The Brand Midwife

Fame in the (ex) colonies

Country House Hideout has been picked up by the press in Hong Kong and Australia. In recent weeks there have been full page articles in the South China Morning Post and the Sydney Morning Herald. Which is kind of ironic given the vaguely colonialist overtones of the product...

The Guardian seemed to like it

The first big write-up of Country House Hideout was in the Guardian this weekend.

Becky Gardiner and her family had stayed at Hamptworth over the opening weekend and had a good time. The children ran wild in the New Forest with Country House Hideout which "could be the very place where Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan got all domestic with Jane".

And I know I am biased but I do agree with Becky that "the shower was the best I have ever had".

Country House Hideout opens at Hamptworth

Two weeks ago we put a Country House Hideout tent up in the Malverns for Channel 4 then promptly took it down again 48 hours later. Henk and his opening crew then set off for the Hamptworth Estate to put four more up in the New Forest.

 

Guy Anderson and his team had already been hard at work levelling and preparing the sites. By the time I arrived on Wednesday it was clear that the time we had set ourselves, six weeks, was extremely ambitious. 48 hours to go before the arrival of the first journalists and the tents were up but it looked like the Battle of the Somme had been taking place around them.

Thanks to Herculean efforts by all concerned, the tents looked idyllic by Friday afternoon and we could afford ourselves a sit down and a coffee.

We knew that things like the 78 player would be a hit but it turned out that the field telephones scavenged across army surplus stores in central Europe proved even more fascinating. Mobiles were cast aside and long forgotten cries of "Daddy, but how does that work?" echoed through the forest.

The biggest laugh of the weekend was when yours truly announced to the Andersons, whose seat Hamptworth had been for generations, that I would show them how the tractor worked that would re-charge the batteries. That the ultimate townie who had first got onto a tractor 24 hours earlier could show these gentle country folk how to operate one is the equivalent of them showing me how an Oyster card worked. Peals of laughter all round.

My personal favourite was the shower. Being the exhibitionist, I rolled the sides of the bathing tent up and communed with the trees and the warm water. Having got a fire going to heat the water tank and hand pumped to the bucket that served as a shower head, you felt you had really earned it. Far better than any shower at home.

I was really sorry to leave the encampment on Sunday evening. The tents are so classy and such fun that I could quite easily have moved in and be done with the suburbs.

The first Country House Hideout tent goes up in the UK

I was in the Malverns the last week. We were putting up the first Country House Hideout tent for a Channel Four reality TV show that airs in the New Year.

The gang arrived from Holland with an articulated lorry that contained the tent and all its contents. 

The chaps worked their socks off to get the tent ready in time for filming to start late on Sunday. It looked stunning in the woodland setting. 

Everything worked fine and then it was handed over to a family who were staying overnight and being filmed. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive both on and off camera.

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Then barely 48 hours after it had gone up, this Country House Hideout came down to be reassembled at the Hamptworth estate in the New Forest later on this week. That opens on 18th September to a mixture of press and members of the public until the end of October half term.

Nice Feather Down Farms photography in the Standard

http://tiny.cc/BdF5C

Aliens in Oslo

A posting about our recent house exchange to Norway should of course mention all the wonderful things about the country. 

Like how wise the Norwegians have been with their oil and gas riches from the North Sea. Whilst we pissed ours up against a wall in a familiar tale of boom and bust, Norway stashed it away so the politicians couldn't get their mitts on it easily. The fund is the biggest share owner in Europe and has approximately $100,000 set aside for each member of the population for a rainy day.

Or it would be boring to talk about how nearly every home would make the final of Grand Designs.

Or how the great outdoors is so accessible that if we were there in the winter we could stumble out of the back door and be skiing - down-hill, cross-country or even off a ski-jump. In the summer we were stuck with just cycling or swimming there.

And everyone knows that most Norwegian women would waltz into 'America's Next Top Model' without reaching for their make-up bags or cosmetic surgery.

All that would be too commonplace and tedious.

So I thought I would just bring to your attention some of the things about Norway that were a bit different.

Such as how the shops give equal prominence to their opening hours as their names.

First time you see it, you wonder whether the legacy of Prohibition hangs over them to the extent that shops have age ratings. Or short phone numbers.

What is also unusual is that the suburbs of Oslo appear to have been invaded by blue trampolines.

What was strange is that there were never any children on them. Perhaps they had been abducted by aliens. It could be that the trampolines were so super bouncy that the kids had been propelled into outer space. 

Also more interesting are some of the road-signs they have in Norway that we don't in England.

I also enjoyed the Norwegian police. Each time I saw them out and about on the road I was transported back to the 80s.

It's not that their VW's were particularly retro in an 'Ashes to Ashes' kind of way. Rather it shed a whole new light on one of my favourite bands of that decade, namely Scritti Politti.

I always thought the band's name referred to the writings of Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Although of course the eagle-eyed amongst you would have realised that they should then have been called Scritti Politici rather than Scritti Politti. Perhaps their influences were more Norwegian, in a pre Royksopp sort of way (meaning 'puffball mushroom' in Norwegian and hence the Norwegian title of Fay Weldon's novel 'Puffball'). If they had been a Norwegian band then the seminal album 'Cupid & Psyche 85' would have been from a Sting spin-off meaning (approximately) 'Steps by the Police'.

What I would have missed out on if I had taken the tube yesterday

I took to the roads on my commute bike yesterday after a month's absence. And here are all the fun things I would have missed out on if I had taken the underground into central London instead:

1) The Great Action Chip Fat Disaster. Basically Acton closed down as a chip fat spillage turned the High Road into an ice rink.

2) Guiding two young Dutch chaps from Shepherds Bush to Buckingham Palace. They were on a two week youth hostelling trip round southern England. I didn't think these sorts of holidays happened any more outside the pages of Enid Blyton. They looked a bit phased by the London traffic so I did my bit for Visit England and showed them the sights along the best bike route.

3) Bumping into my wonderful Birkbeck Masters dissertation supervisor Silke.

4) Swimming in the Serpentine on the way home (and admission is cheaper after 4pm, don't yer know).

As well as being the scene of the archetypal street urchin scene, the Serpentine Lido appears to be the only place in London that tolerates topless female sunbathing. Providing you are over 65.

Oslo is just a Scream

I have enjoyed Edvard Munch's paintings ever since my angst-ridden teenage years. Tortured masterpieces like the 'Sick Child' made you realise back then that things could always have been a lot worse.

It was with some anticipation therefore that I came to Oslo to see the real thing. How would I relate to Munch's work in the flesh? Would it move me in the same way as it had done 30 years ago/

The National Gallery there has a clutch of the best-known Munchs whilst most of his output was left to the nation to be housed in a dedicated museum. This has the dubious distinction of having stricter security than Heathrow following the theft of several of his works in broad day-light five years ago. A case of closing the stable doors after the horse has bolted, if ever there was one.

Returning to Munch's work in mid-life, is now a more serene affair. I can now appreciate more his portraits for example.

On the way out of the museum I picked up this book, a series of parodies of Munch's best known painting, the Scream.

Every cartoon in it cracks me up in a way that my teenage self would have heartily disapproved of.

Lars von Trier tries S&M on Radio 4

This interview with Francine Stock in advance of the release of 'Anti Christ' caused me to snort my breakfast cereal all over the kitchen.

Research Autism conference coverage

Last Thursday's conference got good coverage including the Telegraph, Guardian and New Statesman. And given the emphasis there on the importance of adults on the spectrum getting into the world of work, the announcement the next day of a Danish computer firm employing workers with autism setting up in Glasgow was quite nifty too.