dovegreyreader scribbles

Oamaru, Steampunk, Bookbinding and the Best Bookshop in the World

As we drove into the coastal town of Oamaru on a sweltering South Island Sunday afternoon my first impressions were of a rather prim, nay immaculate place. The wide streets (something I loved about New Zealand) every house pristine and clean with a well-manicured garden...no there'd be nothing out of the ordinary here.

Except then I discover that Oamaru is the Steampunk capital of the world.

Now I know nothing about Steam Punk beyond the fact that it featured in the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, and seemed to consist of odd-looking bits of scrap metal and vaguely familiar chunks of machinery welded into an unfamiliar whole.

I've had to look it up...

Steampunk has always been first and foremost a literary genre, or least a subgenre of science fiction and fantasy that includes social or technological aspects of the 19th century (the steam) usually with some deconstruction of, reimagining of, or rebellion against parts of it (the punk)...

There's a lot of gothic-type action going on at Steampunk HQ ...



The more I looked the more complicated and uncertain it all became.

I'm not sure Steampunk really knows exactly what Steampunk actually is, there seem to be as many different genres as definitions, but I loved the quirkiness and the way it had dispelled my early assumptions about Oamaru, and I especially liked The Portal which has to be the most mind-boggling cupboard I have ever stood in...not that I've stood in that many.


All a trick of mirrors and lights but this was infinity and then some, and quite beyond the mind's eye to comprehend..

whilst the drop seemed precipitous but was actually non-existent...

Brain still slightly discombobulated from The Portal we fell into the most soothing and memorable place...

Now I've been in a lot of bookshops in my time, and having said I was a bit disappointed by the book shops that I came across in New Zealand here was an exception. I am not sure I have ever met a more genial and welcoming bookseller than Bill, whose shop Adventure Books specialises in second-hand books on travel, mountaineering, exploration, Antarctica and Polar anything, nautical, natural history and true adventure. Well that was the next hour accounted for...


Do you know of Robert Macfarlane's books I asked Bill...

'Oh I'm a huge fan,' he replied before heading to the shelf and finding a copy of Mountains of the Mind...

I don't often do it but I just couldn't stop myself saying 'I've interviewed him...' 

'You know Robert Macfarlane?' said Bill incredulously...

'Well sort of,' I said and recounted that wonderful session at Port Eliot Festival a few years ago.

And looking back I think it is safe to say we are huge Robert Macfarlane fans here too and  here, and here, and here, and here, oh yes and here, and here, and goodness me, more here and not forgetting here. I think this might actually constitute some form of blogstalking of an author.

It's fair to say that Bill is something of an expert on all things Antarctica. He has visited several times and now given a home in his shop to this...

It is a replica of the James Caird, made for the film Shackleton's Captain, about Frank Worsley and the heroic rescue voyage after the ship Endeavour had been trapped and crushed by ice in 1916. Leaving twenty-two behind on the ice four men sailed 800 miles in sixteen days in the original boat before reaching South Georgia, where they then trekked for thirty-six hours to a Norwegian whaling station to raise the alarm. It was three more months before those left behind could be rescued and by some miracle all were still alive.

By now I am slightly overwhelmed by Oamaru, so full of surprises has it been, to say nothing of the choice and range of books in Bill's shop, and so cheered by meeting such a lovely man, but if only I could find something on bookbinding for Bookhound, who is loving his class and his new craft and making very nice things indeed, more of which soon..




So I couldn't quite believe my eyes as we stepped out of Adventure Books and saw this right opposite..



I mean tell me...when do you EVER see a sign like that, an actual bookbinder with a shop.

Sadly the shop was closed and no sign of Michael O'Brien, but that didn't stop us peering in the window and winging the pics across to home as we stood there...



And if Bookhound had been with me I have no doubt he would have been beating the door down and applying for this...



But actually none of this, exciting though it may be, was the real reason for visiting Oamaru.

I was there to visit the house of a writer I love...

Time to go and find 56 Eden Street... 

Meanwhile perhaps someone can explain steampunk...

 

 

 

In a Fishbone Church ~ Catherine Chidgey

Just so that you know all is well, here are the pair of them, Magnus back in his Red Basket, and catching up on sixteen day's worth of news..

And now a book...

Before I went to New Zealand I checked out some authors I would like to read and complied a list of books I might find while I was out there.

Well now, I got that all wrong. The books were incredibly expensive and I only came across a couple of independent bookshops. Plenty of UK and US authors but the NZ authors seemed a little sparse. Perhaps one of the best bookshops was that located within the university in Christchurch, and the fact that there was a 4.5 earthquake as I approached the counter with a heavy volume of New Zealand short stories should all have been a warning about the overweight luggage fiasco ahead.

In fact probably a good thing that I didn't find too many bookshops now I think about it.

Catherine Chidgey had been one of the authors I had hoped to find but didn't so I ordered a copy of In a Fishbone Church, published in 1999, as soon as I arrived home, just to keep the memories going.

"When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard. But Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. In a Fishbone Church tells the story of three generations of the Stilton family, woven together with brilliance and subtlety, spanning continents and decades. From the Berlin rave scene to the Canterbury duck season, from the rural 1950's to the cosmopolitan present, five vivid lives cohere in a deeply affecting and exhilirating novel."

Clifford, a butcher, has died and his effects are being shared around the family. No one wants the diaries so they are foisted on son Gene by his sisters Beryl and Cornelian (Clifford is big on fossils). For some reason, the diary for 1955 has been lost and though whilst Gene will never know its contents Catherine Chidgey shares them subversively with the reader throughout the book.

As well as fossils, there's been a lot of hunting, shooting and fishing in Clifford's life in Christchurch and when Gene decides, after his father's death and his own retirement, to write a survival guide, it is clear that life growing up with his father has equipped Gene well for his project...

'Most of us think of meat when we think of food, and New Zealand is certainly one of he best places to be stranded. Indeed, when we consider that, in a survival situation, protected or endangered species become fair game, I am sure many sportsmen would choose to go missing for a few days! But even if you have never hunted before, animals should always be your first avenue of nutrition. And who knows you may wish to pursue this hobby once you are safely back in the civilized world.'

and Catherine Chidgey cleverly intersperses Gene's writing with the actual moments in his early life with his father.

The gap between what really happened and how Gene recounts it is at times very funny indeed, and also deeply poignant.

Bookhound and the Gamekeeper would have loved the hunting, shooting and fishing stores and the clothes, in fact, another reason for the overweight luggage was the purchase of a coat for Bookhound that was just too perfect to leave behind. The Kiwis don't seem to be in the least bit squeamish or shy about their hunting, an attitude I actually find quite honest and refreshing.

 

Witness the fence of wild boar pelts we saw along the Otago bike trail.

Imagine the uproar in Devon.

There would be letters of outrage to the papers, and talk of germs and disease and psychologically damaged children.

Clifford seems to have been unapologetic about it all too, and likewise about the extra women in his life as revealed by the 1955 volume of his diary along with the state of his bowels and his pulse rate. He was nothing if not meticulous and thorough in his recording.

Themes of family and secrets and concealment emerge, and how the past creeps up on the present as the narrative flits back and forth in time but to Catherine Chidgey's credit never loses track of itself.

And also detectable, that defining and memorable moment that many of us may have experienced when you are less the child of your parent and more their parent. I think that will make sense if it has happened to you. The family is slowly redefined, tensions emerge, behaviours are explained and Clifford's diary refuses to be silenced, becoming a form of chorus, a commentary as Gene's own life draws to a close.

There is much wry humour here too and I loved all the references to little New Zealand moments...

The tea towel with all the birds of New Zealand (yes I have one)

Visiting the nocturnal Kiwis (the birds) in the dark, here's my picture of one...


No, I can't see it either.

And I loved the unique references to New Zealand things...

Jandals (flip flops)

Togs (swimming costume)

Chilly Bin (the cool box) 

Louis de Bernieres is not wrong with his quote on the cover of my edition of In a Fishbone Church..

'This book is warm, subtle and evocative. You will be thinking about it long after you have finished reading.'

A very good book and going up on the shelf with the Special Books. 

If you have read it I would love to know your thoughts.. 

And any other New Zealand authors to look out for. I have a list but there must be plenty more.

 

 

 

 

You'll never believe this....

We woke up this morning and there was Magnus...as if nothing had happened...

Starving hungry, but loooooook...

The Dowager who was starting to fade, and barely eating, greeted him like a long lost friend and tucked into the bowl with him.

I knew it, the minute I wrote a blog post...

 

Posted on the move...

Magnus cuiribh tighinn dhachaigh...

That's a high-risk and probably doubtful Scottish Gaelic online translation for Magnus please come home.

Now I'm purposely not calling this sad news, because though we live in hope more than expectation, maybe just maybe that darned cat will stroll back in the door, but to date no sign of Magnus for over two weeks now.

And my hope is that writing this and telling you all will be his cue to fly back in through the cat flap as if nothing had happened.

Maybe it was because his horse didn't win the Grand National (he had one in the traditional family sweepstake)...

Or maybe he was bored with the menu...

Or perhaps that 10% of feral overwhelmed the 90% domesticated that has seen him glued to his windowsill basket day in day out all winter...

Maybe after four years with us, and that chance finding of a tiny kitten out on the lane, he has decided to go and live somewhere else...

But anyway, Magnus has vanished.

We have walked miles and miles every day, calling him and hoping to hear that little miaow. My paces on the Fitbit are off the scale.

We have phoned all the vets and the local rescue centres...

Contacted the neighbours and put the word out locally...

Searched empty barns and sheds...

Gone back and searched them again to no avail.

And now we have put him on the Cat's Protection League Missing Cats register and mobilised all the local Pet Patrollers who keep an eye out.

But maybe, just maybe he's doing a Six Dinner Sid somewhere.

Meanwhile we nurse the Dowager, our last remaining cat, into her twenty-second year and know she is in her twilight days. The vet was very impressed with her overall condition, and the student stayed on late just to see what an ancient cat looked like, but she has started on Metacam for her dear old joints and has been stone-deaf for years now. While she is settled and eating and still creeping out of the cat flap for a wander round the garden we carry on...

For Magnus, I don't want to think about any other options like close encounters with foxes or shotguns or poison, but it's country life, it happens. So whilst I remain firmly in denial if anyone has any wonderful tales of cats miraculously returning home after a prolonged absence please do share.

They wring you out don't they, bless the little critters.

Feather canyons everywhere...

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way...

Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now from the album Clouds and I expect you are all humming it now and might be all day...sorry.

One of the many joys of New Zealand was to be there for myself and see the Long White Clouds for which the Land is famous, and there were plenty of them to choose from...

This one as we crossed the Canterbury Plain from Arthur's Pass...

..or this little wispy one over Mount Cook.

So I decided to take more notice of nice clouds when I got home. It's been a wonderful week for them here in the Shire and Bookhound and I happen to have been out and about and noticing them.

This one at coffee time in the garden...



and then traversing Dartmoor one day for lunch with friends I had to keep insisting on a photo stop for some cloud appreciation.

And this rather unusual happening over on the horizon, maybe it was raining, or sucking up frogs or something.

Kit Hill and Cornwall from the garden also did something unusual in the cloud department, like a blanket.

And this week's sunset walks have been very cloud-productive..

The question is should I now read Gavin Pretor-Pinney's book The Cloud Spotter's Guide...

The clouds are nature's poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone has an equally fantastic view of them. Clouds are for dreamers, and their contemplation benefits the soul. Yet their beauty is so everyday as to be in danger of being overlooked ...'

Gavin Pretor Pinney is the chairman and founder member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. He contends that we are blessed in this country with a uniquely rich and varied cloudscape, which has hitherto been sadly undervalued. His book teaches us to appreciate their different varieties - the cumulus, nimbostratus and Morning Glory to name only a few - and all their beauties and significances, both meteorological and cultural. We learn how Hindus believed the cumulus clouds were the spiritual cousins of elephants, how thermal air currents act on fair weather cumuli, and how to save a fortune in psychiatric bills by using the clouds as Rorschach images that reflect our state of mind as well as nature's moods.

I think so, it's on its way.

Tithe Mapping

It all began with Beating the Bounds, my project on here to look closely at everything within a one-mile radius of home. We have lived here for twenty-two years now so we're getting to know the land well and then along came my obsession with the 1841 tithe map and an interest in what are known as the apportionments which have continued unabated. 

Fortunately for my purposes, our Parish has what is deemed a First Class Tithe Map. I have discovered that those considered 'sufficiently accurate to serve as legal evidence of boundaries' were marked with a seal of approval before being signed off by two of the three commissioners appointed by the government, in this case William Blamire, a Cumberland farmer and Capt T. Wentworth Buller.

All the documents in Devon at least are now digitised and availably online since my first foray into the tangled bowels of the microfiche and the machine for reading them at the local library, which all makes it a lot easier. I can sit at home with a magnifying glass on the screen trying to decipher the field numbers, which in turn can be referenced against the hand-written lists from the 1840s to give me the names of the fields. 

I have this desperate urge to ensure that somehow the names of the fields aren't buried under the weight of modern-day farming around us here.

More and more of the land in our immediate vicinity, once tenant-farmed on long leases, is now sub-let to contractors who move in, plough, sow and reap on an industrial scale and then disappear off until the next cycle begins. We used to know all the farmers by name, now we don't.

It all looks fine, and a good thing that the land is being used, but the machinery is huge, far bigger than was ever intended for our narrow lanes and gateways, so we watch and weep as they whip stems off our hedge and demolish those ancient gateways, fracture the granite posts that must have been in place since time immemorial and leave the broken debris for the brambles and hedgerows to swallow. We might see the occasional agronomist eyeing up progress but apart from that no one seems to know and tend the land in the way that past generations must have done, or care about it and maintain the fabric of its existence.

It's change and modernisation and progress of sorts, that I know, but it seems sad all the same.

The field names are so special. Our house, once two farm cottages, is built on Outer Down, to the west is Middle Down and beyond that Homer Down. We walk up to the woods across Coombe Park and Great Field, into Lane Field and then across Tuell Field to check our spring water supply. Tuell a derivative of Two Wells and we benefit from one of them.

We look for the traces of Lower and Higher Parson Darts; smaller fields long since absorbed into Tuell Field and we wonder about the name. 

Did it provide a little short cut for the local vicar...or maybe the Parsons family?

It brings us to the edge of what we know as Berry Wood...

..but in 1841 it was Barn Park Plantation and consisted of fir trees. The field behind it is Barn Park and alongside is Barn Park Meadow, further to the west is a field called Berry, everything makes sense eventually. Now it is mixed deciduous woodland carpeted with bluebells, and we have been told, by a farmer in the village who would know, that it was an old anthrax wood, a place to bury the dead animals. When did it all change we wonder.

Walking back down the green lane that runs alongside the fields we look for old gateways because part of the lane's ancient purpose has been explained by the tithe map.

Different fields belonged to different farms and the only access, without crossing someone else's land, would have been via this narrow track. It has sadly been discovered by the off-roaders who come armed with chain saws and winches to deal with any trees that may block their way. The council inform us that it is still classified as a metalled road and thus vehicular access is permitted, though criminal damage is not. Horse and carts back in the day maybe, but surely not a 4x4 with bull bars.

And so my quilted tithe map project has finally emerged from all this walking and discovering and watching along with a sense that it should all be recorded before it is too late.

Thus far I am working on the first of what I think may be one of many; what I consider to be an apprentice piece,a bit of an experiment in method and process and this my template, a first copy from the library microfiche.

I am experimenting with fusible interfacing and a variety of patterned fabrics at the moment. Suddenly I am looking through my stash for fabrics that look like grass, or ploughed fields, or stones.

We know there were a lot of orchards around us here, and meadows which would almost certainly have grown their share of wildflowers so I am having fun with some flowery fabrics too, and the plan is to edge around each field with a very narrow bias strip to represent the hedges, using something a bit wider for the lane.

I've been getting my eye in on that score with this gift for a friend's birthday...



God bless the person who invented fusible bias-maker, I love you. No more unravelling bias and pins everywhere.

I wonder whether you are seeing the landscape changing around your way too...

The old ways disappearing ('twas ever thus)...

And does anyone have any more hints and tips about finding out about things like long-deserted and now derelict properties and who may have lived there...

I get so far with Parish Records and Census Returns and then come across paywalls when I'm sure a lot of this used to be free.

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday to...

...Her Majesty the Queen, ninety years-old today and born just a few weeks before my mum in 1926.



I'm not seeking Royal favour or anything but, whether Royalist or not, I think it is a day worth celebrating because goodness me, hasn't Queen Elizabeth II done a good job, and the press coverage of her life last weekend was fascinating.

Tonight, maybe instead of candles on a cake, the Queen will light the first in a chain of 1000 beacons around the country and we are hoping to see one on Kit Hill, the highest point in Cornwall.

"There is a long and unbroken tradition in our country of celebrating Royal jubilees, weddings, coronations and special birthdays with the lighting of beacons - on top of mountains, churches and castle battlements, on town and village greens, farms, country parks and estates, and along the beaches surrounding our shores."

In fact, maybe we'll have a beacon of our own in the garden, we have the means and no neighbours to annoy with the smoke and then anyone standing at the top of Kit Hill can look across and enjoy ours as well. It's a plan.

We've never met the Queen. I think the nearest Bookhound and I managed was a wave at the car during a Silver Jubilee visit to Plymouth in the 1970s, but I'll bet some of you have met the Queen...

Hands up...

Where and when...

Impressions...

The Silk Roads - A New History of the World ~ Peter Frankopan

Having finished The Button Box by Lynn Knight I was in need of a good new non-fiction reading project to dive into.

It could be anything as long as it was new and a bit different, and having read From East End to Land's End (thoughts coming soon) with its history of Judaism, and realising that the gaps in my historical knowledge were, despite all this reading, still like yawning chasms, well I was up for tackling something hefty but readable.

A book that would give me plenty of Did You Know moments at the breakfast table and a book that would leave me feeling that I had learned new things, maybe even experienced a shift in long-held assumptions, that's what I needed.

What about a book that might even shift the axis of my perceptions about the world.

I had been eyeing up The Silk Roads - A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan for a while. This from the publisher's (Bloomsbury) website...

For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west – in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of adventure and riches. The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture – and is shaping the modern world.

This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root. The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease and death. This was where empires were won – and where they were lost. As a new era emerges, the patterns of exchange are mirroring those that have criss-crossed Asia for millennia. The Silk Roads are rising again.

A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is an important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east. 

 

The reviews had been ecstatic verging on stellar...

“Brilliant and fearlessly wide-ranging … undaunted by the complexity of the material, and the scale of the subject he has taken on, Frankopan marches briskly through the centuries, disguising his erudition with an enviable lightness of touch, enlivening his narrative with a beautifully constructed web of anecdotes and insights, backed up by an impressively wide-ranging scholarly apparatus of footnotes drawing on works in multiple languages … This is history on a grand scale, with a sweep and ambition that is rare … a remarkable book on many levels, a proper historical epic of dazzling range and achievement” –  William Dalrymple, Books of the Year, Guardian 

 

Firstly we must talk about the book as object because they come no more beautiful than this one. If you have seen it on the shelves I can imagine I wasn't alone in coveting...

And that little shrug of a dust jacket which I have removed rather than rip but which reveals the sumptuous design that lies beneath.

I'm ready for the off and so I embark but with some trepidation. I mean World History, where on earth do you start.

Fortunately, Peter Frankopan knows exactly where to start; 2000 years ago when globalisation was nothing new, Persia and China were bursting with opportunities and with them the problems and technical advances that accompany those opportunities. Meanwhile, Rome was also in the ascendant and silk, as well as being a luxury product, was a reliable currency.

Before I knew it I was in.

Now many of you will be experts on all this, for many I expect it is a specialist subject, but imagine coming to it as an almost blank sheet with the occasional cursory line filled in now and again, well that's me.

At page sixty-three I stop and write in my notebook...

'Big surprise, I am really enjoying this...'

Slowly the religious faiths are emerging; Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and to my surprise they seem able to live in relative harmony. There exists cooperation and mutual respect, a 'cohabitation of the faiths,' The Moslem world is scholarly and inquisitive with a thirst for knowledge, whilst in stark contrast Europe is a gloomy black hole, backward and constrained by Christianity in any attempts at progress.

'I'm dangerous when I get my hands on a bit of history,' I note, and by now, having safely traversed the book as far as the twelfth century proceed to the breakfast table with the startling news that actually I have realised that Game of Thrones is not that far wide of the mark for realism, it just has added dragons, and that the Mongol hordes (surely the Dothraki) under the leadership of Genghis Khan (has to be Kahl Drogo) were actually far from being the barbarians I had always assumed. 

I've glossed over the Knights Templar and the Crusades here because it would seem they were ultimately a waste of time and effort, but the Mongols...well how fascinating are they. Not as wild, chaotic, unreliable and bloodthirsty as first thought and only cast in that light by the Persian historians who wrote about them and were keen to emphasise only the devastation.

No indeed, Peter Frankopan informs me that the Mongols were ruthless planners with clear strategies (domination) and a streamlined organisation who used violence selectively and deliberately to cultivate fear, making capitulation more likely. Conquered towns and cities were re-energised and arts and culture encouraged, whilst Northern Europe was largely left alone because it wasn't much of a prize.

In fact, as a prize in a raffle you'd be much happier winning Venice.

And, for now, that is far as I have read. 200 or so pages of gripping reading. It is 1492 and Christopher Colon (aka Columbus) has just set sail west, so America you are about to enter stage left, but in the process I have discovered an authorial presence that I trust. If Peter Frankopan can steer me through the first millennium and keep me interested and enthused, then I am winning because each time I put the book down I can't wait to pick it up again.

If you have read The Silk Roads I would love to know your thoughts...

If not are you at least impressed by the cover...

And can anyone recommend any other books that focus on the subject of the Silk Roads and especially the production of the silk itself...

 

 

 

 

 

Cowslip Workshop ~ Easter Exhibition (Part Two)

Susan Denton, the third quilter exhibiting at Cowslip over Easter, is a quilter who having lived in Australia now hails from Cornwall and who, finding inspiration in the landscape, has translated her love for her surroundings into her quilts. 

Mapping walks and footpaths is something I have been doing with the Beating the Bounds project on here, and finally I have settled down with the 1841 tithe map and the accompanying documents to try and make something fabric-related. It is happening slowly, and thank heavens there is a draughtsman in the house, but it meant I was doubly inspired when I saw Susan's quilt My Place - A Foothold of Belonging (148 cms x 152cms)

I have used auto-correct on the colours, which I rarely do on pictures here, but wanted you to be able to see the detail and especially the quilting. For me, it represented a lot of footsteps across some much-loved territory.

The changing light in Venice along with a poem by Wordsworth (Ode to the Extinction of the Venetian Republic) were the inspiration for the six panels that comprise Serenissima (83cms x 60 cms each click to enlarge)

And then there was a wonderful piece entitled Indigo (152 cms x 155cms) 

What better way to use all those gorgeous Japanese fabrics.

And hanging next to it, the quilt that has caused such a stir amongst us local quilters, Indigo Pyramids (245cms x 225cms click to enlarge)

I mean it's just triangles really isn't it. But then you look closely and you see those little yellow triangles, and then you look again and see bigger triangles, and triangles made out of triangles, and how on earth is it pieced?

Can you see my brain whirring...

In horizontal rows...well no because then a bigger triangle interrupts the flow...

Maybe diagonally...but then I'm not sure.

Think of the planning involved to get this right.

And an even funnier thing happened when Bookhound sat down to try and figure it out for me, and so we printed off copies in various formats (Picasa Pencil sketch is really good for this sort of thing) but by mistake started to look at one of the pictures upsidedown...

And with apologies to Susan Denton for doing this, but half close your eyes and take a look at an inverted image...

I can see a zillion more pyramids, can you?

By 11pm we'd confused ourselves entirely, even thinking that perhaps it been hung the wrong way up in the exhibition because weren't the pyramids clearer this way.

Except all quilts have hanging sleeves on them and I can't see anyone making a mistake like that, but doesn't it all make the piecing and tonal blending of this quilt even more incredible and clever.

I was delighted to hear that Susan Denton might be teaching a course on Indigo Pyramids at Cowslip in the future.

So all in all for me an energising and affirming exhibition by three exceptionally talented quilt makers, and as always huge thanks to the indefatigable Jo Colwill and her staff in the shop and the cafe for giving us yet another special treat.

 

 

Cowslip Workshops ~ Easter Exhibition

Though I may stray far and wide with my handicrafts it is always quilting that I come back to in the end, so I am trying to see as many exhibitions as I can this year (Malvern soon, is anyone else going?) and gather in new inspiration.

I'm feeling that for now, having finally finished Blue Moon, I am over the whole blocks and piecing thing for a while. The Splendid Sampler has more than enough to keep me going when I feel the need, and wanting to find some new directions whilst consolidating on new-found skills there is nothing like an exhibition at Cowslip Workshops to sort me out with some ideas.

The exhibition space is splendid. This is a working farm with huge barns (some now minus animals) offering light and space, and with walls painted white they create the perfect backdrop for the quilts. I went back three times and saw new things that I had missed on each occasion. 

Compare this with my recent excursion to the Spring Quilt Exhibition at Westpoint...

Crowded, the quilts hung closely together in a relatively confined space at one end of the hall, in a system of small echeloned bays that afforded barely a glimpse let alone any opportunity to stand back and admire the effects. It was hectic and sadly I left after about an hour of fighting my way round. I feel sad for the exhibitors because this space certainly didn't do their work justice and I know I probably missed some excellent quilts.

The most recent exhibition at Cowslip, however, was another story, displaying the work of three quilters, Susan Denton, Janice Gunner (who had taught my Shibori course) and Cherry Vernon-Harcourt, quilts hung in perfect conditions.

To walk into a plethora of indigo-dyed Shibori is my idea of heaven right now and it was good to see some of Janice's exhibition work. This piece just 30cms square...

Another piece from the same series...

It's good to see exhibition standard Shibori too..

 And is this one inspiring or not...that wonderful squish-it-all-down on a drainpipe technique, but with bells and whistles. I can but aspire to Arashi shibori of this standard.

These just a few of my favourite pieces by Janice Gunner before moving onto Cherry Vernon-Harcourt's work, much of it taking inspiration from her Norfolk surroundings.

This piece entitled Wells Quay seems almost too simple until you start to examine the colour and pattern combinations within each block, and is it me but doesn't each block seem perfectly square yet the whole has an intentionally and very subtle lop-sided effect..

 And the Venetian tiles had me mesmerised, the complexities of the design and if you look closely you can see the large quilting stitches worked to great effect

Enough blog inches for today so I will save Susan Denton, an Australian quilter now settled in Cornwall, for tomorrow. Without dismissing other work on display there is often one quilt in an exhibition that grabs everyone's attention and gets them talking. It was one of Susan's quilts that has been the talk of Tavistock High Street.

I have had at least four conversations in town as follows...

'Did you go to the Cowslip exhibition?'

'Of course.'

And then simultaneously...

'The Indigo Pyramids quilt...how did she make that...did you figure it out?'

I'll show you some pictures tomorrow.

The Help ~ Kathryn Stockett

Only six years later than everyone else but, finally I discover for myself what a brilliant read it is. 

The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

I mean there's been a film hasn't there and still I've somehow missed it all.

It was only the news from the Happy Campers and their other book group, that The Help had been their top-rated read, that made me pick it up and give it a go.

I don't even know why I had thought I wouldn't like it.

Or what had put me off in the past, but a lovely new edition arrived ages ago with a quilted cover design and so the planets aligned eventually.

I am sure you all know of the book...

Jackson, Mississippi in the early sixties. A young woman returns from college, wonders where the black maid who raised her has gone and starts to make forbidden friendships across the colour lines in order to find out. What she reveals is the madness of racial segregation and the persecution of the 'Helps' who whilst not clean enough to use the same toilet as a white family, or eat at the same table, or to use the same library, are perfectly capable of raising their children for them to save them the bother.

It's a book that exudes shock and horror, fear and loathing but also warmth and friendship and in some cases unquestionable loyalty in the face of extreme provocation.

I was so engrossed I made no notes, but the book is deeply embedded in my mind and will stay there.

When the 'Helps' agree to tell their stories for a book that may be published, all the fears and dangers are thrown into clear relief and I found it harder and harder to believe that this has all happened in my lifetime.

How could this possibly be?

I am sure many of you have read The Help and if so I would love to know your thoughts...

Did the book ambush you as much as it did me, and even though you may have known the facts...

Has it left a deep impression...

And whilst The Help is based on events in America, nor is our copybook unsullied here in the UK of course as Small Island by Andrea Levy proved.

Goodness, we still need books like this to be written and read.

 

 

 

 

 

Some Luck ~ Jane Smiley

Some Luck, the first in Jane Smiley's Last Hundred Years Trilogy and my thanks to someone who mentioned it in comments and sent me to the shelf to take a look.

It is post-World War One USA, Walter and Rosanna Langdon marry and settle on a farm in Iowa and Rosanna's birthing years soon begin. Frank, Joey and Mary will be followed by Lillian, Henry and Claire and all will be raised with the family values of hard work, honesty, sincerity, understanding, discipline and respect instilled in them from an early age.

The children are nurtured and channelled, Frank, the bright but hyperactive and wilful wild child, whose inquisitiveness is readily directed into farm work and education...

Joey, quietly obsessive, gentle, single-minded and self-contained.

Mary, cautious but not fearful and knows her own mind.

Lillian, the beauty, worshipped and adored by her family but is it good preparation for life.

Henry an intelligent, thoughtful and discriminating child

Claire, the youngest, Walter's favourite because Rosanna seems to have run out of maternal steam, imperceptible to others but he spots it and steps in to fill the gap. These children will all get equal shares of the love no matter who gives it.

And what becomes eminently clear is Jane Smiley's incredible ability to step into and inhabit the mind and thoughts of a baby, a toddler, a child and get it right.

I often used to sit with parents and their toddlers and suggest that their children's future skills as adults were starting to emerge, on display before out very eyes. I knew it from personal experience...

Offspringette always writing and creating and making things, and keeping us all organised and in the right place at the right time on holidays...

Try keeping the Kayaker away from water as a child...he'd run into the sea fully clothed in January...

And then, of course, there was the episode of the skinned mouse in the six-year-old Gamekeeper's bedroom...

It was always interesting to watch and discuss what children were doing on home visits, and I always reassured parents that tantrums were character-building and an early form of learning anger-management. Looking for strengths was often a good antidote to those disastrous moments when it all seemed hopelessly difficult. So a fascinating aspect of  my reading of Some Luck has been to indulge in that same 'watching' with Jane Smiley's characters.

The chapter per year structure makes for both a rhythmical and pleasant reading process with stops occurring naturally and at just the right time. The book becomes compelling and quite addictive with each year complete unto itself, and with time to move each character and the plot on into the next year without having to tell every detail. The difficulty, perfectly overcome, has to be to write a book like this without the benefit of hindsight creeping in, to stay in the moment of the narrative. World events would barely touch the Iowa farm but for Frank's escape to school and college and with his parent's blessing, a scout not a runaway and by this means does Jane Smiley include them.

I have been looking again at 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, the book written by Jane Smiley after she took time out to read one hundred books, examining along the way 'why a novel succeeds (or doesn't) and how the novel has changed over time,' She describes a novelist as "right on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing," yet whose "job and ambition is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive." And one of the things that impressed me most about Some Luck was Jane Smiley's innate ability to turn her writerly hand to just about any situation... from sowing corn, to sniper fire, tank warfare and the Cold War, all created with credibility and veracity within the framework of people's lives, creating a book that embraces thirty-five years of the twentieth century (1920- 1953).

There is a moment, at a family gathering in 1948 when Rosanna and Walter exchange knowing glances across the table surrounded by their entire extended family 

'something had created itself from nothing - a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each one of them rich and mysterious...'

The same could be said of Jane Smiley's book, and with its themes of family, hardship, parenting and true endeavour, I was won over to the cause completely, and will be reading the rest of the trilogy Early Warning and Golden Age in short order.

If you have read these I would love to know your thoughts...

Any more Jane Smiley fans out there...

I have read several more of her books but which are your favourites...

 

 

 

Taps

Day is done,
Gone the sun,

Do you remember singing this at the end of Brownies and Guides...

From the sea,
From the hills,
From the sky,
All is well safely rest,
God is nigh.

A sunset walk this evening and a lone blackbird serenading us from the top of our telegraph pole.

And that wire is how I write this blog and send it to you.

All of a sudden everything seemed amazingly clever.

God Speed the Plough

It's been a busy few weeks around our daily walking fields and on Lady Day (March 25th), which also happened to be Good Friday, there was plenty of activity out there. In the church year Lady Day is traditionally the Annunciation, the day that the Angel Gabriel visited Mary, and in the countryside it was also traditionally a day of change. Rents were due, contracts were made and periods of employment began or ended (thank you Steve Roud and The English Year). Hiring Fairs and merry making were the order of the day, but I had my Good Friday Not Going Out to Play mood in situ so I just strode around the fields with Nell and Rusty as usual.

After my super-fit outdoor month in New Zealand, I have decided that my Fitbit Flex wristband step counter is no use whatsoever in the drawer so am doing my 10,000 steps a day (minimum) again and feeling much better for it.







It all brought to mind the Ploughing Mug which has sat in the kitchen for years..

Let the wealthy and great
Roll in splendour and state
I envy them not I declare it
I eat my own lamb
My chickens and ham
I shear my own fleece and I wear it
I have lawns I have bowers
I have fruits I have flowers
The lark is my morning alarmer
Here's God Speed the plough
Long life and success to the farmer.



And as if all this wasn't enough fun for one week, we had a stunning full moon, there it was low in the sky as we walked the dogs along the lane at dusk. A Worm Moon in March apparently, which made me think of all those happy worms woken up and busy after the ploughing.

Is it all waking up over your way too...

Or for some of you winding down and getting ready for bed...

The Outrun ~ Amy Liptrot

The Outrun is where the ewes and their lambs graze in the summer, it is a 'stretch of coastland at the top of the farm where the grass is always short, pummelled by wind and sea spray year-round.'

As a newborn baby, Amy Liptrot arrives back on Orkney from Scotland, in the arms of her mother just as her father is being wheeled to the plane in a straitjacket. He is on his way from the family farm to a secure mental hospital. It is the briefest of encounters on an airport runway, pre-memory for Amy but one that will stay with her nevertheless. Amy's father has suffered a manic episode brought on by her premature birth and it will be many months before they see each other again.

It is a dramatic start to a life and to a book and one that resonates throughout as Amy struggles with her own demons.

I am afraid I am as guilty as anyone else who hasn't lived there.

I too see Orkney as a paradise.



For me what the islands may lack in charm (there is nothing quaint or twee about Orkney) they more than compensate for in atmosphere, scenery, big skies and vast expanses of space, sea and history . Witness yesterday...sorry I got a bit carried away and it seems to be happening again...

It is the sort of place that either penetrates your soul or it doesn't. If it does then an addiction follows, a long-distance love affair and a sense of affinity. To be born and raised there is an entirely different matter and for Amy the need to leave dominates...

'Growing up in the wind leaves you strong, sloped and adept at seeking shelter.'

Whilst her mother seeks solace in evangelical religion Amy heads to London for that shelter and what can only be described as a life on the edge. Relationships and employment dissolve in a two-year miasma of drugs and alcohol, homelessness and destitution prevail, yet throughout it all those deeply embedded echoes of Orkney are everywhere.

There is a moment when cycling through London and Amy is reminded of geese flying across a moonlit Orkney sky..

And with it comes  ' a quietly vibrating sense of loss and disturbance.'

It's not just alcohol coursing through Amy's veins, Orkney is flowing freely too, but it is the alcohol that is now doing the greater damage. 'A slave to the habit of pain,' and a sudden bout of desperation and insight leads Amy into months of rehab in London. Alcohol had become her default method for alleviating anxiety and dealing with stress, and when the 'unwanted fond thoughts of home' creep in and ambush her Amy knows that it might be time to acknowledge those echoes of Orkney and return.

'I wonder if it's possible to really come back once you've lived away for a while. or if it's called coming 'home' when you never belonged.'

With reconfigured priorities Amy washes up on her island again and embarks on a journey of rediscovery and renewal. That all sounds a bit cliched and dramatic, even predictable perhaps, but not so.

Old and previously arduous chores become new and refreshing experiences as Amy returns to help her father on the family farm (by this time her parents have divorced) very significantly she is drawn to wall-building, and she starts to explore the uninhabited islands around the coast too. London clubland and night life is replaced by corncrake conservation with the RSPB, and when she heads for a cottage on the remote island of Papay for the winter it will be here that Amy truly rediscovers herself.

'My ties and traditions are my own to make. I can choose where I will belong.'

The internet, and being able to keep in touch with the outside world as well as seeking knowledge play a big part in recovery, so you will be pleased to know it isn't all hair shirts and self-denial. In fact, it's wet suits and snorkelling for Amy, and her analogy with the legend of the Selkie, as she peels off her wetsuit, made me wonder why it has taken so long for someone to think of that comparison. Sea swimming becomes exhilarating and cleansing opening up new worlds and (as usual) made we want to go and dive in somewhere.

'I feel as if I've opened a door that has always been in my house but I had never noticed.'

Astronomy suddenly becomes fascinating too, whilst natural phenomena like the Fata Morgana (a form of superior mirage where cool air below warm air creates a visual inversion that can be seen but never approached ...or something like that) and the Northern Lights, fondly called the Merry Dancers on Orkney, replace those highs induced by drugs and alcohol in the past.

I still feel I'm making it all sound a bit too good to be true for which I apologise because Amy Liptrot does no such thing, and nor does the book read in that way. This is about one woman's struggles and when the cravings for alcohol invade they are a harsh reminder that The Outrun is a book about addiction and temptation, about salvaging and restoring a shipwreck of a life, refloating, reprovisioning and repurposing (I could go on, all the re-words fit here and defeat all the de-words) and with the help of and by paying careful attention to the natural world Amy Liptrot achieves it.

The fault lines in the cliffs mirror the cracks and crevasses in her life..

The waves breaking on the shore...there is only so much height any wave can sustain before it breaks and crashes down...

 Beachcombing after a storm...empty shells and picking up the pieces.


Awaiting the unexpected yet knowing in her heart that there will no return to addiction, Orkney cares for and works its magic on one of its own. 

The Outrun a book I will read again, and maybe again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Outrun ~ Amy Liptrot (almost)

If there was ever any doubt that a person dreams in colour then I am disproving it.

I dream in indigo.

I see shibori everywhere.

The sun was shining through the blind onto the sofa...

I was about to put something in this bowl and had to stop...why spoil it with stuff...



And then I see things that will make wonderful shibori designs all over the place, and now have to be dragged out of Poundland before I buy any more dolly pegs, or clamps, or clips, or hairbands, or marbles, or trays or buckets. And then I shoot off to the charity shops looking for shapes that will do for clamp resist, or bits of fabric that I can mess about with.

And suddenly, because this thing was bound to seep its way across from my creative hemisphere to my other one that reads, all the books I am reading, or want to read seem to match my recent shibori experience. I'm starting to see gorgeous blue book covers everywhere.

And yes, The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters is still on the tbr pile but The Silk Roads has edged its way in first.

But a blue cover wasn't my real reason for wanting to read The Outrun by Amy Liptrot so much that we actually drove all the way into Waterstones in Plymouth on a wet Maundy Thursday afternoon to buy a copy before Easter. Amongst other things it is about our beloved Orkney and suddenly it had to be my reading for the holiday weekend, nothing else would do.

I wonder if a book need grabs you in this same urgent way.

Even ordering online isn't fast enough, it has to be acquired yesterday.

Anyway, just look at the cover...


I was immediately reminded of the wonderful tapestries by Leila Thomson at her gallery at Hoxa on Orkney.

On one of his early solo visits to Orkney the Tinker drove all the way out to the gallery, three miles beyond St Margarets Hope, to buy me Leila Thomson's book, so it was wonderful to visit for ourselves when we went together a few years ago. I think the Tinker and I both knew this would be his last visit so we made the most of it and I created memories to draw on in the future.

And now I am supposed to be writing about The Outrun and all I can think of is that Orkney blue...


Hoy and Scapa Flow..

and Waulkmill Bay..

and the curlew...

and the lovely picture that Bookhound scratched onto slate while we sat on the beach...

and the beach...

and the beachcombing...



and Skara Brea...

and the scraps of rainbows...

and the ferry into Stromness passing the Old Man of Hoy...




And now I'm dreaming about Orkney as well as indigo, and I all I want to do is go back, and it's our Ruby Wedding anniversary this year so we might. I've been wanting to use the words sui generis for ages, and now I can, about Orkney and about The Outrun.

This is all Amy Liptrot's fault and I haven't even told you a thing about her astonishingly good book yet.

I'll try again tomorrow.

Ice ~ Ulla-Lena Lundberg

I'm wondering how many of you have managed to embrace and enjoy (if that's the right word) the current round of Nordic dramas on TV??

The Killing, Borgen, The Bridge, Trapped ...are you on it and following them??

We haven't and I sometimes wish we had because everyone raves about them, it's a bit like sulking and sitting out on a party that you really want to go to. I think it's the subtitles that seal our non-compliance, I really can't get on with them and Bookhound even less so...he's asleep within minutes.

All this will have to change if Ice by Ulla-Lena Lundberg, and published by Sort Of Books, ever makes it onto our screens. It's not crime, it's not gloomy, it's not a thriller, it's not a psychological drama...it's post-war life on a remote Finnish island, and I would want to watch every single minute.

In the first instance, I am quoting the resume from Sort of Books website because it would be far too easy to give away spoilers and this will hopefully remind not to..

"It is the summer of 1947. A novice Lutheran priest, his wife and baby daughter arrive at a windswept island off the coast of Finland, where they are welcomed by its frugal, self-sufficient community of fisher folk turned reluctant farmers. In this deeply atmospheric and quietly epic tale, Lundberg uses a wealth of everyday detail to draw us irresistibly into a life and mindset far removed from our own – stoic and devout yet touched with humour and a propensity for song. With each season, the young family’s love of the island and its disparate and scattered inhabitants deepens, and when the winter brings ice, new and precarious links appear. Told in spare, simple prose that mirrors the islanders’ unadorned style, this is a story as immersive as it is heartrending."

Young Lutheran priest Petter Kummel, his wife Mona and their fourteen-month-old daughter Sanna arrive on the remote Örland Islands where Petter will take up his ministry. The resourceful, self-contained and hard-working islanders are friendly and welcoming, almost grateful that someone wants to fill the posting, and whilst Mona is more reserved Petter's heart soars with joy as the organist plays Cappelen's "Prayer" (adagio) at his first service.

Cappelen??

This was a real teaser because I was suddenly desperate to listen to it but can find next to nothing anywhere about Norwegian composer Christian Cappelen or any recordings by him. But it all demonstrated that by page fifty-eight I was completely immersed in this quietly different novel. The personalities and the various factions present in any tight-knit community slowly start to emerge, the old feuds and disagreements that are never quite forgotten surface and Petter must learn to balance on a tight-rope if he is to be accepted. It is a complex weave of simple threads, human nature reduced to the basics, little seems to happen and yet a lot happens.

Any member of a clergy family would recognise the life; the tensions and the contradictions, the conflicts between tradition and change along with all the distractions and the demands that a community can make on a priest's life. Seemingly married to his community as well as his wife, Petter finds it hard to refuse any requests for help, for counselling or for listening, and with all the challenges of the weather, the intense cold and the isolation to contend with, as well as all the layers they need to wear, well life will be hard for Mona.

'They are all bundled up to the teeth...the whole family a hymn of praise to the native Finnish sheep.'

Petter's ministry develops in his own inimitable style...

'He's more inclined to wish them the freedom of a Christian soul. The freedom to be unharassed, untormented, untroubled...'

...and he realises that the Örlanders have 'opened the path to Christian fellowship for him much more effectively than he could have done it for himself.'

And with it the couple's marriage grows too, and please don't be put off by any overtly religious themes to this book, they sit comfortably within the whole and at no time did I feel uncomfortable or beaten around the head by them.

Now it does say 'heartrending' in that resume I quoted so I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that I doubt I have read many books of late that give me 244 pages of ice-laden but happy idyll, before suddenly sending a little chill through the pages and into my mind...and I start to feel a bit uneasy.

I have a quiet word with Ulla-Lena Lundberg.

'Please don't...'

I rarely read a book where I don't want anything to happen, but I realise I'd like to get to the end of Ice and would be satisfied with a bit more sledging across the ice and some more skating, and babies and a nice harvest festival, and more of that lovely Christmas passage...lots more hygge and woolly jumpers in fact and then let's all go home.

Of course, I won't tell you whether I was hygge-fied to the end or not, but I can tell you that Ice proved to be an epic story of community and family, a stunning and compelling read (and clearly a wonderful translation by Thomas Teal). I have put this book straight up on the Special Books shelf. If anyone asks me to recommend a Good Read, Ice by Ulla-Lena Lundberg would certainly be on the list.

As Petter also wishes for his congregation these words I would wish for anyone...

'A road you travel in daylight, with a burden no greater than you can bear.'

I had just come back from New Zealand when I read this and there was one little place that resonated in my mind.

The Church of the Good Shepherd at Lake Tekapo. 


It is a highly popular tourist venue except at sunrise it would seem, so I was fortunate enough to have it to myself (apart from about a million rabbits) even if it was too early for the church to be unlocked.

 

Meanwhile If you have read Ice I would love to know your thoughts...

If you haven't, and don't want to buy it, maybe ask your library to stock it. 

And any more good ice-laden reads to recommend...

Even if it is warming up here I could squeeze a few more in before the last frost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Storm Katie

It was heart sink time, and I am hoping wherever you are in the UK, this latest storm didn't do too much damage.

Imogen, Jake and UnNamed had decimated the greenhouse, eight panels of glass smashed, shards all over the garden and little paws in danger of treading on it, so it had been on with the thick gloves to pick it all up (only one pair so didn't argue when Bookhound made a start). Then the repair with new glass and extra clips, and fingers crossed I started sowing...

For obvious reasons I was way behind with the annuals last year and my heart was just too sad to do much, and nor did I get my act together and sow some sweet peas in October, but as you can see I'm on it this year.

The sweet peas are coming along nicely...


I buy a few new ones for pots each year whilst seeds from last year's plants will do out and around the garden, so Percy Thrower is doing battle with Alan Titchmarsh along with Singing the Blues, Turquoise Lagoon and Cupid Pink .

I've also sown those giant African Marigolds again because they seeded prolifically and seemed to keep the aphids under control..

along with old favourites, nicotiana, Little Leo sunflowers and some more lupins because they were gorgeous too...

The plan is not to spend a fortune on new plants for the garden this year, just grow from the seeds I have collected or been given, take cuttings from other plants and let the perennials do what they are supposed to do, which after four years of concerted effort they are.

So when we heard that Storm Katie was on her way, heading into the Western Approaches from the Atlantic, we groaned. It was awful to watch last time, quite thought the whole lot was going to head off to Plymouth even though the base is cemented in, so my suggestion of a large 'bandage' that would at least stop any glass flying around the garden was greeted with much enthusiasm by visiting sons on Easter Sunday.

Fortified by roast lamb out they went...



It's quite pretty isn't it, more of a crime scene than a greenhouse was one comment. In fact, that is Bookhound's very special tape to lay over any underground cables to remind him not to dig them up...

'It's £40 a roll,' he whimpered as yards and yards and yards wound round.

'How many more cables do you plan to dig?' we all asked.

'Well, maybe not many.'

And the storm did rage through the night, it was that Ted Hughes poem yet again,

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

 

Apparently 100mph winds recorded off the Devon coast, that's Hurricane Force 12, so I was a bit nervous about looking out the next morning...

But look...

Still there, nothing broken.

And that afternoon, as if to remind us that at the end of every rainbow there is always something special and nice...

So how did you all fare...

The damage elsewhere looked horrendous.