abstract thing that sometimes it’s hard for me to see the use in it. Sometimes it can be a couple of years between the time that I have an idea for a song and get some version of it recorded, to the time that people actually hear it, so I feel like a lot of the ideas just live in this sort of extended suspended animation. Whereas cooking feels much more like instant gratification.” Given his interest in different types of food, touring the world with Casiotone has had its perks. “I enjoy being a tourist and I think eating is a really important part of being a tourist and being in a different place,” says Owen. “I love the opportunity to try weird stuff. I was just in Hamburg and I had a rhubarb soda for the first time, which was amazing. And when I was in Berlin, I had Sudanese falafel, which has a lot of the same components that are in your standard Lebanese cooking but they pour peanut sauce over everything, and it was so good. “I feel food is such a practical thing and it’s so instantly representative of the place it comes from. I feel like it’s a really nice way—an important way—to experience where you are. Coming home with the recipes is just like having souvenirs.”

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owen’s grandma’s peach cobbler recipe “A cobbler is a very kind of traditionally Southern dish,” he says. “Just a lot of fruit and cake. It’s the easiest thing to make and it always amazes people.”

Ingredients 110g margarine 2 cans of sliced peaches 1 pack of yellow cake mix cinnamon or nutmeg frozen blackberries (optional)

One. Strain the peaches and put them in a pyrex or a baking tin. Optionally, “I’ll add frozen blackberries and I’ll also put just cinnamon or nutmeg or whatever spice, just to dress it up.” Two. Make up the cake mix and cover the peaches with it. Three. Melt the margarine, and drizzle it over the top. Four. Bake the mixture, following the cake mix directions for the cooking time.

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canny crafts what to do with your old tin cans words and illus beth davis herb pots

bird feeders

For all of these, you’ll need an old tin can or two with the labels well scrubbed off. It’s time to get green-fingered in the kitchen. Nothing looks prettier than a row of plant-pots sitting on the windowsill, or livens up the flavour of your cooking like some freshly-cut herbs. Grow a selection of your favourites and use to liberally garnish everything you make.

String these nature-friendly feeders up in a tree near a window, grab your tick-book and settle down for a wholesome afternoon’s twitching.

You will need tin can hammer nail small stones potting soil herb seedlings One. Turn the can over and use the hammer and nail to make a few drainage holes in the base. Two. Place a layer of small stones in the bottom of the can and fill it about half full with potting soil. Three. Place a herb seedling in the can and finish filling with potting soil. Four. Place the can in a sunny window and water / talk to regularly. You can also cheer up your herb pots by painting them with acrylic paint to match your kitchen / curtains / shoes.

You will need tin can hammer nail some string an equal quantity each of shredded suet and wild bird seed any of the following extras: fresh peanuts (NOT toasted, roasted or salted), sunflower seeds, stale cake crumbs, cheese crumbs One. Make a hole in the base of the can using the hammer and nail. Tie a large firm knot in the string and thread through from the inside of the can to make a hanger. Two. Place the suet in a saucepan and melt it over a gentle heat. When the fat is liquid, take it off the heat and stir in the seeds and any other ingredients. The mixture should look quite sticky and not at all delicious. Three. Let the mixture cool slightly, then tip into the can and leave to cool and set completely. Four. Hang the birdfeeder from a branch in the garden and watch them come flocking!

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tea light holders

bread-in-a-can

My brother and I used to make these when we were children. You can create a warm and whimsical winter’s glow by hanging these lanterns from trees or placing them around the house.

This sweet raisin loaf is perfect for camping trips! Once cooked, keep it in the can to heat up by the campfire.

You will need tin can hammer nails tea lights some string, twine or ribbon One. The day before you want to make your lantern, fill the can with water and put it in the freezer overnight. This will stop the can from denting when you are punching in holes. Two. Take the can out and lay it on its side on a folded-up tea-towel, or some other surface where it won’t move around too much. Holding the can securely, and using the hammer and nail, make a pattern by tapping holes around the side of the can. Try using different nails to give varying-sized holes, as they’ll look even prettier when the candle is inside. Three. Hammer a hole near the top of the can on opposite sides, then thread twine / string / ribbon through the holes and tie a knot on the inside of the can. Four. You’re done! Pop a lit tea light inside and watch it glow.

You will need 4 x 420g tin cans mixing bowl tin foil butter for greasing large pan with a lid a stand

150g rye flour 150g cornmeal 150g wholemeal flour 500ml buttermilk 150g raisins 100g treacle

1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp bicarb of soda 1 tsp salt 1 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp allspice

One. In a bowl, sift together the rye flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt, then stir in the cornmeal, wholewheat flour and spices. Two. Add the other ingredients. Beat well. Divide the mixture among four greased and floured cans and cover each one tightly with foil. Three. Place the cans on a stand in a deep pan and add boiling water. The cans should not be resting in the water. Cover with a lid and steam for 3 hours, checking the water level regularly. Four. The bread is done when it has risen almost to the top of the can and the centre has slightly puffed up. If the centre is still dented then re-cover and steam for another 15 minutes or so. Five. Cool for 10 minutes then remove bread by removing the bottom of the tin and pushing the bread out of the can.

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Kirsty Elson and her creation made from salvaged driftwood.

spin us a yarn this september, we asked the online crafters from folksy to make us something with a story interviews beth davis Kirsty Elson is a driftwood and textile designer. She works in Cornwall, where she combs driftwood from the beaches. The fish in this piece comes from a paintbrush handle, a lot of which get washed up on the shore, she says. The thing I like about working with driftwood is the fact that it totally dictates the way I am led through its shape and form. When I first started out, I used to go looking for wood, but as my work has evolved, I tend to fit designs around the pieces I have got rather than the other way around which allows me to be more abstract. I like to leave things in the same form as I found them, whenever possible. My favourite pieces are the ones with layers of different coloured paint that have been worn away, or that still have huge nails in, as they can lend a lovely quirky touch to my designs. I love the fact that every piece is unique, the way it gets bleached by the sun, and the way the knots sometimes fall out leaving lovely natural holes in the wood. I am fascinated by the process of turning found objects into something beautiful, and I love the idea that a hundred people will walk past a piece of wood on the beach without giving it a second glance, but that I can use it to create something that’s charming and one of a kind. One of my other favourite things about working with driftwood is that it’s free! Treasure hunting on the beach is a game for the whole family, and you do find the strangest things. One of our best finds was a fruit-picking ladder, which we lime-washed and it now hangs on our lounge wall. But we tend to come across a lot of buoys, balls

and paintbrushes, as well as loads of little plastic toys, which are good for keeping our sons entertained! There’s always things I regret leaving behind too though: pieces of beautiful driftwood that were too big or heavy to carry or that I’ve had to abandon for fear of being cut off when the tide is coming in. I often see people with great bundles of it that they’re taking home to use as firewood too, which quite honestly makes me want to weep. I store my driftwood in the shed, as a lot of it needs to dry out before it can be used, but if I need any damp bits urgently I’ll put them on the radiators, even though this generally doesn’t go down too well with my oh-so-tidy partner! My studio is a new acquisition. It’s in our old toy room and started off being terribly neat with bare walls and my fabric collection stashed in neat piles on the shelves, although it is definitely looking more lived-in these days! It’s mostly full of my work, but is also home to all the other bits I collect, such as the rusty washers and nails I use for decoration on my boats as well as some of my favourite Etsy and Folksy buys. I’m also gearing up for doing craft fairs, so there are currently robins, owls and fish dangling everywhere too. I can’t describe how great it is to have my own space instead of working at the dining-room table. It’s a lovely and light south-facing space with a nice enough view of fields in the distance, but I would dearly love to one day have a studio with a sea view. You can find Kirsty’s shop at www.folksy.com/shops/kirstyelson.

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Nat Rigby surrounded by her jewellery crafted out of skateboards. Photo: Steve Tanner.

Nat Rigby makes jewellery out of broken pieces of skateboards. She’s a keen skater who has always treasured the broken bits of her own worn-out boards. Transforming them into jewellery occurred to her as a wonderful way to “show off your beloved trashed board.” My husband and I have been skaters since the late 80s. I was the only girl skater in Falmouth and my husband and his friends would rip the carpet up at his mate’s house so they could skate inside while his parents were out. The two of us have always collected and treasured our old skateboards, which we’ve either stored safely or hung on the wall like artwork. I’ve always loved giving a new existence to things, and although I’ve been recycling other discarded items for a while, such as broken plates, records and dolls house miniatures, it hadn’t really occurred to me to recycle skateboards into jewellery until we were given a load of old decks by a friend last year and I started thinking about what we could do with them. I just felt it was such a lovely idea for a skater, especially if, like me, they don’t want to lose a board they have been riding and grinding for years. I take real joy from the multicoloured layers of maple and awesomely edgy, bright and colourful designs of the boards. I love peeling the griptape off too. It used to feel like a real chore, but as I’ve got it down to a fine art I’ve come to love the excitement of slowly revealing what’s underneath it. Each piece gives you so many options that even just cutting sections from the deck can create amazing pieces

of mini-artwork that are perfect for jewellery. The broken pieces are even more inspiring, as you can get a real grasp of the coloured layers, and I often find myself painstakingly cutting the broken edges trying to get a certain pattern or shape, or dissecting the board in order to try and create individual picture postcards from the designs. My favourite piece in the shop is a bangle made from a Girl deck, as I love its graffiti-like pattern and the fact that I’ve managed to feature part of the Girl logo on the back. I begin by gathering up the decks I’m going to use and cutting out the smaller pendants with a plug cutter and the larger pendants and bangles with a holesaw. I usually do this by eye, but it can take some careful manoeuvring in order to get the shape right. Once the pieces are cut and drilled, I sand each one down by hand. I must admit this is one of my favourite pastimes. I do it walking to work, on my lunch break, in front of the TV—wherever I can! Lastly, I seal the wood using beeswax, as I like using natural products, and I adore the smell of cut, waxed wood. I firmly believe that every scratch and mark on a deck is important, as it marks each new trick you’ve learnt and really documents your history as a skater. I’m yet to cut my own favourite board, as I feel slightly nervous about starting on such a treasured item, so I’m waiting until I feel properly ready! In the meantime, I’m trying to get my 3-year-old boy into skateboarding, although I think he’ll probably rebel! Nat’s jewellery is for sale at www.folksy.com/shops/oblue.

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I can’t run but I can walk faster than this robson cezar’s journey out of the favelas of brazil interview liz bennett, portrait des tan

It’s best to come clean right away about our connection with Robson Cezar. oh comely is based in the corner of a sprawling collection of art studios in South London, and Robson’s studio is diagonally opposite our office. When we moved in about nine months ago, Robson was an intriguing but somewhat forbidding figure. His studio was sealed up against the cold, and just a sliver of his intensely colourful artwork could be seen between the boards. He was rarely around, so we used to peer through the gap sometimes, until one day a note appeared in pencil: “Do not enter. Do not open. Do not look.” We’re not sure if he even wrote that note, as it now seems so out of character. His studio opened up slowly (as he incorporated the boards into his artwork, I suspect). We gradually became more and more fascinated by his work and his story. I was born in a favela in Brazil and I left when I was in my twenties. I didn’t go to school much, so I decided I needed to go to school and figure out what I was going to do with my life. I went to live in Bolivia. I discovered a new world, a new language. I’d never been out of Brazil. I couldn’t understand one word of Spanish. It took me a long time to learn. I got fascinated by the colour, by the things the indigenous people made by hand. And in Bolivia, they love Brazilian people. When I got there, I was really loved. Everyone talked to me. And then I started making things. I made a lot of Brazilian sweets and I made a lot of friends, and I stayed for two years. That was the start of everything. I thought, “I am an artist, that’s what I’d like to do: I like culture, I like colour, I like making things.” When we live in the favela, we create things, because we can’t buy anything. So I used to create my own toys. We created our own house. Everything is made out of found objects that we found on the streets. I was really good at that. I had a very frustrating childhood, because I didn’t play football. Everyone likes football in Brazil, because you’re born with that, but I wasn’t good at it. I couldn’t play anything, so I was left out. It was really strange for me, because my family didn’t have any education. Nobody taught me critical thinking. I used to do drawing and things, but nobody paid any attention, so everything I made was lost. So in Bolivia, I discovered that I like making things and I like selling things in the street. A lot of tourists got interested in these things I liked doing, so I got really inspired. Then, my sister was already living

in New York and she invited me to go and stay for a month. They gave me a visa to go there for a month and I ended up living there seven years illegally. It was a really scary situation, faking everything. I had a fake ID. I wanted to see the galleries and museums, and so I stayed. But after September 11th, people like me had no choice, we couldn’t find any more jobs in New York. It became very very hard. I went to Florida, but I didn’t like it. I went back to Brazil; nothing happened. Then I got an invitation to come to the UK. It was this old lady. Her husband died and she needed someone to come and care for the house. And she knew of my work from someone in New York. She hired me to live in the house, and care for it. But things went really bad when I was at university: she got ill, she got dementia when I was doing a BA in Fine Art at Plymouth. She’s the one who paid for my studies. She paid for everything; that’s why I’m here. Because of her generosity, and understanding of art. My work’s related to Tropicália. It was a movement in 1967 that changed culture in Brazil. A lot of people call it a ‘moment’. Tropicália is a mixture of a lot of things: bossa nova, samba, rock and roll. It’s a musical movement, but it really started as a fine art idea. Hélio Oiticica created Tropicália: he took the favela into a museum. This had a big impact. No one thought you could have the favela in a museum. I adopted Tropicália as part of my work, because that’s who I am. I was born in 1967, I am a creation of Tropicália. In Brazil, I didn’t have much education, because I didn’t learn things much in school, so everything I learned I learned from music. I work with bottle caps a lot. In Brazil, there’s a lot of African influence, and they use bottle caps to make a lot of stuff. When I was a child, I used to use bottle caps to make the wheels of my cars. I collected them. I found them beautiful, so I ended up with so many. I made belts and jewellery with them. I didn’t start making words out of bottle cap patterns until I did my BA at Plymouth. Now I am moving slowly, but I keep moving. It’s a like sculpture I made called “I can’t run, but I can walk faster than this.” The sculpture is cast in bronze from mechanical pieces. It’s the inside body of a toy dog with action man and barbie doll legs standing on top of a skateboard. It has wheels, so it has a direction, but it’s a fragile shape. You can find Robson’s work online at www.gorobsongo.com.

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the neurotic women’s club if she hasn’t texted back, go and break the door down words ellie phillips photo leah bernhardt Do you live on your own? Then do you ever suffer from the Bridget Jones fear that you will “die alone, and be found three weeks later half-eaten by alsatians”? If your jaw is hitting the floor then clearly the thought has never even crossed your mind. Turn the page. This article is not aimed at you. If, however, you are going, “Omigod, I thought I was the only person who worried about that!” then perhaps you might like to set up a branch of the Neurotic Women’s Club. According to the 2001 census, one-person households now represent 30% of all households in the UK. On top of this there are lone-parent households adding 10% to the total. So there are a lot of you out there living on your own. If you’re young, then perhaps you’ve done the house-share bit to death and you’ve just about had it up to here with arguing over the washing up and now it’s time to be truly grown up and go it alone for a bit. “I slipped over in the bath last year and whacked my head,” says my friend Jan, who has lived on her own for over a decade and wouldn’t dream of living any other way. “I was totally fine, but it got me thinking about what might have happened if I hadn’t been fine. Who would have found me exactly? My neighbours were all out at work. It’s not like they regularly come and check on me. It gave me a bit of a shock.” Jan is not 95 years old and she isn’t in the market for warden-assisted housing. She’s young and active but she’s worried and I can’t reassure her. I can’t reassure Karen either. She has a 2-year-old and is a lone parent. “OK, tell me if I’m being neurotic, but from Friday to Monday I don’t necessarily see anyone else other than my son. I mean, of course I do, but nobody comes to my flat routinely. I have no appointments, I don’t have to be at work, and what happens if I’m struck down or I fall downstairs and my son is on his own all that time?” The answer to this, of course, is that I have no idea what will happen. According to Karen, Sylvia Plath was lucky and here’s why: “Even when she committed suicide with her two children in the house, Sylvia Plath had milk and bread put aside for them because she was completely confident that someone would eventually be home to check on them. Nobody is coming home to check on me or my son from Friday to Monday.” So we decide to embrace neuroticism and, instead of sitting at home worrying about being eaten by alsatians, we set up our own community: The Neurotic Women’s Club. It operates on a simple buddy principal. You hook up with a buddy and you send a text every day before 10 am, just to let your buddy know you’re fine and then they answer you and you know they’re fine. One word: “Alive.” One word back: “Yey.” And if there is no reply you go round to their flat and you break the door down. Someone at work asked me why my phone alarm went everyday at 10 am. “It’s in case I haven’t had a text from my friend to tell me she’s alive,” I said. “We’re in the Neurotic Women’s Club.” Her jaw hit the floor. Oh dear, I thought, she thinks I’m insane. “I live on my own,” she said. “Can I join?” And so she did. And then so did one of her friends and I’ve now lost count of the number of people I know who are texting each other once a day to check they’re still alive. I did consider inviting my mum to join. After all, she’s 75 years old and lives on her own in a very higgledy-piggledy house with deathtrap stairs. But she’s not nearly neurotic enough, so I haven’t bothered.

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do home remedies ever work? is it even possible to get six colds in two weeks? words connie han

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echinacea

chicken soup

oranges

Folklore: Well-beloved by alternative, legwarmer-wearing types. Also my old classics teacher.

Folklore: Anything that is called ‘the Jewish penicillin’ has a reputation too weighty for me to put into words.

Folklore: Everyone in the world knows that vitamin C, and thus oranges by extension, are good for colds and flu.

Science: A 2003 systematic review concludes that echinacea has been shown to have immunomodulatory activities and to affect the course of illness in human subjects, but that the numbers involved are too small to come to any real conclusion.

Science: Studies suggest chicken soup has mucolytic and anti-inflammatory properties, though there is conflict in the literature. Jewish friend suggests that conflict probably due to not consistently using proper Jewish chickens, as Gentile chickens lack chutzpah for real mucous challenge. PubMed (and I) silent on this subject.

Science: The Cochrane Collaboration suggests vitamin C may prevent colds in times of stress, and may reduce the severity and duration of symptoms, especially in children.

Effort: Echinacea comes in pills and also in droplet form. It also comes with instructions, saying: (1) put it in your mouth, (2) swallow. Feeling of well-being: Did it work? Did it not work? Would my cold have gone away by itself anyway? Was it even really a cold? Is leather really a good look on anyone? On the plus side, it didn’t do any harm. Probably. ?/10. Doubt, uncertainty, credulity, regression to the mean

Effort: Immense. Feeling of well-being: Also immense—it really is exactly what you need—but immediately destroyed by how much washing-up I now have. I phone up my Jewish friend to whinge about it. “Being Jewish isn’t easy,” she says, adding, “Did you use a Jewish chicken?” I don’t know what that has to do with anything, least of all my washing-up, and say so, nasally. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

The evidence isn’t strong, however, and isn’t consistently replicated in randomised controlled trials. Also, it’s not about flu. So believe what you like. Effort: Easy-peelers are easy to peel. And that’s a scientific fact. Feeling of well-being: I feel great. Even with a blocked nose, citrus fruits taste healthful. And I do feel noticeably better the next day! 7/10. Anecdotal evidence: 1, science: 0

8/10 if your mum makes it for you 2/10 if you have to make it for yourself

whinging

liquorice

vinegar

Folklore: Everyone knows that if you don’t think positively, you’ll get cancer and die and it’ll all be your fault. On a serious note, there are many excellent articles on the tyranny of positive thinking online. For anyone who is concerned, I should reassure you that if I get cancer, which is distressingly likely, I intend to whinge about it until I die. And it won’t affect my prognosis one bit.

Folklore: Liquorice root has been used in a number of traditional medicine preparations over the years.

Folklore: My mother assures me that scientists first discovered the life-prolonging qualities of vinegar when a plague devastated China and only workers from the local vinegar factory were spared. Not only did 100% of them survive, they also became more handsome, grew better moustaches, and sired more children. I ask, “How do you know that?” “Every Chinese person knows that.”

Science: Luckily for me, the BMJ doesn’t agree with folklore. A systematic review in 2002 concluded there was insufficient evidence to support positive thinking and current studies are often weak in terms of power or methodology. (See?)

Science: Glycyrrhizin, the active component of liquorice root, has been shown to improve survival from 0% to 100%, to activate IFN-γ secretion from T-cells, and to inhibit cellular uptake of the virus—in mice infected with a lethal dose of influenza. That is exactly how I feel right now. Effort: Sourcing, preparation and transportation of liquorice root is gruelling and timeconsuming. Luckily, Waitrose have done all the hard work for me. I love Waitrose.

Effort: Strangely this one came intuitively to me, though by nature I am a stoic, uncomplaining sort. Still, I don’t want to boast.

Feeling of well-being: Liquorice tastes like medicine (delicious, delicious medicine), which reinforces my feeling of virtue.

Feeling of well-being: Immense. Of course, I do have a lovely, long-suffering boyfriend (see deodorant reviews, issue three). As soon as he comes home, I explain to him exactly how I am feeling at that very moment: moribund; despairing; contemplating my own mortality. “Oh poor you, you do look awful. Can I do anything to make you feel better?” “Do you think you could rub my back? With some scented oil?”

I’m going to tell you the truth: after eating the whole packet in one go, I feel on top of the world.

20/10. Probably the best thing ever

10/10 if you are a mouse infected with a lethal dose of flu. 9/10 if you might have been infected with a lethal dose. I don’t know, I mean, I don’t think I have, but I do feel awful

Science: I am too embarrassed to type in ‘vinegar’ + ‘vaporise’ + ‘influenza’ into PubMed so I do it in Google scholar instead. You may be interested that Hippocrates advocated vinegar inhalation for asthma, and that vinegar inhalers were used in the nineteenth century for consumption. What I’m mainly interested in is a series of case reports about “vinegar hysteria” in China during the recent SARS epidemic which makes me so smug that I temporarily forget I have a cold. Effort: Pour vinegar into pan. Heat pan. Inhale. Feeling of well-being: Perhaps it’s from years of being forced to inhale vinegar by my mother, but this makes me feel happily nostalgic. Also, even though I know it isn’t true, I feel as if my lungs are being thoroughly disinfected. 10/10 if you are Chinese. -1000000/10 if you are Ben Goldacre

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bookshelves we asked you to tell us about your books lucy eldridge The books on my shelf are a mix of old childhood books, recent novels, picture books, French language books and maps. I painted them using watercolours with a very tiny brush for the writing. I was introduced to House of Leaves on a date with a boyfriend—he demanded I read the first page, saying that if I didn’t like it, he probably couldn’t see me any more. 100 Years of Solitude is far and away my favourite novel, it’s beyond words brilliant. Miki is a photo story about huskies in Greenland. I had an obsession with husky dogs when I was little and I got this free at a library book give-away fair. (The book, not a husky sadly.) There’s a map of Copenhagen, a city which I am currently obsessed with reading about, though I have never been yet.

katie may This is the section of the bookshelves that not only enclose but form the structure of my bed. It was a one-off made for me as a child by my dad, Paul. I’m passionate about books and illustration and love combinations of them both. I bought Books Do Furnish a Room to convince myself that you can never have too many books. I’d love to have written it. My books are a mixture of reference texts I use when planning images, inspiring books, as well as old favourites and new discoveries such as the Gift, which I bought from Rob Ryan’s recent exhibition.

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rosie moss I am a recent textile design graduate and I am currently freelancing. Although design books mostly take up all the space of my bedroom shelves, I like to take inspiration from unlikely sources. I visited Edinburgh for the first time this year and picked up this unique guide to the city, although it is aimed at children, from a wonderful bookshop called Analogue. M. Sasek is an 1950s illustrator famous for his “This is” series. They are guides to cities across the world, accompanied by the most charming illustrations. I’m in love with this era of illustration and had to include my favourite book of all. It is a hefty anthology of Charley Harper’s wildlife illustrations. Also on my shelf are various Ladybird books from the early 1960s, many of which had belonged to my uncle when he was a child. To my joy, I found his name scribbled on the inside of each one with felt-tip!

james cressey I love scouring bookshops for a new find and the feeling that all the books that you have read, have been read by other people and interpreted in different ways. I’ve recently started reading books by musicians and looking into their lyrics and influences. Hence the Nick Cave, Patti Smith and Peter Doherty. Patti Smith’s Just Kids shows the beauty and truth of the New York music and art scene in the 70s as well as her evolving friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. My shelf is full of books that make you feel for the characters involved, or the feeling the artists went through, what they were thinking and what they create because of this. That’s why I have also included a couple of CDs on my shelf.

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Books you want to read (but haven’t realised yet)

When you open a new book, do you sometimes pause and just inhale that lovely new-book smell, anticipating the pleasure of a really good read?

Maybe, but I’m usually too keen to wait.

e Always. Actually, some hav e hav ht mig I ed mention p a problem. But I can sto to! nt whenever I wa

Would you ever wear silk and leather in one outfit?

Please, I’m no that obvio t us

You really need a knife, but you can only find 10 ,000 spoons. Isn’t that ironic, don’t you thin k?

Would I ever.

etr y Have you ever written po of two n tha re mo ed tain that con , ely lon k, the following words: dar t, ho l, sou , am dre despair, torn, vampire, lesbians?

o ironic, A little to think? u o don’t y

I would never admit to writing anything like that.

Wait—that WAS one of my poems! Back in 1999. What a masterpiece of terse emotion.

I have too much respect for language to pander to your gross Americanisms.

Milk-plus, ultraviolence, and literary exploration for me. The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter, 1979 Oh dear. You take your sensual-emotionalerotic-dangerous-self very seriously, don’t you? Never mind, duck, Angela Carter’s reimagined collection of fairy tales is your poison. It’s interesting, daring (for its time) and a wee bit selfindulgent. And I’m sure every character wears silk and leather.

Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons, 1932 A book for anyone with a healthy sense of (real) irony, and a dry sense of humour, Cold Comfort Farm is a modern classic. Don’t be fooled by the film adaptation— this is subtler, drier, and just plain better. Enjoy with a cocktail or, better, a cup of tea and a scone.

Pixel Juice Jeff Noon, 1998 Fun, dark, weird, Jeff Noon’s collection of short stories is pulp fiction for the cyber age. Not all stories hit the mark, but those that do are as bold and original as they come. Take in small doses just before bedtime.

So you’re there with your droogs, sitting in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up your rassoodocks what to do with the evening.

Relaxing with some wine, twirling my moustache, and scorning wordy gimmick ry, thanks.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Italo Calvino, 1979 A book for book-lovers. Calvino takes you deeper and deeper into a surreal, self-referential and totally addictive world of words. The plot, such as it is, reveals itself slowly over time and over genres. A book for curling up with on a winter’s night and losing yourself in.

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spring 2011

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