Well I'll be (Amster)dammed

Far from wanting to morph into a travel blog for the next six weeks ('here, look at my fascinating travel snaps'), the fact that we are a family on the road will mean that any posts for a while will be foreign-influenced and probably iPhone generated. At least they will be short.

The last time I was in Amsterdam I had a pretty good time. Let's just day the sort of good time that a pair of cranky jet lagged ten and twelve year olds being towed around in the rain don't facilitate.

We did however manage to squeeze into today a museum, beer in a gorgeous original very old bar and visit the sobering Anne Frank Huise. It was all good but the beer was definitely the highlight.

It is so refreshing to be somewhere where the patina of time is given the respect it deserves. I'm rejoicing in the glorious yet understated style that you only get in mainland northern continental Europe. That old combo of historical architecture and cutting edge contemporary design does it for me every time.

And then there's the bricks. (I can see a bit of a blog theme emerging here). Beautiful, teeny, clay bricks laid with a craftsman's precision 400 years ago abound. A wonder what our brickie would have made of that brief!

Good Luck

Not long after we moved into our house, one of the dogs appeared from under the boards with this in its mouth.

It is said that once upon a time house builders would put a child's shoe somewhere  in the foundations or structure, often near the front door, for luck.  This shoe is well old.  It has been resoled a few times and I reckon it dates from not long after the house was built in the twenties.  Amazing that it has lasted all these years of the elements and curious creatures.

I took the shoe into the local community history centre at the library.  They loved it and took pictures, along with other ephemera that keeps surfacing, such as great vintage cardboard packaging.  I can't wait until the extension starts next year and the whole back of the house gets removed.  We will all be under the builder's feet with our picks and trowels.

I'm flat out getting to leave for our trip back to the UK over the  Christmas holidays to spend with our other family.  Will the bottom of the washing basket ever appear?  Exciting as it is to be going away (when you live in one of the world's most isolated cities, trust me, it's exciting), there's part of me that would frankly rather just stay home.   Life is such a fragile treasure, and taking our family out into the wide world of multiple airports, European winter weather, congested roads and unknown places and plans feels like such a risk to our secure little world and routine.   Jeez I must be getting old.

So I'm thinking about the lucky shoe,  and saying a little prayer for a safe and wonderful holiday, and for everyone else out there also preparing for a well earned break too.

Gifted

I've been reading lots of posts lately about tea towels (coincidental I'm sure) and present shopping.    Present shopping at Christmas time is a bit like doing homework, you know it's got to be done, is highly unappealing, yet renders a sense of serene satisfaction when complete.    I don't know what's worse and takes more input - the pressure to give something of apparent high value, or something that has lots of thought invested.  Both take time and imagination I don't generally possess.  I like Tim Minchin's suggestion that the combination of socks jocks and chocolates is just fine.  What a better place the world would be all round if someone declared a rule that all gifts must fit into one of these limited three categories.

But back to tea towels.  A few years back my old house neighbour gave me this tea towel as a christmas present.  Her husband's mother had gone it to a home, and she'd found a large cache of pure linen tea towels in her cupboard, including a pile of these, all identical.  She gave me two.

Let me count the ways that I love this tea towel(s).  I'm guessing here that the Woman's Christian Temperance (that's dry) Union was a bunch of bible-bashing nationalist wowsers.  A less attractive cohort with which to while away a Sunday afternoon is difficult to imagine.   The mind boggles, but I bet they were all gorgeous in their own special way.  I also love the fact that this tea towel is pure linen.  Once you've enjoyed the benefits of a linen tea towel and realise that this thing can absorb a sink's worth of water and is virtually indestructible, you too will say 'no thanks' to any cotton offerings.

But the thing that really gets me about this is that it celebrated their centenary... in 1982.  Oh, that's quite recent then.  No.  That's THIRTY YEARS AGO.   Amazing!

So there you go, a few forgotten slips of fabric hurriedly wrapped in a bit of christmas paper from the back of someone else's  linen cupboard can transpire so much usefulness, value, pleasure and meaning.  The challenge is matching the meaning with the recipient.  Therein lies your challenge.  Good luck!

Bricking It

Our garage-studio project is making progress, albeit slowly.  Now the steel structure is in, we are at the brick bit.  You might assume there to be little complexity around selecting bricks but let me tell you my friend, you are wrong.   The whole exercise reminds me of choosing white paint.  Anyone who has painted a house in the last ten years will know what I'm talking about here.

A few streets away from our house is an old telephone exchange built in the 1930's.  We love the utilitarian yet quietly stylish design of this building, and it has been an inspiration behind the design for the structure, a bit.  Here it is.

Not only does it sport this lovely relief design, but also boasts some gorgeous flemish bricklaying.  That's when a row of half bricks is placed between a standard row.  I bet you never knew there was so much craft involved in bricklaying.   Sadly the extra labour cost and noise pollution of 4 thousand bricks being cut in half has meant we've decided to pass on the flemish.


So, the most important task was to choose bricks that would render this vintage feel.   If we did not put in some serious effort  getting them right, we'd end up with something that looked like this.  Not good.  Equally naff would be to use ubiquitous recycled bricks, de rigour around here in the 90's.  At the risk of disappearing up our own backsides with attention to detail, it has to be said that either would be a major fail.

What we did was choose three different styles of 'tumbled' new bricks, from two different suppliers, to be blended thus creating a genuinely vintage-looking brick facade, an oxymoron if ever there was one.   This has proved too complex and out the box for brickie number one who has now walked with the bother of it all.  All halt for a week now as we await the start of brickie number two.  

Here are some of the new bricks ready to go.  These will be mixed with other batches that are less or more 'tumbled'.

Speaking of bricks, in the process of digging up the backyard this baby below surfaced, along with other miscellaneous items.  I did a bit of research and found that it came from the State Brickworks in Armadale which cranked up in 1915 and ceased to operate as a State-run facility in the mid 1950s.  Our house being weatherboard, maybe the brick was a token purchase to be admired.  Weatherboard houses were traditionally half the cost of brick dwellings to build.

Just think of the money saved if I'd dug up another 8,499 of them.

Crafty

Once the word craft would be very likely to conjure thoughts of macrame pot plant holders and brown glazed mugs for instant coffee.   In fact, I have a friend who in an amusing,  but nevertheless patronising fashion likes to categorise all craft-related pursuits with the a generic term of pottery.  'That's a nice bit  pottery you're weaving on your needlepoint workbench', etc.

But in the last five years or so craft has become the new cool, and suddenly I am swamped with opportunities to purchase  funky quality hand made items at the same or less cost than any mass produced imported department store tat.  Perth Upmarket started small about four years ago and is now a quarterly phenomenon. http://www.perthupmarket.com.au/

This related magazine will give you a good idea of where I'm coming from here.
http://www.tickletheimagination.com.au/

You can't move your elbows at these weekend events held at the local Uni, with hundreds of creative and entrepreneurial folk peddling their wares to a cashed-up crowd who are all gagging for it.  I got down there last Sunday to do some Christmas shopping for our UK family we are soon to visit.  How cute is this felt trivet I bought for my food stylist sister in law:

The joyous observation to make here is that finally people are cottoning on to the value of handmade locally produced goods that are unique and don't have to travel through a complex global supply chain.  Hopefully the creative value intrinsic within these items also means consumers will be able to appreciate the work taken to produce them, and feel less of a need to buy so much.  

Not that I want to be a  smug 'been there done that', but I had my own foray into craft commercialisation about six years ago at the point when this was all just about to go off, with my vintage inspired tea towel business Patsy and Clive.

It was lots of fun, but after a year or so when I tallied up what it had cost me and how much I made back, well, best not go there.  So when I get tempted to feel envious of these creative types standing behind their wares, taking cash hand over fist for a day, I sagely remind myself of the  endless hours and effort and expense that is involved in getting to market in this creative economy.   For the time being I'm loving being a consumer rather than producer.  But who knows, maybe I'll dip a toe in the craft pool again one day.

Day of the Triffids

Not far from where I live (on the wrong side of the track) is the house where two members of the legendary 80's alternative band the Triffids grew up, and indeed recorded many of there early jams in the basement therein.   The Triffids went on to become one of Australia's most revered bands of all time (for those with any musical taste that is), and had moderate overseas success too.

The two McComb boys grew up at The Cliff with their other brothers and doctor parents, and attended the local private boys school.  The Cliff is a vast rambling weatherboard house built at the end of the 19th Century in a prime position looking over Freshwater Bay (no working class roots for these guys, sorry).   The house has been vacant and decaying for many years now while a series of investor owners have dithered about what do with it.  Thankfully the current owner has declared non-demolishion as a condition of sale, however the buyers are not rushing in.  Such is the 'bowl it and build a mansion' mentality around here.

I often walk my dogs down past the Cliff to the river, and have more than once jumped the fence and  had a good nosy around.  Then when it went on the market a while back I went with my son and we got to look inside too.   It is like time stood still within its walls, in a home that nurtured some of the most creative talent to come from Perth, in its unpretentious and languid beauty.  I just love wandering around here and thinking about those guys growing up there in the 70's, resisting the dominant paradigm of their privileged upbringing, yet probably largely inspired by the incredible beauty of their environment and quality education.  I'm sure a bit of music practice got enforced in this house after school too.

There is also a tragic aspect to the beauty in this decay, with time standing still when the house was vacated, at around the time that Dave McComb died from a combination of bad luck, over indulgence and illness.  

Here are some photos I've taken there.  Just wish I had a lazy $4m and I'd be moving in next week.

Bragging Rights

This weekend I went to see Billy Bragg play at Perth's Astor theatre.  I've been a BB fan for over twenty years and like a total groupie could sing all the words to most of the songs.  I even managed to convince my sceptical husband to come along and watched with smug satisfaction as he became a convert over the course of the evening.  

Anyone who has heard of BB will know that he is more than a musician, and is rather a social commentator, political activist and somewhat of a raconteur who can give a great concert.  He campaigns for the voice of the people, resistance against the machine of rampant capitalism and general shit stuff going on in the world.  The first half of the concert was a tribute to Woody Guthrie who has inspired so many of our century's great songwriters, following on with a set of classic tracks from this inspirational entertainer.  Those minor chords just do it for me every time.

But I come away feeling melancholy.  Sad for the slide of social conscience that I realise middle age has bought me, replaced instead with inward focus on my own issues and those of my immediate family.  Sad also for the guitar playing that I never got back to after my first flurry of BB inspired efforts to learn some chords and strum a tune.  A bit (but not much) sad for my son who instead is being forced by me to learn guitar and listen to my rants about inequality.

Hopefully that evening will recharge me to come back to what is important in life, and maybe even pick up that Ibinez one day soon again.

It seems like you have changed, from red to blue....