Consuming Interest

By LESLIE ADRIAN FOR those lucky enough to have an attic, it clearly pays never to throw anything away. In the last few years nearly everything that has been hoarded in the attics for generations, from scrap screens to hip-baths—used now for potted plants—has come back into high fashion.

The newest revival is basket furnishing. Alas!

I have no attic, or my father's elegant summer- house chaise-longue from Madeira, finally sacri- ficed on November 5 by my children, would now be considered the ideal piece for my living-room.

Basketweave came back into our homes via Italy, espresso bars and 'contemporary' on the 'telly.' There has long been a traditional basket trade between Britain and Madeira. Centuries ago an english lady .tried to teach knitting to the native women. She discovered that years of basketweaving had left them quite incapable of using their left hands, so the experiment was finally rejected and the peasants stuck to their weaving of baskets in the traditional patterns.

Today one basketware firm has found a new gimmick. British designer Terence Conran is now sending designs for good modern pieces to be worked in Madeira by the native workers.

Spiky metal legs hold waste-bins, lampshades and attractive cane-seated stools. The newest work-baskets are cornet-shaped on three-legged metal stands, which are enamelled black. They can also be used as log-holders.

I thought the prices for these light, well- designed examples of modern basketweave were extremely reasonable : many pieces are under £3. A chair with a felt cushion in yellow or shocking pink costs only £3 10s. Some of the traditional designs still remain. No one, so far, has bettered the old-fashioned hamper picnic basket with its cane locking-bar. A set of three of these in various ' sizes costs only £3.17s.

Many of these items are on sale in stores all over the country, or you can get in touch direct with the firm, Basketweave, 6 Cadogan Lane, London, SW1.

One of the ideas' I have had in mind to do before Easter is to discuss where to eat in Paris —on the assumption that many of you go there, or pass through there, every summer. My own impression is that it is mistaken policy, all things (including currency) considered, to go to any restaurant starred in the Michelin, except for special occasions—when for a third of the price you can get the kind of meal which would set you talking 1 for weeks if you had it in London.

• I am prepared to concede that there is an element • of--7what ? snobbery? in this statement.

* Medi6bOn and Kee,'15s. Not exactly the snobbery that Ko-Ko criticised, but of another kind, for which so far as I know there is no term extant. Most of us think about what we eat and about where we eat in Paris, to an extent we rarely do at home. Has this a stimu- lating effect on taste as well as on digestion? And there is atmosphere, ambiance, to consider. The same meal in Paris may appear to taste twice as good.

Let me commend to you, then, Alexander Watt's Paris Bistro Cookery,* those .of you who are interested in cooking at home, as well as those who are going to Paris, and want to have a list of good restaurants in the lower (though not the lowest) price ranges. I know only a couple of the places he mentions; both are, or were, good.

Why `bistro' cookery? Mr. Watt defines a bistro as a place where the patron is chef, head- waiter and wine-waiter, and where there is a zinc counter and sawdust atmosphere, rather than carpets. It is as well to realise, 'though, that some places which call themselves bistros can be expen- sive. In this book Mr. Watt claims to have stuck to the unpretentious—but there are others which are both pretentious and bad.

There are people,, he says, who collect bistros, as there are people who collect stamps; and very often the collectors start a fashion for a place which causes it rapidly to lose its character. It may even end by becoming one of the haunts on the routes of the Paris-by-night coach tours, where the drinks not consumed by the tourists are eventually distributed among the students who have come in earlier, dressed up, to give the place atmosphere (before the war they used to dress as apaches : immediately after it, as existen- tialists; I don't know what the fashion is now).

* * * Dust jackets on new books, like the paper bands on cigars, were things I believed the upper classes discarded and the bourgeoisie preserved. Now I an happy to learn from a friend in the rare-book trade that my dust jackets are reprieved. The really smart book man, he says, preserves the paper covers. For in the future a book in mint condition with jacket intact is much more likely to become a collector's piece than a dog-eared, coverless volume.

We were going through my bookshelves and .I was astonished to learn that some books I had bought only the other day—or so it seemed—are already on the collectors' lists. First editions of the early works of leading novelists like Joyce Cary, Graham Greene and Hemingway are already bringing at least double their original price in the second-hand market. Early Eliot, Dylan Thomas and now Wyndham Lewis are already more than double the published price. Even Agatha Christie has a value in the antique- book trade; vintage Christies are worth £1 Is. today.

Literary periodicals with contributions by the big names are also worth keeping, with an eye to the future. Copies of Horizon with Evelyn WaUgh's The Loved One are still in demand. A set of Transition,' the expatriate magazine pub- lished in Paris, is worth twenty-five guineas.

So if you buy today a first edition of ... welt, who? .

Ah! Who, indeed!