Tag: snappy wordsmith

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Art Luxury People

National Geographic Store Knightsbridge London + The Ghost of Crete

Grecian 2015

The Ghost of Crete @ Lavender's Blue photo by Apostolos Trichas

Destination known. Another evening, another ambassador. Diplomatic community. Greek Ambassador to the UK Konstantinos Bikas co hosted a party along with his cohort the Governor of Crete Stavros Arnaoutakis at the National Geographic Store opposite Harrods and basking in the afterglow of The Lansbury. It was the London Launch of a celebration of all things Cretan. Incredible Crete.

Paulina Filippou Isle of Olive © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Stavros commented, “Over half a million people from the UK have visited Crete this year. Tourism makes up 70 percent of our GDP. We have 1,000 kilometres of coastline and one third of all five star hotels in Greece are on our island.” Woody Allen ponders in Love and Death, “I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer?” The island is after all where the first civilisation in Europe began and later home to Titus, recipient of an epistle from St Paul.

The accompanying photographic exhibition illustrated the built and natural wonders of Crete. The ghost of Crete. Shot in 1905 and then again 101 years later. Previously the only evidence of the rural legend of the Cretan wildcat was a couple of pelts purchased at the turn of last century by palaeontologist, zoologist and ornithologist Dorothea Bate. An expedition by the Natural History Museum of Crete and the University of Perugia rediscovered the Cretan wildcat in 1996. One was captured, photographed, studied, tagged, released and tracked for a few months across its habitat on Psiloritis Mountain.

Notes were swapped at the soirée on the travels and travails of reportage with The Fly Away American, a Texan turned serial expat. Snappy wordsmiths at work. Isle of Olive (say it quickly) did the catering. “We’re based in Broadway Market,” said Christie Turlington Paulina Filippou, who owns the company with her husband. “And sell a range of natural Greek products.” The healthiness of the Mediterranean diet was on display. Dittany by Votania, artichokes, cheese, tomatoes, olives and olive oil by Lyrakis and of course, no meat. Nothing tastes as good as skinny Dakos. Destination next also known. The Tom Dixon lunch @ The Mondrian. 

House of Olive Party © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Categories
Country Houses Hotels Luxury

Callow Hall Ashbourne Derbyshire + Lavender’s Blue

Dorothy and Friends

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Leaf through the editorial pages of Country Life circa 1970 and the text to image ratio is roughly 80:20. Pick up a recent copy of the magazine and it’s more like 20:80. Philosopher of Medicine and BBC New Generation Thinker Dr Charlotte Blease muses, “We are bombarded by media now. There are a million other distractions besides sitting reading a magazine article. And we’ve become used to a smorgasbord of appetisers served up to us that satisfies our attention and kills the appetite for something larger and meatier. Consequently there’s a competitiveness in grabbing our attention immediately before someone or something else does that.”

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Dr Blease argues, “Tweets are the ultimate informational candy. Tweets as sweets? Cognitively they’re like a carb overload. They rot the brain. They’re informational infantilism. McMedia.” On that note, for the attention span challenged, welcome to the first McReview by Lavender’s Blue. It features Callow Hall in Derbyshire. A relaxing hotel, handy for visiting country houses such as Calke Abbey and Alton Towers. There. Dunnit. Lived up to our reputation as self styled Snappy Wordsmiths. Even managed a callow pun in that 15 word review.

Of course if it wasn’t a McReview, we would talk about Callow Hall’s quirks such as how the bedrooms are named after previous owners, like Dorothy and David. Castle Leslie is another example of this trend. A different country house trend and not any less eccentrically egocentric is to name bedrooms after places visited by the owning family. Two Northern Irish houses come up trumps. Mount Stewart and Clandeboye. Who wouldn’t want to sleep in Amsterdam, Hague, Rome or Paris at Mount Stewart? And the bedroom corridors of Clandeboye read like BA departure lounges: Burma, Canada, France, Italy, Killyleagh, Muttra, Ottawa, Paris, Rome, Russia, Shimla, St Petersburg and Walmer. Ok, maybe not Killyleagh.

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