A Mass of Odds and Ends

Many years ago I used to paint regularly, now I just do it on holiday. I found this little folding sketchbook in Venice a few years ago and have slowly filled it up with sketches, mostly drawn whilst waiting for yet another delicious platter of seafood to be placed in front of me. It is very nearly full, so I decided to try my hand at making my own. Its only flaw (to get a technical for a moment) is that the paper is just slightly too thin for my taste, so I bought a heavier gauge watercolour paper, and cut the entire sheet into rectangles, each one the size of two pages. Then I glued them together, interleaved, and sewed heavy canvas onto the front and the back.

It would work as a photograph album as well, with a photograph on each page. The finished product is bulkier than the original, but still small enough to fit in a pocket.

I love notebooks. The groaning shelves my study bear witness to this passion, and every now and then I try my hand at making one myself. This is my attempt at renewing my recipe book, a battered notebook with torn pages, liberally illustrated with splashes of wine and dabs of butter. There is lots of inspiration on the internet, I particularly like Erin Zamrzla’s work, you can see it here , and I love these notebooks made by Attic Journals. My solution is nowhere near as elegant - I took a clip file, covered it with newspaper and stuck some of my favourite recipes on the cover, then covered the whole thing with sticky-backed plastic.

For the pages I cut newspaper down to A4 size then stuck one recipe per page -that way I didn’t even have to rewrite any of the recipes. In the case of old recipe books that were falling apart I took the best recipes out and glued them onto pages as well.

It’s very easy to nothing on the beaches near us, to relax in the heat, lying on your sunlounger and see if you can resist the offers of everything from fresh coconuts to jewellery, sunglasses, cds, toys, cotton dresses and beach towels. We all go to the beach with different objectives, Jasper and his friends like to dig, when they aren’t crabbing,

and I go to read. I start to plan my summer reading back in May, and this year I am enjoying The Gift, by Lewis Hyde, with the wonderful subtitle “How the creative spirit transforms the world”,promising on the back cover to address the following questions: “What are the most important gifts in life?”, “What is the value of art in our society?” and “Are we in danger of ignoring our most precious commodity?” and I’m hoping it’ll help with those vulnerable moments when I wonder why on earth I couldn’t be a proper person, with a proper job. I’ll let you know if it does! In the meantime any book suggestions would be enthusiastically received, I’m always looking for new and interesting books to read.

For the first few years that we lived in Italy it was like living in a zone of sensory deprivation, being without English bookshops. I reread everything in the house, gave long lists to visiting guests and made massive online orders, but nothing could replace the easy joy of wandering down the road and finding something to read right now. Finally all three of us have mastered reading novels in Italian and this shop in Mogliano, aptly named “da Franca C’è”  - “It’s at Francas” is now our treasure trove. Last week I found Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World and the moment the final volumne of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy came out Mario had it ready for Aldo (who promises that he won’t tell me how it ends). I still have to buy some books in the UK, I prefer to read Larsson in English, and paradoxically Andrea Camilleri, who uses too much Sicilian dialect for me, and just to add to the confusion I read Alexander McCall Smith Italian.