Well Day Four has been very unusual , It's had its comic moments, some moments of clarity and determination and also, I won't lie, some very dark moments indeed. Weirdly the second trip around wind swept car parks in Penrith in search of the Mobile MRI unit turned out to be quite a memorable highlight when set against another e-mail from our landlord accusing us (falsely I promise) of aggression and then returning home to find them actually here!
It turns out that having your head scanned is like a cross between a nasty pot holing incident and a panic attack at a techno night. Who knew all my misspent nights at Goodgreef would come in so handy? Trapped in a Smartie tube wearing a Darth Vader mask and ear plugs was almost unbearable until I realised that the drilling, hammering, beeps and jolts had a rhythm not unlike a banging dance tune (remember Tyres in Spaced dancing to the kettle and the beeps of the traffic crossing?) Never underestimate the power of dance music, I think it was the most relaxed I've been all week. I haven't drawn anything today though, not yet anyway.

In other news I went to church. This is the beautiful church down the lane; I'm not a Christian but I've always loved churches and church yards and this one is a very special place. I stopped my snivelling and wandered around the stones, carefully avoiding the snowdrops pushing up through the mossy grass. It was a lesson in belonging, being "hefted". The stones bare just a handful of names, all stating which house they were from; generations of the same families most of whom are still here, living in those same houses. I walked back slowly up the hill, all the time thinking about what it means to truly belong to a place, about diversity in rural communities and about how, even from the point of view of my own relatively privileged background, it's getting harder and harder to live in places like this unless you inherit or are unusually well off. I'm glad I didn't raise my children here, the housing issues in the Lakes are shocking, although things are much the same in the North Yorkshire village where they grew up. Not sure of the answer and obviously I'm biased; probably my new lockdown breaking neighbour has a different point of view...

I wanted to show you this just for fun, I hope I'm allowed as it is from the family archive. I absolutely love this picture and I've been thinking about it a lot because it's also about belonging. The photograph was taken by my dad in the early 70's just before my paternal grandparents retired from running Allan's Store on Linthorpe Road in Middlesbrough. They'd been there since about 1947. It's a staged picture, with my mum playing the part of a customer while Grandad and Grandma do the hard sell on a tin kettle but I also love the girl skipping along the pavement looking straight at the camera.
I was born and grew up in London, moving North to be near our Grandparents (both sets from Middlesbrough) when I was 13 - so I always had hangups about not belonging, being the outsider with the "posh" accent. I still do but this picture makes me happy, it's a root, a little bit of history and context (and those yellow clogs of my mum's were ankle wreckers!) x

I paid the annual fee for my blog this week so thought I'd better start using the damn thing. Every day, in my head, I write several award winning, earth shatteringly insightful posts and draw achingly gorgeous scenes, before failing entirely to commit them to the page. Stories have gone untold and sketchbooks have remained pristine. The things I want to make or tell you, whilst lying awake at night or during my daily stumble up the valley, evaporate with the morning light or as soon as I sit at my table.
Yesterday on my icy walk I suddenly thought that part of what stops me writing or drawing is the pressure I put on myself for it to be "good enough" to share, when really this blog could just be a kind of wordy sketchbook; it's not as if I'm writing an article for the Guardian is it. I think these past months have made me think of all the people whose stories are lost, all the words unsaid and moments unshared because of the pandemic. What are we if we don't tell our stories, however ordinary they seem?
Having failed at all other "lockdown" tasks my aim for the next few weeks is to share an image and a few lines everyday instead of waiting for perfection. Hopefully this might reawaken the fat, lazy muse who has clearly been asleep, clutching an empty bottle of Sherry for most of 2020 (who can be blamed for that though).

... That first paragraph took several hours of yesterday and this morning, full of good intention, I was going to fix my heat press, restock the virtual shop shelves, wish my parents good luck for their vaccinations tomorrow and then tell you all the about the Long Tailed Tits in the Hawthorne tree on the edge of the fell (such joy and fluttering), the creaking crunch of the ice and oh, all sorts of other stuff you might have liked.
Anyway, I'd just got the heat press soldered without setting fire to my hair and everything was going ok but then I got an e-mail.
It's happening all over again, we're being evicted, they're drawing up the papers. Perhaps because they don't want to spend money fixing the leaking windows and providing us with drinkable water, perhaps because they want somewhere to stay while they fix up their neglected cottage next door, perhaps because the Lakes seems like a better place to live in a pandemic than a flat in Mayfair or an Arts and Crafts Mansion in Wales. Either way the timing and the wording of the e-mail is spectacularly bad; the failure to properly fulfil their obligations would be almost laughable if it hadn't left us desperately scouring Rightmove in the middle of a national disaster.

I don't want to be the voice of gloom, I want to write about the patterns in the ice, look for the snowdrops under the fallen leaves, work, do something useful for other people, hunker down and try to stay sane but it knocks the breath from you and makes your arms tingle, too much Cortisol like coming up on a bad pill (apparently). Maybe all I can do is talk about it so that other people know that this happens, it keeps on happening; hopefully one day things will change for tenants so that landlords and estate agents properly understand the importance of "Home" - not "It has been very useful having an income from the barn" (around £50,000 over the years, to spend on doing up next door)
I saw it coming but the impact still hurts, it makes me want to give up art and volunteer for Shelter.

Enough. The fire is on, Nutmeg is sleeping at full stretch and I have a LUSH bath planned. Change is good right?
Stay safe x

This morning I sat on the floor in a square of flickering, leaf filtered, sunlight and felt the strangeness of an empty house for the first time in 7 months. The heat rushes in when I open the doors and everything feels steamy after the storm yesterday.Since I last wrote I've emerged like a nervous rabbit, into " The Easing", to work for three days a week in the bookshop; experiencing the complete reversal of the normal state of things because I was briefly the only person in the house going out to work, coming back grumpy and demanding my slippers, pipe and dinner (during lockdown I never left the valley and still haven't visited a supermarket so it's been quite stressful at times). Wearing the plastic face shield all day,  combined with my varifocals,  means that hours after getting home I still feel like I have a hat on and trippy vision that might necessitate  a trip to Barnard Castle...Today however, Rupert has gone back to work at Outward Bound and Sara is having her first day alone as a bookseller (since she moved north again we have been sharing jobs occasionally while she continues to search for her own path). Tomorrow will be a holiday cottage cleaning day for one of my neighbours so this is my time to catch up on my "real" job, the creative me, the one who gets lost in the gaps between days.August is fading Meadowseet, Heather and Bilberries, horrible Horseflies, late hay and the first signs of the bracken turning. Walking back down the valley last week I noticed the tinge of russet and felt quite overwhelmed by the relentless march of the natural world and its cycles, while for a lot of us mere humans it feels as though our lives have been put on pause. It seemed like only a few weeks ago that we'd talked about watching for Catbells turning green in the spring. I've tried not to think about it too much, but of course that means I think about it all the time - the way almost a year has passed and so much has changed. More than ever the feeling of having lost precious time but also of having gained so much and needing to process it somehow.I thought I'd done quite a lot of new work in the bright sunshine of Spring but when I looked at them again recently, because the special circular mounts had arrived, I found that I only liked one or two and then of course I started with the "honestly Kim you had all that time and all that sunshine, why didn't you create mountains of work?". At least, of the ones I have completed , I am unusually pleased with how they turned out. I like the stitching on this hare and her joyful leap over the Yarrow. Now, how to go about selling work without the shop window of art fairs and exhibitions? This blog no longer has the reach it once did and social media is a tightrope walk - if I mention things are for sale my posts are much less popular than the ones featuring rainbows or wild swimming or loaves of bread. Luckily there are bright sparks on the horizon with a possible nerve wracking secret project and an invitation to be part of a winter exhibition at Harding House in Lincoln again.One day recently members of Cumbria Printmakers had planned a socially distanced drawing trip to Holehird Gardens  but of course it rained and rained and even in Cumbria it was too much,  so instead we all agreed to draw at home and share our day via WhatsApp. I hadn't done any observational drawing for ages but I managed a page of ink and gesso and pencil,  looking out at my soggy plant pots. The thing I enjoyed most about this was taking small sections of it later and  enlarging them to use as backgrounds for other things.I'm not a painter but sometimes I think it would be fun to make big textural  canvasses like this...Instead I made a digital collage using other sketchbook images and came up with this ...I entered the Wraptious competition and a few people actually bought the design as a cushion so I think I might get some giclee prints made of it to add to my website shop. I entered 4 other designs too and voting has ended so fingers crossed, you never know.Believe it or not I spend more time thinking about writing than thinking about drawing or making things so it is worrying that I do very little of either! How on earth do people write books and have jobs or other people living with them?! In my head are some characters and some rambling stories and also some thoughts which won't quite arrange themselves into a Thing and instead there is bread to make or someone else words to read or more recently masks to make. I'm counting it as a small victory that this blog post has been completed during daylight and that I can now put the kettle on and tick this off my To Do list.Thank you so much for lending me your precious time and reading this. xReading : The Short Knife  by Elen Caldecott