(photo taken by our friend, Mule, on this day)
Tom and I have been incredibly moved to read your comments on the last post. Thankyou so much for taking the time to write them.
Shortly, I should have some knitting to show you, but in the meantime, here are a few photos from my phone. . .
A walk at Craster.
Kippers!
Clouds.
First signs of Spring.
We’ve been down in St Annes for a couple of days. I enjoyed walking in the dunes, where there are many opportunities for wintry still-life photography. . .
. . . thorns and lichen . . .
. . . dessicated rosehips. . .
. . . those trees. . .
. . .and not-so-still life.
I am glad you enjoyed the lichen – I have also been very taken with it, and thought I’d show you a few more photos. Sumburgh Head is a place with a lot to look at: there is the focal point of the lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather; the cliffs are alive with the sights and sounds of seabirds (just imagine it at puffin time!); to the West, there is a fine view of Jarlshof’s mysterious outline; and Fair Isle shimmers distantly on the Southern horizon.
It is a place for looking far-away, but what is near-to is just as arresting. I became interested in the foghorn . . .
. . . and the pleasing effects of the weather on its paintwork.
while I was photographing rust, Tom noticed the lichen on the foghorn wall.
These swirls could seem inscrutably runic, but as I understand it, they are just a simple radial growth pattern, that can be used to measure age in much the same manner as the rings of a tree.
I love lichen: its crazy, luminous colours; its fluttering petal-like formations; the way it stoically turns its face to the North. It flourishes in the clean air of wild, exposed places, and is one of those organisms that illustrates how things of incredible delicacy and beauty can emerge out of a landscape that might initially seem quite harsh and unforgiving.
. . . like a lot of things on Shetland, really.
It’s still snowing here.
Snow is one of those things about which Jesus definitely is Not Sure.
Just check out his plum tree. . .
The wee man is spending the day inside, but me and Bruce have been out with the camera. I love the transformative effects of snow, even on the greyest winter day.
It was very quiet out there.
Though Bruce tried his best to make a ruckus.
Spare a thought for poor Tom, though, who set off for Liverpool this morning and is currently stuck on a stationary train somewhere in deepest Cumbria. Familiar Words of Doom have been uttered: “Replacement Bus Service.” If he ever gets there, Tom will be spending a few days at a conference. This will be interesting for both of us, as we’ve not been apart since I came out of hospital. It feels significant. Tom is really quite amazing: as well as working extremely hard in the World of Spleens all day, he then comes home and performs far more than his fair share of household tasks so that I can save my energy for my rehab. I know I couldn’t have managed the past ten months without him, and he is top of the list of the many things I feel extremely lucky for. But it seems a good time for me to try a few days of total independence. I am doing quite well at the moment. I mean, I feel a little peculiar all of the time, but lately the little peculiar that I feel has been slightly less. My norm seems more normal, in other words. I have found myself wondering two things: 1)whether this constant-vague-peculiarity is really subsiding or my brain is just getting used to it and 2) whether people realise how generally weird things are for those who have had a stroke. (I know that brain-injury sufferers who have linguistic difficulties carry around explanatory cards to be whipped out in difficult public situations, and there have been several occasions over the past few months when I have wished I was wearing a t-shirt proclaiming “HELLO! I’VE HAD A STROKE.”)
Physically, I am definitely still getting better, though the improvements are slow and incremental and sometimes hard for me to see. In fact, other people seem to notice these improvements more than I do. On Saturday, for example, we ran into a physio friend of ours who regarded my walking as something quite incredible (which I suppose it is, considering that the part of my brain that was most damaged was the bit controlling my leg and foot, and that some of my medical team thought it was unlikely that I’d ever be able to walk without a stick, brace, and one of those electronic thingummies). Recently, when I’ve been out with Bruce, I have even tried running a few steps. This is really very difficult – there is nothing my left leg likes less than moving at speed – but over the past few weeks I have progressed from five lopsided steps to twenty five. It feels quite exhilarating.
While I am on the subject, and as much for my benefit as anything else, I want to record an experience of a couple of weeks ago, after which my gait seemed to noticeably improve. Mostly, on my daily walks, I just pootle along as best I can, but there is a nice flat stretch of about half a mile where I try to make every single component of my gait correct – this takes more effort than you would imagine, and Bruce often becomes frustrated with what he must regard as pointless dawdling when ahead lie innumerable sticks and squirrels. Anyway, I was covering this gait-focused half-mile a couple of weeks ago, and found that I was walking really well – the knee seemed to be working without locking (a recurrent issue), and my steps were smooth and even. This continued for about half a minute, and then I suddenly had a terrible attack of vertigo and nausea – I had to hold onto a tree while I waited for it to subside – and then took Bruce the shortest way home. There then followed the particularly evil bout of fatigue (mentioned in this post), but a few days afterward I found myself capable of walking six-and-a-half miles from our flat to the Modern Art Gallery and back. I have wondered since whether, at that moment, my brain finally made some sort of useful connection, and that this somehow caused the crazy nausea. In any case, since then, my leg has certainly had more strength and stamina and my knee has been acting more reliably.
Anyway, I seem to have rambled far away from the ostensible subject of this post – which was supposed to be the novel experience of doing my own washing up and cooking for a few days. On the subject of which, I better go and put my supper on. . .
I’ve never really been one for the camera on my phone, but since I acquired one of those silly apps that makes everything look like 1975, it has suddenly become much more interesting. Even when the Autumn light is pretty rotten (as it is at the moment) you can still get some quite appealing effects, and it is much easier for me to carry about than a heavy SLR. I am feeling much more perky today (hurrah), and have been out for a nice lunchtime ramble with Bruce around my locale. Here are a few shots from our familiar paths.
Trees in Victoria Park
One of Gormley’s Six Times, near Warriston
Cherry tree-lined path around St Marks. . .
. . .The Water of Leith
. . . sit . . .
Stay.
Thanks for your comments on the previous post. I particularly appreciated what Debbie B and kblemay had to say. Also, a big thankyou to those of you who emailed me last night with the news that an o w l sweater had appeared on BBC4′s Only Connect. I really was ridiculously excited.
I have been playing around with ideas about mending and darning for a forthcoming article, and have been turning up some interesting tangential things in various digital collections. Pictured above are “Chicago’s top models for 1922″ who have been co-opted to advertise the novel innovation of the seam ripper. The caption reads “Ripping is a pleasure with Rip-Easy!” What’s interesting about this Iowa sewing company’s choice of marketing is that it seemed to be entirely directed at men. This photo, with its group of local lovelies, “pleasurably” ripping the seams out of silk and lace while displaying their ankles, most obviously speaks to the male viewer. That same year “Rip Easy” advertised itself in Boys Life Magazine as “the best and most practical device to help the folks at home with their home sewing. Send in 10c for a sample and Do a Good Turn for Mother.” Perhaps “Rip-Easy” assumed that men and boys were more likely to be fascinated by stitching gadgets than the women stitchers themselves . . or that blokes were simply more interested in the rather racy idea of women’s ripped seams. . . either way, I’ve not found any comparable advertisments in the women’s magazines of 1922.
Here is more racy mending, from a 1904 postcard. This stitcher is clearly an impressive multi-tasker: fixing a hem while reading The Sunday Magazine and giving whoever is watching her raise her skirts a wee thrill. No matter that it is much easier to stitch a hem if one is not already wearing it, to sit in a comfortable chair while sewing, or to use a pair of scissors rather than one’s teeth: the legs are what’s at stake here.
I’ve found lots of these mildly racy, early twentieth-century images of mending, and it isn’t that surprising. Associations between mending and s*x are conventional and familiar from centuries of genre painting and portraiture: a woman looking at the work in her lap gives a man an opportunity to look at her; a female servant bent over her darning displays her hands or chest; an idle stitcher clearly has her mind on other things.
but then I began to find an awful lot of these:
which took the s*xual politics of the sewing basket to a slightly different place. . .
I’m enjoying a lovely weekend at home after quite a tough week in rehab. We’ve been trying to get my foot to move of its own accord. I’ve spent hours thinking about moving the foot muscles; attempting (in vain) to move the foot; watching the foot hang there like a dead clawed-up thing; and trying not to think too much about the prospect of it remaining like that for good. It is difficult stuff. On the positive side, I’ve been using weights in the exercise class, and this really seems to help with the bilateral rhythm. Just giving the left arm something to resist again meant that, by Friday, I was able to move about to “Starship Trooper” and “Kung Fu Fighting” with a modicum of co-ordination. Bingo!
Several other things have felt like real achievements this week. I finished off some socks for Tom. These are the first thing I’ve knitted to completion since having the stroke. I look at them and I see much more than a pair of plain socks in Noro Kureyon (a yarn I will never knit with again). I see the days of effort in which I struggled to make my fingers move and my elbow to support the weight of both my left hand and the knitting. I also see the difficulty of learning a well-known skill from scratch, and the joy of being able to do something I love again. There are hours and hours of many small achievements stitched into this unassuming and uneven pair. Tom likes them very much.
I’ve also been building up my stamina and strength in more ways than one. This morning I decided that I should try to walk to the place where I had the stroke (on one of my familiar paths). I felt it was important to do this: it happened in a place that I am fond of, and I didn’t want to get hung up about it; for it to be somewhere marked with fear and permanently associated with a horrible event. I was worried both about the walking (one and a half miles there and back) and about how I’d feel when I got there. On both scores it was difficult, but I was fine. I stood there and of course I thought a little about how it felt to fall over on a cold February morning after a gun seemed to go off in my head. But I also thought about the many other times I’ve walked there. With its birch trees, its blackbird and blackberry filled hedgerows, its happy views of the allotments, its motley traffic of runners, pedestrians and cyclists, it is a path that I love to walk along and I know that I shall walk along it many times again. And, seriously folks, I walked for one and a half miles! With my gammy leg and my dead foot! And then I came home and slept for two hours.
I also enjoyed a far less taxing walk in the Botanics yesterday. It was marvellous simply to move about in the sunshine encountering so many signs of Spring (I became foolishly excited when we spotted a bee). A garden really is a very healing place in which to spend time, and I am looking forward to wandering in the Botanics with Tom many times again as I recover. I particularly enjoyed photographing the fresh colours and textures in the alpine garden, so here are a few pictures from there to close.
You will note that this advent calendar is turning out to have a determinedly snowy theme. Behind today’s door are some images from our lovely weekend away in the woods and hills. I do enjoy the snow — both for walking, and for photographing. I love its eerie quietness; its crazy, sculptural qualities; the incredible things it can do to the light. When you look at a snowy place from a distance, it seems almost felted, softened, somehow — its sharp edges smoothed away — as if the landscape were sleeping, or at rest. Close up, though, you see that the landscape isn’t sleeping at all, but rather that it has assumed a new outlandish, wintry form. The snow effects a total transformation as it covers the landscape, enacting its own playful metamorphoses. I like the way that it gave each reed its own little hat . . .
. . . and made these grasses shimmer with their own delicate sort of bling . . .
. . . these seed husks bend and tremble under a snowflake frosting . . .
. . . and the shape of these new buds is mirrored in the snow droplets beneath them. . .
I spent a long time with the underside of this fallen tree.
It is a bare, dead thing — but the snow makes it marvellous, makes it more than itself. . .
Snow, of course, is treacherous as well as beautiful, and I hope all is very well with those of you on the other side of the Atlantic, for whom snow has meant severe storms, punishing temperatures, and terrible disruption over the past couple of days.
To close this snowy post, here is a West Highland forest in the act of transformation.
Behind today’s advent calendar door is Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, photographed in 1915 by Frank Hurley. This startling image — which suggests the engulfing beauty of the Antarctic landscape, as well as the vulnerability of the ship (and all things human) within it, features in an exhibition I saw recently at Holyrood. Hurley was a superlative photographer of texture, and his images of the breaking up of the Endurance after it became trapped in the ice are particularly startling and powerful. I was even more drawn, though, to the terrifying quietness of Herbert Ponting’s images of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. The brutal materiality of some of these photographs was quite gripping, and tremendously moving. It will be no surprise to you that I spent a lot of time focusing on what Scott’s party were wearing: their socks, their sweaters, their balaclavas, their skins and fur. I am reading lots about the history of outdoor wear at the moment, as well as being in the process of making some for myself, and I will say more about this another time. Anyway, if you are in or near Edinburgh, I heartily recommend you go and see this super exhibition. If not, you can enjoy it in a virtual sort of way through its excellent website (and accompanying audio commentary / podcast). Meanwhile, we are off to our own landscape of ice and snow today to celebrate Tom’s birthday in true Highland style. Hope you have a lovely weekend!
I’ve always liked the Dalahäst, and was really pleased when my horse-themed stamps turned up here yesterday. This one is designed by the Mayberry Sparrow and I love it. The Dalahäst reminds me of a wintertime trip that Tom and I took to Stockholm a few years ago, one of the highlights of which was hearing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in the Storkyrkan. The music was utterly marvellous, and, during the interval everyone decamped outside to enjoy some hot soup. I remember the warmth of the soup, the hush of the city under snow, and the twinkling lights of the candles in the Cathedral yard. Truly magical. I bought a couple of horses while we were in Stockholm — I know they are singularly touristy objects, but I really like them, particularly at this time of year. The one at the bottom will hang on our Christmas tree.
