Victoria Lochhead

not in the mountains

 

I'm not in the mountains, but I'd like to be, snow, or no snow. Instead I made some postcard pictures because I've been thinking about being there. The words are those from the messages on the cards. I didn't know whether to frame them in different mis-matched old frames, or same-style simple new ones. I'll put them away until I decide. 

Tiffin has a new Amazon box. Somehow she burrowed under the paper. You can see her only tooth. Don't be fooled. When the vet took out her teeth, it's a long tale, but cats' gums work fine for eating and can become like they have razor-sharp shards. The vet left one tooth behind because of anesthetic timings. So Tiffin can still bite me when she's bored or cross, and it does hurt.

 

happy christmas

 

Theis, Bisgaard, Svartman, and Anneka

Happy Christmas to you, and those you love.

flowers

Last weekend I worked in our back garden. It's surrounded by high old brick walls, which are overgrown with ivy and vines and roses. The weather was beautiful, and I was feeling a bit like Mary Lennox because a robin kept me company. He stayed close. His eyes were beautiful, and all in all it felt very much like stolen time. 

During the evenings I've been doing some simple cross-stitch work with Danish flower thread, from a couple of early, 1960s, Gerda Bengtsson patterns which I changed a bit. When I'm a little tired, her patterns are a really gentle and easy way to pass the time when curled up in a chair with a quilt and a cat. I used some old linen which is a dusty natural colour. They are of a foxglove, and I think the other is a type of veronica but I knew it in German as Gamander-Ehrenpreis.

 

the chicken and the eggs

I can answer the question. The chicken came first. Last night I worked a little cross stitch chicken with some Danish flower thread from an old pattern. It's going to become an egg cosy tonight, well, hopefully. I've an old hemp and linen tea towel that I'll use to make a thick lining, and the back will be linen like the chicken side, but maybe it'll be with a little something embroidered on it too. Last week I finished some work which took me a long time, and because I'm a bit snow blind with words I'm doing some very gentle sewing and drawing this weekend. 

Yesterday I had a totally girly day. I went for a really long walk around Regents Park in the sunshine, bought a huge mug of hot chocolate, and tried on lots of clothes in far too many shops in Marylebone High Street. I looked at books, and house stuff, and wonderful food. I bought a magazine and a book. I'm going to make some toffees with roasted almonds and some chocolate kringles with hazelnuts for presents from recipes in the Swedish book. This morning I made big fondant au chocolat for tonight. Serious quantities of chocolate might ease the prawn of doom atmosphere we've had 'round here today, the one that might have something to do with England and rugby...Tiffin and I know when to keep our heads down and bake a chocolate cake.

And I drew some guillemots eggs. I love drawing. 

 

21

 Where does the time go?

the kiosk

 

This is a model of a kiosk which I made a while ago. Usually it's on a shelf above my desk but the finial has been leaning for ages so I've brought it home to mend. It's all made up really, and the inside is just how it worked out. The posters are images that I cut from magazines and washed. The lead roof isn't lead but I made rolls and painted it to look like lead.

I thought that I might try to make a model of a London Cabbies' shelter. I could go on trips with a purpose. Perhaps I'd have something to eat, outside not in. I could take lots of photos, maybe make some sketches with some dimensions noted, and afterwards I would work up some coloured measured drawings. I know that there are thirteen shelters which remain and that they are all Listed. They were built after Shaftesbury founded the Cabmen's Shelter Fund in 1875, and missionaries from the London City Mission visited the cabmen whilst they rested and ate in them.

plans

Is any one else making plans for the Rugby World Cup, 18 September-31 October?

the basket of loveliness

My holidays were a treat but now I'm back in the jug again. I've taken on a lot and things are a bit challenging for me. Since I was a child I've drawn most days, and always made things, and now I didn't do either for a few months. My Moomin calendar promises me that things will be different from 1 October. Meanwhile, how am I coping with myself? The basket of loveliness.

Into the basket of loveliness I am putting all the ideas of things that I cannot yet do. There are books and magazines that I will read, and recipes for preserves and jams that I might make. There are Bohemian and Venetian nineteenth century tiny glass trade beads that I will thread. I have the shirting cottons for a quilt that I didn't work out. And there's the flower thread and linen for embroidery of the wild verbascum that I saw growing on doorsteps when I was on the Ile de Ré. I did buy myself the swimsuit of loveliness when I was there, it's in the basket too, and I will wear it to swim at the Lido. A while ago I found an unfinished finest wool early twentieth century nightdress. I will work all the embroidery with white Danish flower thread and find the palest of ribbons to thread through the eyelet holes that I will have to learn how to make. I think the nightdress might shrink a little and become white when I soak it for the first time.

The biggest project of the winter will be our front and back gardens. Our pavement vault has collapsed. It's a long and boring tale. We're doing emergency stuff but all the rest has to be planned. We will have new walls and will have to rebuild the flight of steps to our front door. I kind of think that we will keep all the climbing roses and the olive and bay trees but otherwise start again with our soft landscaping. That is all the thinking that I have allowed myself to have about new gardens.

The basket of loveliness is getting very full.

 

PS. My favourite winter coat arrived. It is wonderful and all that I had hoped for....but it is so enormous that it fits David not me. He likes it very much. I will see him wearing it often. I don't think I will buy another. Matching coats? Yikes. No way.

maybe I found my coat

Strange, but true, I have been searching for a favourite winter coat for many years and the right one just never came along. The idea of it has been in my head for such a long time that I've made everything far too difficult, most likely impossible for myself. 

What was I hoping for? It would have been great if it had been made in the 1960s. It would have to be Harris tweed, but subtle with lots of gentle colours, certainly no blues, greens, or natural heathers, but  from the palette of the coat of a donkey. dusty with greys, and all sorts of chocolates and tobacco, maybe even the tiniest hint of terracotta. 

It would be not too long and almost straight, but no pleats, definitely no strong seams or shaping, it would be simply single breasted and have raglan sleeves, but no stuck on stuff like pocket flaps or shoulder pieces, and especially no belt. The collar would be as small and as rounded as possible with next to no lapels.

Most important of all my favourite coat would have round brown leather buttons.

This winter I will wear my favourite coat for long walks, to go to the London Fields Lido, on sites, and all around when I am working. I'm saying I will wear my favourite coat for all of these things because I have finally stopped wandering around and peeping over the edge of the top diving board and I am in mid air. After many years I have taken the plunge. I bought a Harris tweed 1960s coat on Etsy from California. Its label and a clue about colours are in the photo above. It's now on its way to Camden. I am excited.

I am leaving for my summer holidays tomorrow.

 

back in the day

 

We live very near to the railway lands of Kings Cross. I walked home from the British Library earlier this week and took some phone photos. The coal drops are still scaffolded. The new spaces become more and more exciting. We bought our house on the way to thirty years ago. We were students and it was pretty much derelict. The floors had collapsed, there was a dodgy 5 amp lighting circuit, no heating, and our bathroom was a lean-to against the back wall of the house. We moved in, and did house stuff after work and at weekends. The boys came along. We still have open fires, and our bath stayed in the lean-to between the kitchen and the garden until very recently. 

For a long time I used to walk down to Kings Cross and wander onto the demolition sites. Nobody bothered about my being there. I had a hard hat and my camera and I took thousands of photos, and made drawings. All the negatives are put away, and my drawings are on a bit difficult to photograph butter paper. I love stealing onto a site close to the moment before a building is demolished, I always will. There's a kind of stillness that's rare. 

I found some prints of the flats which were demolished, next to the German Gym, they were the ones which I cared about the most. Below are a couple of faded old scanned demolition drawings which I made years ago. They're of a site in Kentish Town Road, by the Canal, and a site in Barnet Grove, Bethnal Green.

 

cat sitting

I didn't put up any pictures of Tiffin for a while. She's cream-crackered. The boys 'looked after' her this summer. These are some of their phone photos. Indian takeaways came from The Tiffin Tin and they coaxed her into a box. 

common green lacewing

This common green lacewing is on the wall just above my desk this morning, how lovely is that.

in saint-martin-de-ré

 

I did stay also in Saint-Martin-de-Ré on the Ile-de-Ré for a while this summer. It was lovely to do not too much in such a beautiful place. It's a World Heritage Site, and completely enclosed by really interesting Vauban fortifications. Most days I went for long walks along the ramparts. I drew and took pictures of buildings, I read a little and swam in the pool in the garden. In the way of old postcards I should put a cross on my bedroom window, but it's the one that's open in the photo above.

These images show the fortifications, today, and as they were laid out in the late seventeenth century. The citadelle is still a prison. Curiously, the guide book advised that only one prisoner had escaped recently. In his bid for freedom he had stolen an inflatable dinghy from a tourist and attempted to paddle across to the mainland, but he had been "caught very quickly". 

 

 

some drawings

These are some drawings I made this summer. They are merlan (whiting), roussette (spotted dogfish), rougets (red mullet), chinchards (jack mackerel), truite fario (brown trout), pinces de crabe (crab claws). Sylvie arranged the fins of the merlan for me.

being near cognac

 

I was near Cognac staying with the loveliest of friends. We did memorable everyday gentle things. I worked and I drew. In the morning the sky was cerulean and I swam with diving swallows and white butterflies. Sylvie made amazing jam and a sunflower tablecloth. Every evening we drank cognac-schweppes and I slept like a baby.

two sardines save the day

Life feels a bit like this at the moment, yet two sardines may have saved the day. I got up very very early, and bought these. I don't have a smoking habit, but I did need a sardine.

about drawing

Part of the pleasure of doing these is the feel of drawing with a reed pen on watercolor paper. There aren’t any preliminary drawings, I just start off and find out as I draw what the creature is going to be like, and discover something about the strange relationship. I don’t really know beforehand. Most of the time the women seem to be in charge—whatever the significance of that is. One of my friends said she found them “hilarious and slightly alarming.” Quentin Blake

I thought I'd share these. I first saw them a few years ago. He called them women holding strange creatures. I think they're wonderful.

Why drawing matters and I believe, profoundly, that drawing matters.

mothers ruin

 

Blackberries and bilberries, raspberries and strawberries. And I slept like a baby.