A note from Abi
Hi! I’m Abi Silvester, fashion and lifestyle journalist, web editor and blogger.
If you’d like to find out more about the type of work I do, you can check in here any time to see what I’m up to – just scroll down for news on my latest projects
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have a query regarding any of the following sites:
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The year in shoes
Reckon you can name the designers of each shoe?
If you get stuck (and have an opinion on which one deserves to win shoe of the year 2009) then I’ve got a poll going here.
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Tags: fashion, shiny things, shoes
Regular readers may have noticed that the last month has been unusually busy around here, with me embarking on a lot of new and exciting projects that are in some cases out-of-character…
I’m not having an early mid-life crisis: it’s all in aid of my attempt to get into the mindset of the potentialist: the new breed of ambitious individual identified by American Express who’s more interested in taking on new challenges than in where their next paycheque is coming from – and who in some cases, begins to enjoy the freedom of not knowing quite where life will take them next. This is a sensation I’ve certainly become intimately acquainted with in the past few weeks, as I’ve bounced from knitting lesson to drumming session and breakfast time philosophy debate. I have to admit it’s also somewhat addictive!
So it was that I headed out to the countryside for our fourth and final potentialist challenge: a trip to Gorsfield Rural Studies Centre in Essex, which might well have been a secret location as far as I was concerned. I’d never heard of the centre, but we’d been told that there’s be a ‘volunteering’ element to this task.
Now fully succumbed to the potentialist bug, this idea made sense to me as I already have an appreciation of how rewarding (if exhuasting!) charitable work can be, having taken part in the regular open Christmas held by Crisis one year: an experience I’ll never forget — and mostly for very positive reasons. Of course, that was before I was working full-time and felt I had spare capacity to organise and undertake such endeavours, so the opportunity to get involved in a good cause once again was a very welcome one.
Gorsefield turns out to be a rambling old house in rural Essex, which has an arrangement with several schools in the East End of London. It’s an inspiring place from the moment you arrive – offering a taste of the countryside to inner city children, many of whom don’t get the chance to travel outside London very often. Recently, the Prince’s Trust has stepped in to help the project out with a grant towards what’s known as a polytunnel: a greenhouse-like structure that lets gardeners grow fruit and veg all year round.
Students in the Polytunnel
The beauty of this gift is the continuity it offers the students, who are now able to plant crops at the start of their school term and return to see (and eat!) the fully-grown veg in a few short weeks. It also means they’re not absolutely freezing while they work on the project! The majority of students at Gorsefield come from warmer climes, with many having arrived recently from Bangladesh who are not accustomed to the bitterly cold British winter.
The difference in climate was brought home to us all when one young student exclaimed that the butternut squash growing in the tunnel was nowhere near ready for picking. Not used to seeing such diminutive crops as our own climate will allow, he couldn’t believe the squash (pictured here) were ripe!
During our visit to the centre, we got to meet a few of these students, most of whom are aged around 16 and have come to Gorsefield to improve their language skills. Led by a truly inspiring team of dedicated staff, there were chances to learn at every opportunity, as we followed them through the harvest of their most recent vegetable crop.
It wasn’t immediately obvious how the planting and picking of veggies might help children who have a tough time integrating into a new language and society but it didn’t take long to see how much it good it was doing. As we picked and plucked our way through the garden, boys and girls who might never speak to one another in the classroom were chatting away quite happily. Their remarkable knowledge covered not only on what the edible treasures were called in various different languages, but how to prepare them and cook up a delicious meal using skills handed down through the generations.
We had the full benefit of that knowledge when we joined the students around the campfire at the end of the day, where staff served up a delicious curry made up according to one young student’s family recipe. I’ve never had curry at a campfire before now, but can assure you the experience is worthwhile 
This final excursion really brought home the potentialist message for me – that as individuals, we really do have the potential to enrich our own lives and the world around us. If we all bear this in mind and turn our skills to a bit of volunteering or perhaps even a career shift that helps a wider cause than our bank balances, then perhaps some good really can come out of these financially challenging times!
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Brie and Cranberries are not only one of the nicest festive food combos for Christmas – they’re one of the best taste sensations of all time, so I tend to stock up on the runny stuff around this time of year. The bloke and I have a favourite haunt for this type of thing – Le Peche Mignon off Holloway Road – and that’s where I spotted this lovely display.
I was especially grabbed by the rather wonderful idea for making the cheese even more seasonal: chop off a few edges in a classic brie triangle, et voila: you’ve got a brie Christmas tree. Possibly the quickest food craft ‘project’ I’ve ever encountered, but I couldn’t resist including it here as it’s not something I’d necessarily have thought of. Joyeux noel!
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Tags: foodie
What did you talk about over coffee this morning?
If a brief scan of Twitter is anything to go by, the chances are your daybreak conversation involved such lofty concerns as the X Factor or perhaps the latest celebrity worm-eating antics in the Jungle. Or maybe you just focused on the tasks ahead and how on earth you were going to get through them all in the confines of the working day. I’ll hazard a guess that it probably didn’t turn to Socrates, the true nature of freedom or what you really want out of life — but visitors to the School of Life in London may find that they’ve tackled all these subjects and more, long before lunchtime.
It’s easy to see why a visit to this curious shopfront, with its thought-provoking quotations and pleasantly minimalist decor, may attract those with potentialist tendencies: the recent research carried out by American Express shows that so many of us feel a touch frustrated and hemmed in by our working lives and routines that the prospect of going somewhere to look at life from an entirely new perspective is a highly attractive one, and where better to find those fresh viewpoints than from the minds of history’s greatest thinkers?
That’s what you’ll encounter at the School, which offers visitors the chance to challenge and expand their minds by confronting big ideas that just don’t usually crop up in conversation but which can help give a wider perspective on the minutiae of everyday life. Led by some of the country’s leading authors, actors and academice, it’s a place where you can go to leave the trivial and the mundane behind for a couple of hours and explore life’s most fundamental questions in the company of similarly-minded people.
During our two hour’philosophy breakfast session hosted by Mark Vernon and Robert Rowland Smith, we explored questions of who we are, where we want to get to and how we can get there, drawing on the wisdom of Socrates, Satre, De Beauvoir and Foucault and learning the basics on each philosopher as we went along. Whether or not you have a background in philosophy, the delivery was accessible and engaging, with lots of opportunities to chat and ask questions and without a whiff of intellectual snobbery.
We began the morning’s activities by answering the question ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen to you today?’ an icebreaker with a deeper significance: by envisaging our most deeply-held fears on waking, we can be fairly sure the events of the coming day will pleasantly surprise us. My own ‘worst case scenario’ unfortunately turned out to be prophetic: I posited that I would forget to do something really important and only realise when it was too late to do anything about it — only to discover moments later that I’d left my mobile phone alarm switched on which then loudly interrupted the discussion. Sorry 
In some ways, confronting these issues with a group of strangers felt a bit like a group therapy session — but with much better pastries, far less crying and many more fascinating vignettes you’d actually want to talk about afterwards with your friends! Exploring philosophy in this way is also the perfect antidote to the common malaise felt by those who crave the chance to expand their minds with more intellectually stimulating pursuits: those people we’ve all met who long to go back to college but can never find the money or time to do so.
I know I can certainly relate to that frustration, and the shift in focus away from traditional ‘jobs for life’ and money-driven goals observed in the American Express study shows that many of us are thinking along these lines. My brief visit to School of Life offered me a route back into those long-forgotten ways of thinking. It’s a thrilling feeling – and one that really challenges the idea that learning has to stop once you leave formal education behind. So why not give it a try — what’s the worst that can happen?
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Tags: potentialist
Why you need a Hero…
Having finally fixed the T-Mobile problems I was having with my HTC Hero (all turned out to be down to the rookie doing the setup), I’ve got to say I’m now hopelessly in love. The Hero’s an awesome phone, and looks like it’s going to keep getting better as more new software rolls in.
Some things about the interface aren’t completely intuitive (certainly less so than on an iPhone, I’m sure) but there’s no shortage of forums and I’ve quickly figured out how to use most features I need or want to use. The on-screen keyboard is a little fiddly, but the auto-correct is the best I’ve ever used and might as well be psychic.
There are already tons of really cool, mostly free applications in the Android Market, and I’ve now got it reading barcodes, keeping me up to date on twitter, tracking my periods (TMI!) and basically running my life for me. Yes, iPhones have done this for ages, but they’ve got a competitor now!
So I will certainly be keeping hold of my ‘Jimmy Hill’ phone. Anyone else want to share the love?
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Tags: shiny things
It’s a gloomy, miserable day here in London: The rain’s been going at it all day, and I for one feel like doing nothing more than kicking back with a cup of tea and a nice hearty slice of cake. And what could be a better treat on a drizzly day than lemon drizzle cake?
Fortunately, I have just a thing at my disposal, as my good old ma has passed on this wonderfully tangy recipe for me, which goes down a storm on rainy days. It’s great with vanilla icecream, and I recently took it along to a top-notch tea party I attended with the Domestic Sluttery girls.. .So without further ado I’d like to share my lemon drizzle cake, which is adapted from an old Cranks recipe. The defining feature of this heartwarming cake is the warm syrup that’s poured over the finished item at the end, but more about that over the jump…
Read on for the recipe
Apologies for the amount of parenthesis going on here: I believe all recipes should be adapted to taste, and experiments have proven that varying the ingredients can result in very different (though equally yummy) cakes. The choice is yours.
Ingredients
• 100g butter or margarine (I used a 50/50 mix for the best results)
• 150g caster sugar (or brown sugar for a denser, more gooey effect)
• 1 lemon, grated and juiced to within an inch of its life
• 1 to 1.5 free range eggs (the 1 egg version is flatter and denser again)
• 100g self-raising flour (wholemeal works well and gives a nuttier effect)
Method
Grease and line an 18cm loaf tin. Heat the butter/marge in a pan with about two thirds of the sugar, over a gentle heat until the fat has melted. Then take the mixture off the heat and add the grated lemon rind.
Next, whisk the egg(s) in a basin and add the sugar mixture. Fold in the flour and pour the whole mixture into the prepared tin.
Bake in the oven on gas mark 4 (180 degrees) for about 30 minutes until cake is just firm to the touch.
On the hob, warm the remaining sugar along with the lemon juice to make a warm syrup.
Prick cake all over with a fork, then spoon the lemon syrup all over it.
Leave in the tin to cool.
Adapted from an original recipe by Cranks
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Tags: food
What I did on my holidays
Dublin has been on my list of places to visit for longer than I can care to remember, so it was good to get on a plane and actually do that last week. Of course, we had to go and pick the day of the worst conceivable weather to travel in for a person whose fear of flying is legendary, but following a three hour delay that allayed my fears that they’d just fly on through a storm regardless, we finally got off the ground and were touching down before I’d even thought to unfasten my seatbelt. The flight itself was obviously not the smoothest in history, but it was nowhere NEAR as bumpy as my ill-fated returns from Athens and Madrid, so if nothing else it taught me not to assume anything from a certain type of weather!
There were plenty of cafes during the day serving veggie stuff but our fine dining habit was curtailed from day one, when Joe was served bacon in a ‘vegetarian’ risotto at one of the places we’d booked in advance. Ho hum! On our last night we shared a romantic bag of chips on Baggott Street followed up by a 9 inch takeaway pizza in the hotel.
Don’t assume we sat around eating junk food and drinking obvious drinks, mind you: plenty of art and culture was observed, including two art exhibitions, a tour around the Chester Beatty library and its wonders, and culminating in a trip to the Gate Theatre to see a new adaptation of The Birds.. In the unlikely event that any of you ever go and see it, I won’t spoiler the end. But good grief it was chilling! We also managed to catch up with ex Benwell Road resident Nora, take a walk along the canal and buy ghastly souvenirs, so all in all not bad going for a three day jaunt. I liked the city and want to go back, but will be factoring in a day trip to Cork next time where the nearest rated veggie restuarant is situated 
More photos here.
Admin and outings
Joe and I declared Wednesday and Thursday ‘admin days’, which meant that he played computer games while I went out shopping and got my hair cut. It’s quite short now incidentally – I must have got to that age. Oh, we got some boring stuff done as well – I’m looking at a ‘to-do’ list that’s 90% ticked so some progress must have been made but I’d never be so rude as to blog about it.
Brighton break
While I was down there, the urge struck me to equip myself with a new phone, and I finally settled on the HTC Hero, having conducted extensive twitter-based research. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to test out its myriad and apparently wonderful Android features as yet, because the person who served me at T-Mobile was new to the job and of course I was too British to demand that someone else do it despite knowing it would go wrong. I’m still waiting for them to put me on the right data package and may soon have to ‘turn to twitter’ to ensure this happens promptly.
Update: It has indeed ‘gone wrong’. I still can’t access the google android store a week later, despite several despairing calls to T-Mobile. If anyone else can help me out here you’ll be my hero…
home is where the hearth is
On Sunday, I packed my bags and headed up to London to play the drums: you can read about the fantastic time I had banging away on them below.
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Tags: life
It’s back! The biggest craft extravaganza this side of the Atlantic is returning for a big festive bash in London on 12th December when BUST magazine take over York Hall in Bethnal Green.
The Craftacular, which only started to host events in the UK a year ago, has fast become an important fixture in the indie crafter’s diary. Its summer event was a huge hit, and this more tinsel-tastic affair promises to be splendid fun too – with a Christmas tree Tombola; tea and cake at the Lady Luck Rules OK Pop-Up Christmas Party, knitting know-how with Prick Your Finger and Knit & Destroy’s giant knit-along Christmas decoration. And if that’s not enough to get your needles knocking, plenty of very hip-sounding DJs will be in residence, spinning tunes as you craft the night away.
Anyone else planning on going along?
Bust Christmas Craftacular: 12 midday – 7:00pm, York Hall, 5-15 Old Ford Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9PJ
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Anthony and I prepare for our next blogging challenge
This weekend, following my birthday and a week of rigorous chilling out in Dublin (full report to follow!) I was feeling relaxed and ready for my next potentialist adventure: a session with high-energy drumming team BassToneSlap, who’d pitched up in Covent Garden Piazza for to help London rediscover its inner beat.
At a time when many of us (an impressive 53% according to the recent research carried out by American Express and the Future Laboratory) are keen to put our energies into self-improvement, I’m far from being alone in my desire to add a few accomplishments to my existing skillset. And what could be more rewarding, life-affirming and fun than setting free any suppressed musical talent that might be lurking just beneath the surface?
Perhaps, I quietly hoped, BassToneSlap could be the catalyst I needed in kick-starting a musical eduction that like so many people I abandoned when I left school. The potentialist message is all about exploring these untapped and neglected areas of our lives to realise our full potential, and in some cases that can mean revisiting interests and activities that have lain dormant for years or even decades. Banging on a drum certainly fell into the latter camp for me! Here’s a video clip taken on the day to give you and idea how they roll:
I was pretty excited about meeting these guys, who I’d first seen on Dragon’s Den and whose enthusiasm and energy was infectious even through the TV screen. Unfortunately, the only rhythm I was able to detect en route to the session was the steady thump of torrential November rain hitting my umbrella — and I wondered how on earth the troupe was going to ‘drum up’ any morale at all in such drizzly conditions.
I needn’t have worried though: the sound of energetic drumming could be heard from as far off as the Tube station, and the friendly helpers on hand seemed to be doing a great job of encouraging those with nothing more life-changing on their minds than shopping to take some time out and embrace what would be an altogether more creative experience.
I was certainly eager to join them: drumming is one of those things I’d always fancied having a go at based on a secret hunch that I’d be rather good at it. I’ve always loved music and played the piano at school but I got hung up on all those pesky notes, envying those whose parents were rich or tolerant enough to buy them a drum kit, which I imagined would more or less play itself given an adequate sense of rhythm.
Happily, my unashamed confidence was well-founded on this occasion and I found that I took to drumming just as quickly and easily as I’d hoped, soon picking up the rhythm and loving the feeling of being immersed in such an absorbing task (that’s concentration on my face, not boredom!). A group of a dozen or so newbie drummers were given the chance to take part in each session with all ages in attendance, and it didn’t take long for a real sense of togetherness and team spirit to develop amongst this motley bunch of strangers.
Look! Hands in perfect unison
But how does indulging in a spot of drumming fit into the business of enriching and investing in your future?
For me, the experience was rewarding in a number of ways that could certainly contribute to a more rounded future. For starters I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t appreciate music and the way it enriches our lives, so actually participating in a musical event is immediately rewarding. The drums are a good instrument to work with if you want to feel instantly satisfied because they are so easy to get to grips with – at least in part because there aren’t any notes to learn. And learning as part of a group with BassToneSlap takes away any performance anxiety you might have in a traditional music lesson — even if you do make a mistake you can easily blame the five-year-old bashing away on the tom-tom behind you!
Learning to drum is also a surprisingly fun and effective way to develop and improve our powers of concentration, which in an age of instant gratification is becoming a bit of a dying art. As a blogger I’m terrible at focusing on anything longer than a 140 character tweet, but when I’m forced to pay attention for long enough, the sense of relief is immense. Drumming is great for sharpening concentration because you need it to keep the rhythm going, and then to ensure you’re ready to react to whatever the lead drummer instructs you to do next.
Finally, another eminently employer-pleasing skill that can be honed through drumming is the ability to work as a team. There are a definite sense of camaraderie I’ve not felt through any other class or activity I’ve taken part in, and paying attention to what your neighbour’s doing is crucial. So would I put drumming on my CV? You bet I would…and if it didn’t help land me that dream job right away I’d at least be able to beat away the frustration!
If you’re feeling inspired to give it a try yourself, here’s a taster tutorial video from BassToneSlap!
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Tags: potentialist
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Recent Entries
- A note from Abi
- The year in shoes
- Unlock your potential #4: a trip to the countryside
- Oh Christmas brie, oh Christmas brie…
- Unlock your potential #3: Philosophy for breakfast
- Why you need a Hero…
- Lemon drizzle cake for a drizzly day…
- What I did on my holidays
- BUST is back: roll up for the Christmas Craftacular
- Unlock your potential #2: Drumming up success
- Unlock your potential: learning a new skill
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