Microwave jam

In my new life “on the block” I’m starting to live differently. This has all sorts of manifestations, from turning into one of those people who changes from outdoor to indoor shoes (because we’re surrounded by a sea of mud) to sweeping the floor everyday (see mention of mud, previously).
















I am also much more aware of our waste since we no longer have a refuse collection service. We’ve bought a couple of small bins that sit out the back, one for plastics and tins and the other for non-recyclable items, plus we have two big boxes to separate out glass in one and paper in the other. Much of the paper is now being recycled by us rather than taken to the recycling depot because we need it for both the worm farm and the compost heap.
















It is something of a joy being able to take our food waste and mix it with grass clippings, wet cardboard, old newspapers and detritus from the guinea pigs out to the compost bin and watch it degrade! The process is rather faster than we expected in both the worm and compost bins because of our collection of friendly soldier fly larvae. We opened the worm farm last week and it looked like something out of a horror movie: the few remaining worms had hidden in the damp but dense coir compost bedding at the bottom of the box, leaving the rest of the space to the seething mass of grey, white and brown segmented larvae that were wriggling everywhere. They’re large, soldier fly larvae, and get their name from the fact that they were commonly found in field hospitals and in the trenches... not very nice, really, but in fact they are amazing composters. Once we’d closed the lid of the worm farm and run back indoors I looked up ‘big maggots’ and ‘worm farm’ on Bing and immediately got results that suggested to me that they aren’t all bad! Soldier fly larvae don’t feed on worms, but have voracious appetites for all sorts of food waste (including the meaty kind you don’t usually put in compost bins). So they hadn’t ravaged the worms, they’d simply out-eaten them! Moving half the colony to the big compost bin and restocking the worms with an extra thousand friends should help, and we can safely put more food in the worm farm to keep everyone happy.
















Voila! We have on-site recycling of ALL our food scraps via the compost heap, and recycling of all our paper and cardboard via the compost heap and the guinea pigs to add to the fact that we’re completely self-sufficient in water, sewage and electricity. In fact despite recent deluges our solar system is still running with the batteries at over 90%, which suggests we could survive about a week of really foul, dark weather before the diesel generator would have to kick in – and that’s with the current amusement of our ground-mounted arrays pointing in different directions. I hope that someone from the installation company will be coming out today to try and sort out the problem, but one of them is having a little trouble following the sun...

I keep dreaming I’m in a slightly mad episode of The Good Life, sadly without Felicity Kendall’s looks or Penelope Keith’s wit. Today’s adventure into self-sufficiency involves the discovery that one can make jam in the microwave. I may never use my heavy, old-fashioned jam kettle ever again (which is probably just as well since it’s lurking somewhere in the shed and I may never be able to find it!).


















The recipe is simple: 500g fruit (plus the juice of a lemon for every 200g of strawberries if you’re using them), softened in the microwave for 4 – 5 minutes on High. Add 2 cups of sugar, stir it in, and then cook for about 15 minutes on High, stirring occasionally; you may need to adjust the cooking time depending on your microwave. Make sure it doesn't boil over! Do the usual set test with a cold saucer and cook for longer if needed until you reach setting point. Today I’ve used up a large punnet of fairly tasteless strawberries that were a very disappointing buy from our growers’ market last week, and 5 nectarines that were on their way out. These quantities made enough for one large (think Hellmann's Mayonnaise jar!) size, which was enough to fill the large pyrex bowl used to cook it in, although it did boil over once (I had fun spooning up the spillage). Now I'm not a preserving expert (see Ronnie's post on the subject, which made me feel tired and awestruck while reading it!) but this little effort does taste good, and has given me ideas about using other slightly elderly fruit instead of putting it on the compost heap.

Back pain

Yes, I've been bitten by something again - despite the usual precautions! This is just small 6" sample but there's lots more... and yes, it itches like hell.

All the fun of the Fair

The Fair comes to Coffs Harbour every January and in the short time we've been here it's become a ritual to go right at the end of their visit so that we can enjoy family arguments about how much money we're spending, who wants to go on the scary rides and no, we're not buying show bags...


















































As a first class wimp, my interest in the whole shebang is purely photographic!

Still here, but not fully functional!

I just posted some amusing photographs of the before and the after in what will eventually be our office/studio, which is where we are temporarily living while the 'big' house is built. So much for the pristine state of things when we first arrived! But the main thing is that we have moved house, so the awful part of that process is over. No more packing, no more shifting furniture (for a while, at least) and no more cleaning up your former rental property so that you can see your face in the toilet lid. Hooray!

The only downside to moving into our office/studio building is that we are a little cramped. Now I have to confess to the fact that we own FAR too many things, so it's mostly our own fault. But sadly my 'studio' for the next few months is going to be in the 'garden store' room with a roller door, at the end of the building... We've bought a collapsible gazebo thing that we're going to erect over the garage door to give me some shade from the sun beating down onto the metal door and wall cladding in the morning, which will be a relief, and the gazebo will do double duty as it will also partly shade the inflatable swimming pool (12' across) that is part of darling daughter's birthday present. The wet-edge infinity pool will have to wait until our scheduled Lotto win later this year, I'm afraid.


























As you can see, my darling press is sharing the space with the washing machine AND one of the builder's diesel generators, which can't be helped. The purple pipe running out of the garden store room is the outflow for the washing machine (strangely you don't have a washing machine outflow plumbed into a garden store under normal circumstances so we're improvising), trailing across the sand out the front (base for the pool) and over the edge of the hill!

So far, so good. Only a few outbreaks of temper in the last two weeks, which I count as a blessing and a miracle all in one given the grim resignation with which we approached the task of moving house and the fact that dearest daughter had to endure the whole thing with us as all my cunning plans to entertain her elsewhere fell through... We're tired, frequently sweaty and totally over the whole process but we have survived relatively unscathed and that celebratory bottle of champagne we drank a few days ago went down very nicely, thank you.

Much excitement..

We're sitting here on our first night staying up on our block of land, having spent the day moving furniture essentials (you know, beds etc!) into what will be our office/studio. It's a lovely temperature and no rain today after a week of heavy showers that played havoc with our removals plans. We can hear frogs and crickets, saw an echidna on the way back to our old rental house this afternoon, and found a rhinoceros beetle blundering into our outside lights... so it isn't peaceful in the countryside, but lots of fun! I'm typing away, illuminated by our new LED recessed downlights which look just like halogen spotlights but are brighter and consume a fraction of the electricity. It's going to be a big adventure getting used to the tank water and solar power, and learning to drive up and down the dirt road safely. Yesterday I was still feeling incredibly nervous about it all, but today has been great: exciting and energising and fun. Just got a lot of clearing up to do at the old place...

I may be out of contact for a few days as we try and get our computers and phones sorted out but hopefully we'll be back soon, with photos! Happy New Year.

A Christmas poem

I've been reading and re-reading the BookArtObject set text by Rosemary Dobson as I assemble boxes over Christmas because I've pasted the poem in full in the bottom of each box. It has made me think about poems and the fact I don't often read them, and I thought you might like a poem I saw in Lesley's Printed Material blog... Lesley, I hope you don't mind me quoting you!

Feet that could be clawed but are not...
Arms that might have flown but did not...
No-one said 'Let there be angels' but the birds

Whose choirs fling alleluias over the sea,
Herring gulls, black backs carolling raucously
While cormorants dry their wings on a rocky stable.

Plovers that stoop to sanctify the land
And scoop small, roundy mangers in the sand,
Swaddle a saviour each in a speckled shell.

A chaffinchy fife unreeling in the marsh
Accompanies the tune a solo thrush
Half sings, half talks in riffs of wordless words.

As hymns flare up from tiny muscled throats,
Robins and hidden wrens whose shiny notes
Tinsel the precincts of the winter sun.

What loftier organs than these pipes of beech,
Pillars resounding with the jackdaws' speech,
And poplars swayed with light like shaken bells?

Wings that could be hands, but are not...
Cries that might be pleas but cannot
Question or disinvent the stalker's gun,

Be your own hammerbeam angels of the air
Before, in a maze of space, you disappear,
Stilled by our dazzling anthrocentric mills.

Carol of the Birds by Anne Stevenson
From 'Light Unlocked' Christmas Card Poems published by Enitharmon

I suppose it means something to me partly because the birds are Northern European ones with which I'm familiary, as is the landscape. But anyway, I liked it! It's not quite the same looking out of my windows and seeing parrots and honey eaters feasting on grevilleas in the sunshine, but that's the magic of Christmas in Australia in the summertime - something totally different.

Ye gods and little fishes

I may have mentioned the rain here before, non? Yesterday - Christmas Day - was lovely in and around Coffs Harbour: about 28 degrees C, sunny with just a few clouds intervening between my delicate English skin and the UV rays. We went to Arrawarra Beach after a later breakfast (smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. Yum), walked the dog, collected shells and had an altogether leisurely day. Things weren't all quite as anticipated as the oven in our rented house gave out half way through cooking the Christmas Duck which was a bit of a pain, but essentially we had a great day.

This was a good thing because today is the day we start packing and moving, and with this in mind we loaded the trailer, hitched up the 4W drive, and sauntered off to our block with the idea we'd start unloading some stuff into the shed. Ho ho ho.

The rain started, the clay turned to mud, the 4W drive couldn't get up the steepest, claggiest slope on the 'goat track' up to our block... the engine started straining, the car started slipping back down the slope, the trailer jackknifed, the car didn't want to stop...















It looks nice in the sunshine... it looks damned nasty when shiny with a lick of rain!

Dearest husband managed to bring the car to a precarious halt, darling daughter got out and sat on her backpack on a safe bit of grass, while I packed stones under the rear wheels of the 4W drive. Luckily husband had packed a 4lb lump hammer which came in useful trying to prise the trailer off the tow-bar... and luckily the connecting mechanism wasn't damaged, despite the dodgy angles and the potential for the metal bits to have bent. The trailer then had to be manhandled as far as possible before we all crossed our fingers and had to let it go, chuntering down the hill under its own steam! And luckily it managed to swing round and front itself into a patch of long grass near the bottom of the slope, leaving enough room on the 'road' for dearest husband to be able to slide the car back down the slope, engage the engine and do a 6-point turn. Then I slid into the driving seat and was directed backwards to meet the trailer and we managed to hitch it all up again and drive home, tails between our legs. So much for unloading in the shed! However, I do think we were very lucky indeed: it could all have been so much worse.

And the moral of the story? Um, not sure if there is one, but it probably goes something along the lines of "don't buy a rural block and expect to be able to get up there in the rain" or perhaps, "there's no point in thinking about doing fancy things in your new house until you've spent several thousand dollars hiring a grader and buying loads of gravel to improve the road"! Merry Christmas, everybody.

Peace and Good Will

I've sent precisely one card so far this Christmas, not because I'm a bah humbug sort of person (no, I'm not, REALLY!) but because we have to move house soon and I've not got a lot of energy...






















Inspite of my failings in the festivities department we wish you well over the holidays and hope that the end of this year and the start of a new year bring you happiness, contentment and peace. We're wishing for the same things ourselves.

ITTTTTTTCHY!

Ah yes, ticks! They are one of the hazards of life on the North coast of New South Wales... and on Saturday night it seems I was visited by one in bed. I have over 70 bites on my left arm, plus the ones up my back, chest and the side of my neck... I haven't found the culprit but everyone tells me these look just like "grass" tick bites.
















Of course grass ticks aren't actually a species of grass-dwelling tick - they're the larval stage of some types of tick. There's no specialist treatment, just endurance of the agonising itching, albeit with the help of anti-histamine tablets (day and night), hydracortisone creams and - I've been recommended - 1 cup of Bicarbonate of Soda in a hot bath, which is next on my agenda!

A treasure box

You may remember that when we got back from Europe in October (oh how long ago that seems now!) darling daughter and I went away on her Class Two camp to Woody Head. When we got back, weighed down with various collections of shells, seedpods, bits of rock, ochre and leaves, I set about thinking of a treasure box I could make for the class. I thought it would be nice if they had something in the classroom that reminded them of the fabulous time they had, both visually in terms of photos, but also through touch and smell and their own retelling of the story of the camp. This is what I came up with:






















The box is made from A3 grey board, although naturally it is larger than A3 and the cardboard needed to be laminated in order to get the right size...






















Each piece - walls, floor, lid, partitions - had to be cut twice, glued, weighted, sandpapered smooth, filled and painted white before being covered in thin Thai banana paper with wild grasses in the mix too.
















Class Two wrote accounts of their trip on thick drawing paper, with illustrations on both sides but words on only one side. The paper was folded along one edge so that I would have a margin I could use to stitch the stories together in two accordian books.

















The inside of the box base was painted with natural ochres I ground up from the rocks I collected on the beach and mixed with an acrylic medium, then the whole box was varnished, ochre paint and paper, in order to make it a bit more durable under the stresses of 22 pairs of hands!
















This is the finished box before I inserted the two accordian books, which I secured to either side so that they sit flat on top of the collection beneath. The 'handle' on the lid is a twig I picked up on one of our walks, sewn on with sage green linen thread to match the leaves in the paper, and varnished as well so that it feels smooth to the touch. Today I presented it to Ruth, their class teacher, so I hope they like it.

A first on Double Elephant

I just want to say here that I rarely watch any clips people send to me and I've always been a snob about YouTube, but my friend Jan over at Snippety Gibbet put this up on her blog, courtesy of a friend, and I love it...




I love papercutting, despite being a complete novice at it myself, and I find this video clip amazing. And how great that New Zealand has a national 'Book Council'...

ps. adding a video was MUCH easier than I thought it was going to be!

Squeaks

Yes, yes, yeeeeeeeeeees, I am a great big softie under the apparently scary exterior (that's what my family says, anyway). These are the two latest additions to the family:





Bubbles




and Squeak

So far as we are able to tell at this stage, Bubbles is female and Squeak is male. They come from our friends Adam and Adrienne, who ended up with a litter of 9 guinea squeaks, 7 of which were albino 'Himalayans' with creepy red eyes so we chose the 2 coloured ones instead.

Darling daughter managed to keep her hands off them for 2 days after they came to live with us, which was a truly heroic effort on her part! The result is that they were able to get used to their deluxe guinea squeak accommodation and then slowly get used to us. Squeak lives up to his name and chirrups and snuffles and squeaks when you visit him or pick him up. Bubbles is a cool kid, seemingly very calm and happy to be picked up (which is just as well since darling daughter swoops on the poor things rather alarmingly...). They have a daily routine: clean food and water before DD goes to school in the mornings, a squeeze from me mid-morning as I transfer them to their holiday home on the grass for a happy day munching, and then we play with them when DD gets home from school before putting them in their hutch for the night with a gourmet salad to keep them going until morning. Oh to be a guinea squeak!

More paper lust

It's paper pornography, but since I was busy unrolling them and putting them in a big flat case for storage I thought I should photograph them as I go! Except for the beautiful French paper with the flowery inclusions in the final photograph which I bought in London, all the papers were picked up in Italy.

Rain, rain, go away

Have I mentioned that it rains quite a lot in Coffs Harbour? Apparently we usually get 125mm in November, and 13 days of rain in the month. Not too bad. Well according to the Bureau of Meteorology we've had 464mm (almost half a metre) of rain in the last 2 days, with 354mm in the space of 6hrs on Friday evening alone. And it's only November 8th.

We haven't been badly affected: darling daughter's school remained open, as did local shops, and so although driving has been hazardous it hasn't been that bad. About 45 families in central Coffs Harbour have been evacuated due to flooding but it isn't as bad overall as the March 31st floods, thank goodness. We don't yet know what's happened on our block. We were up there on Thursday morning, before the rain started, and the building work was coming on apace. We were there with the electrician, placing power points and a TV point around the walls of the office/studio building, and watching the roof joists going up on the main house. But on Friday the builders weren't able to get up there and I'm not yet sure if that is because the road was blocked, covered in water or washed away again... fingers crossed it's not the 'washed away' scenario, because that will be a huge financial headache as well as delaying the building, which isn't good news!

Then it got ugly

Sometimes life is a complete pile of poo and I wonder why I bother to get up in the morning. Today is definitely one of those I-am-totally-fed-up-with-coping sort of days. I trundled off to see our lettings agent because she wanted to speak to me and discovered that we have a choice: either we sign up for a full year's lease on this place (with penalties for breaking the lease) or we have to move out on January 9th 2010. Obviously we can't sign up for another year because at some point next year we hope to move into our own place, so we will have to move. AGAIN.

Since arriving in Australia just over 3 years ago we've already lived in 3 different houses, so this will be our 4th... and we'll be moving at the hottest time of year, when Coffs Harbour is full of holiday-makers and short on accommodation, and we have to find somewhere that will take our dog. Did I also mention that I'll have to pack up my studio for the umpteenth time and kiss goodbye to any chance of doing any meaningful work...?

Just for the rest of today I'm going to pretend it isn't happening, because I really feel that I can't cope right now. I'm going to give myself some time off, and then I'm going to get angry (I'm quite looking forward to that bit), which will delay the necessity to DOooo something about it for a few hours longer. No use thinking about it now because I've got to take darling daughter to her piano lesson. In the rain. Grrrrr.

Then the good stuff

Which is the Class 2 camp I went on with darling daughter last week! Three blissful days at Woody Head, which is near Iluka on the northern coast of New South Wales. Practically Queensland, in fact.





















Woody Head camping ground is slap in the middle of Bundjalong National Park, and has kilometres of pristine beaches, safe swimming areas and shallow snorkelling so it's perfect for kids. There's also a fabulous rock platform with deeeeeep rock pools, places to fish, a kiosk that serves decent coffee and it's clean. It's so good, in fact, that I've picked up the brochure and plan to spend some time up there with my family.
















The whole thing was new to me: I am unfamiliar with Australia's National Parks, know nothing about that part of the coastline, have never been to a formal camping ground and I've never taken 20 children (5 of whom have special needs of one sort or another) away for three days before... on Tuesday evening before we left I was seriously asking myself WHAT WAS I THINKING? I mean, I'd only got off a plane a few days beforehand!





















In fact it was really good fun, if very hard work. Ruth, the class teacher, is amazing: calm, well-prepared, doesn't need to raise her voice, and completely organised. Also, we weren't in tents but were staying in the conference centre which is two huts with bunk rooms for the children and private rooms for most of the adults, plus a fire pit, a barbeque and a fully-equipped kitchen so we weren't roughing it at all. Some of you may sneer and say it wasn't really a camping experience, but for this lot it was enough. The children rose to the occasion magnificently: the tears on the first night (many of them had never spent time away from both parents before and missed their mummies and daddies dreadfully, so I got to give out LOTS of cuddles, which was nice) gave way to unadulterated enthusiasm by the next morning. Ruth had organised teams with one adult and several "helpers' each to do various tasks: prepare breakfast/morning tea/lunch/afternoon tea/dinner, clear it up, do the cleaning on the way out, serve food, make food... and they did it all with very few complications. I was really impressed actually: 8 year olds aren't renowned for their organisational skills, patience or dexterity but they completed their tasks and were able to take responsibility for things like having a shower after swimming in the sea, cleaning their rooms, packing and unpacking and keeping things tidy.

Tomorrow it's back to school and they will spend a few days de-briefing and learning from their experiences and each doing a page in a book I'm going to make for them. I'll make a box with compartments for treasure we found on the trip, and I'll turn all the drawings and writing into concertina books to go into the box. The class will be able to keep it as a permanent reminder of their adventures.

It was a lovely break from reality! Now I have to get back to the real world and focus on things like the accounts, business cashflow, getting the car serviced, the house-building project, Board stuff for the school, oh... and also doing some of my work! I'm finding shuttling between two houses very tiring as it adds a good 2 hours of driving each day, and I'll be glad to get back into our Korora house, hopefully next weekend. It will be a filthy pit but at least we'd be sleeping in the same place as our belongings.

First the bad news

I didn't realise that my darling daughter thought that the following scenes of devastation were her fault until we got home from our European tour on Friday, when actually she is the heroine of the piece!

Can't remember what I've said before (jetlag is my excuse, as if I needed one) but the potted version goes like this: just before she and dearest hubby came out to join me in the UK, darling daughter was in her downstairs bedroom, watching with fascination as a large water-filled bubble appeared under the window... After Daddy had been summoned, who called the agent, who called the emergency plumber it was established that copper water pipes buried in the concrete floor of the upstairs bathroom had finally burst.














The escaping water did what it does and found various escape routes, mostly in between the waterproof membrane that covers the concrete floors and the lovely wooden floor boards laid on top, but some flowed into the cavity in the external walls and into her bedroom where it seeped everywhere, very quietly!





















Prior to their departure they had to endure holes being cut in interior walls and drilled into the exterior walls, but it was only once they'd left that the full extent of the damage became apparent: every wooden floor in the house (and there are many!) will have to be replaced, and our en-suite bathroom has to be ripped out and replaced...















So when darling daughter and I landed in Coffs Harbour on Friday after over 30 hours travel back to Australia we went to a hotel for the weekend, and as of yesterday we are the less-than-impressed inhabitants of a slightly damp, roach-infested holiday "cottage" in Sawtell. Jim, the builder, assures me that we only have to endure it for 2 weeks. Fingers crossed; that would be great, but the landlord's agent rang me earlier to ask me to come in for a 'quiet chat' early next week and so I'm not entirely sure what's going on!

Ciao!

You're quite right, I have been RUBBISH at posting anything while away, but there are several reasons for that: I've been too busy eating/drinking/seeing the sights/relaxing/reading books oh, and did I mention we've had the best part of two weeks with no internet connection? It's a curiously liberating experience although after a while one begins to get the fidgets and wonder how everyone else in the Blogsphere is getting on...

I'm not trying to make you jealous, but I should tell you that I'm typing this sitting in the bar area of Antica Casa Coppo, our home-from-home in Venice. We're down to the last few days of our holiday and by this time next week Darling Daughter and I will be at home and may even have managed some sleep.

Talking of home, a new complication has arisen in our lives that I'm going to have DEAL with once I get back to Oz... just before Darling Daughter and Dearest Husband departed Coffs Harbour to join me in Europe they discovered a bad water leak coming from our en-suite bathroom and manifesting itself in Daughter's bedroom. Further exploration on the part of our managing agent and landlady have revealed serious problems in the first floor plumbing that will require a complete tear-out and re-build of our en-suite bathroom and Daughter's bedroom, plus other associated areas. Why do renovating builders not realise that sealing water pipes in concrete is a recipe for disaster...?

The implications for us are huge: naturally the insurance company is dragging their feet which means that far from completing the repairs while we were conveniently away for 6 weeks, they won't even get started until early November. As water and electricity are being switched off during renovations we are required to move out!!! Our agents are offering us temporary accommodation at a vastly reduced rate in a holiday flat but we have no information yet about whether it will even be suitable... I, for one, cannot just move all my printmaking kit on a whim: it's too heavy and there's too much of it, so I am going to have to continue to work at the 'old' place, wherever we eventually end up sleeping. I'm still trying to clarify what our agent's and landlady's obligations towards us are under the contract: if we chose not to accept the offer of the holiday flat, does that mean they have no further obligation to find us somewhere to live? And as our tenancy agreement is shortly due to expire is there a possibility that they may simply give us notice to quit..? And what about Toby: can we take him with us or...? Lots of questions and currently no answers! Bummer.

My head hurts!

Not because of the copious amounts of wine I've been drinking with friends and family during my stay in Bristol, but because today I was required to think... and quite hard, too. I've attended my first sessions at the IMPACT conference in Bristol and it's been really interesting.

I'm fascinated by what happens when artists and academics get together (and yes, I appreciate that there are artists who are academics as well as academics who are artists and that sort of dualism isn't particularly useful). I've not been to other professional conferences (unless you count the times I used to deliver sessions on the tax advantages of charitable giving, many years ago, but that was when I was a speaker, not in the audience) and so I'm very ignorant but I imagine that if attending a conference on theoretical physics, say, then all the sessions and most of the speakers would be 'on topic'. What struck me today was the diversity of topics in discussion and how difficult it must be to try and corrall speakers into an overall session theme.

The consequence is that topics are so diverse that sometimes the session titles are either misleading or meaningless! My first session on 'Theoretical Approaches to Print' was fine, with erudite discussions on materiality, the interface between art and science in one speaker's art practice and the digital matrix in printmaking.

The second session I attended was titled 'Print in the Social Sphere' and whilst I was impressed by the diversity of speakers I detected a lack of underlying cohesion in the topics discussed. We moved from talking about the paradox of printmaking and the implied production of multiples as an egalitarian art form against the elitism of art collecting and the consequent incongruity of multiple anything in a world awash with multiples, through the necessarily emotive topic of printmaking as activism, as evidenced in the political commentary in apartheid South Africa (with the attendant AWFUL verb-making word "conscientize"! YUK), through to a presentation on lamp posts as a public gallery space in Buenos Aires to a final two-voiced ramming-the-point-home-repeatedly piece about sustainability in printmaking that was a bit like a Fry and Laurie monologue but without the humour or the self-awareness.

At least one person fell asleep, which is not entirely surprising since the Q&A session at the end degenerated into a holier than thou exercise in individual print practices, debating the merits of particular sorts of vegetable oil in post-printmaking cleanup. No-one was satisfied with stating that they use vegetable oil instead of solvents without scoring points about whether ground nut oil is more ecologically acceptable than blended vegetable oil which might contain palm oil or soy bean oil, both of which are intensively farmed in South America, destroying huge swathes of rainforest. I sat there with eyebrows slightly raised as delegates around the room chipped in, only slightly surprised that we didn't extend the conversation to include a debate about the energy embodied in producing plastic oil bottles versus cans...

What's on the schedule for tomorrow? Well, I think I'm going to a morning session about 'Applied Arts', then coming home for a short time to meet up with Dearest Husband and Darling Daughter, who are currently flying over the Indian Ocean on their way to Europe, and then I'm off to the UWE campus at Bower Ashton for a product fair, academic poster event, open portfolio sessions and various exhibitions, which I'm really looking forward to (if I can figure out how to get to the campus without a car). Adios!

Ode to Bristol

Once upon a time I used to live in Bristol, which for those who don't know is an historical city about 150km due West of London. I spent 4 years in London and had a great time, but eventually the noise and the traffic and the sheer effort involved in getting anywhere begin to take their toll and I moved on. I'd been to Bristol when I did a 1 year post-grad business course at Bristol University when I left Oxford and had fallen in love with the place. Walking through the city centre you pass remnants of medieval walls, a 14th century church, huge red brick warehouses from the Industrial Revolution and catch glimpses of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's famous Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon Gorge. What's not to like? There's opera and world class theatre, a livly arts and music scene, a zoo, children's festivals, the annual balloon fiesta, plenty of wine and food and some of the best restaurants in the UK... and when you get on the bus the driver is likely to ask you, "Where's that to then, lover?" with a Bristolian burr. I love it.

I've been living in Australia for 3 years now (blimey!), and haven't been back to Bristol for two years, so I'm having a strange time of it now I'm here. I've been away long enough for there to have been major building projects completed that were only in the very early stages of demolition and clearance when I left, and yet in other ways I haven't been away for long enough for the smaller things to have changed. For example, Cabot Circus is finished and open and when I left it was mainly a huge headache for Bristol drivers who had to navigate lots of roadworks on a major route in order to skirt around the edge of a mammoth building site.





















The development is a huge shopping complex that has revitalised a slightly seedy-looking part of town called Broadmead. Bristol was heavily bombed during WWII and the medieval centre was destroyed. In the brave new world of the 1960s Broadmead was turned into a purely commercial area with no residential accommodation, but by the 1990s it was failing, really, and the big stores had mostly moved to an out-of-town complex called The Mall on the edge of the motorway. Broadmead was full of second-string shops, the odd department store and a lot of empty buildings. And it wasn't pretty.
















You could argue that Cabot Circus isn't pretty either, and I wonder what it will look like in 20 years' time, but for now it's quite a thrusting sort of development, covered in a paned roof to keep out the British weather.

The developers have at least tried to beautify the development... Walking along the outer walls on my way to the bus stop, and feeling a little disoriented because it didn't come out quite where I'd expected, I found the above wall of what looks like etched slate. The imagery comes from something like a medieval herbal and is based, I presume, on what would have been woodcut illustrations. Printmaking is everywhere!










































Do I like Cabot Circus? Hmmm, hard to say. It's difficult to navigate around and a bit brutal in its architecture so I'd say 'not really', at least in an aesthetic sense. What I really did like was the appearance of Harvey Nichols in Bristol! If you don't know the store, perhaps you remember Joanna Lumley forever meeting people for lunch at 'Harvey Nicks' in Absolutely Fabulous? It's synonymous with designer labels and ladies-who-lunch, and it's definitely NOT the sort of place I usually go into. However, despite appearances to the contrary I am a fashion fiend. Yes, I know, this does sound highly unlikely, but since my youth I have in fact read Vogue assiduously and lusted after certain designers. I even have a few choice pieces in my wardrobe, believe it or not, and I can certainly spot Moschino, Commes des Garcons or Dianne von Furstenburg at 100 paces. So it was delightful to spend half an hour in the designer ladieswear department at Harvey Nicks in Bristol with friendly, helpful assistants who didn't mind me drooling all over the clothes! Ahh, the enjoyment.

Anyway, I've had my fix now of Georgian houses, early Victorian terraces, small-but-imaginative front gardens, uneven pavements and lots of greenery, mixed with wonderful views from the hilly streets out over the Mendip hills or West towards Wales. There's been sunshine and scudding clouds in a brisk wind, and plenty of early Autumn leaves to kick through. It's been fun being in Bristol again.