The evenings are longer, and tomorrow I will be picking elderflowers, for cordial which I make every year. It’s gorgeous – lemony and refreshing, with a delicate flavour. I make my first batch next week, and for those who are interested, the recipe can be found on the recipe pages . It’s ever so easy, and freezes well – my Mum, who has a huge freezer, freezes it in ice cube trays, and thus keeps her household going in refreshing drinks through summer. The other nice drink is lemon balm tea – just pick the leaves from the plant, rinse, and infuse them. It’s refreshing in warm weather – uplifting rather than zingy. I’d add a slice of real lemon to the infusion, too.
I have busy tidying up the end of one job, and starting the other with proper energies. Ludlow Assembly Rooms, gorgeous though it is, has had to be relinquished. That isn’t because I don’t love art curating, but simply the paid hours in Ludlow are far too small to make the job worthwhile. And the school where I’m working truly does look after its children, and so it’s rewarding working there, properly rewarding, in the sense that you feel what you do makes a small difference.
Anyway my last weekend at Ludlow was spent organising the private view of Patrick Semple, and his work looks gorgeous. I loved it, anyway – his collaged pictures. It’s a combination of found objects and interesting things arranged so as to make one stop and take a philosophical breath, wondering on purpose and tradition. I truly could spend hours looking at them, on a visual and thoughtful basis. The man himself is nice, too.
What else? Well, despite the love of walking, I have learned to drive. And bought a car. This is not without regret, since ecologically it sucks, but three miles a day is too much for me to walk in all weathers easily, and the three miles is added to a train journey. I like this Hereford job, and it fits round my children (and my own work), so car seemed inevitable.
Car is burgundy and small. I drive it badly, and probably shall continue to drive badly around the good roads of Herefordshire, pissing off its road-worthy citizens, for some time to come. I am doing my best, and it is not a fast automobile. Sixty miles per hour is as fast as I can go, and that is with a favourable wind. My children, however, are very proud of me, and remained so even when I reversed into eldest daughters best-friends-mothers-gatepost yesterday night (I did not hit her dog, or her new car, however).
The pictures are of my back garden, with its row of painted jampots holding tealights (I love that it is warm enough to stay out in the dark, in the evenings, wrapped in a blanket, with a small fire, and the lights twinkling and glimmering), and of the view from Offas Dyke footpath, just before Kington. There are advantages to driving, after all. It’s my favourite stretch of the path, with gorse, hills, trees, sheep, and quiet. I saw a rabbit hole, used and furred up where they bolt down it each night. Lots of lambs, and the hills swooping away to valleys without roads in them.
Sometimes, feelings creep up on one. Buried in busy-ness, I find myself tired and sometimes sad underneath. My own work has ground to a halt, slightly (which is a double shame because LAR has made me some useful contacts). But the other good thing about the teaching post is that I will not have to worry about drawing work to sell for prints all the time. I can make things with more leisure, more thought, more lazily, with time to edit and rework. And so I have ordered five metres of fine silk, and fished out my frame and dyes, and will make some banners, for despite the tiredness and the sadness I feel the old familiar feeling creeping up from my toes, a need to make, make, make. And so I shall, but bigger and less saleable, and with more of the old sense about it, of making to communicate, in some way, and making, if I can, something which could (like in the fairytale) be shaken out of a golden pear, all coloured silken yards of it, a banner and a story combined.
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