But is it art ?

My mother-in-law was a great maker. Even when she was too old to be moving around, she continued to think of creative uses for old tights, of which she had a truly staggeringly large stockpile.

This week, a bunch of her pieces came to light. They are all dolls' house rugs, and beautifully made.

It's true that I am no stitcher, so am probably not a good judge. It's only thanks to a junior school trade that I still have my stuffed Bambi, supposedly made by me, but in fact made by Susan Sowotka in exchange for me helping her with maths. Bambi has some large exuberant blanket stitch here and there (guess whose), and in between some impossibly fine careful stitching (guess again).

Anyway, I liked the small rugs, and in particular this one, which is about 270 x 240 mm.

My mother-in-law had stuck a label on the back noting that the rug design came from a Holbein portrait of George Syscze. This seemed a really exotic provenance for the rug, and it seemed to me that something had gone awry with the spelling. There are more improbable consonants there than even the average Welsh village.

I think the portrait must be this one, of Georg Gisze, painted in 1532:

Holbein liked putting puzzles and visual jokes in his pictures, and this one abounds with them. But where is the rug ? I have squinted optimistically at the table-cloth from a zillion angles, but still cannot see where the design fitted in.

If you recognise the rug from any other Holbein picture, please let me know.

As I gave up on the rug, the picture became more and more enchanting. It seems almost like black magic that anyone could achieve this sort of photographic quality with paint and brushes. Just look at that sleeve. The light on the material of the right arm is astounding.

I'd love to know (but never will) how Ma came across this picture, and what inspired the rug. Even if it isn't a direct lift from the painting, and is just inspired by it, it's still fun that she would get her tapestry kit out and figure out such an unusual pattern. Maybe she was having a small joke all her own. Yes, fun.

 
 

Bird of the wire

Yes, it's meant to be an owl. I know. 

And yes, it does look slightly puzzled and a bit unsteady on it's talons as if reeling home after a hard night on the trees.

But if you can't bear to waste anything, and can't resist messing about, troubled owls are what happen.

We has just had our ancient electricity supply put underground. No more sparking cables swaying in the breeze or endless power outages.

The guys who did the job had a huge tangle of old cable which they were pleased to get rid of. Once the outer casing was stripped off, gleaming copper appeared and the idea of the owl took shape.

Oh, and the cable was strengthened for hanging between posts by having a heavy aluminium core which carried no electricity but stopped the cable sagging too far. If anybody needs about 3km of aluminium wire, well......

Still stunned, but settling in

The foothills of dementia

Blogging can be tricky.

Is it boring ? Does it have any interest ? Is it too personal ?

The feeling that something is too personal is a great deterrent. Bloganonymity helps to protect people I know, and whose personal space and privacy I don’t want my blog to breach. Family, friends and neighbours appear here in slightly disguised form, and it’s important not to give away any secrets, especially other people’s secrets.

Sometimes there is a lengthy internal discussion about what to write about, and there are plenty of drafts that never see the dawn.

But rarely, as now, something needs to take a risk and be out there, however personal.

I have heart failure which was diagnosed a while back, when I was suddenly breathless. It wasn’t really much of a surprise: I have a hereditary heart defect which I have known about for forty years. It was what killed my father.

Health has never been something that has worried me. I have kept pretty fit, eaten abstemiously, taken lots of exercise. I am sure that if I was a dog I’d have a cold wet nose and a glossy coat. Health matters in a lot of the things I love to do: cycling, walking, shedding. I never wanted to live forever, but rather hoped just to seize the day, and fill every minute with sixty useful seconds.

Over this last year, there have been some changes, and it’s those changes that are whispering that I should write about them.

Cognitive decline is sometimes linked to heart failure, and I am in the foothills of dementia. My memory – always sharp as a tack and almost eidetic when I was younger – is failing, and leaving me living like a cat in the perpetual now.

I thought I might try to write dispassionately about this for as long as I can as it develops. At the moment it is an irritation, something that requires accommodation, something I can more or less adjust to. Nobody knows how fast it will develop, or whether its progress will be linear or more complex. Nobody knows whether there will be plateaus, or when the sharper declines will be.

Where am I now ?

Well, I first noticed the problem when I was finding it hard to remember the previous year, and realised that I had only broad outlines and no fine brush-strokes. Now I have difficulty in constructing what I did last week: dates are vague, and days blur a little. Occasionally it is hard to remember what I did yesterday, or where I cycled. The days seem to run into each other and my sense of my own time is telescoping.

Part of this might be retirement when the agenda is looser and less differentiated. No more important meetings to distinguish a particular Wednesday, and the intensity of experience more even now than before with fewer peaks and troughs.

But it is more than that. I lose thoughts, even, sometimes, mid-sentence, and can feel out of conversations. 

Friends tease me because I repeat things, and because I do not remember what they have told me. And that's exactly right. Sometimes there is just no memory to access. It is not wilful. It is just a failure of memory. It is in there somewhere, but getting it back is tricky.

It is as if you go shopping, fill all the cupboards, but then, inexplicably and disturbingly, find that the cupboards no longer have doors that can be opened, and that no end of prising with a screwdriver is going to get inside. You know the flour in in there, but there is no way of making oatcakes with it.

Recently I read a couple of articles I had published last year. They seemed fresh, as if someone else had written them. I had done endless research, and spent hours writing it up. I was pleased with the result. But now I am distanced from them, as if after a family argument the children became estranged.

Memories of the deep past are still sharp. Too sharp, sometimes, in every sense. There is no problem with recall there. It’s trying to recall recent memories which is hard, and I realise that while I might have laid them down, I cannot access them at will, but only by chance.

Similarly, reading is still a pleasure, but it is harder to retain what I have read, to marshal it coherently into something new. And it seems impossible to memorise music I love. It was always very easy to play something a coupe of times, and it would be there forever. I can still play things I learned forty years ago without the music in front of me. Now, it’s the dots or nothing. Practising a piece of Bach last year – a short piece – I could not get it committed to memory. Every time I play it now I can get through it, but it is a struggle without the dots whereas before it would have been easy.

Finding things on my computer is also an infuriating joke. Where did I file what I was writing last week ? Who knows ? Where WOULD I have been likely to file that if I had written it today ? Check through the files. Nothing. This happens so often, and if I don’t find it quickly I won’t even remember writing it.

I can remember most easily things that have been burnished by emotion. The emotional charge can be either great or awful: both help to fix memories.

The thing is, I have to adjust to knowing that this is the way things will be and that no end of lists, post-its and pictures will help in the end.

At the moment I can enjoy the things I love. I like making stuff, riding the bike, playing music, talking, being outside. And there is no diminishment in any of those things (though I find myself wondering precisely which tool it is that I am searching for now and then !).

No real point in imagining how this will end, or having my nows polluted by worries about what nexts.

Cats and other animals do not seem much troubled by anything other than the immediate present. It’s a lesson time will teach me.

I will come back to this in the blog, and you can just skip it if it is too dull, or too parochial to be of interest. It’s just meant to be my log of finding my way forward. If there is a hint of self pity, let me know. I have no patience with that and will not tolerate it in myself any more than I admire it in others.

Mistakes can be lovable too

This is just at dawn, when the almost infinitely long shadows stretch right across the fields.

This is my neighbour's house, and along one side of it was a long row of 13 limes. They shimmer in sunny breezes, and from my house you look down the row to fields beyond.

Richard, my neighbour, was a farmer. He is a practical man: skilled, resourceful, creative. But most of all he is meticulous, painstaking. A planner.

The limes were fine when they were small, but began to crowd each other, canopies interlocking, a dense mass of foliage in summer, with no room to grow. Trees don't like to be so close, and their shape suffers in the chase for light. 

Richard decided to take out alternate trees, and planned to invite a group of friends with chainsaws to fell them. The deal was that we each took a tree down, cut it up, and could keep the timber. It was a fun approach: six trees heading for new lives as bowls, carvings, craft work of all kinds. Lime is a forgiving wood to carve, surprisingly soft to cut and straight grained. It is easy to work and responds well to sharp blades, though it is allergic to being smoothed with glass paper when it tends to go annoyingly fluffy.

On a sunny Saturday we all turned up. Richard had marked the trees with tape to indicate which were due to come down. He introduced us to our tree. There was coffee, cakes, sunshine in an open field and lovely timber. Partners and wives came with the cutters, and children were kept well away on the lane to watch from a safe distance. It was a festive atmosphere, almost like a barn-raising.

Once a tree was down, the longer task of cutting it up, taking off the branches and gradually reducing it to usable timber absorbed us. Richard hovered around, and mid-morning went off to make more coffee.

It was then that one of the partners got confused, and, not having had the original instructions, took a saw to a tree that was not taped to come down. Nobody noticed the saw chattering away. There were chainsaws everywhere, ear defenders keeping the noise at bay.

When Richard came out with the coffee, there was a gap in his carefully planned line. An unfillable gap, and seven trees down instead of six.

He said nothing, delivered the coffee, kept on smiling. The gap was not mentioned at all. Only later did I find out that his heart sank at the mistake. 

In twenty years living across the lane from him, I never saw him angry. He considers all news carefully, almost ponderously. You can almost see the cogs whirring as he takes stuff in, turns it over, looks for solutions. He is never quick to act, and tends to compost problems until solutions begin to emerge.

His solution was to love the gap. His carefully planned line would have been fine, but he decided that the additional view that the gap afforded was great, and loved the afternoon sun which the trees had blocked so well. He decided that the small gap was perfect. Now his garden offers both sun and shade on summer afternoons, and he can choose to sit in either.

It reminded me of Garrison Keillor:

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

  

New shelves from old

Here is one of a set of thirty shelves made for a primary school maybe 80 years ago.

How do I know there was a set of thirty ? Because whoever made the backs for the shelves wrote a chalk message on the back of the set here saying that thirty similar backs were needed.

You can't see the finish very clearly on the picture, and you certainly can't see any grain. The finish was really fashionable for a while and consists of a yellow undercoat on which glaze was applied. They used a comb to draw the glaze into a sort of faux grain pattern. Sometimes the grain produced is very very good, but these were for a school, and the graining is terrible.

The shelves are solidly made and have lasted pretty well in a demanding setting. But to fix them, they needed to be dismantled completely, have some joints re-cut, and be re-assembled after stripping the glaze and undercoat.

Here's what they looked like just after dis-assembly.

And in this shot you can see the build up of decades of school floor polish on the feet. It was a thick coat of blackened waxy stuff. You can imagine generations of caretakers happily sloshing the floor polish about on sunny afternoons when the kids were on holiday.

Removing the glaze was a bit of a chore. There no alternative but to plane the timber down, making sure to remove every last nail, drawing pin and staple. Once done, the wood began to breathe a bit, and looked like this:

And suddenly you can see the grain, and the genuine wood. That feels better already.

Now put back together, with a nice new back, they look as if they might give good service for decades still. They are much lighter in colour without the glaze, and the pattern of the grain is joyously visible.

The shelves are a bit shorter in height than they were. The feet had to be sawn off a little to get rid of damage under the black goo, and the top shelf needed a new joint, so the old joint had to be cut away.

Apart from that, they are good to go. 

Grace shining through

Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids - all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. 

Garrison Keillor

Edward

Sometimes I worried about the kids I taught. Really worried about them. Not because they did not learn, but because they seemed so vulnerable in such an unforgiving environment. It was these kids who kept me awake at night.

Just one day home from the maternity hospital, Edward was crying uncontrollably.

His mum went round to see Maggie next door, and Maggie, knowing the family well, came right away. Had Edward been fed ? No. Had Edward been changed ? No. Did they have any nappies ? Yes, but not sure when to use them. Or how.

Changed and fed, Edward quietened down, and began the arduous and chancy road to survival.

His parents were characters, well known in the community, and supported by it. But they were not easy and often did not even realise that they needed a little help.

Maggie, elderly and endlessly loving, was some kind of over-worked voluntary guardian angel. Everyone called her Auntie Maggie.

Edward was in my class. At 10 he was unique in my experience. He had an unfinished look about him, and slightly crazy Boris Johnson hair which he continually swept back with surprisingly delicate fingers. He appeared to have been built from blueprints drawn using a confusion of scales.

He spoke in an unlikely falsetto monotone which was slightly unnerving. He was eager, so eager, to please, and worked very hard to make sure he gave satisfaction. He would be the first to volunteer for any job, and occasionally I would give him one, knowing that it would need a team to rectify the damage afterwards.

Edward was always jumpy, nervous, on edge. He jiggled a lot, as if something was trying to get out. He was forever glancing round when he was talking to me, looking for unseen attack. It was as if he was being pursued by an invisible swarm of angry bees. 

Edward was an unguided missile. His clumsiness was legendary. He would trip over chalk lines, dust-bunnies, contours. Negotiating even flat surfaces could leave him ambushed and prone. But he would be vertical again in a second, with profuse falsetto apologies, and he would be breathlessly away on his mission to please. 

Safelty was always a concern, and in his hands the most docile of everyday objects could suddenly become unpredictable. During a Christmas pageant in church, Edward carried the candle snuffer, a sort of narrow brass cone on a pole which had been entrusted to him by the vicar. Placed gently over a candle, the little cone would extinguish the flame, leaving a wisp of meditative smoke twisting languidly to the rafters. We had no actual candles, and the candle snuffer was merely ornamental. What could possibly go wrong ? 

Edward processed up the aisle with an odd mixture of pride and nervousness, glancing side to side at the audience. Looking ahead, he missed his footing, fell over a small step, and lunged at the vicar, the candle snuffer, now a sort of spear, held before him. The vicar, seized with unexpected agility, leapt out of Edward's path and the candle snuffer, now airborne, thwacked into the woodwork where the vicar had been only nano-seconds before. Without missing a beat, and ignoring the gasps of the assembled, he helped Edward to his feet and the show went on, with Edward glancing anxiously over both shoulders.

In class, Edward loved work. As he saw it, the main idea was to fill as many exercise books as possible, some with maths, some with writing. And with that unswerving mission he set to number and stories as a child possessed. No matter that he wrote nonsense, or that none of his maths ever came close to a right answer. He eagerly took work home and returned with page after relentless page of diligent drivel. He could not be deterred. This was what he felt school was about, and he was determined to make a good job of it, to do his level best.

Every child in my class had a tree. We had been given some land, and we planted trees there. Everyone had their own, and tended it from sapling onwards. We went down now and then to weed and to check the stakes. The kids were very proprietorial about their trees. 

Kneeling one cold day to hack away weeds too stubborn for the kids, Edward's falsetto appeared behind me. "Mr Hepworth, there is something wrong with my tree." 

Without turning round, I assured him that I would be over in a minute and would check his tree. There was a silence, and then the falsetto repeated. "Mr Hepworth, there is something wrong with my tree." Impatiently I repeated my answer, and the line went dead for a minute as Edward went away.

Then the voice came again, and I was ready for it.... "Mr Hepworth... " I turned and saw Edward standing still, holding his tree in both hands. He had brought it over to save me the walk.

Playing rounders or stool-ball Edward was as ineffectually determined as ever, and never tired of trying to hit the ball. Though he had no friends as such, and seemed unconcerend by the fact, the kids were enlessly patient and supportive. When he failed to hit the ball, they were always keen for him to have another try. One day when he accidentally hit it, they all cheered warmly, genuinely. 

The candle snuffer incident opened doors for Edward. He decided that he liked the church, and wanted to take an enthusiastic part. The vicar was happy to give Edward a safe haven and I suppose he continued in much the same incorrigible spirit as when he had been in my class.

One evening, when walking home to his parents' house, Edward stumbled in front of a car. He was 25.

Today, and every day, he rests, all nervousness gone, on the soft hillside overlooking his tree and just 50 metres from his home.

A girl from his class wrote to tell me the news. She knew I would want to know.