Noises on: So Wrong It’s Right

I was very excited to be on last night’s episode of Charlie Brooker’s So Wrong It’s Right on Radio 4, alongside Graham Linehan (progenitor of Father Ted and The IT Crowd) and Matthew Crosby (occupant of my spare room 2007-2010. Amongst other life achievements).

The show was recorded in March, and having not listened to it yet, I can’t remember anything of what I said. Fingers crossed, eh? I do remember having a lovely conversation beforehand with Charlie Brooker’s mum, who showed me the balls of yarn she had bought earlier that day. She is a very accomplished knitter, FYI.

Also, since Jubilee weekend is almost upon us, allow me a final plug for the Answer Me This! Jubilee album, the aural equivalent of Union Jack bunting.

Watercolour is too damn watery

The order of a spectrum of pigment pans; the disorder of the paint splatters; the neat tin with fold-out palette: this sight is pleasing to me.

A less pleasing sight is what I am capable of painting with it.

Here’s the galling thing: I was better at watercolour when I was nine. (I was better at most things when I was nine. Peaked too early.) My school art teacher taught us the main watercolour techniques with a classic newbie watercolour exercise: making us paint pictures of a tree on a hilltop, next to a piece of broken fence. Somewhere my parents have a stack of my pictures of trees next to broken fences, and I dare say Monet’s mum got a bit sick of looking at his poplar paintings too.

Anon, I grew up, and put away such childish things. I didn’t paint much again till my mid-twenties, whereupon I was on a far more cartoonish streak painting in acrylics – I will try to dig out some pictures of these sometime.

Anyway, for some reason, after some twenty years not missing them, I chose to use watercolour to paint my brother’s Edinburgh poster last year. It didn’t turn out terribly well, albeit with mitigating circumstances as I mentioned, and it reminded me that actually I quite hate watercolour. How are you supposed to exert control over something that is so damned runny? How are you supposed to love a medium that won’t let you cover up your mistakes? An even bigger problem for me is reversing the mindset I got into through acrylic and oils, with which you add light; watercolour is all about taking away light, which necessitates too much forward planning for my tastes.

But I can’t put away the watercolours quite yet, in case I just hate them because I’m crap at using them. Hatred is bred of fear. I MUST BEAT MY WATERCOLOUR FEAR.

With postcards.

Watch out, friends! If you invite me over for a meal, three days afterwards you’ll probably be assaulted by a practice watercolour postcard depicting something that cropped up during our discourse.

For Catherine, who cooked us Sunday lunch, the swan above. After we ate, she took us for a walk along the canal, and waited patiently whilst my husband spent an inordinate amount of time trying to take Instagram pictures of swans grooming themselves.

Then we were fed supper by Racton and Eleanor, who wound up with:

I can’t remember why Robert Evans came up in conversation, but the caption is from our friend Amy’s bravura recreation of The Kid Stays In The Picture. If she ever decides to go professional with the after-dinner speaking in the manner of 1970s Hollywood producers, I’ll let you know, because it would definitely be worth the fee.

Noises on: Woman’s Hour and Sweden

I can now die happy (well, dependent upon the method of despatch) because yesterday, the radio dream of my life came true: I got to go on Woman’s Hour! Right after Gok Wan and Sapphire, the author of Push that was filmed as Precious. They weren’t appearing together, BTW. He was cooking green beans. Anyway, if you’re interested to hear, click here.

Immediately before I went into the studio, there was another first: I appeared on Swedish radio! Talking about podcasting, but alas not in Swedish, for I am linguistically ill-equipped for appearances on foreign radio stations. In case you weren’t tuned into PP3 on Sveriges Radio P3 yesterday morning, you can listen again here.

Other recent audio events polluted by my blabbermouth: last week’s Guardian Media Talk; AMT213; and a solo appearance on our regular BBC 5 Live beat, Saturday Edition (at 22min 30secs).

Lies about love

As of next week, I will have been married for one year. Which, according to my divorce lawyer friend Nick, means I will be able to get divorced!

I’m not planning to, and hopefully neither is my husband; but I thought that I would mark the occasion by writing, for once, not about audio entertainment or handicrafts, but love. I cannot claim expertise – and anybody who would is not to be trusted – but I have loved and been loved by the same person since 2002, which I am pretending sufficiently qualifies me to debunk some of popular culture’s most prevalent falsehoods upon the topic.

Love will keep us together
Incorrect. While love might bring you together, what will keep you together are such things as compatible life goals, selective hearing, and respect for each other’s private bathroom time.

Love will tear us apart
Here, Joy Division confuse ‘love’ with ‘hungry tigers’.

Love is a battlefield
It is not love to place tin soldiers on your partner’s prone naked body and pretend they’re Normandy. That is just a sex thing.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry
Are you kidding me? You have to say you’re sorry all the time! ‘Sorry I broke your glasses.’ ‘Sorry I ate all the sausages.’ ‘Sorry I forgot your birthday.’ ‘Sorry – I was drunk, and I promise I really thought she was you.’

Only sociopaths would not apologise when apologies are expedient, and sociopaths are not renowned for their capacity to love.

Love is patient, love is kind (1 Corinthians 13:4)
Let’s see how kind love is when you tiptoe in the dark to go to the loo in the night and trip over the pair of shoes your beloved left smack in the middle of the doorway. Let’s see how patient it is when you explain for the sixth time that the reason you’re not going to be in tonight is because you’re going to Jane’s birthday dinner and IF YOU REALLY LOVED ME YOU WOULD REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I TOLD YOU.

All you need is love
In an ideal world, sure; but it is hard to love if, for instance, you have nowhere to live and nothing to eat, and your liver is packing up. But it is easier for multimillionaire rockstars to gloss over that.

Love me, love my dog
A common folly is to think your loved one needs to love all the same things you love. In fact, both of you need to reconcile yourselves to your differences. Healthy relationships involve a fair amount of compromise; and while you can’t reasonably expect to change somebody, you can decide whether or not you can live with what you perceive to be their particular deficiencies. For instance, in theory a hairy back or a love of Kate Hudson romcoms might look like dealbreakers to you; but in everyday life they are not actually significantly disruptive.

With that in mind, now amend your fridge magnet to, ‘Love me, be prepared to tolerate my dog.’

Love can build a bridge
Nonsense. Had the Clifton Suspension Bridge been constructed by love, instead of builders and Brunel’s engineering brilliance, we’d all be forced to take the long route through Bristol.

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
I was ready to scrape this straight into the ‘Rhyme is no substitute for meaning’ bin. Quick analysis would suggest that a horse is surely better off without the encumbrance of a carriage, which is not necessarily the case with love and marriage. But surprisingly, upon applying it to my own experience of marriage, I discovered this is quite a complex analogy.

I am fortunate to exist in a country and century where there’s no societal or religious imperative to marry. Even when my parents married in the relative liberation of London in 1970, it was the only way for them to live together openly, and for my mother to be granted a mortgage. They married some seven months after first meeting, which would be considered quite reckless nowadays, but was fairly normal back then: marriage preceded the relationship, and in effect your choice of spouse was something of a gamble. Whereas for my husband and me, forty years later, marriage followed almost a decade of relationship, much of which was spent cohabiting and allowing ourselves such proto-marital privileges as joint bank accounts and being too lazy to go out on Friday nights. So what does marriage mean, if you don’t need it, and you pretty much are living it anyway?

I can’t answer this question, but it was at least very clear to me that wedding ≠ marriage. I was far less invested in the former (a day!) than the latter (a lifetime!); but to become married you have to have a wedding, and if you have decided to get married, you might as well get married, and not sneak out to Bromley registry office on Tuesday lunchtime, then return to your separate workplaces as though nothing of note had occurred. Therefore a wedding had to be prepared, and as my husband was much busier than I was, the task largely fell to me. I am very shit at planning anything, and I’d never even mentally concocted my dream wedding as a young girl, or as an older girl; but I thought perhaps his proposal would force open a distant trapdoor within and unleash the bridezilla.

Instead, I hated it. I hated the admin. I hated the friends who appeared to enjoy their own wedding admin (‘wedmin’). I hated friends asking whether we were having a religious ceremony, even though my husband and I are lifelong atheists. I hated having to flip out because the ceremonial venue we’d booked and paid for went bankrupt with just weeks to go. I hated the presumptuousness of people – even strangers, especially strangers – about our characters and our relationship and what we wanted for our wedding. I hated everyone saying, “It’ll be children next!” when, had that been our ambition, it would have made better sense to have the children rather than the wedding, and instead of squandering all that money on cheese, booze and registrars, save it up lest they eventually wanted to pursue tertiary education. I hated people asking whether our wedding had a theme, as if we were decorating a three-year-old’s bedroom, and as if ‘wedding’ was not theme enough, and one we were ever going to use for any other party in our lives. I hated people unsolicitedly telling me to do as they had done at their own weddings. I hated how much effort it took to forge our own path and not succumb to homogeneity. I hated that, by trying to maintain individualism, I had to make a thousand decisions about which I did not care – for example, people will sit, and therefore chairs must be obtained, and therefore choices need to be made about which chairs, and those choices had to be made by me. I hated having to think for more than a nanosecond about something so prosaic as napkins, and I hated spending as much as £70 on napkins, especially since nobody was going to notice the napkins if the wedding was fun, and if it wasn’t, the napkins weren’t going to save it. I hated chair bows for existing. I hated marriage itself, for begetting the wedding industry which encourages the existence of chair bows.

Yet at no point did I hate my husband. (Even though, in the run-up to a wedding, your nearest and dearest have resigned themselves to the likelihood of you losing your decency and using them as slaves and whipping-posts. So really I was wasting an opportunity.) But the fact that I didn’t turn my hate-beam on him, despite the months of tedium and aggravation looking to be vented upon an innocent target, confirmed to me that the relationship itself was not the problem, and thus it had proved itself worthy of enshrinement in marriage. One could then counter-argue that, since the relationship demonstrated itself to be in decent fettle, why actually bother getting married? Similarly, whenever people ask me, “How’s married life?” my truthful answer is, “The same as the preceding 9¼ years of unmarriage” – again proving either that the relationship was good enough to turn into a marriage, or that marriage doesn’t make a difference so there’s no point to it.

Whichever side of this argument you support, the common fact is that the relationship has to work. Which not-neatly returns us to the horse and carriage. I bet there has never been a horse which thought to itself, “I am a sub-par horse. My legs are gammy. I’m not very fast. My tail is sparse. My breath stinks. But ever since that carriage was strapped onto me, I’ve turned into the best, healthiest, shiniest, speediest horse you’ve ever seen!” Marriage does not magically transform relationships. It cannot solve problems within a partnership or the individual; and while marriage celebrates a good relationship, it doesn’t convert a bad or adequate one into a good one. That would be putting the cart before the horse.

Marriage becomes meaningless if you treat it as an end in itself. A large number of my friends, male and female, have no desire to get married, ever. However, looking down from my state-sanctioned Smug Perch For Two, I don’t consider their long-term relationships to be somehow inferior to mine, or less committed, less loving, less likely to last until death do them part. In the terms of the love+marriage=horse+carriage analogy, I just think, “That’s a wonderful horse.” As for those who fixate upon getting married more than cultivating their relationship, or who hanker after marriage in isolation, regardless of a relationship – in that horseless carriage, they’re not even going to make it out of their driveway.

Love is like candy on a shelf
This simile does not work in any way.

noises on

I made plenty of noises this week, including on Steve Wright, Double Take, and Ian Collins Wants a Word. Plus, of course, Answer Me This! Episode 210, the final episode before we go on holiday for three weeks.

We had an exciting send-off, though: our special Jubilee-themed album, which only came out two days ago, is currently in the iTunes Top 20 albums! I don’t suppose that situation will last very long; but for our spoken-word royal extravaganza to be outselling Katy Perry, Florence + The Machine and Rihanna is a truly ‘surprising’ state of affairs. By surprising, I mean ‘absurd’. But I’m very happy to take that.

Button it

A very basic bit of making this week:
old buttons + earring backs + Superglue = earrings

All components made by somebody else (I don’t fancy my chances at brewing my own Superglue), so my role was about as creative as assembling flatpack furniture. But, I’m going to a wedding on Saturday which promises to be very spangly, and I needed some mock jewels in a hurry.

Living in Crystal Palace, I have a magnificent source for old buttons: the Haynes Lane Market. Tucked away behind the Sainsburys, it is the kind of place that is virtually extinct now, a scaled down combination of the dear departed Kensington Market (now a PC World) and Greenwich outdoor market (now a boarded-up building site). In summation, it is a two-storey treasure trove of random old shit.

If you’re ever in the neighbourhood, withdraw a fistful of cash then pop in there for a rummage. There are so few places remaining where in one sweep you can snap up 1960s teapots, Georgian fishknives, Deee-Lite shoes and Arctic Explorer outfits for Ken dolls; so let’s support them while they’re still in business.

Starry starry night

Hey pals,

I’m going to be live-tweeting The Oscars tonight from around 11.30pm, so please join me at twitter.com/helenzaltzman – it’s the only way I’ll stay awake during the boring bit in the middle.

Adventures in podcasting: the full set

Here’s the full list of posts in my Potted Guide To Podcasting For Beginners:

Part 0: introduction
Part 1: hardware
Part 2: software
Part 3: sound quality
Part 4: editing
Part 5: sundry other stuff

To read Martin’s take on podcasting knowhow, click here, here and here; and for specifically academic podcasting, click here. Also iTunes of course have very useful podcasting advice, which you can read here.

If you’re looking for anybody to talk about podcasting, I, Martin and Olly are all available for hire, either solo or in combination, so drop us an email via answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.

And if, after all, you would rather listen to podcasts than make them, Answer Me This! is right here, and here are a few other podcasts we enjoy.

Adventures in Podcasting 5: miscellaneous

The potted guide to podcasting is almost complete. I’ve spilt the beans on hardware, software, sound quality and editing, so here are the leftovers. If there’s anything else you want to know about, pipe up in the comments.

Adventures in Podcasting 4: editing is your friend

Face it: nobody says 100% interesting things.

I certainly don’t. I’m certain you don’t either. Not even Stephen Fry does.

Happily, when you’re podcasting, this isn’t a problem, because unlike radio or real-life conversation, podcasting is not live. And therefore you can reap the benefits of the most magnificent part of the process: editing.

We edit the shit out of Answer Me This!, and I mean that both literally (i) and figuratively (ii):

i) Although we’ve chosen which questions we’re going to answer each week, we don’t decide what we’re going to say before the recording, so the conversational results are not predictable. Sometimes a very unexpected tangent will produce some Class A material, which we never could have planned; other times, it’s just not good. But thanks to editing, nobody ever need hear that stuff! Goodbye, shit. Goodbye forever.

ii) We record around 90 minutes per episode, and cut that down to around 30 minutes. I do one rough edit on Logic; I send it to Olly, who writes a list of further cuts he wants made; then I do a final edit. So each podcast undergoes some 10 hours of editing. It may not sound like one, but it is a very highly polished turd.

In my opinion, absolutely every type of creative endeavour benefits from editing, but I think it’s particularly important in podcasting. Why? Because podcasts are on the internet. The internet is very entertaining. Your podcast is competing with the whole of the internet for your listener’s attention.

People complained that MTV reduced people’s attention spans to four minutes; well, online you have maybe 10, 20, 30 seconds to grab your listener’s attention, after which they’ll defect to the rest of the internet, and quite probably never give your podcast another shot. There really are so many funny videos of animals on YouTube, and so little time.

Bearing this in mind, keep your podcast tight, especially in the opening stretches of the show, and also in the early stages of your podcasting career, while you’re trying to gain an audience. Short but good is better than long and lacklustre. Numerous new podcasters have asked me to listen to their first efforts (never ask me to do something like that, I’m horribly critical) and so many of these are an hour or so of ‘Errr, I don’t know what to say’ and ‘Ummmm….Sorry, this is terrible!’ Better to cut out all of that stuff and release a 30-second podcast, I say ruthlessly. If the podcaster doesn’t sound like they’re enjoying it, there’s no way the listener will enjoy it. As for apologies and disparagement: self-deprecation has its place, of course, but I urge you not to leave in statements which imply to the listener that they shouldn’t be bothering to listen to your podcast. If your listener has been generous enough to offer you their ears, don’t censure them for having done that.

One must in fact hold the podcast-listener in great respect. They have not only chosen your podcast over the aforementioned All Of The Internet’s Wonders; they have leapt several hurdles in order to listen to it. Unlike radio, which might just be on in the background without anyone bothering to change the station all day, it’s pretty hard to find oneself listening to a podcast by accident. The listener has made a series of conscious decisions: to seek it out, to download it, to choose to listen to it at that moment. Repay this effort with a podcast which does not imply that your own amusement is considerably more important than theirs.

I’m not saying every podcast has to be as heavily edited as ours, but do not presume endless indulgence on the listener’s part. Although celebrities might expect an audience to be devoted enough to sit through their uncut musings, the rest of us can’t. And rightly so.

Adventures in Podcasting 3: a quick note on sound quality

No matter how amazing your content, if people can’t hear it properly, they won’t stick around. Listening to crackly podcasts recorded onto crappy inbuilt computer or camcorder mikes hurts the ears.

Furthermore, people often listen to podcasts in noisy conditions – in the car, on commuter trains – or on rubbish headphones.

Therefore, do all that is in your power to optimise the sound quality of your podcast.

As I mentioned before, record in high quality formats, like AIFF or WAV. Try to keep your volume levels consistent – nobody likes that thing when they’re watching a nice gentle afternoon film, then THE ADVERTS COME ON AT BLARING VOLUME.

So: during recording, keep an eye on the levels – in Answer Me This! this is Martin’s job, when he’s not too busy checking Tweetdeck or eating sweets. If you’re too quiet, come closer to the mike. If you are too loud – Oliver Louis Mann – back off the mike, especially if you are about to do something like a big laugh, or a theatrical bellow. And speak INTO the mike, not off to the side. And tuck your shirt in.

In post-production, I spend a tedious amount of time setting the volume automation on our vocal tracks (that is the yellow lines on this screengrab) so that the result is as loud as possible, without being so loud that the levels peak (that’s when the friendly green lights on the mixer turn angry red) because then the sound distorts. This is undesirable.

I also use plug-ins on Logic that I don’t really understand. I use a noise gate, to cut out some background noise, and a compressor, to make quiet noises louder; but I only use quite gentle versions of both, because if too heavily compressed, the edits will sound more obvious and clicky, and background noise becomes too amplified. The latter is a problem because we’re not recording in a sound-proofed studio, but in our living-room; we frequently have to stop whilst sirens and helicopters pass by outside, and even wait for the neighbours to stop copulating loudly on the other side of the wall.

Radio professionals don’t have to contend with that shit.

Adventures in Podcasting 2: software

Now that we’ve dealt with hardware, our next bit of podcast business is software. Wow, just typing the word ‘software’ makes me feel sleepy, so let’s get to it.

Adventures in Podcasting 1: hardware

OK, let’s get the boring bit out of the way first: recording equipment. I mean, boring to me; my husband Martin seems to have endless enthusiasm for ribbon mikes and sound cards etc, judging by the magazines hidden under the bed.

Adventures in Podcasting

Usually when I post on here about things I’ve made, I’m talking about things I made from yarn or scraps of fabric or flour. But the biggest claim on my time is making podcasts: chiefly Answer Me This!, which you probably already know about if you’ve fetched up here on my website (unless you found me accidentally after googling ‘Donald Rumsfeld doll‘ – if so, welcome!).

This Tuesday, I took part in the Fast Train event, cooked up by the BBC Academy and Skillset, where radio professionals came along to learn about more angles of the radio industry. I was charged with teaching people about podcasting, naturally. Shortly before my classes kicked off, I bumped into Jonathan Wall, the 5 Live commissioner who has very kindly been employing me on Saturday Edition for the past year and a half. “You’re giving away all your secrets!” he exclaimed.

In truth, there are no secrets. I have no training; I only know how to do it through having done it, pretty much every week, for more than five years now. I’m not sitting on any insider knowledge which has kept Answer Me This! going and growing for all this time – perhaps this can be ascribed to a combination of luck, persistence and application.

Therefore I thought I’d share my not-secrets on here in a few posts over the next few days, a rudimentary ‘How To’ guide for any of you who were considering giving podcasting a whirl. When we started, we had a copy of Podcasting For Dummies, which almost defeated us before we even began; so consider these posts to be Podcasting For People Who Are Dumber Than Dummies.

I can’t tell you what to say on your podcast, or how to say it in an interesting and engaging manner, but I can give you a quick rundown of what you are likely to need behind the scenes. If you have any particular questions about podcasting, stick them in the comments and I’ll try to address them. With very little learning, YOU can become a podcasting powerhouse. Although if and when you do become one, I’ll probably throw a jealous shitfit and wish I’d kept all the podcast knowhow sequestered, just like Jonathan Wall was trying to warn me to do.

free entertainment?

There’s nothing good on telly on Tuesday 31st January; so if you’re at a loose end that evening, and crave diversion at zero cost, then please come down to the Phoenix Cavendish Square.

Forwhy? Well, Olly and I will be recording a radio pilot for a new comedy quiz – with Ian Collins, Tom Parry and Bridget Christie as the contestants – and we need YOU to be in the Live Studio Audience. I promise you won’t get hauled up on stage or forced to recount your most embarrassing sexual experience, as it’s neither panto nor So Graham Norton. (I have a phobia of audience participation, so I wouldn’t do that to you.)

Doors open at 7pm for a punctual 7.30 commencement, concluding by around 9pm. As there are no tickets, it’s first come first served for the chairs. I don’t know whether the pub allows bring-your-own for furniture.

Keep your laptop warm all winter

This isn’t the most exciting or original thing I’ve made, but it turned out quite pleasingly so here it is. It is my friend Miranda’s birthday this week, and I received word she wanted a laptop sleeve. Mine not to reason why, mine but to do and…do. Here it is:

Miranda is an academic, so the exterior is the second most academic of fabrics (the first being, of course, tweed): corduroy.

But inside…

…hot pink silk shantung!

It was extremely simple to make, but if you’re too time-poor to expend 3 seconds thinking how to do it, here’s a ‘tutorial’:

1. Make a paper template approximating the following shape. Miranda has a small laptop, so I cut mine 27″ long plus seam allowance, but for a bigger computer, 30+ inches would be necessary. Approximately, the template needs to be thrice the length of your laptop and a couple of inches wider than its width, plus half an inch of seam allowance all round. Use the template to cut three pieces of the same size: one of each of your outer fabric, lining fabric and thin batting.

2. Sandwich the right sides of your outer and lining fabrics together, place the batting on top, and sew around all but one of the edges, as marked in the photo above.

3. Turn the right way out; tuck in the raw edges, then sew the open edge closed.

4. Fold up the bottom edge to a height appropriate to your laptop’s comfort, and sew up each side. I oversewed them by hand, as my sewing machine refused to penetrate the combined six layers of corduroy, batting and shantung.

5. Attach a little loop of thin elastic to the underside of the top flap (if I make another one, I’ll remember to sandwich this between the layers of fabric before embarking upon stage 2) and firmly sew a nice button towards the bottom of the sleeve.

I don’t know about you, but I tend feel that the objects I make are a little redolent of whatever film or TV programme I was watching whilst making them. For instance, the oversized patchwork on my sofa = Babette’s Feast and Infamous. So, sorry, Miranda; your laptop sleeve is imbued with the essence of Revolutionary Road and the Marilyn Monroe episode of Quantum Leap. Happy birthday!

Laptop not included; for demonstration purposes only.

top books of 2011

Thanks to an English degree followed by several years of book reviewing and editing, over the past decade I completely fell out of the habit of reading for pleasure. Hence my new year’s resolution for 2011 was to read more.

I don’t think I had ever bothered making a new year’s resolution before, but this one worked out rather well for several months, until I started reviewing again and the fun-reading immediately dried up. (Currently all books are stuck in a queue behind one that is so bad I can’t bear to finish it.) Nonetheless, I hope to redouble my efforts in 2012, so please be so kind as to recommend me some good books in the comments and I’ll add them to my reading list.

Of the books that I did read this year, the following were my favourites, and I recommend them without reservation. In no significant order:

How I Escaped My Certain Fate – Stewart Lee
It is very difficult to write well about comedy, still more so to write about your own comedy; yet Stewart Lee succeeds with ingenuity and wisdom, and without disappearing up his own arse. Alongside his dissection of his own oeuvre, he provides a potted history of alternative comedy of the past few decades, plus affectionate/bitchy comment upon various contemporary stand-ups.

Mrs P’s Journey – Sarah Hartley
It seems I enjoyed this far more than the average Amazon user! What’s not to like, haters? The first half reads like a jaunty novel, as the titular Mrs P – Phyllis Pearsall, creator of the London A-Z – is born to histrionic parents who act like dicks fairly consistently until she skips off to live under a bridge in Paris. When she grows up, she takes the unprecedented step of compiling an exhaustive street map of London, which involves her walking every single street then drawing it up by hand. Google Maps make it so easy to take cartography for granted now, but it must have been a major ball-ache in the past. I mean, ‘labour of love’.

Lint – Chris Ware
I don’t have much appetite for graphic novels/comics (choose whichever term angers you least), but I do love Chris Ware. In many other graphicnovelcomics, I find the visual aspect is only illustrating the story, so not telling me much I didn’t already learn from the words and slowing down the book to boot; whereas in books like this, the visuals ingeniously convey the story of a man’s life from conception to death. Depressing, but that goes with the territory.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – Anita Loos
I borrowed this from my friend Will, who had read it for his book group and emerged thoroughly perplexed by it. I’m not sure what baffled him so acutely; it’s quite straightforward, although a good deal different to the film. Originally a series of magazine columns in Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1920s, it’s the diary of the gold-digging blonde Lorelei – Marilyn Monroe’s faux-naive character in the film, but rather sharper here – as she seeks a wealthy husband. One thing I learnt from this book is that although I’m generally a massive pedant, I do enjoy a Character Spelling Mistake.

Sisters by a River – Barbara Comyns
More Character Spelling Mistakes here, although not deliberate ones in this fictionalised account of the author’s childhood, in a rambling country house overrun by siblings and rambunctious parents. That’s usually a good set-up for a book, isn’t it? As it proves here, and very charmingly so. Eccentric without trying.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
A very sweet, cheering short novel, wherein a series of mistakes propels sad middle-aged spinster Miss Pettigrew into a joyous new Roaring 30s existence. I’ve never been disappointed by any book from Persephone Books, partly because they seem to favour the early-20th century period of literature of which I am very fond, and partly because the volumes are very pretty.

Lobster

Yesterday I promised to post about the best Christmas gift I made this year. (Best in my own opinion. Opinion of the recipient: difficult to gauge.)

Here it is:

It came out nearly twice as big as I’d anticipated, at almost three feet long. A three-foot lobster is quite creepy-looking, even when made out of a material as innocent as red felt.

Exoskeleton.

Beady eyes.

patchwork dog

Alas I only had time to make a couple of Christmas presents this year. I’ll post about my favourite one tomorrow. This patchwork Scottie dog, which I gave to my sister-in-law Kate, I do like well enough; but because I used a pattern and didn’t invent it myself, it didn’t involve the three-act drama I enjoy so much during my improvised crafting endeavours: first act, optimistic experimentalism; second act, panic; third act, relief/horror at the end product.

Anyway, if you want to make your own patchwork dog, you can find the pattern here. Behold my effort:

I’ve never done patchwork with small pieces before, but it was very quick to sew by hand. Plus it was pleasing to work in some of my sillier fabrics.

I deviated from the pattern by sewing a border strip out of 30 squares instead of one fabric, which meant the dog could have a rather apt piece for its mouth:

And, entirely by chance, it ended up having quite an apt little bit of pattern at its far end too.

noises on

I assume that not all of you had particularly happy Christmases, given that there were more than zero visitors to this site yesterday. Today you’ve also been sending me some corking tweets about your worst presents – click here to read.

Halfway through building the Christmas pudding-substitute tower of profiteroles, I realised I was at that moment on BBC 5 Live, as a guest on their Radio Review of 2011 hosted by the magnificent Jane Garvey of Woman’s Hour (who happened to be the first ever voice on 5 Live, fact fans) and also featuring Mike Toolan, Miranda Sawyer, Emma Barnett, John Plunkett and Olly Mann. You can find the show here. Unusually, I really hope nobody was listening to it live yesterday evening…

Shortly before Christmas, Olly and I also piped up on Guardian Media Talk’s review of the year, and also polished off the podcast for the year with the Best of Answer Me This! 2011, part 2.

And now, the profiteroles:

Dad said they looked like a lion had done a shit on the plate.