A Farewell

In what feels like a spectacular act of betrayal, I sold my wheel on Ebay. Just pause for a while, as I sob uncontrollably.
That wheel has travelled with me to foreign lands, it's turned tons of clay into pots that are in at least thirty-two different countries, it's entertained children, educated, demonstrated, and helped me earn my living. And, in all the time since I bought it in 1980, its never once failed me, never once broken down. I've looked after it, greased its bearings, adjusted its drive belt, but never once has it failed to do its job. Yes, I kinda bent the tray, whilst using a gas torch to stiffen a very big pot, but I've lumped it in and out of cars, trailers, trucks, trains, ships, and up and down stairs, we've demonstrated in museums, mediaeval halls, schools, town squares, castles, everywhere.
Heads of State,  tourists by the million, and secret-policemen have watched me and my wheel working together.

Why  sell it, then? Well, I'm moving, as many of my readers know, from the north of England to Texas.
"Can't you take it with you?", you ask. Well, yes, I could. But my wheel runs on a 230 volt AC supply alternating at 50 cycles/sec. And the U.S. power supply is fundamentally different. Yes, you can get 240v, but it's a completely different ballgame. U.S. 240v is from two opposing phases, unlike the european phase/neutral. And the clincher is that the alternation is not at fifty, but sixty cycles per second. I could get a step-up transformer, and feed it through that for the voltage, but the frequency would not work well with the electronics of the speed-control box.
Or so says a professor who specialises in speed control of electric motors.

 

The buyer is an enthusiastic potter, just starting out. He and a friend are planning to learn throwing, they're both hand-building at the moment,  but, chatting with him, I felt it was going to a good home. I chucked in a couple of bags of White St Thomas' Body (a stoneware clay), to get them started.

Back in the eighties, art residency in a school, funded by the Arts Council. A display, a demo, then project work with small groups of children. I wonder if any of these, adults now, parents, probably, remember any of it? I had a heap of roman pots that I handed around for them to touch, and hold, then I made facsimiles of each one, but the fun part was the kids challenging me to make odd things. A Caterpillar! A Car! A Bucket! A Princess!

Products of the wheel, on tour in Finland.

 

In my workshop in England

The wheel, resting, after a busy day in southern Finland, throwing clay dug from the fields behind the pottery, the floor's been mopped, It's time to go home on my bike, across the little bridge over the stream, above the micro-turbine hydro-electric station that powers the village. A mile or so uphill, to my home in an old wooden house, then a stroll down through the woods to the lake, and a leisurely paddle in my kayak.....

On arriving in Texas, I'll start looking for a new wheel. Potter-friends, your advice and preferences and warnings would be greatly appreciated. I want smooth creamy torque at low speeds, no lumpy acceleration, and fairly quiet would be a bonus. I'm wondering about the Shimpo VL Whisper?

I use water, I'm a messy thrower, so I like a big wheel tray to catch glop and trimmings, but that's something I think I can get around. I've used the old cone-drive shimpos, with their little trays, they're okay, but I don't like that fixed pedal, I'd get foot cramp after a few hours, I like a pedal I can shift about, lift  up, whatever.

Advise me, please.

On Possessions, Stuff, Things.

I just moved house.

Well, to be exact, I moved back into my place after two years of house-sitting my mother's much nicer little house a couple of miles away. We, my brothers, sister, and I, were trying to sell it, and I was living there in much nicer leafy suburbs than my own. Last weekend, we finally did the move-out, it's sold, furniture and things apportioned, sales at auction, which brings me around to my subject, Stuff. Things. Kipple. 

The debris of a life.

As you may recall, I blogged some old family photographs. In the same closet were the boxes of my dad's stamps. He started collecting stamps when he started work, in a business which exported all over the world, and by the time I was eight or nine years old, I had a stamp album, a Stanley Gibbons catalogue, a lot of little tissue paper stamp-hinges, and a fascination for these little coloured patches of paper, these world travellers from far-off places and times.

A stamp-collection is a poor-man's art gallery.

My father collected for over seventy years.

I bought stamps for him, on my travels.

History on the pages.

The Shah of Persia

Tristan Da Cunha

The Falklands Islands

Palestinian Stamps

Saar, a short-lived republic.

Boxes of Unsorted Stamps

East Germany

And so, about seven boxes of stamps, albums, first-day covers went out to the auction valuers, and we're told they might bring in a hundred and twenty pounds. Pah! For that I'll have them back, frame a few. I value them, personally, at more than that. 

But here I am, in the midst of trying to downsize my possessions to start a new life in another country, and I'm getting bogged down by stamps. 

Am I crazy?

Tatting of the Toos

The Red Dirt Girl sometimes tells me she'd like a tattoo, but she's not quite sure what, or where. Might I suggest.....? 

On Spaaich.

Observed Today... A Parking Hoo-Ha.

The Beautiful South Weren't from the South

"Don't Marry Her, **** Me?"

Percussion, this time.

I was planning a post on horses in lasagne, but tripped over this on the interwebnets, while wandering unfocusedly.



"And afterwards, Ladies, we'll go for a slap-up meal."

Sahara

In the news recently, Mali, one of the countries of the Sahara. Islamic fanatics held Timbuktu, and burned ancient manuscripts.
The Touareg, nomadic peoples of the Sahara, are resisting the takeover of their traditional lands. I posted this Touareg band, Tinariwen, a few years ago.

"Tinariwen was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who at age four witnessed the execution of his father (a Tuareg rebel) during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child he saw a western film in which a cowboy played a guitar. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes.^{[citation needed]} Ag Alhabib first lived in Algeria in refugee camps near Bordj Badji Mokhtar and in the deserts around the southern city of Tamanrasset, where he received his first acoustic guitar from a local Arab man.  Later, he resided with other Tuareg exiles in Libya and Algeria.
In the late 1970s Ag Alhabib joined with other musicians in the Tuareg rebel community, exploring the radical chaabi protest music of Moroccan groups like Nass El Ghiwane and Jil Jilala; Algerian pop rai; and western rock and pop artists like Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits, Jimi Hendrix, Boney M, and Bob Marley. Ag Alhabib formed a group with Inteyeden Ag Ablil, his brother Liya, Ag Ablil, and Hassan Ag Touhami in Tamanrasset, Algeria to play at parties and weddings.^[9] They acquired their first real acoustic guitar in 1979. While the group had no official name, people began to call them Kel Tinariwen, which in the Tamashek language translates as "The People of the Deserts" or "The Desert Boys."
In 1980, Libyan ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi put out a decree inviting all young Tuareg men who were living illegally in Libya to receive full military training. Gaddafi dreamed of forming a Saharan regiment, made up of the best young Tuareg fighters, to further his territorial ambitions in Chad, Niger, and elsewhere. Ag Alhabib and his bandmates answered the call and received nine months of training. They answered a similar call in 1985, this time by leaders of the Tuareg rebel movement in Libya, and met fellow musicians Keddou Ag Ossade, Mohammed Ag Itlale (aka "Japonais"), Sweiloum, Abouhadid, and Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni. All sang and played guitar in various permutations. The musicians joined together in a collective (now known as Tinariwen) in order to create songs about the issues facing the Tuareg people, built a makeshift studio, and vowed to record music for free for anyone who supplied a blank cassette tape. The resulting homemade cassettes were traded widely throughout the Sahara region.
In 1989, the collective left Libya and moved to Ag Alhabib's home country of Mali, where he returned to his home village of Tessalit for the first time in 26 years. In 1990 the Tuareg people of Mali revolted against the government, with some members of Tinariwen participating as rebel fighters. After a peace agreement known as the Tamanrasset Accords was reached in January 1991, the musicians left the military and devoted themselves to music full-time. In 1992 some of the members of Tinariwen went to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire to record a cassette at JBZ studios. They played occasional gigs for far-flung Tuareg communities throughout the Sahara region, gaining word-of-mouth popularity among the Tuareg people."
 (Wikipedia)




More from Mali, Ali  Farka Toure, and Toumani Diabate.
Trust me, I know they're funny names, and a language you don't understand, but give it a chance.