The book in the background is my diary, which has a cover illustrated by Brian Froud.
My husband, who may officially be the Kindest Man In The World, has bought me a Kindle Paperwhite. This came after a week of me complaining about tremendous headaches caused by trying to do the majority of my reading from bright white screens.
From an eye strain point of view, and also from a not having to hold a massive heavy book in my arthritic hands point of view, it’s absolutely fantastic! There are a few things about it which bother me though. Not least the logistics of how you go about citing something in your research when there aren’t any page numbers.
My main issue though, is that it’s weird having invisible books.
I love books. My degree was in Typography & Graphic Communication which, at the time, was a 50/50 split between practical graphic design work (which I was not very good at), and learning all about the history and materiality of books (which I absolutely loved).
My bedroom is lined with books which are overflowing from the shelves and stacked on the floor. My office has one wall entirely covered with bookshelves. I love how they look, how they smell, how they feel. I love thinking “oh yes, that passage was towards the top of a right hand page, quite near the beginning”, and being able to pick up the book, flick through, and find it. You can’t do that with a Kindle.
I also quite often sell my books, or give them away to charity shops, when my interests change. Which they do. A lot.
It makes me feel quite sad to know that my Kindle books will never have that second life. They’ll never give another person the joy of walking into a second-hand bookshop and picking up exactly what they needed. They’ll just sit there, in the ether, taking up virtual space until I eventually delete them.
It turns out that I feel sorry for my Kindle, because it’s not a book.
THIS. This is the type of book I want to write. Accessible language but fully referenced, as well as beautifully designed and illustrated. Frustratingly, it's pre-empted a chunk of my dissertation, but at least I can reference it, and I know I'm reading the latest research. pic.twitter.com/FqNnz7WkDy
Obviously I’m a long way off from being able to write a book… but when I get there, this is what I want it to be like. (Click through for the Twitter thread.)
Tweet from Anna Soper on the folkloric uses of cyclamen
First of all Tomos Jones, one of the PhD students at the Herbarium, shared this tweet with me. It’s part of the #folklorethursday hashtag, and the theme this week was the folklore of “elders”. The use of the word “crones” reminded me of a lecture I attended earlier this year by Dr Olivia Smith, who was talking about the origins of the phrase “Old Wives’ Tales” and some of the ways in which folk and oral traditions were marginalised by the cultural transition into print.
When I was taking notes during the lecture I wrote down, “how to separate actual women’s knowledge from reported Old Wives’ Tales???“, which turned out to be exactly the issue that Dr Smith was investigating in her research. When talking about Old Wives, or perhaps Crones (as above), these figures are often used as a shorthand means of describing an unreliable source or narrator.
I went back to Gerard’s Herball to see what he had to say about Cyclamen as a love potion:
Gerard’s Herball, first edition. Photograph by Claire Smith.
Being beaten and made up into trochises, or little flat cakes, it is reported to be a good amorous medicine to make one in love, if it be inwardly taken
I particularly like “it is reported” as a nice vague way of absolving Gerard from any responsibility, should said love potion turn out not to work. Also, who reports it? Whose knowledge is being simultaneously reported and omitted by these noncommittal turns of phrase? That’s definitely something I’m going to be interested in when it comes to my dissertation. The majority of early printed herbals in English were translations and compilations from various earlier sources, but scattered amongst the empirical research is an awful lot of “it is reported” and “everybody knows”.
I think it’s also important to note that little round cyclamen cakes are not the benign floral love potion that we might imagine them to be. Gerard mentions several times, in both The Vertue and The Danger of the plant that it “killeth the childe” (see image & link above), to the point where Gerard advises that a pregnant woman should not even go near to the plant, nor step over it. While Gerard’s warnings may now seem a little overstated, we do know that Cyclamen is indeed toxic. In fact the Journal of the Cyclamen Society (Vol. 18, No. 1, June 1994, pp. 15-17) contains an article by Dr J. Rupreht regarding the dangers of Cyclamen purparescens as an abortifacient.
Folks, please, do not eat cyclamen, or attempt to recreate any of Gerard’s given remedies.
Last week we had a seminar to discuss how best to begin our dissertation research. One of the important pieces of advice was to read around our chosen subjects, and to look into other disciplines to find out different information and make connections.
Genus Cyclamen: Science, Cultivation, Art and Culture by Brian Mathew (Royal Botanic Gardens, 2013)
The following day I went into the Herbarium to continue my regular volunteering with the Cyclamen Society collection. While I was there, I flicked through a book which had been sitting on the bench next to my computer for weeks and weeks – Genus Cyclamen: Science, Cultivation, Art and Culture by Brian Mathew. Entirely by coincidence, I opened it at a page discussing the depiction and description of cyclamen in Gerard’s Herball.
Gerard’s Herball of 1597 contains descriptions and illustrations of two distinct Cyclamen, C. purpurascens and C. hederifolium; C. repandum and C. balearicum were added by Johnson in 1636.
Genus Cyclamen: Science, Cultivation, Art and Culture by Brian Mathew (Royal Botanic Gardens, 2013) p. 450
There is also a fascinating discussion of the transition from manuscript to print in terms of the accuracy (or otherwise) of the illustrations that were used. Some had evidently been drawn from observation, and these allow for accurate modern identification. Others have been copied, often repeatedly, until the resulting illustration bears very little resemblance to the original plant. (Chapter 6.1, by Martyn Denney.) It was very common for printers to re-use woodcut blocks for different texts, so the same images appear repeatedly over quite a long period of time.
Gerard’s Herball, first edition. Photograph by Claire Smith.
I’m looking forward to reading that chapter in full, and understanding more about the scientific difficulties that were inherent in the study of botany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It was particularly timely as I’d spent Saturday in town, sorting out a few bits of Christmas shopping, and generally being distracted by Shiny Things.
Shopping-wise, this is a difficult time of year for me. Everything’s black or burgundy or velvet or lace or sparkly, and as a recovering goth these things are extremely tempting! But, like most people, I have a wardrobe filled to bursting with clothes that I hardly ever wear because I’m pulling out the same few outfits over and over. I’m going to a grand total of two Christmas parties (one in a pub with my husband’s colleagues, and one at a friend’s house with my swordfighting buddies), and I definitely do not need a new dress for, what? about eight hours’ wear a year?
Having avoided the “I MUST have a party outfit!” temptation that all the adverts and shop windows were screaming at me, I did give in and “treat myself” to a little something, because frankly, who can resist Harry Potter nail polish? I must admit, the vast majority of my nail polish collection was acquired in this way – as a consolation prize for not buying something that I either couldn’t afford or couldn’t justify to myself ethically. Not ideal, but if it helps me to feel more fancy in my old clothes, then hey. We all need to feel a bit fancy every now and then.
Speaking of old clothes, I do need to start thinking about replacing a long black cardigan that I’ve had for something in the region of twenty-five years. My Mum knitted it for me before I went to University, and it’s still just about hanging on. I’ve mended it as many times as I can, but the fabric itself is really on the point of giving up. I am a very slow knitter, so although my Mum has given me the original pattern that she used, I definitely can’t knit myself a new cardigan before this one finally falls to bits. So I am going to need to buy one.
Nomads have a lovely long cardigan with pockets for £70… but it doesn’t come in black! And then there’s this one, from People Tree, for £99. That sounds like such a lot of money, doesn’t it? £99 for a cardigan? Given that I’m on an extremely restricted income at the moment, it’s definitely not something I could click into an online shopping basket without a second thought. I’d have to save my pennies for a few months. But, it’s 100% organic cotton. It’s made and bought on Fairtrade principles from India. And if it lasts as long as the cardigan I need it to replace, that £99 works out to just £3.96 a year. And that definitely doesn’t seem like too much money to pay for a cardigan! Of course, I have no guarantee that any new cardigan will last as long as the old one. But it’s cotton, so I can dye it when it starts to fade, the cuffs and elbows will be easy to mend, and I can add loops and buttons (or brooches) if I decide I need it to fasten.
But most importantly, I’ll know that nobody needed to leave their child in another village, or keep their baby lying on the floor right by their sewing machine, be beaten, shot at, and forced to work in unsafe conditions, or end up with jaundice and liver failure and skin and lung conditions from working and living with improperly-controlled chemicals.
The film is right. We can do better. All we have to do is think. And then care.
Honestly though? I don’t think I’m going to buy a £99 cardigan.
By the time I’ve saved the money, it’ll most likely be sold out. But I can save the money anyway, and see what’s available when I have it. It might go into a sale at the end of the year. I can have a look on Ebay, or in my local charity shops, for something similar. I have regular searches set up on Ebay for things that I liked but couldn’t afford – like last winter’s floral velvet Boden jacket. (Although – looking around for a link to it – how many of these jackets did Boden actually sell, and how many did they give away to bloggers and “influencers”?! Hmmm.)
Anyway. I’m waffling now, so I’ll stop.
But please do watch the film if you haven’t already. And please do recommend anything else you’ve seen on this subject. It’s so important.
Yesterday was the 5 year anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh. 1,138 garment workers died, after being threatened with the loss of their jobs if they didn’t go to work in a factory that was known to be structurally unsafe.
There were five garment factories in Rana Plaza manufacturing clothes for big name fashion brands. Not just cheap, fast fashion companies including Primark, Matalan and H&M, but for supposedly high quality labels too.
I’ve been trying to write something on the blog about this a while, but what can I say? I can’t tell you where to shop. But I do think that people need to be much more aware of the conditions under which their clothes are produced, which is what makes them so artificially cheap.
Fashion Revolution, a campaign started in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster, has an excellent ten-point manifesto of what a genuine FASHION REVOLUTION could look like. Culturally, we’re very far away from it at the moment, but every single tiny little step in the right direction helps.
We try to visit Carter’s Steam Fair every time they come to our local park, and this weekend was no exception. I wanted to take lots of photographs of the typography. (I still haven’t saved up enough money to go on Joby Carter’s signwriting course, but one day I will. One day.)
The rides feature two main styles of artwork – the intricately carved and decorated work of the 19th century…
…and the streamlined Art Deco style of the early 20th century.
This gorgeous Morris JB van is from the late 1950s. Every time I see it, I mentally drive it away and use it to travel around selling lovely things. Fortunately for the Carters it’s extremely unlikely that I’m ever going to learn to drive, so their ice cream van remains safe for now!
One day I must be brave and ask for permission to photograph some of the fair’s living vans. (There were people doing that, but it seemed a little bit rude. They are people’s homes, after all.) The Carter’s website has some more information about them, but not about the one I fell most in love with, which was a very streamlined caravan, which you can catch a glimpse of from their Facebook page:
I must admit, I’d gone to Carter’s looking for magic, and didn’t find it there this time. (Not through any fault of the fair, which I absolutely love, but more to do with my own frame of mind at the moment.)
So, I was very excited to go online yesterday morning and find out about Rima and Tom‘s new project – Hedgespoken. It’s going to be a travelling performance space and home all in one! Please watch the film, it’s absolutely gorgeous, and explains their hopes and dreams beautifully.
I’m hoping to find a little money to send their way at the end of the month, and I’ll be following the project’s progress with great interest.
I’m always a little bit nervous talking about my interest in magic and liminality and travelling life (particularly when I don’t travel myself!), for fear of being thought even dafter than most people think I am already. But in a world as horrible as the one we’re currently living in, I can totally understand the need to create your own magic, and to share it as widely as you can.
Bishopston Trading closes tomorrow, after 28 years in business. This is the statement, in full, from their website:
“It is with great regret and sadness that we have to announce that, after 28 years in business, the Bishopston Trading Company will close at the end of July 2013. The village of K.V.Kuppam, where our clothes have always been made, has seen huge changes. An entire generation has grown up since we started. All our workers’ children have been educated and very few are now seeking jobs as tailors, embroiderers or appliqué workers. The problem is even more acute with our weavers. In 1985 we formed a partnership with a community of handloom weavers in the village. Weaving is a traditional craft skill, passed down within families. We helped pay for a scheme to enable weavers’ children to stay in school until they were 17 years old. Many have been able to go on to higher education. There are now not enough weavers in the area to keep up with the supplies we need.
While India has developed financially, Britain’s economy has been slow for five years, and this has changed the buying habits of our customers. Our customers tend to be thoughtful, concerned, cautious people (a bit like us). They worry about the environment and over consumption and debt. They have not deserted us but are buying less – this is particularly evident with our online customers.
We can now no longer continue and wish to close down our business voluntarily and ethically and in an honourable way. We would like to thank our loyal customers, in Britain and around the world, who have supported us for many years.”
The photos, above and below, are from the one and only wholesale order that I placed with them in 2008. To be perfectly honest, I ordered far too much, and five years later I’m still using it. I may have been a small and infrequent customer of Bishopston’s, but I’ll still miss them.
There’s something that intrigues me about their statement though, and it’s this:
All our workers’ children have been educated and very few are now seeking jobs as tailors, embroiderers or appliqué workers. The problem is even more acute with our weavers.
So we’ve set up these co-operatives, and we’ve paid fair wages, and we’ve educated all the children… but there’s nobody left to do the weaving. Because traditional skills, passed down from person-to-person, generation-to-generation, simply aren’t valued any more.
Now I’m certainly not saying that any child, anywhere in the world, should have to forego a formal education in favour of sitting at home with multiple generations of their extended family and learning to weave. But if nobody learns how to weave, or sew, or lay bricks, or install plumbing… because those kinds of practical skills simply aren’t valued in an “educated” society… then how long will it be before we’re all naked and homeless? How bad do things have to be before actual practical skills are seen as anything other than menial?
I’ve learnt a lot of practical skills over the years. I very much doubt I could remember my Girl Guide training in how to make a shelter and find clean water, but I can still make a damn good stand for a plastic washing up bowl, given enough pea sticks and a handy ball of string! I’m hopeless at cooking, but I know how to make bread, how to make butter, and how to forage for some edible plants. (And how to burn baked beans inside the can into an inedible mush over a campfire. Thanks again, Baden-Powell!) I may not be retting a pile of stinging nettles to weave my own cloth, but I’m learning to spin wool, and I can knit, and I can sew and mend my own clothes. I realise that “naked and homeless” is a shameless piece of hyperbole. And I’m all too aware of the hypocrisy of decrying any skills other than the strictly practical whilst sitting at my computer shouting pointlessly at the internet.
What I’m searching for is balance. Something that seems to be lacking almost everywhere I look right now.
This photo looks how I feel: rubbish, and a bit fuzzy.
I don’t want to get into a habit of posting about being ill (I do enough whingeing about that at the best of times), but the last time I did mention it a few of you were kind enough to get in touch, so I thought it would be nice to let you know what’s been going on.
I’ve had a bunch of tests – I scored 18/18 for fibromyalgia tender points – top marks for me! This basically means that I went OUCH every time the doctor prodded me in the 18 test places. Including under my shoulderblades, which is a place I don’t tend to get touched, so that one was a bit of a surprise! I also had lots of blood tests done. So many that I felt a bit like Tony Hancock. (“A pint? That’s very nearly an armful!”)
The results came back today – mostly clear, which was nice. No inflammation markers, no signs of connective tissue disease. Phew. One more test to go (an ultrasound on my worst wrist), but rheumatoid arthritis and lupus are pretty much ruled out. Excellent.
The one that did come back a bit surprising was the test for vitamin D. The usual levels are between 50 and 200 (50 and 200 what, I don’t know), but mine were, rather startlingly, 11. Eleven. Which is not enough, by quite a long way! It’s common for people in the UK to have low levels of vitamin D because the weather’s not exactly sunny (especially this year), but even “low” usually means around 40. Not eleven.
Symptoms of vitamin D deficiency can include things like joint, bone and muscle pains, chronic fatigue, and confusion. Which explains a lot. Thankfully it’s extremely easy to sort out! I’m now taking vitamin D tablets for 500% of the RDA, which I’ll do for the next six months. After that I should be a) feeling much better (fingers crossed!) and b) able to go down to a more sensible maintenance dose.
As for the fibromyalgia, the hope is that once the pain from the lack of vitamin D is under control, it’ll be a lot easier to manage. In the meantime I have three months’ worth of a very low dose of amitriptyline (10mg) which will hopefully help to break the pain cycle that’s going on between my body and brain.
I also have advice about diet and exercise and acupuncture and generally looking after myself, which should hopefully all help too.
So, I can expect to continue feeling a bit rubbish for a while, but once the vitamins start to kick in, hopefully all will be well. Hooray!
I did buy four pairs of stripy over-the-knee socks, and a bright yellow skirt.
It’s calf length, 75% wool 25% nylon, fully lined, with pockets in the side seams. Smells a little bit of mothballs now I’ve ironed it (yes, believe it or not I did iron it before I took this picture – clearly not hard enough!), but that’s nothing that a little wash won’t fix. And it shows that somebody’s bothered to look after it. The label says “Yessica” which, if memory serves, is 1980s C&A. It cost a grand total of £6, from the Sue Ryder shop.
I have a sneaky suspicion that this skirt will sit in my wardrobe (along with the tweedy one I bought in May) and be relegated to “vaguely Steampunk dressing-up”. Which would be sad, as it’s a really lovely skirt, great quality, and with details that I really like.
So, why buy the skirt that won’t get worn, and not the blouse that will?
I’ve been trying very hard not to buy mass-produced things from chain stores this year. The biggest exception has been my ever-increasing collection of TM Lewin shirts, but I think I’ve got enough now to last me a good few years. (She says, having just looked at the website and seen a purple flowery one, and a blue one with birds… both reduced from £85 to £20… argh!)
So whilst the hot air balloon blouse is lovely, and silk, and would in fact look great with this yellow skirt… and the skull tops from H&M were just generally awesome (I’m still a sucker for anything with skulls on it)… and the Thundercats Converse were hilarious… they’re all mass-produced, fast fashion, and designed to be disposable. And I don’t want that from my clothes any more.
I’d always thought I wasn’t one to worry about what other people thought of my clothes (see: yellow coat, silly prints, bow ties, gold boots, pink hair, Being A Goth), but I think part of my reluctance to wear skirts like this and my tweedy one is the fear that people might look at me funny. I had a teacher at middle school (anyone remember Mrs Trubshaw?) who was widely ridiculed for wearing unusual clothes, including an a-line skirt with a forest design appliqued round the hem, which a) I would now kill for, and b) was probably actually quite fashionable in the mid 1980s. As kids, we were absolutely horrible to her, and I’m basically afraid of being treated the same way. Which is silly really, because if I coped with people shouting at me in the street when my hair was pink, I’m sure I can deal with a few sideways glances at a yellow skirt.
Perhaps one of my resolutions for 2013 should be to stop falling back into the comfortable trap of jeans and t-shirts, and start putting more effort into wearing the clothes that I really love.
Yes, I know the circus is more traditional. But ever since I moved to Reading almost twenty years ago, I’ve been in love with Carters Steam Fair. On a whim, I wondered what sort of job a person of my skill range* could do as part of a fair, so I went to their website to have a look.
That’s when I discovered that Joby Carter, son of John and Anna who originally started the fair in 1975, runs courses in signwriting and coach painting. He also has an additional business called White Waltham Restoration, which specialises in the restoration, conservation and use of vintage machinery.
Now that, I could do!
In fact I went to a signwriter and printer for my school work experience at the age of fifteen… although they didn’t let me actually paint or typeset or do anything, and I spent the entire week designing my own letterhead (they printed an entire ream for me, I think I still have some left) and drawing an extremely detailed picture of a hawk moth that was later hung in my parents’ hallway.
But I digress.
It seems as though my degree in typography and my (admittedly limited) experience of painting pub chalkboards would stand me in good stead for not making too much of a pig’s ear of a signwriting course. I’m good at hand-lettering (if I do say so myself!), and learning how to work in the style of the Victorian fairground would be fascinating.
And how absolutely wonderful would it be to work for a company that has its very own Victorian Roller Disco, complete with a live pianist in the middle?!
So, here’s my latest New-And-Improved Life Plan:
Step One: Book a place on Joby Carter’s signwriting course. Step Two: Get a job with Carters Steam Fair or White Waltham Restoration**.
What could possibly go wrong…?
*Can’t drive, can’t lift heavy things, can’t operate or repair machinery, fairground rides make me sick…
**Yes, of course I know it’s not as easy as all that. Stop spoiling all my fun, will you?!
