Promise: no more chairs

Rural idyll

OK. No more chairs. But I could not resist this picture.

This is a friend's garden and the chair I made for her almost painted. She lives up a vertical hill just at the point when your legs are screaming to get you to stop cycling and go lie down.

Apart from the newspaper, this could be a calendar picture to herald autumn, right ?

Not only does she like to gaze over endless fields while basking, but she also sits outside at night star-peeping.

As she is one of the most energetic people I know, and insatiably interested in almost everything, it's only a wispy maybe that she will spend much time in the chair.

Ho hum.

Aaahhhhhh !

Weird starfish

This is what happens when you can't bear to throw stuff away.

The starfish you see here, appalled readers, started life as the discouragingly bulky legs on a dining table with a sort of tripod arrangement.

They were waiting for a new life and this shape seemed to beckon. The thing is about 500mm across and looking for a home. It does work now and then as a stand for a vase on a glass table top, and could even moonlight as some kind of propeller.

Oh dear.

Oatcaking

I do not cook. Well, as eating seems such a huge waste of time and simply a matter of refuelling and then getting on with something interesting, why would I ? Why waste further time on preparation ?

Well, I have aspergers, so that makes perfect sense to me.

But I do make oatcakes.

Oatcakes are therapeutic.

More edible than they look, thank goodness

 My utterly wonderful bloganonymous neighbour brings me bags of oatmeal as a sort of trade for my looking after her small zoo when she is away. And my oatcake recipe is hers. So it is genuinely Scottish, just as she is.

And here is the recipe, unmetrical, but otherwise poetic:

8 oz medium oatmeal (I like more oatmeal than flour so vary the proportions.)

8 oz wholemeal flour

6 oz butter

1 teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

2 oz white sugar

Dash of milk

Mix together all dry ingredients. 

Rub in the butter

Add dash of milk and knead into a ball

Roll out on floured board and cut out with the top of a glass.

Bake at 170 degrees for 20 minutes.

YUM !

The ones in the picture are a special batch for my sister. Added cashew nuts. We shall see...... 

PS I burnt an entire batch by writing this post and cooking them for a bit too long. They could make coasters, though, with a bit of varnish.

Grazing

You know what ?

Living here in the country I am surrounded by birds. Note: birds. Not starlings and throstles and buzzards (though I can recognise them), and finches, and robins. Birds.

And the garden is full of flowers. Don't ask me what. I haven't a clue.

And why is this ? Well, maybe because when I was a kid, we didn't have a garden and nobody cared too much about birds, so they were more or less an amorphous grey and inconsequential mass.

And my mum cooked meat. Meat. Nobody enquired what kind of meat. Maybe nobody knew there were different kinds. Though my rabbit did disappear in suspicious circumstances about the time that a large pie was being created. But it was always meat. Meat pie. Meat and potatoes. Meat sandwiches.

So a foodie I was never going to be. Unable to differentiate one meat from another, I became a vegetarian at 20 having worked in a potted meat factory as a student every holiday for three years. Can't say I have missed it.

Meals in our house - actually an open-all-hours shop - were taken on the hoof at odd times, and always interrupted by the shop bell. As a consequence, the whole family grazed uneasily, like wildebeest who suspect a lion is lurking. Mealtimes where everyone sat around a table were reserved for days when over-perfumed aunties turned up bearing plastic boxes of salad, or, on good days, cake.

Now it's hard to remember when the last meal here was. The grazing habit is hard to break, and I tend to see food pretty much as fuel, a chore you have to get through smartly to allow you to get on with something interesting.

Do we only differentiate what we care about ?

Stained glass

What is it about stained glass ?

Maybe it's just the combination of simple skills, each slightly therapeutic, leading to something so pleasing.

Making glass is meditative. Not something you can rush. I like things you can't rush. These are two of my pieces, inspired by a holiday in the Lake District.

Blackwell House is a celebration of craftsmanship. Sure, the scenery helps, but the tranquillity of the setting is enhanced by the house itself, where every last piece was designed to be completely congruent with the grand concept of the place. And the quiet quality of the craftsmanship permeates the place as much as the scent of polish on oak.

Anyway, Blackwell House has so many beautiful glass panels that it's hard to take them all in. They are often hidden round corners, so take you by surprise. The sense of delight is unexpected and lovely. And these are my take (on a slightly reduced scale) of two of the panels. They were fun to make, and cheer me up every time I see them

They look complicated, but really do result from the concatenation of very basic skills. Everybody should try working in glass, at least once.

Saving grace

Self-portrait with hooks

A bunch of Victorian cast iron coat hooks came my way, and why wouldn't they ? They were fixed to steel bars and had graced an Infant School cloakroom moons before. They were almost invisible under a gazillion coats of paint in various jolly colours. Cleaning them up took a while, but once the bare metal was polished they seemed to breathe again and do look fantastic. But what to do with 50 cast-iron coat hooks, magnificent as they are ?

And this door handle also escaped the demolition, and I wish I had more of them. Again, lovely craftsmanship and detailing were hiding under generations of paint, with just a hint of smooth metal peeping through.

Just need to find the right home for them now.

Spot the difference

This is my Bloganonymous Daughter's chair.

We made it together to her design and had a fun couple of days.

So what's different ?

Well, no legs at the back. That makes it look a bit strange, and it's a visual puzzle that it stays up at all. Of course, the arms are slimmer, as nobody, but NOBODY, likes the fat arms on mine. (Except for me. I love them and can a get a morning's books on them.)

And last of all, the back slats are only 5 in number, rather than my 7. And the curve at the top is Bloganonymous Daughter's own.

The timber is all old mahogany. Some of it has had at least two lives, the latest being as university lecture desks - the long type fond in lecture rooms everywhere. All the wood is recycled, and we cut the thing out with very little waste. Most larger offcuts can be used in other projects.

You might not think it, but these chairs are amazingly comfortable. You certainly don;t feel in a rush to get up again.

This one went off in the BD's car almost as soon as it was finished.

Bullying

In secondary school I was bullied. It was the school culture that older kids bullied younger ones who got their turn eventually.

Being bullied was only to be expected. I wasn't the right shape and was always a geek. I talked as if I had swallowed a dictionary. I was good at no known sport.   My proud record was that in 6 years of compulsory cross-country, I ran on not a single occasion. I preferred to evaporate invisibly to the library. My hair was unfashionable and apparently sculpted by a topiarist on drugs. None of my uniform fitted well. The family maxim was: buy large, and grow into it. The tie was a pretty good fit, but that was it. I was, dear reader, a mess.

But peaceable. As a young teenager I was very verbal, but not physically aggressive. 

On one occasion, caught between lessons in some far-flung and forgotten corridor,  an older kid was pushing me around again. He was enjoying it, and a small crowdlet was gathering for the fun. There wasn't much fun at my school.

Unexpectedly, I had suddenly had enough.

I hit him and hit him again. He wasn't expecting it, and neither was I. I can remember feeling out of control. It was frightening. He sank, hands to his face, his nose broken. Blood everywhere.

Some kids pulled me off, while others picked him up.

I can see it in stills in my head even now. 

He was taken to hospital. I was taken to the Headmaster, and, after a few days of investigation, got a telling off and some suitably lofty advice.

But that afternoon was the last time I was ever bullied at school, and also the last time I ever struck anyone in anger.

What to make of this ? Not something to be proud of, violence. Nowadays I think of myself as a pacifist in all circumstances, personal and political. Violence feels like a failure of imagination, an admission of defeat in losing the argument.

However unacceptably, in one instance at least it got the result I needed. But I have always regretted the incident, and becalmed in later life wish I could find the bloke, now in his mid-60s somewhere, and apologise. It still feels like a huge failure, a betrayal of myself.

Boys will be boys

Miss Green did not have a forename. Not even an initial.

At least not as far as I knew. 

She was always just "Miss Green", and she was my headteacher when I was an infant.

Miss Green and I saw a lot of each other.  She was pretty stern and I was pretty awful, so we spent a lot of time together, tete-a-tete, as it were. Hers was one of only two rooms upstairs, the other being the staffroom. I got to know the inside of her office well.

Miss Green ran a Tight Ship, and if any loose cannons needed nailing to the deck, she would see to it personally.

Miss Green had once caned me for talking to Mary in the school nativity play, against instructions. I was Joseph, and had a strictly silent role. But I was always a talker and couldn't resist. It was only later than I realised that I was giving girls called Mary a very wide berth indeed.

And only very much later than I realised that 'infant' meant 'not talking', as in small children as yet unable to talk. It was a sentiment Miss Green would have agreed with.

On one occasion I was explaining my part in some misdemeanour to Miss Green, and her unblinking gaze told me that it was not working.

She was standing in front of her desk when I came in, and it was there that we talked. Miss Green was a small woman, but a lot larger than me, and she tended to loom over me, rather like a cliff. 

My explanation was not going well, and Miss Green was losing interest. The storm was gathering. She did not paw the ground, but it would have been no surprise if she had done.

I had one last strategy.

"Well," I said, in desperation, aged 6. "Boys will be boys."

Miss Green paused, turning to select something from her desk.

"Yes," she said. "And teachers will be teachers."

I had lost the argument again.