Spectator Life Autumn 2012

A R T / s t y l e / i n v e s t m e n t / F ILM / T rav e l

J UST I N C A R T W R I G H T p.41 The coffee revolution

R u by wax p.51 Bring on the Botox

p.33

DAV I D T H O M S O N p.17 Why movies must move

ISSUE 03

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S P E C TAT O R L I F E

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AU T U M N 2 0 1 2

armed and dangerous: Jeremy clarke gets a gun

A L E X A N DR A T H E

GR E AT

p.20

Rising star Alexandra Roach on fame, ambition and fan mail from Meryl Streep

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E DI T OR’ S L ET T ER

T

his quarter, Spectator Life kicks up the leaves and romps through your favourite autumnal activities, whether that’s going to the cinema, taking tea, shooting, heroic drinking at party conferences or buying yourself a (small, modest) island.

Wherever you plan to be (anyone for a spot of rhino tagging?)

I hope you do it in style, and, as airports continue their war on luggage and mascara, we’ve even taught you how to pack.

Indeed, you can get your Life fix wherever you are in the world.

On spectatorlife.com you can read more as well as go behind the scenes on our cover shoot. Alexandra Roach is on screens at the moment in Anna Karenina and Private Peaceful and her career is moving at such a pace that we can barely keep up. I’ve no doubt the crack team involved on our shoot will one day recount the time they checked into a penthouse with Alex Roach. . . and she made them listen to Beyoncé. The volume up, gazing out over the London skyline — it was a shame Spectator Life had to leave.

But there was work to be done. . .

Spectator Life www.spectatorlife.com Supplied free with the 22 September issue of The Spectator 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP Telephone: 020 7961 0200 www.spectator.co.uk ISSN: 2050-2192 Original design & art direction Kuchar Swara, DKW&R Cover image Katy Lundsford Location Corinthia Hotel, London Hair Errol Douglas MBE, assisted by Harry Kille Make-up Jerry Chaplin, using MAC

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CON T R I BU TORS

Chris Greenhalgh, who interviews film critic David Thomson, is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, based on his novel, closed the Cannes Film Festival in 2009.

His second novel Seducing Ingrid Bergman is published

by Penguin on 1 November.

Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist based in London, where she writes columns for the London Evening Standard and the Sunday Times. For this issue, she has written a guide to afternoon tea, which required extensive research in the guise of eating a lot of cakes.

Jeremy Clarke is the Spectator’s Low Life columnist. For this issue, after some persuading, he agreed to learn to shoot. A collection of Jeremy’s writing Low Life: One Middle-Aged Man in Search of the Point was published last year.

Camilla Rutherford, who writes about her love of pearls, is a model, actor, writer and mother of three.

She’s worked with directors from Robert Altman, in Gosford Park, to Wes Anderson in The Darjeeling Limited.

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Chairman Andrew Neil Editor Olivia Cole Deputy editor Danielle Wall Sub-editor Peter Robins Features assistant Will Gore Design & art direction Steve Fenn – Design by St, www.designbyst.com Client services director Melissa McAdden: melissa@spectator.co.uk, 020 7961 0212

London

Paris

New York

Berlin

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CONTENTS

17 47 33 61 C U LT U R E

STYLE

LIFE

T R AV E L

14. The Index Where to go and what to see in October, November and December

42. Remade in Chelsea Priscilla Pollara on a restaurant controversy in Sloane Square 44. Invested interests You too can buy an island, says Merryn Somerset Webb

17. A life in pictures Chris Greenhalgh interviews the film guru David Thomson

47. The world in an oyster Camilla Rutherford on the lustre of pearls

20. Interview: Alexandra Roach The young star of The Iron Lady talks to Olivia Cole

51. Suffer and be beautiful Ruby Wax sticks up for cosmetic surgery

27. The ironic American Tom Teodorczuk introduces playwright Jon Robin Baitz

52. Interiors built to last Designer Tim Gosling chats to Oscar Humphries

28. Painting the town Berlin still does street art better than anywhere else, says Harry de Quetteville

54. The art of packing Toby Young on why some men don’t know how to fill a suitcase

33. Bang for your buck Jeremy Clarke goes shooting

56. The wish list Must-have British jewellery

36. Party time Melissa Kite on the perils of conference season, and Mr Steerpike on the silliest conference moments

61. The rhino sleeps tonight Alex Clark goes on a mission to protect rare wildlife

38. Cake expectations Melanie McDonagh seeks out London’s best afternoon teas

64. Globe trotting Luxurious destinations worth the journey

41. A barista’s pupil Justin Cartwright learns how hard it is to make a great coffee

66. One to watch Stella Tennant on the jeweller William Welstead

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THE INDEX

T he Rive r Royal Court, from 18 October Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem conquered both the West End and Broadway. His new play is opening at the Royal Court’s 85-seat Theatre Upstairs, with no tickets available in advance. The queues promise to be an event in themselves.

OCT

NOV

L o nd o n F i l m F e s tiva l BFI, 10-21 October Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie is the opener, Mike Newell’s Great Expectations the closer.

And the next big thing? Well, this is where you’ll find out.

F r ie z e A rt Fa i r Regent’s Park, 11-14 October The reliably exciting contemporary art show celebrates its tenth year, bringing the work of more than 1,000 artists to its ‘bespoke temporary structure’ (we think they mean a tent).

Or phe us De s c ending Royal Exchange, Manchester, 24 October-12 November Imogen Stubbs stars in Tennessee Williams’s southern rewrite of Greek myth.

Pau l M e rt o n Vaudeville Theatre, 1-20 October Forget all those silent film documentaries — a live audience is the only proper foil for Merton’s intimidatingly quick mind.

S k y fa l l From 26 October After sky-diving with the Queen, Daniel Craig’s Bond faces an even ticklier challenge: saving Judi Dench’s M from Javier Bardem’s villainous Raoul Silva.

V l a dimi r J u row s k i a nd L o nd o n P hi l h a r mo nic Orc he s t r a Royal Festival Hall, 3 October The LPO’s principal conductor presents a characteristic mix of the British (Walton, Britten) and the Russian: extracts from Prokofiev’s War and Peace

Seduc ed by a rt National Gallery, 31 October-20 January Exhibition exploring early photographers’ yearning after artistic respectability, with the help of Old Master paintings selected from the National’s collection.

Gr i z z ly Be a r Various venues, October 17-22 The sound of indie Brooklyn comes to Gateshead, London, Manchester and Glasgow.

T imo n o f Athen s , Natio na l T he at r e Live Various cinemas, 1 November If you couldn’t get a ticket for Simon Russell Beale’s acclaimed performance, there’s always NT Live, with the show beamed to cinemas from cameras in the best seats in the house.

Ric h a r d I I I a nd T w e l fth N ight Apollo Theatre, from 2 November Mark Rylance, Stephen Fry and the rest of the Globe company head indoors for a West End run.

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T h e M ic h a e l Gr a n dage C o mpa n y Noel Coward Theatre, from 1 December Grandage’s foray into the West End has casting that reads like the guest list for the Baftas: Daniel Radcliffe,

Jou r n e y s E a st: A Di s c ov e ry o f H i dde n T r e a s u r e s The Wallace Collection, from November 17 That’s East as in East Wing — the part of the Wallace which houses its Dutch masters. This community art project should be an excellent chance to see them afresh.

DEC

T h e S c o tt i s h C ol ou r i st S e r i e s : S J P e p l oe Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, from 3 November Third in a series of shows exploring Scotland’s postimpressionist circle, with more than 70 Peploe paintings.

H ugh H ugh e s Barbican, 28 Nov until 8 December Wondrous storytelling theatre to rival the master of the genre, Daniel Kitson.

Jude Law, Dame Judi Dench and David Walliams. First up is Simon Russell Beale in Privates on Parade.

E l b ow 02 Arena, 2 December Another chance to check in with Guy Garvey, perhaps the nicest man in stadium-sized indie rock.

L o n d o n Ja z z F e st i va l Various venues, 9-18 November Venues including the Barbican, Southbank Centre and Ronnie Scott’s host gigs from an array of jazz stars including Herbie Hancock, Lucinda Williams and Sonny Rollins.

Ru f us Wa i n w r igh t Various venues, 16-23 November The operatically witty singer-songwriter plays songs from his latest record, Out of the Game.

T h e Mik a do ENO, from 1 December Jonathan Miller’s production transformed perceptions of the Savoy operas. It’s now 26 years old, and revived more often than patients on Casualty, but it’s still well worth catching.

Au t u m n rugby i n t e r nat io na l s Various venues, throughout November Australia, South Africa and world champions New Zealand are heading to Europe to take on the home nations in a series of test matches.

T h e H o bb i t : An Unexpected Jour ney From 14 December Peter Jackson returns to the world of Tolkien, with Martin Freeman as Bilbo. Here’s hoping the inevitable success doesn’t encourage him to tackle The Silmarillion.

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MOVI N G P I C T UR E S No one understands the power, pleasures and perils of film better than David Thomson Chris Greenhalgh film. Mesmerised by the antics on screen, he forgets his miseries and finds he that is starting to enjoy himself.

The message is that, even in a cruel universe, there are consolations that make life worth living. And among those consolations, movies rank high. At their

best, of course, movies are also works of art, and of the medium’s many distinguished critics, none is better informed or more authoritative than David Thomson. Thomson, author of the definitive New Biographical Dictionary of Film and that endlessly pleasurable inventory Have

Paramount / The Kobal Collection

In Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen’s character relates how he hit rock bottom.

He botches a suicide attempt and, having alarmed neighbours with a misfiring shotgun, he takes to the streets and walks for hours. Eventually he shuffles into a movie theatre where he watches a Marx Brothers

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CULTURE

John Engstead; United Artists; Bunuel-Dali / The Kobal Collection

Clockwise from top left: Charlie Chaplin in City Lights; Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron perform in Daddy Long Legs; Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious; Simone Mareuil in Un Chien Andalou; Marlon Brando.

Previous page: James Stewart in Rear Window, an apt symbol of screen obsession

You Seen? spoke to me from his home in San Francisco about his new book. Part film history, part thesis, part love letter and lament, The Big Screen is both all and none of these. He is quick to admit that his is an opinionated rather than an objective history. It is also a delightfully sly method of establishing a canon. He is tough on Allen, De Sica, Fellini, Hawkes, Spielberg, Tarantino, and generous to Antonioni, Bresson, Buñuel, Renoir and Wilder.

Welles remains central; Murnau’s Sunrise is a glory, but for sheer bliss it has to be Fred Astaire. ‘If you want to show an alien civilisation what the movies are about,’ he tells me, ‘you’d show them something with Astaire’. Indeed, the MGM musical and its gloomier twin, film noir, best embody the mix of celebration and unease, the appetite for desire and dread that lie at the heart of this book.

Thomson declares it his ‘central task’ to explore the influence movies have had.

Unsurprisingly, given the ambition of the

theme, there are gaps. There is little on how cinema changed the way we think about race, though he tells me its record is ‘shameful’. He does not offer much evidence for his remarks on film advertising and violence, and he has a fondness for the rhetorical question. But genuine insights abound, including about the way American movies have enacted the pursuit of happiness (with Marilyn Monroe as perhaps the most tragic example). He argues fondly that we learned ‘how to smoke and kiss and smile from the movies’, and more darkly that, for all the championing of male bravery, there is no matching advocacy for intellectual courage. He meditates on the affectless sex involved in hardcore pornography, and lest anyone doubts the power of Hollywood, he reminds us that one of its actors became President.

Thomson then sets out to develop a theory about screens, fearing that our attraction to them serves to remove us further from reality. First it was the TV in the liv-

ing room; now it’s phones, iPads, electronic games, all of which neutralise any attempt to protest because they are ‘always on’.

We exist in a kind of ‘luminous passivity’, and he finds an emblem for this quiescence in The Truman Show.

‘We used to believe the screen was there just to help us see the pictures … now we guess that all these screens are the real thing … subtle barriers between us and life’. Films are artefacts, he reminds us, a series of tricks on an illuminated screen.

‘You are not watching life. You are watching a movie.’ It is a variation on Plato’s parable of the cave, where prisoners chained in a cave mistake shadows projected on a wall for the real things that pass in front of a fire behind them. Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which James Stewart spends his time secretly watching his neighbours through their apartment windows, operates as a modern equivalent, as the hero slowly realises the truth of what is really going on behind the screens. It is a neat

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metaphor, and with it Thomson laments our general failure to engage meaningfully with the real world.

‘People ready once to remake the world … instead gaze at screens as an alternative,’ Thomson complains. Rather than participating in life, we have become spectators. This is perhaps to neglect the fact that today people use screens far more interactively; he does, though, acknowledge the key part played by screens in the downfall of the Soviet Union, and by mobile devices in quickening the Arab Spring. And as the looting that attended last year’s London riots revealed, most people don’t seem interested in political change; they just want more screens.

The real agenda emerges late in the book, like a negative from its tray of chemicals. While we might be wowed by Jaws, Thomson worries we are not emotionally involved. Similarly with Pulp Fiction, we come ‘ready to be dazzled but leave [our] feelings at home’. There is, he final-

Thomson wants audiences to rediscover the impulse that made them flinch at Un Chien Andalou, and weep at City Lights.

What he hankers after most is authenticity

ly declares, ‘nothing to match motion and emotion running together’. He wants audiences to rediscover the impulse that made then flinch at Un Chien Andalou, and weep at City Lights. For all the debunking of the Italian neo-realists and even method acting as fraudulent and dishonest, what Thomson hankers after, it seems, is authenticity.

bution, it is perhaps movies’ disposability that concerns him, and the lack of respect for the art form.

In the end, The Big Screen is not quite rigorous enough to be a history, nor fully developed enough to be a polemic. Its tone is too witty and anecdotal, its enthusiasm too uncontainable, its wisdom too distilled for that. No, like any great work of criticism, the book is essentially an education in good taste, and crucially it sends us back to the movies. Thomson’s montage of ecstasies and laments re-awakens in us the thrill and wonder of moving images and the need to know what happens next. In that, it is as close to definitive as any book on film can be. Just as we look at the movies, we should listen to him.

David T hom son’s T he Big S cree n : The Story of the Movies And What They Did to Us is published by Allen Lane on 11 October.

Getty Images; RKO/ El Bacrach / The Kobal Collection

The implicit conviction is that we should look to movies to tell us something about what it is to be alive in the world.

Thomson reserves particular scorn for the inauthentic: special effects, CGI, franchising and Facebook. He’s upset that today’s movies are consumed like fast food — the screens make them so readily available. While insisting that the movies are illusions, he seems disappointed that people are choosing to view films — and socially connect — at quite such a remove: he thinks we should know better. Though he is excited by the opportunities now presented to break the studios’ grip on distri-

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CULTURE

AF TER

MA G G I E She made her film debut as a young Margaret Thatcher. Is the sky the limit for Alexandra Roach?

Olivia Cole

I first met Alexandra Roach at a Bafta dinner at Dean Street Townhouse thrown by Harvey Weinstein. As I recall, we sat opposite each other, swapping notes on the problems of heels and the trials of negotiating a glittering industry party when you barely know anyone in the room. It was several courses before I worked out that these are difficulties that afflict ascendant stars of nominated movies as well as party-going journalists. Minus the blond helmet hair, with a tiny clutch in place of a capacious handbag, and ‘Welsh as a mountain goat’, Roach, 25, neither looked nor sounded anything like her portrayal of the young Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

Although the film garnered a mixed response, Roach’s performance as Margaret between the age of 16 and 33, battling toxic snobbery and sexism, was widely praised: warm, affecting and funny, it put this Rada graduate incontrovertibly on the map. How anyone, in their first film role, manages to live up to Meryl Streep (who played the mature Thatcher) is impossible to say, but somehow Roach managed. More than this, it was the scenes between the young Denis (played by another up-and-coming Brit, Harry Lloyd) and Margaret that established the Thatchers’ relationship on screen and gave the present-day scenes their emotional power.

Roach says that she has ‘no idea’ where the acting thing came from. Most of her family are or have been in the police force — her dad, though he is now a rugby coach, as well as her two brothers and her sister. But Streep, who watched Roach’s audition on tape and was instrumental in her being cast, plainly recognised something extraordinary in the young actress. ‘My agent rang me to say my tape had been sent and Meryl loved the way you brought comedy to Margaret Thatcher . . . and something along the lines of any actress who brings comedy to a part is a great actress in my eyes.’

Roach tells me the story over tea in a quiet place in Carnaby 20

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Katy Lunsford www.katylunsford.com

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CULTURE

Forward momentum: Alexandra Roach with Jack O’Connell in the forthcoming first world war drama Private Peaceful; and, below, as a young Thatcher in The Iron Lady

with Keira Knightley and Jude Law on the set of Anna Karenina.

Her mum and dad let her go along to a local acting workshop with a neighbour. ‘I thought I’ve got nothing else to do on a Saturday, dad’s watching the rugby, I’ll come.’ She was, she says — knowing how ridiculous it sounds — a ‘shy’ kid and they hoped it might take her out of her comfort zone.

As it happened, the timing of her arrival at the drama workshop was fortunate. She turned up on the day when casting directors for the soap opera Pobol y Cwm (it’s like a Welsh-language East­enders, she helpfully explains) were looking for young actors.

‘I was only there for a couple of hours,’ she says, ‘and it all happened really fast. I was like, what am I doing? I’m an actor now, cool.’

On set, she developed an insatiable curiosity about the technical side of film acting, something that stood her in good stead later. In LA, comically, directors and casting agents often see actors who start in their teens or twenties as at some kind of terrible

Street. By this point, her eyes are the size of saucers. Then, refusing to take any of this seriously, she starts laughing. ‘I was like, ok, can I have that in an email?’ She pauses: ‘So I can wallpaper my loo with it.’

But while it seems that Roach is enjoying an astonishingly rapid leap into the big time, she’s taking nothing for granted. ‘We have no control as actors at the start of our career, over anything,’ she says. ‘You have to fight your way to get in the room. And once you’re in the room, you have to fight and really try your best, in order to be better than the name that they’re thinking of hiring.’

It’s tempting to think the same applies to politicians, a clue perhaps, into how she thought her way into the mindset of Britain’s most infamously driven woman.

Alex comes from the small mining town of Ammanford, which she describes as a haven of friends more concerned with who they saw in the post office the other day than tales of hanging out

Pathe Productions Limited / Channel Four / The British Film Institute

‘We have no control as actors at the start of our career, over anything. You have to fight your way into the room.

And once you’re in the room, you have to keep fighting’

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ly inscrutable female leader, a fashion magazine editor based on Anna Wintour. Frankel recently let slip that he’d received a text from Streep in praise of her co-star. It said just two words: ‘hire her’, and he promptly did.

As for the Iron Lady, the adventure ended with the then 24-year-old in New York for the first time, cast out of a Hummer and on to the red carpet into a sea of flashbulbs. ‘The adrenaline, the nerves ... it was like, well, this is what I’ve seen people do in magazines so I’ll just copy that!’

She pulls a face that is comically stricken and then grins, full of a kind of pretend aplomb. ‘I’ll just do that! I’ll just do the handon-the-hip thing! And hope for the best!’

Something tells me that she’s going to be needing that hand-onthe-hip thing for a very long time to come.

Private Peaceful is in cinemas from 12 October.

disadvantage. This autumn she can be seen with an uncharacteristically haughty demeanour in Anna Karenina; in an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful that has far more subtlety than the War Horse juggernaut; and also harnessing that comic potential in Hunderby. In this, Alex has her bonnet moment — sending up every costume drama heroine you have ever wanted to throttle. And while details are yet to be formally announced, she is also rumoured to have landed the lead role opposite James Corden in Harvey Weinstein’s new project, One Chance. The film will bring to the screen the so-good-you-couldn’t-invent-it story of Paul Potts, the mobile phone salesman and opera tenor who won Britain’s Got Talent.

One Chance will be directed by the Hollywood powerhouse David Frankel, best known for his pitch-perfect fashion film The Devil Wears Prada, in which Streep played another supposed-

Katy Lunsford

Alex wears peplum mini skirt, £325, and swallow shirt, £275, by Tibi. Available from www.net-a-porter.com

CULTURE

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am E R I CAN I R ONI S T Playwright Jon Robin Baitz’s sharp, Anglophile sensibility won him a hit on Broadway: now it’s coming to London Tom Teodorczuk

T

hey don’t get more Anglophile than the American playwright and screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz. His favourite writers are Harold Pinter, David Hare and Caryl Churchill, and the ironic and acerbic sensibilities that run through his scripts could easily be mistaken for the work of a writer this side of the Atlantic.

As well as this, more than a few of his characters are English. Yet despite being renowned as one of the leading American dramatists of his generation, who has written films featuring Al Pacino and Sarah Jessica Parker, Baitz has been largely ignored in Britain, apart from two early autobiographical plays (The Film Society and Three Hotels) which were staged offWest End two decades ago.

Sometime in the next year that will change, when Other Desert Cities, the most acclaimed play of the 2011-12 Broadway season, is staged in London.

Baitz might be a fixture on the New York theatre scene but Other Desert Cities was his first work to play on Broadway, where it starred theatre stalwarts Stacy Keach and Stockard Channing and was directed by his former boyfriend Joe Mantello. The play chronicles a fraught Christmas in Palm Springs when a left-wing writer’s memoir about her late terrorist brother upsets her Republican grandee parents.

The American family crack-up is well-trodden dramatic terrain but Baitz’s

humane and humorous approach to his characters elevates Other Desert Cities.

It’s clichéd to frame a dramatist’s life as a play but it’s irresistible in the case of Baitz. Act One: Born in Los Angeles, he grows up in Brazil and South Africa owing to his father working for the Carnation milk company. Act Two: He moves as a teenager to Beverly Hills and works as a personal assistant for a tyrannical film producer, getting a debut play, Mizlansky/Zilinsky, out of the experience. Act Three: Baitz’s plays, many of them featuring background material from his peripatetic childhood, make him a playwright to be reckoned with. Act Four: He goes to Hollywood and creates the ABC TV drama Brothers and Sisters, starring Rob Lowe, only to be fired in spectacular fashion in 2008. Act Five: Creative crisis, followed by Other Desert Cities becoming a Broadway sensation.

When we meet at the downtown restaurant Odeon, Baitz, 50, doesn’t disguise his happiness at making his Broadway breakthrough: ‘It’s an utterly new experience for me. Every night there are 700 people there and everything becomes larger and more magnified.’

Other Desert Cities emerged from the dark cloud that descended over Baitz — known to his friends as Robbie — after he was fired (he chronicled the experience, which coincided with the writers’ strike, in a series of biliously eloquent blogs.) ‘After I left television, I found myself writing for the Huffington Post, which is a horri-

ble Hollywood cocktail party of a journal, about the strike,’ he says. ‘I wrote some really nasty shit. Most of it was to some degree true but I was left reeling by my own vitriol and I thought of the Joan Didion quote that writers are always betraying somebody, and I wondered who I might hurt, having managed to get myself fired from my own television show.’

That coincided with his increasing frustration at the partisan political process: ‘Americans have come to hate other Americans now in such a profound way that it seems to me to be verging on civil war.’ Baitz calls the Tea Party a ‘black hole of negation’ but he also objects to the left caricaturing the right. ‘The notion that a Republican like Paul Ryan is a slobbering capitalist monster is patently untrue. I’m incredibly bored by the writhings and contortions on both the left and right in which everybody vilifies everybody else endlessly and there’s no more dialogue.’

In that spirit, Baitz goes out of his way not to demonise Lyman Wyeth, the patriarchal former ambassador and Hollywood actor in Other Desert Cities, for being on the right of the political spectrum; even his Reaganite Republicanism is hardly in vogue today.

‘I described the Wyeth family in rehearsals as very much a dying breed,’ Baitz says.

‘They are articulate and humane and trying to make sense of a shifting landscape under their feet.’

After the success of Other Desert Cities, Baitz’s star has never shone brighter, not that he would admit to it. Team Robbie, I say, is pretty strong. ‘If only there were more people on Team Robbie,’ he responds, ‘my life would be so much easier.’ Later this year, Baitz will be writing the script for the film adaptation of Other Desert Cities, which he reveals will be directed by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours).

‘Screenwriting is a kind of science that is about what is in the frame. Great British writers have made great screenwriters. I think it’s the English schoolboy education system of rigour and reason.’

Back to Baitz lauding English writers.

When Other Desert Cities is staged over here, I suspect his take on fragile family life will do wonders for the British wing of Team Robbie.

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CULTURE

PA I N T I N G

THE

T OW N

Berlin has turned street art into a major cultural draw — without losing its subversive edge

H

ow do you know if you are living in a city whose fortunes are on the rise? You might have found yourself bicycling through a mound of magenta chalk dust, leaving a magical neon trail in your wake, or noticed that signposts, traffic lights and telephone exchange boxes have been altered by the addition, say, of cheeky figurines fashioned from wine corks. These kind of arty happenings are

now commonplace in the streets of Berlin, a city that has changed immeasurably in the last decade or so.

Loft apartments have replaced squats and so-called street art has flourished, to the extent that trendy districts of former East Berlin now resemble open-air galleries. It’s a pattern of gentrification that will be familiar to the skinny-jeaned residents of formerly run-down corners of London, where ­Banksy, that master of clever-clever

iconoclasm, whips up wall stencils in minutes. Still, Berlin is different. It has no single, dominant, media-savvy maestro of the urban canvas. Rather it is home to a bubbling array of talent, drawn to a city with a unique history of decorating the drab slabs that surround us.

In fact, without Berlin we probably wouldn’t consider Banksy a star at all.

Cedar Lewisohn, curator of the 2008 Street Art exhibition at Tate Modern, puts it like

Getty Images

Harry de Quetteville

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CULTURE

Previous page: Lisa Hankow paints a giant map of Berlin in the city centre.

The art installation is at the scale of 1:775, created to coincide with the 775th anniversary of Berlin, which the city will celebrate in October.

This page; Berlinbased French artist Thierry Noir, who started painting murals on the Berlin Wall in 1984.

this: ‘It’s a rule of thumb that when you see graffiti you know that a district is on the way down; when you see street art you know it’s on the up.’ And the crucible for that transformation — from graffiti to street art, vandalism to museum-piece — was Berlin. The RAF did its bit. It turns out that the German language, with its wonderful ability to snap one noun into place on top of another, has a single word for the vast, windowless side of a building exposed when the house next to it has been blown away: brandmauern. After 1945, Berlin’s brandmauer were testament to devastation. But in the 1970s some Berliners began to see creative opportunity in them. Graffiti artists, drawing on close creative ties between Berlin and New York, set about covering these vast areas of brickwork. It wasn’t strictly legal, but municipal authorities looked the other way. Then, in the dilapidated area of

Kreuzberg, in the centre of the city looking over the kill zone between East and West, artists began to experiment on the urban fabric just metres away from the controlfreakery of the communist regime. ‘It was kind of an oasis there,’ remembers the Berlin artist Daniel Ginelli. ‘It was the end of town. Nobody cared what artists got up to.

Nobody was interested. Art on the Berlin Wall is a big thing now, but at the time no one cared.’

In the 1980s, artists such as Thierry Noir, Kiddy Citny and Lisa Brown began to cover the Wall with bold cartoonish figures that stuck two fingers up to the harshly regulated world on the other side.

When the Wall came down, some of them became rich and famous. Others remained obscure. But their spirit quickly infected the former East. Tacheles, a building on Oranienburger Strasse, was occupied by an

artistic collective in 1990, providing workshops almost free of charge. Its brandmauern became city landmarks. ‘At that time there was no difference between graffiti and street art,’ says Ginelli. But then new kinds of work began to appear. Instead of using spray paint, artists began to take all kinds of media on to the street. In 2001, for example, a project called Blinkenlights invaded the Haus des Lehrers, a concrete block, or plattenbau, on the monumental Alexanderplatz, heart of the former East.

By turning the huge building’s lights on and off in sequence its façade became a giant pixellated screen. In 2003, Roland Brueckner captivated city dwellers with posters featuring a forlorn man appealing for the return of his lost love, Linda. (It later emerged she was a fabrication.)

Today, Berlin’s street art is thriving as never before. Much of it still involves send-

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Window down, its driver harangues privacy-obsessed Berliners through a loudhailer with the message: ‘Google knows what you look like. Don’t try to hide.’ When he is dragged from the front seat in a staged lynching, a passer-by joins in.

Of course, the street artists are not immune to the lure of commercial success. Linienstrasse and Torstrasse in Mitte were once their canvas; now those streets are home to the high-priced galleries that exhibit their work. If the subverters are in the end subverted, however, there are plenty more to replace them, even if they might currently be unknown or disregarded.

‘We think of a Berlin street art scene, but I’m not sure there is such a scene, with artists getting together after a day’s work for a beer,’ says Ginelli. ‘Sometimes it’s a very lonely lifestyle.’ But in the German capital, it’s the act of creation that counts.

AFP/Getty/Mark Ralston; Iain Masterton

ing up the behemoths of society — whether that be the former communist regime or contemporary corporate giants. And much of it involves the city’s residents. Jan Vormann started a craze by filling in the cracks in buildings with brightly coloured Lego blocks and encouraging others to do the same. It was Lepe Rubingh who spread chalk dust at crossroads, to be spread around town by the tyres of passing cars.

The politics of street art is still potent, too. Neozoon, a trio of female artists from France and Germany, are behind the startling silhouettes of orangutans swinging along building façades. But the trio also modify advertising hoardings, adding traces of fur to the impossibly smooth underarms of bikini models. Then there’s Aram Bartholl, who built his own Google Car, the camera-equipped vehicle behind Google’s Street View. A film shows the car in action.

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BAN G

F O R YO UR

BUCK S

Our Low Life correspondent had never really approved of shotguns. Then we put one in his hand…

John Carey / Getty

Jeremy Clarke ‘Do you shoot much’ asked Edward Walters, manager of the West London Shooting School (1901), the oldest shooting school in the world. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I prefer to see the dogs work.’ This was deliberately pompous: an attempt at humour. And yet I have always disliked the idea of shooting at wildlife with shotguns.

Too much technology, too little art. I’ve been on a farmers’ fox shoot and seen the lads banging away at a fox that was running across the guns, and was clearly being peppered, but poor Tod kept on running. Ghastly. The best I could say about blasting away at small living things with a shot pattern 30 inches wide is that it isn’t ­cricket.

And to be frank, as the former vice chairman of the South West Terrier, Lurcher and Ferret club, and an Essex man, there was an element of chippiness in my antipathy. People who shoot, I thought or imagined, were by and large either members of a social class who prefer to have their sport dished up on a plate, or dilettante sportsmen from the up and coming silly-money set.

Edward Walters and I were standing chatting in the club lounge a few minutes before my one-hour shooting lesson began. On a recommendation, I’d booked my lesson with the school’s senior shooting instructor, Mr Alan Rose, who has been a WLSS instructor for 40 years. He learned to shoot under the famous British shooting 33

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LIFE

man Percy Stanbury, a former WLSS chief instructor and inventor of the influential Stanbury shooting technique.

The Stanbury method for massacring God’s creatures is founded on the shooter’s stance. The body weight should be kept on the front foot, whatever the shot — to the right, left or centre. The chest should always be at an angle of about 45 degrees to the line of fire. There should be a slight forward lean, with the front hip kept well forward and the rear heel slightly raised. The straight front leg acts as a pivot allowing movement of the hips during the swing. Get the style right, argued Percy Stanbury, and accuracy will follow.

Other techniques, such as that championed by small-bore shooting champion Robert ‘Bob’ Churchill, favour a squarer stance, with weight moving on to either foot.

Alan Rose is considered one of the best shooting instructors alive, and wealthy shooters from all over the world fly him in to give them a lesson. As Edward and I chatted, a suntanned Mr Rose emerged from the gun room, seated himself on a low stool beside the door and set about lacing up his boots.

At the same moment, Mr Will Kemble Clarkson from the London gunmaker James Purdey and Sons arrived, unlatched the gun case he was carrying, reverently lifted the lid, took out the three sections of a shotgun, snapped them together, and placed the result in my hands. A Purdey Sporter over and under with 28-inch bar-

My entire shooting experience is precisely six shots at six clays in Scotland last year, hitting one

rels. Seven and three quarter pounds of elegance in fantastically marbled Turkish walnut, polished gunmetal, and closely engraved rococo scrollwork. The scrollwork took a master engraver a month.

A top-class London gun, in short, and probably the most satisfyingly beautiful man-made object that I will ever be given to hold.

I was surprised by the gun’s lightness. It wielded easily. At £31,000, the Sporter is James Purdey and Sons’ entry-level shotgun.

Being presented with a work of art like that, my shooting prejudice had been clipped in full flight. If the tools for the job were as 34

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Cultura/Tim E White; John Warburton-Lee

lesser known regions of that country. ‘In the ’ead,’ said Mr Rose, twinkling at him.

We put on shooting jackets, helped ourselves to ear defenders and strolled towards the butts. Alan Rose showed me how to carry a shotgun broken, and remembered the days when Ealing was still a rural district and he and his pals could walk down the high street with airguns and nobody thought anything of it. ‘You couldn’t do that now,’ he said. He spoke with an Ealing accent, but an Ealing accent from when it was a country place.

We stopped near a wooden hoarding with what looked like a pantomime prop chicken suspended against it. Mr Rose took a brush and briskly whitewashed the surface of the hoarding, then he dropped a cartridge in the top barrel of the Purdey and asked me to fire at the chicken from about 20 yards with both eyes open.

‘From the hip, Alan,’ I suggested. He twinkled his eyes at me as if he wasn’t against the idea one hundred per cent, but we were there to learn gun safety, among other things. Instead of replying, he positioned the gun stock against my shoulder — at a higher place than I would ever have imagined.

As I was about to squeeze the trigger, I turned my head towards his and said, ‘Both eyes open, Mr Rose? Are you sure?’ His expression vividly indicated that he would rarely lie about such a thing.

As you can probably tell, I had a lot to learn.

beautiful as that, I was beginning to see the attraction. The next moment my prejudice received another hit: Will introduced me to Mr Rose, still on his stool wrestling with his bootlaces.

‘Do you shoot much?’ he asked, looking up at me with disarming frankness. My entire shooting experience is precisely six shots at six clays in Scotland last year, hitting one. ‘A low partridge or pheasant on my left is my Achilles heel, Alan,’ I said. Behind Mr Rose’s cheerful, outdoor countenance lies the seductive combination of maximum good humour allied with the humility of a saint.

Alan Rose utterly confounded every one of my prejudicial expectations of what a celebrated shooting pontiff would be like.

‘To be honest I’ve fired a shotgun six times in my life,’ I said.

‘But I used to be quite handy with an airgun when I was a kid.’

I didn’t really think this was a relevant or sensible contribution to our conversation, either. But Mr Rose thought it was. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, with quiet seriousness, unexpectedly allowing the simple airgun its own dignity. Encouraged by that, I boasted, ‘I got so good with it, I used to fire it from the hip.’ Mr Rose was comfortable with this, also. ‘Yes, we can do that,’ he said gently.

‘Have you been anywhere lately, Alan,’ asked Will Kemble Clarkson. Mr Rose said he’d recently returned from a shooting trip to Germany and confessed to shooting a roe deer while there.

‘Whereabouts,’ asked Will, perhaps offering a familiarity with the 35

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LIFE

Par t y time Expect gaffes aplenty this conference season — starting with the fashion choices Melissa Kite ‘What happens at Fight Club stays at Fight Club,’ said Brad Pitt to Edward Norton in the cult movie.

The same closed-door policy should operate at party conferences. MPs should not be sent far away from home to drink and plot in hotel bars all night, then pontificate at public events the next day.

No wonder some of the greatest political gaffes of all time have taken place at conference, with some truly awful violations of taste and decency. After all, if the man in charge of upholding the government’s image can manage to get himself arrested at conference, what hope do the rest of them have? Steve Hilton was tired, stressed and emotional after the Conservative gathering in 2008 when he got into a row with train staff. Police were called to Birmingham station and the PM’s director of communications was carted off and fined £80 for disorderly behaviour.

No wonder David Cameron imposes strict rules on what MPs may and may not do at these events. For the past few years, there has been a champagne ban in line with the government’s austerity drive. This year, once again, MPs will be forbidden to be photographed with a flute in their hand, partly in an attempt to curb their consumption, but mostly so they don’t look at odds with the rest of us in triple-dip recession Britain.

In practice, all this means is that they will only drink champagne in private parties in their hotel suites. The debauchery continues apace behind closed doors. Some of the most frenzied partying I have ever

If the man in charge of upholding the government’s image can manage to get himself arrested at conference, what hope do the rest of them have?

seen has taken place at conference. MPs are epic partiers who can drink, argue and even physically fight with the best of them.

Of course, they used to be able to blame the sea air. MPs traditionally gathered in

seaside resorts for their annual shindig.

A typical conference season would involve a combination of Blackpool, Bournemouth and Brighton. Every now and then, they would troop off to a genteel spa town like Harrogate, where the tea rooms of old England would reverberate with their raucous behaviour.

But not any more. Not since David Cameron insisted on the Tories relocating their conferences to ‘modern’ metropolitan settings. This has opened the way for a whole new era of embarrassing incidents, with, for example, Tory MPs getting lost in Manchester’s red light district and being found wandering dazed and confused around the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham.

Fashion is always a big feature of the conference season. Theresa May started it when she made her ‘nasty party’ speech whilst wearing a pair of leopard-print Russell and Bromley kitten heels.

Samantha C ameron now tr iggers a high-street stampede with her choice of outfit — there was, for example, the fairly unremarkable but endearingly girlnext-door Marks & Spencer spotty dress that sold out in minutes after she wore it to her husband’s speech.

Often, she opts for an eye-wateringly expensive designer blouse, but accessorises it with a high-street skirt and a pair of

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cheap Zara heels. Then there is the traditional shot of her arriving at conference in her faded denim jeans. Personally I wish she would retire those awful scuffed-up boots she keeps wearing. We don’t really buy that she is feeling the pinch, so she may as well wear Louboutins.

Arguably, the biggest ever fashion faux pas at conference was when generously proportioned David Davis supporters sported tight white ‘DD for me’ t-shirts in aid of his leadership bid. Unsurprisingly, that bid promptly went bust.

The conference visitor should pack strategically. Having attended these events for many years, I would recommend ladies to fill their case with LBDs, big heels and big jewellery. Only use waterproof make-up, because everywhere is going to be jam-packed and you will sweat buckets as you sip warm, cheap white wine and try to make conversation with an even sweatier MP. If you are not careful, once you have traipsed from one reception to another, and listened to endless MPs vent their spleen, you could end up looking like a version of Munch’s The Scream.

As for where to go and what to avoid, we should turn to a veteran of these occasions far more experienced than me. my very close friend Tamzin Lightwater, who has worked for David Cameron for many years and now has a very senior secret role at No. 10, tells me: ‘Avoid events attended by cabinet ministers. No one will say anything, because if they do we take their jobs off them. You may even have to make small talk with Theresa May and once you’ve complimented her shoes that’s it, you just have to stand there in silence wondering if she will put a control order on you if you walk away to talk to Nadine Dorries — so much more fun!

‘Do go to the Spectator party, which will be beyond fabulous. Also, Tory grandees throw super parties. I remember in opposition once, Lord Hesketh had us all over to his suite and the bath was full to the brim with bottles of Pol Roger. I got a bit squiffy and accidentally briefed that we might have to cut child benefit and put income tax up to 50 per cent, which caused a frightful hullabaloo. I was only joking but years later we ended up doing it!

I guess that’s politics for you!’

Telling Ta le s The Spectator’s Mr Steerpike recounts some infamous conference moments

W

hat could possibly go wrong when you lock 10,000 political hacks and flacks in a hotel for 96 hours and let lobbyists pick up the tab? Well that’s party conference for you, and there have been some excellent tales of drunken debauchery over the last few years.

The most riotous parties are the ones upstairs in the private suites of the main conference hotel. Representing the Tory side, Lord Strathclyde fills his bathtub with ice and champagne and opens his doors every year. Rumour has it that he always reserves a magnum for later.

Last year, one Tory MP went so far as to punch a colleague. Other MPs had to drag one of them away. It was all denials the next day, but multiple witnesses reported that a woman was involved . . .

Damian McBride, perhaps the most notorious Westminster boozer of his generation, has the most high-profile conference story attached to his CV — the infamous Peroni-gate of 2008. News of Ruth Kelly’s resignation from Brown’s government had prematurely reached the BBC, and after many hours on his Italian beer of choice, Brown’s poisonous spinner found himself caught up in a briefing storm in the conference

hotel. Though various blurry versions of events have done the rounds, what is known is that McBride found himself forced to go on the record to a huddle of lobby hacks in the bar at three in the morning.

Work hard and play hard seems to be the mantra for spinners at conference so it’s hardly surprising they let off some steam in the wee hours.

While still in opposition, one Tory spinner, having been out until dawn, arrived later in the morning to brief journalists in a highly delicate state.

When one journalist complained that she could smell sick, the quick-thinking spin doctor blamed a nearby guide dog.

It worked.

Mr Steerpike’s favourite conference story involves the Conservatives’ new head of press, Susie Squire. Before she worked for the party, this leggy brunette was turning heads at the conference bar. One amorous and leathered lobbyist attempted seduction by giving Squire his spare hotel room key, suggesting she join him later.

Unimpressed, she saw an opportunity for revenge when another plastered delegate made his move. Slipping him the very same key, she told him to join her upstairs.

Oh to have been a fly on the wall when the two men came face to face.

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CA K E EX PE CTAT IONS The rebirth of afternoon tea Melanie McDonagh

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civilisation, this mid-afternoon break for tea and cake. It bridges the gap between lunch and dinner in a potentially sublime way; wonderful in summer in the open air, and no less pleasurable in winter, when your thoughts turn to crumpet. History doesn’t relate if Henry had a fondness for a toasted teacake, but as he put it, ‘There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.’

The nature of the contemporary sandwich, however, has had an overhaul. At The Goring they do rather a good guinea fowl one with mushroom. The Ritz afternoon tea does its cucumber sandwich with cream cheese, dill and chives on caraway-seed bread; its smoked salmon one with lemon butter on rye; and its chicken with horseradish cream. Any hotel worth its salt will keep the sandwiches coming ad lib, so that dispiriting moment when you’re too polite to take the last smoked salmon sandwich needn’t be a problem.

Ask for more. The same goes for scones. They should be light and warm with a choice of fruit or plain. There must be cold clotted cream, and strawberry or raspberry jam; it’s so familiar, you forget what a sublime combination that is.

Dean Street Townhouse recognises that a solitary scone can be a healthy replacement for lunch, and offers them on the menu, light, warm and — crucially — singly. The jam is a critical indicator of a really good tea; the strawberry jam at Brown’s tastes as if it has just been made.

That said, some French versions of tea skip the scones altogether; at Galvin Demoiselle, the little bistro overlooking the Harrods food hall, you get madeleines instead, which are hard to find in London; and there’s not space here to do justice to the invasion of the Ladurée macaroon.

fternoon tea used to be a fairly sedate affair, where you knew pretty well what you’d get on your cake stand. Sandwiches to begin with, followed by scones or crumpets and then Swiss roll, meringues or fruit cake to round things off. Yet the London afternoon tea, at least the grander sort, has now become a very different kind of meal and there’s a spectrum of variants on offer. Think mini French-style desserts instead of Victoria sandwich, and carb-shy cake. You could even go for a Man Tea or a detox version.

Afternoon tea is now a very big deal and where it used to be the cheap way of getting the grand hotel experience, it will now set you back up to £40 per person. You can get a set-price lunch at the same establishments for less. Londoners who are time poor with a sweet tooth will even maintain that a tea meeting is a profitable use of time. So much less of a disruption to your working day! And you get to eat cake!

Let me put my cards, or rather carbs, on the table here. I’m a fan of the trad version of afternoon tea. Put me in front of a threetiered assembly with well-filled sandwiches — or even slices of bread and butter — at the bottom, scones or teacakes in the middle, and sponge cake on top, and I’m happy, especially if you throw in a tart on the side.

I grew up on the plebeian version of tea, which is simply your evening meal if you’ve had your dinner at lunchtime; it’s known in polite circles as high tea, though I’ve yet to hear a mother calling to her brood on the street: ‘Would you ever come in for your high tea?’

As Henry James, an American in London, observed in The Portrait of a Lady, it’s one of the great English contributions to 38

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Illustration by Emily Robertson

(there’s a roof garden). My gentleman friend loved it, though he paled at the price.

But for the wildest, weirdest takes on afternoon tea, the boutique hotels excel themselves. There’s the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party at The Sanderson, a barking mad but rather wonderful assortment of Drink Me bottles of fruit jelly, sandwiches made from coloured bread, blueberry lollipops and chocolate cake shaped like a rabbit’s watch. The website warns: no fancy dress.

The W Hotel’s Rock’n’Roll Tea comes served on a vinyl cake stand, with each creation a tribute to a song. Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix becomes a slice of mauve Battenburg. Delicious, especially washed down with a Mar-tea-ini, because if you are truly a rock star (if only in your head), doubtless you like your cakes with something stronger than a pot of Earl Grey. You can, in fact, sometimes forget that the point of afternoon tea is the tea. Brown’s treat it as seriously as wine, with adjectives including ‘chocolate’ and ‘honeyed’ on the menu.

The best afternoon teas, it must be said, are often the ones you make yourself. If you’re pushed and can only run to sandwiches, you may like to call up some really good cupcakes from Sweet Redemption; I liked the gluten-free one made with almonds and soaked in lime syrup. Tea can be healthy — really, it can!

But if a cupcake just won’t cut it, for the whole tea experience, sans effort, the lovely Mary McCoy of Mary’s Tea Parties will come to your home, armed with all the main constituents, from good, substantial sandwiches to scones and a succession of little cakes: eclairs, passion fruit tart, frangipane. She’s an actress, and does the waitressing with aplomb. And, best of all, there’s no washing up.

The trouble with afternoon tea — or perhaps its point — is that it is the ultimate carb fest. Sandwiches, scones and cake amount to a celebration of starch and sugar enough to wipe the pout off the face of your average hedge-fund girlfriend, let alone the Dukan diet brigade or the fashion pack. And this may account for the contemporary top-tier solution to the problem: mini jellies, panna­ cotta, mousses in little glasses.

Brown’s could be said to have their cake and not eat it. They have the delicious little desserts all right, but for traditionalists there’s the option of a proper Victoria sponge or fruit cake as well.

They have also invented the virtuous low-carb Tea Tox, with open spelt bread finger sandwiches or a chicory leaf with quail’s egg on the bottom plate, a fruit skewer instead of scones, and a dense gluten-free chocolate cake sliver or chocolate shell with fruits. Reader, I came to sneer but ate the lot, excepting the lettuce leaf with couscous.

The Berkeley has a different approach for fashionistas. Its celebrated Prêt-à-Portea gives you a sweet take on fashion, with iced biscuits inspired by that season’s collections. (And if you are very restrained you can request a very pretty doggy bag and ration them over several days.)

Afternoon tea poses, perhaps, something of a problem for nonmetrosexual men, in that it’s a bit girly. What they want is a bit less of the finger sandwiches and a bit more in the way of pie and scotch eggs. The Soho Sanctum Hotel offers the Gentleman’s Tea, which gives you as much substance as you could want in the way of a plateful of mini savouries, from rabbit pie to steak sandwich. It doesn’t come cheap, at £50, but that’s probably because of the silver tankard of Jack Daniel’s on the side and the cigar to finish 39

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5/9/12 16:26:27

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31/08/2012 14:38 3/9/12 13:07:30

A B a r i s t a’ s P U P I L Can just anyone learn to make a perfect cup of coffee?

Justin Cartwright

I

t was my idea to do a two-hour course of barista training. I was keen to learn how to finish off my coffee with a picture of a heart or a palm tree or perhaps a swan. I invited one of my sons to come along, as he too is a coffee addict.

Now we are sitting in the barista school of Prufrock Coffee, in Leather Lane, looking at a whiteboard. This in itself is disturbing: insofar as I can remember, the whiteboard did not exist when I was at school. On the board are some simple graphs which demonstrate the relationship between dilution and extraction. The temperature should be 93.5°C, the dose per cup should be 15g of ground coffee, and the time allowed (presumably for the coffee to infuse) is ideally between 28 and 32 seconds. I hope I have this right. My son is something of a scientist, and he is clearly finding this easy. At school, I won the essay prize, so I am easily confused.

In the new artisan coffee movement, Jeremy Challender, a 32-year-old Australian who is one of the founders of Prufrock Coffee, explains, precision is everything for the barista. Jeremy is able to analyse his coffee with the benefit of an app on his phone. He also has something called a spectroscope (or perhaps it is a spectrometer) to see what each dose consists of, I think.

Grinding is very important, and this innovation guarantees an exact dose every time. For instance, if your Guatemalan beans (I am simplifying for your benefit) have a better flavour in a 18 g dose than your Kenyan beans at 14 g, you can capture these settings for ever. This little gizmo costs £400. Complete barista-standard coffee machines cost from £1,600 to more than £20,000. Jeremy has a number

of fancy machines, and one Dutch machine which he seems to favour. It has chrome fins, like an old Cadillac.

So far we have spent more than an hour discussing the technicalities. I haven’t made art on milk froth yet. I haven’t begun to live the dream. We now get on to grinding and tamping. We are shown how to work the grinder, which is operated by hand, producing the traditional clunk, clunk of coffee bars. We transfer this to the basket and then we tamp. My son goes first. Jeremy is impressed: ‘Nice technique, classical.’

It’s my turn and I use the wrong tamp — too small for the basket — and the coffee is cruelly shunted into drifts. Coffee must be treated gently, and smoothed out.

I hadn’t realised it was so temperamental.

Jeremy levels my effort with his forefinger. He loves coffee; it produces a beatific smile on his face. I have read a coffee blog from Dublin which says that the ‘bleeding bunny syndrome’ is fatal for baristas: don’t demonstrate weakness or you will be savaged by your customers. Jeremy is serenity itself.

Now I must heat the milk to the required 93.5°C. This can be done unscientifically, by placing the palm of your hand under the titanium milk jug. When you say ‘ouch’ it is ready. You can, of course, use the thermometer. You want 2oz of foam in a 6oz cup — I think. Now I have no idea what the brew ratio is supposed to be, not even what it means. But I have watched the next bit carefully, and pour my milk into the middle of the cup from 10 cm, and then very close up to make the palm effect I am after.

Instead, I make an unremarkable round white blob in the middle of the cup, a caffeinated île flottante. My son goes next. I simply cannot believe what happens: he

makes a perfect palm frond. It seems to appear as if by magic.

O

ur two hours are up. Jeremy tells me something about his life: he is from Sydney, and came to this country on a visit, taught jazz piano, and played publicly, but he was always interested in coffee. And this coincided with the new interest in coffee brought to this country by Australians.

Jeremy joined up with the world barista champion for 2009, Gwylim Davies, a Yorkshireman, to start Prufrock Coffee.

Their first venture was a concession in a clothing shop in Shoreditch High Street, and now they also have the Zen-like Prufrock in Hatton Garden. They serve exquisite coffees as well as teas and some lunchtime eats, such as avocado on toast with lime juice. Very Australian. But what actually distinguishes this new breed of coffee people is a kind of zealotry. They are interested in the origins of beans. Jeremy told me of a small grower in Central America whose crop is so small (seven bags) that it is bought by one individual coffee shop for the exclusivity value. And they are interested in making the world a better place.

I have seen Square Mile Coffee in many of these artisan coffee shops, at a very fancy price. Jeremy tells me that Square Mile has two of the best coffee minds in Britain. I can’t exactly envisage a coffee mind, but their blends of coffee are delicious. I favour Redbrick.

In the meantime, back home I have used up two litres of milk trying to make a swan, a fern, anything at all without success. It’s depressing: I will have to make a flat white to cheer myself up. www.prufrockcoffee.com

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5/9/12 16:27:17

LIFE

CH ELSEA

B OY S

They gave us the Wolseley but can Corbin and King manage to eclipse Oriel?

Priscilla Pollara

D

lord, the ludicrously wealthy Earl Cadogan, refused to renew its lease. Having threatened to do it for years, he ignored numerous pleas to change his mind and went ahead, terminating Cadogan Estates’ links with one of Chelsea’s most beloved stalwarts.

‘I didn’t like the food and the prices are far too high,’ the earl, whose 300-year-old family company is valued at £3.2 billion, revealed one afternoon back in 2008. But did no one tell him? Horror stories of interminable waits, stray hairs in soups, and frozen pellets of garlic butter arriving atop overcooked steaks were very much the norm.

When it came to food, Oriel was bad, famously so.

The fact it also charged sky-high prices for grub

uring my teenage years, as a schoolgirl in Belgravia, my friends and I loved Oriel. The imperfect but glorious French brasserie on Sloane Square became ‘our place’, a home from home where we would retreat for birthday parties, first dates and first break-ups. It even provided the ideal spot to hide when playing truant.

After all, why would anyone come to look for a young girl in such a pricey restaurant?

Little did we know it at the time, but the ‘Grande Brasserie de la Place’ would not go on providing sanctuary to errant schoolchildren for ever.

After 25 years of service, it closed its quaint French windows for the last time this February after its land-

Getty Images

Diner’s delight: Jeremy King and Chris Corbin 42

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that would have disgraced a greasy spoon café should have put paid to any chance it had of establishing itself.

But none of the customers, except, it seems, the earl, appeared to care.

One loyal patron says, ‘It was well known that if you were looking for gourmet, Oriel just wasn’t the place for you. Still, its natural charm meant you were always content whenever you’d found a table at which to perch.’

By ending Oriel’s lease Earl Cadogan hadn’t just closed a restaurant, but a social hangout, too. In its quarter of a century, Oriel became the place to see and be seen.

To enjoy a coffee, a croissant and lunch beneath its 1920s Parisian spherical lamps as the hullabaloo of Sloane Square unfolded was a daily hobby for many. It was home to all sorts: ladies who lunched, young couples on blind dates, peckish theatregoers with tickets for the adjacent Royal Court Theatre and us schoolgirls crowded in the corner.

According to another regular, Oriel was ‘the kind of place one could waltz into dressed unkemptly for that warming pot of tea at any time of the day’. She adds, ‘I got into the habit of walking in with my head in Richard Ward foils, stopping for a snack, and going back to my stylist 30 minutes later to have them removed. Anything went at Oriel and no one judged you.’

Enormous shoes, therefore, for new restaurant Colbert to step into when it opens this month on the cherished site of 50-52 Sloane Square, not least because it is said the family’s priority is to regain popularity with locals whose ‘Save Oriel’ petitions it ignored.

(In March, the earl was succeeded as chairman of the Cadogan Estate by his son, Viscount Chelsea; he is now the company’s life president, but no longer a director.)

Cynics suggest that the estate has already played it remarkably safe. In November it was announced that a lease had been agreed with Rex Restaurant Associates — in other words, London’s lauded restaurateurs, Chris Corbin and Jeremy King.

The Wolseley-owning pair, who began their ‘professional marriage’ by rescuing and restoring restaurants including the Ivy, J Sheekey and Le Caprice, beat off stiff competition in the form of Jamie Oliver, Selfridges and arch-rival Richard Caring’s Caprice Holdings. ‘It never mattered to Cadogan Estates that Corbin and King have fewer restaurants to boast than Caprice Holdings, because it was the Wolseley’s unabashed trade that bewitched them,’ explains a property insider.

‘They’re keen for similar traffic on Chelsea turf, but they also realise that the elegant, tried and tested grand brasserie look of Rex Restaurant’s places is very similar to what Oriel once was. It’s a canny way to get the same loyal diners back.’

In addition, the sudden swelling of the pair’s collection in the last 12 months must have helped sway minds. Last year saw the Wolseley’s younger, more informal brother the Delaunay, along with its takeaway deli branch, the Counter, open to much praise: it’s been hard to find an empty table since. The feat was swiftly followed by the opening in June of the 250-cover Brasserie Zédel, a Parisian ‘grand café’ on the site of the old Atlantic Bar & Grill. There’s already anticipation, too, for their first hotel, the Beaumont, scheduled to open in 2014.

While Corbin and King appear to be on a winning streak, there is no guarantee that Colbert will be another hit. Their record does have the odd blemish (their Mediterranean restaurant St Alban closed its doors in 2009) and it is also not clear how the new venture will fare now that the Chelsea Brasserie and Tom and Ed Martin’s neighbouring Botanist have acquired their own crowds of devoted Sloanes.

We can presume that Colbert will serve exquisite food and be finished with a glossy sheen. But we must wait for an answer to the more important question: will this be enough to win back the wives, businessmen, theatre enthusiasts, shoppers and schoolgirls who once upon a time preferred character and heritage to flawlessness and Michelin stars?

at 12A Piccadilly Arcade SW1Y 6NH Telephone: 020 7491 9201 Email: jewels@nigelmilne.co.uk www.nigelmilne.co.uk

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5/9/12 16:29:02

LIFE

AN

I SLAND

OF

ON E ’ S OW N Now is the ideal time to snap one up, says our modern-day Robinson Crusoe Merryn Somerset Webb

E

very August, my family and I leave the city and head for our private island. There we spend much of the month walking, fishing, barbecuing and generally lounging around. We do all this with no one watching us — we are surrounded by our own beaches and our remote personal paradise is reachable only by boat.

It sounds glamorous, doesn’t it? But actually having your own island isn’t just for the super rich. Ours is off the coast of Shetland. Our beaches are more pebbly than sandy; we fish for mackerel not marlin; and our lounging about only very rarely takes in any sunbathing. Oh, and if we want to sleep on the island we have to camp. It has no utilities and no house — unless you count a small pile of rocks that was once a crofting cottage. Still, while it isn’t exactly five star, it still comes with all the privacy and romance that people associate with owning an island. So what do you do if you want that feel to your holidays, too?

First, buying an island really isn’t much different from buying a house. You can call an international estate agent or visit a dedicated website (try www.­v ladi-privateislands.de, www.­p rivateislandsonline. com, or www.caribbeanisland­brokers.com for starters), take your pick and instruct a solicitor in the relevant country just as you would if you were buying a house in London or a villa in Bermuda.

However, while the process is not necessarily more complicated in legal terms, there are a few extra things to consider.

Do you want one with or without a house?

Most uninhabited islands end up staying that way: it can cost twice as much to build on an island than on the mainland.

Does it have a fresh water supply? If not, you might find you don’t spend much time there. Does it have power? How are you going to get to it? If you aren’t in helicopter/airstrip league you’ll need a boat.

We get by with a battered aluminium farm boat. But that’s just not going to strike the right note in the Caribbean. There you’ll need a yacht. And don’t forget to ask how easy the waters around the island are to navigate: you might need crew.

You’ll also need to think about how

Buying an island isn’t really much different from buying a house. You call an international estate agent and take your pick

your island gets looked after. Scrappy bits of grassy rock in the Atlantic don’t need much TLC. Sandy islands with docks and houses located in hurricane areas sometimes do. Then there’s the cost of all this.

Can you rent it out to cover the caretaker and the yacht? Our island isn’t much of a cash cow (to put it mildly), but Richard Branson rents out his Necker Island for a reported $50,000 plus a night.

Finally, there is tax. Buy in the likes of Greece (which is by all accounts a tryingly bureaucratic process anyway) and you can be almost certain that you will soon find yourself hit with some kind of spe-

cial tax on well-off second home owners.

Most brokers suggest anyone who needs to think about all this rents an island for a few seasons before buying one.

H

owever, if and when you make up your mind, you will find there is no shortage. If you want an uninhabited Scottish island a bit like ours you can pick up the Out Skerries (two main islands totalling 600 acres) in Shetland.

They are on for £400,000 with Knight Frank, although I suspect that at that rate they are around £ 350,000 overpriced.

Otherwise, if you must have a house, there is Shuna Island in the middle of Scotland’s Loch Linnhe. This comes with one main house, a variety of outbuildings and 388 acres of land. On the downside, it costs £1.85 million. For that, you could instead head for Canada, which with its lakes and coastline has more islands than any other nation, and get the rather lovely Goffatt Island (CAD $2.25 million).

If I were to trade in our island, I’d consider the summer refuge islands off the coast of Sweden (there’s a fabulous one called Hastholmen for sale for €250,000 — cottage included). But I suspect that in the end I’d be won over by the idea of sunshine all year round and head for the Florida Keys. Top pick? Broad Key, a 63-acre island just off Key Largo (Sothebys International Realty, $20 million).

Otherwise, were my ship to really come in, it would be an island in the Exuma Cays 35 minutes from Nassau, complete with a gorgeous-looking plantation-style house. It costs $ 85 million (Sothebys International Realty) — and that’s before you go helicopter shopping.

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THE

WOR L D IN AN

OYST E R Pearls aren’t just for Sloanes – they can be the key to timeless elegance Camilla Rutherford

Getty Images

I nearly always wear pearls. When I was a little girl I had a picture of Louise Brooks on my bedroom wall, before I knew who she was, because I admired the way she looked. I would stare at my poster of Louise Brooks, absorbed by her look of dignified determination set off by the upward tilt of her head, her focused, intelligent eyes, her short hair and pearls. If you stared at that poster for long enough you could see rebellion in the eyes. But her expression was calm and sophisticated. She wore pearls, with their symbol of purity and elegance. I wanted to be like her.

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STYLE Many of my childhood female icons wore pearls: Jackie Onassis, Grace Kelly, Amelia Earhart and Wallis Simpson. They were women who led wildly different lives. But their style was classic, evoking decorum, self-awareness and confidence without arrogance. It is the dignity and elegance, strength and fortitude worn in the right proportions that I am compelled by.

‘A woman needs ropes of pearls,’ said Coco Chanel.

Chanel, like Brooks, must have had bravery and perseverance to come out of a life of deprivation and

A Mikimoto Akoya cultured pearl strand necklace

Wearing pearls attests more to a woman’s taste than her actual wealth

poverty to achieve her iconic status. Flappers, a word evocative of birds about to take flight, wore pearls. as a woman in the 1920s it must have been easy to feel bitter, but this is not an admirable response to adversity.

No, it is more persuasive to be brave and beautiful and feminine, to combine courage with decorum. Pearls with their lustre, their subtle glow are striking without being ostentatious.

When a woman needs to demonstrate both restraint and power, pearls are just the job. Both the Queen and Michelle Obama wear them; for both women, intelligence and confidence combined with modesty and grace are essential to their image.

Pearls were once very exclusive. In most European countries in the 13th and 14th centuries, only a very few people could afford them. They continued to be very expensive for a long time. In 1917, Mr Cartier bought his Fifth Avenue headquarters in New York with $100 in cash and a two-strand natural pearl necklace valued at a million dollars. In 1957, the same necklace was auctioned for $157,000.

Pearls have become less rare, especially with the arrival of cultured pearls on the international market in the 1930s, and therefore less expensive and exclusive.

Now, wearing pearls attests more to a woman’s taste than her actual wealth. Princess Diana wore her Kenneth Jay Lane pearls interchangeably with the much more valuable pearls from the vaults of the English crown jewels. Pearls represent an attitude rather than a ‘bling’ factor.

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The similarity between Jackie Onassis, Grace Kelly, Amelia Earhart and Wallis Simpson is their seemingly effortless chic. The irony is how important the clothes, hair and jewels are in creating this image. Think of the Amelia Earhart with her crop of hair which looks like she cut it with a pair of gardening shears. For none of these women was the casual look coincidental — it was calculated. And it was clever, because who wants to look as if they have spent ages preening themselves in the mirror? For a start, it might suggest they have nothing better to do.

The other thing these inspiring women had in common: they all wore pearls.

When I was a teenager, girls who wore pearls were sloanes. To avoid the confusion, I shunned pearls for a bit. Nothing wrong with being a sloane but I didn’t want to be mistaken for one. I am entirely urban with no real experience of the countryside and finding a suitable husband was never a priority. I looked forward to being older so I could be what I wanted in pearls.

I dreamt of independence, combining work with life, children and a house.

The three times I have packed my bag to go to the hospital to have a baby I have brought my pearls. To me, no other jewel could be as pure or as motherly or as

hine_life.indd 1

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beautiful. As a mother, I want my children to feel the tenderness of my love but never to doubt my strength.

Pearls look good on all occasions: a serious meeting, a social gathering. Pearls vary in colour, lustre, size, surface and shape — this affects their value. And they can be worn in different ways. But it is the choice to wear pearls that makes the real statement. Traditionally, pearls are passed down through generations.

The fashion designer Donald Brooks once said, ‘you can turn an absolute whore into a lady by just putting pearls around her neck.’ I do not wear pearls because I am posh — I wear them because I like them.

They are not my grandmother’s pearls; they were given to me by my boyfriend. If assumptions are made about me because I wear pearls, it is as annoying or amusing and usually as predictable as any other assumption based on superficial observations. I wear them because I like their lustre, elegance and versatility. I like they way their shine improves the more you wear them. I wear pearls on the school run, to the gym and to bed, as well as to more formal occasions.

But my real attachment to pearls is because the images of some women who have worn them have been an inspiration. They have fuelled my ambition to be an actress as well as a certain kind of woman.

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SL I CE OF L I F E From facial harpooning to laser treatment, the more pain cosmetic surgery causes the younger you’ll look Ruby Wax

longed redness, swelling, oozing, petichiae, delayed wound healing, scarring, crusting or scabbing, infection from bacterial, viral or fungal agents, pigmentary changes, herpes reactivation and acne flare-up.’ My feeling is: so what, you’re striped with scabs for a few days, but when they drop off you are as smooth and creaseless as a baby’s bottom.

I do not like pain on any occasion — even with pregnancy, I asked for morphine a week after I found out I was expecting.

Obviously, I didn’t put a check in the box for natural childbirth. I did not want to be conscious until the ordeal was over, wanting to avoid the experience of passing a watermelon. Some women feel that the agony of 57 hours of labour brings them closer to their baby. To me, it’s like saying to my dentist during a root canal, ‘Hold the novocaine, I want to bond with my teeth.’

But when it comes to looking younger, I will gladly climb on to any crucifix and shout, ‘Start the hammering.’ I will take any amount of pain to ward off unsightly age. I often have to suppress giggles of joy while having Botox, knowing that even though someone is intentionally sticking syringes into my face, I will soon look 12.

I don’t believe in facials — that’s paying someone to rub a little moisturiser on your face. If I have a treatment, it must hurt.

I have had Fraxel laser, in which they put goggles on your eyes and then burn stripes on your chest like you’re some primitive tribesperson partaking in a ritual to prove his manhood. A description I found of the treatment is, ‘When you get a Fraxel treatment, you can feel confident you’re receiving a safe, effective procedure. Fraxel is a treatment you can trust… Potential side effects include pro-

When I was told about the dermaroller and how much it would hurt, I practically skipped to the dermatologist

So when I was told about derma-roller and how much it would hurt, I practically skipped to the dermatologist. Derma-roller is described as ‘a simple skin roller with 192 surgical steel micro-needles which are able to part the pores of the top layer of the

skin without damaging it. The pores of the skin close again after about an hour, but during that period your skin is able to absorb skin creams and lotions much more efficiently … it will also naturally stimulate collagen and elastin production in the skin without damaging it.’ In real speak, it puts holes in your face like golf shoes on a putting green to trick the face into thinking that it’s been wounded; your face then produces collagen, which helps the healing process.

So there I was, lying on a trolley being facially harpooned for a good cause: me.

Judging by how much it hurt, I would say it works, because in my experience, the more pain, the bigger the chances of success. The more medieval the instruments used, the younger you’ll look, and it can’t get more medieval than a roller covered in spikes, which is similar to what they once used on sinners to make them confess they were witches. I was just scared that, leaving the surgery with all those face holes, I would blow out my insides if I sneezed.

Just to say: having a child also makes you look younger and your skin glow with hormones, and is less painful than piercing your face. It’s now two weeks later. I’ve recovered from the trauma of the pain and I’d like to report I am wrinkle-free and glowing. I will continue the regime until I am well and truly lacerated.

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STYLE

BUI LT

LAST

TO

Tim Gosling’s interiors are designed never to go out of fashion Oscar Humphries

Hugo Burnand

S

ycamore House in Clapham Old Town is home to Tim Gosling and the design business that bears his name. This grand house, built in the 1780s, reminds us that Clapham once stood apart from London, that the surrounding area was pure countryside.

‘I love the scale and the balance of the rooms, there is something incredibly reassuring about the Georgian proportions — the windows give such an enormous light to it,’ he says.

As a decorator and designer, Gosling is in many ways a traditionalist, and the classical values and proportions that exist in his home and workplace exist in his craft also. I would describe his style as ‘Georgian Modern’ but Gosling counters that his taste is difficult to describe and that ‘style depends on the building you are designing for and the clients you are working with’. His influences are evident. Soane, Adams, Kent and also 20th-century figures such as Jean-Michel Frank and Mies van der Rohe. Gosling says that the first conversation with a client might be, ‘So you’ve got a Nash regency house, do you want to play with that in terms of proportion or do you want to play against it in a contemporary way? What are the rules? Is it Grade I listed?’

Walking into the Sycamore House, I see an enormous amount of wood stacked in neat squares on shelves. Veneers and solid blocks, in all colours and textures. This is a material that is enormously important to Tim Gosling, just as it is important for David Linley, for whom Gosling worked for many years.

What is it about wood that is so attractive? ‘Its longevity,’ Gosling says. ‘The things I’m making should last us 400 years and in time they’ll develop a patina which should make them even more beautiful. I’m interested in combining wood with new materials, of being able to float very classical shapes.’

The use of wood, both in furniture and interiors, is one of Gosling’s ‘style signifiers’, as is his use of shagreen and vellum, materials more closely associated with continental art nouveau and art deco furniture.

When looking at a room full of Gosling furniture,

one is reminded, through his use of material and shape, of both an English country house and an art deco ocean liner. It is this look that has made Gosling so popular with clients.

He’s working on a large house in Regent’s Park at the moment, in which every piece of furniture has been made specifically for the room it will inhabit.

Gosling has also just finished a major overhaul of the reception areas of the rather salubrious Nell Gwynn House on Sloane Avenue. The grand lobby is now a reflection of the glamorous pre-war age in which it was built — all chrome and leather.

‘There’s nothing more exciting or spine-tingling than standing in a space that you know has that gravitas to it and then looking at the pieces of furniture that you’re playing with.’

Prestel published a monograph on Gosling two years ago (Gosling, Classic Design for Contemporary Interiors) and he has just worked with the publisher Endeavour to produce London Secrets: A Draughtsman’s Guide a collection of his drawings of London buildings and interiors that may have been rarely seen or overlooked.

Gosling says that he draws every day and no matter what he is designing, architecture remains his primary influence. He sees Britain as a world leader in architectural design, but believes that when it comes to furniture making, its heritage is being lost.

‘You look at the 18th century and it was legendary, you could rattle off loads of names that shaped so many pieces of furniture in the world, and I think that in the last 100 years a very strange process has happened,’ he says.

‘It’s gone from being a studio of production to an artist working on their own. Inigo Jones, who designed the first classical building in England, also designed furniture. There wasn’t a segregation to say you are just a furniture designer or you are just an architect.

In the last 100 years, people have wanted to pigeonhole it and ask, “Are you an interior designer or a furniture designer? What are you?”’ www.tgosling.com 52

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OTHER DESIGNERS TO LOOK OUT FOR R ose U ni a c ke Rose Uniacke’s roots are in the antiques business — beginning as a furniture restorer and guilder. Her style grew from it, but is by no means defined by it. Her pieces are elegant, and tastefully simple.

As well as restoring furniture, she trawls Europe in search of pieces for her range.

Based in Pimlico, the heart of London’s antiques world, her shop offers furniture ranging from the 17th to the 20th century, as well as lighting. The bespoke aspect of her store is also booming. www.roseuniacke.com

V eere G renne y Veere Grenney has been at the forefront of the international design industry for more than 20 years. Before starting his own company, Veere was a director at Colefax and Fowler, where he honed his elegant, understated and classic style.

To Veere, purity of design and quality of finish is foremost, but his style is also daring and his talent for incorporating mid-20th century design into his interiors ensure that he is much in demand. www.veeregrenney.com

N i c k y H a sl a m Nicky Haslam is Britain’s most high-profile interior designer and has forged a career producing idiosyncratic and quintessentially British design since 1972. Nicky founded NH designs in the 1980s, specialising in high-end products, bespoke furnishing and grand, opulent style. Nicky has worked all over the globe and boasts clients from Lord Rothschild to Mick Jagger to the Prince of Wales. www.nh-design.co.uk

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STYLE

NO BAG GAGE Oh, the satisfaction of travelling light Toby Young

Illustration by Jamie Portch

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until one day, as he was leaving for a two-week trip to Australia, he let me in on his secret. Undoing his suit trousers, he revealed that he was wearing another pair of trousers underneath. He was also wearing two shirts. All he had in his briefcase, apart from what he needed for work, was a change of underwear and some soap powder. Provided he washed his shirt, socks and underpants every night, all he needed was a change of trousers. Quite an effective system, albeit a fairly eccentric one.

My father was fanatical about travelling light and he passed on this obsession to me. Nowadays, I have four children and if we go on holiday anywhere we have to take at least two large suitcases. But I still pride myself on needing as little as possible. I leave the packing to my wife and she packs almost nothing for me even if we’re going abroad for two weeks. I would rather buy a new shirt on holiday than pack one I don’t end up wearing, such is my horror of taking more than I need.

The Tumi bag finally packed up this year — the zips stopped working. Not quite ‘indestructible’, then, but 17 years of loyal service isn’t bad. I immediately went to their website to look for an exact replica, but unfortunately my particular model had been discontinued. I bought the closest one I could find for £250. With a bit of luck, it’ll last me for the rest of my life.

got my first serious piece of luggage in 1995.

I’d just started working at the New York headquarters of Vanity Fair. My office was next to the fashion department and I witnessed the daily arrival of free gifts from people hoping to curry favour with Elizabeth Saltzman, the fashion director. If Elizabeth didn’t want them, her deputy got first dibs, then her assistant, her second assistant, and so on.

Occasionally, some unwanted piece of bric-à-brac was offered to me, the lowest person on the freebie food chain. Which is how I came to own a Tumi bag.

It was a cross between a computer bag and an overnighter, made of some durable, space age material that was billed as ‘indestructible’. It was a good size — large enough to take a couple of books, a pair of shoes and a change of clothes, but small enough to be classed as hand luggage. At that point, I was travelling back and forth to London at least six times a year, with a flat in both cities, so this bag was all the luggage I needed. I also used it as a briefcase, taking it to work with me every day. It was the most useful thing I never bought.

One of the reasons I liked it so much was because my late father had a brown leather briefcase that served the same purpose. Whenever he travelled for work — which was often — this was the only piece of luggage he took. I always marvelled at his ability to stuff everything he needed into this small vestibule 54

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H ow t o p a c k a n d s t a y s a n e

Write a LIST

D O IT A DAY EAR L Y

D O N ’ T DRINK AND PACK

If you’re only thinking about this because your mother – or wife, or girlfriend – has declared that she is not packing for you any more, start with the basics. Make a list. It begins with as many pairs of pants as you have nights’ stay, and twice as many socks. Oh, and your phone charger.

After that, most things are negotiable.

You will still have a last-minute panic, but if the suitcase is already full, then it will be about what you’ve forgotten, rather than whether you’ll be able to take anything at all. This is better.

An appendix to ‘Do it a day early’. If you want not to panic about what you’ve forgotten, it helps to be able to remember what you put in the suitcase. And few people find the experience of doing up a recalcitrant zip improved by a hangover.

S TAY O U T O F T H E H O L D

B U Y IT O V ER T H ERE

W ATC H T H E W IRE S

Everyone tells you things are much easier if all your stuff is on a carry-on bag. What they don’t tell you is that airlines, for fun and profit, now vary the size limit of carry-on bags by a few inches either way.

Check the website, and don’t get mugged.

Most other countries have shops. Many of those shops sell shampoo, and shaving foam. Some may even have socks.

When security tell you to pull the iPad out of your bag, life will be happier if it doesn’t drag your iPhone with it and then drop it on the floor. Winding up cables will stop that piece of malign magic happening.

T H E M AN B A G S The perfect bag can help you master the art

Montblanc office wheeled case with handle extension, £885

Dunhill Chassis leather-trimmed suit carrier, £295 from Mr Porter

Giorgio Armani crocodile leather briefcase, from £14,500

Polo Ralph Lauren sportsman leather gym bag, £500 55

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THE W ISH LIST Photography Dennis Pedersen

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STYLE

TREASURE HUNT Previous page: 01 Chronometro Gondolo rose gold watch with brown alligator strap, £26,100, PATEK PHILIPPE; 02 18ct gold fly fishing reel cufflinks, £3,200, WILLIAM & SON; 03 Midnight Cerf pink gold watch, alligator strap £73,500, VAN CLEEF & ARPELS; 04 Brushed steel tourbillon cufflinks, £325, WILLIAM & SON; 05 Saira Hunjan ox-blood flask, £135, ETTINGER; 06 Shotgun sterling silver toothpick, £100, WILLIAM & SON 07 Cigar cutter, £1,350, PURDEY; 08 Classic automatic gents watch, rose gold plated, £2,000, FREDERIQUE CONSTANT 09 Patrimony Contemporaine Perpetual Calendar watch, £57,250, VACHERON CONSTANTIN; 10 12-bore over & under gun with large scroll engraving, POA, PURDEY. This page: 11 12-bore self-opener shotgun, £47,500, WILLIAM & SON; 12 18ct gold, quartz Mikado Flamenco bracelet by Tamara Comolli, £18,000, NIGEL MILNE; 13 18.07ct orange-brown diamond ring with brown diamond set band, POA, DAVID MORRIS; 14 Oak leaf necklace with 18ct yellow, rose gold and pavé diamond sculptured leaves, £3,300, ASPREY; 15 Pair of antique sapphire and diamond clips (one pictured) set in 18ct yellow gold by Van Cleef & Arpels, France c. 1950, £12,000, NIGEL MILNE; 16 The Fern necklace with emeralds and diamonds, POA, ASPREY; 17 Fusion 18ct yellow, red and white gold and diamond rings, £4,430, GEORG JENSEN; 18 Sunbird mandarin garnet yellow gold ring, £43, 260, BOODLES; 19 18ct yellow gold fox brooch with tortoiseshell eyes, £4,950, GEORGE PRAGNELL; 20 18ct yellow gold cockerel amulet, £1,900, ANNOUSHKA

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3/9/12 13:36:03

The rhino Sl eep s T on igh T Tagging rhinos at a South African game reserve protects them from poachers — and makes for unusually interesting postcards

Sean Caffrey / Getty

Alex Clark

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T R AV E L

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othing prepares you for its size, nor the feel of its skin under your hand. I am standing in the early morning sun, in knee-high scrub, in the middle of a game reserve in KwaZulu-Natal. Since dawn, we have been tracking — by helicopter and open-topped truck — the beast that now lies unconscious at our feet, blindfolded, its ears stoppered with cotton wool, a dart protruding from its considerable rear.

In the few days since I arrived here, I have seen white rhinos — and even caught a glimpse of the more elusive black rhino — but on each occasion from a distance, safely ensconced in a game vehicle. Now, though, I’m closer than most people will ever be fortunate

All images: &Beyond

First, catch your rhino.

Funnily enough, it turns out not to be quite as simple as putting a collar on a cat

enough to get to one of these vast animals, courtesy of a remarkable conservation programme which has one aim: to stamp out the illegal trade in rhino horn forever.

To understand what a challenge that is, consider the numbers involved. In 2000, seven rhinos were poached in South Africa; in 2011, that number had risen to a chilling 448. This year, when I visited in early June, the figure already stood at 237; 23 were in KwaZulu-Natal.

As if those statistics weren’t horrifying enough, consider also that what the poachers are after — the rhinos’ horn, which they frequently remove by hacking, leaving the animal to bleed to death — is now worth more per ounce than gold. Despite the fact that it has no special

Private plunge pool at the Rock Lodge

properties, it is used in traditional medicines and as an ornament — sometimes, it is even snorted. As useless commodities go, it is worth a hell of a lot of money.

At Phinda, a private game reserve owned by eco­ tourism pioneers &Beyond, they take conservation — and rhinos — very seriously. Since 2003, they’ve been ‘notching’ rhinos — a process in which small holes are punched in an animal’s ears to provide a unique identification number; if, subsequently, the contraband horn is seized, it will be possible to establish a chain of evidence that will lead back to the crime scene.

But first, catch your rhino. Funnily enough, it turns out not to be quite as simple as putting a collar on a cat.

We have an extensive briefing — including a warning to steer clear of the morphine-based drug used to fell the rhino, which would have a catastrophic effect on a human in as little as a minute — and then get up before first light. A vast team of people has been mobilised, including the intrepid vet who will hang out of a helicopter to shoot the sedative into the rhino once it has been located and the equally skilful pilot who must fly, much of the time, beneath the level of the trees. On the ground, teams of helpers move across unpredictable terrain at high speed, all focusing on the spot where the rhino, once darted, will eventually drop to its knees.

The notching that I witnessed goes pretty smoothly; the four-year-old bull calf succumbs quickly to the sedative, and his mother is corralled at a safe distance. The experts work in concert, and with practised precision:

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Above (left to right): Zuka lodge; Forest lodge

the aim is to carry out the notching, take DNA samples and insert a microchip as swiftly as possible. The blindfold and ear stoppers are deployed to minimise any distress the animal may feel; throughout, his well-being is carefully monitored. Within 20 minutes, we are all climbing into our vehicles; and, at the same time, the rhino is climbing, albeit unsteadily, to his feet. He’ll never know what has just happened to him, but he’s probably very glad to see his mother ambling back towards him through the bush.

At Phinda, they undertake ten or 15 notchings a year, with places available for guests on safari at one of their beautiful lodges. We stay at two: Mountain Lodge, with its fabulous views over the rest of the reserve, and the even more magical Forest Lodge, set deep in the rare ‘sand forest’. Each glass-walled cabin nestles among the trees, completely cut off from its neighbours, with only the rustle of the red duiker deer to provide a soundtrack (unless, of course, you indulge in one of the divinely relaxing massages, which are administered in the open-air privacy of your verandah).

Not that anyone would want to spend a great deal of time in their room, luxurious and sybaritic though it might be. The lure of the morning and evening game drives, managed by wonderfully knowledgeable rangers and trackers, are too much to resist. On our first night at Phinda, we happened upon a pride of lions, lying sated around the carcass of a recently devoured buffalo. They were too full to take much notice of us

until, without warning, one young male reared its head and looked straight at us. The gaze of a lion, post-prandial or otherwise, is not something you forget in a hurry.

On another evening, we found ourselves driving towards the sound of trampling; suddenly, in the moonlight, we made out the ghostly grey shape of an elephant, snacking on a few acacia branches. And perhaps most captivating of all was the sight of a cheetah and her cubs, two of them injured by marauding males, all of them clinging together for survival. But it’s not just the marquee animals that fascinate; one of my abiding memories is of sitting, utterly quiet, watching two nyala antelope squaring up over territory. Eventually one slunk off, defeated by who knows what subtle signal of dominance. And I defy anyone not to be charmed by a warthog.

All of these spectacles were viewed from the comfort of a Land Cruiser. Most memorable of all, though, was the moment we abandoned the car and went on a bushwalk. We spent some hours on the trail of a herd of bison who, despite their size, proved trickier to locate and more fleet of foot than you might imagine. We ended up leaving them to roam in peace, but the experience of merely walking through this untamed landscape felt like privilege enough.

Mahlatini (www.mahlatini.com) offers a five-night Zululand safari at &Beyond Phinda from £2,650 per person, including flights, transfers and scheduled safari activities. Rhino-tagging is extra.

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T R AV E L

GLOBE TROTTING Wow factor: Destinations that offer different kinds of luxury 1

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01 — Castello di Casole, Tuscany Do Tuscany in style by staying in the boutique hotel housed in this historic castle. Private villas, dotted around the 4,200 acre estate, are also available for hire. www.castellodicasole.com

03 —South Place Hotel, London A new venture from the D&D London group boasting Conrandesigned interiors, three bars and a rooftop restaurant. www.southplacehotel.com

02 — Soho House, Toronto After ‘popping up’ at the Toronto Film Festival for the last few years, private members club Soho House now has a permanent home in Canada. www.sohohousetoronto.com

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04 — Dunston Springs, Colorado Nestled away in the Colorado Rockies, this restored ghost town consists of 12 private log cabins. Have a go at dog sledding and snow shoeing, or just take thing easy at their spa. www.duntonhotsprings.com

READER EVENT

Andermatt is developing a new resort in the heart of the Swiss Alps.

On 11 October, we are hosting an event at The Spectator. If you would like to join us for a glass of champagne please email: events@spectator.co.uk 64

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STOCKISTS Annoushka www.annoushka-jewellery.com; Asprey www.asprey.com; Boodles www.boodles.com; Breguet www.breguet.com; David Morris www.davidmorris.com; Errol Douglas www.erroldouglas.com; Ettinger www.ettinger.co.uk; Frederique Constant www.frederiqueconstant.com; Georg Jensen www.georgjensen.com; George Pragnell www.pragnell.co.uk; Giorgio Armani www.armani.com; James Purdey & Sons www.purdey.com; MAC www.maccosmetics.com Mary’s Tea Parties www.marysteaparties.co.uk; Mikimoto www.mikimoto.co.uk; Montblanc www.montblanc.com; Mr Porter www.mrporter.com; Nigel Milne www. nigelmilne.co.uk; Sweet Redemption Cakes www.sweetredemptioncakes. com; Tibi www.tibi.com; Patek Philippe www.patek.com; Polo Ralph Lauren www.ralphlauren.com; Vacheron Constantin www.vacheronconstantin.com; Van Cleef & Arpels www.vancleefarpels.com; William & Son www.williamandson.com; William Welstead www.williamwelstead.com

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O N E T O WA T C H

WILLIAM WE L S T EAD A widely travelled jeweller with a talent for finding beauty in unexpected places Stella Tennant

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els everywhere to find the right ones (I love the idea of going off on a trip to India to search for precious gems — there’s a romance to it). Each piece is individual, and the settings are minimalist to show off those beautiful stones.

I remember especially one lovely necklace with gold wiring and these brown, fairly dirty diamonds — even so, they still had that amazing sparkle that only diamonds have. No one else makes jewellery quite like that. William’s career has been a long, windy, fascinating path, and it’s amazing to see how far he’s come, and to guess how far he’ll go. He is a dear friend and a remarkable jeweller. Make no mistake: William Welstead is one to watch.

’ve known William Welstead ever since he started out as a jeweller about 15 years ago.

He’d become interested in jewellery after seeing beautiful stones on sale in Kashmir and Nepal, and he stayed to learn about them in the workshops there.

He’s like that, a real traveller. The sort of person who hops on a plane and then, before you know it, he’s working with a bunch of hand loomers in some curious backstreet in Kathmandu. He’s just incredibly engaged wherever he goes.

That’s what makes his work unique. Jewellery is usually about perfection. William prefers to use stones that aren’t necessarily flawless, but do have charm. He trav66

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03/09/2012 11:35 4/9/12 17:18:08

Breguet, the innovator.

Invention of hand-guilloché dials, 1786 Around 1786, Breguet created a resolutely new style by introducing dials adorned with gold or silver guilloché work. Today, this form of authentic hand craftsmanship is still one of the distinctive characteristics of a Breguet watch. A heritage proudly perpetuated in the Classique 7337BR model with its silvered gold dial adorned with five different hand-guilloché patterns. History is still being written…

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