GETTING OUT

 

It’s important to get out, I told myself, even on days like this. Important for both physical and mental health. I’d missed the brief fifteen minutes of sun around two o’clock and the approaching storm was surely not far off, so it was now or never. Donning full wet weather gear and a woolly bonnet of my father’s I ventured forth. I’d adapted the hat specifically for this sort of blustery conditions by knitting extra ear flaps and securing straps and with the water proof hood strings tied tightly under my chin I was ready for whatever the remainder of the day had to throw at me.

Walks are not planned, they just happen and my trajectory today would be dictated by the south-south-westerly wind. So shutting and locking the door behind me I stepped out. I would not normally lock the door but with the wind face on to the front of the house I felt uneasy relying solely on the latch. There is a knack to closing it and if someone came calling in my absence I didn’t want to risk the door not being securely closed. Head down I made my way up to the T junction and turned right, downhill towards the beach. The ditches were full to brimming with peat stained water and at the culvert it gurgled and thrashed impatient to reach its destiny. Like a reluctant child I was being nudged forward by the wind’s parental guidance. Two cars passed as I stood to one side and decided it would be safer to cross burn and fence for the softer ground. I watched as both dog-less cars carried on along the dead end coast road to Garry and wondered if they would quit the comfort of their vehicles for the beach. I followed the mill stream transformed into an angry torrent, churning and cleaving the land, spilling voluptuous over the granite boulders, forming newly found falls. Staying to the sheep tracks high above the car park I discovered a moment’s calm and ewes grazing contentedly on whatever tasty growth the machair had to offer in late autumn. Down on the dunes it was a different matter as the coarse grass bent seaward and wet sand drifted low across Traigh Mhor beach. Three people and a leash straining dog made their way back to the car as I turned and headed into the wind. Here it had the uninterrupted mile and a half of beach to show its full force, whipping arches of celebratory spray from foaming white crests. Hungrily the towering waves devoured brown peaty moorland waters. The riot of noise from my flapping hood deafening. The painful sting of fine rain on my face, plodding on, head down seaweed at my feet interred beneath the shifting sands. Leaning into the wind I staggered forward at times halting as the wind held me in its grip. Barely quarter of the way along I gave up the struggle and made for the relative calm of the dunes. There along with the sheep, beneath the steep slopes of the machair I found a moment rest bite. But this is a walk and must be continued if the circuit is to be completed, and a cup of hot tea and cake the reward. It’s uphill and thankfully more sheltered but I zigzag none the less along sheep trod terracing. At the brow I take the final step up, headlong into the gale-force wind.  If I am to make the gate and track home there is no alternative. I totter drunkenly on, deafened by the din of the flapping waterproof hood. A brief look up for direction, I locate the gate and press on leaning forward, crazily determined. I find myself singing or more accurately shouting defiant nothingness, roaring in the face of this wonderful force of nature. I’m here, part of it, alive.

Making the gate I clamber through the gap at the hinged end and turn sideways now up the track. This is a different sort of stagger, a different sort of intoxication, an old persons teetering wobbly advancement but what am I at 67 if not advancing in years. Passing George’s house I raise a hand as I catch sight of him at the kitchen window. He at least won’t think I’m mad. He’d understand that need to be out in it, feeling everything, all cobwebs removed. On the road again the wind is at my back pushing and shoving me relentlessly homeward. Walking is not the usual left right rhythm as I lurch irregularly forward trying not to trip over my own feet or to end up sprawled on the tarmac. A brief interlude of calm as I pass the treed hollow before croft thirteen to fifteen and ahead my own front door awaits, within the centrally heated warmth of my new peat fired Rayburn. The old £60 faithful of the past twelve years, finally rusting and leaking, confined only two days ago to the back yard. The new bright and shiny but decidedly more efficient arrived, equally efficiently a day early from Gloucestershire and with help from neighbours was installed and running by mid-afternoon.              

A CLOSER LOOK.

 

I’ve been right up close to the painting this past fortnight with reading glasses on and small brushes for detailed work. The subject is inspired by those wonderful 17^th century botanical Dutch masterpieces that became popular around the time of tulip mania. No flower has carried more political, social, economic, religious, intellectual and cultural influence. The tulip reigned supreme throughout Europe during the extra ordinary events of the 17^th century.

I once hoped to buy a pair of these botanical painting at a house sale down in Cornwall. I was encouraged by the auctioneer’s estimate of £500-£1000, but could see there would be competition. I looked at my bank account and decided I could go to £9000. On the day of the auction, the price rose quickly to £3000, and then stopped, so I prepared to raise my hand. Someone else joined in and off it went again, faltering at £7500. Still I could not raise my hand as yet another continued the bidding. It passed my limit but I wasn’t taking any notice of that and at £12000 was prepared to take a chance. Thankfully it took off once more and didn’t stop till they were finally sold for £23000, a bargain for the person who had the funds and satisfying well beyond my resources. So, having an aversion to anything other than the original, I must now paint my own in homage to what I could never have afforded. I’ve incorporated all manner of bulbs that includes corms such as cyclamen and anemones and will add some insect life before completion.

Although I admire such detailed work this is not at the exclusion of more abstract and loose brush work. A point in question is a large oil that I have known since childhood by Thomas Hunt.

It always took pride of place in my parent’s house and now it graces mu parlour wall. A suitably romantic vision of a highland glen with cattle it also displays a wonderful technic in foreground work which I like to call clean off the brush, and here close in you find the painterly abstract quality of the piece. Just as much a joy as the fine controlled illustrative brushwork of the 17^th century.

LIGHTING THE WAY.

 

I left the studio late the other night. On moon-lit evenings there is no problem in negotiating the fifteen meters walk along the back of the barn to the back door. However this night it was pitch black so I was relying on familiarity to guide my passage. It led me to turn one step to soon and collide with the granite corner. No harm done but thought it about time I add a torch to my shopping list. Just as I did this the following morning I immediately crossed it off. Why was I contemplating buying a battery operated plastic light when I already had a perfectly good lantern.

I came across the lantern some thirty years ago on the west coast of Ireland, when as an antique dealer I was buying furniture. When I asked Simon Quilligan how much he wanted for it he looked perplexed. I’d already spent several thousand pounds with him and a broken box lantern had no real value. “Sure you can take that as a present” he said and for the next twenty five years it hung from a wooden peg in the stairwell of my house in Brittany, complete with candle but never lit. I had repaired the tin funnel and made a door for the back but this summer I decided it needed a further going over, so replaced the broken glass and added a reflecting mirror on the inside of the door. It was packed into the van for my return to Lewis and now, at last it could be put into service. My perfect pre-electric torch, that has the added benefit of warming your hands as you carry it.    

WHAT DID YOU DO DURING THE MONTHS OF LOCK-DOWN?

 

For the first time in over a decade I have spent the summer months in Brittany remaking acquaintance with my sorely neglected garden. Years of abandon had seen a serious reserve of weed seed build up plus some sort of pernicious creeping sow thistle that would regrow from the smallest section of root. During the lockdown period I devoted at least part of each day to clearing, digging and manuring and was pleasantly surprise just what can be achieved by methodical persistence. Perhaps that should really come as any great revelation since my work with embroidery entails a similar mind set. Unable to travel back north to the Hebrides it seemed logical to start growing as much food as I could and by late June the freezer was three quarters full and trips to the supermarkets were considerably reduced.

Then restrictions reduced and the holiday period was in full swing. Never have we seen so many people in Finistere, presumably they decided to come to Brittany because we were clean and to all practical purposes free from covid. Not for long though and so I returned to my garden and studio. It wasn’t until early August that I realised that in living alone I had made no physical contact with another human since mid-March. My home and studio in New Tolsta was calling; with that panoramic view down the croft to the Minch and the north east coast of Lewis, so I booked my ticket for the day after a dental appointment on the 8^th September in the hopes that I would be able before then to have harvested the bulk of the fruit and vegetables. The seasons are definitely changing and everything seems almost a month in advance which has meant that the apples are picked and stored, the slow gin is made and the hazel nuts are drying. Unfortunately the walnuts will not be ready before I leave so I’ve asked a friend to collect them in a few weeks’ time. Similarly the bumper crop of quince and meddlers will not be ready, but those will be harder to find anyone to gather as the former requires work to prepare jelly, and the later rotting fruit few people, apart from myself and Henry VIII seem to like or know what to do with.

My embroidery project over the summer months has been a stitched book and to that end I have completed over half. The wooden framed pages are hinged together using a boxwood mechanism which to my delight has worked out perfectly despite not first making a trial prototype. There was no fixed theme for the pages and I have stitched very much according to what came to mind.

There is a wide range of stitching and technics used to create each page, and while some derive influence from 18^th century samplers others are very contemporary using the attestation we required here whenever we left the house during the covid lock-down period. Other pages use a mixture of technics with appliqué and embroidery as in the two pages of the bear trap (a view of man’s extra ordinary ability to constantly create traps for himself). I estimate that by the end of the year the project should be nearing completion.

Meanwhile I prepare for the journey north and the knowledge that I have a further two weeks quarantine to complete on arrival and a second and very different garden that requires my attention.    

Stitched by Tom Hickman

 

A book can take many forms, not simply a printed text and illustrations but something that in itself is a work of art. Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth century embroidered stitchery was often employed on book covers. I took this as my point of inspiration and during last winter while still in Western Australia I started my stitched book. Since then I have concentrated my creative needlework entirely to the pages of this book and estimate it will take the rest of 2020 to complete. Each panel or page measure 30cm x 40cm, while the book itself has a concertina form, standing on bun feet and when open is self-supporting. I had given little thought to how these needlework panels could be bound. It was only after several months of stitching that the idea of framing each one in wood and incorporating a wooden hinged mechanism evolved. To execute this I called on my furniture making friend Simon Tyler. Over the years I have worked with him on various projects and he has made not only furniture for me but all the oak windows of my Breton farm house. Like myself Simon did not stop work on reaching retirement age but now tends to concentrate on what gives him pleasure. At the moment that as playing his banjo as well as making himself a new banjo. It sounded as if my concertina book was going to be equally complicated to construct as that banjo.

There is something very special in a friendship that allows you to work in someone else’s studio or workshop and Simon’s is a space that has seen an exceptional creative output over the past twenty years.

Most people would have made a scale model in order to see if worked but I moved straight on to the finished item confident that it would work. I have as yet only assembles three of the double sided pages but already I can see the finished book will look impressive. It was back in April during the period of covid confinement when we were required to carry an attestation with us every time we left the house, which stated by way of box ticking one of the valid reasons for being out. If when inspected by the Gendarmes it was discovered to be incorrectly filled out on inspection an on the spot 130 euro fine could be imposed. Walks of up to one kilometre from the house and for one hour were permitted but I found myself on more than one occasion crouching behind a talus (stone and earth field hedge similar to those found in Cornwall), just in case the sound of that rare approaching car turned out to be the Gendarmes. Those printed attestations became the inspiration for another page.

Brittany was almost clear of covid during that period but now that the government has decided that everyone requires a period of regeneration (would that because people’s work or the stress of being confined was degenerating, or was it referring to those businesses relying on tourism). Tourists flocked here bringing the virus with them and a corresponding “R” rate of 2.5 around the coast. I have twice seen couples thumbing a lift on the outskirts of local towns and although the main music festival in Carhaix was cancelled this summer there are plenty of smaller uncontrolled events. During that blessedly peaceful period of confinement one of my walks took me past a remarkable oak tree that has little changed during the thirty years I have known it, and so before it came into leaf I captured its form in tweed wools.

Including both front and back cover there will be in total 24 pages to the book which will require in order to be opened out and read a good size farmhouse kitchen table.         

EATING FROM THE GARDEN

Trips to the supermarket are less frequent these days with the vegetable plot starting to feed me well. The first row of potatoes dug with both surprise and disappointment, firstly to find them so monstrously large and secondly that the chitted potatoes I discovered in a sack under the sink were obviously main-crop and no good as early new potatoes, lesson learnt. Mange tout peas now in full swing as is Swiss chard, Rocket, beetroot, carrots, courgettes and salad. In the fruit garden that had been abandoned for years the crop of black currents was remarkable and what the French call groseille was even better. Gooseberries or maquereau-groseille were limited having suffered in their neglect as well as being swamped by moss and lichen. The raspberries went wild but are producing a small bowel full each evening while the rhubarb is thriving with the dressing of manure, (15lbs picked today). A borrowed chest freezer is filling fast and the preserves cupboard has already a healthy store of strawberry jam. The pollination was disappointing on the pears but a couple of the apple trees are seriously laden.  

If as I suspected the bees were late to work this spring, now I certainly see them hard at work and none more so than in the lime tree. The scent of the blossom is heady in the garden and as I pluck bags-full of flowers for tilleul I’m accompanied by the buzzing din of bees. Somewhere there is some beautiful lime scented honey being made.

I am reminded that nobody need go hungry around here, but even though in other years during my absence I’ve told friends to help themselves it would seem that few made the effort. The supermarket is so convenient and everything is beautifully presented ready wrapped in plastic so why would anyone choose to spend hours picking it from the bushes or even worse getting grubby when digging it from the ground. Similarly I remember hearing a woman having been promised a braise of pheasants from the local farmer’s shoot being shocked to be presented with them still with feathers and not oven ready.

STRAWBERRIES AND CHAMPAGNE.

I know of few better ways to start the day than with a bowl of muesli and yogurt topped off with wild strawberries. Strawberries collected fresh from the garden, still with that chill of morning dew rather than the fridge. Money can’t buy this and such fruit do not come packed in little plastic containers. In years pasted I have cursed the invasiveness of the wild strawberries but being unable to be up on Lewis and having to spend the summer in Brittany has meant the garden has once again received my attention. Due to an exceptionally dry period the task of getting back some sort of control has been easier than expected with fewer weeds growing back in the powder dry soil. Watering has been essential and now I’m beginning to taste the benefits and am already eating Swiss chard and mange tout peas.
The dry conditions has also meant no problems with slugs or snails as they hide away in whatever cool damp spot they can find. Having left the garden fallow for the past decade it was pleasing to see a healthy population of slow worms plus a mass of millipedes and a few very large old toads. Creeping sow thistle has been the only real problem with hours spent breaking up the soil and trying to remove every last trace, then digging several more times as the inevitable tiny remaining rhizomes start to regrow. The potatoes went in first in late March and look strong and healthy with hopefully plenty going on below ground. I’ve planted loads of cherry tomatoes outside and hoping that blight will not be a problem, certainly if it continues to remain dry. I had to restart the strawberry patch with fresh plants from a neighbour so there are not many this year but he has them by the bucket full and jam making is in full swing.

When trees are under stress then flowering is the first option of survival and back in April the valley was full of cherry blossom. When the wind came great clouds of white filled the sky and the roads in places received a powdering of snowy petals. Unfortunately the fruit setting has been minimal with many apple trees have no fruit at all for the second year. The Elder trees however have been glorious and my first batch of Elderflower champagne is ready to drink. This is the taste of summer and while my morning tipple might be an infusion of freshly gathered mixed herbs the rest of the day my thirst is quenched with champagne.