261: in an unusual move…

A few months back my friend Jill, who knows I love a good crime novel, handed over a book called The Raging Storm and told me I’d really enjoy it. I was aware of the author, Ann Cleeves, as I spend a lot of time perusing the crime section in libraries and charity shops, but for some reason I hadn’t read any. This one, one of the ‘Two Rivers’ series which focus on Detective Matthew Venn, sat on the TBR pile for a while until I was in the mood for something new.

The story is set in a small Cornish fishing village, close to where the detective was brought up in a very strict religious sect. A local celebrity is found horribly murdered in a storm, and then another body follows on the same beach. Venn, with the assistance of his colleagues, are tasked with finding the culprit. For the first few days this was my upstairs book (as opposed to my downstairs book or my portable book), and then I was hooked and it got carried around with me – I didn’t work out the murderer until the reveal. By about half way through I’d ordered several more from the library, was rummaging in the charity shops and checking out the Kindle deals.

The first book in this series was filmed as The Long Call, a four parter available on ITVx, and I watched it in one sitting yesterday afternoon. We’ve also been binging one of her other series, Shetland (BBC iPlayer) in the evenings. I am heavily invested in this now, not least because the main character – Detective Jimmy Perez – is played by Douglas Henshall.

I have had a bit of a soft spot for Mr Henshall since Primeval, where he negotiated anomalies and prehistoric creatures in very practical fashion. If I was in danger of finding myself threatened by dinosaurs I could think of no one I’d rather wrestle them with, quite honestly.

However, as we’ve progressed through the series I have become increasingly interested in how cuddly he looks in his trademark crewneck jumpers and I am having worrying Mrs. Doyle-esque thoughts – as in the Father Ted episode Night of the Nearly Dead. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a Father Dougal so this is a concerning progression. In this episode Mrs Doyle (the brilliant Pauline McLynn) wins a poetry competition where the prize is a visit from daytime TV host Eoin McLove (Patrick McDonnell). McLove, a Daniel O’Donnell caricature, is beloved of old ladies across Ireland and known for his love of jumpers and cake.

Rest assured I will not be writing odes to Mr Henshall’s knitwear or, indeed, baking a cake. However, this is not the normal progress of my occasional celebrity crushes – I have never been tempted to send John Cusack lists of my top five break-up songs, for example, or to crochet guitar cosies for Mr Springsteen. Also, I have never had a favourite jumper in a TV series before (it’s the dark green one, if you’re interested). Not even referring to it as CSI: Balamory is helping.

I think I may need to go and watch videos of Robert Plant circa 1976 until I feel better. Or plan a trip to Lerwick.

Other things making me happy this week

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A midweek visit to The Goldsmiths Centre to see their Interwoven: Jewellery Meets Textiles exhibition. They always have lovely shows on and there’s an excellent cafe attached.
Excellent progress on the Hexie Cardigan while watching Shetland. (I can’t see Detective Perez in this one.). This is such a relaxing project.
Starting on the cream granny squares for my portable project
A five-mile walk with Thing 2 this morning, at least until she started complaining about the wind, the stitch, the uphills, the drawstrings on her jumper…
The one cat (Teddy) that just walks into the cat carrier and sits down, without requiring a pincer movement and a pre-planned strategy (Lulu) or a short wrestling match (Bailey)
Remembering the genius of Terry Pratchett

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Today I have a 15km walk planned, in preparation for the big day next Sunday. Hopefully the weather will behave!

Have a good week, everyone! All crime novel recommendations accepted, as long as they’re not written in the first person.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

Raven Black/The Crow Trap – Ann Cleeves

The Trouble With The Cursed – Kim Harrison

The Truth/Going Postal – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

257: time flies when you’re being mum

The last couple of months have been bringing home to me how fast the Things are growing up, not just physically (as I crane my neck to look up at them) but in what they are up to. I think I have been deep in denial that Thing 1 is actually planning to leave home in just a couple of short months, to head off to university to do Early Childhood Studies. Thing 2 is revising hard for her GCSEs and had an interview for a professional cookery course at a local college this week. Thing 3 is making his GCSE choices and wanting to join gyms and things.

It does make me feel a bit wistful looking up at them all, especially when the digital photo frames show ‘on this day’ pictures of when they were small: using their dad as a climbing frame, charging off into their first deep snow in the local park, picking me bunches of bright dandelions on the way to the shops, ‘gumping in muddy buddles’ in their ladybird wellies, being hopelessly overexcited at a toy train, being the Littlest Gruff on daddy’s lap at storytime. I still have their first shoes and their first tiny Welsh rugby shirts stashed in my wardrobe, of course, and locks of hair from their first haircuts*. There are certain photos which make my heart melt every time they pop up.

Now I look at Thing 3’s shoes (size 12!) and Thing 1’s varying hair colours. Thing 2 still picks flowers but is now more likely to press them and turn them into art than clutch them all around the town. It used to take ages to get anywhere as she was so engrossed in looking at all the small things. Thing 3 used to make us stop at every lamp post where he’d say ‘that sign means lightning! If there is lightning you must not go in the garden because you will DIE’. It took a while to get to nursery. Thing 1 used to talk to the meerkats that lived in Daddy’s shoes, which was a bit disconcerting but there you are. Who were we to say that there weren’t meerkats in his trainers? Imagination is one of the best things about being a small person, building the world the way you want it – I think if they get to exercise it when they’re small it’s good practice for improving the world when they’re older. I think we’re going to need the imagineers in the next couple of years.

Obviously I know in my head that kids are supposed to grow up (I plan on trying it some time myself) and leave home and be their own people and all that sort of caper, but it seems to have come round terribly quickly and without much consultation. I’m not sure I like it but apparently it’s not up to me….

*Thing 2 is reading over my shoulder as she revises and just said ‘urrgghhh, you kept our hair?’ She’ll learn.

Things making me happy this week

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Last week’s post being flagged as not meeting some tech corporation’s community standards – AHAHAHA. Like Captain Vimes says, if you’re annoying the right people you’re doing things properly.
The V&A Academy’s online ‘In Practice’ series – last Monday I did Ekta Kaul’s Stitching Nature session and had an enjoyable evening doing embroidery..
Meeting lots of lovely ex-colleagues from Young V&A as I was in Bethnal Green for a meeting.
Turning a Vicki Brown Designs yarn advent sock yarn set into piles of squishy granny squares. Eleven colours down, 23 to go. She designs gorgeous sock patterns too. Sock yarns are too nice to go inside shoes though.
Making some progress on last year’s temperature tracker which I hadn’t touched since August as I put it down in favour of Christmas crochet. Only four months to go…
The prospect of a lot of baguettes, canalside walks and a week off.

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What I’ve been reading:

Million Dollar Demon – Kim Harrison

The Fifth Element/Night Watch – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

Death of a Lesser God– Vaseem Khan

Week thirty nine: small world, big ideas

Serendipity is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? About eighteen months ago, during a quick scan of my Twitter feed I saw an ex-colleague from the National Army Museum, who is now in New Zealand, tweeting about a game called Library Island.

This interactive training activity helps participants to explore strategy, innovation, and the messy business of working with communities. We’ve spent the last two years perfecting Library Island with university staff, health workers, museum professionals, students, and, yes, librarians.
matt finch/mechanical dolphin

This piqued my interest, as a) I really like libraries, b) I’m a museum professional and c) I’m really ~~nosy~~ curious about what other people are up to in the culture sector. At the time I was also doing a lot of thinking about how we could make our school sessions more playful/gamified, so I jumped on the conversation. That tweet opened up a whole new world of conversations around scenario planning and how that approach might be adapted to work with secondary school students, starting with a cup of coffee and a wide ranging chat on a hot day at the museum with Matt Finch of the Said Business School and developer of Library Island.

Fast forward eighteen months and one global pandemic…

At 7.30am on Wednesday (8.30am in Copenhagen, Denmark and 6.30pm in Sydney, Australia) I logged into a Zoom call with Matt, Teresa Swist of the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney Uni, and Kirsten Van Dam of Out of Office. This was the third zoom meeting of what’s becoming a knowledge sharing group set up originally by Matt, as the nexus, but which is creating synergies between different projects all over the world. Co-design, co-production and co-creation with communities were all part of this week’s conversation, which link back into the development of the new museum.

I can’t imagine that, without COVID-19, I would ever have had these conversations with people all over the world. Pre-corona, arranging a meeting just with someone in London would have meant building in travel time, trying to find a day when we didn’t already have umpteen things in the diary months ahead of time, and certainly wouldn’t have happened on a Wednesday morning when – in ‘normal’ times – I take the kids to school and then trek into London.

My next meeting on Wednesday – also via Zoom – was a filmed interview about teddy bears and mental health, and then a conversation about how we can make the museum into a virtual environment so we can use the building while its closed. Even my works Christmas socials were online! A party where I don’t have to get on the Central Line home afterwards, perfect.

Zoom and Teams aren’t perfect, but this year they have made the world smaller and my thinking bigger.

Christmas can start now!

I think I am finally ready for the festive season, despite announcements of mutated viruses and the invention of Tier 4 in the last 24 hours. I am sad, as we can’t go and see the older girls (formerly known as the Timeshare Teenagers) and our grandson, but I am also glad we are safe at home.

I finished work for the holidays at lunchtime on Friday after a cheery, chatty Christmas cuppa with the rest of our little learning team. In the afternoon I gave in to the demands of Thing 2 to make a gingerbread house from scratch: we’d never done that before, but when we have had kits previously the biscuit has been quite fragile and the houses have been a bit of a disaster. So, it was back to BBC Good Food, which is usually my go-to for new recipes, where we found instructions – including templates – for a simple gingerbread house. We made the gingerbread and constructed the house on Friday, then left it to set overnight before decorating with Dolly Mixtures, mini Smarties and chocolate fingers on Saturday morning. I think at least as many sweets ended up in Things 2 and 3 as on the house, but it looks really festive. Thing 2 made a mini Christmas tree as well, with a wall of jelly sweets to hold in the Smarties.

Right now I am waiting for the Stollen dough to prove – again, it’s a BBC recipe, this time by Simon Rimmer. It’s funny – there’s nothing to say I can’t make stollen at any time of year, as I really like it, but it has become part of the Christmas routine. The cake was marzipanned yesterday, and I’ll ice and decorate it in the week. I’ve been haunting Pinterest again for ideas, which is always risky.

The Zoom blanket is finally finished and was sent off on Thursday, so that’s out of the way and I can focus on a crochet commission for a friend. I enjoyed making this, apart from weaving in the ends, and the matching hat is very cute. Hopefully the expectant mum will also like it!

On the cross stitch frame I have a Lord of the Rings themed pattern, on black aida so the daylight lamp is coming in very handy. A top tip someone told me ages ago was to have a white cloth on your lap when stitching on dark fabrics, or even a light box. No one mentioned cats, which is usually what’s on my lap!

My next post will be after Christmas, so I’ll leave you all with warm wishes for a peaceful, safe festive week. See you at the end of week 40!

Merry Christmas!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Hogfather – Terry Pratchett

Bad Penny Blues – Cathi Unsworth

Without the Moon – Cathi Unsworth

Christmas films ticked off:

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Serendipity (2001)
Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion/The Runaway Bride/Voyage of the Damned
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
Detectorists Christmas Special (2015)
A Christmassy Ted

Week thirty six: if you go down in the woods today…

Over the last few months I have railed at the randomness of the learning collection at the museum: plastic tat you can buy at any English Heritage gift shop, for example, or objects too fragile to handle. I have been adding things to the ‘someone else might like it’ pile with abandon, and sure enough Fran, our brilliant Creative Practitioner, has been finding new homes for all sorts of strange things; including the House on the Hill Toy Museum and the New Vic Theatre. I have never understood the point of a handling collection that can’t be handled.

And then this week I got to the teddies. Oh dear.

Teddy bears have been around since the early 20th century, when two toy makers – Richard Steiff in Germany and and Morris Michtom in the USA – were inspired to create toy bears after a political cartoon was printed in the Washington Post. It told the story of a bear hunt, where Theodore (‘Teddy’) Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that had been caught and tied up by a handler as it was unsportsmanlike. I won’t comment on the fact that they were out shooting bears in the first place, as that’s not the point here!

Cartoon by Clifford Berryman, published in Washington Post, 1902

Michtom saw the cartoon and was inspired to create a toy bear cub which he displayed in the window of his shop, with a sign saying ‘Teddy’s bear’. He’d sent a bear to Roosevelt and been given permission to use his name, although apparently Roosevelt himself hated being called Teddy.

Simultaneously, over in Germany Steiff designed a similar toy bear and exhibited it at the Leipzig Toy Fair. Both toys were an instant hit, and the world has been buying teddy bears – and other stuffed animals – ever since. Our most popular ‘Spotlight Talk’ (on-gallery short teaching sessions delivered by the brilliant Activity Assistants) was Teddy Bears. One bear in the museum – Little Tommy Tittlemouse – is a celebrity and gets birthday cards sent to him every year by members of the public. His previous owner started the tradition when he donated the bear in 1965 and it continued until his death in 1986. He even has a museum blog post dedicated to him. (In case you’re interested, his birthday is the 24th of November, so this week our Tommy turned 112)

The mohair has rubbed off, the wood wool is coming out of his paws, his nose is squashed but someone really loved this bear….

Early teddies looked more like real bears, with long noses, beady eyes and a hump on their backs. They were also a lot less cuddly than the bears we have today – stuffed with sawdust or wood wool, they were heavy and hard, but still lovable. Their ‘fur’ was mohair, which rubs off and so a lot of our older bears are bald and a bit battered. And really, really hard to give away. Own up – how many of you still have your beloved childhood bear? I know I do. He’s balding in places, a bit flat, is missing an eye and has some very amateur repairs but he’s mine and I love him. My mum never quite forgave her own mother for getting rid of her teddy while my parents were on their honeymoon.

I knew there was going to be a problem when I unwrapped a particularly old bear…and started talking to him. Only an ‘ohhh, hello you!’ but still, it was a slippery slope.

The modern, mass-produced bears were easy to say goodbye to – they have no personality and most of them are brand new. I admit to hanging onto all the Paddingtons, of course, but the McDonalds Happy Meal toys, Beanie Babies and film tie-ins will be going to new homes. The very odd poodle toy (with detached ear and jewelled collar) was also pretty easy to say goodbye to.

But…the old bears have character. They have been loved, and their faces are a bit wonky and sometimes their fur is a bit patchy. I don’t know who they belonged to in most cases, but they have had a second home – even if its been in a box – at the museum. I mentioned this on Facebook the other day and a friend said that when she was buying a soft toy as a gift she deliberately looked for the one that wasn’t perfect. Sometimes a toy just calls out to you and you fall in love with it – my mum fell for a Hamley’s polar bear on a shopping trip to Bath, for example, and my dad went back to buy it for her Christmas present.

Our teddy collection ranged from the tiny, pocket-sized bears to much larger Steiff growly bears, nearly half the size of the six year olds who ‘demonstrate’ them in school sessions. Some were handmade, some were beautifully dressed in handmade clothes. There were also rabbits, cats, dogs and the box of more than 100 mice I have mentioned in a previous post.

Can you see why it’s so hard to get rid of them? I confess that a number of these are staying, if they can be handled. Teddies come on life’s adventures with us, after all, and some of them deserve to come with us to the museum’s next life too.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

What happens to rolls of double-sided sticky tape? Where do they go? I started a new one a couple of weeks ago when I was making my colleague’s birthday card and today I couldn’t find it anywhere. I managed to find a squashed roll in the shed, luckily, so my plan to frame various cross stitches wasn’t thwarted. I also found a stash of coloured aida fabric which was in the wrong box – that’s going to come in useful.

Progress on the sock has slowed again as I was only on the tube two days this week, but I have started putting together squares for a blanket. I wanted a nine-patch effect, and am edging the squares and each block with charcoal grey. I like the stained glass type effect.

So that was week 36. Things 1 and 2 have both had days at home this week as there have been confirmed cases of Covid-19 in their year groups, and Thing 1 has to isolate for a fortnight as she’s been identified as being in contact with a case. I really can’t fault the school, whose communication with us has been effective, clear and timely; yes, they have a duty of care towards the school community but right now they are going above and beyond, working long into the night to make sure things carry on as close to normal as possible. Who would have guessed that a lockdown that didn’t include the schools might see cases spreading, eh?

Later this morning I’ll be heading to Redricks Lakes for my weekly dip – the water was 7 degrees C yesterday after a few frosty mornings this week. That’s a big drop from last week’s 9.5 but I’m still looking forward to it!

Let’s see what week 37 brings.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

Last Stand in Wychford (Witches of Lychford) – Paul Cornell

Gobbelino London and a Scourge of Pleasantries – Kim M. Watt

Sampleri Cymraeg – Joyce F. Jones

The Dark Archive (Invisible Library) – Genevieve Cogman

The Graveyard of the Hesperides/The Third Nero (Flavia Albia) – Lindsey Davis (Audible)