Salvage from the local skip

 

Another freakin' makeover

Welcome to my Steampunk Workshop. Making it up, by ourselves. In progress. Mezzanine floor, supported by scaffolding (expensive) and original Victorian cast iron drain pipes (cheap, from the scrap yard).

Copper tank to be dining table. Thank you Peepah!

Column, painted up, waiting to be a shower. It's going into the inspection pit.

Beautiful little window on the upper floor, with shutter, overdesigned. Metal framed window rescued from a pile destined for the tip. Little lock works beautifully. I'm told it came from an outhouse. (Freecycle at its best, I'd say.)

Rrrraaahhh! With many thanks to Mr M and Mr R for sharing ideas, creative processes, thoughts, whimsies, and everyday laughter. I've not taken a welding course and have not yet had a go with the angle grinder, so much yet to learn. 

Still to come: more painting, table, sink, suspended bed, sofa, swing, toilet, Belfast sink (thank you Freecycle), kitchen table, shower, lighting, solar heated water store, outdoor dining area...
 

Best memories

 

The Border Force know where I live

My left knee is bigger than my right knee.

My left knee is bigger than my right knee after I fell off a mountain bike in the French Alps, having run away in June at the first sniff of a lifted-lockdown travel restriction, (I just said it was to join the circus) but definitely in the company of Mr X whom I met (before lockdown) at a comedy club.

I know it sounds unlikely. Tiger pointed out (quite rightly) I had known Mr X for less time than she had known a bag of lentils.

My only reply was that I also carry a Best Before date so I had better get moving.

Maybe my tribe could mark my death date with reminiscences of that time Mother threw back the front door, shouting, I'm going to France. Don't ask me where, but I'll be back in about a month. Please water the lobelia.

Anyway, I have returned home. I have had a jolly good time and the Border Force know where I live.

Also, Knicker Drawers is getting back to business.

Old tank gets trashed

A day from which all other days can flow; the 6x4x2 tank in the garage, which has been an eyesore, impediment and a hated old lump of metal just asking for a recycling centre, finally gets lifted up by a crane and taken out of my house.

Good riddance you bastard and I hope you get crushed and beaten up before being made into something more useful to society.

Got that off my chest. Can get on with building an artist's studio now.

Nice Arse, Aunt Fanny and Lovely Jugs

I don't know about all you single people out there, but Grit is not doing so well in these times of LOOK DON'T TOUCH.

I sorely miss all the hugging and handing of my normal days, when connecting with friends through welcome clasps with kisses, hello and goodbye, was happily normal.

And that's before I get onto the subject of missing out on the Pensioner Sex.*

I can't wait for this horrible LOOK DON'T TOUCH phase of lockup to be over.

But the British are supposed to be so repressed about touch and intimacy, aren't we, that maybe we're accustomed to this new lockdown code, LOOK DON'T TOUCH.

Hmm. Right now I wish I could be Dutch. I read how one of their lockdown rights was a Bedroom Buddy. Imagine!

Yet of course we have a silver lining to this traditionally repressed British state. We are absolutely bloody brilliant pioneers in the language of nudge nudge wink wink.

In which spirit, I am delighted to launch my soon to be (unsuccessful) business line for this new phase of LOOK DON'T TOUCH lockdown. Where we single folks can regard a nice arse from a distance, no touching allowed.

My Nice Arse, Aunt Fanny and Lovely Jugs.

 

Suitably British LOOK DON'T TOUCH naughty words and thoughts with traditional lead print to stamp into your Knicker Drawer Note Book.

Or just hang it from your doorknob. It's up to you. The police aren't watching on this one.

On sale soon at the Knicker Drawer stand in Vintage Number 38, if you're local. And if you aren't, you'll have to make your own.

(Nice bum, by the way. I've been regarding it for quite a while and I just thought I'd mention it.)


*Sure to increase the blog statcounter by a few hundred readers, every one of them to be quickly disappointed.

Satisfying

It became very important to do this today: put some battery-operated fairy lights in a metal cage and find the best space to perch it. Two hours of amusement for which I probably need to thank lockdown.

To the Post Office, which is not the point

Walked to the post office today.

I feel I should record it.

It's either 'Walked to the post office today', or 'I have consumed eight packets of chocolate biscuits during lockdown, which I am declaring is my contribution to the national economy in a time of crisis and you can send me a letter of thanks anytime from now, Boris'. That would do also.

But I prefer the diary update to be about the post office.

Thinking about it, it wasn't really the walk to the post office.

It is that my knowledge about social judgement has become a bit dimmed. I think this is largely because there is no social.

I set off down the street wearing the leggings I have slept in for two nights and worn for three days. They got a bit hot to wear, so rather than take them off - they are comfortable - this morning I took a pair of scissors and cut them off to the knee.

The tee-shirt I am wearing in no way complements the leggings colour, but even in bright purple it is serviceable, with its oil stain and some toothpaste dribble over one bosom.

The shoes, I changed. This year I found an old pair of flatties while clearing a cupboard. But the velcro fastenings were non-functional; the leather has stretched. The top and bottom velcro patches no longer meet. I cut the leather, shortened it, got it under the sewing machine and voila! My velcro sticks! Add shoe repair to my list of talents!

The straw summer hat is essential, because I am sure it is the sun and not my kissing distance to 60 years that has wrinkled me (albeit attractively). As I leave the house in my bed and tee-shirt attire with my upcycled flatties, Squirrel casually says, 'You have a safety pin in your hat'.

Safety pins can come in useful, I tell her. You never can find one when you want one, so I keep one in my hat just in case.

Regarding all other social niceties somehow expected of women - make up, smooth legs, fragrance of scents and perfumes, knickers, a functioning bra - I never thought about those at all until I got home.

I just set off with my set of brass rods wrapped in brown paper.

I'm not sure if I care if the look of me is in any way socially agreeable - perhaps lockdown relieved me of those responsibilities. Maybe we can all change completely the presence of ourselves on the High Street, if we ever take to it again.

I think I might re-emerge, when it is all done, wearing my favourite goth corset and super-comfy Fly London boots.* And my black top hat, on which I have wound ribbons that flutter in the breeze. I rock that look. In my opinion. It will feel, just fantastic.

* Not a sponsored post. They're just my favourite boots.

Crap memories

 

Now, you only get to see the ceiling

This diary entry is for those people who stared inside our office 2010 to 2019.

Recall a dishevelled-looking bloke? He was maybe wearing his pants like men do in their sheds, with a barely buttoned shirt, pre-dribbled, topped by an old cardigan. The glass doors behind him? Faked on a green screen. In reality, one was smashed.

I loved my husband dearly, despite what you might have suspected (or been told), and certainly if you saw inside our office and came to a very definite conclusion - here was a sad man abandoned!

Nope. He was loved! Utterly. The landfill he made of the office was not loved.

Think yourself fortunate. You saw this chaos from your safe side of a plastic screen. There you could sigh and tut and do whatever before slipping back to your normality. I bet you felt sorry for him. Hmm. Misplaced sympathies. I lived with this state, powerless to do anything about it, too respectful of, 'don't touch my stuff'.

'It's my stuff!' covered the hole in the ceiling, piles of ancient papers, collections of magazines and manuscripts from 1974, a cellar full of computer equipment from the 1980s, peeling paint, 100kg of cabling, cassettes, floppy disks, piles of gadgets and a variety of indescribable items whose only redeeming feature was that they didn't have real hair.

And the smell. Let's call a spade a bloody shovel. If you have lived with a teenager who locks their bedroom door, closes the windows and draws the curtains, then you can imagine the smell coming from the office. It was very similar.

Did I mention that time my office colleague absent-mindedly threw a dead bird in the bin? That is not endearing. That is a health hazard.

Anyway, those days are gone! I no longer feel the need to put a bag over my head when I realise someone saw the office.

These days, my office / flat / rooms of elegance / hand-made kitchen is now transformed. And it is fecking amazing.

I threw open the doors and windows, scrubbed the carpet, hired the roofers, painted surfaces, dumped furniture, offered a ton of stuff to happy hands on freecycle, sent 50 metres of books to the charity shop, dismantled shelves, installed a Victorian overmantle above the fireplace previously blocked by a bookcase and seven blankets, enjoyed my repaired glass door and sold anything of value on ebay.

I'm happy to say - if you are one of many previous guests invited via video link to this office - you'll never see this wonderful space. Maybe you can look at the ceiling - the old office is transformed to my new rooms.

Enjoy your happy memories.

Think of the good things...

There are some positives about lockdown, huh?

Not the awful consequences of this horrendous virus; I can't go there without fear of being quickly overwhelmed into numbed silence.

Nor the daily challenge of frugal living thanks to a diminishing income. Not that either. Anyway, frugality is normal.

Nor the way I get to experiment with the limits of my personal hygiene! Although it has advantages. Three weeks and no shower! (And no running water in my little bolt-hole flat because I can't afford it).

And not being able to go out to find human company of my own interests and dispositions. That is Not Good. That is The Worst Thing Ever about lockdown.

But here is to count the good things!

Clear, clean air. Air that does not get in the way. Precisions of colours and shapes I can observe from my laying down flat-out position by the hedge where no-one can see me.

The garden robin, who is running a mealy worm protection racket. (I have seen The Birds.)

Time, that I cannot avoid, to do things I have long put off. Clean the hob, paint the ceiling, clear out the garage, scour the fridge, put up shelves, hoist out the overmantle etc etc.

Zoom, which I have used, once in terror and with the growing, horrible realisation that people can actually see me in my private space, so next time better tidy up a bit and put on a bra. But I am counting it as good (and not bad) because it is engaging me with the 21st century!

Reading, more consistently, for longer, and not just to page 11.

Making things, and not just a mess, but things with wire and glass and ribbons and hooks and bits you find at the backs of drawers to hold up and wonder, 'Can I use this instead?'

Taking longer to do anything and everything.

If I am going to hold onto one positive outcome from lockdown, it is this. To consciously think and interact and shape my environment in more deliberate ways; slower, with greater thought for ahead, than behind.

Let the Burning Begin!

In the national spirit of flagellation I'd like to confess my crimes regarding flaunting the lock down rules!

This is entirely in consideration of the fact that soon we open our doors, windows, garden gates to let all the grudges go free.

Then we can stare at the neighbours properly for the first time in weeks. No longer will we be forced to peer at each other from behind net curtains, clutching a pen and logging down their crimes in a Lockdown Grudge Book.*

Huh, I am Grit. I want to get in first before the neighbours grass me up.

Read my charge sheet and gasp.

1. Visiting another household with a birthday card.
Prepare the bundles of wood for the fire. I am guilty. In mitigation, the birthday card was to celebrate an 18th, after the father of the tribe left the family for another woman in the same fortnight his wife faced a diagnosis of breast cancer while her mother was diagnosed with dementia. (I couldn't make this up.) On balance, propping up a home-made birthday card on the drive while dancing and blowing kisses seemed like the smallest thing I could do. I accept, in the eyes of any particularly scrutinising neighbour, it remains possibly the biggest crime of all.

2. Furtively sloping off to Lidl, late at night, to stock up on Vermouth, crisps and chocolate biscuits. (I wish I could say this was only once.) Definitely guilty. No mitigating circumstances. Set light to the wood torches.

3. Driving to another household to drop a black bin liner at the front door. But this is not the actual crime! The other household got out garden chairs so we could sit 6 foot apart in the drive in full view of the neighbours! PS. The black bin liner contained stuff from an office clear out. Non-essential. (Unless you value the turn-out from an office.)

4. Returning to the scene of the crime to pick up CAKE. The Nation Your Honour, this was more than my anticipated reward for a load of old paper from an office clear-out. But what could I do? I was offered CAKE for feck's sake. Let the processional train of witch-burners begin the sorry journey to the pyre.

5. Accepting a visit from Mr M. (who is a proper artist), who had cleared out his workshop and wanted to shove a load of glass our way. I have nothing to offer in mitigation but weakness motivated by my own greed and the overwhelming desire to see if I can melt glass in a barbecue. We talked about, among other things, my home-made bike shed which was an unavoidable participant in the conversation since we had to sit on either side of it.

 My bike shed what I built at the bottom of the garden. 

(Lock down Project Number 8.)

 Mr M was kind enough to say that my bike shed resembles Caribbean architecture circa 1980. 

He also suggested that with a few pots and pans I could try living in it.

The Nation Your Honour, here are my ugly truths laid bare. I accept my fate. As the Chief Burners pop to Lidl to buy a box of matches, I would like to add, if we are to be released to judge each other remorselessly without let or hindrance, then, in my opinion, as a motivating factor to flaunt lockdown, adultery is morally worse than effecting an 18th birthday surprise.


*Of course I can sell you a book for your Lock down Grudges!

Anything is possible

Here's an illustration of a chicken. Just as a memo to myself that there is no subject out of bounds, especially in a note book, and I will rise to any challenge.

Kitchen Journal

Sometimes I make a note book and I just want to keep on going, playing with it, dressing it up, shoving things between the pages, seeing how much it can hold and building it up to see when it bursts.

Then I remember. It's not my book.

What I really hope I've stitched into that book is the spirit of play.

I want you all to have that spirit with your notebooks. Just throw your cautions to the winds and enjoy yourself with crayons. It will do you good, believe me.

Drink a cup of tea and splatter your pages with the tea bag. Crush your pages together while they hold sprays of fresh flowers or leaves you collected from the walk. Add post-it notes and scribble and doodle and torn bits of magazines - see how the colours and shapes change your book.

Don't come to me and say, 'Wah! It's too nice to write in.' PAH. You can make it a lot nicer. You can make it Yours. Go on, claim it for your own.

Consider the notebooks a piece of collaborative art. I make the frame and you do the pictures. I offer you the format for your poem and you find the words. I give up the baking tray and you pour in the cake mix. You get the idea. Just give it a go. You can only make your note book more beautiful, because you're making it expressive of You and what could be more beautiful than that?
 

Night walk

Walking at night has become a pleasure. I enjoy the exaggeration of shapes and colours; the views stretching out along points of light, brought to sudden halts by impenetrable dark layers. The night walk is affirming of the stronger in me: I am self-reliant, curious of what lies over there; a person of privacies and transparencies.

I'll stitch a book for that.

Garden change

I'm one of the lucky ones. I have access to a green place filled with fluff and stuff and blue and green and things unrolling and blowing about the sky.

Change is everywhere. I can see how the world moves within hours, day to night and sun to rain.

The garden is a companion of sorts, where I see change as a source of endless inspiration.

I love the colours that play in any garden within the layers of light and shade.

I try and fix those shifting moments in a book I stitch. I want your hand to move across brights to darks and through the shifting colour tones and tints between.

In the garden, there are so many tints and tones and hues and shades, and then the sun comes out, or the cloud passes. My inability to capture all those shifting shades must become a sort of celebration for me. Not so much managing my content with failure, as a reminder that change is all around us, it is us, and it necessarily is in the things we make.

I want the books in many ways to be transitory, ephemeral, and to be constantly changing in your hand.

One day it looked like this, and another day, after you added stuff, pressed flowers, slipped between the pages the handwriting of someone you loved, well it all became something else.

Change.

Stitching together my Grit and my Knickers

Here I am, posting photographs on my Knicker Drawer Note Books site, with increasing irritation!

The problem is: under the Covid cosh, I cannot witter endlessly on about my outsider art.

Before the lock down, I could happily meet anyone and everyone in the street and anywhere to talk about my lovely stitched note books with amusing objects! and curious papers! Every day! Until the hapless listener tuned out, glazed over, got up and left (while striving to look polite) or just fought back (the best).

Truly, any of the above was good by me. But now, only my own head answers me back. I have three ladies in my life (living next door in a complicated arrangement) and they have limited interest in my affairs (quite right) except to tut-tut at me because I slope off to Lidl to buy crisps (probably illegal but essential)*.

I miss the ordinary to-and-fro of every ordinary conversation. Those everyday moments are the breathings of my stitches; my books are work books, fun books, day-to-day books, pointless books, essential books, books of history and today. Somewhere - like the chat in a post office queue - to express a favourite grudge, bear witness to the passing time, have a moan about the weather, be sentimental, celebrate a moment and voice a sorrowful regret.

Well, I'm merging my worlds. I kept them separate and now, damn the consequences!

Knicker Drawer Note Books, meet Grit's Day. Take a handshake.

Phew. At last I can tell at length, daily if necessary. Here are the backgrounds, the wherefores, whos, what-made-me-do-it, what it is and why the hell does that book have a poison warning?

The Plague Experience is fundamentally a dispiriting experience. Who would actively seek to have their freedoms curtailed, huh? Yet. like everyone else, I'm finding bright sides, silver linings, happy  spots. Even if those moments come in the form of cleaning up and washing down.

Well, here was my first truly bright, bright spot. Plague Journals. Before the Plague, I was given, by a well-wisher, a big bag of leather, all beautifully tattered and worn.

I have a tender place in my soul grown to respond with love for scars, wrinkles, tearings, breakages, fragmented parts. To me, these are not fearful symbols of grotesques, they are the tender marks of life, experience and humanity. Age does not wither. It makes a beautiful weave of a life to hold, touch and feel.

A material that has already passed through experience, been torn, cut, lifted by hand, rolled up, discarded and shoved in a Lidl bag. What could be more poetic? The best and the worst. Perfect for the wrappings of a seventeeth century Plague Journal.

But I didn't have any handmade paper or pressed paper made from rags; the sort that shows flaws, scatterings of colours, strange blends and irregularities to the touch. So I set about a stack of paper from a copier machine with a teabag. I added a pack of typewriter paper (scavenged) and odd bits of torn paper from my torn-paper-piles. (Thank goodness I'm too much of a paper hoarder to throw any away.)

Finally, a thorough rummage in a set of drawers yielded key rings, keys, clock hands, bottles, bits, pieces, this and that.

Oh happy hours with the Plague!

All note books sold thanks to the hard labours of Vintage Emporium Number 38. And Daniel Defoe.

Really, the only way for my head to surf the Covid Lock Down is to lift my gaze and make my respectful nod to what went before. As I overheard in the post office queue: 'I'm fed up hearing people complain about the lock down. Our parents were asked to go out and fight. All we're being asked to do is sit on the sofa and watch TV.'


*I note the three ladies eat my crisps, however.