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Last week was the first week of baking after a long and delightful holiday in brittany while all animals, plants and walls were looked after adroitly by LMS. How lucky.

Last friday was too hot in the kitchen for sourdough despite my freshly hung blinds and the resulting bread was a little flat as I hurried off to the train on saturday with N to Dublin to an artists book fair leaving the rest of the family to bring freshly baked goods to market, new cakes, flatter bread. This friday I won’t have to worry about packing books and rushing to Dublin and the weather is given rather wet I am told, I just need a little more breeze but
I know all will be well and I am greatly looking forward to take my weekly stand and talk to the good people who will come to knockvicar this saturday. I do love this job I invented for myself.

 

home remedies, away from home

Here I am in Annaghmakerrig (the Tyrone Guthrie centre) for a week of hand and mind work so there will no be baking this week (16 may), no show in Knockvicar, but I may well get home a little heavier with all the lovely cooking here. A fellow inmate, American artist Kathleen Ferguson, who is plotting great work on the Silk Road gave me her home remedy against cholesterol and I thought I’d share it on :

3/4 cup organic apple cider vinegar

3/4 cup honey

7 cloves garlic

blend and leave to sit in a cool place for four days.

Take one tablespoon in warm water every day.

(I read a while back in some newspaper that Ralph Fiennes learnt from his grandmother a magical cure against arthritis, a tablespoon of honeygar [a honey/vinegar mix] every day so with the above concoction we may well be killing the two birds. )

In an old house encyclopedia I also read that using only demineralized water helps with arthritis greatly (did someone ever use this?) you need a dehumidifier plugged in any room if you live in the damp northwest of ireland to get a good supply.

As for me here, I am making very new work with material and rusty metal, I don’t know where this is going but I am amused and excited.

 

look at the blue eggs

The hen is white, her eggs are blue. We do not give names to poultry anymore. We do not eat eggs until they are a couple of days old.

Sometimes when I eat a soft boiled egg I realize there might be no finer food, with bread and butter. The simplest food often serves to reconcile you with your life in particular and the world at large.

 

small achievements today

Children away for their thursdayfriday at their father’s, and I am a little ill again, this time the chest, my body is telling me that I am tired, I am not listening enough. Listen more, I tell myself in vain. I take Gouttes aux essences, a great blend of essential oils (peppermint, clove, lavender, ceylon cinnamon, thyme) that deals with “acute benign [oxymoron ? sounds good anyway] bronchial diseases” beautifully. No first-aid shelf of any bathroom should be complete without this, we live in the damp north west of ireland and we survive Without Antibiotics Very Well. The brand is phytarma, and you can get it for between €7 or €8 in any chemists in France.

I do my jobs slowly. I establish which of my two goats has a touch of mastitis, by doing the washing-up-liquid-test (add washing up liquid to fresh milk and see if the milk turns like snot). Only one does. Tomorrow I will find out if she has it on both sides or just the one as I suspect, and then I’ll probably try homeopathy. I had a little mastitis myself with each children so I have all remedies leftover and homoeopathic remedies never go out of date. I really think you can only look after animals that you empathize with.

Anyway, no progress with reorganizing my studio because I am really dragging myself around, but I finish the hat I have been knitting at the knitting and chess-playing afternoons (4 to 6, wednesdays at the Dock).

And I make a whisk out of willow for L, L is happy.

 

strange visit from a furry friend

We were driving home around 7 last night in the dark and although I was keeping a good speed some van overtook our car and just ahead of us started to brake and then come to a halt. We thought : ‘we know your kind’ the type of people who overtake you a second before their exit come up and risk missing it and sending you into the landscape. It was a different scenario though. After a minute or two it indicated and drove onto the other lane to pursue its route, so we moved forward to discover that a little baby pine marten was on the road, no sign of blood but not great movement either. I went out to see it, tried to semaphore to it to move onto the grassy side of the road for safety but it just stared at me so. So after a minute’s hesitation I just grabbed the animal by the skin of the neck and deposited it onto the grass. It did not struggle and then just stayed there staring. We decided that we should offer the creature some comfort as we did not want to see its silhouette imprinted onto the asphalt the next day. We happened to have a cardboard box in the boot so I put it in there and again it hardly struggled. We thought we’d keep it safe until it looked fit to be wild again and return it to where we had found it. By the time we reached home it was more alive, we put it in a cage away from the wind, gave it some meat, and went about our evening business.

I know what you are thinking, we have chickens, this was playing with fire, but what else could we do ? And of course it had escaped the next morning (well again obviously) having slightly widened the gap between two thick wires in the cage. Our only means of protection for our chickens—apart from locking them in at night—is conversation with the predators but this one left before we had time to talk so I do hope it understood that we were wishing it well.

Lovely animal though, I was told that it was introduced in Ireland as a predator for the rabbits that had been introduced previously, and it is now a protected species. Funny world.

 

a lot on, thin presence here, I know

Feet not quite touching the ground this week again with upcoming food/guerilla art/performance at 3 on saturday 14 february in the Dock in carrick-on-shannon, Love ? We would like to help, to coincide with the opening of the love show (invites to be downloaded from the ‘so what’s on ?’ page, just clickclickclick) added to the ordinary and to the weekly extraordinary of farming. And the good news is, the little white hen that looks just like her mother who was taken last year just started to lay the magic blue eggs her mother used to.

 

happy two thousand and nice

So this is the return from hibernation : nest-building, celebrations, sleep. The head is clearer, less piles of unsorted clutter around and no more emergency breads in the freezer, you can probably imagine how much I am looking forward to tomorrow’s breakfast with a fresh loaf. After a grey, wet and windy morning the sky is now bright and blue, now that would be a good thing if the children and I could wake up to similar weather for our first day of the year in knockvicar at precisely 10.30ish.

 

organic food

I bought a jar of organic peanut butter as a bait for the mice in my humane trap. How do you justify this ? How do you justify eating organic whenever possible ? I do not want chemicals to be used on the soil on my behalf. I do not want animals to be mistreated on my behalf. Simple. How do you justify the extra spending ? Eat better and less. Pretty simple.

 

contemporary food practice [discussions in]

Here therefore downloadable invitations to the forthcoming exhibition at the Dock in carrick, Discussions in Contemporary Sculpture (curated by Oliver Dowling, featuring Maud Cotter, Dorothy Cross, John Gibbons, Paul Gregg, Fergus Martin, Kathy Prendergast, Grace Weir, Alistair Wilson) and my opening night guerilla-art-style food performance, Contemporary Food Practice [discussions in], all welcome, come and enjoy, discuss.

discussion in contemporary sculpture

contemporary food practice [discussions in]

 

letter to the bank

I thought I’d share this with you as the actual recipient might not appreciate it to its full value.

annaghmaconway, Monday 20 october 2008

Dear Madam. Dear Sir,

I was in your branch on Tuesday last 14 october and requested to make two euro transfers out of my account. While filling the form I queried the difference between ‘standard’ and ‘express’. The man who was looking after me explained that ‘standard’ cost ‘75 cents or thereabouts’ and took three working days and that ‘express’ cost €25 and would be a same-day service. I chose standard, I’m sure you would have done the same.

On Friday 17 I received at home two printed receipts indicating that I was actually charged €20 euros per transfer, a far cry, you will agree from “75 cents or thereabouts”. This is an unacceptable sum considering the advice I was given while the operation was carried out and also an extravagant sum considering that this is a euro transaction within the eurozone.

I am aware that times are tough in the banking profession, and you may therefore feel justified in collecting money where you can in order to enable to weather the crisis successfully knowing that if you ever go down a lot will go down with you, but dare I remind you of a number of facts :
-the deregulation of financial markets unwittingly favoured by governments in the last few years has benefited your profession more than any other. As I do not own, never have and never will purchase shares or indeed speculate, I do not therefore feel I need to support you more than I already do with the charges that you routinely impose upon my meagre resources.
-The bailing out by governments of a number of your friends or colleagues around the world, is and will be borne by ordinary citizens like myself.
- You have recently closed down a number of branches including my particular one in my nearby town, no doubt realizing considerable savings while a lot of your customers now need to spend more in petrol and in time for the privilege of banking with you.

I would therefore be obliged if you could credit me with the €38.50 or thereabouts that you have mistakenly removed from my account.

regards or thereabouts

mari-aymone djeribi