Thursday 10 July 2014

a sideways look

I always enjoy the joke of the signs on these shutter garage doors at Spike Island studios.

From one direction it reads:



If you walk in the opposite direction, you are instructed:

But if you look at the doors face-on the message is not so clear:

 

Which just goes to show that facing things head-on may not always be the best strategy.  Some things only make sense with a sideways look.

Friday 20 June 2014

a quilt for a little girl

J has just had her fourth birthday.  She is moving house this summer.  A joyful quilt for her bed seemed in order.

This is what I made.


She seems to like it.

Sunday 9 March 2014

uxorious


Uxorious is a strange and rather ugly word to describe a man who loves his wife.  Its root is the Latin word 'uxor' (wife).  Where it is used at all in modern English it may take a slightly pejorative tone, implying a slightly cringe-worthy devoted love.  Or it may be misused entirely.   In his book Levels of Life Julian Barnes says “I bridle at the misuse of the adjective ’uxorious’.  If we don’t look out, it will come to describe ‘a man who has many wives’, or even (that dubious phrase) ‘a lover of women’.  It doesn’t mean this.  It describes – and always will, whatever future dictionaries may permit – a man who loves his wife.”

My father was an uxorious man, devoted to my mother.  He delighted in buying her clothes and was quite dapper on his own account.  It therefore follows that when, in his later years, he gave me a sum of money for my birthday or Christmas present, I generally spent it on clothes.  Since his death I have missed the ritual of the birthday card with a cheque and the self indulgent shopping spree.  So I have a new birthday ritual, which is to go out on that shopping spree anyway with my own money to buy something that I think of as being from him. 

I am lucky to have an uxorious husband who takes pleasure in buying me clothes for my birthday too, so this year I have indulged in two lovely pieces of fair-trade clothing:

From my Pa, a block-printed tunic dress by Accacia from Chandni Chowk, which pleases the natural dye geek in me by having a swing ticket enumerating the dyes used (alizarin, indigo, madder, cassis, iron, pomegranate, turmeric)

 

And from Steve this rather lovely summery retro-styled number from People Tree.



It's not even my birthday yet, but the current sunny weather is making me look forward to venturing out in my new threads.  Thanks,  chaps!