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.

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wild prairie

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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??

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the start of things

'I remember the rain - how it hammered day and night against the windowpanes; how my grandmother left a hay bale outside the back door to act as a dam; how Mrs Maddox came to us for buckets when her porch began leaking... My grandfather's hair plastered itself down over his forehead, like weed. And I remember how, by Valentine's Day, the heaving ewes were huddled in the barn, the Brych finally burst her banks, and the mud came. Mud - such a small word. It looks weak, bashful, what harm can three letters do? The answer is more than you think. That mud was the start of things.' 

Susan Fletcher, Eve Green

vanessa jackman

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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!

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only a game

"With Mike it was different. There was no pitying smile on Adair's face as he started his run preparatory to sending down the first ball. Mike, on the cricket field, could not have looked anything but a cricketer if he had turned out in a tweed suit and hobnail boots. Cricketer was written all over him - in his walk, in the way he took guard, in his stance at the wickets." 

P.G Wodehouse, Mike: A Public School Story

Isabel Lucas in Vogue Australia December 2013

Not only because I just spent the last year reading all about it, but I find cricket very, very interesting. The love of the game - one quote I particularly like is, "it was only a game... but it was life!" - and the historical legacy, spread out across the colonial diaspora, that sound of leather on willow reverberating everywhere from Sydney to Simla (and yes, even Hong Kong, as my thesis went into great lengths about), the sheer illogicality of it, its convoluted, elaborate, maybe, yes, archaic set of rules, and, most of all, the ritual. I remember that ritual well; watching my brother in pristine, freshly laundered whites, grubbied only by a bit of sweat and grass patches on the knees ('I had to dive mum, to get the catch!'), swapping his sneakers for shiny school shoes, donning his bright cerulean blazer, and walking into the hall for tea break with his team-mates. Gathered around a table, shaking hands with the opposition over cucumber sandwiches and early grey. Where did this sport come from? That year when the cup was in question and it took a whole day before the points could be accurately tallied up I remember my brother's tense, tightly wound psyche bringing us to the brink of exhaustion. 'It's only a game', I wanted to say, loudly, often. Oh, I didn't know then, not quite. It is only a game. But it is life.

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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.

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lonely girl

'Already a vital conflict had set in, which frightened them both. But he was alone, whilst already she had begun to cast round for external resource. When Ursula had gone, Gudrun felt her own existence had become stark and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and inevitable, as if she were centered upon the pivot of all existence, there was no further reality.'

D.H Lawrence, Women In Love

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Spending the last dregs of sunday doing a little bit of healthy, 'me, me, me' moping. 

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don't worry, be happy.

Margot Robbie in Vogue Australia November 2013, styled by Stevie Dance

Okay, things are about to get a little bit silly. Things to do if you want to be instantly, irrevocably happy. Watch About Time. Listen to Kiss You (I said silly!!). Read The Rosie Project. Go to The Noodle Markets. Eat popsicles. Think big.

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