Cooling

It's cooled to autumn - my favourite season - and so apart from beautifully coloured leaves it's also time to start admiring cats keeping warm. This is a friends cat, Treacle who lives in the countryside. As I started spending more time there I was going to post more photos but got unnerved by the dastardly local council bods trying to evict us who used this information in their social cleansing campaign, implying I may want to leave the area anyway - how weird, I don't. I am still in South London! and we don't go back to court til April.
Grayson Perry has been very interesting in his Reith lectures: talking about artists as the shock troops of gentrification. It's true, we move into an area people didn't much want to live in, clean up the dirt, make it buzzy and interesting and then the developers move in - he therefore suggested you should pay artists to live in these places for free. Yes! It's so saddening, when will planners and developers start counting us in as an asset instead of squeezing us out? Have a listen here on BBC iplayer.

I had bravely, or stupidly, walked through a field with a bull in it on the way to fondle an egg from under this bird and have tea with freshly baked cake using her eggs.

Upcycling Horse

This is possibly a poor excuse for a blog post but life is very stressful at the moment re info on the post before last. Amazingly I have managed to maintain some chandelier making during this period and it's like a tonic to do it. But in the countryside you see these reminders that people have always reused stuff. I'm not bothered by the terminology; upcycling, recycling, reusing etc - though re-purpose always sounds a bit clumsy to me - I'm more bothered by over trendiness and the core of resourcefulness being overlooked by some fancy styling - so here is an under-styled horses water drink thing for you to admire.

Snowdrops

Here in the countryside the snowdrop season is coming to an end. My friend Matt Bishop is a very very serious galanthophile or should I say galanthus expert. Here's a taster. I've had a tour of his own new nursery where he's nurturing varieties that will be for sale from his website when the sales go live in the summer. I always liked snowdrops because they look like baby goats faces with floppy ears. Matt travels to various snowdrop belts and has identified previously unidentified varieties. He named one variety 'Toby' after my late brother (they had worked in horticulture and studied landscape architecture together) so when he's reared these baby plants I'm going to get at least one of those and will have to find a good place for it. So if you're stuck for gift ideas from this summer I reckon a rare snowdrop from Matt would be a fantastically original present.

Countryside

This is the beginning of my second studio I'm setting up here on the edge of Dartmoor. It's not exactly by choice - my mother has had a stroke - what dreadful things they are and so common - so I'm needing to be away from the London studio part time but wanting to work when I'm not at the hospital. I often wonder how other people cope with the mix of professional life and crisis with friends or family health, though it's not a new scenario for me to down tools to be bedside. I suppose we creative self-employed people are lucky to have a more flexible set up than many. Anyway I found this nice old tin and thought I'd keep my new tools in it. I hate cheap crappy far eastern tools - I'd rather pay more and get a decent pair of pliers but they're hard to find so sadly I succumbed to the £1 guys - lets see how long they last! What a cynical activity it is to produce a load of cheap rubbish to make a fast buck.
Countryside tales to come!