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!

The people on the streets

OUTCASTS and strange folk are fascinating to me ... as I say in my website porch, they are most welcome in my world, and indeed they people my paintings more than do any others.
As you may have read before, our living is made by selling our work from town to town, setting up a temporary display on the street, selling pictures to passers by and then moving on. This is the most exhilaratingly precarious way to make a living, where earnings are dependent on such see-sawing variables as the weather, people's whims and wallets, vehicular compliance, police and council officials' good will & finding a Good Spot...
Recently we have been hiding in the hills more than usual due to unending rain, truck preparations and repairs, and paintings to do.. nevertheless, we have to go and sell when we run out of money and grab any chink of sun that we can. Often this might mean a small trip to our nearest big town - Glasgow, which for the last two weekends has been the case (yesterday being a true escapade of frazzling exhaustion, ending in us randomly not being allowed on the tube due to our baggage and "health and safety reasons".)

In this country, selling our work like this is not exactly legal; it is impossible to get a license for street trading in the way we do it. Most towns have a handful of licenses available and these have been bought up for years ahead by locals who turn up every Saturday with a tacky display of cheap football shirts and mobile phone accessories, and this is not quite what we're after anyhow, as we sell in many towns. The only alternative is a pedlar's license (bought from the police) which "officially" covers you for peddling door to door or selling on a mobile trolley sort of affair that you move every 15 minutes down the street.

The term “pedlar” means any hawker, pedlar, petty chapman, tinker, caster of metals, mender of chairs, or other person who, without any horse or other beast bearing or drawing burden, travels and trades on foot and goes from town to town or to other men’s houses, carrying to sell or exposing for sale any goods, wares, or merchandise, or procuring orders for goods, wares, or merchandise immediately to be delivered, or selling or offering for sale his skill in handicraft;
~ Interpretation of the term "pedlar" from the Pedlars Act 1871

Luckily we get away with it most of the time, and if we are approached by police on their rounds/suited council officials on their lunch break who decide to invoke the law, often a pleasant conversation about how we do what we do, try our best not to bother anyone, and how we'd buy a country-wide license if one existed appeals to their humanity and they turn a blind eye. Not so always however. There are people in the world who take pleasure in speaking to us as if we are a piece of dirt on their shoe, making assumptions before even trying to have a conversation with us. If these people are the ones asking us to move and happen to have a uniform on, then we have to move, even if the day was going well and the sun was shining. On the whole though, the police are fine.
Plenty of contradictions are thrown in our laps too... over the road we see a beggar preparing for his days' work: positioning his polystyrene cup in front of his feet, donning a suitably grubby t-shirt, pulling it forlornly over his knees, and bowing his head, ready to invoke peoples' pity and in so doing earning often more than a street musician. This is not illegal. The police can move us for selling pictures that we've made ourselves, but they can't move him. In other towns we are approached regularly by people with cameras and microphones... they are making a film about the vibrancy of the street entertainment in the town and could they interview us.

On top of all this, we have to deal with the colourful circus of humanity that lurches past us while we sit there quietly selling our pictures. Despite the fact that we tend towards the shy and certainly never shout "roll up, roll up".. we are called upon by the street to rub shoulders with what, I am certain, must be the strangest, most challenging and disconcerting folk ever to walk the planet.This phenomenon never fails to amaze us and cause us to shake our heads in disbelief.

In the early morning we have to battle with our trolley of wares and armfuls of pictures up and down public transport steps to beat all the other street performers to our Good Spot (a wall where we can lean our pictures that isn't in front of a shop).

Once there and set up, and before many people are even about, we will have met at least two teetering bedraggled drunks who can barely speak and decide that we are the most interesting folk to talk earnest jibberish to, three inches from our faces, even though they can't remember who they are or where they live. The day continues like this ... there are the regular hoo-haas between buskers loud and quiet, talented and dreadful /balloon modelers /Big Issue sellers /street performers /left-wing campaign groups with leaflets and tables and stiff expressions /religious fanatics with microphones and billboards of sin and damnation /annoyingly bouncy "chuggers" (charity muggers) with studenty haircuts who block people's path and bully them emotionally into giving.

In between meeting lovely interested kind people who look at or buy pictures or just pass with a smile, we have to parry the metaphorical blows of a stream of nutters: abusive track-suited teens on low bikes who, laughing, pretend to ride over our pictures and tell us to cut our hair; lonely old men with obsessive interests in cameras and large bellies who engage us in inescapable conversation for aeons; costumed genuflecting weirdos with quotations tattooed on their arms who use the word "betwixt" in ordinary conversation; hollow-eyed heroin addicts who want money for the train; tottering abrasive plastic women/judgmental fat lawyers talking on mobile phones who stand almost on top of of our display and on being asked kindly to move a little say things like "he wants us to move" or "You dare to ask me to move? You're scum"; guitar strumming buskers with dogs that howl to the harmonica who chat at us vaguely; red-faced old scots who shout - "Are you English?! What are you doing here?!"; bearded and alcoholic old men with no homes who dance in joyful oblivion to the street musicians playing and who are not the tiniest bit aware of the crowd of shoppers who have stopped to hold up mobile phones, to laugh and ridicule and video him ...


All of these sad, funny, upsetting and unbelievable anecdotes are true to the letter and have happened to us on the streets of the UK. I may sound like a ranting hermit, but days like yesterday make you marvel and despair at the people in the world, and want to scuttle off to the forest. However, I have always found these interactions fascinating, and it makes a happy encounter with a friendly, unusual or interesting person all the more appreciated. I love the beautiful colourfulness of life, but there are some horrors out there too. Being on the street and exposing yourself to that thing which we call people is a brave eyeopener and a journey and a half for a hermit.

Sometimes when we sit waiting for a sale (which can be a long wait on a bad day and a fleeting minute on a good day), I play the accordion to pass the time and gather a few pennies, or I draw.
There above (click for a larger view) is a collection of a few sketches that I have made whilst sitting amidst the uproariousness of the street, they are almost always portraits of people in my head (although once, in Canterbury, an exact incarnation of my just finished drawing walked past! ~ the old plaited lady, bottom left).

They are odd folk, outcasts, people with wonky eyes ... the people I welcome into my world, and, I suppose, they are the medieval marketplace of folk going by. Maybe I romanticize them ... for in amongst it all, these people are raw and not always pleasant. But for all that, my eyes always will be drawn to the ones who are sitting on the edges of things.