Katyboo1’s Weblog

Another factoid for your file on Italian artists and their crazy ways:

 

• Andrea Del Castagno painted ‘a number of illustrious men in a hall,’  You can tell because of the hat stand and collection of Wellingtons in the corner.

 

At lunchtime today Matilda asked me if people who explored cheese were known as cheeseneers.  I asked her why she would think that.  She replied that people who explored the woods were known as ‘pioneers’, and she was just wondering.  We then had to have an explanation of why pioneers weren’t people who explored the woods.  I then asked her if she had ever met a cheese explorer.  She hasn’t as it turns out.  I think she is hoping to though.

 

Shortly thereafter Tallulah asked me if I thought you might kill yourself if you ate glass.  This kind of questioning sums up the extreme personality difference between my two children, one of whom lives in an imaginary world populated by cheeseneers and one of whom contemplates even more hideous ways to kill oneself.  I was very vehement in my anti-eating glass stance.  This led to a strange and complicated conversation about why a person might want to eat glass in the first place and my stance on suicide, including my thoughts on why someone would want to commit suicide.  I didn’t say: ‘Because even the simple act of sitting down and eating a cheese sandwich might involve deep moral investigations into methods and ethics of committing suicide, which is a discussion most parents don’t have to enter into with their four year olds, and which makes a person’s head ache quite a lot.’

 

We then had a conversation about collections.  Matilda is a great believer in collections at the moment, and her interest has been aroused because we read a Nicholas story yesterday (from our new book, Nicholas and the Gang), where Nicholas and his friends decided to take up stamp collecting.  Naturally it ended with Eddie punching everyone on the nose and Alec covering his stamp in smears of croissant.  They were most amused, and now it is one of Tilly’s pet subjects.  She expounded fervently on the delights of her three collections.  These are:

 

1. A collection of sweetie wrappers that she keeps in an old Quality Street tin and which I catch her sniffing at times of crisis, in much the same way as someone addicted to glue.

 

1. A collection of stones from the garden which she keeps at school because when she keeps them at home she invariably gets into trouble for scattering them hither and yon and feeding them by accident to her baby brother.

 

1. A collection of toilet roll tubes.  This is her latest collection.  She only has two so far, but is very excited about the possibility of having a third quite soon.  I asked her what she was going to do with them and she just shrugged happily.  It seems that it is enough just to own them.

 

Tallulah is quite jealous of Tilly’s collections (Tallulah is quite jealous of Tilly. Fin).  She tried to start a sweetie wrapper collection of her own, but she keeps forgetting that she’s collecting them and throwing the wrappers in the bin.  She will invariably have a Homer Simpson ‘Doh!’ moment about five seconds after it has been covered in beans or dirty nappies.  It is, it is clear to see, not a terribly successful collection.  I don’t worry about it too much, due to the fact that her collection is based on elder sister envy rather than any deep and lasting desire to own a load of sweetie wrappers.

 

Careful readers will be aware of what happened to her fledgling stone collection, which I ended up picking off the kitchen floor last night.  This has gone the same way as the stone collection her sister started to keep in the house.  She is now talking about starting a toilet roll collection, but only to annoy Matilda.  You can tell she hasn’t really got the heart for it.  She just can’t resist a bit of sister baiting.

 

She does have a postcard collection.  My mother gave her a load of postcards that she hasn’t sold and isn’t ever likely to sell.  Tallulah loves them, but they’re even less likely to increase in value now due to the fact that she has little reverence for the collection and spends quite a lot of time writing on them, creating her own stamp designs, folding them into rhomboids and trying to shove them under people’s doors.

 

My mother is a great one for collections and always has been.  It’s a part of her hoarding instinct.  She also gave the bug to my dad, unfortunately.  Things that she has collected and continues to collect include:

 

• Huge, brown, industrial sized tea pots.  At one stage the pantry was full of them.  Sometimes she would fill them with pennies.  Other times she would just fill them with dust.  The only thing you could be sure of was the fact that she would never fill them with tea.  She only liked ugly brown ones. I tried her on pretty ones, she just couldn’t warm to them.

 

• Victorian jelly moulds.  These were huge and unwieldy.  They weighed about twenty pounds each.  They were gorgeous on the inside but unsightly on the outside and almost impossible to display.  She was forced to leave them in the pantry along with the hideous brown teapots of doom.  As with the previous collection, no jelly was harmed in the making of these moulds.

 

• Toby jugs, but only ones which featured Welsh women in traditional costume.  You would think that this was quite a niche market, and you would have one or two in your collection at most.  Sadly not.  Turns out that they were very popular, and at the peak of the collecting fervour she had about forty, the tiny beady Welsh eyes of which would invariably follow you round the room.

 

• Commemorative mugs.  She made us collect these too.  They were universally ugly and we didn’t like them at all.  We would get them on special occasions, high days, holidays and if they were on sale.  Her theory was that it would provide us with mugs so that we wouldn’t need to buy any when we set up house for ourselves.  A kind of dowry if you will.

 

• Nasty German wine jugs which were made from poured concrete, featured jolly German mottos about getting shit faced and had florid bunches of blue and grey grapes on them.  They ranged in size from midget to huge and there were about a hundred of the damn things around the house at one point.

 

I have to say that it’s much nicer now that they tend to sell things on, and now that she is mostly collecting bits of paper. They are much easier to store and don’t land on your head when you’re sneaking through the pantry at four in the morning to have a sneaky slice of cake.

 

All the nice things they have mum invariably breaks.  All the ugly things are totally indestructible.  It’s just the law.  She had some fantastic World War One Jam pot lids with cartoons on that were worth a fortune which she dropped, probably on the pantry floor.  She also blew the delicate Vaseline glass Victorian posy flute out the kitchen window where it smashed onto the path below.  Never get her to look after your most treasured possessions, although she is quite good with small children, except the time she catapulted Tilly off the top step of the kitchen on a rotating ladybird.  That was a difficult day.

 

I think she got the collecting bug from my gran.  She didn’t have a chance to collect much in her earlier life, being too poor and busy with three small children and a husband who was keen on the outdoors and fresh air for everyone. In later life she liked to collect things that nobody else would give a home to.  The more horrible the things were, the more she felt sorry for them, and the more she wanted them.  This is why she ended up with:

 

• Big bowls of china fruit and vegetables which didn’t ever look like fruit and vegetables and made people cry.  I once bought her an artificial potato in a basket for Christmas. She loved it.
• Snow globes of places nobody wanted to visit like Hunstanton sewage works.
• Deer heads and random antlers on the wall.
• Paintings by people with no heads, hands, eyes or taste, but who liked to work ‘big’ and ‘bold’
• Pictures of people’s bottoms.
• Sand from every place she had ever been to in jars, buckets cups and old Heinz tomato sauce bottles.
• Stones, the bigger the better, preferably with holes in.
• Random jars of pennies, which she would give you on your birthday if you were lucky.  Again these ranged from the tiny pots of jam you get in hotels up to giant mayonnaise jars. She got really cross if you threw away a jar she could fill with small currency.
• Large wooden sculptures of eagles made out of railway sleepers.  She had one in particular called Leera (because it would look at you funny).  I was terrified of it and hated having to go for a wee at her house in the middle of the night because Leera would be watching me on the landing and might kill me and peck my eyes out.

 

 

My mother encouraged my brother and I to have collections when we were small.  She thought it was healthy and would keep us out of trouble.  It would be interesting to see how many psychopaths were forced to have collections of Victorian penny farthings as a child.  I don’t know what she was basing her findings on.  It certainly didn’t stop me drinking to excess and engaging in hair curling activities as a teenager.  Still, who knows what I might have been doing if I hadn’t had my collection of scented rubbers in the shape of sausages, stamps from Romania and postcards of Hop Picking in Essex to keep me on the straight and narrow. I’d probably be on a filthy mattress in a crack joint surrounded by the rotting corpses of my dead babies by now.

 

I can’t remember what Robert collected.  He was never very keen and was always much more anarchic than me when it came to things like that.  I think at one time he might have had a collection of those weird little beer mugs that were about the same size as shot glasses and had nasty pictures of water wheels with the legend: ‘A souvenir from Chipping Sodbury’ on them.  I think this may have been due to the fact that my mother would bring them back for him from antique fairs, rather than from his overwhelming desire to drink midget sized pints of beer.

 

I gave up all my collecting activities in my late teens.  If I had been my mother I’d have been wildly relieved as by then my collections had gone from the standard stamps, postcards, rubbers to quite odd things.  At one time I had:

 

• A collection of wooden spoons and various other wooden culinary implements which I kept in jars around my bedroom, rather like other people keep vases of flowers.

 

• Pictures of eyes, hands, feet and other bodily parts which I cut out and made into a giant collage which covered two whole walls of my rather large bedroom.  It unnerved lots of people and I didn’t have many visitors at that time.  Eventually even I got a bit weirded out.

 

• Flotsam and jetsam washed up from the beach where my then boyfriend’s parents lived.  I had a rusted milk churn (I was made to keep this outside), half a tree, hundreds of bits of weirdly shaped driftwood, the lid of a barrel from a Russian cargo ship (nobody knew what was in it, because naturally it was written on in Russian.  It stank to high heaven and was something else I was obliged to keep outside), glass fishing floats, bowls and bowls of stones and shells which I used to fill with water so that they would go all shiny, and then fail to empty out when they went mouldy and stank and lots of smelly rope with cork floats (outside).

 

• Hats. I loved hats.  I had loads of hats, and campaigned for many years for a hat stand, which I eventually drove my parents mad with, taking it to and from university each term.  They hated me.  Serves them right for encouraging me to collect things.

 

• A pair of crutches and a hockey stick.  This was to be the basis of a collection of tall things.  I also wanted a false leg (don’t ask! I have no idea.  It seemed like a good idea at the time), a lacrosse stick and some stilts.  It petered out after the crutches, due to lack of enthusiasm on my parents’ front for subbing me for a false leg.  Spoil sports.

 

• Uniforms and army stuff.  I don’t mean military hardware.  I just liked those second hand army supply shops where you could get all manner of strange things.  I had a fantastic Norwegian seamen’s jumper which came down to my knees and saw me through many a cold winter.  I also had dog tags, a navy pea jacket, a kit bag and several hats.  My ambition was to own a belt with all the spent gun cartridges in and a full Admiral’s uniform.  Sadly it was never to be.  Men in the navy were rather small, and once my bosom started growing I was on a losing streak there.

 

Anyway.  When I got to be eighteen I got rid of most of my collections except for the hats and the uniforms.  My mum was worried about me, so tried to encourage me back into the world of collecting by starting several collections which she thought might stop me from sliding into depravity, having tattoos and making her a grandmother.  The first thing she chose was shoe horns!  Why she chose shoe horns I’ll never know.  I was slightly amazed when she turned up with a couple announcing that it would do me good and I could use this to get going.  I just couldn’t get enthusiastic about the world of shoe horns, so she tried a couple of other things (cigarette cases might have been one of them.  Clearly she wasn’t worried about me smoking myself to death), but it was all to no avail.  My collecting days were over, but it looks like my children have got the bug and will carry on the fine tradition, thus ensuring they grow up healthy and in sound mind and body, just like their mother!

 

Anyway, I’m writing this so that I can keep an eye on the kids without actually interfering too much.  They’re next door having a disco to the strains of Abba’s Waterloo.  As indicated in previous blogs, for some reason they think that having a disco means that you have to wear pants on your head.  They are all replete with pants, which is good.  They are jigging about, pants aloft with their hobby horses in one hand and various weaponry in the other.  It’s a bandido’s disco as far as I can see.  Still, as long as they’re doing something creative and not just watching telly I don’t mind too much.

 

After lunch we did colouring.  They have all done pictures for Caron’s new baby.  Tallulah and Tilly were very keen on the theme of aliens and have done pictures of the baby being taken away in an alien space ship.  I don’t know whether this will reassure Caron, but after a week of no sleep she might find that thought strangely soothing.  I know I probably would.  Oscar has done some lovely squiggles.  He’s very into drawing circles at the moment.  He did one and I said in an encouraging voice: ‘Oh! Oscar! That’s lovely! You’ve drawn an ‘o’ for Oscar.’  He looked at me, looked at his work, pointed at it and said very firmly: ‘No.  Pooh.’ So there you have it.