Some links
My pal Pádraig has followed up his interview with all-round comic supremo Alan Moore (parts one and two) with an interview with lettering mastermind Todd Klein.
Design Freebies is a brilliant new blog (at least to me) featuring some of the best free desktop wallpaper and printable stationery available on the net. This one is my favourite thus far.
I recommend you to head over to the Radio 4 website to listen to Ian Hislop talking about Hogarth’s life with input from Andrew Graham-Dixon. It will be available for another week.
Toe Jam Car Boot Sale
Yesterday Shayne of Eat a Vegan, friend J and I went to the Toe Jam Car Boot Sale in the car park of the Bernard Shaw pub in Portobello. We picked up a few things between us and the atmosphere was laid-back with some good tunes and tempting smells from the foood stalls. It was full of hipster types, with ambitiously tight jeans and directional haircuts much in evidence. My question is, where do these hipster types habitually live? Because I see them at events like this, at Whelan’s and then …. that’s it. Are they all in hiding somewhere in Portobello?
Hasten!
To those in Dublin, get yourselves down to the Leinster Gallery for an exhibition of affordable art, but hurry, as it’s only open until the 27th. I found this out via one of the exhibitors’ blogs, no less a person than Mr Rob Ryan!
The blessed Blackrock Market
Today was bound to be a good day – I woke up to beautiful sunshine and had a visit pencilled in for the afternoon to Dublin’s best knitting shop, This is Knit, with Shayne, author of everyone’s favourite vegan cookery blog, Eat a Vegan - but it ended up far better than I could have expected. We went in search of wool for some scarves to Blackrock, where This is Knit is situated. As Shayne and I got to the door of the wool shop, I happened to take a look in the door of the shop opposite, Michael’s Books, which had this directly in front of its entrance.
For €40. For FORTY EURO. It was at this stage, as Shayne will attest, that the palpitations began. I have been aware and desultorily looking for a copy online of this book for years. The very cheapest listing I’ve ever seen for this book on AbeBooks is in the £60 sterling region and that’s before postage to Ireland. And yet here it was, The Compact Oxford English Dictionary for, relatively, buttons! I was saving money by buying it, I’m telling you.
The reason it’s so expensive is that within its single enormous volume is the entire Oxford English Dictionary, a dictionary which usually comes in twelve volumes. The Compact Dictionary manages to fit in everything by printing the text micrographically, fitting nine pages of the ordinary dictionary on each page of the compact one, like so:
It is supplied with a magnifying glass with which to read the text. It is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. I’m as pleased as Punch with my find.
Shayne and I did not forget our purpose in setting out, despite the excitement of getting my hands on the dictionary. I got some very nice 100% cotton wool, Araucanía Ulmo, that I’ve never seen before but like very much, being both soft and warm. I hope to have something to show for it before long, but till then this picture will have to do.
As we were leaving the market, the man belonging to the book stall (a separate entity to the bookshop) saw me wilting under the weight of the dictionary and observed that it wasn’t very compact at all. I took it out and showed it to him and he agreed that it was a lovely thing altogether. Just as we were going he reminded me of the real sign of an intellectual: a person who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger. Odd man.
Knitting needle case
I am currently wiped out on antibiotics, so the only thing I was fit for today was a spot of craft. I bought some pretty fabrics when I was in Liberty on my birthday, including a fantastic Amy Butler print, which is the topmost one in the photo below. I have a habit of buying fabrics and then not doing anything with them – I’m not a very practised seamtress and so I’m sure I’ll do something to mess it up and ruin the material. As I invariably love the fabric I buy and also because it’s so expensive, I always want to get it right and so I get performance anxiety without doing anything at all.
I wanted to make a roll-up knitting needle case, as my knitting project bag is a mess (as an aside, I never have the same problem with knitting, but then wool is endlessly reusable in a way that material is not – you can always just rip it up and start again with knitting). I used the pattern on WikiHow as a reference and adapted it (for which read: made it up) where I didn’t understand it.
Above, pinning the lining to the outer fabric.
Stitching the inside divisions.
Tidying up the ends.
The finished back – and look at that pattern! I wish we had a haberdashery to compare with Liberty here at home, but Hickey’s is about it in Dublin these days. Does anyone know anywhere better?
The finished inside, serving its purpose.
The wrap, rolled up with a ribbon from VV Rouleaux, just a few minutes from where I used to work. (Again as an aside, while we mightn’t have a great do-all haberdashery over here, we do have a passementerie at least as lovingly stocked as VVR, if not quite to its scale, in the A Rubanesque shop on South William Street). So without realising it my needle case is made up entirely of nice things picked up in That London, so I have this and my scar as souvenirs of the summer.
———————————
This is my first post written and sent on my whizzy new laptop via my whizzy new wireless internet connection! I am in my sitting room and I’m on the internet – we are living in the future, people!
Dublin Culture Night
Just to let those of you in Dublin know about Dublin Culture Night, an evening where a vast swathe of Dublin’s cultural attractions stay open until eleven at night, enabling those chained to their desks nine to five a chance to sample the life of the mind. There are also a large number of outdoor goings-on, so let’s hope it doesn’t rain.
Addendum
I don’t know how, but I forgot to mention Sarastro, a restaurant in Covent Garden and site of my last meal in London (for now).
The food mightn’t have been fantastic (though it was fine) and the walking quartet (for there was one) weren’t overly concerned with keeping time with each other and the two operatic singers who were beginning just as we were leaving might have seen better days, but that wasn’t really the point: the point was the sheer spectacle of the place, and it is jaw-dropping if, like me, you go there without any hint of what it’s like inside. Each little bay (the second photo shows little galleries, like bay windows jutting out – these are semi-private tables) has its own theme – ours seemed to be some sort of Middle Eastern bazaar, with the one to our right a Venetian tower. It has to be seen to be believed.
I won’t divulge the secret of the toilets, but I will say that they’re not for the faint-hearted.
1 comment