Seasons Bleatings

Christmas cards may be loved or loathed but the vast number of people send at least a few every year. I love them. I love the slap-thud as they land on the mat, so much more interesting than the pile of junk mail that usually slithers my way. Cheap tatty robins or designer glitter, mine are all read enthusiastically then pegged on strings around the hall. More is best.
There are a few from family, not full of hugs and kisses, we are a restrained bunch, but welcome all the same.
Then there's a sprinkling from friends saying how the months fly and we’ll have to meet up soon.
Two are hand made, one very arty the other of a friend's dog in a soppy outfit.
At last, a party invite. That’s lucky, now did I wear my velvet jacket to their house last year? Hmm!
A couple from ex colleagues. Is there a hint of jealousy when they mention how stressful the old place is? I hope so…
Ah ha! An embossed official card from cousin Joan. I haven’t seen the woman for ten years. She‘s never sent me a card before. I see, she’s now mayor of a small town in the Midlands, Well done Joan!
Some make me feel guilty. Two come from old acquaintances culled from my list in a moment of thrift and one from the milkman thanking me for my loyal custom, even though I haven’t given him a tip. I wish now I’d ordered extra cream.
Once I received a lovely card from Jonathan, and I still don't have clue who he was, but he sent his love. Well, that was quite a few years ago.
A couple of cards are conspicuous in their absence. Oh dear! Who have I offended now? Or perhaps they are ill? S**** is getting on in years, I hope she’s o.k. I’d better give her a ring.
What’s this? A neatly written card with my name on the envelope but inside it says To A… and Margaret. Hang on a minute. My husband is A… but my name isn’t Margaret. How can that woman make a mistake about me. I send them a card every year. This year it was one of my better ones too. I’m offended and childishly miffed. I feel a bout of thrift coming on as I mentally cross her name off next years list.

Merry Christmas everyone.

The redwings have arrived

The redwings are back. I saw them myself this morning, their wings flashing red and white as they stripped the holly berries from the trees next door. Mine will be next, but I don’t begrudge those lovely birds their feast.

For many years, when I was working full time, redwings were mythical beasts to me. Off I’d go early in the morning, my holly tree laden with berries that were barely visible in the half light. Then I’d return well after dark only to find, by the light from the porch, that all the berries had been mysteriously removed. Not a berry left.

Indoors my phone would be flashing red, with a smug message from next door saying that, once again, the redwings had arrived and I’d missed them. The following dawn would reveal a tree stripped bare.

For neighbours, bird watching from kitchen windows can be a competitive sport. Last year my neighbour saw a spotted flycatcher on the shed, but I saw the bramblings first. We both agree that redwings are something special. So I was pleased to catch sight of the flock that flew over this mornings. Their shrill trecx, trecx, trecx and the whirr of many wings made me look up in time to see about thirty flying overhead. A race upstairs for a better view showed them feasting and growing fat on next door’s berries.

They can strip a tree bare in a matter of hours and be gone as mysteriously as they arrived, those tough little harbingers of wintry weather. What a pity he’s missed them. I think I’ll just leave a message on his answer phone. The redwings arrived but he was out.

The Stick Ape - A short story

It was still daylight and she was in bed. It felt odd. She heard talking in the garden outside the room and thought of those long afternoons when, wilful and cheeky, she had been sent to bed long before her sisters. That was a while ago, in another life. Her mind wandered to other high summer evenings, when she’d tossed, hot and sleepless, listening to the click of her father’s spade as he worked outside in the garden. It was on one of those evenings that, in the oak tree just beyond the garden hedge, she had first seen the outline of an ape.

Her stick ape had loomed larger and larger every day until it dominated her waking hours. Even in snow the ape was there, looking down, its stick arms stiff with cold. On frosty nights she thought she heard it scraping and tap tapping on the window. In the summer it hid behind the leaves, ready to swing across the gap between tree and hedge and into her bedroom. Then she grew afraid that her thoughts might let it in.

Her sisters said they couldn’t see it and laughed at her, saying she was daft. They told their mum she was silly. Her mum smiled at her fondly, looked in the wrong place and said abstractedly that it was probably an angel watching to see if she was good. She knew it wasn’t an angel. It’s stick like frame hung over her waking hours, threatening and gleeful that no one else in her family really knew the truth.

To start with she tried pulling the curtains more tightly, but that only made the ape more real, its presence more imminent, so she slept with the curtains undrawn. Each morning, on waking, she needed to see out of the corner of her eye that it was there, just to make sure it was still safely imprisoned in the tree.

One day the urge to watch grew so strong she moved her bed directly opposite the window. That night there was a terrible storm. The sort of storm that pulled down telephone wires and tore birds out of the trees, dashing them and their nests onto the ground.

She had never heard such a storm before. She lay alone in her little bed, looking out as the darkness suddenly lit up like fireworks. Huge jagged streaks ripped across the sky. Slashes of light shone behind her eyes long after the lightening had gone.

The wind tore the noise of the thunder away and rolled it around the wood. She heard the tufted leaves on the ends of the branches slashing together and the whole wood hissed with distress.

Again and again rain hit her window like hailstones on a cold tin roof. Wind gusted down the chimney, leaving patches of sooty grime in the hearth. As the latch rattled and the backdoor opened, the lino lifted as the wind came under her bedroom door.

She relaxed when she heard her father’s voice, back from the pub. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but knew he talked of the wind. Her mother’s lighter tone answered in agreement, then their footsteps came in unison up the stairs. They whispered briefly at her door, then there was silence in the house. A silence more acute because of the tearing noise outside.

She thought of her stick ape. In her mind she saw his body lean forward, changing shape as it moved in the wind, springing back and forward, back and forward. She strained to see the tops of the trees from her bed, waiting for the next lightening flash, needing to make sure he was still there. When it came the brightness burnt strange patterns on her eyes, blinding her to what was going on outside.

She shivered as she heard the crack of a bough splitting, then ripping sounds as it fell, twisting through smaller branches, down into the undergrowth. From her bed she felt sorrow for all the animals out in the wind. She pulled the covers up to her chin but still peered out into the blackness, not sleeping until the storm eventually stilled.

In the morning washed sun streamed in her window. She lay dazed, watching the dust fairies dance in a beam of light. As she moved her legs in the bed, the dust fairies swirled and climbed. She tried sleepily to recall the night before. On remembering the storm, she sat up in bed with a start. Once out of bed she staggered, and the light coming in blinded her for a moment. Then, running to the window, she looked outside. Down in the garden tall blue flowers lay flat and battered across her mother’s once neat borders. Her cat picked his way cautiously among the debris. Tufted bunches of oak leaves lay mangled on the path and lawn. Larger twigs straddled the hedge. Beyond the hedge the tree was still standing, but the ape was gone. Where it had once loomed down at her was just a gap, a space of blue washed sky. She could see the track it had made as it leapt through the trees and bushes. She imagined it running along a road made by the fallen branches. As she stared at the path its retreating form had made, she was engulfed by loss. Loss so profound that it clutched her chest and squeezed her throat. The stick ape was gone forever.

How she missed its looming branches and its sketchy shape. From now on she would sleep with the curtains tightly closed, not bearing to open her eyes onto the space it had left so empty. For a long time she told herself it was freedom, but mostly she knew it was loss.

Now, years later she was in another narrow bed, looking at another sky through open curtains, with her thoughts flitting back to that childhood room and the stick ape that had waited beyond the window.

Outside the garden had grown silent in the dusk. Evening was rapidly approaching and, as the light dimmed, she began to feel an old familiar presence. Had her thoughts called it? Was it coming for her? Was it there outside the window? She thought she saw a movement from the corner of her eye but her head was heavy and hard to turn. The room was getting darker now and finally she was sure what crouched beyond the window. There was comfort and dread in its return. Slowly she turned her face towards the dying light. Just before the final dark she felt it close by, looking down on her again and this time she realised there would be no storm. It was there and she knew this time they would go together.

On Presents Past

Apparently Cath Kidson is selling wool tam o’shanters at £25 a throw. I wish I’d saved mine from when I was a kid. I’d have made a fortune. I wonder what’s the going rate on eBay for a vintage tam? Unfortunately mine all met sticky ends.

My Caithness Granny must have spent most of the year knitting and sewing as around Christmas, a bulging parcel would arrive. Along with a blackbun, some oatcakes and sometimes a very dead black hen, (she was convinced we couldn’t get wholesome food in the wicked south) would be several individual parcels. Usually my Mum’s contained a tartan pinny, for wearing on a Sunday, instead of her week day floral overall. My Dad, a son in exile down south, had the most beautiful hand knitted stockings, complete with knitted garters.

My father always wore tweed plus fours. This caused huge embarrassment to us girls, but Caithness Granny made sure he had proper wool stockings, so he‘d look really smart. In fawn or lovat green, those stockings were the work of a superb craftswoman and looked well with his ‘tackety’ boots. It was an unusual outfit for a father to wear in Surrey, in the late fifties and swinging sixties. If we begged him not to wear them, a threat to wear his kilt was enough to bring us to heel.

I can’t remember what came for my big sisters in that parcel, but I often had a fairisle tam o’shanter and once a fancy pixie hood and mittens. Though I seldom saw her, I loved my Caithness Granny but I hated every scratchy stitch she made for me, even if her knitted presents were works of art.

A visit to see her meant huge expense, at two day train ride to Inverness, hours in a rickety red bus and a bumpy ride in the back of my Uncle’s van, before we reached her isolated house, out in the hills by the Grey Cairns of Camster. I now realise those presents were acts of love to granddaughters she seldom saw, the daughters of a son she missed so badly, but to me they were an embarrassment. No one else had to wear hats like mine and worse still, they were physical torture.

To this day I can’t bear wool anywhere near my skin, but off I’d go to school with my Granny’s headgear pulled hard down over my ears, my head itching like it was on fire. I didn’t dare scratch for fear of a,

“You’ve got nits”, taunt from my sisters.

I lost those lovely tam o’shanters. I left them on the school bus, dropped them in puddles, abandoned them to hang lonely and unloved on school pegs in draughty cloakrooms. The pixie hood was quietly hung up a tree. I wouldn’t be so thoughtless now. I think they’re rather smart and I’m quite tempted by a Cath Kidson’s snazzy little number, but the thought of what my thrifty Granny would have said keeps that £25 firmly in my purse. I’m sure she’d have approved of my thrift or may be she’d just be dismayed that I couldn’t knit one myself.

( The pictures are of my Dad as a young man wearing his plus fours and my Caithness Granny and Grandad)

Back to school

A couple of weeks ago I found out that Father Christmas wasn’t real, but Mr Ellis, the school inspector. Where did this definitive proof come from? It was in the written records of the village school that I attended from the age of five. On reaching its 100th year, this venerable establishment threw open its doors to all old pupils. Some seemed very old indeed.

The staff and governors kindly opened the school on a Saturday. The children had made colourful displays, record books dating back for 100 years were available to peruse and even a traditional lunch provided. Not the dreaded mince followed by blancmange that looked pink and tasted pinker, but a tasty shepherds pie and butterscotch tart. Yum!

I stood in my old, shrunken classroom and read the school records with much pleasure. My Dad was mentioned several times. As the local forester he delivered the tree for our Christmas carol concert. I can remember being very proud when he arrived in the National Trust Landrover, a huge Norway spruce poking out of the back.

My big sister found an entry that stirred guilty feelings. Her best friend had been punished for, “Extreme rudeness to a teacher…”, Over 50 years later she still cringes. On Valentine’s day she’d dared her best friend to ask their young male teacher for a kiss. No kiss was offered but the friend got two strokes of the cane instead. It seems incredible now.

Neither of us were ever caned in school but we were both smacked with a ruler. Surprisingly, I don’t remember being troubled by physical punishment. It was a fact of school life and infinitely preferable to writing lines or having to stay in at playtime. In our rural school, surrounded on three sides by beautiful countryside, I remember sitting in class watching kestrels hover over the downs and longing to be free like them. I hated being indoors.

There were a few people we remembered at the reunion. Some very different, some hardly changed. Often I recognised a smile or laugh rather than a face. It was and still is, a very happy school. Though I’m puzzled by the smartly dressed middle aged gent who greeted both of us fondly. When we obviously didn’t recognise him he looked wistful and said, “Oh I remember you both so well. You’re the M..… girls. You lived in the woods.”

I left that school at the age of eleven with a greater knowledge of tree and plant names than I did of maths. I’d read Jane Eyre and Treasure Island and had a sketchy knowledge of British geography. I knew that Sussex was named after the South Saxons and Dorking after the Dorks. I’d also picked up that girls didn’t need careers, only husbands . It took a few years and some hard knocks before I realised they don’t teach you everything in school.

Scalan

Scalan is a collection of old seminary buildings in the Braes of Glenlivet. Though long deserted, it remains an enigmatically spiritual place. Tucked under encircling spartan hills, its ancient stone buildings huddle round a burn and a clear spring that’s commonly known as The Bishop’s Well. Some of the buildings are in ruins with yellow stonecrop clinging to the walls. Some have been restored; a place to shelter from the rain and ponder on the austere lives they once sheltered.

The ground surrounding the buildings is dotted with gnarled and twisted trees, sparsely fruiting rowans and sycamores, fissured alders, branches laden with blue grey lichen, that edge towards the waterside. All around the burn soothes and tinkles.

Apparently Scalan, set in its lonely isolated glen, was a Catholic seminary dating from a time when to be a Catholic was a risky business. I am not a Catholic, or even a particularly spiritual person, yet the place is profoundly moving.

My first visit was on a sunny afternoon when it glowed green and friendly. The second time a faint Scottish drizzle fell softly on my skin and evening was coming on. Then there was a slight air of apprehension about the place.

It may have been partly because four belligerent looking cows and a rather nervous calf stood solidly by the running water, between me and the bridge. They obviously resented the intrusion and my heart beat a little faster as the biggest one splashed purposefully through the burn towards me. The others followed, stopped almost face on, then nosing the calf before them, they turned shifty glances towards me, before nudging the calf up the bank. Once on the path they looked my way and waited.

I was too nervous to pass them so I also waited. We eyed each other, then I waved my arms. The older cow turned on her heel, gave her nearest companion a stroppy shove with her head and they all trotted away, looking back resentfully a couple of times before disappearing behind a small hillock.

Scalan was empty again. The burn played and the wind sighed softly in the trees. Once again it seethed with ancient spirituality, with a mysterious atmosphere that seemed to predate the long gone priests.

We dallied a while, breathing in the atmosphere and taking photographs, as dusk fell we walked back in the softly falling rain. On leaving the silence flowed slowly in behind us.

I caught a movement in the corner of my eye. To my disappointment it was only the cows creeping quietly round the back of the barns, waiting for us to leave, reclaiming their shelter for the night. It was cows, but it could easily have been something more secret and hidden that was also waiting for us to go.

How I got on at the Samaritans' Craft Fair

One of the best things about having a stall at the Samaritan Craft Fair, apart from the obvious one of helping a wonderful organisation, is that everyone is so positive and cheery. I’d had my doubts. I was staying the weekend with a close friend, the person who’d asked me to have a stall in the first place and a committed Samaritan. I could hardly back out, whatever the weather, but the day before the fair was so wet I’d feared drowning on the M25. I expected the fair to be a washout.

The Craft Fair was set in a lovely house and garden that’s not usually open to the public. The owner and organiser greeted me like an old friend, despite the fact I’d just mistaken her husband for the gardener. (Well he was dressed in overalls and raking the leaves off the lawn. And it was the type of house to have a gardener. Very grand! I only realised my mistake when he entered the house wearing his boots.)

Despite steady drizzle, the lady of the house assured me the weather would be lovely and it was. How could the sun not shine on the Samaritans.

I have never been at a craft venue where everyone was so resolutely cheerful and supportive. Though I know from my experiences from Purple Coo, that goodwill is surprisingly infectious. Stall holders helped to look after each others stalls and praised their rivals work to potential customers.

I even smiled reasonably sweetly as I extracted my bright glass beads from the hands of yet another sticky toddler. Agreeing once again that, ‘Yes they did look exactly like sweeties.’ Though secretly wondering why the little poppet wasn’t firmly restrained in the pushchair.

Visitors came to the fair determined to buy. I had a good day and came away a satisfied and happy bead maker and the weekend was made doubly pleasant because I was staying with old friends.

I can’t say I returned home any richer. Craft fairs are full of temptations. I really did need a craftily turned wooden salt pot, some excellent hand made soap, that exotic chutney and, as for the plant stall…Well, need I say more.

Several people have asked where to buy my beads. They are currently displayed in Concepts in Art, Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex and Simply Unique, East Mey, Caithness.

I’ll also display a few on my blog in case anyone is tempted. If you are, please send me a PM for further details.

The flat beads (£14.50 + p&p) are threaded on silver wire (approx 40cm) and the beads have gold inclusions, one on a yellow background, the other on a turquoise background.

The bead drops (£19.50 + p&p) are on silver wire (approx 40cm) but the drops themselves are white metal with white metal beads in addition to the glass beads. The first drop is mainly mauve and orange glass, 2nd Turquoise and mauve glass, 3rd I call my 'Garden Beads', red raised flowers on a cream background, 4th a flat orange flower with a small black centre.