Canvas & Aluminium

This morning the last Land Rover ran off the production line at the Solihull works. So we’re regaled by journos talking about the Land Rover Defender being born in 1948. No it wasn't. As you all know I was born in 1948 along with the Land Rover. (Are you really sure? Ed.)The Defender came much later after the Series 2. Anyway, farewell. And thanks again to Toby Savage who is amongst a very elite group that knows everything about the wonderful original, and indeed allowed me to photograph his 1948 model for the Shire book cover above. He is probably sitting at his kitchen table now, with head in his hands and fist closing round a starting handle.

Grape Nose

Researching nursery rhyme illustrations I came across this gem by Charles Folkard (1878-1963) and couldn’t wait to share it with you. I bought it as a single sheet, but have no idea as to the title of the book it’s from. Paramount amongst childrens’ book illustrators, Folkard started out as a conjuror, (no wonder his pictures are so magical), but turning to illustration he created the Teddy Tail character for the Daily Mail and is famous for The Arabian Nights, Grimms’ Fairy Tales and Pinocchio.

 

I first came across his work when many years ago I bought Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes, edited by L.Edna Walter. Apart from his four coloured pictures, this 1924 edition has Folkard drawings liberally spotting the text, including some exquisite silhouettes. I’ll always remember where and when I bought it, on a hot summer’s afternoon in Great Malvern in that bookshop that’s at the top of the steps leading up from the gardens in front of the Priory. I looked down on them from a hot stuffy little room and saw Edward Elgar slowly walking towards the Priory with his dogs. For only a second or two, but that’s another story.

The Wolseley Awakening

Amazing how a simple image from a 1950 copy of the Illustrated London News can act as a touchstone to an event that, if not entirely forgotten, was at least tucked away amongst the deeper recesses of my memory files. As I dust this one off, all I ask of you is that you imagine this Wolseley Six-Eighty is painted in glossy black.

I was between schools, aged I suppose around thirteen, and this was the geography master's car. When the summer holidays came, and before the new term started elsewhere, I joined a school camping trip to Symond's Yat in the Wye Valley for a week. A host of teachers were in attendance, all now calling us pupils by our first names. It was so surprising to be called 'Peter' by the PE master instead of 'Ashley you cretin', and having him talk to me nicely instead of blowing a whistle in my face. We gathered at the school on the Saturday, and were divided up between the cars, one of which was towing a trailer with all the tents. Including the geography master there were six of us squeezed into the big Wolseley. I was in the front on a bench seat, with a GIRL in-between me and the driver. Having two brothers I'd never been this close to one ever. So we drove off with me staring ahead, bright red and clasping my hands between my knees. After a couple of miles our driver said "Peter, wouldn't you be more comfortable if you sat with your arm around Diane? You don't mind do you Diane?". I can't remember what she said but she smiled at me and I smiled at her and thought to myself  "Oh God you're so pretty". And with delicately pink cheeks and black curly hair she certainly was.

Three or four hours later we got to a muddy field near Symond's Yat and we fell out of the car. Diane ran off to join her girlfriends and I was left gazing fondly after her. For the rest of the holiday I could be seen lurking in the distance, tripping over guy ropes and behaving suspiciously in the environs of the dining tent. Quite rightly she completely ignored me, and I was grateful for an overnight canoe trip downriver with three mates, just so that I didn't have to worry about it all for a while.

I can't remember ever seeing this Wondrous Beauty again, but Wolseleys will always have a special place in my heart. Even the one my dad drove into the side of a Midland Red bus. Another awakening. But it does make me think. My Youngest Boy will be thirteen very soon. But somehow I don't think for one minute he'll have to be encouraged to put his arm round a girl.

The 1948 Show

On Radio 4's Saturday Live last week I learnt of Dr.Irving Finkel's Great Diary Project which has so far accumulated 6,000 unpublished diaries. He rightly maintains that journals kept as a personal record, and not intended for publication, can be far more interesting than, say, Simon Cowell's. (My example.) The Rev.Kilvert's diaries are amongst the best of these unintended treasures, a searchlight reaching deep into the past of 1870's Welsh Borders and Wiltshire.


All this made me return to a diary I picked up from an antique stall last year. Firstly because it's such a delightful object in its own right ,(leather cover, beautiful gilt script and marbled endpapers),secondly because there are full entries in blue fountain pen ink on virtually every page, written in a very neat if occasionally illegible hand, and lastly because it's for the year I was born. (Surely not? Ed.)


I have to admit I got totally absorbed in the everyday life of a young female nurse living and working in London. Nothing earth shattering, but another searchlight into the minutiae of an anonymous life. The rigours of working in a London hospital in post war London, her worries and desires, the occasional cocktail party. Interspersed with mad dashes by Southern electric train to go sailing on The Solent.


Naturally the first page I turned to was my birthday; so I learnt that as my mother was bringing me into an unsuspecting world in the back bedroom of a Victorian house near Leicester, Nurse X (her address in the back is under 'Myself') was getting her hair done and wondering how she would get one with the new 'moderately attractive' Ward Sister. One thing she wouldn't have thought of was that a baby being born as she did her duties would read her diary 67 years later.


All very thought provoking. The next thing to do is to get it transcribed and then to try and piece together all the clues that must be hidden within as to who she might have been.

Creature Feature No.11

So. Happy New Year Everyone!  After all the pies, Stilton and moshing over our cake to Metallica's Enter The Sandman, we go through the first gate into the first Unmitigated field of 2016. Above is a delight discovered on our Cheese Run. This entails getting lost (everytime, it's a Christmas Custom) in the quiet pastures of the Nottinghamshire / Leicestershire borders trying to find Colston Bassett. SatNav not allowed, we always seem to find ourselves facing the wrong way as Noddy Holder belts out Merry Christmas Everybody. (Noddy won't be drawn on what he makes every year, just says it's his winter fuel allowance.) But once the best Stilton in the world was stowed away we progressed to the tiny market town of Bingham. A town suffering somewhat from inappropriate out-of-scale development but still retaining good buildings around its market square. Except, as usual, for a Co-Op that pays no respect to anything around it.

But in a little side street were these gems on the frontage of J.Butler's butchers. It was, I think, still operational as a shop, but maybe not one with cows' and sheeps' heads knocking about. What I found amazing was that the two animals are on individual whole tiles, with a decorative border that's worthy of Walter Crane. (You can gauge their size by comparing them with the normal tiles surrounding them, which of course are square.) I think they're fabulous, and a reminder that there was once a time when the link between animals in the fields and the joints in our ovens wasn't so blurred.

The Unmitigated Christmas Table Top

A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Schooner of Pentels

This is probably the most inconsequential blog post I've ever written (no, there's plenty of those: Ed.). It's just that two things happened yesterday that confirmed that we do now live in two parallel retail universes. One is how we'd actually like it to be: shops on a high street where we hope we'll get anything we want (within reason), and cyberspace where although we won't be able to touch anything we'll still get our hearts' desires and won't have to wait long to get them. But I do like to give local traders first dibs. So, wanting black Pentel Sign pens for a set of drawings I'm doing, I enquired at Ryman's in my local town. They were very helpful as always but not only didn't they stock them they hadn't heard of them either. This was the fibre tip pen that once rivalled the Biro in its ubiquity. On Saturday Youngest Boy discovered the one I had got and after a weekend of drawing and emptying it said it was the best pen he'd ever drawn with. A quick tap-tap on the keyboard yesterday means a pack of twelve are now winging their way to Ashley Towers.

From Ryman's I went to the local cookshop, specifically for sherry schooners. "Sherry what?" asked Bloke A. "Schooner" I said, staring out into the street. "Shooner?". " No, look," but then Bloke B (a manager I supposed) said "No, haven't seen one of those for years. Sort of thing you would've seen in 1970's pubs." I said thank you and left. Tappity-tap. Six schooners were dispatched to me this morning.

General ignorance aside, in both cases I wouldn't have minded waiting if both shops had said they could get them for the next day. After all, I know all about Click 'n' Collect now, after having had my first go at it with John Lewis and Waitrose on Saturday. (All went very well until I had to show the girl my driving licence which has a picture of myself sans spectacles that looks like a Photofit of a serial killer.) I know, I know. I've just got to accept how it is, and leave Ryman's for the coloured plastic folders I like and the cookshop for bright red teapots.