News from Norfolk

The thing about taste is that it is necessarily subjective — which is a fancy way of saying that, unfortunately, most people get it completely wrong most of the time. So when it comes to selecting, renovating and dressing a house, it’s important to develop, as soon as possible, skin as thick as that of a particularly tough, hard-living rhinoceros of mature years. Otherwise, the wrongness of other people will soon become a source of anxiety, perhaps even alarm.

If you’re in the market for an old house, friends and relatives may chip in with helpful advice. Part of this, admittedly, is because fantasy house hunting is, to a certain sort of London-dwelling property enthusiast, what actual hunting is to country people. Which is to say, it’s a pleasure to be embraced as an end in itself, where the chase counts for more than the kill. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Your house was the worst place I’d ever seen in my life’ our indispensable site supervisor reminisced to me, long after the fact. ‘None of us had ever seen anything as damp as this place. We all literally thought you were crazy to have bought it.’

‘I thought exactly the same’ agreed our urbane, unflappable dry rot consultant. ‘It stank. It was disgusting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worse place either.’

Let us put this in context. Our site supervisor has worked for many years for a family firm of builders who have worked on some of the most interesting Grade I and II* buildings in East Anglia, sacred and secular. Our dry rot consultant is not only an experienced surveyor and scourge of serpula lacrymans, but one of our nation’s most profound thinkers on issues of building pathology and conservation — and a very diplomatic, tactful man at that.

So when I say that our house was once damp, I don’t mean that unaired linen felt just the tiniest bit damp to the fingers on cold autumn mornings. Read the rest of this entry »

Admittedly, there’s something about the editorial injunctive mode that always brings out the rebel in me, that makes me ask ‘why would I want to do that?’

Consider a recent example, culled from the sort of decorating magazine one picks up along with the organic rare-breed pedigree quail fillets, Heston Blumenthal’s individual cedar-smoked pomegranate-and-harissa custard pots and ambient superannuated Sloanery from the King’s Road Waitrose. The instructions must have caught someone’s fancy, as they are printed as quite a flashy pull-quote. Here they are.

‘Make a quirky bedside table by attaching 1950s style table legs, sourced from eBay or a flea market, to a small but solid vintage suitcase. Adorn with a sleek and practical Anglepoise-style lamp and oversized alarm clock.’

Let’s consider, for a moment, the circumstances under which anyone, anywhere, would dream of taking this advice. Read the rest of this entry »

Dogma is the enemy of useful discovery. This is the phrase I repeat to myself, mantra-like, hoping that someday I shall even come to believe it, as I watch friends exclaim in delight over that dismal, popular, incomprehensible thing, the Barn Conversion.

‘But it’s so light, so airy, so full of character!’ they exclaim. ‘And there’s so much space!’

What I have to stifle, repeating my mantra silently, is this: ‘But that space ought to be full of corn, agricultural machinery, or perhaps even livestock. Because it’s a barn. It isn’t a house. It’s a barn.’ Read the rest of this entry »

My grandmother was born on a US Army base in the Philippines, in a bed with the Stars and Stripes draped across the headboard, just after the beginning of the last century.

Her father was a colonel in the US 16^th Infantry who had been posted to Luzon in the course of the Spanish-American War. He was Dutch by birth — his clergyman father had left the Netherlands in the 1840s along with his congregation in the doctrinal split the Dutch call ‘the separation’ and moved to Michigan — and an idealist by conviction. His various projects over the years included a plan to improve the lives of prisoners by encouraging them to take up gardening and early support for the infant League of Nations. During the First World War, when German-speakers in the USA risked lynching, he demanded that his two young daughters learn the language of Goethe and Schiller.

His Calvinist upbringing notwithstanding, he died a Shinto Buddhist. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in my student days, I once loaned a dog-eared copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada to a flatmate. There are plenty of criticisms one could throw at this book — it’s overwritten, self-indulgent, whimsical in places and also goes on about itself too much, although this was probably precisely why I loved it so much in adolescence. My flatmate, though, came back with a criticism I hadn’t anticipated. ‘It’s too elitist’ she complained.

I would never have thought about it in those terms. Ada was, is, a book about aristocrats, but then it was self-evidently building on a literary tradition that was almost exclusively preoccupied with aristocrats. But perhaps that was not all that my flatmate meant? Ada is also full of long words, a few of them marginally obscure. It is laced with in-jokes that require a passing grasp not only of European history and literature, but probably also Nabokov’s own Speak, Memory.

But even this wasn’t the problem. Read the rest of this entry »