The wind is howling, the weather wet. This is the limbo time, the time when nothing but reflection is possible and all the fears and fears of the previous year hang heavy on your mind trying to crush you with their weighty self-importance.
The shed, the gas tank, the bank balance, and the glass, the glass, the glass…
Yes, with Christmas and the Christmas glass-rush all over and finished I am left feeling as flat as the proverbial fart. No, flatter. For a while there, with all my orders and the fun and worry of getting them all out before Christmas Eve, I felt as if I was riding the crest of a wave.
And I must have been because now that wave has come crashing down and I’m bobbing around in a cold and empty ocean just waiting for… well, whatever comes next I guess. A hungry shark would be preferable to a slow death through hypothermia though. (Please God).
Oh, I’m still sure that I have a great product that people want and I do believe that I am good at this malarkey, but at the end of the day it’s a numbers game and I need to generate the volume I require. The volumes aren’t massive, in fact the volumes are very achievable, but I ain’t gonna get them by sitting on my arse and waiting for people to wander into my shop and buy from me. It ain’t Christmas time any more.
And just why am I saying ‘ain’t’? Have I suddenly turned into some sort of glass gangster or something? Maybe I’ve spent too long being a trader (whatever that is) already, already. Oi vay!
Yes, I really wish it could be Christmas every day. I really don’t mind the late finishes, the 5.30 am starts to bake the glass, the cars, the funny faces, the Christmas Eve panic trying to rectify a mistake on that glass at the last minute (well, Greg can be spelt with two g’s apparently).
I did it though. I genuinely believe in offering great customer service and I have the Christmas day texts, e-mails, and the three customers who popped in to thank me today to prove it.
All I have to do now is make like Christmas every day.
The answer would appear to be online. These days all answers appear to be online, but even with my experience I find myself ill-equipped to make it happen. If I have one resolution this year, one necessity that is - I must take my glass online.
For those online wizards out there – all help gratefully accepted.
If I ever needed help I need it now.
Boxing Day with Christmas day gone. Well almost, some of it remains in my doodle book, gathered over the run of the morning, afternoon, evening, and well into the early hours.
Fuelled by the day itself – the presents, and food, and candles, the fire, the chestnuts, the tree, some quiet, and some noise - helped along by a slow procession of seasonal drinks – morning champagne, a pre-dinner jaggers and taggers, red wine, port, some JD and cokes, and finally a long late night scotch on ice - a nightcap.
Yeah, as someone who was once close said to me once I lead an alcohol fuelled existence, meaning it as a jibe. Of course I don’t, and her judgement only ever took into account her own small view, a set of arse-tight tiny beliefs and standards so full of doubt and self-importance that even trust was given a probability score.
Me? 2 out of10.
Anyway, if you can’t have a few drinks on Christmas Day… Well, I just hope it all shows in the work.
Throughout the day and night – above and below the ribbon’s outer lines, segmented up – morning, afternoon, night, and very late dark; five minutes here, a flick of ink there. Thirty seconds scribbling with my new pound shop felts (thanks Santa), careful manipulation of liquid gold, a flash of silver string, some scribbled words “hello, hello, hello – merry had a little lamb”. A record of my day and night encapsulated in my mind and allowed to pour itself onto my paper in any form it and I wanted it to.
Look closely. It isn’t quite the chaos it first appears to be.
Oh look – a Christmas tree!
My Christmas Day present to myself – all wrapped up in red ribbons and silver string.
A memory and a freedom and such a precious freedom. Fuelled by alcohol? Well maybe a little, but what great fuel and what a great memory.
Tin cans and Christmas day presents 2011 – for your pleasure and mine.
So, Christmas Day.
Up and showered by nine, mid morning champagne, present opening, early afternoon dinner, too much wine, not enough air, and the house far too warm with the heating cranked up to full.
I made a tin can telephone out of two old coffee cans and a length of string then Holly and I played and whispered to each other in the hallway for a while, our words bouncing along the white twine, echoing on our ears.
“Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Merry had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow.”
No snow this year though, just drizzly rain.
Evening now and, trying to shake off the need to doze, I park myself in the kitchen and drink a coffee. Jack Daniels later with his good friend Pepsi, but at this moment I need some caffeine and perhaps a glass of sparkling water.
And all day the drizzly rain in my mind falling on my thoughts and threatening to dampen them. Communication is such a hard thing and sometimes there just aren’t enough tin cans to go around, and anyway I wouldn’t be able to tie the string – my fingers might fail me yet again.
Not everyone though - still some words along the strings when really I'm not sure that I deserve them. I take them anyway and thanks - you have no idea just what they mean to me.
"Its fleece was white as snow.”
Time to light the fire, get a good blaze going. That will chase away this drizzle, but I may leave a candle lit. Who knows?
Merry Christmas.
They say that when you have no idea what to write about that it is best to just start writing and see where it takes you. So I guess this page is a bit of an adventure, I have no idea where it is leading but I’ve started out now so I’ll have to finish.Which way to go? Ah, I think I’ll walk towards that wood; I never could see the wood for the trees.
Sometimes when things get messy I just put one foot in front of the other and trudge on. It’s a lesson that I’ve learnt over this last year particularly (more about this year later once it is nearer to an end I expect). Trudging on has become my coping mechanism and defence.
No, I don’t think that this is the right path. Maybe I should forget the wood and see what’s down by the river.
So I’m writing as suggested but still have nothing to say. If you’ve got this far I won’t blame you if you head off home now. This is likely to be a bit of a meandering walk.
I stayed up late last night. I’m up to date with my glass and yesterdays bake is cooking away as I prattle. The glass seems to have caught people’s imaginations. I’ve certainly made a lot of Christmas presents and on Christmas morning husbands and wives, grans and granddads, boys and girls will open their deluxe carry boxes and find their hand-painted wine/beer/whisky/juice glass sparkling in its tissue paper wrapping.
I am such a wonderful person to be making all those people so happy.
This seems like a good path but I think I’ll go that way instead. That’s what I do when things are going well. I head off in a different direction, making it hard for myself.
Perhaps that’s what my new doodles are about. I have no idea where they are going but I know they are going to take me somewhere that I’ve not been to before. Just as I knew that when I started writing this blog - all those posts ago - that it would take me somewhere. I still don’t know why I do those drawings and mostly the making of them is – well not unconscious, but always semi-conscious. Perhaps it is the wine.
Well, this isn’t working is it? Nothing much coming out at all, not that I want it to. I’d rather wander than come out with what’s on my mind. I’d rather trudge on head down, staring at my feet and telling myself everything is okay when it isn’t. It isn’t okay at all – and I can’t do much about it. Not without losing what little of myself I’ve managed to salvage.
The wind’s at my back now. It’s blowing cold. I’m just going to take a look in that church over there. Have a sit for a bit, rest up, think, stop and see what I can come up with. Best you go your own way now. See you later.
There’s been a whisper in the air for a while now. Something not quite heard, not yet audible, but there nonetheless. I haven’t caught it properly, whatever it is, but almost – yes, almost.
I am the machine. Flawed and pitted, rusting and in need of oil, wasting away in a cornfield somewhere. Kansas or Oz it hardly matters.
It has been many years since we spent Christmas at home, over twelve but less than fourteen. Christmas for a number of years has been spent in Wales.
Up at seven to bake the glass - I’ve become a strange sort of Baker.
A few years back, when it seemed like nothing could stop me, we all three went to Lapland to visit Father Christmas.
I often wonder if those pigs will ever fly.
No, not one of mine, but a picture made literally from rubbish.
I was almost off to bed when I was struck by the urge to scribble.
I don’t know why. It just happens that way sometimes, like an itch that keeps moving until you have scratched most of the skin from your shoulders and back leaving you bleeding.
To be honest though it had been a long day at the glass face and I really couldn’t be arsed, itch or no itch.
But then the blue pencil crayon that had been lurking on the kitchen work surface watching me all evening was in my hand and my scrap book opened almost of it’s own accord. Yes, I have a book now, I’m progressing. The crayon frenetically scratched a couple of ovals onto the surface and the pink felt tip from the pound shop packet flew and flurried its pink on the paper.
Wet ink thrown here, a squiggle of silver straight from the tube there, and in less than five minutes there it was, or rather there they were.
Mother and child.
I’ve no idea why, they're not for me you see. I don’t believe and the last thing I want to spend my time doodling, when really I want to be asleep, are schmaltzy, sentimental, Christmas cardy drawings of mothers and babies, holy or not.
I still did it though – scribbled and blew and splashed - guilty as charged m'lord.
I wonder why?
Perhaps it wasn’t for me at all.
Perhaps it was for someone else. For them maybe, or perhaps it was for you.
So today was our Victorian Christmas day – mulled wine, mince pies, pianist and cello, and costumes.
So here I am all the Victorian shopkeeper. Bowler hatted, bow tied, all be braced, aproned, moustachioed - and with a pillow that’s taken me years to grow stuffed up my shirt.
I just love dressing up.
Well even the glass meister has to let his hair down sometimes.
My mum and dad have flown off to
This is the picture she took whilst waiting for them to come off the plane and when my mum saw her she didn't recognise her and told Della to 'Take care' ... She thought she was off the plane! Well, it’s a long flight and she’s as dotty as a polka dot frock anyway, but what a funny thing.
And talking of funny things, here’s another. I miss them already even though we usually only communicate by phone, annoying each other with our separate conversations, my dad calling in the back, my mum relaying messages that I’ve already heard (he has a loud voice).
And here’s another funny thing. I never worry about them when they are home (well not often) but I’m already worrying now that they are so far away. What if this should happen? What if that should happen?
And the funniest thing at all?
I didn’t expect to feel this way.
Sets me to thinking, but I don’t want to go there just yet, not for many, many years. Not at all really but I know that one day I’ll have to.
Anyway down safe after a long journey, have a great time mum and dad, missing you and see you soon. Take care!
It wasn’t the light that got him.
Of course he was attracted to it. After all, light is like the moon - and as each moth knows one must follow one’s mothy heart and fly towards the silvery glimmer.
But no it wasn't the light. It wasn’t the light at all. It was the reflection of the light in the water of the sink drainer tray; and flying directly toward and into it he drowned.
Maybe we are all moths, flying towards the light only to find that we are mistaken, drowning in a sea of glimmer rather than being content with the everyday dullness that is our discontentment.
Poor moth, he was only looking for a little excitement and found extinction instead.
Look how he shines though.
So I missed my window of opportunity to post last night.
"To market, to market, to buy a fat pig."
Altrincham Craft and Vintage Market on a wet and freezing Sunday morning. Up at six to bake the candle glasses, loading the car in the pouring rain, unpacking and arranging the stall.
"My life is one demd horrid grind."
Yes, sometimes I feel like a character in a Dickens novel. Just which character changes dependent on circumstance – Brushywig the glass painter, Coinscrew the trader, old Mr. Potty the eccentric (some say madman). At least I'm not an Abel Magwich, or at least I don't think I am.
Today I was a combination of all those first three as I stood behind my stall purveying my wares, doing deals and up-selling to make the merchandise move.
I didn’t do great and I didn’t do badly, I really enjoyed the catching of interest though. Not a bad day at all, all-in-all.
"Home again, home again, jiggety-jig."
So I decide to make a picture and tell the world on Facebook. Well, not decide exactly, kind of have to.
I set out with my paper and pens with really no idea where this is going and then, after thirty or forty minutes, sometimes far less, of splashing and scratching, pouring and scribbling, I have something - although often at the end of it I have no idea what.
These days though, it doesn’t matter.
Gone are the days of pouring over paper and landscape, slavishly trying to copy the light and shade. I don’t and can’t do that anymore. I’m seeing things differently. I’m making my own light and shade. Or it is making me.
Anyway, it just happens. Thank God.
It’s all there you know, it’s all there if you look - the clowns and the conundrums, the leaves and the leavings, the tears and the blood to make any number of me.
What would Charlie have said? ’Look after your hands boy; they have a talent inside them.’
Maybe. Or maybe it wasn’t the hands, maybe it was the life – mewling, pushing me over and over so many times that eventually I just had to let it out.
Anyway, it just happens. Thank God.
So here it is; the lengthening of the autumn days. Here it all is at almost winter. Well formed upon the page with leaves and sun and moon and shadow and all bright red - and my pricked thumbed autumnal blood.
You work it out. I can’t. It just happens. But it’s all there if you care to look.
Yes. It just happens.
Just look who I found spinning his web and crawling across the old latch of my kitchen window this morning. What a magnificent orange, and just look at those wonderful stripy legs. I wonder what team he supports?
Life's rich tapestry (or at least the needle and thread that embroiders it) continues to stitch me up - more or less. 
So little happens in my life these days that I’m considering giving up the blogging life. Well, I spend as much time staring into space wondering what to write than I ever do writing. I can only write so many posts about painted glass.
So here I am again wondering what to write. I wouldn’t say my life was empty, but the mediocrity of it all is only just beginning to crash in on me, leaving me wondering ‘what next?’ and not having even the sniff of an answer.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a decent sunset, or watched birds feeding, or saw the sea. These were the things that set my mind to words, not this greyness that I’m becoming increasingly used to.
Grey paint, grey paint everywhere.
I suppose I could write about the stranger I had a coffee with over Knutsford way earlier in the week. The stranger who asked me questions about a previous life, getting answers which were true but I felt had happened to another person, not to me at all. He seemed interested, nodding his head in all the right places, smiling, jotting down a few notes, and after an hour or so of nothing in particular I signed his forms, shook his hand and left.
He was definitely putting me forward, he’d be in touch. I haven’t heard anything yet though.
More grey paint I'm afraid.
No, really - I'm afraid.
I’ve had a lot of ‘not hearing anything yets’ just lately, I’m still waiting to hear from one ‘we’ll definitely be in touch’ after three interviews, and that was weeks ago.
‘Yes, we’ll be in touch.’ it's all just grey paint and I’d rather they told me the truth - at least the truth has a little colour.
No fancy header on Google which must mean that it’s a nothing sort of day, one of those days that isn’t particularly special for any reason at all.
Increasing for me days become less special as my routine becomes set into a pattern that gradually melds time in to one single ongoing – well I was going to write event, but things aren’t very eventful so I shall write non-event. It sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not really. Broadly at the moment I don’t mind this sameness, in fact I find it quite comforting – this mini-adventure without much adventure. It’s a time of repetition. Oh, I suppose I could break out of it, throwing everything into the air in an attempt to do something radical, but for now I think I’m enjoying the calm even if the water may be going stagnant.
Each morning when I wake up usually around three, then four, then five, until I get up some time between six or seven, I tell myself, in a rather clichéd way, to count my blessings. I have something to do, I am warm, I will eat well tonight and I will go to bed tired ready to get up and do it all again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Not how it used to be – but simple.
Yes, simple – if you don’t look beyond the moment. Simple, as making broccoli and stilton soup. Simple, if you don’t try to catch the wind and fly. Don’t get caught up in the wind, don’t go there. No, don't try to catch the wind - it may take you with it.
Go there and you will see the chaos coming, go there and who knows what excitement may happen.
Six hours solid making product. Angels and snowmen, once plain white, now all painted and drying, shined up, given personalities, made as Christmassy as a carol sung by Santa, standing in lines, and waiting to be sold.
'Help me, I'm melting...'
No really, I’m so tired that I almost couldn’t be bothered tonight so I’m going to have to be quick, not that I’m ever really that slow.
A friend of mine (who shall remain Malcolm) texted me today asking about my Dali clock. My Dali clock? Yes my Dali clock.
A great looking piece of high quality plastic that I have indulged myself with and would only part with for three times the amount I paid for it. Make me an offer!
You see my trader’s blood grows thicker each day.
As I look at my Dali clock, watching the melting clock seconds melt away into goodness knows what melting where, I am often tempted to consider time in all of its aspects and if there is really any time at all.
Then with a realisation that my mind is far too, well what I can only call ‘gone’, to cope I decide to leave this to professor Brian Cox or even that other Brian who played with Queen (the group not the dignitary).
Of course you know you have made it as a scientist when impressionists start doing impressions of you as they have with Brian (Cox not May). He follows in the footsteps of such greats as Magnus Pyke, Patrick Moore, the two David’s (Bellamy and Attenborough - although I’m not at all sure that David Attenborough counts), and of course Marie Curie – well maybe not Marie Curie then.
He seems to manage this with only a Northern accent without a trace of a twitch or speech impediment, nor flaying hands, or whispering dulcets, or even a bushy beard. How does he do it I wonder?
Times up. The melting clock has melted. I told you I had to be quick.
So remember - things can only get better.
The glass world grows stranger every day, requests from customers more off the wall, each with their own message to give, thoughts to send, axe to grind. Messages of love and thanks, birthdays, weddings, christening, divorces.
‘Here’s to the Marchella Fella!’
‘Captain Fantastic!’
‘Mike’s wee dram’
‘Bugger off and boil your head.’
And now to haunt my sleep and make my dreams even stranger still, a glass depicting a carrot smoking a cigar, all Savillesque and orange, on the other side a blue banana – and all around a milling crowwd of stick armed and leg potatoes with electric blue empty television eyes.
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits.
My sister in
My sister in
My sister in
My sister in
My sister in
My sister in
My sister in
My sister in
My sister in Australia, happy birthday - take care.
Just an autumn doodle of the Autumn King made on an autumn afternoon when I really should have been doing something else and paying attention.
I want you to imagine now that you’re looking up into a beautiful night sky and that you can see, in the distance, a star. You can see one beautiful, solitary, silver star, shining down out of a velvety black night sky, and that star is millions and millions of miles away. And you focus your gaze entirely on that one, solitary silver star. And as you focus your gaze on that silvery star you notice it begins to twinkle and you become more and more relaxed, more peaceful, more calm.
And imagine yourself rising out of your body - feeling drawn toward your star - you begin moving toward your star - through space and time - through the earth's stratosphere - passing comets and planets - into a different galaxy - closer and closer toward your star - and the nearer you get to your star - the larger and brighter it becomes - and the larger and brighter it is - the more comfortable and relaxed you are - until your star is there - right in front of you - one - solitary - silver star - and you are on your star - you are in your star - and the star is in you - you are the star - up there - shining down on the earth below - millions and millions of miles away...
Doodled November sunshine and Mr. Moon, scarecrows, birds, fallen leaves, ripened crops, ploughed fields, and a star.
The Autumn King on his field-fence throne sees it all and…
smiles?
Sometimes I feel like I’m waiting for yesterday to come back.
Not one yesterday, but all of my yesterdays.
Somehow yesterday seems so much better than today and not as worrying as tomorrow. After all, you know what you are getting with yesterday with that lovely rose tint of retrospect surrounding it.
Rose tinted retrospectacles that’s what I want.
As a kid I remember watching ‘All Our Yesterdays’ on TV. I must have only five when those flickering newsreels appeared on our tiny black and white screen, pictures of our boys coming home to blighty on troop ships, fags in their mouths and whistling. Quite a trick really, smoking and whistling at the same time, like dodging bullets and not getting blown to pieces.
I remember watching tiny black and white doodlebugs stopping above the terraced roofs of London and white searchlights moving across the grey sky over a stark and grainy St. Paul’s, sand covered tanks and black bereted soldiers dusting themselves down in the Sahara.
Each programme looked at one wartime year and the newsreels from it, and I think I learnt more modern history in those twenty minute segments than ever I did at school in later years. Of course the war was a much closer thing back then, newsreels not yet an anachronism and still almost reportage.
I have an image of German soldiers goose-stepping in time, stop-start to the music of the Lambeth Waltz, cartoons from some newspaper or other and well known voices reading the captions. I remember my dad laughing.
My dad never missed it.
Somehow Granada TV seemed to take the misery and loss of that awful war and reinvent it as light entertainment, almost as comedy, colouring the old black and white footage with a thick coat of rose tint so that we could all slip on our retrospectacles and warm to the glow, telling ourselves it wasn’t so bad, when for most people it clearly was with death and separation, rationing and constant fear.
What a strange programme.
Maybe I don’t want those yesterdays after all. Perhaps I’ll take my retrospectacles off and be content with the colour of today or even the harsh black and white that tomorrow could be.
Perhaps it’s better that way.
No post last night, to be honest by the time I’d done what I needed to do I was too tired, besides what to write about?
No, it’s not all fun at the glass face.
Days melt into each other in a sameness that I’ve never experienced before. Well, not quite sameness really, but there is a uniformity about them that makes me wonder if I am actually waiting in purgatory and at any moment the devil will appear in a fancy suit and walking cane, twirl his long black moustache and welcome me to Hades.
And I think we all know exactly which way I’m going - down, down, down. Like that film with Terry Thomas, Vault of Horror, where a group of people end up in the basement of an office building when the lift malfunctions. They exchange true tales from their lives, horrific tales of murder and torture, to pass the time and when the lift door finally opens they find that they are in… HELL!
Yes, this world of glass leaves me feeling fragile and shattered (pun intended) and sometimes the other inmates of my own personal purgatory don’t really help.
Take Jack (we’ll call him Jack because Jack is such a common name) - Jack is at one moment friendly and the next moment hostile. He paces the floor of purgatory looking for anything that may be about to affront his own sense of self worth which appears to be very high. But when you look behind the hard man mask and watch his actions you begin to wonder. Jack starts arguments which turn into vendettas and then become intimidation campaigns. He really is quite a scary character, not because of what he does (well not that alone) which are irrational and unpredictable, but because I think that he thinks that he is justified and that the reality he sees in his head is really reality - which it isn’t.
Yes, Jacks in a fog. A fog of rage and imagined persecution. Everyone whispers about him, although most of the whisperers live in his own head.
Maybe Jack has been put in my purgatory to test me. Maybe he is an agent of Lucifer sent to sort the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the strong from the weak, the honest from the charlatan. Will he find me wanting I wonder?
Maybe - and maybe he’s just a young man in need of a lot of help.
Have we reached the bottom yet?
Spooky tale anyone?
Dinner, supper, tea, doesn’t matter what you call it, it isn’t what it used to be.
Take my meals over the last few days for instance. Saturday I ate Italian (minestrone followed by spaghetti and meat sauce), Sunday Thai (Thai green curry and rice), Monday French (escalope of pork in a green pepper sauce with sauté potato), last night Chinese (Ribs, Prawns in ginger, Chicken with bamboo and water chestnuts), and tonight we are having Moroccan (spiced lamb, chick peas, and sweet potato cooked in the tagine with flat breads).
I hasten to add all these meals were home cooked and quite delicious.
How different from my childhood. Back then it was sausage and mash, fish and chips, meat pie, liver and onions, and a roast on Sunday. Spaghetti came in cans and rice was made with milk. I can remember endless joyous childhood teas when all I eat was beans on toast – how I loved beans on toast, still do.
In the town where I lived the only take-away was Kimberley’s fish and chip shop, pubs didn’t do food, not even sandwiches, and restaurants (I can only remember one) served pretty much the same fare as we ate at home, just on posher plates. You could get beef burger, egg, and chips at the Wimpy, and steak and roast chicken at the Berni, but these were in the larger towns not the little town of
There were no fast food places (well,
The fist time I tasted ‘foreign food’ was the anglicised spaghetti bolognaise made by the school cook at Lord Bill’s. Minced beef and tomato, topped with overcooked spaghetti, covered in grated cheddar, and baked in the school ovens until it was crisp. Delicious.
She also made a version of curry with stuck together boiled rice, full of raisons and not hot at all, we all loved it.
And of course there were those Vesta curry meals.
Then the Chinese came to town and the world changed overnight. Chan could cook bean sprouts to perfection. Bean sprouts? What was a bean sprout? And his Chinese curries were to die for, and some town residents probably did.
Soon you could buy chilli mixes at the bottom shop, and rice, and dried spaghetti. And then everybody was boiling spaghetti and rice for forty minutes, trying that ‘foreign muck', and quite enjoying it. It was a gastronomic revolution. My mum even started to buy and use spices! Well, not buy them. By this time Swartz had opened a factory on the industrial estate and my Uncle Len was working there.
Yes what a change in such short a space of time.
What foreign muck shall I have for tea tomorrow?
Vesta anyone?
