214: oooh, people

Every so often I stick my head up above the arts and heritage parapet and remind myself that there’s a world out there of people who probably really enjoy spreadsheets and who can do magical things with apps and technical things and who aren’t at all fazed when month-end and year-end come around. A fabulous friend of mine runs an event planning company and one of their big events is the Digital Accountancy Show, this year held over two days at Evolution Battersea. She brings me and two of our other friends in to support the event – if I tell you that over the three days I logged more than 80,000 steps that should tell you how busy it is.

I love it. My role is officially exhibitor support, plus anything else that looks like it might need doing – covering breaks for other staff, lugging giant water bottles around, answering questions about access, unloading courier deliveries and more. On the first morning of the show I arm myself and my little team with about a million HDMI cables, acquire a notebook and pen from one of the stands and troubleshoot everything in sight.

This year there were many tech queries so I spent a lot of time fetching the people in charge of the USBs. Some things I can fix myself – upside down logos on the stands are pretty simple, for example, by removing the panel and rotating it through the required number of degrees. Some things are harder – my stand isn’t where I thought it would be, something’s damaged or broken, there’s no TV/lights – so I listened to stressed digital types, soothing ruffled spreadsheets. I collect feedback to give to the Show team, check in with people throughout the show, herd people over to the marquee for the evening show, wrangle fire-eaters (yes, really) and generally fly about the place.

Taste test required – I think I’ll stick with the wafers

The show is pretty spectacular and the venue is more like a club than a trade show – laser shows, silent disco style earphones for the talks so all the stages can run simultaneously without the sound bleed, dry ice, light rigs. So much so that when we had a thunder and hail storm on day one a lot of people thought it was sound effects. The companies up their game every year too – when the event was held at the Tottenham Hotspurs ground it was quite straightforward, but now teams bring fancy coffee machines (some bring baristas to work them!), and one brought an ice cream machine. Scottish firms ply everyone with Tunnocks teacakes and caramel wafers, which are always winners. The show swag gets better every year too – a firm called Apron had the best tote bags this year, and put the team in funky work overalls. Some firms give away good coffee, others seed sticks or seed packets. This year there were interactive elements – darts, safecracking, those buzzy puzzles and an electronic thingy. SuperAcornomics dressed their poor lad up in a red squirrel costume and his handler trundled him about giving out mints. There was a red panda mascot, but I couldn’t convince the organisers that we ought to start the night show off with a mascot wrestling match, unfortunately. It would have been great. These shows keep me in notebooks and socks too, which is handy.

Days are long and although we were in a rather nice hotel in Battersea, we didn’t get to see much after Sunday when Miriam and I had a wander round Battersea Power Station and tested out the spa (very small and uncomfortably couply – we were doing widths in the pool to avoid the other end, where one of those ‘no petting’ posters from municipal pools would have been appropriate). A nice lady in the Curated Makers shop told me if I ever wanted to make jackets to sell to come to them first, which was lovely to hear.

At the end of Day 1 we made it back to the hotel and I was in bed by 9, having stayed in a hot bath till everything stopped hurting. By the end of Day 2 I was so ready for my own bed…

Having been working on closed projects since 2020, things like this remind me that I rather like interacting with people – I love my day job but I’m really looking forward to having some visitors again! Four-legged ones will do, like this tiny cub who kept having to be rescued from the venue while build and strike were underway.

Other things making me happy this week:

A visit to Westminster Abbey to meet the team there. I also met a cat.
First of the summer swims at Redricks – 12 degrees!
Sleeping in my own bed again. Hotels are all very well but lack cats.

This week will have a lot less walking, I hope! Watch this space…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

A Court of Thorns and Roses/House of Flame and Shadow – Sarah J. Maas

Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)

213: impossible questions

This week one of my manymanymany cousins posed the following ridiculous question over on FB: what are your two favourite novels?

Well, honestly – where do you even start answering a question like that? I thought about it for a bit and asked for clarification along the lines of ‘what, this week or always?’ The two novels you’d most read, apparently. This did not, for some reason, narrow it down at all, even when children’s books were eliminated from the equation.

At age 10 this would still have been a hard question but I could at least have narrowed it down to a Nancy Drew, one of the Little House books or something by L.M. Montgomery. At 50 and as an avid reader this question ranks right up there with the meaning of life or one hand clapping or something equally conundrous (that’s not a word, according to the spellcheck but it’s my blog and I can make up words if I want. It’s a good word. Conundrous. Try it.)

Novels most read? I read my way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld at least once a year, with probably Night Watch and Hogfather being most read. But then I also pick up the Moomin books with the same frequency. There are novels – series – I go back to and read through before the new one comes out (Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, or Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway books.

What about novels that have stayed with you even though you’ve only read them once? The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, for example, or The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley, both fairly recent reads but which I’ve been recommending to all my friends who like cats and/or books.

Do short story collections count? If so, some of Stephen King’s collections or any of Charles de Lint’s Newford stories have been in heavy rotation for years – and there are novels in this series too.

Also, favourite novel for what – a good mystery? For when you need a good cry? When you just need to remember that magic is out there, when you’re feeling nostalgic or in need of a good belly laugh? For when you’ve just been dumped? When you want something that you know you’re going to enjoy but don’t want to spend too much brainpower on it?

I did manage to settle on one novel – The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.. It’s what people would call ‘YA’ these days, but is still one of my all-time favourites, and now Things 1 and 2 also love it. I’ll have to come back to you on the other one.

Other things making me happy this week:

Progress on new cross stitch (despite being afflicted by an unputdownable series of books)
Good long walk in the sunshine on Saturday morning
Weather warm enough to consider painting my toenails – and that they’ve all grown back now to be painted!
A visit to the Unravel exhibition at the Barbican with an ex-colleague – gorgeous creations and a good catch-up

What I’ve been reading

Shanghai Immortal – A.Y. Chao

House of Earth and Blood/House of Sky and Breath/House of Flame and Shadow/Throne of Glass – Sarah J. Maas

Sweets – Tim Richardson

Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)

212: I will hug him and pet him and call him…Kevin?

Faithful readers will no doubt recall that back during lockdown – four years ago! how? – people were doing a lot of baking things like banana bread and buying all the flour and yeast and stuff. Some people even nurtured their own sourdough starters, including London sister who called hers George and kindly shared one of George’s offspring with me. It feels wrong to call these offspring discards, as it might hurt their feelings. I called my new arrival Kevin, after Harry Enfield’s teenager, and kept him alive for….oooh, months. And then he grew mould and died a sad and gloopy death.

Luckily London sister is tolerant of my lack of culinary achievements (viz -TANITH! THERE ARE FLAMES! HELP!) and posted me another baby George which probably contravened some law or other about sending live things through the post but whatever. Kevin II spends a lot of time in hibernation or cryogenic suspension (OK, he lives in the fridge) but he hasn’t gone mouldy this time.

Every so often my family will request/demand sourdough pizza so I am forced to bring poor Kevin out of his slumber and coax him back to bubbly life. It’s not that I don’t love sourdough pizza (and cinnamon buns and bread and doughnuts) but I always worry that I’m going to spend several days adding flour and water to the jar while nothing happens, other than creating enough papier-mache glue to service an entire nursery craft activity.

Kevin, however, is from hardy stock and just two feedings later he was glooping away merrily, so much so that he and his discard (sssh!) made spirited attempts to escape from their containers shortly afterwards. This is despite the discard being in a container in the fridge….. “mummmmm, your sourdough has exploded…”

Today I made a loaf and tomorrow there will be pizza, and a baby Kevin will go out into the world this week to live with one of my colleagues (what will she name him, I wonder?) and then I’ll make a few more loaves and swear that I’ll make them regularly….and in a few months time when my family demand pizza we’ll do it all again.

Other things making me happy this week

5k in the sunshine on Saturday morning – though off-road is still a little swampy
Popping down to The Bomb Factory in Holborn to see the work one of our community illlustrators did with the children at Holborn Community Association
Reaching series 23 of Silent Witness – only 45 more episodes to go!
Not being March anymore so my annual crisis is over for another year
Using my Christmas fabric to make a beautiful coat – the proper version of the bucket coat I tested a few weeks ago
Cutting things out for sewing bags
Lovely evening celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday

Now I am off to start the lengthy, lengthy process of making pizza….honestly, making pizza for six is a day-long commitment.

See you next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Easy Life in Kamusari/Kamusari Tales Told at NightThe Great Passage – Shion Miura

She and Her Cat – Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa

Sweets – Tim Richardson (possibly one of the most interesting books I’ve read in years. Try it.)

Notes from a Big Country/Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)

The Door to Door Bookstore – Carston Henn

211: communications breakdown

Easter is here already, and I am relieved of the responsibility of getting anyone out of bed other than me for the next two weeks. This makes me quite cheerful. While I am known for being generally quite chirpy of a morning, this is only the case if I am allowed to have a cup of coffee and half an hour (at least) of solitary reading before I am expected to engage with anyone else. Having to coax various offspring out of their pits before my happy face is in place is known to test the bounds of my patience, and brings on what London sister refers to as my ‘psycho Mary Poppins’ persona. Gritted teeth, determinedly cheerful voice and walking (and occasionally falling off) the fine line between perky and profane.

It turns out that pulling an all-nighter in A&E with a miserable child (don’t panic, mum, she’s FINE – NHS111 sent us up there but their concept of emergency does not translate to actual emergency care) also tests my patience, especially when communications break down within the hospital and things are missed. The streaming clinician telling child they need to go to Urgent Care where they’ll be seen quickly, for example, but no one having told the clinician that Urgent Care had closed. Then, because we’d been through triage once and then got put back on the system as they’d taken her off because she’d been sent to Urgent Care (that wasn’t open), they failed to take bloods which were finally done at 4.30am – and then the doctor said they couldn’t do anything for various reasons, and to get a GP appointment. I laughed in a what was, according to the child, quite a scary way. These days you can only get a GP appointment if you phone in an arbitrary half hour slot on a Thursday afternoon, a month in advance, and there’s a z in the month. Or if you dial upwards of 50 times (my record is 96) to get into the queue at 8.30am and pray that by the time you get through there’s an appointment left. And now the nurse practitioner (lovely lady, did all the medication reviews, HRT and generally useful things) has left which will reduce options even more. The child also needs a consultant appointment – a telephone clinic – so she attempted to book online, only to find there were no appointments and to leave a number and the clinic would phone back. They did not phone back – the next contact was a letter telling her if she didn’t book an appointment she’d be discharged. I suppose the theory is that you’ll either be better or dead by the time you actually get to see anyone, which at least reduces waiting lists. You can’t fault the actual people on the NHS frontline (which includes some of my favourite friends) but something is going wrong somewhere.

AND the bloody coffee machine was broken.

After six hours I was forced to channel my inner dad, and explain that we’d been there many hours at this point, and that I did have two other children who I needed to make sure got to school and perhaps a doctor might like to talk to us so we could leave? I was extremely polite but my inner psycho Mary P was very definitely in evidence. The only plus was that we’d been there so long that the buses had started running again so at least we could get home.

We got home, I made sure the other two were at least awake and then went to bed, slept for a few hours and was in work for afternoon meetings…. FML, quite frankly. FML.

Things making me happy this week (not the NHS)

Monday morning coffee with an old colleague
Getting a lot of crochet done on my scarf – obviously I’d rather it hadn’t been overnight in the A&E dept, but there we are
Finishing the Rivendell cross stitch – next up, a Michael Powell kit that’s been lurking in the stash
Getting up to date on the temperature cross stitch
Discovering a rather magical new book – Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – and a whole new genre of literature (cats and books in Japan)
A visit from London sister, although I think my cats are trying to kill her
An Easter morning swim

Hopefully you’re all having a lovely Easter weekend filled with chocolate and hot cross buns.

Same time next week then!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Voodoo River – Robert Crais

Sweets – Tim Richardson

At Home/Notes from a Big Country – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Kick Back – Val McDermid

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – Satoshi Yagisawa

The Easy Life in Kamusari – Shion Miura

210: mad March malaise

Ah, March. People who’ve worked with me for years will recognise this as my annual ‘chuck the toys out of the pram and swear I need another job’ moment, despite the fact that I love my job and really don’t want another one. Usually it’s related to the performance appraisal cycle, when I’m reviewing my year against targets and feeling as if I have achieved absolutely nothing.

In my head I know that the targets set the previous year are SMART (but VAGUE) and often don’t reflect the things I do across the year – which in some years have included writing a unit for the London Curriculum, working on hugely successful exhibitions and applications, developing innovative sessions, pulling off high profile events, to name a few things. If the things aren’t quantified in the targets I feel like a failure.

My current role doesn’t work to the April-March appraisal cycle but it turns out my brain hasn’t worked that out, so I’ve spent all week with a horrible case of impostor syndrome and associated wobbles. Oh yes, and a cold and the tail end of a cold sore.

Tuesday was the worst day. The cats were misbehaving, Thing 2’s work experience paperwork needed sorting out, I had a headache that wouldn’t go away, Thing 2’s eczema was making her miserable and it was clearly my fault, Thing 3 was being stroppy, Thing 1 has mocks and was stressed, my throat hurt, the big piece of work I’d finished the previous week was all wrong, everyone wanted me to do everything all at once, and I was clearly failing on all counts. I was also very, very tired.

I was very, very tired as on Monday I’d been to a conference at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which meant getting up at 4.30am, travelling 3.5 hours each way and when I got back at 8pm they were all waiting to be fed (see? all this responsibility!). It was a really interesting day, despite the cold taking hold and feeling very down – all about values-led community engagement.

One of the breakout sessions, led by the team from the Bluecoat in Liverpool, got us thinking about resilience vs vulnerability and how we define them. Resilience is a word which has been massively overused in the culture sector for the past 15 years or so – ‘resilience training’ for staff, along with ‘change management’ training, is often chased rapidly by other re- words, like restructure, reorganisation, redundancy, and (the most recent one I’ve heard) realignment, Resilience has been pushed on us by years of under-resourcing and uncertain funding, and vulnerability – especially personal – is often masked by a culture of toxic positivity masquerading as resilience. It was a relief to have a conversation with a group of people with shared experiences from across the sector, including one who’d been at one of the same organisations as me during the post-Covid ‘recovery’ process.

Chichester was lovely, too – I took a wander around it after the sessions and before the train – it’s a funny place, with about 12 phone shops interspersed with much higher-end shops (and a New Look with a frontage like the British Museum). There was some lovely street art as well, including a Stik piece, tucked away in side streets.

Pallant House Gallery’s exhibition of work by John Craxton, an artist who’d spent a long time in Greece, is worth a visit if you find yourself over that way. I adored the mischievous cats he’d captured in some of his paintings, and some of them would lend themselves beautifully to textile work.

Other things making me happy this week:

Little lambs seen from the train (and going on a train. I like trains)
Early Saturday morning coffee
Deep Heat on a stiff neck
Spring being on its way – and an office with daylight and a door we can prop open to the fire escape to enjoy it.
Excellent progress on the Rivendell cross stitch and the alpaca scarf

Same time next week then! A couple of four day weeks coming up with the promise of chocolate eggs, what’s not to love?

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches – Sangu Mandanna

The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic – Breanne Randall

At Home – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Sweets: A History of Temptation – Tim Richardson

Noise Floor – Andrew Cartmel

A Blend of Magic – Kate Kenzie

209: casting about

I should make it clear that there are no cats in this post, despite the cover image – it came up when I searched for ‘cast concrete’. Cats are nice, though, as Terry Pratchett’s Death memorably said. It was the anniversary of his passing this week, so it feels right to reference him here, as one of the only public figures whose death has made me cry.

Last Sunday I finally got round to trying one of the craft kits I’d bought with the Obby voucher my lovely Young V&A colleagues gave me as a leaving gift last year. I had great fun choosing some things I’d never tried before – a wet felting pebble kit inspired by one of the artworks at Kettle’s Yard, which I’d fallen in love with on my team outing last August, and a jesmonite casting kit from Creators Cabinet which was the one I tried out. I’d hoped to do a live and in-person workshop but there weren’t any available or scheduled when I was looking, sadly.

Jesmonite is a environmentally friendly resiny concretey stuff (probably) that one of my ex-colleagues Haidee Drew uses to make beautiful jewellery, and which can be used for HUGE and small things. The kit I bought was for making three small pots – a bronze nugget pot, a marbled pot and a split pour. The kit came in a lovely box which made it feel like a present (I like presents), and an email accompanies them with a link to a video workshop.

All poured and setting for however long it was

In the kit you get a bottle of the jesmonite liquid, a mixing stick and paper cup, the silicone mould, three pre-weighed packets of the jesmonite powder, tiny pots of bronze powder and black ink, and a pair of gloves. It all feels a bit like a science experiment, measuring and mixing and stirring and adding things and swirling!

The video, presented by a nice pair of people in aprons, shows you how to do all three pots step by step. I could have done with a few more close-ups on the pouring process and when the man said ‘leave this to cure’ it would have been helpful for him to have added ‘for 30 – 40 minutes’ but otherwise the process was straightforward and Google had the answer. The paper mixing cup provided started leaking by the fourth and final mix so I had to quickly transfer it to a plastic pot, but otherwise I liked the principle of ensuring all the packaging is biodegradable. The silicone mould is reusable, and their bottles are made from sugarcane.

It wasn’t too messy, and I enjoyed the mixing process and mucking around with bronze and black pigment. The bronze nugget one (the first one I made) isn’t perfect as I think I used too much bronze but I still love them and would happily have another go, They feel lovely, heavy and smooth like stone, and I’ve put tealights in them for now.

Other things making me happy this week

Getting to see a bit more of Islington on my way to and from a network meeting (with hot cross buns)
Making everybody squish the new scarf I’m making out of the lovely Drops Alpaca yarn that was a birthday present a couple of years ago. Sorry team but it’s JUST SO FLUFFY.
Cinnamon buns made by Thing 2 – she’s a handy child to have around
Joining a ‘visioning day’ with the Pollocks Toy Museum team at Holy Trinity Dalston – the church where they hold the clown service. There was excellent home made cake and I made a new friend – it’s lovely when you hit it off with someone!
Canneloni for dinner on Saturday – such a faff but so worth it
A sensible thought process: I need to go for a walk and I need to buy something for dinner, therefore I shall walk to Tesco. It was sunny and warm, for a change.
Good progress on the latest cross stitch – I’m using an app called Pattern Keeper which is SO much better than paper charts. I have a unfinished paper chart piece so I might try scanning the pages in for the rest of it and see if that works, as there’s lots of ‘confetti’ (single scattered stitches) in the piece and PK makes this easier.
Coffee and a catch-up with Heather
The water at the lake breaking double figures again – spring has sprung!

This week I am off to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester for a conference – a new place and a train journey! I do love a train.

See you next Sunday then,

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

A Boy of Chaotic Making – Charlie N Holmberg

Killing the Shadows – Val McDermid

The Cat and the City – Nick Bradley

At Home – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Sweets: A History of Temptation – Tim Richardson

208: so, what do you want to be when you grow up?

So here we are at week 208 – four years of me rambling (physically and literarily), reading, making stuff, working, swimming and anything else that’s taken my fancy., Happy birthday to WKDN once again. 11,688 people have visited my little corner of the internet, which is pretty cool – thank you, especially to those people who drop in every week to see what I’ve been up to. Some of them aren’t even related to me!

Does this make me a writer of sorts? There’s certainly been a lot of words. 214,103 to be exact. Some of them have been quite cross and some of them have been airyfairy and about mushrooms and flowers and things, and a lot of them have been about various crafts. Some of them may even have made people think about things differently – I hope so, at least.

At one point in my life I wanted to be a writer, but the trouble was I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, and as it turned out I accidentally fell into a career I rather liked so that worked out quite well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about careers recently thanks to a couple of events I’ve taken part in: one for Year 10s with Inspire, our local Education Business Partnership, and one for undergraduate Education Studies students at the University of East London, but both aimed at helping various levels of students think about their career choices post-education. I’ve just signed up to the latter’s professional mentoring programme, in fact.

When I do these events we’re always asked to talk about our ‘career paths’ and in the last year or so there’s been a focus on non-traditional paths to the workplace – less of the narrow academic routes and more about apprenticeships, traineeships. Definitely less of the ‘I got 3 A*, went to Oxbridge/insert Russell Group uni of choice, got the job of my dreams and now I have a house, 2.4 kids and a dog called Volvo’ career path. I do see some of those people still around – one engineer telling students that they have to do a degree or they won’t get a job, for example, which in the middle of a white working class council estate in depressed post-Ford Dagenham isn’t really the most helpful advice in these days of student debt.

I was on a panel the other day with someone doing youth work and marketing, and he was really open about the fact that he’d dropped out of university having made a mess of his first year, and his dad made him get a job. The job turned out to be in youth work, and he loved it – so he went back to uni with a purpose and now is doing amazing things. He also had an excellent hat.

Another event saw me talking to an environmental scientist who wishes she’d gone down the apprenticeship route as she’d have entered the workplace with practical experience rather than a lot of theory. Her job, on the Tideway Tunnel project, seems mostly to involve telling the construction workers off for throwing mitten crabs back in the river.

The panel event at UEL was essentially for opening up the students’ horizons about the different careers in education: as well as the marketing youth worker, there was a teacher and someone who works in outreach in the Home Office. I always like to describe my career as accidental, as the move out of teaching came as a result of an Inset Day arranged (coincidentally) by the very EBP I did the school event with a few weeks ago. I like these circular moments.

We inevitably get asked at some point what advice we’d give to people starting out, and mine is invariably to take every opportunity you can as you’ll always learn something useful. A range of handy teaching skills, for example, actually came from working behind a bar and clearing people out at closing time. Be curious about all the people around you and what they’re doing – getting the whole picture of an organisation helps you work as a team, and builds relationships. I mean everyone, from the cleaners upwards – make friends, ask them how they are. No one is too low or too high to say hello to. Play nicely, and – this is my current office bugbear – always put your cups and teaspoons in the dishwasher.

Other things making me happy this week

Interesting online meetings about working with young volunteers and Bradford City of Culture
A surprise birthday breakfast for Rachel at the lake after a chilly swim
Good progress on the current cross stitch
Visit from Timeshare Teenager 2 and Grandthing 2
Coffee and world-righting with Amanda
Still watching Silent Witness. We’re up to series 15!
A visit to the Foundling Museum with a colleague

Same time next week then 🙂

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

The Rules of Magic/Magic Lessons/The Book of Magic – Alice Hoffman

The Wild Rover – Mike Parker

At Home – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Killing the Shadows – Val McDermid

207: listen very carefully, I shall say zis only once

You may have noticed that I love an audiobook. As an accompaniment to the continuing chaos of a Central Line commute (along with a crochet project) it can’t be beaten – it’s like someone reading bedtime stories, especially with the right voice. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is perfect for the Rivers of London series; Neil Gaiman narrating his own books is a joy; Michael Sheen could read me a shopping list, quite frankly; Esme Young reading her autobiography; Stephen Fry reading the Hitchhikers series; Zara Ramm reading The Chronicles of St Mary’s; and many others. This week I’ve started listening to Bill Bryson reading his own At Home book about the history of all the things in our houses.

The wrong reader can kill a book – the person who narrated Mike Carey’s Felix Castors series was awful, and there were a few of Lindsey Davis’s Falco books with the ‘wrong’ narrator. Tony Robinson was wrong for Discworld, Nigel Planer was a bit better, Stephen Briggs and Celia Imrie were great but the new Penguin versions with people like Richard Coyle, Andy Serkis, Katherine Parkinson, Indira Varma, Sian Clifford and others – all with Peter Serafinowicz as Death and the glorious Bill Nighy as the Footnotes – were perfect.

And then there’s accents. Sometimes – done well, and done appropriately – they can add to the listening experience, but sometimes they’re excruciatingly inappropriate and give you what the kids call ‘the ick’. Posh white readers doing ‘generic Chinese’, for example (as my lovely colleague was horrified by the other week) or posh English people doing cod Welsh, which quite ruined the final instalment of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. This particular voice belonged to an actor I rather like, usually – known for playing quite posh people – but oh lord, he mangled the Welsh accents in Silver on the Tree and had clearly made no attempt to find out how to pronounce the Welsh placenames he was reading (despite the fact that in the previous book he’d narrated a section where the Welsh character taught the English one how to say them). It was painful to hear, and I apologise to anyone who saw me grimacing every time he mentioned Machynlleth or Aberdyfi.

Things making me happy this week

Catching up with this year’s temperature tracker cross stitch
Getting a good start on Country Magic Stitch ‘Welcome to Rivendell’
Coffee with Amanda
A chatty evening on Wednesday instead of D&D
A chilly but sunny walk on Monday morning (and a rainy one on Saturday morning)
Harry in Silent Witness
A chilly but refreshing swim at the lake

What I’ve been reading:

Hedge Witch – Cari Thomas

The Book Keeper – Sarah Painter

The Wild Rover– Mike Parker

Silver on the Tree – Susan Cooper (Audible)

The Owl Service – Alan Garner (Audible)

The Familiars – Stacy Halls

Practical Magic/The Rules of Magic – Alice Hoffman

At Home: A Short History of Private Life – Bill Bryson (Audible)

206: a right pain in the neck

This week has been mostly notable for a migraine which has been sulking and stropping around since Tuesday, making its presence felt in a variety of unpleasant ways. Quite apart from the pain, a full-on migraine comes accompanied by visual disturbances, nausea, light and sound sensitivity, shakes and – joy of joys, these days – hot flushes which are a new and entirely unwelcome addition to both the menopause and the migraines.

The migraine landed on Tuesday night and I beat it into submission with painkillers, heat packs and an early night, and then (thinking I was winning) I went to work on Wednesday morning. The Central Line, which at the moment is a portal into the deepest pits of hell (and no, I am not exaggerating) was crowded, hot and delayed. By the time I got to work the side-effects were back with a vengeance and the pain was gearing up for round two, I went home after a couple of hours and took to my bed, which helped, but I’ve had to be careful with my choice of activity for the rest of week.

I’ve had migraines since my late teens, occasionally triggered by food and drink (red wine, white wine and lager – halfway down the first glass, which effectively ruins an evening out; strong cheese; too much dark chocolate – all classic triggers). Sometimes they’re hormonal, sometimes stress-related; sometimes they just turn up for no good reason whatsoever. They’re exhausting, and the really bad ones leave you knocked out for several days and feeling fragile. Painkillers take out the pain, but not the rest of the symptoms – over the years I’ve tried all sorts of thing, like Migraleve and Syndol when they strike; amytriptyline which didn’t work; a nasal spray containing ergotamine which came with a long list of side effects including death, so I didn’t use that much; Tiger Balm, Kool’n’Soothe, heat packs, Deep Freeze gel, and right now I have my neck on an acupuncture pillow which is spiky but effective. It would be nice to find something that worked consistently but so far no luck. Everyone seems to have their own ways of dealing with theirs – currently I take Paramol alternating with Ibuprofen, use Tiger Balm on my temples and a heat pack or cold gel on my neck – I have seen something that recommends a bag of frozen peas on your neck and your feet in a bowl of hot water, but that seems complicated at a time when even thinking in single syllables is a challenge.

Things that were better about the week…

Interesting meetings – the Participatory Arts Network and a friendly rabbi
A great walk in the chilly sunshine with Toby and Loki the Weimaraner on Saturday morning – we anticipated squirrels and rabbits but the geese were a surprise!
Finishing the cross stitch that’s been on my frame for about a year and kitting up the next one
Finishing the scarf I’ve been crocheting on the train
A bit more attempting to draw – this time I liked the bricks but I need to learn about perspective and things. Somewhere I have a book but it’s hiding from me!
The Naked Marshmallow Company’s salted caramel gourmet flavour (thanks Tan)
Thing 2’s lemon and cranberry biscuits

I am off for a swim this morning for the first time in a couple of weeks – let’s hope I haven’t lost my acclimatisation!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Threadneedle – Cari Thomas

Silver on the Tree – Susan Cooper (Audible)

Neighbours from Hell?/The Wild Rover – Mike Parker

205: it’s very nice…what is it?

One of the things we believe at work is that – given the right tools – everyone is an illustrator, and we don’t limit illustration to picture books which is the answer virtually all school children give me when I ask ‘what is illustration?’ at the start of a session. That includes the Year 10s I worked with last week, and even post-graduate illustration students seem puzzled when I ask them how they’d define illustration.

We say it’s art with a job to do, the art we see all around us, the art which helps us make sense of the world. It’s art that communicates without words – though typography is part of illustration – and it’s art that’s been around since before words. There’s a lovely animation here that illustrates (see what I did there?) all this much more eloquently that I have.

I love all these definitions and the learning strategy I’m currently writing has this as its mission, and I’m quite prepared to think of myself as an illustrator but…not a very good one, and I’d never apply the word ‘artist’ to myself. For that I blame school. Art, after second year comprehensive, was for people who were ‘good at’ art. I was not ‘good at’ art – the best mark I ever got was a B- for a drawing of mum’s avocado plant which I was very proud of, but that mark was all the feedback I got – nothing constructive, no next steps, no ‘try doing this’. I don’t remember ever being taught to draw, or indeed to use watercolours, to try typography, or collage, or any other art form – these were things you either could or couldn’t do, and no real effort was made to change this state of being. Presumably this changed when you got to do art GCSE, but I don’t know – maybe the teachers gave that sort of feedback then as exam results depended on a certain level, but also there was an expectation that if you were doing the subject you were already good at it. This still makes me sad, and I can see the impact that this sort of school experience has had on a lot of the adults we engage with: ‘I haven’t done this since school’, ‘I used to love painting in school but I was no good at it.’

Thing 1 did art at GCSE, and Thing 2 is in her first year of GCSEs and she gave me a tour of her sketchbook the other day – I was very impressed. I am biased but they’re a talented pair – they get it from their Dad, who did Art to A-level, and who is able to help them with this subject. I was impressed with their teacher, who didn’t require that they should be ‘good at’ the subject, only that they were passionate about it and prepared to put the time in. This, I think, is the right way to think. How will young people ever find out if they are artists (of any calibre) if they never get the chance to find out? Even if they find out that they aren’t ‘good at it’, they might find they get great joy out of it – mot a quantifiable outcome but still a very valid one.

The artist Bob and Roberta Smith said that every school should be an art school, and even Ofsted said last year that ‘art should command an important place in every school’. I’ve written about the importance of creativity – not just on wellbeing but on general thinking – previously and posed the query ‘what happens if you replace the word craft with the word art?’ Obviously I understand the pressures on the curriculum (which sadly begins in the early years, just when children should be free to explore all the amazing art and craft materials around them) and the pressures for schools to achieve certain levels of GCSEs and A-levels, and the EBacc, blah blah blah, but I also understand the importance of being given the space to create and explore and scribble and doodle (sorry, boss) and generally play with art and craft materials, even if you’re not ‘good at it’. I understand, too, that at primary school in particular the majority of teachers are not art specialists, and have been given only the most minimal training in how to deliver the subject.

The creative industries contributed £115.9billion to the UK economy in 2023 – OK, this is only 0.4% of UK GDP, 260,000 full time jobs, but this is growing year on year. The soft skills that come with creative learning – empathy, creative thinking and problem solving among others – are among those most highly valued by employers according to research by the Edge Foundation. Unfortunately the current pressures from government, tightening budgets throughout the education, bad PR around ‘creative’ degree subjects and more are drying up the pipeline of young people into these industries.

All this, by the way, was just a lengthy preamble to what I’ve been attempting to do this week, which is to try and draw the things I’ve seen around me – from Sunday to Tuesday I did the ‘draw my day’ thing but on the days I was in London I didn’t have time. I took photos of the things I saw on my travels though – I am finding myself drawn (if you’ll pardon the pun) to signage and buildings, as well as my usual plants, Landscapes are nice but I have no urge to draw them – I like small details rather than the big pictures, it seems. I don’t think I’ll be any threat to the livelihoods of any artists out there but I am really enjoying stopping and looking and then spending time focusing on details. So keep your B-, Mrs Allan, I’m having a go at drawing whether I’m any good at it or not.

Other things making me happy this week…

Making an effort to go for early morning walks on the days I work at home
A long walk yesterday morning- the floodwaters have receded so I managed to complete the loop I tried last week
Volunteering in the garden at Copped Hall with my Beloved and Thing 3 last week, except there was mud.
Interesting site tour with colleague Laura and Studio Weave. I like people who get excited at the potential of our site.

And that’s it from me for the week – half term this week, at least for the Horde.

Kirsty x

Cover image: Dial House – https://www.radical-guide.com/listing/dial-house/

What I’ve been reading:

The Cold Calling/Mean Spirit/Marco’s Pendulum/Marco and the Blade of Night – Phil Rickman

Greenwitch/The Grey King/Silver on the Tree – Susan Cooper (Audible)

Map Addict – Mike Parker