Plucky Daily Creative

DAY FIFTY SEVEN  Why do we own the things we do?   I woke to automated emails from my library saying that a number of the seventeen books I have on loan are about to become overdue. Handily, unlike in years past it only takes a few groggy presses on my phone and they are renewed. This is a double-edged boon. Without physically going to the library how will I pick up another seventeen books which I am almost certain not to read. This has been a life-long habit with me. Of course some of the many thousands of books I must have borrowed will have been read, but many many more will not have been. Same goes for the books I have bought and which now ornament my shelves. The big question is this: Why do I need a constantly replenished supply of borrowed books not to read when I have my own collection of books not to read?  There is, inevitably, a Japanese word for the buying of books one doesn't read: Tsundoku. It originated in a satirical sense so I understand but is now used ...

DAY FIFTY SIX Do you prefer to open the door and let people make their own mind up about entering, or do you grab them by the hand take them through and show them around each piece of furntiture?   Not sure one should ever start a post with a metaphor, especially one for which the inferences haven't been properly thought through yet. But I shall live dangerously.    I've been lurking around a small corner of social media of late, one occupied mainly by creative types working in a wide range of media. Ninety percent of the postings are people showing pictures of their work, or simply pictures which are their work. I've noticed that some - I would say a majority - like to give chapter and verse about their making: size, materials, what it's about, when it was made, why it was made, struggles they had with it, lessons learned from it, what they would do differently next time, and so forth. Is it wrong of me to say I really don't care to know all that and prefer to jus...

DAY FIFTY FIVE It's Christmas Day,   So many opportunities to be creative for Christmas.    There's the presents which I'm always intending to make but somehow never get around to; the decorations which I mean to put up but somehow always ends up as the minimalist piece of holly on the front door; there are the exotic stuffings and trimmings to go with the turkey which somehow always end up as my favourite old stand-bys plus bread sauce.  That's the true spirit of Christmas as far as I'm concerned, so I very belated season's greetings to you.   Onwards...merrily.

DAY FIFTY FOUR Do your creative and making efforts have to be wholly original?   In asking this I'm not talking about working from patterns or plans - though for some reason I've always had a problem with people who work from woodworking plans - I'm talking about working from kits, or any other medium where the job has already been started for you. One of my most cherished mementos is a painting of a labrador made by my youngest son when he was about eight years old from a paint by numbers kit. He was very into them at the time. I also have a collection of Airfix models my children made. I can remember my nieces making embroidered samplers from kits. There are 'starter kits' of various kinds in my local hobbyist shop, many of them seemingly involving balsa wood. My mother loves doing jigsaws, which is a form of kit, I suppose.  I had a cousin who was a model train enthusiast and built whole towns with stations and sidings and heaven knows what else, all of it from k...

DAY FIFTY THREE "Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!"    This is a line from the film Carry On Cleo, and according to some sources was voted the best one line joke in film history. By people who hadn't seen many films presumably.    It's not so much infamy that's been on my mind today, but rather fame, or more precisely, the desire for such, which for our purposes here I will conflate with vanity.  You'll need to be patient for a moment or two while I give some background; I have to tread a little carefully because I am speaking about a family member.    This person produced a small book some years ago, of which more below, and while they would not for one second consider themselves vain, and indeed do not fit what I imagine is many people's mental image of a vain person, is nonetheless one of the vainest people I know.  Unwittingly so. For this person to be knowingly vain they would need to have significantly more self-awareness than th...

DAY FIFTY TWO "I wear my heart on my sleeve, I'm not afraid/To say what I mean, mean what I say/ Set myself up, let myself down/I may be a fool to spread it around..."   Some of you may be inexplicably unaware of Gallagher and Lyle's 1976 paen to self-flagellating honesty in matters of the heart and conscience, but you have just read the first verse.  I woke up with the song on my mind for no reason I could name, and it's been burrowing away in the best earworm tradition all day. Might as well try to make use of it here in the hope that I can somehow exorcise the demon. In all seriousness wearing one's heart on one's sleeve does have a fairly sincere connecton with creativity, making, and so forth. Even if your making activities are purely for your own interest and pleasure you will be putting something of yourself into them, you will be making some sort of artefact which will evidence something about you and which should it be shared publicly, by accident...