JOY PARADE No.7 (Actual No.7!)
Being a Borrower! Fern Gully in Harrogate! Celia Imrie's Aggressively Applied Blusher!
HELLO!
Well, did you spot the mistake? Last week’s JOY PARADE was numbered No.7, but it was really No. 6, and so what we can take away from that is that I have not made any improvements from when I was in secondary school. (On the first day of a new year I walked into my mathematics class and the teacher looked at me and sighed heavily and in a deeply depressed manner…)
Anyway, here we are at ACTUAL No.7 and what news have I for you today?
Before we begin properly, here’s another duck from my sketchbook. I can’t seem to stop drawing 1950s Avantgarde ducks…
Well, as you know last weekend I was away Jaunting again. I went to see my friend M’s new house and also to promenade around Harrogate for a bit. I can tell you that a WONDERFUL TIME WAS HAD.
Of course I took my Train Picnic and Adventuring Flask and it was v. pleasing to sit for many hours sipping away and eating pain au chocolat whilst looking out of the window and occasionally glancing at the book I’m reading. I think it’s very important to factor in some time to really get stuck into a good bit of idly watching the world go by. Out-the-window-gazing is very underrated and there ought to be more of it.
What I particularly enjoyed was that the further Up North™️ I went the greener the scenery became and it also got increasingly cow and sheep covered- THRILLING!
Once I arrived that’s when things really got exciting :
Tacos for lunch! (Delicious but an absolute bugger to eat with decorum.)
Gossiping over tea upstairs in a coffee shop surrounded by scented candles!
Being lured by the sultry siren song of a bookshop!
Then after all of that it was off to see M’s new home. It’s GLORIOUS!
You’ve never seen such tall ceilings! A bath in her own little built in alcove! A tumble of canary yellow Welsh Poppies growing wild by the backdoor!
I found myself giving the whole place the full Jassy and Victoria Radlett treatment from Love in a Cold Climate…
After this we went off to promenade at leisure around the beautiful Valley Gardens in Harrogate which were spectacular in the late afternoon sunshine. Is there anything nicer than wandering a beautiful garden with an old friend whilst getting thick into a good convo and both jangling the cup your drink is in so the ice cubes shake like maracas? I think not. I don’t have a photo of us doing all of this, but here is an artistic impression:
That evening there was a Chinese takeaway for dinner and thrillingly I managed not to drop a single bit of it down my white jumper. WHERE IS MY AWARD?
(I should point out that throughout all of the above I kept accidentally shouting extremely loudly. My ear had popped on the train and until it re-popped several hours post-locomotive, I had absolutely no control over the volume of my own voice. I thought I was talking normally until we went into an antiques shop and a couple jumped out of their skin suits and nearly dropped the porcelain shepherdess they were looking at when I Exclaimed! at a set of Staffordshire dogs.)
The next day, (with ear and voice volume restored to normal) we had breakfast and then ambled about a bit to the sound of church bells peeling around us. This was lovely until someone somewhere started to play the bagpipes. On the way to the station we dipped into the most amazing antiques/vintage/junk shop whose name now escapes me and I bought this giant wooden knife and fork…
… and these two pieces of art. The Lovely Pair (of Pears) is an original and (according to the signature) drawn by someone called Cicely M. Cook in 1971.
Unfortunately, the lovely frame the fruit picture is in didn’t quite survive the rigours of three hours on and off a selection of Pendolinos so along to the framers I must go. I’m DELIGHTED by all my purchases- particularly the knife and fork because it’s nice to feel like a Borrower from time to time…
And so that was my weekend. I was back in time to deadhead the marguerites before sinking EXHAUSTED FROM FUN onto the sofa.
Now, it’s time for this week’s JOY PARADE…
1. Firstly, as always some BEHOLDING! and EXCLAIMING!
The two peony buds in the garden have FINALLY bloomed! They have been teasing me for weeks - sticking a fishnet- tighted leg coyly through a velvet curtain whilst David Rose and His Orchestra tune up - but at last all has been revealed! I could not be more delighted!
When promenading through the park in Harrogate, these giant Chilean Rhubarb plants (below) really got the old eyebrows waggling. SO! ENORMOUS! and made me feel pleasingly Fern Gully-esque.
Also from last weekend, this photo of sun peeping through leafy trees. Deeply cheering!
2. Continuing the Harrogate theme, I decided to record some of the things I spotted at the station and out of the window of the first of my three trains home. Here’s a selection:
3. Have we all been GLUED to the BBC coverage of the Chelsea Flower S? If so, which were your favourite gardens? I was particularly taken by the Seawilding garden (a mini beach! Gently swaying aquatic plants!) and The Hospitalfield Arts Garden with its wild tangle of plants and the rusted pavilion/summerhouse. Heavenly!
4. The incredible Victoria Wood would have been 72 this week. What a genius she was and so greatly missed. I think hers is a talent never to be repeated. Inspired by my shopping up in Harrogate, please enjoy Keep On Shopping by Victoria Wood and the cast of As Seen On TV.
(Hope Jackman’s gappy teeth! Eyeshadow to the eyebrows! The blouses! Celia Imrie’s aggressively applied blusher! WONDERFUL!)
5. Alex Chinneck’s A Week At The Knees sculpture for Clerkenwell Design Week is so great! More about it here.
6. I love these mermaids. (Tag yourself. I’m bottom left.)
7. I’ve always really enjoyed seeing behind the scenes process of how illustrators create their work -the preparatory drawings, the sketches, the discarded pages, all the half rubbed out bits, etc. These rough drawings and plans for the Moomin book illustrations by Tove Jansson are BEYOND GLORIOUS!
8. Have you ever seen anything more cheerful than these Welsh tapestry patterned socks?
9. I couldn’t love the murals at Benelmans Bar at The Carlisle Hotel, Manhattan more if I tried. Created in the 1940s by the creator of the Madeline books, Ludwig Bemelmans, they are just beautiful.
10. Edith Piaf singing La Vie En Rose live on TV in 1954. Come for her voice and the heartfelt performance, stay for the eyebrows. (Also, I defy you not to be moved by the delivery of the last line of the song…)
11. My oldest Neph and his girlfriend (my Honorary Niece) are visiting Vienna soon, and this has made me remember my trip there a few winters ago. I went to see artwork by Klimt and Schiele, and this exhibition curated by Wes Anderson and his partner, Juman Malouf (which was brilliantly bonkers!). I got up very early one morning and decided to head to one of the galleries for when it opened to be able to look around before it got busy. As I strolled quite alone through the gallery grounds I heard nice accordion music playing from nearby. I followed the sound and I don’t know what I was expecting to find but discovering that this was the musician absolutely floored me…
AND FINALLY…
In the antique shop where I bought my giant knife and fork I spotted this behind the counter. Everything about it is perfection.
Thank you for joining this week’s JOY PARADE!
I hope you all have a lovely Sunday. I’ll be dashing out in between rain showers to pot up some new plants I bought this week. I also MUST tackle a good tidy of my studio. What that means of course is tidying something for five mins then once again spending a good two hours chasing one/all of the dogs around the house to tackle them and remove from their gobs whatever it is they have stolen from the bin bag.
I’ll be back next weekend with May’s FULL NEWS BRIEFING. In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed this JOY PARADE hit the heart button below and do please follow me on Instagram (I’m @mralextsmith over there) and also subscribe to and share this newsletter to all your chums.
Thank you so much!
In Tearing Haste,
Alex T Smith
HEAD PIGEON.
All I can scream is....I WANT YOUR LIFE AND YOUR VISION.........💚
What pure joy the Pigeon Post is. Manifique!!!