Looking up is a thing I’ve always had to do to be heard. Everyone is a lot taller than me. Lately even more so. Sometimes it hurts the back of my neck, to talk with my head angled this way. Other people’s ears are a long way away so the tilting focuses my voice in the right direction – earwards. Nowadays, bending my head back … Continue reading Looking Up
‘Hello Lulu!’ he said. And just for a second, as I registered what he had called me, I was Lulu. And then she was gone. The transformation started in the butchers, in Leominster, where we stopped to buy lunch. Peering through the glass at the meats, pasties and pies, nose to glass, small son spotted the wands, painted in bright primaries in the tray next … Continue reading Magic moments
1. Jane Roberts said, in some of her books, that time present is time past is time future. 2. It’s a point of view I subscribe to. 3. My grandparents’ longcase clock, a dark brown wooden-cased Victorian beauty with an enchanting ivory face, disagreed with me and marked linear time all day and night long, ticking off the seconds one by one in the cold … Continue reading Timing
Of all your designs, this is the one I loved the most – the foundry-boot-tap-shoe fusion. Polished applewood soles, percussive silvery blakeys tapping tempos, all fake flamenco and Flateley rhythms. Brass tack-spangled, red-laced, copper-capped. Useless in a foundry they’d let the hot metal sluice in through the eyelets, burn to the bone, but for dancing they were perfect, with their heavy weight swing, clear wooden … Continue reading Re-boot
At this time of the day the garden is full of sharp scents, the early morning autumn cold reducing rich clouds of late summer perfumes to thin lines. A vinegar edge hangs around the rotten fruit under the large yellow vine leaves. Strident silver notes from the long dry fingers of potted lavender reach as far as the swing from the far end of the … Continue reading Mint Pot
Hector’s room was an Aladdin’s cave of magical machinery. It was a place he shut himself away in for hours to peer down microscopes, write stories, take pictures, or make placemats and table runners on a loom the size of a house. Sometimes I hid under the loom, camouflaged in its mechanical guts, waiting for the shuttles to dance, and the heddles to open up the threads … Continue reading The loom
Even though this brooch was nestling right in the middle of a box labeled Jet, jet it certainly was not. It was something quite different – a labour of love in shells and wire, masquerading as a beautiful bunch of white flowers. ‘Edelweiss’, said one of my fellow museum volunteers, and Julie Andrews instantly sprang into my head at full volume. I banished the thought … Continue reading Shells are a girl’s best friend
Nestling at the bottom of the jewelry box, among the paste and sparkle, was a pair of earrings with some puzzlingly sharp spikes on the back. The hand-written label said £4. I put them on cautiously, but the sudden shock of pain switched on a light in my head and I realized what they really were – a pair of Victorian shoe buckles for gripping … Continue reading Buckled
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