It never rains..

Posted on 1st February 2026 by admin

Although it has, rained, a lot recently.  Up until yesterday the Met office was predicting today to be the only dry day this week, so I decided I would catch up with the washing, get it on the line, put the books out and then get pouring.

And then the Met office changed its mind and said it was going to rain today.  Alexa and various other online agencies agreed.  Bucketing down they said.  So I didn’t get on with anything much except pouring porcelain.

Regular readers like you (hello, how are you?  Glad we’ve got past January?) know that pouring porcelain dolls is tedious to say the least.  It is highly skilled; if you are a person making jointed porcelain dolls under two inches please get in touch for a mutual complain.  There might be someone in America, or Germany, maybe but I don’t know of anyone in the UK doing what I am doing currently, which is making doll’s dolls for dolls in twelfth scale and smaller.

Everything about it is difficult.  Despite what will be 34 years of practice, right now, some parts of the process are still reliant on a dollop of luck along with the learned skill.  This time round it has become apparent that two of the holes in two of the moulds are not quite right.  The shapes do not demould easily.  One of the hands, which is for a kit doll to make a Victorian doll’s doll just will not join in.  I may have been too ambitious in making a holding hand.  I think I thought at the time of modelling that it would be nice if you could make a kit doll and then give it a doll to hold.  Well it would but a bent hand in such a tiny scale is, apparently, not easy to make a mould from.

This means that when you have poured enough for eight dolls, which is eight heads, sixteen legs and sixteen arms, you only have three arms and they are all right hands.  It becomes necessary to carve the mould a bit until it will release and then just stand in the freezing kitchen and pour the missing hands one at a time, making up for the loss of detail in adapting the mould by carving it back into the wet clay.  As you know, you have to wait, sometimes an hour or more, for the plaster mould to absorb the water from the clay sufficiently for the shape to release.  As the mould gets wetter over time the release time changes.  Occasionally you find yourself trying to carve a dollop of nothing much, occasionally you put your knife on a very dry casting which crumbles to dust.  I find intuition to be the best timer.

There is a jointed doll which is easy to pour and will be quite small but it has thin ankles, which means that they are going to be difficult to rub down without breakages.

And there is a fourteen part twenty fourth small lady who turned out to have difficult shoulders.  Getting the hole in the correct place so that her shoulders would sit next to her torso nicely was the problem.

Days and days standing in the freezing kitchen are not good.  Also because I’m not working out, but still, foolishly eating because I am cold, I am getting fatter.  Getting fatter after Christmas is just annoying.

I read somewhere about the joy of creativity. This article did not include instructions on how to get your feet warm enough to be able to go to sleep, which  I feel would have been useful information.

In between the freezing hours I pop upstairs and make cards from printed scrapbook papers and similar.  It is slightly creative and certainly easy and good fun but it is someone else’s art with proven and demonstrated methods of completing the task.

Herein lies the reason why I fell in love with miniaturists forty years ago.  Very many of them are original artists in difficult mediums.  The skill levels of some Miniatura exhibitors are off the charts.  There are people who are crafty in the sense of sticking together pre-made items.  Over the years there have been some of those who were hailed as the new best thing.  I’d include people making up kits of various sorts, people decorating bought in items and so on.  One of the wonderful things about Miniatura is that the brochure for each show does indicate which exhibitors are crafters as such and which are original artists.  Over the years it has been interesting to see that the stickers together come and go but the original artists last the distance, in many cases only giving up when they actually die.

Which I am hoping will be me eventually.

Next up will be the gargoyles.  These are very experimental.  They are articulated, small and, naturally, never seen before,  and will only be seen if they work.  The first task is to find a way of creating porcelain slip of the right colour for a gargoyle.  Then I have to devise a way of attaching wings.

I’ll show you all of these things if they come to fruition.  Part of real creativity has to be the willingness to fail.  Not knowing if I can do it at all is the engine of uncertainty that propels me into the chilly kitchen in the middle of winter.

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Posted in About artists., Dolls | Tagged | Leave a comment

Economical presents.

Posted on 27th January 2026 by admin

Here in the back end of January some people are so inconsiderate as to have birthdays.  What are you thinking, expecting presents when normal people are surviving on the crumbs at the bottom of the bread bin and trying to make hot chocolate with quarter teaspoons of cocoa powder and water?

Of course these are the people whose giddy parents got carried away with daisies in the grass, birds twittering and a bit of sunshine back in the early summer.  Can no one count on their fingers anymore?  The only time for conscientious procreation is November, bearing the resulting children during the school holidays, giving them the opportunity to be the eldest and brightest in the class or another go a year later if they turn out to be a dunce.

Nevertheless some improvident families produce children in January, condemning them to a life time of presents bought in the sales.

Some years, however, going to a shop to purchase an item just to give away, feels like unnecessary extravagance.  It is surprising how nice a re-sourced gift can appear when gaily covered in Christmas wrapping paper turned inside out.  A quick felt tip pen can turn robins into birthday-appropriate ravens, and Rudolph into a seaside donkey with a drinking problem.

Cast around the house for suitable gifts to earn praise and gratitude for your thoughtfulness, and, with a little work, you can appear the soul of generosity.  Here is my initial list, do feel free to write with commendation or inspired additions of your own.

1) Short lengths, pre-cut, one careful owner, dental floss.  A matchbox makes a attractive container, especially if decorated with cut-out ravens.

2) Unscrumpled, lightly ironed, stacked paper hankies.  Everyone gets a cold in January, especially if sneezing relatives have been kissing them. Discard any that stick together and they will look as good as newish.

3) Re-boxed household surplus un-assorted orange crème chocolates.  The iron will again be your friend, helpfully erasing any evidence of licking before realisation of the awful flavour.

4) Worn-in socks.

5) A handmade drawstring plastic bag of assorted sized hair curlers. Perm curlers can often be found in the corners of hairdresser’s floors.  For giant card rollers, see the illustration below.  Everyone likes a beauty aid, especially the plain, or moderately ugly.*

6) Pocket-handy two inch pencils.

7) A cushion amusingly shaped like a pair of underpants with the legs sewn up.  You cannot go wrong with a talking point to break the ice at parties.

8) A washed-out marmalade jar with a full complement of biros with some ink left.

9) A knitted house plant cosy with holes at the sides for the leaves and decorative tea stains.

How about a selection of gifts acknowledging the recipient’s interests?

10) A gift for the keen crafter – string.

11) Gift a new hobby – start a collection with either a few tea pot lids, or, for those with a historical bent, a selection of previous year’s diaries, written up for the first week of January (so thoughtfully month relevant.)

How about some techy presents for youngsters?

12) A memory stick with some space on it.

13) The useful back of a phone case.

14) A roll of only partially exposed film.

And, for the man in your life –

15)  A tin cough sweet box generously filled with used nails, including many almost straight.

16) Handcrafted vintage oval plastic picture frames with matching oval top hinged lids that close so the photograph of the recipient behind will always have a fresh look.

17) DIY telescope kits.

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*How to make a drawstring plastic bag.

Take a plastic bag, poke holes round the top.  Thread the string you were going to gift in suggestion 10 through the holes, tying the ends together.  For a decorative touch glue a birthday raven to the front.

Coming soon – where to shop for cheap toilet seats.

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Posted in The parrot has landed. | Tagged | Leave a comment

More challenges.

Posted on 26th January 2026 by admin

When you have had enough challenges in life, you get smart.  You try to forestall them.  This has been a mistake for a couple of thousand years, at least.

In school, doing Latin literature, we studied the Aeneid.  In this ancient tale, Aeneas and his pals go off on a very lengthy circular trip.  In the last stanzas after numerous exhausting adventures they return to their own town, which, cresting the hill, they see below them.

Aeneas, explains the Latin, had done all this ‘quo fata requiras’ – as was required by fate.

The Romans knew a thing or two.  Perhaps you cannot escape your fate, maybe if you try to do so all you’re doing is embarking on a long circular campaign that will bring you back to where you started with nothing resolved, with a slight possibility of being wiser and a great certainty of being utterly knackered, ‘defessus’ if you’re an ancient Roman.

Nevertheless, determined to outrun my fate and looking backward in order to leap forward, I had asked the OH at Christmas if there were a way of backing up everything that needed backing up on a laptop whose battery was, I believed, failing.  I had been in this neck of the woods before.  Sudden demise of a computer can be sufficiently challenging to challenge your vocabulary as well as your blood pressure.

The OH examined my store of memory sticks, mainly in the form of cartoon characters, so I can easily identify who is guarding which unpublished novel, and had a good laugh.  Then he assisted me in ordering a memory stick with enough Gig to download the bank of England at least, promising to help his idiot mother to do the download, later.

Subsequently the OH went to a location at which a seller resided who had remotely sold the S&H two tyres and four wheels for a car that the S&H owns.  The OH fetched the tyres, which, when they are not on the axels of a car, are a lot bigger than you think and, also, a lot heavier.  He brought them to our garage and, with extreme difficulty, unloaded them to a space beside my library trolley.

There they stayed.

As anyone with adult children will tell you, they can approach any sort of grown up age you care to name, but still consider themselves to have storage rights at your address.

So it was when the electrical friend declared himself able to arrive (today) and bang holes in the garage wall through to the kitchen, I rang the S&H to tell him the garage door might be open for long periods of time and, in January, his ancient mother was unwilling, reluctant, in fact downright would not, stand outside in order to guard his tyres and wheels from muscular depredators.

Accordingly yesterday (Sunday) he arrived, set the massive memory stick to record the contents of the laptop, took his wheels with the assistance of his father, and a bag of stuff for the grandchildren (there is always a bag of stuff for the grandchildren) and departed.

When the computer grew tired of displaying the graphic illustrative of the lengths to which the backup had gone, it blanked the screen.  Visible progress was restored by jiggling the mouse and pressing escape.

I am not good at computers.  Wrong generation.  Inevitably I just pressed escape jiglessly, whereupon the machine informed me the backup had been cancelled.

A phone call to the S&H was answered when he had driven back to Wales, had Sunday lunch, done some shopping and was ready for the gym.  (This is my child, when and how and also why, did he become so active?  This is my little nerd, going to a gym, do they have computers there?  Have you ever been to one?  Do you know?)  He told me the procedure to follow so I did.

At this juncture I would have done the blog because I do try to do the blog on Sunday, every Sunday at the least.  But, jiggling my mouse revealed that the backup was still in progress.

Leaving that particular dead end I essayed a load in the washing machine, expecting to have to find £160 call-out fee in January.  Like everyone else we are eating  bread crusts and whatever is in the tin at the back of the cupboard that the label fell off. (The tin, not the cupboard.)

And for lo!  The machine worked.  It did not cry, it did not behave incontinently.  Oh muted hooray.  Now why is that?  Is it just doing it to lull me into a sense of false security?  Has it eaten the hearing aid batteries and enjoyed them?  Is it hoping for more loose change?  Is it saving up for something?

I then tackled the kitchen.  I washed, wiped, chucked out the tin tray commemorative of the Silver Jubilee with the late Queen looking very young and the Duke of Edinburgh totally erased by the bases of many mugs of tea.  I left my kitchen absolutely spotless.

Overnight the computer churned away.  This AM it had made no progress whatsoever apart from getting overheated underneath.  This was alarming, if it wants to get overheated I would prefer it to do so after everything is backed up.  I emailed the OH.

Finally, on his lunch break, he replied; upon his instruction the idiot mother wiped the memory stick and started again.

I quickly visited my own kitchen where the electrical friend was busy coating every surface with brick dust.  At this juncture I was able to get behind the built-in oven with a vacuum nozzle.

I am completely amazed that we have not previously demised from Black Death at least.  I have spent years wiping the surface of the cooker, utterly ignorant of the thick ropes of spider webs, builder’s rubble, unspecified dirt and enough Grease for several musicals that lurks below.

Having seen the weather forecast, I decided it would be wise to go shopping for pans that would work on an induction hob at once, despite the opinions of my intestines and psoriasis.  I left the OH and the electrical friend playing in the rubble, trying to take a few millimetres off the tiled hole into which the new hob would not fit by ‘that much Jane, just that much’, using a vast number of tools the friend had brought with him, many extra tools from the OH’s shed and other items that set the fire alarms off three times.

At the out of town big supermarket I purchased the one choice of Induction hob pans without metal conductible handles and loitered in Marks and Spencers as long as I could.

I returned to find the hall was the only place to put the shopping down as the kitchen had turned into a war zone.

The rest you know, if you’ve read the blog below.

The OH, accurately reading my expression, set to work tidying up.  He even washed the kitchen floor, which may have been a mistake because I now know he can do it.  He had, of course failed to clean the brick dust settled in the grouting, everywhere, on all the handles, on every jar, on the kettle and the teapot, on the light switches, the kitchen windowsill and numerous other locations.

We are, however, back to where we began.  We have a kitchen, it has a hob.  All that remains is to spend tomorrow cleaning the garage and then putting everything back where it was.

The OH is £500 + £1.50 and five hearing aid batteries lighter in the pocket.  I am out two pans, a milk pan and my favourite newish nice little ceramic frying pan which I gave to the S&H.

We are older, are we any wiser?

Is January the ideal time to skint yourself on a circular trip or was it all ‘quo fata requiras?’

I’m so defessus I couldn’t say.

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Challenges.

Posted on 26th January 2026 by admin

Life is so easy now, here in the future that there are no longer any problems.  That’s nice isn’t it?

What we have instead are challenges.  This is a challenge, that is challenging, this interesting individual has challenging behaviour, a challenge is a chance to develop our skills.

Has everyone forgotten what happened to a space shuttle called Challenger?

So far January round here has been nothing but challenges, which, of course are not disasters, and have only been occasioned by the challenging behaviour of the OH, which is a wonderful opportunity for me to develop my patience.

I’m sure it’s not challenging for you to recall (if it is scroll down to Hot Stuff) that the OH took the oven door to bits to clean it ‘properly’ – as in factory refit, contrary to the manufacturer’s destructions.

So off we went together to the electrical retailers to look at ovens.  Having agreed on an oven and agreed that it was too much to fork, casserole and oven mit out for in January, we departed.  Only for the OH to go back, on a whim, in his car alone, the following day and buy an induction hob.

I would have been in the kitchen aghast had my intestines not started playing up.  I find that while I’m alright with challenges my intestines and my psoriasis are not.

Were the weather better, and, as soon as it is, I shall be out in the garden whacking my block of stone with a hammer and chisel.  After the Uffizi the inspiration is probably Andromeda, chained to a rock in her vest, although the raison d’etre will be to stop frustration building up with a hammer and chisel.

The OH contacted a friend of his who has a proper job as a fireman and another job as an electrician.

If you contact an electrical company they will tell you for certain when they can come.  Make an appointment even.  If it’s a pal, they come and have a look and a chat and think about what it will entail and come for another look and…

…in the end I spoke to the friend on the phone and screwed him down to a day.

This was not me being difficult, this was me, with a Miniatura in the middle of March, having a set, unalterable number of weeks to pour my new moulds and do the work.

You cannot hurry porcelain.  You cannot stand by castings and shout ‘dry!’ at them, neither can you stand by the kiln yelling either ‘cook’ or ‘cool’.  Well you can if you are slightly to the left of insane but it won’t do you any good.

So I rearranged my schedule to allow time for the fitting of a hob I didn’t want and hadn’t asked for.

Immediately the OH announced five days before the arrival of the electrical friend that he would clear all my slip, my stuff and my kilns and lock them in his shed.

So, having heard the phrase ‘over my dead body and yours if you touch my stuff’ he then proceeded, challengingly, to nag me every half hour about when I was going to do it.

At this juncture the new washing machine helpfully flooded the floor.

Last June there was a similar flood, which after many interesting challenges and opportunities for growth, was resolved by a plumber but in the middle of which a new washing machine was removed with all the paperwork neatly tucked into the plastic bag in the drum and replaced by a replacement washing machine without paperwork.

Any reader with a good memory, or the ability to scroll down will know that I am usually very good with paperwork and able to produce fourteen year old receipts with a flourish.  For this expensive washing machine, being unable to comply had hindered me in registering the guarantee, which I had failed to do.

Now paddling, I thought it was maybe time to do so.

Companies find customer behaviour so challenging they feel constrained to speed read a good fifteen minutes  of legal utterances more back-covering than a cashmere boyfriend cardigan.

Having used this challenging phone time to develop my ability to withstand garbled stupidity whilst sounding neither annoyed or patronising, I managed successfully to avoid paying a mere £25 monthly for the next ten years, instead acquiescing to the £160 call out fee which would be levied if the fault were to be discovered to be due to transgressions on behalf of the washing machine holder in the form of pulling at the door, scrabbling at the seal, kicking the drum or door, leaving knives and sharp objects in pockets…

At the point of this particular challenge I kept silent.

For lo, just a couple of days previously the OH had been to the docs to fetch his new hearing aids.  The hearing aids came with a little, pocket-sized container of teeny tiny batteries.

‘Have you seen my hearing aid batteries?  They were in the pocket of my jeans, the ones drying on the radiator  but they are not there now.  Also there was £1.50 in the pocket.  Have you got that.  At all?’

A challenging question I think you’ll agree.

Here is another question:  Is a slew of tiny batteries accompanied by £1.50 in coins enough to cause a washing machine to break down in floods of tears?

So I agreed to everything, and, having mopped up, put the washing machine back on to wash the mop cloths and to see what challenging occurrence would occur next.

For which you will have to scroll down.  The OH  just shouted upstairs that the friend was finished (coating the house in brick dust) and would I come down to watch the OH boil water on the new hob, now!

So I hit publish by mistake and rushed downstairs.

Do you remember one part of the Star Wars films in which action takes place on a planet coated in white dust?

As I reached the last stair, for lo!  I had been transported to a galaxy far far away, where everything makes one see red.

‘You’ll have to clean this up,’ remarked the OH.  Seeing my face he back tracked. ‘Or I will.  Someone will.’

More later this evening, as long as the computer is not tied up again (another story, another challenge, anon my friend, anon.).

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Platform One. The fridge.

Posted on 18th January 2026 by admin

What do you think of podcasts?  Social media posts?

Me neither.

The only broadcaster on these media that I had any interest in was David Attenborough who reached a million people on Instagram in four hours, because we all know that he knows what he is talking about.  This goes contrary to other postings I have encountered which seem to me to be, in the main, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

However, quite by chance I encountered a doctor (with actual proper qualifications) talking about why it is so many of us can’t lose weight.

Many words and pictures have been broadcast on numerous platforms about health problems posed by obesity.  Hot on their heels are the adverts for fat jabs.  More recently arrived are the expected horror stories about what happens when the fat jabs stop.

The OH had a go, of course he did.  Any elderly man sitting every evening for four hours declaring himself to be entranced by the television, to which the half hourly forays into the kitchen give the lie, will quite quickly be researching all the sedentary weight loss possibilities there are.  As is his wont, he persuaded the GP and began injecting himself with great enthusiasm.

I kept my big mouth shut and waited.

With the speed of light the OH was up the stairs and in the bathroom for many miserable hours, as the bottom fell out of his world, and his poor intestines, already plagued by nearly sixty years of alcohol, turned into the human equivalent of a laundry chute.

He lost a few pounds, which, as soon as he came to his senses and stopped, reappeared with friends.

I still kept my mouth shut, not just because I don’t believe in prodding the sleeping tiger, but also because a lifetime of struggling with weight has given me a very sympathetic viewpoint.

I always thought my troubles were mental.  My adoptive mother took delight in starving me from the start.  I was a bad baby because I drank my milk too quickly.  I was a bad child because I didn’t want to eat the animal on my plate because I felt sorry for it.  I was a bad teenager because my flat chested mother was jealous at the way matters developed.  She had access to the doctor and had Munchausen’s by proxy and I was the proxy, starved and experimented on in hospital.

So I thought my problems were mental until I had the surgery to remove the clogged eight inches of intestine, which timely intervention saved my life, three years ago.  Healed, I can lose weight because for the first time since the appendectomy that sewed the front of me to the back of me at the age of eight, my intestines are working properly.

I lost a stone last year, starting in the spring, have kept it off so far and intend to lose another by the same method, of simply eating less and moving more, this year.  After that I’ll be at the lower end of the recommended weight for my age and height.  I don’t want to be thin, I’ve broken too many bones to wish to be without a bit of padding.

Nevertheless I am still very interested in all matters to do with weight.  Why are so many people struggling to lose weight that a magic fat jab is likely to turn the inventors into millionaires in a blink of the scales?  Are fat people bad people?  Is it because the television is less fascinating than the fridge?  It can’t be lack of exercise, I can look out of my window any day of the week and any time of day and see cold, wet, miserable people running in the rain.  It can’t be ignorance of the importance of exercise, or gyms wouldn’t be nearly the only businesses to welcome January with open tills.

I have managed to lose weight, does this make me some sort of genius?  (No, well, you know that.)  Why are so many of us so fat?  Why can’t we lose weight?  What is going on?  (Hang on, let me put this sandwich down) WHAT IS GOING ON?

I have very nice neighbours.  The wife is the youngest of her mother’s second family.  Not a second marriage, the first lot of children starved to death in another part of the world where the sixties were not swinging and food was very hard to come by.

Have you seen, or read of the news in parts of the world that are currently at war?  Have you seen thin children with begging bowls?  Are you aware of third world countries where babies are not expected to survive because of malnutrition?

What the doctor in the podcast pointed out, which really we always knew but had forgotten, is that starvation has been the default position for most of humanity for most of human history.

If you have read the Bible, or, as I am, are interested in the history of Ancient Egypt, you’ll be aware of the Five Fat Years and the Five Lean years.  Civilisations without means of storing a good harvest were not likely to last long.  This in an area where the inundation of the Nile provided natural fertility which did not take too much organisation to profit from. 

Throughout human history, despite social organisation, and naturally fertile areas, the rhythms of nature have not always provided the harvest.  For all our artifice we are part of nature, when nature is in abeyance, so are we.

Our journey through evolution has been a long one.  Unable to rely on the bounty of nature we have evolved to store fat to see us through the lean times.  To continue the human race it is essential that women are able to sustain the unborn baby to full gestation, whether there’s a good harvest or not.

We know this, even if we do not acknowledge it openly.  In most art of the past that we admire, the enticing vision of womanhood, usually beguilingly underdressed, tends to the chunky.  Throughout the Renaissance well-upholstered artist’s models were in great demand.  We still find the resulting depictions of substantial ladies dancing around in wispy scarves and little else, very appealing.

To enable us to store fat we rely on our appetite.  Our appetite, said the podcast doctor, developed long ago with our lizard brain.  The least advanced part of our brain has the upper hand.  To save us from starvation it prefers anything high calorie.  Less work for more calorific intake keeps the lizard in us very happy.  Anything sweet is calorie dense.  The molecule of alcohol is so small it can go through the stomach wall and be in the brain delivering calories without even being digested.

Ripe fruit, chocolate bars, ice cream, anything coated in or cooked in fat, chips, any foodstuff that can overcome satiety with extra flavour of added salt, fat or sweetness, food with little nutrition that is diverting to eat, fluffy sugar, crunchy little tasty bits…….

Have I described the contents of your favourite supermarket isle yet?

When we went to Australia for my cousin’s wedding, we were travelling along the coast to see as much as possible and ate in restaurants serving fresh food all the time.  Out of the sea on to the plate was pretty much the rule.  In three weeks of eating in restaurants for every meal, I lost weight.

What was missing?  What had fatly waddled off and was not readily available?

Factory food.

In order to feed as many people as possible and avoid population starvation and depletion of the workforce, many developed nation’s  strategies, since the industrial revolution, have tended towards industrialised food production.

If you are making food in industrial quantities you have to do at least two things.  You have to make it palatable.  For this you need food scientists, who know about the lizard brain and what will make it so happy it will keep on purchasing your product.  You need to know how to make the product last as long as possible, so you can persuade customers to buy more than needed, tapping into their historical dread of starvation by stockpiling.

Napoleon’s troops were some of the first forces to benefit from tinned food.  Nicholas Appert had invented the principle of heating food in glass jars, for which he won a government prize in 1910, using the prize money to establish the first canning factory.  Early cans had to be opened with the end of a handy bayonet but they made the feeding of a whole lot of soldiers a whole lot easier.

So great trees from little acorns grow; the food industry is massive, international, and designed to make producers fat by pandering to our lizard brains.

If knowledge is power for them it is power for us too.

When you can really see the shrink wrapped- long life- salt and sugar saturated mouthful you are about to consume as the income for the factory shareholders that it is, rather than the nourishment you need for your body, your clear vision could start to save your life.

The main thrust of the podcast that started me thinking was: don’t pander to your lizard brain.  Do a bit of thinking with your highly developed pre frontal cortex instead.

I would add what I’ve been saying here for seventeen years.  Don’t just sit and gawp at actors, or likes, or those celebrated for nothing other than appearance.  Especially don’t sit and do it while necking a shareholder’s dividend coated in year-old salt.

Read a book, build a dolls’ house, plant a window box, paint a picture, learn a language, get a hobby.  Sit on the lizard brain, silence it with something more interesting, and get your life back.

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged | Leave a comment

New year, old thingummyjigs.

Posted on 11th January 2026 by admin

Do you remember this?

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You don’t need much of a memory, in fact you can scroll down and read all about it.  This is a photograph of 13 cardboard toilet roll middles shoved into one cardboard toilet roll middle, prior to recycling.

I invited anyone who could do better to send me a photograph of their triumph (not the bra, or the car, just the toilet roll shoving accomplishment) and then thought that it has always been part of my personal hooja maflip, not to ask anyone to do anything that I would not do myself.  Such as get out the thesaurus and look up a better synonym for ethos than hooja maflip.

Stratagem.  Yes, it has always been part of my personal stratagem not to ask anyone else to do something I would not myself, essay, or, even, have a go at.

Demeanour.  Hmm, part of my personal demeanour not to ask anyone to do…

Hang on.  Emanation.

Emanation?  Manifestation?  No, that sounds as if I’m fading up out of the woodwork.

It could be that what I want here is a new Thesaurus.  The front cover has drifted off mine and the back looks as if it wants to follow and will, once the spine, currently in cardboard stripes, has given up completely.

Cardboard.  Yes, that’s where we were.

For this is the column where we laugh in the face of intellect. Hi, Hi, Hi, we go.*

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Taa daa!  What is this?

It also looks like this.

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It is me improving on my first attempt by quite a lot.  This is eighteen and three quarters toilet roll middles.

How do I know (apart from the fact that I did it)?

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When I achieved nine, I thought I might lose count, so I started recording. As you are able to observe by comparing the tops of the two achievements, the crucial difference is the way I shove the cardboard in.

First time round I just rolled each tube up and shoved it in.

Second time round, with a changed demeanour, I flattened each tube and circled it round the inside, starting at the edge.  Additionally, manifesting my inner tool user, such as a chimpanzee fishing for ants with a stalk, or a song thrush smashing a snail on a rock, I rammed the handle of my hair brush down the middle and twirled it each time to manifest, or, possibly emanate, a flatter inner circle wall into which to shove the next toilet roll middle.

As matters progressed, or, even, advanced, by time, in the upward and onward department, (I must get a new thesaurus, I really must, demand, call for, put it on the shopping list, ) (put it on the shopping list?  It actually suggests this as a synonym, replacement, new lamps for old).

Anyway.  After a while I had to switch to a small hairbrush.  The smaller the hairbrush the smaller the handle.  (Let us take this as our text for this week.  Or, not.) Eventually the space in the middle being insufficient, inadequate, fizzling out, I resorted to an eyeliner case,  the arena of action being the bathroom, and, finally, the tail of a tail comb. 

Even so, formal dress, regalia, peignoir wrong page, I could not get the nineteenth toilet roll middle in there and had to cut the side off it.  Hence the final, honest total, eighteen and three quarter toilet roll middles is  the total, or, to be exact, precise, photographic (nice!) seventeen and three quarter toilet roll middles inside one other.

New year old whatsits.  Now the tinsel is in the loft, you could try doing an old thing a new way.

If however, nevertheless, all the same, you are still suffering from start of the year malaise (why has nothing got better immediately, when we have identified the year by completely new, unused, contemporary, revolutionary, (yes really)  numbers?) You could do worse than search online for Paramount Frasier Season 6 Episode 14, Three Valentines and watch the first five minutes.  You can find the relevant five minutes free on YouTube. Never fails to cheer me up.

(Gladden, warm my heart, elate, buck up, frisk, frolic, rollick,) Oh, I say, steady on.  (Whoop, cock a hoop! ) It was only toilet rolls, I’d better order a new thesaurus in a plain brown cover.

~~~~~~~~~~~

*This should probably read ho, ho ho.  Or, even, ha ha ha. Or, alternatively, he, he he.  Anything would be better than hi, hi, hi.  Sounds as if I’m trying to catch a bus.

~~~~~~~~~~~

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Bottoming out.

Posted on 3rd January 2026 by admin

No, nothing to do with Brazilian butt lifts at all.  Nothing to do with the very nice looney TV show Bottom.  Nothing to do with addicts finally scraping the barrel bottom and waking up.  Nothing to do with getting into the warm winter trousers bought many years ago, mostly velvet, because the air temperature has dropped and corduroy just isn’t helping any more.  Nothing to do with getting the last crumbs out of the giant panettone tin, which will occur tomorrow.  None of those.

There are, however, plenty of articles about Brazilian butt lifts, in every magazine.  There are, apparently, many, many women who wish not only to have a massive fundament, but would like everyone to notice that they can walk around with a tray, a couple of glasses and a bottle of something fizzy balanced upon it.  This is contrary to the whole of desirable fashion in my lifetime so far, although, being thoroughly cognisant of fashion in the British Isles for the last thousand years or so, it is merely a repeat of previous centuries.  Eighteenth century court dress required collapsible panniers so wearers could negotiate doorways without getting totally stuck, causing starving gentlemen courtiers to have to borrow through the folds to get to the breakfast table.  More recently Edwardian bum rolls were detachable and there is written anecdotal evidence that the fashion was quite warm, if inconvenient when attempting to perch on the newly invented omnibus seats.

However, none of these, or previously, fashionable extra girth, width, height or anything else needed the body of the fashionista to change.  All the fashionable shapes of history relied on additions to the clothing that would push the more mobile areas of the wearer to prominence, or flatten them, or make cunningly wrought fabric additions to change the silhouette. 

The lifting of the derriere, so very now, is achieved by surgical implants, sculpting and similar procedures, which do, over time, succumb to gravity and require repetition to restore the abnormal tray shelf to the required height. This requires repeat expenditure of a large amount, or, as the operators involved classify the liftees, an income.

It has to be very expensive because, despite all the magazine ink and podcast electricity expended upon the procedure, not all that many people can be involved, or Marks and Spencer’s would purvey the knickers for it.  Which they do not.  I checked.    They do have women’s knickers for every other condition the lower half of a woman could find itself in, with high legs, low legs, low rise shorts, full body, half body, thong, lacy thing and some like bits of string but butt lift knickers absolutely absent.  I looked very thoroughly because I was after some new ones to replace some I am going to chuck out.

That really is what the bottoming out is about.  Not necessarily bottoming out myself, or, even decking out my bottom with new decking.

What I am really bottoming out is drawers, cupboards, wardrobes, boxes, craft rooms, spare rooms and everywhere else that craft stuff, fashion and bits of this and that, purchased in faith, with hope and the prospect of either joy, or, at least five minutes gainfully occupied, in view.

Now that I come to look at it all, joy was an awful lot to hope for.  Why did I buy all this stuff?  How have I accumulated such vast quantities of things I have not used?

Absolutely acres of it are for card making, which could be described as my hobby, now that dolls housering has been for years and years, my jobby.  I have just printed off the calendar for this year, 2026 and added, along the bottom edge, all the occasions, birthdays and so on for which I make a card. 27.

How can the need to make 27 cards in a year fill an entire craft room, the S&H’s former bedroom, quite a lot of the garage and random piles in my bedroom?  If I stuck all the 12inch paper pad sheets side by side I could wallpaper Buckingham Palace, easily, with enough left over for the all horses in Horseguard’s Parade to have pretty stables.

I don’t even do 12 inch scrapbooks now that Portraiture has stopped.  My holiday sketchbook/scrapbook is four inches square.

And yes, Christmas cards.  This year I made and sent 60 cards and received 28 but even that tour de force of two months does not require two rooms and a bedroom floor.  I like buying the stuff to do it, I have discovered today a box labelled ‘Christmas’ with enough stuff to do the next three or four.  Five if you include the very brilliant one in the cupboard behind me which requires fifty porcelain bits, of which I have managed only about eight so far.  That was a good idea about five years ago.

And there is the nub, the kernel, the wellspring and, if you insist, fundamental problem.

I have ideas.

I wake up in the morning with ideas.  I go to bed thinking of ideas and, in between, I have ideas.

Not just for card making.  For porcelain dolls, for new dolls for new cards, for new joints for new ways of making things work and putting them together.  By the Spring I’ll be having new gardening ideas.

Some people, such as the OH, are addicted to their mobile telephones, the problem of which is, that those are other people’s ideas.  I don’t have a phone because I don’t have room in my head for other people’s ideas, I already have too many of my own.

While I’m writing this I’m thinking of several other things I could be writing about and will.  Thoughts for writing, usually, stay in the brain, which is a lot neater than thoughts for all these other things that fill up rooms.

I did meet a very nice miniaturist once, who was married to a farmer.  He had given her a barn of her own.  Needless to say she was a very good customer.  She had a barn to fill.

If I had appended a barn to the house instead of just building a craft room and two bedrooms on top of the garage, I’d have a barn full of stuff to bottom out.

Would you ever see the bottom of a barn?  That might be but one butt too far to lift.

Just in case you were wondering, I am not going to throw anything useable away.  Come the miserable third week of January all this lovely, in many cases brand new, and in all cases in prime condition and unused craft stuff, will be going out with the lockdown library for the neighbours to take away and play with and cheer themselves up.

Yes, having filled my spare room I’m now going to fill spare rooms all over the neighbourhood.

Uplifting BUTT, also, bottoming out.

~~~~~~~~~

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Hot Stuff.

Posted on 31st December 2025 by admin

The last 49 years, on Christmas afternoon, I have been absent from the lounge, where the S&H and latterly, just the OH, occasionally both plus the DIL and the grandchildren were to be found, playing with the toys I had bought them, and no one ever asked where I was.

Spoiler alert (if you wanted to guess) or soiler alert (if you have already guessed) – I was cleaning the oven.

This was not the only occasion in the year.  For all the years the S&H was at home, except on Miniatura weekends, we always had Sunday lunch.  Sunday lunch being much the same as Christmas lunch in that it featured some large joint of meat, or a whole bird, that required at some point open roasting without a cover, and roast potatoes, ditto, and various other items in the cooking of which said items were wont to spray fat, juices and other components around the cavity of the oven.

Therefore, for most Sundays, for many years, I was absent on Sunday afternoon, from the lounge where the OH and the S&H were watching a film, usually, because I was cleaning the oven.

This paid off.  When we were young and poor I twice sold ovens, when we moved house, for what I had paid for them when new.

I thought I was setting a good example.  Foolishly.  To do so I probably needed to drag the oven into the lounge in front of the TV and clean it there, regardless of the frowning and craning.

Since I became mostly vegetarian the OH has taken to cooking.  Not to washing up, or to cleaning the oven.  However three times since we have owned the current built-in oven with the two layer glass door, he has exclaimed over the filth trapped between the glass layers, and, contrary to the manufacturer’s instructions, entirely dismantled the door, having removed it, which is in the instruction booklet, from the body of the oven by grasping the door and lifting it off the hinges.

As this exercise is infrequent, I had had to clean the oven prior to cooking the turkey and said so.

Accordingly the OH decided that he would dismantle the oven door and clean it.  The day he chose to do so was the eve of New Year’s Eve, while I was out in the cold, returning the shirt he hated so much he wouldn’t try it on, and giving donations to the Air Ambulance shop of various, in some cases, new, clothes that I thought would be suitable for New Year’s Eve.  So did the volunteer in the shop, and we had a bit of a chat.  The other shop was out of town in the other direction, through all the traffic jams caused by all the other people returning gifts.

Therefore, I had been away some time, in the cold, and was looking forward to a hot cup of tea and a sit down.

I returned unable to put a few basic food purchases away, as every flat surface in the kitchen was covered with bits of oven door.  Of the OH the only sign was a note saying that he had gone to an electrical retailers.

As one so often does in the middle of cleaning the oven door, or, as it was now, a bread board covered in screws, my screwdriver set with all the screwdrivers out, two separate sheets of glass, a metal frame and some metal bits, fixins and doodads.

I put the food away.  The OH returned, furious.  He had been to an electrical retailer, purveyor of a similar oven, who, very uncharitably, had not allowed him to dismantle the oven in the showroom to see where the two rubber thingys went, that he couldn’t find a place for.  Although seething, he managed to tell me that he even knew the name for them, because one of the many electrical retailers he had telephoned had vouchsafed unto him that they were the rubber glass separators.

After a couple of minutes of fiddling around I found out where they went, but being a woman, I apparently knew nothing.

It would, he shouted, help if we had kept the instruction booklet or, even, which we wouldn’t have, we’d have thrown it away, the receipt, so we could tell the second help robot he was now phoning how old it was, or even, without removing the oven from the housing, what model it was.

So I went into the kitchen and fetched the receipt, so he could tell the robot, which, not having been married to him for forty nine and a half years, had kept hanging up on him, the model number and the fact that it was fourteen years old.

All very well, he shouted, having a receipt, what he really need was the instructions.

So I fetched them.

They did not have instructions for disassembly of the factory assembled door, which I knew, but the OH was frustrated to discover.

After some debate and another demonstration, by me, of the logical place to put the rubber door separators (separating the two glass doors, so each door fitted neatly into the little groove intended for the door to go into, dontchaknow), the OH decided to reassemble the door without them, because, being a woman, I know nothing.

So, in between phoning robots, because everyone should have a hobby, he reassembled the door without the rubber door separators, and then, as an encore, couldn’t get the hinges back in the hinge holes.  I was co-opted to help but gave up after one go of being shouted at, I left him to do it himself and went into the lounge to watch TV with the sound off so the most recent robot would be heard when it rang.

Shortly thereafter, the OH emerged from the kitchen and went to his shed, returning with a mole grip wrench and a hammer.  Ideal oven cleaning tools.

Some unknown person had twisted one of the hinges when removing the door.

I did not ring a robot and ask if it had done it, neither did I phone a friend.  I waited until the OH emerged in triumph to announce, much in the same vein as Spartacus raising the troops, that he had returned the oven door to its accustomed spot, on the front of the oven, minus the rubber door separators, as no place could be found to put them, and they were now on the windowsill, awaiting instruction from a robot, electrical retailer, or other expert, or anyone who knew ovens and had male genitalia.

The ideal time, I have been informed, to buy a new oven will be in the January sales, when I have no money at all, having spent it on sixty Christmas cards (received twenty-eight), gifts for the OH (horrible shirt, returned and other acceptable item)  vast amounts of gifts and money for the S&H, Gkids, DIL (received, two jars of jam) and, wildly, two new vests for myself (fashionista that I am, waiting for the call from Anna Wintour, or similar).  (The scar is healing nicely, thank you for asking.)  (Fringes are back again.)

Nevertheless, we will be in a different electrical retailers (not the one who is pissed off with the OH) looking at built-in ovens in 2026, which will roll into view in eight and a half hours locally; Sydney Australia, where they’ll all be round the local OP Shop donating the BBQ that exploded with the turkey in it, already having seen it.

Happy New Year wherever you are reading this.  As we close the door on 2025, hinges permitting, I’m sure we’re all hoping 2026 won’t turn out to be a turkey.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


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The dark of the year.

Posted on 21st December 2025 by admin

If you have been wondering where I am, here I am, knackered.

I have previously expounded my theory to anyone who will listen, that Christmas is a festival of work for women.  If you are a lone man sitting down to a packet of gravy grains and a tin of sprouts, I’m sorry, but usually it is.

I have spent the last many days trying to catch up with myself.  What a sensible person would have done who had planned a fully interactive, play-with Christmas card prior to splitting their forehead open, would have been to curtail the plans to something more manageable.  At the outset I asked the OH if he wanted cards for his relatives and drinking buddies.  As usual he said no until a couple of weeks after I had finished about 700 passes through the die cutting machine to create the bits for a put it together yourself folding dolls house.  He waited until I had printed 50+ funny pictorial letters, which are never round robins, and, on years when I am not freshly scarred, all handwritten and different.  He waited until I had got through three tubes of glue sticking all the rooms together.  He waited until I had made 50+ stand up Father Christmases, posh Victorian ladies and Rudolphs and stable doors for him to hide behind .  He waited until I had cut up 50+ bags of sticky and 50+ bags of white Tack.  He waited until I had made 50+ card boxes, addressed them, picked, packed and posted them and begun the massive tidy up and then he asked if I had any cards for his relatives and drinking buddies.

Surprisingly, no.

In the middle of all this effort, I had to go to the supermarket because I was running out of things to eat.  Returning to my car, in the rain, I had to halt my trolley for a lady on her third go at getting her small car into the space beside my car.  She abandoned her car at an interesting angle and got out.  Looking at the car she remarked ‘ Well that’s easily the worst parking I’ve ever done!’  I said, ‘Oh don’t be hard on yourself, I’m so tired I can hardly think.’ ‘Yes,’  she re-joined ‘and men don’t help, they just sit there..’  ‘Watching television,’ I added ‘and’ we finished together, ‘saying: Christmas, isn’t it lovely?’  How we laughed (slightly insanely)!

A distant neighbour threw me into a panic by asking to borrow my carpet cleaner for her mother.  Last time she did it took me an hour and three quarters to clean the cleaner afterwards.  Picking other people’s hair wound round your Bex Bissell rollers dun’t half put a dent in your magnanimity.  So, trying hard not to be too British, I plucked up courage and asked, when she arrived, if she wouldn’t mind cleaning it after use.  A couple of hours later she was back with it, her mother having decided to buy one of her own.  I was so relieved I did not have to do stranger hair removal four days or less, depending when it came back, before Christmas, off me bristly rollers, I allowed myself to sit down and have a cup of tea.  After I had finished cleaning the fridge and freezer, of course, there’s no need to go mad with relief.

You have to pace yourself as you get older.  Twenty years ago I regularly painted the hall stairs and landing in the week before Christmas, stayed up until it was done and still got up at the crack of dawn next day.

Besides being a festival of work for women (and sprout can opening men) it is worth remembering why we have Christmas now.  The date has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus, which was in the spring, and everything to do with earlier, pagan celebrations in the northern hemisphere that saluted the turn of the year and the winter solstice.

Five thousand years ago Neolithic people worked out how to build the cairn at Maeshowe  with a passage that would let the winter solstice sun shine through and illuminate the opposite wall.  They knew that in the dark of the far north, on mainland Orkney, they had reached the turning point at the shortest day of the year.

I get a bit chilly going to the heated supermarket in my heated car at this time of year.  Ignoring the fact that I would not, as a neolithic woman, have lived to my current age, quite how I would have got through the winter with only firelight, with only dried food and berries, without my comfortable bed and most of all without really thick knickers and a nice long vest, I do not know.

No wonder they used some of the food stores to feast and a big yule log to keep warm.  No wonder they celebrated when they knew for certain that they had reached the turning point.

It is certain knowledge you seldom possess.  There have been many times in my life when I would have been so glad to know I had reached a point at which things were going to start to get better.  Horrible times such as the fag end of caring for someone who is on the way out.  Times of  desperately mourning the loss of a relative or friend.  Times such as possible recovery from cancer, times when you think your arm with the new metal in it actually is going to work again.  In my experience you never get the memo telling you it’s over and that you can relax, you just set your teeth and plough on.

The neolithic builders who put certainty into their dark, cold world were very wise.  In the dark of the year they could look to the light.

I only have four rooms to bottom out and the Christmas food to fetch tomorrow.  When I have done that I might put the decorations up and then I have to do some present wrapping.

I shall keep reminding myself that it can’t possibly be as bad as dragging a yule log across the tundra, making a twig hut for your penguins, or sticking your last tooth gingerly into the edge of a dried haddock.

Yes I could start preparations in September but that’s Miniatura; and I could have done without a holiday in October, I managed for seventeen years without one.  I did once do all the cards at the end of the summer  and I did on a couple of occasions do all the present shopping early in the summer sales.

If you do it all too early, it’s just wrong.

The most Christmassy I have ever felt was either, when I was younger, waiting for a bus in the snow with my arms full of presents and, more recently, driving back from shopping for food somewhere special, knowing I had lovely things for everyone.

I’m not sure why we have Father Christmas, Mother Christmas would be more accurate.

I could, of course just not bother. I could sit in increasing squalor and dropped peanuts watching rubbish on TV.  If I did that there would be no celebration, and we might even have enough money and food to last through January.

But you don’t have to live up in Orkney, to be joyful that, once more, the light will conquer the dark and that there will be a future and that there will be good things in it.

************

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Roll of honour.

Posted on 7th December 2025 by admin

What is this?

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I hope this is the most impressive photo of 2025.

I think it is (I do have a new camera and actually will get it out of the box and try to learn it because the computer has started saying things like ‘this file is unsupported’  or, ‘unable to access’.  My old camera is over twenty years old and has given sterling service but bits are dropping off, the cover of the port where you put the thingy in, that connects it to the computer, is attached with sticky tape.)

So, (as anyone under 40 begins a sentence) this photo is a bit of a miracle, of a bit of a miracle.

Long term readers (last three weeks or so) know what this is.  It is a personal best is this, because this is

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

oh yes, this is 13, count them, thirteen, toilet roll middles all shoved in one of them. As the immensely discerning among you are able to, er, discern, one of the cardboard tubes has had to be cut in half lengthwise to get it in there and hasn’t been able to go all the way down and, therefore, is sticking out.

Did you discern the sticking out one?  Additionally did you discern that it (they?  Now there’s a neat grammatical point, is an item in two halves still it, or did it, upon division, become a they?  Discuss – but not for long, this time of year porridge gets cold in no time.) or they, are partial and not whole roll middles?

So, (am I looking younger yet?) here is a personal best at the end of the first week in December.  There are, after all, still wonders in the world.

Moreover, feel free to join in.  I will publish photos of equal or greater similar feats sent as attachments by clicking the link below.

So anyone can join in.  (That wasn’t a youthful, give me time to think, I am not on my phone and thinking independently, so, it was explanatory grammar, basically a coordinating conjunction, used, daringly, to stand alone at the head of a paragraph, as it qualifies the preceding column.)

So, (yes that was the youthful one, did you guess?) feel free to join in, while I slog on making Christmas cards, because now the toilet rolls have reached the limit of their stuffability (unless you can prove otherwise) I have no further excuse for not doing so.

So, I’d better stop chatting to you and get on.  (Guess, guess, answers on a postcard, please.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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