Tuesday 1^st December 2009

A delightful but astonishingly simple cott near Battle in Sussex formed the backdrop last weekend  for an onslaught of queenage and queenaria as never seen before.

I was with Angus Willis and Fergus Strachan. You remember them: Angus is the internationally-known food writer, food stylist and photographer who waged the tiramisu war with Donatella in Tuscany in the summer (but Angus has put Donatella’s recipe for Penne con carne alla salvia in Australian Vogue, out now), Fergus the brilliant lawyer, loves the Lib Dems, botox, political philosophy, work-outs and hair products.

On the way down there was a block on the motorway. How dare people have accidents! Angus and Fergus were stopped ten metres after a slip-road so they boldly reversed the Mercedes, gesturing other traffic out of the way, and surged forth, triumphantly circumventing the jam.

We were in the cott, but there is no shortage of other properties in the neighbourhood being restored by Angus Willis – the Tudor house in Hastings, for instance, where builders have been working, with nail files and tweezers as it were, for the last three years at least.

On the first evening, Fergus styled the telly. I mean he adjusted the contrast and colour. He wanted a very slightly bleached-out look. We watched ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ (Angus’s favourite prog) and then ‘The Duchess’, with Kiera Knightley, which I liked more than the last time I saw it. Her peculiar marital arrangements had Poor Little Rich Gay overtones. While viewing, Angus was cooking and styling onto huge white soup plates a German beef goulash with celeriac and thyme mash – delicious.

One of the rooms in the cott is impenetrable because of Angus’s stock. He’s going to open a shop in Hastings. It will sell complete sets of china – Beryl ware amongst others –  also huge pieces of furniture.

The next day, Angus and I hurl out in the Mercedes: so much to do and see. We visit another vast collection of stock at a secret location: huge chests out of the offices of yesteryear, hospital cupboards from the Hattie Jacques era and so on. You do rather think, What on earth….? but Angus is genius. He can make the debris of a previous age blossom and flourish again.

Then on into Hastings. When I first knew this sea-side town twenty years ago it was a hell-hole and dump. But now, grandeur is setting in. Still, at a charity shop, Angus buys a glass ashtray for 10p, surely the only item left in the country at this price. His other purchase is a moulded glass school water jug, in some way exceptional. I seize a more elaborate glass dish and Angus points out that there are others I might have. I get three:total, £2.25. I suffer a lunge of guilt at the poverty of my serving dishes generally. I’ve let this whole area slip. Maybe with the sales coming up…

In a real old-fashioned junk shop, we come across photograph albums – oh the sadness! Majorie and Wilf on Dartmoor in 1957, barely distinguishable in the tiny Kodak snaps, so carefully pasted in and labelled. But Angus buys; Majorie and Wilf and Mr and Mrs Barnes can be turned onto cards for some purpose or other. To tell the truth I haven’t quite grasped. But they’ll have their time again.

My Charity Shop Glass Dish Selected by Angus Willis