Yesterday I headed to Kew Gardens to meet with Raphael, Marie-Pierre and Odette to spend an afternoon looking at odd exotic plants, eating Victorian sponge (very much liked by the little bird pictured below who pestered me for more) and climbing on the tree-top ladder. I am cultivating a growing interest in gardening, and I really want to sign up for this course, but given that my free space is a balcony and tiny terrasse, it’s probably not going to work.

The area around Kew Gardens’ tube station is unbelievably beautiful (think Gilmore Girls setting, complete with little books and flowers shop, French wine store and bakeries), but such cuteness filled my with rage. I mean, fuck, Bethnal Green is painfully ugly/smelly/dirty and yet everywhere I go during the weekends (Hampstead, Epping, Bermondsey, Belsize park, Primrose Hill - you name it) people seem to live in Victorian houses with huge gardens and quiet streets. How did that happen? How yeah, maybe it’s because nobody can afford a council estate house until they’re 50 nowadays and I have to live near dusty hipsterland with cheap rent instead. Fuck that.

I keep on thinking of my mother who kept on telling me, when I was a lone teenager glued to the interwebz all day, that one day I would regret not hanging out in our lovely garden in Tours an awful lot more. Mom 1, Jess 0 + crying.

Bitterness aside,

In french we call this ‘une bouture’ but I am not sure of the English equivalent. It’s surely one of the most amazing experiment done with gardening: take a stem, wrap it in mousse and plastic to conserve the moisture and leave it to grow, turning into another branches which can be later transplanted.

My obsession with benches continues. Someone get me one somewhere nice when I am no more, please.

Oh and plants, gardens, cakes, jam making and homesteading?  I guess that’s what they call being old, and yet I haven’t hit 25. Clearly there’s something wrong with this picture, because everytime someone says”festival” or “clubbing” I cringe. Give me white wine and a quite space instead please. I guess London will do that to you.

The oldest blogger in the world, Olive Riley, died yesterday and I am not sure why but it breaks my heart. She was, I think, 106 108 years old. And I really, really loved her blog (not sure why it seems broken now, perhaps bandwidth issues).

Update: blog replacement here.

Is there such a thing as Sunday depression? For as long as I can remember I have always been feeling down, bored and vaguely blue on Sundays. The excitement of having days off is gone, the weather is always gray if not worst, I don’t watch to TV anymore (if at all, really) and the only thing which could potentially warm my heart is a book. With loads of caffeine.Today would be good as any to start breaking this tradition, and I decided to get busy instead. I made a free-form nectarine and apricot pie with almond and two cans of raspberry+apricot jam. If the happiness subsides, I might finish that blog entry about Jezebel and slip under my new bed sheets (something to put on my ‘10 things to make me happy list’) with a boyfriend, a cat and The Wire. I would love to start a sewing project but for now I am too intimidated by awesome sites such as this one.

Free-form nectarine, almond and raspberry pie

Ingredients

- 340g shortcrust pastry (you can make it or buy it if you are lazy, like I did today)

- 3/4 teaspoon ground ginder

- 2 tablespoons ground almonds

- 2 nectarines, 3 apricots, handful of raspberries

- 1 egg white

- 3 tablespoons soft sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

- 1 tablespoon of raspberry jam (I used my handmade strawberry-rhubarb one)

Roll the pastry to a 30 cm diameter and set aside. In a bowl, mix the fruits cut in pieces, ginger and sugar. Take the pastry and make a circle of 8 cm of diameter in the middle using the jam, and add the ground almonds on top. Add the fruits n top of the mix and fold the pastry over, as pictured. Sprinkle some sugar on top, and brush the pastry with the egg white. Add almond flakes on top if you feel like it.

Bake in the oven @ 250 degrees for 35 minutes, serve hot or cold.

I really want to write about the whole Jezebel ‘thinking and drinking’ fiasco, because the whole thing got me livid and torn in more ways than one. But I’m not ready to articulate why I find it so appalling just yet. My patience is also wearing thin when it comes to those flash-debates, and these days I uncharacteristically tend to come to the conclusion that people should get a life - after all, it’s just online drama.

—–

I recently remembered something quite odd. When interning in Canada I worked with three lovely but very different women, one of whom had started at the same time as me. She was about five years older and was quite brilliant, but for some reason I was afraid she thought of me as a bit dull. Perhaps my age, perhaps the non-flueng English, who knows. I am not sure about the details, but one day she came to the office telling me she had read my blog.

“It kind of changed my perception of you”, she said. “I did not know you were intersted in so many things, it makes me see you in a different light.”

And that, my friends, is serious food for thought. Did the fact that I was writing on the interwebs in 2003 made me somehow more interesting? Was I more articulate blogging rather than in real life? Did I not have any conversational skills, or struck her as an introvert? Who the fuck knows - and the same questions remain, even though I would say my close friends always liked me better than they liked my blog (hint: they never cared enough to read it).

—–

Mais, passons… Here’s yet another recipe to cheer up our horrible gloomy rainy summer evenings.

Spinach, bacon and nutmeg-filled filo pastry.

Ingredients (serves 2)

- A medium bag of spinach

- A quarter nutmeg, grated

- 4 slices of bacon, trimmed

- 3 cloves of garlic, cut in small pieces

- 2 sheets of small filo pastry for each serving

- 1/2 cup of riccotta

- cherry tomatoes to taste

And now to the cooking:

Fry the garlic cloves in a bit of olive oil , add spinach with 1/4 cup of water, and wait for the spinach to reduce. In a seperate pan, fry some bacon cut in tiny pieces and garlic. When the spinach is ready, drain the water and add the nutmeg, followed by the bacon - fry for another minute in low heat.

Take two filo pastry sheets and place them perpendicularly. Place some the spinach mixture in the middle, add a spoonful of ricotta and two halves of one cherry tomatoes. Carefully fold the pastry and fry in two teaspoon of olive oil, 2 minutes on each side, medium heat. Add salt + pepper if necessary, and enjoy.

“But I think because we in some sense have shared the ups and downs of literary life together for so many years that it’s almost like breathing.” (via)

I think it was my friend Faith who first mentioned ‘What I loved’, the second novel written by Siri Hustvedt. One small detail pushed me to buy the book as soon as she mentioned it: Hustvedt is Paul Austers’ wife, and of course Auster is one of my all time favourite artist.

I loved her novel and quickly read her other works through the years. And as it happened, I just finished her new book, The Sorrows of an American. I thought it was wonderful, but one thing stopped me in my tracks and forced me to reflect is how similar her writing is to her husband’s.

I am absolutely not interested in knowing who was ‘first’ in writing in such a style, who thought of using serendipity and coincidences with such gusto, or who decided to paint post 9/11 NY in such lights. But the obvious question are at which point does a marriage start to really influence an artist’s thought process? Would both Auster and Hustvedt write in similar manners should they not have met? Do they talk and inspire one another during the writing process?

In retrospect, and having read more than my share of Auster interviews, I recognized much of his (their?) lives in her words: the quick mention of holidays and villa renting in Provence, the beautifully described white middle class guilt, the interest in the occult and the paranormal (Mr Vertigo), the symbolic metaphor (The Country of Last Things), the celebration of multiculturalism (Smoke) or the postmodern love letter to America.

They are, of course, many differences in their prose. I think Hustvedt does the sensual and erotic better than her husband, and she undeniably is more subtle than him in myriad of ways - I would even dare to say this is due to her gender, but I would hate to jump the gun.

So where does that leave me? Oh, yes: when two artists -or two human beings, for that matter- spend so much time together, do they end up seeing things with the same eyes? Are they inspired by the same details in their environment? When I try to think of different couple using the same medium as a creative outlets ( Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, hell, even Van Gogh and Gaugin), I think it’s definitely safe to say there is an element of competition and envy in their relationship. As Auster’s books are receiving less and less positive reviews (fools!) while his wife’s novels are widely acclaimed, I wonder if he’s just proud to be with her, or just frankly peeved.

… Did I mention his name is not in the book’s ackowledgments?

Wanstead park in Epping: the best London discovery we’ve made in a long time - except of course when we got lost and had to walk an hour between highways, Presbyterian churches and depressing nursing homes.

Yes, I suppose there was something quite nice in biking home after work under the absolute pouring rain, Patrick Wolf’s Stars blasting away in my headphones. Next: trying out my new sewing machine.

Last week I received an e-mail from a nice researcher working for The Listening Post, a tv show broadcasted on Al-Jazeera english. She had read my blog entry about Sarkozy and the media and wanted to know if I was interested in talking for a few minutes about his influence on the French media. I said I was of course interested in principle, but when she phoned back the next day and had me spend 10 minutes blabbering away about my hate for the president, I thought she’d never call back. Too often, I am an embarrassment to no one but myself (see also: Bicycle Mark’s podcast).

But I was asked back today and said I would spare the team the commuting pain and pay them a visit in person. As it happens, the show shares a building with CBC Canada (droll), and I was welcome by a lovely and very interesting intern and a very funny cameraman/producer, who was in panic because he forgot his pregnant’s wife wedding anniversary. We chatted for a few minutes and they told me to speak for a couple of minutes, in front of the camera, about my opinions. And how do I put this? I am horrible at being interviewed for podcasts, and even worse on camera. I was thinking about the poor editor who would have to work on the footage, deleting my ‘errrs’ and my awkward pauses, and I ) blushed 2) wanted to stab myself in the eye. I profusely apologized but they both said it was absolutely fine and what they were looking for.

As I left, she said she’ll let me know when the footage is online. I thought, fuck me, I hope I’m so bad it never airs.

Lesson learned: stick to blogging.

During an afternoon stroll in Soho yesterday, Mark and I stopped in front of markets stalls selling boxes of strawberries for just one pound (it was five o’clock, and I love market bargains). Upon buying a box and tasting a couple of strawbs, I immediately did a u-turn to buy three more. That’s how good they were, and we spent a few minutes cursing the very existence of Tesco under our breath. Long live street markets.

Today I set myself up to make some jam, my new favourite past time since I made raspberry-rhubarb spread in France last week. And by god, it is the simplest of all things to cook, and the best tasting one. Not that I am blowing my own horn or anything but damn, even Mark says it’s the best jam he ever had (not the France one mind, but the another one I made last week, since the fuckers at the airport took my container).

The whole process takes less than an hour, is very relaxing to boot, and your entire house will have the most wickedly gorgeous smell. I doubt I even have to write the recipe down, but given that many great sites give very different advice, I’ll give you my grandmother’s.

Ingredients (makes a medium jar):

- 400 grams of strawberries

- 250 grams of sugar

- Juice of 1 lemon

- 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence; or half a vanilla pod

And now let’s get cooking:

- Wash fruits, remove the stems and cut them in two. If you are using vanilla pods, add the seeds now. Mash the fruits with a potatoes masher or better yet, with your hands. Add the sugar and let it sit for 10 minutes.

- Put the mixture in a saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. After 8 minutes, add the lemon juice (it makes to jam into a gooey consistency, and you won’t need pectin). Keep on stirring occasionally for another 15 minutes, and gradually remove the foam. The jam is ready when the jam is still liquid, but is setting quickly after one minute in the fridge (test it with a tiny bit of jam).

- Pour in clean jar when still hot, close very tight and turn it upside down. Alternatively, you can also EAT IT ALL IN ONE SETTING.

Take my word for it, it brings a whole different meaning to the French adage “like children around a pot of jam”.

In Angel

The HIV data is horrible, but seriously - they totally got this ad wrong.

I would love to have a boat similar to these.

My dear friend.