Best Of 2010. Le Petit Moulin.

We've been meaning to post on Le Petit Moulin in Paris for some time but the opportunity hasn't really presented itself until now, when we think it merits a mention as our favourite hotel of 2010. The interior is by Christian Lacroix and it is all pretty riotous and bonkers, although -somehow- it works. The rooms are small and no two are the same. The original frontage -a bakery- has been retained; that's it in our picture. It's a lovely little place, eccentric and one-of-a-kind; it is, in fact, the absolute antithesis of the contemporary, minimalist, boutique hotel. But what we like best about this place is that the staff never change and they are friendly and welcoming and seem to remember the guests from one visit to another. This is so rare, it really is. It always seems to be fully booked when we visit, so book early. There's a link to their site in the title above.

Under The Tree.

A few days of enforced away-from-computer-time are over. Except for the odd ten minutes checking email and the occasional posting on Facebook, we have tried to keep away from phones and iPads and laptops and all of that stuff since Christmas Eve. How has it been? Well, odd, actually. Like many of you reading this, we are addicted to email and Twitter and everything else internet-related. This is both good and bad; but it is definitely an addiction. And an exhausting one at that. A few days away have done us good. So, back to our blog. We'll carry on posting on some of our favourite things of last year soon, but for now we wanted to show you my (Charlie's) Christmas present, an axe from Best Made Co. Now, Best Made Co. is definitely a bit of a boy thing. Caroline finds it odd that I wanted an axe for Christmas, and seeing the axe hasn't really changed her mind. But Jack, our eldest, totally gets it; and I am wild with excitement. Everything about this axe is perfect, from the feel of the thing to the packaging to the bits and pieces that arrive with it. And I spent an hour chopping kindling yesterday and can happily report that it works like a dream. Happiness.

Happy Christmas, Blog Friends.

Happy Christmas, Blog Friends. And thank you for your support this year; it's been fun. xx

Best Of 2010. The National.

It's been a close run thing, the race for our favourite band of 2010. As ever, there have been loads of great records and loads of great shows. Of course, releasing records isn't really a competition, but canvassing our family for the best of 2010, The National and Beach House keep coming out on top. And so, we have to decide between the two and, by a neck, it's The National. Their album, High Violet, is perfect; deep and complex and rich. It's slow to reveal its many charms, but many charms it has and we love it even more than its wonderful predecessor, The Boxer. And their recent show at Brixton was our favourite of the year; just extraordinary. So, that's it. The National are Family Gladstone's Band of 2010. Do you agree?

Best Of 2010. Signs And Posters.

It feels like now is a good time to review 2010; the first year of this blog. Everywhere we go we snap stuff with our 'phones and looking back over the last year's photos, we seem to have photographed some pretty good signs and posters. So, here are five of our favourites this year. First, there's this strange chalked message in the car park at Earl's Court, inviting us to the vicarage; the bike wasn't there. Then there's opening hours sign in a garage at Goodwood. Next up, honourable mention for our shop in Notting Hill. Like almost all traders in the area, we board up for the Carnival. Carnival was great this year and on the Tuesday the shop was covered in graffiti, so these posters didn't have a long life. Then there are the three amazing signs that we found in a barn in Wales, from the early 1900s. They now hang in our Farm Shop and our favourite bit of their many rules is the bit discouraging 'litter hogs'. Finally, an ad in Warwickshire (clearly not designed by a graphic designer) for The Wurzels. If you remember The Wurzels as well as we do, you'll see why this merits and honourable mention. More Best Of soon....

Balbegno Gets The Thumbs Up.

The Guardian ran a review of our Pedlars holiday home, Balbegno Castle, on Saturday. If you didn't see it there's a link in the title above. By the way, we did have a peeler and a masher; unless someone stole them....

Meet Swarm.

We get shown masses of wonderful product at Pedlars. Sometimes hundreds of emails and packets arrive at Pedlars Towers each week. Anyway, a friend showed us these wonderful bags by Swarm earlier this year. They're made from old paintings sourced at markets in Holland and Belgium and they are beautiful, original one-offs and amongst our favourite things this year. We have talked to the maker -Leslie- about working with her some day; but for now, here are some of her most recent bags. There's a link to her blog in the title above.

Winter In The Highlands.

We're sorry if this seems like a boring topic, but our thoughts keep turning to winter; and for good reason. It first started snowing here over three weeks ago, and it has not really stopped. At first it snowed solidly for seven days, which resulted in a good three feet of snow. Then it stopped for a bit and then it started again and then, well, it stopped and...you get the picture. We have had minus 20 degree nights, frozen pipes, frozen diesel in the Land Rovers, 600 sheep trapped in the hills that had to be dug out with a massive digger, our home 'phone lines have been down for eight days. A sky-light outside our kitchen even caved in under the weight of snow. Are we complaining? Well, yes, we are a bit, largely because it has put a terrible strain on business. Our intrepid Team Pedlars have really struggled to reach work and get home; we have had a daily ferrying system into work involving Land Rovers; and some days the journey has been dangerous and demoralising. The problem is that our road, the infamous B974, has been officially closed for much of the time as the snow ploughs avoid it. Weirdly, though, our main problem has not been Scotland-based, but has been the issues caused by the national courier service that we use essentially collapsing due to the weather. Clearly, this has affected thousands of other businesses, we heard that 4.5 million parcels are stuck in depots somewhere in the UK. But it is upsetting for our customers and that is genuinely upsetting for us. It has been a tough month. But, well, at least we've taken some good snaps like this at sunset yesterday...it was very cold.

Is It A School? No...It's Our House.

News from the front line. Not content with having our six home for the holidays (and very nice it is, too) we have just had six of Felix's friends here for three days. Snow allowing, they are about to make their way home in a few minutes. It's been brilliant; chaotic, but brilliant. The girls shared the spare room and the boys piled into the attic (where we also have our drum kit...elementary mistake). Seven ten year olds. They don't quite pack or unpack like we do; their stuff was everywhere. Meal times were done in two sittings. There is still a lot of snow here -more today- and so there was endless sledging, snowy kick-the-can, walks, some quizzes, the odd movie, very little sleep. And very few baths. Phew.

Apartamento Magazine.

High quality, independent mags are a big thing at the moment. In the old days this sort of publication used to be called fanzines, but today the production is generally so swanky -the word fanzine conjures up something black and white and rat-eared- that most of the good ones have to be called magazines. We sell a few of these at Pedlars; Anorak, Fire & Knives, Uppercase, the brand new Lost In London. What binds these all together is that they are borne of love and passion. They have tiny budgets, little advertising and a clear vision. One of our favourites is Apartamento, a bi-annual, English language mag that is about, essentially, interiors. What sets Apartamento aside is its format and paper stock (small, very tactile) and its approach; it seems to put people at the heart of their homes, rather than pushing the home to the foreground and ignoring the people, or putting them in the background, like most interior mags. It has a lovely lo-fi feel to it; a bit like a good interiors blog, it feels real, uncontrived, human, wonky and warm. We hope to carry it next year, but until then you can find out about it by clicking on the title above.

Lomography.

We've waxed lyrical about vinyl this year. And we have a similar love of real camera film. There are lots of digital devices that twist and turn images to look like film; but none of them are film and although, to the untrained eye, a good App can do pretty much what real film can do, in reality the differences are massive. It's like the difference between CDs and real records....you either get it or you don't. Anyway, one of the surprise developments of the last decade has been the rise and rise of the Lomography range. Lomography make lovely cameras -some faithful reproductions, some modern creations- that use real film and, in many cases, that deliberately make images look flawed. Lomography has been around for a long time, but now they are really hitting their stride. And now they even have their own shops; here's one in Paris. It was heaving when we were there; we had to queue just to ask a question.

Tim Hayward on Fire and Knives. Part 2.

Here's the second part of The Story of Fire & Knives; the first bit was published yesterday. We hope that you enjoy it....

Then I met Cathy, the force of nature who runs Anorak magazine. Cathy is one of those very rare people who makes things happen. She can, in the nicest possible way, be bloody terrifying but when she says something can be done, it can and will be done. It was Cathy who introduced me to the world of ‘’Zines’. I had no idea that there was an entire subculture of people putting together their own magazines and self-publishing using all the benefits that new technology could offer.

Within three weeks we’d worked out that we could design and print a magazine on a loan of a couple of thousand pounds and Cathy agreed to ride shotgun on the first issue. She also introduced me to Rob Lowe (not that one), the Art Director who was going to make Fire & Knives into a beautiful object. I wrote a brief for Rob (maybe all those years in advertising weren’t entirely wasted) and a couple of weeks later he returned with a first draft so perfect in every respect that we accepted it without any changes. It’s unbelievably rare in any creative endeavour to hit it off so easily with a collaborator and when it happens, believe me you treasure it.

We used Twitter, and food blogs to talk about what we were doing and by October 2009 were selling subscriptions in advance. By the time we had the first magazine ready to go to press in late November, several traditional food mags had recommended a subscription as an ideal Christmas present and we had enough money in the bank to run the presses and pay postage.

From the first issue, F&K has pretty much broken even, which is all we ask as we never intended to make a profit. The writers contribute their work unpaid. We run the kind of pieces they want to write, properly subbed but not butchered, beautifully laid out and presented and we ensure that copies of the mag go to several hundred of the top commissioning editors in the country (many of our writers have already sold other work or gained book or TV engagements on the strength of F&K pieces). Subscriptions continue to rise and, though we never expected it to happen, some smart retailers are now picking up the magazine to sell as individual issues - thank you Pedlars. We’re happy that we produce a beautiful object, our writers seem happy to see their work go out in it and our readers continue to say wonderful things about us. Because we don’t rely on advertising to stay afloat we can continue to publish great stuff without compromise - Nobody’s getting rich, but we’re all feeling good.

When Rob showed us those first beautiful designs, he’d planned a palette of colours so the year’s four covers would look great on a shelf together. It was the kind of beautiful touch that distinguishes his work and Cathy and I smiled and quietly hoped we’d survive long enough to see the full set. Now, as we begin the second year we’ve run out of colours - it’s a nice problem to have, having survived longer than you thought possible - so we’ve had a bit of a redesign. Inspired by original Penguin book covers we commissioned a Marie-Claire Bridges, a brilliant textile designer, to come up with a set of patterns based on domestic fabrics from the Festival of Britain so next year's magazines will look as beautiful as this year's... and yes, thank you, we've already thought about tea towels.

Perhaps the oddest thing about being magazine editor in this odd new world is the emails I get from design or journalism students asking if they can spend the summer interning on the magazine. Since the beginning, F&K has been put together online. I commission writers by email, copy is held in an online ‘drop-box’ where Rob, the subs and I can all get to it and Rob files the final designs to the same place where I approve them. I'm writing this in a Vietnamese restaurant just around the corner from my house and once I've finished this, I'll be checking off the final proofs on the same iPad.

Though I'm prepared to bet Rupert Murdoch isn't having as much fun, it's hard to explain to students that we don't have an imposing front door, receptionists, lifts, or ad-sales departments and a meeting with the editor is likely to be held over a bowl of bun bo Hue or in my Camden Town kitchen. To be fair, though, the coffee is much better.

Meet Tim Hayward. He Does Fire and Knives.

We asked Tim Hayward, the passion and drive behind the wonderful quarterly Fire & Knives (there's a link to the mag on our site in the title above) to tell us about his work. This is what he came back with. It was long -which is good- so we'll finish it tomorrow.

I’d love to say it was my life’s ambition to launch a magazine, that I’d always been a Murdoch wannabe with printers ink in my veins instead of blood but I’d be lying. I never set out to publish a magazine at all. Seven years ago I quit advertising when I realised people would actually pay me to write. I specialised in food because, well because I’m greedy and since then things have progressed to the stage where I make a reasonable living for a writer - which for those of you not au fait with the current state of publishing, is about the same as I’d make bussing tables in a greasy spoon. All the contact I’d ever had with magazines, apart from reading them, was visiting their vast offices. Entering through the imposing doors, signing in with the receptionists, taking the lift through the two floors of ad-sales staff and having a meeting with an editor while we drank vile coffee from a machine. People say there’s been a food renaissance in this country and to an extent, they’re right. In the big cities there are better restaurants, across the country supermarkets have better quality ingredients and we have a great network of farmers’ markets but in truth, the biggest change in our national approach to food has been in the media. A decade ago, food coverage in a magazine comprised a single column near the back. The writer was either a hack, too drunk to trust with features but too respected to fire, or a relative of the publisher. Their task was to produce around 300 words of agreeable prose about a restaurant they’d visited, something they’d knocked up in their kitchen or a simply lovely week they’d spent on holiday in Umbria. Then food, like gardening, travel, homemaking and, (god-help-us) parenting became 'lifestyle' subjects and the papers sprang new columns, pages and sections. Suddenly there was lots and lots of work for food writers - even me - and a much broader audience. A magazine food section could attract a wider audience if it included lots of celebrities, it increased readership if the recipes were simpler. Numbers only dropped if they ran stories that were alienatingly nerdy, too specialist or obscure. Bigger audiences, of course, meant bigger money as all these magazines relied on advertising.

Food writers, every one of them an enthusiast and food nerd, found themselves in an uncomfortable position: lots more work but not necessarily the kind of thing they enjoyed writing. It would be wrong to speak of ‘dumbing down’ yet all of us experienced the same thing with increasing regularity; a story would come back from the editor with the comments, ‘It’s a bit ‘foodie’. Can you make it more accessible, shorten the recipe, take out the long words and namecheck a celebrity.’

I knew dozens of food writers in the same position, with bottom drawers increasingly groaning with stories they loved but couldn’t sell. I also knew from the online food community that they were desperate to read almost anything that didn’t involve celebs and ’10 quick ways with mince’. It seemed so obvious that a magazine which put writers' work in front of readers would be a success but the only model I knew involved that big office, full of people trying to sell enough advertising to keep themselves, their lifts, receptionists, ad-sales departments and coffee machines afloat......to be continued.

Gail Bryson For Maggie's Centres.

Today we launch our second Pedlars Prints For Maggie's Centres project. The idea here is that, every month or so, we'll launch a new limited edition print that has been designed exclusively for us for this project. The prints will be signed, limited editions and they'll be framed. Every single penny of the purchase price will go to Maggie's. You can find out more about Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres (Charity Number SC024414) by clicking on the title above or at our website www.pedlars.co.uk but suffice to say that these centres lovingly provide people with the tools that they need to cope with cancer. Gail has made no charge for their work and we make no charge for framing etc of the prints; so every single penny of the purchase price will go to Maggie's. YOU CAN BID HERE FOR PRINT NUMBER 1/1, BY LEAVING YOUR BID IN THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW. Please start at, say, £70. We are selling them for £100 at Pedlars. Remember...peeps...all of your cash goes to a brilliant charity and you get a great print.

Christmas Fair At The Farm Shop.

We've just launched our first ever Christmas Fair at the Farm Shop, centred around selling our Christmas Trees and proper Christmas food. The first weekend was a big hit, we had our biggest day of trading ever on Saturday. Christmas is coming....yippeee!

Jeff Barrett's Long Distance Running. Post 2.

Having gone back twenty odd years in my last bulletin I was expecting to be repeating the trick on this one knowing as I did that I’d be joining a ravers reunion watching Primal Scream perform their ‘Screamadelica’ record at Olympia. The Scream guys are my pals and I’ve been around and somewhat involved with them for most of their career including the burst of era-defining creativity that was ‘Screamadelica’, nineteen years ago. The shows were good, Saturday particularly, but the hall was horrible and I’d be doing the band and the event a major disservice crapping on about stuff like that when my view from the balcony was hundreds and hundreds of people having an evening of deep joy. Old faces filled the bar and it was really nice to see everyone. Appropriately enough, the album's producer, Andrew Weatherall, played the records in the interval and melted minds with a selection of pure psychedelic soul. Maybe next year when the twentieth birthday arrives I’ll expand on the story but for now I’ll stay in 2010 and flip the script to the subject of my favourite books of the year.

I’ve been going over the last twelve months and thinking about what has been put out that I have enjoyed – books & records & the like - and without doubt my favourite read has been Patti Smith’s book ‘Just Kids’ in which she writes of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It comes twenty years after he passed away, leaving Patti mourning for the guy she took on the world with, whilst on a mission to express their art in the New York of the sixties & seventies. Two incredibly driven and talented people cutting it under difficult circumstances in a mind-blowing period in the history of art / rock ‘n’ roll.

She writes about having her picture taken by Mapplethorpe for the cover of her debut album, ‘Horses’. It’s an image that established Patti as an icon and it’s quite something to be taken into the room when that famous photograph was taken and what she writes is pure poetry. Like the book itself, I found it incredibly touching;

The clouds kept moving back and forth. Something happened with his light meter and he became slightly agitated. He took a few shots. He abandoned the light meter. A cloud went by and the triangle disappeared. He said, “you know, I really like the whiteness of the shirt. Can you take your jacket off?”

I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra. I was full of light and shadow.

“It’s back,” he said.

He took a few more shots.

“I got it.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

He took twelve pictures that day.

Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. “This one has the magic,” he said.

Whenever I look at it now, I never see me, I see us.

(from ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith (Bloomsbury). Out in paperback next month)

Honorary mentions must go to:

‘Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip’ by Peter Hessler (Canongate)

‘The Marrowbone Marble Company’ by Glenn Taylor (Blue Door)

‘The Good Soldiers’ by David Finkel (Atlantic)

‘Bloodknots: Of Fathers, Friendship & Fishing’ by Luke Jennings

‘Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I have Not Visited and Never Will’ by Judith Schalansky (Particular books. I’ll come back to this gem next time).

‘The Local’ by Maurice Gorham & Edward Ardizzone (Little Toller)

‘The Unofficial Countryside’ by Ricahrd Mabey (Little Toller)

and a real honorary mention must go to Shaun Ryder. I lied. I looked. I couldn’t help it, my kids were saying “Dad, do you know Shaun Ryder? He’s brilliant” and he was.

Have yourselves a very merry Christmas.

Jeff

Christmas Decorations.

We love Christmas. Not everyone does; but we do. We've been mildly disappointed by the street and shop decorations that we've encountered on our travels in the last two or three weeks. When we think Christmas shopping we always imagine those cheesy Hollywood moments when someone falls out a shop on Madison Avenue at 5pm on Christmas Eve with a massive pile of wrapped presents, and the carol singers are doing their bit, as is the show. Now that is what Christmas shopping should be about; and the Christmas decorations have to match, don't they? Anyway, despite a general sense that decorations are not as they should be, we did see some cracking lights and baubles and things on a quick afternoon in Paris this week. Here are some of the best....

Market In France.

We haven't been as active here as normal; travel chaos has been largely to blame. We still have three feet of snow at home and frozen pipes in much of the house (-20 C is just too much for our lagging). Anyway, we've got loads of stuff we want to talk about that has cropped up in the last week. First, last weekend we took a short hop by train to our part of rural Burgundy; a quick whizz under the Channel, a dash across Paris and the TGV, fast, dirt-cheap, on time. And so Saturday morning found us at the market in Cluny. This is a perfect example of a rural French market; unpretentious and non-touristy (nothing wrong with tourists...we're tourists, but we mean that this market sells mainly what you need, and not stuff you don't). Farmer's Markets are starting to catch-on in Blighty, which is great; the best are modelled on markets like this.

Thank Goodness For Land Rovers.

Pedlars Towers is at Glen Dye, in the Highlands of Scotland. The nearest shop is about 8 miles away, and the road to the office is small and winding. When it snows life becomes quite tricky because our road is right at the bottom of the council's 'to plough list'; in fact sometimes it doesn't seem to appear on that list at all. This is an odd place to have an office and we take the rough with the smooth; the good bits of being here outweigh the bad bits. There's been a great deal of snow this week and so we have had to develop a system of ferrying everyone to and from work (this has been our busiest week of the year so far at the office) in Land Rovers. Here's our trusty Pedlars Land Rover outside Towers yesterday. We're still waiting for the plough...