Eastern Promises

I'm always up for a craft market and so when I saw an ad in this week's Time Out for the Designers/Makers Market in Hackney, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity for me to acquaint myself with a new quartier in East London. I took the 30 bus all the way through Islington, Highbury and Dalston to Hackney Central and wandered down towards the market. It felt like a bit of an Apprentice pilgrimage as I walked past the Hackney Empire (which featured in this episode) and the Hackney Town Hall (which featured in this episode).

Violet's mini-cupcakes

It was perhaps rather unusual that large numbers of trendy, affluent, 20- and 30-something women were wandering around the area where the market was supposed to be, looking slightly confused. When I went inside the studio that hosts the market to ask what was going on, the receptionist said it was cancelled for the next few weeks. They were looking for a new venue as not many people were showing up. Great timing there — calling off the market the week it gets featured in Time Out. That's one way of guaranteeing people won't bother trying to find it in future.

Climpson & Sons

Luckily, I'd already prepared a walking tour for myself and so I didn't feel too annoyed about the long bus journey. First, I went to Broadway Market, which I'd been meaning to visit for a while. I had a macchiato from Climpson & Sons' stall, which was great; I'd like to visit their shop, at the other end of the market, too. Also on offer were: lots of cakes (I opted for a mini salted caramel cupcake from Violet), flowers, breads, clothes and accessories and, of course, jellied eels. There was also a great independent book shop, The Broadway Bookshop, a branch of a Fitzrovia boutique I like called Black Truffle and a cool-looking bar called Off Broadway.

Regent's Canal at Broadway Market

I carried on down to the Regent's Canal (a new stretch, for me, of a very familiar canal), and walked just past the Kingsland Road bridge, where there was a really nice café called Towpath, which serves coffee, drinks, ice cream and light, simple, but tasty-looking food and you can sit at little tables right on the towpath. A very nice place to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon. I then continued down the Kingsland Road, along Shoreditch High Street and on to the Old Truman Brewery, to take a peek at a couple of sample sales, although I didn't purchase anything. I also discovered the original branches of Rosa's and of Nude Espresso.

Canal-side sunflowers

I normally like walking through the City at the weekend because it's almost eerily quiet but today, probably because of the sunshine and school holidays, it was pretty busy. Eventually, I reached the Fleet River Bakery for more caffeine and a brownie, which I enjoyed while sitting in the gardens of Lincoln's Inn Fields. 

And then it was only a few more miles back to NoMaRo (via Anthro, where I did cave and buy a t-shirt, although I also resisted buying a skirt and lots of yummy-smelling candles). The whole route was 9.5 miles, which explains why my legs are now a little achey.

But I enjoyed my visit to East London and some of the canal-side apartments were funky enough for me to add parts of the area to my list of "areas in which I would consider buying a flat, if I can ever buy a flat"  — any area where there is a good independent bookshop, good coffee, cool bars, hipster shops and a nice water feature (well, the canal) definitely wins my approval.

Roving in the 'Rovia

 For once, I actually managed to get out of work early and although I'd hoped to make it to a cheapskate/earlybird movie, it turns out that the only film that's out at the moment that I'd like to see is The Tree of Life and that wasn't on anywhere early or close. Instead, I settled for checking out another new coffee bar — the new branch of Tapped and Packed on ToCoRo [EDIT: NOW CLOSED]. I had somehow never made it to the original branch on Rathbone Place, in Fitzrovia proper, despite it being on my list for a while — probably because I tend to go to Lantana when I'm in that neck of the woods and in need of caffeinating.

Anyway, my macchiato was suitably tasty — rich, smooth and flavoursome — and I liked the cafe's woody, minimalist interiors, particularly the central tree stump, which holds sugars, napkins and other coffee-related paraphernalia, and the large, antique sinks that hold bottled soft drinks on ice. Reimagining Lyle's Black Treacle tins as sugar holders was a nice touch too, and there was just a nice, chilled out, early Friday evening vibe — so nice that it made me wish I could get out of work before five on a more regular basis.

Walking back home through the 'Rovia, I came across a smart-looking new gelateria, called Polka Gelato, serving, Italian-style, artisanal gelato and sorbets. For once, I didn't have much of a sweet tooth this afternoon so I didn't indulge, but I was sorely tempted by flavours like salted caramel and nocciola (and the mojito flavoured sorbet).

Starting off on the Right Foot

To all those Americans who complain about or wonder at the obscure vocabulary found at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, I would offer in return the word commencement. It took quite a few US college movies before I realised that commencement, somewhat counter-intuitively, is something in which you participate at the end of your degree rather than the beginning. Perhaps its etymology derives from the fact that those who have graduated are just about to commence the rest of their lives. The OED claims it was originally a Briticism anyway:

The action of taking the full degree of Master or Doctor; esp. at Cambridge, Dublin, and the American universities, the great ceremony when these (also, in some cases other degrees, esp. in U.S., that of Bachelor) are conferred, at the end of the academical year.

This is a rather long-winded way of introducing a book called Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan. I read about Sullivan's latest novel, Maine, which sounded like my kind of novel but as it hasn't been published in the UK yet, I sought its predecessor. I knew from the blurb that Sullivan's first novel would be even more of my kind of novel and sure enough, it was. OK, superficially, the description makes it sound as though it might be Sex and the City: The College Years:

Assigned to the same dorm their first year at Smith College, Celia, Bree, Sally, and April couldn't have less in common. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, arrives with her grandmother's rosary beads in hand and a bottle of vodka in her suitcase; beautiful Bree pines for the fiance she left behind in Savannah; Sally, pristinely dressed in Lilly Pulitzer, is reeling from the loss of her mother; and April, a radical, redheaded feminist wearing a "Riot: Don't Diet" T-shirt, wants a room transfer immediately.

I never watched SATC but even I could see that Celia, the writer who loves to observe other people, is a Carrie-a-like and hard-working, career-focused Sally turns out to be a lot like Miranda. But Commencement is really much more like Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group, though. At the start of the novel, four years after their commencement graduation, April, Bree and Celia are returning to their college for the wedding of their best friend Sally. They were all very close while at university but since then, life has intervened. 

The point of view in each of the sections alternates through each of the girls and we learn that they are a little nervous, as well as excited, about their reunion with their college — and with one another. They often jump back to reflect on their time time together at college and on some of the important events of their friendship.

Stuck in the worst four rooms in one of the nicest dorms in the all girls' Smith College, the four girls meet on their first day and despite their differences, they soon become the best of friends (now this sounds like Sweet Valley High, but that is an unfair comparison). Irish-Catholic Celia, who comes from a big Boston family, chose to go to Smith because it was the best school she got into. She feels like she's the most normal person at Smith and mourns the lack of men on campus. After college, she yearns to be a writer but is stuck working for a crappy publisher and has to make do with writing about her graduating class for the alumnae magazine. While dying to meet a nice bloke, she also wishes that she was still the most important woman in Bree's life.

Beautiful, sensitive Southern Belle Bree's mother attended Smith and wanted her daughter to do the same even though Bree's fiancé chose to go to school back in Georgia. The long-distance relationship doesn't work out but although her parents can forgive her calling off the wedding, they can't forgive her falling for someone completely unexpected, i.e. a woman, namely Lara, who is unlike anyone she has ever met. To Celia and Sally's wonder, Lara follows Bree to Stanford, where Bree completes her law degree. But she isn't sure whether she can give up the rest of her life--especially her disapproving family to whom she has always been close--for a life she still isn't convinced is really her.

Sally almost gave up her place at Smith after her beloved mother was discovered to have cancer and died very suddenly but does decide to go in the end. She aces all of her premed classes but is having trouble with her token poetry class until her much older poetry professor effectively promises her a good grade if she comes and tidies up his office while he reads Auden and Keats to her, quoting selectively from them to give her the impression his wife is dead rather than teaching on campus. 

Their affair continues for three years until she graduates and he breaks it off. She doesn't think she'll find anyone but then, after graduation, she meets Jake, randomly in a coffee shop and then, suddenly, they are engaged and then married, with more big decisions to come. Sally often acts as the mother of the group but she worries her friends will disapprove of Jake because he's too straightforward — historically, they've all opted for complicated, heart-wrenching and inappropriate relationships.

Tough, radical April wanted to go to a college that wasn't completely dominated by traditional patriarchal values. She's really asexual rather than gay and doesn't have a lot of time for men. She works two jobs to pay her way through university, getting no financial support from her mother (and she never knew her father). She finds her niche at Smith and becomes one of the most popular women, leading many feminist movements and organising countless rallies and events. But after graduation, her activism leads her to lose her way and she ends up living with and working for a woman who ends up putting April's life at risk as they campaign to raise awareness for women's rights and issues like the kidnapping of women into the sex trade.

April's sections are, objectively, the most interesting, but subjectively, I found myself rushing through to get back to the other girls' chapters, perhaps because I can relate to them more (I'm probably a cross between Sally and Celia, of course). I liked the back-and-forth, achronological structure, with the narrative sometimes jumping back to an event we've already seen but looking at it from the perspective of one of the other girls, and certain throwaway comments taking on a much greater significance later on when we understand them better. I can definitely sympathise with some of the problems the girls face at a single-sex college, having gone to an all-girls' secondary school. I would never have chosen to go to an all-girls' college (not even if I had to choose between Newnham, say, or a non-Oxbridge university), partly because after seven years of female company, I was fed up of having to make the effort to meet guys.

Commencement is a well-written, neatly structured and convincing account of the college experience and friendship of four very different women. All four characters have their flaws but, without wishing to sound too trite, in each other, they gained something potentially far more valuable than their degree during their time at Smith. Lucky them — but I still wouldn't switch my co-ed gaggle of university friends for a close, all-female cohort.

A Match Made Far from Heaven

Lionel Shriver is very skilled at creating unsympathetic female characters. Sometimes, if I don't like the principal character, I find myself disliking the book too but somehow, I found We Need to Talk About Kevin and Double Fault compelling, as well as uncomfortable, reads. 

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the antagonist Eva writes letters to her estranged husband Franklin, telling him her side of the story of their relationship and of the birth and upbringing of their son Kevin, who, at almost 16, carries out a massacre at his high school. Eva is selfish and strong-willed but she's also very successful in her career as the managing editor of a series of travel books — far more successful than Franklin — and the competitiveness between husbands and wives is a theme that recurs in Double Fault, which I read this week.

Double Fault tells the tale of 23-year-old tennis player Willy Novinsky — ranked 386 and on her way up — and Eric Oberdorf, another would-be tennis star who, at the start of the book is ranked in the 900s. In the foreword, Shriver cautions that it isn't really about tennis so much as about a relationship — a marriage — and not a happy one. 

In fact, Double Fault made downright grim reading, for the most part. Willy has been good at tennis for her whole life but she has always had to support herself without help from her parents, partly because they couldn't afford to send her to training camps and tournaments and partly, Willy thinks, because they are both so bitter about their own failures and wasted opportunities that they are desperate to see her fail. 

Eric, meanwhile, is good at everything to which he turns his hand and has managed to claw his way into the top 1000, despite only having picked up a racket a year or two earlier. His well-off father is paying his way. He is also very good at many other things. He destroys Willy at Scrabble, he can skip longer, faster and harder than she can, he speaks several languages, and he has an Ivy League degree. Willy, by contrast, dropped out of the University of Connecticut in her third year, mainly because if she completed her degree, it would prove to her father that she felt she needed a back-up plan.

Willy and Eric marry and although their relationship seems to do wonders for Eric's tennis playing, it starts to cause problems for Willy. Soon after their marriage, he beats her for the first time and nothing will ever be the same again, as Eric's ranking begins its meteoric rise into the top 100 and Willy loses and loses and loses. And she can't accept her husband's success. She has dedicated herself to tennis for most of her life and she deserves to make it to the big time whereas for Eric, tennis is just something he enjoys and happens to be good at.

As Willy's jealousy, resentment and anger grow, cracks begin to form in her marriage. Giant fault lines in fact. Eric seems infinitely sympathetic and understanding but then it's easy to be the bigger person when you have all the success. Willy seems, at times, to want to push Eric to the point of leaving her but because he doesn't do anything by half measures — and because he has channeled all of his emotions of love, desire and companionship into the neat compartment that is Willy — he will never leave her. Their marriage will only come to an end if she leaves him. And just as she can't quite bring herself to give up tennis, even when, after an injury, her ranking continues to plummet through the floor, can she really leave the man she loves and hates with almost equal measures?

Willy isn't entirely unsympathetic. As a competitive person myself, I can understand how crushing it must be to be beaten at the one thing you're supposed to be the best at. How that could tear down any sense of self-worth you ever had and how that must make it so painful to be supportive of the other person's easy success. 

For much of the book, though, it is hard to believe that Willy really does love Eric at all. Various characters including Willy's coach muse that a marriage between two tennis players could never work. Someone always has to be the less successful one and even if they both reach the top, the crazy schedules of training, tours and competitions means they aren't even going to be in the same country for a lot of the time. If the wife is better than the husband, she can't respect him but in this case, the husband ends up being better than the wife (or, manages to play better than her, anyway), and she hates him for it and hates herself for allowing him to be better than her.

The title of the novel suggests that both players in this marriage have to accept some responsibility for its failings but when Eric is so reasonable, rational and sympathetic, even after Willy's jealousy brings her to the point of violence, it's difficult to award him much of the blame. Double Fault isn't an easy book to read (if it is made into a movie, Disintegration by the Cure would make a suitable addition to the soundtrack). It's sad, raw, bleak and painfully absorbing.

Absolute Beginners

The eponymous beginners in Mike Mills' new film Beginners are Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor), his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) and Anna (Mélanie Laurent). Between them they are just starting out at many things — relationships, falling in love, being gay, dying — but mainly at being happy and true to themselves. 

It's a funny film, mainly in the odd sense of the word, although there are plenty of funny moments mixed in with the sadder, more poignant scenes. It is, primarily, a film populated with lonely, self-reliant people (what with Crash and, er, In a Lonely Place, one would think it isn't possible to live in LA and have a good network of friends).

The film's chronology jumps around quite a bit from 2003 (when, soon after his father has just died from cancer, Oliver meets and falls in love with Anna, a lonely French actress) to five years earlier (when Oliver's mother has just died and his father decides it's finally time for him to come out of the closet, go clubbing and get a boyfriend), to Oliver's childhood, where the emotions of his sad, lonely mother clearly made a lasting impact. 

Present-day Oliver is definitely very lonely. He works as an illustrator but has a habit of letting his clients down by bringing too much melancholy into his drawings — a band who just wanted their portraits for the album cover are presented with a 20 page fold-out booklet illustrating the history of sadness in the universe. He clears out his father's apartment, adopts Hal's lonely dog, Arthur, to whom he often talks (Arthur's "responses," which appear as text on the screen provide some of the film's funniest moments), and he doesn't have many friends. His few serious relationships failed because, as he later tells Anna, he never thought they would work out and so he made them fail.

But then he meets Anna at a party and finds a kindred spirit. Anna is a French actress stuck in LA and doomed to a life of travelling from hotel to hotel, never feeling like she is at home and always having to leave people behind (as Oliver puts it, "you don't have to keep leaving to leave people behind"). And slowly, they realise they can trust each other and that relying on someone else isn't a bad thing.

Back in 1998, Oliver can hardly believe it when his dad comes out. "But you and mom were married for 44 years. Didn't you love each other?" he asks. "Of course I loved her," he replies, "and I loved you and my job and our house and my life." But that wasn't the point. He had always known he was gay and when he married Georgia in 1955, she gave up the idea of marrying a Jewish man and he gave up a part of himself that he thought he could manage without. After Georgia's death, Hal starts dating Andy, a much younger man, who is about the same age as Oliver.

The characters are all on a hard and complex journey but at least they have one another along the way. They learn from one other too. Soon after they meet, Oliver and Anna go for a drive. "I'l drive, you point directions," he says. Later we see that Oliver's quirky mother used to do this with him when he was a kid. They borrow from one another to feel connected or maybe because it's the only way they know. With great acting from the three leads, Beginners is a warm, sensitive and quirky film, which adroitly handles several difficult topics. I highly recommend it.

Tell No One for the Next Three Days

I'm sure it's not just me who finds it hard to feel sorry for beautiful, affluent Parisians who live in huge, gorgeous houses in the smartest suburbs. Still, if anyone can inspire sympathy, it's the ever charismatic Romain Duris (of L'arnacoeur fame), who stars in The Big Picture as Paul, partner in a top Parisian law firm, husband of the pretty but sad and frustrated Sarah (Marina Foïs), father of Hugo and the oft-screaming baby Baptiste, and would-be photographer.

Actually, he has an enviable photography lab in his enviable house, paid for with the spoils of his lawyering day job. He always dreamed of being a professional photographer, just like Sarah always wanted to be a writer, and Paul figured that even if he had to sell his soul at lawyering, at least his wife could achieve her dreams. The trouble is, she isn't any good and, stuck all day with two young kids, she becomes bored and frustrated. Sure enough, she starts the inevitable affair with their friend Grégoire (Eric Ruf), who is trying (and failing) to make a living as a photographer — luckily, he has a trust fund and, like everyone else, an amazing house.

When Paul finds out about Sarah's betrayal, he goes to confront Grég, they fight and Paul ends up accidentally killing his rival. Oops. Luckily, he has already seen Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) and Pour Elle (remade as The Next Three Days) so he knows exactly how an ordinary guy can deal with such situations. Thus, he cleans up the blood, hides the body in the freezer, acquires a new passport in Grég's name with his own photo, learns on the 'net how to blow stuff up, plots his escape and generally works out how to get away with murder. 

This plan includes emailing Sarah from Grég's computer to tell her of Grég's plans to go Hungary on a project with National Geographic. Then he fakes his own death on a sailboat and escapes to Montenegro in the world's least subtle getaway car (a powder blue vintage Mercedes — I can only assume it was Grég's car but still...).

Safely ensconced in fallen-down cottage in a small town in Montenegro, Paul-as-Grég is free to follow his dream of becoming a photographer. Spotted by Bartholomé (Niels Arestrup), the editor of the local paper, he is commissioned to take a series of portraits of locals, which eventually leads to an exhibition. The trouble is that he can't let any photos of "Grégoire" appear in the press and so when the gallery owner makes a deal to transfer the exhibition to some big London gallery, it's time for Paul to do another runner. What a palaver.

Despite its flaws (it's lucky, for example, that there are no photos of the real Grég online. Also, given that Bartholomé tells Paul-as-Grég, "je t'ai Googlé," why does Paul then try the search on a fake website called "Searcher," which looks remarkably similar to Google? I think the Académie française should be told), The Big Picture had me right up until this point. Based on the English-language novel of the same name by Douglas Kennedy (rather like Tell No One is based on the English-language Harlan Coben thriller), Paul's story was compelling. Like Pour Elle, it tells the tale of an ordinary (if very handsome, wealthy and talented) guy thrown into extraordinary circumstances.

**Spoilers, including an indication of the ending, follow**

But The Big Picture lost me at the end. It was inevitable that Paul's new-found happiness and success would also be his downfall. I guess the writers (or maybe Kennedy; I haven't read the book) wanted a less clichéd ending. I found it highly unsatisfying.

Essentially, Paul escapes to Italy on a ship, having paid off the captain. While on board he spots — and photographs — the crew throwing a couple of stowaways overboard into the open sea. When he protests, they chuck him in too but he manages to drag himself and one of the others onto some kind of raft or large buoy (ah, redemption!). When they eventually reach land (Italy, it seems), he gives the film with the evidence of the crew's crimes to the other stowaway to sell to an Italian newspaper for tens of thousands of Euros. Paul smiles (maybe he's getting half the money; maybe he just feels he's fully redeemed himself; who knows? I didn't really care). Fin.

This felt like an unnecessary juxtaposition. It felt like the ending of an entirely different movie, which is a shame because otherwise The Big Picture is a good, absorbing thriller, due in part to Duris' performance (Catherine Deneuve also pops up as Paul's boss/mother figure who is, sadly, dying of some brutal, unnamed disease).

What's in Store (Street)?

In my ongoing attempt to pay less than the standard £12 central London cinema ticket price, I often find myself heading to a Curzon cinema at the weekend, where tickets are £7 before 2 pm, or £6 at the Renoir, located in the architectural wonder that is the Brunswick Centre. 

And so today, I went to the Renoir to catch the latest in the Gallic-thriller-based-on-an-Anglo-Saxon novel trend (of which more later). Serendipitous wandering, on my way back to NW1, brought me to Store Street in Bloomsbury, which I've been meaning to check out for some time now but Bloomsbury always feels one borough too far away for me, even though I can walk there in about 45 minutes, at most.

My first stop was Store Street Espresso at number 40, which, thanks to the Londonist's recommendation, has been on my caffeine to-do list for several months. I stopped by for an excellent macchiato (today featuring a guest espresso blend from Metropolis Coffee in Chicago, it seems), while I made a start on the Grauniad crossword and made a few notes on the movie I'd just seen in my Moleskine. 

As well as the coffee, Store Street Espresso offers some tasty-looking sarnies and an assortment of cakes and other sweetmeats, all served up with a very chilled out vibe and cool music. I'll have to go back when I have a bigger appetite.

Next came Potassium, a fashion/lifestyle boutique located at number 29. They have all sorts of lovely, colourful garments (pretty sundresses and funky leather handbags seemed to be a particular forte), as well as designer furniture (including some good bargains to be had on display models), candles and art. Unfortunately, the Store Street branch is a pop-up shop and only around until the end of August but fortunately, for me, at least, the main store is in Seymour Place, in SoMaRo.

Finally, just next door at number 28, is Caffè Paradiso, which is, unsurprisingly, an Italian cafe serving coffee, ciabatta sandwiches and genuine gelato. I still hadn't worked up enough of an appetite to indulge but this would be a lovely place to sit and pass a pleasant hour at one of the outdoor tables, one sunny lunchtime or afternoon.

This being Bloomsbury, Store Street also has a couple of quirky bookshops that might be worth a peruse: The Building Centre at number 26 for art, design and architecture books and Treadwell's at number 33 for all your magic, Wicca and paganism needs.