The Last Apple Tree

Well, of course it’s not the actual Last Apple Tree, thank goodness, although there’s a fable lurking in that title somewhere. No, yesterday I went out walking with Father and Eldest daughter, late afternoon, and out of the grey, in the old orchard, there shone out one tree, bare of leaf, but with apples hanging on – they looked like baubles on a frosty bit of twig, as if decorated for Christmas, half unreal, half magical. I hadn’t got my camera with me, but vowed to head off out this morning early, while the frost was still around to photograph this tree…

…and so I did. Which was all a bit of a palaver, because I had to rush out as the kids were eating breakfast, with the frost still thick on the ground (cats waterbowl frozen over). My little car wouldn’t start first time (gasp). And a friendly neighbour offered me some warm water to help de-ice the thing. And now I know why people don’t recommend using warm water to defrost cold cars. Because the ice melts, then forms again, but this time as a thick shiny sheet. Which you have to pick off with your fingernails. It was like driving through a magic landscape, though, and when I got to the woods they looked beautiful. And when I excitedly reached the old orchard – well, as is the way of these things, the treasure had diminished somewhat. The light was different? The day was different? I don’t know, but although I do quite like some of the images I came home with, I was slightly disappointed by the tree ones. There is always photoshop to reckon with, though. If time, space allows, I’ll see if I can catch it again. I tried slightly today, but I’m never sure whether these things work or not. See below and make up your own mind.

 

 

Was it worth my fingers hurting from the cold? I think so. There’s always other treasure, if not the ones you initially expect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the feeling of coming home to an enamel coffeepot on the stove, with proper coffee, in a warm kitchen. That was gorgeous.

Cordially yours

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.

Sunshine, ice and mummified Barbies.

Well, it’s been half-term, and I’ve been enjoying my children. One trip to London (I could almost see the doors opening in my eldest daughter’s mind), friends round for a party, more friends round for tea, and gingerbread men to be baked (and eaten). This week, technically, was back-to-work, but as all artists-with-children realise, it’s difficult to get down to things when you spend a good hour looking for that masking tape, only to realise it’s been used in a vibrant (and imaginative, yes) game of ‘Tutankhamen’ – in other words, Mummify That Barbie. I’m torn between pride (best thing you can do to Barbie, really) and sticky exasperation. Youngest daughter has decided that her favourite reading matter is Pink magazine. Alas, it has little to do with Gay Rights, less to do with an ironic take on the punk rock movement, and is full of twirly (pink) ballerinas and smiling (pink) bears. I am tempted to start, singlehandedly, an Ironic Mommas Underground movement, and design a Pink magazine full of O’Keefe drawings, analysis of the contents of lipgloss (slimy fat, pigment made from beetles) and How to Mummify Your Barbie tips, but it might not sell.

And I have gotten some work done. The weather was gorgeous for photographs. Ice, sunshine, and the ice half-melted, half frozen. I have enough on my plate with the hedge pictures, and coast pictures, to not want to take on more, but I’ll hang on to these in the back of my head and see if I can do something with them properly another day. I even, at one point, braved the cold and took out my sketchbook, which is where the small watercolour comes from.

Sticks, stones, rainbows over the beach

Well. So where have I been. All over the place, pulled through a hedge backwards (I have the drawings to prove it) and then to the sea, with pictures to prove that, too. It would be nice to say that I’ve been following a caravan of camels through the silk routes, bartering in bazaars, or flying a magic carpet over Norweigan granite, but Norfolk will have to do. Hey, it’s got windmills. What more do you want? A kiss-me-quick hat and economic renovation?

First to the hedges. This is really two blog posts rolled together expertly for your blithe delectations. I went for a walk on a very unsalubrious morning a couple of weeks ago, and the hedges had just been chopped by big machinery – their natural patterns throttled and twisted from the very force of it, but still apparent beneath the massacre. Half of it was black fairy-tale, half of it the promise of Spring beneath structured branch. I took a series of photographs, now pinned to my workspace board, and I’m drawing hard, hoping to finish off with a series of proper pictures based on this idea. Two I have finished:

and two of the photograps from which the series will be based.

Then, whilst running with that at the back of my head, I took myself off from the Herefordshire countryside to the sea. I love the sea, but it’s a treat – a place I don’t know like the back of my hand – a place which when I dream about feels like flying, rather than the comfort of the usual, but it has an odd comfort to it, all of it’s own – that knowledge that we are very small, and forces beyond us move us along in ways that aren’t really controllable, though we try. But we’re pushed from behind in the crook of our back, regardless.

So. All those ‘big’ things, and yet they’re echoed in the small visual things, too. I think the carefully engineered windmills are beautiful, fragile things – the patterns in the sea are so big, so vast that they make me want to weep, and the pebbles, buried in the sand, or patterned by spray are small paradigms of this vast and gorgeous loveliness. And then some lichen, reminding me of Herefordshire, and found by a particularly stolid and porridgey bit of cement step.

Drenched treasure.

Well, it was an inauspicious morning to go out for a walk – drizzle, and the children just strapped onto the school bus. But good things seem to be happening at the moment, and I’m very glad that I plodded up the muddy hill. A storm was blowing in from the East, and all to the left was a golden light, and to the right, clouds racing and movement in the bare trees. I took several pictures, but these seemed to me the best ones, and their colours seemed to pervade the rest of the day – golden, faded, illuminating the world differently to the normal grey January day-after-day, like the quince and the blossom in the hedge outside a huge Edwardian house which I pass nearly every morning.
I’ve started a watercolour. I’ve been trying for some time to get rid of the ink lines – they’re too harsh for me at present, and too defined. Fine for doodling, but I want to play with colour a bit more – do some work reminiscent of the long bluey-greeny silk banners I made one Summer a long time ago – all swirly colour and dip dyed. I’m pleased with it – at the stage where I’m a bit unsure of touching it for a bit, in case I Spoil It Completely. Which has happened before to pictures half-way through.

All swooshy, muted colours – 1930’s faded wallpaper colours – gold the colour of the sky this morning, blue the colour of the clouds. Let’s see if I can pull this one off, then.

Hedgerow, muted. With a choice of Fancy Cakes.

You’ll be pleased to know (I’m thrilled) that my seasonally mimsy self-reflection has ground to a merciful halt, and I’m back to my usual state of calm-amid-chaos. The resolutions have been made, the cake is back in the tin, and at least this year I have managed not to dye my hair bright orange in an urge to appear more interesting , but have left it it’s natural colour, which will just have to be interesting enough All By Itself.

I’ve been reading about Whistler, and his deliberate choice of muted palettes. I’ve never-ever been one for Muted Palettes. I like bright rich blues, and reds, and gorgeous silky greens. I like Kandinsky and Chagall and Frida Kahlo, with their peacock colours. But I also like Whistler, and his Nocturnes, Harmonies and Symphonies. With their muted, faded palettes, but gorgeous still.

Today was a muted day. There was not heavy frost, nor bright sunshine, but I went out and took the camera anyway (partly to see the overflowing river-water on the fields, partly to grab some special time with my eldest daughter). And I think I came back with some treasure. The photographs aren’t as immediately pretty as the frosty ones, but they’re interesting, and I’m fascinated by the colours in the seed-head one. So there we go. A muted hedgerow, but still interesting.

I spent much of yesterday in Ludlow, in the rain. We went first to DeGrey’s Tearoom, the children and I, and then to the castle. The tearoom is what you would think a DeGrey’s tearoom should be like. It has waitresses with little aprons (it must employ half the teenage girls in Ludlow on a Holiday basis), and real china. The tea is leaf tea, and comes with a little pot of water. And the cakes (you get a choice of ‘Cream Tea’ or ‘Afternoon Tea’) come on a little three-tiered stand, with aplomb. The building is Tudor, and the whole experience like going back to the 1930’s. The sandwiches (I chose salmon and cucumber) come beautifully arranged, as if they had been dressed by an old-fashioned couturier. It is a rather gold-plated experience, but one we cope with it by the children sharing the sandwiches and scones, and my not having a choice of fancy cake (yes, they are called ‘Fancy Cakes’). And it’s worth it, just for the sheer fun of the small ceremonial of it all.

Ludlow castle, if you ever get the chance, is well worth a look around. It’s not too large to be scarily imposing, and there’s plenty of room for children to run around. There are many tall winding staircases to spooky towers, and an ice-house under the moat which doubles as a skeleton-rattling dungeon. The views are suitably viewish, although the experience does lack the terrifying thrill I’ve experienced in some Cadw properties, which seem to specialise in surprising twists like unmarked 200ft drops to the waiting sea. I can only deduce that the Welsh do not believe in Fencing Children In. Or they are conducting some experiment to do with natural selection.

Drawing in the gap

I never know quite what to make of the gap between Christmas and New Year, and this year is no exception. Yesterday I was tired and fretful, and glad to be done with the hurly-burly hustle of a family Christmas. Today I’m bored and faintly restless – on the edge of something, but I’m not sure what. So I’m drawing, while the children play with their toys. I would like to be grand, and to make a thing each day, until the holidays are over. However the drawing today took a bit of a while, and I want to do more on it, or collage it, or embroider it, or something . We shall see. I don’t know yet whether I think that the sketch can come to anything any good or not.

Things you should know about my Christmas:

On Christmas Eve, Rosie decided to attack her hair with the paper scissors, just as my Mother was coming in for Mulled Wine and Polite Conversation. It was so hacked that I sat her (Rosie, not Mother) on the table and gave her an impromptu pudding basin ‘trim’. She looks a little strange, but given the ‘before’, it’s a distinct improvement.

Eleanor then (to be nice), wanted her hair cut short, too. So she has a bob, which suits her. Father, in his wisdom, collared me just as I was sweeping up the copious hairiness, and took the hair away in a bag, because, according to him (and he should know), it’s ideal for simulating Thatched Roofs on his guage of Model Railway. A slightly surreal moment, but it passed, thankfully.

On Christmas Day, I was woken at precisely Half-past Three, and didn’t get back to sleep. There is a picture of me, all dressed up, at my parent’s house (I did the cooking, but their house is bigger), but no-one will ever, ever, see it.

Eleanor’s favourite present is a whoopee cushion with a picture of a football on it.

Rosie’s favourite present is paper and new shiny felt-tip pens.

My favourite present is a Book Token. I am, officially, a dull girl. But a dull girl who loves bookshops, which has to be better than a dull girl who loves, say, Asda Meat Pies, or Bargain Hunting in Matalan. I may take the children into Hereford tomorrow, and we shall spend our tokens with happy abandon. I am considering taking the children to a Youth Hostel somewhere, because that really would be fun, and good for us all to get away for a night or two.

My Parent’s house is set in really beautiful countryside – a remote valley. It’s lovely – so quiet and beautiful. I managed to sneak out for a walk, early on Boxing Day morning. The views were splendid over the valley, and the river full and beautiful. I walked from Kinsham to Wapley Hill Fort, and then had to rush back for drinks and Aunties.

The pictures which are not of the drawing are of my Mince Pies, which I enjoyed making, and we are enjoying eating, and our cake, which the children decorated. I make my own mincemeat – it’s easy as easy and nicer than the boughten variety by far. The cake is a Dundee Cake, rather than a Traditional Christmas Cake, because I find the Dundee kind get eaten, rather than sitting around in the tin until November next year.

It is a bit early to wonder what 2008 will bring, but I am thinking about resolutions, and wondering anyway.

Oh, the piney wilderness of it all.

This will (unless something really noteworthy, like an earthquake, or thunderbolts happens) almost certainly be the Last Blog Entry Before Christmas. I may, if not horizontal on the carpet at my long-suffering Mother’s House, post one between Christmas and New Year. I may, with luck, decide that my New Year’s Resolution is to join a peculiar branch of a peculiar tree-worshipping sect, and eschew the computer for leafy branches and delightful shadow patterns. But it’s unlikely.

I have few nice new pictures to show people, which is rather mizz. It’s because I’ve been busy being Mama, and having a Rather Nasty Cold, which sentence will be causing stressed Mamas all over the world to nod knowingly in time with me, whilst wading through seas of paper and sellotape, and blowing their noses in synchopated rhythms. We should start a band. Really we should.

However, I can show you the more landscape oriented pictures of the frosty morning walk (and I shall – it is unashamed padding). And some pictures of the glassy, classy baubles on my Christmas Tree, some of which are finds foraged from junk shops and are relicts of chandeliers, and under which people have probably danced, and cried, and looked at for many years. Very Jane Austen, the chandeliers, and the landscape, I think, and that feeling of watching people dancing. Although, to be fair, they did not have telephone wires in Jane’s day. Or cameras, apart from the obscura kind.

Fairytale hedges and brrrrrry burrs.

Today was cold. I sleep under two duvets since the log fire doesn’t warm at night. Incidentally, one of these is a vintage duck-down beautiful cherry-red quilt, and is the warmest coverlet you could imagine (as well as making me feel rather like the princess in ‘Princess and the Pea’). But this morning was so cold that I carried it downstairs with me to make the three bears some porridge.

Then, rather than crafting boldly on with teacher’s gifts and pulled candy making, I sneakily went for a really long walk. Which was icy cold and as much a fairytale as you could imagine, with pools of frozen flood water in the valley, and pine trees appearing from the mist.

I took pictures, of course, although I’m not a very good photographer, and at some point I’m going to do some line drawings – very simple I think – just pen and ink – of some of the pictures, and some liney tangled embroideries with wafty white silk strands, and silver thread, of other. Blogging may be useful for reminding myself of these grand schemes, too.

It was very cold in the valley. However, luckily I am the proud possessor of a secondhand sheepskin coat that I bought from a charity shop last year. I am confidently assured by friends that I don’t look like a football manager when wearing it, but I certainly look like a lass that you wouldn’t want to tangle with at night, rather than a fairytale princess. But it is a very beautifully warm coat, and besides, a fairytale princess would never be able to wear woolly hats with any kind of aplomb. Not that I do, particularly, but they are better than tiaras for keeping ones head nice and warm.

I came home just before lunch and drank hot chocolate. Then I got on with my current make, which, alas is not a hat or funky mittens, but Gifts for Teachers, as they do deserve gifts, and I do not want to rush out and line Mr Cadbury’s pocket through buying six boxes of Milk Tray Chocolates. What we are doing instead is threading bayleaves, dried orange slices, vintage beads and buttons, bits of saved ribbon, and rosemary sprigs onto wire, and adding a terracotta star at the end (the star will be scented with variously cinnamonish essential oils). The children can help me do these, and they look pretty when finished. I’ll post pictures and the technique when I’ve made them all.

Now, thankfully, it is nice and warm by the fire. And the Christmas Tree looks pretty.

Chocolate fishes

Marshmallow and chocolate kebabs, cream fudge, and other yummy things. It’s the time of year when I boil up sugar, do things with an orange that don’t stop with juicing, and make confectionary for Christmas presents.

Why do this? Well, firstly it’s cheaper – far cheaper, to make these things yourself. Secondly it’s fun, and thirdly you know the provenance of the items. I’m not sure it’s super-green because of fuel economy, but it’s not terrible, at least, especially if you save and recycle packaging.

So far I have made cream fudge (the recipe, if you want it, is here), barley sugar and crystallised orange peel (dipped some in chocolate, too – well, not actually dipped, more popped them in the pan and stirred them about, pulled them out, left to dry, rather than the ’skewer each piece on a cocktail stick’ tidy purist method). I’ve made mincemeat (very, very easy, and you can check for what kind of nasty fats go in there), and I’ve covered marshallows with chocolate for stocking fillers.

Tomorrow, barring adventures, I make Turkish Delight, which is such a delicate thing to make, and, like all these things, incredibly easy.

The barley sugar has been taken to friend’s houses for gifts (it’s vegan, which is useful), and the marshmallows have been put away. The crystallised chocolatey oranges have been hidden in the ‘cupboard where the ceiling is coming down’ and the fudge…

the fudge…

The fudge I have eaten. This is bad. There was one bit left, about half an hour ago. I photographed it. Then I ate it. It is (or rather was), and you can trust an expert here – Very Lovely Fudge. It sits on a nice vintage plate that I found for 10p, and which originally was made for a Brexton Hamper.

I have also made a small embroidered landscape with which I know not what to do next. I don’t want to embroider it any more, and so I shall, ummm…paint it?