Food

In an attempt to curb my sweet tooth, have been doing more home baking recently. This wholewheat banana and walnut loaf went down well with colleagues.

These muesli muffins were also (I thought) pretty nice and formed a robust mid-morning snack with a cup of coffee. Topped with linseed, just in case there weren’t enough seedy bits in them already. Ruth is suspicious of the wholemeal flour with millet seeds, linseeds, cracked wheat and poppy seeds that I am trying to use up (bag just visible on the right of the picture) as she claims it keeps creeping in to recipes where she expects white flour and is solely put there for her to crack her teeth on. None of which is of course true.

Have also found a delicious Delia Smith recipe for peanut butter cookies - halving the amount of sugar in the recipe (also leaving out the actual peanuts, and using smooth peanut butter as I prefer it - OK, so quite a lot of modifications) - but haven't photographed those yet.

At the other end of sweet snacks: Arctic Roll. I had no idea this was even still made. I remember having it occasionally as a child, and perceiving it as a luxurious special treat (or possibly just a respite from Instant Whip), though I don’t think it was something Mum was willing to buy all that often. Ruth and I had a nostalgic slice each, which we enjoyed though almost inevitably with such things, we weren’t as enamoured of it as adults. From an adult perspective, Nigel Slater's reported comment about Arctic Roll tasting of frozen carpet is probably a reasonable summing up, but I do remember that from the point of view of a 1970s child, Swiss roll BUT WITH ICE CREAM IN THE MIDDLE did seem rather thrillingly decadent.

A bit of research suggests that Arctic Roll did in fact cease production, but had a bit of a resurgence following the 2008 recession.

Moving on to savoury foods: I had a go recently at a recipe for saag paneer. The result looked quite pretty but lacked something in the taste.

Finally: bloody marrows. I like courgettes and Ruth and I did grow some a few years back, but I've no idea how people end up with such a glut of them - possibly it's crucial to stick to having only one plant. These somewhat careworn-looking specimens were laid out on the garden table at Mum and Dad's when I visited in August. Mum has evidently made chutney with some of the marrows, but no idea whether that used them all up - I suspect not.

Spot(s) o' culture

‘Into the Blue’ at the V&A

13 August

Admittedly my tastes may be a bit niche, but this was really interesting. Exhibition of the development of swimming pools over the years. Lots about lidos and recent campaigns to restore them. It featured a photo of the Thames Lido, which coincidentally Ray and I had visited again just the previous day.

It was pretty small-scale, tucked away on an upper floor of the V&A (which I had to ask how to get to – the staircases at the V&A each intriguingly only lead to certain floors, so you’ll find yourself on a staircase leading to floors 1, 2 and 4, with the staircase to floor 3 somehow at the other end of the building). I think this Guardian article alerted me to the exhibition. Pics nicked from the exhibition page.

‘Foragers of the Foreshore’ at Oxo Tower Wharf

29 September

This one was only on for a few days in September. Ruth is intrigued by mudlarking, presumably imagining discovery of gold coins, Roman artefacts etc; I am less intrigued by it, pessimistically imagining discovery of rubbish or the odd human torso. This claimed to be ‘the most expansive exhibition on Mudlarking that has ever taken place’. I wasn’t familiar with Nicola White but Ruth follows her on Twitter.

The exhibition itself was quite interesting but hot and crowded, so our visit was fairly brief in the end. Some interesting stuff has certainly been found over the years, though the exhibition did also reference the pitiable Victorian children who'd scoured the Thames' shores trying to actually find stuff to sell.

It was a relentlessly wet day. Afterwards we huddled outside the branch of Caffe Nero opposite for a hot drink. Think Ruth's expression says it all.

I’d often walked past the Oxo Tower but not visited any of the shops or the gallery space there. We had a quick mooch around the shops on the upper levels, though most of them appeared not to open on Sundays.

The mudlarking exhibition was held in Bargehouse, a large building opposite (presumably a former warehouse; no idea how it’s avoided conversion into luxury apartments) that's also part of the Oxo Tower Wharf development. The whole thing’s apparently owned by Coin Street Community Builders, a social enterprise.

Bargehouse has the names of the nine Muses written along one wall, which had me dredging my classical memory banks to enlighten Ruth as to who they were.

‘Other Spaces’ at 180 The Strand

12 October

Came across the exhibition while Googling exhibitions on in London during October, looking for the token something cultural for Helen and I to do on our meetup that weekend. Never heard of this place before. I might have walked past the building before, but certainly wouldn’t have thought it was an exhibition space – it looks like an office block with boarding around the ground floor. Apparently it’s an ‘iconic Brutalist building’ undergoing a transformation into an arts venue.

To get in, we joined a queue stretching around the corner of the building – I’m not great with queues but we agreed to give it a bit of time and see how fast it moved. In the event it moved reasonably quickly. We were then funneled in quite organized fashion through the three rooms, though there was plenty of time to experience each. Once inside, the exhibition was over three rooms containing three separate installations, ‘Our Time’, ‘Vanishing Point’ and ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’. There's a short clip here of the three installations.

I didn’t have my phone on the right setting for taking pictures in darkness, and didn’t like to fiddle about with it too much once we were inside, so these pictures may or may not give a flavour. Here's a review.

Our Time

Vanishing Point

The Great Animal Orchestra

‘Mary Quant’ at the V&A

19 October

This was great. Mum had mentioned quite a while back fancying going to see it – it’s been on since April – but we took until October to get around to arranging it. Fantastically set out on two levels within the V&A’s fashion gallery.

One of the most fun aspects of the exhibition was that there had evidently been a shout out for women to loan their Quant dresses to the exhibition (#WeWantQuant), with the result that in addition to the dresses themselves being on display there were a number of accompanying photographs of the then-girl in question wearing the dress in her parents’ sitting room or back garden, and a bit of the back story as to how she’d come by it.

I’m too young to be able to imagine the impact that Quant had on fashion options for young women, but Mum said that Quant had without doubt influenced the way she dressed in the Sixties. She said that she’d once modelled for a Quant-style pointed haircut while in college, though disappointingly isn’t sure she’s got any photos of it.

Quant’s King’s Road boutique 'Bazaar' was apparently famed for its eccentric window displays. I assume this exhibition mock-up of a woman in a distinctly eccentric pair of trousers with a lobster on a leash was one such.

There was an incredibly varied selection of outfits on show, including a range of PVC rainwear, and a range of shoes. Also some information about the range of ‘Daisy’ dolls, which I hadn’t known about. One exhibit showed some of the range of ‘Daisy’ accessories that were available.

Funky outfits

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'Daisy' dolls and accessories

After doing the Quant exhibition and lunch, we went up several floors to the ironwork gallery to view the Hereford Screen, installed in Hereford Cathedral in the late nineteenth century and removed from it in 1967 and sold to a museum in Coventry, who couldn’t afford to maintain it so sold it to the V &A. Hard to imagine that it’s likely to return to the cathedral at this stage.

Mum by the Hereford Screen