The November Clock

THE NIGHT has begun to nibble at the tail ends of the days more and more, so that at 5 o'clock the chickens have retired to their coop and our lanterns must be lit - we are getting through lamp oil faster than ever.
The walk through the woods to the village is auburn now, and beautiful in its shedding.



November is here, and with it comes a new Once Upon O'Clock! This one is for Tess, a dear lady who ruminates inquiringly on a miscellany of spiritual paths and ideas over at her excellent blog Anchors & Masts. Tess asked me to make her a clock to celebrate her stepping into the autumnal phase of her life. She asked for a white haired wise woman in a forest or a cave mouth, and stars and moon, she asked for regenerative ivy, and colours of autumn, with a hint of winter. This crone-clock was a lovely commission, and I hope I have managed to make what Tess hoped for. The white-haired woman opens a round door in the roots to an Underground Place. What magics take place there we can only guess at by the smoking of the chimney. Perhaps it is the root-door to time itself?

(please click to enlarge)

This November Clock is painted on a delicious slice of Yew. Finding interesting pieces of wood for my clocks is a job in itself, and I was lucky to be offered some slices from a well seasoned Yew log in the workshop here. The wood is dense and orangey in its colour, which compliments the autumnal pallet, and the grain positively undulates! The inner area of the tree (another circle of time) is outlined by a natural dark edge which I used for the border of the image.

(please click to enlarge)

A little while ago I wrote to all those on my Once Upon O'Clock order list to say that I was unable to continue making clocks at the rather low price of £150. I found that I was favouring other paid work over fulfilling clock orders as they take over a week to make each and £150 is not really an adequate exchange for my time. So the price has gone up to £250, and this is the first clock I have made at that price. I was delighted that so many folks were so enthusiastic about these Once Upon O'Clocks, and I wanted to make them affordable items for people, but now I am able to look forward to painting the next custom clock and know that I will earn a reasonable little purseful of money from it too.. unfortunately a necessary consideration for us as makes a living by hand this way.



Anyway, the November Clock is on its way to Tess now, and I hope she delights in its ticking away these leaf-rustling, trick-or-treating, apple-and-chestnut days.

The falling leaves and the strange case of vitamin B12

ON RETURNING to our hilltop parking spot, we found all well, a few more brown leaves blowing about the wheels, and a sense of relief at being amongst hedgerows again. The colour of things is definitely changing, and small creatures are preparing for winter, in rather interesting ways... We opened our food cupboard to find that during our week away small mouse teeth had been gnawing determinedly at (of all things) the vitamin B12 jar!! Their nibbling had almost succeeded in opening the plastic lid! What strange mice, perhaps they sense themselves deficient in this particular vitamin? It reminded me of a passage in one of my favourite books - Master Snickup's Cloak, by Alexander Theroux, illustrated by Brian Froud.

Mountains were climbed, mazes thrid. He crossed a sea that had no motion on the ship What is Pseudoymry? and came to a desert where he said penances and fed on caper buds, dormice, lentils. Still he pilgrimaged, Reading the footprints of geese in the air.
To reach eventually the Black Sea where, living alone on a shale island, he chastised himself with thongs and subsisted only on air and dew. Rain fell on his blue cloak, which he sucked, supplying himself with vitamin B12.
Swallows sang upon his wrists.

This artful writing is combined with illustrations of wonderful medieval strangeness. A delight indeed! And I wonder what it is about vitamin B12?!

~

The land we are on is home to a basketmaker and a woodworker/toolmaker. They have a beautifully organised array of outbuildings, workshops and garden. We will be doing the odd little thing here and there for them in return for our spot, and we have been feeding their chickens and stacking logs for them while they are away these last few days.


My muscles ache today from many happy hours of log stacking yesterday. Tui's job was to wheelbarrow the logs from their piles in the field to me in the woodshed where logs are organised by dryness and stacked in sturdy towers.


This kind of outdoor work on a sunny autumn day leaves excellent space for mind-wandering and thinking up more words for my tale. These last few days I have tried hard to climb back into the story which I have picked up off and on like an old piece of knitting over the past year. I carry this little notebook everywhere; in a strange way I almost have come to love it and what it contains, the thought of losing it fills me with horror. It is so hard though to keep a work like this going, when you have other tasks that earn money or are everyday necessities to do instead. I must try to make a little corner for this story every day, even if it is just one word I adjust. Each time I return to it I reread what I have written from the beginning, therefore becoming absurdly familiar with the first few lines. I cross out, rewrite passages, add little scribbled ideas in the back of the book, when words fail I draw, and I go on imagining.


One day I will bring you a finished book, with words and pictures, and a tale that is my own.
Here is the corner of the truck where I work, which is rather messy with boots and things, on the desk you can just see the clock that I have been busy painting.. I shall show you that soon, when it is done!


After our logging day, we made an outdoor fire in a firepit that is a few yards away down the field. The plan was to sit and eat dinner by the fire whilst watching a film on the laptop, but that idea proved more romantic in its imagination than in its realisation - the wind blew smoke this way and that, and so we retreated, eyes stinging, to the warmth of our lovely vehicle home, where we could have a fire without smoke (the marvels of a chimney!) and sit in comfort whilst watching The Secret Of Roan Inish- a lovely Irish film about the legend of the Selkies.
Tui's latest construction is an ingenious wood and rope laptop-swing that can be hooked from the beam in our luton sleeping loft. And he's fitted two more little speakers in amongst the books there, so that we can sit in bed watching films with surround-sound and hot chocolate and the night tree-breeze blowing in through our round window. Not bad for a rustic peasant life eh? :)


Our autumn walks have been scattered with autumn treasure: chestnuts popped new from their shells, downy-soft and shy, exactly the sheen of a horse. Upside-down mushrooms and right-way-up mushrooms - red Fly Agarics - waiting like Christmas amongst tree roots ... who will nibble first?

(these lovely photos are by Tui of course!)

On my way to the village today, on my way to write you these words, I met a white cat on the lane, she said a few words to me, and I to her, and then she disappeared into the trees.


Once I stepped into this world-wide-web, I was delighted to find that this here blog has been listed by Blogger as a Blog Of Note! Gosh, thousands more visitors are now following our happy little peripheral tale! The internet never fails to amaze me, though it is scary too, you are all very welcome! I'm back off up that white cat lane now, back to our little wooden wheeled house, and a cup of tea and to this exquisite view...

At my parents' house

THIS WEEK we have been visiting our families. We left our house parked in its Dartmoor field and hopped on a bus and then a train. The train took Tui up to the north-east where the fog horn blows out at sea and where they pronounce cake keeak and film filumm and call their mothers me-mam. And the train took me down to London (which despite being a Londoner, I find altogether alien now and horrifically busy with millions of people. I found myself like a green visitor from faraway, unaware of city customs and taboos, staring too long in fascination at

billboards and people in their closed little commuting worlds.)

...and back to the house where I lived since I was about this age...

It is strange how a place holds memories in the walls, almost as if my childhood is trapped in the folds of the brown gingham curtains. Though my parents' house is in an ordinary corner of an ordinary suburb, they have over the years made a unique artistic nook amongst pebble-dashed ex-council houses - "the odd house" - where neighbours would hook their disapproving snouts over the garden wall and not understand.

This house was home for me for the longest time in my life so far, and it has always been full to the brim with artistic inspiration and love.

In all fondness I think my mum and dad are possibly the world's most infrequent bloggers, and so I bring a report from their rustic nest instead because I think they do beautiful things here.

In the back garden my dad has built a courtyard and workshop, all by hand over the years, from wood and slate and cut-in-half bricks for cobblestones. The red autumn has begun to grasp the roofs and all my mum's hanging plants in ceramic pots are stitched together by spiders building webs in the October suns.

In the house, shelves are made beautiful with little things. My mum makes hearth and windowsill into shrines of seeds and sculpture and stones.

Books on shelves in dark corners remind me of days off sick from school when I'd lie on the sofa, the titles and fonts and colours of the spines chanting and marching through my flu-dreaming head.

Those canvas tool rolls, full of chisels, for the making of my parents' work, are still stacked on the shelves of my memory.

And the wonderful faces of my dad's carvings that have looked at me, and I at them, for many familiar years.

My mum has been creating - beautiful shapes in alabaster and soapstone, birdlike and moonlike and budlike,

and smooth and round as these pebbles.

She has also been creating in the kitchen: knobbly tasty barleycorn bread,

And there's mackerels for tea.

This little personality lives here now (though I have dear memories of a large and kindly black predecessor) - the cat with the chequerboard chops, and an I'll-do-just-what-I-like look in her eye.

The other day we walked in the woods that were wildness for young me, and which now seem so much more edged than the countryside forests we wander in these days...

On the walls there are words beautifully penned,

(calligraphy by mum's art school friend Karen O'Neill-Newman)

an alphabet drawn by my grandmother when she was a girl at school in New Zealand,

And in the garden the little apple tree is still making apples, just in time for Apple Day.

I went back to the library yesterday where as children we would hungrily borrow our weekly allotment of six books, books where I learned to lose myself in story. There is a book I remember loving back then, the cover was a black and gold chessboard and there was a chase through the forest in the tale, with knights, and a good measure of foreboding, and the word mire, but not for the life of me can I rememeber the title or anything else about the book. I wonder if you recognise it?

I love to pop into the childrens' sections of bookshops now and then and delight in the wonderful selection and visual sumptuousness of what there is on offer for kids these days.

Story is in us all: our days gone before and yet to come, the lives of others that we hear about. We are ourselves stories and we must continue to tell and be told.

On the train here I was reading a mouldy old Dylan Thomas Miscellany that I found in a box outside a house once with "please help yourself" written on it. As well as his beautifully crafted poems and stories, there are his broadcasts - delicious evocations of the sights and sounds and smells and thoughts of a childhood vividly remembered.

Here is an extract from his radio broadcast "Reminiscences of Childhood":

I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War: an ugly, lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me), crawling, sprawling, slummed,unplanned, jerry-villa’d, and smug-suburbed by the side of a long and splendid-curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old anonymous men, in the tatters and hangovers of a hundred charity suits, beachcombed, idled, and paddled, watched the dock-bound boats, threw stones into the sea for the barking, outcast dogs, and, on Saturday summer afternoons, listened to the militant music of salvation and hell-fire preached from a soap-box.

This sea town was my world; outside, a strange Wales, coal-pitted, mountained, river run, full, so far as I knew, of choirs and sheep and story-book tall hats, moved about its business which was none of mine; beyond that unknown Wales lay England, which was London, and a country called ‘The Front’ from which many of our neighbours never came back. At the beginning, the only ‘front’ I knew was the little lobby before our front door; I could not understand how so many people never returned from there; but later I grew to know more, though still without understanding, and carried a wooden rifle in Cwmdonkin Park and shot down the invisible, unknown enemy like a flock of wild birds...

~

For more of my parents' wonderful work see their website and etsy shop.

& apologies for the dubious photo quality - I am testing out a new camera!

A new hill in October

AND SO THEY DROVE their house again to a new place. As the hills pulled up their autumn hoods and leaned into the wet winds of October, one of the hills wore a Bedford as its hat, and smoke rose like hill-thoughts from the chimney. From there they could see for miles all around and began to think about wintering. The walk to town is even further now, and the wet lanes are spotted artists' palettes of umber and ochre. They are busy, with paintings and woodworkings and visitings and doings and proppings of back wheels on slopes and under-stackings of wood for colder days. There will be more news when the camera-that-takes-black-photos has been fixed! And Rima says thank you for many many kind birthday wishes.
Meanwhile pheasants with autumned feathers strut by the crisscross windows and cock-a-doodles welcome their wet grassed mornings. When the nights come in, earlier now, they can see the grey layers of faraways blackening as the sun goes down, all dotted with lights as people Over There kick off boots in porches of warm houses and begin their imagined evenings.

Self Portrait

A THIRD DECADE BEGINS! And in need of some "proper" painting practice, I decided to set my last day of twenty-nine in oil paint. I have painted three self portraits in my life, as well as a few drawings, and mainly do so because I love to paint people and their faces best of all, but have not had any other face than my own that would sit there patiently long enough! I paint from a mirror, and, I have just noticed, always seem to sit at the same angle, probably because I'm right-handed. I leafed through a wonderful tome - 500 Self-Portraits - full of artists' depictions of themselves from antiquity to modernity, and was inspired. Here are a few of my favourites:

(click to enlarge)

1. Vincent van Gogh. 2. L.S. Lowry. 3. Albrecht Dürer (at age 13!). 4. Rembrandt van Rijn. 5. Hans Holbein. 6. Filippino Lippi. 7. Käthe Kollwitz. 8. Vincent van Gogh. 9. Gwen John. 10. Edgar Degas. 11. Giorgio Morandi.

Such beautiful work, that I could only hope to emulate. My recent attempt I am fairly pleased with, and thought it might be interesting to compare it with my earlier self portraits!..

Rima Staines - Self Portrait at age 18.
Oils on board

Rima Staines - Self Portrait at around age 24.
Oils on board

Rima Staines - Self Portrait The Day Before Turning Thirty
In A Garment Of My Own Imagination
Oils on board

This last is painted on a piece of hardboard with no undercoat, and I've purposely left it rather scrubby. I took stage photographs which I thought folks might be interested in seeing..

(click to enlarge)

I wear a "garment of my own imagination" - made from all the faces of characters that fill my world, drawn in pencil..



And here are some close ups..




It is a strange thing stepping into a new decade. In our heads I think we all feel around the age of 21, or thereabouts, the age at which we got to some inner point of knowing ourselves. As I age I find that the age of others has become pretty irrelevant to me, which is quite in contrast to the aeons that seemed to separate me from older children in the class a year above me at school.
It is just another day after all. And a splendid day I had! My mum sent me a home made birthday cake through the post, there were beautiful cards and gifts from friends old and new, and Tui and I took good food and wine and lamps and a blanket down to the woods for a fire, to see in my turning One Score Year And Ten...

A mountain song for my wordless son

I HAVE PAINTED a new painting, four inches tall this time, and containing the most bent of bodies I have yet portrayed: A mountain song for my wordless son. It is made on the slice of wood that lay directly up the branch from the slice on which the blackberry wedding pendant was painted.
I cannot explain what it is about, see in it what you see...


There was a sitting-up-til-midnight to finish all the Telling the Bees artwork, which is now swimming amid the cogs at the printing mill. It is always lovely to make a work for myself after working on a work for somebody else. But I've started to go cross-eyed with these ever diminishing paintings, and get cross with the tiny hairs of the paintbrush that at this minuscule level seem like tree trunks to a beetle. The next painting will be bigger!

*POST SCRIPT* Prints available here.

Acorns and Blackberries

ALL ALONG THE LANES the brambles are fruiting. In between jagged stems burst little black juicy clusters, each day bearing another nearly ready berry. Our long walk to town is slowed by these waylaying roadside treats. Some blackberries are small and still too sour, others fall apart to a sauce in our fingers. Some are crunchy with seeds or beasts. For the perfect king berry, hardest to reach, we must compete with feasting wasps. Some say you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michelmas (29th September) for the devil comes down and wees upon them. Perhaps we should make a blackberry crumble soon.


And I have been painting, a tiny work, wrapped around with blackberries for an approaching autumn. This is a wedding pendant, commissioned by Anna and Justin who we met at a fair. They are to be married this month and wanted a tiny painting for her to wear on the day. It measures about 3 inches in height and will be worn with a forest green dress. On the back I painted their initials and the date of their happy day (All full of nines like my own date of birth!). There's a smoking rural cottage and hills, and in front of it a two handled lovers' cup. I hunted my books on folklore to find a nice image for a wedding, and found that two spoons on a saucer means a marriage approaches.


Blackberries are not the only fruits in my work of late. There are acorns in the album artwork for the second Telling The Bees album which I have been working away on busily with my 0.3mm pencil. Most of the main drawings are done, but I still have all the smaller work for the interior to do as well as knotting it all together with words and layout.
For those of you who haven't seen it before, you can see my work for the band's debut album here. We were delighted to finally meet Bees' songwriter Andy and his missus Nomi last week as they travelled past our Dartmoor field with bagpipes and mandolin, and tea and biscuits and talk were enjoyed.
This time the artwork includes a sort of wayfaring musician, coming out of the forest, who is at the same time some old oaky symbol of England. He carries a barrel organ / cabinet of curiosities, that displays an object for each song. I shall leave those discoveries until the day when you hear the songs. They are delightful. On the CD circle leap those three hares again.


I found this oak berry and leaf in the grass here the other day. Though the trees are still green, the morning airs feel different. We are remembering the time of year when we used to light fires before breakfast, and can smell the leaves thinking about browning. I always find the turn of this new season hits me like a memory of all past autumns in my life. Soon I will turn thirty which is a bizarre thing indeed...

Vagabond Villages & Transient Towns,

I HAVE BEEN THINKING about moving villages: Towns that assemble and disperse and then reassemble. Gatherings of people that are not always in the same one place, or indeed are not always the same collection of people.
As we travel we meet so so many different people. We visit festivals where we set up camp with many other wheeled and canvas houses, and for a week or so that field becomes our neighbourhood. We smile to meet folk we've met before and cross paths with new people who we'll meet again. Our house is admired by many and we sell pictures in between.
These weeks we spend at festivals are like colourful knots of noise and bustle, of many faces and too much hoo-haa. A hermit-like pair we are, as I have said before, though there is something we love about these gatherings too. We always find that we drive away with a nostalgia, and a bagful of lovely memories.


From our delightful perch in Dartmoor, we moved just a couple of miles to another field where farmer Will kindly welcomed us. This locality is such a warm haven of interesting and artistic people. We have met so many folk, often walking into town and being called by name. On our travels through places this is rare indeed, and it is lovely.
The walk to town is now not so steep, but takes us about half an hour through wonderful woodland and along the side of a river, where we took our tin bath and bagful of laundry the other day to wash. This is the kind of place we hope to come back to. A road life with a perfect place to return to seems like the ideal balance right now.

Anyway, we left this lovely place for a week to attend the Off Grid Festival, a new event in Somerset, dedicated to all things powered by the sun and the wind and to the idea of transition.
Transition towns are emerging all over the world, and are examples of new (in fact old) and exciting ways to look at community, and all the many things that come together to create and sustain it. These include a drive to self-sufficiency, in food, energy and money. Transition towns have begun introducing localised currencies, such as the Lewes Pound (an idea that was experimented with at the Off Grid Festival too, though with a little hesitancy amongst those new to it, us included). You can read in much more eloquent detail about the transition idea here, but it ties in with my thoughts on community, though my thinkings have been leaning rather more towards transient towns, than transition towns.

Just along from where we pitched our house-display, the day before the festival started, a whole tin village was being constructed, with a wooden structure and corrugated iron roofs and walls. In here, they held talks and films on permaculture and other things, as well as building a clay wood-fired oven for making bread and pizzas. A garden emerged out front too, complete with tiny ponds and potted pear trees. And a week later this was all gone, and the ground returned to grass.



Further off we spied another lovely Bedford TK, complete with old time coconut shy and hand made carousel. Inside the truck was a warren of a house, where Ruth and Simon lived whilst travelling, and stored their entire set up too! It was wood-stove warm and ramshackle-nooky in there and a tray of fresh baked buns emerged from the oven (held shut with an axe) before my eyes. They had painted their mini fairground my sort of old-time colours, and the hand-made childrens' carousel vehicles were protected by a barrier made from old nuns' bedposts! It is always lovely to see others doing interesing things from Bedfords!


These were not the only intriguing goings on there. One chap was operating a printing press from the back of a pink milk float. Pancakes were being cooked in tipis. Another man tried to sell us psychedelic toad poison! We met a fellow called Gary who photographed our truck before we were even parked. It seems he goes from festival to festival photographing and then drawing all manner of live-in vehicles and then printing them to sell in little booklets. We bought three editions of this unusual publication "Tax Exempt", in which our own truck house will probably feature one day. I was particularly impressed by the excellent standard of drawing. Feastival art can so often be a bit gaudy and badly done, but Gary's pen and ink drawings were detailed and expertly executed. (As an interesting aside.. if you would like to browse a comprehensive photographic museum of live-in vehicles, Traveller Homes is a great place, even we're there, in the Bedford Truck section. :)


In meeting so many different folk, I have begun to develop a distinct and worrying forgetfulness. I have always had a vagueness about me and an unusual concept of time passing, but having so many faces pass in front of my eyes seems to have done something odd to my brain. People I have met the previous day seem new and never-seen the next. Tui has to nudge me as they approach. "We've met them" he mutters through his teeth. It's embarrassing. I feel so awful when they say "Hello again" and I look at them somewhat blankly. I do try so very hard, and then get all in a fluster when meeting and greeting several people at once, and the panic must disable that memory trigger in my brain. I did once hear of a man who had lost this ability entirely so that when shopping in a supermarket with his wife, she had to wear a special red coat for him to recognise her amongst all the others.
It's not as bad as that for me, it doesn't happen with everyone, and certain folk who I have met a few times or know well have migrated to the other side of my memory bank! But let me say here to anyone who I have looked vacant at - I am dreadfully sorry! I wonder whether my shortsightedness might contribute to this, my blurry visual information of folk far-off being less comprehensive than it should be!



Since you last heard from me, our house has changed a little more too. We sawed our back door in half! And now we can lean over the top like contemplative horses, another 'window' added to our vista. It makes such an excellent difference. There's a brand new cup shelf too, just by the sofa, made by Tui from a lovely slice of wood. He has been transforming the new stable door with latches and ledges and hooks and escutcheons and he's made a wonderful new bench from found wood for sitting outside, the legs have toes. There's even a bracket above the back window on which a lantern dangles. And I sat there admiring it from the hammock we strung between truck and magnificent tree. These trees are our neighbours now. We are back in farmer Will's field, admiring the view and sharing the grass with the sheep (who have taken to sleeping under the truck at night!), the trees towering above us.

We are part of a new village now. Our neighbours were neighbours before, were not for a while and now are neighbours again. The village we made part of in Somerset has dispersed. Our friends Hannah and Daniel and the twins were parked by us there again. They have headed off east to join another gathering. We'll see them again somewhere sooner or later. We'll see others too, familiar and unfamiliar. It's a strange experience of life, crossing paths with others, a unique experience for each person, and yet shared in some aspects. It is the net that links us all, the strands are gossamer-thin and steel-strong, and each path-crossing vibrates them.
No wonder I'm so overwhelmed!

We'll spend a while under these trees, getting on with our works painterly and musical, and I leave you for now with a quote from Rumi that I found and liked in a lovely clothes shop Haruka whilst treating myself to garments after successful festival picture sales.

Let the beauty that you love be what you do.

There are many ways to kneel and kiss the earth.

The mists between horses and hares

AND SO WE TRAVELLED OFF from Wales towards the Big Green Gathering, overnighting on this spot along the A466 - a picturesque stretch of road that runs down beside the Offa's Dyke path for a while. We don't often see our truck home from above, but there we could walk into the conifer forest above and look down on ourselves as the mists rolled in. We thought we'd outrun the rain as the sun tempted us back towards England. But it caught us up. And low clouds skidded over us dropping their downpours and rushing on. We even saw a cloud outside our back door, hovering over the river valley. A gruff man pulled up while we were parked here and asked if we were selling our truck. He told us he'd owned it once, but we didn't believe him.
And then we drove on, down winding roads that lost us a wing mirror at one point due to a wide-wandering Hymer.


All the way to Cheddar we drove and gathered with others ready for the festival. But it was not to be. A police injunction stopped the event from going ahead, and so over the next few days many sad people chugged away from the muddy field through the ceaseless rain and back to where they'd come from. We were due to be joining the permaculture area there, with our truck dwelling friends Hannah and Daniel. Eventually another field was rustled up for those who would have been our permaculture neighbours, to have a mini gathering on the edge of Dartmoor.

There we spent a week with other lovely people. We sat around fires and sold some pictures, we walked and we sat, we met hedgehogs and gypsies, we learned stove making, we watched films in yurts and chased children. Here we all are attempting to assemble a geodesic dome with the two truck houses in the background and a twin or two in the foreground.


There were moments of despair as we realised our coffers were nigh-on empty and the rain did nothing to cheer us. But people bought pictures and the sun came out.. and life went on.


And then we wandered on. Further north into Dartmoor we went, taking care to use the main roads. Then as we approached our hilltop destination we found ourselves in first gear on hair-raisingly narrow steep bends, but we made it. And now we are here, in what might possibly be our favourite place in England so far.


Parked on the top of a hill we can see for miles over the moors when the clouds clear. Such an amazing landscape I have not come across before. There are those most English of gnarly oak trees gripping the stony lane-sides, there are delightful villages, delightful people, and the views are just incredible. We've met the ponies on the hill, and I even lay down next to some afternoon-snoozing foals. Out of our round bedroom window we've watched the clouds skud across the full moon amid the most beautiful of skies and the quietest of airs.





And most delightful of all I seem to have walked into the land of mythic artists. How pleased I was to meet Terri Windling and her wonderful work in the flesh. In fact it is she we have to thank for field hunting for us. I feel just a little starry-eyed to have a writer and artist whose work I have long admired come to tea, and humble to have her admire my work in turn. I can see why these artists who dwell inside tales have chosen this corner of England for their homes. There is something 'other' about the land, but it is absolutely not describable in words. It is for me a little like the warm memory of a deeply enjoyed book. Meeting this land is like meeting a love. It is wild yet familiar, and I think I should paint in it.


Before all of these latest journeyings, my friend Poppy sent me a wonderful piece of stitchery that she spent weeks working on. It contains words from the Havamal and old blackwork patterns. I shall be framing it and hanging it in our sleeping quarters soon, I think it describes things for travellers well.


While we are here, in between visiting lovely people and exploring the moors, I am working away on the next album cover for Oxfordshire folk band Telling The Bees. Amongst many folkloric symbols woven into their music, which I am to illustrate, is a strange symbol, the so-called Tinner's Hares, a triple hare icon, where three hares share just three ears, yet appear to have two each. Oddly I have seen this symbol here where we are, on shop fronts and posters. It seems that there are more triple-hares in Dartmoor than anywhere else. It is an old symbol, which like the Green Man appers often on medieval church bosses and the like. But no-one knows quite what it means...

Wet Welsh Weddings

SINCE YOU LAST SAW US parked in East Anglia, our house has made its longest leap so far (apart from the initial flight south from Scotland). We wended our way west across the country a couple of weeks ago now, taking a few days about it and stopping with friends en route. In Cambridge we loitered to see the Folk Museum and a lovely Swedish film, as well as desperately seeking out some Chinese Medicine for a nasty neck-crick of mine which wouldn't go away. Then onwards we drove, noticing the landscape changing subtly. Into Bedfordshire we took our Bedford, and stayed a happy couple of nights in the orchard of friends where their two year old twins ran about clothless in the withering heatwave, and we helped add an undercoat of paint to their house-lorry in the making. They took us to an Emmaus Centre for cake and second-hand rifling, where we found a bike for £20 that now resides on the roofrack, has since been painted olive green with matte emulsion and can take us from parkups to towns that are just a little too far away to walk to. Overnighting by a lake (above), we drove the next day via Ikea to restock our picture frame reserves, and onward into Oxfordshire. Each county we have noticed is just a little different from the last. You cannot always put your finger on the reason, they are all most definitely England, but also unique in their county character. From the flats of East Anglia we were gradually encountering hillier roads, the further westward we drove. The maximum speed of our truck-house hovers around 50mph, and this plummets to about 30mph if there's a slight incline. So on motorways we are hooted as impatient drivers zoom around us and even slow moving vehicles have to overtake. We prefer to wiggle down medium sized roads, at our own pace, and so that the old engine is not screeching so loud that we can't converse. As the map reader I take us on occasion down a road that looks small and picturesque on the map only to find that we are squeezing the hulking house down a single track road with low hanging branches swiping at our chimney and no idea of what claustrophobic peril might be round the corner.

In Oxfordshire we were surprised by a rare sight on the roadside verge as we whizzed past - another Bedford TK house! Parked with a tipi beside, and a man reclining in a deck chair, talking on the phone! We honked and waved but he did not look up.
And then, since we were passing right by her neck of the woods, we pulled into a layby for a cup of tea with my friend Gretel (who many of you may know already in blogland through her brilliant illustration and felt toy sculpture work). Braving the dreadful heat, Gretel and Andy zoomed out on their motorbike to find us. It was a delightful visit, which Gretel told of here.


We were keen to make it to Wales the next day so we plodded on and made it as far as just past Ross-on-Wye where we drove around a fair bit, at the tired end of the day, remembering that frustrating feeling trying to find a suitable place to park overnight that wouldn't be too near the traffic (it's noisy and large passing vehicles rock the truck in their wind-wakes), or bother anyone else living nearby. Eventually we hunkered down at Winter's Cross, knowing we only had a short last leg to go the next day.

We were loving seeing Welsh hills from our windows and following bilingual road signs. The house was even slower up and down the hills, and the air was thankfully cooling.
Do you remember back when we were parked by the sea in Kent? And kind Maria who brought us food and flowers and offered us her sister's address in Wales? Well that is where we are now, parked on the land of kind Mo, sister of kind Maria, next to her rather unusual gypsyish wagon. We overlook a river where we have spent happy hours, and are surrounded by the misty Brecon Beacons.

Not that we have had any chance to go up into them, because since we arrived it has rained every day. Westerly wild weather. Wet winds, weather that reminds us of those endless rainy days in Scotland. Tui has been fighting an ongoing battle with leaks. Armed with his silicone sealant gun, he is daily clambering about on the roof and walls to find and fill the sneaky little cracks that seem to let torrents in. The beauty of an old wooden house vehicle has the downside that the wood moves and swells and shrinks with the heat and damp and even a tiny chink beside a screw can let enough correctly angled rain in to soak through my entire clothes cupboard.
The river below us has been a delight, we have pottered about in it and I even swam an invigorating swim amongst the rocks and green slime in the icy icy water. One night we left our mats in a rushing bit, weighed down by river rocks til the morning, where we found them washed (fairly) clean and harbouring little clinging pincered things.



Another night we had a fire on the flat rock beside the water, which was lovely. Woodsmoke drifted along with the water to wherever it was in such a hurry to go. Out to sea?
There are horses all around us here. This group we met in the field beyond the river, and friendlier horses I've not met. One black fellow with the softest of wrinkly noses became my friend for an hour, and the horses all stood in a kind of horse-trance, gazing into the mid-distance, one hind leg cocked slightly, thinking maybe thoughts of hay and who-knows-what.

The next day we heard shouting from the field which we think was the farmer cajoling the horses into transport for market. We never saw them again.

Tui did manage to get just inches from one horse's eye, since they were so comfortable with us there, and took this exquisite photograph.

And inbetween all the Welsh raindrops I have been busily painting a clock to celebrate the marriage of my younger-yet-6'4"-tall brother Jan to his lovely lady Maria. We travelled by train to the wedding, to see the dear pair make their vows, which were sincere and moving. A beautiful couple they are and right now off in the Pacifics on honeymoon...

The clock is them but not a portrait, riding a tandem of two clocks, one that moves forwards, and one in reverse. They carry a basket each containing things they love to do. Jan is a wizard of mechanical trickery and could easily build a real-life bike powered clock if he wished. Maria is a keen finder of antique things and a crafter of wool and wonder. May they be ever happy on their tandem.

Here too is another thing I gave them, a little cardboard heart box painted by me with treeish things, the day of they marriage and words: Of Leaf And Tree May Your Love Be. Inside was berries from the hornbeam trees in the road where we grew up.

If you look closely at the clock painting, you'll see that the happy cycling couple have mouse tails poking beneath their garments, just to add an edge of Rima-oddness!
We're off tomorrow to the Big Green Gathering and so we had to return from London to wet Wales. We came back to find all in order, the truck having been well watched over by Mo. Though in the food cupboard, the cheese and the chocolate had dear little rodent tooth marks in the corners. Who could have been sneaking up through the clutch pedal holes I wonder?...

The One Two Bird And The Half Horse

SOMEWHERE INSIDE the beginnings of a leaf in a forest far away from things, lays cocooned a memory of a song not yet born. If you lean a gentle ear close enough, you might hear her name spoken. Orla Wren is a dream child, a smile before sleep, an old lullaby, an ache in the space between. And my Tui knows Orla Wren best of all.

I have waited a long while to tell you about his incredible creation, this work that has taken him in and out of quite some years, and now I can. The One Two Bird And The Half Horse is here.
I have watched over two years as these most intricate of outpourings grew. As Tui made and remade these twelve beautiful sound sculptures with infinite care, I learnt that his craft is like mine, but the hairs of his paintbrushes are the most delicate of violin notes, and his paint is birdsong, netted from the bedroom window at dawn. I have never known anyone so heartfelt about the work he does. And it is this heart-feeling that he weaves amongst the melodies he makes with many strange and wonderful instruments. There are zithers and whistles and bells and fiddles and erhus and Uzbek changs and fence-twangs and melodicas and accordions and beautiful voices from Georgia and Japan and France and Scotland and birds and clarinets and cellos and creaky chairs and sewing machines and flugel horns and Tibetan singing bowls and pianos and music boxes and children's songs. And all of these are taken like threads on a laptop-loom and woven, with a quite extraordinary ear for detail together.

Tui is often asked what kind of music he makes, and this is an almost impossible question to answer. For him nature is his cello string, whether it be to record the rain on the tin roof of an abandoned house, or place a microphone close by the pebbles shifting at the sea's edge. Together with these collected voices of wild instruments he weaves into a precisely chosen part of the tapestry small lines of melody, sometimes played by him, and sometimes imagined by him but sung in imaginary words by others. And then he listens, sometimes for days, inside the womb of the music, until he hears more chinks in the warp and weft, where he gently places a harmony made from electronically altered footsteps or the rustlings of something that could be moth wings. And then maybe he takes a whistle and plays just two more notes, long and barely there, and lays them, repeated like a playground song, two octaves away from where they started and bouncing from ear to ear, like a blanket over the whole music as if to tuck it into bed for the night.

The One Two Bird and The Half Horse is Tui's second album, and in his sphere (seemingly named "folktronica") Orla Wren is quietly rather successful. This beautiful work has received some eloquent and deserved praise already (a few here below), though it has only just been released, on the Japanese Flau label. I am enormously proud.

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It distils sublime wood smoke folk atmosphere and pointallist digitalis to the subatomic level, until it becomes effectively the same stuff that makes brooks babble and winds whisper. ~David Sheppard

A dream I would like to return to... ~Ben Eshmade

...these porcelain pirouettes are possessed and woven of a beautifully demurred tapestry that‘s all at once untamed and pure, not so much primitive but rather more natural, the melodies appear like daydreaming serenades, barely there, as though like flickering apparitions caught from the corner of the eye, willowy and fragile, partly hazy and blurred seemingly just out of focus, their free spirited timbres idyllically teased with an unreal arresting tenderness as they sway murmuring like woodland opines caught adrift upon a delicate breeze... ~The Sunday Experience

...au vu de la petite fille crayonnée qui sert de pochette, et à entendre la voix fébrile, haut perché, qui s’échappe des morceaux, vous allez penser qu’Orla Wren est une fragile petite fée, qui dépose ses disques discrètement sur le rebord de nos fenêtres... ~Delicious Scopitone

Les pattes craquantes des insectes s’occupent des percussions, tandis que les toiles d’araignées se tendent dans le vent pour vibrer doucement, harpes minuscules. ~Delicious Scopitone

... achingly lovely ... ~Boomkat

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I have been enormously privileged to see inside the making of such unique music.
And even more so to have my scratchy pencil drawings adorn the album sleeve, my flute and clarinet and accordion meanderings to be mixed into the music and be asked to tell an animated story around one of the tracks.
For many months I sat crouched in our Scottish attic moving tiny pieces of paper underneath a camera to tell the pencil-drawn tale of The Fish and The Doll. And here it is at long last.

There is another film on the album too... made by Tui from little snippets of film of my family and me when I was just five. These he has made black and white and layered with old photographs, and exploiting my Dad's original wobbly video camera technique, he has created a glimpsed evocation of childhood, half remembered, and half longed-for. The First Born Daughter of Water.

Both of these films are for tracks featuring the amazing vocals of Georgia born Russudan Meipariani. We do hope you like them.




Tui sees the world in a very beautiful way. Like me he always notices the outsider, the one who is innocent or old, who has known madness or has lines of sad experience etched around her eyes. Those who long to hold hands with these folk will hear what Tui is trying to say in his music. Orla Wren is for these people and about these people, and if you are one of them it is for you.
These songs are fragments of a yearning with no name. They will evoke in you a childhood, down amongst the grass blades, where it was once possible to find sunlight floating in a puddle and make stories for all tomorrow's mayflies.
The songs' names are as beautiful as their sounds, and you must listen to them alone, sitting by a tree or at the edge of a hill. Put the music right into your ears so that you can hear every lilt and scuttle, so that you can find that place in you where your tears began.








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Here are some places where Orla Wren can be found...

orlawren.com
orla wren on myspace
orla wren at flau
You can buy the album from cargo records here
sideways through sound (A psychedelic reverie of a radio station half way round the world who made The One Two Bird And The Half Horse the featured album on the show a few weeks ago.)
orla wren blog
orla wren at expanding records (the home of his acclaimed debut album Butterfly Wings Make)
& on street corners and village greens of Europe playing wonkily handmade instruments alongside my yet-to-be-made puppet theatre...

The lovely delicate photographs of frosty leaf, downy seed-head, foggy trees and moth-cocoon are Tui's too :)

In the woods

SOMEWHERE IN SUFFOLK live kind Mr and Mrs G. They share their 160 acres of beautiful wooded farmland with sheep and dogs and moorhens and geese and chickens and bees and for a short while, us too. They came across us at Weird and Wonderful Wood and were amongst the numerous generous folk to read our "park-up request sign" and respond with their contact details for if ever we passed by. And so we did.


Last Sunday was Strawberry Fair - the wildest yet of this summer's fairs, though only a day, so grittable-throughable for the mountains of pennies that we made! An estimated 30 thousand bodies pass through this annual event on Cambridge's Midsummer Common, and I think most of them were drunk. Our neighbour - a carnivorous plant seller - warned us that gaps between vehicles would become loos as the day wore on, and he was right. We packed up when the staggering got too much, and attempted to chase away many weeing men from the sides of our house, but gave up in fear of retributive smashed windows, wandered off into the strange sea of humanity and bought a hat, some incense and what I think is an antique Indian holy ash holder.


Whilst in Cambridge we were able to feast our eyes on the delights in the marvellous Fitzwilliam Museum (such as incredible Medieval Miniatures, Breughel's Village Festival (below) and Gwen John's The Convalescent); and accidentally stumbled past the Corpus Clock & Chronophage which I blogged about a while back. Sadly rain and time prevented us from visiting the Cambridge Folk Museum... but maybe on the way back past.


So from there we headed to this leafy Suffolk nest... and our wheeled house can now be found parked at the end of a pathway into young woodland, where a circular glade houses a beautiful copper beech tree at its centre, and a log bench cut by Mr G for Mrs G on their wedding anniversary. We keep marvelling at the kindness of people and how things have changed for us, once hanging on in the park and ride with endless engine trouble, or being checked up on by the council. It is amazing, as 'grubby travellers', to be welcomed so warmly to a grand estate! It proves again for me the importance of seeing people for the people they are, rather than by any label or received idea; and it is lovely to be seen that way too. I hope that folk invite us onto their spot of land because they get a sense that we'll be a delight to have!
I am very happy to say that we are meeting people who show us England's hospitality, warmth and intelligence, which is easy to forget when you're being shouted at in the street or clipboarded by council men.


This is a real haven of peace, and we have loved being in the woods. Though interestingly we've rather missed the view. Because this little glade is enclosed all around by trees, we feel sort of "muffled" and wonder what is beyond. We have walked, though, and enjoyed this land in its patchwork of light rains and sunshine-afters, which have soggied the ground and dappled nearly-warm sun into our morning doorway.



And all the while there have been woods in my drawings. Or rather I have been into the woods in my drawings. For a long time the old woman who lives in a hut in the woods in folk tales has fascinated and drawn me. So now I am drawing her! In three guises - Baba Yaga, Hansel and Gretel's Witch, and Red Riding Hood's Grandmother. These drawings I have made in charcoal and pencil and for the blackest of black forest, compressed carbon, which gets up your nose, and makes you look like a coal miner. The three drawings, along with a piece of (still to be finished) writing are for an edition of Marvels & Tales - A Journal of Fairytale Studies - to be published next year... so I will show you these progress snippets for now, and more when I can.


Making these drawings whilst reading the well-loved (and enormously recommended) Women Who Run With The Wolves by Jungian Analyst and Storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes is very apt indeed, exploring as it does that inner yearning for wildness and following of true intuitive paths through the woods...


We're invited to tea this evening with Mr & Mrs G and then we're off again - this time to a wildlife and nature reserve open day at The Sinfield Trust near Woodbridge in Suffolk, where there'll be nature trails, wood crafts, traditional firelighting workshops, barn owl and wild herb walks, turf labyrinths, Swedish folk music, and us selling pictures!!

Elder

Elder Mother by Arthur Rackham

"Old girl, give me some of thy wood
and I will give thee some of mine
when I grow into a tree."

AND SO, in various parts of England and Scandinavia, a woodsman who wished to cut the Elder would ask of it, lest misfortune befall him.
The Elder is a tree thought in many old tales to harbour a spirit. In Northern Europe she is the Hylde-Moer, a death and fertility goddess. And since days of yore and before, folk have alternately revered and reviled the Elder as a witches' tree, a tree of magic, which must be respected.


The tree's name comes from the Anglo-Saxon word Æld meaning fire, because the hollow stems make excellent kindling, and indeed it also bears folk names such as "pipe-tree", since Elder twigs have long been used as blow-pipes by children.
Its negative associations come from a belief that Elder was the wood of the crucifix and/or the tree from which Judas hung himself. The Jew's Ear fungus which grows predominantly on the Elder is so named also because of the crucifixion associations (Judas' punishment was to forever hear folk whispering of his betrayal by having his ears grow on the tree of the cross).

The Elder appears in the conjurings of the Macbeth witches, and there abound tales of Elder Tree Witches trying to steal cow's milk or pinching black and blue a baby sleeping in a cradle made from Elder Wood...

"It were all along of my maister’s thick ‘ead. It were in this ‘ow't’ rocker comed off t'cradle, and he hadn’t no more gumption than to mak’ a new ‘un out on illerwood (elder wood) without axing the Old Lady’s leave, and in course she didn’t like that, and she came and pinched the wean that outrageous he were a’most black in t’ face; but I bashed un off, and putten an eshen on, and the wean is gallus as owt agin."

But above all the Elder is a tree to be used in cooking. Elderflower and Elderberry wine and cordial are probably the most well known and fragrent Elder-recipes, but alongside these, the plant has many many medicinal benefits and other more obscure culinary uses, one of which, since the Elder is just flowering, I decided to make today...

ELDERFLOWER FRITTERS
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1. On a sunny day, pick a fair few flower heads, leaving long stalks.


2. Beat 1 egg in a bowl.


3. Add 250ml milk and stir.


4. Sift in 200g plain flour whilst stirring. Add a pinch of salt.


5. Dip flower heads into batter (after removing cobwebs and weevils).


6. Plunge battered flowers into a pan of smoking hot oil, a few inches deep, holding onto the stalks until the fritters have turned a golden brown.



7. Serve with a sprinkling of sugar, maple syrup or cinnamon.

For more information about Elder Lore, there's an excellent essay "By Standing Stone and Elden Tree" over at Hedgewychery.
There's more wild foodery and suchlike at Colour it Green where I found the fritter recipe.
And the fritters were delicious!

A Carnival of Caravans

GREETINGS FROM THE MOST SOCIABLE HERMITAGE there has been! Though we are usually a quiet pair who like a secluded green spot where only the chattering of birds can be heard, our work and travelling takes us on occasion into pockets of busy humanity to sell our wares. The last two weeks have been positively bristling with people, as we've taken our rolling house and all our wares to fairs and festivals where we've seen so so many faces and swapped many interesting tales.


Weird and Wonderful Wood was a delightful event set in the leafy grounds of Haughley Park where a knotwork of wood crafters set up tents and stalls and tables to show and sell the things they made. We were parked between beautifully painted gypsy vardos and a travelling family selling walking sticks carved from Bog Oak. There were wandering musicians and activities for children, stiltwalking and all sorts, and we thoroughly loved it. The back of our truck turned into a shop front where I hung original paintings and framed prints were displayed on a blanket below. With the door open our house became part of the display too and brought countless oos and aas and "Do you live in this?"s ... Folk tramped in an out of it and our jaws almost came loose from chatting. All the while my pictures sold like hotcakes - amongst them two originals! Tui's truck handiwork was the star of the show and the gnarly ladder and roofrack in particular prompted much praise!
We hardly got a chance to properly look at other people's doings unfortunately, though we were pleased to meet Andy the woodturner of Cobweb Crafts and several other blogging friends.



We commented after the weekend that all the people were so nice, a selling experience quite unlike our usually slightly harangued street set-up. We were met with much kindness and intelligence and were thoroughly glad to have joined in, though we did sneak in and shut the door of an evening so as not to have to do any more talking! Numerous folk offered us park-ups all over East Anglia and we heard tell of other fairs too...

*Last slightly supernatural jumping picture courtesy of Hetty who we met there :)
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So rather uplifted and quite weighed down in the pockets, we headed to the next festival in Kent. Small World Festival is a twice-yearly solar-powered gathering of hippies in a beautiful rural spot in mid Kent. It's a music festival, though definitely not mainstream, and as such was to be a completely different experience from our previous weekend. There was a lovely ramshackle air to the site as we arrived and the strange sensation of pulling into a gathering of other live-in vehicles of all shapes and sizes. There were people too.. in all the colours of the rainbow and more. And so the five strange days began.


The first couple of these were quieter affairs as the site was mainly full of people working there or doing stalls.. the others would arrive later, as the weekend got madder.



We have never seen another Bedford TK on the road in real life but this little field housed four including ours! And along with those, many other trucks, vans, vardos, tipis, tents, yurts and buses.. all kitted out like homes, some of them for living in all year round, others just for the odd festival.


Festivals are strange things. I think the idea is to create an alternative sort of a world for a weekend where you can escape. So they gather colourful folk from the country round to bring their strange land yachts together and park alongside each other, not unlike a gathering of barges, moored side by side. Hedonism seems to be the aim and delight of most visitors, and in this other reality, anything goes. I find this uncomfortable. There is something in me that has always been drawn to an alternative way of life, and the sight of a field full of coloured waggons, cookpots on campfires, children with grubby faces and barefooted matted-hair parents makes me smile no end. But the hedonistic side of it all makes me shy away. So many of the conversations we had with people made no sense at all. People mostly didn't really want to buy pictures, cans of beer abounded, and people staggered around the site until well past dawn.
I do not judge people's need to celebrate or escape, just the brutishness with which it is done sometimes. It made me feel like I was hiding from school bullies again. It made me feel like I do not fit in, in the very place where an onlooker might assume I would.


So we hid again. We walked out of the gates into the surrounding (silent) fields where cows looked at us soft-nosedly and we could take time to look at grass blades. Then rejuvenated we returned to the melee. It was not so bad really, and there were wonderfully interesting things going on. It was a festival after all, and as festivals go it was a lovely little one. I found the fact that the whole gamut of sound systems and so on were being powered by wind and sun quite inspiring.. We drank chai round campfires and we met folk there with whom we hope we will stay friends. I think five days was a little too much for our world-weary souls, but in a strange way we became fond of the place and the people and were sad to go. It was indeed a small world created for a week in a field.
A last day delight was a little old lady from the locality who'd never been to a festival before who brought her home made ice-cream in little tubs and many wonderful flavours: gooseberry and tayberry, greengage and damson ... my goodness I have never tasted ice-cream like it. She sold out quickly I think. We spent ten pounds on her delicious ice-cream!


We have noticed how odd it is to settle into a particular view out of our windows, and then have it change. It makes me realise how much a part of your home the view is. The atmosphere inside a house is flavoured by what you can see out there and there. But at the same time you create a haven-bubble of candlelit serenity amid the beercans and loud music. For five days we could see a purple face with two staring eyes out of our back window (part of another display's awning). From the bedroom window we could see across the tops of tents, and from the side we could see Moroccan textiles under tarpaulins. Now it is different. And that change of view feels odd. I think our itinerant life means that change is much more of a relevant entity in what we do. Our life is lived in small chapters, where we learn to love that view, that tree, that walk to the "loo", and then we are gone, and a new fondness must grow in its place.



Our days at these festivals have taught us that we need maybe to aim more for crafty, outdoorsy type fairs and if any of you can recommend some to us, we'd be mightily pleased. We are planning to head to Cambridge's Strawberry Fair in a couple of weeks' time which we've heard is a manic rush of 30000 people but excellent for selling. Can we do it?!
Some of the festivals charge an awful lot to traders, so those are ruled out. (Also because those require such things as risk assessments, public liability insurance and form filling!)




The rain made the odd appearance at these events too as one would expect in Britain. Weird and Wonderful Wood was rained on on both days and we had to bundle our goods indoors before they got ruined, which added to the general hecticness. We shall have to look into extending our display with an interesting wooded awning type affair. Small World was blessed with sun until the last evening and the morning of packing up. So an army of exhausted hooded folk loaded vans and stuffed damp tents into rucksacks. We drove off early on the Tuesday so as not to get stuck in the quagmire of muddy tyre tracks left by folk returning to their other lives.

The Greening and The Keening

THERE IS A LADDER that climbs up the side of our wheeled home and takes the daring up to the roof where a roof-rack has appeared, all edged in branches from the woods. If you sit up there, high above the goings-on below, ruffled by the chilly winds, you can see treetops and further, and smell woodsmoke from the battered chimney behind you. Up there you can imagine things a little way off, you can look in one direction and imagine what folks are doing over there underneath their roofs, and in another direction to imagine what you might do next. If your vision could fly past the opaqueness of things, you could leap off the rooftop and follow your long-held dreams to a place just over there where they are real.


We have been loving our days here in this beautiful green and windy May. We have worked and pottered and looked and walked and touted our wares. We have talked and been silent, we have looked at insects and met friends. We have planned and sighed and drunk coffee and sat by rivers. It struck me today how happy I am, as I sat outside our back door painting and a weevil with a luminous back crawled over my knuckles. Our days are our days and that makes us smile. We are mostly down to our last £20 but it never seems to matter. Somehow something comes along at the last minute and we sell only the things we create, never the minutes of our lives.


Springtime is wonderful. There are green things birthing themselves all over the place, somehow all hearing that sap-murmur that says 'now's the time'.
We walked down the path alongside the river yesterday and saw life and death. We scrambled through fields yellowed with buttercups, where delicate calf ankles crept amongst the yellow. Growth was in everything. By the water, hidden in the tallnesses of grasses a white swan treasured her nest. And yet by the roadside, a baby deer lay, flung aside by the car bonnet of somebody in a rush, eyes already fly food.





Sitting on the roof again you wonder why someone might have been in such a rush that they did not see the shy trembling thing emerge from the trees. Perhaps they had to get to work. Perhaps they had to get to work to earn money (or rather so that some numbers changed on a computer screen somewhere apparently equaling wealth). Perhaps that money paid for a large house and for materialistic kudos in its myriad forms. But that rushing person did not spend very much time in that large house because they were too busy rushing to a job that made them grey to earn the money to pay for it. And what wealth is that? That you sell your one given life to someone else so that the very life force that keens in you, that makes these daisies turn to the sun, is put on pause until some other time in the future, that never quite arrives.



On Saturdays we have been pushing our excellent old lady shopping trolleys full of pictures through the barley fields to the place where the rather infrequent bus stops, and travelling into Colchester town where we have tried to sell our wares. A new town is always exciting. These are people we've never seen before, nor have they seen us. The first time we tried, we were circled by fat yellow-vested council bouncer types who worked for one of the private companies who seem to have bought sections of the town. Not one of them was brave enough to approach us, but they phoned another company "Street Care" who sent a nervous young chap, newly in the job, to move us. Our usual chat ensued... we had set up outside a boarded up shop, and were bothering noone, except it seemed those who did not want us there. He was kind, but we told him we would not go. And so the police came. And of course unless we want to spend an afternoon arrested and then released chargeless, we have to move for them. These though, were possibly the nicest police we've come across and one of them wanted to (but couldn't) buy a picture. So that day we packed up early and stumbled upon a delightful Clock Museum in a timberframe building which we explored instead. As it turned out the policeman visited us with his wife some days later at our farmland parkup and bought a picture after all.
We got away with it the following Saturday by trying another spot, and hoped the same would occur this week.. but it was not to be. Our day was started by a beggar launching fury at us for saying hello, and our mood continued in a sort of "readiness for battle" as various lurching heroin addicts slurred abuse at us and eventually the same nervous council man from a fortnight before brought with him a council colleague and an army of 2 policeman to move us.
However on that day a chance encounter with a face I had seen in blogland brightened things enormously. We were delighted to meet the Snippety Giblets family and go to theirs for tea after the grand turfing-out. And then a few days later they visited us here and we are happy to say that such friends, intelligent minds and good hearts we are glad indeed to meet.



So here we are almost ready for our next chapter. We'll be happy for the next horizon, and for the feeling you get as your house pulls away, but the leaving will be sad because Sarah and her clan have become good friends and so has the land here. For their stretched out hand of kindness and their hospitality and help and lifts to galleries and address lendings and freshly laid eggs and friendship we thank them. We shall be back again next time round.



The next exciting thing to tell you is that we'll be taking our house and wares to the Weird And Wonderful Wood fair near Stowmarket this weekend. Hopefully unless we are caught in a deluge, I'll be hanging pictures from the side of the truck, and also showing originals (i.e. all my work from the exhibition, minus one - Hark Hark - which very excitingly sold!). If the rains do come, then it'll be a weekend of huddling inside with the kettle on and delighting in the woodturning, musical instrument making, basket making, tree climbing and other spontaneous happenings that are to be found there!


And I have been busy making a sign in a wonky reclaimed-wood-worn-out-folk-art style that will stand outside the truck at the fair and will attach to the back while we go along, so that interested people in traffic jams can find out what it is that we do in here!




So til soon, I wish you all the greenness of May in your hopes and dreams and delight beyond measure in the things that you do.

What I saw by the wayside

AFTER NATURE'S WEDDING when the ground was strewn with petal-confetti, I walked along the road, and delighted in my wild garden by the wayside.

There I saw growing in blue-eyed carpets Germander Speedwell or Jump Up And Kiss Me as they call it across the green sea.



And waving white Cow Parsley, beautiful stalks of lace, with sinister other names: Mother-Die, Stepmother's Blessing the children called it, don't pick it or it will break your mother's heart.



I saw Vetch that clings with wiry tendrils onto things.



And White Dead-nettle pretending to sting.



For gamboling children with a stitch in their side, Stitchwort grew for the piskies to hide.



And Red Campion which they used to call pudding bags on account of their shape.



I saw Goosegrass, or Cleavers, the sticky plant for finding out sweethearts.



And Ground Ivy, all mauve amongst the grass, and bearing the lovely other name Robin-run-in-the-hedge.



Common Mouse-Ear Chickweed or Mouse-ears for making peasant cough syrup grew in little white daintynesses there too.



And escapees from the forest, Bluebells blue.



Dove's Foot Cranesbill, whose roots powdered in claret were thought miraculous against ruptures, danced pinkly there.



And looking out at me from their grassy green sky, two open Daisies: a perfect day's eye.



As the day wandered on I saw yellow tooth-of-lion dent-de-lion Dandelions sending off their seeds.



And I waved off the what-o'clocks as a kiss on the breeze.



Everywhere I went on this wild-flower day, there grew lush confederations of green stingers, which I gathered in gloved hands for tea.


We infused it in a teapot for keeping away the summer sneezing, and we cooked it as greens in our dinner, sharing in an old tradition of using nettles in food.


They are full of iron and delicious in soups too. Nettle tales and lore abound, but I shall share just one here: A New Forest Gypsy in 1952 was recorded as using nettles as a contraceptive. The plant had to be laid inside the man's socks as a sole for 24 hours before his dalliance with his lady!

Tender-handed touch-a-nettle

It'll sting you for your pains

Grasp it like a man of mettle

And it soft as silk remains

Now as I sit here writing, I see that some of these spring flowers have wandered into my spring Crow painting for Melanie.




My bookshelves are full of plantish books, but for wayside identification I cannot recommend highly enough Roger Phillips' Wildflowers of Britain and indeed all the others in his photographic series. For the folkloric side of things, the brilliant Oxford Dictionary of Plant Lore will keep you diverted for hours.

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And there's our growing house... parked by a patch of nettles. Tui is building a roof-rack for bikes and other things (including sitting on summer nights), and a foresty ladder to get up there! Now as he climbs he has to dodge bees, because they too have decided that a house on wheels is the best of all places to live.



And two cuckoos in the trees are cuckoo-echoing, like children singing a round as the shadows get long. And I am off to sit in the evening...

Oil paint for the ears, spring flowers for the sorrows

THERE ARE WHITE FLOWERS growing beautifully about this rusty old wheel at the front of our truck, but I haven't had a chance to go and look at them these last weeks because I have been painting. Painting at night, painting in the days, painting in the bits in between.
I am emerging gradually from underneath an elephant of exhaustion which is the result of two manic weeks of exhibition preparation. Up in that tree I knew not of the long hours of desperately focused painting that lay ahead. I have always been a last minute artist and I think really that I work well under pressure, even though I don't like it one bit. I like best to be able to set my drifty painting pace to meander around my days as they go, but when an outside deadline looms, I fear failure above all and morph into a new creature with an iron will to finish it, no matter how leaden my eyelids or how loud my inner screams.


I had two paintings to complete before the opening and both are, I think and hope, the best things I've done. And while I have painted like a thing possessed, Tui has made me the most lovely picture frames from found wood.
Along from where our house rests its wheels is a pile of moss and timber that was once a barn. The roof has caved in completely and all around nettles and brambles grow. There by the barn-that-was lie stacks of old pallets. Weathered by time and the sky, grey and holey. Perfect for a poverty stricken artist who cannot afford expensive framers. I bought cheap clip frames to provide the glass and the backing and had mounts cut. The rest was done by Tui with glue and staples and sandpaper. Here are the magnificent rustic results in progress and in all their gallery glory!

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Meanwhile springtime was passing me by; I sat bent over the table like my painted characters, moving my three-haired paintbrush over the neverending surface of wood.
These two latest works have music coming from them. If you lean close and listen, you'll hear strains of strange East-European melodies, for those are the musics that move me.
If you have not yet heard the exquisite harmony singing from Bulgaria, sung sometimes with the accompaniment of the goat-bagpipe, the gaida, I urge you to - there is nothing like it. I've recommended it before but A Harvest, A Shepherd, A Bride - Village Music of Bulgaria is a wonderful collection of songs which I think is how this painting would sound if you could for a moment swap your ears with your eyes and listen to it. Anyhow, the point is that the painting I worked on up in that tree studio became this below. I am very pleased with it, and I rarely say this. A new tiny paintbrush has led me to paint fine lines describing the shapes of faces and hands and feet with finely diluted oil paint. And these different-sized people fit happily into the odd shaped piece of wood, singing their Bulgarian harmonies, while the little fellow plays heartily on his gaida. I only managed to take one photo of this painting amid the recent chaos, but here it is... (that first word of the title means 'sing' or 'we sing' - unless any Bulgarian readers can tell me otherwise?)

пея : A Song To All Our Sorrows

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And next came the final piece. With just one week to go, and the most enormous piece of wood I have ever painted on in front of me, I began work on a clock to out-tick all previous clocks... With pencil in hand I spent late nights drawing a scene of Pied-Piperishness, an old bearded one-man-band with rats nestling in his beard, and children following. It took time, and the painting gradually took shape. I had read that the story of the Pied Piper was perhaps a remnant of a history of an exodus from Hamelin to collonize parts of Eastern Europe. And this combined with ideas about Jewish music (something that has always resonated old and true in me), and the ostracization of Jews through history formed an image. The pied piper in this case has become a one man band, partly because I like the idea of a character carrying all his instruments and chattels at once, and partly because I needed the roundess of drum for the clock face. The title I took from the well known W.B Yeats poem The Stolen Child that has been sung by various folk singers, and so tied in thoughts of childhood, and the taking-away that is done by music and imagination, and that is so very important, not just in childhood. Of course there is sadness there too, as there always is I think in my work.
I took photos of this one as I went which I share with you here.

So there it is, I am pleased with my work, though I became far too exhausted to be able to 'see' it properly by the end. The night before the opening of the exhibition I was still painting... and went to bed, finally putting the battery in the back of the clock, and setting it to twenty to eleven. On waking.. it still said twenty to eleven and there followed a morning of panic, re-drilling and just a little throwing of pliers. With just half an hour to spare we arrived and hung the clock in its place on the gallery wall. There it'll be for all to see, and perhaps to buy until the 10th of May. These rather nice photos of it below were taken for the Imagine Gallery website.

Come Away O Human Child From A World More Full Of Weeping
Than You Can Understand

Now I'm off to not paint for a few days and enjoy the wonderful springing springtime...

Tree Studio

TUCKED AWAY behind a crumble-down barn, with a logpile, a rusted wheeled farm machine and newly budding trees for neighbours we look out of our back door at rabbit-holed fields and treetops beyond and smile because we are somewhere new. Our long delayed next leg eventually took us winding up from Kent, above the busyness that ebbs out around London and into East Anglia where we are parked in a field on a farm just on the north edge of Essex. It is owned by kind Sarah and her family who offered a spot on their land, after she stumbled here on a blog wander. It is delightful to walk amongst trees again and step between stinging nettles. How lovely of Sarah to invite us to enjoy a corner of this land, and it means we will not be approached by council men while I prepare for my exhibition which is just a few towns and only two weeks away from here!



If you climb down the steps at our back door and hop down the grassy hill and beyond into the woods, at the bottom of a slope there at the edge of a lake stands a tree. Its insides are black and scaly as a devil's armpit, perhaps it was struck by lightning like is striking above us now. As I write the inky sky sends cloud-wolves howling and rain beats down on our little wheeled house.


I have begun a new painting to hang in the exhibition on a slice of wood ferreted out in a charity shop by my mum. I have been working hard, and it is great to be able to wallow in my own ideas for imagery. Normally if you were to ask me at this early stage of a piece of work what I thought of it, the most positive response you'd receive would be a tentative hmmm.., but this time I am really pleased with it! It's rather a Rima-ish sort of thing sporting as it does bent people, earthen greens and reds, a Bulgarian Gaida Bagpipe, and a touch of melancholy...


Today if you had wandered down to the blackened tree by the lake you would have found me there painting up in the tree house that was started a few years ago by Sarah's boy. I scrambled up and sat high and hidden, looking out over the water as a lone swan floated past and back again giving me sideways glances. I sat there until the evening began and goosebumps came and Tui brought me red wine and pickled onions.


These next few weeks will be busy with preparing of the exhibition which will take place at the Imagine Gallery in Long Melford, Suffolk. You can see I have put the advert for A Gathering over there on the right. You might recognise a certain crow of mine. It runs from 26th April until 10th May. The exhibition will include five other artists and I must say what a delightfully enthusiastic gallery curator John Foley is. Galleries have never brought me much success in the past; instead I think the more hand made immediate way of selling work has so far served me well, and perhaps I went to the wrong sorts of galleries. But this time I will be exhibiting amongst some other wonderful earth-flavoured work and the whole thing is being put together by someone who is genuinely delighted by what I do, which is both humbling and encouraging. I have the endlessly talented illustrator and tale-teller Jackie Morris to thank for connecting us.
So.. on with frantic framing and painting of pictures, and in between, explorations of this greening corner of England which is our home for these next few weeks...


PS - do click on that last photo to enlarge.. I am in the tree!!

A house on your back

THIS MAN CARRIES his house on his back in a drawing just completed by me for a nice lady* who asked me to make her a drawing for her house-builder husband. She had seen my Goods & Chattels Man and asked for a little drawing in a similar vein but with a house on his back and a nod to the corrugated iron roofs of Australia where they live.
It is also a rather apt illustration for our predicament right now. We feel like we might have to hoick our house onto our backs and walk!

Regarding our recent and ongoing engine troubles all I can say is GrRrRrRrRrRhHhH!!!
The problem that we went to that garage with in the first place all that time ago is still not fixed, despite all the money we paid them and the weeks we spent parked there. We are very frustrated indeed!

Our intention was to leave for East Anglia this week but alas we are back in the park and ride! There have been days peering under the engine hood, and thinking 'aha we've found the cause', ordering a new part, collecting it from the post office, fitting it and crossing fingers, starting the engine and driving down the A2 a bit to see, only to be greeted with momentous chugging at junctions, revving of its own accord and billows of exhaust smoke down the road. We are pretty sure based on advice from various quarters that all this is being caused by air getting into the fuel somehow... so we have looked for cracks and loose nuts and bolts until blue in the face. Finally yesterday we were put in touch with a knowledgeable man who trained on TKs and can recite the serial numbers to you over the phone. He reckons it's the fuel pump playing up... but alas cannot work on it as the truck won't fit in his yard. So, he recommended another place... which it turns out is just down the road from here and on a farm! And that is where we will head in a bit when I have finished moaning on here. Gawd knows if it'll be good news, we are starting to despair a bit and not trust people. The knowledgeable man made a knowing noise when Tui mentioned the garage in Faversham where we had been and said "..well my mother said if you have no good thing to say about someone then don't say anything!" It seems we were lead to a nest of cowboys, and it is such a shame. We probably never needed six brand new injectors fitting at all. People can so often disappoint you, and we are even more at the mercy of garages as this is our home.

Mechanical troubles are the real downside of living on wheels. It is so much more important for things to run smoothly and the freedom to move vanishes in an instant when things go wrong, leaving you wherever you happen to be. As it goes the park and ride is a sort of sanctuary in this kind of situation, it's quite alright to be parked here for lengths of time, and we are close to town to frantically sell pictures in order to pay for the work!

All the while we have been in this loop of trying-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-it-and-then-not, I have struggled to work and we have sold some pictures. Tui even turned the carpark into a carpentry workshop for a day or two whilst he made a new cupboard for our crawl-through. The space between cab and house had become a sort of pile of vegetables and cartons of juice and milk and bags of salad, and butter (it was cooler you see), so we thought why not put all that into a cupboard... and there's the lovely result above. Tui can be seen here from my desk window mid saw, and his activities even brought the carpark attendant over as he'd had a call from the central CCTV monitors telling him "there's some bloke in the carpark making a cupboard!"
The handles (which I think look slightly like poached eggs) are my contribution to the new creation and are made from a piece of Yew that we found back in the orchard days before any chugging was even on the horizon.

I leave you with a familiar scene of recent days... our house pulled in on a roadside somewhere with the engine hood up, spanners strewn across the pavement, Tui underneath cursing, and kind folk stopping to cough through our exhaust smoke and ask if they can help.
Will we be wandering again next week? Oh I do hope so...


*edited for secrecy :)

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JUBILANT POSTSCRIPT!

I would like to report that following this rather glum post we chugged off to the garage-on-the-farm and had our faith in humanity restored. The kind fellows at Injection Development took time and care and diagnosed the problem straight away. It was just a small heater plug part malfunctioning that was letting unburnt diesel through the system. Our relief is tangible... and they shook their heads at the rogues in Faversham, quite incredulous at how much they had charged for not fixing it! It is so nice to have someone who knows an engine inside out really look and work it all out. We needn't have had all this trouble if we had been there in the first place. But now we know, and if ever anyone else is near Canterbury with diesel problems, I can't recommend them highly enough. And the setting is so much more lovely than that dreadful industrial estate.
Rightyho, well I shall return soon with more cheery tales of travelling again!

Tiny corners of our home in sunlight after rain

THIS WAY



There are crisscross shadows on the curtains



The kettle is always on



Green light shines through old wine bottles full of olive oil



And the strings of strange instruments shiver



The sun shines and so the oil lamp waits unlit



Paper plants tremble in the window



And pegs hang thinking about holding up washing



The porthole is a moon



There's dust on the dice



And in the oil paint



Once upon a times hide in unexpected places



And small wire horses gallop across window ledges



Two knarled fellows crouch and grimace at one another



The sun paints colours of India here and there



And wooden eggs nest on string



Birdsong hangs silhouetted



And the sun after rain shines on through our windows

Tales of third eyes, injector pipes, duck eggs, childrens' drawings, and some other lovely things...

THIS IS A SNIPPET OF A JUST BEGUN PAINTING of a white-haired owl-riding lady pointing at a place on her forehead where some believe we have a third eye for seeing Other Things. She has been taking shape in between a rather patchworky few days, and is the sixth painting in the chakra series. I don't know if third eyes are meant to foresee things, but if they are, I wonder if her third eye foresaw that we would be hobbling along the road with a leaking injector pipe just the day after having escaped from our two week sojourn in the garage. We have spent rather a scary amount of hundreds on the recent works that have been administered underneath our house... and had just enough left to afford diesel for a trip to Ikea to stock up on frames for the next weekend selling... and we drove along the road yippeeing to each other that we were free of the industrial estate and actually driving along again.

The joy was short-lived however as on the journey home there followed stalling and horrendous smoking of exhaust and juddering aplenty. We somehow managed to hobble back to our forest spot, Tui expertly manoeuvring our house down the narrow dark country lanes without letting his foot off the accelerator as it would stall if he did. A late night look under the engine hood revealed an engine covered in leaked diesel from a tiny crack in the injector pipe... this had probably been egged on by the recent fossickings under there, and is hopefully not actually such a major disaster as we had thought, we'll just need to get a new pipe made.. and these woods are the most best of all places to be stranded! We'll have a perfect excuse should the council decide to come down and point out the no overnight parking sign to us.

In recent days we have enjoyed a lovely lunch with my family who visited and brought post that had been accumulating on their doormat for me. A house that moves has no address obviously and so for certain things I have been using mum and dad's whist we are about. We also use the Poste Restante service offered (not always smilingly) at post offices. Anyhow, I had parcels from lovely blog readers across the ocean.. and I was delighted first of all by these wonderful drawings of a driving house (with rather apt exhaust cloud!) and one of Baba Yaga's house by the talented children of Anthromama to whom I send big thanks for posting me these delightful works. Also parceled up beautifully was a box of "Rotating Fez Magical Harissa Spice Mix" and a wooden figurine along with kind and interesting words from Joseph Yarrow whose wonderful medieval-slavic-hermetic-norse tale The Goose Grail I urge you to investigate. I was also excited to receive a recently ordered book A Year At My Back Door by my blog friend Ciara, whose beautiful photographs of her view of the Sugar Loaf mountain in Wicklow Ireland through the changing year have been put together in a very lovely little book indeed.


Tui, in between stoically chopping wood for the fire, has been quietly preparing for April when his much awaited and very beautiful second Orla Wren album will be offered to the world. We excitedly peeped in WHSmiths at the latest copy of The Wire magazine where there is this month a fine looking and enticing advert for The One Two Bird And The Half Horse with spidery drawings by me. Soon I shall be telling you more about this wonderful work and showing you animations and films...



Right now, we are parked in this lovely wood where owls hoot by night and woodpeckers peck by day. We have had such happy days amongst the trees and it almost doesn't matter that we chugged here. People have been so friendly, and we have even been brought freshly laid duck eggs (thank you Sue!) which we had on toast and which were of the delicateist duck egg blue you've ever seen. And today, Sunday, the busiest day here, we decided after being asked if we wanted to sell a painting by a friendly visitor, to set up a gallery-in-the-woods on the side of our truck. It attracted interested browsers and two much appreciated sales...

So there you have it.. our patchwork of news for these last few days. Some days are wonderful, some days are stressful... much like anyone else's life really. But we are happily living the life we've chosen. Many people tell us we are brave, but we are not really. We have the same fears and dreams that all folk have.. and sometimes we fly and sometimes we sink. The important thing for me I think is that I am not imagining some other time when I might do this thing I dream of. I'm doing it now, and for all its hooting owls and cracked injector pipes, it is beautiful.
We plan to stay in the woods for a while and then providing there are no more mechanical disasters we will begin to head up to East Anglia where I will be taking part in an exhibition, and where our patchwork journey will continue....

The Avocado Tree Clock

ONCE UPON O'CLOCK
whilst tending to their flock
two shepherd girls came upon a tree.
Its fruits were blackish green
with a crocodileish sheen
and their baskets were as empty as can be.
So with shepherdess bravado
they picked an avocado
that was growing just behind the number three,
then in the yellow air
this fruit collecting pair
ate twenty avocados for their tea.

And with this silly rhyme, I present Once Upon O'Clock number seven. There has been a too-long gap between the previous one and this, but, well, what with moving into a house on wheels and one thing and another, the months have passed clockless. The waiting list is ticking away there, at the back of my mind .. and I long to have more hours in the days. This particular creation is for a second cousin of mine who lives in New Zealand. She placed an order way back in the beginning of my clockmaking days for three clocks, and has been exceedingly patient about the wait!
This one is a gift from her to her friend and ex-husband who grows avocados in Kenya.


It is a yellowish brownish greenish creation, with two women gathering the fruit in baskets. I don't really know what avocado trees look like, but mine had to be round for the clock face and I think I was slightly inspired by the colours in a lovely film we saw recently called Lemon Tree. It told the tale of a Palestinian widow trying to protect her lemon grove from the Israeli defense minister who wanted the trees cut down. Actually looking now at the website.. I see a similar tree motif there, which I had not seen when painting this clock!
Anyhow, it is nice to continue my clockmaking. I feel so busy with lots of lovely little jobs and lovely big jobs to fit in around the ever growing clock list...
And I shall not moan on about the fact that we are still living outside the blimmin' garage. I shall keep painting, and cross fingers for being gone from here in a day or two. Meanwhile perhaps I will eat an avocado, cut in half with a little lemon juice and a tiny pinch of salt....

Trees

TREES. I love them. Especially when they are next to other trees.
Standing in a forest feels like being stood over kindly by a huddle of gentle mossy old men.
We love to park our house best near to trees too... and so we have. But not today.

Today I write from the antithesis of a forest clearing... our house is parked in an industrial estate, outside a diesel garage who are trying to fix the radiator. We thought it was just a small hole to mend, but after hours of wrestling the radiator out, its copper innards were revealed to have turned to paper, after 30 years of radiating.. and so it needs to be sent away and refurbished. Meanwhile we must stay here. We have hung all the curtains and are trying to pretend we are still in that forest clearing, so I shall tell you about our days with trees instead...



The photographs above were taken in a lovely forest park which we discovered on a walk back when we were in the orchard... there is of course a no overnight parking sign there too.. but we thought to try it for a night. And it was delightful. The most lovely day greeted us on waking and the birds sung their tiny songs for us all day, while I painted a tree on a clock (with trees out the window!) and Tui stained picture frames for the weekend ahead. We put up our sign again, and though it was not busy, a fair few walkers and dogs came past and chatted. We felt welcomed... the back door was open in the balmy weather and folks I think felt more able to come and peek... There was an art group visiting the woods who stopped to chat and tell us about a summer exhibition they were planning amongst the trees. Even the park warden was friendly, though he had to "log" our number plate in his daily council report, since we had spent the night there. We ate dinner on the logs outside in the evening and collected twigs for kindling before heading off to town for the next day's selling.



Back at the park and ride, which had been our home for a few weeks previously, we met some friendly fellow vehicle dwellers who became our neighbours for a while... Tracy and Troy are a mother and son living in their camper van and we have enjoyed saying good mornings to them by the water tap as their little dog races about happily. Tracy has begun a blog and I gave 9 year old Troy a drawing lesson in the back of our truck one day. He is home educated and a keen artist ... we had fun learning the proportions and structure of a face. They came with us on a wood hunting expedition too, tramping along the secret track that takes you from carpark to woodland ... and we brought back bagfuls of logs from a disintegrating forest walkway, made at some previous time by unknown passers by.

In the chinks between all the ups and downs and ins and outs of our life these last couple of weeks, I have painted and drawn and I have written more pages of my story, which I am beginning to love. I have sneaked to coffeehouses and curled up in a comfortable corner with headphones on, and managed to create an oasis of space in my head to allow the tale to be woven.
I shall be back here again soon with clock works and new journeys... and hopefully a sparkling new radiator.

View through the portholes

LOOK! Can you see through these porthole-goggles? It's the sea!



Outside our round windows there are seagulls and seamist and seasongs and sea!
Yes indeed we have made it to the coast! Here we are parked at the end of a little lane on the top of a cliff where we can see miles of greyblue water, gently approaching and withdrawing from the stony edge of this land where we are. The sounds are different and there is salt and seasleepiness in the air. We hear the sqa sqa of gulls swooping and the bluck-clucking of a yardful of chickens kept in the grounds of an interesting eggshell blue house with a round tower just over there. We hear from time to time a deep low boom from out at sea which for a while in our imaginations was pirate-cannons or whale-thunder or ...
well apparently it's the exploding of bombs that have gone past their sell by date would you believe it!



This little spot is where people come to walk their dogs, car after car pulls up by us all through the daylight hours and we are beginning to recognise people by Whippet or Wolfhound, Setter or Husky... We were apprehensive. How long would it take for someone to ring the council? There is after all a No Overnight Parking, Campers or Caravans sign just there, and houses not far away either. So we put a temporary sign in the windscreen, propped against the steering wheel, saying this is our house... and watched as folks stopped and read. What a delight people are here! Not one hostile word yet, nor any sign of a council man. In the mornings while still beneath the duvet we overhear the early dog walkers saying "oo look" and "what a nice idea" and "where are the horses?" to one another, while their snuffling bounding companions snuffle and bound about the wheels.



We have walked and walked by the cliff edges and have found such things along the coast as forests and Roman Forts, gorse bushes and cooing doves. And we have crunched along the stones at the water's edge where strings of seaweed drape themselves over the tide breakers, and collected driftwood in abundance for our fire. Tui took me for breakfast the other day in a tiny cafe down the road a bit. He has been crouching by the breaking waves and catching sea sounds in his electronic sound net, and we have enjoyed spending our days by the sea.




I have had time to begin two new paintings (one of which will be a clock) and to work on a lovely map commission for someone who is to be married in the summer. She wanted her overseas guests to be able to find the wedding with a hand drawn medievalish sort of map that could direct them from the main airports and show the important old towns nearby. I am delighted to say that she is skipping with excitement about it, and I am rather pleased with it too.



Best of all we have been touched by the kindness of a visitor.. A dear lady called Maria who cares for rescued dogs read our sign and was the first person bold enough to knock on our door!
She offered a possible place to park in the hills of Wales where her sister lives... and was kind. And today she returned not only with her sister's address but a delicious bagfull of cheeses and walnut bread and olives and sundried tomatoes and biscuits and oaty chocs and yellow tulips! We sat and had tea in the sea air and were glad indeed for kind hearted people as we pass by.



As I write, the sun is setting and Tui is gathering sticks on the beach for a fire-by-the-water. In a while we will stumble down the steep and eat our food gifts with some wine by the burning driftwood, knowing that just out there in the blackness is the Edge of England. If I am feeling exceedingly brave, I might jump in the waves and out again ... and then scuttle back to the firelight to dry.


We have been noticing the importance of moving on in this itinerant life. It is of course a rather obvious thing to say... but you get a little bit settled where you are if things are ok, even in a carpark. You start to know the little walks and develop a routine quite quickly. A sort of lazy familiarity lurks there too.. and this can only be swept away by driving off.
It is so nice to meet new people in their place, and to see something different out of the window. It is a privilege to be able to experience the land like this I think. When your house is stuck to the earth you develop a different sort of relationship with it. Equally beautiful, but it feels like ownership. And when passing through you can see the bits of earth that others call their own, and enjoy them for a while. Perhaps one day we will want to stop and put down roots somewhere and grow vegetables, but for now, we are loving the wandering, and the turning up in new places, and the making it home for a spell.

Burnt orange evenings

WHEN THE SUN goes down, our evenings are orange. Lit by oil lamps and candles and smoking logs, lugged far and sawn to keep us warm. We squint at our meals cooking and peer into the shadowy sink to find spoons, read books by little circles of orange where the furthest away words on the page fall off the edge into the darkness.

The other day we took our home to the garage to be mended.. we hope the six expensive new diesel injectors will make the engine breathe more easily. While we waited for the work to be done, we drank pots of tea and ate scones too early in the morning. We wandered into interesting old bookshops and I bought a chamberpot in a brickabrack place. I found a delightfully dog-eared story called Tale of Sister Vixen and the Wolf with turn of the century Russian illustrations, a beginner's guide to Anglo Saxon Literature and Ted Hughes' collected poems which I find just beautiful. We sat by the wharf in Faversham, ate monkey nuts, and read the books until the engine was better...

And we have spent days hunting for lovely spots to put our house with not much luck, though there is a perhaps place by the sea where we might sneak for a few days. Life in the carpark is not so bad ... I have been drawing and painting and the days have been mild like the beginning of spring, and I sold the original painting of The Visitors too!
I leave you with some words made beautiful by Ted Hughes about an evening.

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

Ted Hughes

Gnarls in the Branches

LAST NIGHT brought a sprinkling of snows that seemed to fall underneath the streetlamps only, but this morning the snow is gone. This corner of the country is the bare toe poking out from under the snow blanket that covers the rest of England. The skies have a leaden lowness to them here and the winds are chilly. We have discovered a little track that winds behind the carpark fence and takes you into muddy fields and eventually forests, where we've seen treeroots knotted like old ladies' contemplative fingers, abandonded trailers and puddles which turn the trees upsidedown. And we've eaten peanutbutter sandwiches and talked to horses with coats on, and worn our legs out walking for miles.


Back in the truck I have been hunkering down at my desk with an oil lamp and headphones and painted fervently, trying to pretend that the view out of the window is not tarmac.
Melanie has commissioned me to paint four seasons of crows, the winter aspect of which I made last October. She has been waiting patiently for the next one and I have finally completed it.
This painting has been through a gnarled struggle of sorts.. mainly because I drew it out onto the watercolour paper way back before we left Scotland and it has sat tucked inside the sketchpad ready to paint since then. Somehow the momentum of a work gets lost for me if I leave a gap that long within the process of working on it. So I tried to paint it and there were moments when I thought it might be getting somewhere but by the end I despised it. Really it was so dreadful I had to start again. And of course when this happens my confidence plummets to a place where I am convinced I can no longer do it.


I needed to replensish my reserves of inspiration and so buried myself in various Arthur Rackham books... A master and a half he was, and also an accomplished drawer of crows and gnarly branches. I looked in close detail at his lines and tones and marvelled. I think to try to emulate the old masters is a good way to learn, but it raises an interesting dilemma for me: because imitating a contemporary feels very wrong, epecially the copying of ideas ... so why is it alright if the artist is dead? Artists in days gone by would have always learned by copying their predecessors and I think this is an extremely valuable learning method, for somehow the knowledge enters you through the pen and bypasses your rational brain, eventually becoming lodged inside your subconscious fingertips.. so that you are just better at it than before!
It seems to me similar to the oral tradition of passing down stories from generation to generation, but instead of tales, design ideas and specific ways of making image are passed down, and over time this knowledge is naturally subtly altered with each person it passes through.


Ever since my schooldays, I have had an aversion to someone looking over my shoulder and copying.. it makes me cross, it is as if I am being stolen from. I remember an occasion when I was about 9 and we were asked at school to draw our initial made from all the things that represented the thing we loved to do best. I painstakingly drew a letter R with the straights made from pencils and paintbrushes and the semicircle was a protractor. (not that I was keen on maths, it just belonged to the contents of my pencil case which meant drawing to me) But being a slow dreamer-Rima, another boy whose name also began with R had taken my idea and got to the teacher to show his drawing first. I was very annoyed, but this beady-eyed teacher knew what had gone on, and told him off for copying. I was inwardly relieved. And to this day, the idea of someone taking something that represents me and passing it off as their own somehow panics me. It's as if on some inner level I am being erased I suppose. I think this is more relevant when it comes to ideas... it's ok to learn by copying another's technique, beneficial in fact. But it must be filtered through your own eyes and ideas before becoming an artwork I think.

So, I have studied Rackam's works at close proximity these last few days and been inspired. I have made a work not nearly as wonderful as his, it is different... it's my own ... but I was helped by a skilled teacher long dead.

The neighbours beyond the curtains

COR BLIMEY It's been ages since I wrote here! These last two weeks have taken us from countryside to townside and through a fair few despairs. Here follows a tale of moving on, the sour particulars of which will be familiar to travelling folk across the centuries.

We were quite happily enjoying our as-long-as-we-like stay in the orchard and pottering away at work, barn clearing for the owner, trying to keep out of the rain and even meeting some kind locals with whom we shared soup, when we came across a nasty little knot of hostility which has forced us to leave. However romantically one thinks of this life it never pays to forget that the hostility is always bubbling there under the neatly trimmed hedges and behind the carefully arranged net curtains everywhere we go.

On a sunny January morning on heading out for a walk down the lane, we were rushed at by a snarling neighbour who greeted us with not a hello but "how long are you going to be living there?" .. "it's not very nice for us to have to look at you milling about!" (with extra spit on the italicized words and a dismissive wave of the hand)
Well! Said we.. that isn't a very friendly hello! Who are you? I don't think we have met before. And sorry that you have obviously been harbouring such anger, ("I'm NOT angry" said she)
Could you not have come over and had a chat with us, and talked about your concerns?
"No" said she, "you might have come out raging at me... I mean you just don't know do you... I mean, you might have had DOGS!" But said we, have you seen any dogs? We have been here for a month! We have not made any noise and we take all our rubbish away, we are quiet people, and don't want to bother anyone. It seems that our very presence bothers you very much. "Oh NO" said she "I mean don't get me wrong, I haven't got anything against you personally, I mean I have friends who are gypsies! And I like vintage vehicles" ...
But have we disturbed you in anyway? said we ...
"No" said she ... "But this is the winter.. who knows what you might get up to in the summer!"

And on the discussion went.. she gradually softened as her fear subsided, realising we weren't all she and her fellow gossipers might have imagined, and perhaps feeling bad for her initial attack.. I gave her this blog address and we jokingly told her to watch out because she she might well find herself there!


And so we walked on down the lane with knots in our bellies, feeling very much affected by this blatant dislike.
We had offered to move down to the other end of the field where we could not be seen "milling about" and were hidden by trees, but had to wait until the muddy ground hardened a bit before we could attempt it.

Then next morning we sat with our coffee and the back door open in the cold low morning sun watching the friendly blackbirds hop about our wheels. And we noticed a man, suited and bald, with a notebook, standing perhaps 200 yards from us, staring, staring right in our open door. And talking on his phone. And writing notes. And then he got back into his car and drove away.

Later that day we heard that there had been a phonecall to the kind orchard owner from the council. It was a second complaint which they had had to follow up. (The first had been on the day of our arrival).. Now the orchard owner could have said: they are my friends and this is my land, I gave them permission to stay there for a while. But he is in the early stages of applying for that strange thing that is planning permission. He plans to do up the tumbledown barn that stands in the orchard, and because of this he has to keep his neighbours sweet.

So we had to go.

But we were stuck in the mud.
And we had to wait for a frost.
And all the while we waited, we imagined nasty words, fears and shakings of heads behind all the curtains that twitched towards the orchard. And we felt unwanted. The kindness of our one soup-sharing friend meant all the more to us and by that we were warmed. (Thank you Kate!)

When we eventually did get all our bits and pieces packed up and any toppling items stowed carefully on the floor, the engine started with a worrying judder and billows of black exhaust smoke.
We manoeuvred our house gently between the apple trees and juddered to the church car park just down the road to assess our situation. The juddering was worrying and of course the hole in the radiator is still corked with a bolt. There followed a hearts-in-mouths journey avoiding the motorway to a garage who told us when we arrived that they wouldn't and couldn't work on this size of vehicle. So we limped on to the good old park and ride. And there we remain.


For £2.50 for 24 hours we can be here and bus in and out of town whenever we like... From here we can hunt for garages who will work on our juddering engine and we can sell pictures when we run out of money. I have even jumped on a train to visit my family and left Tui beneath the snowdrifts. It's not as picturesque a spot as we like best, but there is beauty here nevertheless, hidden between the railings and ticket barriers, and nature gloriously singing and unaware of its island-like existence in the middle of a ringroad.

When we were last here we heard from the friendly carpark attendant that there had once been a woman who had lived here for a year. And what to our interested eyes should be parked here on our return but an anonymous looking mercedes camper with a sock stuffed in for a fuel cap. Perhaps this lady might be a different sort of neighbour? Perhaps she has a story to tell? She is a mystery to us... she spends her days and nights in there with the curtains drawn, only emerging to rev her engine at all hours, for some unknown purpose. We have glimpsed her outdoors now and then staring at the sky, or visiting the dustbins, but a hello from us results only in a wordless grimace and a turning away of the head. I wonder about her living in that van alone and in her 70s. What is her tale?

It is easy when you are sensitive like we are for scowls and disapproval to affect you negatively, and make you feel that the world is a dreadful place full of people who should largely be avoided. We have taken great strength from those folks who come and chat and are kind. A lovely blog reader who I did not know presented me with a book on Somerset Folklore the other day whilst out selling! (Thank you Alice!) Such kindesses as well as the cheering ons left by all of you in the comments section here really make a difference. And we also happened upon a spirit-lifting book about off-grid living that is full of interesting tales of folk living gently and cheaply and lightly and invariably getting up noses of neighbours. How To Live Off-Grid by Nick Rosen is an interesting and informative exploration of all manner of ways to escape the rat-race. (It sports the most dreadful jacket cover I have ever seen, but don't let that put you off!) The experiences detailed in this book show that many of the Neighbours Who Complain are in fact moneyed second home buyers from cities who believe that they have bought the view along with their house and anyone altering it by stepping across it is not to be tolerated.

So we are here. Trying to get on with work and other essentials. Tui has been up on the roof today painting sort of rubbery tar stuff over the sneaky leaks and I have been sewing curtains (rather late in the day but there we go) out of old patched trousers and decorators' floorcloth. Whether or not these curtains will be twitched remains to be seen!

We are planning our next trajectory too. I think to combat the inevitable hostility which we will find in every corner, we must be quite forward, which is not in our hermit-like natures at all. We must knock at potential complainants' doors to give them an opportunity to meet us and to allay seeds of fears. We have spotted a secret little leafy lane somewhere which would be a delightful spot to stay awhile, but we feel sure that a dogwalker would report us to the council within a day.. so I plan to make a big sign to hang outside the truck saying THIS IS WHO WE ARE, we are travelling artists, here for a short spell, you can see what we do here at this website, and please feel free to knock with any concerns for a cup of tea and a chat. Perhaps this might weed out the wondering waiverers .. no doubt there'll still be the odd sour-faced narrow-minded person who will not be moved, and sooner or later the council will come. But I have read up on the council's policy for gypsy and traveller encampments and hope to be able to talk openly and sensibly with the council too about our way of life. And maybe, just maybe, they'll leave us for 28 days. And then we'll move on.

Misrule, Mockery & Monstrosity

THIS RATHER RUDE FELLOW was painted in Belgium around 1520 as part of an even ruder diptych, and he is pulling a face at you here to invite those of you who have an interest in the margins of things and the monstrosities found there over to read a thing I wrote...
It's not the story! It is my final year dissertation from 2003 entitled Misrule, Mockery & Monstrosity in Marginal Medieval Art, which has been languishing on a shelf for yonks and I decided that some of you folks might be interested to read it. Also all 14000 words of it are confined to the one print copy that I have left, so I thought it might be an idea to scan and store it online so that it can be read and seen. It's not exactly light reading and my layout skills have improved somewhat since those days, but it is overflowing with interesting ruminations on the peripheral art of the Middle Ages, grotesque hybrid creatures, outcasts, bums, tongue poking and ruder things, wild men, topsy turvies, proverbs and fools ...

It struck me as strange that in a highly religious age, the margins of the religious texts and buildings were peopled with the most un-religious of creatures and scenes. All manner of grotesque and otherworldly, bizarre and profane imagery can be glimpsed in the carvings under choir stalls, in the corners of church ceilings, or around the margins of bibles. Why was this? I wondered ... and so I wrote this thesis. Anyway, I'll leave you to it ... if you bravely wander over there I suggest you take a cup of tea and a handful of hours. I'll be back here again soon hopefully with tales of our latest doings ...

misrulemockerymonstrosity.blogspot.com

A new story

THERE HAS BEEN A STORY in my head for a long long time ... it has changed and grown and found new paths down which to wander, and sometimes bits of it have escaped onto the first few pages of a notebook or sketchbook where they hide for a long time until they lose their oomph. But always it has been there. I see life through the window of a storybook. When something troubles me I think to myself.. How might the people in stories resolve this? Would this thing that seems horrendous to me not add wonderful colour to the journey of a tale-character? Whether or not this is a practical way of viewing things, I am not sure, but it seems to be the escape route my mind chooses for itself.

As a child I would create worlds in my head under beds and behind doors. A mat on the floorboards would become a raft on the high seas of an almost-ending apocalyptic world, and all my belongings had to fit on the mat with me in order to survive the unknowns ahead. These make-believe adventures are a normal and delightful part of childhood, and I remember the feelings that certain book illustrations would evoke in me when I looked at them. The feelings were quite unlike those I get now on looking at the same pictures. Then they nibbled right into me, they changed the way I experienced life, they wrenched emotions from me strong enough to bring a sharpness akin to tears. Now I look at the illustrations and remember these feelings, and simultaneously I view the images through my adult eyes and admire the cleverness of line or the exquisite execution of watercolour backgrounds...

I wonder what it is that changes when we lose our childhoods? There is a sadness in me that I can never go back there, and I enjoy so very much to listen to the thoughts of children.
Lost youth or no, the stories have never left me. Indeed they have grown. I have always been fascinated with languages and the interesting intertwining links between the words from different countries. And recently I have decided to remove the stubborn cork from my bottle of stories. I am a world class procrastinator and a perfectionist too.. and this is a disasterous combination, because I put it off and put it off until such time as I might be able to achieve the best creation that I can.. which of course is always tomorrow.

Blogging has been a great encouragement.. for which I have all you lovely people to thank. My mouse's voice has felt a little more hearty since it has received so many kind words about my writing. I think the deciciveness necessary in capturing a moment or a small collection of thoughts in a blog post makes me write what comes into my head and publish it before I can agonise ad infinitum over the arrangement of the words. And this has softened that fear that always stopped me writing a diary when I was younger. I have to accept what I wrote and not cringe embarrassedly at a small outpouring of myself.
It seems that this coupled with our new life on wheels has kickstarted something in me and I am beginning my book!

I have been sitting at my newly marvellously windowed desk with Thesauruses and candles all about me, and I have put pen to notebook and made the first few tentative pages of my book (which have been sitting for yonks twiddling their thumbs in my head already written almost word for word), with sketches of ideas for the illustrations too. We also have a nice new sound system in our truck with speakers expertly wooded by Tui that can play us songs to inspire while the high winds of these last nights buffet us from side to side. I have begun to think lately that perhaps the reason for my never having had a proper illustration job for a publisher is that my visual world has quite a strong flavour that perhaps can only be matched with words of that same flavour.

It is a tendency of mine to gather all the things I love under one little roof of ideas, and so creating a book filled with my words and paintings and thoughts is a thrilling plan for me. It is what I have always wanted to do. This may take me years, but I want to keep it going, and not leave this notebook empty but for the first few pages. I have been spending the evenings buried in Anglo Saxon dictionaries and books illustrated by other artists I greatly admire, and writing and drawing in little frenzied spurts as ideas and images burst inside my head like smoke bubbles, and that nameless organ between my heart and my belly has felt itself settle into the thing that I love to do most of all and it has thrilled.

Fogs and Fish Eggs

A FOG sneaked up on us this morning and sneaked away again just as quickly. It filtered the frosty sunlight through its damp doubtful fingers and made everything nearby look far off. We did our morning chores of sweeping and mat shaking and washing breakfast dishes to radio 4 with the door open and the fire crackling, and the fog tried to sneak in over our door sill, but we wouldn't let it.
Then I walked through the fog over the fields with a loo roll under one arm and a bag of fire ash and a bucket of veg scraps under the other and stitched my gumbooted steps between the apple trees to the place where we have dug holes for .. um .. such things.




I finished my first truck painting today whilst Tui fitted glass to a new window he is making for my desk area. It's a strange thing this painting ... a boy fishing through an ice hole for a hinged fish with an embryonic old man inside its belly ... made with rusty watercolours. I am today opening my shop again and I bring The Fish Egg as an offering for the new year. It'll be an interesting thing running a shop from here. I have stacks of lovely prints and sturdy envelopes ready to send off, so do wander over for a browse ... and if you make an order, apologies if your package arrives a little muddy around the gills :)
We have enjoyed tramping about the local lanes and hedgerows and orchards here. Kent it seems is full of apple trees. In fact just yards from our door stands a four year old Iranian Quince Tree. There's a busy mole who tunnels under our wheels at night too.. we wonder if we might wake one morning to find the whole truck submerged in a new earthy appletree-rooty mole world.