needled

Needled reviews: The F-Word. Tuesdays, 9pm, Channel 4
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Allen Lane, 2008)

Don’t get me wrong, I do not like The F-Word, but it is worth watching it occasionally for a few cheap laughs. You know the bit I mean: when Gordon tells you how to make his pea and lettuce soup in just one minute, all in words of just one syllable. Riotous! We are somehow meant to see Gordon’s failure to use any adjectives at all as the signature of his virility, “full of balls, energy, and really great food,” as the Channel-4 tag-line puts it. (Full of balls? Sure is. . .) And the gender stereotypes peddled in Gordon’s brisk how-tos are just as strange and crass as those associated with Nigella. Man does not describe. Oh no. Describing words redundant, and unmanly. Man only know how to use imperative. Imperative style of cooking instructions works best with short, firm words. More difficult with two syllables. Very hard to make the word “mushrooms” sound manly. “Mushrooms” does not sound like manly decree. Man quickly mutters “mushrooms” then gets on with real business of shouting Real Man Words. “WHISK! TOSS! STIR!” etc. If Nigella’s mellifluous, adjectival style is supposed to be read in direct relation to her cleavage, then the F-Word’s use of the imperative might be seen as the culinary equivalent of a wanking circle, with wee Gordon in the centre, braying out commands (Shaft! Girth! Beat! Etc)

Gordon.

But I bring the F-word to your attention because of a particular moment in Tuesday’s show. The redoubtable Janet Street Porter appeared on set, fresh from her carefully stage-managed experience of rearing and slaughtering two veal calves. The viewer had already been treated to the money-shot of the poor beasts’ deaths, and what we clearly needed now was Janet to preach at us about our lamentable food-buying habits. We must never buy cheap meat again. No we mustn’t. Instead, we should feast only on luxury meat products humanely reared by media luminaries. While dispensing her new-found farming wisdom, Janet was dressed in a formless top, machine-knit in a vibrant shade of puce. It was a truly hideous garment (sorry, Janet).

“I suppose you knit that yourself?” said Gordon, inferring that Janet’s experience of slaughtering “her boys” had turned her all rustic, or something.
“No I fooking didn’t, Gordon,” retorted Janet, “this is a designer item.”

puce

Now, I know that I’m more sensitive than your average jane to anti-knitting slurs, but this was about so much more than knitting. Janet enthused about how raising the calves, and watching the process of their lives and deaths, had completely transformed her perception of meat. She now knew what was involved with what she put on her plate. And everyone should think about how the meat they eat is raised and killed. Apart from the patronising attitude, and the unavoidable questions Janet did not address about cost, class, and the ethics of raising a niche luxury product like veal, this is sort of fair enough. Yes, Janet. We should all think about process, and production. But, the problem is, that she hadn’t really engaged with process at all. She had merely played a game to camera: a game with a neatly plotted narrative arc, with contrived hooks and encounters, with a particular rhetorical language (that of reluctant maternity—quite bizarre) and with moments of typically ‘direct’ and ‘irreverant’ Street-Porter-like entertainment. “’Oh no, it’s pooing again’, moans Janet,” to quote The F-Word website. Janet had engaged about as much with the slow processes and difficult realities of farming as she had with the making of her sweater, and her quick retort about the obvious superiority of ‘designer’ to ‘hand-made’ spoke volumes.

So is it just me, or does so much of this currently popular moralising about process (particularly as it concerns food) have an incredibly hollow ring? It is just far too easy for Gordon, Janet and their like to preach to the middle classes about the importance of the means of producing edible luxuries, before nipping out to snap up, promote, or sell other commodities with little thought about the process of their making—or the livelihoods of their makers, for that matter.

But one place where such discussions of process are neither hollow or easy is in Richard Sennett’s excellent new book, The Craftsman. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should. In a series of radical, lyrical essays, this venerable sociologist makes the case for a reassessment of the idea of work itself. The making of things for use or beauty are never, he argues, a matter of individual brilliance, the romantic imagination, or isolated talent. Rather, for him, excellence lies somewhere between the eye and hand, in material practices and processes, and the slow engagement with them over time. Sennett’s notion of craft is something equally applicable to the design of a mobile-phone or a line of linux code, as much as a Stradivari violin , or a particular recipe for Poulet a la d’Albufera. For him, all these ‘crafts’ involve the same struggle with tools and processes, the same issues of encountering and solving problems, of developing and refining skill and focus, of learning how repetition itself can be creative, and of coming to know the singular pleasure of doing something well for its own sake. It is a book of tremendous breadth and sweep but which is also rich in details. In fact, for me, Sennett’s singularity, both as a writer and a public intellectual, is found in such details: in the bumper that really bothers him in the parking garage of a post-modern building; in his discussion of the symbolic values of bricks; in his thoughtful self-awareness of being an outsider as he watches a group of healthcare professionals transfixed by the image of a troublesome large intestine. And any man who can begin a sentence with the words “consider, for instance, an irregular tomato” and from that opening build an argument about the how an idea of virtue inheres in thing-ness, is OK by me.

Epinglier (pin making) Diderot, Encyclopedie (1762)

Lurking around the back of Sennett’s thesis is a familiar argument about the de-humanising effects of the modern and post-modern division of labour. He is quite explicit about his fondness for the all-encompassing curiosity of the mid-eighteenth century, or the undifferentiated artisanal labour of the medieval workshop. Not for him Adam Smith’s efficiently produced pins. This practical resistance to the division of labour—and the division of knowledge too, perhaps—is something he clearly applies to his own intellectual craft-work. He writes about the way children treat the spaces and equipment of playgrounds just as articulately as he does about Martin Heidegger.

Sennett’s thoughts about process have multiple and resonant contexts for me. For example, his remarks about being-in-the-thing came to my mind very strongly, when I read Mandy’s account of the pleasure of the rhythm of knitting her swallowtail shawl:

“We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labour, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it’s nothing like this. Doing something over and over is stimulating when organised as looking ahead. The substance of the routine may change, metapmorhose, improve, but the emptional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled crafsman has extended rhythm to the hand and eye.” (p. 175)

. . .and his section on mess chimes very strongly with Felix’s and Kirsty’s Messy Tuesdays posts:

“To arrive at that goal [that of being fit-for-purpose] the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess—wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.” (p.161)

And what Sennett has to say about the importance of modesty, and the awareness of one’s own inadequacies, while engaging with material processes is very moot too. Perhaps this is something for Janet and Gordon to bear in mind.

*You can hear Richard Sennett talking with Laurie Taylor and Grayson Perry about craftsmanship, and process in this episode of Thinking Allowed.

I’m following the train of a thought here, and very much bouncing off the ideas of Felix — who has just written a superb post about the joy of the tiny, one-inch, button badge. The tale of her numinous birds — separated from their childhood context, immortalised on a badge, then re-united with their original source — really gets to the heart of the allure of the badge-object, and has made sense of why I find badges so appealing. Its got me thinking generally about the miniature, and the metonymic.

If you are wondering what on earth I mean, you will find both in the work of Edinburgh Jewellery artist, Grainne Morton.

(image courtesy of the artist)

Morton works with found objects — tiny pieces of old lawn and lace, details, buttons, scraps of things — and, through a precise and very beautiful use of settings, combines all this wee stuff into small, numinous objects. In the brooch above, for example, the floral setting joins the unconnected scraps it contains, lending them the cohesion of a single, lovely thing. But what is so interesting about Morton’s work, to me, is less the formal unity of objects like this one, but rather the way that, in other of her pieces, the tiny fragments of stuff suggest themselves as figures or metonyms: they seem to be the last remaining parts of an absent whole. For example, the wee details in the piece below seem to be bits of a half-remembered story; what remains of a buried memory; the relics of a lost narrative that can’t ever be told again:

(courtesy of the artist)

The setting does so much work here. It acts like a spider-diagram of memory — drawing threads and connections between the different fragments — but it also lends each fragment the luminous quality of a piece of stained glass. Through the setting, the piece becomes a window, shining out of a pale-blue past which will never be regained. Proustian jewellery!

Miniature, wearable objects have long carried this kind of metonymic function (that is, as parts of an absent whole). In the Eighteenth Century, wearing a miniature portrait of one’s beloved made a presence of their absence as the tiny representation of the person stood in for the person themselves. When combined in lockets, friendship boxes or mourning bracelets, the miniature took on an even greater commemorative potency, as actual parts of the lost person (such as hair) might be preserved alongside their image. Wearing the fragments of one’s sentimental attachments about one’s very person reached a sort of peak in the eye miniatures popular at the end of the century:

(© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

These miniatures were often produced following bereavement, and there is so much more to say about them than I can here*. What really interests me, though, is the way that this particularly powerful part of a person suggests (in a very distinctive way) the lost memory of the whole person: a memory which, like those called up by Grainne Morton’s brooches, will never be fully regained. For it is not just the past, or memory, or the dear thoughts of your beloved that you see in the eye. It is loss itself, looking right back at you.

Grainne Morton’s pieces do not (of course) suggest The Void, but I think theres an obvious comparison to be made between the use of settings in her work and that of this eye miniature. Surrounded by jewels, and jewel-like itself, the eye is made precious by its setting. It is made into a separate thing — a fragment separated from its whole — a tiny detail that, because it is broken from its context, can now be looked at, scrutinised, properly treasured.

It is Grainne Morton’s use of settings that makes her brooch of pale-blue fragments seem so precious and evocative. And this brings me back to Felix’s button badge, and to badges generally. Setting any detail or fragment into a tiny wearable badge-thing has an effect that is just powerful as that of the portrait miniature. It makes the scraps precious, as well as calling up the wonder and absence of a lost, proustian whole (See Felix’s post again!). And what’s so great about badges (unlike eighteenth-century miniatures) is that they are cheap, portable objects that everyone can wear. As such, they highlight how the ordinary is also immensely precious, intensely numinous. This is what’s so fantastic about the work of the Mundane Appreciation Society. By setting incidental stuff in an object that is tiny and lovely — but also democratic and accessible — their badges make jewels out of the everyday.

*See Hanneke Grootenboer, “Treasuring the Gaze: Eye-Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision” Art Bulletin (Sept, 2006). See also Marcia Pointon, “Surrounded With Brilliants: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth Century England” Art Bulletin (March, 2001). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an incredible — and quite spooky — collection of late eighteenth-century eye-miniatures.

I have been getting troubled by the tam. It is a nice tam. After passing it a few times, abandoned on the path, I just couldn’t leave it for the rain to rain on and the dogs to piss on. But it isn’t mine. And how will its owner find it again?
So I made a sign:

. . . I put my details on it, and I went and put it where I found the tam.

If you’ll excuse some trumpet-blowin for a moment, I have a piece in the current issue of Selvedge about the doll-art of Tabitha Moses. I find Tabitha’s work incredibly suggestive for many reasons, especially her thoughtful engagement with stitch as both process and mark. I urge anyone who’s interested to have a look at the catalogue from her superb exhibition at Bolton Museum, The Lost and the Found, in which Alexandra Wolcowicz’s photography goes some way toward capturing the powerful effect of objects like ‘Untitled’ (2006).

Anyway, in the course of researching the piece, I rediscovered Annie’s room. For those of you who do not know, Annie’s room is a talking point of the Edinburgh attraction Mary King’s Close, which has opened up the fascinating world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century streets hidden beneath the Royal Mile. Many tourist attractions in Scotland seem to feature a wee Annie as a matter of course, but this particular Annie is particularly interesting. In 1992, just after the rediscovery of Edinburgh’s hidden city-beneath-the-city, Japanese psychic, Aiko Gibo, visited a tenement in Mary King’s Close and in one room reportedly felt the tugging hands of a girl abandoned there to die in a plague year. Gibo comforted the restless ghost with a tiny tartan doll, leaving her a curiously nationalist playmate.

(The doll originally left in Annie’s room by Aiko Gibo)

Since then, numerous visitors to what quickly became known as Annie’s room have done the same. While the original doll is now dusty and showing signs of age, she has been joined over the years by hundreds of new companions. There are Barbies and beanie-babies and several Raggedy-Anns. Stuffed animals jostle alongside plastic infants; painted wooden soldiers smile up at porcelain princesses.

(miscellaneous gifts in Annie’s Room)

As well as toys, visitors also leave money for Annie (which is charitably donated by Mary King’s Close, and which, in the last year alone raised a staggering ten-thousand pounds for the Edinburgh Sick Kids Hospital). So what are we to make of this shrine, this spontaneous memorial to the ghost of a girl no-one remembers? Are we moved or repelled by Annie’s room?

When, as a tourist myself several years ago, I first visited Annie’s room, I remember that I was most definitely repelled. The shrine seemed completely grotesque to me. Lying in that cold tenement for a decade or more, some of the toys had taken on the appearance of textile objects abandoned at a landfill site. They were ugly things, making an interesting space, an historic site, ugly too. And my immediate reaction to the story behind the shrine was to regard it as a laughable testimony to a ludicrous superstition. I have no truck with ghosts or saints, a world beyond or an after-life, and the impulse that would lead someone to leave a commemorative object for the ghost of a child who probably never existed seemed to me odd and incomprehensible. Why even bother?

But when I recently enountered Annie’s room again, I discovered that my reactions had completely changed. I’m certainly not saying I suddenly believed in Annie’s ghost, or even that I found anything remotely admirable or appealling in the strongly-held belief that a ghost innhabits that room. I still think that’s all superstitious nonsense. I also continued to find the shrine ugly, both as object and as space. But even though I do not really understand the motive for the placing of the objects, there seems to me now to be something particpatory, celebratory, even radical about Annie’s room. It is a spontaneous act of commemoration, a popular and populist and incredibly democratic act of making in which everyone might play a part. Annie’s room is perhaps folk art at its best, a thing in process, an object in a constant state of becoming, being made and re-made anew every time another visitor adds their contribution. The whole ghost business now seemed weirdly incidental. . .

(the shrine)

. . . and what’s interesting when one begins to look closely at the piled-up array of gifts in that dark tenement is their many different associations. Some have been left with evident care (a pricey bébé) others with apparent thoughtlessness (a screen wipe). So many of Annie’s toys seem just misplaced or random: plastic binoculars, a Westlife CD, an enormous grinning bear. Together, though, these things have transformed a space that is supposed to be terribly spooky and lent it a spectacular ordinariness. Annie’s room has a materiality in which there is a pathos that exceeds, or defies, the uncanny. Like the dolls of Tabitha Moses, the toys in Annie’s room are, in the end just part of the everyday world of things.

(thanks to Lisa Helsby of Mary King’s Close for the tour and the chat)

After reading Felix and Lara’s superb manifesto and posts, I am inspired to celebrate messy tuesdays.

“Neat” in the rooms in which I live, is a rare and fragile thing. There are mountains of mess at the margins of the tidy, just waiting to seep in.

You see here one corner of my work pod. Others may more accurately describe this space as a “cupboard”. Note the mess, above, steadily encroaching on the workspace, below. If you are short, like me, the mess is above eye-level and virtually invisible. And in any case, I am fond of the mess: it is a sort of sculptural testimony to space-saving. It is frankly amazing what you can fit in a space three feet by six feet by eight feet high: computer, printer and associated gadgets; three bookshelves filled with books; my entire stash of fabric and wool; half of my packed away wardrobe (I have to rotate clothes between winter and summer); numerous old handbags and pairs of worn out shoes; boxes of photographs; old letters and greetings cards; a frightening assortment of wooden animals; several eighteenth-century prints; a small rug; a clarinet; me sat at my desk, and a commemorative bottle from 1876 in the shape of George Washington.

I love mess. Mess is archeology.

(who knows what crappy detritus hides beneath the keys, or how long it has been there)

Mess is pleasure, and the memory of pleasure:

(last night’s drinks)

And it is the stuff of potential:

(this mess may soon be made into something else).

Mess is good because it is stuff in the process of becoming. It might well become more mess, or it might turn into something else entirely. I am put in mind of Bill Brown’s account of Toy Story, in a great article he published ten years ago. Brown gives a superb reading of the mutant toys under Sid’s bed –”a one-eyed baby’s head on an erector-set spider, a pair of Barbie legs attached to a miniature fishing pole” — as things of tremendous transformative power. For him, these essentially messy objects are suggestive of a “wish to transfigure things-as-they-are.” To me, tidyness is an acceptance of things as they are. Mess, on the other hand, is the wish for transformation.

I have been making a start thinking about Belle’s quilts. She lived near Blackpool, and the first quilt will be a jolly sea-side-y affair, made up entirely of her stripey tops and T-shirts — of which she had over thirty. In the summer she was always in stripes. I’ve been looking at different methods of piecing and quilting striped fabrics:

. . .and getting lots of inspiration from the way that Jude makes — and writes — about the texture of memory.

Then yesterday I read Vladimir Arkhipov’s Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artefacts, and it completely blew me away.

Arkhipov is an artist, who, for the past decade and a half, has travelled all over Russia collecting and exhibiting ordinary and marvellous hand-made objects. The objects, and the human stories behind their making, are documented in this super book. The bigger picture here is Perestroika and Russia’s economic and political crises from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s — a period when not not only items of luxuriant or complex manufacture were difficult to get hold of, but when everyday commodities became both scarce and pricey. All of the objects in this book are useful, and the vast majority are born out of necessity — but scarcity and privation are only part of the story here. Arkhipov, and the individual makers whose work he brings to light, show how conditions of necessity produce a particular material grammar; a poetry of ingenuity out of the aesthetics of use.

Here is a poetry of mending quite different from those eighteenth-century darning samplers I wrote about a few weeks ago:

Lubov Arkhipova, Socks, Kolomna (1995)

Arkhipov describes his archive of hand-made objects as “socially responsible art . . . in which people are [authors] of their own histories, histories that have unique illustrations — the self-production of everyday things.” His collection shows individuals as creators not just of things, but of meanings, as each maker accounts for their object in their own words. These short texts and multiple voices often produce intriguing dialogues between the makers and their objects through the narratives, memories, and desires with which they are invested. For example Aleski Solomkin’s contribution to the collection is a doormat made of beer-bottle tops that his neighbour and drinking partner kept flicking over the fence into his garden. Forced to clear up the debris of several evenings’ drinking, Solomkin felt “it would have been a shame to just chuck them all away,” and created an object that, beyond its immediate function, is also a quiet celebration of booze, friendship, and neighbourly-ness.

Many makers also speak persuasively about the pleasure of everyday materials and the creative process. For example, this beautifully made leather cap is formed out of an old Soviet punch bag and a worn out pair of leather boots:

Aleksandr Yakimovich, Cap, Moscow (1993)

Aleksandr Yakimovich talks about how the leather of the punchbag softened up over fifteen years of hard use, and of the “great pleasure” he derived from “making something out of something else” and subsequently wearing it. “Its one of my masterpieces” he says of the cap.

In terms of my own thinking about piecing cloth and memory together, the object I was most drawn to was this quilt made by Galina Svistakova for her son, out of the clothes of his brother, his father and his grandmother.

Galina Svistakova, Quilt, Ryazan (c.1990)

Of this wonderful cloth Svistakova’s son says “I think that things possess the aura of their owners, of a person who may very well no longer be with us, that things all carry information and inform us, and harmonise with other people’s things. I believe they live their own independent lives and that we need to. . . harmonise with them and be sensitive to them, in order for them to work in our favour.” This is the sort of functional poetry I can only aspire towards.

I am wary of posting about something so painful and personal, but feel it is important, so here goes.

A few weeks ago, my mother-in-law died. Her death was unexpected, very sudden, and very sad indeed. Belle was only 64, was looking forward to retiring, and, in fact, would have done so this week. She worked as a cleaner at a local school until the day she died.

Belle was a warm, generous, funny, and truly lovely woman.

Losing Belle is utterly awful, and especially so for her three sons.

There have been many painful moments over the past few weeks, but some of the most difficult and emotional have concerned Belle’s things. I am sure anyone who has lost someone knows exactly what I mean. In all the stuff she had around her, Belle is very vividly present and her presence in these material things makes her absence all the more powerful and terrible. She is there in the chance placing of objects all over her house — the scribbled note of train times; the pebble she kept in her handbag as a souvenir from Malta; the hyacinth now sprouting on the kitchen window sill. Every new discovery of an object in which her hands, her actions, are apparent deals another blow. And somehow it is the smallest things — the things that seem most incidental and unimportant — that are the worst of all. A swimming costume still damp in a bag in her car; a forgotten earring left on a bookshelf; a pair of gloves hastily placed in a pocket against the cold.

The shock of the materiality of Belle — of her presence in her absence — was particularly hard when preparing the outfit that she was laid out in. We selected a beautiful suit — one she had recently worn at a wedding — and I packed a case for her. Selecting her underwear, her cosmetics, the hair-rollers she referred to as her “space helmet”, I felt very much as if I was caring for her. But I would never have the opportunity to care for her again.

Belle’s was a very material life. Her job was hard and physical. At 64 she was still lugging around heavy bags of rubbish and scrubbing acres of school floors. She spent every day dealing with the stark materiality of other people’s mess. But she also liked to make things:

. . . and to make things grow

. . . and she was always a woman of style.

Yesterday, Belle’s sons and I began to sort through her lovely things. This was a task of terrible intimacy. It felt as if we were erasing Belle’s materiality, removing the her-ness of her from the rooms that she lived in. But we decided that instead of discarding all her stuff, we might make it into something new, and, in so doing, attempt to transform her loss into a material memory. So over the next few weeks, I shall be making three quilts — one for each of her sons — out of Belle’s clothes and her fabric.

Making is, of course, no sort of compensation for the material fact of Belle’s death, but I hope it will be an act of meaning and memory at least.

I just found this in the bathroom:

Perhaps Jesus (the cat) drew it himself. Or perhaps it is the work of another hand. Either way, I was distantly reminded of the story of the origin of painting, which, according to one popular myth, begins with portraiture and the Corinthian Maid’s tracing of human (rather than cat) features on a wall. I particularly like this depiction of the story by Joseph Wright of Derby (1782-4).

Work in the one-woman factory of seasonal gifts continues apace. I can now see an end to the process and am having to resist the urge to keep several items for myself. These are both good signs. I shall post about the things I’ve made soon. Meanwhile, from the clutter of objects on my desk, I present thing 2.

I received this thing about ten years ago. Its source was a friend who had a part-time job in an antiques shop. I think he pilfered it. Because the shop was in Sussex, and because of the shingly nature of the beach the women are photographed against, I think they are enjoying a day out in Brighton. It is an ambrotype: an early photograph produced by capturing a positive image with wet collodion on a small glass plate. You see it here larger than its real size — around 3 by 3 1/2 inches. It would originally have been protected in a presentation case. This had disappeared long before it found its way to me, and you can see where the black collodion varnish has flaked off in several places. I have protected the fragile back of the image with a piece of black card, so the clear glass no longer peeks through the gaps in the women’s dark clothes. There were, apparently, several ambrotype photographers in Brighton in the late 1850s and early 1860s. By the mid 1860s more portable and less fragile photographic processes had become popular — so the media in which the women are captured dates this moment on the beach to the turn of the 1860s.

I do not have any photographs of friends or family on or near my desk and these two women are completely unknown to me. They look like friends rather than sisters and seem completely at their ease. With their good boots and capable hands they mean business. There is a quizical look in the eyes of the woman on the right — perhaps she is intrigued by the process of being photographed, reproduced. The woman on the left is more enigmatic and harder to read — but there is a certain confidence in her attitude and gaze. They are respectably but not (for the 1860s) particularly fashionably dressed. The cuffs and bodice worn by the woman on the left are worked in a textured embroidered pattern which is elaborate without being showy.

Beyond these basics — moment in time, location of photograph, good-quality respectable clothing — I have no story to tell about these women and I like it like that. I have not read their letters. I have no sense of their characters, their politics, their desires, their social positions or affiliations. They are not part of a collection of similar objects or images. I am not related to them. There is no fantasy of familial or personal connection. They do not belong to me. In fact, I like them because I am unable to appropriate them — because they are a possession that (to an extent at least) defies possession. I can imagine what I like about the 1860s, about British seaside towns, the history of photographic processes and nineteenth-century women’s social roles. I can tell myself (as I did above) that the women are ‘confident’, ‘capable’ or whatever. But beyond any story I may choose to spin around them, the two women on the beach keep their own quiet counsel.

The image certainly carries commemorative associations insofar as it is a record of a friendship (mine, and the women’s too). But beyond this I am unwilling to invest the ambrotype with any sort of sentimental significance. As a thing among the other things on my desk it has a strange independence. The women are relating to each other and to their moment on the beach more than to me and my clutter. And in its independence — the way that it tells me very little — I find this object both evocative and discomfiting. It says keep your distance, have respect for what does not belong to you. This is sometimes a useful thing to have in mind.

From now until the end of December there will be no pictures of things in process or completion. I just don’t trust the recipients not to peek. Instead I shall divert myself with discussion of other Things.

I have been reading — and enjoying immensely — Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes’ Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance. This superb little collection celebrates the sheer stuffness of stuff. On the face of it, the book might just seem like a random, albeit pleasurable, assortment of inane ephemera, but really is so much more. It constitutes a serious meditation on the relationships that objects contain and define — the human work, as it were, that things do. The objects under discussion here have meanings that completely surpass the usual associations of kitsch and personal memorabilia. There are things randomly found, carelessly stolen, or purposefully appropriated. There are objects that commemorate pointless relationships, that subsequently become imbued with tremendously poignant significance. There are broken things which, when combined with each other, make a new, meaningful, whole object. There are things fascinating and disgusting (Amy Kube’s nail clippings) or lovely and absurd (Beth Daniels’ pencil sharpener). I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates the beauty of the quotidian and the material and attaches value to everyday objects in ways that surpass the pecuniary. As a thing in itself, this book would certainly make a great gift.

I could wax lyrical about the suggestive and wonderful things in this book all day, but here are my two favourites: Joel Holland’s bear lamp-shade (”the bear’s blank expression and passive posture called to me”) and Mimi Lipson’s collection of cupcakes (”although I did notice them sweating on the muggiest days of summer, they always returned to their petrified state”). I felt a particular connection to this last, as my dad has a chocolate parrot that he has kept since 1981, and, to me, an orange undergoing the process of decay — puckering, imploding, surrendering to mould — is a thing of real beauty. Mr B does not share this perspective and often becomes exasperated at the way I extend my failure to throw anything away to food-items.

My work space is a veritable clutter of things. After thinking about just how many of them there were, I began to reflect on how very different all these objects were from each other and how they all spoke to me in various ways. I thought I’d share a few of them with you.

Here is thing number 1.

I have had this thing since 1996 or 7 but it is about 50 years old. It is a bar of puritan soap, now discoloured and odourless, and was a gift from a friend long-since out of touch. She found it, I believe, at Dave Dees junk shop — a treasure-trove of gew-gaws that we often liked to rumage through. She gave it to me because of my interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, but somehow, this was never at the front of my mind when I looked at it. I enjoy the colour of it (I imagine that things were only that particular shade of green in the 1950s); I like its slightly waxy (now slightly dusty) hue, as well as its satisfying three-dimensional solidity. There is also something pleasing, as well as rather naively straightforward, in the way it tells you just what it is about — the way it wears its advertising on its sleeve. I like the implication that in using it one would achieve moral, as well as physical cleanliness. Though I have never cleaned my hands — or, indeed, my soul — with it, on my desk, it does fulfil a function weirdly moral. I find it acts as a sort of prompt to clarity. Even though it is a piece of clutter itself, it is suggestive to me of a clean and uncluttered mind. It is a material injunction to WORK — it says to me — “just get on with it”. And mostly I do.