Soap and Brush

For a proper traditional shaving experience one needs a razor, a brush and some soap. Having tried out seven or eight different brushes over the last dozen years, for the last while I’ve settled on two that I alternate between. The one shown above is a Portuguese-made Semogue 1250 bristle brush with a wooden handle. It cost me less than a tenner and I’ve been using it for two and a half years. The other is an Omega 108 Professional brush (bristle again, but made in Italy) with a slightly larger knot and a plain dark blue plastic handle. It cost the same as the Semogue and I’ve been using it for twice as long.

Also made in Italy is my current choice of soap: Cella, specifically their regular ‘Extra Extra Purissima’ variety in the red plastic container, with its simple but eminently agreeable sweet almond aroma. I stockpiled three tubs of it when Connaught Shaving (also my source for the brushes) had it on offer the October before last (for less than £4 per unit, delivery included). Each tub lasts me several months and I’m still working my way through the second of the three. One of the good things about Cella is its easy-going nature, with even a somewhat underworked lather providing plenty of slickness for a first-rate shave with a straight razor.

Roberta

Last August or so I saw or heard someone singing the praises of Roberta Flack’s debut album First Take (1969). As luck would have it I found a cheap vinyl copy in September; but as luck wouldn’t have it, the disc was in barely playable condition. Still, I heard enough to know I too would be singing its praises in due course.

When I hastened to obtain another copy from a Discogs seller, even at four times the price I’d paid for the first one there was no qualm of buyer’s remorse. I particularly love the opening two tracks, the uptempo opener ‘Compared to What’ and the impassioned ‘Angelitos Negros’. Elsewhere, Flack’s famous version of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ is all the more lovely in the context of the album, and follows a stately cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’, then still a relatively new song.

My luck came good again a few weeks later when I turned up her fourth solo album Killing Me Softly (1973), again on vinyl and again for only a few pounds (albeit this time in better shape). I was well-acquainted with the powerful title track but didn’t know the album included another Leonard Cohen number in the shape of Flack’s version of ‘Suzanne’. Overall I thought the LP almost as good as her first. I had to wait several more months before chancing on album no. 2, Chapter Two (1970), which cost me roughly twice as much as Killing Me Softly, half as much as my second First Take. It gets off to another strong start with Reverend Lee but has a couple of weaker tracks too, such as her less than fully convincing attempt on Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’.

Most recently of all - the weekend before last, returning to my usual haunts paid dividends yet again when I found a copy of her 1972 duet album Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway. This one I’m still getting to know - at first acquaintance I feel it may be straddling the line between the agreeably and the overly smooth: repeated listening will be the test of that. Now I suppose I’m on the lookout for solo LP no. 3, Quiet Fire (1971).

Havana Club

Last night, while listening to Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Jerome Kern Song Book, I reached the bottom of the bottle of Havana Club Selección de Maestros rum I’d been savouring, snit by occasional snit, since last October. It was delicious.

When it comes to spirtuous liquors, my preference has always been for booze (be it whisky, rum or brandy), that has spent a good long while resting in a barrel. I first formed a taste for rums of that ilk between 15-20 years ago, with the Havana Club Anejo 7 Años becoming a firm favourite that consistently offered what was, for me, a particularly appealing quality-to-price ratio. I had better rums; I had cheaper rums; but none that struck me as better and cheaper.

I was tempted last year to try something from the same producer at a higher price-point, hence the now-empty bottle above. It cost about twice as much as the Anejo 7 Años, and, while it afforded fine pleasure, and I’m delighted to have tried it, the extra expense didn’t provide enough extra benefit (for my palate) to justify a repeat purchase.

Menus

One of my less successful typewriter purchases was a 1956 Voss S24 I ordered from a French ebay seller in 2019. It was a good-looking machine that just about worked - albeit never altogether satisfactorily. It arrived screwed down inside its travel case: when I unscrewed it I found two slips of paper that had been stuck underneath on which (so it appeared) menus had been handwritten in pencil, perhaps ready to be typed up. Fortunately the writing is fairly legible, and I’ve been able to at least make a guess at what it all says:

• Potage du jour ou S[alade] de concombre
• Steak. Pommes frites
• Potage . Terrines[?] Crudités
• Rognons S[auce] Madère
• Tarte aux foies de volailles
• quenelles S[auce] Nantua
• cote de porc  p. purée
• canard Roti  Petits Pois
• Faux Filet Béarnaise

Makes me feel a bit peckish. Printed on the reverse of the same slip, meanwhile, is Cafés BALZAC / Le Régal des Connaisseurs, which could be the establishments where these dishes were served up. The other ‘menu’ (below) includes similar fare, with the following not included on the first slip:

• Petits Salés aux lentilles
• Tête de Veau Vinaigrette
• Escalope Viennoise

Laroche-Joubert

The stationery set shown above is one of a couple I’ve owned that were produced by the French company Laroche-Joubert. This Barbarella set doesn’t have any obvious connection with the comic book or the movie featuring that character: perhaps there was merely an intention to cash in on that phenomenon by indirect association. As might just be visible, there’s a faint image of a woman’s head and shoulders on each page, with the same picture more clearly visible on the front cover of the folder.

The other set (whose product name is Anabelle) likewise has a background image on each sheet (see below), this time a drawing of a figure reminiscent of some of Leon Bakst’s designs for the Ballets Russes. Here, however, the folder’s cover image bears no relation to the one within. I wonder if this one might date from the early-to-mid ’80s, whereas the other one has more of a ’70s look about it - but those are altogether uninformed guesses.

The industrialist and politican Jean-Edmond Laroche-Joubert (1820-84) inherited a paper-making concern from his father, building it into a much larger enterprise, chiefly associated with the town of Angoulême. “The company was known for high quality writing papers that could be watermarked with all sorts of drawings at the choice of the buyer” says his wikipedia page, which ties in with the sets I’ve acquired, in which the paper quality is indeed admirably good.

Orlam

Although more a standoffish admirer of P.J. Harvey’s music than an outright fan, I was nevertheless intrigued on reading a description of her book Orlam (when it was published last year) as “a novel-in-verse written in dense Dorset vernacular”: not the sort of work one might typically expect from a rockstar-turned-author. When I picked up a copy from a bookshop shelf last month I liked what I saw of the verse therein. At the next opportunity I bought the book, going on to read it cover to cover by the end of that same day.

It didn’t strike me as much like a novel, nor would I categorize it as a single long narrative poem: rather it seemed to me “a series of lyrical vignettes” in which the outline of a larger narrative could be discerned. Like a song-cycle where the reader is called upon to supply much of the music, it’s something akin to a concept album in book form. To say it presents an unsentimental look at rural life is putting it very mildly: in no way is it a pastoral idyll. There are moments of quiet beauty, but the prevailing mood is one of grim grotesquerie (“suffused with violence, sexual confusion and perversity” as the blurb on the back cover puts it). There is most assuredly “something nasty in the woodshed”.

I think the decision to use Dorset dialect words and phrases more or less liberally throughout works very well indeed. Their buzz and burr conjures up an intense sense of place that is meanwhile anachronistic and apart from current reality, given that many of those words are (apparently) no longer in current use, being salvaged by Harvey from the pages of William Barnes' 1863 Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect. Readers not from that part of the world are aided by numerous footnotes and a glossary, and for the fainter-hearted, all of the poems are given in plainer English too. All this apparatus can at times seem like overkill, but an excess of hand-holding is probably better than too little.

It’s a highly idiosyncratic book with no few weaknesses, but overall I found it a bold and a compelling work. An odd surprise for me was that I recognized a couple of the ostensibly obscure dialect words therein having previously heard them via another source. My late wife hailed from Newfoundland, which has a rich dialect of its own. On occasion she’d use the dialect word bivver as an emphatic variant of shiver (i.e. with cold); Harvey uses biver, which is explained in her glossary as “to shake or quiver with cold or fear”. And sometimes when brushing her hair, if it were badly tangled, my wife might complain of it being clitty. Harvey uses clitty a few times, glossing it as “stringy and sticky, tangled in clods or lumps”. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that a relative of my wife’s, on tracing their shared ancestry, found a number of forebears who’d moved to St. John’s from the Poole area of southeastern Dorset.

Wedding

I took numerous old-school analogue photographs at my older niece’s wedding last year. They came out pretty well overall, which encouraged me to do the same for my younger niece, who got married last weekend.

I knew I’d be using my trusty Nikon FM3a. I knew part of the proceedings would take place in a relatively poorly-lit hall: not having a fast lens I obtained a Nikkor 50mm f1.4 AI-S for it, and also dusted off my old speedlight, in case a flash might be needed. In my experience, Kodak 400-TX film has been the most flexible and forgiving that I’ve used, so I ordered some rolls of that, despite it now costing the better part of £15 per roll.

I was disconcerted to find, when the time came to send the exposed rolls of film off for processing, that Peak Imaging in Sheffield, who had been my lab of choice over the last twelve years or so, had permanently closed their doors. This time, I used Ag Photolab in Birmingham, whose service on first acquaintance seemed similarly excellent.

Despite all my advance planning, alas, the end results were something of a disappointment. I was unaware that the FM3a, now about twenty years old, had sprung a light leak since last summer: it didn’t affect every frame, but it spoiled a couple of dozen of them. And just my being out-of-practice (I’d not taken any pictures on film over the rest of the year) meant that the proportion of shots that were out-of-focus, poorly-framed or badly-timed was regrettably high.

There were still some frames that came out OK; and of course I was only one among many guests taking pictures, not to mention the professional photographer, who gave every indication of doing a thorough job of documenting the happy event.

Snake-plant

My history of houseplant husbandry has been characterised by failure and misfortune. I brought home my first two plants Sid (a yucca, named after Sid Vicious) and Syd (a weeping fig named after Syd Barrett) to the student flat I shared in Wimbledon, ca. 1989. While Sid lasted a couple of years (thanks more to my flatmate’s attentions than my own); Syd’s time with us was all too brief. Next was Susan the dragon tree, who may have had great potential had I not been obliged to abandon her in Bristol when I moved overseas in ‘95. And so the sad stories have sporadically continued.

My only current indoor vegetation is a snake-plant (or Sansevieria) I call Ray - a 50th birthday gift from my niece. Ray has done remarkably well to withstand four and a half years of my inept care, meanwhile steadfastly photosynthesizing and sprouting the occasional new leaf. A few weeks ago, however, Ray brought forth a new stalk bearing buds that promised to open out into flowers. And that’s exactly what happened: the first blooms appeared while I was away at a wedding last weekend; the marriage, moreover, of the same niece whose birthday gift Ray had been.

Snakeplants seldom flower (I have read), and their doing so tends to be a sign of their being “mildly and continually stressed” (i.e. it has to live with me). The spindly little white blossoms are nothing much to look at, but their perfume is exquisite, somewhat lily-like but subtler, less strident: a very beautiful surprise.

Rendezvous

Buying records based purely on their cover designs is something I’ve frequently regretted and yet continue to do. Then again, where the outlay is small, the regret need only be relatively inconsequential. An example is Rendezvous, a 1957 LP by Bobby Hackett I picked up for a few pounds a few months ago with a particularly appealing cover (above) so very thoroughly redolent of its time. The back of the sleeve is no less well-designed.

Hackett was a trumpeter who had played in Glenn Miller’s and Benny Goodman’s big bands, among others. By the mid-’50s he was prolifically churning out albums of retro mood music. The tunes on Rendezvous maintain a ’40s feeling, but rather than the upbeat exuberance one typically associates with that earlier era, the feeling here falls somewhere between the seductive and the sedative. The track titles suggest the progression of a romantic night out: ‘You Are Too Beautiful’, ‘Thank You For A Lovely Evening’, …, ‘We Kiss In A Shadow’, ‘Two Cigarettes In The Dark’, …, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, ‘Love Me’, ‘One Kiss’.

“But when music is part of a rendezvous” say the sleevenotes, “it has to be something special, deftly fashioned to create a quiet, after-dark mood. Such is the smooth and relaxing music on this album. The songs are comfortably familiar, with a warmth and freshness wonderfully suited to the persuasively romantic trumpet of Bobby Hackett…” - which isn’t altogether inaccurate, though any freshness that there may once have been hasn’t withstood the test of time. While undoubtedly a well-exectuted record, it’s just too blandly mellow for my taste.

Oolong

Neither of my parents were tea-drinkers. My first taste of the stuff came when I was maybe nine or ten years old during a family holiday at Butlin’s in Pwllheli. We’d been accompanied there by my cousin and aunt, with the latter one evening taking it upon herself to proffer me a standard British cuppa made with a teabag, with milk and two sugars added. I duly tasted it, but thought it was quite disgusting, and couldn’t fathom why anyone would voluntarily consume the stuff.

About sixteen years later, I related this experience to my then pen-pal, a German student who spent her summers working in a tea-shop in Regensburg. She took it upon herself to send me a package containing some loose-leaf teas. One was a rooibos-based blend; while the other was a green tea with jasmine. These struck me as much more appealing than the ubiquitous paper sachets part-filled with brown leaf-dust I was more familiar with. Having acquired the necessary paraphernalia to try them I was favourably impressed: I did like tea after all.

Another dozen coffee-dominated years elapsed before I turned to tea-drinking in earnest, and tentatively began to explore the world of green, black and white teas, of oolongs and pu’ers. Fluctuating fortunes meant that there were times I was obliged to stick to cheaper options, and thereby learned to appreciate the lesser merits of mass-produced (bagged) English Breakfast teas, though never with milk or sugar added, which to my mind do not belong in a nice cup of tea.

For the last three years I’ve been ordering loose-leaf teas from What-Cha, whose ever-changing selection never fails to intrigue. Today’s brew - shown above - was a simple and relatively inexpensive (but nevertheless delicious) ‘Four Seasons’ Taiwanese oolong. The cup and saucer in the picture are from a partial set of Kokura porcelain I found in a charity shop. Although I’ve lately become re-acquainted with coffee, I remain primarily a tea-drinker.

Red Flags

Continuing and concluding the East German theme, the above is one of two miscellaneous colour slides I found amidst the incomplete set of b&w film stills I’ve mentioned before. It depicts a parade through what I believe is East Berlin ca. 1960. I’ve mislaid the slide for the moment so can’t transcribe the caption printed on it. The other colour slide offers an uninviting interior view of an art gallery.

Koenigstein

It surprised me to learn, when perhaps it ought not have done, that communist East Germany was a source of high-quality stationery. Was it, I wonder, a democratic luxury, or one restricted to the export market and to those in the upper echelons of the Party? Five or six years ago I aquired the box of Koenigstein paper and envelopes shown above. The simple design on the box reflected exactly the watermark in each A4 sheet. The paper within was beautifully hand-made: some of the best I’ve yet to put my hands on.

As well as the Koenigstein paper, the box held a smaller number of sheets bearing a different watermark: Spechthausen, likewise hand-made, and of no lesser quality. The Spechthausen mill, I gather, was not far to the north-east of Berlin; whereas the Koenigstein one was located south-east of Dresden. Like the majority of hand-made paper it had a very slightly hydrophobic surface which made it less than perfectly suitable for use with a fountain pen. Even so, I had no difficulty using it all up.

More recently I’ve acquired the set of paper & envelopes below. This paper is perhaps a tad less deluxe, with a smooth machine-made finish, but it still has a lovely high-quality feel. This paper isn’t watermarked, and the only indication of a manufacturer or brand-name are the words Briefalux Papier on the outside of the folder. The envelopes are tissue-lined. Each sheet in the pad bears a sepia-toned illustration of one of ten different East Berlin landmarks: it’s by no means clear in the small image that follows that we’re seeing the Marx-Engels-Forum depicted on the uppermost sheet. According to wikipedia, this park, with its statues of the authors of The Communist Manifesto, wasn’t inaugurated until 1986, thereby (one imagines) dating the set to the last years of the DDR, or the first years of a reunited Germany.

Solenoid

The work of Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu came to my attention in late 2019, by way of a review of his novel Solenoid at The Untranslated weblog. While Solenoid remained inaccessible to English-language readers at that point, I saw that two of his other books had been translated: Nostalgia, and the first volume of his trilogy Blinding (with an excerpt from the former, moreover, available on-line).

Around the time I placed an order for Nostalgia, I realised I’d already made an accidental acquaintance with some its author’s poetry, thanks to the inclusion of ten of his poems in an anthology called When the Tunnels Meet (1996). This was the culmination of a project in which ten Romanian poets were ‘twinned’ with Irish ones to produce translations of each others' work, Cărtărescu being paired with Medbh McGuckian. Those poems had a conversational tone (suggestive, perhaps, of American influences), and low-key, urban settings. Some struck me as a tad prosaic: I didn’t see any sign in them of the extravagant (and often poetic) surrealism that so often lights up his prose.

I loved Nostalgia, whereas Blinding: the Left Wing, though scarcely less impressive, left me with somewhat mixed feelings. Now, at last, I’ve also read Solenoid, published last year by Deep Vellum in Sean Cotter’s excellent translation. While I think one’s first encounter with Cărtărescu’s prose is always liable to be the most memorable, Solenoid is a more ambitious and coherent book than Nostalgia and intermixes its grandiose flights of fancy with down-to-earth realism in a more purposeful way than in Blinding. It’s not without some significant flaws, but I loved the whole well enough to have no qualms about overlooking those of its parts I liked less.

Up Against the Wall

My erstwhile enthusiasm for photgraphy came about, in part, because I’d seen the writing on the wall.

Easily the coldest and longest of the nine winters I spent in Sweden was that of 2005/06. Through the frigid misery of that January and February, a spray-painted piece of graffiti repeatedly caught my eye. Almost every day from the bus to work I’d see the words Up against the wall, motherfucker! on the side of a building. “I should take a photo of that”, I thought.

The same thought had occurred to me a couple of dozen times without my having done anything about it, when I further thought “I should take a photo of that with myself up against the wall!”. The problem was that my camera at the time was a basic point-and-shoot model that wasn’t working too well. “I’ll need a better camera,” I thought “and a tripod”. Another dozen more trips to work and back ensued, with my plan still only vague and ill-formed.

Then came the decisive thought: “I should take a photo of that with myself up against the wall, with my head positioned in front of the letter m!” The prospect amused me enough that the next Saturday I went to the local electronics store and bought a slightly better fixed-lens digital camera (a Sony DSC-V3), and a tripod. Having done so, the onset of a migraine disinclined me from trudging through the snow to the wall in question, and a few more weeks passed before the opportunity to go there finally arose.

On a Sunday morning in late March, the temperature still a bracing -5C, in overcoat, hat, scarf & gloves, I set up the tripod in the snow, positioned the camera so the full sentence was in shot, set the self-timer, and ran to stand in front of the m in motherfucker. After checking the result, I repeated the process another six or seven times until the camera’s battery fell victim to the chill and died. On reviving it back home and transferring the shots there was disappointment. The framing didn’t look so good and the colours were drab. Only after experimenting with cropping and desaturating the images in Photoshop did I end up with a satisfactory result.

I imagined I might try again when the weather and the light were better, but, no sooner had the snow begun to melt than a load more graffiti was added to the same wall, rendering it rather less photogenic. Having a slightly better camera meant I was more inclined to use it, and over the rest of that year and the next one I took something like a thousand more shots, both enjoying the experience, but also increasingly cognizant of the camera’s limitations. By late 2007, I had my heart set on acquiring a DSLR…

White Right Hand

On my mantelpiece there stands a glossy white right hand with an inexpertly-repaired break in its little finger. I’m not sure what it’s made of. Fibreglass, perhaps: it’s quite lightweight. Within its hollow wrist is a metal piece where it’s meant to be attached to a matching arm. It belonged to a mannequin, the remainder of which stands in my study/office.

Its working life had been spent in the Herbert Lewis department store in Chepstow. Having traded for some 140 years, the shop closed for good in 2018. I’d only seldom shopped there - now & then I’d pick up something from their kitchenware department - but I was sorry to see it go. As if to stress the finality of their closing down sale, not only was the stock all marked down, but certain of their fixtures & fittings bore price-tags too, the mannequins included. Of those that remained, the one that seemed in the best shape set me back about £30.

It’s a female mannequin with a featureless face. A metal bar jutting up from its oval glass base into its right leg holds it upright. Not only was the right hand damaged, but the corresponding wrist-joint was missing, with the hand merely taped to the end of its arm. Removing the tape, I merely detached the hand. I’d imagined the mannequin might serve as a quirky piece of decor; a conversation-piece. On taking it home, however, and re-assembling it, I felt a rush of buyer’s remorse. It just looked creepy and out of place.

Up into a corner of my study it went, where it still stands now, dressed in a long white shirt and adorned with a Venetian mask. It’s somewhere to put all the neckties I no longer wear: a cautionary example of a misjudged impulse-buy.

Shelf Portrait (iii)

The Compact Disc has been largely unloved for at least the past fifteen years. There are scattered signs of a slight revival of interest in some quarters, but it still seems to fall some way short of the groundswell of affection that brought about vinyl’s second coming. I came to CDs quite late (not until 1997) and retained a stubborn affection for the medium while it it was pushed aside in the rush toward digital downloads and streaming. I’ve done a good deal of downloading myself, but still prefer the pleasures of physical media.

At one time I had at least half a dozen Gnedby-esque units to house DVDs and CDs. Nowadays I’m down to three, with those fully-devoted to CDs. I currently own somewhere in the region of four hundred and fifty shiny discs. A section of my central shelving unit is shown above, covering some of H, all of I & J and most of K in my more-or-less alphabetical arrangement. There’s at least one album here I’ve owned for twenty-two years, and at least one other I’ve had for less than a month.

This subset of my collection goes from 17th-century harpsichord music by way of big-band jazz to near-contemporary pop/soul tunes. it contains singing in Welsh, Swedish, Spanish and German (not to mention English). I sometimes congratulate myself on having diverse tastes, yet was already doing that back when they were rather narrower, so perhaps I ought to try instead to be more conscious of what’s not represented here. In any case, if experience is anything to go by, the contents of my shelves will continue to change over time.

Brie de Meaux

Round one, 1995: taking some baby steps to ever-so-slightly enlarge my hitherto blinkered view of the world of cheese, I’d discovered the agreeably anodyne pleasures of brie. At a supermarket one day I picked up a portion of ‘premium’ brie without looking closely at the label. What I’d bought was, in fact, some Brie de Meaux, a strongly-flavoured variant whose aroma soon fully pervaded my tiny fridge. It proved too intense for my then-uneducated palate: I didn’t like it.

Round two, 2022: At a gîte in the grounds of a château near Épernay the morning after a wedding, nursing quite the hangover having absorbed a tremendous quantity of fizzy wine, breakfast was served; a simple matter of pastries, bread and cheeses. Among the fromages on offer was some Brie de Meaux. I had a taste and, with my palate better-schooled through exposure to a variety of cheeses over the preceding years, I loved it.

Since then, an occasional morsel of Meaux has become a recurring little luxury. I bought some at Aldi the other day, its AOC designation placing its origin within the Seine et Marne department (which includes Meaux itself). Wikipedia suggests, however, that “there is […] no production close to Meaux, and there is little celebration of the cheese in the town.” Having said that, the existence of a Maison du Brie de Meaux museum indicates at least a modicum of local pride.

Wikipedia intrigues us further by stating that Brie de Meaux “was named the ‘king of cheeses’ in 1815 by Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna.” Not even knowing what the Congress of Vienna entailed, I further learn that it was “a series of international diplomatic meetings to discuss and agree upon a possible new layout of the European political and constitutional order after the downfall of […] Napoleon Bonaparte.” Not a dairy products trade show then. I’m informed, however, that the factoid about Talleyrand first came to light in a volume of gossipy memoir printed some twenty-six years after the event, so its historical basis isn’t the soundest.

Waldorf Club

Waldorf Club writing paper has nothing to do with the Waldorf hotels (aside, perhaps, from a hope of accruing some unearned prestige by association). Neither has it anything to do with the Waldorf educational method, the salad, or the Muppet of the same name. The paper was first sold in 1910, two years after the London Waldorf Hotel opened its doors, and was apparently among the first to be advertised nationally in the UK. It was made by Jacobsen, Welch and Co., who had their origins in London before becoming associated with their Newton Mill plant in Cheshire.

My current box of the stuff (shown above) came with a couple of slips reminding the owner to re-stock: ‘Say this after me - “I must get some more Waldorf Club - the noteworthy notepaper”’. The watermark on the pre-folded Post Octavo sheets includes the text “N.M.Ltd.” for Newton Mill Ltd., as the company had become known by the ’50s. If I had to guess, I’d hazard it may possibly date back as far as that decade, or perhaps from the following one. The reminder slip mentions a choice of two paper sizes and two colours; whereas some promotional material from the ’30s mentions half a dozen sizes and a wider variety of shades.

At some point during the ’70s the Club was dropped from the brand name, which, eventually, also became the company name: Waldorf Stationery & Greeting Cards Ltd. To my mind, the Waldorf stationery from this later period lacks the charm of their earlier production.

Love and Rockets

I didn’t hold on to any of the books of my childhood & teenage years, not the odd assortment of volumes about cars, aircraft and imaginary spaceships; not the hardback copy of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar… I never returned to the school library; not the first book I bought with my own money (Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss) nor the other SF&F paperbacks that followed it: Dune and its sequels, the first three Hitchhiker’s Guide books, Jack Vance’s Lyonesse - and a few others. The greater part of my youthful reading had been courtesy of the local library. My parents kept only a couple of dozen books in the family home, but frequently borrowed from the library, and I habitually followed suit.

Things began to change when I went to university, where I took my first steps toward accumulating a personal library. By the time I graduated I had something like a hundred volumes of my own. After some thirty-three more years of acquisition and deaccession, however, a mere four of those remain on my shelves today. Of those four, the one I’ve held on to for the longest is Love and Rockets: Book One by Los Bros Hernandez, bought from Forbidden Planet in London in the autumn of 1987, when graphic novels were newly in vogue. It was later joined by the likes of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, Elektra Assassin and The Incal.

In the summer of ‘88, I obtained a paperback copy of Primo Levi’s wonderful memoir-novel-essay The Periodic Table, which appealed perfectly to my taste at that time for combinations of the literary with the scientific. I had already had my mind blown by the university library’s copy of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow when, in ‘89 or ‘90, I bought a copy of my own - an 8th printing of the Picador paperback edition. In late ‘88, a friend with poetical aspirations recommended Heaney & Hughes’ The Rattle Bag anthology to me, and I soon afterward found a well-used second-hand copy of the ‘83 reprint in the Oxfam shop on Kensington Hight Street for £1. It proved to be a potent ‘gateway drug’ for me into the world of poetry, and I’ve treasured that dog-eared volume ever since.

Also on my shelves back then (such as I can remember) were Pynchon’s V, Slow Learner, The Crying of Lot 49 & Vineland; William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Cities of the Red Night; Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs; Kerouac’s On The Road; Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky; Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood; The Great Gatsby; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, & Finnegans Wake (also Pomes Penyeach); A Hundred Years of Solitude; E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime; Black Tickets by Jayne Ann Phillips; Lucius Shephard’s The Jaguar Hunter; an omnibus edition of The Books of Blood; Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson; Amanda and the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer by Carol Hill; William T. Vollman’s You Bright and Risen Angels and The Rainbow Stories. What others, I wonder, have since fallen permanently beyond the reach of my memory?

Life Work

In a 2009 issue of the Boston Review, a piece by John Crowley about Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist begins beneath a black-and-white photograph of spent matches lying on a page of text. The photograph is one of mine: I’m credited in tiny letters at its right-hand side. The page belonged to an outsized copy of Arno Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold that I was never in any danger of finishing. The matches were my wife’s: by then I had smoked my last cigar.

Technically, I am a published photographer, essayist and poet, though none of those publications amounted to much. The photo above is one one of a dozen or so that others found via Flickr & asked if they could reproduce. Most of the requests were for on-line use, but a couple found their way into print. No money ever changed hands, but at least in the case of the Boston Review, they were kind enough to send me a copy of the magazine in which they used the shot.

‘Essayist’ is an over-generous descriptor to cover the pair of blog posts of mine that were reworked into a article published in a magazine (whose name I’ve long forgotten) that only ever ran for a few issues. A very brief book review of mine also ended up in a print publication at some point. None of the above had I actively sought out, whereas with the poetry there had been a deliberate action on my part - in ‘94 I sent three or four poems off to a local Cardiff free-sheet who had invited submissions, and they chose to print two of them. The sheet may have been free, but I was sent a nominal payment: the one and only time I’ve gained any financial recompense for my ‘creative’ endeavours.

Going back to John Crowley, I recently acquired a copy of the epically-delayed twenty-fifth fortieth anniversary edition of his novel Little, Big. It’s a beautiful thing, almost too big a Little, Big for my needs, whereas the mass-market paperback edition I’d once owned had been too little. I loved the book when I was nineteen yet have not gone back to it since: what might I make of it now?

Safety Razor

For decades I unwittingly bought in to the fictional narrative of progress pushed by the marketing departments of Gillette and their competitors that two blades were better than one; that three were better than two - and so forth. “The first blade shaves you close, the second closer still” according to one of their slogans. The ridiculousness (and needless expense) of the multi-blade arms race slowly became more apparent to me over time, yet it wasn’t until about twelve years ago that I tried stepping back to using just the one double-edged blade in a safety razor.

My first such razor was a cheap, plastic-handled Wilkinson Sword model. After a little experimentation I found it gave me better and more enjoyable shaves than the cartridge razors I’d been using before. The only downside was that it took a little more time. In the years that followed I acquired a few other inexpensive razors, with the one shown above being the latest of them. It’s a Fatip Piccolo I bought four years ago. Also in the picture is a pack of ten Japanese-made Feather New Hi-Stainless blades.

I’ve more recently moved on to using straight razors, but even now there are occasions when I need to shave fairly early in the morning while sub-optimally caffeinated - which is when I reach for the Piccolo. As the name implies it’s a compact implement, but nickel-plated brass handle lends it a pleasing heft in the hand. I’ve used it hundreds of times and hope to use it hundreds of times more.

Sweet Child

My last record-buying outing netted me five LPs and a 7" single for a total outlay of £23. The cheapest album was the only I didn’t much care for when I played it: a recital of piano pieces by Erik Satie on the Classics for Pleasure label. Beyond a handful of his greatest hits I’ve struggled to enjoy Satie’s eccentric compositions, and this was another unsuccessful attempt. Pieces like his ‘Sonatine Bureaucratique’ and ‘La Piège de Méduse’ left me cold. Then again, the record was only a pound and at that price it had seemed worth a try. The same charity shop had a similarly cheap copy of The Astrud Gilberto Album, which I’d have eagerly grabbed had it not been in such poor condition.

As a general rule, I’ve tended to be drawn toward lower-pitched singing voices and conversely have often shied away from high soprano & falsetto ones (I was slower than most to recognise the merits of songs such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ & ‘Smalltown Boy’). Combined with an incuriosity about the British folk-rock of the late ’60s and early ’70s, this prejudice sufficed to keep me well away from Pentangle’s music for many years. The dull months of Covid lockdown brought about quite a bit of musical reappraisal on my part, with one of the upshots being a very belated recognition of just how unusual and excellent a band they were. The frequently high pitch of Jacqui McShee’s exquisite vocals was no longer a deterrent.

I’ve much enjoyed a ‘Best Of’ 2-CD album of theirs I acquired at that time, and hadn’t considered buying any of their original LPs until finding a gatefold copy of Sweet Child in the bins. At £12 it was easily the costliest of the day’s buys but it’s a late ’60s pressing in very good condition and (most of) the music on it is a delight. ‘Sweet Child’ itself, and the live rendition of ‘No More My Lord’ are my favourite tracks. I very much like the pictures of the band in the gatefold too.

Blood Oranges

Living at a latitude inhospitable to the cultivation of citrus fruit means I’ve only been exposed to a limited proportion of what the genus has to offer. Of the citrusses I have tried, my favourite sub-variety must be the blood orange.

Although I can recall first getting a taste for them in my teens, it was during my ’90s sojourn in Italy that my preference became fully-formed. Sicilian sanguinello fruit were abundant from the end of January into early or mid March, with many cafes setting up juice dispensers on their counters full of their sharp red-orange juice for the duration.

Nowadays, as with so much other produce, the window of availabilty has been extended, and as well as enlivening the drab month of February, so-called “sweet reds” can now be found until late April: I bought some this morning.

Special Bargain Offers

An interesting ebay purchase was a folder containing “Specimens of Die Stamping, Notepaper and Copperplate Printing” produced by the once-renowned London department store Harrods ahead of their 1940 January Sale. It contained the typewritten letter shown above, along with examples of stamped & printed personalised letterheadings, and samples of some of the various types of paper they stocked.

“Paper prices are literally soaring” begins the letter, getting straight to the point, before adding, realistically, that “even to-day’s prices will certainly go higher”. For some, it may have been a last chance to stock up before paper rationing took effect the following March, with, in its wake, measures such as the “Book Production War Economy Standard”. With the raw materials for paper-making (esparto, most notably) in ever shorter supply, British paper-makers were obliged in some cases to make do with rather less desirable stuff such as wheat-straw in its stead.

A Harrods catalogue of somewhat earlier vintage lists papers made by prestige manufacturers such as Joynson, Hollingworth, Towgood & Whatman, along with an extensive range of own-brand lines. I imagine their range wouldn’t have been too very different by 1940. Via separate ebay acquisitions I’ve had the chance to work my way through a cache of their ‘Hans Bank’ writing pads and to use a fine machine-made rag paper made by Hollingworth and sold by Harrods (I’m unsure when) under the ‘Stag of Kent’ brand: both were excellent.

Shelf Portrait #2

It took a few false starts before I developed an enthusiasm for photography, but once I did, things escalated quickly. A few months after getting my first DSLR (a Nikon D80), I’d supplemented it with a second-hand film SLR (a Nikon F80). Having rediscoverd the joys of shooting on 35mm film it wasn’t much longer before I got my hands on an old TLR (a Yashica-Mat) to dabble with medium format. I took up home development of black-&-white film, and daydreamed about having my own darkroom, and of experimenting with a large-format camera.

At length I coaxed both those daydreams into reality, but in each case I bit off more than I could chew. My circumstances never permitted any kind of permanent darkroom, and the makeshift one I was able to set up was in no way satisfactory: the enlarger I’d acquired only got used on a handful of occasions. There was marginally better success with an entry-level 5x4 camera - a Crown Graphic - but after seeing for myself just how much bigger a step up it was in terms of inconvenience and expense from medium to large format, I felt discouraged after taking and developing only a few dozen shots. At around the same time, money and free time came to be in all too short supply, with photography in general having to take a back seat to other priorities.

One of the 5x4 shots I did manage to take was of the disorganised and neglected state of my bookshelves at that time (Autumn 2011). A detail from it is shown above. I find it interesting to look at in retrospect, given just how many of those volumes I’ve since let go. I no longer own the half-dozen copies of FMR magazine, for eaxmple, or the art-books about Adam Elsheimer, A.G. Rizzoli or Jacques Callot. And I sold my first-edition two-volume copy of the Codex Seraphinianus no more than a year after this picture was taken. I hated to part with it, but the four-figure sum from the sale proved very useful at the time. A decade later I bought a copy of the 2013 Rizzoli edition of the Codex by way of a belated replacement.