Welcome to a lateish and attenuated blog as I struggle to catch up with myself. As you know I have been making my own Christmas cards for over thirty years. At first they were just my dolls that I had started making, posed in Christmassy scenes, photographed and photocopied on an office photocopier on folded paper. By the turn of the century I was making porcelain items, which ended in 03 when I set myself to making fifty trotting camels with wise men who were bells, on top. I wasted at least three months in deep research on axels. I still don’t know what sort of axel is best for a camel.
About ten years ago I switched to complex paper crafting, the tally had risen to about eighty cards; I started as soon as Miniatura was finished.
Then came lockdown, in which I felt it necessary to console everyone with a working theatre and a play.
I just don’t know how to do anything a bit? Do I? If I make small dolls they have to be not only the smallest and most perfect but also working and moving.
Without revealing that this year’s is an entire village, I can tell you that I cut 360 parts yesterday, have at least the same twice over to do and for surgical reasons can really only stand for a couple of hours at a time and now the post office has announced they all have to be in the post in eight days time to leave the postal workers time to go on strike.
Why do I do this? I now make sixty cards, though I never get anything like that number back again. I do get messages telling me the cards ‘are the favourite thing’, or, worse: ‘have become Christmas’. Perhaps I just have a pathological need to be needed and need really to be lying on an expensive couch somewhere explaining all that was wrong with my mother. Perhaps I just want to make everyone happy.
Anyway – back to work, I don’t know why I am chatting to you when I have stuff to do. The OH as usual complains that my busyness is affecting his television watching. He is currently immersed in ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’, no doubt the start to an endless series.
There could be the party version – Obi wan canape
The sequel – Obi two Kenobi
The Zen version – Oh Be One, Kenobi
And the rainbow one – Obi Mum Kenobi.
I’m off, May the Force get a pay rise, may the postal workers get resolution, so we all can send cards, and may the nurse’s strike be averted without loss of life (and we all thought lockdown was a problem!)
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