My Own Private India

'People have been drawn to India for centuries for reasons that still excite travellers today; for legacy, for colour, for the opportunity to stand before something that is bigger than yourself.  When EM Forster wrote that India is “not a promise, only an appeal,” he summed up something that Hunt herself acknowledges implicitly. “Be brave,” she says, “but be careful.” The beauty is in exploration but also in reserve. Fresh from her latest trip to the country, Hunt spoke to us about India’s siren-song appeal and its particular relationship with Jac+ Jack.' 

I interviewed Jac + Jack designer Jac Hunt about her own private India for Brace magazine. You can read the whole article here. One of my oldest friends is in India now, having the time of her life. I want to go, I want to go, I want to go. 

X

You have read this article australia / fashion / friends / holiday / me / travel / writing with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-own-private-india.html. Thanks!

team nigella

I'm so team nigella it's not even funny. If we can forgive Kate Moss for years of drug use I'm not sure what's stopping us from doing the same for Nigella. Maybe because she's up on a pedestal, and we take some of perverted pleasure in watching heroes - but in particular, heroines - fall. But we have to remember, it was us that put her up there. Us that made her the Domestic Goddess par excellence. She gave us the term, but we applied it to her, she who from the start just wanted women not to be afraid of the kitchen, not to be afraid of being domestic, not to label ourselves or let ourselves be labelled un-feminist because we enjoyed such a simple, traditional thing as cooking. There are so many women who owe their love of food and cooking to Nigella, but I just want to talk about one - me. It was to Nigella that I turned when I made my first home-baked birthday cake all on my own. I banished my mother from the kitchen and fuddled my way through a recipe with the most deliciously written introduction I have ever seen. It was Nigella that I ripped open the wrapping paper to on Christmas, and spent whole nights with the light on low, devouring recipe after luscious, effortless recipe (linguine with pancetta and lemon oil! if only it could always be this good!) long into the night. It is Nigella that I have to credit for my greatest culinary successes; to this day I am renowned amongst my friends for Cloud Cake, a flourless chocolate torte that is so gloriously balanced it gives 'intensity, and then relief, in every bite'.

Time passed and Nigella, domestic goddess that she is, was relegated to just that. Goddess status. My mum and I found new foodie crushes, who seemed to speak to the simple, casual way we had grown to eat (nigel, hugh, sophie, I am speaking of you). We took out her books to consult recipes that we adored and those alone. But we never stopped loving her. How could we? How could I? When she taught us not to feel ashamed at sneaking a spoonful of clotted cream from the fridge at 3 in the morning, when she insisted we not be afraid to take short cuts in the kitchen, when she showed us just how much pleasure - is there a better word for nigella than that? - we could get from cooking.

As I finish writing this I can see so many Nigella books in my mum and I's groaning cookbook shelf. Without pausing to get one down and check I would be able to tell you where all my favourite recipes are (Cloud Cake, page 110 in Nigella Bites, covered in flecks of chocolate and with the page slightly ripped, not that I need the recipe anymore though, the devils on horseback from Nigella's Christmas, the one pan cherry chocolate cupcakes from domestic goddess, the easiest, simplest, BEST TASTING cupcakes I have ever had). I could even tell you the occasions we had all her food, too. Because, as she says in Feast, she makes food that celebrates life. That's why all of her books have sections for the festive season, for parties, for entertaining, for sharing. Her food is about love. It's not really about expedience, or restraint and it's certainly not about health. Just plain old love. That's worth something, in my eyes.

X

You have read this article books / cake / cooking / family / food / kate moss / me / photos / picture / pictures / writing with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/12/team-nigella.html. Thanks!

to pack and wear; v2.0

 

Whoever said it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive surely knew a thing or two about packing lists. I live for them. I scribble them down on everything to hand - the end papers of books, napkins, the backs of receipts - and find them weeks, months later, only to scribble them out and start again. A list I wrote last week could be completely, hopelessly wrong by today. For me, the joy of travel has always been partially shrouded by the inane thrill of planning. I gather tips and recommendations, I buy a map and plot walking routes out with green pen, I email everyone I know who lives even remotely near where I am going and beg them to meet me for tea/cake/talks, and I write tens/hundreds/thousands of packing lists, just like joan (always like joan). Writing packing lists makes me giddy. It makes me light-headed with excitement the way that, say, mundane tasks like applying for travel money cards and buying thermal underwear doesn't.

Like last time, this trip is going to be different. It's a trip to travel light on, for sure. I travelled light last year - well, light for me - and then was confronted with the horror of completely exceeding the confines of my suitcase in London (I coudn't close it for love or money, even with me and my friend sitting on the lid) that I had to buy a new suitcase from a greasy-fingered man behind Leicester Square for the price of a weeks worth of meals at Ottolenghi. Never again. Everyone laughed at me and said I brought a too-small suitcase but I knew the truth. I didn't pack truly light. But I am going to this year. This trip - to Denver and New York and Vancouver! Still taking any tips and recommendations if you have them, comment or email me - is going to be a bit of everything. A bit of work, a bit of snow, a bit of fun, a bit of new, a bit of old, a bit of all that good stuff that makes travel so intoxicating, so enthralling; that glorious mish-mash of the familiar and the foreign that makes you go, yes, I could do this, everyday for the rest of my life. I'm taking one coat (the BEST coat). I'm taking my trusty Benah pouch. I'm taking porsellis (even in New York winters I'm a slave to ballet flats. There will be boots too, don't worry). I'm taking lip balm and hand cream. And, at this stage, I'm taking one sweater. That will probably change, but oh, this sweater is a good one. Hope, grand, so grand, with a turtleneck you want to hide your face in and a long, thigh-skimming hemline and a thick, stocking-stitch knit that your mum sniffs at ('I could have knitted that for you,' I imagine her saying), from My Chameleon, where all the good, grand stuff comes from, and just begging to be taken to some proper cold weather.

Chances are by next week I will have rethought my whole 'Merica Winter 2K14 wardrobe, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I won't. I'm taking the sweater to Tasmania this weekend for a road test (summer in the city means 18 degrees, my dream) and I'm pretty sure that it's going to pass with flying colours. The best bit? It's so versatile and so much of a cosy, multi-tasking hero piece all you need to go with it is a few pieces of delicate jewellery and rosy lips. Packing light is going to be a cinch this time. I swear.

X

You have read this article bags / ballet / benah / clothes / clothing / coats / holiday / jewelry / joan didion / knitwear / me / my chameleon / New York / pants / perfume / polyvore / shoes / travel / weather / winter with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/12/to-pack-and-wear-v20.html. Thanks!

wild prairie

source

I want this for christmas so bad that I'm tempted to just get it myself and wrap it up in red and green with a big velvet ribbon and stick it under the tree. That's how much I want it. I've been getting out my Slim Aarons print almost twice weekly because I just can't stop looking at it. There's something about the home and homewares that's getting me excited at the moment, more excited than clothes, or beauty, or books, or movies. I've got new sheets, new pictures, and dreaming of enough coffee table books that my house just looks like this. Time to move out, maybe??

X

You have read this article apartment / art / books / christmas / home / houses / me / presents / want with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/12/wild-prairie.html. Thanks!

life in a tiny room

Today a package arrived containing a set of sheets so fresh, so clean, so light and bright, I had to put them on straight away. Of course they were from IN BED store (thank you, thank you, thank you!), that delicious purveyor of dreams, and it was such a treat I almost crawled straight back into bed again (on a Monday morning, very bad). One of my favourite blogs to actually read is Read My Tea Leaves, and she has a lovely section where she shares the trials and tribulations of her life in a tiny new yawk city apartment. Well, those who have seen my room know that I live in a tiny room. It's not even a real room, it's like a sunroom annexe to my house, and though that means that while it is gloriously light-filled the whole year round, it is also very, very small. One of her tips? Use white sheets. Because it makes the room seem bigger and they're also a dream to sleep in. Well, Consider this suggestion well and truly observed. Now to get some low-maintenance house plants and actually start to take proper care of them...

X

You have read this article home / houses / love / me / photos / picture / pictures with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/11/life-in-tiny-room.html. Thanks!

saturdays are for love

Who would have thought that we could have pulled it together, after cancellation after cancellation, and all of it a SURPRISE? Only for you, RKB. A kitchen tea for the ladies, at our favourite place, with our favourite people, just before you get a(nother) ring put on you. Who would have thought we could have done it - betterthanchiswick lamb, nigel's mistress chicken, a coconut dream cake, and pavlova with all the trimmings, just the way it should be - and all with maximal minimal stress. We pull out the stops when we do it for love. Afternoons like this are the ones that make the working week worthwhile, the ones that you get up every morning at 6.45 for. They're the ones that never end, even when the rain starts to drizzle down mere metres away and the staff start to get out the mops and clean up around you. Lucky we have friends in high places that let us linger, eh? If only it could always be just like this.

X

You have read this article blogging / cake / cooking / family / food / friends / future / love / me / sydney with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/11/saturdays-are-for-love.html. Thanks!

something new

I hate to get all consumerist on you guys but... I've got some new stuff and at the moment it's ruling my world. New candle, new throw, new moisturiser, new book, new glasses. Just let me laze about all day, please!

X

You have read this article beauty / books / candles / glasses / me / photos / picture / pictures with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/11/something-new.html. Thanks!

I just don't know

'I wrote my first novel because I just got married and I was living in Stratford-upon-Avon and there was nothing else to do. I was very bored. I had no particular friends there. I'd been very busy up until then—at university, passing examinations—I very nearly took a job that summer and if I had taken a job, I probably wouldn't have written the book. So in a sense it was accidental. Whether I would have written a novel later, I just don't know.'

Margaret Drabble, The Paris Review The Art of Fiction No. 70

kinfolk 

Just thinking.

X

You have read this article books / dreams / future / me / photos / picture / pictures / quotes / writing with the title me. You can bookmark this page URL http://startthefire-cafagesta.blogspot.com/2013/11/i-just-don-know.html. Thanks!