Christopher Stocks

Blog

Back into the swim

April 27th, 2011

My first swim of the year this weekend, though admittedly it was in a friend’s pool rather than the sea, which friends who have been in all agree is (and I quote) “fucking freezing”. But then returned to London yesterday and back to my regular running this morning, which I’ve started to enjoy at least as much as swimming now – and oddly, it strikes me, for pretty much the same reasons.

They’re both cheap, for one thing: with money so tight there’s no way I can afford a gym membership at the moment, but running costs hardly anything – just a decent pair of shoes and some old shorts; same with swimming – a pair of trunks and you’re away.

Yet there’s more to the similarities than that. Running give me an exhilharating sense of freedom – the feeling that somehow you can go anywhere, in a way that you’d feel awkward if you walked: down dead-end streets, round courtyards and parking lots, through twisting passages and  alleyways, into areas you don’t know and have never been before. It’s a wonderful way of exploring the city around you, and I’ve surprised myself in going so far – round St Paul’s Cathedral, Tate Modern, Bermondsey, Trafalgar Square, through the City, even as far as the Gherkin one day.

Harder to define is how physically similar the experience of swimming and running can be: once you get into your stride there’s even a similar sense of bouyancy somehow. Even more than that, as I shouldered my way as nimbly as I could the other day through crowds of commuters emerging from Farringdon tube, I could have been shouldering my way through the waves as they fell on Chesil Beach. Strange meeting indeed.

Picture goes here?

April 13th, 2011

Writing about perfume is all very well, but who wants to read a blog that has no pictures? Maybe I’m just a lazy git – correction: I am a lazy git – but it’s so hard to find good images to illustrate my perfume postings that it puts me off (or at least gives me an easy excuse to avoid) writing them, when I should really be adding new posts every time I smell a new scent.

Or perhaps I’m just not being imaginative enough? That’s perfectly possible, but it also raises an interesting point, which is what an iron grip the perfume licensees have over the way their products are pictured and advertised.

Like wine or music, perfume doesn’t, in itself, have much (if any) innate visual appeal, and perfume bottles, though far more varied in design than bottles of wine, are often so hideous to contemplate that it’s kinder not to illustrate them at all. Take the unutterably hideous Womanity from Thierry Mugler, for example… (NB I mean ‘take’ in a physical rather than a metaphorical sense – as in please, please take it a very long way away and never bring it back.)

 

Diggity dig…

April 9th, 2011

Getting chucked off our old allotment by the horrible little builder who’d bought the land was a bit of a blow, but our new plot has several advantages, apart from getting away from him: it’s flat, for starters, the soil is more than two inches deep, and it’s not full of paving-slab-sized stones. It’s also on a really well organised, large and friendly site with around 160 plot-holders, not to mention automatic gates and (imagine our excitement) a composting toilet.

The only drawbacks are that it’s on the mainland (boo!), so we have to drive or cycle there – not very easy with a spade on your back. And though the soil is lovely and rich and deep, as soon as we started digging we discovered that it was infested with bindweed, brambles and couch grass.

So the last week, which we’d planned as a week off, has turned into an epic session of back-breaking digging; after four days of this I actually started dreaming about digging, which can’t be a good sign, but we finally finished last night – 60 square metres of digging done. Which means we can start planting tomorrow morning before heading back to London for a rest. Phew.