The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman

After weeks of excitement and anticipation I finally got to see the Grayson Perry exhibition at The British Museum yesterday.

Entitled: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman it was a collection curated by Perry, which included objects from the museum archives as well as items he had made himself.

The exhibition worked (for me) on many levels.  It was an exploration of what crafts mean to us; as makers, as users of objects, and as observers.  It looked at where art and craft meet, and what happens to objects that either sit on the dividing line between the two areas, or move across from one to the other.  It looked at how we pour meaning into objects and how we extract meaning from objects.  It explores what happens to them over time in terms of their importance to us as objects and artefacts, and how our understanding of them changes with the passing of time.

I am fascinated by these ideas.  I read Brian Sewell’s review of the Perry show, and it was harsh.  Sewell dismissed Perry as a craftsman, as if somehow this was demeaning and unworthy.  I utterly disagree with him.  I remember seeing Perry speak at De Montfort University a few years ago, and being captivated by his ideas about craft.  It is this that draws me to his work.

I don’t know if I’ve got this right but I will attempt to explain my understanding of it.  A craftsman is someone who makes the same thing over and over again, like a bowl or a cup or a chair.  These objects, after thousands of makings, are made with a fluidity, and ease and grace which give them an inherent artistry and worth that underpins and adds to their pragmatic value.  Perry’s work seems to cross the divide between artist and craftsman in that he makes these crafted objects but because of his status, the way he decorates the objects and how and where they are displayed, they become art in the more accepted sense of the word.

The items in the British museum are, in the main, crafted.  They were not made to be seen in a gallery.  They were made by artisan craftspeople to be used in homes and buildings, temples and shops.  They have become art because of their age, and because of where they are now displayed.  We have ascribed them artistic value despite the fact they were not made by named artists.

I love these ideas.  I am a huge fan of craft as an art form.  I believe that the objects you have in your home, the things that surround you and which make up your every day life should have an inherent beauty that is at once a part of and yet which also transcends their practical use.

I hate Sewell’s idea of art as being something exalted and unreachable.  It is so elitist.  I love some of the art that Sewell reveres, but I cannot afford it.  It is not within my reach.  I would never be able to own it and enjoy it every day.  In order to see it I would have to make a pilgrimage, much like the one that is artificially created in Perry’s exhibition.

Sometimes I want to do that, and that kind of art has its place.  A place where, for example, one of Perry’s pots sits.  I would never be able to afford one. I have to go to a gallery to see one.  But Perry’s art and the way he makes it, talks about it, and sometimes displays it is a reminder that art and beauty can be in all things.

And this is what makes me joyful about his work, and it is a word I do not use lightly.  His things make me feel joy.  Stupid perhaps, but there you are.

Even though they are out of my league financially, they remind me of the beauty that surrounds me.  I have, for example, chosen to eat from my Bridgewater pots, which I can go and see being made and decorated by hand.  For me they are craftsmanship which also give me great aesthetic pleasure.  I drive past Victorian factories which are such beautiful examples of craftsmanship I want to touch them. I have a hand carved pestle and mortar made of a deep grained, copper coloured wood that looks like art to me.

In the exhibition space, we are able to look at objects with an aesthetic eye rather than with a pragmatic eye.  We are able to see the beauty in the every day.  We are able to make art out of every day things and every day things into art.  Perry’s work explores these ideas.  His iconography is full of famous brand marks, mobile phones, sound bytes and items from contemporary life that he has purloined to become spiritual and symbolic reliquaries.

The themes of faith and belief were also a huge part of the show.   The exhibition was set out as a kind of pilgrimage; with Alan Measles, Perry’s teddy bear as a benevolent deity both presiding over and taking part in the pilgrimage.  The objects were laid out to create a kind of narrative journey which led to the final piece, the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, which was a ship, cast in iron, slung with reliquaries and totems, and housing an ancient flint axe head.

Perry’s notes, which accompany the objects are fascinating insights into the way he planned the exhibition.  The objects not only lead us on a journey which is symbolic of a journey into understanding and possibly faith, but the whole thing is a symbol of what the British Museum as a whole stands for, as a kind of Mecca and place of worship for pilgrims wishing to understand more about the world though the people and artefacts that inhabit it.

I also saw it a Perry’s own journey of discovery as an artist.  His pilgrimage to Germany on AM1, the bike I have posted pictures of, shows a growth in his understanding of both his psyche and his art.  The embracing of other crafts as well as ceramics, with tapestries and the amazing iron ship.  The continuation and exploration of recurrent themes like his sexuality, his transvestism, and his obsession with maps as a way of expressing and understanding faith and spirituality, self and other.  I particularly loved the tapestry, which was a map of the ideas of pilgrimage and the afterlife.  I found it interesting that the medium of weaving is used as a way of mapping things, and chose, perhaps erroneously to think this was a kind of meta comment on what maps do, taking strands of understanding and weaving them together to create new ways of understanding and looking at things.

It pleased me, anyway.

The other thing that also impressed me was the sense of humour that the work is put together with.  It can be disturbing and dark, and provocative but it is also really, really funny and engaging.  One lady I stood in front of summed it up for me when she turned to her companion and just said: ‘Alan Measles! He he he he he.’

I wanted to blog about it when I got home last night, but the exhibition, although quite small, gave me so much to think about, I found myself a bit overwhelmed by it.  I decided to sleep on it and see if it helped clarify my thoughts any.

What I loved about it most was that each object was picked with such care and placed in such a way that a story unfolded as you travelled around the exhibition.  I am sure that this is what many curators do when they set out to put together a show, but this is the first time I have really experienced it as a visitor.

I found myself appreciating objects that I know, had I seen them in a regular museum case, I would not have given a second glance to, but because of the way they were placed and the items they were juxtaposed with I was able to enjoy them in a completely new way.

I am not an artist, although I love the visual arts.  I like to see beautiful things. I do not always understand them.  My appreciation of them is rather like my appreciation of a flower.  I like things which make my inner beauty receptors quiver.

I am a writer.  It is words that do for me what art does for an artist.  What I loved so much about this exhibition was that because the narrative within it was so strong I was able to translate the objects I was seeing into the story I was reading and feeling, and make sense of things in a way I found deeply satisfying as well as aesthetically pleasing.

It was an absolute delight, and I am hoping I will be able to go and visit it again before it closes in February.

Yummy London

I went to London yesterday, not to visit the queen (she wasn’t in), but to visit my friend Gina, and pay homage to Alan Measles by going to the British Museum’s Grayson Perry Exhibition: ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.’

You all know how I feel about London, and yesterday was just one of those perfect London days that made me fall in love with it just a little bit harder.

I got the train from Rugby. Hardly anyone was on it.  It took fifty minutes to get to Euston. I read my book in peace and quiet.  It was delightful.

I was meeting Gina at Covent Garden.  I was so early that when I got there  hardly anybody was around. Nothing in London really wakes up until about ten thirty, and the streets were so peaceful.  I spent the hour and a half I had until we met just walking the quiet streets, looking at buildings and exploring streets I’d never walked down before.  The weather was mild. The shop keepers were bustling about, getting ready for the rush that was to come, and everything was beginning to look rather christmassy.

When Gina arrived we wandered off to have brunch at a place she recommended called Bills.  It’s tucked in an out of the way corner between Leicester Square and Covent Garden proper, but not too difficult to find.  The place was filling up when we arrived, and as we left there were people queueing.  Much like Wahaca, which it reminded me of in spirit, you don’t book.  You just turn up and hope.  The staff are friendly and efficient and the service is speedy.  You don’t feel you are being rushed when you are eating, but because the service is good, you don’t usually have to wait too long for a table.

We had the full works breakfast.  Gina had the meat version. I had the vegetarian version.  I am not a vegetarian, but the food sounded so good, it would have been rude not to try it.  I had thick slices of delicious toasted bread, spread with garlicky hummus and guacamole.  There were fried mushrooms, poached eggs and my absolute favourite, bubble and squeak.  It was the most scrumptious bubble and squeak I’d ever had, as they had added grainy mustard to the mixture, which was such a simple thing to do, but lifted it firmly into the ‘food of the gods’ category.

The whole lot was drizzled with chilli dipping sauce, and it was divine.  I could not fault it.  The fact that the coffee was good was an added bonus.

I would definitely go back again.

And again, and again.

We staggered off into the afternoon, stately as galleons, wending our way over to the British Museum.  I will write a separate post about our impressions of the exhibition, but I will just say that it was the best exhibition I have seen in years.

Afterwards we decided that tea and cake really were required.  I remembered that the London Review of Books Cake Shop was just round the corner.  I’m so glad I remembered. It was fabulous.  We had what we considered to be one of the top three carrot cakes ever in the history of ever.  The mascarpone icing lifted it firmly into the realms of the divine.  We also had some fantastic tea.

I do not drink builders tea, or indeed any form of black tea, but I do like green and white teas.  There is an extensive tea menu at the cake shop and we tried a white tea called silver needles, which was beautiful, and a tea called jasmine pearls, which was scented and really tasty.  The tea comes in tiny glass pots with various things to decant, all resting on a small wooden box, so you can do your own tea drinking ritual.  It’s extremely fun and I highly recommend it.

After waving a reluctant goodbye to Gina, I consoled myself with a visit to Foyles on Charing Cross Road and started heading back to the station.  Unfortunately there had been a power outage at Wembley which was affecting all trains from Euston.  It said I could use my ticket at St Pancras to get through to Leicester.  I decided to go over there and see.  If it was going to turn out to be an epic voyage of discovery where I ended up stranded in Milton Keynes at three in the morning I wouldn’t bother and would just check into a hotel and go home in the morning.

I rather hoped this would be the case, as I was having such a nice time it seemed a shame to end it.

As it was, I got to the station and they courteously waved me through the barriers and straight onto a train.  I even got a seat.

When I got to Leicester, Jason and the children were waiting for me so I didn’t have to hang about in the cold.  The children were all wrapped up in their pyjamas, enjoying a dark adventure, and as we drove home, talking nineteen to the dozen I was glad I hadn’t had to stay in a hotel after all.

 

Bear Necessities

Oscar is currently switching allegiance on the soft toy front.

Last year he asked for a blue teddy bear for Christmas.  He got this one:

It is imaginatively named ‘bear’.  It is rather a nice bear. It has that delicious plush fur that bears didn’t have way back in the day.  When I was born my parents had a bear made for me. It was called Bungle after the bear in the troubling television programme Rainbow.  My Bungle was not ideal in that he had fur that was akin to wire wool.

I never really took to Bungle.  Mainly because of the fur thing and the fact that he was quite large (compared to the average toddler), and completely over stuffed. He simply did not bend.  In fact, he looked like a bear in the final stages of rigor mortis.  He was not comforting in any way, shape or form.  He just kind of lay there in bed like a lumpen mass of petrified bear.

The final insult was the fact that the lady who made him had put one of those things in his tummy when she stuffed him. One of those things that when you tip it up makes a lowing noise, like a wounded cow.  This meant that not only was he large and unwieldy, but he went off on a lowing spree at inconvenient times.

Bungle was not a total dead loss.  I have very vivid memories of me at the age of three, brushing Bungle’s teeth using one of my brother’s baby bottle cleaners dipped in a large bucket of mud.  It was excellent fun.  I must have known however, that this would not be a popular move, so I shut myself in the caravan we were going away on holiday in to do this subversive dental work.  It turns out that this was also not a popular move, as I managed to flick large mud splatters over the entire interior of the caravan in the process of the teeth cleaning and got a very sore bottom for my pains.

Luckily Oscar has never done anything like this with bear.  He has merely done the usual child’s trick of losing it up and down the country, whereupon anguished tears and much hunting have taken place.

Bear’s best jaunt was being left in the Ashton Under Lyne Travelodge when we went to visit my friend Heather in the summer holidays.  Heather’s long suffering husband Clive was despatched to rescue him, and bear spent several days living it up at Heather’s house before being reunited with his owner via the power of Royal Mail.

It looks like bear’s days as favourite toy might be numbered  though, as Oscar has started to take this thing to bed with him:

It is a platypus apparently.  It has a large, yellow platypus tail at the back as evidence.  I remain unconvinced, and deeply troubled.

I don’t blame him for picking a troubling toy mind you. What adults think children will like and what they actually like are two different things.  Usually two different things that are massively disappointing to parents.  You want your child to fall in love with the hand crafted train set made by poor Ugandan natives out of rare baobab tree.  They prefer the Optimus Prime plastic tat that came out of a Happy Meal Box.

It is the way of their people.

When I was a child it was a fad for a few years if you won anything at the fair to be given a piece of shaped foam, with a swathe of real fur glued to it, and a plastic monkey face stuck to the front.  These were then attached to a bamboo cane on a piece of elastic.  What for remains unclear.  They always fell to bits within half an hour of you winning it, and they were very disturbing indeed.  They also used to smell quite worryingly of adhesive and damp fur.

One year I won one and would not be parted from it, even when its face fell off, and its tail fell off and it was basically a sponge wrapped in what was probably the remains of a dead rabbit.  I used to rub it over my face in an OCD type movement that had my mum so disturbed she tried everything to get it off me.  Eventually she managed to swap me for a Paddington Bear toy complete with duffel coat, hat and cardboard briefcase.  Ten minutes after undressing him to find that he was basically Bungle but on a smaller scale, I had hysterics, marching into the kitchen with the rejected Paddington, and demanding my furry sponge back. My mum was having none of it.  She had buried it in the bin under a mound of wet tea leaves.

I sobbed for a week.  It explains my deep antipathy to all things Paddington related.

Although I distrust platypus I am going to tolerate him.  He doesn’t smell and as long as I don’t have to spend time in the same room with him (his eyes follow you), all is well.

It is interesting to me how children form attachments to toys.  Tallulah has never had a deep yearning for one toy in particular. She is more about quantity than quality.  Regular readers will remember her collection of bush babies.  She has about twenty of these candy coloured, plush monstrosities.  I believe Oscar’s platypus is a member of the bush baby tribe, even though it is not a bush baby at all.  This troubles the makers not one jot, as you can now get Elvis bush babies and squirrel bush babies and bush babies that light up and sing.  I am thankful that she is going off them.

She is now back into the soul sucking money pits that are Build A Bear bears.

I am appalled and yet fascinated by Build A Bear.

If you have not yet had the dubious pleasure, it is a shop where you can go in, pick a bear skin, and have it stuffed and sewn up in the shop as you watch.  Each bear gets a heart put in as well. Not an anatomically correct heart, a small, shiny, satin red heart, which you as the soon to be parent of the bear get to shove in place before it gets stitched and stuffed.  When you purchase the bear you are given a birth certificate naming you as the parent.

Then you can roam the extensive shop buying such things as bear roller blades and Hello Kitty pants, and bear wigs at vast expense.

I loathe them, and yet I know that when I was Tallulah’s age I would probably have cut my right arm of for the chance to own one.  It is not so much the bears, which are uniformly boring. It is the wealth of accessories. You can even buy bear microphones and stethoscopes and mobile phones.  It is insane.

Of all my children, Tilly is the most loyal bear lover.  Apart from a brief flirtation with a plush Elmo called Melmo between the ages of 18 months and three years, she has always been loyal to ‘bear’. Bear is a girl bear, with an extensive wardrobe of clothes, most of which Tilly has made, as bear is a rather funny shape.

Bear’s fur is a bit loved off, as you can see.

As bear is so special, the  bed that bear is tucked into in this picture is actually the wooden bed that my granddad made for my favourite doll when I was about four.  I felt that it was only right to pass it on to bear.  It is a well earned heirloom.

Bear was a gift from Tilly’s god father at her naming ceremony when she was three months old, and she is a well travelled bear. She has been carried across continents, up hill and down dale and loved with a passion that defies logic.  We have rescued her from being lost at organic farms, the Royal Free Hospital, and so many other heart stoppingly busy places I have grey hairs I attribute solely to bear.

Tilly ‘knows’ that her bear is real.  She is more like Tilly’s daemon than a toy.  If something were ever to happen to bear I think we would learn the true meaning of the word inconsolable.

Tilly wanted to enter bear into the Grayson Perry competition at the British Museum.  They were asking for three Alan Measles stunt doubles to sit on the AM1 motorbike shrine for the duration of the show.  Tilly was so enthusiastic until she realised how long she would have to part with bear.  She could not do it.

So bear remains at home, best beloved of all. Splendid in her piebald glory.

Oooh! Oooh! Oooh!

Even though I am currently tied to the Chaise Longue of Death I must update you on more exciting activity in my world.  I know I’m blogging like a fiend today, but my word twist application won’t load on Facebook and I am too sore to sleep.

Alan Measles

The Alan Measles bag project has made some headway.  I have found suitable material.  I have found a suitable template.  I have cut out most of the template and Alan now has eyes and a nose.  Unfortunately Alan now looks manic, demented and slightly like he is possessed by the powers of evil, but hey.  I think Grayson might quite like that.

The problem is you see, that I chose some splendid blue sparkly buttons for eyes without working out the eye to head ratio, mainly because I didn’t know what size he was going to be until I found the template on the interweb when I got home.  He is rather a small bear sac.  In fact he will be more of an ornamental purse in which one can keep an Argos catalogue pen, a twenty pence piece in case you need to ring the Emergency Services and a hankie for Thumbelina.

I decided that the buttons were too good to waste and that I would use them anyway. Now they take up the majority of his head, and because I have fixed them on rather crudely they loll about like he is under the influence of some class A narcotic or possible horse tranquiliser.  It also means that there was very little room for his nose on his face so it sort of lurks about at chin level.  I am stumped as to what to do for a mouth.  I may not bother.

Despite this, I am quite pleased with progress.  It does actually look like a bear, which is more than I could possibly have hoped for when I set out on this craft odyssey.  There is hope yet that I may rise like a phoenix from the flames and reclaim my centuries old craft style heritage.  Mind you, the phoenix will probably have very odd shaped eyes and be far too small.  But what the hell. 

 

Jason’s Lady Boy Activities

Jason had to go in to work today in his full lady doing sports ensemble.  Now I was not prepared to go and spend vast sums of money on female sports attire, size 22 thank you very much.  We made do and mended and in the end he looked rather more like a naughty school girl who would sneak off behind the bike sheds and have a fag while everyone else played hockey and galloped about.  It was a triumph.

We ended up with a white t-shirt with collar and thin black tie attachment (£3.00 in the bargain bin at Tesco. Entirely understandable as it was a very random piece of clothing), a black skirt which I hacked and hemmed and whose hem looked like the back leg of a donkey.  They didn’t notice the wonky hem on a rather large hairy man though.  He provided enough of a distraction to get away with it.  We teamed it with red fish net hold ups and trainers, a straw boater and electric blue plaits on a headband.  He looked divine, as you can imagine.  He refused to let me shave his beard off or apply makeup so he looked even more rakish.  His boss however, cornered him and daubed him in electric blue eye shadow at eight o’clock this morning, and I’m glad she did.  It finished it off nicely.

I will be getting photographs soon and will post them the second they land in my in box.  You will probably need a stiff drink.

 

Regimental Ferrets

My cousin Ruth is in the army.  She’s an engineer and drives tanks and climbs mountains in her spare time.  She gets posted all over the world and often writes to the children and sends them postcards for their collections.  She is a favourite cousin because of this benevolent activity. 

She has recently received a new posting somewhere in Germany and wrote to the kids with the latest news.  It turns out that where she is they have ferrets as their regimental mascots.  I was very surprised by this as goats are apparently all the go on the regimental mascot front.  Goats called Baldrick according to my father who surprised me with that random bit of general knowledge only this week. 

Anyway, the ferrets are not called Baldrick.  In fact I don’t know what they are called, but they are taken very seriously indeed according to my cousin.  When they are all on parade in their best clothes, the ferrets come and inspect the troops, running up and down the lines of soldiers! Not only that but they too have best clothes and each have a set of regimental uniforms complete with hats, that they wear when performing this bizarre rite.

I told this to my mother and she said that it couldn’t possibly be true and that she would ask my aunty when she met with her for lunch this week.  She rang me today to say that she had been forced to eat humble pie because it is indeed true.  Not only that but if any harm befalls the ferrets, those in charge of ferret handling get demoted!  They also have spare ferrets in case one or the other ‘real’ ferrets is laid up or doesn’t feel like going on parade.  They pick the spare ferrets to match the original ones so that the join doesn’t show.  Apparently it’s quite difficult finding replacements with the right head size for the hats.

Who knew?  No wonder our military is unravelling at the seams.  They’re all too bloody busy looking after ferrets and performing ferret fashion shows to get to grips with things like war.

The world has gone mad, mad I say.

Hooray…

Alan Measles

I have got a little project on hand.

Jaywalker has a new dress.  She blogged about it here.

She says it is like something Grayson Perry would wear.  I love Grayson Perry I got terribly excited.

For those of you who don’t know who Grayson Perry is, I will reveal all.

He is a brilliant potter who makes gorgeous pots which are very lovely to look at and you think: ‘Oh! How pretty.’ and then you realise that plastered all over said pot is a picture of a man with a hoover attachment up his bum.  The things he makes are often quite rude. Rude but beautiful.  I have blogged about him several times because I am hoping that one day he will read about how much I like him and give me one of his pots.  Because otherwise he’s going to have to wait until I win the jackpot at Gala Bingo before I can afford one.  He makes other things too, carpets and maps and stuff and things. I’d take any of it, napkin holders if necessary.  I can’t really find a picture which does his stuff justice.  Here is a paltry effort.  You’ll just have to take my word on the beauty thing:

This one is called: ‘We’ve Found The Body.’  Best not to buy it for your gran.

The reason Jaywalker’s dress looks like Grayson Perry is not because it is the shape of a pot, or indeed a man shoving a hoover part up his anal passage, but because Grayson Perry is a transvestite.  He has a girl alter ego called Claire.  Claire is not a regular transvestite type woman.  Claire is a little girl who likes party frocks and balloons and bows.  Claire looks like this:

 

So as you can imagine I was intrigued by Jaywalker’s choice of fashion wear.

She has promised to send me a picture of it.  In exchange I have promised to make her a bag with Alan Measles on it.

Alan Measles is Grayson Perry’s teddy bear.  He got it when he was a small child. It is called Alan after his then best friend and measles because he had measles when he got it (Perry, not Alan. Do keep up.) Anyway, Alan Measles looms large in Perry’s life along with mad frocks and rude pots.  In fact he often makes rude pots with Alan on.  Alan is a hero who often saves the day.  I couldn’t find a decent picture of Alan either, but you may just be able to make him out on the top of this pot if you squinch your eyes up a bit.

I have promised this thing in a fit of enthusiasm and am now slightly stumped as to how to go about it. I’m not getting cold feet.  Don’t get me wrong.  This is not a get out of jail free, wiggly, wriggly blog.  This is a mulling over my options blog.

The crucial thing to remember here is that I am not artistic.  I am much more of a make do and mend woman. I appreciate art. In fact I love art.  I would love to be artistic.  I have been to drawing and painting classes and I am crap.  I am also bad at handicrafts in general and sewing specifically.  Nevertheless I am enthusiastic.  There is none of this, ‘could do better if tried harder,’ about me.  More like, ‘did try harder, didn’t do any better, but fair play.’

I was going to go into town today with Oscar and spend time mooching about various craft and sewing emporiums coming up with ideas.  Instead I stayed at home and sulked, played rubbishy games on the internet and wondered about making myself an eye patch with the remnants of whatever I make an Alan Measles bag with.

I am now wondering if the prototype goes well and Jaywalker is happy with it, if I could make Mark II for Grayson Perry and send it him for Christmas.  He may be so impressed by my artistic creations that he sends me a lovely hand crafted present to cheer me up.  Either that or a cease and desist letter and something fierce along the lines of; ‘I’ll sue you, you Alan Measles stealing swine’. 

Never let it be said that I’m not daring.  Let’s do it.

In the meantime, any ideas gratefully received.  The project will inevitably take time, particularly if my Word Twist habit keeps on apace.  I hope it’s not in demand for christmas parties.  I shall however, keep you all posted on the progress of the measlesac.

Sunday 7th September – The Gnowl

Not really in a blogging mood today.  I’ve got a good book. I’m reading: ‘Grayson Perry; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl’ by Wendy Jones.  It’s fantastic.  I love Grayson Perry.  I’ve blogged about him before, but for those of you who weren’t around then, he’s the transvestite potter that won the Turner Prize a few years back.  I first saw his work on an OU course I was doing last year, and then had the great good fortune to go to a talk he did with the ceramics expert from the Antiques Roadshow, Lars Tharp.  Perry is funny, clever, articulate and makes some stunning things.  He also has a fixation with a teddy bear called Alan Measles, and you can’t say fairer than that.  What I particularly love about his pots are the fact that from far away they look so serene and graceful, and it’s only when you get up close and actually look at the pictures that it melts your mind.  It’s not often you see a Ming esque vase with a picture of people pleasuring themselves with hoover attachments on.  Not something you’d want to show your gran, probably, unless she was extremely broad minded.  I find it quite refreshing, not pleasuring myself with a hoover attachment, that just seems rather painful and unneccessary.  I don’t do painful.  I do comfortable.  I do hot chocolate and snuggling in giant blankets.

I’m supposed to be reviewing a book for Amazon Vine, but I left it at my mother’s yesterday after a particularly chaotic visit and Grayson Perry was just lying around begging to be read.  The vine books is about necrotic demons rising from the ground to suck out peoples’ souls, so I was easily swayed towards hoover attachments.

My parents have my aunt visiting from Italy.  She’s not a favourite aunt and can be quite a challenging house guest, as illustrated by the fact that my brother caused a stir yesterday having quite an interesting fight with her.  I took the children down the garden and we went to inspect the new gnome house that Tilly had built in the pouring rain whilst I avoided questions about what all the shouting was about.  I don’t know why I have to qualify the statement about outside activity with the words ‘in the pouring rain’ given the fact that it has bucketed it down almost solidly for the last week.  Let’s take it as given that any outdoor frolicking will be of the wet variety. 

The kids didn’t let it put them off.  Tilly has been building gnome dwellings for several weeks now.  She naturally gravitates towards using cardboard as a building material.  Both my mother and I have pointed out the pitfalls, but she persevered until yesterday when her third house ended up in water logged clumps.  She then moved on to a kind of wattle and daub mix, but thankfully without the pooh, although I did offer her the contents of one of Oscar’s nappies.  Eventually she settled on some bubble wrap that she found in the garage.  She also fashioned some of the bubble wrap into a kind of nineteen fifties style retro-future headscarf.  What with her ankle length, rather sensible coat and wellingtons, she looked like an Eastern European peasant about to start queueing for cabbages.  When her coat was too wet to wear anymore, she swapped it for her dressing gown (they all have their own bedrooms at grannies, complete with clothes, etc. And they have a playroom with a t.v. which is more than I ever had when I lived there!).  She looked decidedly eccentric, but she was having a lovely time and who am I to criticise? My parents never said a word when I took to wearing men’s pyjamas with the fly sewn up and vintage bowler hats.  There are some things that are just best accepted.

As you may know the kids have these gnomes at my mum’s house.  They have one each, which ‘mysteriously’ appeared in the garden.  Every time we go over, mum and dad will have moved them, which the children think the gnomes have done spontaneously.  On the way there in the car yesterday my dad was spinning Tallulah some yarn about how he had seen her gnome doing back stroke across the lawn! She was quite impressed.  Anyway, yesterday they were amazed and astounded because an owl has now joined the gang.  I have threatened my mother with death if any more statuary appears.  As I pointed out, when she’s in Shady Pines and the house has to be sorted out, it’s going to be me adopting four hundred tonnes of garden masonry.  She was unrepentant!

The owl is a gnome owl or gnowl as Tallulah called it.  My mum says that it’s called Wol.  Tallulah says that it is called Bill.  She won.

Aunty Squirrel came round and Hopi’d up my ears for me.  Apparently I have to have it done three times in a week to see if it’s really going to work.  I’m booked in to be candled again on Tuesday for my sins.  It didn’t hurt.  It was strangely soothing in an odd way.  There’s never going to be too much normality attached to having foot long beeswax tubes stuck into your ears and set alight.  Thank god we didn’t do it to Tilly, her head scarf would definitely have melted.  My sinuses were agony all day yesterday and all night.  Today they are a little better.  I await the further results with bated ears.

Our friend Peter came round after Aunty Squirrel had taken her leave.  He had been put in charge of his two daughters for the day while his wife Caron went up to London for the first time since the youngest was born in May.  He coped admirably, but was looking a little tired by the time he reached us.  A few hours of watching the eldest run round the lawn covered in bubble wrap and helping Tallulah wash tea towels by stirring them with a stick in a wicker basket soon set him back to rights.  Mum and dad have a verandah all across the back of their house.  It is deep enough to be able to sit out even when it is pouring with rain, which is what we did for most of yesterday.  I love their verandah.  I have verandah envy.  It’s especially good for reading your book on whilst watching your children squelch around in the rain.

So a soggy day, a busy day, but a good one.  We got home at about half seven, threw the kids in the shower and then let them have a play swordfight to work off the last bits of their energy before bed.  We only had one unbroken sword left, so the others had to have war hammers, but they coped admirably and made a hell of a row.  Mercifully nothing was broken except the sound barrier.

Today the girls have been at their dad’s all day and are not due back until Tuesday morning.  It has been very quiet.  We have done very little.  The laundry got me in the end, although I have managed to put it off since Friday and it was quite pressing then, so much kudos to me.  We bought a new kitchen bin, because we snapped the lid on our old one.  I’m going to use it in the garage for recycling storage. 

Our council are quite enlightened.  We get a weekly bin round where most people in the county only get a fortnightly one.  We also get a plethora of recycling bins which are collected fortnightly, one for paper and card, one for glass and one for tins and plastic.  Unfortunately these are quite small and we fill them in a few days.  Up to now I have just been using the regular bin once I fill up the others, but reading Mrs A.’s blog has pricked my conscience somewhat and I have decided to turn over a new leaf.  I have commandeered some containers in the garage for overflow recycling and we are going to make more regular trips to the tip.  I am also going to try not to buy any more magazines.  As I am a bit of a magazine fetishist this may require me to have extra doctor and dentist appointments so I can get a regular fix, and I’m not promising I won’t fall off the wagon, but we will see how we go.  I don’t know.  I might have to stop reading that woman’s blog altogether.  She’s turning me away from the dark side dammit.  I’m not giving the cape back though.  They’ll have to prize it out of my cold, dead hands first.

Random Thoughts from Abroad

Sometimes you write a blog and it’s all seamless and smooth and lovely.  Other times you write a blog and it’s all lumpy.  Sometimes you have lumpy thoughts, but you don’t want to insert them into an otherwise smooth kind of moment.  Then you find you have a collection of random thoughts which were quite nice, and sort of amused you in a gentle and entirely non-threatening way.  You think; ‘It’s a shame to waste those.  I’ll save them up until I’ve got enough and then I’ll post them all in a lump.’  And that’s what this is.  A lumpy, bumpy randomly thought out collection of stuff that has flitted through my brain in recent times:

 

• I bought some Jelly Baby ice lollies because they were on offer at the supermarket and they looked small enough for Oscar to handle without ending up inside the lolly screaming to be let out.  It said on the packet that the jellies were ‘wobbly’.  I thought they were lying.  They weren’t.  I got one out of the packet for Oscar to eat on the way home from the supermarket.  I pulled it.  It stretched.  I pulled it some more, it stretched.  I finally wrenched it out of the packet, by which time it was about three feet long and droopy (very visually disturbing).  Oscar held it by the stick and the lolly broke in half.  One half plummeted onto his shorts and made him shriek and then he burst into tears.  I wrestled it away from him and ate the fallen bit to see if they tasted as weird as they looked.  They do.  I can see why they’re on special offer.  It’s a bit like eating orange flavoured, frozen glue.  Quite, quite disturbing.
•  My friend Daf sent me a superb quotation which I will recreate for you here with the aid of future technology (i.e. cut and paste). ‘A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece’ Ludwig Ernhard  I don’t know who Ludwig is, but you’ve got to be impressed by such a massive intellect when applied to the world of cake.  There aren’t enough philosophical cake based quotations around in the world for my liking and it’s good to see the balance being redressed finally.  Ludwig may be my new hero.  It will now transpire that when I finally get around to looking him up on Wikipedia that he was in favour of compulsory mass genocide for the over twenty ones and responsible for the discovery of ricin tipped umbrellas no doubt.
•  I was reading in the news that the toilet on the International Space Station is finally fixed after two weeks of being broken.  What it didn’t make clear was: a) what they all did for two weeks while the toilet was out of order, as it’s not as if you can just pop next door and b) who they managed to get in to fix it.  I bet their hourly rate was astronomical.  It’s only confirmed my deep and lasting desire never to have to go into space.  No cakes, no bookshops, no trees and apparently no working bog.  Nice one.
•  On my daily perambulation through the world of news I also came across a fabulous picture of my favourite potter Grayson Perry in his delightful, home made ensemble which he wore to the opening of the Royal Academy exhibition this year.  He looks like the high drag version of Little Bo Peep.  If you have a look you can just see a silk appliqué of what looks like his treasured teddy bear, Alan Measles on the front of the skirt. Go Grayson, go! You are a potting God.
•  I may be developing a fixation with Dan Cruikshank.  I recorded some of the Hay-on-Sky programming last week for those times in the day when I get to sit down and there’s nothing else to watch.  I want Mariella Frostrup’s job, so I thought I’d do some research (I also want her face, her hair and her enviable figure please).  Please note that these were recorded last week and that today is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and watch one.  The lovely Dan was on, being interviewed about his book about the architectural wonders of the world.  There’s something so ineffably sexy about men who are deeply enthusiastic about what they do, even if they do look rather odd. People who fall into this category include:

1.  Ray Mears
2. Jeremy Clarkson
3. James May
4. Alan Titchmarsh
5. Diarmuid Gavin
6. Simon Schama
7. Michael Woods
8. Stephen Fry
9. Gerard Depardieu

 It’s enthralling.  There he was bless him, Dan Cruikshank looking like a tiny mole who had only just been let out into the daylight, blinking and squeaking away and I just suddenly felt an unbearable rush of tenderness towards the man.  Lord love him and all who sail in him.

 

• My mum told me today that the machine builders use for drying out a room full of wet plaster is called a Rhino.  I asked her why.  She said that she didn’t really know.  We agreed that it was unlikely that real, wild rhinos do this in their natural habitat, although it would be quite cool to think that on the Veldt when you’re building a house and it’s a big soggy, all you have to do is tempt a rhino to come and squat in your living room and all would be well.  Apparently the larger version of the Rhino, the machine, rather than the animal, is known as an elephant.  Mum said that this made more sense because the flapping of the elephant’s ears would probably help to dry the plaster quicker.  Rhinos however have stupid ears like little twists of paper, so how they help with plaster I really don’t know.  Perhaps they have very hot breath.  It would be weird and more than a bit confusing if real big rhinos were called elephants.  Perhaps small elephants are called rhinos.  It all got a bit surreal after that and we agreed to move on to other, less complicated issues.
• I found out today that if a man dies in Thailand, his son has to become an honorary monk for the day of the funeral as a mark of respect for their father.  I think this is quite a nice idea.  It happened to someone I know.  What isn’t so nice apparently is that they shave your hair off to do this in the most authentic way.  Not just all the hair on your head, your eyebrows too.  I found this a little challenging as one would hope at a funeral that people would be going for the ‘sad’ look rather than the ‘surprised and startled’ look.  Apparently it takes quite a while for shaved off eyebrows to grow back.  So that’s what Stag nights and Thai funerals have in common.  Bizarre eh?

Wednesday 27th February Andrew Motion Girds His Loins with Grayson Perry and Alan Measles in an Earthquake

It’s late, I’m tired and I’m beginning to show off.  I just sent a friend of mine on Facebook a very long and involved message about Mellotrons, new sofas, Julian Cope and Odin.  I’m sure they really didn’t need to know any of that stuff at all, and will probably either ignore the post, or e-mail me and suggest I have a soothing lie down and a glass of water.  They may even enquire as to whether I have been taking drugs, which given the nature of the mail seems like an entirely reasonable question to ask.

I am buzzing because I went out this evening to an event with Andrea.  She came back to my house because we were home at a reasonable time and we made the foolish decision to drink coffee and chat.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  This is a good thing.  We like coffee, we like chat, we have known each other forever and she understands my peculiar quirks.  The thing is, I try not to drink coffee late in the evening anymore. I am no spring chicken and my system can’t take it.  Consequently I am now buzzing like a little bee, knowing full well I should be in bed catching up on valuable sleep, but am instead doing this and ‘mucking about’.  I shall soon start to feel gritty and tired and regret that I’m doing this, but at the moment I’m happily surfing along on chemical induced adrenaline, just knowing that I’m about to surf into a large brick wall.  Not only that, but I have nobody else but myself to blame.  Jason will be hugely unsympathetic, and I will be grouchy.  This is the way life goes.

I’m already a bit grouchy because Oscar woke up about a billion times last night, and the one time he did stay asleep was when the earthquake quaked and I woke up thinking a piece of furniture had fallen down downstairs and that this must logically mean we had burglars.  I shook Jason awake and hissed that I was sure we had burglars just as it really kicked in.  At this point it sounded like a giant lorry was about to drive through the house and everything rumbled and shook like billyo for several minutes, at which point I shouted: ‘Oh crap! It’s an earthquake!’ and Jason, who was only half awake, went: ‘What are you talking about woman? Everything is fine.’ and went back to sleep.

This morning I rang my dad to make sure he was o.k.  He got huffy because he thought I was checking on him because my mother is away and I was afraid he couldn’t look after himself.  I am afraid that he can’t look after himself, but this was beside the point and I very indignantly pointed out that we had had an earthquake last night and I was ringing to make sure he was not black and blue with large lumps of masonry embedded in his skull.  He then accused me of making it up, and it was only when I forced him at phone point to turn on the television that he actually believed me.

I couldn’t believe he had slept through it, but he then confessed to me that he hadn’t.  Mum and dad have a set of wind chimes in their bedroom, and my dad had woken up to the wind chimes jangling and the cat going absolutely ballistic.  He had put two and two together and decided that a strange cat must have gotten into the house and while it and their cat were duking it out in the bedroom the wind chimes had been jostled.  He decided that the noise of the chimes had scared the other cat away, so he and the cat got dressed and turned the whole house upside down for the best part of an hour looking for a cat that was in fact an earthquake!  It makes my burglars idea seem positively tame by comparison.

If you add to that the fact that he rang me several times over the course of a day to ask me questions about how to cook a fish pie (he has branched out into culinary adventures in the hope of impressing my mother into not going away and leaving him on his own again), despite the fact that we had this conversation yesterday and I loaned him the cookbook with the recipe in, you will see how ludicrous it is that he gets into a huff about me ringing him to make sure he’s the right way up.  It’s a wonder he hasn’t poisoned himself, and she’s only been gone for two days.

I do think however, given the fact that I have given up drugs, drink, wine, women and song, and can’t usually stay out past half past ten without having to have a Red Cross parcel air lifted in, that the occasional ill advised night of gossip and caffeine is probably o.k.  And let’s face it, even if it isn’t, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about it at the moment is there?  I have made my bed, and now I am incapable of lying in it, not without a lot of muttering, huffing and pillow shuffling anyway.

So, today has been interesting.  Oscar and I made a foray into the wider world this morning.  Well, to be strictly accurate, we went to the post office and the Co-op, but for us this is like canoeing to the source of the Ganges.  We were very intrepid.  We posted letters, we prodded produce, we muttered knowledgeably over types of organic yoghurt.  We were law abiding and didn’t eat our grapes before getting them weighed (we have been warned about this before.  We are rebels, but only when we think we won’t get caught.  It’s too risky now.  They have their beady eyes upon us).  We scooted about in the sunshine marvelling over the wonders of an impending spring.  Then we were quite tired and went home.

I couldn’t live with the crunchiness of the kitchen floor any more, so when we got back Oscar emptied the toybox in the lounge and I swept the floor.  I then decided that there were too many leaves and clumps of mud on the hall floor to make me entirely comfortable (I don’t want people to think I’m opening a nature reserve after all), so I decided to sweep the hall floor as well in a fit of enthusiastic incipient Springtime induced madness.

The hall is good because it offers an excellent view into both the lounge and the kitchen, so I can monitor Oscar’s activities at all times, or so I thought.  By the time I had decided to move my operations up a notch he had migrated into the kitchen and was in the process of opening the cupboards and emptying them out.  He likes sorting things.  Jason is impressed because he says this is a sign of Oscar’s ability to be a rational, scientific thinker, and proves that he will be a mathematical genius in later life.  I just think it is because, like his mother, he is hideously nosey and has a driving compunction to find out what is inside everyone’s cupboards.  We agree to differ.

Anyway, he was happily engaged emptying one of the cupboards which contains foodstuffs as I was sweeping.  I was relaxed about this because I was fairly confident that I had frisked this cupboard for risky objects and that the worst thing he could do was drop a tin of Devonshire Custard on his foot.  As far as I know the mortality rate for accidents involving tins of custard is fairly low, although I expect if I dropped one off the top of the Empire State Building onto your head you would be somewhat dead, and/or fairly annoyed at a random custard based attack on your person.

I turned my back for two minutes to use the dustpan and brush and shake the sweepings out of the front door.  When I turned back all I could see was a small, puthering white dust cloud at table height.  This was bad news.  The boy had disappeared inside the cloud and it looked suspiciously like flour, flour which I thought I had carefully put on a high shelf.

Unfortunately for me, he had found an open packet of cornflour which had been in the back of the cupboard and which my clearly not eagle eyes had overlooked.  By the time I wrenched it from his hot little hand he had shaken it over half the kitchen tiles, had it dripping out of his mouth and nose and had filled his shoes.  The only part of him that wasn’t white were his eyes, which were ghoulishly staring out at me in solemn amazement from his pancake white face.  He was severely and I mean severely impressed with himself, particularly I feel with the ninja like turn of speed he had used to create such havoc.

It was a nightmare trying to clean it up as he kept wandering around in it, amazed at the fact that when he smacked his fat little hand down on it, it rose twirling into the air in an impressive smoke column. In the end I picked him up and put him in his high chair.  This meant that I was now smothered and that there was a trail of flour from the floury side of the kitchen to the previously clean side of the kitchen where the high chair was, because naturally I was too dumb to take the chair to the child rather than the child to the chair.  I am not known for my pragmatic thinking in a crisis.

What pissed me off most of all was that I had already swept the kitchen floor once.  Now I had to do it again, and wash the floor.  Even worse was that the tiles on my kitchen floor stand slightly proud of the grouting, which means that the grout forms little runnels into which stuff can fall and get trapped.  The flour very kindly congregated in all these runnels and then turned into mush when water was applied.  It then had to be gouged out of the grout at the cost of many man hours and much swearing.  Oscar was so quiet in his chair.  He put his dummy into his floury mouth, grabbed his blanket and sat back to enjoy the spectacle of his floury mother with her giant arse poking into the air, bobbing and weaving through a sticky flour storm.

This took up the rest of our morning in a much more interesting way than I had originally planned (i.e. slumped on the sofa with CBeebies to babysit the boy).  I then had to feed him on the run and rush him to nursery because I had a hot date at the University with Grayson Perry and Lars Tharp.  I only had a quarter of an hour to get there, as the earliest nursery would have him was 12.30, and I had to be collecting my ticket at 12.45.  I had a taxi and made it by the skin of my teeth.  By the time I got there I was still a bit floury, very hot, very bothered and wondering whether it was worth all the effort.  Andrea was amazed by my sartorial appearance.  She had merely sauntered over from the opposite building where she had been attending some great academic shindig, whereas I had been chipping away at the Sahara of flour in a muck sweat.  She continually thanks her lucky stars that her babies live in a shed (No.  She’s not an abusive mother, she rears Hereford cows) and don’t like emptying cupboards.

Luckily for me, the talk was excellent, and I urge you, even if you have no interest whatsoever in art or ceramics, to get a ticket to see Grayson Perry doing whatever, wherever, whenever.  He was fantastic.  I spent a large part of the hour in fits of laughter, not something you necessarily associate with lectures on contemporary art.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, Grayson Perry is an artist who works primarily with ceramics who won the Turner Prize in 2003.  He also happens to be a transvestite, a happily married one, but still, a fully working transvestite.  He turned up to collect his prize in ladies’ clothes and when asked what he felt about winning the Turner Prize announced that he didn’t think enough transvestite potters were winning awards, so it was nice to make a start!

The discussion was absolutely fascinating.  Sadly he didn’t turn up in a frock, although he did wear a particularly garish neon pink jumper with what looked like purple heiroglyphics on it, which was fairly eye catching and certainly not for the faint hearted.  He did contrast beautifully with the immaculately turned out Tharp, who is better known for telling people how much their Minton Jardinieres are worth on the Antiques Roadshow.  He was clearly revelling in his new found freedom and was having a wonderful time.

Perry was clever, articulate, thought provoking and funny, and he has a teddy bear called Alan Measles.  What more could you want from a talk about pottery I ask you?  I had to leave just before the end, because I had to pick Oscar up from nursery.  I was absolutely gutted, and am determined to hear him again sometime soon.  They always have questions at these sort of things and I was dying to ask him my question, although I would never have the guts to do it in real life.  Not unless I had had one too many chocolate hob nobs anyway.  I wanted to ask him what he thought of my business idea for a transvestite shopping and personal grooming service called: ‘Tranny and Susannah’.  I think it would be massive.  Perhaps, if he liked the idea, he could be the figurehead of my first marketing campaign.  It would be brilliant if we could get him, Trinny and Susannah and Alan Measles.  Perfection!

So, I was delighted I did make the effort to go, even if I did turn up looking like the Pilsbury Dough Boy and spent a fortune in taxis.  It’s one of those things I will be pleased about for the rest of my life, much like the discovery that I actually did like anchovies after all.  Some revelations are beyond price…

This evening we went to a poetry reading by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.  It was quite strange.  I don’t really know much about Andrew Motion, but I felt that I ought, and Andrea agreed to go along with me for the crack, so off we went.  Well off I went, because I met her out of work.  I bought sandwiches for her, because I didn’t want her to faint on me during the process, and I like feeding people.  She ate her crisps before the reading because she thought it would be bad form to crunch through the poetry.  She’s very considerate like that.  It’s one of her finer qualities.  When I do my first poetry reading I am sure she will agree not to crunch through that as well.

Anyway, after much discussion, we are not sure how we feel about Andrew Motion now we have seen him in action.  We think he is a nice man, but that he is far too nervous for a poet.  He seemed like a little vole, caught in the headlights of a 4×4, all blinky and a bit timid.  Given the fact that he has won billions of prizes, is an academic guru and does lots of public speaking it might be that the vole thing is an act, and he clearly can’t be as nervous as he comes across.  Maybe it was nerves at being in Leicester.  It can take people that way some times.  It’s the thought of the cheese and the hosiery apparently.

Back to Andrew.  We liked some of his poems.  We didn’t like others.  Some we just didn’t understand.  He was very explainy, and kept announcing the poem as if he was going to read it, and then taking his glasses off and doing a little introduction and then doing the title again, and then doing another little introduction.  Andrea said it was like he was working to get a good ‘run up’ to the poem, just in case he missed!  This is an excellent explanation and one which might make its way into an essay on Andrew if I ever have to write one about him, which given my penchant for doing weird courses is not beyond the realms of possibility.  I could call it: ‘Andrew Motion Girds His Loins’…