Excerpt from Piers the Ploughman (c1380)

 

A very bawdy passage from Piers the Ploughman (c1380) that made me laugh in a childish way:

"By that time, Glutton had put down more than a gallon of ale, and his guts were beginning to rumble like a couple of greedy sows. Then, before you had time to say the Our Father, he had pissed a couple of quarts, and blown such a blast on the round horn of his rump, that all who heard it had to hold their noses, and wished to God he would plug it with a bunch of gorse!"

William Langland trans. J. F. Goodridge

William Cobbett on Resilience

"Go and kick an Ant's nest about and you will see the little laborious courageous creatures instantly set to work to get it together again and if you do this ten times over ten times over they will do the same. Here is the sort of stuff that [people] must be made of to oppose with success those who by whatever means get possession of great and mischievous power."

William Cobbett

Review: Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier

I have just finished Le Grand Meaulnes (translated in my Penguin edition as The Lost Estate), having found it lying in a charity shop, seemingly rather unloved and, if I am honest, I was enticed by the cover image, having never heard of the novel before. And I am not alone, it is barely known in this country, but is a set study text in its native France and voted there the 6^th best novel of the twentieth century. It is a great shame that the work isn’t more widely read here as the book is an excellent novel and Adam Gopnik is right in saying that it is a work that leaves an impression on you, which it is hard to shake off. Listening to an album shortly after I couldn’t help be keep drawing parallels between the two and likewise reflecting on my own experiences of youth as I went through the day. 

Written by Alain-Fournier in 1913 it was to be his first and only complete novel, as he fought and died in the First World War and to a degree the novel is autobiographical in the sense that it concerns a instant connection (love) between two people, for whom the hope of long term relationship is denied – he even names the ethereal main character after his own lost love; Yvonne.

One of the most striking elements of the book is the sense of freedom that prevails, more generally through their childhood, but specifically within the school and their relationship with Monsieur Suerel.

Many of the reviews of the book make a point of saying that it is a novel that means different things in youth than it does in adulthood and that it is only in this later state that one can understand the loss that Alain-Fournier writes so wonderfully about. Reading it for the first time in my early 30’s I am not too old to have forgotten many of the emotions and events that so easily span a hundred years, but likewise I am old enough to know that it is an age, that even in our current desire for eternal adolescence, that has passed me by. The fights and carefree adventures were never a part of my childhood, but the sense of longing for intimacy, identity and independence I can remember well, along with the frustration and repression of youth.

The arcadia of the early chapters, where we are lead around the estate and along the lanes of the countryside is slowly swept away, until at last in the final chapters it disposed of entirely. Leaving you feeling almost slightly foolish for having fallen for its charms; this is real life, this is adulthood, the book seems to say, here there is no place for dreams and utopias. A stubborn mule is beaten by the same children that led Meaulnes excitedly around the corridors; ducklings lay dead in the garden of the playhouse.

And yet the illness and death of Yvonne, suddenly and beautifully roots her in the world of the living. Gone now is the abstract and dreamlike fairytale princess and instead we have a girl, a woman, who feels, who suffers. With it goes also is our rose tinted youth as we emerge to find ourselves in a much more readily recognisable world of pain, responsibility and with a clearer sense of mortality.

There is no doubt that most of Le Grand Meaulnes was, for me, a melancholy read, particularly as it drew to its conclusion and all hope of the promised fairytale ending vanished, but for all that it carried with it a sense of the beauty of the human condition and captured wonderfully the transitory moments of dreamlike pleasure that make up a part of what it is to be alive.

The Season for Plum Flowers by Lee Chul Soo

 

In early spring,
When a plum tree that survived the long winter blooms redolent flowers,
A farmer, who survived the long winter,
while plowing the field, smiles at the life that survived the cold weather.
Life in spring and the farmer are friends in this way.

Woodcut and poem by Lee Chul Soo

Listening to flower pots...

There is something truly wonderful about the pile of old terracotta pots sitting patiently in the greenhouse, awaiting the chance to fulfil their potential. The very fact that they are made from the earth is testament to its essential productivity and they seem to hold within the promise of fruitfulness. Most of these are very old, perhaps some over 100 years, handed on from gardener to gardener, garden to garden; but for this year they are here and silently crying out to work with me in trying to bring a harvest from the earth.

And in gardening, as in life, we need that encouragement, that belief. In spring we need to see these pots, empty and have the thought that maybe with just a little bit of compost (old dead matter) and a seed and some measure of luck, something beautiful and wonderful will come from it – as unlikely as that may seem and even if experience tells us it doesn’t always work out. To pick one up and know, that to not fill it, to not sow something, to leave it unfulfilled is to have already written failure; but that to take that chance, to take that risk, might just result in a little miracle and something quite wonderful.

So I sit in the warmth of the small greenhouse with the wind and rain hammering to get in, next to this pile of pots, and try not to look out the windows, past the shed, at the beds unprepared, the grass growing too long, the weeds waking up from their long winter rest, keen to make up for time. Instead I fill each one and nestle some seed down into its dark duvet and try not to get too excited by the pictures on the packet or the descriptions of fantastical crops. Although in this I would almost certainly fail, where it not for last year’s fallen written across labels and gathered like tombstones in an old broken pot. I take one out, put a line though the squash that for some reason didn’t ripen or the celeriac that never got planted and then, with genuine belief that this year will be different, write on the new name.

I have been trying to think of a sentence which neatly uses the word that keeps coming to mind, but actually it’s so fundamental to all life that it deserves one of it’s own. Tenacity. Nature has it in abundance; the damn Marestail that you just cannot get to the end of; the Marguerite that shrivels and dies due to me failing to water it enough during the summer, but then revives each winter to take another onslaught and the rhubarb that no matter else fails can always be relied on to be there, allowing us at least one meal from the allotment in early spring.

Whilst it would be foolish to suggest that we take pride in not learning from our mistakes, it would be twice as foolish to be paralysed by the thought that we might make them again. The pots have no memory of past wrongs and take no umbrage at being emptied of dried compost and stalks too withered to be identified. So I’ll take my lead from them and sit in quiet, hopeful expectation, and fill and sow each one as though it were my first.

Some recent things...

Weaving

We'll start with weaving, as that’s the craft that takes me the most energy to come back to. Not because I don't love it - I do - but because success is not always guaranteed and the initial warping and dressing of the loom takes a while; which doesn't easily fit with my impatient nature that loves to see something finished the same day that its started. But that's good; as it makes it not only a craft exercise but a personal (spiritual?) one too.

We were visiting our adopted local city, Norwich, a while back and in one of the charity shops down by the Cathedral square was a lonely (slightly dirty) cone of creamy yarn. A sniff and a rub on the neck by both of us confirmed it was wool and I happily parted with £2 for what is over 2lb of yarn. It’s a little coarse and sticks a touch during weaving, but it looks to be undyded and has the most wonderful feeling of welsh hillsides and leaves your hands scented of lanolin.

My weaving skills are still very embryonic, but I wanted to try something new, so I have created a check pattern by warping a charcoal woollen yarn every 11th warp thread and then weaving to the same. This meant the charcoal thread had to run along floating selvedge, which has given me something else to worry about when it comes to the tricky selvedge. I certainly recognise myself in the following description that I found on one website 'Frequently, new weavers have trouble making even selvedges when they weave, or they fuss excessively over the selvedges, slowing down their weaving'. You'll notice that the photo above doesn't show the selvedges!


The other half walked in on me when I had done the first three inches and announced I was weaving a snood for her - although it will need a lot of softening and fulling if that's the case.


Book Binding & Slipcases

I am really pleased with some of the book binding that I have been doing - in particular slipcases for existing books. I followed an excellent tutorial on YouTube by Sage Reynolds and have made a few now; all using recycled materials. When we were clearing out my parent’s house I found a pile of foolscap envelopes, all of them sealed. I have no idea why or what they were for, but the inside paper texture is really interesting and made an excellent work-a-day book cloth for the two volumes of Roget's Thesaurus. All the cardboard comes from display signs that our local clothing shops throw out with depressing regularity each Sunday. Some have cardboard stands at the back, which limit their useful size, but I have never needed to buy any card for my projects.

When I got a copy of Miriam Darlington's book Otter Country I just knew it was crying out for a slipcase that made the most of the book's dust cover. I made a template of the cover to ensure I got the window in the right place and then created a slight ressess to finish it. Likewise I have protected my favourite little volume of poetry 170 Chinese Poems, with a rather pleasing black and yellow slipcase.

Please do give these a go; if you have a favourite book it really does make it stand out and gives it a little something. There is nothing quite like ordering a coffee in a cafe and sliding out a little volume from it's homemade slipcase to make everything feel pretty peachy and special.

Where from here...?

I know I still haven't shown you the homemade bone folders yet, plus both the book press and engineers cabinet are still being worked on. With the weather having finally broken the allotment is going to be the subject of my next post, followed by a photo blog of me making up some willow cloches.

How to Make an Engineer's Tool Cabinet: Part One

My Poppa was a tool maker, ending his working life at a technical college in Basildon, a place that sprung up over his lifetime from the fields he knew and loved. He was one of these wonderful squirrel type characters, who knew that almost anything was of use one day and hated the idea of throwing anything out. Small pieces of metal, cutters etc would invariably find their rest in the already overflowing black engineers tool cabinet and on inheriting it I had the tough task of trying to decided what I felt would one day be useful and what should go on to be recycled and turned into something else. I was aided in this by my general ignorance with regard to engineering and metal work in general and so the little cabinet was soon emptied and cleaned, only to then be swiftly commandeered by the other half as a sewing box.

A little while ago I stumbled on another one, this time unstained, sat in the window of a small antique shop. As with so many (my Poppa’s included) it had lost it’s door, but was in good overall condition and had been cleaned and polished by the shop owner. We agreed a price that was fair and I brought it home to reline the draws (which I detailed on a previous blog post) and then sold it using a rather well known auction website, to a costume designer working on a Sci-fi film who was delighted with it. However, before I sent it to it’s new owner I took some measurements and drew out rough sketches in the back of my notebook, thinking that making one would be a very enjoyable project and handy for keeping various craft tools in place and easily transportable.

So when I signed up to a furniture making course at my own local technical college I knew exactly what I wanted to make and I went along to the first session, notebook in hand, and tried to explain to the tutors what my ideas where and what the cabinet looked like. It’s is so often the imbalance of knowledge that gives rise to confusion and this was certainly the case here and on reflection a photo or two would have made things so much clearer; instead I watched as they tried to make sense of my little partial drawings, that were marked with the readings from the micrometer I had used to measure it to 0.1 mm accuracy. The sketches and figures made sense to me, because I knew where they had been taken from and I knew how the cabinet worked as I had a mental picture of the finished piece. The second week I am not sure if I improved the situation when I turned up rather late and flustered (although I was the only one who cared), with several pages of scale drawings that once again made perfect sense to me.

Hopefully you'll understand then why it came as a huge relief when last night at our third session, the main tutor, studying my drawings, said ‘I get what you are making now, this is going to be a lovely little cabinet’ and was positive and encouraging about me building it. However, I had drawn the cabinet to the same dimensions as the original, only to discover that the oak timber I had available was not wide enough and had decided that my new one would need to be much narrower. The tutor asked if I was wedded to the idea of using the oak I had taken in and, mindful that something more exciting might be in the offing, I said not particularly. This led to me being taken out through a series of rooms and into the timber store and shown a huge piece of mahogany at the bottom of a stack. ‘Why not make it out of that?’ he asked.

So, I have got to go back to the drawings, rather pleasantly and rework it not just to the original size, but on his suggestion a little larger so that the door fits cleanly in the bottom when in use. I’ll be documenting the progression of building it here and will publish the plans and photos of the finished cabinet; hopefully it will put a smile on the face of my Poppa and give me somewhere to poke the bits that are 'too good to throw away'!

In the meantime please do visit Adam Cherubini’s blog Arts & Mysteries where you’ll find him contemplating and building a very similar piece.