M&M’s World and Leonardo da Vinci

Last night, in a study in contrasts, we visited M&M’s World on the way to the Leonardo exhbition at the National Gallery.

M&Ms world is terrifying.  M&Ms are, basically, sweets.  And not particularly exceptional sweets at that.  Smarties are more pleasant.  Revels are more interesting.

This entire shop – all four floors of it, in some of the capital’s most expensive real estate, and with a staff of dozens – is based on anthropomorphising those sweets.  Making them cool.  Making their purchase and consumption an experience.  It is a triumph of marketing over sanity.  You can buy hairclips, toys, clothes, teapots, plates, bedlinen, photoframes, basketballs, notebooks and playing cards with the M&M logo and “characters” plastered all over them.  Everything is cheap, but nothing is inexpensive.

If you really feel like it, you can even buy some of the wretched sweets.  From giant silos.  In different colours.  You choose!  Make your own unique mix!  Personalise!   But M&Ms come in, er, a whole two flavours.  So it’s a pretty thin veneer of choice, at best.   I was glad to leave.

At the heart of Leonardo exhbition are some glorious paintings – including La Belle Ferroniere and the Lady with the Ermine – but I was particularly struck by the notebooks and the sketches.  The paintings are all about the divine, and the mysterious, and the calm.  The sketches and notebooks are much more lively, and fun, and human.  They suggest a sense of humour and lightness of touch that isn’t evident elsewhere.

I also like the way the exhbition played up the cold hard politics behind the art.  If you’re painting the mistress of the most powerful man in the state, you’d better make her a symbol of purity itself.  If you’re painting the Last Supper in a society with some dubious prevailing racial attitudes, you’d better make sure Judas is darker and curlier-haired than the other disciples.  And if your longstanding patron gets knocked off, never mind – do some commissions for his conqueror instead.

What happened in 2011?

Chaos in the world economy.  Nationwide strikes.  Closer to home, all kinds of family upheavals and professional crossroads.

Still, 2011 wasn’t all bad.  What better time to look back and reflect on what went right?

This year, I:

• Swam 300 miles
• Went to Australia – my first ever trip to the Southern Hemisphere.  I visited Melbourne, Syndey and Adelaide; saw koala, emu and kangaroo in the wild; took a cruise on the mighty Yarra; swam in the ocean; ate frog cakes;  and saw a ballet in the Opera House
• Flew in a helicopter for the first time
• Saw the Killing, the Danish TV drama. I liked it so much I went to Copenhagen, wore a woolly jumper and climbed the spire of the Town Hall
• Stayed in a centuries-old Abbey in the middle of Bedfordshire
• Competed in the finals of the Times National Crossword Championship
• Ate in two Michelin-starred restaurants (L’Autre Pied in Marylebone, and the Hand and Flowers in Marlow)
• Saw live performances by David Sedaris, Stewart Lee and Judith Kerr
• Gave away 50 books on the first ever World Book Night
• Won the local Fortune Green quiz, the “Jester Tester”
• Ran in the London 10k
• Visited some of the finest tourism hotspots England has to offer – Weston, Legoland and Chessington
• Took in Faustus at the Globe, War Horse in the West End, and Frankenstein in the Everyman
• And finally… did the “Dark Side of the Rainbow”: that is, watched the Wizard of Oz to the soundtrack of the Dark Side of the Moon while eating rainbow cake

Bourne as Travelogue

I just watched the third Bourne film and all I could think of was where I might want to go on holiday.

As Paddy Considine’s brains got splattered across Waterloo, I thought “you know, you live in London and you don’t really make the most of it.”

As Matt Damon strangled someone to death in a shower in Tangier, I thought “it’s only a ferry ride across from Gibraltar…”

And as a bullet-riddled body plummeted into the icy Hudson, I thought “what could be nicer than an NY city break?”

Pumpkin and Banana Crumble

A word of advice to anyone thinking of making pumpkin and banana crumble: don’t.

The Times National Crossword Championship 2011

Three things immediately struck me when I arrived at the championship:

1) I was the youngest person by approximately one ice age.  And I am by no means in the first flush.  There were a few more under-40s by the time the contest started, but I was still decades below the average.  In rather bad taste, I hoped it might give me an advantage.  To show you had finished, you had to raise your number paper high above your head.  I’m still not sure how some of the old dears managed.

2) Wearing jeans and trainers, I was firmly in the minority.  There was a lot of tweed on display, at least one bow tie and one Oxbridge college tie.  If that sounds like a lot of men’s clothing, it’s because 80% of the competitors were men.

3) These people knew each other.  They took part every year.  One man I spoke to had been coming for 32 years, won once and been runner-up four times.  I recognised another as a contestant in a successful team on the BBC4 ultra-difficult quiz Only Connect.  In other words, they took this seriously.  And they were really, really good at it. Ulp.

I distracted myself by admiring the view.  We were in the lair of “billionaire tyrant” (his words) Rupert Murdoch.  Up on the 13th floor in Wapping, you could see straight across the bend in the river to Canary Wharf.  It was opulent.  And none of this “age of austerity” stuff.  I drank free coffee and ate free biscuits until I was buzzing with caffeine and sugar and had to avail myself of the (opulent) facilities.  I almost had to queue, in fact: we were warned several times over that while we could use the toilet during the test, IT WAS IN OUR BEST INTERESTS NOT TO.  Like children on a school trip, ranks of crossworders obediently trotted bogwards.

The test itself was very much like an exam.  On each desk lay a thick question paper, on which you had to write your name and candidate number.  Inside – three puzzles, with an hour to solve them.  Invigilators watched like a hawk in case anyone tried to sneak a peek.

At eleven sharp, the organiser said the magic words, and the room turned over and began.

I don’t know about you, but I zone out during exams.  I don’t notice the passage of time or the environment around me.  My strategy had been to try to do ten minutes on each puzzle then come back to the tricky bits in the last half hour.  In practice, I really don’t know what I did.  I remember there was a point after about 40 minutes when I realised that I had completed the second puzzle, and then five minutes after that I finished off the third.

It was the first of the three puzzles that I found trickiest by some way.  Most of the left-hand side resisted stubbornly until the fiftieth minute at least.  The last clue took at least three minutes all of its own.  Let’s just say there’s a certain cartoon dog who won’t be on my Christmas card list this year.

At 56 minutes I’d done it.  There were a good few clues where I was fairly sure I’d got the right answer but wasn’t quite sure why – a nagging condition which will be familiar to all crossworders, and for which there should probably be a German word.  But by that point I had, even in my little bubble of concentration, realised that an awful lot of people around me had finished quite some time ago, so it was time, as a poker player might say, to stick ‘em in.

So how did I do?  I was delighted to find out that some of those prompt finishers had made a mistake or two, and in the world of the cruciverbalist, accuracy counts for more than speed.  I came 27th out of 76 in my heat, well outside the qualification time for the grand final (top 12 only), but just a hair’s breadth away from a free place for next year’s championship (top 25.)  In other words, I’m not Premier League, nor even quite Championship, but a force to be reckoned with in League One.  The Huddersfield Town of crosswords, if you like.  And that’s a result I am very happy with.  Until next year, natch.

Christmas Comes Early

Marks and Spencer have put their Christmas range on display.  I am such a sucker for it.  I spent a good three minutes semi-mesmerised by the shiny tealights, plastic holly, pop-up fireplace cards and other such guff.

Marks have also been selling mince pies for a fortnight already.  I looked at the “best before” dates today – 3 November.  Now I like an early Christmas as much as the next weirdo, but really, isn’t this taking advantage of our enthusiasm?  Who genuinely wants to buy Christmas-themed goods that go off seven weeks before the big day?  And just think where this could take us next.   Easter Eggs – guaranteed putrid by March 1.

Finally, I noted that you can buy a Christmas tree decoration that is itself a fuzzy, three-inch representation of Christmas tree.  Symbol upon symbol.  Like having a tiny picture of your own face tattooed upon your forehead.

Berrets

My local trendy store says it is selling cosy clothes for winter, including sweaters, mittens and berrets.  I can only presume the latter is something between a beret and a ferret: sleek, stylish and a little bit musky.

The Perils of Fame

I feel sorry for famous people.  In Green Park Tube station today, while going down the escalator, I saw a familiar face going up.  It was Clare Holman, aka Dr Laura Hobson from Lewis.  The poor woman saw me staring for a good moment or two before my brain worked out who she was.

Some actors are lucky enough to have a persona or a look different from their own.  Clare Holman, by contrast, looked as though she could quite plausibly be on her way to a crime scene, about to slip on a pair of plastic gloves and shove a finger or two in a cadaver.

Apple Day 2011, Fenton House

Today is all about…

Yes, once again it is Apple Day at Fenton House in Hampstead.    Every year, this National Trust property flogs off the apples from its kitchen garden.   I am a big fan, and this morning managed to nab the first ticket.  Sad but true.

It is also a sad truth that this year’s Apple Day didn’t have the oomph of previous years.  Instead of a whole venison roasting in the Rose Garden, there were some polite sausages grilling on the upper lawn.  Instead of the good ladies of the WI with a table groaning under the weight of cakes,there was a dainty tent selling specialty tea.  And instead of great crates of apple varieties you’ve never even heard of, there were just five types of pippin on sale.  I bought some Charles Ross and some Blenheim Orange.

The upside was that it has been a glorious day and the gardens looked stunning.  Dahlia:

Convulvulus:

Michaelmas daisy and sedum:

Some very autumnal sights too.  Pumpkins:

And, out on the Heath, some fungus:

Charity Celebrity Cricket Match in Hampstead

If yesterday was cultural, today was celebritastic.

First off, I’m relatively  sure I saw Nicky Clarke in the grounds of Kenwood House this morning.   Normally, that would be a reasonable score.  But this afternoon we went to the Hampstead Cricket Club end of season celebrity charity special, where there were famous people a go-go.

Emma Thompson bowled the first ball (look for the black trousers in the middle of the pitch):

She very kindly signed a copy of her Nanny McPhee book for small people I know.  Her mum (Phyllida Law) did likewise with her own book.  It was very sweet of them both and they were both very charming.

Imelda Staunton was there.  Her husband Jim Carter, the butler off Downton Abbey, was giving droll commentary.  Dan Stevens (who is also in Downton as the heir who ain’t quite posh enough) was playing.  Here’s an action shot:

Last but not least, I’m fairly sure Duncan Preston, the actor best known in my house for his work with Victoria Wood in the 80s and 90s, was also watching.

Fair play to all of them, I hope they raised a ton of cash for the club and even more tons of awareness for the Anthony Nolan Trust.

Six hours to go until Downton returns!

UPDATE: I won nothing in the raffle.  Penelope Wilton, however – that’s Isobel Crawley, the mother of the not-posh-enough-heir – did.  I now really cannot wait to get my Downton.