Very often, it’s small adjustments to a daily routine that over time change the way we think and feel. Throughout my teens and twenties, my new year’s resolutions –– a long list of lofty goals –– always included drink more water and smoke less. At 30, I gave up smoking (and a much funnier, cooler part of myself) but carried on like a camel, going for days, weeks even, with barely a glass of water. It’s been years since I’ve made resolutions, but I’m happy to say, that at 46, I finally smoke, never, and drink more water than a cow. I must pee 27 times a day. My pee’s so clear that I could drink it. My work here is done.
It’s a beautiful idea to take relics from different cultures and time periods and re-imagine them as contemporary sculptures. French artist, Nicolas Lefebvre does exactly this. A background in antiques informs his work. As does his extensive travel. Imagine an antique Amazonian headdress and Nigerian coins, or a Khmer mirror and a Berber tent peg. Each one of his “objets montés” are a delicate balance of colour, texture and scale. As is often the case with collections such as these, choosing just one is impossible. I want them all.
Robert De Niro hit the nail on the head when he said there’s no right or wrong in art. “There’s only good and bad. And “bad” usually happens when you’re trying too hard to do it right.” Kate Semple‘s ceramics are a glorious example of the possibilities available to an artist when she, as De Niro says, “feels loose enough to create what you want to create.” Conventional forms –– vase, bowl, cup –– take on a life of their own in Semple’s hands. Each piece is just a little bit lopsided. Seams are unfinished. She makes no apology for running glazes or wonky rims. Quite the opposite, she celebrates them. “Getting it right” often means denying ourselves the eccentricities that make us unique. That render a piece (or a person) interesting. Human. This is a slow and painful learning curve for me. I’m grateful to have a studio space, finally, where I am “free to try anything. To have choices.” I hope to “loosen up” a little more every year. What I’m most drawn to in Semple’s work is exactly that, that it feels free and unfettered. And what is more beautiful than that?
There are five people living in our home, and three more if you count our neighbour, Angelo and his niece and nephew, Nicole and Carlos. Our walls are so thin that we may as well share a home. Sometimes, I hear Ange’s radio and I wince thinking about all the wailing, roaring, singing, dancing, bashing, squealing he must hear from us. A few years ago, Nicole knocked on the wall at 7 a.m. to signal to the kids to stop making so much noise. That’s the one and only complaint we’ve ever had. “I’ll take the noise over silence any day,” he used to say to me after his Mum died. Christina was a woman of few words. Tough as nails. An immigrant. A widow. She wore a teal blue coat in the winter and loved pro-wrestling. Whenever the kids and I got locked out of the house we’d go next door to watch guys pummel one another in her front room. Ange would give them Coca Cola, or some other fizzy beverage they’d never be allowed to drink at home. They’d bring out the family albums —Ange in a tux at his brother Alvaro’s wedding — and share immigrant stories reminiscent of the ones we’d hear from Jason’s grandparents. I remember coming home one day a few years after Christina died to find four large garbage bags on the porch, her teal coat peeking through one of them. Shortly after that, Alvaro’s grown kids came to live with Angelo and life was restored to his side of the house. He was born in this house –– Ange is almost 70 –– “and they’ll take me out in a coffin.” He went to all our local schools, and ran around our lanes at night like our kids do today. Some nights, he and his pals would get as far the Philosopher’s Walk, lift up the grates, climb into the sewers and make their way into the Royal Ontario Museum. Angelo never married. He worked in a printing factory. He’s one of my favourite people on earth. When we renovated our house, a massive headache for Ange, his response was, “you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. I’d take yous guys over anyone else.” We bring him Ferrero Rocher’s at Christmas and a pizza on his Birthday. I’d like to think he knows how much we love him. He knows our rhythms, and we know his. He was there when we moved in. When we brought our first baby home. The terrible nights. The joyful mornings. To Ange, I feel a forever debt of thanks. I sat in his kitchen today catching up on Coronation Street. He’s the only person I know who still watches it. He smelled, as he always does of soap, coffee and cigarettes. And I thought to myself, of all of the houses, of all the streets, we landed here, next to you.
“It’s cool to see an old lady on the front cover of Vogue,” says my teenage daughter on seeing Isabella Rossellini on the cover of this month’s Italian Vogue. We’re standing in line at the supermarket with a week’s worth of food in our trolley. “71 isn’t old,” I shoot back, tossing a parsnip on the conveyor belt. But I know what she means. And I couldn’t agree more. I had zero interest in the hoopla around The Supers’ September Vogue cover. As the New York Times writer, Vanessa Friedman put it, “Do Supermodels age, or just get airbrushed?“ This cover though, this cover is beautiful and majestic and real. “I find it very reductive to appear younger than my age and in any case it’s a losing battle,” says Rossellini. “I asked Vogue Italia not to retouch the photos and leave me with my wrinkles. Francesca Ragazzi, who directs the magazine, accepted: the new generations are looking for more modern and intelligent definitions of beauty.’ I hope so.
I rarely saw my Mum cry as a kid, but I do remember the time she cried over the Christmas lights. Tangled wires are enough to make most of us cry. I think it was a string of burnt-out bulbs that sent her over the edge. Seeing my Mum, the very essence of Christmas magic, cry like that was my first glimpse into another side to Christmas, another side to her, one that didn’t become clear until many years later. Now that I have three children of my own, I understand. Christmas is a fraught and intense season for parents, mainly because we’re now the magicians. We’re the conjurers of twinkling lights, gifts in shiny paper and amaryllises in golden pots. We’re icing gingerbread houses and stuffing turkeys with chestnuts and dried fruit. We’re filling charity boxes with toothpaste, winter woollies and cans of tomato soup. We’re filling stockings with slime and tangerines, scoffing down carrots and leaving trails of biscuit crumbs in the fireplace. We are the magicians. We are the dancing elves. We are Father Christmas and his herd of merry reindeer. No wonder my Mum came undone over the lights. No wonder we all do. Heavy is the head that wears the magician’s hat. And the elf’s hat. And Santa’s hat. And the chef’s toque. It’s a lot. And I’m learning that it doesn’t have to be. In recent years, thanks in part to a pandemic that showed me how wonderfully blissful a no-fuss, zero-events, paired down, steak-lunch-for-five can be, I have given up the hats. And the sugar plum fairy’s wings, too. So much so, that when our ten-foot Balsam Fir, fully decked in lights, bunting and baubles collapsed into the sofa yesterday like a drunk teenager, I actually considered leaving it there until boxing day. Two hours, three arguments and eight billion needles later, the tree was once again standing in all its festive splendour. No one person can be responsible for the magic, and no one person can be responsible for the mess. The best part of the tree falling down was all five of us putting it back up together. It really is a beautiful tree.
