A pot addict confesses and appeals for help

Well, it got your attention didn’t it? Actually, the type of pot I am obsessed with is the kind you look at, fill with pot pourri or soup. Not the kind you smoke.



I haven’t given in to my addiction to things ceramic for a few years but I have just parted with £25 to help out a talented potter called Kirsty Badham. Her kiln came over all chaotic recently and destroyed some pots-in-progress. In an effort to raise the funds to repair it, Kirsty has offered to make a bowl in return for each of the 100 pledges of £25 that she receives through this site:
http://www.pledgeforapot.co.uk/



Now, I am trying to be helpful by doing this but I also see this as an opportunity to buy a unique and lovely thing at a bargain price - I’m not stupid - at a time when things are rather tight (I have yet to break the news to The Attached One that I have taken this course). In fact, if money was no object I know that we would not be able to move for things ceramic. I’m not sure how or when this need to own pots developed, it may have started at the British Museum where I fell in love with ancient pieces such as those made by the Beaker People. I expect Freud and Jung would see connections with wombs or similar but that’s all too complicated for me. I just like pots.



The last investment of this kind was a week’s wages spent on a bowl by Julia Jefferson. I needed a salad bowl and it occurred to me that I could eat from something handmade and beautiful rather than mass produced. It means a lot of careful hand washing but I still love it. When we brought it home I couldn’t stop looking at it and it seems to have been made for blackberries.



When I actually got the chance to make pots myself things just got worse. I don’t want to mislead you, don’t imagine that I am capable of slapping a lump of clay onto a potter’s wheel and turning it into something resembling a bowl. My efforts were restricted to pieces built from slabs or formed in plaster moulds, incorporating leaves and fabric dipped into slip (liquid clay). As far as I was concerned it was choosing the glaze that was the fun part.



Once I left college (and free access to a kiln, clay, glazes and knowledge) I had to buy my pots from other people, often potters who had stalls at festivals and fairs. I went through an unfortunate phase when I bought every chipped and manky piece of 1930’s crockery that I could find for 50p at car boot sales. Most of these are now living in boxes under my work room table. No Clarice Cliff unfortunately.



Some unusual items have made it onto the walls and into a display cabinet. I dream of eating from plates made by Sean Miller, an urban potter based in my area and one day that will happen. Until then I drool as I sit in front of the screen, perusing craftsmen potter sites. It has been a while so I think I deserve one of Kirsty’s bowls. Can’t wait to see it…

A

The Griffin is given wings and claws

You are probably wondering what a couple of stone beads have to do with Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party.

These beads may be thousands of years old. They turn up in the sands of the Sahara and are sold to foreign collectors by the hardy people who live there. A very long time ago someone used very primitive tools to drill holes through two attractive pieces of stone and polish their surfaces. One is probably a piece of agate with some tiny quartz crystals that, even now, sparkle in the light, the other may be a piece of petrified wood. I love them because they are tiny and affordable pieces of ancient history and because they are a connection with my most distant ancestors - Africans.

One of the few intelligent and serious comments made by a member of the studio audience on the BBC’s “Question Time” was in response to the BNP leader’s suggestion that white English people are now aborigines in their own country. She pointed out that, as we are all descended from the first humans who came from Africa, we are all members of minorities now.

I did not plan to watch it. I haven’t in years and I don’t need to see Nick Griffin in person to know that I don’t agree with his views. In the end I watched it online because I had heard so many comments about the programme that I felt I had to see it for myself. Unfortunately my love for the BBC has now cooled a little because what was considered a smart attempt to undermine the BNP‘s growing influence has probably backfired.

Those involved in the decision to invite Griffin to take part in a debate alongside other politicians are clearly out of touch with the sort of people inclined to vote for a party generally regarded as racist and beyond the pale. They made the mistake of treating him differently to any other politician. There was an obvious and open lack of respect from the very beginning. I understand that the audience was carefully selected - I am not sure what criteria were involved in this selection but the impression I was left with was that they chose anyone prepared to boo and shout. The atmosphere was such that I expected to see girls with trays of ice cream (or rotten eggs and tomatoes) wandering up and down the aisles.

Jack Straw has been criticised for his performance on the night. It is easy to forget that, while we often see images of politicians seconds apart on our TV screens, in reality they don’t always meet face to face. It may have been one of the few times that they had been in each other’s presence and Straw was clearly already very angry. Having Griffin raise the fact that his father was a conscientious objector imprisoned during WW2 couldn‘t have helped. It must have taken some guts to do what his father did but Griffin’s comment was a crafty and subliminal message to anyone watching who has sympathy with his views. They won’t remember the fact what his dad did had little or nothing to do with today‘s politics. All they will take in is that, in their opinion, Straw is not made of the right stuff unlike Griffin whose daddy was in the RAF during the war.

The fact is that Nick Griffin came across as a reasonable, well mannered, clearly spoken individual - if you ignore what he was actually saying - compared to the programme’s presenter, most of the panel and the studio audience. What I saw was a gathering of arrogant liberals (with the exception of Bonnie Greer, who I felt was respectful to him) having a night out at the circus, the sort of circus where lions eat people. Griffin has had a lot of practice saying all the things he said on the night. He has said them a hundred times before to television cameras. He would have had a much harder time if he had been asked for his policies on the environment, Afghanistan, Iraq, the postal strike.

More importantly, the people who have some sympathy for his views on immigration and its impact on the availability of resources (as pointed out by Baroness Warsi this, not race, is the issue) will have seen someone they feel represents their views being howled down. It would be an enormous mistake to assume that the average BNP type is still a skin head with a swastika tattooed onto his forehead. It is unlikely that those who make “Question Time” have experienced life in a tower block, waiting years for a transfer to more suitable housing, or been in the queue at the post office watching someone who can’t speak English collect substantial benefits as they wait to get their own meagre pension. I suspect they pay occasional visits to this alternative reality. They don’t have to live there. They can afford to be open minded.

To me the worst thing of all about that broadcast was the complaint made by a woman in the audience at Jack Straw’s repeated use of the term “Afro-Caribbean”. It seems that he should have said “African-Caribbean”. Surely that night of all nights was an occasion for what is a very tiny failure in protocol to be overlooked. A group of people who should have been united against racists have shown themselves to be divided by semantics. I suspect that this woman, who struck me as someone I would like to know in spite of what she said, would regard me with some suspicion for stating my love of things African. Perhaps she would find me patronising. Sometimes you just can’t win but the taste in my mouth is all the more unpleasant for a realisation that the BNP have gained more than they have lost because of the BBC’s lack of judgement.

This Griffin now has wings and claws. The dangerous fantasy of a country run by racists may now become reality. Thanks Auntie Beeb…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nft24#synopsis

Not "The X Factor" - an urgent appeal for Akmal Shaikh

The popularity of talent shows such as “The X Factor” has shown just how many people have the urge to strut their stuff in public and believe that they have what it takes to get to the top. A very small handful of those who expose themselves to potential ridicule in this way actually do make it. As for the rest, their friends and family may regard their desire to become celebrities as a touch of madness.

Akmal Shaikh is not the obvious candidate for a career in the pop industry. Fifty-three years old and father to five children he comes from north London and is a British national. He has shown the signs of serious mental illness for years and it is likely that he is suffering from Bipolar Disorder which used to be known as Manic Depression. This condition can lead the sufferer to behave in ways that the average person would regard as risky or unacceptable. They can run up large credit card debts, shoplift and display all kinds of antisocial behaviour. They often end up in the criminal justice system before their condition is identified. In Akmal’s case it meant that he was living in Poland at the mercy of friends who were in fact members of a criminal gang. They persuaded him that they had contacts in the music industry and that he had a real chance of making it. It would involve his travelling to Kyrgyzstan and then China. Considering his state of mind it is not surprising that he accepted this as the truth and also agreed to take some luggage with him. He trusted them.

Upon the discovery of four kilos of heroin in this luggage Akmal was charged with drug smuggling. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Now that he has lost all his appeals there is no hope for him other than the pressure that can be placed on the Chinese authorities by people like you and me.

Even if you have never done anything like this before please think about doing it now. All you have to do is add your name and email address to the form but it would be more effective if you thought up your own polite message (even if you don’t feel like being polite - don‘t make things worse by expressing too frank an opinion).

Akmal Shaikh has probably been quite a challenging dad to love but that is because he is a very sick man who needs help. He is not a criminal. His case has the support of Stephen Fry, Amnesty International and Reprieve. Please help Akmal’s family bring him back home to north London.

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=638%20 http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18460
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/helpakmal
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/stephenfryappeal

Sweet charity

Last week I dropped off a fat brown envelope at a discreet industrial unit in west London. On the way in I passed a woman who gave me a conspiratorial smile. We had a common cause. We were delivering our little woolly hats.

Since 2003 Innocent, the company that creates fruit and vegetable products, has encouraged those in the UK who knit and crochet to make the small hats that are put on to their smoothie bottles throughout November. Every bottle with a hat that is sold generates a donation for Age Concern/Help the Aged. In 2008, £253,384 was raised as a result of the 506,738 hats that were sent in. Some of those little hats are works of art (subscribers to the Innocent online newsletter get to vote on the “Hat of the Week”) and showcase the creativity and skill of contributors to this cause. And it is addictive. Some have made hundreds and even thousands. Last year I made 40 but this year, in spite of my best intentions, I only managed 27.

I delivered them in person as the possibility of a postal strike meant that they might not have reached Innocent before the 2009 deadline and knew that I was in the right place when I saw the delivery vans covered in plastic turf and purple daisies. I walked out in a bit of a daze as the lovely people at the reception desk, having startled me by offering me a smoothie, filled a little paper bag with five of them and gave them to me. No wonder that woman had been smiling. I was smiling to myself on the way home. And trying to lick strawberry smoothie off the corners of my mouth. If only there were more companies like Innocent, with their unorthodox but effective approach to fundraising.

Crafters are a generous lot. They use up their stashes of yarn, fabric and beads to make the lives of others a little easier and give up hours of their time to do it. For some it is a chance to show off their skills but I cannot be too cynical about this. They don’t have to do it but they still do. Search the internet for knitting and crochet patterns and the word “charity” comes up fairly quickly. Ravelry, the yarn crafts community website, hosts a number of groups that create items for donation. One member is collecting easily laundered scarves to pass on as Christmas presents to homeless women. Others are asking for contributions of yarn to make blankets for animal shelters or offering their free patterns as ways of raising money. Feed the Children has withdrawn their free knitting pattern as they have been sent so many sweaters that they can’t cope with any more for the moment.

Many of us are moved by the loss of a loved one to a preventable illness or risk to raise money for the charity that will stop it happening to anyone else. Sometimes we just want to be kind. Some of the most popular “makes” are chemo caps, made for those who have lost their hair as a result of chemotherapy. Another, sadder cause is the provision of tiny clothes in which to bury the stillborn. There was a time when these babies were not spoken of and an effort made to forget that they had ever existed. Today we know that it is better to acknowledge these events and the crafters who make these clothes help the bereaved in the most practical way.

Dog blankets, prayer shawls, scarves for women in refuges. There is a knitting need out there to suit everyone. At some point I hope to make some teddy bears for children in eastern Europe, Africa and Asia as well as fundraisers for SSAFA and Combat Stress. And little woolly hats of course.

http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/thebigknit/

http://www.ravelry.com/

http://www.teddiesfortragedies.org.uk/

http://www.christianhope.org.uk/stitches/index.html

http://www.headhuggers.org/

http://www.cuddles-uk.org/

http://www.bonniebabies.co.uk/

http://www.knitting4charity.org/

http://www.missionstoseafarers.org/

http://www.missionstoseafarers.org/pdfs/knitting%20patterns.pdf