Questing Vole cards

The Questing Vole cards are proving popular... I was distributing them around Bristol on Wednesday, and this morning was in Devizes and Seend, and sending a parcel of them off to Australia! If you'd like some, they're available in my Etsy shop. I've also had some printed up as giclee prints, and the picture is available in a limited edition of 50. You can get one here,  again in the Etsy shop.

a caganer for Bristol

 Here's Bristol mayor George Ferguson as a caganer, a figure used in Nativity scenes in Spain but not so much over here... at least, not yet.

I've been occupied with rebuilding the engine on the Traveller, after that blown head gasket last week. House Teenager was unimpressed, of course.

"Why don't we just get a modern car?"
"Because I couldn't fix it if it went wrong"
"They don't go wrong."
"Oh yes they do, and if the head gasket blew on a modern car it would cost hundreds of pounds to fix. And this cost me fifteen pounds to fix. And the Traveller nearly always gets us where we want to go....."

...and so on.

Oh, and the winter lurgie. Yuk, snotty and norrible, and a voice as growly as a bear whose pint you've just spilled.

Still, it's passing. And the car is now running sweetly. Touch wood.

round robin

Fresh from Minuteman Press comes another Christmas card! You can get it over in my Etsy shop, or if you're in Bristol, you can pick up or I can deliver....

They're blank inside. This is the poem I wrote that got me thinking of painting the round robin. Or was it the other way round?

Not slim

And far from win-

some, the round robin sings

In unmelodious tones of things familial;

Who passed what exam, did well at work, had chil-

dren of rare beauty; feathers puffed with pride; but still

Behind the seeming gasconading, someone strove

To keep the distant bonds, with time worn thin,

In place, that complicated love

That families have

Within.

(coincidentally, Lynne Truss read a series of thoughts on round robins, on the Radio 4 Today programme. A bit unkind, I thought; it's easy to poke fun at the gaucheries of family bulletins to get clever points, after all. I've always been happy to get family newsletters; these days they tend to be from people I like anyway, and even the bad ones I used to get were good for a laugh. Let us yet be merciful....)

new cards for Christmas, or possibly Winterval *cough*

 

I picked up the first batch of this year's Christmas cards from Minuteman Press yesterday. They've turned out nicely, I think!

This one is inspired by Thomas Hardy's poem The Oxen

...and this one is called Christmas on the Cut. Because it's been quite a canal-orientated year for me...

I've got them up for sale in packs of five, on my Etsy shop. If you would like lots, do get in touch and we can try to sort something out! ...I'm learning about selling as I go along, of course....

The Oxen

 The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
   "Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
   By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
   They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
   To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
   In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
   "Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
   Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
   Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy

I love this poem; it fits my own feelings at Christmas quite well. I remember the sense of magic about the Christmas story, and feel its absence now I am both older and a lapsed Anglican (ex-Anglican? post-Anglican?); magic, for me, is now far more elusive, though still there sometimes in the corner of my eye.

So I wanted to do a picture to go with it. It was a bit of a rush to get it finished in time for Christmas Eve! We had a good day; House Teenager was busily either painting at her desk or learning Fairytale Of New York on the ukulele, and I was doing this.  The gold paint for the detailing on the dressing gown was a bit of an experiment, and I quite like it- you can't see the glow of the paint on this image, but it's there! House Teenager posed for the picture, as did Ted, Deborah's lively galoot of a collie.

Saint Werburgh and the goose - cards

I thought that the story of Saint Werburgh and the geese would make a good subject for a seasonal card, not least because the central goose in the story is resurrected after having been eaten. A good story for a  gluttonous festival.

And now the cards are back from the printers (those nice folk at Minuteman Bristol), and available from my Etsy shop:

Pack of 5 cards for £5

Pack of 20 cards for £15

...though if you want more than that or fewer than that, just say the word and we'll sort something out!

knitting

The longest night of the year merged into a muggy dawn, which I ignored as I was concentrating on the picture I was painting. Come 9 o'clock, I finally got up and opened the curtains, and found a big sky full of blue. 

We just had to go out into it.

Not too long later we were rumbling across the Severn Bridge, admiring the milky sunlight on Avonmouth, glinting on the wind turbine blades. "Open the Cherry Coke, please", I asked Katie as I munched my way through the bag of special offer Christmas pretzels. We'd stocked up on fuel at the Shirehampton filling station.

She put down her strawberry flavoured Wonder Winder for long enough to pass the Cherry Coke. I gulped briefly and handed it back. "Thank you. Just think of all the adventures we've had that started off with us driving over the Severn Bridge and drinking Coke and eating crap," I said. "Remember canoeing round the coast in Pembrokeshire?"

"And me saying 'I'm tired' and lying down in the bottom of the canoe."

"And falling asleep instantly. Dead impressive, that. I was paddling for ages against that tide and getting nowhere. Those were the days, when we did stupid dangerous things together."

"And I was too young to know any better."

"Too young to know that you could say no..."

These days, expeditions are by negotiation. Today Katie's here by her concession, and we use our  history as a tentative shared language, a touchstone.

"That's a rain cloud," she observed. "Sunny in Bristol, look - head to Wales and it starts raining."

"There's a patch of sun over there on Twynbarlwm," I said. "If you don't like the weather, something different will be along in a minute. Purse is in the bag; sort out the toll money, would you?"

I threw the £5.70 in loose change into the hopper on the toll booth. Coins chinged down into the rejected coins bowl. I pulled them out, threw them back in. The barrier lifted, as more coins spat out into the change bowl. "Come on come on come on," Katie said anxiously as I grabbed the change and passed it across. We accelerated sedately away from the toll booths as cars  and lorries hurtled at us from both sides. Scary places, motorway tolls with everyone pretending it's a Le Mans start at the other side. "Whoo, one pound forty. That's good."

"It's an omen."

We passed the waypoints of our westbound journey- the stalinist fortress of the Celtic Manor, the eagerly-looked-out-for Castell Coch- and arrived at St Fagans, the open air museum on the western fringe of Cardiff.

I'd not seen the celtic huts before. We entered the smoky one and crouched near the fire. The woman looking after it was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. "My flatmates complain I come in stinking of smoke," she said. "It's not so bad if you get down close to the floor; the smoke rises."

They'd had a solstice feast, a few days back. She described the preparations; a chicken, rarely eaten as valued more for the eggs, but killed for the ceremony; spelt flour for the bread, ground twice in the quern because it's so hard. "The stone gets ground into the flour, so their teeth wore away quite quickly."

We wander around buildings that have been familiar to me for over forty years, and see the dark interiors, smell the woodsmoke and polish, miss the tang of the animals in the Rhayader longhouse.

"I like the idea of sharing the house with the cattle; it must have smelt really nice", I say. "If you like the smell of cattle..."

"They'd be kept in over the winter," said the guide. "They'd keep the hay up there in the loft, and milk them. They'd give milk through the winter, then."

We warmed ourselves at the fire. "People say it must be nice just sitting in here all day," he added. "I say, you try sitting here next to an open window..." 

I remembered the first winter I came here with my parents, in the 1960s. It was snowy, and we sat in a settle in a big fireplace and warmed ourselves and talked with the guide. It was a glorious memory, and one I hold on to. Now my past is mixed up with the history.

We went into a recent addition, a small schoolhouse. "It looks very much like my school at Llanfrechfa," I told Katie. She looked pained; I'd already commented on the familiarity of the Workmen's Institute and the ironworkers' cottages. I admired the school room's big coke stove, and recalled the milk bottles ranged round it to thaw out, to the woman sat at the teacher's desk. "Lots of people remember that," she said kindly, pausing from her knitting.

busy

busy, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

just at the moment, the gurt A0 drawing board that looms over my room like a big looming thing is overwhelmed with stationery, as I package up yet more cards. It seemed daft to keep getting them printed them in dribs and drabs, so I took a deep breath and ordered 500.... so, thanks to the economy of scale, I am selling them in my Etsy shop at £15 for 20 cards.

They are also available at £5 for 5. Or, heck, as few as you want!

Just sayin'.

get thee up into the high mountain

Christmas Day dawned with not a cloud in the sky, so I headed over to Wales and Ysgyryd Fawr, just north of Abergavenny. I was up there last year, too, but it was misty and windy then. Today it was cold but clear, although the massif of the Black Mountains, just across to the west, had a great fug of fog on top of it, and the Blorenge looked like it was wearing a hat of the same stuff.

There were other walkers, and we exchanged Merry Christmases as our paths crossed, sharing that sense of felicity in being there.

But it was a bit cold for eating lunch (a big lump of tortilla in my bag) on the top, so I drank my flask of hot chocolate and came down again.

Next stop Skenfrith, and St Bridget's church.


I love this church. The windows add gentle hues of yellow and green to the sunlight on the floor's memorial inscriptions. Restoration has touched lightly upon it. And I had the place to myself, in a sense.