interview #1: Grace Alexander
A plug for my thing first. Have you considered a bundle of sweet peas with a gift membership to Gather?
Or, and this truly is the perfect present for a very specific sort of person, a gift membership to The Jilly Cooper Fan Club…?
I am delighted to invite some of my favourite people to contribute to this year’s gift guide. Rather than just banging on about thing itself, I wanted to introduce you to the face behind the brand. If you know anything about me, you know that I would never ever send you a link to Amazon to buy your Christmas presents, and if you are looking for exceptional small businesses owners to support, I have found you some great ones.
I invited each to come and do and interview and, so as to assuage some nerves, I prepared some questions in advance. Out of fairness, I thought I’d better answer them too.
Tomorrow - you’ll be hearing from Emma Lewis…
What makes you feel Christmassy?
Cheese and crackers, on a big wooden board. Snow. Making plans for that last day in the office. Pulling traveller’s joy out of the hedges and hanging it (or wreathing it) on every surface I can find. Sneaking out to walk the dogs late and turning left into the village (rather than right, straight out to the fields) so I can look through my neighbour’s windows and be judgemental about their interior décor/festive baubles/Christmas trees.
How are you spending Christmas this year?
Very much en famille. Almost the entire extended family are either NHS or armed forces so it is something of a Christmas miracle for everyone’s leave to coincide. This is one such year. There will be ten of us meeting for a dog walk with mince pies and hip flasks at 10am, back to Malus Farm for canapes and Bucks Fizz, and then on to my mother’s for the full Christmas dinner works. If I am not fast asleep by the end of the King’s Speech, I will consider something to have gone wrong.
I just need to work out if I can face doing all that the morning after Midnight Mass.
Dream Christmas?
This is very much a dream, because I have never tried it, but I would adore to suddenly, without having to have done any planning or thinking about it, whisked away to the Fife Arms in Aberdeenshire. If one can be whisked from Somerset to Scotland. I want to be placed in a four poster bed with a decaffeinated espresso martini, to sleep for 36 hours, and then be fed pigs in blankets dipped in bread sauce, and drink nothing but champagne from morning until night.
What was the best Christmas present you ever received?
Maud arrived in our household three days before Christmas in 2017. She was an absolute delight from the moment she arrived. When I say delight, I mean monkey.
My mother in law arrived two days before Christmas and my abiding memory of that year was her sitting in an armchair calling ‘should she be eating that?’ to me in the kitchen as I cooked a full Christmas dinner. Maud stole baubles, sausage stuffing, pine cones, kindling, and cardboard boxes. Nothing was safe. She still steals things. She’s still adorable and the light of our lives.
And the worst?
I think the worst Christmas presents are the ones which reveal that the gift-giver has no sense of who you are, or that they perceive you in a very different way to the image you were really hoping you were putting out into the world. When I was twenty-five, I was given a musical jewellery box with a twirling ballerina. I was speechless for about an hour, and then I think I cried for a while.
Oh, and my mother always gives me ‘improving’, passive-aggressive presents. The advanced driving lessons were a real low. She asked me if I had passed my advanced driving test once a week for about five years. No, I never took it.
Who would love some Grace Alexander seeds as a present and why?
I adore this question, and I adore Christmas, and I adore being given seeds as a gift. But so many seed packets were so incredibly ugly, with dreadful imagery on the front, all over-saturation and cheap gloss. I like to think that the perfect person to receive my seeds is someone with exquisite taste, but who loves getting their hands dirty and growing their flowers from the ground up, with just enough space to grow a few hazel teepees of sweet peas, and who cares enough about ceramics to have just the right container for each variety.
What are you hoping for this Christmas?
I mean, obviously any of the options that are guesting this week, because it’s my list. But in addition, some Malin & Goetz perfume (although I wouldn’t be disappointed with some Penhaglion’s ‘Quercus’), a Charlie Borrow handmade game bag, Rococo Chocolates, some extra tall dinner candles from Baileys Home, and a new pair of Ariat wellingtons. (Their quality is truly dreadful so I get through a pair every twelve months, but until they split, they are the most comfortable wellingtons I have ever known.)
See you tomorrow for the exquisitely tasteful photographer, Emma Lewis.