With Dr Mistry at his shop.

I write this on New Year’s Eve, as it seems appropriate: this being a portal into the new year, filled with hopes and dreams, parties and resolutions.  This time last year I was well on the way to being a mother: sporting capes and flat shoes; I followed Dr Mistry’s health and diet regime ‘happy food’ to a capital T.  The result?  The healthiest of babies, the easiest of labours in my group of NCT mothers despite my being the eldest.

Turn back two New Year’s Eves however, and there was I felt little chance of my being a mother.  I tried to remain optimistic, but somehow the curt sharp words of the specialist I had seen just after our honeymoon, paralysed me into believing their version of my destiny.  Perhaps we wouldn’t have a baby; perhaps this would be our lot.  I tried to remain optimistic, yet recently married to a man whom I had loved for many years, it felt so spare to think this was it.  Nine months later on a whim, a half-conscious last resort, one Saturday I walked to South End Green with my god daughter to see Dr Mistry at his shop.  I had known him for many years, he had cured me of acne, and a friend of rheumatism with his simple vitamin and diet regimes mapped out on a hand drawn A4 paper chart.  Nine months had been long enough to incubate an impotent sense of fertility failure imploding as it did upon the previous many months: the specialist’s words had  become my grey reality.

Dr Mistry led me into his consulting room, read my pulse and announced this was all rubbish, that if I followed his routine, taking this before breakfast, that after, eating this and that so on, I would be pregnant within 3 months.  Wow I thought, really?  It all sounded too simple, too good to be true.  The consultation was free, as all his are, the supplements cost me £50.  The chart was stuck to the fridge, this was easy to follow; there aren’t many components to his remedies, since Dr Mistry adheres to simple, sage methods.  6 weeks is all it took; not even the 3 months he had confidently scheduled.  It was while we were on holiday in Turkey that the nausea, the exhaustion kicked in: the giveaway signs that I was pregnant.  I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe it and looking back I realise what a voyage it has been, as while he read my pulse as pregnant when we returned and I knew in my heart he was right when we were back, the first test showed up as negative.  My lovely client Charlotte Church was one of the first to reassure me that this happens, these tests are not the 99.9% accurate they proclaim in bold typeface they are on their packaging; but of course we all are more likely to believe the certainies, not the 72 year old Asian Ayurvedic Dr working from his health food pharmacy in NW3.

If there is one thing, actually I have learnt so many things this year, it can’t be refined down to one, but if I have learnt one large lesson this year, it is this: that babies are miracles and they are more likely to come from love, from simple healthy happiness with guidelines such as those outlined by Dr Mistry, as they are by specialists, especially if like the one I saw they drown you in negatives, in proportions, in fear.  Dr Mistry points out that each person can transform their body through their diet: nothing is unchangeable.

One friend of mine has just had twins thanks to Dr Mistry again after only 6 weeks, another couple we know it took only 2!  Meanwhile friends I sent for polycystic ovaries, for anaemia and other ailments, all report remarkable recoveries.  A lot of the products are manufactured by him, even a range of beauty products and creams, where though the packaging is not Space NK standards – the products with their potentised organic ingredients are – at a fraction of the cost.  The House of Mistry Herbal Baby Powder eradicated my baby’s skullcap within a day, while the calendula cream removed nappy rash within hours.

Jeremy and I are the most exhausted we have ever, or shall ever be, the headlong jump into parenting being a crazy initiation, where other parents nod in coded agreement at the utter relentless tiredness of the first year; yet somehow relating in direct proportion to the immense love we feel for our baby son: it is molecular and endless.  As the person we dreamed into being becomes not someone we see reflections of ourselves in, but his own beautiful, unique self.  I can never thank Dr Mistry enough for what his simple guidance did for us, given that he is a man not charging thousands, instead offering his services for free; a man whose spiritual harmony is at the heart of his work.  We still follow his simply healthy steps, they are common sense with a dash of the spiritual mixed in.  The result?  The healthiest, the happiest of babies, the best gift of my life.

Dr Mistry, Dukey and I.

For more information, to buy his products or to book in for a consultation, please check:-

www.houseofmistry.com

Day Tripper from Jeremy fusco on Vimeo.

The fashion film I styled when 9 months pregnant! SS11 Meadham Kirchhoff Collection Special
Shot by my fabulously talented husband.
Now on ASOVFF.

Tamara Cincik / Cornwall Ecopod

Stylist Tamara Cincik for our series on the summer adventures of 2DM’s artists.

Memories of our wedding where we spent 3 peaceful nights in a Romany caravan in a Suffolk field close to where we were married at the ridiculously pretty Wingfield Barns, inspired me in a turn of thought where I thought how marvellous, yet utterly golden-tinged it would be if, instead of leaving England for the continent, we went West to Cornwall and Devon…

Jeremy, my husband was less convinced of the merits of this, but after 3 days of 30ºC heat in the city, I remained utterly adamant about the merits of the trip, as our baby boy ‘Dukey’ had been very unsettled by the balmy nights. So I booked 3 nights in a gypsy caravan in Devon, to be followed by 3 nights in an eco-pod in Cornwall.

3 nights in Devon translated to 30 minutes. We collected our Sainsburys online delivery food shop, changed the baby’s nappy and after looking at a picturesque scene of dog hair, stinging nettles and pig manure, realised that this was not the place to be with a 3 month old baby. So we scarpered. The owner kindly offered us a house rental, but we were a bit scared to accept.

Taking refuge in Totnes, a lovely riverbank supper: our first night out with Dukey, was slightly overshadowed by a sojourn in what can only be described as Fawlty Towers without the tweedy styling. Totnes’ answer to Basil had been busy with the laminator: we counted perhaps 15 signs, 2 containing poetry about toilet habits, if I use the term poetry loosely, in a bedroom the size of which is more apt for a bathroom than a room for 3.  Space is obviously at a premium in Devon, as it wasn’t cheap; who knew Totnes is the new Knightsbridge?

The ecopod I had booked in Cornwall’s owners were very sweet in allowing us to bring forward our stay and we drove down through Exmoor the next morning – a place so beautiful it still feels rawly elemental.

The , Atlantic Surf Pods are set in land on a farm, over the road from the sea, close to Bude. Think Teletubbiesmeets The Hobbit: they are well designed, clean, cute and offering good quality barbecue and cooking facilities. All was lovely, the only thing I would say is going off-grid with a 3 month old takes verve and guts in the sunshine, in thunder and lightening, I think it is kind of nuts!

We agreed that had we paid for the nanny all week and had a few beauty/massage treatments – ie enjoyed a London staycation – for the same amount of money spent, we would have been left feeling less exhausted.  A new mother’s back is sore on another level and all I can add is, ladies with babies should go more luxe than home on holiday, not less.

I take total responsibilty for the choice in holiday made: I guess it takes time for a new mother to work out where her old life ends, and her new one starts…

On the plus side, we visited two gorgeous Cornish places of verdant gorgeousness: The The Eden Project and The Lost Gardens of Heligan which I would totally recommend each for their individual visions of this green and pleasant land. And the clifftop evening with old friends who had spent the week surfing and staying in a field above the sea for the princely sum of £5 per night, overlooking the Atlantic; where we had a makeshift bbq-ed supper, albeit under 5 layers, was perhaps not a glorious sunset, but fun and epic in its beauty nonetheless.

Zoe my God daughter at Vintage at Southbank

Terrace Drinks at Vintage

When Britain really did rule the waves, the high-point of her Britannia arrogance and verve was the 1851 exhibition.  A huge house of glass – a ‘crystal palace’ –  was constructed in Hyde Park.  Queen Victoria, her handsome consort Albert and their 9 children were resplendent in matching costumes: a visual hit of majesterial alchemy.  Exhibits from the Empire wowed crowds who had never left seen Dover’s white cliffs, as well as foreign guests and exhibitors who wanted to display the latest designs, inventions and innovations. 100 years later, to cheer ourselves up after WW2, Britain decided to hold another exhibition based on those same national pride principles, albeit now in a world where not only was the Empire and our certainty shrinking, those participating and attending had survived a war beyond all wars and still six years later wanted some fun and optimism after nearly a decade of post-war rationing.

70s Styling - Vol Au vent anyone?

The 1951 Exhibition saw the building of The Southbank: a concrete modernist Ark of artistic endeavour cutting a sharp swathe across the recently bombed southern side of the Thames: from Royal Festival Hall, to National Theatre, art lived on here in its mid-century absolutism.  The glass house which had encased the original exhibition was bombed and destroyed in its South London suburban location; what people needed was a boost, a sense of hope, yet like all British institutions, one founded upon a memory, an old idea made good, a sense of the past, of continuity into new ideas.

Which leads me to vintage: when I started buying old clothes, they were that, old clothes, secondhand was the name used and they were: 60s cocktail dresses bought from charity shops, deco bags at jumble sales, Victoriana from Portobello, as a teenager my penchant for silk velvet grew unabated as I would forego supper to buy something which I believed enchanted.  I can’t quite remember when secondhand morphed into vintage: perhaps when the prices went up? Perhaps when others en masse showed how they too shared my love affair with the old, with the stories, the craftsmenship and the unique beauty these clothes hold in their seams and darts.

Last Friday, my mother, my god daughter Zoe, my old friend Sukie and my 3 month old baby all went to Vintage at Southbank.  An homage to all things nostalgic curated by the Hemingways of Red or Dead infamy, to celebrate 60 years since the 1951 with a party/shopathon/fete/festival celebration of Twentieth Century modes in music, art, design and fashion.  Transgenerational, we moved from Abigail’s Party installation, to retro Art School printing class.  But it was the shopping, oh my friends the shopping, where my girls of all ages swooped on pieces of beauty, while my baby snoozed on magnificently.  You see he was already wearing the best in vintage: for I had prized onto him that morning a wondrous 1950s playsuit, baby shower gift from the lovely Mica, offset with a red and black check pair of M&S Vans.  I am sure if he could speak he would say ‘Mummy vintage rocks’.  Somehow too vintage has become a noun and for that I applaud last weekend, as a celebration of the best in past memories reshaped into something tantalising and hopeful.

The next day we went to Kew Gardens: both for Jeremy and Dukey their Palm House debuts.  For a still-standing glass palace and a relic of Victorian splendour in a cozy corner of South West London, I can recommend no greater way to spend a sun-kissed day.

Cosmo Duke Hotspur

My gorgeous son Cosmo Duke Hotspur aka Dukey, born 04/05/2011.  With each day, observing him as he makes the most amazing discoveries, I feel completely overawed by the love I feel for him.  Today he saw thunder and rain for the first time and stared entranced out of the window.  Every day I learn more and more: about him, about me, about becoming a mother…

Rainbow Precocity

xxx

The Hackney Empire Interior at the House of Hackney Pop-Up Shop.

Some people see an empty white room and feel a sense of peace, order and tranquility.  There are others for whom this is a blank canvas onto which they can lavish layers of love, adding a treasured piece of texture from their travels here, a handmedown from the family, or a cherished much coveted heirloom-to-be sourced from hours spent carousing car boot sales, markets, or auction houses.  I fall firmly into the latter category: what I described to M. Christian Lacroix as ‘too much is just enough’; I rest most happily in a world of more is more completeness.  While I can and do appreciate the clear charm of minimalism, there is for me an innate comfort in the creation of collections: the sheer enjoyment in the knowledge that my world is filled with pretty things.

This love of maximality started young: obsessed with history, I would try to recreate the past in my imagination – via the portals of time-travel, jumble sales and wardrobe.  Aged 7, I was quite the young fogey: partial to a puff sleeve in the style of Holly Hobby and Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Fast track a few years and I was at my happiest collecting again while living out of a rucksack: from traditional Indian fabrics, to handicrafts my Turkish aunties made in our village (my Aunty Meryem was shocked when I coveted an old deeply gorgeous slightly frayed patchwork quilt over a brand new one) and vintage kimonos in Japan from the Tokyo Salvation Army sales.  What might start filled with base essentials, would on each trip mushroom into a Mary Poppins universe in a bag, filled with new treasures, as I explored ideas of  colour, fabric, texture and taste through travel-happy folkloric ritualised design (part of my aunts’ dowries were 100 piece of embroidered bedding), thus to a sense of the timeless root  of beautified utilitarian design.

Last week we went on a day out adventure to the mothership of my childhood time travel fantasies: Hampton Court Palace.  It was one of those alchemically divine early Spring days, the light was bright and the day filled with hope of sunshine days to come.

Entrance to another world: where magic happens through the arched doorway.

Taking in the Tudor Kitchens.

Like a tourist... In William and Mary's garden.

Stuart Maximal Neo-Classical Order

Tudor Chimneys resting in a beautiful blue sky.

What is quite amazing about Hampton Court Palace is how each epoch danced time on her surface: from Cardinal Wolsey’s Thames-side retreat, gifted to Henry viii and Anne Boleyn when The King’s Matter (his divorce from Catherine of Aragon) seemed out of reach and his own future doomed, to Tudor pleasure palace, through to the renovations undertaken by William and Mary, who had hoped to totally rebuild it, as a response to Versailles’ stylistic dictate of royal living.  As they ran out of money, they had to accept this hotch-potch half Tudor, half Neo-Classical patchwork of a palace: eras grafted onto each other.  Somehow to me this is more poetic, more English as we constantly edit and reapply our design motifs onto the past – how many Victorian London terraces have been gutted and remodelled in the last decade to display a new opened out kitchen, defying the rectangular narrow design of the original?

Admiring Charles 1st's portrait - hung directly opposite William of Orange's throne: defiance or humility?

The sheer luxury of William of Orange's velvet privy was not lost on me!

Admiration for Anne...

From Hampton Court, we went to visit Lesley Silwood, from Buba London at her idyllic island Thames house.  Jeremy was quite entranced with the idea of us relocating to this magical place: resting on the riverbank, it is amazing, very Swallows and Amazons.  Lesley and Euan similarly embrace the maximal approach to living: with Euan’s zingy poptastic artworks, Lesley’s partiality for sparkly treasure updates, which given her mother is a vintage clothes dealer, means she knows (!) it did translate into a sunset slice of paradise.  Recently branching into homeware from their  gorgeous bag collections, Buba London have designed the most gorgeous pouffes, a white one of which sat rather comfortably in their bright expanse of kitchen, as we looked out at their cat tormenting their rabbit rather mercilessly in his front garden hutch.

Buba London Pouffe.

As we are about to have a baby, but waiting to move from our let’s call it compact one bedroom apartment until after the birth (translation: until we know what we’re doing!), Jeremy has been actively modifying the space: from creating a shoe cupboard, to repackaging my Victorian owls.  As we aren’t moving yet, rather than install the new kitchen we bought a few months ago (still in boxes in the garage until we move), we have restyled it on a budget thanks to wallpaper and willpower.  Adhering to the maximal codes of overlaid design, I feel rather proud of the results.

Taxidermitastic for Tamara.

After butterflies and gnomes, came owls - an ode to collecting..!

Kitchen refurbishment rather than Kitchen overhaul, thanks to a spot of wallpapering.

The original cabinets are rather revolting and if we were planning on staying much longer then the spanking brand new ones we have chosen, bought and paid for, would now be shining in all their boxfresh glory.  But as we are aiming to move, this then is a Spring-hopeful transformation.

Last night we popped over the launch party of the East End’s ode to maximalism: The House of Hackney, a pop-up shop on the strip of road where Dalston meets Stoke Newington.  Their delightful hostess Madeleine guided us on a tour of the space: three themed spaces, with sustainably locally sourced interiors, where fun and OTT embrace the more is more prerequisites of layering, redesigning and making you think.  I loved the Hackney Empire room, with its Mad Hatter sense of psychedelic Victorianism.

Walls have been stripped back to reveal their Georgian past, while mirrors have been over printed with floral designs and updated with graffitti.  I was totally charmed: perhaps I was old before my time, my little girl well-being was as rooted in how a space feels; and as such I have always felt the pangs of lust of a luscious interior, as much as for a snazzy pair of shoes.  What is charming here is to see how this world order has been translated into something at once layered with an homage to the building’s many pasts, with current stylistic solutions and humorous analogies: Colefax and Fowler on acid indeed!

Have you ever imagine what happened if we dared to step through the looking glass and saw the world through topsy-turvy spectacles for an afternoon?  Well I think it might be rather fun: a place where our eccentricities sense order in their madcap escapades and where good design is shown it’s ultimate OTT overhauled conclusion.

If you do go down to Dalston this weekend, take a trip to the basement where cult baker Lily Vanili’s subterranean tea room will complete your tour.  Jeremy reported that the espresso martini was rather delicious.  As Lily had fed us at Amelia’s 123 Bethnal Green Road book launch, it felt like a full stop to the circle to enjoy them here too at another of London’s charmingly creative responses to duller than ditchwater corporate uniformity.

http://www.bubalondon.com/

http://www.houseofhackney.com/

http://www.hrp.org.uk/hamptoncourtpalace/

A list of deliciousness available at Dukey's Baby Shower

Last Sunday I hosted Dukey’s Baby Shower at the newly opened Bunker Cafe, at 123 Bethnal Green Road (www.123bethnalgreenroad.co.uk): a shop whose products are all sustainably sourced from within the boundaries of the M25.  What I loved about the store, when I came to Amelia’s book launch there last month, is the way it combines a simple use of space with quirky eccentricities.  Plus designers sold there include some old friends, such as JJ aka Noki, which adds another layer of familiar cuteness to the equation.

The Bunker Cafe pre-celebrations: prepped for the baby shower

My lovely god daughter Zoe came down for the weekend on an exeat from her school in Taunton to take up the mantle of face painting artistry; while Mark commuted between shows at Covent Garden for balloon animal-making duty (plus a rather ‘creative’ balloon neopolitan ice cream, as well as randomly sized swords, which was perhaps more than a sleight of hand!..).

Zoe, brush in hand.

Mark displaying his skills.

Face Painting Art Direction: note how the result matches the outfit - genius!

The staff at The Bunker Cafe were lovely: providing a carb-fest high tea of scones and victoria sponge, combined with Siam’s super-duper triple layered home-made carrot cake. The result: a relaxed soporific haze of smiles and contented stomachs; while mini-munchkins compared their face painted results, enjoyed a spot of colouring book wizardry and fought each other with balloon-shaped swords.

Eddie and Rocco as Spidermen.

Jeremy arrived for the last hour; displaying if ever we needed reminding our divergent tastes in wardrobe!

All smiles from Dukey's Glamour Aunties!

Mum aka Grandma!

As the countdown to motherhood rushes on unabated: part exciting, part scary; this was a really special afternoon, filled with kindness and smiles. Pregnancy can be isolating and I am sure so can early motherhood, it was then, all the more lovely to spend time with friends, basking in a golden glow of love and kindness.  We were bought some fantastically gorgeous gifts, Dukey (our nickname for the bump) will clearly be the best-dressed baby in town!