Recently the Financial Times Weekend Magazine published this fascinating and beautifully illustrated story of how an industrial process that replaced skilled craftsmen who made lace by hand is now, in its turn, dying, due to a lack of people with the skills it needs to survive. As newspapers are ephemeral things and thus it becomes very hard to access the fine pieces they sometimes contain, I decided to photograph my copy of the article to preserve it for others to read here. I may be biased as I am very interested in textiles, but it seems to me to be so exceptionally good and interesting that it deserves to be widely seen and read. It is, I think, an unusual story - it describes an instance of industrialisation retreating so that, if lace, the product that machines took over the manufacture of, is still required in future, it will need once more to be made entirely by hand:
zmkc
My name is Zoë Colvin & I am increasingly baffled about everything.
Wednesday, 19 February 2025
Tuesday, 18 February 2025
What I Have Been Reading Lately: The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
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Wednesday, 12 February 2025
What I Have Been Reading Lately: The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is a narrative centred on a weekend during which three elderly women clear out the beach house of a friend who has died. The friend is called Sylvie and she seems to have left the beach house to a person called Gail, who never appears and about whom we are told almost nothing.
The three women are called Wendy, Jude and Adele. Wendy is an academic, very slightly in the Germaine Greer mode, except she has - or had - a husband and children. Her children don’t like her because she was too absorbed in her work to pay them much attention when they were little. Her husband is dead. She has an incontinent half-blind extremely old dog, a present, as a puppy, from Sylvie at the time of Wendy’s husband’s death. Jude has made a career as a manager of very expensive restaurants and is very keen on order and keeping a tight control on everything she can. She is short-tempered and intolerant of mess. She has been mistress to a wealthy married man for decades and that relationship is the one joy of her life. Adele was once a successful actress but is no longer. She is fairly self-indulgent and has just discovered that she is being kicked out by her lover. She has no money, no prospects and nowhere to go, but she isn’t enormously troubled by any of this. These women have all been friends for a very long time, but their friendships have been thrown out of balance by the death of Sylvie, who, in a way that is never explained, made everything work smoothly.
Who Sylvie was remains a mystery throughout the book, and the reason the women feel they need to do this chore for Gael is never made clear. The house is built on a slope and has a peculiar outdoor lift arrangement on which the characters spend a lot of time travelling up and down. I suspect the author had some real place in mind as this is such an odd and unusual detail and required such a lot of explaining to help the reader imagine it. I think it would have been better left out as each time it was mentioned one was distracted by questions of why one had never seen one anywhere and whether such a thing would actually be permitted given the prevalent concerns about safety one encounters in Australia generally. So far as I could tell it didn’t serve any point or further the plot in any way.
Inasmuch as there is a plot: I got mildly excited when Wendy takes an object described as unusually heavy out of a cupboard that she is clearing. The object, we are told, is contained within a black cover. Wendy finds she cannot open the black cover and hesitates. Then, after a moment, she chucks the mysterious thing into a black bin bag, along with the rest of the rubbish. Having had my attention drawn to this object so emphatically, I assumed it might turn out to be something important that would need recovering later in the book. However, it is never mentioned again - and no other line of plot comes up to create any kind of concern on the part of the reader about what happens next.
Wood is excellent at creating a world on a page and extremely unusual in taking elderly women as her subjects. I imagine her intention in this novel is to meditate on friendship. Unfortunately, there was not one single line of it that leapt out at me and made me thing, “Oh what an insight”. It is vivid and well-written, but it is, I suspect unintentionally, very unsettling in its portrayal of three entirely self-absorbed, spiritually empty lives. Although the theme is friendship, there was little that could be called comforting or generous in these friendships - more a clinging to each other, faut de mieux, than anything involving love and care. Perhaps that is often the truth of human relationships, but it is a bleak one all the same. Perhaps this is realism and I ought not to object. Perhaps my Catholicism is getting in the way
Tuesday, 11 February 2025
Small Miracles
I came across this observation from GK Chesterton recently:
“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. We should always endeavour to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake and wonder more at the earth. What was wonderful about childhood is that any thing in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”
Shortly afterwards, I found that one of the small pots of unidentified bulbs I had bought some weeks earlier had burst into flower:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen glossier examples of crocus. I was amazed.
But, while they could hardly be classified as the permanent thing Chesterton urges us to wonder at, they could not really be called the exception either, given crocus are ubiquitous in late winter and early spring, (one proof of this is the fact that James Marriott also mentioned crocus this week: he spotted one flowering in the wild - and the incident reminded him that Geoffrey Hill wrote a poem about crocus).
Whichever category Chesterton would have put crocus in - permanent or exception - I think he would have agreed that mine at least - so richly purple, so radiant - are miracles in his “world full of miracles”.
For a time, the other pot I’d bought remained harder to feel any wonder at - while its companion offered a storm of shining flowers, all it could manage was this unpromising set of stalks:
But then one morning I discovered those stalks had transformed themselves into these exquisite flowers:
Thursday, 6 February 2025
Can Bad People Do Good Work
Today at a second-hand bookstall I found a collection of articles by Clement Freud. I bought it and began to read it and so far have found it hilarious.
The book was published in 2009. In 2016, after Freud's death, two women revealed Freud had molested them when they were in their early teens. One was raped by him.
Is it wrong to continue to find someone's work hilarious, once they have been revealed to be wicked? It was easy to forego the creative output of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris as neither of them ever created anything I was interested in. I think most of Wagner sounds like the score for Ben-Hur so his association with Nazism has never meant I've had to think about depriving myself of his music, as I wouldn't choose to listen to it anyway.
The dilemma comes when one likes the work, but not the person who created it. Caravaggio was a murderer but his Taking of Christ is still marvellous. Bill Cosby's monologues would probably still make me laugh - and Kramer in Seinfeld certainly does.
Does it achieve anything to refuse to be amused by Clement Freud's anecdotes? Is laughing along with what he writes a way of being complicit in his actions?
I suppose there's the whole performance of reading someone's work in the light of ghastly posthumous revelations. That seems to be a tactic for Alice Munro fans. In both instances - Munro and Freud - I rather wish that particular light thrown on their work had remained dimmed
Sunday, 2 February 2025
Unintended Consequences
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