Pink Saturday - watermelon salad

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

What's pink, cool and refreshing for summer, yet sophisticated enough to serve company? Watermelon salad.

This one is watermelon, basil, feta cheese and pistachios, served at Gordon Ramsay's gastropub The Narrow, on the banks of the Thames River in the Limehouse area of London.

We enjoyed it at a windowside table, looking at the river. The clouds threatened, but the storm never came.

This Pink Saturday, we're staying home, due to Carmageddon! Have a great weekend, all!

Super potatoes

We saw these beautiful purple and gold potatoes at the stall of Weiser Family Farms at the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market. Their pretty coloring is only skin deep - the flesh inside is pale and starchy like a russet potato. The farmstand recommends them as a great baking potato.

What do you call purple and gold potatoes in Los Angeles?

Laker Bakers, of course!

The end of life as we know it.

 

"Carmageddon" - that's what they're officially calling it.

This weekend, starting around 7 pm on Friday, July 15, the California Department of Transportation is going to close the 405 freeway through the Sepulveda Pass, until Monday morning, July 18.

The 405 will be closed between the 10 and the 101 freeways so the DOT can take down a bridge in the process of widening the freeway.

With the 405 closed, the entire west side of LA, including Santa Monica, Brentwood and UCLA will be forced to travel on surface streets - or not at all.

Not at all is more like it. We're staying home. Because - believe it or not - our winding, two-lane mountain road is the next road through the mountains west of the 405. Which means it will be the first thoroughfare chosen by anyone who needs to go from the Valley to the beach.

People are coming up with some ingenious ideas, though. My favorite? JetBlue is selling tickets for flights from Burbank airport to Long Beach airport - for only $4!  The flight takes about 35 minutes - pretty darn good, I'd say!

Here in Topanga, we've laid in supplies and we're having a "stay-cation." We've invited our neighbors for a potluck barbecue on Sunday.

American ignorance?

 

You've probably seen all those studies that claim how ignorant Americans are - sometimes it's a study about the population in general; sometimes it's about students. The survey shows that an alarmingly high percentage of respondents were totally ignorant about basic facts of our country's history or the basic functions of government.

I always wonder who those people were. But yesterday I was talking to someone I've known for at least a year, and she surprised me.

We were catching up after a month of being out of touch. I explained that I'd been traveling, and that we went to London, England. My friend had been at a family gathering in Lake Tahoe. We both told little stories about our stay.

I told about the weather. During our London stay, the weather had been very unusual - lots of rain, one really hot day, some surprisingly cold days, and one day of really fierce thunderstorms. After a bit of back and forth, my friend asked, "So, in London, it's their winter now, right?"

My friend wasn't sure which hemisphere Britain was in.

My friend is in her mid thirties; she's smart, talented and has a good job. She hasn't been to college, but she certainly graduated from high school without trouble. Yet her grasp on basic geography - where is Britain located? - came as a shock to me.

What do you think? Is this common? Have you encountered similar examples of ignorance? And - playing the devil's advocate for a moment - does it really matter, if she has a good life in society?

*Update - misspelling fixed. Thanks Gary!

Summer pleasures

These pretty flowers are Helenium, and since they were photographed in England, they are probably the well-known garden hybrid called "Moerheim Beauty."

This genus is native to Texas, Northern Mexico, and the Southwest of the U.S. They are members of the Aster family. Somewhat drought tolerant, they like full sun and look great with other hot, dry summer flowers like dahlias, yarrows, black-eyed Susans, and crocosmias.

I love their cheerful bright color and the prominent round central cone - it feels like a chenille-covered button under your finger.

What says "summer" to you, in your personal landscape?

Warm beer

The grey-haired man in black accepted the glass of beer from the bartender, but then he tasted it and placed it back on the table.

"This beer is too warm," he said.

It was a Sunday, just after noon, and the Dog and Duck pub in Soho had just opened. The landlady was cleaning up the place after a raucous Saturday night. "It's not supposed to be cold," she said, taking him for a tourist unaccustomed to British pubs.

"I know that," said the man, irritated. "But this one is too warm."

"It's the same as all the others. We keep them at 14 C." She was having none of it.

"it's too warm," he said again. He set the glass on the table, turned and walked out of the pub, down the narrow street and away.

The landlady smirked and muttered at his back.

The other customers shrugged, watched the black-clad figure diminish down the street, and sipped at their own glasses of ale or cider. "Pushy bastard," said someone.

After a moment of silence - "D'you know who that was?" asked the man sweeping up in the corner. Everyone looked at him. "That was Terry Jones."

We all looked down the street again, but the former Monty Python comic was no longer in sight. But the glass of beer remained.

Pink Saturday - Columbia Road

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

Columbia Road is a narrow crescent of roadway, lined with small shops that are just a little too funky to be rightly called "boutiques."  These small cake shops, vintage shops, housewares and hardware stores are fun to browse in, but early on Sunday mornings, they aren't the main attraction that brings throngs to this East London neighborhood.

The Columbia Road Flower Market fills the street, with racks and stands full of cut flowers and potted plants. Everything from exotic orchids to mundane annuals is here for sale, and loudly hawked by Cockney-voiced vendors competing with one another for your business.

"Doy-ann-thuss! Two fer a fiver!" shouts one man, cradling an entire flat of garden pinks in his beefy embrace. "You've got lob-eee-lee-ah loike that, dah-lin', shood be four pots a fiver!"

At the stall next door, another vendor shouts, "Any two for three pounds!"

Further down the row, another vendor holds up a standard-pruned fuchsia in full bloom. "They's stolen that's woy they's so cheap! A fiver!"

I marveled at these blue Eryngium alpinum - I've never been able to grow this plant, and here were bunches of them.

Further down, a display of dahlias.

Or hydrangeas catch the eye.

As you squeeze through the crush, you might decide to take a break, buy a coffee or a pastry, and explore the little shops.

This one entices you with a phrase of poetry chalked on the door.

Inside, you find rustic pots, packets of seed, garden furniture, hats and tools.

You can even buy compost by the scoop here.

Other shops sell clothes, jewelry, or artwork.

We relaxed a bit before wading back through the tightly packed scrum. Such a sea of color and scent! It was irresistible! Though I knew it would be foolish to buy potted plants, unable to take them back to the US, there's no reason not to have cut flowers. I bought two bunches of peonies to bring back to our flat.

They lasted for days, filling our rooms with scent.

If you visit London, don't miss the Columbia Road Flower Market.

Ready for one

So glad it's Friday.

Xanadu by the sea

The Royal Pavilion seen from the park and gardens

In 1783, George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales and son of King George III first visited the seaside town of Brighton, on the English Channel. He had just turned 21, obtained an annual income that allowed him to live a luxurious and licentious lifestyle, and at Brighton he found he could indulge himself away from the disapproving eyes of his dour and somewhat crazy father.

He bought a modest farmhouse a short walk from the pebbled beach, and as the years passed he improved upon the property. In 1815 he engaged the architect and designer John Nash, who turned the modest Sussex farmhouse into an extravagant, almost hallucinogenic, sprawling fantasy palace known today as the Royal Pavilion at Brighton.

In the midst of the town of modest attached houses and pubs, pale stucco turrets, minarets and bulging onion domes rise over a green lawn and winding, flower-filled gardens. The exterior style is an amalgam of Saraceno-Indo-Islamic Arabian Nights on acid. The interior is one of the finest and most overblown example of Nineteenth Century Chinoiserie ever created.

Entry

You enter the Pavilion through long and low galleries with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, and though the appointments and trim are more extravagant than almost anything you'll ever seen, the delicacy and proportion sooth your senses and gently usher you into the fantasy land Nash has created.

And then you enter the Banqueting Hall. It's a huge domed room encrusted with decor - the walls are painted with Chinese scenes, the windows crested with pelmets fashioned to resemble writhing dragons; great banana leaves of bronze and gilt top the dome and from them a huge silver-gilt dragon bearing a crystal chandelier is suspended.

Click to "embiggen"

For me, it immediately evoked the exotic and Orientalesque interiors of magnificent 20th Century movie palaces like Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theatre or the St. Louis and Detroit twin Fox Theatres - but it was even more than these. For one thing, the Royal Pavilion is one hundred years older than any of these. And further, it was built not as a commercial palace, but for the pleasure of one man and his friends.

Tourists are not allowed to take photos of the interior, so you'll have to be content with this contemporary print of the Banqueting Hall.

Nash's designs were state of the art. The building was built with the latest technological advances - a frame of iron clad in stucco was innovative and allowed for the fanciful domes and shapes of the building. Even the kitchens were designed with the latest - a specially engineered contraption used the power of the wind to turn dozens of trussed birds roasting on spits. Nash allowed the kitchen slaveys a bit of fancy, too - the cast-iron columns in the room are topped with palm leaves, as though trees are holding up the high ceilings.

Kitchen at the Brighton Pavilion (sorry, no larger resolution)

The Prince of Wales - known as "Prinny" - needed such a huge kitchen to support the amount of entertaining he did. The Banquet Hall  is set for thirty places, and a sample menu on display shows one hundred different dishes that might be served at a single meal. Prinny managed to spend his way through the equivalent of millions of pounds, incurring huge debts that outraged his father.In 1810, George III's ill health and mental instability caused Parliament to pass a bill allowing the Prince of Wales to serve as Prince Regent in his stead.

The Prince Regent, painted by Thomas Lawrence, circa 1816

Handsome, fashionable, and dashing as a young man, by the time his father died and Prinny ascended the throne as king in 1820, he was obese and suffered so badly from gout and dropsy that a special private suite was made up for him on the ground floor of the house so he wouldn't have to climb stairs. The tour takes you through these rooms, which seem a little sad. He died in 1830, at the age of 58 - a prime example of how bad habits take a toll even on the most fortunate of us.

The upper floors include the suite Queen Victoria used the few times she came to Brighton. You can even see her maid's bedroom and the royal commode. There are also suites that housed George IV's brothers, the Dukes of York and Clarence, decorated in a searingly vivid chrome yellow, with dragon-patterned panels.

Victoria disliked Prinny's elaborate fantasy, finding it vulgar and not a good place to raise children. In 1850 she sold the building to the City of Brighton at a cut-rate price - after stripping it of most of its furnishings and fixtures.

The town used it as assembly rooms - no doubt the tourism trade provided a good market for meetings, ballrooms and the like. King George IV's fantasy became the first modern example of a municipally owned event facility.

As we toured the upper rooms we also learned of an odd, paradoxical yet fascinating episode in the history of the Pavilion. Between 1914 and 1916, at the height of the First World War, the City of Brighton provided housing for military hospitals in municipal buildings like schools and exhibit halls, and also the Royal Pavilion. The Royal Pavilion became a ward serving wounded troops from the Indian Corps - soldiers from Britain's colonies in India. Over 4000 men were treated there during this time.

Another view from the garden

One has to wonder what these men now transplanted to Britain's chilly seashore must have thought when awakening in the extravagant, ridiculously faux-Hindoo domed palace. Was it an oddly comforting taste of the architecture of home for them? Or a bizarre cartoonish travesty? 

Painting by C C H Burleigh showing the Music Room used as a ward

You can see a Flickr set of images of the Brighton Indian Military Hospital at this website HERE. A nice article about those days is HERE.

After the Second World War, the City began an effort to restore the Pavilion. Queen Elizabeth II returned on loan much of the furnishings that Victoria had removed. Today, the house is beautifully preserved and conservators are trying to recreate its original furnishings and decor.

If you're interested in interior design; a fan of chinoiserie, or interested in seeing what might have been the first true fantasy-land environment, you'll love a visit to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton.