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.

~~~~~~~~~~~

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

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?

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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

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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.)

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

Posted in About artists., The parrot has landed. | Tagged | 1 Comment

Are you easily distracted?

Posted on 30th November 2025 by admin

Me too and I don’t even have a mobile phone.

The OH spends hours of his life on his phone.  He is unable to watch the news without getting out his phone to look something up, usually half a minute before the news reader tells us exactly the thing he is looking up.  This may or may not come under the heading of impatience, which, for the OH is highly likely.  It seems to go with the territory of being overly keen on alcohol, elderly and having an interesting variety of ailments.  This combination is enough to make anyone annoyed, but if it proved inadequate there are millions of things to get annoyed about if you have a mobile telephone to hand.

The very first moon landing was achieved with a computer with less computing power than a very basic mobile phone.  Probably just as well, if all the astronauts had had modern phones to hand, they’d have been so busy looking up moon facts, they might have missed the landing.

Which would have been very annoying.

Not having a mobile I have to rely on my own brain to get distracted, at which I am ace having had tons of practice.

I am meant to be getting on with the Christmas card. As always, this year is planned to outdo last year.  Half of it is in my head and the other half actually exists.  Part of the interest lies in wondering if I am actually going to be able to do it but if it is looking quite difficult, or hard work, (currently I have die cut twenty four of a major multi part component and have at least another thirty six to go, of the first component,) I tend to wander off and do something else.  I have just tidied about a five years’ worth of a massive dies collection because I am contemplating buying some more for another idea I’ve had and I wanted to make sure I hadn’t got them already.

Last evening I foolishly watched a Black Friday event on a crafting TV channel and not only bought a load of stuff I had not intended to buy; when they invited emails, I joined in and subsequently went to bed with my brain buzzing.

At this time of year I reread Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, easily the best Christmas book ever.  It is very hard not just to sit up all one night and read the book.  I force myself just to do a bit and make it last.  As a result I only had the end, which is definitely the best bit, to go, which did not prove enough switch off from joining in with TV.  I love making smart email remarks and getting them read out on TV.  The aim of the game is to make the presenter laugh or distract them so much they forget what they were selling.  This distraction, which died with Create and Craft, looks as if it’s back with HobbyMaker, much to my delight.

Here is another game, good for all year.  It’s the toilet roll middle game.  You are playing against your own previous efforts.  The aim is to pack as many carboard roll toilet roll middles into one cardboard toilet roll middle as you can.  Like this

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see?  Empty roll middle on the right, packed roll middle on the left. You would be surprised how satisfying this is.

This one

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has ten other toilet roll middles packed inside it.  How many more do you reckon I can get in there?  Two? Three.?

You can spend a remarkable amount of time on this, especially if you have finished in the bathroom and the next appointed task is unsavoury or daunting.  I got the last four in there when I was supposed to be washing a floor and, ideally, plastering up the dent in the wall made by my head. 

There are people who just start a task, finish it, tidy up and go to bed.  If you have proper work that you have to go to, you are more or less obliged to do that.  If you are retired or self employed, you would imagine that the endless days stretch before you until boredom sets in.  My problem is the endless possibilities contained in every 24 hours.

I don’t actually have 24 hours in a day, I have discovered that, without a couple of hours workout, everything seizes up and sleep is elusive.  If I take the two hours out to workout I will get a solid eight hours sleep, which leaves an hour for a shower and an hour for kitchen, food, or cleaning related tasks and an hour sitting in a heap for lunch, an hour sitting in a heap for tea and an hour for random stuff such as shopping, all of which only leaves nine hours to do anything in, such as writing this, which has taken a couple of hours.

How can anyone take two hours to write such rubbish?  You may well ask.  You do have to proof read careflly or et loks liiik siz.  You also have to do thinking, er, I think.  Though, really, how can it take two hours to write a measly thousand words?

Before I answer I have a toilet roll middle to cram into another toilet roll middle, now I have taken the picture and shown you what to do.  They won’t just cram themselves you know, it takes thought, a skilled finger and sometimes a tail comb.

And, of course, something else altogether which urgently needs doing.

Which I will definitely get round to when I’ve done this.

~~~~~~~~~~~

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Uncivil.

Posted on 24th November 2025 by admin

If you have just watched Civilisations rise and fall because I mentioned it, I am very sorry for wasting an hour of your life that you’ll not get back.  Quite how you are able to make the sack of Rome, one of the great disasters of history, so boring, is a wonder.  Having several different presenters, who all sounded as if they were lecturing Class 3B on a Friday afternoon was as unhelpful as time lapse photography of visitors rushing round the British Museum ignoring the artefacts that told the story.  Was there not one member of museum staff who could have shown us an artefact properly in a good light and explained the object?  The fact that the objects in the horde were of precious materials and virtuoso manufacture wasn’t mentioned.

If you are old enough to remember the original Civilisation as told by Kenneth Clark with absolute fascination, so that it was utterly riveting when all he basically did was get on his hind legs and talk, you’ll feel as short changed as I do.  There was no clever clogs camera trickery in 1969.  With all the technology available to tell the story in 2005, why did they not use it?

Spoiler alert.  I’ve already told you that the Aztecs were mostly defeated by diseases brought by the conquistadors, and their own beliefs that the invaders were gods.  The Ancient Egyptians were defeated by Rome and became a Roman province, as I remarked.

Just in case you were wondering, the Samurai were brought down by superior fire power and a desire of their leaders to modernise.  It can take many years to learn how to wield a sword properly.  Many antique weapons have the same disadvantage.  Regular readers know the OH has been enjoying archery for a few years, has made his own longbow and some archery bosses (targets) for his club and still has plenty of days where he finds the target remarkably elusive.  In the middle ages most towns had an area where all able bodied men were required regularly to practice with a bow and arrow for which they were granted the right to farm strips of land.  In the town where I live there is still a street called The Butts.

As the spate of mass murders around the world by lone lunatics with a firearm attest, you do not need any skill to fire a gun around generally.  You just need the weapon and some bullets.  An older version of this ability suddenly made the skilled Samurai swordsmen obsolete.  The OH inherited a Japanese sword surrendered to his father, who was a young sailor in the Navy at the end of the Second World War.  The OH sold it and bought a computer keyboard, that linked to the TV and fascinated the baby, now in IT.

I think I may predict that the new series of Civilisation will emphasise that strength to keep a civilisation going lies with its ability to keep up with the times, with new technology, and recent developments in weaponry, and keep a beady eye on what the people are doing and who they are.

Depressingly all that will be necessary to destabilise the current Western civilisation will be a magnetic pulse or similar that can knock out all the computers in one go and leave them that way.  We have already experienced cyber attacks with massive financial implications, all it would take is for enough hostile powers to recruit enough nerds who regard cyber crime as a personal goal, to take over a country.

The geeks shall inherit the earth.

Meanwhile you can still turn off all the devices and read a good book, might be time to get the original paper Civilisation by Kenneth Clark out again, Amazon is selling the paperback for a fiver and some pennies.

Reading in various forms has been a good idea since the first caveman drew a hunt on the cave wall.  It will always be beneficial to understanding to do your own research.  Read some books.  Visit museums.  Make an historical model.  Dig a test pit in the back garden.  Have a go at crafts and skills of the past.

In short, find out for yourself.  Use the human brain.  The more you use it, the better it gets.

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Ancient Egypt for miniaturists.

Posted on 23rd November 2025 by admin

It has not been often in the history of this blog that I have added a new category.  Ancient Egypt for miniaturists is the new category for many reasons.

Talking to miniaturists at Miniatura I realised how much I knew about Ancient Egypt.  I didn’t have to look anything up, it was all there in my head.

Straight after spring Miniatura I started doing the research, though it was hardly a new topic for me.  I was not introduced to the topic at school, though it is now part of many curricula but first became aware of it in a major way with the 1963 film of Cleopatra.  There is a copyright free image of Howard Terpning’s iconic film poster, here it is.

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The film had absolutely everything, it was gorgeous.  I haven’t been able to find it online to watch yet, but I’ll keep looking.

The film tells the story of the end of Ancient Egypt, which story has considerably more drama than most end of empire tales.  There is betrayal, romance, a woman fighting to save a whole kingdom, fabulous costumes, amazing crowd scenes and three of the biggest box office stars of the time.  It didn’t hurt the action one little bit that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton first met on set in the eternal city, Rome, and started a romance that sizzled through the celluloid.  In real life they had a glamorous time, she was the most beautiful woman on the planet, he was somewhat unfettered and bought her gigantic diamonds.  Really, really big diamonds.

Much of the tale of Ancient Egypt has a lot to do with things similar to really, really big diamonds.  Everyone knows the Howard Carter quote when he was asked what he saw with his head in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and said he saw wonderful things and ‘everywhere the glint of gold.’

There isn’t a person on earth whose attention wouldn’t be grabbed by gold and diamonds, add a fabulous film, that amazing year 1963, the most beautiful woman in the world and we all want to know more.

I963 was the year that I began to be interested in Ancient Egypt, I was gifted a book about it by my parents, then 1972 brought the Treasures of Tutankhamun to London, and though I didn’t go, being a very new teacher struggling to afford rent and all expenses away from home for the first time, it was impossible to ignore the souvenir items flooding the market everywhere you looked.

That is the impetus for my revisiting this past interest, and interest in the past.  A huge purpose-built museum is due to open in Cairo on November 1st which will house  all the treasures of Tutankhamun, in the same place for the first time since they were discovered, the solar boat of Khufu, an enormous statue of Ramses the Great and many other wonders.

Why does this civilization, which began to flourish 5,000 years ago have such a grip on us today?

The gold has a lot to do with it.

Because of their beliefs that important people in their civilization would, upon death, be reborn again, if they were good, and go to the Elysian Fields, a beautiful country where they would be happy forever, the Ancient Egyptians focussed their attention on the afterlife, and provision for its splendour.  This is understandable when you consider their actual lives, which were in the main, not very long.  Life expectation was about forty years if nothing went wrong.  However, many things did go wrong, starting with childbirth which was hazardous in all ancient civilizations.

Mummies have been discovered of women who died in childbirth with one or more babies trapped inside them. Delivery by Caesarean section is called after Julius Caesar, that’s him in the poster above, played by Rex Harrison.  There he is in the poster, the first person we know to have been born successfully this way. In the whole preceding 3,000 years of Egyptian civilization this had not happened, hence the stuck babies.  It did not help that any type of midwifery in Ancient Egypt was considered a low status job, given to the dancing girls, who were not generally important enough to wear clothing.  There was a birthing stool, examples of which have survived and the sacred lotus flower, which, as well as being nice in a bouquet and pretty as decoration on pillars, happens to be a powerful drug.  If you had had a baby stuck inside you for a couple of days, Nile flies swarming all over you and your only help a stool with a bit at the front missing and a lithe but dim dancing girl, you’d want a powerful drug.  Frequently.

Having read and reread all I could get my hands on about Ancient Egypt, I began to compare notes and books and discover mistakes, or areas of ignorance in earlier published works that have been updated or infilled with later research.  One of these is a mystery object labelled an apotropaeic wand.  Surviving examples are often made of hippopotamus teeth, which are naturally curved, the entire object looking like a very small boomerang.

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The pointed end shows signs of wear and the whole is covered with images of various deities and magical animals known to be protective of children.  There is an inscription which translates as: words spoken by these (animals depicted) are to spread protection over this child.

I read about these wands as mystery objects in numerous reference works and now believe by context of finding, by size and by previous descriptions and by hints in more recent publications, that this is an early version of a high forceps delivery tool to assist in childbirth.  If you are a female reader you may cross your legs now.

At Autumn Miniatura, exhibiting my mini Egyptians, more than one visitor told me that the Ancient Egyptians wore white because it deflected the rays of the sun or indicated purity.  A moment’s reflection on the probable condition of a child, dressed in white, sent out to play on the muddy banks of the Nile, would be unlikely to conjure up purity.  In fact, after a lot of reading, it becomes obvious that the Ancient Egyptians never found out how to make colours applied to linen to stay when the garment was washed.

As any miniaturist will tell you the Arts and Crafts movement with its emphasis on nature was the vehicle for the popularisation of mordants used to make natural dyes permanent.  If William Morris could have time travelled to Ancient Egypt the Egyptians  would have been delighted to dress in the naturally derived colours that we see in all the late nineteenth century paintings of the Arts and Crafts movement.

In fact the textile technology of the Romans, who were getting very good at dyeing using natural resources such as murex shells, a type of snail, to produce Tyrian purple, the status defining Imperial Purple, would have been available to the Egyptians had it not been for the unfortunate defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian at the battle of Actium in 31BC. Subsequently Egypt, one of the world’s great civilisations, became a Roman province.

It was civilised in some quite modern ways; Antony and Cleopatra spent time in the library at Alexandria, the greatest collection of literature (on scrolls) in the world at the time.  You’ll be pleased to know that cats were employed to keep down the numbers of mice that wanted to nibble the edges of the books.

I will be watching the new BBC series:  Civilisations Rise and Fall with great interest.  There has never been a civilisation on this planet that has lasted forever.  They have all put out propaganda about their existence into the far distant future, which always grinds to halt when they are conquered, overrun, succumb to interesting new viruses or fail because of geography, climate change or numerous other reasons.

One of the programmes is about the Aztecs.  Their legends about wonderful four-legged gods caused them to interpret the Spanish conquistadors, who arrived riding on horses, as benevolent.  As these ‘gods’ had arrived drawn by the gold, which they proceeded to steal in industrial quantities, bringing with them an assortment of diseases which the Aztecs had no defence against, including smallpox and measles, that was the end of that.

One of the advantages of studying ancient civilisations with the perspective of time is that we can sometimes see where they went wrong, but with the eye of a miniaturist, reproducing their reality, we can also experience their technology, their reality and the wonderful things they made and did.

As a miniature doll dresser, I have nothing but admiration for the textile technology of the Ancient Egyptians.  In the illustrations of their lives, the size of their hands is usually exaggerated because everything from textiles, to pots, to buildings and carved stone was made by hand.

A hand-made civilisation is a marvel we will visit again in the future.  If any reader has the chance to visit GEM, the new museum of Ancient Egypt in Cairo, please get in touch, we’d love to see your photos.

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Art and Tuscany.

Posted on 16th November 2025 by admin

Apologies for the radio silence.  I am healing from my ‘orrible injury and was, as usual, trying to do everything.  I sent a card to someone also having health problems and, having advised them to rest, realised I was not doing it myself.  So I stopped for a while and just spent time doing my little scrapbook.

I showed you the sketches I had done from life in Tuscany.

I think there is little doubt that the landscape has given rise to the art

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even the agricultural junk littering the landscape is incredibly picturesque.  If you are a fan of Matthew Palmer, who is a great painting teacher, his landscapes frequently have roads leading into the distance or going round a bend in the road.  In the UK he does classes in the Lake District and various places with interesting landscapes, which you need to go and find.

In Tuscany it was impossible to look in any direction and not see a potential picture.  It is the geography.  There was a great deal of looking out of car windows and, when looking at recently harvested fields, seeing very basic mud, in lumps; friable rich compost it definitely wasn’t. Round the villa there were olive trees, lemon trees in pots and various tame plants.  If you looked twice you could see the watering system  of half buried hoses.  If you look at the fields in the photograph, there are hardly any flat ones and some of the fields in the distance are not far off vertical.  Yes there is a lot of sunshine but the geography is not helping, at all, neither is the soil.

Tuscans must have strong thighs.  Every ridge top that was not an actual knife edge had a house right on the top,

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and an even higher mast on the top of the house.  Everything is up, even if you are only working in that flattish field on the left behind the line of trees, you still have to walk up to the house at the end of the day when you are tired.

I went, having, I thought, just recovered from a fortnight of flu-like something.  One vertical walk into a hill town was enough to convince me that my lungs were not working very well at all.  Each step was like breathing sandpaper.

People who live round here must be either hard as tanned leather or dead.

I am sufficiently recovered now to have nearly finished making up the little album and, before the Christmas cards and pouring the new dolls, I have some big sketches half done, properly done and to embark on from photographs, which I intend to watercolour.

I always enjoyed portraiture, which has now finished as there weren’t enough students.  Self-taught, I learned over a few years, the importance of getting the pencil lines in the right place.  Now that I have had my cataracts done and can actually see the landscapes, I’m going to see if the same thing will apply to the sketched views, enlarged, and some still in my mind but prompted by photographs.

I didn’t take enough photos.  My little Olympus Miu is on its last legs, the shutter is intermittently working.  So I spent more time looking with my eyes than through a lens.  As I am probably the last person in the world who does not have a smart phone I didn’t do any of that either.  I try hard to be present in my own life, using my own five senses. When I look at the work of some of the Uffizi artists from a previous posting, I am reminded that all they started out with was their own five senses and a pencil.

And the landscape, the incredible Tuscan landscape.

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Tuscan sketchbook.

Posted on 3rd November 2025 by admin

Although bits of the holiday were not that good, especially the journeys and injury, nothing could detract from the incredible scenery.

I had paid for everyone to go to the Uffizi, which would have been better not on the first day when, thanks to redirected flights we had previously had only three hours sleep.  However the splendour of all the Renaissance art was fortifying.

One of the features of art of this era is all that is going on in the background of the scene.  I often wondered about all the little houses perched on hilltops.

Here is  a photographic detail from Leonardo’s Annunciation, of stuff going on in the background, behind the angel –

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are these very sculptural trees imaginary?  What about the buildings over the balcony rail beside Mary?

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look at the pillars and the buildings going up the hillside, are they fictitious?

I took sketchbooks with me to Tuscany.  Little four inch square books with hardbacks.  We were staying in a rescued old house, refurbished beautifully by the owner and surrounded on every side by views.

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This is the view from the pool.  All those pointy trees and the buildings going up the hillsides and perched on the tops of the hills are real, and everywhere you look.

I only had a day and some mornings in the house to draw and only had a propelling pencil and some multicoloured biros, having provided the same for the grandchildren, but the views were unbeatable, and I hope I got better as I practised.  I always thought the Italian Renaissance had been inspired by archaeology, as people began to dig down through the layers of a thousand years of mediaeval mud, to the glory that was Rome below.  Quite  bit of it is down to the geography, unearthing thousand year old marble statues and standing them up again in such landscapes was bound to inspire anyone.

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Here is the dirt track up to the villa, done in biro with a bit of pencil in the background.

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Every view into the distance reveals little buildings, perched on hills, surrounded by sculptural trees, which are Lombardy pines and Italian Cypresses.

Absolutely everything is picturesque.  When talking to Italians in Florence, they want to know what sort of artist you are.  Outside of the Duomo a man in jeans and a tee-shirt was singing opera, by the shops an artist was painting pictures of mediaeval bridges with a palette knife.  I was glad I had learned the Italian to say I make miniature articulated porcelain dolls, because I was asked.

I don’t usually draw, but in the Tuscan countryside, you almost cannot help yourself doing so.

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I do need to go back.  I need less time being driven round and more time, much more time, just looking.

I should be getting on with some moulds, but I’ll not do that until my stitches are out and I feel better but I think I’m going to have to do watercolours of some of my photographs.

After the Uffizi I felt as if art was spilling out of my ears, now I think it may come down my arm and escape through my fingers.

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Thank you to all readers who emailed, concerned.  There goes my possible career as a top model, I’ll just have to tell Chanel, no, I’m sorry, I’m going to be an artist instead.

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