I needed to curl up with a good nook. And not just any nook.
I was after a comfortable place to read at home, with gentle light, proper padding and a place to rest my tired wheels. Maybe some coffee nearby, and Brahms, played at a whisper.
Basically, what I wanted was a reading womb.
Despite lacking text of any kind, this book told even a child that it was meant to be leafed through from start to finish. The momentum begins on the first page, where a draftsman is seen drawing a horizontal line that will, during its transit across seven pages, undergo mutations that make it a geometer’s X-axis, the waterline attaching a domed Venetian church to its reflection, a railway trestle, a roofline, and, finally, the first of many labyrinthine flourishes. The book introduced by that manifesto soon impressed me as unique, and it still does. The Labyrinth adds up to something—not a narrative but something authorial, more journal than story. Between its covers lives a mind making itself inhabitable—a mind, moreover, that has been around, a mind that is about things.
Cosmopolitan, which has the highest circulation of any Hearst magazine, was taken from a sleepy literary journal to a sensational pro-sex feminist magazine by its longtime editor, Helen Gurley Brown, who worked there from 1965 to 1997. She stepped down at age 74 and became editor in chief of Cosmo’s international editions until her death in 2012 at 90.
Cover lines, long thought to compel buyers to pluck a magazine off a crowded newsstand, were always a main ingredient of Ms. Brown’s success. Hers (often written by her husband, the Hollywood producer David Brown) were especially breathy and enticing: “World’s Greatest Lover — what it was like to be wooed by him!”
Now, cover lines are mere adornment to the print product — something that may be thought of as a loss leader for a brand aimed at women aged 18 to 34, possibly the most mobile-phone-obsessed demo there is. Ms. Pels hopes Hearst will come up with a way to easily let readers subscribe by text and pay with Venmo.
The invention of the ball pit (or “ball crawl,” as it was first dubbed) is widely attributed to Eric McMillan. Born in England and an industrial designer by training, McMillan moved to Canada and worked as an exhibition designer for Expo ’67 in Montreal. In 1971, he was appointed chief designer of Ontario Place, an ambitious project that included a park, theme park, and the world’s first IMAX theater on newly built artificial islands just off the Toronto waterfront. Ontario Place was a visionary project, but it was missing something.
“One of the ‘mistakes’ was the project’s lack of child appeal,” McMillan notes on his website. Striving for a more kid-friendly environment, the designer created The Children’s Village, a massive playground unlike any other, where youngsters could climb huge rope nets and soft pyramids, crawl through hanging tunnels, and jump on an enormous air mattress. “The Children’s Village opened in July 1972, and it was an amazing success,” McMillan writes. “People loved it, and it quickly became the top attraction at Ontario Place. Suddenly I became the world’s expert on child’s play.”
The Burger King in Mattoon, Illinois, is not your typical Burger King. You won’t find Whoppers or chicken fries on the menu, and while there is a drive-up window, it won’t resemble almost any other modern drive-thru with a two-way speaker. Instead, you’ll find fresh burgers with beef straight from the meat market, a single window, and employees who run out to cars with a paper and pencil in tow when the line gets too long (a la Portillo’s, fellow Midwesterners). The biggest difference, though, is that this Burger King isn’t affiliated at all with the fast-food chain owned by the $28.65 billion Restaurant Brands International group, and it’s the one restaurant in the U.S. with a trademark that Burger King’s parent company has been unable to wrest away.
Ernie Drummond, the owner of Mattoon’s Burger King, says that people sometimes do get confused when they first visit, expecting traditional fast food with pre-made burgers and heat lamps. Instead, they’re met with a homey small-town feel and a burger that goes onto the grill fresh when you order and requires a little more of a wait than those at other Burger Kings. But customers, especially the students from the nearby Eastern Illinois University, get used to it, and after a few weeks of puzzled looks in the fall, everyone knows what to expect.
Pouring the liquid into my plastic cup, it’s thick, and creamy, and steamy. “The locals still call it ‘pearl tea,’” culinary guide Ai-Jia Yu tells me, adding, somewhat mysteriously, and without further explanation, “they also call it Kung Fu tea—but not the martial art.” Soon enough, the small balls of silicone rise to the surface, and as the ice melts in my cup and the tea rapidly cools, I get ready to tip back a glass of bubble tea, in its very birthplace.
I am no stranger to bubble tea. Attending school in Montreal, I made frequent trips to the city’s one-street Chinatown and a small, very unpretentious restaurant there (I once saw a mouse scurry across the dining room) became a Friday night mainstay for me. My friends raved about this peculiar beverage but, a small-town kid, at first I couldn’t understand the allure—cold tea, sucked through a giant straw, big enough to inhale those chewy, mostly tasteless gobs of silicone. But eventually, when my workload at university got heavy, it became my comfort drink (and food).
When I decided to walk I didn’t consider the difficulties involved in walking the longest national train in England. Or that covering the 630 miles of the South West Coast Path carrying a rucksack on my back containing only the bare minimum for survival, might be the hardest thing I had ever done. I hadn’t thought about how I could afford to do it, or what I’d do afterwards. I didn’t realize then that the path involved ascent equivalent to climbing Mount Everest nearly four times, or that I’d be wild camping for nearly 100 nights. It just seemed like the best response to the hammering of the bailiffs at the door.
It was the end of one of those weeks that you believe happen to someone else, not you. A financial dispute with a lifetime friend had led to a court case that culminated in us being served with an eviction notice from the house we owned—our home and business of 20 years. Just days later my husband, Moth, was diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative disease, CBD. A terminal disease that has no cure, or treatment. My world and all that kept me stable slipped from beneath my feet.
“He who walks lives longer,” he writes, but that is “only half the truth”. The other half is that the act of walking also slows down time, and forces you to consider your surroundings. “The mountain up ahead, which slowly changes as you draw closer, feels like an intimate friend by the time you’ve arrived.” Walking, in other words, prolongs the experience of life, as well as life itself.
Outpost is a book about “the romantic, exploratory appeal of cabins and isolated stations”, places far from the noisy world where people can find clarity and connect with nature. Thoreau retreated to a cabin at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, and Dylan Thomas had his “word-splashed hut” at Laugharne. Inspired by Thomas, Roald Dahl built a writing cabin in his garden at Great Missenden. Richards visits this “denspace”, still redolent of coffee and tobacco smoke, which Dahl memorably described as “a place for dreaming and floating and whistling in the wind, as soft and silent and murky as a womb”.
Wonderfully plotted, with elegant prose, witty dialogue, homages to German Expressionism and a strong emotional charge, this is a bittersweet ending to a superb series.