Crafty. November 7, 2011

I’ve been off sick for about a week now and have discovered that though tonsillitis is bad for my health, being off sick is bad for my bank balance.

When you’re stuck at home with nothing but tomato soup, daytime tv, a secret stash of chocolate coins and a persistent jack russell for company, tedium surely follows. It didn’t follow that swiftly to be honest, building a special duvet sofa throne, having soup brought to me, ‘homes under the hammer’ and shiny golden chocolates hidden under the fish tank was brilliant for about 4 days.

Anyway, when I did eventually get restless, I reached for the laptop. After many hours of news websites, Facebook, iPlayer, Facebook, fail blog, Facebook, urban dictionary, Facebook, twitter, Facebook, iwantoneofthose.com and Facebook, I found myself at eBay’s door.

And I bought a sewing machine.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened but there is a new and unused purple sewing machine, currently being smashed about by the postal service, with my address scrawled upon its wrappings. (The fact that it is purple is quite probably something to do with why I bought it though I’d like to say it was because of the fever.)

I am actually now very chuffed with my delirious purchase for two reasons. Firstly when we redecorated the hallway I rather airily told Tim that I could make the curtains in an attempt to seem incredibly capable and skilled (I have a GCSE in textiles actually, though I’m buggered if I can remember any of it.) Secondly, I have been watching Kirstie’s Homemade Britain where a homemade Kirstie Allsopp makes homemade things with homemade WI ladies to enter into homemade competitions with homemade cows and homemade tents. Anyway watching her make papier mache birds, sewing bits of leather to cardboard and stapling pages of Grimms’ fairy tales to her cardi as a brooch has given me an enormous urge to ‘make things’.

It seems to be very trendy these days to take things that used to be part of a woman’s role in her domestic life such as baking, kitting and sewing and make them a hobby. So long as you can do them whilst riding the tube, on your lunch break at the park, post pictures of your latest efforts to Facebook or write a blog about them…

Baking is something that commands a lot of food porn air time. Shows such as Ace of Cakes, Choccywoccydoodah and the Great British Bake Off show elaborately created sweet treats in an array of lurid colours that look so good that we have to get up and have a go at making the bloody things, just to ensure we fill our sweet tooth full of cavities. As we try to create stripy pink and yellow triple decker white chocolate and rose water frosted mini muffins, we inevitably discover that baking, just because we feel like it, is fun and very therapeutic. In fact, I only bake for people’s birthdays and when I’m on the brink of hysteria. If I offer you a freshly baked cake, just take it and don’t hang about to find out why.

It seems the latest inclination however is to make baked goods out of bizarre ingredients. Zumbo’s patisseries in Australia offer macaroons that are flavoured with peach and blood. Blood. I can’t even watch Casualty so I’m pretty sure I won’t enjoy blood from an unknown source baked right into my dainty french dessert.

Knitting has become an unlikely hobby of the young and fashionable. Knitting clubs have cropped up everywhere from pubs, boutiques and libraries to hospitals and university societies. Knitting has become a platform on which to socialise and these clubs give people an opportunity to learn a skilled craft, share their own prowess with the needles or have a much needed rant about life.

Skills such as knitting and sewing were passed from mother to daughter so perhaps, with all of our modern conveniences and retail opportunities, this is the evolution of these practical skills and crafts being passed down. Or sideways. Or over a gin and tonic.

One spin off from knitting that always fills me with joy when I find it is ‘yarn bombing’. This is basically knitted graffiti. People knit and crochet patches to wrap around the most unlikely of things. Lamp posts, benches, bike racks, sculptures, trees and train seats have all been seen covered with brightly coloured woolly jumpers. I love the idea of someone creating something specifically and sneaking out to affix it to their chosen spot for no reason other than to make people witness and appreciate their art and to make them smile.

These crafts have evolved from being learned, essential skills to useful and enjoyable hobbies. They allow people to make a mess and a statement at the same time and they allow people to leave something behind for another to enjoy.

Or, they help you get fat, stay warm and make a lovely pair of curtains.

Growing up, or just getting a bit taller. October 31, 2011

Writing about my mildly unorthodox childhood exploits started me thinking about growing up and leaving weird childish ways behind. Becoming an adult is supposed to mean becoming financially and emotionally independent, wearing sensible clothes and having sensible hair, getting a job that aids your career and doesn’t just fund your beer habit, putting a permanent roof over your head and considering joining the institutions of marriage and parenthood. No more running to your folks in hysterics because you can’t afford to go to Havâna to drink watery vodka and shit coke on a Friday night or running to your friends in paroxysms of grief because you got ditched by carrier pigeon. Not a carrier pigeon you understand, I think there are laws against all that.

Where do the conventions of life and timelines of achievement come from? Are we subjected to subliminal messaging as children via our television and teachers? I can’t recall Mrs Ross my junior school history teacher saying “Henry the eighth was born in 1429 and was king – get married before you have babies – all the way from his eighteenth birthday until – go to university – his death in 1547.” That’s not to say of course that it didn’t happen. She did speak very quickly.

Society dictates what we should and shouldn’t do (and in what order) right from our births until we cark it. I’m not saying I don’t agree with most of the moral code that is pumped out however. Of course we shouldn’t steal (no, not even penny sweets but if you ask a child how many sweets are in their little paper bag and don’t count them for yourself then you’re asking for trouble) and no we shouldn’t murder other people to death or get our bums out as the Help the Aged minibus rattles by the Queen’s Head on a Saturday afternoon but I do think there is room for manoeuvre in that classic order of things.

So what if you go to school, have a baby, get married, get older, get older still, turn ninety, go to university, go travelling and re marry a twenty three year old croupier called Orson that you met in Vegas or if you never get married or indeed never have children. Of all the people I know, not many have taken the socially desirable route of school, college, university, job, marriage, babies and so on but I know many who put themselves under a lot of stressful pressure because their order isn’t quite right or parts are missing. I know a lot of people whose lives are chaotic, complicated, filled with whims and impulses and they are the most relaxed and fascinating people I know. If they want a ketchup sandwich and a bag of Pom Bears instead of a Moroccan cous cous salad with roasted artichokes then they’ll have it and who cares what anyone else thinks.

And this reminds me around of my main point. Why do we have to leave our childhood quirks entirely behind? Why can’t we simply bring them with us into adulthood? I have a friend who shall remain mostly anonymous who, upon waking in the middle of the night, froze in fear at a figure lurking in front of the wardrobe. After forty minutes of wide-eyed staring at the figure, waiting for it to pounce, she summoned the courage to switch on the lights. The eerily watchful figure was a coat. To be fair to her though she was 3 pints down.

I know that I too have never lost that childish ability to be spooked by the dark and as such I have to sleep with a night light. I don’t lie sweating under the duvet reciting the mantra ‘foot not in duvet, foot not safe’ as I stare into the darkness looking for predatory movement, I just can’t sleep in pitch black. It feels too heavy and I have a fear that I may have gone blind and not realised it.

This brings me to a story of a friend, who shall also remain unnamed, who woke up in the middle of the night whilst on holiday in very rural France. He couldn’t see a thing and so reached over to switch on a light. Click. Nothing. Click, click, click. He frantically switched the light on and off praying for it to turn on. ‘I’ve gone blind’ he thought to himself as panic gripped him. He slithered out of bed and crawled on the floor to the bathroom, bumping into things on the way much to his alarm. He fell into the bathroom and desperately reached for the switch, praying for it to illuminate his world again. It did.

Of course it did but the dark was so all-encompassing and as such so scary, that it turned a thirty year old man into a quivering wreck on the bathroom floor, convinced of his own optical demise.

There are aspects of childhood that I think should and would indeed advise all, to continue into adulthood as they will bring you as much joy as they did when you were tiny:

Advent calendars are a must. How anyone can even contemplate not having one is beyond me. THEY COUNT DOWN TO CHRISTMAS. How brilliant is that? You can keep track of exactly how many sleeps it will be until you can dive into the pile of gorgeous packages under the tree. They also have pretty pictures, glitter and most now have chocolate. It’s a no-brainer.

If you are lucky enough to have a tree, for god’s sake put a treehouse in it. You can gather your friends, drink wine and reminisce, you can have some quiet time to read a book, you could have a picnic up there or just sneak off for an illicit smokey treat when the day has got you down.

Finally I advise bed time stories. You know when you have those tough days that refuse to stop charging round and around your mind when all you want to do is pass out? The ideal solution is a bedtime tale. You don’t even have to have ‘Miffy in the snow,’ you can have a grown up book now. It might take some persuading to get someone to actually read to you, especially if you live alone but that’s why audiobooks are so awesome. The best bit? Your sleepy time narrative generally features in your dreams so choose wisely.

Growing up is inevitable but make sure you take some of your childhood with you.

P.S. Pull my finger.

Weird childhood. October 23, 2011

This is my first blog so bear with me. Style, finesse, humour and structure come with practice I am told.

I would like to point out that the ‘weird childhood’ to which I refer is not a disturbing nor sinister one but merely one filled with those odd little things that children seem to do. My three year old niece Poppy for example has a strange habit of meeting you, learning your name, evidently deciding it is quite unsuitable and renaming you as something completely obscure. We have no idea where she hears these names or why she decided that her cousin Rhys was far better suited to the name Pony.

Since growing into an adult I have met new people at social occasions and the like, where many a conversation involves people harking back to their childhoods for both comic and pompous effect. Some grow misty eyed as they recall days spent in wendy houses playing tea parties, climbing and invariably falling out of trees or riding “dear Andromeda my little dapple grey” to first place in the ‘prettiest pony’ class at the local gymkhana.

These anecdotes have been amusing of course but also mildly discomforting as they have highlighted the fact that my childhood is scattered with slightly more odd experiences and past times. Before you contact any authorities, let me explain.

My childhood from the age of four was largely spent with Fran who is still one of my best friends. I’d often go for a sleepover and still be residing at her family’s home eight days later. This is still triumphantly referred to as ‘a week and day’ as I can only assume we thought it to sound much more impressive this way.

Staying at Fran’s house with her and her sister Mick was truly brilliant. We had acres of woods and garden to play in, a huge wooden playhouse (although this largely lost its appeal when we convinced ourselves we heard a snake hiss at us from a darkened corner) and a nearby play park called the ‘Newman Collards’ (the name still baffles me) which had a massive ‘yellow thing’ to play on that literally threw you about 6 miles into the air. Literally. This all sounds relatively normal you may think but this was just the setting of our frankly bizarre activities.

Possibly the most disturbing of our enterprises involved trawling the woods, ponds and local country lanes for dead or dying animals. We would then scoop them up  (literally as in some cases our yield would include the obligatory roadside flat pheasant) and bring them to a marked out area of the woods that we called our ‘Pet Cemetery’. Thankfully we could spell for anyone who’s a fan of Stephen King.

Once there we would dig them a grave, bury them with a small ceremony and create them a persona and history which we used to make a headstone. The headstones normally involved pink kitchen tiles and permanent markers. I have vague memories of standing silent with clasped hands, at the grave of a little frog called Fred.

Now as I have never met anyone else in my life who would spend large chunks of their summer holidays burying roadkill, it became clear to me that this was possibly not regular child behaviour. However to put a positive spin on it, we have contributed largely to future archaeological finds detailing woodland creatures of the twentieth century as there is a hotbed of newts, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, frogs, pheasants and mouse skeletons in Liss, Hampshire. The guinea pigs and hamsters might throw them off a bit however.

Potentially more socially acceptable was an activity that took up much of our time and was our obsession with certain musicals. For one of Fran’s birthdays we were taken to see Starlight Express and this momentous occasion marked the beginning of an obsession spanning several years, with putting on our own productions. In all Fran and Mick were taken to see Starlight Express five times and during those times they committed the entire script to memory.

Parts were distributed to friends, rehearsals that never happened were arranged in the playground, roller skates were bought for Christmases and birthdays, the soundtrack was listened to religiously, costumes were attempted (for my part of Dinah the dining car I attempted to make a skirt like the actress’, out of a lampshade and my mum’s favourite blue top. It was not a success) and our amateur skating was practiced. In Fran’s kitchen. From the table to the kitchen roll and back. Continuously. Fran’s Mum is a lovely, patient and indulgent lady luckily.

We never actually put any of our productions on for an audience. Little Shop of Horrors met an untimely end when we failed to turn a fridge freezer box into the blood thirsty plant body of Audrey 2. After spending a few hours with Fran wedged inside the box trying to take off a large black baritone singer doing the song ‘I’m a mean green mother from outta space,’ we gave up. I don’t know if we truly believed we could create the West End spectacles that we’d seen or if we simply enjoyed dreaming of it, writing out the scripts and singing the songs but we certainly spent many, many, many hours on them.

Another way we entertained ourselves was with word processing software and some teabags. We spent hours crowded onto Fran’s Dad’s study chair producing our very own newspaper called ‘Aqua News’ which contained hard hitting journalism such as ‘Herbal Remedies: Are they safe?” (we had no idea what a herbal remedy was but seemed determined to write with authority on the subject.) Aside from our challenging feature pieces there were adverts for ‘Black Tea from the Black Tea Company’ and photocopies of various items of stationary. It must have been a compelling read.

One day when playing on the computer we discovered an exciting font that looked very medieval indeed. This must have led us to what we believed was an incredible idea. We copied and pasted (probably  from Encarta) a picture of a portrait of Henry the VIII and included a paragraph (in the genuinely medieval font) about a portrait of him that had been found and was available for sale for the very reasonable price of £20,000. We printed it and here’s the genius part, stained it with a used tea bag and burnt the edges. We then delivered it to the nearest house and waited for the calls and money to roll in. Quite what Fran’s poor neighbours thought of our aged poster and was wrong with us I don’t know.

I could ramble on for hours about all the peculiar ways we would spend our time as I’m finding it rather cathartic but I’d like to retain some friends and my liberty so I shall round off here. Anyone who has got this far, much thanks for persevering with my first clunky blog and to anyone who spent their childhoods mud sledging into bramble bushes, videoing their own adverts for black tea (using glasses of coke) writing and filming their own soap operas (Dove Street, disappointing reviews) opening a roller skating cafe that was halfway up a flight of stairs, running round a circle of cushions singing Michael Jackson’s Earth song at the top of your lungs and making shoes out of paper, please get in touch. Maybe we can form a support group or something.