Category: Posts of Note
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Falling and Laughing: or, why I love Orange Juice and loathe Spandau Ballet
On November 13th, 1980 Spandau Ballet made their Top of the Pops debut with their first single, To Cut a Long Story Short. Coiffed, primped and styled to within an inch of their lives, the north London quintet had kitted themselves out in full Highland dress for the occasion, complete with kilts, sashes, sporrans and…
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Six creative lessons from Herbie Hancock
Apologies about the delay to your Sunday newsletter: following a severe storm this weekend, we are currently dealing with a power outage in South Kintyre, and I’m posting this from the library in Campbeltown. I’m hoping our electricity will be restored in good time for this week’s pattern release (which very much depends on our…
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Blue in Green and me
Good morning, and welcome to your Rip it Up (and Start Again) Sunday newsletter. Today’s long read explores my personal connection to ‘Blue in Green’, which you can hear on this week’s two classic albums, both recorded in 1959: Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ and Bill Evans’ Portrait in Jazz. “Thanks, Dad!” It was my…
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knitter’s jukebox
Hello! We are beavering away behind the scenes, getting ready for the first pattern from Rip it Up, and Start Again. Tomorrow, there’ll be a newsletter, and club members will receive the first pattern, together with a separate email containing your discount code, and other essential club information. Please check your spam folders (where this…
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Rip it up, and start again
Wow! Thanks so much to those of you who have already signed up for our Rip it Up club! I’m thrilled to be sharing this project with you, and to have this opportunity to celebrate some of my favourite music and musicians! There’ll be a lot of creative fun in coming weeks (we’ll be kicking…
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announcing . . .
Hello! Thank you for bearing with me. I have a couple of announcements for you today . . . First, congratulations to all the Yorlin knitters who have completed their fabulous cardigans. The grand winner of our KAL is lovely Amy, who knitted her beautiful version in the tasty, complex, Horseback Brown shade of Milarrochy…
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Playtime
Although my dad did not take photography particularly “seriously” and would never regard his images as constituting, in any sense, an “archive”, the photographs and slides I have been scanning certainly reveal a lot about him and his character. To someone who didn’t know my dad, his photographs might seem a bit confounding. My dad…
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St Martin’s
One of the things I’ve found comforting in these sad days has been scanning and organising my Dad’s old slides and photographs. Spanning the late 1950s to the 2000s, these images are not only a rich and evocative source of family memory, but are powerfully suggestive of my Dad’s creative sensibility. This is particularly evident…
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Wal Davies
My lovely dad, Wal Davies, died on August 12th, aged 89. Dad was a gentle, smart, and incredibly silly man. He was a jazz musician of extraordinary talent: from a teenager . . . to his final years. Dad loved the music deeply and unconditionally, as he loved so many things: . . .me and…
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Each to their own
Good morning, people, it’s your happy-go-lucky labrador-friend BOB here. All of us have our favourite summer activities, and BEACH is a great place to enjoy them. Would you like to come with BOB and see? BEACH is BOB’s happy place, as it is, I think, for many humans who live here in Kintyre. Kintyre humans…
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Sea Rose
In spring and summer, the lanes and field margins of South Kintyre are awash with flowers: primroses and bluebells, cow parsley and campion. Each is lovely, and each has its season: midsummer being the time for nodding ox eye daisies and fragrant roses. Because I’m thinking a lot about roses at the moment, I’ve noticed…
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I see you, Rose
Perhaps for no poet did the rose serve as a more powerful motif than Rainer Maria Rilke. As he lay dying in 1926, he composed the epitaph which was later inscribed on his gravestone: rose, oh reiner widerspruch, lust,niemandes schlaf zu sein unter soviel lider rose, o pure contradiction, desireto be no one’s sleep beneath…
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The name of the rose
We inherited several roses in the mill garden and, never having grown them before, I’ve been trying to identify and learn about roses and their needs. In some cases this is quite simple. “Rhapsody in Blue“, for example, is an immediately recognisable cultivar, not only because of its its open blooms of a most unusual…
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pink pink!
I really enjoyed the discussion of yesterday’s rose / pink post. In the comments, we heard about different words for this colour in Dutch (Titia), Armenian (Annie), Finnish (Helen) and Hindi, Tamil and Gujarati (Deepa). Rebecca told us about how she’d been instructed that the liturgical vestments worn on Gaudete Sunday are definitely rose, and…
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Roses and pinks
It is rose season here in the mill garden, and I have the colour of roses on my mind. Because it is so loved, and because it has been so widely cultivated for such a very long time, perhaps no flower has the ability to soak up cultural meaning quite as much as the rose.…
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evocative ermine
I find our responses to colour endlessly fascinating. It’s amazing how, by simply looking at an object, we can so immediately use its palette to visualise another object that might share the same distinctive colouring. And there’s much more to this process than the brain simply using colour to awaken a neural association between two…