Brighton serves up two more enjoyable eateries

Beets with goat's cheese

If The Salt Room and Petit Pois were the runaway winners of the culinary side of last week’s working trip to Brighton, two more eateries also had things to recommend them.

Tuesday saw our team dinner, which often flounders on the food front – not least because such affairs are largely about the socialising.

This time, one of our number had booked for the Copper Clam on the seafront, another of the town’s new eateries.

Temporarily faced by hoardings as the refurbishment and redevelopment of the seafront continues, we were shown to a very nice upstairs room that had been set for our group.

Cod in a buttery, sweet sauce 

However, having spent all day in a darkened conference centre, being outside was absolutely key – not least in hot weather.

The staff dealt with this change from our booking with alacrity and good humour, and we sat down outside with our first drinks.

While imbibing a very pleasant rosé, we enjoyed whatever we’d pre-ordered on a very good deal.

In my case, it was a prawn cocktail to start, with serious prawns rather than the pink tiddlers sort you’d usually expect in this retro dish.

And no avocado in sight.

As only a slight aside, I used to like avocado – and I know how to de-stone one without giving myself an injury – but in recent years I’ve found them too sweet. Perhaps the decline in my liking has a direct relationship to how hip they have become?

Wine glass; chilled wine

Anyway, back to The Copper Clam.

Everyone had opted for sea bass to follow – and it is indicative of the quality of the kitchen, that over a dozen people could be served such a dish at the same time and without quality being compromised.

This was decent fish, well cooked – moist and tasty – and the right sort of portion for an evening where the socialising was the main thing (and hence the reason for no photos).

The staff are very friendly – and our waiter was particularly deft at spotting an empty win bottle that might need replacing.

Find out more at thecopperclam.com and on Twitter at ‪@TheCopperClam.

Sea bass and salad

Twenty four hours later, in need of a quieter experience, we decided to try the bistro at Hotel du Vin on Ship Street.

Revamped last autumn and pulling in appreciative noises, we got a table outside in the courtyard – a pleasantly peaceful environment that felt as though it were miles from the hubbub of the promenade that was, in fact, just a few metres away.

After enjoying a glass of Nyetimber – an interesting English fizz – it was time to see what the food was like.

First up for me was salt-baked beetroot with whipped goat’s cheese, sumac, Greek yogurt and Melba toast.

Cheesecake

Looking beautiful, it had plenty going for it. The beet was warm and tender, while the other ingredients lent various degrees of sharpness to the dish.

The Other Half had ordered soft-boiled duck egg with asparagus soldiers, which came on a wooden block that had clearly been designed for just such a dish, with once large dimple to hold the egg and a smaller one for the salt.

It was apparently very tasty – and for once, the slightly fussy way of serving it worked.

Most of the time, simple plates are more than adequate – even if that goes against the current fad for presentation demanding all sorts of ‘quirky’ alternatives to plates, which add absolutely nothing to the food.

Amaretto over ice

Next up for me was butter-poached cod with lyonnaise potatoes, smoked salmon and a hispi cabbage sauce – enough sauce, indeed, that it was served in a bowl.

A very sweet, rich dish, the cod was moist and flaked beautifully.

The Other Half opted for more sea bass – this time, with a panzanella salad and nasturtium pesto.

I finished with a lime cheesecake with meringue and dice of elderflower jelly, while The Other Half settled for ice cream.

The service was very pleasant, although we had quite a wait for dessert. But the setting made that bearable – and even allowed for a touch of dinnertime macro still life photography.

This is good food, well presented and served in a very pleasant setting.

Altogether, another welcome addition to a growing list of decent eateries in this south coast town.

To find out more, visit Hotel du Vin and Bistro.

The Salt Room ticks all the boxes again

Raw scallop starter

Extraordinary weather on the south coast ensured that dusk on Sunday evening was a beautiful sight to behold, with sky hues that were redolent of the Mediterranean, evolving through a palette that ranged from apricot to lilac.

And in such a situation, what could be better than a really good meal, enjoyed al fresco?

This was my fourth visit to The Salt Room in Brighton in the space of just over 12 months and The Other Half’s second.

I have, before each of those meals, had just the tiniest amount of trepidation. British dining is, in my experience, so often a matter of pot luck.

Over the years, we’ve paid not inconsiderable sums for food that has, if not inedible, been little more than fuel. Given serial disappointments, one is familiar with an inkling of fear that perfection simply cannot continue.

Teriyaki salmon

But this is The Salt Room and now, having eaten 12 courses there, I can report that it remains utterly flawless and a simply wonderful place to eat.

This time, I started with raw scallop, finely chopped and combined with elderflower and radish, and topped with lumpfish roe.

It was beautifully served on a shell, which sat on top of crushed ice to keep the fish at the perfect temperature.

I’ll say it again of this eatery: a single bite is enough to tell you two things – that the fish here is seriously fresh and that the kitchen really knows how to handle seafood.

Trout

In the case of the scallop, delicate tastes and a delicate texture made for an exemplary dish.

The Other Half very much enjoyed his teriyaki salmon, with wasabi, cucumber and lime.

He noted, as we dined, that suggestion from some that an expensive meal should induce guilt.

But as touched on above, you can spend less and, for instance, have a vast plate of pasta placed in front of you and not be able to come close to finishing it because it’s an insanely over the-top portion.

On weekdays, I lunch sometimes at a café near work where, frankly, any pasta dish is close to being half a packet of the pasta in question.

It’s not particularly expensive, but I can never eat it all – even though I always ask for a smaller portion.

Cod

The OH posited the point that, on such occasions, you even find yourself eating more than you really feel comfortable with – simply from guilt and not wanting to have to face staff asking what the matter is.

So which is worse – an expensive meal of quality that you eat every last crumb of, with relish? Or something that is far cheaper but you eat largely because you need to eat and you leave loads because there’s far too much to start with and it’s not particularly special anyway?

Cherry Arctic roll

Portion size is a wide-spread problem in the UK. Thankfully, it’s not the case at The Salt Room, where I can comfortably eat a three-course meal.

The plates from our starters could have been licked clean by the time they were removed.

Next up, The Other Half enjoyed – very much – cod and chorizo with BBQ onions, samphire and lemon.

For me, it was sea trout, with crayfish dumplings, asparagus, BBQ tomato and basil.

Again – an utter delight, with perfectly-cooked fish and lovely flavours. Textures were light, while presentation was also up to the very high standards.

And two more plates were completely cleaned before being removed.

Last up, The Other Half had mango and vanilla parfait with lime curd, lime snow, passion fruit and macerated mango.

Parfait

I opted for a cherry and chocolate Arctic roll that was a confection of cherry ice cream, chocolate espuma and compressed cherries.

Do I have to tell you how much was left after we put down our spoons?

I didn’t think so.

The Salt Room is consistently producing excellent, seasonal food. The creations of head chef Dave Mothersill are inventive but never feel forced. Frankly, it was difficult to choose what to eat because there was so much to whet the appetite.

The service also remains superb: efficient, friendly, knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

My only question is when I’m back in town next!

To find out more and book, visit www.saltroom-restaurant.co.uk.

A culinary masterclass from a master chef

Sweetbread, almond, pear

Back in December, a whole fortnight before Christmas, we ended up at the Gilbert Scott for my birthday meal, after a salutary lesson in just how far in advance you need to book for certain restaurants.

Not, I hasten to add, that The Gilbert Scott is in any way a culinary let down.

But within a few days, I’d suggested to The Other Half that we try to book well advance for his birthday, which fell this weekend just gone.

It paid off – thanks to very helpful staff – and we found ourselves with a reservation for lunch at Marcus, Marcus Wareing’s eponymous eatery at the Berkley Hotel in Knightsbridge.

Having quaffed a late-but-light breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast – as much to get the systems going as anything – we dressed and headed out into Saturday’s gloom.

To begin with, the bus was slow. Then, after getting to King’s Cross, the tannoy blared out the news that a signal failure had stalled all Piccadilly line trains – just as we’d found our way to the platform.

I’ll just say at this point: King’s Cross was always bad, but it now simply seems bigger and more crowded than ever, even if shiner and newer. It’s a nightmare to navigate around.

We thought about hopping onto the nearby Victoria line and changing – only to see that there are no stations where you can change to the Piccadilly.

We’d given ourselves more than enough time – more than recommended by Transport for London – but with less than half an hour left before we were due to take our seats, we hopped a cab and I rang the restaurant to let them know we would be a little late – which didn’t worry them in the least.

Eventually, we made it across London just 15 minutes beyond our appointed time, but nonetheless feeling slightly harried.

Anjou pigeon, celeriac, bean, blackberry

Moving through the tea room and into the restaurant provided almost instant tension relief.

At a comfortable spacious table, we started to unwind with the menus, a welcome glass of fizz and small, doughy balls with a Parmesan salty kick inside that really lengthened the taste experience.

Marcus is one of those establishments that uses very simple menu descriptions, but frankly, I don’t know why some people find it disconcerting: for me, it’s a nice way to highlight the key flavours and ingredients.

So, while The Other Half started with “sea bass, sweet potato, saffron, sorrel”, I opted for “veal sweetbread, almond, pear”.

Sweetbread is one of those hugely misunderstood cuts: yes, it can be testicles, but it can also be several other things – not least, thymus.

These were blissfully sweet and tender, with a texture that was not unreminiscent of foie gras, and with a gloriously caramelized top providing a wonderful contrast.

The pear came in at least two ways: two segments that, our waiter explained, had been given the sous vide treatment, which firmed them up at the same time as keeping them juicy. The cut edges had a filigree of black on it – a little like charcoal, I thought.

And indeed, that would work perfectly, given the wine I had.

We’d decided to rely on the sommelier for recommendations, and for this course, mine was a French white – Chardonnay ‘Vieilles vignes’, Seguela, Côtes Catalanes, 2013 – with a distinctly burnt toast taste that worked really well as a compliment to the sweetness of the meat and the pear.

There was also a pear crisp that was wafer thin and simply melted in the mouth, plus slivered almonds and a purée to add further textures.

It was divine.

For a main, The Other Half picked “venison, chestnut, cranberry, black pudding”, while I took on “Anjou pigeon, celeriac, bean, blackberry”.

Again, two very happy diners.

The pigeon was wonderful: superbly cooked, with a single leg roasted to the point of being sticky with it’s own juices, and served in a tiny bowl of bread sauce and with a water bowl alongside. There’s something almost divinely nefarious about sitting in a two-Michelin-starred restaurant and eating with your fingers.

Rhubarb, custard, thyme, ginger

The blackberries, I suspect, had also been in the sous vide for the same reason as the pear – intensified flavor and firmness – while the celeriac came in both tiny, sautéed dice and little roundels. The beans added yet more texture.

Wine this time was an earthy red – a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, ‘Clos des Brusquieres’ from the Rhône, 2010.

And then, of course, dessert.

Both of us, having seen Wareing himself present Masterchef: The Professionals late last year, were aware of his love for the dishes his grandmother cooked in his native Lancashire.

So on seeing a listing for “rhubarb, custard, thyme, ginger,” neither of us bothered with a second thought, given that the Yorkshire Triangle’s forced rhubarb season is just underway.

Not, of course, that this was any old rhubarb and custard.

The custard came as feather-light set discs, flavoured with vanilla and thyme.

With that, there was a sticky rhubarb smear, a quenelle of rhubarb ice cream, pieces of rhubarb (probably from the sous vide, because it was ‘cooked’ yet firm) with dots of foam and thyme, ribbons of stewed rhubarb and strings of ginger.

With the restaurant out of banyuls, I tried a digestif from Spain: a Moscatel Dorado, Bodegas César Florido, Jerez, which was full of prune sweetness and sunshine.

There were Tahiti vanilla and milk chocolate truffles and banana ganache with yuzu gel squares to complete the meal.

We that, we headed home, both sated and soothed.

People sometimes question whether fine dining is worth the lay out.

Truffles and ganache

I know I’ve said it before, but yes, it really does.

This was flawless cooking; not a single false note. Superb ingredients, with flavours that were robust yet combined with great subtlety, and all presented quite beautifully.

Having the wine selected for you by an expert really adds to the experience: when matched like this, it becomes even more an integral part of the meal than if you simply selected a single bottle to cover all courses.

Service was exemplary – friendly yet formal at the same time: the perfect way to illustrate this was that the junior sommelier happily agreed to give me a list of the wines we’d had, and did so in a beautifully hand-written list before we left.

And in the interests of completeness, the setting combines comfort and elegance.

This was a wonderful meal – and a perfect way to spend an afternoon.

The new butcher of Broadway Market

A brand new butcher

Broadway Market has seen a change or two over recent weeks. Henry Tidiman’s has finally closed after a year of seeing reduced hours.

Hopefully, Henry can now enjoy a long and relaxing retirement.

But just as I was lamenting the loss of a butcher on the street – the premises will, from what I’ve heard, be turned into another eatery of some variety – something unexpected happened.

Another butcher opened, on almost the opposite side of the street.

The shop has been through various incarnations since the street started to revive, but it had, many, many years ago, been a butcher.

It’s quite possible that it had even been the shop that Henry’s father had run, giving us a rather pleasing sense of synchronicity.

Anyway, Hill & Szrok, master butcher, is now with us – and most welcome.

By day, it is a traditional butcher – very traditional, as the design reveals. Tom Richardson Hill is most certainly a butcher who combines a serious commitment to traditional butchery with an understanding of what a modern clientele in an area such as ours needs.

In the evening, an hour after closing, Alex Szrok takes over and operates it as a cookshop, taking a fresh look at that aspect of our culinary heritage.

There are a couple of important things worth noting. The shop will open to 6pm – pretty much essential these days for any new, independent food outlet that wants to catch people on their way home from work and offer a real alternative to supermarkets.

It helps to allow a Paris-style of shopping for food: being able to buy fresh, from independents, after work.

Since Broadway Market now has a fishmonger with a similar approach – Fin & Founder – and two organic greengrocers that open late (plus a range of very good Turkish general grocers) and La Bouche, which doesn’t close early, I can travel home and still shop for that evening’s meal.

The next thing to note is that Hill & Szrok is an organic butcher.

Forget the plastic

The area has changed – it doesn’t matter if some think that’s good and some think it’s bad – but it’s simply a fact that we’ve become the next stop on the eastwards-moving trendification of London’s East End.

That causes issues – not least in terms of the prices of housing in the area – but also in terms of prices on Broadway Market.

However, it’s also important to be realistic.

Broadway Market was all but dead little more than a decade ago.

The myriad shops that Henry described to me had, apart from his own, been consigned to history – in part because local people had decided that shopping at a big box Tesco was what they wanted.

Anything opening now has to ride the wave of the revival of interest in food.

However it’s characterised by some, that isn’t just ‘foodieism’, but reflects a number of trends – particularly among more middle-class people who can afford not to have to shop as cheaply as possible.

Lovely burgers

Last year’s horse meat farce is one such reason – people care increasingly about provenance for a very good reason. They’re also increasingly concerned about GM, about the use of antibiotics and hormones in their meat, about the sustainability of fish and about seasonality.

What’s happening on Broadway Market merely reflects that.

There is, as I’ve mentioned previously and touched on a few paragraphs ago, a question of money.

The UK has long seen households spend a lower percentage of their income on food than households on the Continent. And in the last few years, that gap has widened further.

While there are myriad issues with a wide cultural attitude of seeing food as fuel, and nursing a deep-seated suspicion of anyone who spends ‘too much’ time and money on it, it remains almost certainly the case that the recent further decline is down to stagnating and declining wages.

We know that incomes for everyone apart from those at the very top have fallen steadily for the last 30-odd years, while the cost of living has risen – not least in areas that are not even counted for the sake of inflation figures, such as housing and domestic fuel bills.

This is what I call a butcher

But since the 2008 crash – and even more so since 2010 – that decline has increased for many. The rise of foodbanks is an indicator of that.

And when many of our fellow citizens are having to make choices about whether to pay the gas bill or to cut back on what they spend on food, then this is not the best time to finger wag about how they should all eat better.

Mind, even with all the ‘added value’ at Hill & Szrok, it’s not as pricy as I expected.

But let’s go back to our new butcher: we’ve had a few things from there now – I admit to an almost giddy delight in being handed a package that is not bagged in plastic with a sticky red tie at the top, but wrapped carefully in proper paper, tied neatly and then handed to me in a simple paper bag.

When you walk in, there’s usually some serious butchery going on in the centre of the shop, often involving some huge pieces of meat – Tom also ages his own beef. This is the antithesis of the supermarket, with its pristinely-packed cuts sweating under plastic.

Beautiful pork

And Tom does not believe in all the nonsense about low fat being vital for continued good health either.

Oh my goodness – proper layers of creamy fat on meat, the like of which you suspected you’d never again see in a UK butcher.

A week ago, it was time for a piece of pork. I don’t often cook pork, because I’m terrified of that entire business of drying it out too much, but this was far too tempting.

It was a 2kg piece of boned, rolled leg – not done as a perfect tube, but, Tom explained to me, more like a bloomer in shape, because there are three types of muscle in that cut and, unless you butcher it the way he does, it will not cook evenly.

So, the oven was heated to its maximum and the meat brought out of the fridge to come to room temperature before having good salt rubbed into the scored skin.

It was given 20 minutes at the high temperature and then 20 minutes per 450g at 160˚C (fan), before being rested for 15 minutes.

Real gravy, reheating. Eat your heart out, Knorr

Gravy was made not from some pre-bought pot, but by first sweating shallot, carrot and celery, then adding dry cider and chopped apple, and simmering gently to reduce.

When the meat came out of the oven, the roasting dish was deglazed with that cidery mix, before having the fat separated off (my Lidl fat separator has proved a great bargain) and decanted into a small, copper pan, where it was reheated and then thickened carefully with beurre manié. Good enough to keep what was left over and reheat during the week.

Indeed, the pork did us a number of meals: how old-fashioned – buying a joint for the weekend and having plenty left for the days that follow.

And the pork itself was wonderful.

A wonderful leg of lamb

We’ve also had some of Tom’s burgers. Dense and lightly spiced, they produce actual blood when grilled – in other words, these are the real deal.

And a piece of boned, rolled lamb was excellent too.

This Easter weekend, being a traditionalist, it was back there for a leg of lamb. Longwood has had so little fat on its lamb in recent weeks I wanted to make sure I got some with a decent coat.

It was 2.1kg, so was started at 190˚C (fan) for half an hour, before being given a further 30 minutes per 450g. So three hours in total, give or take a minute or so, and followed with 15 minutes resting.

Served with English asparagus and the first Jersey Royals of the year – you know winter is really behind us when these appear – with a lovely jus from the meat juices, it was an absolute, melt-in-the-mouth joy.

Broadway Market has a new butcher – and it is most welcome. 

Still life in the photographic age

Peppers, 2010

When you’re sitting inside on a gloomy, wet weekend and you don’t know what to paint or draw, the answer may be nearer at hand than you imagine.

Still life is a gift for anyone wanting to paint, draw or even photograph – and as a genre, it has a remarkable capacity to make some mundane, domestic items look interesting.

With origins in ancient times – there are still life paintings on the walls of Egyptian tombs – still life as a genre reached a pinnacle in the 16th and 17th centuries, not least in the hands of Flemish and Dutch artists.

Mind, that could be taken to read that nothing after that period was much cop, but you only need to look at the vast number of still life paintings by Cézanne to realise that that was not the case.

And modernity didn’t ditch the still life, but simply found new ways to represent it, from Braque’s Cubist canvases on, while photographers have also realised that you can do great things with everyday objects.

With just a simple, single light source, you can even create a picture that conjures up those classic paintings of yore with their rich, velvet-dark backgrounds.

The Ukulele, 2010

The vanitas, as a sub genre of still life, also has a place in today’s world, although we probably wouldn’t see it in quite the same way, while there have been plenty of street artists who have executed superb Trompe-l’œils – the sort that aim to make you think you’re about to plunge off the pavement and into a vast hole that’ll send you to Dantean depths.

From a personal perspective, it was photography that led me into still life – although I’d regularly drawn, in painful detail, single objects when studying art at school.

But what makes still life work is the arrangements you use and not simply how you paint or photograph any objects.

It pretty much goes without saying that fruit and flowers were popular subjects for still life paintings, and they remain so.

Food has also often been popular – no, ‘food porn’ isn’t as new as some might imagine.

The history of representations of food in art is itself interesting. In the case of those Egyptian tomb paintings mentioned earlier, they often featured food, which was believed to transform into the real thing in the afterlife, thus providing the deceased with sustenance on their journey.

Pears, 2009

But later in Western art, many paintings featured food in a moral sense – as an indicator of something related to sin and its dangers.

Some of those paintings are hilarious, since they seem to have been executed with a sense of great irony.

When the food looks beautiful and the partying in the background shows everyone having fun, it’s difficult to believe that the artist was entirely convinced that he was painting all this to show that it was all bad.

One is rather inclined to believe that the ‘moral’ aspect of such paintings was really just an excuse to represent interesting subjects such as food or even partying – just as early landscapes were painting around religious subjects, which themselves finally diminished and diminished until we were left with entirely secular representations of the world around us.

You could extend this argument to the vanitas sub genre: after all, you might be saying that good food and wine and music mean nothing when it comes to the final reckoning of death, but if you’re doing so in a way that shows off your skills as an artist to an incredibly high degree, then an element of pride seems rather to have crept in to the equation.

Still life has, historically, been considered as one of the poorer relations when it comes to the painted subject, but it has always been popular with buyers, and when you consider the roster of artists who have painted still lives, then it’s hard to see that as much other than a form of snobbery.

Glasses, 2013

After all, when you can list a roll call of the likes of Rembrandt, van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso as creators of still life works, it’s rather difficult to maintain an idea of the still life as artistically inferior. And van Gogh’s Sunflowers remain some of the best-known and most loved paintings in the world.

These days, a certain snobbery exists about photography – or more accurately, about ‘Photoshopping’.

The advent of cameras had a huge impact on the path of art history, as they removed a sense of painting as being the only way that you could visually record images for posterity.

Once that had gone, it freed artists (as opposed to photographers) to look for ways to represent other elements of life than the straightforward figurative image – for example, the Fauves trying to convey an emotional response to a scene rather than present a photographic record of it.

Cup and saucer and stripes, 2010

And now photographers are altering their images too to create something beyond what the lens cannot capture.

Yet alteration of an image on a computer is not new – photographers used all sorts of techniques in the developing lab to create different effects – and it’s really only an issue if you are seeking to present a photographed image as a true record of something, so in reportage, for instance, or in terms of the moral argument about digital alteration presenting ideas of supposedly ideal, but impossible, bodies.

But even a sub-editor’s crop of a picture for the page is an act of alteration – a choice made for all sorts of reasons, not least the purely practical, but also involving the aesthetic, the political and many more.

Otherwise, alteration of digital images is simply another part of creating a final picture.

The still life may never have enjoyed the status of the genres above it – history paintings were at the top of that particular tree – but, unlike those, it has remained a constant throughout art history and one could even suggest that the most modern installations to be found in contemporary art are themselves little more than large, 3-D still lives.

Truffle, 2010

The photographs that I’ve posted here are all examples of modern, photographed still lives.

Some have been worked on heavily – others not.

But briefly:

Pears is one I shot in 2009, quite early into my experiments. It uses two proper fruits and a glass one. The latter is from Isle of Wight Glass – my mother has been buying me pieces as presents for some years and it’s very lovely stuff. A small mirror underneath the three pears provided the reflection, and it took a fair amount of Photoshop work to achieve the finished effect.

The Ukulele also took a lot of post-production. It’s sepia tinted but, I think, holds within it the suggestion of a story.

You might, by now, have sussed that I do rather like dramatic light.

Peppers is nothing short of food porn – and why not? Like most of the rest of these pictures, it was shot on a desk, with a single Lidl-bought lamp for the lighting, on a black t-shirt to give me the basic background, which was then deepened and smoothed out on the computer. I keep meaning to turn this into an art poster. The translucent quality is something I’m particularly pleased with.

76 Trombones, 2012

Cup and saucer and stripes was not set up, but grabbed when I was waiting in an apparently bland meeting room to doing something else. It seems to me to illustrate perfectly how you can get an interesting photograph from something that you’d barely imagine could look so good. There’s also almost no processing involved.

Truffle, on the other hand, was both carefully lit and carefully processed to give the reminder of that ‘old’ look. It also involved a number of components and a more complex composition.

76 trombones is not, of course, a single trombone – let alone many. But it made me think of Robert Preston and The Music Man for what should be obvious reasons. It’s unique among this selection in that it was shot with an iPhone when an entirely unexpected opportunity materialised. And yes, it’s highly processed – right down to the spot colour, which is not an effect that should be overdone, but works well here.

Glasses was grabbed during a shoot that had nothing to do with glasses, but is an example of how you can shapes and patterns and textures in the remarkably ordinary. It isn’t actually a black and white image – that’s just how it came out in colour.

So there you are: if you fancy a spot of painting or drawing or photography and you’re stymied for a subject: have a look around: you may be surprised at just what will make a good subject.

• All photographs © Amanda Kendal