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.

The Orchard Tales and the Orchard Toils of the First Few Days of Two Thousand and Nine ...

AS THE OWL in the barn hoots and stirs himself for a night of hunting I sit here in the Bedford a few yards from him, warm and dry with nostrilsfull of harissa-spiced chickpeas almost ready to eat and connected via a little plastic thingamyjig to the whole world outside this orchard. The people in that whole world are amid such different experiences and live in an alphabet'sworth of different dwellings, and yet they all share the same need and yearning for warmth and home.



In these last few weeks I have learnt to think quite differently about those warm home comforts which we never really give a second thought. Living in a wooden vehicle parked in a field means that nothing comes in or out of our home unless we physically bring it about. Water must be collected from somewhere (at present a tap for watering flowers by gravestones in the churchyard down the lane), and waste water emptied. And warmth too must be collected ... we have spent much of our time since being here walking with rucksack and saw to nearby forests to find fallen branches and bring them home in great quantities so as to keep ourselves warm. This, I know, sounds romantic and perhaps a little obvious... but actually finding enough dry, uninhabited wood and carrying it back again is a constant occupation of ours in this cold weather. We have been lucky down here in this southern foot of England to escape rainclouds, but instead the sky has brought us thin blankets of snow and frosts that freeze last night's bathwater to crackling.

So we bought some bags of coal to augment the logs and it burned hot and fierce for two days. Then the stove began to smoke.. and not just out of the chimney. It smoked from the door, from the all the seals and bolt holes and from the collars at each flue joint. We coughed and coughed and opened windows. Freezing cold with streaming eyes we realised the stove couldn't be used any more. So for the next two days we had a fire outdoors, where the smoke could escape. We watched the stars and made hot water bottles to warm the twoquilted bed which we ran to as the embers died. The next evening the gas ran out! So that night we cooked dinner and boiled hotwaterbottle water on the outdoor fire and in the morning (after heating a precarious cupful of water for tea on an upturned camping-gas heater) I trekked out to find a new calor gas bottle while Tui stayed at home and dismantled the fire and re-fire-cemented all the joints before putting it back together again. I won't go into long boring detail about my day of gas hunting except to say that it wasn't unlike Frodo's journey to Mount Doom, but with more disappointments and train cancellations and refusals of busdrivers to take me due to "hazardous chemicals". A final arm-achingly arduous trek brought me back to a delightfully warm and smokefree Bedford! Our home is wonderful, but with no fire it is very much less so.. and in these modern days of central heating, it is no longer appreciated how very important warmth in the winter is. The next day we cleaned the chimney and found that the coal had left such a thick black sooty residue that there had been only a couple of centimetres of air left for the smoke to escape. Now we burn just wood and little nuggets of smokeless fuel.

In all these days of tending to our daily basic needs, neither of us has had time to create anything. I have begun but not finished a drawing by daylight, which begins to fade around half past three. We have bought a little generator to power laptops, a phone charger and a desk lamp, and now at long last have the internet too. Soon we'll be more established and I'll be able to reopen my shop and begin making clocks again. Town is not far away and my family is much nearer by than before, so we have had lovely days walking between the sunlit appletree stakes, and drinking cups of tea.


We have felt very much more outdoors than you do inside the walls of a house. Nature is right there. You don't have to go out into it, you are already there. It affects you more directly for good or ill. I have weathered cheeks, twig-scratched arms and dirt beneath my fingernails. The skies are beautiful and the blackbirds tiptoe their little threetoed birdfeet across our roof in the mornings. It is freezing in the night when we climb down from the luton bed and run outside to wee; and the low sun and the cracking of forest underfoot and the smell of woodsmoke from the chimney make our hearts soar.

Horseboxing Day Happy

HELLO! Happy Christmas! And thank you to you all for such a jubilant waving-off! We have travelled the whole length of the country through rainclouds and sunclouds and in and out of radiator leaks and battery failures to get here, although we have always been "here" wherever we stopped along the way and we've always been heading "there".

Gradually day by day we have settled in to our wheely home and begun to realise why we did it. We have had warm candlelit evenings by the fire eating mince pies with cream and saying to each other - do you remember leaving all those months ago? (when in fact it was just the previous monday) Days turn into weeks when the scenery changes so fast and your days are so full of so many faces. It is wonderful to wake each morning to a new tree outside the round bedroom windows, and in its branches, a new bird singing. As we have headed south, the cold Scottish winter has lessened its grip on our toes and there have even been days on the street selling pictures without coats!

We have been lucky enough to find forests or at least a tree or two beside which to park each night, and have met interested people young and old along the way who have come inside our house to nose about. Sales got gradually better as we headed south too, culminating in a shockingly lucrative two days before Christmas in Canterbury - our favourite town to sell!

The TK is a beast of a thing to manoeuvre around little snaking lanes and is left floundering on slightly inclined motorways, managing a top speed of about 45mph. And of course there have been mechanical stresses too.. our last leg of the journey was made through heavy four lane traffic with a bolt stuck in a radiator hole to quell a leak until we could reach "dry land". I had to leap from the vehicle amid traffic to refill the leaking radiator with water whilst impatient drivers zoomed round us. We just made it to Canterbury and found ourselves heartily welcomed. It was a delight to meet kind folks of all sorts in all corners. The Brothers of St Francis whose wall we sell our pictures against were accommodatingly friendly and the Park & Ride attendant offered redundant tree stakes to burn in our fire which we delightedly collected from the emptying carpark to bemused stares from the departing shoppers.

However we had reached our final selling destination with no leafy corners in which to moor our land boat, and were beginning to worry a little. Thank you for all your kind offers and ideas.. You may well be hearing the rumble of a Bedford engine up your lanes one day :) On the day before Christmas eve Tui got into conversation with a nice bookbinder man inquiring about a commission. The converation turned to houses and horseboxes and he said "well if you are stuck for a place to stop I have an orchard with a barn on it where you'd be welcome to park"... what a perfect turn up that was! And so we trundled away from town with bulging wallets on Christmas eve to find this excellent spot where we have been given kind permission to stay for a while. This was just the most perfect outcome after all these long months of work, exhaustion and bad weather, and there we'll be able to spend a time resting. We can rig up internet and power, make windows and build roofracks, mend radiator holes and add another layer of waterproofing. And I can paint clocks at my desk and we can take afternoons for reading books and wandering about the hedgerows. And after a time there we can wander off again :)

Christmas Day dawned over young apple and quince trees, Kentish oast houses and a draughty barn; the early coo-hoo of a wood pigeon made us feel very much in England. I have noticed a phenomenon amongst folk we meet whilst selling.. they almost all ask "where are you based?" or "where are you from?". It's a strange question anyway, because you never know whether that means where were you born or where do you live.. and when your house moves about it's even harder to answer! It seems an interesting need in people to be able to pinpoint some kind of originating place, and it makes passing through other people's originating places all the more interesting.

I am writing at present from my family home where we have been able to spend lovely time at Christmas; and dotted amongst these words here are pictures from our journey: sunrises in Lincoln and tree-stake fires and peeps in and out of our door. Soon I will be blogging from "our" orchard and I look forward to making stories and creating things from inside our lovely creation of a home.

We wish you all warm and happy tale-filled Christmastimes all over the world wherever you are from and wherever you are going to in 2009!

"Well goodbye then!" They cried ...

PHEW! What a gargantuan journey of a mountain we have just climbed, and here, now, on the eve of our departure we sit with aching bodies and creaking minds and half mad smiles on our grubby faces.
Apologies for my quietness here of late.. this really has been a huge upheaval for us. We have felt like we've been gestating for months in a wooden sawdusty womb, elbowing for room between boxes of stuff and now this week we have been born. For all the romance of our adventure, it has been such a struggle getting to this point. There have been tears and black clouds, deep snow and ice, worries upon worries, mechanical complications and utter physical and mental exhaustion.
The animation is finished at long last and it is lovely.. and so a couple of weeks ago I climbed down the ladder from the attic where I had been living to launch myself into frenzied packing and chucking. How on earth I have accumulated so much stuff I do not know.. and it is hard being brutal when you are sentimental. Nevertheless, a houseful of chattels has had to be shrunk to fit inside a vehicle. Every time I go the local shop to buy biscuits they ask after our progress and the conversation continues between them... "could you fit everything you own into a horsebox?" "Pfrrfffffffftt! No Way!"

The MOT was a third time lucky affair, only failing for one small thing, but causing a week of worry and running about and back again. We finally have the all important piece of paper and thanks to Andy whose help was such a support. We have now been able to fill up Tui's beautiful creation with the nest of things that make a home.
Over the last few days we have been bringing our beloved truck outside the house and laying a pathway of mats across the ice from door to door. Gradually we have filled cupboards and drawers and hung pictures and bells. On each and every hook and corner there sits a little piece of colour, a little tail of our tale.
And so tomorrow is a day of house cleaning and then we're off.. somewhat later than planned, but such is life. We should manage a day or two of picture selling amongst the Christmas crowds and after that we'll just follow our noses. A wee while back we received a beautiful gift handstitched in red on white by Ciara to wish us well on our road. It is a moomin-inspired delight and I was touched indeed. Thank you Ciara.. it will grace our wooden walls and make us smile :)


This blog will continue on the road, but there will be a bit of tumbleweed blowing past here in the next weeks... we haven't organised mobile power and internet yet and until we do, blogs and emails will be restricted to internet cafes en route.

Now.. just before I go, I wanted to be cheeky and invite ourselves round for tea :) You see we have many lovely little spots dotted about the country where we park for a night or two and wake to the twittering of birds. These places are perfect for the way we flit from town to town selling pictures, but if we stay longer then we're sure to get a knock on the door from some men in uniforms. So, my cheeky question to all you lovely UK blog wanderers is ... do you have or know of a leafy spot where a beautiful Bedford and its two inhabitants could park for a few weeks at a time and not bother a soul?
Ideally a corner of a farm or similar rural setting would suit us best. We don't want to step on anyone's toes or doorsteps and wish to keep our hermitdom as well as giving others plenty of space. Really if the spot was not near any houses, that would be splendid. Obviously we'd be extremely quiet and tidy and wouldn't dream of accruing piles of scrap metal or other unsightlies. Indeed we'd be willing to keep watch, scare crows or sweep leaves or similar in return for a small spot of earth to park our house for a while. There would be a kettle on the boil for you too :)


We have a problem near London because of the new low emissions zone around the M25 which seems specifically designed to exclude Bedford TK horseboxes built in 1976. So visiting my family will mean finding a more Kentish spot as a base.
Living in a vehicle in the UK, especially England, is not an easy thing to do unless you keep moving. Scotland, where there is more expanse of nature, is easier. But I would like to try to see if by joining an old rolling wooden cabin with the wonders of 21st century communications technology, we might be able to bypass the usual prejudice and bother that comes with a travelling way of life. We don't want to get in anyone's way.. but no doubt we'll come across folk who would rather we weren't there. So if we can get an OK here and there, perhaps our wanderings might intrigue rather than strike fear and people in corners of the country can enjoy a cup of tea with us and a tale or three. If you think you might know of a place drop me a little mail to the address over there.. Thank you :)


Here for you to see are some peeks inside our newly born house. There are two new portholes and some copper behind the fire (my tiles fell off!), there's a wooden edge to the bedroom that I made, another window and many many other lovely nicknacks. Tui has been sanding off the nasty old brown paint on the outside and has nearly defeated it all.. so now it has a patchworky woodenness to it that I love. For a while the truck leaned a bit due to my books residing on just one side of it.. the lean has been righted now by a rearranging. What a wonder our house on wheels is! And we are nearly too frazzled to see it, but I think we have a sneaking suspicion that we'll realize in a few days what it is that we've done.

Last but certainly not least I want to stand on a hill and say a loud and sincere thank you to my Tui for building us such a beautiful and heartfelt home, the like of which I have never seen in my life before. I cannot wait to spend days of wanderings in it, to look outside at the new and turning world passing by our windows, and to sit by a fire together in smoke in the forest smelling the rustlings of other places ... ♥

Cheerio!! .....

A visit from Jack Frost

CAN YOU HEAR IT? A tinkling crackity-crickity peppering all over the hills. It sounds like the breaking of a thousand tiny glasses under a thousand tiny boots. The ground is hard as stone and walking on the earth sounds like my feet are knocking on a wooden door that leads to Underground. All of nature is iced in mid sway and crowned with winter jewels rarer than diamonds. A low sun scatters fractals of beauty between the tips of grass blades and the furthest reaches of my eyelashes.
Jack Frost has been here.

Hiding the Hedgehog & Other Stories

ANOTHER WICKED flu has had me cast down these last few days which is the very last thing we could do with right now. There simply was not time to get ill! But I had to give in to the sofa as my body and head felt quite entirely drained of life. Today I am upright again tho on the phone I still sound like an old horse who has smoked 80 fags a day all his life.
I have been finishing off a drawing this afternoon which I had started some weeks ago. Here it is above, Hiding the Hedgehog ... I have not the faintest idea what it's about ... I'll leave you to imagine a tale around it! This drawing, along with two other recent pencil doodlings, The Spoon-Eared Child and The Coffeepot, are being offered as prints in my shop in honour of a sort of One-More-Week-To-Go-Sale ... in fact it isn't really a sale at all, since everything's still the same price but I can't think of another word! Basically, I have decided to temporarily close the shop when we head off to give me a little breather while we embark on our grand journey and anyway, the last post date for those of you Over The Sea is looming too.
So all that is a round about way of saying Roll Up! Roll Up! Last chance to grab Christmas presents in the Hermitage Etsy Shop!
The blinds will be pulled down over the frosted windows of my emporium on Friday 5th December.. so .. quick!
I will of course be opening it up again come the new year, hopefully with some new drawings therein.
Meanwhile I'll leave you wondering why on earth that hedgehog needs to be hidden...

Lanterns in the snow

THIS is what we woke to this morning .. these wonderful brown heather hills dusted with an icing of snow. It's very cold indeed and we are busy as ever, tying up knots in things.
We've had pre MOT headaches galore and would like to say a big and heartfelt thank you to Andy for helping us out of a tight mechanical corner :)

All the last minute little dots on the Is and crosses to the Ts are arriving in jiffy bags in droves, much to the interested eyebrow raisings of the owners of the local B&B where we have to go to collect the parcels: hooks and elastic to hold books in, more door knobs, portholes and quite excitingly, a Beamish oil lamp. I think it's an old miner's safety lamp, and filled with some oil (which also arrived in the post) it sits handsomely in our truck alongside another dear little oil lamp which I already had.




The animation has about 4 more scenes plus title sequence to be completed before it's finished, and when it is done, I will turn into a whirlwind of boxes and binbags and dustpans and brushes until the truck is full of our things! There are many more things to do, and we'll still be adding extras when we're on the move as we settle into our home.
We recently (nervously) had it weighed, and found to our relief that it amounts to a mere five and a bit tons. The limit is 7.5, so there is still room for a book or two! I'm also in my infuriatingly last minuteish sort of way still trying desperately to sell my car.. if anyone would like a little 1976 Renault 5 with personality, a few creaking knees and an excellent engine, do have a look!

Hinges, Handles, Taps, Tiles & Blisters

WELL THE LAST DAYS are approaching, not in an apocalyptic sense, though it feels rather that way. We are tearing about like loons trying to get it all done. I am spending my days up in the attic animating, scrunched up into a crooked S shape, only knowing the weather changes by pattering or lack of it on the roof by my ear. Tui meanwhile has been rising at bird dawn to rush round to the dingy old garage and put all the final flourishes to his masterpiece of a truck-home. The cupboard doors are a marvel, and there are hinges and catches and little hinged shelf ledges. We have a fully plumbed in brass pump tap which makes the most interesting graunching noise as it delivers water, and all the gaps round the doors have been closed in with artistic knotted lintels and edges. I have taken the odd break from move-clicking my paper characters to make a curtain from an old pair of well-loved trousers and a brown-dyed decorators' dust cloth.

Today, by candlelight, I tiled the small area of wall behind the fire with terracotta floor tiles to stop the wood getting too hot when the fire is alight. Tui's hands are all a-blister from days and days with a screwdriver, and we are panicking about all the last minute things that need doing as a cold wet cloud creature sits plumply ontop of our village making all tasks much more difficult than we'd like. In our back pockets, we keep a golden nugget called Thrill Of Journey; it is warm and we peep at it sometimes in between stresses. We mustn't look at it too much just now, but we mustn't forget it either.

The Curse

FOR THE LAST TEN YEARS I have suffered under that ancient curse. The Curse. The monthly affliction of women. My period pains have been beyond bearing. Every four weeks I would be bent double, on hands and knees, screaming in pain and vomiting. If I was caught unexpectedly at work, I'd end up laid out on the floor under desks clutching hot water bottles, colleagues stepping over me. I became for a day or two, a complete zombie to pain. I know that many women suffer from period pains, but mine were otherworldly compared to most. My face would turn green and I'd lay writhing in pain in a hallucinatory swoon. There was nothing that would help, I have been to many doctors, who prescribe either the pill or lethal painkillers, neither of which is an answer for me. I was sent for scans and investigations which all came back clear. I tried homeopathy (which helped briefly), yoga, cramp bark, agnus castus, raspberry leaf tea, black cohosh, endless ineffective pain relievers.. and I was desperate, clinging to my hot water bottle as the only slight relief I could find, knowing I'd have to go through all that again in four weeks' time.

I am generally a very healthy person, but this one thing rendered me useless for at least two days a month, which if you work it out would mean at least a whole two years of my life spent in pain. And that excruciating pain, I thought, had got to be treatable. It was not normal that I should experience it so badly.

Some months ago I wondered about acupuncture .. but didn't know anything about it. And here in blog land met the lovely Diana Moll, a Chinese medicine practitioner based in California. Over some time she diagnosed me via email the Chinese medicine way. She asked all sorts of questions about my health, life and things, questions about temperature and temperament, and I had to send her frightful photos of my tongue! From this information she gleaned that something was stuck as I had always thought. Something needed to get moving in my lower abdomen and it was stuck because it was cold. She told me Chinese medicine looked at things in terms of a weather forecast, rather than a diagnosis, therefore leaving the door open for a more changeable outcome. The body and its energy is affected by cold and hot, wind, wet and dry. And pain or illness is seen as an imbalance of these things, an imbalance of your energies.

Moxa

The idea of yin and yang has always made sense to me. I have always thought of things in a dual way: life/death, day/night, male/female etc, and we are very dual beings with two of many organs and limbs. However, to a western medical sensibility this meteorological view of my problem probably seems like codswallop. Diana set me instructions for massage to get the energy moving (including twice-daily ear massage!), recommendations for dietary adjustments and herbs. She also suggested I buy moxa sticks (the mugwort herb packed dried into a black smokeless cigar-like stick). To use a moxa stick you must light it just like a cigar and hold the glowing end over the acupuncture points on the body, in my case on my belly. It is warm, and smells pleasant, and the ash has to be tapped off as the stick burns. The practise of moxibustion is an ancient one, and relieves coldness and dampness in the body, even being used to turn breech babies.

Diana's help made sense and I started to notice a slight difference in the pain, but it did not remedy it, so she advised I find an acupuncturist to see me in the flesh and assess my situation. This I did. On walking past a Chinese Medicine centre in Glasgow one day, I walked in and asked.

There followed a strange and wonderful three months of weekly visits to Dr Mae who gave me acupuncture, which I had never had before. The needles don't hurt much, and were placed in my inside wrists, lower legs and just below my navel, whilst I lay there with a heat lamp over my belly.
Meanwhile Dr Fu would package up a special selection of dried Chinese herbs into seven paper bags to take home and boil up as tea, to be drunk twice daily.

These herbs are a wonderful collection of what looks like devil's toenail clippings and fossilized cat poo, and the evening boiling ritual, which took an hour and which somehow became Tui's job smelt intriguing to say the least. The drinking was another matter altogether.. I had never tasted anything quite so vile. The result of an hour's simmering of the sinister looking barks and roots and who-knows-what-else made a strong dark brown liquid that tasted bitter as the bitterest roots and sweet too in a strange way. It was hard not to gag, but I had to gulp down a pint and half of this stuff daily .. with sediment at the bottom.

Oddly though it got less disgusting as the weeks went by, now I almost enjoy it. I found it hard to afford the weekly visits to the Chinese Medicine centre, but was determined that I would try, because Dr Mae had promised that after three months of this treatment the pain would not come back. This was like a holy grail for me, and so I scrimped to find the money each week. On arriving there I would sit down and have my pulse read, on both wrists, for some long minutes whilst we asked how each other was in a very basic English. As far as I can gather, the pulses felt by Chinese Medicine practitioners are not the one heart beat a western doctor can feel. Amazingly hidden there are evidences of my inner workings, and each week Dr Mae would take my pulse to see how I was progressing. She concurred with Diana ~ my abdomen was too cold and damp, and things were out of balance. In traditional Chinese Medicine, the body is a whole map of lines ("meridians") along which are the hundreds of acupuncture points where the needles are inserted to effect change in the flow of energy through a particular part of the body.

I even once had the strange experience called cupping, where a small glass jar like a heavy light bulb is placed over a flame for a second before being plonked onto your flesh, which slurps up inside the vacuum inside the jar and looks most unsightly indeed.
I would often lay there with my needles in listening to the Learn English CDs on in the background as the drawers of herbs were opened and closed and scoops of dried barks and roots were measured into bags for me.


So no doubt you are wondering ~ did it work? ... YES! I am at present drinking the last week worth of nasty brew and this recent full moon brought a mercifully painless period! The pain got gradually less over the three months and now I am able to lie with my hot water bottle and no writhing whatsoever. I still experience the strange floating swoon, but it is wonderful to be free from that terrible wrenching pain.
Thank you to Diana for showing me this wonderful medicine. I must say I am completely converted. I like the thinking behind the system, and have proof that it works. If I need to seek medical help again for some other ailment, it will be to a Chinese doctor, not the GP that I'll turn.
Do give me a shout if you live in these parts and would like details of where I went for treatment.

And just think, a few hundred years ago, women used to jump broomsticks coated with the hallucinogenic mandrake root to relieve period pain and in so doing caused themselves to fly.

Woodcut from "The History of Mother Shipton"
published at Aldermanbury around 1750

Wonderful Wheels

WHEELS, as you will probably know by now, are one of my favouritest of favourite things - Especially when attached to things they are not usually meant to carry along, like people, musical instruments, artifacts and best of all, houses :) Whenever I come across another artist who puts wheels in their work, my heart does a little leap of comradeship.
Our own wheeled home is growing, growing, and we are at present looking for a set of seven 20 inch wheels for it, which will be easier to find tyres for on our travels.

I thought it time to show you some treasures amongst the work of other artists I have tripped over on web wanderings recently. From time to time I like to show you works that have made me smile and inspired and gladdened me instead of joining in with the blog award thingamyjigs that get passed around these parts. Over the last months Moonbindery, Qi Papers, Dogberry Hill, Snapper & The Griffin, Krisztina Maros, Amy Short, The House of Edward, Lost Stones, Ink Haven, Mille Fiori, Moonroot, Bimbimbie, & Gypsy Root have all been so kind as to pass me awards and tags, and for their appreciation and lovely words I thank them heartily. Apologies if anyone is left out in the cold there.. my brain is still all a-scramble. I have also received the most kind and appreciative writings by the two most recent clock recipients, Nina and Allegra.

Indeed Allegra sent to me in the post a most thoughtful gift, a good-journey talisman made with an old piano key, charms of significance and a photograph of me as a young wheeled-home dweller :) All the elements of it are intended to connect us like a knot in a long string to the old gypsy journey tradition and it is to be nailed with a horse nail to the door to bring us luck.

Also in this beautifully wrapped package came a book Tres Deseos (~Three Wishes) illustrated by a recent blog discovery of mine, Gabriel Pacheco ...
It is a wonderful earth toned book with very up-my-street illustrations of an old couple squashed into a chimneyed little house. Thank you Allegra for such appreciative words and thoughtful gifts.



Whilst perusing Gabriel Pacheco's work, I found a strange wheeled apple and so thought to theme my latest gallery of inspiring artworks... here I bring you a wonderful wheeled world in both two and three squeaking dimensions.



Gabriel Pacheco is a Spanish illustrator who creates hazy other worlds of strange beings with subtle colours and textures, and was introduced to the arena of children's literature by his sister who asked him to illustrate a story. I can't find out a huge amount about his creations as my Spanish is non-existent, but by the looks of it he employs a very clever mixture of digital and traditional techniques. As far as I can gather these illustrations shown here are from a tale (Calabacina) about a pumpkin.

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Next I wheel on the incredible creations of Akira Blount of Akira Studios. She lives on 70 acres of land in Tennessee raising goats in between making these wonderful dolls with twigs and wheels and delightful characters. Cage dolls form a large part of her work and inside the cages hide other little people and birds and things. Akira's cage dolls often sport wheels and are for me like a strange circus performance and performer combined, and the twigs conjure a foresty-ness that I love.

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Third and fourth I present two Russian artists who both make sculpture and paintings of a strange naive folky sort that make me smile no end, and which are so brilliant I can't quite find the words.
Vladimir Gvozdariki makes wooden toys, animations, paintings, drawings and dolls, and here above are some of them that have wheels... how wonderful is the old man inside a wheeled barrel with a chimney and lantern swinging!

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And lastly Boris Ivanov ... whose painted wooden sculptures are like automatons, puppets, and toys all in one.. and whose paintings are exquisitely done naive worlds populated with large, wide people, flying, fishing, playing and dreaming. Boris says of his work:

"Once upon a time - it was about 15 years ago - an idea came to my mind: to create a new World, kind of a new Planet, and populate it with People. So I did. As time passed new personages came to existence. This planet became inhabited by its population of Fatties. Currently there are more than 1.5 thousand of them."

Here below to complete my gallery of wheels is a man driving a wonky beer vehicle, both in paint and in wood. Boris's work creates a world that I find familiar and wonderful and it makes me very happy indeed to look at these works. I suggest you take a good long time to visit his website and peruse the treasures there.

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And for more wheeled creatures I mustn't not mention the beautiful watercolours and felted toys of my talented friend Gretel. Wheels have cropped up rather a lot in my work too of course, which I wrote about a while ago here ... you can also see there where Allegra found that photo of my early days :) My paintings seem to me novice-ish and un-developed next to these great works above, but at the same time their work spurs me on to new levels of excellence.
I hope that our days on wheels will bring my work inspiration of a new kind ...

PS - Do click on any of the pictures for a larger view.

Balalaika

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, we used to have a book called Trubloff ~ The Mouse Who Wanted to Play the Balalaika by the wonderful John Burningham, and I loved the story very much indeed. John Burningham's illustrations have a fabulous scratchy folky quality that embodies great heart. This is the amazon synopsis of the story:

Trubloff the mouse lives with his family in the village inn but dreams of becoming the greatest balalaika player in the whole country. So one night, when everyone is asleep, he runs away to join a band of gypsy musicians who promise to teach him to play. Trubloff's poor family are overcome with worry, but in the end, it's Trubloff's gift for music that saves them all.

I have always loved Russian music, in fact anything from the Eastern European folk tradition and most especially Jewish Klezmer music. This music moves me in a way I cannot explain, I think I might have inherited this love of oom-pah from my mum ... but as far as we know there is no Jewish blood in our family tree.



I try to play the accordion, as I have mentioned before.. specifically the Russian B-System Bayan :) ... there is something about the sound of accordion and clarinet together that really gets me. I often paint musical instruments, I like the shapes of them and I find that I can hear the paintings playing if I listen to a recording whilst making the image.


Anyhow, back to balalaikas... those triangular stringed instruments that can be seen not only in the arms of mice but also played in whole ensembles with instruments ranging from tiny tinkling things to great bass balalaikas.
As you know, our grand clear out is including the odd original painting sale and I have decided to sell my Balalaika watercolour for an extremely reasonable £80 :) ... it's a smallish little thing (7.5" x 5"), which I painted in 2005 and I'm selling it unframed. There it is in the fireplace with my first green accordion; a funny little man on the back of a wheeled reindeer, playing the balalaika in a snowy onion-domed Slavic forest. And here it is in my etsy shop if you should wish to own it. [Edit... the painting is sold!]


And if you'd like to hear a balalaika playing whilst you look at the painting, here's well known Polish/English balalaika player Bibs Ekkel in 1978 with Ensemble Tsiganka playing Papirosen, a Russian/Yiddish song about cigarettes. That's them over there leaning against the Gypsy vardo :)
Hoi!

NB - all images except those of my painting and accordion are nicked from the internet :)