The field is full of little tiny trees in their plastic pinfeather tubes now, so it does not have lapwings in it, which is a cause of some upset for me. Much like when I felt some pride when the tawny owls moved in, as creating a tawny owl territory is cause for celebration, but it also meant the bats left, because bats and owls are incompatible. You can like woodlands, and you can like lapwings, but you can’t have both in the same place. Quite late in the season I found out where they had moved to, but only because they were under threat; that’s the trouble with lapwing spotting. After the mating rituals are done, you only really see them when they are mobbing things; this time, crows. Even when I knew where the nests are and brought binoculars, it’s hard to see the little black head nestled far distant in the fields; they survived the crows but I don’t know how they fared in the heat. They might’ve fledged and moved on by now. I try not to assume the worse. I haven’t been checking up as much, as the weather has been hot, which means I have become largely nocturnal. We walk in the evening, by the river where the swifts sear the sky, cutting insects from the air.

There are some different bat species down by the river; the ones I know- the pips and daubs and most delightfully noctules. You don’t tend to see noctules at the lake till after midsummer, so I am exited to hear them. There are the ones that stay silent till they get right up close that I assume are brown long eared, and possibly some others that I don’t know well enough to recognise with a heterodyne detector. I’ve started to hear different sounding bats around college too, but they get drowned out in the melee of the all night lakeside bat party. I was hoping to get better at identifying unusual bat calls but I’m fairly useless. The detector was such a blessing and a favourite gift but using it makes me want one of those fancy ones you plus into your phone that tells you exactly who’s calling.

As an added birthday present (because it was my birthday on Tuesday), a tree next to the bridge is full of tawny owlets, who are always easy to find if you know what they sound like, which is like partially chewed dog toy. They are very, very noisy things, and I know them from when they nested by the lake and scared off all the pipistrelles. Later in the night I have the joy of watching them launch thier little bodies off into the night at they hop from tree to tree learning to fly. That brings the total of owl species I have watched fledging up to two (a new record. For me)

Here’s a video of noctules and owlets for your listening pleasure:

Workings

The swifts are back! Paper ones in my shop that is. And the regular ones but I can’t sell those ones.

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Findings

When I water the garden in the hot weather, it seems like an endless task. You water, and it becomes dry; but I find it to be pleasant nonetheless. The early evening stillness, checking on the progress of the flowers; disturbing a slumbering bee, the hiss of water on parched earth. Same with weeding; the smell of the earth, the herbal smell of displaced plants, the sound of the birds. Garden chores are the sort that lend themselves to peacefulness; I begin to understand why some people enjoy it. And there’s a lot to feel grateful for; having a garden to water, having the water to water it with, having finally achieved a longstanding ambition of growing a peony flower larger than a pin prick. It seems better to feel grateful than to begrudge the watering.

Gratitude is a good thing, and it’s important to notice it when it arises naturally. A feeling of luckyness is good for the mental health. The mind naturally holds on the to bad and forgets to take note of positive things, and the current trend is to counter this tendancy with gratitude journals, but instead of reviewing the day to see where gratitude arose naturally, one or more things to feel grateful must noted. It might work for some people. For me it arouses the memories of being forced to write thankyou notes for presents I need not need or want in my life, or being told I had to praise Jesus because he died for me when I really didn’t ask him to.

On the forums, someone struggling with their gratitude journal asked what they should do? They were bored of writing that they were glad coffee existed and that thier car hadn’t broken down that day. I would recommend slowing down, paying attention and aiming low. Notice the world. In the city, I noticed a dandelion growing in a little deposit of soil in a crevice half way up a tree. Delightful! How nature finds a way. We can be glad, especially in this hot weather, for trees, for their shade and oxygen. For a jolly little weed showing us how to bloom in the difficult circumstances of continual tarmac. Paying attention is a gateway to all sorts of things, and tiny delights are free and never run out, like coffee might.

With this in mind, I have been keeping a note of these delightful things instead. A little reservoir of joy. I got the idea from the pillow book of Sei Shonagon who, in the 10th Century, kept note of delightful things. She also kept notes of distasteful things and hateful things, which I don’t really recommend, though it is interesting to know that boresome men pretending to know things they didn’t were a problem since forever.

It’s not that we should overlay our emotions with false positivity. I have been grumpy and there has been good reason for that, but in the midst of it all, there are still greenfinches pecking about on the lawn, teaching their fledglings how to forage. I’m sure most of you have noticed some ducklings recently; the ponds are full of them and I stop a while and listen to their little cheeps instead of worrying about work and politics and climate change. Just for a moment, a little respite. The implication you are grateful for small ducks is in there. I am too hot, and cantankerous, but here are some of this month list of delights:

A swallow sits on the phone line in the early evening; a glorious quarter moon shines behind her.

A red kite flys over the house trailing a branch still festooned with leaves, which puts me in mind of those planes that used to fly past trailing messages on a big banner, like come to Flambards, or Lizzie is 30! Happy Birthday!! I always liked those as a child.

While chatting with a fellow walking near my house I mention in my house we refer to the monarch as “Chucky sossagefingers”, and he replies that he has met Charles, and shook his hand and by god, they are massive. MASSIVE.

Finding a huge amount of rubber stamps at Oxfam. And buying some, obviously.

Song thrushes singing so vigorously in the woods that it sounded somehow tropical, and magical, the sort of thing that makes you stop and enjoy our woodland and appreciate it for the wonderful biosphere it is rather than overlook it in favour of more exotic habitats.

A little egret flies low, just above me, along the road as I cycled home from gym.

I remember there is a place in the neighbouring village that’s started selling good coffee, right when I realise I really need coffee. And I can get some, because I have finally managed to add my debit card to my phone. Deep Joy.

I found a moomin bag at the car boot sale for 50p. I use it to store my other boot treasures and have recieved a compliment on it before I left. Lucky.

I take an early morning walk on my birthday; but by 9am it is already 21 degrees, which is my maximum operating temperature. As I turn to go home, a noisy oyster catcher lands on the playing field and starts digging about, probing the dry earth for food. What I delightful birthday present! Though if I were an oysetercatcher in this weather, I would definitely be by the water somewhere else.

I have delighted you enough for now, thankyou xx

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One swallow becomes many, and the sky if full of their chittering; the bluebells are replaced by cow parsley and the lawn, like every roadside verge, is engulfed by swarms of ox eyed daisies. There are no cormorants by the lake. Over the river, the mayflies dance out their brief lives. The sun is out. The hammock is out. It is summer.

It’s not odd to see a daubenton’s bat out by the lake fishing for gnats in the summer, unless it is 1.30 the afternoon in broad daylight. This is odd. I have never seen before (it is not at all sensible with the amount of raptors we have here), but I saw it today and it was amazing to see a bat on the move so clearly. She seems healthy, and I wonder why she’s up for a midnight (daylight?) snack, which makes me wonder if the bats ask why a human is out so late at night when I visit them. ‘It’s not normal for humans to be out late at night away from the lights and noise. Is she ill? Mad?’ They would ask, and I would explain that some humans just like the dark. Maybe this bat just likes the light. Probably, I decide, she has been up all day with the babies, and that makes you very hungry. That and all the feeding, very draining. No wonder she needs a little pick me up; there are plenty of bugs in the daytime and very little competition. I hope an owl doesn’t eat her.

Commonplacing

I read this book recently. Its important because of this:

If you look closely you will see that despite being called Clara and looking like this:

It has been assumed that Clara is a man, either because she was working in the 17th century or because she was quite good at what she did and certain members of society think for reasons that are entirely beyond me that women can’t paint.

I was quite enjoying The Story of Art (without men) at the beginning, but it got increasingly depressing as time marched on and women were still massively underrepresented in the Arts (spoiler alert, we still are). I’m also not very good with art history, for a couple of reasons.

Part of the problem I have is dealt with in the book itself: art history has been quite selective. Selective in what is allowed to be art (no embroidery, no indigenous works), and selective who gets to be an artist, which was mostly just white European men, but another personal difficulty I have is a lot of art movements seem contrived to me, and I get bored of the long lists of them, so somewhere near abstract expressionism I got bored.

The history of art when presented as list of art movements is really the history of what was fashionable to white european (or lately, American) men at that time. Take abstract expressionism- am I really supposed to believe that no one thought about expressing emotions with non representational marks before? Scribbling is a natural phenomenon, if you ask me. Maybe I just think that because abstract expressionism was discovered before my lifetime, but it seems more likely aunt Betty’s masterpieces were hurled into the trash by her nearest relatives that didn’t understand them after she died.

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I can’t prove amazing innovative artists existed but got deleted by an uncaring world, forgotten for not being white or male or well known enough. I do know this: in 1911, Wassily Kandinsky wrote that he had produced the first abstract painting. And he was wrong.

I would argue he was wrong because I have seen a lot of abstract art- mandalas, indigenous works, geometric patterns in embroidery, and spiritualist automatic drawings all predating 1911, but for some reason they are either not art or abstract enough. But he was also wrong because Hilma af Klint* had been knocking out completely abstract works since 1906, and she was a trained artist and exceptionally gifted; you can’t argue she didn’t count. Sadly she was also a woman, so they did. Her work was not met with much enthusiasm in her lifetime, and she left the lot, over a 1000 paintings, to her nephew, who thankfully did not bin them.

When asked why she had not been included in the 2012 exhibition on abstract expressionism, the museum of modern art in New York said her work didn’t count because she didn’t exhibit her abstract works in her lifetime. She did, actually, and is that really how it works? She was dismissed for being reclusive, for being a woman, for being a spiritualist (which was actually normal at the time. Did Kandinsky dabble in spiritualism? Yes, most in that circle in that era would’ve, but he was a man so it was OK. He might even have known about Hilma’s paintings through a mutual connection in Rudolph Stein)

Hilma is an inspiration to me because she stuck at her work for so long, under such adversity I can hardly conceive how she did it, as an artist that can hardly stick and anything for any time whatever. To produce a body of work is hard; to produce it in a vacuum with barely any support seems almost impossible, and that’s probably why art movements seem to emerge. At a certain time, there is a group of people producing, exhibiting and supporting one another to make a certain type of art. Surrealist, Dada, abstract. Robert Pirsig said a religion of one is madness; likewise, an art moment of one is just a mad aunt and her weird paintings. Both get discarded by the mainstream.

Katy Hessel refers to spiritualist work as proto-abstract rather than just abstract. You could argue that the basis of surrealism was the surrealist manifesto and Freud’s theories, so you can’t have surrealism before Freud and Max Ernst, but artists were definitely up to weird shit long before that, they just didn’t have a name for it. It’s not that I don’t think art movements like surrealism happened, it’s just that they are a reflection of our culture at the time, the way any fad is, a reflection of the consciousness of the era rather than solid and unchanging movements.

The mindset of humanity went through a huge shift in the renaissance, which caused a massive upheaval in thought and culture that wasn’t just to do with art. Art changed, but only because the human mind did. Copernicus showed the Earth rotated about the Sun instead of being the centre of the universe as supposed, a heretical view that required the expansion of minds to accept. Paper became available, so artists could practice drawing cheaply, the printing press was invented and information became more freely available. Another phase shift occured in the late 1800s; again, science was advancing- past the classical Newtonian mechanics that fuelled the renaissance into a quantum world. Is it a coincidence that the early 20th century, when these strange quantum ideas were circulating, was when people became more amenable to abstract art?

It’s not that I don’t think art doesn’t have a history. Of course it does. It’s just it’s intertwined with human history and to divide it neatly into art movements gives me the mistaken impression that I have grasped and understood it when I have not. That’s just naming, which is different to understanding. Then again, am I in a place to criticise? My degree is in physics, not art history (obviously).

*Hilma wasn’t even the first spiritualist to produce abstract works we know of.

Findings.

I ordered a fancy cover to keep my commonplace journal nice and neat. I ordered it from D&M leatherworks on Etsy, which meant it came all the way from China, though that was a smooth and customs free process. I’m quite pleased with it in terms of quality and affordability (I did pay. I am not an influencer). Similar commercially made leather covers go for a lot here.

It’s actually one that you can keep a number of smaller booklets in, so I can keep different notebooks for different topics if I want, though I quite enjoy the onslaught of various idea in my current book, which reflects the chaos of my mind.

Because I’m a very serious adult I took advantage of the free engraving service and had a serious and important message inscribed so everyone knows how important my journal is.

It’s got pockets and things on the inside to keep important bits. It should’ve come with a pen loop but it looked quite bulky and I knew I wouldn’t use it so I asked them if they could leave it off which they did. Quite looking for another reason to be wanting another journal cover to be honest, it was a nice shopping experience and it makes me feel fancy.

Anyway, shops still open for bits or you can bung me a few quid to spend on birthday cake a bit later in the month here

The year winds on but I remain resolutely stuck. The blossom switches from the whites of plums and damsons to the pinker hues of the apple, and now that too begins to fade. I sit by the lake at the evening and listen to the echolocation clicks of daubenton’s bats, because the more raucous pipestrelles, though awake, are still off away in their winter roosts. In their absence, the daubs, instead of fishing over the lake, race up and down the pathway along the lakeside, where the pipistrelles usually dominate.

I take time out to visit the West Country, and look at cormorants which do not live at what I consider my lake, not that there are any cormorants at my lake at this time of year. I see a strange looking cormorant on the Devonshire coast and realise that a strange looking cormorant is, of course, a shag. I know the differences well enough, but my first thought is still there’s something up with that cormorant and the thing up with it is that it is not a cormorant. In the same way I recognise the not-quite-a-kite over the marshes of the Somerset levels as a marsh harrier; I know red kites and buzzards well enough to distinguish them without thinking, and this bird is the size of a buzzard and flies like kite and is over a marsh and is therefore a marsh harrier. It’s not really recognition but a process of elimination. There’s a brief arguement with my husband who contends that it might be a hen harrier, but the bird hide is empty and not full of strange, camouflage wearing types excited to see a hen harrier that I’d expect for a such rare bird. Also, it’s a marsh harrier.

I return home to the gossiping of the blackcaps, a chattering so confident and continuous that it seems it could never have been missing for half of the year.

While down south I see my first swallow and being to worry whether the ones from back home have got lost; a week after that the skies are still empty, and I begin to worry more vigorously. A few days after that, well past mid April, I finally see a pair swoop gracefully across the playing fields, a joy mitigated by the fact the stable is still empty. It takes another two days before what I consider my swallows return, whose jubilant flight I see through the window while I’m supposed to be watching telly. It provokes another disagreement with my husband, who thinks I saw a house martin, but the stable is full of chattering once more and even though I have seeming failed to reanimate after winter, at least the swallows are OK.

(small sketches of blossom from my sketchbook)

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Findings.

I seem to remember a talk by Alan Watts, where he mentions that though many of the university students he counselled were unsure what career they wanted to move into at the beginning of the course, but the end they’d all made up their mind. I can’t remember what the actual point and perhaps I made it up, or perhaps it’s just part of a talk that people don’t quote because googling it was fruitless. If anyone remembers, do let me know. My interpretation is that no one wants to sit with uncertainty. The mind doesn’t like it. It would like a plan, and so you must make a decision and that decision is a random because all decisions are sort of random because no one has all the facts to make a decision; you only know if it’s a good decision with hindsight. So you make an emotional decision just to stop feeling uncomfortable and then rationalise it.

This lead to a long meandering detour around the fertile void, a concept in Gestalt psychology where one rests in this uncertainty; a period of ‘stillness for rest, reflection and organic transformation rather than forced action’. I think the purpose of this was to make me feel better about my failure to emerge from hibernation, other than an overwhelming need to draw and print onions, which I can’t help thinking is related.

I like to think of myself more lying in, and absorbing, a thick mulch of unconscious influences waiting for the soil to warm up before a vigorous and productive summer of growth. Still, there always the worry a small burrowing rodent might have eaten my soul sometime in the hungry months and I will never emerge, so I console myself with the thought that all this sitting about it doing me good, and indulge in my overriding hobby of journaling. I have a lot of hobbies, but all of them can be enhanced with the use of a really good notebook.

Workings

This notebook is by zen art and is serving as my commonplace book, the encyclopaedia debtanica, or the storehouse of cool shit I learnt*. It is not the best notebook I have but it is the best one for this job. I actually did want to have a big beautiful heirloom commonplace, even before I saw commonplacing had become a thing on social media, so I did actually buy a big grand book, and it was a problem, because I noticed I had stopped writing, and when we stop an activity we love, then there is a problem we are not addressing, and you have to find out what it is before you can get going. This is a common problem and people often say that they’re too busy, or too lazy or they’ll start next week rather than sitting and working out the actual problem.

I found I had two: I did not like writing in my big, beautiful book, and it was just too much work so not fun anymore.

Firstly, big books are a pain to write in, and not just because perfect things will become imperfect when you start to defile them with your thoughts in scrawling misspelt writing. We need to throw out the idea of perfection; nothing is perfect and the only way to get good at things is to do them and the only way to do them is make mistakes. No horrible mess, no beautiful journal. So beautiful books are often a problem because they intimidate us, but also big books are bulky and your hand falls off a cliff before you finish writing on the page (or at least mine does) which makes them uncomfortable and inconvenient to write in.

So I bought less intimidating, thinner notebook with a soft cover. It doesn’t have the super thin Japanese papers I really love, but it’s pretty good for fountain pens and thicker pages are is better for sticking things in. It’s also B5, which is a weird awkward difficult to find a size that is perfect for me, as I am also weird and awkward. I have often come to feel that A4 is just much too big and A5 is much too small, but B5 sits in between the two also comfortably in my satchel.

Finding the perfect imperfect journal to write in wasn’t the whole solution; I realised I also expected myself to illustrate my book, which seemed reasonable given my chosen profession and current lack of employment in it, but makes a huge amount of work planning and sketching and drawing things which frankly don’t want to and therefore won’t. I decided instead to move to using stickers to illustrate things. A lot of people are printing their own stickers and that’s a good idea, especially if theres a particular diagram you need, but I also know that I am always going to avoid turning on my printer, a machine I am fairly sure runs on human joy, specifically mine.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, the OG , recommended one should ‘provide oneself with an enormous and very varied supply of illustrations… ready for use at a moment’s notice’ so I’m sure he’d have been pleased I bought a enormous selection of sticker books; I didn’t know they existed before I got one Christmas, but now I do I am unstoppable. I’m sure Erasmus would’ve gone down this route if there were sticker books in the 1500s This makes looking for a little image to illustrate a concept rather fun hobby in itself, flipping through all the pictures, as long as you’re careful not to buy the ones with weird AI stickers.

My new modifications mean I can sit and complete an entry in one sitting, and since I stopped to ask myself why aren’t you writing in your notebook? last month I have completed a massive 16 pages of notes so that’s a massive improvement.

Here’s a bonus picture of a lizard I met on holiday. My husband took it because the lizard was on me.

*I have had a commonplace book of sorts since I was 18; that was a long time ago and certainly before it became a thing on social media; I don’t know when that started but there are a lot of posts about it now. Like bullet journaling, a lot of people on social media shouldn’t be trusted and don’t seem to understand the practice other than making nice pictures of instagram, so perhaps I might write about my personal practice of commonplacing but it seems too big for today, mostly because I have not left enough time before my newsletter is due out to properly compose my thoughts.

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The moon is full, but I still pick my way slowly through the grass. Things I cannot see lurk within in. On the way down, the path was littered with frozen sentinels, unmoving in the light of my torch, marking my way; but I know that their immobility is a lie. As soon as the light fades, they go about their business, creeping purposefully towards the lake. Only when I am almost at the waters edge do I hear them. Only when they are in the throes of passion do they fail fall silent at my approach, tiny croaks leading me the squirming, heaving mass of creaking toad love.

I’ve forgotten my torch but shoving my cold hands into my pockets I realise that I’m the type of person that always carries a hand lens- in case of lichen- and this particular model has a built in light. I return to the toad orgy to take a picture. Under the assault of the bright light the female toad- bottom-most in a pile of at least five- has enough and starts walking with heaving gait towards the water hefting all her suitors along with her, and I wonder if it’s fun. Do toads have a sense of fun? Or Chores? Or are they just driven by impossible impulses? We are driven by impulses too, only we want to do those impulses because they are fun. We are manipulated into procreating by brain chemistry.

Toad orgies don’t look very fun for anyone from what I can see, but perhaps it’s different for toads. In early march while it’s still frosty they are driven from their cosy nooks and slowly travel miles to the natal pond where they gather in phenomenal numbers, a heaving, croaking mass of lust. One of the males kicks another in the head. The female shuffles along some more. There must be some upside to all of this.

From my point of view the upside is more tiny toads. I like toads. Clammy and imperturbable, squat Buddhas that sit immovable like they know something. Guardians of secrets, toads. You can’t spend that long sitting on the cool damp earth without absorbing some of its mysteries you know.

Workings

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One of the hedge trees in the field out back has shot up. A a plum tree I think; the damsons do not have such a profusion of blossom as this one, and they are not quite in full force yet. It stretches up from behind their still bare branches in a pillow cloud of white. Everyone enjoys the sight of white blossom against a bright blue sky, the epitome of springtime; but all skies are good. I lie in bed and enjoy the white blossom against an overcast sky, just white against white, almost the same. No one would notice that branch of blossom it blends into the background so well. A little secret just for me.

Also, a bunch of these turned up today so if you are wanting an owl card and live in a place where owl cards are not for sale I can probably get one of these to wing its way towards you for a donation on Ko-Fi (you can also donate if you don’t want owl cards, money is always gratefully received)

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Findings.

I recently cut off 14 inches of my hair and no one noticed. As I am always noticing things this is always quite shocking to me, but ans my son explained, it was long before, it’s long now, it’s long what’s to notice? After waiting patiently for quite a while I start dropping hints to my husband ‘can you notice anything different?’

I think my husband is hungry, and excited by the prospect of naan bread, because he suggests that the aberration is I’ve got the yeast out of the cupboard. I cannot suggest strongly enough if a woman asks you if there is anything different about her, the answer is NEVER yeast. Anyway, heres a link to the little princess trust if you want to donate hair or money to their cause.

I don’t really like the name little princess trust if I am honest, even though I believe in the cause. I’m not very good at gender stereotypes, though that sensitivity may be particularly acute as it’s Mother’s Day and the adverts have been getting right on my wick. Here’s a list of ‘perfect’ Mother’s Day gifts I would absolutely fucking hate. A butter dish. Deodorant. Socks. Anything in a hamper. Shit flowers from Sainsbury’s. Cream tea by post (there are hundreds of these, why?). Perfume. Face cleanser. Any toiletries. In fact, the only sensible suggestion I’ve seen is noise cancelling headphones, which I’d deem essential for mothers, but also anyone else who has to live near humans.

Gift guides are always super annoying because they take the whole point of giving a gift -showing someone you love and care for them by picking out something based on their unique interests and personality -and turn it into the opposite. You are a woman so I’ve bought you a generic thing based on the crudest definition of your personhood.

And even small people know it’s rubbish because when my son was in reception he came home very upset because he’d been forced to make me a card with flowers and ‘mummy’ written on it, and even at 4 years old he knew that was all wrong. After I taught him how to spell mama, and he disappeared off make me a more fitting gift with angry birds on it. This year he returned from town with a lemon jelly CD. It has all my favourite songs on it. It’s not a Mother’s Day gift, he’d forgotten about that nonsense. It was just a thing he saw and thought I’d like, like the lavender cremes he’d bought because I love violet cremes so probably needed to try. I hope you have someone in your life that buys you lavender cremes from a motorway service station despite them being five quid and ‘definitely not worth it’ (they were worth it).

I sniff loudly while scrutinising a bunch of russet, roughly bird shaped leaves clumped on the sweet chestnut. In response, the leaves grow wings and fly away- a kestrel. This is good because I have not seen him around recently, and at the end of a hard winter one must worry whether all the garden friends have made it, except maybe last winter when the rat that liked to shit on the front doormat disappeared after a particularly vicious freeze. I don’t actually mind the rats, but that was the year the farmer dumped all the nice warm manure out back, which lead to a population explosion. I still wouldn’t have minded so long as the rats had kept their toilet away from the thing everyone liked to wipe thier shoes on vigorously before walking into the house. You could keep him away using some used cat litter as a perfume but as soon as it wore off he was back to crapping on the doormat with an impressive dedication to the cause; I suppose it was some kind of territorial marking behaviour rather than pooping on bristles being enjoyable, though maybe it is, I wouldn’t know I have never tried. Anyway. He’s dead now. It’s for the best.

I walk on. There’s still a few leaves on the tree. Enough to almost disguise a kestrel. Is that why a russet colour is so popular in nature? The preponderance of decaying leaves allows one to blend in with in the British countryside? Is that why the celts were redheads?

Red kites, red squirrels, weasels, stoats. In the summer, when the grass is high, I supposed the worm-tremors-thing that hunted voles in the grass was a weasel. Even when I saw it, there was only a brief flash of weaselishness, a sinuosdal wave of mustelid, to work with. But now it is winter, and the grass is low and I can say with confidence that I saw a stoat in the garden. I can say that because I saw a rabbit and a stoat are together, it is clearly too big to be a weasel, and there is a black tip of the tail. Also, on Christmas Day as we sat around the Christmas tree opening presents, a stoat came up and looked through the patio door with quizzical bright button eyes, momentarily forgetting its animal nature, as if it wished to join in with the present giving.

In fact, what I saw was a rabbit attacking a stoat which made my husband look at me quizzically, as if I had got things confused. Why would a rabbit attack a stoat? One supposes they don’t because rabbits are kind and gentle and edible I suppose, but mothers are mothers regardless of species and kindness goes out the window if you try and eat her babies. Steve used to bring his ferrets around to keep things in check before we moved here, but I havent seen the rabbit population get out of control without his presence, and the increase in weaselish sightings seems to indicate the reason for that is an increase in stoats. I still have no photographic proof because stoats move very fast, and I wonder if there might be weasels too. There’s nothing to say some of the grass-worm-tremor-things aren’t.

Despite February Februaring relentlessly, I have reason to believe that spring is underway. Not only did I glimpse the sun twice last week inbetween bursts of torrential rain, but whatever plant the releases pollen that makes my nose run if I go swimming without an antihistamine has definitely released its pollen. I sneeze again. Two kestrels fly out of a different tree, which is hopefully a herald for more small kestrels soon.

Workings.

I have finished this now.

I have even listed it, though I really would rather not have to. I really hate listing things. Anyway, I strongly encorage you to buy stuff.

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Findings.

I have not been finding things if I’m honest with you, unless you count finding fault with the state of humanity because for some reason I seem to have stumbled into the part of Instagram where people are stopping ‘food noise’ with ‘one calorie cloud cookies’ and when I say that, what I actually mean is people are trying to curb hunger with the world’s shittest sugar free meringue, and I fear I have become obsolete in my own lifetime because the children are renaming things we already have names for, and I’m not ready to deal with that emotionally. I’m not over an advert for a ‘solid, packaging free shower gel’ I saw last year if I’m honest, though I can tell you if you don’t want to pay £5.99 (plus postage) solid shower gel you can still buy soap at the supermarket for 69p. Anyway. I’ve got to go shout at a cloud now (an actual one. Not a meringue)

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The trouble with January is once you’re through it, which feels like an achievement, is you’re into February, which is much the same as January. There are some perks to it; it’s shorter by two days, which amounts 2 weeks at any other time of the year. The rain makes time expand, you see. If it ever stopped raining, though, you’d be able to tell the days were getting longer, which means that the ‘song’ thrush has started up its alleged singing in the morning. Changes happen slowly in nature; spring creeps up achingly gradually; it’s not like you wake up one morning and all the birds are a bit see through. Why are the birds transparent now, you ask? Aesthetics. Can you change the settings so that you have the regular birds you’ve always known? No. The powers that be have decided on see through birds, and now there are no robins unless you delete all your photos, because turning the birds see through uses a lot more memory.

It might be that I’m just bitter about the recent IOS changes. I guess there have been sudden changes in nature, flash floods, annihilation by asteroids. But mostly the changes are small things. Eight cormorants, then five, all week five, then suddenly, nine.

‘I don’t see how the lake could support nine cormorants’ I tell my son as we stare out over the swollen waters, the colour of dangerous yet milky tea.

‘Maybe they eat elsewhere’ he suggests, and I concede that the cormorants are not there at night. I would like to track them and see where they go, but my son does not need such science

‘Clearly they go to the chip shop in the evening’ he says ‘nine cormorants in a trench coat. It makes sense’ where else would a cormorant buy fish?

It makes as much sense as turning all the app icons on my phone a little bit see through if I’m honest. It starts to rain again, and I wonder if it is possible for the newly planted trees to drown, or maybe simply wash away in the deluge. Crocuses start to struggle out of the puddled lawns, the floor of the woods is dotted with newly emerging leaves- bluebell, cow parsley. Little points of optimism. The daffodils next door are already out, but ours are only leaves at the moment, which is the case every year. If they weren’t next door I’d assume there were special climatic conditions that meant those ones bloomed earlier, but the patch of grass 20 metres away is not advancing into summer faster than mine I’m sure. There must be a type of daffodil that’s a lot more punctual, or optimistic.

When I return to the lake in the evening, or rather, dusk, which is 5.30, only one cormorant remains. He won’t tell me where the others went, which I’m fairly sure means they’re at the chip shop in the trench coat.

Workings.

I didn’t write last week because all I had to show was this,

which wasn’t very impressive. But then this week I worked very hard and so I have this

Which doesn’t look much better until the sun hits it and the eye glows and then I have a sense of optimism that things will turn out well in the end. Maybe. If I don’t mess up. Reduction lino cuts, layer upon layer, incremental changes. I hoped to be done now but the constant rain has increased the humidity which slows the inks curing. We’ll get there in the end. Probably.

Etsy

Findings

I’ve been watching the channel four series ‘Patience’, because instagram seems to have shown me most of it in one minute bites, so I thought I might as well. I’ve quite enjoyed it, it fits in either my favourite genre, which is people make a friend or two, and feel a bit happier. Did you think I was going to say my favourite genre was crime? No, my favorite genre is platonic friendship because I’m not basic, and it’s a difficult genre to enjoy because it’s not actually a genre which I think says something devastating about our culture; romance is a genre, platonic romance is not. Don’t get me started on all the genres that are not genres but settings either.

I don’t think I really do crime series correctly though. I’ve guessed the murderer correctly every time based on no evidence whatsoever. Just vibes. It’s like playing cluedo, shouting ‘it’s Professor Plum, because he seems shifty’ then insisting I won because I’m technically right. Since I’ve watched them all now I’m watching the french version it was based on, which I am enjoying more than I thought because the differences intrigue me. It seems a little cosier for the english audience; the french one is more brutal. I like that the actor playing Patience in the English version is actually is autistic. I especially enjoyed the warnings at the beginning; the french ones are definitely better. This programme contains graphic scenes of an autistic person being bullied which might upset you. The cruelty! Oh yeah, and quite a lot of murdery stabbing. It’s a crime programme what did you expect?.

Anyway. Next week I hope to have something good to show you.

Last year’s saplings, planted in different fields, did not fair well in the dry spells, and I hope that the weather is more clement this year; it certainly seems to be wetter so far. The lake defrosts and promptly overflows. The cormorants return, and I keep careful note of thier increasing number. First four, then five and then yesterday, two in the tree, one on each fountain head, and three on the bank, which made and enormous seven, until I saw another swimming; which makes an unprecedented eight. Eight! I didn’t write last week because I didn’t have very much to say, but a 60 percent increase in cormorant population? That’s news that needs reporting in a newsletter alright? I’ve got to tell someone these things.

The new cormorants have jaunty white face markings. I stare at one from a distance wondering if it is some kind of grebe (or more fancifully, penguin) before it helpfully gets out and stands on the bank, wings outstretched in the archetypal cormorant fashion. Breeding plumage, with white marks on the flanks too. Fancy. They’re up to something, those cormorants, but thier ways are mysterious and unknowable to mere human minds.

Things are getting louder. It starts with the owls, which can sometimes start hooting before December. Then come the great tits. I heard that the great tits are declining which seems unfathomable to me, harbingers of spring that they are. I suppose the silence of corncrakes or passenger pigeons seemed unfathomable to people once, so we should protect species long before a terrible silence is upon us. Now, as January drearily trudges towards on, other birds are starting up to add to other sounds- the deer barking, the wompf of air moving through the flight feathers of a swans wing as he comes in to land. The world is starting to awake, slowly, to become noisy after the frozen hush.

Workings

I have left the world of drawing bad paintings with cheap markers temporarily behind as I did some actual work this week. I still haven’t updated the shop though. It’s like I want to live in poverty, I don’t know what’s wrong with my brain sometimes.

Anyway, look a this, its gonna be good (I hope)

I didn’t take a photo of the resulting print, you’ll have to wait for that.

Findings

My son asked for a bass guitar for christmas, and being an obliging parent that only knows about the regular type of guitar I gave some cash to a knowledgeable friend and let him trawl facebook for deals, which apparently he had a lovely time doing. That’s why I currently have a bass amp only slightly smaller than the living room in the living room. Apparently bass guitar means playing in a band, so you might as well skip to a giggable amp straight away, and the amp was a steal too good to miss at £35. Why is it in the living room? Possibly because that’s where the Christmas tree was and no one wants to move something that heavy. Having friends with specialised interests is useful when your child hits adolescence, and is suddenly interested in things you know nothing about like record collecting (I will never call them vinyls) and bass guitar. Have I been giving advice on my friend’s childrens new interests? Yes I have. It’s not a one way thing.

My husband, on the other hand, wanted a new radio. I got him a digital radio as soon as Pure started making ones that were affordable in times of yore, before smartphones, so it was quite old. When talking with my friend I accidentally made her laugh when telling her what I’d got my family for Christmas, because she asked me what I had asked for Christmas, and I answered ‘noise cancelling headphones’. I wanted them for the gym, and hadn’t thought about the noisiness of my gifts, but they are life changing in reducing the amount of stress I feel in response to sounds. I don’t think I actually realised I was constantly stressed. I’ve begun to wonder what the environmental implications for streaming the sounds of thunderstorms for several hours a day are. All the tracks on the 10 hours of thunderstorms sound pretty much identical (like a thunderstorm) but I make sure I don’t start at the beginning of the playlist so I get to listen to all the tracks like I do every other playlist. I am thinking they are right when they say I have problems.

Anyway, it’s lovely to get what you have asked for christmas, and it was nice to see my son excited for christmas, but I think it nice to get a lil surprise now and then. Personally I enjoyed this excellent sticker book, lots of lovely mushroom and toad stickers, nice paper, good binding- why should kids have all the fun when it comes to activity books?

This one is very grown up- I was going to say adult, but that’s a different type of activity book altogether. Reminds me of when I ordered a doll- a regular toy doll, the collectors type- and the seller had written ‘adult doll’ on the customs label. The look on the postman’s face was a delight, I tell you (I was working painting doll faces at the time, so I got a lot of doll packages and he knew it was a toy but adult doll is legit hilarious). Anyway. Till next time.

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The ducks try and walk with dignity over the ice to a small patch of water that never seems the properly freeze over. They fail, mostly because ducks are not designed to walk with dignity even in ideal conditions, and no one really enjoys dignity when slipping about on a pond.

The ice hole they are walking to is already crammed with waterfowl, who seem unwilling to stop swimming no matter how cold the water gets. I don’t know why that bit doesn’t freeze. Maybe someone keeps it open. Maybe the motion of ducks themselves, though they won’t explain why they always that patch, every year. It might possibly be, I think, looking at the layout of the golf course, be kept open by golf balls that haven’t been struck hard enough to quite make it across the lake. It seems unlikely because there are no signs of any golfers this freezing morning, but I am momentarily delighted with the thought of golfballs skittering across the frozen ice anyway. I am almost tempted to wait for a golfer to come by.

A moorhen flaps its wings to aid its movement as it skitters along the lake surface to join the ducks. The whole world is frozen, still. And capitalism wants me to make some new start? Seems foolhardy. Maybe next week. Maybe in a month or two.

Workings.

I haven’t started work yet, because I have been assessed, and the amount of questions asked in an assessment means I need an extended recovery period, which is partly why I needed an assessment in the first place. You’ll be pleased to know I have joined the ranks of Wes Streeting’s most hated and over-diagnosed. If you look at the statistics, ADHD is actually massively under-diagnosed in this country, but I do agree that it is over-diagnosed in a way because they seem to insist on diagnosing the same people over and over, so it seems logical that the problem with this whole shambles of a care pathway is me, a person who is struggling, and not the huge systematic failure that occurred so that no one noticed despite repeatedly asking for help*.

Shop anyway

This year I have resolved to make more messes, annd to absolutely trash an expensive sketchbook, and I have bought this terrible set of acrylic markers to help me achieve this. That wasn’t why I bought the markers, it was an accident, the convergence of two things. Firstly, I needed one (1) acrylic marker, and secondly I had vouchers I needed to spend urgently before Jeff Bezos realised I had embezzled him.

I’ll explain. I needed a cream marker to use as tippex on a notebook with cream coloured pages. Just one. It cost 4.29. You can only buy expensive branded markers You can only buy expensive branded markers singly.

But for 4.99, which is the same price really, now isn’t it? I could buy a set of 12 off brand markers. So why wouldn’t I buy a set of 12?

Because for 9.99, a mere doubling of the price, I could get 50, FIFTY, terrible markers, over four times cheaper. I mean it’s not, it’s twice as expensive in real terms, but it terms of marker per pound, we’re winning. I was unsure why I need that many markers, but I don’t let things like that stop me, especially not when I have ill gotten vouchers.

Though to be honest, only one was ill gotten. Amazon gave me £5 for filling in a survey (I purposefully did a terrible job of it) but it didn’t work, so I went straight to customer service and demanded my £5 I’d completely forgotten about which had suddenly become urgently important. I’m very efficient about free money from Amazon. I was very efficient redeeming the new replacement code they sent everyone the next day too. I was fairly sure that since I had already been paid for the survey, it would be morally wrong to redeem the second code, but this was balanced by it being a civic duty to embezzle Jeff Bezos at every opportunity. That’s what he’d do, you don’t get to be a billionaire by not cashing in free money. He’ll only spend it blowing himself up in a space rocket anyway, so it’s a moral duty to remove money from the pockets of Bezos. For his own safety. And I had markers to buy.

So many markers.

I made this, a drawing of a twig.

And I made this. I’m not sure what it is. I don’t think I’ve finished yet

I also made this, which will be a cuckoo approximately 3 seconds away from being sparrowhawk food. It involved no markers, as you can probably tell.

Anyway. I have a headache so I’m signing off now.

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*That was sarcasm, just incase Wes is reading. He doesn’t strike me as the brightest. Anyway, if you do have a raging neurodevelopmental problem, don’t, whatever you do, do well academically, because you’ll be left high and dry.

Radiohead are on tour again for the first time since 2018, which, in my aged state, seems to be about yesterday. I’m not going because it seems prohibitively expensive, and I have already seen Radiohead when I lived in Oxford. This surprised my son who is very much enamoured of Radiohead himself right now, because there is no large music venue here, but it was a sort of festival deal in South Park. He asks if Cartman was there sarcastically, and I tell him no, he’s on the t shirt, because when Trey Parker found out, he wanted to design the T shirt. I still have that shirt; a friend didn’t get tickets so I kept it pristine to taunt him with it from time to time. Apparently it’s worth 180 quid now.

I’m not prepared to pay huge amounts and travel to see Radiohead anymore, but I was full prepared to trot myself off to see ‘This is What You Get’, at the Ashmolean, a collection of work by Stanley Donwood in collaboration with Thom Yorke. This seems mostly well received as an exhibition unless you work for the Guardian. The Guardian review was titled ‘a succession of bad paintings’ in a review that so comprehensively missed the point I can’t stop thinking about it. ‘A sucession of bad paintings’ as a title is in itself an odd take when most of the things there weren’t paintings. The main gripes were the paintings were bad; that they wouldn’t be exhibited if Radiohead weren’t popular, and they didn’t deserve to be in a gallery like the Ashmolean.

That last arguement might hold up slightly if the exhibition were in the dedicated art gallery like Modern Art Oxford, but the Ashmolean isn’t a gallery. It’s a museum- though many of the paid exhibitions are art, there are other culturally relevant exhibitions that enough people would want to go see to make it worthwhile financially for the Ashmolean to host them, for example one about witchcraft I saw several years ago. Since local band Radiohead are sufficiently culturally relevant that people will travel to Oxford and pay quite a lot of money to have a look at Thom Yorke’s notebooks, the Ashmolean seems an ideal place for this exhibition, which includes album covers, audio clips, ephemera, interactive displays, printmaking plates and most of all sketchbooks.

Lots and lots of sketchbooks

You know how I love sketchbooks. It think I love the workings out more than the actual works. I came out with so many ideas for my own sketchbook practice. I always get to enjoy exhibitions on two level; to enjoy the things on display, but also to steal ideas to ferment my own work. It doesn’t matter if it is work similar to mine, in fact, all the better if it isn’t. If I don’t like things I’ll still find something to steal, the looseness, the carefree consumption of art materials, anything I struggle with.

But is it art? And is it art?

What makes a painting bad? I know what I don’t like, but not liking it doesn’t make it bad. There are three main ways I can fathom; one the materials are unintentionally used badly, so the art doesn’t last, it doesn’t obey the rules of colour and proportion etc. that makes for beautiful art, and lastly, the subject matter is just not good.

None of these are a foolproof test of badness though, except perhaps the first when the art simply doesn’t exist in the intended state any more - Leonardo was guilty of this with a fresco- apparently it was very beautiful but we’ll never know because it (probably) fell off the wall almost immediately, but even here, impermanence has been used as a technique in art, such as the sculptures created by Andy Goldsworthy using natural material that degrade quickly, such as leaves.

Two, we might expect the artwork to uphold some of the rules of good art- perspective, colour theory, proportion etc. The trouble with that is that is since realism peaked in the renaissance, since the mannerists, and honestly probably before, artists have been fiddling about with proportion and colour on purpose, for effect. Really the realism of the renaissance was a blip in a long history drawings where colour, proportion and perspective weren’t the be all and end all. And then art really got deconstructed in the 20th century, so they stopped drawing actual things so how do you even know if it lacked proportion or the colours are wrong? Apparently Guardian reviewers can. If the definition of bad art is really that it’s badly (by that definition) painted, then a lot of abstract expressionism is in trouble.

The other problem is that a painting can still be technically good, but absolutely awful, and by this I am largely thinking of the certain fantasy paintings in the 80’s. Yes, the man and the horse aspects have good proportion and musculature, yes the paint is well applied, no I don’t want to look centaurs doing that. In this instance, good and bad are a matter of taste, and taste is subject also to whims and fashions. There have definitely been some lows in the history of fine art, where even fashionable art was somewhat questionable in matters of taste, so I’m finding it pretty hard to pin down what a good, or bad, painting can actually be. We can form our own judgement, and there are extremes at either end where most people are in agreement, but most art sits in a hazy middle where some people absolute love it, some hate it and most are entirely indifferent.

If found this beauty in the charity shop and it does make me ask questions. Ones like what are the boobs doing up there? Did they really sell 150 copies of that? I don’t like it but they’re still charging 10 quid for it.

What do I think makes good art? A painting that deserves a wider audience? I think probably it’s a painting that has something meaningful to communicate, and is doing what the artist wants it to do, that is to say, it communicates effectively to at least some people looking at it. By my definition, Stanley Donwood is doing fine. People want to see the work (the exhibition is popular) the work has things to say, and the paintings look as the artist intended, ie, the paint is not falling off the canvas, and the style of the work is not an accidental thing caused by an inability to draw. Stan can draw if he wants, we can see that in the sketchbooks.

The thing that really boils my piss upset me, which really sets it out as a mean little review, is claiming these paintings ‘wouldn’t even get into the RA summer exhibition’

I think that line really shows the problem at hand, with word even. Because it’s hard to get into the RA summer exhibition, and people are rightly proud when they do. It’s a prestigious event that people are happy to participate in. What the hell is the problem with the Royal academy summer show?

Probably that anyone can enter. The riffraff. The hot polloi. The unqualified. The unwritten sentiment is that good art is made by proper artist with studios and minions to do the work for them, not regular people or, god forbid, people that happen to be mates with one of the countries top bands. I hate this as some of my favourite drawings are by children, and I’m a big fan of outsider art, I love an amateur, and think everyone should have a go, and if their work fulfils my requirements of having a cohesive body of work that has a narrative that people are interested in hearing, an exhibition.

Stanley Dogwood and Thom Yorke have collaborated for years, inventing an interesting visual language and world to create a visual identity for the band that I found fascinating to see in an exhibition. I like Thom Yorke’s music and that was the primary reason I was there, but to say I wouldn’t have been interested without that cannot be proved. I’m quite fond of artists that create thier own universes, and most of them aren’t attached to a band I like. Also, I must point out the W.A.S.T.E website was not officially connected with radiohead for quite a long time and still managed to tick along so there clearly were people interested in the art without being a fan of the music.

Stanley’s work is so intertwined with the music that separting them doesn’t even make sense. The art with out the music would be something else. Maybe paintings that snobby little Guardian critics think are good, who knows.

The whole review has a bitterness to it; it mistook the exhibition as for ann art show, and it’s angry that an artist they see as inferior has undeserved opportunities. It’s snobbery, and I don’t like that. Don’t let it stop you visiting if you’re a fan, and if you are not but know fans then the little shop next to the gallery has loads of Radiohead treats you can get them without paying to see the actual show.

Workings.

I’ve been ‘a couple of days off finishing’ this all week. It’s becoming very obvious I will not be printing this before term breaks up next week and I am forced to devote myself to festive cheer. Forced, I tell you.

Also I’ll have a print (the feet one) in the FOG group show in London open Thursday to Sunday 11-6 till the 14th of December, so if you fancy having a looksie for presents then the address is Brixton railway arch 18, Valentia place SW9 8PJ

Or you can get it direct from me for half the price if you’re sensible here.

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I’m sitting in bed and it’s raining, the super heavy torrential kind. There’s something nice about heavy rain when I have nothing to do; being forced to stay in my warm nest of bed, grateful it’s not a day that I need to leave the house. The hedge cutting has been done, and the cycle path to the real world is littered with pointy sticks and slick mud. Glass you can cycle over but a blackthorn thorn? That can shred an innertube, and don’t think you will be breaking safely down the hill because it’s a mud slide now. Best stay safe at home and let the rain wash it all away.

I mean, I should get up. I have things to do. In a moment I might exchange my night wear for an almost identical dress. I made both from the same pattern, but there are minor barely perceptible differences that mean one is daywear, which gives me a totally unjustified feeling that I have got up for the day. In recent years, modern people have cottoned on the tactic and have a name for it; they are calling it a nap dress. This is rude, it is a dress, and I am dressed, and I am not napping. I am doing my important work. From bed.

There will be no nature today, unless the nature comes up and harasses me, which it might. Sometimes birds tap on the window, sometimes owls sit in the tree by the bedroom window and hoot relentlessly. Neither of those has happened today, but yesterday I said hello to my first fieldfare in the garden, delighted to hear that distinctive chatter again after so long. Two nights ago the deer formerly known as baby deer (DFKABD) started barking, a strange undeerlike noise that is slightly alarming but comical at the same time, as if a muppet has been startled. It leaves you feeling confused as to the correct response.

I know it was the deer, not just because the muntjac is known as the barking deer, but because I went out to ask if he needed assistance. He didn’t so much as blink, just kept on hollering. I think we’re friends now, or at least I’m considered a benign presence in his garden, not the sort of alarming thing that need to disrupt an important mating ritual. I hope we see baby deer mark two soon, another has been spotted.

Workings.

I have this (you’ve seen before):

I have this:

The mental health nurse at the surgery, the replacement of my nemesis Kieron, thinks these are good. I was doing a little colouring in while she was busy sorting things out on the phone for me. I like her. No one listens to me when I phone.

Thusly, I have this:

It should keep me busy for a while, I reckon. Absolutely delighted to be carving again. Watch this space.

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Findings

I was going to write something of import here, because apparently Substack should be full of useful information otherwise why would people subscribe? By accident, evidently, by the way they unsubscribe in horror after I publish my frankly insane witterings. Anyway, it’s late in the week and I don’t have the bandwidth to write meaningful or intellectual things. I’m not getting paid for this. I’m doing it for fun, at least this way someone’s enjoying it (me)

Anyway, I went to Runnymede recently, which is where they signed the Magna Carta. There’s no Magna Carta actually at Runnymede, which is no loss as the Magna Carta is basically a tedious legal document. It is full of other interesting things to see, especially the yew trees over the river at Ankerwyke. Definitely recommend.

There were also a lot of parakeets, not that my friends would believe me, maintaining that it was a bird of prey, and since I, a bird person, did not know which, it must be a rare and interesting bird of prey. ‘Or a parakeet’ I suggest again, but no, they decide, apropos of nothing, that it is a Merlin, until my husband walked over with the look on his face he only wears when he’s very wrong, but isn’t going to admit it. ‘It’s green’ he says.

It’s green, it’s got a lot of friends, they are making a racket. Thus the legend rare green Merlins of Runnymede was born.

You might think there’s a copy of the Magna Carta, there but none of them are actually at Runnymede, only a sort of memorial building which definitely wasn’t there when the thing got signed. I have seen the best surviving copy of the original Magna Carta, though.

I used to be a keen choral singer as a kid and every now and then all the choirs would meet up in Salisbury cathedral and sing together. In the Olden days, the cathedral was free and you just paid to get into the chapter house. I was not interested in what was in there; I was too busy running furiously up and down the cloisters in my cassock and generally causing mayhem.

As an adult, having fond memories of the cathedral, I went there with my family, and we noticed that the door to the chapter house had been left open, so I went through it because I didn’t know what was in there. I had never been willing to pay.

There were some exhibits surrounding a sort of curtained off chamber. There was a queue to enter the darkened room and I duly joined it, if only to try and assess whether the mystery thing was worth seeing. I was about to give up (because I have no tolerance of long queues) when I noticed the person queuing behind me had started behaving oddly; she was now walking alongside me in some kind of erroneous parallel queueing system. If you’re not from round here I must explain the one thing the British truly value is an orderly queue. This sort of behaviour cannot be tolerated, and thus I became throughly invested, with the sole purpose of not letting her in, and in one of the slowest races in history we crawled slowly towards whatever the hell was behind the curtain. No one else let her in either. She couldn’t even get back into her former position behind me. She had to leave the room in shame.

And that’s how I came to break into to see the Magna Carta out of spite. Was it worth it? Probably. But only because it was free, and I was victorious. Otherwise it was a quite tedious legal document which isn’t in English. Doesn’t even have any pictures. No jousting snails in the margin, rubbish. Apparently I didn’t even take a picture of it, but I did take one of this far preferable cathedral graffiti.

Five! Five cormorants stacked in the dead tree on an island in the middle of the lake. A new record. And it’s cold. It’s been Friday all week, and it will be Friday until about Christmas, from what I can discern. Every day, new bargains are sent to my mailbox because it’s Friday, even when it’s not, because it’s almost Friday and theres a pre sale and that means you should buy things. I don’t know what makes it black though, because it’s actually quite sunny.

Last week it seemed that there were sheep in the field already, but when I did the maths it was mid November and that’s a perfectly reasonable timescale. You harvest wheat in August, grow some turnips and then they are ready to fatten up sheep in the winter; I think I was struggling to grasp the concept of it being winter. Now the turnips are frosty, it all starts to fall into place. It’s winter, and the world is full of cormorants and sheep and turnips.

There’s a red kite sitting on the very top branch of the weeping willow, a tenuous fragile thing. The branch, that is, not the kite. The kite will rip a sandwich out of your hands with a display of sharp talons and ferocious accuracy, it’s not at all fragile. I mean that the branch does not seem sturdy to support such a massive bird, but he launches himself and gracefully wheels about the lake in an aerial display of kite-ness, the forked tail, the white head, the vast wingspan- how could it balance on such a twig?

Thinking of it, yesterday I saw a squirrel sitting on top of the dog rose that sprawls across the top of the lilac bush, which seemed similarly improbable. Perhaps squirrels and kites are a lot lighter than I think they are, or perhaps gravity is not working properly at the moment*. That would explain why the gym people have accepted me as a gym person; I’ve been asked about my training several times, despite never considering myself to be doing any such thing. I do like lifting weights though. I just assumed it was glaringly obvious I an impostor, a non gym person who happened for indiscernible reasons, to like lifting weights, and was forced to go into a gym to do so.

Not only that but people have been asking me for help. I showed a lady how to use the adductor machine last week, who then asked me if I had lost weight using it. It was a disappointing question, firstly because she didn’t need to lose weight, but also she was probably in her 70s, and I would have hope for the societal pressure for women to dissappear themselves would have lessened after that age. I tell her I have not lost weight, and aimed to bulk up and crush the heads of my enemies like watermelons, which I feel should always be the aim of gym attendance. Increase bone density, get strong enough to fight off attendants, use your dexterity to vault over the gates of the care home and go to the pub. That’ll be my gym goals when I am in my 70’s.

I’ve also realised that I am prepared to rush my sets a little if a girl is politely waiting while inoffensively pretending to look at her phone, but if someone is trying to hurry me along they will be watching be take every second of my 3 minute rest between sets. I do not care if you think your toned physique should give you priority. I was born fairly bloody minded, and its only got worse as I’ve aged. A gym bro aggressively pacing in the mirror behind the squat rack giving me looks is not intimidating, it only fuels my desire to do! More! Squats! If he hadn’t given up and buggered off I’d still be lunging there right now.

Workings

I’ve found a few more of these dragons under Oxford prints (Ironbridge printmaking prizewinner!!). These are the artist proofs, they are on a different, thinner paper and the paper size is smaller than the orginal print run- there’s less of a margin for framing, but it is you last option to buy one as it was a reduction print and I can’t reprint it. Grab a bargain.

Sorry for the terrible dark photos it’s because I forgot to take it in the five minutes of daylight today.

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I like big books and I can’t deny.

‘I grew up thinking this was normal’ says my son, who is stacking ITV digital monkeys on me ‘this is not normal. Why do you have four ITV digital monkeys?’ Friends, I do not have four ITV digital monkeys. There are three more under the bed, and one on the shelf over there. And thats just the full sized ones; no one’s managed to do a full census on all the little ones, though most of those are actually PG tips promotional monkeys. I hear PG tips are going to bring out some more which is exciting; I expect my monkey army to increase.

Some years ago I caught my husband watching a video on minimalism, which made me laugh because he’s married to me, and I’m one degree off clinically hoarding packing boxes because they’re really good and might be useful for something someday. Luckily for me he gave up on the idea before he gave up on me, a person who was told that they should charge entrance to their bedroom, because it was like a museum in there. Not any museum either, a veritable sprawling mess of cluttered artefacts such as one would find in the Pitt Rivers. And that was when I was 16, things are a lot worse now, or better, if you really like knitted monkeys. While he was cleaning out his bookshelf last week, I was buying this, which I found on postscript books for 99p:

It’s called ‘Marks of Genius’ and it’s a big book full of pictures of other big books (plus some small books and regular sized ones). I also saw it for sale the week before for considerably more at the bodleian library. It pleased me because, as I said last week, I like the bring home exhibition catalogues so I can study them in the safety of my museum-cave-home, and most of these books I have been lucky enough to see at various exhibitions at the Weston library, where I visit often. ‘Look at my book’ I tell my husband cheerfully, ‘it cost 99p and it’s really BIG’ I slam the massive tome down and remove three paperbacks from his reject pile because they are mine. I’m not going to read them, but I might one day wake up an entirely different person (a functional one that reads books) so I’d best keep them in case.

It’s probably a good thing he’s cleared out some room on the shelves, because obviously I have to buy some other books so that I got free postage otherwise it’d cost £4 in total, which would still be a massive bargain. Not that it’s going on the bookshelf immediately because it’s going on the pile of books to be read that lives next to my bed, which is starting to teeter dangerously. In case you are wondering, I’ve read one of them since last time, but I have also been to the charity shop again so over all, the pile is increasing to dangerous levels.

*and also things like Stonehenge. I’ve often thought lapses in gravity would explain how they used to build massive stone constructions before cranes were invented.

I walk out on a good and blustery day, with the sole intention to be alone; only the wind for company. I listen closely to the wind, sure that it would have some tales to tell having wrapped itself endlessly around this world. Is the wind silent when it rushes up in the atmosphere? Do the air particles themselves make a sound, or do we only hear the wind when it hits the trees, fluttering leaves and howling down the chimney? The wind hits my ears and howls down them, too. It tells me that humans are not worth talking to, that they are only interested in made up things like money and politics and boundaries. Nonsense. Nothing to care about. Humans, arrogant enough to say that man made things are not a part nature, as if they were not a part of things, as if they were not dependent on this earth. The wind doesn’t converse with humans; it steals building materials from the house building operation down the road and leaves them around the fields. I’ll keep working on it though; maybe one day, when I live in the forest in a house with chicken legs, the wind will whisper its secrets.

All four cormorants are back at the lake, sitting sentry in the dead tree. They have the lake on timeshare with the bats. If you sit long enough at dusk you can still see a pipistrelle wing past if the weather is ok, because they roost in the trees behind and it’s warm enough one might pop out for a snack. The daubentons and noctules abandoned ship for winter roosts weeks ago. The days of serious bat parties are gone now. Now is the season of the cormorant.

I thought maybe they might increase in numbers again this year, but then, perhaps four cormorants is the maximum a small lake can support. Seems logical. The trees are looking threadbare if you get up close. I still hope for a few weeks of colour yet, but eddies of leaves dance across the golf course, while more fall down to join them, a veritable autumnal snow globe. I might be overly optimistic. I don’t normally walk here if there are golfers playing the hole, but these ones only pace slowly while staring at the ground, which is a lot less dangerous than regular golf. They haven’t played the whole time I’ve been walking. I silently point out the golf ball lying on the grass as I pass, so they can get busy knocking it into the lake. The ball is white and it seems obvious to me amongst the leaf speckled grass, but they delightedly seem to think I am some kind of genius for finding it.

I smile mystically at thier praise. Maybe I am good at noticing things, for a human, anyway. Why not accept compliments at face value? Why always modestly downplay them? Golfballs, cormorants, wind blown leaves, a clump of mushrooms. Someone ought to notice them.

Workings

Hares are available here

I could probably do a framed one if you ask nicely, but that hasn’t been listed. Thanks for you orders last week, they all mean a lot. I’ll be working on some smaller, more affordable prints soon for stocking fillers and such so keep an eye out here:

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Findings.

This week I popped into Oxford to go and see the Suzanne Triester show at the museum of modern art. I’d seen some of the postcards for sale in the museum shop and decided it was worth paying to go and see- the prices are a fraction of what the Ashmolean charges anyway, so it seems like a bargain. Sadly you can’t leave and come back in after having a rest, which I really think an exhibition of this complexity needs. A day or two of digestion. There are also insufficient seats. Really insufficient. Other than that, I enjoyed it, especially her later works. I’m not so interested in the early video game stuff.

You might think my interest is paradoxical; I have no personal interest in a lot of what she explores, being more interested in nature than human activities and finding AI and generative art abhorrent, but I am interested in the tarot and psychedelic plants and creating fictional characters. I’m fascinated by her kabbalistic drawings. For want of a better term, I vibed with those works, getting it on a more than intellectual level. I don’t really want to talk about the works though, I don’t feel qualified, but it’s a good show and worth seeing if you are around.

Sometimes I get art on an intellectual level, but without this deeper feeling, it’s never going to resonate. Sometimes, as an artist myself, I am interested in a technical level too. I don’t have that with Suzanne Treister. It’s more like the feeling I have with William Blake; I am pretty certain that I have no idea what’s going on but somehow get it through commonality of expression. Feelings like these are why seeing art is amazing.

Another thing I realised is my enduring need to buy the exhibition catalogs, which is an expensive hobby I can ill afford. I always wanted to be the person making sketches al fresco, despite vastly preferring to drag little bits and bobs home and draw them in the safety of my studio. In the same way I want to drag bits of exhibitions home and enjoy them in the safety of home too. It’s a sort of fundamental part of my nature; maybe in order to feel creative I have to feel safe, and thats not possible out in the society, a human designed world that is vaguely hostile to people like me. I should probably stop trying to fulfil an ideal that goes against my actual nature and learn how to lean into being myself.

Anyway even if you buy the catalogue you should still take pictures if you can- I couldn’t find my favourites in the book but luckily I’d taken a cheeky photo for my journal. Also very much admire the book highlights the barcode in gloss day glo pink on the back there. Sorry about the photo- it was taken in darkness, some days the sun just doesn’t rise. See you next week!

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I turn the corner elegantly, and come to a stop with a deafening screech. It’s been such a dry summer I had forgotten that my bike brakes scream when it rains. Sometimes it’s quite useful, as I often forget to ring the bell in times of emergency, and the banshee shriek alerts those nearby to impending catastrophe when I brake hard. It’s not dissimilar to the noise I made when the bus I was waiting for cruised on past me, only my bike doesn’t swear. There’s a yellow wagtail in the drive to welcome me home, and some half eaten apples. I don’t know which deer ate them, maybe the muntjac, maybe the roe. It’s nice to be home, anyway.

The sunday before last the clocks had just gone back, and I’d forgotten it would be dark at half five, and that the bus stop is an unlit lay-by that is largly unused by the bus going population. Busses have headlights though, and I was waving increasing frantically, so I felt he should have notice me, especially as I moved as close to the road as I could without being actually hit by the bus as it sailed merrily past. That’s when the scream left my lips, a scream still, I feel, being carried by the wind to be heard in the far reaches of the Andes. A shriek of such urgency that the bus did actually stop. In the road. The driver was very apologetic. He was apologetic when I left the bus too. Do you think he heard? I ask my son as we walk towards New Theatre. ‘Yes’ my son says. ‘The whole of Oxford still reverberates with the words ‘f***ing stop’.’

My husband said we were leaving far too early, but I feel justified. You can’t trust public transport. What if I wasn’t in possession of a voice that could freeze passing vehicles in their tracks? What if I were a normal mortal instead of some kind of siren that stops vehicles in their tracks? I wasn’t prepared to be late. I wasn’t even prepared to be on time. I had tickets to Entangled Life live, really good ones because I bought them in February, and I was going to be early. I only have two modes; far too early, or I’ve completely forgotten, and I had not forgotten.

My husband had come down with a virus and bailed, and so I had called my son to take his place with urgency, since we now have to navigate public transport. I sent a text message, but I might as well have summoned him with a magic horn gifted to me by the fairies to be used in times of crisis, the way he thundered in through the door having run back full tilt from whatever bog or forest he was roaming about in. He’s a good sort who always understands the assignment. ‘You’ll get there horrifically early’ my husband assures me.

I didn’t mind. I bought us drinks at the bar, had a chat about Graeme , who I once served at the Little Chef. My son didn’t know who he was but the lady sitting next to us assured him he was quite famous back then. Possibly as famous as it’s possible for a cricketer to be. (He was a very pleasant customer. I had no idea who he was, because he wasn’t that famous, though he was the most famous person I served, unless I failed to recognise someone famouser and no-one pointed it out). I talked to a fellow that had come all the way from Worcester and was trying to synthesise DMT (unsuccessfully, and I don’t recommend confessing you’re synthesising chemicals to random strangers either). It was fun.

DMT came up in the show too (a legal medical study). I forget how it came up because it was a show about fungi and DMT isn’t a mushroom but 50% of the audience had a niche interest in a specific type of mushroom, so I guess it was relevant in its way. I forgot a lot of things actually. I enjoyed the show but really I sometimes wonder why I do things at all. Reading books or watching things. He puts up a quote by Ursula le Guin. I must remember that, I think, instantaneously forgetting everything about it. The words, the topic, everything except it wasn’t the quote about Harry Potter. Of course, I remember the things my brain finds important, it’s just I’ve paid a lot, and feel that it should remember 50 quids worth.

The only drawback to taking my son, who was delightful company, was he’s a stickler for rules. The sort to tell me ‘you can’t take photos, there’s a sign’

I point out there’s another sign that says ‘scan this QR code’ which requires a phone camera and he tells me you don’t have to actually take a photo to scan it while I blithely pretend to scan the code so I can accidentally take a terrible illegal photo as a memento. Old people struggle with technology, you see.

Anyway, if you have the opportunity to hear Merlin Sheldrake talk, I recommend it, he’s a very engaging speaker. Also, he has a fridge.

Workings

I’ve been in Cornwall hiding from life, and work, so I’ve got nothing except this terrible sketch of the sea. I’m always impressed at how bad I am painting en plein air (en plein voiture, really. It was raining) Arting in a different medium really puts me back in my place. You think you’re quite good at a thing, then you try and draw in public and realise that the whole of your technique relies on dragging things back to the safety of your room where you can erase everything three times, choose a better angle and light and use a substantially better paint.

Anyway, do consider buying something that’s not shit from the shop. Christmas is coming, and all that.

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Findings

My son wanted to go to Oxford to take photos of ‘medieval architecture’ for an art project, so, being an excellent parent, I took him tripping through the back alleys to the Bear, a pub that claims to originate in the 13th century and smells of old ties. Because it’s full of old ties. It stinks of ties and the stairs to the women’s toilets are particularly askew which is dangerous if you happen to be drunk, which you probably are because you’re in a pub and trying to dull the pain of smelling 2 centuries worth of decaying tie. I say two centuries because the whole oldest pub thing is a lie and they simply stole the name off a 13th century pub despite being a completly different pub. Anyway, my son was horrified because The Bear (and most actual medieval houses, I suspect) has none of the features he was looking for: Windows. Gables. Crenellations. It is Oxfords oldest pub, and smells like it, but it is also essentially a wonky box full of mouldering ties, so I took him to Christchurch college which isn’t quite medieval but is quite old and has sufficient gargoyles.

It also has a door with ‘no peel’ spelt out with nails, which refers to the British prime minister Robert Peel, and makes me wonder just when graffiti stops being vandalism and progresses into a tourist attraction. Like every doorway in Oxford, there is a tourist standing in the way. It’s traditional to have one or two blocking every entrance.

Christchurch pleased my son and has all the things he wanted and a few more, doesn’t smell of ties and best of all, it’s horrifically expensive, probably because they shot a bit of some of the Harry Potter movies there. They kept trying to tell us it was a serious and boring documentary at the time so we wouldn’t bother them, but everyone knew it was Harry Potter. Which meant I still didn’t bother them, not interested in Harry Potter. Anyway, it’s horribly expensive but I don’t have to pay, which delights me endlessly and sort of justifies my degree. Also, because I don’t have to buy tickets, I get to walk past a large line of tourists who are queuing up to get absolutly fleeced. Enjoy these pictures of architecture so you don’t have to get fleeced (unless you particularly want to)

The weather is exceptionally autumnal; there is a chill in the air. I have rediscovered the joy of my electric blanket. Sadly there was not a newsletter last week as I had to obtain what used to be a repeat prescription,but now somehow isn’t, from my doctor, a mysterious beast I have not caught glimpse of in five years. In line with her being, I suspect, a unicorn, I had to complete a series of quests to appease her. First, fill out the online form, a transient beast that only appears a few hours a day, sort of like a shit brigadoon. Next I waited for the doctor to call me, which she didn’t, which lead to another hunt for brigadoon on the following days. That time went slightly better because she did manage to phone me, but only sufficiently late I’d given up and started cycling home. I explained I couldn’t talk right now; she explained she was a doctor. Sadly, although she is a doctor she is not the doctor, and thus cannot manipulate space and time, and I was still on a quite loud road. She said she’d phone back in 10 minutes and that was the last I heard of her.

You’re probably thinking that, since there is a newsletter today* the matter has been happily resolved; you would be wrong. I have managed to get my prescription, but I also seem to have started a blood feud with the receptionist, who is approximately 1500 years old and, I suspect, only works at the practice in order to steal the blood samples to preserve her immortality. She’s certainly not there because of her love of the job or her competency at it. Frankly the amount of effort it took means that I’ve done absolutely bugger all except make a dress. I would show you the dress but I’m not prepared to brush my hair and take a photograph. Sorry.

But there is an email for you today because I found this:

A magpie inkcap, coprinopsis picaea.

I’d gone to hide in the woods like a goblin until I felt strong enough to return to the human realms, and console myself with some fungi - the little white tremulous ones you find on tree stumps, some sulphur tuft, maybe a fly agaric if I was lucky. I’d bumped into a roe deer and said hello, so it wasn’t a bad walk at all, but it was about to get a lot better. Look at this treasure, which I have never seen in the wild before. Is it my favourite? Yes. Like a gothic fly agaric. Is it poisonous? Absolutely. Did I pick it and take it home to draw? Absolutly not. There were many stems of deliquesced predecessors but I daren’t remove the spores of such a rare beauty because I know where magpie inkcap live now which is absolutely marvellous information. I tried to get other people interested in rare and precious fungi but they are broken or something and don’t care, so I shall share it with you, my people. If you don’t think this is absolutely brilliant, I made you this:

*its not a letter and I’m not sure it contains new. Is a really good mushroom news? Probably. I don’t think I’m writing this because anyone cares about my news anyway. To be honest, I’m vaguely shocked anyone reads this, and certainly don’t understand why.

Workings

As I said, I haven’t done a lick of work. I have found my owl card for sale at Waterstones though, so that seems to be a professional sort of bit of news to share. Had to sign a contract and everything, check me out.

Findings

As you know, being a completely normal person I have a range of normal hobbies, such as breeding shrimp and biting increasing small ornamental pumpkins and stacking them. Recently I have been collecting fragments of old languages preserved in songs; this week I found a letter. I knew of some other letters that have dissapeared from the english language, possibly because of the invention of printing press - they simply didn’t have the letter þ, or thorn, for example. Þ makes a ‘th’ sound like, well the th in thorn. Not having a þ in the type that came with printing presses people for some reason substituted Y for Þ that’s why ‘ye olde bookshop’ would be pronounced the old bookshop much like we do but with a West Country drawl (I suppose). It’s confusing because ‘ye’ is also a word (as in ‘ye of little faith’) so I’m assuming somewhere along the line people just went with writing th, unlike the Icelandic which kept þ and are far more hardcore.

In a similar way I discovered the name Menzies was pronounces MINGIS. Honestly I prefer Menzies; why would you look at a baby and say ‘he looks like a Mingis’? I’m fairly sure I called my brother a Mingus and I didn’t mean it kindly. Anyway, it’s old Scots and the letter z in that word IS NOT A Z. It’s the letter yogh, which looks like a cursive z, the one that sort of looks like a 3. Brilliant.

Anyway. Don’t forget that there’s no newsletter next week due to half term disruptions x

The apple tree has been picked. My husband climbed it, dangling precariously while lowering bucketfuls of apples down on a string, but this year was so abundant it hardly looks touched. Masses of apples still hang from impossible to reach branches, tumbling down in strong winds, or just of thier own accords. After September 30th, you should leave the windfalls for the fairies, but I doubt the fairies are eating them, unless they are exceptionally well endowed in the jaw department, a mystery that was solved early yesterday morning when I caught this fellow, and a couple of his girlfriends, in the garden. You can’t get more autumnal a sight than roe deer eating apples. I think he had some lavender for pudding- do deer eat lavender? He was in the flower bed, anyway. Then they aided the digestion with some fennel:

I don’t leave the windfalls for fairies, I scoop up the ones without bite marks and cook them up because there’s too many to leave them rotting on the floor. I’m not the only one, sometimes I see a nice fat apple on the way out and it’s gone by the time I get home. Last week I was disturbed by a furious pummeling on my door, more sinister than even those delivery men that, confused by the lack of doorbell, mistakenly believe that they need to knock hard enough to break the door down. This is the sort of double fisted pummeling that your brother adminsiters after you’ve locked him out because he was being a knobhead; the type that you don’t open the door to because it will be transferred to your person the moment that you do. I tell the perpetrator, who I cannot see, to stop. I will not be opening the door. There’s probably no doorbell because it was assumed we would install a ring doorbell, which I haven’t because I’ve never needed to know who’s at the door before answering it until now.

She reveals herself when she peers through my windows, before shuffling off with a wheeled shopping bag in tow. I don’t know who she is or what she wanted. I assume apples, but maybe chestnuts. I don’t live in a place you bring wheeled shopping bags to unless you are expecting a haul; dirt tracks aren’t conducive to them. Maybe I’m wrong, I didn’t find out what she actually wanted because the answer to ‘why are you pummelling my door’ was incoherent.

If you pick windfalls after the 30th, the fairies send their emissaries to pummel your door. If you do not leave some in a bucket by the gatepost the apple witch of entitlement will pay you a visit.

Ladybirds crowd around the outside of the windows, trying to get in. You shouldn’t open the door to them, either. The sensible ones hide outside, between the wall and the cladding, which is a good enough place to hibernate. Some will get inside, and if I don’t find them, they don’t fare well, though possibly a large percentage of ladybirds hibernating don’t fare well wherever they hide. These already a dead one by the toothpaste. If they do wake up inside next spring, after avoiding the spiders and their webs, there’s very little to eat.

If you pay attention, there are different, more subtle signs of autumn that people don’t seem to write about. I sing a little song: Autumn days, and the grass is jewelled, acorns dropping on my head. Old ladies abuse the door to get refuelled* and a ladybird that’s dead!

*with apples. Maybe.

Workings

This has been listed- yes,I know, within a week of me saying it would be available, inexplicable proficiency - though apparently I can’t post to Canada now, or maybe I can but it won’t get there.

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There’s other things to buy too.

Findings

I’ve found another ancient language song- a Bretonic counting song.

Well, it’s just counting, but there is a guy that sang it within a song which is good enough.

Incidentally, don’t people from the 1970s always seem to look really old for their age? Is that just hairstyles, or bad skincare?

The mornings change from bright and crisp to mellow, tinged with fog and mushrooms, soft around the edges. The leaves start to change colour, a gradual change in shades as the chlorophyll degrades, not the desperate yellowing of heat stress. I meander my way along woodland paths without hurry, as the season dictates. The fungi are actually thin on the ground; it’s been dry all week, and the few I find are too dehydrated to identify. I’ve been alone all weekend, as my husband and son are off on a school trip that involves walking up Yr Wyddfa, formerly known as Snowdon, three times in two days. I can understand wanting to walk up more than once. I’ve walked up once, and would do so again. It’s just, in my eyes, 25 years is about the right amount of time between summits. Or at least, the gap should be measured in years, not hours.

I’ve been alone a while now. The silence starts to seep into my bones. If you get close enough to the ground, you start to see the fungi. I poke at what I think is a severely dehydrated slippery jack. It’s not really slippery anymore, just a jack at the moment. . There are better mushrooms around the mossy stumps, where the moss stores moisture and keeps the humidity up.

‘Did you know that mushroom cells are made of chitin?’ Said my son earlier in the week, apropos of nothing. He comes home from school full of facts, delighted to finally be studying subjects he likes. ‘That’s the same stuff insects are made of’. I think this fact came from a biology lesson. I do, in fact, know some mushroom cell walls contain chitin. It is in my new mushroom book, and the Merlin Sheldrake one. I know a lot of his facts, because my son’s main love is geology, and I am partial to a nice rock myself. I do not hear many facts about German, but some amusing anecdotes about how there is a native speaker in the class, but the A level is not quite as easy as he’d hoped because German as a second language is not taught as native speakers learn it; the same way, I suppose, I am not quite sure what a past participle or a split digraph is but its never hindered me writing absurd newsletters.

Actually I do know what a split digraph is, though strangely my son does not remember, despite it being a considered critically important in primary school. He spent a long time trying to teach me about them ten years ago, failing to understand something about the word digraph makes me want to know as little as possible about it, and instantaneously reject any information on it from my brain.

I only know what one is because my friend, a primary school teacher, told me a split digraph was simply a completely shit way of describing magic e. Why is it shit, you ask? Well, firstly, magic e sounds exciting, and possibly forbidden, like a cool drug. I want to know about magic e’s, tell me more. Names matter, but also, it has a song. My son doesn’t remember what a split digraph is despite the amount of bandwidth it took up in year two, but I never forgot about magic e, because it had a song featuring a wizard, which back in times of yore meant the special privilege of getting the telly wheeled in so you could watch words and pictures, which was the pinnacle of primary school excitement. You don’t forget that sort of thing (See also the 1066 song and that autumn days hymn, which was a bit less educational because it gave a whole generation false memories that we’d seen jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled)

Workings

I’ve finished this now, and I think it turned out even better than expected, so I will be listing it in a couple of days when the ink is thoroughly dry.

Watch this space (regulars in the UK can email me for a discount if they want to pay by bank transfer, as per usual)

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Findings.

It’s ancient wisdom that words are magic things, after all, they make the intangible realm of thoughts out of minds and into the world; and as I said before, if you want to make words stick, then you sing them. This too is ancient knowledge; incantation, enchant, charm all have their roots in the Latin cantare, to sing.

This week I learnt that in the 1930’s a researcher investigating Gullah, a creole language spoken in the US low country by formerly enslaved people, recorded a song sung by Amelia Dawley. She didn’t understand it.

Years later a series of coincidences lead to the language of the song being identified as Mende, a dialect of southern Sierra Leone. In the 1990’s researchers took recordings all through the region, and found the song alive and being sung in only one village, which may well mean they can trace, through those words alone, where Amelia’s ancestors were taken 300 years previously. You can read about it here.

This isn’t the only case I know of where songs have been remembered even though the language has not. Sometimes it has been assumed that the lyrics are simply gibberish when they have in fact been another language, or sometimes an extinct language, as in the case of the the Unst boat song, which is in Norn, a language once spoken on Shetland. If you can think of any other songs crossing cultural divides I’d love to know, because I seem to be collecting them.

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The reward for a perfect week is to do it all again. A horrific discovery. Really, it’s better to have a less than perfect week, the worse the better. Then you have something to aspire to, you can say, I’ll try harder next week. But if you can’t try harder, then you just have to do it all again, only this time you’re tired from being perfect the week before, which takes a lot of energy if you are a horrifically flawed human like me. I have done the laundry, so why is the laundry back again? This doesn’t seem fair. I don’t recommend it at all, actually.

A teaching friend once said that the difference between year 8 and year 12 was when he sarcastically asked ‘what do you want? A chocolate medal?’, Year 8 (the 12-13 year olds) would say yes. And they are right to do so. When did we stop getting rewarded for doing things? Because the reward for creating a healthy, nutritious meal is a kitchen full of dishes I’m supposed to clean which is frankly not on*. The advert for fairy liquid claims if you leave a dish to soak, in the corner of your mind, you will be worrying about undone dishes. This is not true. I am the personification of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. I have literally no perception of anything that isn’t right in front of my face, and I have no intention of going back into the kitchen after dinner to remind myself.

Some of the disappointment may actually come from realising it is not laziness, but that no human is capable of doing what I expect myself to do in a week. Well, not just laziness, anyway. Part of the problem is that it only takes a second to write a thing that takes absolutely hours to do (gym. Draw hare. Print Meadow). But most of the disappointment is that I do not have a chocolate medal and I very much deserve one, even if morally I have to share it with my husband after I exploded the kitchen last night.

To cheer myself up, I decide to walk to the woods. My husband has forgotten his ID card, so I take it to him; although it is in the wrong direction entirely, it does allow me to walk past the lake, and brings to total amount of woods I visit up to three because I walk through 2 small ones to get to the big one.

I find a full complement of swans (2 adult, 4 juvenile) an enormous amount of Canada geese at the lake. Maybe they are gathering up to migrate too, or maybe they just had a prosperous year raising babies, and last years babies had babies, and now they are all adult. How many geese can one small golf course sustain? Perhaps we will have to ban golfers because we need that grass to support our goose army which we will surely need in the apocalypse. Not to eat. To fight. No one fights like an angry goose.

It is good to contemplate the important questions in life, like how to support a goose army. And train them too, I suppose. I haven’t thought enough about important things like goose armies, partly because I hurt my foot and haven’t been walking as much, but mostly because I have been doing relentless chores from an unending list of things to do.

I slow down and pay attention. I find a really red bolete at the woods, which makes me happy. It does not bleed blue, which is a strange thing some boletes do when they are damaged, which helps with identification. I suspect it is a ruby bolete, a fairly rare mushroom I have not seen one before. The reprise is brief because I am soon home, and realising to my horror that I have to manage to do all the things a third week in a row.

Workings

I have been printing the colour layer of the meadow all week. I have no idea how this will work with the final layer on. It might look terrible. My sneaky plan was to print the final layer to check it looked good before showing you this layer. I didn’t do this (it’s almost like I am not actually perfect even when I am trying really hard). Also, without the final layer to make it make sense, it looks really bad. Not as bad as the owl that looked like a mutant furby, but definitely not something I should be showing people in the hope they will give me money.

I’ve also started this nonsense again. You are probably wondering why another hare? I cannot answer that. If I had any ability to do things I wasn’t interested in I’d probably have a regular job that paid a salary, or at the very least, a smaller to do list.

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Findings

I found out this week you can cook gnocci in the oven and the gnocci taste even better than if you boil them. You just chop up an onion and some veg and shove it in the oven with some harissa paste and olive oil on for 20 mins, then mix some feta in and put it back in for another 20 mins. This gives the impression you have slaved over a meal while never turning the hob on. Frankly the hob is my enemy, and I cannot suppress my delight at avoiding it. Next week I’m gonna see if I can cook pasta in one pot the oven.

* my long suffering husband usually sorts that out

As I walk along a horse chestnut, heavy with the weight of autumn, falls onto the asphalt and splits open, its glossy conker tumbling out and rolling along the road. I add it to my list of autumnal signs:

Condensation on the windows.

A cormorant at the lake.

Acorns.

Green walnuts.

The pervasive smell of apples throughout the house and garden.

Yellow leaves.

Empty skies.

Conker attack.

The skies are empty because the swallows and housemartins left, over a week ago. My husband asked me why there were so many hirudines all at once swarming all over the college. It’s where the gather up, a meeting place, before they migrate. I have no proof of anything, but every year there is a day of many, many swallows and housemartins amassing around the buildings, and then there are none. The stables are empty.

I wonder if the stable swallows fly over to the college to meet with the housemartins and college swallows. I wonder how they know where it’s time to leave, when the others are meeting, and if that’s even how it all works. The birds they gather up and go and I think, it’s still warm, why not stay a little longer? But they know things and it’s no longer that warm and the rain seems constant.

I muse on the absence of the swallows for slightly over a week until I am distracted by a chaotic flock tumbling over the house, not the neat organised flight of the winter starlings, who will surely come soon, but the gang of mixed corvids that pick about the field then hang about the chestnut trees in a bickering noisy rabble all winter. On sits in the pine tree before rejoining the group. Silly to think the skies would ever be empty really.

Musings

This year the apples did not get picked; the last week of the holidays everyone was ill and it started to rain and that job didn’t get done, so I’ve been doing the best I can alone. I am eager to get printing so I should, I think, feel resentful that I have to spend my work hours appleing instead. Society tells us money, and the things that earn it are of prime importance, and that happiness is to be found in big meaningful event. We might save for a holiday, for a big wedding, for the most advanced phone; and then we can be happy, but only for a moment. This way big companies can profit from happiness. This way we spend our lives trudging through what one supposes is the drudge work, waiting for the day when we can afford to be happy, slogging through the menial tasks, trying to get them over and done with, not paying attention, pushing aside the bulk of our one precious life.

I have to cook those apples that have fallen immediately because their bruises will eventually rot, and cause any neighbouring apples to spoil as well. It is slow and methodical work, full of good smells; it bids me to slow down, pay attention. I think joy hides in the pauses of life. We think that we need to be busy, to plan big events, go to exotic places to find happiness, but it’s actually a matter of paying attention, which is all the more difficult when the world is hard.

I am entranced by the sunlight trickling through the canopy when I pick the apples, and the rustle of an apple I’ve accidentally dislodged tumbling through the leaves towards its terminal thud. I am so grateful to be the guardian of these trees. I don’t know why it would surprise me; I love everything about apples. The blossom, the sight of autumn blushed apples hanging in the branches in such abundance, greeting me when I come home, the smell of them decomposing in the garden, and cooking in the kitchen. I love to see the windfalls peeking out from amongst the grass, and am fascinated by the patterns of mould and the way a select few turn completely black. I just really love the apples. They make me happy, even when it’s technically a chore, so I guess thats why I’m writing about them, here’s a print I made a couple of years ago to make it seem relevant:

That’s still available in the shop, though I probably haven’t managed to switch US sales back on yet. Apparently RM is now shipping there again and I need to earn some money but I’m really disorganised.

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Workings

As I said, I had a cold at the end of the oil days. I’ve been trying to push through, thinking it was some kind of post viral fatigue, only to discover that I was, in fact, incubating a new cold, so I haven’t got as much done as I would have liked, but that’s OK.

I’ve finished this plate, so now I have to just do the hard bit. Watch this space.

Also, exhibition news:

Also thanks for the donations last week, love you x

Bung us a quid

Findings

I’ve been about the charity shops and they were in fine fettle, I got three of these hardbacks from BHF alone. Some of them I did get a few new from postscript books though. I shall carefully stack them onto the quivering heap that lives by my bed and threatens to engulf me. We mustn’t mention the ones I have put away on shelves with no actual intention of reading (sometimes I buy a book to complete a set. Sometimes it’s really just about the pictures-I mean, it’s a reference book, not a reading book ). I would make another solemn promise to not buy more books till I’ve read at least some of these, but I’ve already seen at least 5 new releases I desperately need, which I store carefully in an amazon wishlist called ‘books I desperately need’ and wait patiently to become spontaneously incredibly rich, which seems unlikely. Still, I’m rich in apples and that’s what really counts.

Anyway, don’t expect a review of any of these anytime soon - isn’t buying them enough?

The corn was not as high as an elephants eye, not unless it was a quite small elephant, just a little bigger than me. Thinking about it, I am not sure how tall all species of elephants are, only that language has lead me to believe all elephants are, well, elephantine in dimensions, that is to say, large. I am not sure why I am thinking about elephants. Oh, yes, corn, or rather, maize. It’s gone. Somewhere in the last week of holiday while I was furiously doing all the things I supposed I had months to do so didn’t, they cut down the cornfield, which made me sad because it’s fun when the corn is big, and that didnt properly happen because it was stunted by the lack of rain. Once I took my son and a friend to the maize maze at millets farm and they were absolutely baffled as to why we’d pay £8 per person to wander around a field of maize when they could just wander around the field out back for free. I think the point was that it was a maze to get lost in, but their arguement was saving me £32 quid, so I wasn’t pushing it.

The trees are yellowing early too, which isn’t, the BBC tells us, an early autumn but heat stress, which seems kind of too obvious to be reporting on if I’m honest with you. Trees are yellow because theres no water is the sort of thing that seems obvious to me but I notice others struggle with given the number of ‘whats wrong with my tree’ posts with pictures of extremely dehydrated plants every drought year I see on the internet. I did wonder if some of the trees are shedding their leaves because its been so sunny they’ve got all their work done and are going to bed early; perhaps they are full of sugar, and there’s no more room. That also seems reasonable to me.

Out on the lake, there are three surviving swan babies, though they are not really babies anymore. I cannot see the fourth, but maybe he’s ok, hes big enough to wander off now. Three out of five is still a much better survival rate than last year, anyway. Something slick and black flicks through the water, eel like, low lying. There. I was not expecting that yet; a cormorant, just the head and neck, its heavy body so deep in the water that it cannot be seen. Last week, it seemed that summer would never end, and rain was a forgotten phenomenon only for it to return with torrential force, relentlessly this week. Last week I had marveled that the discorea elephantipes had started its autumnal growing season despite all environmental cues seeming to say it was very much summer. But the plants knew what I was slow to pick up on; the nights draw in, and the temperatures drop and the cormorants return and suddenly it’s autumn, and I need a jumper.

Workings

I’ve managed to fit in a little bit of work on this here are there throughout the holidays. It’s quite fiddly and took a while. Hopefully it will print ok. Sadly due to the orange menace I’ve had to suspend sale to the US (as have the Royal Mail). I’m not terribly happy about this because that affects my income quite a bit and it’s not been great out there even with US sales. Hopefully it will get sorted soon, one way or another.

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Findings

Last year I visited Bempton Cliffs in May, in order to see the gannets doing thier mating dances. This year I visited in early July, in order to see the chicks such dances produce. I was not disappointed.

Gannet chicks are odd gangling things; they look like something I’d produce and one of the those drink and craft nights after I’d seen a particularly fluffy pipe cleaner that I thought would make a good bird, but was too drunk to quite remeber what a bird looked like other than the beak bit.

They are also very noisy.

Because of the relentless good weather we had over the summer I was quietly confident my gannet cruise would not get cancelled this year as it had the previous two. Third time lucky and all that.

I have never seen sea fog like it and I lived on the coast most my life. Sad times- but still, thats why I go to Bempton cliffs for my gannet fix- no boats required. And I was able to observe them fishing quite close by from land several times anyway; once, with binoculars, they seemed so close I would touch, or at least see the dynamics of what a gannet dive entails. I would have watched them for hours but sadly that happened during a rare but torrential downpour and for some reason my son wanted to run into the cafe for some hot chocolate (no idea why? There were gannets diving right there).

Also the place we stayed at was absolutly riddled with hares so you can expect more hare prints soon it was very inspiring.

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It is 10pm, the sky is blushed with sunset, still tinged with midsummer magic, and for the first time in some days, deliciously cool. The path is dusty, and sprinkles of dry leaves rain down, as if it were autumn. I wasn’t going out to look for bats, which is why I saw them before I heard them. I had my detector in my pocket, of course, but I hadn’t turned it on. I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary.

Noctules are big bats, they fly high, ranging far and wide. I hear them passing sometimes because they are noisy, but if you want to see them properly, really properly, you need to know where they are sleeping, so you catch them as they leave their roost, which fairly early for a bat, just before sunset. This is fine, because usually by midsummer, they are in their summer roost and I know the appropriate location of that. I’ve come to associate them with dog days, flying in the dusk over the playing fields on hot summer evenings with the boys still playing football beneath, but this year, despite my increasing vigilance, my life has been largely noctule free. Several weeks ago I headed down early in case I was somehow missing them, only to discover if you come out while it is still light, terrible things happen; humans are still up, and worse still, they were sitting on what I hitherto assumed was my personal bat watching bench. Incidentally, if you creep around the woods trying to avoid people about a week after the tiny frog exodus, you will find the grass therein is absolutely heaving with minuscule amphibians which makes progress slow but then, you have a lot of time while you wait for the terrible humans and their awful dogs to bugger off.

I did not find the noctules, and thus came to the sad conclusion that the tree that fell down over winter must have been the noctule roost, and I will never see the halcyon days of noctules gambolling en masse again. That’s why I was not looking this evening. I had given up. But now, high above the lake there are bats; maybe an amateur could mistake them for a bird. I walk as close to them as I can get, up the little almost-island, the bit where the land at the edge juts into to lake. There’s probably a word for that, a sort of inverse peninsula. A natural jetty. The geese are preparing to sleep there but the goose babies are practically adult now and they ignore me as if they are used to, and perhaps tired of, my nonsense. The bats swoop past my head, their distinctive hetrodyne signal blurring together into a senseless mass of noise that seems impossible to interpret, not that I need to. I know they are noctules.

I try and count them and fail. At least six. The noctules are back, finally returned from the maternity roost with even more noctules. I am so used to decline, to things being taken from me, that this growth in population seems to defy the odds. Look at them all, hear the cacophony. As they gradually begin to to drift off into the night, I return to my thankfully empty batting bench, and listen to the static clicks of the Daubenton’s bats skimming the surface of the lake to make short work of any midges they find. I know where the pips are, and they are doing very well; that they are not at the lake probably means there are tawny owlets nearby. I haven’t heard any owls, but I haven’t heard much from the owls in the garden this year either, and they seem to be doing very well if I base their wellness on the appearance of pellets in the garden. For some weeks they were presenting a regurgitated pellet near the washing line; thankfully, perhaps politely (more possibly due to a dislike of flapping drapery) , they have moved thier upchuck point away from the drying laundry near the pine tree. I used to think finding an owl pellet was a rare and precious thing; now, when I remove one it seems to seamlessly regenerate overnight like the head of a hydra.

The world seems a terrible place sometimes. Bad things are happening, brewing on the horizon, their ominous dark clouds casting shadows over our lives. More than one of my close friends are struggling through the darkest of times right now; unimaginable suffering abounds in the human world, in nature. Who am I to delight in bats and owls? Why should I have this happiness when the world is endlessly plunged into darkness?

Because it would be plunged into it anyway. Despair is what they want, but these morsels of delight are what keep us going. We must find them in our everyday life. The blossom of a favorite flower, the soft shoot from a seed freshly planted, the smell of coffee. Things given away for free, tiny morsels that could be overlooked- seek them and feast on them. Learn to forage joy, to find sustenance in lean times so we don’t starve. We must learn to notice them now, to give thanks, so that they are there for us when times grow dark. Besides, I am not afraid of the dark; it is when the bats come out.

Workings.

If you bought a hare, they’ve gone out now. The rest of the edition is to be probably going to be held over until after the small and mighty exhibition at The Royal Society of Painter-printmakers in London Bankside in September. I found out I was accepted into this this week which is delightful, but means I have to work out the logistics of getting work to and from London while being a hermit who can absolutely not cope with the overstimulation of a drop off, let alone one in the big smoke. Any ideas let me know.

Also, I’ve been drawing my feet.

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Findings.

I was asked to write a poem out in neat, which, since I am not a calligrapher, I hated. I do have quite nice handwriting, but I fail at the final hurdle with it all; I cannot write in the slow and meaningful way calligraphers do, and I am never careful enough to get all the letters looking the same. I know how to do it theoretically but I just can’t maintain concentration for that long, or rather, I’m just not that interested in letters.

I thought that the writing would get better with repetition but found that this is only true up till a point; it gets better for a while as I remember the poem and make less spelling and general errors; the lettering itself didn’t get that much better, and then there was a definite peak after which I was throughly bored of this poem and things got worse. This is over several days of practice. No doubt it could improve a bit if I were to practice my writing generally, but as I said, that I not going to happen as I find it very boring apart from that one year I was absolutely hyperfixated on it which is how it going looking like that. Also, it’s a very long poem, just drawing out the guides was a chore, so it’ll have to do.