SHERINGHAM DIARY 28 ~ The Singlet Vest & The Fruit Compote

Is it a sign of advancing age when the depth of your appreciation for a good fruit compote on your porridge in the mornings, starts to blossom beyond an unstated enthusiasm? Of late I've been greatly savouring a gooseberry compote cooked on a low heat. Soon to be followed by a plum compote or any other fruit there just happens to be a glut of this week. What is a compote?, well its the continental way of saying something is fruity but not quite a jam. Never sickly sweet. A syrup caught on the cusp of congealing. A compote slow cooked to perfection on the lowest heat possible is a newly discovered culinary ambrosia for me.

My deep indulgence in excessively sweet things and chocolate has noticeably diminished over the years. I say diminished, but I don't mean defeated, just moderated. I will remain forever part of the Lumb Lineage where no savoury meal would be complete without some sort of sweetening at the end of it, usually a dessert, immediately followed by cake. My Dad in his later years abandoned all pretence of eating protein and could be found lurking in the back of a local bakers cafe tucking into a lavishly iced Belgian bun, as his main meal of the day. Myself, I just try to limit this to the weekends. To get my sweet hit I replace iced buns with fruit when possible. So whilst such things are less prevalent for me, they are definitely not absent.

In my dreams my body still looks like this

Another age indicator might be when your dearly beloved hubby forthrightly forbids you, not just from owning a singlet vest, but owning a 'coloured' vest, and bars you from ever publicly parading your torso wearing one. Unfortunately he does know my family has history in this regard with my Dad, who, in the summer, if he hadn't already stripped down to the publicly respectable minimum, would be seen sporting a rather scruffy pale blue one with white (well, it had been white) piping, when outside gardening. The impact of this prohibition on my bodily well being, whilst we were in the middle of a 30 degree plus heatwave cannot be underestimated. I get easily overheated and its consequent mental fluster in even mildly hot weather. If I was a plant, I would be the sort that would wrinkle, shrivel up and desiccate whilst the gardener had turned away to make a pot of tea.

As I've got older, though I'm considerably taller than my Dad, my body has developed a recognisable rectangular quality, a solid stockiness very reminiscent of his. Why any of these things should come to mind now is anyones guess, but the 27th July was the first anniversary of Dad's death, so there's probably been the strong bodily aroma of Dad wafting around. The death of ones last remaining parent is never without significance, whether you personally got on with them or not. I do miss the presence and example of his easy going geniality, I was fond of my Dad and his mostly benign eccentricities, without ever feeling I was that emotionally connected. There were infuriating  things, his stubborn desire to not ask for help and to do things his own way, for instance. But as Hubby would no doubt be butting in at this point, I provide quite a good example of that myself at times. Ah, like Father like Son, and the discomforting reemergence of familial behaviour patterns.

We've completed our second month of trading and Cottonwood Home is doing well. We are now into August, the height of the holiday season, and sales have lifted considerably. Introducing our outside shop stalls has helped increase our monthly take, plus it gets people to actually come in!. Even with the effects of the dramatic shifts in the weather, we've not had a completely dead day for a few weeks now. Currently we are more than covering our costs, though still more to be done. This is high season, so if you don't do well now, well, you never will. The Autumn/Winter season will be our testing time.

Some of our own handmade stock, as a consequence, had begun to look a bit thin. At the moment I have an average of two + making days a week, plus my focus can get diverted into making props for the shop. So progress on new lines is spasmodic. Staying engaged with 'set aside' projects is difficult. This tends to lead to many half finished projects on the go simultaneously, which can feel a bit of a drag. Its like doing slow motion running keeping multiple plates spinning. Not helped during the big heatwave by my mitre saw going into to complete melt down.

One afternoon a family came into the shop. Their little girl was wandering around holding her Dad's phone aloft and chanting 'Daddie's Bottom', 'Daddie's Bottom', Daddie's Bottom. She'd been taking photos of her Dad's bottom from all angles and was now showing them to anyone who would look.

We've sussed out what we do when the shop isn't busy. We have a shop workstation, well a work table. Here Hubby can sew and lampshade make whilst I can get on with upcycling projects I can complete in a shop. At the moment I'm focusing on refinishing a range of jewellery boxes. I've also started exploring the world of mosaic, my first experiment was making some coasters/candle stands. They aren't finished yet, because they're one of the projects I've had to stop spinning to create time for more immediately pressing stuff.

What has arisen out of the mosaic practice is a Postcard Sized Art project. My artwork has a tendency to end up huge and consequently beyond most people's purses. So I've begun making small postcard sized collages, made from offcuts of wood and various bits of objet d'art I've accumulated.  I find them enjoyable things to make, we're selling for under twenty quid. Its a challenging discipline to consciously work small. They're proving to be the perfect art project for me. They dont take long to complete, so there is less chance of me being distracted or becoming bored with them. They offer unlimited scope for stretching my creative imagination and invention. I can take them in any direction I want, and they're also easy to make in the shop.

We were standing in a queue outside the chippy takeaway No 1 Cromer, waiting to actually get in to place our order. Immediately opposite is an amusement arcade, by the entrance is a machine you play Flappy Bird on. Its a video game, so I'm told, where you manipulate a bird up or down to get over columns of green pipes of different lengths without hitting them. Hubby tells me its quite difficult to do.

Anyway, a young man, probably mid teens was playing Flappy Bird, constantly hitting a large blue button with one hand in a trance like and worryingly alienated concentration. Each hit producing the ubiquitous computerised farty noise.

The boy played without an interruption, break in concentration or the game. On and on and on he went. The ticker tape recording his successes spewed out, forming a vast snake of yellow paper around his feet. After, at least, the twenty minutes we'd been queueing, he finally stopped. He then stood for a further five minutes whilst the ticker tape machine caught up,still spitting out his winning hits. Picking up this vast sheaf of paper he wandered off to collect what ever this herculean effort had earned him, probably several cuddly toys and a Red Bull flavoured ice lolly.  I fear for today's youth, I really do.

We were having a veggie breakfast in the Mulberry Tearooms one Sunday morning. On another table a woman expressed loudly her incredulity 'How on earth did you get cheese in your eyebrows?' Indeed, I'll leave you to ponder on that one.

CARROT CAKE REVIEW 17 ~ I'm Not Saying Fuck Off To Gluten Free, OK

Hunstanton, West Norfolk.

This cafe overlooks the main green that slopes down towards the promenade, where everything that Hunstanton can throw at you as a childish diversion resides. The cafe's interior, sits uncomfortably between spacious and sparse. I'd like to say it was a symphony in grey, but that would require much more effort than the uniform pale grey tone here can make. Bare of much to ornament its walls without the satisfaction of achieving minimalism, it is, in short, characterless - with very sticky tabletops.

It was a bit late in the day for a Flat White so I toned down the caffeine to a Latte. Not that I needed to let such cosmopolitan worries about caffeine intake get the better of me. The Latte came in a mug, yes, a generic white ceramic mug straight from the local cash and carry. The contents looked disconcertingly like used dishwater. Beneath its feeble frothy surface lay what was in fact just an ordinary milky cup of coffee. Inoffensive were it not for its blandness. Thank god I didn't order a Flat White or my disappointment level would have gone much further than peeved.

And so, to the Carrot Cake. Oh, how I wish I could really let go and explode into rhapsodic language, about how the cake turned my impressions around, that any place which could serve such a superlative carrot cake could be forgiven a minor slip with the quality of the coffee. But, alas, it was not to be so - it was more than slightly dry for starters. Its texture actually wasn't that bad, so there might be a slight possibility a carrot was once waved in its vicinity. However, the more it stayed tumbling up and down around the region of my taste buds I could sense something else was awry on an ingredient level.

It was Hubby who put his finger on it. Not only was this cake Gluten Free, without informing you it was, the flavouring was the mixed spice equivalent of a cheap men's after shave. I've nothing against cakes being gluten free so long as they steer clear of me and I of them. But there is a growing tendency to assume there's no difference between a Gluten Inclusive and a Gluten Free version, which is just not true. A Gluten Free Carrot Cake will always be for me a Fake Carrot Cake. There are currently  increasing  numbers  of, undoubtedly well meaning ,cafes and cake shops who serve you nothing but the buggers.

Where does this leave those of us with a robust digestive system? Are we forced forever into an inclusive world where Carrot Cakes are pale imitations of the traditional? If I were not so liberal minded  and fearful of triggering the sensitivities of social media, I'd say fuck off to Gluten Free. So, just to be clear I haven't actually said that,OK, I'm  declining to endorse the content of my private internal unvocalised vitriol online.

All this was disguised, or do I mean relieved, by the sweetness of its frosting. Boy was the sucrose high. Sugar hit coming up!

CARROT CAKE SCORE  2/8

 

A SPIRITUAL BASTING ~ Carry Out The Activities Of A Buddha

A series of blog posts reflecting on spiritual practice in everyday life. Inspired by phrases from Dogen's Instructions For The Tenzo.

Carry Out The Activities Of A Buddha

'The monks holding each office are all disciples of the Buddha and all carry out the activities of a Buddha through their respective offices.'

In these few opening sentences The Instructions For The Tenzo lays out a simple context and purpose for monastic office holders and their work. Though applicants should be able to keep the monastic community healthy and running smoothly on a very pragmatic level, its their spiritual qualifications for taking office that are considered the most important - to 'carry out the activities of a buddha' through their daily work.

What would this mean, not just for the cook, but for anyone performing any task?  The linear notes to this statement inform us its 'to live constantly settling one's life'. 'Settling' is an interesting word choice. In English we can refer to people as 'having settled down' which can have a slightly derogatory inference. The subtext being 'they're lives have become quite traditional and predictable, if not boring - just like the rest of us' . The unconventional has become conventional, once perhaps a risk taker but now perceived as playing it safe.

From the viewpoint of traditional Buddhism to 'have settled down' would be tantamount to the death of their spiritual practise, a lifestyle thats too comfortable, taking shelter in domesticity, trying to sidestep the tricky devil of dukkha, and the raw underbelly of unsatisfactoriness in life.

There is, however, another meaning to 'settling', which is ' to sort out', to have 'come to terms with things'. So ' to live constantly settling one's life' is really a description of the whole purpose of Buddhist practise; to constantly strive to come to terms with how things really are, and to become so settled to be able to abide in that insightful state.

Returning again to those linear notes, they couch 'carry out the activities of a buddha' as 'to actually put your life to work...to make it function in a way that things become most settlied'  To grasp your ordinary life and give it spiritual purpose - to make our ordinary life function as the means to fully seeing the way things really are. Any day, any task, however humble, non-descript or apparently useless ought to be able to work as a means of truly seeing how reality is. Requiring us to remain alert, open and on the case with where our lives and practise are currently at. For what can seem a workable effective approach one week, can feel absolutely dead in the water the next. Nothing stays the same forever, conditions change, things move on as the impermanent nature of reality shape shifts, yet again.

The tasks themselves, however, alter only slghtly, cooking remains cooking, artistry remains artistry. Both are things that human beings choose to do. It is 'why' and 'how' we do them that is susceptible to change.  What would it mean to make work a means of self-transformation, a means to Enlightenment, work enabling you to seeing things as they really are? What does 'seeing things as they really are' mean anyway? It implies our present human way of seeing and being, is one that is obscuring or deluding us. We certainly are inconsistent as practitioners, one minute conscious of what we're doing, the next off with the fairies.

According to the Buddha there are four false perceptions of reality obscuring our vision; that the world can be perfected; that worldly things can make you consistently happy; that the world is permanent; that your self's existance within that world is as a fixed entity. These false perceptions restrict and cloud our imaginations. So traditionally speaking, to see through these four false perceptions would be like lifting a fog, creating the conditions to perceive reality as it really is.

Note your mental state as you are working; the moments when you're irritated or frustrated are the best, to spot whats going on in the background. These are moments when you are not getting what you want, so what you want becomes double underlined, with an exclamation mark for added emphasis!. So you feel very cogently, when you are in pursuit of perfection; what it is you are seeking consistent happiness from?; how much of your behaviour is based on a model of how reality is,one that has a permanent world view underlying it? These three form the foundations for the fourth false perception, of the steady state view of your self, that you  can be free of suffering, that you can be perfect, you can be happy all the time, that you have a spirit, soul or consciousness that is eternal and will survive your physical bodies death.

To the extent we all act according to these four false perception, we will not be fully ready to 'carry out the activities of a Buddha.' When this does happen it would instigate a fundamental shift in how we carry out our life and work. Once we are no longer striving for permanent worldly perfection, for permanent happiness for ourselves from the world, then our fixed sense of reality and of our self as an unchanging entity ruling within it, takes on a more fluid nature, more at ease with the flux of our changing substance. A truer perception of the world will have arrived, most likely, so we are told, unnanounced by any fanfare.  Living our lives and work on the basis of how reality is, not how we'd like it to be, that would be the activity of a Buddha. .


* Extracts from Thomas Wright's translation - From The Zen Kitchen To Enlightenment, First Published by Weatherhill in 1983.

FEATURE ~ Anglo-Catholic Bling

OK, I've been to Walsingham again. But I came back with a camera full of these precious beautys. I just can't get enough of daggers through the heart, bleeding hearts and fey hands placed on the chest in an 'I feel for you' gesture.

A SPIRITUAL BASTING ~ From Ancient Times

A series of blog posts reflecting on spiritual practice in everyday life. Inspired by phrases from Dogen's Instructions For The Tenzo as inspiration

'From Ancient Times'

' From ancient times, in communities practicing the Buddha's Way, there have been six offices established to oversee the affairs of the community...... Among these is the tenzo, who carries the responsibility of preparing the community's meals.' *

Whilst I am a Buddhist praticioner, I'm also an artist/craftsman. Endeavouring to keep in daily contact with Dogen's ideas about work as a spiritual practice. Applying these to my own eveyday life experience. Remaining creative within this is not without its challenges. It also requires a degree of translation and contextual reimagining to ensure its usefulness within 21st Century conditions.

A tenzo is the head cook in a Zen monastery, they have a practical yet life enhancing role. Cooking for them becomes entirely a selfless act of other regarding service. To place your culinary talents before everyone to either savour or reject, is a testing practice. When it comes to what they eat, people can become picky and complain about the smallest thing. Food is rarely able to please everyone. Seeking praise or appreciation is a lottery with the potential to build or crush anyone's ego. Likewise, in the world of art and craft, its perilous to be too closely attached to what you do. Its rare for any aesthetic endeavour to be universally appreciated, people either love or loath it in equal measure. This is just how it is.

Dogen emphasises how important it is to not over invest in the end result of your effort, particularly if you desire it to be appreciated, or worse still want it to be perfect. However, your ego still grasps for every crumb of praise it can, because your self esteem has a perpetually hungry bottomless pit of a stomach. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do your best. Instead try doing your best, but without those limpet like expectations. Perceive your work through the broader perspective of how what you are doing can be of benefit to others, not only through the myopic view of your selfish needs.

At first glance the similarities between cooking and the artistic process are unclear. Art appears to have no
immediate tangible benefit in quite the way that cooking has. Cooking sustains life, it helps us survive. Any creative process, whilst it may sustain the spirit and feed the soul, from a practical viewpoint its an activity devoid of use. However, looked at from a spiritual viewpoint impracticality can be transformed into a virtue, the more useless it is the better. That aesthetics is largely divorced from utility is part of its purpose and raison d'etre.

Arts purpose, if well executed, isn't a panacea to make existence tolerable, nor intoxicate you like a drug. It deals mostly in those fuzzyheaded intangibles, not clearly comprehensible, pointing towards something out of reach and quite 'other' than terre firme. The sole purpose of the artistic process and its result, is to cultivate our individual and collective receptivity to this.

'From ancient times' Art has performed a distinctive function for humanity, introducing us, at to best, to awe and an elevated spirit. Cathedrals or Buddhist Temples if they are working correctly should take our breath away almost from the moment we enter. This may only be for a split second of uplift, a fleeting experience of exaltation, vanishing before we even consciously notice it. Yet to imagine trying to achieve that through one's cooking, or through your everyday life and experience, can seem an overwhelming, if not impossible, thing to attempt.

Yet Dogen insists later on in the Instructions For The Tenzo that we should aim to build 'great temples out of ordinary greens', meaning out of the humdrum ordinary things of life. To endeavour to create something beautiful out of unpromising material, out of nothing, out of nowhere, out of this imperfect world. This reaches to the core of human creativity. We embellish and beautify pretty much everything we make. Machines, from a practical point of view don't require painting at all, it contributes nothing towards their better functioning. That we paint tractors bright colours appeals to us aesthetically, it makes us feel better about the cold lifelessness of this useful tool we are using. To apply extra effort into cutlery to make it pleasing to hold, lifts it from utility into an aesthetic experience. Utility can only be elevated spiritually by cultivating our altruistic impulses. To do everything for the benefit of others.

Lets make no bones about it, no one has ever died from a lack of Art or aesthetics in their lives. But despite this, it remains the quintessence of our dreams. Humankind as a species has been propelled forward by the supposed 'madness' of its dreamers. To deprive life of Art, and the spiritual intent embroidered beneath it, would render our existance arid and cold.  'From ancient times' from the instant our ancestors began painting magic animals onto walls in the deepest recesses of caves. But even when their religious significance or purpose has dwindled we still return to caves, temples and cathedrals because of what they represent. They reconnect us with what we've lost touch with. This lies outside and beyond our understanding of a universe based on scientific rationalism.

Whilst cooking feeds our stomachs, broader creative impulses feed our spirit, raise up our hearts to ease the troubles of our restless minds. Art has performed this role 'from ancient times'. Communicating through artists, visionaries and shamans, the values and intuitions, not just of what we have become, but more importantly what we can become. We are the lucky inheritors of this vast evolutionery and creative legacy. Nothing new or unique ever emerges into our world, that isn't indebted in someway to things learnt, passed on and influencing us 'from ancient times'.  


* Extracts from Thomas Wright's translation - From The Zen Kitchen To Enlightenment, First Published by Weatherhill in 1983.

CARROT CAKE REVIEW 16 ~ Falling Short Of An Open Target

Wells-Next-The -Sea, North Norfolk.

This was the first cafe in Wells to dump the standard cottage tearoom mode for something designed more for contemporary cafe culture. The serving counter greeting you as you enter always has a sizable range of cakey nibbles on display. The staff, though friendly, do seem to be working with a certain level of self preoccupation. On this visit the display did include a carrot cake, so I felt a review stirring in my loins before I'd ordered it with the ubiquitous chaser of a flat white. As I always eat and drink with Jesus in my heart, I'll try to be kind.

The cafe decor doesn't quite gel.You sort of know what they're aiming for, a stylistically eclectic mix of chairs and tables, creating a characterful boho feel. But here there is raging disharmony, classic bentwood chairs and bamboo garden furniture do not sit well together. It appears to cut corners not a dash. The ceiling is painted in a sludgy taupe colour, leaving the impression of having been executed as part of a prison dirty protest. Sounds harsh I know, but its these things that lend it the air of a half cocked execution.

It sits opposite Wells Harbour, so if you grab a table by the window you can observe the endless chain of traffic and parked cars obscuring your wide harbour vista. Not to mention the aimlessly wandering tourists with fish and chips in hand on route to the face, thinking 'we've gorus chips, is there owt else to do ere?'  Wells-next-the-Sea, because of it homely nature, down to earth, and altogether lacking in pretence, has always been the working class holiday destination of choice. This is slowly changing with the arrival of the new Maltings Art Centre, and a scattering of middle class trendy shops that have appeared over recent years, sandwiched in between the butcher, the baker and the classic North Norfolk rambling hardware store that stocks everything somewhere within its labyrinthine corridors. One hopes Wells never loses this. At the moment its more like its put on a smarter pair of M & S socks beneath its scruffy open toed sandals. That said, its yet to create the must go too cafe. Most are acceptable but no cigar.

You can usually tell when I've not found much to say of positive or negative worth about a cake, because I rant on and on for paragraphs about anything other than it. So, deep venerable breaths, as I step onto the slippery approaches of the cake review. To my well trained eye its visible texture did look rather hopeful, that distinctive slightly gappy stranding, obviously weighty with bits of nut chippings, evenly spread. Dense and moist to the eye, once laid upon the palate it proved to be both. However, my first gob full was all cake with no cream filling, and my expectations of a rich carrot flavour were startled by how spicey and sweet it was. Yes, it tip toed onto the near approaches of my bet noir, the masquerading spice cake.

If anything saved it from tipping into unforgivable sin it was the texture, and a general intuition that the cake maker did have their heart in the right place, The message having got mangled twixt the recipe and the measuring spoon. The cream cheese filling and frosting was fine, but just not enough of it. The rubble of nuts on top, all well and good, but like the chopped nuts within the cake they functioned only as attractive teeth grit, one couldn't actually taste them. They were perhaps aiming for a richly rounded flavour and cake texture that unfortunately fell arse in the air at the final fence.

This feeling of a cafe being a hairs breath away from achieving, if not greatness, then at least above average, I find is a common experience. Its not unusual in fractionally missing hitting their own open target. How was my Flat White I hear voiced quizzically. It was in the right cup, but was really an extra stiff coffee with frothed milk.

 CARROT CAKE SCORE  4/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY 27 - The Twin Sinkholes of Paucity and Positivity

Since we signed the lease and got the keys, its been shop, shop, shop, shop ,shop. You've seen the photos. The shop fit itself was physically demanding on both of us. Every week we thought ' maybe now the intense weather will ease' but only the wind direction changed. Plus one too many middle of the night flurries of anxiety, not directly shop related, but manifesting through something a way distant from it or of trivial significance. Once the refit was complete and Cottonwood Home was open our daily lifestyle morphed chameleon like into something both familiar and unfamiliar.

A really good weekends trading can be followed by unpredictable week days. As yet there appears no rhyme nor reason whether its tumbleweed or customers whisking through our door. This has the potential to freak us out a bit, if we let unrestrained mental proliferation get a grip. It's become a regular practise to disengage mood and sense of well being from the shops daily sales, otherwise it will be positivity when good, paucity when bad. That way madness lies. At the moment town seems subdued, what with the poor weather, the ever expanding sinkhole and perhaps a Brexit infused mood of depression that's draining wallets and purses of confident optimism. Anyway. one of our first lessons has been you don't open the door and hey presto, it just works, you have to work hard at building any business. That process will undoubtedly be ongoing and at times emotionally testing.

Previous tenants of our unit said they did two thirds of there business through stuff they had on show outside. All The Courtyard stores do do the same. We've devised a plan for outside displays of lower price point items to lure folk into the shop, hoping to pull this together over the next few weeks. But in the meantime we're endeavouring to keep our feelings in check and out of any mental sinkholes we might encounter. Our shop fit makes us look higher end than we actually are, but apart from selling stuff with hare prints on, beach huts, seagulls or seahorses, throwing a dishevelled carpet down and being more chaotic in our merchandising, there's not much to be done about that. We are what we are, what we need to do is convince more people that what we are is for them too. All the stores in our mall when they started out only covered their costs in their first year, so our short term aim is to at least do that.

We are slowly getting home back to being tidier and cleaner, plus attending to all the other things that fell into neglect whilst we were focused on shopfitting.We decided initially to open the shop seven days a week just to see what custom was actually like. Ten days or so in, we'd become so emotionally frayed we decided we just had to take a regular day off together.  We settled on our provisional opening hours and will be closed on Mondays. One of the things that's clear from observing other shopkeepers in The Courtyard is that your opening hours can be treated as a flexible arrangement, close early if and when you feel the need too. For our first day off we travelled to Lavenham and Bury St Edmunds, for no other reason than a change of scenery. It was the first of the endless torrential rain days, everywhere we went was drenched, as were we.  The bliss of freedom can simultaneously also feel foolhardy.

It started like this

Quiet little Sheringham has acquired a sinkhole slap bang in the middle of the High Street. Its hard to tell if its affected trade our end of town, but either side of 't' ole' it has halved the shops takings their. Two shops can't open at all and you really feel for them, as the date by which the hole problem will be resolved keeps moving further away, engulfing the profitable summer season trade. Initially the road signage was lacking and visitors were confused where to go. When the signage did arrive it was a bit OTT and gave the impression the whole town was closed to traffic, which it wasn't. It has now settled down to informative but sensible. The Town Council has launched a push with the backing of Norfolk daily newspapers to publicise that Sheringham is open for business, I'm not sure that this will be effective or what is really needed.
                                                                     

Its now like this

Meanwhile the size of the cavernous sinkhole, if we are to believe the melodramatic newspaper reports, is ever expanding. We've yet to hear the survey results as to the cause and who is responsible. At the moment officials are being extremely circumspect, fearing the hell of attributing liability prematurely. But you can't claim for loss of business until someone is found to be at fault. In the meantime retailers hold onto a wing of positivity with the hope the hole and the hole in their finances will be plugged soon.

Recent recurring night time worries have included :~ Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister, homosexuality being criminalised, feebly railing against Brexit and where the hell we are heading as a country. Credible political options ignored, the staggering lack of flexibility, imagination and vision etc etc. I also had a recurring dream of people I know in the Triratna Buddhist Order accusing me of betrayal and treachery. Quite what that's about I haven't quite fathomed, but we were coming up to the first anniversary of my resigning from the Order at the beginning of June. I've just parked that in a convenient lay by for now.

I've been reading about the history of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage. This book by Micheal Rear is the best written and most comprehensive I've read. Like most books on the subject it inevitably veers away from historical fact into Christian theological and devotional issues which I do find a bit baffling.  But I have learnt a bit about Anglo Catholicism and the The Oxford Movement, of which the revival of veneration and pilgrimages to Our Lady Of Walsingham is a significant achievement of. There are a few intreging aspects such as:~ the original shrine was built close to two wells where the site of a Roman Temple has been found. Who this was dedicated too is unclear, nor what pagan god/goddess no doubt preceeded it. Tantilising as this is, I think I've read enough about Walsingham and Our Lady for now.

Our Lady of Walsingham

Its still unclear what the significance of my response to this figure is or what its pointing towards. Perhaps I do not need to fully know, the figure of Our Lady exists primarily on the level of myth, not rational logic. I have noticed iconographic similarities between Our Lady of Walsingham and the Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha. Each has a staff symbolic of purity and sovereignty in the right hand and holding a symbol of wisdom, Christ or a Chintamani, cupped in the left hand. She is seated on a throne of wisdom, he on a lotus throne the symbol of Enlightenment. Her throne is placed on top of a 'toadstone' a symbol for the evil which she has conquered. His sits upon a symbolised version of a mound of Kusha grass, a traditional meditation seat where he has conquered mental defilements. The uprights of her throne have seven rings on them that represent the seven sacraments or practises of Catholicism. He holds a monks staff which bears six rings to represent the six perfections/practises of a Buddhist, for any Bodhisattva dedicated to saving all sentient beings.

The mythic background of Ksitigarbha is interesting as the only Buddhist archetype that moved from originally being a female figure to becoming a male one. There is an echo of this in that one of Ksitigarbha's epithets is still Earth Womb. This feminine original is referred to as the Sacred Girl, who goes into the hell realms in order to save her mother but ends up vowing to save all beings from suffering. This act of reaching down in order to save is traditionally represented in Buddhist iconography by the left foot stepping onto a lotus blossom. Devotions to Our Lady often focus on her role as the vessel or route to salvation, the go between, as intermediary between Heaven and Hell on Earth, and vice versa. Such salvific acts of compassion are a theme that Ksitigarbha shares with Our Lady of Walsingham. So there it is, for what its worth. This of course may all be cock.

Ksitigarbha

COTTONWOOD HOME ~ We're Open!

So we are finally open. Whilst we've been anxious in advance of experience about whether our stock would sell, it would appear we need not have exercised our worry muscles quite so assertively. The 1st of June was a hot day in Sheringham where most of the visitors headed for the beach, passing our now infamous sinkhole. All the other retailers in our courtyard said it was a quiet day as a result, but for our first day we felt it went really well. Though we didn't know what to expect, it exceeded our cautious expectations.  

I took these photographs at the end of the day just before we closed. We really did have customers honest, these weren't taken on slow exposure to eradicate all sign of human life, its just I didn't want to appear intrusive or inappropriate.

We've had lots of local people coming in just to see what the shop looks like and they've been very encouraging. Now we actually have a shop it brings renewed impetus to our making. Even when the shop is quiet we can still be knitting or crocheting something. There is a sense of something having lifted now we are no longer making items in a vacuum.

Jnanasalin 'a crocheting'

Lovely flowers from family

An offering of sweets and biscuits for our customers

The back of our window display

Jnanasalin closing our very high Velux 

COTTONWOOD SHOP REFIT ~ 4th Week ~ Countdown to Opening

FIVE
Our last day of shop fitting. Fixing up our feature display unit, card shelves and rack for wrapping paper. In a way its a bit of a relief to be finishing all this prep side, so tomorrow we can get on with the real business of a retail shop fit ~ the stock

FOUR
It took three car trips to get all the stock into the shop. Once we'd unpacked a few boxes you could hardly move for discarded packaging. For day one of merchandising we've done very well, the basic blocking of the stock layout has been completed.



We are beginning to get a sense of what works and doesn't work on our shelving. Less is more being generally the case here. We aren't high end but we're not bargain basement either. So giving stock enough space will be important for us to maintain.

THREE
It's obvious today that apart from cushions and the stock we've bought in, we have no back up stock for some items that we've made. One of our middle of the night anxieties about this retail venture is being able to make items fast enough to keep up with sales without sacrificing quality. But first we need to get a sense for what sells and how quickly. Still loads to be done. A window display, price labelling, setting up the till, jewellery stands to be made up, etc etc etc.

TWO
I spent the morning putting in the window display using our 'gansey styled' cushion range. The photographs don't quite capture how good it looks. Meanwhile Jnanasalin was setting up all the stock on the till system. After dinner I went home to do work in the workshop on frames for some lovely prints we have. I'm not a hugely confident framer, but I am very pleased with the quality of the results.

ONE
Our last day before we open to the general public. Almost ready, just pricing and final tweaking, plus all those little things that support the running of a shop that don't surface until you are almost there, or actually open, and you realise you need a cleaning and tool kit etc. The pricing went quite smoothly, and brings that finishing touch to 'a shop'. We've done our best but not everything in the shop has the best sales position on this time around, but we'll get there.

It feels great to finally get everything that doesn't need to be there, not just off the floor, but returned to home. Its been quite testing to my equanimity when I'm in the workshop and realise the tool I need is in the shop, or vice versa. It goes without saying, that we're both very pleased with how the shop looks. We've had a lot of appreciative and encouraging comments in person and online. If we let go of our anxiety there is a certain excitable air that takes flight about how it all will go on the 1st June, my god that's tomorrow.

Everything packed & ready to go home