Weeks Two and Three

The world has finally stopped spinning around me and I can make a blog entry! The last two weeks have been busy, between university and finding a place to live and starting my placement. Here are the highlights:

The placement, where I go on Fridays, is in a small, two person upholstery shop in a village called Nettlebed. The main person I learn from is Greg, a very relaxed person and perfect teacher for me. He knows both English and French techniques. I'm working on a reproduction piece of Louis XV furniture for my first piece. It is gilt but the client doesn't want it regilt, just cleaned. So far I have stripped the old upholstery and have gotten it webbed and sprung and ready for making the hair pad next Friday. Work is leisurely and stressfree---I am offered tea at least four times during the day, which is too much even for me. So far, the placement seems absolutely perfect. The things I've learned so far are things that I knew how to do but not perfectly, and without knowing the physical principles and goals of each step. AHHHHH!

Back in the lab, I've been learning all sorts of things. Last week, we had a very interesting lecture on shellac by Campbell, my main tutor. He's a wonderful lecturer, very theatrical. Shellac is not made of ground up shells of bugs. It is the dried sweat of the tiny lac insect, a bug that lives on twigs on certain fruit trees in India. The female lays 200-600 eggs on the twig; the larvae hatch out and, feeling peckish, eat her entire body. The lac bug is the size of the head of a pin. As the bugs grow, swarming all over the twig and sucking out sap, they exude a resinous business that hardens and forms a protective sausage-shaped cocoon the whole length of the twig. When the life cycle is over, the twigs are harvested, the shellac removed from the twigs by women sitting in a circle on the ground, then it is broken up, sifted into little pebbles, placed in long cotton tubes and heated over a fire, and the shellac melts and drips out onto a stone, where is cools in little puddles called buttons. It is then further melted into a sheet the size of a bed, then lifted by a man who pulls and stretches it until its thin as a membrane, then it's allowed to fall and break into bits. Now it is ready for export. Egads. We then grind it up, mix it with linseed oil, and heat it for use. it is a totally unreproduceable substance by man, and is used in papermaking, computer chips (it's a superb insulator for wires), and a hundred different things.

I have started my first project, two footstools. I had to first strip off all the paint and bronzing powder, which took an entire day! Breathing in toxic stripper all day.... They are missing their feet so I will have to research what kind of feet would be appropriate, and then make them. Then I have to gild them, and clean the upholstery. I am very curious about gilding, particularly whether I will like doing it. If I do like it, there's good money to be made back home, where gilding is not an everyday skill.

This is my plane: I have spent two hours cleaning it, and two-and-a-half hours sharpening the blade!

Here I am making mortises for the back feet of the ladderback chair. The ladders will fit into the mortises.

I have to laugh a little at the English habit of having tea during school hours--since the labs have to be kept perfectly clean, everything has to cleaned in order to have tea, which happens at 10:30, takes half an hour to make, drink, and eat biscuits or cake, then lunch at 12:30-1:30, then another tea at 3:00-3:30, with more biscuits, then end the day at 5:00. And half the time he wants us to stay on until 6:00. Is it very American of me to wish that we could skip the tea breaks and get done a little earlier? Well, no, as it turns out, since my Greek and Spanish classmates are also feeling over-tea'd (new word).

At this moment I am sitting in the back bedroom (Bruce's office), looking out on the back yard, which is long and skinny and joined to the neighbors back yard, with a pretty vista of the hills. Periodically a person or two comes along the field, often with a dog. My goal today is to have a good tromp along this field road, to see what everyone else is seeing. We probably need to go into High Wycombe and get some Wellies. We have numerous bedrooms and would love visitors. It's not a huge house, but it would easily accomodate four visitors. The village of Lane End has three pubs and a really good Indian restaurant. The other eveing we heard the church bells being rung, for practice? for about an hour. Rather magical. Much love to all, Ellie

P.S. Our address is:
7 Ditchfield Cottages
Ditchfield Common
Church Road
Lane End
Buckinghamshire HP14 3HJ

P.P.S. -- please email me anytime at ellie@together.net , and I'll try to answer!

Old Neighbors and New Birds

Ditchfield Cottages is a row of attached brick two-and-a-half story residences, with adjoining front and back flowerbeds, and small garden plots out in a back field. It seems like it could be a place for lots of neighborly intimatcy as, upon first meeting him, my time-worn, stooped neighbor Tony made very clear. After a friendly greeting, he expressed the hope we wouldn’t be playing the boombox all day and all night long, like some previous inhabitants. (“Couldn’t even hear me own TV!!” he growled with a thick Midlands (?) accent.) Not bloody likely, Tony, I thought.

Yesterday I met Arthur and Denise, from Number Four. Arthur works three days a week for one of the remaining fine furniture makers in High Wycombe: Ellie says he’s a polisher. Denise’s uncle apparently was an upholsterer, so my conversation with them took me into waters for which Ellie has the family compass; not me. I was lugging a bucket of coal at the time, so Arthur volunteered he burns wood in his fireplace. Since it’s supposed to snow this weekend, I asked him about a good wood source.

Today I knocked at his door to get the name and number of the "timber merchant," and he of course invited me in for a cuppa tea. I declined, whereupon he asked “D’you eat. . . ya know. . . meat?” “Yes,” said the Yank. “D’you know how to fix a partridge?” Stunned silence. It seems that an old mate works on an estate that had a “shoot” on Wednesday, and had stopped by to deliver Arthur eight braces of birds last night. On the hoof. Right out of the sky. “Them’s French partridges; the red-footed kind,” said Arthur. “Some people skin ‘em, but I just lop of the head, feet, and wings, and pluck ‘em into a plastic bag.” We proceeded to the garden shed for a demonstration. The Yank replied: “No problem: we do that with our chickens back home. My wife will know how to cook them.” We’ll see how Ellie responds after a long day ripping down upholstery.

Hunting the wild Welsh Bore

Against our every intention, we again own an internal combustion vehicle: a Spanish-made Corsa, with a 3-cyl. engine and tyres about 6 inches across. (The reasons for this acquisition are varied and not to be explained here.) So, with petrol in tank and sun in the forecast, we set out to visit Michael and Allison in Blakeney, Gloucestershire, near the Welsh Border.

Witin ten miles of home we got lost -- for the first of four times -- on our 110 mile journey. Eyeing the map but taking the wrong left turn, we found amazing precipitous ups and down in between tiny crossroads villages of the Chiltern Hills. Regaining a major road and passing around Oxford, we thought we'd find a spot of lunch in the Cotswolds. We found our way to Bourton-on-the-Water (not far from Stowe-on-the-Wold), strolled the lanes, found discount woolens, and had a nice pub lunch.
Then on to getting lost several more times in Cheltenham and Gloucester (cathedral stones first laid in about 1070; complete in about 1480 -- DEINITELY a place we'll have to visit at length), and down the west bank of the River Severn. The river has a huge broad valley and widens out to the sea as it divides England from Wales. Just north of Blakeney is a little town with a lovely church yard from which you can look out over the valley.

Sunday Michael drove us to Yat Rock, a huge overlook above the Wye River, which forms part of the border with Wales. We drove down the steep teeny lane to Symonds Yat East, where you can eat drink, hike, bike, and take kayaks and canoes out on the river. We hiked down-river, crossed the suspension bridge, and first placed our feet on Welsh soil a Symonds Yat West. We will return and perfect the Welsh pronunciation of multiple unlikely consonants. Following a nap and light supper, we motored across the Severn Bridge and home.

Oh yes, what about the bore. . .? What is the Severn Bore? "When the boar comes, the stream does not swell by degrees, as at other times, but rolls in with a head...foaming and roaring as though it were enraged by the opposition which it encounter" - Thomas Harrel 1824

Saturday in The City

On a brilliantly sunny Saturday morning we boarded the Chiltern Railway cars for Marylebone Station, London, and a visit with Ellie's second-cousin Nancy Mitchell and her son. The first vista off the train was the huge array of bicycles parked and locked by Londoners who are regulars on the Chiltern Line -- on Saturdays, no less. Who are all these folks who bike to the station, and where do they go?

After some coffee and fresh scones with Nancy, we made our way through the glorious clear winter air to Portobello Road: several miles of exotic foods, pickpockets, street vendors, antique shops, cheap clothing, incredible bargains, and exotic languages and accents (English and not).

We wandered for several hours, and fortunately did not stop to take in any of the scrumptious-smelling street food, since Nancy was had planned a proper feast for us once we meandered back to her place. There are endless shops -- actually we bought some outrageous Scottish woolens at unspeakably cheap prices -- but also these really interesting warrens of booths. More like a bazaar. Amazing old silver services, wooden monogrammed lawn-bowling sets, bizarre trade tools, cheap polyester miniskirts and fuzzy sweaters for tourists. . .you name it: it is there. We actually made mental notes about some of the things we might try to come back and get "flea market" style, depending upon how "furnished" our eventual digs are going to be.

Some of the vendors are complete specialists: 33 RPM hot wax of British boy groups from the 70s: zillions of platters for sale (for example). But Ellie has always had a weakness for tea cups, and I thought we could be in for a serious spending spree when she encountered The Greek Guy with a Million Teacups. She found a favorite, and asked the price. He opened a reference book of antique English china, found the exact pattern, showed her the maker's mark, and quoted £260!!! We'll be back, no doubt.

The clouds were moving in as we trudged down an avenue, across a park and canal, and back to Nancy's for a warm and bubbly dinner while a gale moved in from the Channel.

The first three days

So I've now come to the end of my first three days of classes. Tomorrow I have off, but as of next week, Fridays will be in a conserva-
tion upholstery shop.

In one of my classes, we are building a chair. We were given the beautiful drawings on huge paper, as well as a treatise on how to cut every piece, shape each piece, etc., as though one were a chair maker. I've had my first experience with planers in the wood shop, though we are expected to hand plane the rest of it, I think. It's a ladderback chair. It amazes me that they think I can do this.

I'm coming face to face with my preconceptions. I would have thought that the students would be sort of arty and serious, but in the chairmaking class, which we share with firstyear BA furniture students, they are young people who in any other setting might be seen as, well,...thugs. I can barely understand them, they look very rough indeed, and yet here they are studying furniture, and restoration. The people in my program, the MA, are a little more what you'd call mature, but some of them seem kind of tough. It's a diverse group.

Today we started learning about French polish, and the wax sticks one has to make for repairing wood surfaces. There are two waxes, beeswax and carnuba, which is a natural wax that is hand scraped off the bottom side of the carnuba palmleaf by women in Polynesia. It's fantastically tough, and expensive, and is added in tiny quantities to beeswax to toughen it. We melted the waxes and added natural pigments, one recipe at a time, pouring each color into molds, then unmolding to let it dry on racks. We had to clean up after each color, quite fanatically, so there was no "contamination" between colors. The recipes are for different woods, boxwood, oak, mahogany, etc.

We also spent time this week starting to make a chandelier out of "composition" which we will then guild. We had to design it first, based on a wire frame, and using antique blocks of wood that were carved for plaster trimmings. In the first picture I am cutting out a leaf design with a scalpel. It's kind of like being in playschool! But next week I have to learn how to guild, and hopefully it won't be too hard, because my second project is going to be a guilded sofa.

Bruce and I are looking at more flats tomorrow, some with very silly sounding road names, like Shrubbery Close.

And that's the news from HW, love, Ellie.

My induction day

Hi y'all!
Today was my induction at Bucks. ( They have different words for lots of things; it just means orientation.) I met the other Masters students, and spent a little time with the people in just my program, which seems to be about nine people, but only three full timers like me. I got my first look at the semester schedule and it looks heavy-duty: a week off at Easter, two weeks off in August, and that's it until mid December when I finish. So much for all that summer travel I was thinking about! Well, I'm here to learn and work.

The whole thing today was very good, just what I had expected; the students are diverse, from England, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Italy, South Africa, Korea, and two Americans. That makes me very happy! The University buildings are very proletariat, functional buildings with nothing to say from the outside but bursting with cool things on the inside. Two of my classrooms look a bit like a laboratory; one is an enormous wood-working shop with huge power equipment; one looks like a boardroom. And every Friday I'll be spending in the shop of a nearby conservation upholstery shop. No one else is doing this, and while it's really exciting that I get to do this, I'm a little alarmed that I won't be able to do my research on Fridays! Oh dear.

Tomorrow I have a sort of preliminary class with the course leader, Campbell, and I'll be bringing the weird tools that I've been able to find, including the handy dental tools that Kim gave me...

We looked at a flat this evening (evening sets in around 3:45). It's quite handy, a ten minute walk to my school, but it's hard to get used to the total blankness of most apartments. And, of course, none of my funny old stuff to put around. It looks as though we'll find something this week--not a cute little thing, but servicable. High Wycombe is a very nice small city, with a beautiful long park with lots of ducks and swans and curving walking paths through trees that are luminous green from lichens, I guess. The train station is a block away and there are six trains to London every hour. Or, you might prefer to take a bus, every hour at twenty past. There's a theater across the street with year-round offerings of opera, jazz, Broadway musicals, etc. etc. etc. I've found the Marks &Spencers and that looks like a very dangerous place to go grocery shopping. All in all, there seems be everything here that one could possibly need for all NORMAL purposes. Until next time, much love from Ellie

Freezing Fog

We flew on Aer Lingus (with lots of entrancing Irish accents) via Shannon and Dublin, to London's Heathrow. Ellie took a picture of me enjoying the verdant Irish countryside on our brief stay, while waiting for the freezing fog at Heathrow to clear sufficiently that we could transit there. After all our hassles getting 12-month student visas, they weren't even checked (!) by The Queen's immigration folks, as it seems that coming in from Ireland is about as hum-drum as driving across the bridge from New York State.

It is damp and cold (for these folks); a bit unpleasant, but not unlike balmy spring Vermont weather. After our several days of frantic packing and saying goodbye, the emotional turmoil, several nights wakeful with anticipation, and an extended plane journey, we were pooped. Christine put us to bed in the spare room; we fell -- at last -- asleep till the 8 AM dawn.

After a rasher of bacon, toast and two cups of coffee, the sun actually appears to be glimmering through the clouds of Olde Englande. We actually are in High Wycombe, staying with David (a graduate of Ellie's program) and his wife Christine, in a Victorian brick block just a block from the medieval market building in the old village center. Just blocks for Ellie to walk to the University buildings for the start of her program (tomorrow), with shops and pubs all around. The park -- complete with swans -- is just a few blocks away, and I'm looking forward to an exploratory run.

Snow, sleet, slush. It's GREAT that it's all coming down yesterday and today: tomorrow we head out. It will be cold, but the weather will be clear.

The house is a complete mess, and we have just ONE MORE DAY to get packed, complete our storage process, and do some cleaning to get the place ready for Joanna and Kevin. Lord, what to do first?

Kitty has verified for us that we have not actually filled all of the interstices in my office, though it is pretty much packed to the ceiling with our stuff. The heat is shut off, so my office is now the kitchen table (yes, I have to do some work with Web conferencing the day before we leave.) We've packed one of our knee-wall attics upstairs, and the other will be filled with pictures and detritus today. How do you handle cupboards full of food when you've run out of boxes? We'll figure it out.

Butterflies, Tears, Second Thoughts

Goodness, dearie (as my great-aunt Adah) said to us kids, I can't believe we're really doing this. Ellie and I are looking at a bleak snowy Monday morning, knowing that by this Friday, we must pack up all our household goods, store things away, and be on our way to the UK for a year.

So: we are overwhelmed with the packing, and relieved at many things we don't have to do to get ready for our tenants. We wonder: "Again, why are we giving up all that is comfortable, and packing our lives in a few suitcases?" How we will get by without Kitty to warm the bed each night and throw up in the kitchen each morning? How will the chickens make it through winter? Will Brits talk to us loutish colonials?