School of the Unconformed

an appreciation

Making drawings for ‘The Wake’ 2016

Now that I am writing a main essay each fortnight, I still find there are things that queue up to be told on the intervening Monday mornings, and while they do, I’ll just allow those thoughts to well-up and spill over, here. No voiceover, just an occasional enlarged ‘this week’s good thing’ feature. Enjoy. See you next week for either softening around hard things or a prayer journey. I am not sure which will be ready first, both are proving equally difficult to get right.

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I have subscribed to

Peco

and

Ruth Gaskovski

‘s School of the Unconformed for quite some time, probably having been directed there originally by links or comments at the Substack of

Paul Kingsnorth

. It is always good, what can I say? Just go and subscribe. This week, in a particularly heartening, thorough, and wide-ranging post, Peco and Ruth spoke about some of the down-to-earth ways in which we can foster anachronistic practices in our lives that help derail the forward thrust of the technological juggernaut. They suggest some delightful ways to be ‘weird in public’¹, and although I won’t be knitting anytime soon, as for me it’s crochet or bust, I loved the other examples they gave. I won’t precis the piece further, as you can go and read it here.

As someone who gathers and grinds rocks and earths to make paint, and teaches how to do this for a living, being years, centuries, or even millennia out of fashion in my behaviour is an everyday occurrence. Travelling up and down the country, and occasionally abroad, with a massive backpack of rocks, feathers, reeds, gums and berries, to make the art supplies I use and teach, brings me good-natured stares, pitying comments, and sometimes very achy hips. On station platforms while waiting for delayed trains, I’ll sew leather pouches made from offcuts from hides I have tanned, or perhaps crochet fingerless gloves for a friend. I have always crafted in public, when I am not in the mood for a book. Travelling in India in the early 1990s, having colourful cotton threads to hand with which to make friendship bands and impromptu shoelaces meant I encountered a world of women I would never usually have met, as they came over to see what I was making, and exchange fellow-crafter smiles.

I never was good at the penny whistle, and I don’t have a good repertoire of a cappella songs to burst into at the drop of a hat. But having a little craft with me at most times has opened many doors into connection in unlikely places, as well as stopped me dwelling on things and being stuck in my own head, countless times.

Ye olde packhorse of the anachronistic containers

Peco and Ruth asked readers this week to list their anachronistic practices. Here’s a few of mine, just for fun, because after reading that piece I felt more at home in the world, un-conformed as I am to it. And then I had to spend almost all day online doing admin, amongst other things, so I am ending my day with this, as a way back to good thoughts, before I sit in bed with The Matter With Things, shortly.

Pickling and preserving food, making vinegars, baking bread, cooking from fresh most days, writing in a paper planner and diary, using a fountain pen daily, drawing with home made ink and quills, mending clothes, making clothes, making rag rugs from worn out clothes, tanning waste-stream deer hides, foraging for food regularly, learning and teaching T’ai Chi for decades (a slow process both to learn and teach well), tanning the skins of fish I catch and eat, making almost all my own art materials, not driving or owning a car, walking to the shops with a backpack for all shopping trips, clean a well by hand regularly, make (slow!) string from plant fibres, making sweets for Christmas from good marzipan and chocolate in the way my mum taught me, using a hot water bottle at night rather than the heating, making all birthday and Christmas cards by hand from collage, making sloe gin and beech leaf noyau as gifts and pick-me-ups, producing annual rosehip oxymel and fire cider to keep me and loved ones healthy through the winter…

Ok, time for bed. Today I have felt as though I was in the grip of the machine again, for good reason. But writing this simple list of what came immediately to mind, inspired by Peco and Ruth’s post, has cheered me up immensely. It isn’t important which things we do, only that we find some, that they re-embody us, enrich our shared lives, and return us to our ‘right minds’. I’m a fanatical crafter, so my list is long, and I feel physically unwell when I have a prolonged period without making things. I wrote about the benefits of working with the hands here in my Substack. Today I only made bread, but that was my haptic highpoint.

What weird and lovely thing will you do in public or in private to bring you freedom from tech-serfdom? What will your hands hold, apart from screens? I hope whatever it is brings you joy and connection.

Warmest greetings from a blustery evening from me, the two-legged pack horse of the anachronism.

It looks like mayonnaise, I know

1. A term I love, and that my inner teen Goth is very happy to adopt.