A French country kitchen – in Hackney?

Tiles from Collioure

Television occasionally teaches you genuinely useful things – even when you don’t necessarily expect it to.

The limits of aspirational telly for The Other Half and myself is Grand Designs, the programme about people who build their home, under the watchful eye of the charming Kevin McCloud.

Mind, I say “aspirational”, but it never ceases to amaze how you can build a gorgeous home for considerably less than the going rate of a ready-made, small flat in London.

Perhaps that tells us something about ... something.

But if one thing is clear from regular viewing, it’s that, unless you have the expertise, don’t project manage the job yourself.

Two years ago, we had the bathroom done while we were away.

We moved into our home, a housing association new-build block of 12 flats, 19 years ago.

Being on low incomes, we were incredibly grateful to be able to escape escalating private rent – although at this point it’s only fair to say that our landlord never ripped us off, and was incredibly understanding when we had payment problems caused by erratic payment.

Since low incomes was a specific factor that housing associations were attempting to address, we were appreciative of having fitted wardrobes, carpets, a fitted kitchen and bathroom – and even a rack for drying laundry – when we moved in.

But with time, things wear out. Two years ago, we had cracked tiles, bath taps that had almost seized up with limescale, flaking ceiling plaster, a wobbly toilet and a plastic shower curtain that was beyond the merely manky.

Initially, we considered just getting these individual problems remedied. But it didn’t take long to realise that, given that the bath would have to be removed in order to replace the taps, we might as well get a new one.

From there, it was but a small leap to replacing the entire bathroom.

I had an ISA that, given interest rates, was doing nothing, so we funded it that way and spent a month or so pottering around – online and on foot – coming up with ideas and then sourcing and buying stuff.

Fortunately, thanks to a recommendation, we have a gem of a local tradesman who can do work for us.

Ian, a dour – on the surface of it – Scot, is a godsend, who we can trust with the flat and who, as an added bonus, loves cats, or “The Young Ones”, as he refers to our feline trio.

Indeed, a few months ago, he volunteered to come and feed them when we were away, even when he had no work to do.

We got through the bathroom business, but after that, we looked around and saw very clearly that other work needed doing too.

The kitchen, for instance, is slowly falling apart. Ian has done remedial work to keep cupboard doors in place, but it’s not just the doors – and drawer fronts – that are splitting apart and warping; the actual frames are too, with dowels visible in an increasing number of places.

At the same time, the fridge is doing a slow dance of death.

We knew all this last year and started planning 12 months ago, having a box of lovely features tiles shipped over to us from Collioure. They will form the splashback above the new cooker.

That cooker will be the indulgence. I have plumped for an all-electric (we have no gas feed) Rangemaster – and I am already relishing the idea of what a double oven, separate grill and fifth (ceramic) hob will allow me to do.

No more Einsteinian calculations for roast dinners; no more inability to do oven-roasted, crushed potatoes (with home-grown sage) together with something that’s grilled; no more having to wait to put a pudding in, in the cold, dark days of winter, until after the main course has finished cooking.

The boons, even for a household of two, will be enormous.

Being rather old-fashioned, we opened an extra savings account last year to fund it, along with removing yet another ISA that was mired in interest-rate slumber.

But even with finance sensibly in place, it didn’t take long before we realised that a repeat of the process for the bathroom was simply not possible.

It’s one thing to pick a bathroom suite and some tiles; it’s another entirely to sort out units for a kitchen, with all the measuring and so on that that entails. So we asked Ian to project manage.

He, knowing outlets other than B&Q, Homebase and Wickes, has measured, taken our list of ‘this is the sort of thing we’d like’, and come up with solutions that we now realise will revolutionise the kitchen.

And stereotypes exist for a reason. Ian hates to see clients spending any more than they need, and has sourced a number of things in a way that is cheaper than our own original ideas.

CGI of the new kitchen

The big issue was always going to be storage – and our current cupboards are a nightmare. Being a short arse hardly helps, but cleaning out what’s there has been decidedly difficult, even with a step ladder, simply because stuff gets stuck at the back or, worse, in impossible-to-reach corners.

As an example, I found three bottles of soy sauce on Saturday, when I expected only one.

And in one of the aforementioned corners was an ancient, opened box of cat biscuits, and a tin from prehistoric times containing the remains of a packet of cream crackers.

It is, then, the perfect opportunity for a major clear out. Given all those corners and high shelves, I had no idea just how many jars for preserving and stock I had – but it was enough to save some and still fill three bags for recycling.

We have timed this for when we’re away. There is no practical way you could have a kitchen – or a bathroom – done while you were in residence.

The contents of the freezer are gradually being used up – a pack of lamb kidneys on Sunday, my final jar of homemade chicken stock the day after, the blackcurrant sorbet on an indulgently regular basis.

To be honest, I didn’t realise just how much storage space we have got, but this will transform how we use it. At the moment, my small collection of best crockery is bubble-wrapped between uses, and sits on the top of a bookshelf in the bedroom: no cupboard can accommodate it.

Just working through this means we’re going to substantially rethink where and how we store what, to utilise spaces that are less easily accessible for things we don't need often.

Of course on a less practical side, there is pleasure in considering the look.

A few years ago, there was an advert for one of the big chains where they asked you to go in for a consultation, taking one item from your kitchen that most represented you. I’ve often wondered what I’d have taken – and often concluded that it might be an olive oil drizzler.

It probably wouldn’t have been possible to take the shelf/dresser unit that we bought some years ago on Tottenham Court Road, which turned out to be French, and is a lovely piece of proper, wooden furniture and now holds, as well as many cookery books, pretty pots from Collioure and a traditional, semi-glazed earthenware cassoulet pot from Carcassonne.

As I mentioned earlier, we have feature tiles from Collioure – together with matching cupboard and drawer knobs – so there was already a bit of a theme.

The unit fronts will be off-white, with a subtle look of planking. The awkwardness of the corner will be tackled by, above, double doors opening from the centre and, below, a carousel that will rotate out.

There will be a tall, narrow cupboard that will hold mops and brushes, and even a small, built-in wine rack.

The rest of the wall tiling will be an light ‘stone’ look, while there are quite pale terracotta tiles for the floor.

Paint colours I selected at the weekend: magnolia for the walls, white for the ceiling and an olive for the window sills and skirting, to give some depth. The cooker and hood will be cream, so a hint of solid colour should look good – and besides, olive green continues the developing theme.

The work surface – currently something mottled, grey and artificial, which somehow stains and is almost impossible to clean or dry properly – will instead be oak.

And then there’s the small matter of the sink.

I can’t say I ever expected to find myself spending hours thinking about sinks – let alone taps – but when the first computer-generated images were placed in front of us by Ian, with a bog standard, stainless steel sink and drainer combined, it started me mulling.

And after I lost four days of my life last month to exploring the vexed question of how to produced a pre-paid envelope for a reader survey, sinks and taps proved to be a pleasure.

The current draining board is a pain, since it doesn’t do the absolutely essential job of draining. So instead of repeating this, we’re plumping for a Belfast sink with slightly retro taps – both of which, thanks to Ian’s canny eye, will be cheaper than we had initially thought possible.

It won’t just look good, though: given the amount of slow cooking I do, it’ll be a great deal easier to soak and wash my big pots, without having to twist them to even get them in the sink at all.

It will also, though, be entirely in keeping with a room that, it is becoming increasingly clear, is about to become little other than a French country kitchen in the heart of Hackney.

What a thing that should be to welcome us home in late September.

I shall hang strings of garlic and Roscoff onions from the dresser once more and dive into an autumn of daubes and cassoulets and gardianes.

Books for the beach: the great annual dilemma

Loki with, err, her gospel

And so it begins: the great annual kerfuffle about What Books am I Taking on Holiday.

It brings with it the annual question of: ‘why don’t you get a Kindle?’ Well, I have a tablet, and I read news and features on it, but don’t particularly like reading anything longer.

I love the feel, the heft, the smell, the sense of a real book.

And however good the backlighting is on a device, glass does not take well to being buffeted by sand (oddly enough) and other elements, while computer technology does not, generally speaking, make good bedfellows with water.

I don’t an electronic device into the bath – so why would I risk dropping one into the sea or similar?

Books it is – and this ritual is one that, even in its apparent indecisiveness, I enjoy.

Of course, it adds weight to the baggage, but I’m not travelling by air.

The Other Half is being seriously serious this time around, with an intention of taking Piketty for the beach – only a doubting Thomas would not concede that Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already caused enough of a stir to render the first name of its author as superfluous.

And Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, a massive new biography by Stephen Parker, is also sitting ready to find a corner in the case.

My own reading list is somewhat different – although the Brecht will be available if the mood takes me.

First up is The Colours of Catalonia: In the Footsteps of Twentieth-Century Artists by Virginie Raguenaud, which I bought in Collioure in the first place – and will now take back to provide artistic background for this trip.

It does, of course, include a section on Collioure and Matisse and the Fauves. And Raguenaud talks of Ceret and Elne, of Picasso and Survage.

Museums Without Walls, by Jonathan Meades, is also penciled in for provision of pithy pointers to looking at and reading the built environment around us.

And then I have Five Quarters of the Orange, Holy Fools and Coastliners – three novels, all set in France, by Joanne Harris, together with The Gospel of Loki, her reworking of Norse myth from earlier this year.

Harris is one of those writers I haven’t read as much of as I have meant to – but that’s largely out of fear. For ages, I dreaded any of her other titles being a let-down after the glories of Chocolat, which is a rare beast, in that it’s a book I’ve read rather more than once.

Back in 2005, I reviewed Gentlemen and Players for a magazine – and thoroughly enjoyed that too – but subsequent re-reads of Chocolat and a first reading of its sequel, The Lollipop Shoes, were as far as I dipped my foot into Harris’s oeuvre until dipping into Blackberry Wine a week or so ago.

I’d always intended to get a copy of The Gospel of Loki, but this has not been a big reading year, so hadn’t got around to it until The Other Half suggested it for the holiday list.

One Amazon reviewer suggested that Loki won’t appeal to anyone who liked Chocolat, but that seems a remarkably limiting idea with no logic.

I love Chocolat – and I love the Norse myths. I can’t be unique – well, not on that score, at least.

As Terry Pratchett’s dust jacket biog points out, he is “sometimes accused of literature”.

Harris is, first and foremost, a wonderful storyteller, with a great ability to weave modern fairytales – on occasion, very darkly – and to employ magic realism, but she’s also a writer of the sort of subtlety that the same can be said of her: indeed, she makes me think of Angela Carter.

Take Chocolat: it’s a wonderful story, but it’s also ‘about’ so much: about life, living, pleasure and guilt, and it leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

My mother didn’t like it, but then it was only some time after I’d given her a copy that it dawned on me that Harris’s approach to both the sensual pleasures of life and to religion might not entirely have appealed to her.

C’est la vie, as those damnable Frenchies might say.

Blackberry Wine is a great read, and as I turned the final page and brushed away a tear – yes, you really do care that much about the characters Harris creates – thus was born the feeling that Proust can wait.

Mona Lisa smile – please!

Have you ever wanted to take a photograph in a gallery – and found that you couldn’t?

While many museums and galleries do ban any photography, others don’t. Still others allow some – Tate Modern, for instance, will allow visitors to snap the permanent exhibits, but not the special exhibitions.

But the announcement that, in future, the National Gallery in London is to allow photography has inspired indignation from some visitors, and allowed the Telegraph to provoke a small measure of ire, as well as agreement, in an opinion piece on the decision.

In one sense, it’s quite amusing that publicising a quiet decision – made in part because it’s increasingly difficult for staff to know whether a visitor is using an electronic device to photograph an exhibit or look for information about it – might actually increase the likelihood of people now taking pictures in the gallery by raising awareness of it.

The issue, however, is not really about photographing exhibits, but in many ways, about what galleries are for and how we look at art and what we expect or want from art.

There’s nothing wrong per se with photography in a gallery. Allowing photography doesn’t suddenly mean that every painting is going to be obscured by people taking snaps of it – with or without the added ‘selfie’ element.

Some might ask why you’d photograph anything in a gallery.  

I do so on occasion – almost always for later reference. Many galleries don’t have general catalogues or postcards of every single work. And that’s particularly true of smaller galleries outside major cities.

Sometimes I might make notes – on my phone or even (say it quietly) in a little, old-fashioned notebook. With a pen.

But sometimes, when it’s less likely that you’ll be able to find a reproduction online, a might take a snap.

As an interesting contrast, in Paris, photography is banned in the Orangerie and the Orsay, but not in the Pompidou.

On a personal level, it was helpful in July, in the latter, to be able to take a few photos – and I didn’t get in the way of anybody else and nobody got in my way.

I don’t think it made any difference not to be able to in the Orsay, but in the Orangerie, where there’s a specific effort to create a peaceful, almost meditative space around Monet’s vast Nymphéas canvases, it would have been totally out of place.

There is an element of snobbery involved in at least some of the complaints. Nobody, I suspect, grouches about a visitor sitting quietly in a gallery and sketching a work.

That, of course, has a sort of discipline about it – it was one aspect of a traditional art education, so has a certain ‘legitimacy’.

The big problem in major galleries, though, is not photography, but overcrowding. And I mean when it’s 10 deep near a famous work.

Scrum at The Night Watch

Then, as I’ve said before, I do start feeling irritated by the ‘selfie with Rembrandt’ syndrome, as it occurred when we were visiting the Rijksmuseum last year and you had no chance of really seeing The Night Watch and a bloody struggle to get near any Vermeer.

I actually had to get rather rude myself and push through a crowd, pulling The Other Half behind, so that he could actually get to see The Milkmaid, which he loves.

Equally, when visiting the Courtauld in London last year, I was revelling in being alone in the gallery of gothic and medieval works, when the door opened and a group of tourists flooded in and I was pushed out of the way so that people could start snapping the exhibits.

I fled upstairs, only to be interrupted by them again as their guide nearly sprinted them around the place, barely allowing enough time to cast more than a cursory glance at anything – oh, apart from taking pictures of each other in front of Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve, making crass gestures at the picture.

This is not a question of expecting people to genuflect toward works of art, but of basic good manners and a little bit of respect for the others you’re sharing a gallery space with.

In the Courtauld, I eventually sat it out in the Cézanne room. There are worse things in life.

But it begged a question that why people visit galleries – particularly in those sort of groups – and what art is for.

Is art simply another commodity – an attraction to boost tourism, for instance? Or does it have a value beyond that? In our price-of-everything-value-of-nothing world, I suggest that there is clash between these two.

If, as Picasso said, “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, then that implies the need for some sort of contemplation. In the Orangerie, with those Monets, it could hardly be truer.

I get the sense that, with the likes of that Courtauld group – and others I’ve seen being dragged around cities on tours, led by bored individuals carrying a brolly or a plastic flower aloft to identify themselves – this is tick-box tourism and has nothing to do with really seeing or experiencing what they’re looking at.

At the heart of this, ultimately, is the gross over-commercialisation of our society, with its attitude of instant gratification and the dumbing down that goes with that.

These are problems that spread across all sorts of realms of life, not just art, but one small illustration of it is the use of ‘selfie’ to describe a self-portrait by someone like Rembrandt, effectively removing any appreciation of the skill involved or even what self-portraiture is really about.

Not that this should be any surprise. After all, concentration camps are on tourists trails these days, while visitors stand grinning as they’re photographed next to the statue of Anne Frank outside the Westerkerk in Amsterdam.

And all this works in combination with the technical/digital revolution, leading to a world in which people visit cultural icons – not to look at them and wonder at what made them such, but, in effect, to digitally play a version of I spy, before moving rapidly to the next one.

There is another problem with that. Let’s shrug our shoulders and say that, well, if someone wants to race around a gallery and merely glance at stuff, then that’s up to them and they are free to do so.

Which is entirely true, of course.

But at what point does the sort of behaviour and crowd chaos outlined above become unacceptable where it impinges on the experience of other visitors?

You can ask the same question another way: why should someone have the right to play their music so loudly that all their neighbours have no choice but to hear it too?

Those are the problems: not photographing the exhibits in galleries.