Adopting Scandi Style

Well not really. It's just that when we go to Nordic countries we're always taken with the fact that they  have either cut flowers or flowering plants somewhere in the room. And they look lovely. 

Now my views on houseplants will be well known to long time readers here, as will the fact that I tend to think that cut flowers are all very well but a nuisance once they're over and you have to faff about getting then  out of manky water (assuming you've remembered to keep  the water topped up) and then washing the vase. 

But we were in the supermarket yesterday and the bunches of tulips  caught my eye and voila

I couldn't resist and they give a spring like touch to the hall windowsill. We pass this a gazillion times a day, which I reckon means at least half a gazillion smiles brought  to my face every day. . 

An American in Paris

Generic photo of Sacre Coeur there, from my trip last spring. Best I could do. 

So there's currently a series of filmed musicals doing the rounds of British cinemas; Kinky Boots (really not our thing), Titanic (someone thought it was a good idea to make a musical about the Titanic?), 42nd Street (also so not our thing for different reasons) and An American in Paris. We have been bombarded with trailers for these every time we've been to the cinema since Christmas and I wouldn't have taken a lot of notice except that I've never seen the original film of An American in Paris and the dancing in the trailer looked wonderful. So I suggested we go, and we did. 

Musicals are a bit weird aren't they? I've been struggling over the last few days to try and put my finger on exactly why I should think musicals are weird but accept opera at face value and I finally did. It's because  the dialogue in musicals is so stilted. It's there to carry on the plot and tee the audience up for the next big song, but it conveys only information and not emotion. In this a musical is different from a play, where the dialogue does both jobs, and opera where the music does both jobs, or at least the words and music  are so closely aligned that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.  Musicals break that old adage of writing, 'don't tell, show' because in a musical the dialogue is all about the telling. 

That said, and leaving aside such minor details as my inability to understand what on earth the three leading men saw in the leading lady, a simpering cipher with, in this case, a mouthful of teeth and a bit of an edge to her vocal tone, and the way the actor who was called upon to be New York Jewish just couldn't do the accent, and the constant self preening of the man who was Henri who spent most of the time looking at the audience rather than his co-performers, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it because the dancing was indeed wonderful and a joy to watch. It made me smile and really, that's a good thing in itself. 

 

Some recent reading

 

No I haven't gulped all of these down in the six days since I ditched the poster; only one of them, and the other two were finished before that. 

I've not previously been a fan of Karin Slaughter who I find a bit on the gruesome side and who writes a lot about violence perpetrated on women by men. This one came via a friend and I wasn't sure if I had read it before. By the time I was far enough in to realise I hadn't, I was hooked on the story. Slaughter writes well, has plausible plots and believable characters, although she has created, in one of her minor recurring characters, one of the most irritating female cops in the annals of crime fiction. But if you can get past the gory bits, worth a go and  I shall now be looking out for more of her books.

I documented my surprise a while back  at how much I had enjoyed  the Val MacDiarmid  Carol Jordan/Tony Hill books also given to me by a friend and took the opportunity when down in Glasgow recently to buy the next one in the series. Well up to scratch and with a shocking twist at the end. I don't know where she went from there but I'll be getting hold of the next one to find out as soon as I can. 

I approached the Clytemnestra with some trepidation, on the once bitten twice shy principle.  The bad news is that Casati is no Madeline Miller or Natalie Haynes, lacking the lyrical prose skills of the first and the sardonic edge of the other. The good news is that thankfully she's no Clare Heywood or Jennifer Saint either and the book was very enjoyable. Clytemnestra was never cuddly in this book; well, she was brought up in Sparta after all, but Casati is excellent at showing how little by little all the softer feelings she does have are stamped out of her as she experiences betrayal after betrayal by various members of her family. Mostly the men, but her alcoholic mother is complicit in a lot of it, and her brat  of a little sister is as infuriating as she is in every other book I've read that she appears in. When (spoiler) she finally murders her unspeakable husband the reader is cheering her on. 

I also read the first book in my complete Susan Cooper The Dark is Rising volume. It was written for a much younger audience than me and read a bit like Enid Blyton on steroids in places, but I'm looking forward to getting around to the next one which was aimed at older readers.

Finally the book that broke me as far as the poster went was Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. This had all the things I normally look for in a book; a wide cast of differentiated and credible characters, a plot (somewhat scattered, but still recognisably linear!), some interesting ideas behind its construction and subject matter, and excellent writing. It was to all intents and purposes a Good Book, I could see why it won the Booker, I understand why people hailed Rushdie as a brilliant prospect when it was first published and - it bored me to tears. I didn't want to finish it, and I didn't. I put it in the charity shop box at the same time as I put the poster in the bin. I think I'm done with 'improving reading' at least for a while. I'm going to wallow in detective, fantasy and historical fiction for the foreseeable. As the late great Barry Norman probably used to say 'And why not?'

The Thiel Gallery

It always amazes me that, despite the number of times we have been to Stockholm, we still find things of interest that we've never been to before.This time we had a lovely day at the Thiel gallery, a place of whose very existence we had lived in ignorance until  recently. 

Basically it's a large house that used to belong to a wealthy industrialist who also collected art. In the way these things often go he made a lot of money quite fast and lost most of it even faster, but not before he had built  a beautiful Art Nouveau house in one of the wealthiest parts of Stockholm, and bought  a lot of pictures. These were all - house and pictures - acquired by the state in the mid 1920s and the house, complete with furniture and pictures, was subsequently opened to the public. 

We went on the ferry which is always a fun way to travel around the city and then walked up (very much up!) to the house. The house itself is beautiful and the art is stupendous. Thiel collected mainly Nordic Art although there's a second division Gauguin and a not very good Toulouse Lautrec in there as well. But it is the pictures by  Munch, Zorn, Jansson and, above all for us, Carl  Larsson that were in some cases a revelation and in others just an unmitigated delight. I have to say the Larsson collection at the Thiel is infinitely superior to that which is on display at the National Gallery. The NG may of course have a number of Larsson's that aren't hung but the Thiel has a room full of them and they are all lovely. 

There is a shop (see previous post re shopping for the poster and jigsaw puzzle) and a beautiful cafe overseen by a star Swedish chef (although obviously not in person.) It was just an amazing day and one we plan to repeat next time we're in the city. Meanwhile I learned two things; that I really like big landscapes and that no-one can paint snow like a Scandinavian. 

A selection of photos below 

 art nouveau embroidered piano cover - isn't it gorgeous?

dessert in the cafe. I didn't take  a picture of the meatballs we had for our main course. Look at that glorious tray with a design from one of the gallery's pictures on it. 

cafe windowsill and view 

And some of the paintings 

these four were all monumental in size and just breathtaking. The bottom one is rather chillingly called Sacrificial Grove. The two pics below are of some of the Larssons. 

 It was a fabulous day out and I hope we can repeat it. 

More Happy Mail

Yes, the club yarns from Erin at Henny Penny Makes have arrived. 

First up is the  Little Grey Cells club,  themed around Agatha Christie's Poirot books. The first quarter is The Mysterious Affair at Styles. 

I have been waiting for several weeks for the designer to release the blanket pattern I wanted to use these club yarns in, and the yarn arrived yesterday and the pattern was released today so that was good timing. 

Then there is the minis club, this year themed around the Colours of the Seashore. 

L to R  March, February January - because I hadn't realised I should have rotated the photo before I uploaded it to the blog. These will also be going into  a blanket but I haven't bought that pattern for that one yet. 

 

So the arrival of those has derailed the de-stash numbers a bit! but hopefully by the end of the month that will have sorted itself out. I'm in the  middle of a fun colourwork destash project just now, but I might just make a start on the Little Grey Cells blanket this week because it's basically garter stitch and will make a nice rest from the vagaries of the colourwork now and again. 

The Books to Read Poster ...

 ...has been binned. 

This is what it looked like before it took the one way trip to the recycling bin. A little over half way 'done.'

I could have scraped the silver off all the little pictures before I threw it away just to see what they looked like but I couldn't be bothered. I'm not going to read them, so I can probably live without seeing the (sometimes wildly unrelated) illustrations. 

It's a bit of a relief actually. 

Things we did manage to buy in Stockholm

there's not a lot because we are past the stage of needing a souvenir of the city itself. We did however go to a new(to us) Art Gallery, of which more another day, and there I bought a new jigsaw puzzle 

and a poster 

A poster is a stupid thing to buy to bring back from holiday really unless the place you buy it from offers it in a protective cardboard tube which this one didn't. The girl behind the till overheard me saying to the OH how much I liked it - they had half a dozen or so of previous special exhibitions up on the wall and said 'We have that for sale in that basket over there' so I sort of felt obliged to buy one since I had just been saying how much I loved it, without really thinking through the practicalities. Anyway we stuffed it with socks and got it back unscathed. It's now on the back of my study door and it looks really good. 

Over in Gamla Stan (The Old Town) there is a Sci-Fi bookshop, although calling it a sci-fi bookshop is a bit like describing  an eight course banquet as a nice meal. It's amazing. It does sell sci-fi books but it sells an awful lot of other fantasy/sci-fi related stuff. We'd been past it before but never gone in; this time we thought we'd give it a go and see if we could find a nice present for Son no 2., which we did. We spent ages in the shop and I saw three things I really wanted and bought two of them. Which is good going for me. The one I didn't buy was the follow up book to Godkiller, which a couple of months ago I was lamenting in this very place  would not be out in paperback until next January. Well it transpired that it in some places it must be out a lot sooner than that, since it was sitting on the shelves of this shop in Stockholm. Possibly it was an LFP (large format paperback) if they still do those. I planned to buy it since I was keen to read it but then on the upper level (yes, there's a lower level, a mezzanine and an upper level, the place is huge)  I saw this

and I just had to have it. I'd already seen some stationery I wanted - that looked like this - 

and as I couldn't justify buying two books and some writing paper on a whim all for myself - which I recognise is irrational and foolish, but it's how I am - I decided against buying the Godkiller follow up and settled for the stationery and the LotR knitting book. 

I know the stationery is designed with the tastes of adolescent Japanese girls in mind but I liked it and  I'm learning to accept that sometimes I just like 'cute stuff' and to go with the flow. The pattern book is amazing. Often when you buy a book full of patterns you only really like maybe 4 or 5 of them and I didn't look all the way through this one before I bought  it, because really what LotR fan who is also a knitter doesn't want to knit something called 'Second Breakfast Mittens' as featured on the front cover here and isn't too bothered about the rest? However almost all of the patterns in the book, of which there are 27, spoke to me in a good way. I won't be kitting a Gollum toy, or a dwarf helmet any time soon but many of the rest may eventually turn up here.