At the Table – 29 August 2025

I write this sitting at the kitchen table.* This table once belonged in my parents’ kitchen. It hosted meals and art classes and filing sessions (don’t ask; there always seemed to be a lot of filing). It held roast dinners, steaming gravy boats, a jar of mint sauce with a story I’m not allowed to tell you,** cooling cakes, bubbling crumbles, Peter Rabbit plates and the perfect cup from which to drink hot Ribena.

One day the comfortable pine table was replaced by my grandmother’s mahogany one. It was round instead of rectangular. It was heavy and somehow you couldn’t sit at it without banging your leg. It was too precious to put anything on, saucepans or watercolours. It was an abomination, as far I was concerned. My father, whose mother’s it had been, probably felt differently.

I have all this on the brain thanks to Bee Wilson’s The Heart-Shaped Tin, a book about the meanings we attach to objects, the history, significance, emotions and magic with which we imbue them.

‘Magical thinking is a much bigger feature of modern human life than most of us allow for, and not least when it comes to food and drink,’ she writes, exploring the power of her own kitchen table to call to mind family members so strongly that she feels as though they are in the room.

The book is full of stories as carefully selected as a precious Royal Doulton dinner set. Wilson has clearly done huge amounts of research but the book wears this lightly. I learnt about the 5000-year-old chocolate bottle which transformed our knowledge of when and where hot chocolate was first consumed, about Japanese baby food scissors, about Jacob Chaim, a Jewish man imprisoned in a concentration camp and forced to make weapons who secretly fashioned a beautiful spoon which survives to this day and about David Drake, the enslaved man who carved enigmatic poems into the pots he made.

The Heart-Shaped Tin is a rare and special book. I did not expect to cry about a red washing up bowl, or to look at an ugly item at the back of my cupboard with affection now that I thought of the person who gave it to me or to find myself running my fingers over the grooves in my kitchen table, contemplative and amused.

On the subject of objects (remember stuff? Real, palpable stuff?), Craftland by James Fox comes out next week. An art historian and author of the vibrant The World According to Colour, here Fox travels around Britain meeting the masters and mistresses of many vanishing crafts to reveal ‘that which is overlooked and chronicle what might otherwise be forgotten.’

The result is a brilliant journey full of characters (some of whom have very strong feelings about the word ‘craft’ itself – their work is hard after all, not some twee hobby) and a fascinating way of writing about specific places.

While every town once had a blacksmith, landscape and community dictated the emergence of particular crafts in certain areas. Penclawdd was once the place to go for baskets made from hazel and used for collecting shellfish while if you needed a sieve, you should head to Covent Garden. For chairs, you must go to High Wycombe, hats to Luton, cutlery to Sheffield and lace? At the turn of the nineteenth century, three quarters of Bedfordshire’s women were lacemakers. Three quarters! Oh, you want a career in trug making? Well, you’ll have to move.

Where does one go now for the expert cricket ball maker? What does a bodger do? Is it too late for me to train as a quarrel-picker? And why are there no decent wool shops on Downing Street? Almost all of these questions are answered, alongside stunning writing on watchmaking and elaboration on an appropriate number of words which sound thoroughly inappropriate.

In her poetry collection The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning, Alison Binney writes about the very messy task of clearing the home of a father suffering from Alzheimer’s, ‘frisking your house for ladybird books and egg cups’ and of how objects change for someone with this awful disease, ‘The sock in the bath has forgotten its name… The remote is late for work and has run out of pants… The cooker hunts for its keys.’

It’s a powerful, often funny, book and I love how she sees the world. Her spices jostle ‘like kids in a class photo.’ In Like a Fish, she declares ‘It’s never a woman, unicycling down the road.’ Well, quite. 

In The Museum of Lost Umbrellas by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick, Dillie Kyteler finds herself living with her grand-aunt Florence on the island of Ollipest. The house is full of surprises, the aunt no less so. Searching for a book one evening in an unpromising room lined with titles about mildew, weevils and weathervanes she wishes aloud for an adventure story. A book meeting her exact description seems to push itself forward.

Then, the long-closed Museum of Lost Umbrellas reopens and the delightful objects to which it is devoted prove capable of much more than keeping the rain off. Here’s hoping James Fox’s next book addresses where one can find a good (flying-)umbrella-maker and what the correct term for this profession is.

When I have finished The Museum of Lost Umbrellas, I am turning to an art-world thriller. In Claire Berest’s novel Artifice, translated by Sophie Lewis, strange things are appearing in Paris’ galleries and museums. A horse is found in the Pompidou Centre. Stuffed wolves are toasting with champagne in a gallery. Meanwhile suspended police officer Abel walks the streets of Paris at night trying to get lost. One morning, though he doesn’t subscribe, the Parisien is left on his doormat, the story of the horse facing him…

Finally, to the opposite of stuff: Aggie and the Ghost by Matthew Forsythe is fighting hard with Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob for greatest picture book of the year. Aggie is very excited to move into her new home alone. But the house is haunted. By a very annoying ghost who follows her everywhere and steals her socks. The ghost also eats all the cheese. The artwork is deft and animated. The story is gorgeous, with a tinge of darkness. The ghost is a scoundrel.  

We, and any of the welcoming ghosts who feel at home here, look forward to seeing you soon. As well as providing the best (we think) kind of stuff, there are lots of lovely events to look forward to, all listed here.

May your weekend be cluttered with objects you love,
Lizzie

*And not, like Cassandra Mortmain, sitting in the kitchen sink. That’s for diary writing.

**Someone would have ended up covered in it had someone else not been quite a bad shot. The white walls did not fare so well.