Prince Charming’s got ‘em on speed dial- Pumpkin Weddings

Blog, interrupted. It's been brewing in the Drafts folder since July. I was banking on it marinating in a meltingly choice, sumptuous manner, although if it's been festering into litter-tray mush, apologies. But if it's got any idea of its content (my work experience with Pumpkin Weddings,. "The Fairy Godmothers of the venue industry!"), it'll be simmering over with rich, frothing swathes of flavoursome career goodness. Let's hope for the best because the Pumpkin team are, to use a more relevant analogy, magic.

 
 Time spent with the Pumpkin Weddings crew is a bargain investment- fish out a couple of working week, or a handful of loose days you've got lying around, and cash them in- you'll bag yourself beautiful venue visits, centrepiece/water-bowl/candelabra/ivy/crystal/favour/flower arranging, lunches a la M&S&LOL, chair cover races, cakes, brides, grooms, good tunes, great gossip and more Twix's than you should have, really, but go on then, if you're offering. They'll even throw in some post-venue vino and the offer of adoption, if you're still on the fence. Which you shouldn't be, because it's time for elevenses, hop down! Don't you want a HobNob?

 
Of course, there are those days when though the love shines bright, nature's having none of it...but no need to cloud over the celebrations- a flick of the Pumpkin wand takes this handy manor house from 0 to Organza in a few hours, earning "oooh!"'s, "aaah!"'s and "It's just how I wanted it!"'s as guests peek in at the windows. And let's be honest, when you can charm the crowd with cakes that creamily blossom and bloom, sparking up smiles and appetites with their vanilla glow, then who cares if it's tipping it down outside?

 

Thank you so much to Em, Paul and the team for having me- I know working with you over Christmas will be a cracker! xxx

"I was 'ere...are you?" - observations on desk graffiti

A view on the walk home from uni...what else are you walking away from?

Dashed and weathered by the tides of pens, pages, coats and elbows, their corners buffed into curved polish, their grains ground up with inks and dents of procrastination past.

The raring expectancies of lives beginning lies in these boards- illustrations of the subconscious, thoughts left too long un-tethered in those fragmented pauses between interest and understanding. Like the murk of an evening skyline, the harder you squint, the more biro constellations rise up through the blotted layers. Some wet black with fresh passion or distraction. Some softer- etches waning and wearing away; void and forgotten like the emotion, long since spent, that carved it there.

There are lessons learnt here, offered to us to make our own- it’s odd, both how often the word ‘time’ pops up, and how much there is etched out in English. A lolling scrawl simply suggests, “Take the Time”, another preaches, “time is something in your hands”, while here is scratched the sullen mumble, “kill the time that’s killing you”. There is an excitable, and as far as I can make out from the Italian, fairly derogatory comment about Gwen Stefani, and a few regulation doodles of penises. Some sketches are cruel, some are merry, some loving, some pondering, some make no sense at all- and why should they?



Except...I’m drawn (no pun intended) to a certain few patches of bleached scribbles- despite their age, and their bolder gel-pen successors, I find myself dwelling on them. Wondering if they hold on, in dull defiance, because they hold true, even now, though their authors long since left these pews behind. Their tattered messages are distant, but held here in purgatory, with dogged insistence. Do they stay loyal, somehow, to a dream never realised, a passion never chased, a love left untold? What do they say that their owner could not?



What have you written? Or, more importantly, do your thoughts live on, spectre-like on some desk gone by- shady reminders of a bottled desire? And don’t you think it’s time you let those laboured lines fade away....



Slightly less insightful graffiti, on the Literature Faculty wall

 (if you're bored, leave me a comment below. because...well, I like them :) )



Dustless Centuries- Padova University

So when I discovered a book I needed was in the Palazzo del Bo, the historical seat of the University, I got all geekily excitable, rooted about for my camera and wrote off the next hour or two as Tourist Time. Built in 1493, the place makes old-school look like a nursery fresh off the blueprints, as you can see:

 Track down your text in these leather-bound miniture files...

 The gateway of ancient intellect with a hint of, "I've only gone and lost my bloody parking ticket, haven't I?"

 As you walk through the main gate, pillars and stone wall carvings await...

 This statue of Palinurus was made in commemoration of the University's role in the Resistance, for which it won the Gold Medal for Valour. Padova 1, Resistance 0.

 The paintings represent birth and development of humanity, culture and science, and the multi-coloured stairs jazz things up a notch.

The main doors of the Palazzo are forboding, but remembering the University motto, "Universa universis patavina libertas (Paduan freedom is universal for everyone), originally chosen to show its independence from the Catholic Church, still seems inviting today. It seems, the gate an eddy of footsteps and chatter, the University of Padova is still raring and relevant, wise but fresh, despite its years. Book in hand, I totter past the carvings solemn gaze. Nothing like centuries of composed strength in the snarling, battling face of adversity to make you get your reading done on time.

(leave me a comment below, if you fancy/are bored. ooh, go on.)

Slow Start

It's a bit ironic really- I'm sat, sub-face-pack, in a beautiful, fashionable country shaped like a boot, while fixated on books/sites about beautiful things, like boots, worn by people packing some serious fashion face.

Don't give me that- you try being doped up on volcanic meringues and deepest-fill jam tarts from down the road, and then attempting wistful insights. Too much of Mama's 'special' home baking is making me just that. When's your Dumbass Day?
So, before we go skipping across the cobbles, tramlines and sheened store floors of Padova, I've got a few screenshots instead of snapshots. The focaccia made me do it.

Will Cotton

Mr Cotton has one of THOSE jobs. One that makes you take one scornful look at your snowballing university debt and dog-eared lecture notes and think, "Someone had to earn their living making delicious mess, big bucks and an renowned name for themselves from crafting big heaps of cake- why the Bicarbonate of Soda wasn't it me?!". Astounded jealousy aside, this man has his cake and sells it, recently to none other than Miss Katy Perry, who hired him to design the set for 'Calfornia Girls' video, and to paint her 'Teenage Dream' album cover.

Elie Saab (http://www.eliesaab.com/)
If a particularly diva-ish strain of the Ancient Greeks ever chanced upon a time machine, they would sashay aboard, tailors in tow, and head straight for the runway of Elie Saab, as they RSVP-ed to those amphitheatre premiers with a smile. Hopefully said time machine would break down enroute, somewhere in or around my kitchen. Stand aside chiffon, it's thigh time.

Marc Quinn

Down a street here, over a canal there, and in no time the Furby and I found ourselves lost in Venice last weekend, something which we didn't have a problem with at all. 'Lost' doesn't seem quite the right word. 'Lost' would imply a certain emptiness, a bland loneliness, and that there weren't bakeries, spritz bars, trinket shops, mask stands, glass stalls, gondolas, balconies, bridges and abounding quaint crumbling gorgeousness absolutely everywhere you look. In fact, I don't think I've ever found so much whilst claiming to be 'lost'.

During our rewardingly aimless wander, what should we find but a painting I've never seen by a forgotten favourite- Marc Quinn. Known to favour kitcsh, riches and risk (he once made a live-size sculpture of his own head, "Self"- using 4.5 litres of his own blood, created Roman-style statues with people with disabilities in place of gods, and designed a golden sculpture of Kate Moss in a pretzel-like yoga pose), it was just a little bit cool to see this intriguing mind set to canvas. Even as a self-confessed Modern Art Anarchist, the Furby was taken by it too.
(Couldn't find the exact painting...but here are some other nice ones. The one that got away was better though, promise.)

(Technorati claim: 48FCQDD9DGND)

Up. (Or: what the M4 does to your mind.)

Nice... fun... cool... is that all there is left? My vocabulary ebbing with the fuel gauge, I find myself.... "lost for words", and also, apparently, defenceless against the cliché.

Freckled buzz of the untuned radio seems onomatopoeic for the fizzing disintegration of grey matter, hunched blearily over the steering wheel. Where once, a matter of hours ago, it was lodged content- synapses twitching, dimly ticking over in its shell- it now dissolves to sparkless rubble, numb in my skull.

Think I better have some Fruit Pastilles.

It's only what tumbles serenely above the ... "concrete jungle" (it's worse than I thought...) that loosely sutures me to my sanity- clouds. As a Brit, it seems inherently wrong to root for our reluctant signature, our uninvited guests. But they have a "silver lining" (make it stop!). The plumes and gusts glow with dappled composure, poised above the towers, pylons and streetlamps that grapple at their blooms.

Wincing through the blurry windscreen, over the rim of my Coffee Nation, it seems that the sheer regal vastness of the heavens invite a soundtrack, deserve an accompaniment by a cathedral choir. Maybe even a theme tune (a little part of me wants that to be The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony'...). Their sleet-shot surges demand a requiem, a canon erupting from on high- to present and announce to us mere mortals below, that the Greatest Show on Earth is, in fact, effortlessly pirouetting atop our chimney pots.

The thundered footlights dazzle and snap, and from the cosy theatre of my Micra, I forget the gripe of a nation as the sky lit drama unfolds. I raise my hot chocolate dregs in toast, rain faith restored; it's actually pretty cool.

I would take my hat off, to the clouds above, as a sign of admiration and respect. If they didn't insist on, gloriously or not, soaking me within an inch of my life. Hmm. As 'they', I and the sufferers of clichés everywhere, say, "back to square one".

losing my grip?

Out into nothing

An odd thing struck me at, ooh, about 13,500 feet above Seville. As a self-confessed pudding enthusiast, I wish I could say that I was inspired at this point, by the dusty curvature whistling towards my trainers, to bake some kind of spherical, earthen Heston Blumenthal creation. Or perhaps the correct food blogger response (to the initially feared, but actually giggle-fit-inducing, sky-plummetting situation i found myself in) would be to empathise with the fateful sinking of souffles everywhere. Amongst the ruffling silence and gravity getting all carried away, my mind should have been gloriously awash with the smells and flavours of dinner-times past, flashing before my eyes....
THUD.

Nope. Somehow, all I wanted was 1 x can Diet Coke, fresh from the shop fridge, with all those beads of condensation on the outside, as if it had been making such a (successful) effort to be delicious it had actually begun to perspire. Such drinks might be tins of effervescent murk, chemical-ridden enough to polish a coin to a sheen, but if anyone thinks they can tell me Coca Cola don't know how to market themselves, then I would like to bloody hear it.

'Cafe Cloud 9' -Vendors of the glory drink

You like to think that you're immune to the stuff, oh yeah...

It's fair to say intention is 'honourable'. Except, more often than not, the word is meant in a sidling, Mark Antony way. Despite good intentions, it seems more at home describing the expensive dud firework, the post-Christmas diet, the "We should really do lunch sometime", than anything the dictionary would have you believe. Intention and reality: flippantly dreaming younger brother, dropping far-fetched plans quicker than he can pluck them out of the air, lazes near bluntly discerning older sister, her eyebrows smirkingly doubtful of his frivolities over her spectacles.

If today had gone according to plan, you would currently be perusing evidence of my obsession with GCBMB (Glam Crap Beyond My Budget). For this, read: caligraphy-fine seams, caramel-soft drapes, soirees of sartorial gems fresh and crisp pinned over ambitiously proportioned mannequins. Hours must have passed as I squinted for signs of GCBMB (sleek, slender bags with people to match, the tell-tale iridescent smoke of burning Platinum AmEx's, etc). Not a prima donna Labradoodle in sight.

Until... a distant pink placard caught the light. Peering over my sunnies, it hit me. Cosy reality was welcoming me home. Like a peckish prodigal daughter, I coyly scuttled over, wondering why I had ever strayed. Surely GCBMB could also stand for Gorgeous Cookery ...Baking ...Marvellously..... oh whatever, gimmee the cake.

"Tease", self-proclaimed 'Rock&Roll Bakery of Lisbon', turned out to be more bad-ass 'My Little Pony' than AC/DC, but it was undoubtedly a Nirvana... (I know. Can't be trusted with puns.). Black velveteen skull wallpaper, neon-glass tiered platters, pop-rock radio and faux-WWII "Keep Calm and Eat a Cupcake" poster : highly commended kitsch glitz.

The Aardvark picked a "Kiss Me on the Raspberry" (apparently in Portugal "Rock&Roll" loosely translates as demanding, yet confusingly vague, sluttiness?) cupcake, cooing over the miniature pick'n'mix treats lodged amongst Panda Pop blue frosting. As The Duck scowled testosterone at the 'manly' butterfly cake I suggested ("ooh look, there's a dinky little football on that one!!"), I confessed to my tastebuds- while window-shopping above my station is always relished, and my fascination with ogling snooty boutiques will be a life-long passion, I might as well face it: I'm addicted to... cake. There, I said it. (Oh don't kid yourself Robert Palmer, Valentines Day ain't got nothing on Victoria Sponge).

My slice was every crumb a rockstar, and a diva at that. Basking on lavish napkin layers, in a be-ribboned box, plus an actual fork escort- it found its every need pandered to. Eying the Prestige Pud, i began to feel that the borders defining who was the boss of whom were becoming concerningly hazy. Before things got dramatic, I asserted my authority. Nom nom nom.

And it was word perfect. Lunch didn't even get a look in. I mean, look at the size of the thing. The Aardvark's managed to face-plant the napkins enroute: a streaked blue daub told the story of its gooey demise. Sweet but short-lived, out with a bang ; a rock'n'roll hero till the end.

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