Valuable time

On the whole I have had a reasonable week, one little fall of no consequence; my bladder and bowel has behaved itself more or less; eating has not been too troublesome, but saliva remains unresolved.

The Botox treatment was meant to be: ‘the gold standard for reducing saliva’ in the industry.  It is administered every two to three months at Airedale Hospital and means yet another£2.50 parking ticket.  Even then you may not a place to park, it is always chaos, and you can spend as much time trying to park as you do seeing the consultant, it's ridiculous.  It is even more annoying when you have eventually found somewhere to park got to the clinic, only to find after waiting forty minutes that it's the wrong doctor running the clinic and he can’t administer the Botox. All this after cancelling my appointment twice!  So you’d think they would have booked me into the next clinic with the consultant, the top Botox man and not the junior member of his team that saw me. 

Another frustration was that I arrived at the time given to me in my appointment letter and when I eventually registered with the nurse she didn’t mention that the clinic was running late. There were several patients sitting in the corridor minding their own business waiting to see the doctor.  Patients were arriving after me and getting into the consulting rooms before me which is always annoying when no explanations are given.  Why give a precise date and time for an appointment when everyone knows clinics run late.  This is not putting patients first or valuing their time. It strikes me that hospitals could learn a lot from the railway companies who allow more minutes in stations where trains stop in order to ensure that they arrive at final destinations in time.

I have said before in an earlier blog how impressed I have been in the internet drugs service I receive from my GP and Lloyds the chemist, but this time it broke down badly.  After a couple of phone calls to the practice I still couldn’t order my drugs online, so we resorted to the traditional method and took the paper subscription to the practice to process.  When Liz went to pick up the prescription it was incorrect, it contained the newest drug only recently recommended, not my regular order.  So the pharmacist said that she would sort it out with the practice and the prescription would be delivered that afternoon. She knew Liz would be in our local church as she runs the babies and toddlers group there on Friday afternoons, and that’s where they were delivered by the courier- great service Lloyds! [The courier had never delivered a prescription to a church before.]

To end this week we found mice activity in the garage.  They have been feasting on bird food.  We did not think much of it so put the food in a lidded box.  That should have been it but no I found five peanuts and other bits and pieces in one of my trainers in the back room which meant they were now in the house. This was confirmed earlier this morning at around 5am when we heard noises in our bedroom.  Liz was not amused.  War has now commenced with newly bought little nipper traps.

I had lunch with Ian, a long-standing friend from Skipton yesterday at the pub in Appletreewick.  It was lovely, good company, good conversation, good food and a convivial atmosphere.T to both his house

A Personal Collection

It has been a good week with the opening of the Contemporary Ceramics: A Personal Collection at the Craven Museum, Skipton. The personal collection is mine acquired over at least 30 years. It is the first time the pieces have been exhibited in public as a collection so I am really pleased that they are considered worthy of being shown to the public as a quality collection. There were lots of friends, family and colleagues at the preview evening on Wednesday.  I appreciated the special effort Mark and Eve made and as Grace is staying with us at the moment the whole family was involved.   The house is rather empty with nothing to look at when we get up in the morning!  MSA tried as usual to mess things up by     upsetting my bladder and bowel but didn’t quite succeed.  There is a catalogue to accompany the show that you can order from the museum and/or me. Here are some quotes which say it all for me.  I also recommend looking at my face book site because it has a photo album by Grace of the opening.

An interview with the collector

How did you start as a collector?

I didn’t collect things as a child but I did get the collecting bug when I was working in Freetown, Sierra Leone in the early 1970s. I had trained as an art teacher and wasn’t ready to settle down in an English school so I applied for a post sponsored by the Overseas Development Agency and had the choice of either going to Bermuda or Sierra Leone. I chose Sierra Leone because it was far more obscure and the chances of going there otherwise at that time were nil. Whilst there I bought four masks mostly because I loved them – they were so much part of the country I was in and they now hold special memories of my two years in Freetown.

I had been to art school and when I got back to the UK I worked with Yorkshire Arts for a while so the collection began partly because it was opportunistic – I knew I wasn’t going to have this chance again of seeing the pieces of work and working with the artists. My wife Liz, who was also a teacher in Freetown, and I chose ceramics rather than paintings partly because of the cost but also because we wanted to support the potters. I couldn’t believe the number of good potters that were around in Yorkshire and how good so many of them were, for example Jane Hamlyn and David Lloyd Jones. They were making terrific stuff [Jane still is], salt of the earth potters, and very modest with it. Peter Robinson was another guy producing very good work at the time. He was good at making things happen but eventually moved on to more teaching and community work.

The ceramics collection started with a piece by Catherine Beetham - a modest circular container with a lid to keep things in, from the Marble Street Workshop in Hebden Bridge, which had just been set up by Manchester Poly graduates. In buying this I was putting my toe in the water – it didn’t cost too much and it looked nice. I gave it to Liz to keep her bits and pieces in.

We began to put £10 a month away – quite a lot at the time – to buy work we liked.  We didn’t have a plan. We had a pot of money and if we saw something we liked we could just buy it. It wasn’t always ceramics as there were some really good photographers, including Martin Parr, starting out at the time and beginning to make a name for themselves. Any extra money I made from freelance consultancy work we put aside and treat it like a bonus to go into our purchasing fund.

We didn’t think about collecting as an investment. Bonhams were having two auctions a year of contemporary ceramics so I used to get the catalogues and look at everything. All the prices in the auction room were much lower than the prices I had paid. The pieces had devalued in price but when I learnt that I felt quite liberated. The price didn’t matter and anyway they were only selling particular people – secure bets like Lucie Rie and Elizabeth Fritsch - so I was happy to buy things I saw that I liked.

I began to realise I was buying on a regular basis. The kids started to ask me when I was going to buy the next pot and increasingly I realised I was getting it about right so I drew up a hit list which I kept in my filofax – a list of potters names, and eventually acquired a piece from all of them. That’s when I bought the more expensive pieces – Britten, Baldwin, Ward - but I’ve never regarded collecting as an investment. I think that was the tipping point. I realised I had built up an important collection of its time.

All of the pots we own have little histories and look good in our converted chapel. The histories make them interesting in another dimension. Transporting some home was particularly challenging, for example the very large hand coiled Monica Young which our children have played in.

I have always been keen to support galleries - Godfrey and Watt in Harrogate was one of my favourite places – they were a classic intermediary. Alex Watt worked closely with a small number of artists and craftspeople building up a close relationship with them thereby ensuring that he always got their best work. Alex also knew his customer base and was very good at matching the two and often his exhibitions were sell outs. This to me is success – very difficult to do but if you get it right the cash gets to the artists quickly and regularly and builds up their reputations. In the scheme of things agents are often overlooked but if crafts are going to grow as a creative industries sector so must the intermediaries.

What is left to say apart from,  go and see the pots for yourself,at the CRAVEN MUSEUM, SKIPTON. The exhibition is there until 7^th May 2012.

Secret Stories

I really don't feel like writing this weekend so I’m sorry if this week’s blog is dull.  It has been a very busy week with preparations for the exhibition and work on the Reform Club event.  First things first, my body has played up badly this week with falling for the first time in the shower, which was a bit nerve wracking for Liz and me.  It means I can no longer shower when there is no one around just in case.  It is yet another nail in the coffin.  I have also gone off my food recently and have already lost quite a lot of weight; I yearn for tasty morsels that are easy to eat and to drink a pint of beer without thinking of the consequences!  As they say what goes in must come out and it does unpredictably, which is another progressive loss of control.  However, my health problems seemed quite insignificant when I received a note from a very long standing colleague and friend;

I am so sorry to hear your news – but you sound very courageous. It is vitally important to keep ones spirits up as I know personally, having had two cousins die far too early  due to illnesses.          

I am afraid that I won’t able to come [to the Reform Club event] due to my own state of health which has been rough, but nothing like as rough as yours , over the last two years. One thing seems to have followed another. I contracted MRSA in hospital when I gave a kidney to another cousin, who would have died without a transplant. I was then diagnosed with cancer, which I hope has been eradicated after treatment. This was followed by unexplained back spasms over an extended period and now I have a problem walking which I hope may be treated through the NHS taking a mould of one of my feet and making a support – tiresome , but hardly more than that, but going to large gatherings , exhibitions and walking any distance are out for the time being. My back completely seizes up if I stand in one place for more than a very short length of time – nor can I sit for very ...  Long without problems with my foot! But although I am frustrated, I have a strong belief that things will improve!

We can't even hope that things will improve because we know they will not get better.  We are in the business of managing decline in a gentlemanly fashion.  I feel privileged to be able to share a little bit of this person’s life which would not normally happen in the daily cut and thrust of life. I'm sure that there are plenty more where that came from and ones we don't know about very near home.

Enough of that, it was quite traumatic on Wednesday, when our pots were taken away to the Museum for the exhibition.  They took away about 40 of them collected over 25 years – Liz managed to keep back a few on the grounds that she bought them with her own money. Nevertheless, our house now looks very empty, but I'm looking forward to seeing the pots in a new environment.  I never thought I would have a collection worth exhibiting as I started out simply wanting to support creative people in Yorkshire!  The exhibition runs from 19th January 2012 until 7th May 2012 and is called Contemporary Ceramics: Personal Collection, so you have plenty of time to see it and paste your comments.

The Reform Club event on 9 February 2012, starting at 6.30pm, is not attracting enough people.  We need sixty and at the moment we have about twenty positive responses.  The event is a networking opportunity to hear about MSA, from one of the leading specialists in the autonomic nervous system, and a little bit about my book, the royalties from which are going to support research in this field.  If you can help or want to come or send a rep. call me on 07810 200202 or email me simon@croodhouse.freeserve.co.uk

New Year 2012

Happy New Year, I hope it will not be quite as dramatic as 2011 but no doubt it has something stored up for me besides the Olympics.  For members of the family there are some milestones already in place.  Eve will have a major building project to look after when they start work on the extension to their house.  Grace has just got to get a job in the USA (Can anyone help her with contacts and/or advice?).  Mark deserves promotion and his book will be published and that will be terrific.  I think that Liz and me need a holiday and we are definitely going for a walk or two with the Disabled Ramblers Association.  I have all time in the world, now that I am no longer employed by anybody - I finally gave up my position at Middlesex University on 31st December.  The University has made me an Emeritus Professor, which is an honorary position in recognition of my work over the years; so that I can stay involved with the Institute for Workbased Learning, as well as continue to use the title of professor.  It is a funny feeling after all the years of grind commuting and long hours.  The most noticeable feature is the rapid decline in e-mail traffic!    Mark who lectures at York University told me he had received over 400 emails over the official closure period of the university, that’s ridiculous! But when they no longer arrive that’s when you know you are surplus to requirements!

One way I am using my time is lending my contemporary ceramics collection to Craven Museum for an exhibition lasting three months.  I have been collecting ceramics for more than 30 years, only stopping recently when the house was full!   There is a booklet that that will accompany the exhibition and includes some quotes from my children.  One stands out for me; Harrogate is the Baths or Betty’s, but for me it always meant a trip to Godfrey and Watt to look at Ceramics.  It is going to be exciting to see my pots in a different context and as a collection, because I have never seen them like that. I started collecting because I wanted to help craftspeople by buying their work and support creative industry. If you want to know more, go to the museum website, www.cravenmuseum.org .  If that doesn't work get in touch with me directly.  The beneficial effect of MSA is that it has forced a re-evaluation of my activities and my thinking about what happens to the collection, instead of drifting along and maybe building more shelves and moving books to create more space for yet another pot.

Looking back over the Christmas festivities there are one or two highlights I would like to refer to.  The best one I think was when we received a Christmas card with a note in it congratulating me on passing my MSA.  At the same time the friends who sent the card received our Christmas news describing the impact of MSA on me.  Our friends telephoned us immediately, full of apologies, they were so embarrassed.   To make matters worse, Peter, my friend from school days is a vicar. The other event that stands out for me is the homeworkers annual dinner in our favourite Chinese restaurant.  This year, besides partners being invited daughters were too, ours with a rather good-looking American.  Everything was taking a familiar course as we ate through our Chinese banquet, a favourite being crispy duck with pancakes.  Normally at the end of the meal there is enough to take home for two people for lunch the following day.  Not this time however, as our American friend seems to have hollow legs and a healthy appetite, food was disappearing at a rapid rate of knots and definitely no lunch the following day but everybody was happy.  Ian and I, the founders of the homeworkers annual dinner, made a note in future to be careful about inviting charming American boyfriends.  It was happy occasion.