Tokens of affection

 

There is a quiet splendour to be felt on a chilly winter morning by the sea. Nature is wild and vast. Rocky beaches in the mist, serene and rain-washed village streets and cheerful robins on the stone walls – all evoke images of winter wonderland. The beauty of winter is fragile, delicate and unpredictable. 

Each day reveals a different kind of beauty. The weather is changing constantly. One minute one may find a silver lining in the clouds and the next, the storm clouds gather and chilly showers are mixed with howling gales and hailstones. But there is an exhilarating sensation of walking through the wood among the skeleton trees with their arms awkwardly outstretched, in the early hours of the morning in profound tranquillity.  

The winter’s beauty is also mystical and inward. While everything looks bare and depleted externally, there is a sense of inward stillness, humility and peace. The sun looks pale behind the clouds, strangely luminous like a decorative paper lantern lighting the way.

Although this seaside fishing village may look slumbering in sea mist, life goes on as busy as ever indoors, making the most of the daylight and keeping the home fire burning. It has been a game of cat and mouse (freedom and captivity) with new coronavirus regulations and weekly tier reviews. Some parts of Scotland are still under partial lockdown and the Western parts of the country are in full lockdown. 

The Pfizer vaccine is probably the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. It should help us turn the corner after this terrible year. But it is still too early to predict life could return to normal with this new vaccine.   

November was a busy month for me. It was a time of blending and baking. When Christmas cakes were in the oven, the fragrance of cinnamon, vanilla mingled with the smells of brandy and butter. All the windfall apples were picked from the garden and made them into apple cinnamon jam and the vegetables were made into pickles. My weekends were occupied with writing letters to my dear friends and asking about their health and maintaining each other’s morale during the pandemic. 

If we can’t be generous in physical presence, we can be generous with our thoughts and ideas. We can exchange the news, our favourite recipes and uplifting and thoughtful quotes with our friends.

A few years ago, Paperchase company designed these beautiful writing sets. They are perfect for writing letters to a friend. But they stopped making them now. They probably realised that there is no demand for it. It is such a pity. I adore these writing sets with beautiful and thick sheets of paper and envelopes. They are perfect for Christmas gift, a thank-you note, exchanging recipes or inspirational quotes. 

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” ― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Gordon and I decided to have a very quiet Christmas this year. Although we both love to spoil our friends, we agree with what the First Minister said a couple of weeks ago that “the virus won’t be taking the day off.” I will miss the company of my friends as well as entertaining at Christmas. But it is about taking personal responsibility to make everyone safe and it would be wrong to let our guard down now that we are coming close to deliverance from this highly infectious disease. 

What is certain is that Christmas this year won’t be business as usual. So perhaps it is an opportunity to reflect where we are in our lives and re-evaluate our places in the world. We can take this quiet period as a moment to ponder on the things that really matter and things that are more positive and innately spiritual such as friendship, love, compassion, nature and beauty.   

I love exchanging handwritten recipes and letters with my friends. If you have beautiful scented notepapers or vintage recipe cards, it looks much better than a printed version from the computer. Handwritten recipes will always have a timeless appeal. 

"To live ordinary life artfully is to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for gifts of the soul." - Thomas Moore. 

During this year, I reflect many times on how my life has been blessed by a small circle of friends, how true it is when Robert Louis Stevenson said “A friend is a gift you give yourself”; how lonely life would be without our friends. Our friends reflect the stages of our lives as well as our personal growth, success and happiness. Many of my friends have remained steadfast and they are those who share my passions: books, flowers, quilts, journaling, literature, art and culture – all of which nourish my body and soul.   

As for me, the books are the most personal tokens of affection. They always give us inspiring fresh creativity and imagination. After living through a period of anxiety this year, we are all in need of cheering up and we deserve something to celebrate. I hope that the following selection of gift books will provide the perfect way to celebrate Christmas and I am sure that family and friends will treasure these sweet sentiments for a lifetime.

Gift books to warm the heart 

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) 

Anne Morrow Lindbergh – Gift from the Sea.  It was first published in 1955 and it became an instant modern classic. There are several editions and this book never goes out of print. Unlike Rachel Carson’s “The Sea around Us”, which I also love, Lindbergh’s book is not about the environment and ecology. It reads more like a reflective journal where she writes about her life, peace, solitude and contentment during a brief vacation by the sea. She was an extraordinary woman. She married aviator Charles Lindbergh, and became a renowned aviator in her own right.

I read my old copy of this book during the first lockdown in the spring this year. Although her target audience might have been mainly women readers from the privileged class, I can completely relate to her as a man reading this book. My mother was a full time housewife who never took the time off when we were growing up unless going to the hairdresser to wash and set her hair weekly could be counted as her time off. Only when I tried to look back as a grown up, I realised how much I took my mother for granted and how much she would have felt underappreciated in all those years of my childhood.      

In fact, this book gave me an opportunity to step into my mother’s shoes and look at the world from a mother's point of views. Lindbergh’s words and beautiful sentences had a profound insight and a calming influence on me during the solitary days of lockdown this year. Her writing compels me to observe and appreciate the profound gifts of nature as well as the hidden power of seemingly ordinary aspects of life. Here is what she has to say about the importance of being alone:

“What a commentary on our civilisation, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologise for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice! Actually these are among the most important times in one’s life – when one is alone. Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves…She must find that inner stillness which Charles Morgan describes as “the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.”

“One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyse. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes-in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallise one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer-you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.”

― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within & Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939-1944

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, the new anniversary edition. I love the design of this new edition and this gift will hopefully warm many hearts during this Christmas. 

Granta (The Magazine of New Writing)

I am always in august company whenever I read Granta magazine (website). 

If you love short stories, essays, poetry and photography, this is a beautiful magazine (more like a book), published four times a year. I would highly recommend the series (starting from Granta 151 – 153 and 154 (the next and last issue for 2020) from this year because each magazine features the most eclectic group of writers, artists and poets and their poetic and imaginative responses to the lockdown and the pandemic. Granta 151 does not have the subject of pestilence since it was published before the arrival of Covid. 

But if you want to collect it for investment, you would need a complete set from this year. The guest editor of Granta 151 is a beautiful writer called Rana Dasgupta, and he writes about the theme on “membranes”, which is incredibly original and thought-provoking. If only Rana knew that there will be such a thing called "lockdown", he could have developed a literary metaphor of human skin as a shield, a closet or a form of quarantine. After all, there is a line in one of my favourite plays by Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending, which seems most apt to me in the time of lockdown: "We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!"?           

Cornucopia Magazine

Cornucopia Magazine - an ideal gift subscription for Christmas (their official website is here)

This most luxurious and sumptuous magazine must be the best well-kept secret among the art collectors and connoisseurs. The company is based in Hawick (Scotland) and it only publishes twice a year. The heading of this magazine is “Turkey for connoisseurs”. But the history and romantic inspiration of Constantinople (doesn’t it sound much more romantic than Istanbul?) and a multitude of gorgeous colour photos will transport any type of readers into the tales of Arabian Nights.

As someone who has a fear of flying, I shall never be able to go to visit the faraway places like Turkey. So, this magazine is my vehicle of wonder and pleasure and probably the closest thing that I shall ever experience to this country. Every time I sit quietly to read this magazine with a cup of tea in hand, I am ready to take off on the flying carpet to magical far-off lands of the imagination. To those who cannot travel abroad this year, the subscription for this magazine would be the best alternative gift for Christmas.   

The Palace Lady’s Summerhouse and other inside stories from a vanishing Turkey by Patricia Daunt (Published by Cornucopia Magazine)

THE PALACE LADY’S SUMMERHOUSE: And other inside stories from a vanishing Turkey by Patricia Daunt. Foreword by John Julius Norwich. Available to purchase from Cornucopia’s bookshop (website) 

“From Istanbul’s palatial old embassies to glorious Bosphorus summerhouses, from Ottoman Paris to Ankara’s Art Deco, from rainforest mansions to a mad mosque in the mountains…a diplomat’s wife reveals their surprising secret histories.”

This is the most stunning book published by Cornucopia Magazine in 2017. With elegant prose and impeccable contacts, Patricia Daunt, a writer, married to a former ambassador to Turkey, Sir Timothy Daunt, reveals the faded grandeur from the old, vanishing world of Turkey that the ordinary travellers would have rarely access. 

All of these articles were originally published in Cornucopia magazine. She has an extraordinary eye for the beautiful and an ear for talk and liveliness in the description of people, places and states of mind, which are a rare delight and reminiscent of Freya Stark’s evocative writings. Photography in this book is like a palette of colours - absolutely glorious visual feast!

East of India – Diorama Collection (An ornament for a bookshelf)

Friends are flowers that never fade. I love these wooden dioramas from East of India. They look beautiful and whimsical inside the box as it is or display it on the bookshelf. A charming token of affection!   

Friends are flowers that never fade. Although this is not a book, it would look lovely to display on the bookshelf. I have always loved diorama collection from East of India. It is very charming, sentimental and whimsical.

Graham Greene – Monsignor Quixote (1982)

Graham Greene – Monsignor Quixote (1982)

This novel by Graham Greene is one of the most enjoyable novels for me this year. It is Greene's comic reworking of Cervantes' classic novel, Don Quixote. The story was set in rural Spain a few years after the death of Franco. Father Quixote and his Communist friend Sancho (the most unlikely pair) set off to Madrid to buy purple socks and attract the unwelcome attention of the Guardia Civil and their journey comes to an end with unexpected twists and turns. 

Greene was a Catholic convert and the playful and witty dialogues between Father Quixote and Sancho probably came from Greene’s own attempt to examine his leap of faith and to explore the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between the Church and the World.  

Have a wonderful and safe holiday! Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!