"Bond, Michael Bond"

Many good tributes to the creator of Paddington Bear, but this old one from Pico Eyer is a good one (the NYT obituary was nice too):

Bond’s greatest moment is in describing how the attempt to make a live-action film about Paddington began with “a midget dressed up in a bearskin” (though a midget a mite too large). Given that “the person inside the skin couldn’t hear what was being said to him, let alone where he was going”, and given that, according to Bond, “midgets also tend to be temperamental” (especially when stuck inside a papier-mache head), it makes for a scene worthy of its hero – even before the man “who had invented an automatic lawn mower” is brought in to give the bear emotions, producing an artificial head whose eyes blink at different moments, generating an effect both sinister and salacious.

"A spoonful a day"

"I am not so sure that marmalade sales really are declining."

Also: what would Paddington have said?

Taste, colour and set

It is perhaps not quite blog-worthy, there is nothing absolutely and wildly over-the-top about it, but I was mildly fascinated by this FT piece about Britain's recent marmalade revival (site registration required) and the Marmalade Awards website.

(There is also a prize for Marmalade Cat of the Year!)

My fridge is absolutely bare, I threw out almost everything in fridge and cupboards when leaving the place for subletters in May (I believe this should be done periodically in any case, otherwise aged things pervade!); I believe the purchase of new jams and marmalades is in order...

Entirely unrelated: a rather fantastic Wikipedia biography of British doctor and mass-murderer John Bodkin Adams. (He was convicted, among other things, of the wonderfully named offense "lying on cremation forms"!) This link arrived from my father, who is reading D. R. Thorpe's biography of Harold Macmillan and delighting in the way Macmillan's life seemed to intersect with all sorts of unexpected figures...

Saw an excellent play last night with G. at the Flea Theater, British group Pants on Fire's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Altogether charming! I think my favorite bits were Io's story (amazing use of gas mask and tap shoes to transform Io into a cow, and a beautifully written and performed song after her transformation back into a girl) and the song about Theseus's black sails, but both the material and the production are excellent: particularly inventive use of puppetry and modest sets to do all sorts of amazing and unexpected things. Lovely stuff!

And then we had a beautiful dinner at Petrarca, which has somehow by stealth and excellence become one of my favorite restaurants, so it was the rare occasion when dinner and the play were both exceptional; we shared a bottle of verdicchio and the amazing piatto rustico, a generous platter of prosciutto and salami and parmesan and so forth, then G. had spaghetti and meatballs and I had seared sesame-crusted tuna with asparagus. Topped off, though I was already rather full, by the Amarena: vanilla gelato with amarena cherries. It was delicious.

Jam stain

From Joseph Bristow's TLS piece on Thomas Wright's new book about Oscar Wilde's reading:

It is evident that Wilde treated his copy of Sententiæ Artis (1886) by the aesthete-despising journalist Harry Quilter with some contempt. This piece of hack art-criticism took a bruising when Wilde was drafting his vitriolic review of it for the Pall Mall Gazette, and Wright notes that Wilde’s copy, which is in private hands, has a badly cracked spine and bumped corners. Similarly, Wilde’s copy of W. H. Mallock’s satire on modern intellectual fads, The New Republic (1877), which is held at Magdalen College, Oxford, has, appropriately enough, a jam stain visible on page 30. As Wright notes, Wilde “gorged himself on books and food simultaneously”.

[ED. What I really want to know - what kind of jam?!?]