A Little of What You Fancy...

Since November, I have been volunteering at the Sir Robert Ogden Macmillan Centre at St James's Hospital. This centre offers complementary therapies to cancer suffers and their families and carers. As Covid-19 took hold and began to spread across the country, the centre shut it's doors. After all, it's impossible to give someone a massage whilst socially distancing.

Not long after this, I got an email from Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) Volunteers Services asking if I was interested in being redeployed to do other voluntary work supporting the NHS staff. Of course, I said yes.

Which is how I found myself at St James's on Monday morning, performing the role of sugar dealer. Along with Tif, the Youth Volunteering Manager, I pushed a tall narrow trolley full of boxes of Krispy Kreme Donuts (other donuts are available) in and out of lifts, and up and down the corridors of Bexley Wing. It's interesting just how heavy such a trolley is. Each one had 80 boxes of donuts, very kindly donated by the company for the hospital staff. It was a generous move, but one that posed a logistics problem and, for me, an ethical one.

The logistics problem was: how do you spread this gift around and reach the maximum number of staff without any particular group feeling left out? The answer was: with difficulty. We did our best. We started with the wards first, and that was the easy bit. The longer we spent moving around Bexley, the more obvious it was that not only was word getting out, but that some groups of workers felt that they were going to miss out.

We covered as much ground as we could, including getting lost in the basement, a labyrinth where a lot of the undervalued, but important work goes on. Things that you never think about, but would notice very quickly if they weren't being done; like the laundry, the cleaning, the emptying of bins. Down there are the offices and workspaces of groups like the engineers, the people who handle the deliveries and the radiographers. We also ventured up to the floors above the wards. These are home to workspaces that don't immediately spring to mind when you think about hospitals, like research groups and labs. When we weren't sure about where to go next, we'd ask about, and there was always someone who could point us to an out of the way office or workspace.

After two and half hours, we'd completely cleaned out Tif's trolley, and worked through two thirds of mine. We headed back to Gledhow Wing, the temporary base of the volunteers. The others had covered a few other buildings, and there was only the Trust HQ to be finished off. I distributed the remaining boxes, giving some to offices, and leaving others in communal kitchen areas.

In such a complex organisation, it's hard to cover all bases. Some people are going to be left out; their contribution is virtually invisible to the naked eye. But every now and again, we need to dig out the microscope and look more closely. We should always do our best to acknowledge that everyone is important; everyone contributes to the whole.

And the ethical problem? I'm a fitness instructor with a nutrition and weight management qualification. Giving out that many donuts gave my conscience a twinge. And no, just in case you want to know, I didn't have one myself.

April is the Cruellest Month...

I'm unbelievably busy, considering I'm unemployed at present due to the lockdown  Makes me wonder how I ever managed to fit work in.

Just posting a few pictures for the Easter weekend. The sun has been out in Yorkshire, although not as much as the media would have us believe. These were taken this week, mostly at home (obviously) and also out and about at Kirkstall. Since the lockdown started, the car hasn't moved. Strictly on foot or on the bike. It's been great. Although I love driving, I love not having to drive.

At the Goit, Kirkstall

Kirkstall Abbey

Fan trained cherry tree

Fan trained plum tree

Close up of the cherry blossom

Cocktail hour

Remembrance of Things Past

Yet another day in lockdown Britain. In fact, nearing the end of the second week in lockdown Britain. Last night at 8pm I opened my bedroom window, and leaned out to show my appreciation of everyone working to get us all through this. John was doing the washing up, so he opened the kitchen window and used the cheese grater as an impromptu cowbell. I clapped for the NHS staff and shop assistants and delivery drivers and bin men and cleaners; all those at the sharp end of this pandemic. It was good to hear all the whoops, the banging pans and the cheers echoing around the neighbourhood.

I have some experience of a couple of those jobs at the sharp end. As I mentioned in my last post, I have a little experience of working in the NHS. We all underrate the importance of the NHS and its workforce until we need them. It doesn't take too much imagination to see where we would be right now if we didn't have the NHS. Do you know anyone who lives in the USA? I do. Luckily for that family, they have the resources to pay for good health insurance. I have a suggestion: anytime you catch yourself complaining about the NHS, get on the internet and find out how it would go for you if you lived in the biggest and richest economy on the planet.

The other frontline key job I have direct experience of is cleaning. About twenty years ago, I was in a bad place financially. In order to survive, I did multiple part time jobs. They kept my head above water. Just. For about seven or eight years cleaning jobs brought in a large part of my subsistence income. I've cleaned the homes of friends, offices, schools, pubs, a nursing home and a large retail outlet.

The worst cleaning job I ever had was for a large electrical goods retailer that shall remain nameless. It was given a run for its money by the nursing home, but that's another story. The cleaning was subcontracted out to a franchise, that shall also remain nameless, because I can't remember the name. To be honest, the franchise was not a great employer, but the real problem with this particular job stemmed from the way the retailer structured its management. Every shop manager lived in a different area to the actual shop they ran. That shouldn't have been too much of a problem, I hear you say. Well, in an ideal circumstance, a decent manager who took responsibility, you'd be correct. However, with a bad manager who had no concept of how long it took to get from A to B, that spelt trouble. The manager of the shop in Bradford lived in Sheffield. In the three weeks that I worked at her shop, she was never on time to open up and let us cleaners in to do our job. Sometimes we waited outside the shop for half and hour before she showed up. You have to bear in mind that this was in December. It gets really cold at that time of the year. I have never been shy of coming forward, and made it clear that I was going to work my shift starting from 6:30am, not whenever she graced us with her presence. Two hours for two cleaners, by the way, was nowhere near enough time to do the job. To add to our troubles, she was a micro managing white glover. And I'm not speaking metaphorically. She literally put on white gloves to go around the display area looking for dust to berate us with. It didn't bother me. I shrugged and told her if she turned up on time, we'd be able to do a better job. It was obvious that I wasn't going to last long. Less than a week before  Christmas, I'd had enough, and quit on the spot. The other cleaner was horrified, telling me that I couldn't leave just before Christmas. "Watch me," I said.

I quit that job, went to the JobCentre and walked straight into another cleaning job. This time at a pub. It wasn't a great job, but it beat the hell out of the one I'd just left.

So when I show my appreciation on a Thursday at 8pm, I have to admit I'm mainly thinking about the cleaners.

There's No Going Back

Here in the UK, we're starting the second week of, I don't know what to call it - extreme social distancing? We don't seem to have a snappy name for it. It's not shelter in place, like our friends in California are experiencing, and nobody in the UK wants to refer to it as lockdown. But essentially that's what it is.

I'm really hoping it works.

In normal times, I work with a lot of vulnerable groups. I teach exercise to older adult groups (and some groups that don't fall into that category). As a massage therapist, I volunteer at the Sir Robert Ogden Macmillan Centre at St James's Hospital, and am the complementary therapist on the young adult ward run by the Teenager Cancer Trust.

As you can imagine, I'm not working at the moment...I have started to teach a virtual Pilates class using Zoom. And I've volunteered to work at LTHT (Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust), if they need to call on volunteers in the coming weeks.

In other news...we're in the middle of birthday season. Off the top of my head, I can think of 7 people who celebrate their birthday in March, including myself. There are probably others that haven't come to mind yet. Yesterday, it was my partner's birthday, and tomorrow it's the turn of my youngest nephew, Joe.

Here is a photo of the carrot cake that I made for John. In fact, my first ever carrot cake!

And America Was Closed

I've been away on a well needed holiday. As you can tell from the title of this post, I've just been to the States during the government shutdown. This led to a couple of minor disappointments. Our raft trip down the Colorado River had to be cancelled as Grand Canyon National Park was shut. As were the other iconic national parks in the area which we were going to visit. Also, our planned day's walking in Yosemite had to be switched to Mammoth.

However, I'm not complaining for two reasons. The financial problems that this shutdown will have caused for a lot of low paid government employees is long term and damaging. Having to change travel plans is not. Once the shutdown happened, I got on the internet and checked out state parks. It didn't take me long to work out new and interesting places to visit. If the national parks hadn't been shut we wouldn't have visited Snow Canyon in Utah, or have discovered Sedona, Arizona, and its lovely state parks.

Here are some of my sketches from my trip...

On The Caltrain

Snow Canyon State Park, Utah

Red Rock State Park, Arizona

A Day Out In San Francisco

Waiting For A Seat At The Counter

The Terrace, Station House Cafe

The last sketch was done at lunch in Point Reyes Station, California, a lovely small town north of San Francisco. Looking around the main street, I found a craft shop selling some of the burnished pit fired ceramics that has been inspiring me recently. I resisted the urge to buy any, partly because it can be hard to transport ceramics intact. The main reason is that I'm trying to create work in a similar style, and my house is already filling up with my own experiments!

Fun With Fire

Spent the weekend up camping with friends at Hebden Bridge Camping. The trip was mainly about attempting to test latest theories of how Bronze Age pottery was made, although we managed to make it a party as well. The campsite is run by my sister, Georgina and her partner Phil. They very kindly allowed us to have our Bronze Age pottery experiment.

As no Bronze Age kilns have been discovered yet, the basic theory is that they made pots as part of the general household tasks and fired them in the round house hearth. This meant no extra fuel collecting, which was expensive in time and energy. For more details on the theories and processes check out Ceramicals blog.

With a weather forecast of autumn storms arriving on Sunday, we had to take the whole process through in one day. This meant there was a danger of exploding pots if we didn't dry them out well enough. In the end, we went from raw clay to fired pots in less than twelve hours. Happily there were hardly any breakages.

Clayworking Tools

Working On The Pieces

Drying Them Out

Stacking Pots In The Fire

Stoking Up

Blazing Merrily

Horse Sculpture First Out

The Ashes

Porridge Bowl

Teatime

As you can see from the pictures, although the resulting pots were fired at relative low temperatures, they are capable of holding food and drink. All in all a great success and a fun learning process.

Thanks go out to Georgina and Phil for providing the venue for our experiment, Rachel from Hive for coming up with the idea and Gill from Ceramical for writing it all up in a more technical way.

Life Can Get In The Way...

It has been a long time since my last post. Mostly family events like christenings, weddings and visits have been taking up a lot of my (not work) time. When the regularity of my creative work gets broken up in this way, it often takes me a while to get back on track.

Added to the life stuff is the fact that some of the projects I have been working on this summer were always going to take a while. I knew I wouldn't have anything to show for weeks, so I've been deliberately keeping it all in the background until I was ready. My regular drawing and sketching has taken a backseat during this period. I haven't stopped completely, and will post some of my sketches in my next post.

In previous posts I have shown some of the raku work that I have done in the past. I like this kind of experimental, relatively low tech ceramics work very much. I will be doing more raku in the future, but having read around the subject I discovered other processes that were more accessible to me. Narrowing it down to the work I really like and that didn't involve very toxic chemicals, it was obvious that both pit and barrel firing would produce interesting work. Since my back yard is brick paved, pit firing was out of the question.

My boyfriend is very good at sourcing useful items that are in need of recycling, and managed to reclaim a couple of small steel barrels (closer to buckets really) that were destined for the skip at work. So through most of the summer I've been working at HIVE to produce some simple coil built bowls that I have then burnished, and had bisque fired. During this time, I've learnt a lot about burnishing, partly from experience but also from a couple of very useful books (Low-firing and Burnishing, and Alternative Kilns & Firing Techniques). My preferred method at the moment is to put a lot of thin layers of white slip on to my finished bowl, allow it to dry to nearly bone dry and then burnish with the back of a spoon first, then finishing with a thin plastic bag.

This weekend I had a couple of bisque fired bowls, and good enough weather to do a test firing. I was concentrating so much on what I was doing I forgot to photograph the process. Next time!

I followed the packing of the barrel from the Alternative Kilns section on barrel firing, with a layer of sawdust sprinkled with table salt, the bowls with copper wire tied around them, some dried seaweed packed around, covered with straw and some more table salt, then another layer of sawdust, and finishing with a stack of wood and kindling on top.

As my barrel is so much smaller than the ones usually used, the whole process only took a couple of hours. I was too impatient to let it all cool slowly, but I may do in the future. But the results were better than I was expecting for a first attempt.

I took a few pictures as I was taking the bowls out to let them cool down, so you can see my barrel. During the firing I had it set up on the bricks, but had taken it off them so that I could put the cooling bowls there.

My Barrel, Leather Gloves And The Bowls

The Bowls Cooling

Close Up

After cooling, I cleaned the bowls and put a coat of furniture wax on to seal the surface. Then i took some photographs.

Barrel Fired Vessel

Different View

Smaller Vessel

View From The Other Side