Little folks.

Posted on 6th February 2024 by admin

The fact that I love all the dolls’ house scales is a fairly good indicator of my complete lack of financial acumen.

Dolls are very labour intensive, that is if you want to make a proper porcelain doll that you can really play with and which will last a few hundred years even when it’s under an inch and a half tall.

On my table there is a little box full of 48th scale moveable, bendy, porcelain dolls to dress.  Each doll only costs £10, which is ludicrous when you consider the amount of work involved.  The smaller the miniature, the greater the fiddle and the more the skill required in the making.  I have to top up this box more than any other because any doll-loving miniaturist will sooner or later wonder if they could manage to dress a really small doll.  I do also make jointed dolls, which are solid porcelain with a wire going through a hole in the body and out of a matching hole in the upper arms and thighs.  These dolls are easier for me to make for numerous reasons.  First, they are solid.  To make a solid shape in a mould you need to keep injecting liquid clay until the mould is full up to the brim.  Some shapes made this way can be a bit dodgy because they can create a hole in the middle as the plaster mould absorbs the water.  If the shape is solid you cannot see the hole in the middle when the item is demoulded, the first you would know about it would be when the air in the centre expanded in the heat and the shape exploded in the kiln.  The tiny doll, however, has to have a hole poked through the torso twice with a thin bit of wire, while it is still damp clay.  Any surprise air in the middle has an escape route.  The most difficult part is likely to be rubbing down thin porcelain limbs; if you don’t hold them carefully or rub too violently they will break, sure as broken eggs are smashed and cannot be mended.  As always when I have broken three in a row I know this is nature’s way of telling me to stop making breaks and have one instead.  On the whole (which we hope it is) the wastage rate is not too dreadful, if I pour ten dolls, which is fifty pieces of porcelain, I might get seven whole dolls at the end.

The 48th scale bendy dolls, however, which are much easier to dress because they can bend their arms and legs to help you, have to be hollow.  This is tricky because the bits are rather small.

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Either I’ve nailed it or there is something underhand afoot.  This is indeed a 48th scale foot, you can just see the hole in the top.  The hole must be big enough to admit a cloth-bound wire and some glue and plenty of both so that you can bend the leg back and forth without the wire coming out.  Porcelain is a brilliant material for this because it is porous and drinks glue thirstily.  The skill here is in the pouring.  I have to pour a drip of slip into the mould and then, after a bit of counting, out again to leave a hollow shape.  If some git comes to the door and I’m not fast enough on the outpour, the shape is solid and no good, I have to chuck it and start again.  If I am too fast the shape is too thin to be rubbed down without collapse.  As I pour the mould gets wetter and the time for the plaster to absorb the water changes.

But if I get it right and work for weeks, after the wastage, what I get out of the kiln is this.

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There are three different sizes of 48th scale feet here, I’m going to need the glasses to sort them all out, or the poor dolls will have one big foot and one little one, which is seriously nit picking when you look at the first photo, but that’s 48th for you.

The tweezers are of use in the china painting phase.  I do love china painting, it’s great, but the difficulty with pieces so small is how to stand them and where to hold them.  China paint is a powder colour mixed with a medium.  It remains wet until fired in the kiln when the porous porcelain surface absorbs and bonds with the paint.  This is why you can scrub porcelain and why it will last hundreds of years unchanged.  On the kiln shelf there is a thin layer of kiln sand, the job of which is to stop the porcelain paint bonding the painted object to the shelf forever.  It is a sliding layer which is still sand, if a wetly painted porcelain piece falls into it, it will coat it with sand which will fire on there in the kiln.  So the difficulty is to balance the tiny item on the sand without it falling over.

It took me a few years to come up with the answer.

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Racks.  For each firing I construct racks from thin wire that will survive in the kiln.  Some of the racks are wiggly up and down, like a barbeque rack, I can prop the unpainted legs on these so the painted shoes are sticking up in the air.  Some, those that appear to be rings, I have made like crowns with wire poking up in the air that I can balance the hollow legs on.  The feat is precarious, and so are the feet, never more so than on the walk from the dining room table, round the corner, through the kitchen, up the step, along the corridor, into the garage and down into the kiln…

…and breathe.

It has taken a week to china paint the contents of that round kiln shelf.  It has taken many years to know not just to plough on when I am tired.

My style of miniatures has always been the style I first fell in love with in eighteenth century cupboard houses.  The child-like innocence and optimism that first captivated me and made me want to have a go is what I still strive for.  I love the house being the place where the dolls live.  I can see where miniaturists who wish to make high art or emulate reality to a great degree are coming from, whether they strive to miniaturise perfection or imperfection in reality.  You’ll never find me devising ways to make miniature coffee stains, or agonising over my drawer handle being insufficiently Chippendale.

I like miniatures to be a happy regression to a time when life was simpler, I like the miniaturists to be able to call the shots and not be wrong and I like everyone to be able to afford something that has the potential to be an heirloom.

If you do too, I’ll see you at the show, 16th and 17th March details as always at www.miniatura.co.uk

~~~~~~~~~~~~

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An evening off.

Posted on 28th January 2024 by admin

Yesterday the OH suggested we have an evening out watching a tribute band.

I don’t normally go to watch bands.  I went to see the Beatles in the early Sixties and knew immediately that no experience could improve on that.  The gods were leaning out of Olympus and listening; there was certainly something more in the Sunderland Empire than the audience and the musicians.  David Attenborough gave a radio talk in which he proposed that human male singing behaviour to attract females is akin to similar behaviour in other species, notably birds.  You can see the truth of this in numerous recorded concerts by boy bands; the boy singer warbles and the females respond.

Every now and then something extra occurs: music.

Following the Beatles and their remarkable capacity for writing money, there was an upsurge in showmanship by some bands who could produce music, especially when assisted by technology and, to be fair, an awful lot who couldn’t under any circumstances but did the gig anyway.

But there were one or two who eschewed the bells and whistles and a very few singer-songwriters who only needed a guitar, a microphone and a chair to make magic.

Such a person was John Martyn, who was actually called David McGeachy but chose the name of a guitar for his stage name.  He left the planet in 2009, sadly but not before leaving a fantastic musical legacy, much of which was just him and a guitar because that’s all he needed.

If you have never heard the music of John Martyn I suggest you listen online.  He could not only make his guitar sing, he could do it himself and wrote most of it too.  I think perhaps lack of showmanship did him a disservice in the Sixties and Seventies because, despite several major hits, he was always niche; his music enjoyed by people who were not ‘fans’ as much as people who liked proper music played by the man who wrote it, properly.

So, after an afternoon of kiln watching, when the OH suggested a bit of band watching at the theatre of the local university, I was quite keen to go.

The John Martyn Project is the name of the group, all independent singer songwriters who have come together just because they like the music.  This in itself is interesting because most of them weren’t born when John was at his most active.

The audience were, though.

It was time travel.  Never have I been in an auditorium with quite so many of my contemporaries.  I was not the only one with a seventies hairstyle, though some had given up the hair completely and quite a few were sporting that interesting long-grey-ponytail-from-three follicles look.  I had difficulty negotiating all the steps because I had had a knee pack up on me on Wednesday.  There was a smattering of sticks, a tidal wave of comfy shoes and a few having an evening out in highish heels, mainly waving away assistance to do one step at a time.

After the intermission, in which the OH purchased a tee-shirt, for leaving in a drawer, the band got a little experimental and the audience played on phones and sent emails until the expected songs returned.

It was very good entertainment, they could certainly play the instruments and we found the car park more readily, returning, than we found the theatre setting out on the huge campus.

Good music transcends fashion, but you knew that already and are reminded of it every time you are played Vivaldi in a phone queue.

The John Martyn Project are worth a couple of hours if they surface near you, you can find out where with your search engine.  The music of John Martyn is worth listening to, too.

May you never go much longer without these songs to hold.

~~~~~~~~~~~


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Like Christmas but better.

Posted on 27th January 2024 by admin

Opening a kiln is somewhat like Christmas but better.

There has been a great deal of anticipation and several weeks of work.  I started mould making in the autumn.  The pouring occurred as soon as the holiday ended, with over a week standing in the cold.  As there were several hundred very small items the rubbing down took about ten days, Then came the first firing.

The first firing in which items that could be squashed to dust between your fingers are magically changed to items that are hard and make a distinct chink if you drop them on the kiln shelf (rather than placing gingerly.)  All of this is like writing your list, checking it twice and doing a bit of shopping.

Then comes the wrapping, or in this case, glazing.  The only items I usually glaze are doll’s fingernails, and eyes.  Rarely shoes.  But in this case I was glazing hundreds of small items in numerous colours, some of them very experimental.  What will occur?

About thirty years ago a new couple appeared at a miniatures show, exhibiting bone china.  They had booked the show before they opened the kiln, because you have to book months ahead for popular shows.  After opening the kiln they must have discovered that the glaze they used was unsuitable for either the type of clay or the size of the ware.  What they had to exhibit was their first table full of miniature plates, every one of which had curved backwards, (and they had arranged publicity.)

That could happen to anyone.  I once interviewed someone who said every time she put the kiln on she prayed to the kiln gods.  I’m not surprised, the variables are vast.

All the stuff to do with kilns is variable.  Every brand of clay is different, every batch of clay from the same brand can vary.  I have just discovered that the brand of clear glaze I have used for thirty years has been discontinued.  Various online suppliers of glazes are keen to assure me that theirs is a good substitute.  Ah, but will it work in miniature?  If you ring to ask they will want to know the size of the unfired ware, when you answer in millimetres they go very quiet because they don’t know.

Add to this the interesting fact that every time you fire the kiln the electric elements degrade so you can add variable firing times to the mix, and multiply it by the kiln engineer who put my temperature dial on upside down and couldn’t get it off again, so that I have to guess and stand bent double working it out before I put the kiln on…

There’s a mantra – clockwise reversed is still clockwise and forward to increase is still forward but the values are reversed though the click to full on, is now the click off.  I mutter, trying to stand on my head in the garage.

Then there is the placing in the kiln.  Some brave souls stack items in other items.  When I worked on the magazines we frequently received humorous photographs of vases welded inside baths and stuck stacks.

I do not do that.  I place every item flat on the shelf surrounded by its own half millimetre of space so thoroughly I could almost sell Airbnb flats professionally.  Though as items shrink and move in the firing they could well end up more attached than a newly engaged couple on Valentine’s Day.

Like Christmas I just have no idea what I am going to get.  Not a clue.

The kiln has just gone off but you absolutely cannot peek.

Years ago I read a book about doll making in the Victorian era which painted a picture of Victorian child workers taking very hot items from a kiln and throwing them in a human chain.  This description, which got published in a book, was completely fanciful.  You could not do that because by the time the items had got out of the kiln into the air they would crack with thermal shock before they got thrown to the first child standing with hopeful oven gloves.  I had a doll making friend who opened his first kiln too soon.  He retrieved the still-warm dolls and laid them on a wooden board in great excitement, followed rapidly by despair and a series of tiny ‘chinks’ as each doll cracked between the eyes in the thinnest part of the face.

Just like Christmas you have to wait, you cannot open the presents too soon.

I will wait until tomorrow and then feel the kiln.  If it has cooled I  might take the bungs out and let the air in.  If it is still warm I will wait.  I won’t know what I’ve got until I can unpack it.  There are three and a half shelves and I will have to wait until the last shelf at the bottom is cool too, to avoid thermal shock.

It is still alarming, exciting and unfathomable.

The best thing about it, is that, when I open the kiln to see what I’ve got, it won’t be socks or bath salts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~


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A day off.

Posted on 21st January 2024 by admin

I’m late posting because I’ve been having a day off.  I don’t often do that, which is odd; in theory I’m retired but in practice I’m working more than ever.  I like to have a purpose or several purposes for each day and feel very satisfied if I have done all I set out to do in the day.  But today I’ve had a day off.

It’s because I’ve worked solidly for seven days, starting at nineish and finishing at night at elevenish and having a few breaks between.  That was after over a week of pouring, starting at nineish and finishing at half nineish at night because of the cold in the kitchen.

I worked until half eleven last night and stopped when the kiln was loaded and ready to go.  In the kiln are several hundred pieces of small porcelain items.

Today all I did was the washing machine twice.  The first with some ordinary clothes and all the dusty ones.  Porcelain, once poured, dried and retrieved from the mould, emerges with seam lines, lumpy bits, holes, imperfections and so on.  It then has to be gently rubbed until perfect.  I use old tights which are abrasive enough.  I wear a respirator, a headband, an apron, and very old trousers, top and ancient cardigan.  I work next to the Welsh dresser, which gets covered with bin bags.  I work on the dining table with three covers and sit on a covered chair, resting on a builder’s plastic waterproofing sheet.  All the dust rubbed off goes in a lined bin.  All the time I am working a battery ioniser is on.

Yet the dust gets everywhere.  Despite the headband when I fall into bed at night the dust falls out of my hair, my ears, my fingernails and coats the bed.

So today I cleaned, vacuumed, washed all surfaces and the floor and changed all the bedding.

Then I put the kiln on.

I was still working right up to the end last night because I realised some of the pieces might have air trapped in them.  Air trapped in a piece of porcelain would expand and explode, which you definitely don’t want, so last thing last night I was making holes in anything that might have a hollow in it, which was a lot of pieces.

Then I spent a few hours covering the shelves with kiln sand and carefully placing every piece of hundreds with a tiny border of space round it.

This morning I put the washing out and the kiln on, then I got on my exercise bike because for a week I’ve been getting up and sitting down, which as regular readers know, I consider to be dangerous activity, or lack of it.

And then I really stopped.

Tomorrow when I open the kiln I will know if there is success.  If there is I will spend a few days glazing the ware then there will be another firing.  If that is successful I’ll be on to china painting and firing again.

Then all I have to do is grit scrub my fingernails off, dry everything, match up the pieces, assemble and if that goes well, just dress and wig.

The thing about retirement is, I can’t imagine how I ever had time to work.

So, today, I had a day off.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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with a capital Erk!

Posted on 14th January 2024 by admin

What have we here?

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Looks like a lot of something.

Long term readers (hello, how is your year going so far?) will know exactly what this is.

It is my dining table, which is not small and regularly seats six but can do eight.  It could do more until the OH, who had watched a programme online about  rufty tufty woodworkers in the chillier bits of Canada, decided to copy them.  They were making a dining table by cutting down big trees, sawing them in half, fastening the results side by side with extremely large nails and then running a massive side-mounted circular saw over the top on a sledge.  I saw the film later.  They were laughing immoderately because they were not doing that to the soft pine dining table that was a wedding present from a dear aunt and uncle.

Long story short, the OH had to cut the end off the table and I only spoke to ask him to pass the salt for a week.  I make him sit at the cut end in front of the lift door, contiguous to the table leg, so that he has nowhere to put his knees.  This is kind of me, I feel.  I could make him sit underneath.

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Here we are sideways on, where the good people sit., those who have not destroyed the dining table that was a wedding present. This is nearly my entire collection of expanded polystyrene trays.  As you can see they are full of the results of pouring porcelain for well over a week, in the chilly kitchen in January, until, to confirm my feet were still attached to my ankles, it became necessary to look down.  Thank goodness for microwave hot water bottles.

But what is in the trays?  (I nearly wrote: I hear you cry.  I do not do this.  I have no idea what you are doing as you read.  You could be picking your nose and wiping it on the keyboard for all I know.  As far as I’m concerned, and going by the emails, you are very gracious.  I also know you are bright and highly intelligent.)

(Do intelligent people pick their noses or is this the province entirely of small, hankyless children and ne’er do wells on street corners?  Did Einstein pick his nose?  Maybe, he certainly wasn’t keen on brushing his hair; I’m saying brush, you would never have got a comb through that hair.)

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Readers with vast experience of my strange life will identify the contents of the nearest tray with little trouble.  These are the parts for a new 24th scale doll.  The keener sighted, or those who know how to zoom in, will note a torso with dropped shoulders and arms connecting below the shoulder.  Really crackers doll collectors will be thinking eighteenth century, and would not be wrong at that.

A couple of new dolls, a few porcelain computer keys, as you do, well, I do, but what is all the rest?

Apparently 400+ tiny bits of something.  Some are round, some are triangular.

A mystery!  We’re beginning the year with a mystery.  And I am not going to solve it for you until the summer, though there may be hints on the way.

I hope that will be very interesting for you, what it will be for me is work, with a capital erk.

Better get on. I anticipate a few weeks of sitting very still, getting very cold, concentrating, rubbing down, very carefully, before I can put the kiln on.

Erk!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Win. win–win, win.,

Posted on 5th January 2024 by admin

Few events in life are good in both directions.  Researching Marie Antionette again, trips in a tumbril, really bad both ways.  Political elections bad for most, good for a few for a limited time (a week, tops.)  Flooded towns – awful building up to the bit where the water comes under the door, terrible while it’s doing it and, although few things in life are perfect, perfectly awful in the aftermath.

However, I have just discovered a wonderful win, win situation, which makes you feel really good in both directions, is a level playing field for rich and skint, is anticipated with joy, can be improved with ease, increased at a lower cost and, upon cessation, makes you feel even better.

Can you guess what it is?  Can you see it on the trolley of life?  Can you point to it?  Give up?

I’m not going to tell you!

(Actually, yes, I am, or the next three column inches are going to look a bit sparse.)

Christmas decorations!

Oh yes it is!

They can be totally idiocentric and still be right.  You can make them out of gingerbread, toilet roll middles and sparkly paper, or get children to make them, or buy them in the kind of department store where a bloke in a uniform opens the door for you and however they look, they’re good.  You can go for cut-price in the supermarket and congratulate yourself on your thrift, or you can use the ones you’ve had since you bought your first house, or, even, inherited ones and they’d be OK.  I bought dies to make huge hinged baubles for the grandchildren to decorate that were well received, and they were just white cardboard.

Nothing is obligatory.  You do not have to have a tree but if you have a tree, you can have a real one with roots on, a fake one, plastic slot-together gold branches, a dozen bottle brush trees or no tree at all.

If you go full electricity melt down and fill the garden with lit shapes people will actually journey to see the result.  If you go minimalist and just fill a glass vase with glass balls, you’re zen and ahead of the crowd.

A week before the day, garden centres reduce all their decorations, the biggest are the biggest bargains.  Doesn’t matter what you buy, it cannot be wrong because every single decoration ever made is guaranteed to be utterly tasteless and still look great in situ.

Once it’s all up, whatever it is, all onlookers will declare themselves deeply satisfied, very happy, aware that Christmas is on the way and overjoyed in general.  People will turn off the big light in order to sit in the feeble glow of fairy lights to squint at the television because it makes them feel ‘Christmassy.’

Every extra sequin improves the emotion, until we are all bursting with joy.

Only one event can improve upon putting all the decorations up.

You’ve guessed it.

Taking them all down again.

When this occurs bystanders will pronounce themselves relieved, glad to get back to normal, even if they live in a lighthouse, and pleased that’s all over for another year.  Few life events give as much satisfaction as putting the Christmas decoration boxes back in the loft.  ‘Done!’ barely touches the sense of achievement, regardless of the truth that we’ll all be living on beans for the next three weeks.

And this of course, is the clue to the real joy of Christmas.  It’s the decorations.  You just cannot get them wrong.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Posted in The parrot has landed. | Tagged | Leave a comment

Seriously boring.

Posted on 3rd January 2024 by admin

Not me, I hope.  On further consideration that may not have been the best title ever for a blog posting.

The occupation which is causing serious boredom is tidying up.  Not just the putting it all in neat piles variety of tidying.  I am attempting the ‘what is at the bottom of this box?’ discovered by empirical research, variety of tidying.  Worse, everything which is excavated has to have a proper new home, preferably not this one.

Some git has, of late, or even, apparently, for a couple of years, just kept buying new boxes.  This is the same git that designed an entire craft room with one wall all cupboards in the mistaken and simplistic belief that this would be tidy.  There is nothing tidy about filling a cupboard with junk and then buying a big plastic box to put in front of the cupboard.  Worse, it was a stacking box.  Or four.

Then there were the giant trolleys on wheels.  Two of them about the size of a hospital trolley for people but with three, count them, three shelves, which turned out to be self-filling with junk so that now, as the cupboards and stack boxes in the box stacks were full, the junk could be wheelable.  Until, of course, the little castors gave up and their ankles broke.

There is no excuse for it anymore.  There is currently no reason to need to make cards to send twice a week.  I’ve just done the calendar for this year with a birthdays column down the side. Twenty-five birthdays.  That’s all.

It’s not even stuff for doll making.  I have enough stuff to make dolls for at least another twenty years.

I also must stop buying bits of fabric.  I have at least ten potential quilts in little pieces of fabric in a cupboard.  That has four boxes of overflow fabric.  Big boxes.

To use up all the papers to make memory books I’ll have to record every sneeze and every hooray of every family member for the next six years, at least.

Thank goodness for the craft section of the lockdown library.  I just hope crafty library users are as temporarily entranced by steampunk papers and moulds as I have been.  If they want to take them home, put them in a box and think about them for a few years that’s fine by me; there’s precedent for that.

Paper is so self-generating round here it does make you wonder about Hansard and all the other recordings of above-board government business in democracies round the world.  At least it isn’t in cuneiform on stone tablets.  A year-end clear out of hundreds of stone tablets must have been a nightmare.  I’m not surprised the Rosetta stone got broken, someone probably wanted five minutes off and a cup of tea.  I know I do.

I cleared one giant trolley and then restacked it with paper and card.  If I buy another packet of cards and matching envelopes, even at massive knockdown bargain prices, it’s proof positive of insanity.

The other giant trolley is clear.  I need it to be clear for doll dressing, during which activity everything comes out of the chest of drawers and gets put on the trolley in easy reach.

Some people buy stuff to use, use it, throw away anything they haven’t used and then buy more when they need it.  I do not know such people.  They may be apocryphal.

Did you watch the plesiosaur programme?  Digging a plesiosaur out of a cliff face where it has been neatly hidden for millions of years in order to have to make glass cases for all the bits, and, possibly, an entire new building for all the new glass cases, is what they did.  I’m not sure if this comforts me or worries me.

My mother had a saying ‘Never go up empty handed.’  This had nothing to do with acquiring virtue prior to one’s demise, sadly.  It was the desperate cry of a woman who threw the newspaper away, while you were still reading it, who had inadvertently married an antique collector.  From a very young age I had been trained to distract my mother while my father smuggled the latest antique shop find into the house.

My aunt, her eldest sister, was worse.  If you ate at her house, the last piece of your fish finger was still on your fork, when the plate had been washed, dried and put back on the Welsh dresser.  There was a hefty collection of Toby jugs, but they all lived on a picture rail, safely out of the way of being handled, admired or even looked at, if you were on the short side.

I look at the stack on the metal chest of drawers to my right.  Two boxes away from the ceiling.  I’m five foot one and still shrinking.  I could be found entombed like some cut-price Tutankhamen, but instead of gold beds with leopard feet, my anti-room will be stacked with boxes full of twelve inch scrapbook papers, so that the excavators will produce fanciful wall art of me hunting wild scrapbooks in the marshes, in a self-steering shopping trolley, armed only with a stapler and paper trimmer.

I really do understand why people found charitable foundations.  They probably do it because their own foundations are sinking under the weight of weight.

I am not a rich woman.  This is a blessing.  Can you imagine the amount of junk I could assemble if I had more money?

I still haven’t renovated the dolls’ house in the hall.  I need to fix the missing panel, do the lights and put the furniture back in.  Trouble is, I’ve moved on.  Unlike the house which is still there.

I like making things.

I may have put my finger on the problem there.

Creativity.  I had a friend who constantly complained that she was not creative like me.  She had a tidy house.  We fell out, having little in common.

My grandmother was creative.  She knitted so well and so constantly people were glad to receive the things she made and gave to them.  I still own entire sets of doll clothes she knitted, which reside in the loft.  That’s the first full loft that came with the house.  Not the second loft that I designed to house the show display overflow.  It’s about a foot above the tall pile of stuff up the wall in the craft room.

I like writing.

Currently I prefer writing to tidying up.

I have cleared the stuff off the bed.  Half the bedroom is nearly clear.  Apart from the books, of course.  The books have begun to migrate to the windowsills.  Only because the book stacks had become dangerous.

I have vegetable trolleys (much smaller, and weaker) full of books I started writing.  There’s a time-travel novel that I started writing about fifteen years ago.  When I work out how to save the main character convincingly and get down to writing it again, the book itself will have time-travelled and all the topical references will need updating.  Did HG Wells have this problem?  I should pop on my exercise bike and ask.

And we have two sheds.

Mine is relatively empty.  Just a table, a chair, a metal cabinet of tiny drawers and a broom, an extension lead and a marquetry picture made by my father which the OH promised long ago to turn into a table.  That was, of course before the floor of his shed collapsed, being damp, under the weight of junk.

Back to the tidying, motivated.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Let us now praise famous men…

Posted on 30th December 2023 by admin

Though not all of them.  Fame is a tricky monkey, it can turn on famous people and claw them so badly that you cannot see them ever again without the scars.  It can lean down from the lofty heights it inhabits and peck the famous so full of holes that they become insubstantial and blow away on the breeze.  The murmurings of its silken susurrations can slide people into poisonous acts with ease.

There are a few, very few who have walked the tightrope and never for a moment wobbled because their eyes are not fixed on the fame, they ignore the fame because they have a purpose to which they hold no matter where the fame takes them.

Earlier this year the OH and I went to see the Gaia exhibition at Stowe school.

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This remarkable artwork by Luke Jerram is a balloon 7 metres round the equator covered in photographs taken by NASA.  It is almost 2 million times smaller than the real thing but revolves suspended by a gantry.

We went during the week in the daytime, other visitors were therefore mostly retired people like us.  Visitors were clearly moved by the display, took photographs and talked very quietly.  Everyone I overheard was praising the exhibit but instantly following the praise up with a comment on how we need to take care of the Earth.  Our group followed a group of junior schoolchildren, who, interestingly, emerged from the room saying very similar things.

Gaia, the exhibition, is touring the world, if you get the chance it is worth going to see.  In my opinion this is art doing the job it is meant to do.  I think it would be difficult to see this for yourself and not be moved.  You may have the same feelings as we did.

I was a child in the 1950s.  In the first house I remember well, there was a rifle in the downstairs coat cupboard in the hall, just leaning against the wall.  On the floor of the lounge was Bertie Adams.  Bertie Adams was a leopard skin rug complete with stuffed head in a fierce expression and a red suede tongue, which I think was probably Bertie Adams’ own tongue.  He was called Bertie Adams because I proved to be quick with language from a very young age.  One day my father tripped over the head and started to swear.. ‘Oh that damn..’ and then, aware of my big and interested toddler ears.. ‘Bertie Adams.’  I loved Bertie Adams and was sad when my father opened his retirement antique shop and sold Bertie Adams (to people who weren’t even his family. And probably didn’t stroke his nose or talk to him much, if at all.)

In the next house my father was delighted to collect a set of The Boys’ Own Paper Annuals.  These were the epitome of his very Edwardian boyhood (despite him being born in 1919) that held the Great White Hunter as the very summit of manhood and extreme bravery, with guns, in sourceless crocodile infested rivers, or against enormous beasts of one kind or another on endless plains, as the archetype of What A Man Should Be.

There were miniature Indian pictures painted on ivory, there was scrimshaw on walrus teeth, there was quite a lot of snakeskin. I grew up with collected items almost in direct line from the seventeenth century gentlemen collectors who were the first in the western world to have cabinets made with many drawers to house their wonderful treasures and withdraw them to display to other gentlemen collectors after dinner.

If you are reading this now, I’m willing to bet you would not be happy to show a drawerful of parts of rare dead animals to friends, which you might well have been delighted to do just sixty years ago.

What, or rather who, changed your mind?

Another regular feature of the 1950s for me was staying with my grandmother overnight and going to Church on Sunday with her.  Sometimes when I was staying we watched a wonderful programme called Zoo Quest.  In this, a glamorous and gangling young man lolloped around a variety of tropical beaches and far flung places gathering, alive, a variety of animals to transport back to London Zoo, via the studio, where they could be discussed and admired and salient points about the nature of the beast and its lifestyle could be made.  From the first programmes my grandmother and I watched, the utter enchantment of the young presenter with his captives was apparent.  His rapport with his subjects was as impressive as his knowledge, he had clearly done his homework.  Interestingly the animals always seemed to know that he was on their side, they obviously loved him, and so did we.  The name of the young presenter was David Attenborough.

By the Sixties collecting for zoos, and indeed zoos themselves were no longer looked upon in the same way.  The young presenter had such success he vanished behind the scenes, becoming controller of BBC Two, in the process rescuing it from a trajectory straight into boredom with some very interesting programming.  He commissioned Monty Python’s Flying Circus and deserves a medal for that alone, in my opinion.  He didn’t stay long behind the scenes, he is probably the most well travelled natural history presenter on the planet, in the course of it all collecting 32 honorary degrees.

He is one of the most famous people you’ll ever know, known in many countries round the world.  His Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Life on Earth and numerous natural history programmes showing us, teaching us, educating us and entertaining us for seven decades.  If you put his name in any search engine you will find pages and pages about him.  If you put his name into the books search engine of the Big River retailer you will find almost as many books about him as by him.

One of the most famous people on the planet, is David Attenborough and he has never put a foot wrong.  He hasn’t just been in tune with changing times, he has changed them.  My grandchildren would be as deeply unhappy with a rifle in the cloakroom as they are with any animal who isn’t alive and perky and where nature intended it to be.  He has changed attitudes in a complete volte face in three generations in my family.  What changes has he wrought in the way you think?

The OH and I finished watching the latest amazing tour de force in the shape of Planet Earth 3, as always fascinated, uplifted and educated, and I wondered if anyone had bothered to say ‘thank you’.  I know he has honours and titles and fans and followers, but does anyone ever say ‘thank you’?

When I was writing for hobby magazines, there was a saying, ‘Jane will do it.’  If you are good at something an expectation grows that you will be better next time and that you can always deliver.  No body ever thanked me, they just waited to see what I’d do next.

So I wrote to David Attenborough.  I wrote an old fashioned hand written letter just to say thank you.  I thanked him for all those years of never being boring (I don’t think he knows how.)  I thanked him for never straying from the principles on which the BBC was founded, to educate, entertain and inform.  I thanked him for the changes in my life and in the attitudes of those around me that he had made by putting in the work, doing the homework, keeping up standards and never deviating from his purpose.

I posted my letter a fortnight before Christmas and thought that was it.

And then

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he wrote back!

I was surprised but I should not have been.  I am not going to publish the letter here, it was from him to me.  I will tell you he thanked me for writing and was delighted I had enjoyed his work.

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Let us now praise famous men.  I did because just being famous doesn’t mean necessarily that anyone bothers to say thank you.  I do thank him.  I can’t imagine people would have left the Gaia exhibition saying what they did if it hadn’t been for him.

It’s not just me, of course.  I think the entire planet thanks him, including all the species named after him.  If we manage to turn the destruction of the planet around in time to save many species and habitats on the edge it will be due in no small part to his efforts.

What a wonderful thing to do with your life!  To be so enchanted with the wonderful world and all in nature that is on it that that you wish to save it and can communicate your desire so well that everyone else thinks that’s a good idea too.

I am very glad to have been alive during the time that David Attenborough has been broadcasting, writing, talking, directing, controlling, educating and entertaining. I consider myself to be the very grateful beneficiary of his thought processes and as he has lovely manners too I’m glad I wrote to say thank you.

And he has never, ever been boring.  How on earth do you manage that?  I don’t know, we’ll all have to watch and learn.

Next up on the BBC 8pm January 1st: Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster.  And it’s real.  The chap hasn’t the faintest idea of how to be boring, not a clue.

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A trip in an ambulance.

Posted on 16th December 2023 by admin

It was almost inevitable.  Thursday before last I had a telephone consultation with the surgeon who removed eight inches of small intestine and three hours worth of scar tissue, eighteen months ago.  I told him I was wonderful, better than I had been for ages.  I practically set myself up, I should listen to myself, I really should.

Therefore I was not all that surprised a week later to be riding into hospital in an ambulance wired up to assorted machines.

Fate has Big Ears (Noddy will not pay the ransom.)  Sounding off about how well I was!  Have I learned nothing (apparently not)?

It began, I thought, the previous Saturday. (Just a day and a half after I was bragging about how well I was.)  The OH, having joined three archery societies but fallen out with two of them, we were off to the Christmas dinner of the one he still likes.  On the way he was doing boy racer on the big roundabout.  A car coming in from the left, unprepared for the OH’s car looming at speed out of the mist, nearly ran into the side of us, specifically the side I was sitting on.  I thought I was having a heart attack but gave myself a talking to and by the time we got out to the village where the restaurant was, I was OK.  The OH parked in the pub car park, so to be valid customers we went in and had a drink, then crossed the road to the restaurant.  We were seated at a large round table with various archers, had a nice meal and assorted chat and then left so the OH could make his way to another pub having dropped me at home.

By the Tuesday I was beginning to feel a bit off.  I had stomach ache, going through to my back and wondered if my intestines were playing up.  Resorting to the usual remedy I stopped eating to let them rest but felt worse.  The following day, it being bin day, I just did a lot of gardening to clear up the garden, mostly the wisteria leaves and the remnants of the squash, easily filling the green bin and thinking as always what a blessing green bins are and how very superior to trekking to the dump with soggy bags.

Thursday morning I was going to have a little lie in because I wasn’t feeling very well at all.  That desire was foiled by the OH, up uncharacteristically early, bursting in to my bedroom shouting ‘The central heating isn’t working and there’s no hot water.  You know how to do this!’  There followed quite a bit of running round a cold house in my pyjamas but I eventually got the boiler working and phoned the plumber to book a service in the new year.  By this time I was aware I had chest pains and was feeling very not well.

Arrived downstairs, I made myself a cup of tea, emptied the dishwasher, opened the curtains and generally got things started.  The OH came down. asked what was wrong and suggested I ring the doctor even though it was going to be difficult because I didn’t have the app.  An app!  When did you have to have an app to get a doctor?  And how was appless I supposed to do so?  I rang the surgery and by waiting and pressing various numbers on the phone was able to speak to a receptionist.  I said I wished to speak to a doctor when convenient as I had chest pains.  She immediately said that I must hang up and call an ambulance.  I didn’t, of course.  I rang the NHS consultation line on 111 and after about quarter of an hour of Q & A they said they were sending an ambulance, no arguing.  Ten minutes later it arrived.

Which is how about half an hour later after giving instruction to the OH on how to post the parcel, silver service, with the Christmas present to a friend that was ready on the table and running around upstairs assembling a bag in case I was kept in overnight for the OH to bring in the eventuality, I was sitting in an ambulance partially dressed  but wired up.

You can say what you like about the NHS, and many people do, but on this occasion they were fast.  I was round the back of the hospital decanted, walked to the ward, in a room and hooked up to an ECG machine before you could say heart attack, which, by the way, I never at any juncture thought I was having.  I didn’t have arm pains, or jaw ache, just a very sharp pain right in the middle of my chest. I was there all day.  I was Xrayed, blood tested, prodded, (‘What a scar!  Good gracious, you don’t often see them that long!  You have had bowel surgery and no  mistake!’) history taken and everything else.  There was even a nice young man, waiting with his girlfriend (yes some people accompany their families to hospital, that must be nice) who gave up his seat for me, when I came back from Xray (‘Oh I say, Mrs. Laverick, that’s a really impressive amount of metal you have in your arm, my goodness you don’t see that every day!’) and there were no seats.

By the time I got to see the consultant, who listened to my chest and the artery in my neck, the pain had resolved itself into two pains at the top of my lungs, that fortunately only hurt when I breathed.  So I was not that surprised to be told I had something wrong with my lungs which was pleurisy but was surprised to be told there are five different viral varieties going around currently. I was given a prescription which I collected, eventually, from the pharmacy at half past five.

As there was building work going on it was impossible to wait for the OH in the dry so I stood on the drive and rang and twenty minutes later was home, even though we only live five minutes from the hospital because there was a traffic queue so the OH went the pretty way.  At home having had nothing to eat or drink all day I put the kettle on and the OH was quite glad of a cup of tea, if I was making one.

The following day he had to return to the restaurant because they had got the bill wrong, so while he was there he collected a take out and I had half of that yesterday evening.  I’m still off my grub, and only able to sleep sitting up but I am so glad it was nothing worse.  I would have to say I didn’t know people were getting pleurisy these days, it sounds very 1940s to me.  The OH says that if it is viral, antibiotics are useless, which is true but not very comforting.  The OH declares himself quite upset and not feeling well after all the palaver of waiting at home in the warm for a phone call to see if I had died or not (I had not.  I rang him and told him halfway through the afternoon.)

I am so glad just to have pleurisy.  I’ll have a few days getting up at nine and not working out until the pain has gone away.  And despite not having the app, the NHS did the job when I needed them, how do I like them appless?  Quite a lot, as I turns out.

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A bit of a squash.

Posted on 10th December 2023 by admin

Being vegetarian, mostly, and a gardener, I am always delighted when I can grow my own food successfully.  I particularly like free food from free seeds, especially if I have eaten the rest of the item that provided the seeds.  Long time readers may recall the triffid tomato that grew up the house and knocked on the bedroom window, which was from a free seed.

This year it was a butternut squash.  I don’t do anything clever to cook a butternut squash, four minutes in the microwave will do, cooked with a sprinkling of tap water, served in a bowl and eaten with a fork.  It was about June before I noticed the seeds, cracked the tough outer layer and put them in a container of water in the sun room.  A couple germinated and were planted in little pots in seed compost and then out in the garden under the wisteria.

And then they went nuts.

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They grew at speed out of the flower bed and onto the lawn.  To the top left of the photo you can see the step that leads to the side passage and the back door.

They went exploring up there with such vigour I was half expecting them to knock at the door and come in for a cup of tea.

They had huge flowers.

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These were so spectacular I photographed them in case they would do as paintings for fairy backgrounds.

In theory every flower produces a squash from the centre.  Some did but the tiny squashes, more like squishes, little pale yellow fingers, just disappeared.  I began to suspect that I was sharing the squashes, and sprinkled some humane slug pellets around.  More little squishes appeared and disappeared.  Do we have mice?  Do mice like little squishes?  Had the magpies mistaken a squish for a finger?  Had next door’s cat gone soft and squishy?

The plant grew and grew, I almost had to open the gate so it could go in the front garden.

Along came the Min and I neglected my squash.  Then the squash was squashed by the first frost.  It went all sad and flat.

I decided the time was ripe for the harvest.  I searched among the frost scorched leaves for a squash.  Just one was left.  One whole entire butternut squash grown by me for free.  Here it is, are you ready?

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I am a gardener and a miniaturist.  Sometimes it’s one, sometimes the other and, occasionally, both.

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Posted in The parrot has landed. | Tagged | Leave a comment