Good Morning

Just Wondering

How often do you lose your keys?

If not keys, is there something else you misplace with alarming regularity?

Are you a loser or finder of things?

Book 35 - Nigel Slater "Toast"

Nigel Slater "Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger" (Fourth Estate)




An autobiography told through food. Dinners cooked well, cooked awfully, cooked with or without love. Sweets. Just about anything that you can put into your mouth.

This book has a great balance between the delicious and the disgusting, both described very plasticly. The description of eating spaghetti for the first time is hilarious. It also has a great balance between the very personal, almost ideosynchratic, and the culture this is grounded in. I also found it really touching at times.

Nostalgia all the way. Not a sentimentalised vision of the past, but a slice of hard cold reality served with a dressing of wit.

I would recommend it to any foodie lover.

Pics From London

Some recent pics i took -






This is another full to the brim second hand bookshop i found near Putney Bridge underground station.



This was taken during my covert shop in Woolwich.

Book 36 - Simon Garfield "Mauve"

Simon Garfield "Mauve : How One Man Invented a Colour That Changed the World" (Faber & Faber)





A slim but broad-reaching tale of the beginning of artifiical dyes. At the time Perkin made his discovery that coal-tar could be transformed into mauve dye, chemistry was thought of like philosophy -a gentleman's pursuit with no worldly or industrial value. Perkin's discovery and subsequent ability to make money off of it changed that perception forever. By the time he died, chemistry was a roaring industry.

The history of artificial dyes is a fascinating one. Before Perkin discovered mauve, all dyes came from natural sources like plants or sea creatures. The array of colors was small, particularly for the poor. But chemical processes created not only a wide variety of colors, but made them available to everyone. Soon, bright, vibrant colors were a sign of being low-class instead of rich. Trying to cut corners in the chemical process led to colors that bled (even upon people's skin as they wore their clothes), or colours that were actually poisonous. Bright green was particularly likely to be rife with arsenic (could this be part of why the poison cake in Peter Pan is colored bright green?). Meanwhile, analine dyes were being used to discover the microbial world and eventually, even treat diseases. The tale of how mauve came to be is a fascinating one, and fairly well encapsulated herein.

Fascinating read.

Good Night