The rain has just returned, hammering at the moss covered roof and leaking noisily from the broken gutter. Earlier, it was the picture perfect summers day and I wandered up the valley, in the steamy August heat that has been so rare lately, playing at being a bear foraging for berries, growling at annoying sheep and dying my hands and knees purple with juice. Bilberry, Bleaberry... what do you call them where you are? There is something very primitive and comforting about gathering wild food and filling the store cupboards like a squirrel or a Moomin... I'd already made 8 jars of red gooseberry jelly in the morning after discovering that I'd gone to work by mistake.The day started like this... morning sunshine making the inside of the black painted front door hot to the touch as I dashed out to work with my carefully packed lunch, rarely brushed hair and a day of selling wonderful art to lovely people ahead of me. Only I hadn't read the calendar and had forgotten that I'm working on Sunday instead, silly me, I could have stayed in bed. I put all the lights on anyway and collected my newly framed work for C-Art which had been left in the gallery and headed back to the hills - at least I was up and about early and it was a ridiculously perfect day ... as I drove back I thought, as I often do, how it is SO pretty here it feels unreal, like a fairy tale.
After the gooseberry jelly was safely in its jars I took myself to the garden of the house next door (which I pretend is mine when they are away) with a straw hat and a pile of things to make into nests. Some tiny bronze birds had come in to the gallery last week and I just thought they needed nests. I also just wanted to make something methodical because it stops me thinking too much. So there I sat, with a buzzard crying overhead and the mountains all around me and people rushing past looking hot, with heavy rucksacks saying "ooh isn't it lovely, you are lucky" and feeling guilty for being lucky and also edgy because I've felt like this before about a place and look how that turned out.
Nest building is a lot harder than it looks and the birds were probably laughing at me but tomorrow I'm going to put the bronze wren in one and that will make it worth while. 
So, all the time I was picking bilberries and breathing in the smell of heather and bracken and warm mud and mountain air I was thinking about how to write it down so that you could get a sense of how lovely it all was. I came back and began to cook supper, feeling content in the way that you only can in summer when its warm enough to pad around in bare feet and a scruffy sundress, with the windows open... and then...the horrible sound of banging and squawking and panic and feathers and in the chicken house the mean old stoat. My favourite little chick was killed and Mr Stoat is so fearless that I know he will be back. I'm quite tough- I had to complete the job to make sure she was dead, you do these things in the countryside, I try not to be sentimental but I'm sad and I find the smallest thing hits me hard these days. I won't trap the stoat, it was here first and probably has young to feed. Maybe I can fence him out, but anyway, thats how the day ended. Sometimes I feel a bit like this ...
Now I'm off to bed to read a little bit and try not to dwell on the possibility that I may be suffering from the Jam Makers Curse ( I remember life taking a sharp turn for the worse after a certain batch of Plum Jam back in the Joe Cornish Gallery days AND there was the Apple and Bramble Jelly that failed to save me from eviction !) I don't even eat that much jam, I prefer Marmite :)Reading :- "Haweswater" by Sarah Hall Listening to :- "Stolen Car" Beth Orton and RAIN
More time has flown by; faster than I have been able to write it all down, blurring one day in to another. Six months have passed since I came to live in the mountains; months marked by the changing colours of the fells- monochrome snow scenes melting to become Bracken slopes of Caput Mortuum and now dark lush Hooker's Green with bright Magenta spikes of Foxglove... oh and the more or less constant rain. August feels a bit too jungly for me, the Bracken could hide anything and the patch outside the big window has become heavily shaded by Sycamore and carpeted with Enchanter's Nightshade (which is apparently used in binding spells to keep precious things close).Nothing stays still for very long here, except the sleeping dragons in Newlands Valley- the fells themselves. The hills are full of people rushing about doing energetic things in lycra but always, even in the busiest season, there is the magic of being able to flop down on the mossy grass at the top and look at the view as if you're the first to have ever seen it.In the past two weeks we've been on two lovely adventures... up Eagle Crag and then the strangely named Wandope .I don't seem to be getting any better at the uphill bits... after about an hour my legs finally warm up and stop aching just in time for my feet to start complaining. I really admire people who can run about doing things like the Bob Graham Round (they often come pounding past here in the dark with minutes to spare as this is the last mountain on the round) but I'm still fundamentally a tortoise and prefer to dawdle along admiring the flowers, sniffing the sappy pine cones, filling my pockets with Bog Myrtle, making wands out of rushes and only making it to the top because of the promise of sandwiches. 
And before you think this has turned into a blog about hiking, here is what I've been up to for most of the week, when Rupert isn't here to leave a trail of crumbs up steep mountain paths. I'm trying to get work together for the Dalemain House exhibition so I was pleased when a woman admired my work in the gallery the other week. Not realising it was mine, she asked about the technique and came in again a few days later, with a framer, who offered to frame a piece for free to see what I thought. He made a lovely job of it and chose a frame I would never have picked for myself; now I just have to save up to get some more done and hope that the gamble pays off because obviously I need to sell them to justify the whole endeavour. Working in galleries certainly gives you an insight into what sells, if not the ability or desire to produce it. On several occasions it's been obvious that the customer is really looking for an investment rather than buying for love and its not just the artist's name that matters but the medium they use. Why is it that oils are seen as superior to watercolours or a ceramic sculpture more highly valued than say, a needle felted one? 
I've been stitching into the recent cyanotype prints I've made since moving here. The work represents ideas of home and security, impermanence and the need for shelter- from nests to ivory towers; stitching into the paper represents domesticity and also safety and healing... holding things together with stitches. There ... do I sound all arty and conceptual?! Meanwhile some new greetings cards arrived and a piece of fabric from Spoonflower,to make purses ... (this one was a birthday gift for Ruth who has been very kind to me since I admired her trousers for not being beige walking trousers when she came in to the gallery one day. She runs this guest house which you might want to stay in if you visit Keswick) 
Now it's time to have a last cup of tea before bed and make sure the place looks tidy and loved because the landlord is coming round in the morning to discuss the howling gales that blow up your trouser legs in the kitchen... I need to be in the right frame of mind and not the angry defensive bundle of resentment I have become due to my last landlord's jackboot tactics. I will leave you with this view of Borrowdale, lying on my tummy on a flat rock in the sun...well away from the edge, higher than a helicopter and amazed by the ridiculous beauty of it all.
READING: The Slow Mountain Company Blog which is pretty wonderful and "Flora Britanica" by Richard MabeyLISTENING TO: "No Light , No Light" Florence and the Machine
This past week or two I have been pondering the meaning of life and the secrets of success and happiness while traveling on slow trains, celebrating major life events in inspirational cities and continuing to explore the wonderful land of mountains, lakes and lush bracken jungle that I'm constantly surprised to be suddenly living in. Maybe I should have opted for Philosophy at university like my lovely brother (so I could say what I mean more clearly)... anyway it seemed to me, at low points, that success and happiness are almost always measured in monetary terms. I've been horrified this week by news stories about the Prime Minister's pay rise while doctors are being told they don't work hard enough, people work like hell to subsist on minimum wage, important benefits are cut and don't even start me on the proposed reforms to the hunting bill. It was the hypocrisy and lack of respect for anything other than Mammon that upset me most. It's easy to feel like a failure (professional, financial or personal) in a game someone else invented... and then to find out they're sitting on half the cards and the rule book. And so, yesterday I forced myself to look at what I had actually achieved in the day, a day in which I felt low and unmotivated, and it was this...
1. I finished some stitching on a print I hope to show at Dalemain House in September as part of C-Art 
2. A pan of gooseberries for a fool (!) and a plate of warm peanut butter biscuits. 
3. I made a climbing chalk bag from a piece of cyanotype printed fabric and other things found in a hastily packed box of fabrics.So, take away the crushing sense of failure that means I am too poor to buy a flat with a nice kitchen for my daughter, a house with a studio for my parents or a car that works for my son... surely all we need is food, warmth and shelter and a bit of love...oh and creativity. Everyone should be able to afford this by virtue of their daily work and I never will understand the crazy economics of a world that sets such inequalities at its heart.
Goodness, this wasn't meant to be a soap box tirade, sorry. Its just that I was in Bristol last week for my daughter's graduation. It was a lovely and emotional time and we had a lot of fun, saw some great exhibitions, ate delicious food and talked and talked about what to do after university, the search for meaningful work and a place to live. Walking around Clifton we chose our ideal homes in the leafy, flower scented avenues before returning to Stokes Croft and stepping over the collapsed homeless man in the street, wracked with guilt but powerless to help.
It is a proud and melancholy feeling to realise that both my children are now grown up and have the hats to prove it. My nest is very empty and now begins my slide into eccentric old age; I may collect gnomes or teddy bears and take them on trips to the supermarket in Keswick...So, leaving Bristol was hard.; it felt full of all kinds of life, diverse and creative, inspiring and shocking, but as the empty train trundled North and the sun fell in to the sea I felt excitement in the pit of my stomach to see the mountains silhouetted in the distance.And some bears are waiting, as well as a cupboard full of stuff to make a loaf of bread. The Fells are green and wet and really don't mind how slowly you climb them so long as when you get to the top you look back the way you came and feel overjoyed to be alive despite the struggle of the climb.
Reading:- "Titus Alone" Mervyn Peake Listening To:- Wind in the Sycamore trees