Memoir

A to Z 2025 – Novel-writing…

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

This cover used all my graphic skills- firstly I tried to get Midjourney AI to generate the whole thing but didn’t get anywhere near my visualisation but I really liked the background view of the planet and so I prompted the AI just to generate that and the astronaut. The space-elevator, spacecraft and field of containers floating in space were done in AutoCAD 3D, and everything put together in PhotoShop including the lettering.

When I was living in Ireland, my late sister Carol, invited me to go along to a writing group (yes! face-to-face!) and I realised that I had once enjoyed writing creatively but that as you rise in age, free-writing is one of the first things to go in order to make room for more academic subjects. I remembered one of the few unprompted stories I wrote outside school – it was a ghost tale in which a sorrowing father whose little daughter had accidentally walked into the big saw blade in her father’s saw mill and now, on the one year anniversary, the father, eyes blurred with tears and beside himself with grief and guilt, does the same… This short and sorry tale, though of a genre I don’t enjoy, is evidence that all my mother’s storytelling had left its mark and after the short writing challenges in the writing group, I started a novel which I still haven’t finished (although I have picked it up again recently). The novel deals with themes of post-colonialism and looks at the abuses that happen between countries as if they were intra-familial abuse and weaves several threads around it’s central characters taking in Rwanda, India and Ireland. With such weighty themes, the novel has taken a lot of research and gestation as you can imagine. On the other hand, my second novel – the opening anyway – came to me in a dream when I was recuperating from a hip replacement – I awoke and reached for my phone to record as much as possible before, as dreams are wont to do, it vanished. I started writing and it proceeded in a very linear manner – I even tired to use the A to Z 2021 (see the tab at the top of this page), to push myself to finish it. I didn’t quite make it, but it did get done in the following six months. I felt that finishing a novel (since as I have remarked before, I am not good at finishing things) would, however different a book it was from the first effort (a utopian science fiction novel), be an effort worth making and so it has proved to be. I now have a Critique Partner and he is also writing a science fiction novel though now that I have moved back to the first book, he has taken the change in good faith. Although there is a twenty-year difference in age between us, we never lack things to talk about on our two-weekly chats.

An extract from “The Book” (it has no title yet)
There is a sub-plot in the book involving a young Indian Rhodes scholar at Oxford who has finally plucked up the courage to ask a young Irish barmaid out on a date and being Oxford – it has to be punting…

As she lay back against the cushions of the punt, like Cleopatra propelled down the Nile, Margaret’s only regret was that she was compelled to face backwards. Watching Satajayit’s somewhat erratic and obviously unpracticed use of the punt pole to propel them downstream made Margaret nervous. Besides, although this branch of the Cherwell could not really bear comparison with Africa’s greatest river, nevertheless, Margaret would have preferred to watch it’s charms unfold facing forward. She did not feel she knew Satajayit well enough to face forward in silence or to lie bottom up in the sloping bow of the punt and offering possible distraction to Satajayit. So, resigned to watching the river recede from her, Margaret decided to risk a lesser distraction from his efforts by resuming conversation with Satajayit.
“You never finished telling me who Cecil Rhodes was”, she said.
“No indeed”, said Satajayit as he ducked to avoid the branch of a tree he had managed to steer beneath. Out in the open, he managed a long, powerful glide in the right direction along an open stretch of water with no other boats or obstacles to negotiate and took advantage of the respite to reply more fully. “You must have heard of De Beers Diamond Mines?” she nodded ”Well, Cecil Rhodes founded the company and made millions when he was still a young man. He went out to South Africa to join his brother in farming because he had poor health and the warm climate helped. After they were rich, he came back to England, to Oxford in fact, to complete his education.”
“They must have been delighted to have such a rich young man come here. From what I hear these colleges are always on the lookout for benefactors.”
“I am sure you are right. So too were the Freemasons because they invited him to join.”
“Really!” said Margaret, sitting up a little. “My father was a Freemason too. It’s big with the Protestants in Ireland. Bloody men’s clubs! All sticking together to scratch each other’s backs is what it’s all about!” This sudden vehemence surprised Satajayit and caused his next thrust of the pole to wobble the boat precariously.
“Ach, I’m sorry but I’ve no time for all that carry on!” she said, flopping back onto the cushions.
“No, no, you are right!” said Satajayit animatedly, “and Rhodes thought so too. Even the night he joined, with the usual secret initiation, he wrote they were an organisation ‘with ridiculous and absurd rites without an object and without an end.’ The next night, he had a brainwave – to create a secret society to further the interests of the British Empire and indeed all the Anglo-Saxon people. He wrote down his plan and called it ‘Confession of Faith’.”
“So that’s what you meant about his relationship to the mother country. Well, if you ask me, England was never any ‘mother’ to her empire – more like a thoroughly bad father. Look what they’re still doing in Northern Ireland!”
“Oh yes, I have been reading about that – most unfair on the Catholics. So, although you are Protestant, you are not in agreement with the British policy in Northern Ireland?”
“No! I am not! And the funny thing is, it wasn’t till I came to England that I started to see what was really going on. At home people don’t talk that much about Northern Ireland and ‘the troubles’. You know, when partition took place, we had a civil war that was almost worse than the war to get Britain out of Ireland. Both wars were bloody, but this was worse not because it was us against them. No, this was father against son, brother against brother. So that’s why I think we don’t want to hear about it all starting up again in the north. But then when I came here people were so ignorant about Ireland, like those eejits in the pub today but when I did get talking to the odd one, I realised there was a lot I didn’t know either and I started to take home the papers people left in the bar and to read them. It’s all a terrible mess, Ireland, it’s all ignorance and stupidity on the part of the British. Half the politicians don’t know any more than those students and they don’t care as long as the Unionists continue to vote with them!”
“It is strange to hear you use the word ‘partition’ as my country too has had partition when the British left and likewise it was divided along religious grounds. India is mainly Hindu and Pakistan is mainly Muslim, although there are a few people in each country who didn’t move at the time of partition, so there are still some troubles from time to time. Personally I don’t have any time for all that religious nonsense. India is stuffed full of religions for all the good it does. If there is a God or Gods, I am sure he wouldn’t want people squabbling the way they do!”
“Well isn’t that what the British always did with their bloody Empire? They conquer a country and exploit it as long as they can, and when they leave, they leave it all upside down like a house after a burglary with everybody fighting amongst themselves?” This was more a statement than a question – Margaret sitting bolt upright with indignation again.
“Oh, but in India they left behind great civilisation, railways, a legal system, schools and of course a parliamentary system!” Satajayit said, adding proudly “To which I for one hope to belong someday!” He beamed and completely forgot to pole, nearly running into another punt coming the other way. Only hasty action by the other punt avoided a mishap, but Margaret scarcely noticed with, as her Grandmother would have said, ‘her dander up’. “Do you so?” she said “Well I bet when you are in the know, you’ll find the British robbed the place blind before they left, I mean if they were so great for India, how come there are so many starving people there?”
“Oh my golly! You do ask some difficult questions. I have never met a woman so fierce in her opinions before. Why, you ask better questions than some of the students in the seminars I go to!”
Margaret fell back laughing but sat up again suddenly and with a serious look said, “Well, do you know, I’ve never said anything like that to anyone before! They may not talk much about the north where I come from, but I can tell you, they wouldn’t like to hear me say what I’ve been saying. Oh, Jeany Mac no!” and she burst out laughing again.
“Jeany Mac? Who is this Jeany Mac?” asked Satajayit once more poling the punt downstream and beginning to look more comfortable with the process.
“Ach, it’s only a saying we have, I don’t know where it comes from or who she was.”
“Are you perhaps one of these feminists?” Satajayit asked cautiously.
“Well I haven’t burnt my bra if that’s what you mean!” Margaret replied with mock indignation and burst out laughing at the look of embarrassed horror that overtook her companion’s features and nearly caused him to fall off the punt. ”I’m sorry,” she said, “I was only joking. I never thought of myself that way, but I suppose I do agree with a lot of what they are saying, even though I’ve only read about it in the papers, I mean I don’t actually know any. Come to that I don’t know many people at all. This is the first time I’ve been out with anyone.” She said, suddenly shy, her eyes dropping to her lap as she wondered at her candidness with this comparative stranger.
“You don’t have any family here in England?” he asked quietly.
“No. I left home under a bit of a cloud, and when I came here, I had to do something I didn’t feel very good about and I just kept myself to myself for a long time.”
Satajayit had little experience of women, and although he could not guess what she might be referring to, instinct told him it was better not to probe, so he punted on steadily, the two of them silent for a few minutes. Margaret realised she felt better for having spoken to someone about the loneliness of the last while and it occurred to her that maybe it was because Satajayit was also alone in a strange country that had liberated her.
“Tell me about your family.” She said and noticed a cloud pass momentarily across Satajayit’s normally sunny features.
“There is not much to tell.” He said diffidently. “My parents are not very well off. They are farmers, and I have an older brother who will take over the farm.”
“Really! Me too!”
“What a coincidence! It is truly a strange world. I myself won scholarships, first to school and then to the University of Bombay and finally to here, to Oxford University.” He beamed.
“Your family must be very proud of you so!”
“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” Deflating visibly Satajayit suddenly headed the punt alongside a stretch of open bank and pushed the pole firmly into the mud to hold them fast and sat down facing Margaret. The sudden seriousness made Margaret sit up and draw her legs in to face Satajayit eye to eye.
“You must understand, my father is a very old-fashioned man. He believes everyone has their place and they should stick to it. He thinks I have no business getting ideas above my station and that no good will come of it!”
That sounds only too familiar, thought Margaret but said nothing – just looked sympathetic.
“It is most fortunate that I do have an older brother who wants to farm, otherwise I would have had no choice about going to school. I would have had to stay on the farm to look after my parents when they got old.”
“And do you have any other brothers and sisters?”
“No. That is quite unusual you know, for an Indian family. It makes my mother sad and maybe a bit ashamed. I think perhaps she is proud of me, but she would not contradict my father. It is only because the other people in the village were so pleased for me that my father allowed me to go away to the school in town, and that is where I met Mr Horatio Singh!” Satajayit said, his serious face breaking into a smile of happy reminiscence.
The serious moment seemingly passed, Margaret burst out laughing at the strange combination of names.
“What is so funny, please?” said Satajayit with a frown.
“Horatio! It just seems a strange name for an Indian man!”
“Ah well, you see Mr Singh’s parents were very keen on history and wanting to give their son a truly auspicious start in life, they named him for the great Englishman Horatio Nelson!”
“I see. And what did he do, this Horatio Singh?”
“He was my school teacher, and because it was not a boarding school, but I lived too far away, I used to live in Mr Singh’s house. He was like a second father to me and I can say with the utmost certainty that without Mr Singh, I would not be here today”, and he looked around as if to take in the full reality of the exact spot in which they had come to rest.
The effect of this look was so comical that it was all Margaret could do to keep a straight face, but not wishing to offer any further offense she managed.
“Yes indeed, he it was who set me on the path to learning and gave me encouragement, he is truly my mentor.”
By now, it was late in the afternoon and the light was starting to fade. Satajayit punted them slowly back to the boat station. For the first time since they had met that day, they fell silent, but companionably so.
Margaret felt relaxed and lay back contemplating this gauche but passionate thinker who was propelling her along like the Queen of Sheba whilst Satajayit glowed inwardly at having negotiated the novel experience of dating a member of the opposite sex without any mishaps. They made their way up the High Street again both knowing that sooner or later they would have to go their separate ways, though neither voicing the question of where that might be or what might follow on from this first encounter. Satajayit lived in Rhodes House whilst Margaret lived out along the Cowley Road and so was walking in the opposite direction to home. Half way up the High Street, Satajayit wordlessly took Margaret’s hand. They turned together to look in some of the shop windows, both noticing the novel reflection of their conjoined forms more than the contents of the shop display and yet without comment, savouring their silent companionship. Finally, they reached Carfax, the crossroads at the top of High Street, and Margaret turned to face Satajayit, reached up to plant a firm kiss on his cheek. “I’ll be seeing you at the Turf then”, she said, and with a squeeze of his hand, she turned and walked back the way they had come.

© Andrew Wilson, 2025

A to Z 2025 – Music, Murals, Memories, oh, and Marmite!

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Marmite has become a word that is shorthand for “Love it or Hate it” since the strong-tasting, quintessential British contribution to spreads/food ingredients divides the room. It is yeast extract and is made from the yeast that accumulates at the bottom of beer brewing tanks and if you ever have the good fortune to smell a Marmite, collection tanker passing, you will know the truth of this! As well as eating it on toast, I like to spread it on the toast for baked beans which can be bland but is transformed by the addition of marmite…

Music

Music pervades and has always pervaded my life to such an extent that I am not aware of its centrality but from the few records that my parents possessed (including a 78 rpm record of Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes), to learning the violin at school, to progressively listening to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline on a valve radio to the ease of access that Spotify and You Tube give us to much of all recorded music, I love not just the music but the musicology – the family tree and genetics of music. I gave up the violin for the guitar and the guitar for the ukulele (more of that later), I have sung in choirs from Mozart’s requiem to Dylan – I can’t imagine living without music. On the days when I go to work, I listen to the morning news radio but on the way home I listen to music…

Two musical games of my own invention that you might enjoy…
1. Music Associations
Ideal on a long journey – you play word association but with the title or a line from a song and anyone can challenge a player to explain the connection and if all the other players agree that the connection is valid, the challenged gains a point but if the challenge fails then the challenger loses a point. an example of the chain might be:- Heart like a Wheel – Little Red Corvette (cars have wheels) – Little Red Rooster – Wake up in the Morning etc. Connections could be word associations but they could be deeper – composer, covered by the previous singer – the possibilities are endless…

2. Hit or a Miss (Juke Box Jury)
Juke Box Jury was an early panel show on British TV in which the host, David Jacobs, played the latest pop songs to a panel of guests who were then invited to vote it – Hit or a Miss! With a group of friends, two people at a time play three random songs from a playlist of their own favourites one at a time and everybody else votes on each song as Hit or Miss and the winner is the one with the most hits. Each person may choose the starting song, but then the playlist must be set to Shuffle for the next two songs. My music choices are so eclectic, I couldn’t possibly choose favourite music but to give you a taste, here are three pieces from my largest playlist on Spotify chosen according to the rules of the game…

Sweet Dreams – Bettye Swanne
Breath Again – Åsa
You Do Something To Me – Sinead O’Connor

Well, with 71 hours and 9 minutes of music to choose from – those surprised me too, especially the second choice but that’s the fun of the game!

Murals

This mural was designed by the Irish designer of religious art Desmond Kyne for whom I executed several commissions – since he was in his eighties, he could never have painted this. St. Joesph’s Church, Keelogues, Ireland, had been completely refurbished and Desmond designed the mural and the altar inset which he made with a secret technique that has sadly disappeared with the late artist.
Desmond Kyne and I at the installation of an earlier project where I made the Rereredos which houses Desmond’s icon. The Rererdos is a frame that allows the icon to be taken out and paraded around the parish on religious holidays. You can see some of the same religious elements as in the mural – the descending Dove motif and the flaming Holy Spirit…

My signwriting days will have to wait till the letter “S” but following the car accident which broke my hip in 1999, I was unable to work up ladders in the way I did before and although I started teaching part-time at Sligo Institute of Technology, I also got a couple of mural commissions which I did with I did with my friend Rob Forrester. They were possible to do using lifting platforms or cherry-pickers, obviating ladders. In fact one of the first important jobs I did after moving to Ireland was a mural for a bookshop called The Winding Stair after a poem by the Sligo poet, WB Yeats. The owner already had a successful shop of the same name on the banks of the Liffey in Dublin and had been waiting for some years to get suitable premises in Sligo. Kevin gave me considerable licence in designing the mural, and it served as a great advertisement for me which everybody knew. Here you can see a news item on RTE – the Irish TV, which features a much younger me painting the mural…

Memories – A Poetic Interlude

House with No Plan

The plan of my mind palace
does not exist
I haven’t tried to
master my memories
in that way
but instead I wander
through the corridors
opening doors not quite at random
and relying on my
innate sense of direction
to find my way back
out of the labyrinth.

So sometimes I arrive
in pleasant pieces of the past
and sometimes in rooms
I would rather not visit
their contents not yet
come to terms with or
understood in the scheme of things

Nobody else can follow me here
so I needn’t draw the map out
with notes in the margin
“Here be monsters!”
only I need to know
the rooms best avoided
or put on the long finger to explore
yet sometimes my mental map
lets me down and I find myself
lost and shivering, stuck
in the darker places
searching for meaning

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

A to Z 2025 – Love

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

This sculpture was made by ceramicist Bettina Seitz who sublet her studio to me when I first lived in Sligo, Ireland. I made the painted wooden base which has a quotation from “The Voyage” a song by Johnny Duhan but made famous by Christy Moore which you can see here…

The object I have picked to represent Love is the statue above, which I bought, mounted and gave to my partner Barbara and which is one of our favourite treasures. It encapsulates so many memories, the song “The Voyage“, a favourite even before we went to live in Ireland as it was often sung by our Irish son-in-law, the studio in Sligo and my friend Bettina, and for me it is a reminder of my signwriting and art-making days in Ireland.

Love and Hate are often designated as opposites and Love and Sex are often confused and in the following poem, previously unpublished, I consider the latter confusion…

Sex and Love…

I had a sheltered upbringing
and a late start
in affairs of the heart
my parents love-life
a secret to which their
obvious love offered
no clue.

A generous friend fired
the starting pistol but offered
first sex once but no more
love in confusion mired.
A Brazilian friend also
bemused by sex in England
told me how in Brazil
girls in a friendship circle
sit on any lap except
the one they fancy
sending a coded message
to the cognoscenti
coming closer by staying distant
but in England, you meet
at a party, say
and suddenly you find
you have vaulted over a wall
you didn’t even notice
to find yourself in bed
with a stranger.
There for the birth of
her grandson, her mother
gave me my first massage
and then so much more
showing that Brazilians
excel at vaulting too

I became the toy of
another older woman
not that she was a player
for we both confused
sex for love
and in the end became
respectively frustrated
and disappointed
because you cannot find love
in the cracks of another’s
flawed marriage – there may be dirt
but not the soil in which a
relationship might flourish

If she was not ready
or able to leave her husband
I finally found the one who did
and reached the sunny uplands
where sex and love
in true commitment bloomed
not knowing that winter and the
darkness of the past
was waiting in the wings.
After a short first act
the curtain fell suddenly
with seeming finality
where abundant happiness
had flourished in the light
sex wilted in the dark
but not before true love
had taken root – its holdfast
wrapped tight to the rock of life

And now, in later years
Persephone has been drawn
into the underworld
and winter reigns, mostly
but love leads me again and again
to venture there
to lead her back to the light
if I may, instructed not to look back
But in truth that is her affliction
the past, a cast of characters
who crowd her head
hiding her real self
asserting their various strategies
to protect her from a past
that is no more
and yet is kept alive by the
very protections and distractions
that hide her truth

Those who do not deal with the past
are doomed to live there
but doing that deal
is easier said than done.

So now I know that love
is stronger than sex
and though sex serves to
feed the seeds of love
once the tap root is driven
deep into the earth
the strong trunked love
sustains through long Winters
good Summers and bad
flood and drought
and for the tree of love
the flowering and fruiting of sex
is a bonus
not the whole story…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

A to Z 2025 – Knitting (and Crochet)

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Knitting, Crochet, and Tunisian Crochet Needles. Top – Tunisian needles originally free with Women’s Home magazine, to the right, a Tunisian loop to allow long rows to be made, centre, a double-ended Tunisian needle. Main Row, left to right:- 1″ plastic knitting, 1/2″ wooden knitting, 1/4″ wooden needles, wooden, yellow plastic, plastic tortoiseshell, plastic, bamboo, orange plastic. A loop needle for knitting socks and a set of double-ended needles -the old way to knit socks. On the right side, there is an extreme crochet needle, two ivory and two plastic crochet hooks, a wooden ruler, and a cloth tape measure.
A sampler of Tunisian Crochet stitches done during lockdown – read more here…

Knitting and Crochet

Why do I like to knit or crochet? To be sure, since this a kind of memoir, my mother knitted and passed on the bug to my late sister Carol, and I may have been shown how to knit too, but I think the real reason I like to experiment ith stitchcraft is simply the magic – and the perpetual attempt to understand how it works. Knitting offers the same fascination as watching a conjurer, (magic is a concept, not a real thing)and trying to work out how the illusion is carried out – except that knitting is real and produces tangible, useful and beautiful results – if you don’t drop a stitch, that is… I would say that I do understand the process now, especially with Tunisian Crochet and so now, the quest is to finish projects, something I am not always good at doing.

The work of the guerrilla knitting group “Knit a Bear Face” which I joined for a time in Leeds – you can see more of their activity and read my poem referencing them here…

Part of understanding how it works relates to my wider skill as a designer – I want to understand how things are made, which in knitting means increasing and decreasing rows in order to shape the panels that will be sewn together to form a garment. I once did an evening class in Dressmaking where I learned to make myself a shirt – a project that covers many of the skills needed in dressmaking, cutting to pattern, gathered joins, pleats, cuffs and collars and buttonholes. I was living near Brixton, London in those days and as the only male and only white person (other than the teacher, a sometime dressmaker to the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting), I was a source of wonder and amusement to the West Indian matriarchs who made up the class. My father’s contribution to the family’s knitted clothes was to operate the Knitting Machine, which my mother found too technical to master. My partner feels uncomfortable seeing me knit whilst we watch TV (her father wouldn’t have been caught dead knitting), but there are many countries where it is considered normal for men to knit, sew and even embroider – let us not forget the great Kaffe Fassett. When I joined the guerrilla knitting group “Knit a Bear Face” who used to meet in the Victoria Arms, Leeds, I found both men and women happily knitting together.

A Tunisian Crochet shoulder bag I made as a present – like all woolen baga it needs a sturdy lining to stop it sagging…

What is Tunisian Crochet, you may ask, and how did I get into it when in truth, I don’t know how to do ordinary crochet. Well when my mother died and both my sisters and myself were sorting out her apartment (a rare conjunction of the three of us), Carol and I were going through her many knitting needles – both Carol and my mother ran knitting groups and although Carol could probably have deployed the lot in her groups, she insisted that I should have some too. After most were divided, there remained a beautiful tortoiseshell pair of teedles (plastic – no tortoises were hurt in the making of them), and a curious long wooden needle with a hook like a crochet hook at one end. Neither Carol nor I knew what it was for – there is no need for a crochet hook to be long since it never holds multiple stitches, so Carol made an executive decision, “I’ll have the tortoiseshell ones and you can have this!” and she thrust the curiosity at me! Sisters! After I was back at home and I did a bit of research and discovered that this was a needle for Tunisian Crochet – sometimes described as a cross between knitting and crochet, and although the results can resemble either, in fact, it is not like either! I am going to have a little rant against the stitchcraft publishing industry – once upon a time, books of stitchcraft would contain both knitting and crochet and even give patterns which combined the two – a jersey with a panel of crochet inset, for example. But the plethora of books and magazines devoted to crafts has led to ever more specialisation – not just crochet, say, but beaded crochet – all in the hope of selling more copies. So Tunisian Crochet became overlooked for a long time, and it is only by the democratising process of YouTube videos that it is now making a comeback.

So why would you want to employ Tunisian Crochet in a project? Well. it produces a much thicker fabric, which is both stiffer and warmer, and so ideal for say, a coat rather than a cardigan. It has many varieties of stitch giving it lots of different looks, and IMHO, it is very easy to learn – go on – give it a go…

This hat was done as a continuous circle Tunisian crochet and is currently travelling in South America with one of my grandsons – he has promised to send a picture of him wearing it in Machu Picchu…

Other posts on stitchcraft:-

Lockdown Craftiness…
Bronze Reveries
Handbags at Dawn!

A to Z 2025 – Jam plus…

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace – it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

I have been banned from filling the kitchen cupboards with jam jars so I have to secrete them around the house in nondescript carrier bags, ready for the next, infrequent time I decide to make jam or chutney! I like to collect unusual-shaped jars…

Jam and other home preserves…

Although my mother did not consider it necessary for me to learn to cook (see “C”), when it came to preserving the harvest each year, the whole family had to get involved, either picking (Apples, Blackberries, Elderberries, Rosehips, Sloes) or preparing fruit and vegetables for bottling, freezing or making jam and chutney. The habit has stayed with me, for thrift and for the pleasure of cooking custom jams unavailable in the shops. For example, you can reduce the sugar content in jam (I am Type 2 diabetic) as long as you keep the jars in the fridge after opening. Once, on holiday in Menorca, thee was a massive collection of Prickly Pears at the back of the farmhouse where I was staying offering a bumper crop of ripe fruit – I simply had to make jam although it was a little bland and on reflection, needed something adding to it, more lemon juice, apple or perhaps ginger. There are pairings in jam which are for flavour, like Rhubarb and Ginger and others which are for functional reasons – blackberries lack pectin which combined with sugar is what gives you the “set” or jelly in the jam so they are paired with cooking apple that excels in pectin, hence Blackberry and Apple Jam!
I have written about Rhubarb before, but I didn’t include jam in that post so here is my mother’s tip for making
Rhubarb Jam.
Use the early-season rhubarb when the stems (forced, ideally) are very slender and sweeter.
Cut the stems in 1 – 1/2 cm lengths and weigh before placing in a large bowl.
Weigh out an equal measure of white sugar and cover the rhubarb and leave overnight.
Next day, place the mixture into a large saucepan and bring to the boil.
Continue boiling until a set is obtained.
Place in sterilised jam jars and make sure the lids are on tight.
By covering the rhubarb with the sugar overnight, the sugar sucks the juice out of the rhubarb compressing it so that it doesn’t cook down to a mush. The same thing works with other soft fruit like strawberries…

Making jam is so easy once you have tried it, cook fruit, add an equal weight of sugar – cook till you get a set and all the modern jam jars have silicone seal lids so it couldn’t be easier…
Chutneys work much the same but the preserving is done by a combination of vinegar and sugar and is assisted by the spice content.

The last jar of 2024’s Apple Chutney…

Jam-jars

I confess – I collect jars…
jam-jars for sure
but others too
sweets, gherkins, pills

My partner imagines
I seriously culled the jam-jars
and truly I tossed a few
since diabetes and jam-making
don’t mix

But mainly I re-hid them
where she wouldn’t look…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

A to Z 2025 – Ireland (They order these things differently in France!)

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Croagh Patrick on the day of the annual pilgrimage to climb this mountain as an act of devotion.

Ireland

I cannot track down the origin of the phrase in the title of today’s letter “I” – but it certainly denotes my rapid realisation when I moved to Ireland from England in 1995 for what would be a ten year sojourn in the Emrald Isle. You see, if I had moved to France, I would have expected everything to be different, starting with the language and then the culture, the cuisine, manners, customs etc. Moving to Ireland where, except in a few bi-lingual Gaeltachts (Gaelic speaking areas), everyone speaks “English” – a reflection of a centuries long occupation by the English. However, I soon discovered that the Irish are as foreign in their ways as the French!

The first thing that was noticeably different was the way of death. When somebody dies in Ireland, the word goes out and family and friends from all over the country will arrive by late afternoon, having dropped whatever they had planned for the day – something quite accepted in the workplace, the only exception being if significant relatives have to come from abroad. The same evening, the body will be taken to the church for a service and left there overnight. In this, the church (Catholic for the most part) has triumphed over the wake, where the body would be kept in the home and “drink would be taken” and reminiscences of the deceased shared over the body. No reminiscences are allowed at the church service or at the service on the second day whence the body is taken to the burial ground – I can only assume that sharing reminiscences (other than a sanctioned Eulogy), is considered threateningly secular by the church.
By contrast, in England, funeral services are often held at crematoriums, two or even three weeks after a death and I imagine that an Irish person coming to England would find that equally strange and wonder why we wait so long but in truth we don’t have a choice – there is a huge backlog at the crematoria which is the source of the delay. At the first Irish funeral I went to, the village postman, whose mother had died, told me he had been going to such funerals all his life. Still, until this one, he had never appreciated the power of support that this immediate gathering of relatives has for the bereaved. I can’t help wondering how the long gap in England between death and funeral affects the English psyche – I suspect it makes us ever more detached from death, just as cremations with the body suddenly disappearing behind curtains does not have the same emotional affect as a coffin being lowered into the ground…

An abandoned Protestant church – probably a consequence of the population decimation of the Potato Famine.

The way of death was just the first of many differences I noticed whilst living in Ireland, such as the difficulty in inviting people round for dinner and of course there was the landscape, which as a landscape artist (occasionally) was of especial interest to me. Barbara and I lived 35 miles outside Sligo, the county town, ten minutes walk from the Atlantic Ocean breaking on fossil-infested rocky ledges where I would go to fish and once had an encounter with an otter…

A view of Achil Island, Connemara (Co. Mayo) across the strait, with yet another ruined church.

Incidentally, my sister Helen in Nova Scotia, tells me it is almost time for “Spring Planting” – nothing to do with gardens or allotments but the time when it becomes possible to dig graves in the winter-frozen ground and so, many funerals take place…

Roadside flowers in August…

A to Z 2025 – Helen, the House, Health and Humanism

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

A slightly blurry picture (scanned from a slide) of my sister Helen dressed up as a nurse!

Helen

You have met, however sketchily, my late sister Carol, but I have another sister, Helen who is very much alive and lives across the pond in Nova Scotia, in a town ironically titled, for somewhere so small (population 1,159/2021) Centreville. Helen is the last of my immediate or “nuclear” family and so our Zoom meetings every second Sunday are particularly important and we are discovering new truths about each other, even at our advanced ages. As I described in E for Elsie, my Mum’s imposter syndrome led to us children having a very claustrophobic life outside of school – we may as well have been growing up on an isolated farm and so, when we finally left home, we all headed off in different directions as fast as we could and I would say there was little closeness between us for a long time – our “nuclear” family exploded! The picture of Helen at top, shows the reason why Carol and I had always assumed that Helen was destined to become a nurse, following in her mother’s footsteps. In looks, Helen took after my mother’s side of the family and it seemed unsurprising that she might take up our mother’s mantle. Certainly, Helen looks thrilled with her fancy dress nurse’s uniform and maybe she was given it by my mother in the hope that she might be a nurse but recently Helen confessed that her motive for choosing nursing was quite different. By the time she was a teenager, Helen had realised that nursing offered a way of leaving home and going straight into a “paid-as-you-learn” profession thus giving her independence at the earliest opportunity – even university in my case, or teacher-training in Carol’s, meant that we were home for the holidays and financially dependent. It goes to show that it is never too late to know your siblings better…

After reading the post about our mother, Helen sent me this “knolled” picture of her own memorabilia from her nursing days (the Certificates are shrunk down) and she provided the caption too…

Top left then clockwise: Oxford School of Nursing badge (incorporates Banbury Cross, Oxenford and Oxford University logos); photograph from the nursing set of October 1977; General Nursing Council registration plus GNC badge, confirming Registered Nurse status (1981); silver belt buckle worn with uniform on a navy blue belt; bronze badge (Sigillum Nosocomii Radcliviani) which signifies having trained at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and the final certification of completion for three years training from the Oxford School of Nursing (1980). 


Of interest:
The bronze badge is the one that carries the most pride, as it pertains to the Radcliffe Infirmary – we were the last group to train there in the old style apprentice training, before the new academic system came in.
The John Radcliffe Hospital opened halfway through our training, so we were moved from the old Radcliffe Infirmary to the new School of Nursing at the John Radcliffe but still worked across both sites as well as at the Churchill Hospital and other various locations, including Littlemore Psychiatric Hospital: Littlemore Hospital – Wikipedia

One last story about Helen, not unconnected to nursing – all of us children were born at home, which was unusual in those days when hospital birth was the well established norm and curiously, (since she was a nurse and might have been expected to go with the flow), my mother chose home-birth. When Helen, the youngest, was born, a team of Canadian doctors and mid-wives came to witness the birth with a view to encouraging the practice back in Canada. So my father, Carol, and I were sequestered in the next bedroom whilst my parents’ bedroom was thronged. And now Helen and her husband live in Canada…

Health

I ncluded Health in my putative list of topics for this A to Z, but I am chary of becoming one of those older people who talk endlessly about their health problems! I will however, share a defining moment that changed the course of my life. A moment is sometimes all it takes…

In 1999, en route to collect Barbara from the airport, after a visit to the family in England, whilst driving the tiny van, the Suzuki Supercarryn, I collided with the front wheel of a tractor, rounding a blind bend. The relatively slight impact, nevertheless, drove the ball of my right hip back through its socket. Hospital was an hour away, and after hours of futile X-raying, another hour and a half to a larger hospital in Galway. I received excellent care and the hip was repaired, but I spent a year on crutches, wear a permanent splint due to nerve damage, and my signwriting was at an end even afterwards as I could no longer work hands-free up a ladder. I never got the chance to try surfing, I can ride a bike but not run, and the accident has had a myriad impacts on my health and fitness – still, things could have been worse! So remember folks – drive carefully – it only takes a moment…

A recent X-ray of my hips, the right one of which was broken and repaired in 1999 but needed a premature replacement in 2013…

The House

When we moved back from Ireland in 2005, because we weren’t seeing enough of our grandchildren growing up, we travelled the country between one daughter in Clacton and another in West Yorkshire, looking for the right place to live. In the end we chose Yorkshire because it offered more work possibilities for me and we also found an upholstery workshop, originally built as stables in 1895, on a backstreet in Silsden. Several people had looked at it but there were some tricky planning issues to be solved, which I managed to do – so here are some pictures of the house we still live in…

Before, in 2005, and today…
Our house, centre, seen from the churchyard at the back of the house – very quiet neighbours…
The upstairs (it’s an upside-down house) was a clear space, originally the hayloft for the stable below. We decided to keep it open plan and put bedrooms, bathroom and utility downstairs.

Health

I had never broken a bone until I broke my hip in 1999 – this is probably due to avoiding extreme sports (not a thing in my youth) indeed all sports and perhaps not learning to drive till the age of 35. I grew up in a famously cycling oriented city, Oxford, continued cycling through university and when I moved to London afterwards. With copious public transport for wet and icy days, there was really no need to drive a car in London so it was not until I lived with Barbara in St. Albans and as a jobbing signwriter, the need to drive arose. A crash on a country lane in Ireland, involving a tractor pulling a wide trailer, and a blind bend, an hour’s drive from a hospital, broke by hip and my record of never having a broken bone and in an instant my life was changed. It’s not that the repair to the hip didn’t work brilliantly, but some nerve damage resulted in a drop foot and the need for a permanent splint so no running, though cycling is possible, certainly no extreme sports (I do wish I had tried surfing…) and a general difficulty with exercise, and so, factor in the usual ailments that come with age and having just turned 70, I find myself less than fit! Leonard Cohen said it best in the opening lines of The Tower of Song

“Well, my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play…”

I cannot say my friends are gone (we are a healthy cohort) or that my hair is fully grey but that second line sure resonates with me…

It was hard to find a “significant object” to represent humanism in my life but this left-field book explains humanism seen through the prism of Dr Who – a series I have watched since it’s inception…

Humanism

I didn’t know that I was a humanist until my late teens and once living in London, I tried going to a meeting of The South Place Ethical society who are a formal Humanist group, but whilst I approve of the aims of such bodies as The British Humanist Society, such as giving equal weight to the teaching of Humanism as to the dominant Christian religious teaching, or questioning the refusal of the BBC to allow a Humanist viewpoint on the daily morning “Thought for the Day”, I find my humanism (with a small h) to be a more personal thing. If I had to sum it up I would say that it is to try and leave the world a slightly better place than you were born into both for people and the wider world or environment. I also like to call myself a spiritual humanist – not in the dualistic sense of a spirit that pops into the body at birth and leaves it at death – but in the sense that there are practices which are patently good for the spirit – Kindness, Love, Charity, Forgiveness just as there are things that are bad for the spirit, coarsening and degrading it – Hatred, Unkindness, Pornography, Substance Abuse. In terms of practical application of these spiritual practices, I am not so different from most theistic religions (minus the food, dress and beard strictures, which are really the embellishment of priests).
Imagine a black, male student nurse in an African training hospital – their first lecture might include an account of Florence Nightingale – a white Victorian woman after whom Nightingale Wards are named and if Elon Musk gets his way and there is a colony on Mars (goodness knows why) there will be a hospital ward that owes something to Florence Nightingale. Imagine on the other hand, a village baker who perhaps slips an extra bun into the bag of a single parent, or gives a second chance job to a man just out of prison, or lends money to a customer at a crucial time in their life saving them from disaster. All these humanist acts may be unknown to anyone else and yet when this baker dies, the cumulative effects of all the baker’s acts, which even then may not be shared, might have improved the life of that village immeasurably. So whether one is famous but not known personally to most people, or un-famous and known only to a local community, that is humanism in action…

A to Z 2025 – Gadgets, Gardening, Geography and Geology…

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Top row. The case which I made for the steel gadget (centre) and the Swiss Army Card (top right) with all its tools laid out (Knife, Pen, Screwdriver multi-tool, Scissors and Tweezers. The “card” itself features a Magnifying Glass and an LED Torch. Bottom – the Swiss Army-type penknife which was a parting gift from my students at Sligo Technical College – they knew I liked a good gadget!

I love gadgets – what can I say! The steel gadget was in my pocket for many years of sign-writing and whilst it has many capabilities, it’s most frequent use was for levering open cans of paint! The Swiss Army card is not cheap, £35 for a proper one (don’t even bother with cheap imitations) I use it every day, principally the knife (peeling oranges especially), and the scissors, it also means I am never without a “James Bond” pen! The Swiss Army style penknife lives in my briefcase and is also regularly used… I was never in the Boy Scouts and I think that in part is why I have come, self-taught, to always “be prepared”…

Gardening

The early days of of our current allotment – Barbara weeding, Barbara’s flower section, me building a pond and raised beds.

The first garden I really took notice of was my Grandad’s. He had been a game-keeper ever since surviving the First World War and it was not well paid so he had to grow produce to feed his family. So the garden I remember was a rabbit-proof enclosure carved out of the field in front of the cottage where he and my Granny lived in Nuneham Courtenay. Incidentally, the estate to which the cottage belonged, had moved the entire hamlet of original inhabitants to a new site along the main road bordering the estate – such was the power of the upper classes then. The estate now belongs to the band Radiohead and I imagine they have their recording studios there. My Grandad’s garden contained raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrant canes and this is what I chiefly remember – the smell of blackcurrant must and the taste of a ripe berry can conjure that garden to this very day…

Purple Sprouting, Rainbow Chard and Black Kale from the allotment…

My mother naturally carried on the tradition of growing food with part of the garden and later an allotment devoted to growing vegetables and my sisters and I were given a portion to grow our own choice of vegetables. Two uncles on my mother’s side remained, after the Second World War, as professional gardeners – one in market gardening and one as a gardener for a school. And so it was that the gardening “gene” or is it “meme” was passed on to my sisters and I.

When Barbara and I lived in Ireland, we had a cottage with three acres of land – two we leased back to Tony, the farmer we bought the cottage from but still had more than enough space to make a garden – mostly for vegetables. Returning to England in 2005, we eventually had time to start an allotment since our house has no garden, only a yard – although that is full of flowers and shrubs in containers.
Oh, and with my love of miniature worlds (and gadgets), I have since my teenage years, grown bottle gardens and latterly, windowsill gardens which I keep at work to brighten the office…

One of my miniature gardens after its annual tidy-up.

Geography and Geology

A souvenir of Iceland given to each member of our choir by our Icelandic counterparts – it is a lump of Icelandic lava carrying a cutout map of Iceland.

Another inheritance from my mother was my first introduction to Geology. Not only did she delight in finding fossils at Charmouth, and fossils are after all located in rocks of a particular geological age, but she also bought a tumble-polisher and when we visited Australia in 1968, it was at her instigation that we visited Lightning Ridge where the Black Opal comes from. So I collected not only fossils but also rocks and minerals and when I went to the University of Birmingham, it was to study Geography and Geology. But many things that I learned at school and university, it was not until later in life that I encountered the reality of the knowledge “in the field”. When we lived in Ireland near to the Ox Mountains, you could see scratches in the bare granite where the glacial ice sheet had dragged fragments of rock across it, just half a mile from where I live, you can see hillsides littered with boulders plucked from them and dropped where they fell as the ice melted. But the most exciting geological moment in my life came when visiting Iceland on an exchange with an Icelandic Choir. They took us on the “Golden Circle” bus tour to see the eponymous “Geyser”, to see the wall of ice in the distance which is the “Long Glacier, the stupendous waterfall “Gullfoss” which features in the film Prometheus (https://youtu.be/Z2Ht9I8ik_4) but most exciting of all, we walked down the rift valley at Thingvellir. Iceland is where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rises above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and allows us to see Continental Drift in action – Iceland is literally splitting apart and new land is being created and Thingvellir is on the line of that split – on one side of the small valley you are on the European plate and on the other, the American plate. This particular location is stable at the moment but as regular scenes on the news tell us, nothing is ever fixed and safe in Iceland and new volcanic events can and do happen all the time…

Thingvellir rift-valley has the European plate on the right-hand side and the American plate on the other. At the bottom of the valley is the site of the oldest democratic parliament in Europe which was held once a year

The reason this place had particular resonance for me, was that when we studied Continental Drift at school, it was a new idea and the key piece of evidence for it was and is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where a series of parallel and symmetrical mountain ridges lie either side of the centreline which emerges above water, there in Iceland. Not only is there a symmetry to the form, but each range of mountains records the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field at the time when it was created, frozen into the rock. I came home so excited with this idea that I shared it with my father as we washed up together that evening. I never knew whether the scepticism he evinced at the idea of continents moving, subduction zones and mid-ocean volcanic land forming, was real or just designed to get me to lay out the theory and its evidence for him. Whichever, I finally stood at the spot where the evidence is right there to be seen with one’s own eyes…

One final story about geology and myself – I was coming home from work on the train some years ago when amongst the group of staff from the University of Bradford, was a new face and he was lamenting that if he could not find someone to take a stack of redundant maps off his hands, then he was going to have to send them to landfill. I could not bear the idea of this and volunteered to take them and so under my bed is a stack of Geological maps covering almost the entire United Kingdom including the one below. I love these maps but I need to decide what to do with them before I pop my clogs – any ideas?

This is a “Drift” Geological Map of Aylesbury which means it shows what is at the surface be it soil, or exposed rock. The other type of geological map is the “Solid” and shows the underlying rocks.

A to Z 2025 Challenge, Frewin,Fossils and Film…

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of auto-biographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

This recent addition to the street architecture of Oxford’s main shopping street, Carfax, adorns the entrance to an alleyway sandwiched between two department stores and leads to the back entrance of Frewin Hall.

If you have ever received a comment from me on WordPress, you may have wondered about my username Frewin55 – short story, Frewin is my middle name and 1955 the year I was born and so I turned 70 just last month. The more interesting and turbulent story of why I was named Frewin is told in a recent poetry post I made for dVerse Poets Pub – Whats in a Name.

Fossils

A selection of fossils garnered over the year which I keep not just for their intrinsic interest but also because they remind me of the places and times they were found…

Fossils and thus Geology, are another interest that I got from my mother. We used to holiday in Charmouth, Dorset – part of what is now (since Jurassic Park popularised dinosaurs) called The Jurassic Coast although the same feature occurs in East Yorkshire where the same rocks appear having snaked their way up through the geology of England. I wrote about my mother, Charmouth and fossils in a poem called Cast in Gold here,

In the picture (top row from left) you can make out a Turritella in a cross-section, a section of a bed of bivalve fossils, a colonial coral from the Middle Carboniferous at Rathlee, Ireland where we used to live, ditto the one below. Left hand column – Various Ammonite fragments from Charmouth, the top one is made from Iron Pyrites – Fool’s Gold. Second column – a “Devil’s Toenail from Runswick Bay, East Yorkshire and below, two fragments of Crinoid beds. Third Column, the two white fossils are coral that my stepson brought back from Mexico – they are much closer to modern corals than the Carboniferous examples. Below them, three Rhynconella fossils which by corrugating their shell shape, could maximise their intake of water to filter for food whilst only opening a tiny amount and thus keeping safe from predators. Fourth column, Belumnites so called because of their resemblance to bullets – from Charmouth, just this year when I introduced my partner to the joys of fossil hunting. Bottom right, a recent (geologically speaking) piece of Bog Oak – a very fragile piece of wood preserved in the bog that formed when the climate became much wetter five thousand years ago – first drowning the trees and then growing five feet of peat bog to bury and preserve the base of the trees. Five thousand years is a mere moment in geological time and it is unlikely that the bogs and bog oaks will survive as fossils in the long term – most likely, the current climate change will stop the process of peat bog formation and the bogs and their fossilised trees will be eroded away…

Film

My love of Film began with a book -a Pelican, from the publishers Penguin and like all Penguin books, Film, by Roger Manvell, wore the “utility” style cover from the immediate postwar period which became so iconic. My father had a little bookcase exclusively full of these Penguin and Pelican books which I guess he had bought before he married my mother. “Film” contained sections of B/W stills from films such as Battleship Potemkin (the woman shot in the eye on the Odessa Steps), Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (the eye and the razor-blade) and The Seventh Seal – all images so intriguing that they lit a fire in my young brain even though it would be years before I would have a chance of seeing these films.

The iconic scene of playing Chess with Death from The Seventh Seal – Ingmar Bergman’s monochrome masterpiece.

When I first dipped into this book, we didn’t even have a TV and when we did, the only films shown were in my father’s words “American rubbish” and it would not be until I lived in London, post-university, and got a job at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, that I finally saw some of these “arthouse” movies. I started as a general helper, selling tickets, ushering, clearing up between films and serving cakes, quiche and coffee but not sweets and popcorn – an innovation in Cinema fare for those days. The Ritzy showed at least 10 different films over the course of a week and since it had a single projector, that meant the projectionist had to combine an average of seven “cans” of film into one large and heavy reel – cutting off the header and footer from each can’s contents and splicing the sections together and then reversing the process when the film was finished with. This was so much work for the projectionist, one of three founding members of the cinema, that when I asked if I could help (nothing venture nothing gain) he jumped at the chance. I can truly say that this was one of the most enjoyable jobs I have ever had and by the measure that when you find something you love, it doesn’t feel like work.

The Ritxy Cinema as it was when I worked there around 1980.

Nowadays, cinemas, even small ones, have digital projectors and cans of film are a thing of the past and many great works are to be found on streaming services so much of the romance of the physical cinema has been lost for most people, the lights going down, the audience hushing, the ads, the previews and finally the film itself…There is one thing which is particularly magical about a real film projector and which only projectionists get to see… You can open the “gate” which is where the film passes through the beam of light which projects it onto the screen. To create the illusion that our eyes and brains see as moving images, it is necessary that the projection is broken up into individually illuminated frames, so when you open the gate, the synchronised flashes of light illuminating the fast-moving film, make it appear that the film is stationary, that is magical enough, but look more closely at the frames in the gate and you can see the characters moving in miniature just as they are doing on the cinema screen…

A to Z 2025 Challenge, Elsie/Jill, Mum, Upward Mobility v. Imposter Syndrome…

humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

As with my sister Carol, I have chosen a memento mori that I keep beside me on the bookshelf that contains my poetry and plays books, and reference books from several of my disciplines. My mother had many ornaments in her last apartment – most not to my taste but I chose this little group of geese made of plastic, pottery and bronze respectively and they sit beside me as my nearest reminder of my mother. But in the same way as I speculated about what I had inherited Nurturewise from my father, so I will try to show what my mother gave to my makeup…

To my father, my mother, Elsie May Cook, was a wonder of achievement – before they met, she’d already lived several lives – born a gamekeeper’s daughter in 1920, left school at 14 to work in domestic service (proper Upstairs, Downstairs/Downton Abbey), risen to be a childrens’ Nanny, Left service to join the Womens’ Army during the Second World War rising to be a Sergeant and then after the war, training to be a State Registered Nurse which she had to give up to get married to my father – no married nurses back then… To my father, that showed fortitude, resilience, and character and he was not wrong but over my lifetime, my understanding of my mother, as initially seen through my father’s eyes, has become more nuanced. There was a side to my Mum which did all those things with plucky determination to transcend her origins and through most of that time she chose to be known to her friends and colleagues by a different name – Jill. When she had achieved that upward social mobility, however, I feel that whilst she would have vehemently denied it, she suffered from Imposter Syndrome – a crippling shyness that led her to isolate not only herself but also us children. Don’t get me wrong, we had a rich and stimulating home life from being read aloud to at an early age and teaching us so that we were all able to read before we went to school, through a trip around the world by ship to live in Australia for six months, and the nurtural legacy that each of my parents gave us. As I set out yesterday, my Father made me both a Designer and also, what eventually settled out as being a humanist. From my mother, I got Art and storytelling and if I have been dilatory as a painter, I have, at long last, become a writer and a poet and I think that is down to my mother’s storytelling. Yes, indeed, our somewhat claustrophobic upbringing did not prepare us for the total immersion of leaving home for university. Still, there are worse things to overcome and to blame my mother is like blaming a parent for giving you an unfortunate gene. After all, we are not yet at the stage where all parents are screened for inheritable problems and whatever hand we are dealt, it is up to us to do the best we can with it…

My mother, Jill as she liked to be called back then, in army uniform…

So I could repeat some of the many stories about the many lives my mother lived before she even met my father – the trip to Tunisia as a 16 year old nanny who was left holding the baby alone in a hotel where only one person spoke English whilst the family went on a trip around the country, the Downton Abbey worthy stories of domestic service, the bullying sergeants she took on in defence of her girls, the time she alerted the base to a spy, but I think it is more interesting to speculate about the drive for upward social mobility (not that she would have recognised that term) versus the Imposter Syndrome that affected her once she had arrived. In any case, she herself drew back from telling tales of the war as time went on though in the light of current events and the overturning of all that was being fought for back then, she should arguably have been telling those stories more…

I suppose it might have started with my Grandad – he was an angry or perhaps a bitter man – cheated of the upward mobility that some of his children achieved. Before the First World War, his older brother, wanting to escape the not particularly nice family he found himself in, decided to emigrate to America where the promise of hard work rewarded with liberty and equality, was a beacon to those bound by the strictures of the English class-system. He wanted to take my Grandad with him but as the latter was under 16 and needed his parent’s permission, and since they were dismayed at losing one breadwinner and source of future support, he was denied it. The brother wrote to Tom (my Grandad) advising him to lie about his age and join the army and fight in the war which nobody anticipated would last for four whole years and that he would send money in the meantime so that Tom could join him after the war when he no longer needed his parent’s permission and he was true to his word; however, the family took and spent the money, so when Tom, who had miraculously survived the whole war, returned home, he had no choice but to find a job in England. His first choice was to become a school-teacher, but that job, like certain others, librarian for example, had become reserved for women – so many men had died during the war, that families now had to turn to their daughters to go out to work and support them. Remember, this was before the days of the Welfare State with its basic safety net. Tom became a gamekeeper, returning to the animal husbandry he had learned growing up on a farm. His brother in America turned the same skills towards teaching and after marrying a “Southern Belle”, he ended up as a Lecturer in a Veterinary College…

My Mum, Grandad and Granny in the early sixties.

When my mother, who was apparently a bright and willing learner at school, brought home work specially set by the teacher for her, my Grandad’s bitterness manifested and he said she could take it back and not bother because she would end up in domestic service like most people in their class. This is a man who had spent four years in hell fighting a war which was arguably a squabble between competing cousins – descendants of Queen Victoria and pursued with all the insensitivity and crass disregard for human life of the ruling and upper-middle class of England, a war in which men were literally cannon-fodder. And so it came to pass that my mother went into domestic service at age 14, saving in the form of six penny stamps each week which were eventually sent back to the family to support her five brothers and sisters.

One of the houses my mother served in and on the right, the staff – my mother with an arm round the dog.

Thus the disappointment of my grandad was passed on to my mother although she showed great loyalty to him when, during the Second World War, my mother rose to be a Sergeant in Signals and was then put forward for officer selection. She had truthfully listed her father as a Game Keeper and on being pushed to redefine him as an Estate Manager which she refused to do and so failed to make the grade. Years later, when we went by ship to Australia, my parents would only travel on “one-class” ships – those were the days when ships were a regular means of transport and not for cruises and many of them had First and Second Class areas – this egalitarian attitude says something about my parent’s view of the world…

A photo-op which my mother labelled “Propaganda” – certainly not P.C. my mother is at the far end of the line.
My mother sitting at the back of her landlady’s house on the Island of Portland where she was managing the switchboard at the fortress where the invasion was being planned. She looks calm and happy here but just a few feet away, she had to grab the landlady’s two sons and dive for cover when a German fighter strafed the back gardens for no good reason…
I was not sure if my mother was a qualified SRN when this picture was taken, but my sister Helen tells me the badge she is wearing means that is probably just qualified – so a “graduation” picture. She trained and then worked at the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.

After the war, opportunities were offered to people o become nurses, even if, like my mother, they had not completed school education, and so with some initial special assistance, she eventually qualified as a State Registered Nurse. Just six months later, having met and married my father, she had to give up nursing since you could not be married and nurse – such a waste!
You would think that with all these transformations, the accumulation of transferrable skills, my mother’s confidence would have built up so that she could have conquered anything – certainly my father believed so, but…

My mother sitting with my father in a sailing boat of some kind in their early years.

When my parents met, sailing was my father’s hobby and whilst my mother enjoyed the sailing, I think, she did not feel confident with the social life in the bar at the end of the day’s sailing. In those days, Oxford University was still populated by quite upper to upper-middle class students even if that was about to change. My father was a “Grammar school boy” from Manchester and not one of the “great” “Public (read Private, fee-paying) Schools” like most students and he had to learn enough Latin to pass the entrance exams in just one week – a record my mother constantly reminded me of as a spur to my own efforts! A compromise was arrived at between my parents, they would spend one year doing as much sailing as possible – this included my father skippering yachts for people with the money but not the skills – and after this. my father would turn his back on sailing for good, saving my mother from mingling. As I described yesterday, my father designed the first commercial GRP sailing dinghy and whilst my school had a couple of Alphas, on which I learned to sail, I never once sailed with my father and no provision was offered for me to pursue sailing outside school.

Another way in which, I realise in hindsight, that my mother managed to avoid uncomfortable contacts, she claimed not to be able to drive even though she possessed a driving licence she gained during the war which qualified her to drive anything up to and including a tank! She would have a token attempt at a driving licence once a year on a suitable beach with three children in the back and a very competent husband in the passenger seat! This ensured that she would not be able to collect us from friend’s houses or worse still, have other parents calling in on return visits. I understand – I do – I was sent to the top prep school in the country, The Dragon School, because what else would my parents do but offer us the best they could scrimp and save to provide, but meeting the possibly higher class other parents was a step too far… As I said at the outset, I don’t blame my mother and indeed it took many years before I really understood what had happened and by then I had made my own way in the world. The Dragon School was not easy for me either mixing with the sons of the “great and good” and so I too have been touched with imposter syndrome and so I have sympathy and forgiveness for my mother, after all, what doesn’t kill you…

Mr and Mrs Peel, who wanted to adopt my mother…

There is one more story I need to tell about my mother which may or may not have affected her sense of self in the world, since I don’t know whether she was aware of it at the time or only told by her mother much later on. When she was a little girl, the couple above, who lived close by to my grandparents, having got to know my mother, at least, if not the whole family, proposed that they might adopt her, they being childless. My grandparents wouldn’t hear of it of course though it may have been a temptation since they had six children – enough for future support – and it would have been a wonderful opportunity for my mother to be adopted by some upper-middle class people. Who knows what her life might have been but for sure, I would not be telling you this tale… I don’t know the name of the couple, only that he had some sort of job that may have been ambassadorial or possibly even intelligence work – I do know that they had travelled extensively including to Japan and, via my mother, I have inherited their portraits and the rather beautiful watercolour of a Shinto shrine below.

The final resting place of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu (德川家康, 1543 – 1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, at Nikkō Tōshō-gū (日光東照宮), Nikkō (日光), Tochigi Prefecture (栃木県), Japan.

So, what to conclude from my mother’s story, and her part in mine – beware of what you want, especially upward mobility because achieving it is no guarantee that you will feel comfortable when you get there. Old establishment, aristocracy and even natives of a particular location have a way of subtly or not so subtly, making newcomers, or as they say here in Cobbydale, “Incomers” – feel less than welcome or at least not one of them – ever…

In a recent writing group. I penned this poem about going to the Remembrance Day Service with my Mother and it’s lasting effect on me…

Remembrance

St. Giles, the broad street,
where the fair is held
on happier days
is turned over to remembering
– to Remembrance Sunday.
At one end of St Giles
is the Martyrs’ Memorial
where three priests were
burnt to death over a difference
in religious beliefs and
though we knew the memorial
years before we learned the history
I’m not sure even my parents
knew enough to explain
such savagery.

At the other end of the street
wide as a motorway
and normally lined with cars
parked at right angles to the curb
such is the space
there stands the War Memorial
large, as befits a city
of one hundred thousand
with bronze plaques naming
the dead of Oxford
from two World Wars.

St. Giles is thronged
in all solemnity, with citizens,
soldiers, sailors, and airmen
– past and present, and even cadets
amongst whose rank I’ll one day
stand and hope I’m not
the one who will faint
as much from the emotion
as the heat if it’s a sunny day.
But today we stand beside my mother
wondering at her silent weeping
recalling such stories as she
has seen fit to tell us of the war
and her part in it.
Later she will go deeper
telling of the six men
any one of which she
might have married
who went to war
but never came back.

Our mother’s tears
sear the meaning of
“Abide With Me” and
“For Those In Peril on the Sea”
into our hearts forever.
Then the two-minute silence
broken by the guns in the park
and we all relax as
Remembrance is replaced by moving again
– moving on, for those who can…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024