Today’s topic from the challenge: restaurant moment.

This one is a hard one for me, as I’m not a big restaurant person.  The only one that’s really standing out to me was my birthday meal at Joanne’s in Crystal Palace.

My birthday was a funny one; I turned 21 this year, but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t do anything special to mark it.  I’m not built for throwing parties — organising them, yes, I could do that, but throwing and then enjoying one of my own, that’s not a skill I’ve mastered yet.  Besides that, I was still in London for my birthday, where I don’t know many people at all.  And, lest it start to sound like the lady doth protest too much and I in fact wanted a massive party, I like to practise Gretchen Rubin’s principle that you have to do what you enjoy rather than do what is stereotypically “fun” and that you don’t get much out of at all (see her recent post on the topic here).  So, bearing all this in mind, that morning I went to a few galleries.  I visited the Courtauld Gallery for the first time and afterward pootered around the National Portrait Gallery, where I laughed aloud at this photo of Bob Dylan in Liverpool:

I just love the incongruity of the scion of NY hipster cool with these cheeky little Scouse kids.  Look at that kid’s face, leaning in for his photo!  Hilarious.

In the afternoon I returned home, where I read a substantial amount of my brother’s birthday present: Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland, which ever since I’ve been meaning to blog about, so let me take this occasion to say it’s GREAT.  I had to leave it at the BF’s flat when I returned home to Dublin after the summer, which has delayed the proper review.  This is my excuse.

That evening the BF and I took ourselves off to Crystal Palace for our dinner.  I can’t quite remember what I had, though I do remember I was absolutely stuffed after the main course and wasn’t going to have a dessert, but then made myself because it was, after all, my birthday.  It would be so great to bottle the birthday feeling — I didn’t do anything particular with the day, but enjoyed every last bit of it tremendously, simply because I could keep saying to myself, “It’s my birthday”.

I was just over on Gwen Bell’s blog, where I heard about her Best of 2009 Blog Challenge — participants post on a given topic each day.  I think it’s a nifty idea with plenty of thought-provoking suggestions and, seeing as I’ve been a little slow on the blog front recently, it’s no bad thing to kick me into posting more frequently.

Today’s topic is “trip”.  This year I went to Norway (which I blogged about) in April, which was new for me, and not just because I hadn’t been there before.  It was my first proper holiday away without my family and my first proper holiday with my boyfriend.  It was the furthest north I’d ever been.  I knew hardly anything of the language and knew very little about the country’s history and culture before going — as 99% of my family holidays have always been in France, this was pretty new on me.

Probably the one thing I enjoyed most about the trip was discovering the work of Gustav Vigeland, which I went mad for, and believe to be the highlight of Oslo.  Don’t go to the city without making a trip to Vigeland Park.

My trip has left me with a great wish to see more of Scandinavia — it’s so close and yet I know so little about the history — though for now that ambition is on the back-burner while I am an impecunious student (Norway is great but it’s very expensive).

The last We Make London event (which I blogged about here) may well have been my favourite craft fair of the year — perfectly sized, extremely well-curated, super high quality exhibitors.  Their next fair (which, alas, I won’t be at) is this Saturday, 5th December at Chelsea Town Hall (11am – 5pm).

There are more than 80 exhibitors slated to exhibit this time round, including the likes of Fabric Nation, Emma Bradbury (the shop doesn’t seem to be well updated, but check out her gallery page), Namolio and her beautiful crocheted pincushions, Strikk’s really impressive knits for the home, Isabee’s lovely selection for kids (including wooden swords!), Helena Carrington’s motor-inspired home things, Atherton Lin’s lovely drawings and good taste in music, as well as event sponsors The Make Lounge running a “Creation Station” where you can make Christmas decorations from recycled materials.  I could go on, but I won’t, because it’s only rubbing it in that I won’t be there, sigh.

However, I am delighted to offer Basil Exposition readers free entry to the fair (£2 to the great unwashed).  To avail of this offer, be one of the first 20 readers to email your name to wemakelondon (at) googlemail (dot) com and you will be added to the guest list at the door.  Get your emails in by end of the day on Thursday.

I LOVE mince pies.  They’re as dear to my heart as Christmas puddings, and it’s just as well they’re limited to this end of the calendar, as otherwise I’d eat them all day every day.  I’m not too snobby about shop-bought mincemeat (though, as I say here, it’s a good idea to loosen it up with a little cooking apple and booze if you want it to feel a bit more home-made) but, if I have the fruit in the house and a little time to spare, there’s nothing better than making your own.  Like so much other Christmas baking/food making, it fills the house with the most wonderful scent.  I used Nigella Lawson’s suet-free recipe after much deliberation — I was greatly taken with Sarah Raven’s recipe until I realised that she doesn’t cook hers at all, which sounds highly spurious to me (cooking apple + left to mature uncooked for a month = rank).  I say I used Nigella, but she was really only the starting-point.  I didn’t have the cider she specified, so I went for an equal amount of whiskey; I chopped and changed the quantities of various fruit, and added some that she hadn’t mentioned, such as apricots and prunes.

There’s no getting away from the fact that it creates some mess, at least when I’m in the kitchen (yes, that is a really sticky disgusting spill on the hob; yes, that is stuck-on mincemeat at the bottom of the biggest pan in the house) but then, when it’s all done, you get a little shelf’s worth of these guys:

They’re maturing for now but I’m pretty sure it won’t be long till they’re broken out.  Yum.

We invested in piles of dried fruit this week and so I’ve been making a traditional Christmas food storm in the kitchen.  These are my two Christmas puds, made from Nigella Lawson’s recipe in How to Be a Domestic Goddess (though not very faithfully — I tend to move about quantities of fruit to suit what I have and what I like.  I don’t love currants, so I don’t use many of them) — as you will know from my post last year, one bowl was not enough and we’ve since got another, so I now have two perfectly-formed puds to look forward to.

I went to town on photos in my post last year about how to wrap up your pudding, should you need help with that.  Though be warned, it is not an exact science: the one on the left was done in two minutes flat, the one on the right just wouldn’t stay tied for above half an hour.  Such is life.

I went to see An Education last night and loved it.  I’ve been getting more and more into the sixties recently; I attribute this almost entirely to the BF’s purchase of the two Beatles boxsets, and what’s his is mine so I have effectively bought the boxsets too.  In addition, last weekend the BF and I glutted ourselves on a number of episodes of The Beatles Anthology series — which, if you haven’t seen it (as I hadn’t), is utterly compelling viewing.  An Education is situated in a period that isn’t specified, but is clearly just before the Beatles and Twiggy and the rest of it burst on to the scene, but I felt throughout that they and the changes they were soon to bring about were an absent presence.

The film centres on Jenny, a hard-working Twickenham schoolgirl whose father is determined to get her to Oxford, to read English.  But then one day Jenny meets David, a Jewish 30-something man whose business is never quite pinned down, and her father’s plans fall to the wayside as both Jenny and her parents fall for David.

Lots has been said in praise of Carey Mulligan in this film, and it’s all deserved.  I would already consider myself a fan from her good work in a small role in Bleak House, as well her performance carrying the best Doctor Who episode, “Blink”, since its Russell T Davies rebirth.  She’s 24, but I think she very convincingly plays 16.  If you’re looking for niggles, she’s a mite too confident in standing up to her school authority figures (though I attributed this to the script rather than Mulligan, myself).  Otherwise, she’s wonderful — just wide-eyed enough, just pert enough, pretty and likeable and terribly curious about the world (I loved the way they got her fascination for Paris just right; I was just as determined at 16 to live in Paris and look moody and interesting).  Peter Sarsgaard has a very difficult role which he entirely pulls off, being at once the very charming, attractive older man and yet not quite right (accosting schoolgirls in the street; blatantly lying from the outset to Jenny’s parents).

The film is fantastically evocative, at both the good and the bad — Jenny’s home is pretty disheartening with drab colours and a distinct post-war feeling.  This is gloriously contrasted with the life to which David introduces Jenny, which is full of dangerous-looking sports cars, jazz, good food, FABBO hair, make-up and clothes, and fantastic taste in art, achitecture and the finer things in life.

Rosamund Pike is the main wearer of FABBO hair and clothes in the film, which is hilariously juxtaposed with her very well-pitched ditziness, misunderstanding Jenny’s statement that she’s hoping to read English at Oxford (“Read English … books?”) and being catty about female students and their speccy, spotty, fat ways: “they can’t have started out like that”.  She’s not the only great bit part — Emma Thompson as the iron-hairdo’d headmistress has, if I recall correctly, just two scenes in the film but stands out very strongly in my memory; and Olivia Williams is just super as the sympathetic English teacher who probably won’t get to be a part of the sixties revolution (like Larkin, it might be just a bit too late for her) but thoroughly deserves to.  This film is fantastically stylish, yes, but I really thought it had tremendous substance too, and succeeded in creating a very believable world.

One of the things that hit home most with me was the interrogation of what education is and ought to be — through her liaison with David, Jenny’s latent disrespect for her Latin cramming, and for its ultimate end, comes to the fore.  I’m not sure quite on which side the film comes down in the argument of school of life versus book learning, but it offers plenty of food for thought.  The dénouement is just as well done as the rest of the film; I don’t think it’s spoiling things to say that the not-quite-rightness of David becomes more apparent to Jenny, perhaps frustratingly later than it becomes apparent to the audience.  The ending is very well pitched and nicely ambiguous.  The more I think about the film the more I like it.  And the more I want Jenny’s outrageously wonderful hair and wardrobe.

Last Saturday the BF and I went to the final night of An Inspector Calls at the Novello Theatre, before it restarts at Wyndham’s.  Neither of us knew a thing about it (I suggested it because it was well reviewed in Time Out and tickets were available) but this is the apparently terribly famous Stephen Daldry production, which, according to every online review I’ve found, transformed the play from the warhorse of rep theatre to an edgy, existential piece, and has been running pretty much continually since it began in 1992.

I prefer not to tell anything about the plot, as I found it fascinating to watch with absolutely no background knowledge myself (though think a darker Christie plot for mood), but I will say that aspects of the staging are terrific (I was particularly struck by the difference between the cosy lighting of the Birlings’ dining room and the cold, clear light surrounding the Inspector) and the cast is uniformly good, though I particularly liked Nicholas Woodeson as the Inspector, very humane and portraying a lot of restrained emotion and power, and Robin Whiting and Marianne Oldham as Eric and Sheila Birling.  The transformation of the setting from a simple dining room set to an inhospitable waste replete with bomb craters, upon which the Birling’s dining room (basically a doll’s house) is perched on stilts, is a wonderful move, but the use of a mixture of Edwardian costumes and Second World War costumes seemed rather confused to us, though it was evidently deliberate (apparently it’s supposed to signify the future generations judging the short-sighted actions of their forebears or summat like that).  It’s a strange beast — I can both see why this would run and run, and see as many reasons why it should be as short-lived as any other play.  It’s full of this kind of rhetoric:

One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do.  We don’t live alone.  We are members of one body.  We are responsible for each other.

Now, I’m a massive pinko jessie, and that kind of sentiment will make me well up every single time — but it won’t do that for everyone, I know.  I suppose it’s reassuring that that kind of thing can be made so successful that it’ll run for nearly twenty years.

I’m certainly curious about Priestley now.  Do you have anything else of his you’d particularly recommend to a neophyte?

But great.  Via Craftster.

If I hadn’t already made her present, and if I had about $1,500 to spare, I would definitely get her this.

It’s a handbag.  By Olympia Le-Tan, via India Knight’s Posterous.

Oh, and this is post number two hundred for Basil Exposition!

It was a beautiful day here today.  Look at that sky!  I haven’t retouched any of these photos.  That’s real.