During
the depths of this very soggy winter I have undergone a self enforced
hibernation. It started with a candlelit Christmas very romantic but
none the less rather dim as a working light, after four days when the
electricity was eventually restored I marvelled at just how bright
even a forty watt bulb was. Having retrieved the contents of my
freezer from friends who had retained power a few miles away I had
all I required to close down the outside world, no phone or internet
connection and I let friends know that Mondays would be visiting days
should they wish to check on my progress.
Upholstery was to be my
indoor occupation and during the first few days it was finishing off
the re-covering of a late 19th
century easy chair that I had acquired from a pile of discarded
furniture at the back of a West Country saleroom.
A double drop ended
Chesterfield settee that came from the same free source will this
summer be going up to my house on Lewis and miraculously will match
the parlour curtains. To cover the chair I used the “Gothic
Arches” fabric printed by Stothert and Miles back in the late
eighties copied from a rather ragged old quilt I had purchased for
the outrageous price of £20. Having got into the rhythm of
upholstery I pressed ahead with a few more jobs I had put aside for a
couple of decades. The first was a wreck of an elm armchair that had
during its heyday been the pride of someone’s parlour but for many
a year suffered in silence in the corner of my bedroom beneath layers
of rotting rexine. The seat had been stuffed with any and everything;
hay and straw, newspapers, old invoices and an ancient pair of
bloomers. The remains of a rather fine pineapple pattern single early
Victorian curtain proved ideal in returning this fine old chair to
its former glory. In the swing of it now and having had my sowing
machine serviced I set to making new covers for the mattress cushions
of an iron fold out chair that had for many years served in my studio
to recline the occasional nude model. Fourth on the list came a chair
that had been given to me twenty years ago and which even back then
require serous attention. Now its prolapsed seat showed springs
protruding through rotten webbing and the entire back had slumped
into a very unflattering sagging posterior. From the outset this was
always going to be an entire rebuild as the lumpy back stuffing
revealed itself to be little more than a rats nest of kapok and hay.
I knew one day I would find a use for the old kelim carpet but when
it came to chopping it up I discovered even that required some
repair.
The exterior faces were done in old 19th
century linen; an entire unused roll found on the tip, and although
it took well over a week to complete the end result was very
pleasing. I find that variety is always a good thing and so
interspersed with upholstery I continued my shell work with the
biggest arrangement of shell flowers under dome to date. There are
well over a hundred flowers and many of these flowers consist of
between forty to eighty shells, so one could say it’s a labour of
love and in the way that love can often resemble madness by an
observer so this work seems to send me a little strange simply with
the concentration required. Other objects d’art were two obelisks,
one shell encrusted and the other clad entirely in old mercury
mirror.
And
during these long dark TV free evenings I sort through the many
sketch books I’ve filled from the Outer Hebrides and piece together
a travel diary in the hopes of getting funding later this year to go
into print. Drifting through the islands I meet and observe many
fascinating people but those who impress and stay close to the
surface of my memory are often the elderly.
There
amongst all the modern supermarket shelves I see him, a great
lumbering fossil of a man, something prized out from between the
pages of my youth, and I wait for the smell of oily sheep's wool to
waft past. He examines a plastic bag of mixed chopped veg and I
wonder does he know about stir fry, wasn't it just tatties and swede
in his time? His Harris Tweed jacket is almost shiny at collar and
cuffs as he slumps forward on the bar of his trolley for support. His
glasses are half way down his nose, a nose that sprouts hair
externally as well as internally, white stubble powders his leathery
sunken cheeks speaking of ages past, of evenings sipping peaty
whiskey in smoke filled rooms, and his gnarled oversized hands that
attained such grandeur with professional skill of shearing sheep
during long summer days. Now they grip the bar of the trolley like
two great claws of a perching raptor long since extinct. This is a
man of my youth from Tarbert market that lent heavily on the iron
gates as he tipped his head to the auctioneer and twitched his mouth
in a silent bid. The man that held at arms length an ash crook with
rams horn handle to catch a young lamb by the neck. The man from
endless summer afternoons who walked the stubble fields behind a
clanking binder standing oat sheaves into stooks. The man who took my
tiny smooth white hand in his and shook it with a grip both firm and
tender leaving me confident that in his presence I would always be
safe. I pulled myself back from another age and century with the
strangeness and abruptness of an unexpected moon landing, as I stared
at my own short shopping list; fruit, bread and cheese.
