Here’s the view out the art room window this morning:

The country has been paying for that pretty, warm, and fairly dry September and October we had, by giving us rain and gale-force winds for a couple weeks now. There were terrible floods up north in the Peak District, with a few entire towns and many bridges wiped out. We live less than two miles from the Thames and I think we’re protected somewhat by the raised embankments of the rail lines and the M4. But we definitely live in a low river valley so we do wonder about what Maidenhead would look like if we got as much rain as they did up north.

Anyway, I’m trying to learn to live with gloomy days like this. And that lovely damp-dog smell!! I knew that was going to be the biggest challenge, coming from sun-drenched Colorado. It took me nearly 3 weeks to shrug off that cold I had (maybe I did have the minor-symptoms version of the swine flu), and Paul has been working long hours and not getting home as much for lunch. All that added up to me feeling like a real shut-in recently. I’m usually a quite contented loner, but I haven’t had the opportunity to make any friends here and not getting out of the house for so long made me realize how much I am missing even my minimalist social life in Boulder! After these last few weeks I am now determined to get out by myself on weekdays and explore more places within a couple hours drive—even in winter drizzle!

Yesterday we walked the Boyz over at Henley-on-Thames, my favorite local village (a quite posh one actually) and remembered again why I am so blissed to be living here. (Wow, that sentence actually sounded kind of Brit-speak didn’t it??) The town has such a picturesque setting on the river with their church and bridge. They hold the annual Henley Regatta here, which is one of those see-and-be-seen summer social calendar events like Ascot. Even though the grass is still vibrant green and daytime temps are mostly around 50°, Christmas lights (they call them fairy lights over here) are beginning to come out. It was picture-book pretty walking through town as the sun was setting; too bad I forgot to bring my camera!

It will be fun observing the holiday season over here. A lot of celebratory traditions are the same as in the US (including some politically-correct schools banning anything but the most secular decorations and names for the season). Christmas Pudding seems to be a variation on (or more likely the origin of) our fruitcake, and I read in the paper that yesterday was “Stir Up Sunday”. The first day of the holiday season, where the whole family is supposed to take part in making the Christmas pudding.

Over here they have Boxing Day, on Dec 26th. According to the web: An ‘Alms Box’ was placed in every church on Christmas Day, into which worshippers placed a gift for the poor of the parish. These boxes were always opened the day after Christmas, which is why that day became known as Boxing Day.

During the late 18th century, Lords and Ladies of the manor would “box up” their leftover food, or sometimes gifts and distribute them the day after Christmas to tenants who lived and worked on their lands. Traditionally, Boxing Day is the day when families get together. It is a day of watching sports and playing board games with the family. Many families will go on walks in the countryside together on this day. There is also a tradition of fox hunting on Boxing Day. (Though now they can still hunt but can’t actually chase foxes.)

In recent times, some shops have broken from tradition and started opening on Boxing Day to start the New Year sales. Hundreds of people now spend Boxing Day morning in queues outside shops, waiting to be the first to dive for the sales racks as the doors opened. (Sounds just like our “Black Friday” the day after Thanksgiving. Though recently I think our stores have been having their biggest sales after Christmas too.)

We won’t be here for Boxing Day, as we fly to NY to spend Christmas with my sister Kristin and her family in Brooklyn for a few days, and then upstate with Paul’s parents.

I’ve been puttering away in the art room even when I didn’t have much energy with the head cold. I’m almost done with the china “Optime” Arabian onto which I am sculpting a unique mane and tail:

I got my china molds out and cast a “Streetwise” Quarter Horse the other day. I want to see if I can do a drastic customization and get three legs on the ground (instead of the current two) so that it will stand without a base. It’s a good choice sculpture to use as a guinea pig because I was surprised to find that I have two complete sets of his molds. I wasn’t planning on releasing too many more of him (might have to re-think that now!). Here’s what he looks like in all his parts…

I also have four good molds of the little “Breakables Live” show medallions I sculpted as awards for that show I held in 2002. (I cast one of those the other day too. You can see it in the lower left of the photo.) I have no clue what to do with them. I offered them to the person who revived the show last summer, but I was turned down. Guess they wanted something new.

Lastly, here is more progress on “Roundabout”.

It is still horribly rough but that’s the way sculpting goes around here. I work on one part and then another part looks wrong, and back and forth! I’m not sure if I am doing my work-self any favors, revealing my in-progress “dirty laundry” in this way. Is it really a good idea for everyone to see my cringe-inducing mistakes revealed in the process? Or is it better to present the finished product only??

A warm and Happy Thanksgiving to all my USA readers, family, and friends! We’re flying back to Boulder this week (first time Paul’s been home for nearly a year!) and then on to visit my two brothers’ families in Tucson for a few days. Sun, here we come, yeah!!

I’ve been sculpting for a couple hours a day now. I predict a productive winter at this rate! Now that dismal damp winter appears to be here for good, there’s not much incentive to go out and do anything except walk the Boyz around the immediate neighborhood studying sodden leaves and drippy trees. The nice thing is that it isn’t too cold, and the grass is amazingly green. It has only got to freezing a couple nights so far. And there is something interesting about the soft, misty look to everything. Such a difference from Colorado, where the air is always so dry that you see everything in incredible sharp focus.

I’ve put that right hind leg flat on the ground and just started the process of “sketching” in the anatomy details on this side. This guy will be pretty fat and rounded so a lot of the hyper-detail will get smoothed away but I need to sculpt this sort of thing in as a guide to my anatomy. Which I’m trying harder to get right on this piece. I had to remove the whole head and neck today because the wire I had in there was shaped at the wrong angle and kept showing up right down the head. I think maybe now the neck is too short and/or head too big, so ignore that..! And bleah, that extended front leg is bugging me for some reason.

I was in denial about it for several days, but I must also pull the clay from the wire in the left-side hoof and bend it straighter out; the wire isn’t at the right angle in there, either. Aaargh! This always seems to happen with me, always clay vs. armature right when I’m closing in on the details and proportions I want! It’s a pain to rework but I’m NOT complaining. The beauty of clay is that you can push it around forever until you get what you want.

A couple hours a day when the light is best in the art room, is enough. I find if I spend too long in a session then I might lose track of the big picture. I like to walk away and come back the next day with a fresh eye for it. Amazing what jumps out at you!

Here is a first look at the sculpture I started recently. It is to be a type of horse found here in Britain called a Heavyweight Show Cob. I just smile and smile every time I have seen one of these horses. I’m just plain drawn to their short-legged, fat-butted, roman-nosed sturdiness. Probably the kind I’d need if I ever were to take up riding. And I’m seeing them a lot over here, as they are quite a popular horse for all kinds of riding.

As a sculpture, it will have a nice element of versatility for me in the china finishing department. If I add feathering to the legs and sculpt in a mane on a greenware piece, it can then become a Gypsy Cob, which come in interesting pinto colors. This sculpture is “traditional” scale, in model horse collecting terms.

I have also given it what I think is the perfect name: ROUNDABOUT!
It ought to be my most precious souvenir/memento of my time here, appropriately “born and raised” in the UK!

It’s been far too long since I finished a sculpture and I am so hoping that “Roundabout” will be the vehicle to take me down my re-energized artistic road.

I’m coming down with a headcold this week, and at this point I don’t have energy for more than typing at the computer. Which makes it a good time to sort through our Scotland trip photos and write about it.

Overall impression: Scotland looks SOOO familiar!! If you have been to upstate New York/Adirondack mountains, northern Vermont, or New Hampshire, you will feel right at home in Scotland. We couldn’t get over the feeling we’d been there before, all week. Though the Scots have much better-looking and more interesting housing styles and architecture, ha ha!! Their stone cottages and ruined castles/abbeys/cathedrals are something we sure don’t have in New England.

I was delighted to see that as we drove north the hedgerows went away!! I noticed it right around Lancaster as we were passing by the Yorkshire Dales National Park area. The fields bordered by thick hedges gradually were replaced by drystone walls or just fences. Hooray! I think the hedgerows are definitive rural England but they are so annoying if you are trying to SEE things on the other side of them. You can’t! If the land is flat like around Maidenhead, there is no view. In the north of England and Scotland they had fabulous stone walls. (Again just like in New England!) I was very very happy to be able to enjoy the scenery hedge-free. Here’s a photo of a genuine Yorkshire Dale, with stone walls and sheep:

Thanks to the amazing worldwideweb, we found a dog-friendly apartment rental about 10 minutes from the center of Edinburgh. But the apartment’s site did NOT prepare us for how enchanting the place actually was! Here’s the description:

” “Peffermill House” dates from 1636 and has its own 4 acres of gardens at the end of a private drive. It is a Schedule ‘A’ Listed fortified tower-house, built solidly of stone, which was renovated and restored to its present outstanding condition some years ago, and it is as well-furnished and comfortable inside as its Virginia creeper-covered exterior is beautiful.”

Well, the photos only showed one (back) side, and when we got there we could NOT believe our eyes. An exquisite 3-storey stone building that had a turret stairwell and formal gardens. And we got the whole bottom floor! (The listing just said “garden apartment” so we assumed we’d be in a building attached to the property somewhere.) An “L” shape building with the tower (containing a stone spiral-stairwell) tucked into the inside of the “L”. It had two bedrooms which was more than we needed, but it made it all so spacious. One bedroom was made up all in tartan colors and the other, plus the living room, had barrel-vaulted (round) ceilings. The owners were both college professors and invited us up for drinks Sunday night. We had an enjoyable 2 hours talking with them about everything from history to politics! There was an impressive ruined castle (Craigmillar Castle) less than a mile from this house and the owners told us that originally the tower house was all part of the same estate.

Here are photos:

This photo was taken in the 1800’s:

We spent most of our time exploring all the riches Edinburgh had to offer. We were right on the bus line into the city center. Both of us were so impressed with Edinburgh and its city and suburbs. We both said we could easily imagine living there. The art museums and the architecture were great. We loved the way the whole city had preserved so many of its old buildings, rather than building new modern things, like sadly London has done so much of. It is built across several hills and that landscape makes the area so interesting! There’s a large park with a very high ex-volcano peak right in the middle of everything, called Holyrood Park. The highest point there is Arthur’s Seat, which we climbed with the Boyz. The views were wonderful across the city and we could see the Firth of Forth estuary easily, even though the weather was pretty misty and overcast.

I loved the combination of the mountains in view around the city, plus the seascape/port, plus all the history in evidence. Meets all my needs! They even have some ski areas in Scotland. Now, if it wasn’t always so cloudy, damp, and windy…! I suffered a bad hair day all week, that’s for sure.

That said, we were actually pretty fortunate with the weather. We only got rained on for a little bit on two days. The rest of the time we got at least partial sunshine. It wasn’t freezing cold. I am so glad we got to see the highland foothills in autumn with the trees turning color. How I wished the sun would come out and light up many a scene, though!! We explored all parts of the city, spending time in most of the museums and the castles. They even have a ruined abbey at Holyrood Palace (the official Royal Residence). We had to giggle by the end of the week because it seemed no matter which castle, church, abbey, or stately house we visited, Mary Queen of Scots had stayed there!! I’m sure it was all true but it began to seem like a bad tourist joke.

The view across Edinburgh from their castle. That’s the Forth estuary in the background:

This is the ruined abby on the grounds of Holyrood Palace:

One day we drove over to Stirling, to visit their castle and town. A compact town on its hill, impeccably kept! It sits in the middle of this broad valley with the river at its foot and long views from the castle. We had lunch at this pub. We were attracted to the name (Drouthy Neebors), but we can only guess what it means:

The view from Stirling Castle. That’s the William Wallace memorial tower in the distance:

Stirling Castle, from the back wall:

Speaking of guessing, sometimes the Scottish accent people had was so strong, we couldn’t understand them. For some reason, I thought everyone in Scotland would sound like Sean Connery, ha. Wrong!

After Stirling we drove about an hour northwest to Loch Lomond, our first real Loch. The Boyz waded and chased sticks in delight. Too bad it was so grey but the long view was stunning even in the mist.

On the way, we came past a field with real Highland Cattle, what joy!! There they were in their pretty green field framed by the Loch, just waiting for a painter to come along and turn them into a classical landscape:

Another day we took a drive across the Forth Bridge to Fife, a coastal county with a series of fishing villages like this one:

We ended up in St. Andrews, the famous golfing mecca. I was more interested in the ruined cathedral and castle, and it was also a lovely university town. The Boyz can now say they’ve been in castles AND cathedrals! Here they are checking out what’s on the other side of that arrow-slit in the wall:

St Andrews town is bordered by the ocean and the sea was amazingly rough, even though the weather in town was not bad at all. The storm must have been out at sea. No fishing boats were out that day!

We did not stop to see the golf links, not being interested in golf all that much!!

After St Andrews we drove back west and north, through Perth, on the way up for another peek at the Highlands. We drove up along the main rail route from Edinburgh to Inverness and stopped at roughly the halfway point. There was a vintage stone train trestle there at a place called Killiecrankie, complete with round stone turrets! I was thinking of my Dad the whole time, the family train watcher. It was such a gorgeous spot on a tributary of the Tay river, with the fall trees and the mountains rising above. I wished we could have kept going north!

We could have spent a month in Scotland. We didn’t even do any serious hiking, and only scratched the surface going no more than an hour from Edinburgh on any day. There are SO many castles and ruined abbeys, it was hard to choose. I’d like to go back and explore the western islands and get into the real highlands in the north. Maybe next spring! It only took us 7 hours (with a stop for lunch) drive from Maidenhead! The Boyz are always up for a ride:

On the way back we turned aside from the motorway at Carlisle, to see a part of the famous Roman Hadrian’s Wall. It was a rainy day but it let up enough for us to walk the fort remains at this particular site (among the grazing sheep), and try to imagine what the area looked like when the Romans were there. (Not easy!) The wall used to be higher than the height of a man, now it is about waist high at least where we were. Looking at all the stone walls in the area, you could tell where most of the stones went. Another Must-See place checked off the list, anyway!