Beautiful boxes

Those of you who know me well will know what a sucker I am for design... I'm constantly arrested by beautiful posters, album or book covers, wonderful packaging, interesting typefaces, magazine layouts etc.

So you won't be surprised when you find out I've been drooling over this little box of delights - a box of sampler teas given to us over the weekend by our dear friends Michael and Alison. These are people of wonderful taste, and they probably don't even know how much they hit the target with this.

It's a very plush little cream-coloured box adorned with beautiful typography and elegant use of space - and inside are a variety of herbal and flavoured teas, each of them individually packaged in a tiny cardboard pyramid.

They've been laid head to head in the box, so when you lift the lid it's a sequence of very satisfying and snug little geometric shapes in a range of muted colours. I find stuff like this irresistible. I almost can't bear the tought of trying one of the teas and ruining this display.

Back in the vinyl days, I was always the kid examing the gatefold or double albums and the inner sleeves with the printed lyrics, soaking up every detail of the package. I've been known to buy certain 50s Blue Note jazz albums just because the cover looks really cool. Now I find not much has changed.

Bye bye Ronald

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the wonderful cartoonist Ronald Searle, who passed away at the start of the year at the ripe old age of 91.

I first came across his irreverent, hilarious work when I in my second year at Coleraine Inst. There was a book of his work in the library, including his drawings from the War in Burma and inevitably the St. Trinian’s girls. I was immediately smitten with his comic invention and his inventive, stretchy and scratchy drawing style.

My favourite was a cross-eyed mare standing chewing on a wildflower in an overgrown meadow, captioned ‘Idiot Horse Labouring Under the Misapprehension That It Is Representative of Nature’.

I was all ready for a big art weekend in London in February 2010 - I was going to see the Van Gogh drawings and letters at the Royal Academy, but I also wanted (probably more) to see the Ronald Searle retrospective at the Cartoon Museum, laid on to celebrate his 90th birthday. The Ash Cloud put a spanner in all of those works, and I was grounded.

The papers were full of obituaries and tributes in the last week or so, but my favourite story was from Gerald Scarfe, himself perhaps the greatest of the legions of cartoon geniuses from this part of the world. Scarfe idolised Searle as a teenager. On a number of occasions, he had cycled from his home in Hampstead all the way over to Searle’s house in Bayswater and stood before his big green door, unable to overcome his nerves and push the bell.

Many years later, Scarfe’s wife (Jane Asher) threw a secret birthday party for him in an exclusive restaurant in Provence. When they entered, he found that the only two other people in the place were Ronald Searle and his wife, who happened to live nearby.

“A beautiful little package sat on the table, all done up with ribbon. I said: ‘Oh, is this for me?’ And Ronald said: ‘Yeah, it’s nothing.’ So I opened it, and there was a brass doorbell with a note saying ‘Please ring any time’.”

Blown away in the hills above the city

Today Andrea and I made the first of what I imagine will be many trips to Black Mountain and Divis, the hills above Belfast.

  I’m ashamed to say it’s the first time we’ve ever ventured up, despite much talk over the last couple of years. Of all the days to choose, today was typical of Northern Ireland – blowing a gale and with intense showers glittering through bright sunshine.

  It’s hard to imagine such massive open moorland within 20 minutes of the city centre – it’s primal, raw landscape in its extremity, lashed today by the revolving door of Ulster weather.

  There are a number of major broadcasting masts up there, so most of the journey is made on a well-finished concrete pathway that leads up as far as the antennae. From there on, it’s a combination of boardwalk across the marshland, and a carpet of plastic grip surface – it looks like old milk crates have been sunk into the soil.

  We came up over the brow of Divis and there was a spectacular view of the city, with the Hardland and Wolff yellow cranes standing out gleaming in the sunshine and huge towers of rain marching across the distant east of the city. The wind was buffeting us madly, so we took a couple of quick snaps and turned back, thinking of cappuccino at the end of the rainbow. 

  On the way back down, the rain came on and the sun retreated to an angry white spot in the midst of a bruised sky. You could still see the sunshine glinting off cars coming in on the M1 in the distance, while the gusts peppered the sides of our faces with stinging rain.

  We made our way back past the antennae and towards the car where we shook off our rain gear and made our way back down the Springfield Road and into town, watching the traffic lights through steamed up glasses.

Raising a glass to winter

TODAY Andrea and I decanted the sloe gin that we made during the autumn... We discovered some heavily laden sloe bushes in Victoria Park back in October and filled our pockets and even our caps with them, getting soaked by the rain in the process. We brought the whole lot home, washed them, pricked them with pins and threw them into two bottles, each half filled with Gordon's Gin and some sugar.

This weekend it's harvest time. Anyone who darkens our door over the festive season is welcome to a slurp. Here's a poem by Seamus Heaney on the very subject:

SLOE GIN

The clear weather of juniper

darkened into winter.

She fed gin to sloes

and sealed the glass container.

When I unscrewed it

I smelled the disturbed

tart stillness of a bush

rising through the pantry.

When I poured it

it had a cutting edge

and flamed

like Betelgeuse.

I drink to you

in smoke-smirled, blue-black,

polished sloes, bitter

and dependable.

Alphabet soup

The Thai alphabet bristles with accents, underscores and umlauts. The letters are often rounded, and clusters and phrases are conjoined to make long single words - sentences roll across the page like a legion of wriggling, hairy little caterpillars.

The Thai language, like all the tongues of Asia, is enormously complex. Because of course, you not only need to know the words and the sentence construction and the characters, but also the musical tones in which they are spoken. Saying something with a rising inflection at the end of the sentence for example, can mean exactly the opposite of what you wanted to say.

There are points where all languages sonically and unexpectedly overlap, however - overhearing the guide and the driver talking to each other on the way down to Bangkok, for example, I distinctly heard one say to the other: 'handicapped dog'.

And a moment later, his companion finished one statement with the phrase: 'She's a minger.'