Stone me!

Could it be?

Could it?

Could this object, nestled in the palm of my hand, have also nestled in the palm of another hand (probably a much hairier one) 12000 years ago or more?

Well, I don't know, but I've become mildly obsessed with this beautiful piece of flint I found in the garden and the idea that it might be a small Stone Age tool.  A hand axe perhaps, or a scraper.  It caught my eye ages ago and I kept it with the bird skulls, fragments of china, pieces of clay pipe and even a mummified baby rat amongst other random objects that comprise my personal little Garden Finds Museum (admission is free but please phone ahead).  I kept it because I thought it looked lovely; there's something compelling about it aesthetically - you could say that it "spoke" to me when I first discovered it in the soil.  It feels good too, it feels good in my hand.   It was only recently when I stumbled across some images of  Paleolithic tools that I suddenly thought about it differently and started to wonder if there had been some human intervention in its formation thousands of years ago.

My mild obsession has led me to numerous websites where I'm learning about things which might help identify whether or not that could be the case.  I'm finding out about striking points, bulbs of percussion, negative flake scars, distal termination and ripples - all sorts of things that sound like progressive rock album titles.  It's amazing what info you can absorb when you're interested and yet if you tried to teach me about managerial accounting or Coldplay's back catalogue I wouldn't remember a thing.

Perhaps it's more likely that this is just a flake of flint which was naturally battered by time and thermal changes and/or broken by the blades of a combine harvester, but I'd still like to fantasise that it came courtesy of a half naked man with strong, skilled hands and a pet mammoth called Brian*.  Ok, that last part might be a bit far-fetched, but still, could it have a back story?  I may try to find out more.  I'm prepared for a disappointment on the history front but its beauty remains, regardless.

And to go with it, here's a piece of Jurassic beat, very sub-Crampsian and not quite as old as it sounds...

Eddie Angels: Caveman (1993)

* After my friend's cat - not our lovely blogging pal!

An Anglo-Saxon education

I took myself off to a very rainy London the other week to meet a friend at the British Library, where we wandered around an eerily lit gallery to view some beautiful art, literature and treasures from 1300 years ago. 

There in the semi-darkness I half expected to bump into Lance and Andy from ‘Detectorists’, for there was indeed Anglo-Saxon gold on display...

Exquisitely shiny, tiny coins, brooches and intricate heavy-looking belt buckles almost glowed from behind their glass cases.  The exhibition was well-attended – with white hair and glasses the look of the day - but no-one spoke, or if they did it seemed only in hushed, reverential tones.   It felt terribly straight and subdued in there, but I was excited by what I saw to a degree I hadn’t expected, and found myself having to stifle little gasps of inappropriate enthusiasm.

What always gets me about the sort of artifacts on show here is when I can make that human connection.  When I think about the real person who wore that buckle and the fingers that looped the belt through its clasp – that kind of thing.  And, as an illustrator, I wanted to see the marks of the artist’s hand on the manuscripts, the strokes of ink and the characterful features, and imagine the creator’s mind at work,  just like mine.  I was more than rewarded by what I saw – astounded at the brightness of the inks in particular – I had no idea that the vivid oranges and greens so frequently used in the illuminations would shout out so much, not unlike the shades and strength of the felt tip pens I used as a kid.  Almost garish.  I’m convinced too that people had better eyesight 1000 years ago than we do now, and nimbler fingers too, for the minute scale of the details in the decorations was quite mind-blowing. 

In the dumbed-down world we live in I’d come to hate the way labels on products often refer to them in the first person.  I’m usually irked by a pack of carrots and its patronizing instruction to “keep me in the fridge!”, etc.  But after this exhibition I realised this is nothing new and it’s softened my attitude. The anthropomorphism of inanimate objects was very evident in Anglo-Saxon times – the books that introduced themselves:  “(Name) wrote me”, and the brooch which threatens any thief with an inscription: “May the Lord curse him who takes me from (owner)”, etc.  Books of riddles too, a huge literary genre 1000 years ago - more proof that really we’re still the same people at our core, and that’s what I want to believe.

Even an early version of a word search, with a palindrome...  

I love the figure at the base.  (British Library postcard)

Plus, I love books.  I love the physicality of books, the feel and look of them as objects, their construction and their role.  Huge books of manuscripts with metalwork bindings reflected their importance and I was amazed by the sheer outrageous size of a giant bible (the ‘Codex Amiatinus’), measuring 2ft long by 1ft wide and an incredible 1ft thick, weighing in at 75lb (over 5 stone for those like me who still think in Imperial). 

With my desire to relate to the illustrators involved in particular, I was really gratified to see a lovely 11^th Century book called ‘Marvels of The East’.  Written in Old English, it’s like a mythological travel guide, describing the weird and wonderful creatures that can be found in some faraway Eastern place, such as the “men who are born fifteen feet tall and ten feet broad.  They have big heads and ears like fans”.  I'm thinking Martin Clunes.  Nooo!

Or how about this:

"Lertices, a small creature with donkey’s ears, sheep’s wool and the feet of a bird."

 (British Library postcard)

Or this:

"The Blemmya, a man 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide with his head in his chest." 

(British Library postcard)

I lingered long over this image, studying those fingers wrapped around the frame in an imaginative graphic touch, the benign expression on that face and that lovely inky outline and, never mind those hundreds of years that have passed, at that moment I’m inside the artist’s head.  What a great commission that must have been!

The thing is, I was absolutely shit at History in school. Bored out of my mind I would concentrate on trying different handwriting styles and experiment with coloured inks as Miss Jones drearily dictated facts about Acts and... well, stuff I simply can't remember for that very reason.  It's the human relatability that makes it come alive for me and when that comes via two of my favourite subjects, art and language, as it did in this exhibition - I'm in.  And seeing that Anglo-Saxon gold, well, to paraphrase Lance, it's surely "... the closest you'll get to time travel".  Definitely worth a trip to a very rainy London.

'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War' at the British Library, until 19 February 2019

Return to sender

My imagination was fired and many feelings stirred when I read about the leather trunk full of 17^th Century undelivered letters that had been kept in a Dutch museum, and which are now being studied and transcribed by academics. I love this article, and especially the picture of the beautiful cut-out dove carrying the flaming heart; it looks so fresh, as if it was made and coloured yesterday, not 300 years ago.

I know I'm not alone in my desire to read some of the contents of this correspondence time capsule, to be teased by the fragments of people's lives within it, and to enjoy the strange pleasure of wanting more of something I cannot have.

I thought about the power of letters as I read about some whose important messages could have changed the course of the lives of the readers had they ever been received. Many were written in anxious times of political turmoil. One of them, as described in the article, is dated 1702 and is from a man warning his musician brother not to travel via Paris because a fellow musician had been conscripted into the army there. His warning was worded: “If you come here, do not bring your instrument or anything else.” But no-one read it. What happened? Did the musician brother take his instrument with him to Paris anyway and, if so, did that determine a very different future for him than if he had only read that letter first?

Could such a situation possibly exist now? If you never received that letter offering you that perfect job you went for? Or if the envelope with the large cheque in it, posted to you by an anonymous philanthropist, never arrived? And nor did the proclamation of love written inside a Valentine card by someone who secretly admired you...?  I guess not... there would be emails, and texts, and follow-up phone calls, not inky missives sent by horse-drawn carriage.

These are stories without endings nor beginnings, but they're stories I really would love to read, and I do hope the best of them will be published some day.

Did they ever meet on the sunny road?