Country Life

As promised in my last, I had a lovely sticky time making a cover sketch for my Venetian pal. I don’t, for good reason, have much faith in my ability as a painter, because I don’t put in the time and concentration to develop my skills, so if I want to do anything in colour, I turn to collage. The Professor buys Country Life these days – leaving aside the property porn, it has very sensible articles on  issues which really do affect country life, and remains, as it always was, good on architecture (though it has to be said, it is Tottering By Gently which is the ultimate thumb in the scales as far as the P is concerned, especially if it features Slobber the Labrador, Ms Tempest, take note). But even the property porn, though, has its uses as far as I’m concerned. The magazine is printed on good quality paper, and it’s terrific for collage because there isn’t bleed through from the back. For this particular design I wanted a lot of blue, and a dozen or more optimistic skies from Savilles, Jackson Stops etc. were culled and put to service. All good fun. The main subject (a leaping fish) was composed of a cuttlefish, close ups of halved strawberries and strawberry ice cream, and a drawing of a Ferrogamo shoe. One slightly more irritating feature of the last few days is that I have developed an ear infection. Fortunately, I was picking up the Prof from his Chinese doctor the other day, and so the good Dr Wu kindly took a look down the offending orifice with an otoscope, and assured me that there was no problem in the ear canal, but merely in the outer ear. This is jolly good news but for the time being I have a sort of cauliflower ear, though not from the usual causes. And I’m a bit deaf. It will pass, with the aid of ibuprofen and hot cotton wool. On a more cheerful note, I have discovered something nice to do with celeriac! The Two Nice Girls do keep giving us the damn things and in cold weather, there is a limit to how much céleri-remoulade a body can stand. Following a tip-off, I simmered the celeriac with a small potato and part of a vegetarian stock cube. Once everything was cooked through I drained it, mashed it, and added garlic, parsley, celery salt, a knob of butter, and crucially, a slosh of truffle oil. Then I left it on a very low heat to dry out a bit while I did everything else,  since celeriac is sort of watery at best. And after all that,  I can say, absolutely, this is the nicest thing to do with celeriac yet discovered hereabouts.