Anyone for a tobacco flavoured drink?

To Barts last night to sample their new tobacco flavoured range of cocktails with my friends B, G and V. Barts is a cool, speakeasy-style bar in Chelsea Avenue which is hard to find but lovely once you're there, with cartoons and old clocks on the walls and fishing buckets hanging from the bar and lovely wooden tables and comfortable, squashy chairs. They are known for having some of the most delicious (and brilliantly named) cocktails in London - including a wonderful rhubarb one called The Charleston Crumble - which you can get served in sharing portions in teapots or tophats. All in all, retro heaven.

I must admit, I was somewhat apprehensive about tobacco flavoured drinks. I mean, there are few smells more delicious than a packet of fresh rolling tobacco - but few more revolting than an old ashtray. Where on the scale would these fall?

We were brought a selection of four drinks: a Signiature (tobacco liquer, honey liquer, champange and orange peel); an In Vogue (tobacco liquer, rasberry liquer, fresh rasberries, tequila); a Holy Smoke (tobacco liquer, cognac, rum - above); and a shot of straight tobacco liquer. And they were all absolutely delicious. The In Vogue particularly was fab - crisp and sweet and fruity with an aniseedy aftertaste from the tequila. The straight tobacco liquer wasn't bad either, slightly smoky and sweet (it's flavoured with vanilla, too), a bit like Amaretto or Cointreau. Yum yum yum. Plus, we were given a cigar which we smoked in the car on the way home, feeling very gangsta.

I never really experiment with cocktails; like most people, I know what I like (mojhito or daiquiri) and tend to always order that, rather like a Wagamama's. But wow they can be delicious when you branch out. We also sampled a margherita (heaven) and some more of those rhubarb ones (which taste like a Platonic ideal of rhubarb). If only one could have a cocktail tasting, like a wine tasting. But it'd only be a matter of minutes before one'd be too drunk to be able to taste anything.

Two reviews: David Shrigley and Lucian Freud

Image from the retrospective at the Hayward Gallery.

David Shrigley is funny. Very, very funny. He has an odd way of taking things that are very ordinary and making them seem absolutely ridiculous - eggs, for example - or vice versa: taking the absurd or ununsual, e.g. sculpture, and rendering it quotidien.

It's not exactly that he has a weird mind, it's more that his mind is exactly in tune with everyone else's, except that he notices things that others don't - or, rather, he thinks that small, unnoticeable things are worth commenting on.

So I was very much looking forward to seeing his show at the Hayward Gallery, which is on at the moment. And guess what? It's funny. He's a conceptual artist, or a childish cartoonist (or both) - but the things that work best, I think, are the least conceptual, the times when he has just had a thought, or perhaps caught a fraction of a sentence, and illustrated that thought or scrap of conversation. As in the picture above: A child cannot be expected to perform the rescue. There are plenty more along these lines, and I thought they were the best thing in the show: funny, irreverent, profound and silly. There's one that says something along the lines of: It's ok to run away from your problems; it's a good idea. Hilarious. And kind of true.

Unfortunately, the very tall man in the green fleece standing next to me didn't feel the same way. He was gazing at each picture - and, yeah, they're art but they're also basically funny drawings (is there a conflict there? I don't see why, particularly) - as though each one has the intricacy of a Hieronymus Bosch. And he didn't look kindly on my giggling.
'Don't you think they're funny?' I said, eventually.
'They're art,' he said, censoriously. 'But I suppose everyone has their own sense of humour.'

Told.

No laughing, then, at this morning's press preview for the enormous and wonderful Lucian Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery.


All images from postcards available to buy at the National Portrait gallery or from www.npg.org.uk

Now this is one helluva show. Boy oh boy is there a lot to see - and wow it's good. What one notices, seeing the pictures up close like this, is how brilliant, beautiful and delicate the hands are - particularly in the earlier work, in the 60s, where you can see the curve of each nail and the close-ups of every cuticle; the roughness of skin on knuckles and the veins, either greenish or bluey, on the backs. And the faces are so expressive, too. Not so much in the pictures of Kitty Garman (his first wife), but by the time he gets to Caroline Blackwood (his second) it seems as though he has unlocked something in himself and they are extremely powerful - first laden with innocent loveliness and then, later, with scorn.

Throughout, the paint itself looks sticky and peaked - like tacky half-dried bodily fluids. The nude portraits are peculiarly, disquieteningly sexy - almost coldly objective, yet one could nearly reach out and touch the warm skin. Somehow, the paintings of two people together are the most powerful and moving in the show. Perhaps this is because they bring the subject out of pure objectivity (as a subject, seen and viewed) and back into their human life with its interactions, quibbles and love and the need for companionship. They move from the stasis and momentary glimpse of life that the single portraits (or at least the less good of the single portraits) are and into movement and dialogue. Which all goes a long way to heighten their pathos.

My brother will kill me when he reads this post. He thinks that any postulating about art is unforgiveably pretentious. Actually, come to think of it, so do I. So ignore all of the above.

Heeeerrrrrrre's Violet

All change, please.

Since I last wrote, I have left the bookshop (which is very sad indeed and I miss A, J, D, S, C and F almost constantly) and got a lovely new job at a magazine, which I adore and means lots of writing and giggling: I spend my days mainly discussing Pippa Middleton's bottom and doing things like researchnig the cost of renting a helipcopter to take you from Nice to St. Tropez and so on.

I have turned 23, which is weirdly A LOT older than 22. At 22, you can still be precocious and enormously over-acheiving: people are downright amazed that you have got a degree AND a master's AND a job at such a tender age. By 23, however, it's the norm and tales of your success, which would have met with wild applause mere months ago, are suddenly rather dull. This is very annoying, especially for me, as I love being praised. Man cannot live by bread alone, but I reckon I could get along just fine with nothing but compliments.

Anyway, off to the Port Eliot festival this weekend with O and A. Slightly dreading it as have just remembered that a) I hate festivals and b) I don't have any gum boots, but hey-ho. I'll get all erudite, like, and fill y'all in next week.

Idler and Idler

Went to the opening party for the 'Idler Academy' which has just opened in Notting Hill on Thursday night. It was a fabulous party - lots of beautiful and interesting people and 'slebs (including Emma Thompson who I elbowed in the face, accidentally, obviously). Saw someone I thought I knew and kissed them hello (on the cheek) before realising it wasn't someone I knew, it was just someone who comes into the shop sometimes. Got called 'Violent' for about two hours by a drunk man. Kept needing to pee. Saw the Latinist and author Harry Mount and quite fancied him. Managed to walk in my high heels all night EVEN THOUGH they are very high and the floor was very uneven and I was very drunk. Told A and S that I loved them about a zillion times, which is true but perhaps didn't need to be stated quite so often. Spent a lot of time walking from the front of the shop to the garden at the back in case there was someone fun I was missing. Flirted a lot. Left party and weaved around the surrounding streets with a group of other hungry revellers looking for an open restaurant, couldn't find one, went to a pub, felt very cross when the last order bell rang almost instantly. Then went back to local friend's house and insisted on him slaving over a hot stove for forty minutes to make me food, didn't eat it and fell asleep in my dress. All in all a lovely evening, and one which precipitated much idleness the following day.

From the mundane to the silly

Feeling rather down at heel as I left work yesterday - hungover from a heavy weekend, tired from waking up at the crack o' dawn to catch the milk train from the country and with a streaming cold to boot - I was cheered up in a most unexpected way. Walking through central London towards the bus stop, feeling oblivious to everything except the need to get home and into bed, I suddenly felt a tug on my pocket. Looking down, I saw that the loo-roll I had nabbed from the bathrooms in the office to cope with my copious nose-blowing had fallen out of my pocket and unwound itself all the way from the middle of Bond Street to Piccadilly. Tears sprung to my eyes, but so did laughter to my lips. An amused queue outside a cash point started giggling as the loo-roll was whipped by the wind and fluttered across the window dispays of Moschino, Armani and the like. A Chanel clad woman with a dog-in-a-handbag got some caught in her hair. Some wound itself around the railings outside a smart hotel. There was nothing for it but to laugh - and in those moments of laughter, as the wind blew the white stream up towards Oxford Street, it blew my blues away too.

T. S. Eliot Prize

The weekend before last, I went with my dad to see the shortlisters of the T. S. Eliot poetry prize reading their work at the Royal Festival Hall. Due to various inanities on my part, we missed the first two speakers (Simon Armtiage and John Haynes - I was particularly bitter about the former, on whom I have harboured an enormous crush for years, despite the fringe). The performances we did catch were all wonderful, though; I particularly loved Robin Robertson's wonderful descriptions of the natural world, as in these lines from 'Abandon':

That moment, when the sun ignites the valley and picks out
Every bud that's greened that afternoon; when birds
Spill from the trees like shaken sheets: that sudden loosening
Into beauty...

Heavenly, too, was Daljit Nagra's charming and witty reading of the winner Derek Walcott's poems. In the car on the way home afterwards, my dad and I discussed the power of poetry, and all the things that it can do. It is at once utterly superfluous and completely necessary for the soul, we agreed; the medium where sign and signifier seem closest, where emotion and intellect are fully in harmony. We both found ourselves inspired to write poems in the next couple of days. Mine was profoundly silly about the Queen taking a taxicab, but my dad's was absoutely lovely. So, here it is:

Letting Go

You gave me a poem,
a pebble warmed by your hand.

Words smoothed
by the reach of moonlight on water,
or the dappling of sunlight
on the shoulders of a girl.

Words that carried their own weight
polished by the use of others,
but in them, you set a spark
like a striking of flint
a fire set alight
passing from one to another.

What was certain,
what confirmed this transaction
was the light.

A few things I have done recently

Last Friday evening, I went to the launch party of Frances Welch's new book 'The Russian Court at Sea: The Voyage of HMS Marlborough' at a venue called 'The Horse Hospital' in Bloomsbury. It's the real Victorian London deal - cobbled floors, a ramp to walk down to the basement, old iron thethering rings on the walls. And a fabulous place for a party. There were lots of interesting, bespectacled literary types (including my no. 2 crush, Ian Hislop, who alas I didn't speak to) and trendy youngsters - also in specs, but of the huge-frame-no-actual-lenses variety. I drank champagne galore and tripped over a lot (having ignored the recommendation on the invitation to wear flat shoes), and ate canapes which were served rather oddly on see-through sealed trays which had plastic breadsticks and pats of butter in them; I would greedily reach out for a carb-n-fat mouthful, only to find myself with a dainty bit of grilled courgette or feta cheese in hand. Later in the evening The Vagabond Trills - Frances' daughter Tallulah and her band - came on and sang delightfully, cheered on by Tallulah's cousin, singer Florence Welch (who was, to my joy, wearing even higher heels than me).

Then on Monday night I went to (well, sold books at) the 5 x 15 event at The Tabernacle in Notting Hill. The line-up was fantasic: A. C. Grayling, Tiffany Murray, Susan Greenfield, Emma Forrest and Edmund du Waal. All the speakers were brilliant, funny and touching in equal measure. I'd never been to a 5 x 15 before but I loved it - lots of nice people, cheap drinks (although my gin and tonic was actually gin and soda water), some intellectual stimulation and still time for supper afterwards with my wonderful friend M and his beautiful new girlfriend K. Better yet, while discussing it afterwards in The Wine Factory - where they do actually serve food, for those worried that I am getting my calories in entirely liquid form these days - we made friends with the people sitting next to us who had been as well. I love making new friends.

And finally (drum roll), last night was the launch party of Emma Forrest's new book, a memoir called 'Your Voice In My Head'. Emma is like the sixth-former that you had a crush on as a year 7: beautiful, tiny on a proper porcelain-doll level, super friendly but very obviously much cooler and cleverer than you will ever be, successful and with the most heavenly collection of tea-dresses in pastel colours and lovely prints. In fact, so enamoured of her am I that I'm going to go now so I can finish reading her book. She walked in this morning while I had in my hands, and I felt exactly like Manny in that episode of Black Books when the explorer comes to the shop. Cue girlish giggling and hair flicking. Cue au revoir.

Honey, I'm Home

After a VERY long break, during which I successfully completed an MA (even the really difficult Paleography bit, hurrah), moved to London, got a job and became a little bit more grown-up, I am back in the blogosphere. Expect non-stop scintillatingly witty posts from now on.