behind the .........

It is raining again, the only consolation is that it is raining in Paris too [according to the tennis] so I don't feel totally victimised.
C, who lives in Scotland records that her town is twinned with the Germans, [well not all of them] and that some of her neighbours are not keen.
I found, when in Wick, that some Scots prefer the Germans to the English, a salutary lesson, reinforced annually now by the Eurovision Song Contest.
Here, we are twinned with the French, which leads us to cadge coach lifts when the local junior Jazz band etc. are practising detente. Arras is a market town like us, except most of it was not knocked down in the enthusiasm of the sixties to build rectangular brick blocks all over the place.
We do still have town square with a pompous Victorian town hall and even some outside cafe bars in the summer.
Arras however has two huge and magnificent cobbled medieval town squares, either side of their Gothic town hall. The edges of the squares have ancient stone pillared colonnades and 16th and 17th century Flemish style houses provide the shops and hotels.
Both here and there market days bring in some life, in Arras at religious festival times they have processions and a big fair which rackets round most of the night.
Here we have one small roundabout for the holidaying kiddies and a poor droopy Xmas tree, fenced off in case the local gentry should take a fancy to the few trailing bits of tinsel that miserably cling, until the cold winds whip them away.
Actually Arras town hall and much of the town was flattened by said Germans in the First Big War, but was carefully restored in the twenties when presumably one could do such things without being allied with the likes of Prince Charles.
It is nice for me that in medieval times [and between Other Quite Big Wars]it was a textile town, specialising in the tapestries that Polonius? had to hide behind.
When I was doing my C&Gs creative Embroidery we took an swap exhibition over there to some enthusiasm. We went with the Fine Arts faculty who were very proud of their melted marshmallows dripping down boards etc. The French, bless them, seemed to prefer our more colourful contributions.

a feminist issue

I have spent most of the day making a fat lady, or another fat lady if you count me.[here's one i made earlier}
She is calico bound and stuffed with lots of wadding and old wools which I always knew I would find a use for one day.
She, [must give her a name], is life size but not very demanding as yet, as she has no head, arms or bottom half of legs. She does have, however, a lovely fat tummy and bottom and a fairly fine pair of boobs. I suspect the latter need some help, boobs [and lips] are always more subtle than one would think.
I shall call her Clarissa.
Clarissa comes about because my stitching group, S.L.A.P.P.E.R.S, had a rush of blood to the collective head and decided to make 6 life size fat ladies the centre piece of our next exhibition.
The concept was keenly adopted before common sense could prevail and additionally it was decided that each F.L. should be covered [dressed] in the method of her downfall.
Clarrisa is to be dressed in crisp bags.
Her friends will display the wrappers of sweeties, booze, advertising, cakes and for some reason the last - will be covered in zips and buttons [her maker is a Danish lacemaker and makes up her mind differently at times...........]
Stitching crisp bags together will be interesting, tho not as interesting as sweetie wrappers or cake ?tins perhaps.
I do like making female figures in whatever medium, what to do with them, once I have finished, is more of a problem.
I led a workshop for another of my stitching groups, T.A.G.S,[what diverting names we have, not as good as hairdressers tho] in making wire figures a month or so back, which we will display in a Circle Dance at our July exhibition. Although they enjoyed getting a figure together, only a few really developed the figure further -into something individual and different.
I suspect there is an Art and Craft division there.
I tried to explain to the members that I like to make fat-ladies because they have female strength, rather than be judged as sex objects. They took it personally unfortunately and were not best pleased.
The local exhibition this weekend is with yet another group, Peninsula Crafts, a rather down to earth name,, where we will each demonstrate our art/craft. The plan is that each will have a table and 2 screens behind, where we will do, for the day, whatever it is that keeps us off the streets.
We aspire to sell some of our stuff and also encourage other local people to join. Usually we have a rather pompously contrived "exhibition" where I suspect I provide a backdrop for the wood turners and jewellery makers to sell their stuff.
Truth is that if I try and make cushions or something useful I just can't get it together to make anything worthwhile. What I like doing is to cobble together my ladies in whatever medium happens to be at hand.
I do have some quite nice pottery figures this year, but will have to sell them for twopence to get rid of them, which I should do, but I get shirty and pompous myself about selling so cheap.
Last week I made a rather nice little clay figure, but just as I had successfully fired her once and was ready to fire her glaze, I knocked her off the stand she was perilously waiting on, and she broke her foot.
At least with fabrics I can drop them and the cat can sleep on them and they still come up smiling.
What I am doing in all these groups is - mostly suffering. I am not at ease in any situation in which I am not firmly in charge, and then if I do manage a coup, the resultant responsibility destroys me.
However one must get on with it, or go potty at home.

42

"If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity".
Just struggled through Zadie Smith's article in today's Guardian, discussing Middlemarch - and George Eliot's exploration of a search for - truth.
I relate to the thought, as the wind from that roar gets in my head quite often, blogging is one of the activities that quietens it.
GE/ME/ZS felt Spinoza got to the core of the meaning of life with the advice to cling to - feeling into knowledge, knowledge into feeling.
This rooting for feeling appeals to me, rather than trying to rid oneself of all emotion.
GE, Zadie claims, I think [and I am grateful for any help either can give me to unpick what each is going on about] that through our own experiences and imagination we can learn what it is that each of us needs to grow. Not so much through theories or explanations of "facts". Most of all the experience of love helps us to grow.
I guess loving child/partner/friend/parent does eclipse at times the terrible fascination with oneself.
I have read Middlemarch a couple of times I guess, but I think i will give it another go this summer.
I once read Daniel Deronda in it's entirety on a fast train to and from Granada, but I couldn't remember a word about it, and when I tried again recently I didn't like it much, and didn't finish.
Hopefully Zadie and Dorothea will encourage me forward.
Re-reading books at different ages is interesting. I loved the Golden Notebook in my 20s, Womens' Room in my 30s but a couple of years ago I couldn't get into either of them.
Once on a train [again] to and from Cornwall I was reading Mr Pickwick, when we got home I couldn't extricate my mind from the characters and was very confused indeed until revived with a cup of tea, followed by a long sleep.
David Baddiel, again in the Guardian Review today rings the bells for Jane Austen - no it is the Books section of the Times [we have both so him upstairs can go to the pub and do the crosswords].
DB says she has "all the key modern realist devices; ironic narration; structural unity; transparency of focus; ensemble characterisation; fixed arenas of time and place and most importantly, the giving up of the fantastical in favour of the notion that art should represent life as it is actually lived in all its wonderful ordinariness"
Coo.
But I like it.

Marvel

This is my Marvel stitching machine, which I still haven't quite sorted out. It looks more like a syringe for delivering heroin than a lady's stitching aid.

Maybe I should have tried it out today, in one form or another, as I made a right mess of covering some cushions with my patchwork fat ladies.

I really should stick to Art, I am not clever enough for Craft. I expect in 1918, whoever first had this gadget was a marvel of neatness and expertise.

The only needlework I was taught at primary school [or not] was to hem round a napkin [no, no, those stitches are far too large] - encouragement was not yet considered a teaching aid.

When I was eleven we girls all had to make an apron for Domestic science, while the boys knocked up a table or something manly. My green check pinny turned out wonky, as did my later fish pie or fruit salad. Neither of which troubled my parents dining table, as there was no way they were going to survive the three mile trip home on the top deck of the No. 62 bus.

Hastings

Once again we invaded Hastings, for the fifth time it seems. I could never understand people going back to the same holiday time and again, but now we seem to have joined yet another club I never foresaw.
The cottage is in the Old Town, under the East Cliff, a terrace of 5 built in the first decade of the 1800s for local fishermen, just one room wide, 3 stories and now Grade 2 listed the owner boasts. Didn't stop him bricking over the back garden since we last visited.
All the fishermen's houses have small gardens I note, no time to plant and weed, no energy left perhaps. The rest of the area is old and higgety piggety, poor man's Brighton lots of arty types pottering about, now growing lots of colourful flowers in as many pots as they can stack.
After a late breakfast we climb Tackleway and then the steps through the trees, up onto the cliffs grassy tops, led by Hattie's waggy tail. Lots of nesting magpies, skylarks and very noisy gulls.The magpies are extremely arrogant and just sit on the ground eyeing us with one gimlet eye, deciding whether we are worth moving for, usually not. Likewise the baby bunnies, but in their case maybe it is youthful ignorance.
The gorse is over now, concentrating on making seeds to pop in the heat of August
so the broom is taking it's turn before the bullying brambles and unfurling bracken subdue everything.
I am impressed that I now know this succession, having grown up on a new post war council estate. I was allocated a small strip in our unruly garden and poked in lupin seeds, which obligingly grew, so i have been fond of them ever since.
Lunch was often taken at the FILO [First in Last Out] and dinner at the Dragon [arty wine bar, mixed matched tables and playing the blues].
George Street in the Old Town has many many junk shops, tho some proprietors would not relish the title.
I bought a bag of abandoned white damask napkins for 50p to dye and stitch, some mixed threads - I can sell anything she proclaimed, wet fish, anything and an old Hand Stitching "machine", patent 1918 applied for, broken needle but may be fixable. Given that the parts may not all be there, I beat her down from a fiver to £2.
It was great to be away, no surprises, every minute of the day comfortably programmed ....oh dear.
The fishing boats are more adventurous,adventuring out to sea all night, smashing back onto the shingle at high tide, dragged to safety by their own tractor. Each has a long line up the shingle of piles of nets and tarpaulins and mysterious paraphernalia, reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut's alien characters that see everyone in the context of their previous life, all their individual histories trailing behind them.
I realised when I was away that sometimes I feel like those boats, now in one element [the sea - happy creative] and then beached in total misery. Come to think of it I have yet to see the boats ?dragged out to sea, maybe that is my problem. I get stuck in the sand too often.

tripping

Sunshine beats fog. It is very hot today.
L. just got back from a sketching trip in Namibia [posh or what] and reckons it is hotter here. ["Different kind of heat" - of course].
She sketched a purple and orange ochre land, with giraffes and seals and lions.
I am off to Old Hastings tomorrow, seagulls, chip papers and fishing boats rushing straight onto the beach, bow first - then a tractor pulls them further up, used to be a horse or two. I like the confidence as it crashes up out of one element - smash onto another.

howl

Some days a dark fog descends and there is nothing to do but howl at the moon, or in my case become intravenously linked to the television until mind reboots.

St Mary at the Quay

Mrs Lusty is in a church, one of those surplus to requirements. It is pared back to the plaster, cool and high, soulless, definitely redundant. The altar is fenced off to protect the loss of ritual being exposed, tidied away, no longer needed on voyage. Redundant.
We spent a week in Norfolk once exploring redundant churches, they have a society of course, and thus a leaflet.
Most were sitting quietly in the fields, churchyards full of the black death that finally left them abandoned.
Mostly they were built 12th centuryish, small, walls white plastered at a later more severe time but now peeling damply back to shyly reveal the red ochre outlines of paintings that used to revel in the Holy stories.
Very quiet in there, just the noise of the scraping as the big iron key turns and the doors open.
You have to collect the key from a nearby cottage, from someone who now works in the town, or maybe commutes to a bigger one.
Or probably goes nowhere much these days.
The fields around are wide and flat, a few clumps of trees, lots of sky, some rooks and often a skylark shouting excitedly, too high to see.
Mrs. Lusty's church is right in town tho, on the road that runs by the docks, one of many, many churches built later in the fifteenth century and onwards when the town was rich and rich men wanted to buy a place in heaven too.
It has a hammer beam roof and tall, tall arches the length of it. But the water it is so near - that floated the barges that carried the trade that paid for the church that fatty built - made it very damp, even then.
Then the Germans bombed the docks, leaving it wobbly, so now it is only good for arty types to camp out in and do their strange stuff until someone with the right forms can get it dried out and steadied and then do some worthwhile social work from it's shelter.
So there is Mrs Lusty. Looking a little fragile herself, uncorsetted by a frame as she is, but proud to be shown with other Art, no Craft in sight.
Quite a lot of avant guarde student art, Union Jacks splashed with rude words and pixelled hugenesses titled Portal and the like.
Being as it is now on a noisy one way system, out of the shopping town with no parking places, it is doubtful that many will get to view, but display has it's own rewards at times, as long as it doesn't involve raincoats.

making a spectacle

I have two pairs of spectacles now, one for Blog etc. and one for every day life. I can't see real life with these specs, every thing is blurry, not as blurry if I take them off altogether.
I don't need number 1 specs to read, or eat and I usually take them off when I am speaking to someone face to face - eyeball to eyeball. I have them on a chain round my neck, number 2 specs are supposed to sit on my desk, here, waiting to be useful.
Of course this morning I set out in the car with No.2 specs on my head and No.1 specs on my nose.
I measured the distance I needed for the optician by reaching out my arm till my fist hit the screen, straight from the shoulder.
Direct hit, no fannying around.
I obviously don't have much to write about today, but I am averse to fighting my way back into Blogspots good books, so I am trying to keep the contact regular, and thus be recognised and allowed entry.
It hailed today.
Very English, discuss the weather when all else fails.
The hailstones were large and sparkly in the sun. I didn't witness the hailing, as i was in an alternative weather zone 2 miles away where there was a thunder and lightening storm. I feared no evil being balanced on my four trusty rubber tyres.
It is sunny again now.
I took Mrs. Lusty down to a local exhibition yesterday, and tomorrow we will go and visit her at the Private View.