Month: April 2015

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Review: The Swallow Bakery, Cheltenham.

JpegMy first visit to the Swallow Bakery was back in 2012, whilst working at The Times Cheltenham literature festival (in the kids tent), and en route to the train station homeward bound, decided to stop by because it was right next to the festival tents. In a rush I grabbed a cupcake which was so scrumptious with a generous serving of icing, I knew I would have to comeback again. 
JpegCut to December 2014 and beyond I throughly enjoy returning because the cakes are THAT good. Above on the left is the three-tiered lemon cake.JpegAs you can see there is luscious, thickly spread icing between the beautifully moist sponges and very tasty icing on top and a squiggle of cream! Indulgent and satisfyingly creamy. Not the place to go when you’re on a diet! The slices are gigantic! You definitely receive generous, dreamy servings in this bakery.JpegFirst I ate the panini on the far right . It is a delicious, can’t-go-wrong: chicken, mozzarella and pesto filling. All good and served hot. This savory sandwich was followed by the lemon cake and Bailey’s cupcake eaten in alternating intervals of the cakes; per two bites. My taste buds relished the juxtaposing rich, creamy lemon cake followed by bites of the chocolately cupcake. Yes I am indulgent like that! Greedier than Nigella Lawson! The icing tasted of Bailey’s and sat atop the complimentary chocolate cupcake sponge. Absolutely fabulous! I urge you to visit the Swallow Bakery. (Or better yet order online as they prepare x24 cupcake batches for home delivery! Wow!) For readers outside of the UK at the time of this writing: http://swallowbakery.com/pages.php?pageid=2   states: “We can ship to virtually anywhere in the World.” Double Wow!!!

Though I am happy to commute an our for an afternoon in glorious Cheltenham and loose-leaf tea & cakes in this particular café.

The drawbacks to this lovely place is that the cakes  sit prettily with no cake stand glass lid! Argh! So if you’re lucky the cake will be fresh and moist. If you have popped in on a quieter day then with no lid covering the cake you find one slice horribly dry and unappetizing. Damn!

No problems with the panini’s tasty and sufficient fillings inside. However the other ‘warm’ foods like the mini burgers are  cooked presumably earlier on in the day then simply left out on display so when you eat it, it is COLD!!!!!  *Bleurgh!*

So this lovely café receives 7/10. In my humble opinion this deserves a “very good” label.

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Hay Festival 2014 Event: Picture Book Panel (Part 3)

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Picture Books are very magical indeed. I will soon blog about how they magically, yes MAGICALLY came into my life in a later post. Obviously I love picture books so could not resist this event. And Rachel was most inspiring because she literally has her own card and gift EMPIRE plus she like randomly decided to work as an air stewardess (among many other ventures) which is sooooo the type of thing I would do except I’m not good with flying! Oh yes and Rachel was 5 months pregnant at the time and has since had her beautiful daughter! 

So the Super-Awesome-Picture-Book-Gang is Chris Haughton on the left below, Oliver Jeffers centre and the sunny & gorgeous Rachel Bright! 😀 You need to read “Oh no! George” by Haughton because you need more colour in your life and you must purchase “This moose belongs to me” by Jeffers because it is a gorgeous picture book and you must read all the “Love Monster” stories. I also own some of Rachel’s “The Bright Side” range of gifts and cards. A post on that coming shortly!
JpegOk so seconds before I got a pic with the Super-Awesome-Picture-Book-Gang my hair was on point. Like PERFECT. On Fleek as North West would say.

Then somehow my hair turns into this…Like WTF? Just not on point, just seconds ago it was like Rachel’s with a side parting and then this raven cascade sans side-parting just flops down upon my scalp from outta nowhere! Just not a good look but my boobs look EPIC so can’t complain 😛

JpegApologies if you were looking for a more in depth discussion of the points raised at the panel. I have simply forgotten-it was a year ago! Notably the trauma of my hair not on fleek took precedent in the recollection of this event.  

xoxo Catherine 😀

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Hay Festival 2014: What it Looks like/What to Do/Where to Go? (Part 2)

JpegThere is an island spot where you can sit on the free deck chairs but it was a drizzly day and it was not worth getting mud on my shoes to sit there. With better weather it’s an opportune time to read and wait in between events. 🙂

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The venues are clearly sign posted and there are lot’s of stalls and random things to look at. All good fun for any age and if you have children 🙂JpegJpegJpegThere was a charming blackboard of quotes and wishes people wanted to accomplish before they die. Again my phobia of mud paralysed me from walking over and jotting down my very modest bucketlist: a luxury holiday in the Maldives, publish lot’s and lot’s of books, fall in love, eat Beluga Caviar with Lord Disick and go shopping with Mark Francis Vandelli and Ooooo meet Louis Theroux! 😛Jpeg

The onsite Bookshop:

This is where you can purchase new and some backlist titles of the writers and authors in attendance. Also the book-signings take place here too!

Check out my video from my Youtube Channel: Catherine Vaughan for behind the scenes views!

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Hay Festival 2014: Travel Tips (Part 1)

Hay-On-Wye is a magical and whimsical little market town on the English/Welsh borders-near my hometown. Plenty of charming bookshops, cafés and gift shops. And once a year there is an inflow of literary and artistic minds gathered to educate, entertain and inspire.

Ironically for the past 5 years I had not attended an event because I was too busy working in a bookshop or always seemed to book my annual vacation in Malta on the exact same week!

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I was fortunate to get a Monday afternoon off and scoured the pages for events to attend. Of course nobody around me gives a damn about reading, the arts so I knew I would be riding solo yet again.

I was very nearly going to attend Mr Hook of Sotheby’s talk on the Art World and his book but then there was a picture book panel with three illustrators/creative extraordinaire’s so being as ridiculously frugal as I am I figured it’d be a three for one which would be a more efficient use of my time.

JpegJpegAs you can see the festival like many other literary ones are a series of connected maze-like tents. The entrance to the festival can get very muddy and you would not be out of place to wear wellies particularly as our British Summer may decide to drizzle on us or worse! My Clarke ballet flats fortunately got over the very unbearable though brief exposure to wet mud.  JpegIt does understandably get very busy and jam-packed as you walk around the tent but it is not that gigantic, you will not get lost and the loos are onsite and easy to get to though the queues for them can be enormous. JpegFor some reason I did not eat a thing that whole afternoon so have no idea what the onsite cafés and food stalls are like. There is plenty of seating area in some open café areas.

A note on travel:

Because I live nearby I simply hopped onto my local 39 Hereford to Hay-on-Wye bus. It is an hour ride possibly £9 return ticket if my memory serves. I did notice that the special Festival Bus link last year were late. From what I heard from other festival goers the Festival bus was an hour late and it’s route were delayed (on the Monday I went.) So a lot of people that previously purchased festival bus tickets paid again to use the local 39 Yeomans bus. This Yeomans bus is not in service during the late evening. Anyhoo the drive/ride from Hereford to Hay is beautiful, scenic and quintessentially British. Once you arrive at Hay there are buses going back and forth regularly to the festival site and it’s £1 return to and from Hay and the site. It’s a very quick journey 10 mins max. I hope that helps!

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When Beyoncé met Terry Richardson. (2013)

bey3Beyoncé’s photoshoot for GQ magazine shot by Terry Richardson encapsulates everything about the post-noughties era we are in. Let’s start with that hairstyle.

The extremely highly placed bun a.k.a. The Basic Bitch Bun. Still worn with wildfire vigor by “extra regular girls.” The setting of a minimalist interior echoes the growing surge in simple-living. Throwback continues to be the word du jour and that is made manifest by the Warhol-esque image of Beyoncé on the wall behind her asserts all that Andy stood for: fame, making the ordinary extraordinary and embracing the All-American. The entire photograph itself reflects just that with irony thrown in for good measure.

Why is one of the most extraordinary woman on the planet having her her up in the “extra regular girl” style? The newspaper she holds is angled to show the word “sanity” and one can  assume the folded prefix part prints the letters “i” and “n”. An All-American baseball sports sweatshirt lies on the couch with her. Her glasses perhaps represent the thriving pseudo-intellectualism rife on the internet or she’s copying Terry’s signature look.

Having always thought Richardson’s aesthetic was always the same, like his photos could be viewed as having been taken on the same roll of film even if the photos are decades apart. Today I notice the  subtle shifts in his work. When you look closely his images really do tell you how new or old the shot date was. Terry Richardson has done an excellent job of capturing the post-noughties zeitgeist and as always we will appreciate it more years after seeing the photo.