On the move

July 20, 2008

We’ve moved out and Jack Dee the comedian has moved in. For the next month our house is his and the tv crew’s filming his next Lead Balloon series. I must confess I’ve never seen it (I’m an early lights out girl) but I shall be all agog to spot my cooker when it’s aired.
I go back to collect post and nurture the beans, which seem to have won over the slugs. Bea the cat has stayed and infiltrated the set. No one seems to mind. There’s talk of writing her in. My bedroom is ‘make-up’, top room ‘wardrobe’, (easy chair and rails of badly patterned shirts for Dee’s character, a successful but weary standup), and gap year son’s unusually pristine lair, ‘office’.
The Pure Style house is often the back drop for magazine shoots; it works hard for a living. We’re well drilled though. The practice of living with less means packing up for these invasions is far less fraught. So is the unpacking at the other end. Our temporary home is in leafy Dulwich where ‘yummy mummies’ steer (or jog behind) Bugaboo prams over manicured playing fields. Just as a huge glass extension seems to be the height of social and cultural acheivement round here, the Bugaboo (the price of a decent secondhand car) is the equivalent for aspiring parents. Give me a Maclaren fold-up job, that is light portable and relatively cheap. Mine survived three kids, and years of uneven City pavements without even losing a wheel. The commodification of childhood – ¬¨¬£1,000 nappy bags, and private members clubs for toddlers – is just as unsettling as the feeling that we’re not good enough unless our homes are perfect showhouses.
There’s never going to be a headline that says ‘your baby lying down and looking at a rose is great’. There’s nothing to sell in it. Similarly telling the consumer that he or she doesn’t need state of the art power showers, and expensive wallpaper with giant prints isn’t good for profits. The important thing is to resist the ads and dig your own path.

I like a good potter in the shed. We inherited ours from Mrs.Campbell, who took tea and cucumber sandwiches in it on pre-war summer afternoons. The live-in maid, sent postcards of her visits to Rhyll and slept in what is a.k.a Jack Dee’s ‘wardrobe’. The shed is now home to bean sticks, flower pots, and trays for drying apples. I painted it in a soft bean green to make it blend with the greens in the garden. Maybe over the summer I’ll clear it and write there like George Bernard Shaw did in his little revolving writing house at Shaw’s Corner, one of The National Trust’s properties. See custom built wooden summerhouses inspired by Shaw’s at www.scottsofthrapston.co.uk.

The weather’s perking up. I can’t wait to swim at the Brockwell park Lido, a thirties’ art deco outdoor pool recently given a fantastic refurbishment. It’s time, too, for asparagus, and summery salads like this simple nicoise-inspired arrangement. It’s really tasty and a good idea if you have tins of tuna in the house, and don’t know what to do with them. Amalgamate pieces of cooked potato, tomato, a few anchovies, a can of tuna and chopped spring onions. Serve with some homemade mayonnaise, or a simple dressing.