Archive for May, 2010
29/05/2010 3 Comments

Lush Places: Happy Oak Apple Day

Odd’s fish, it’s Oak Apple Day: Charles II’s birthday and the 350th anniversary of his restoration to the throne.

Here in Lush Places, the day passes by unnoticed, as people scurry under large umbrellas across the village square in a dance choreographed jointly by Renoir and Magritte. They charge to the shop for their Telegraphs and Daily Mails, to pick up the gossip about the latest politician to be hoisted by his own petard or to add to the rumours about the building work going on in our house.

‘Well, I heard they were having a three-storey tower extension,’ says a farmer.

‘Yes, as big as The Gherkin, they reckon,’ says a second homer from London.

It is spring in the village: the bronze statue of a nude nymph greeting motorists has had a clean-up and the vulgar bizzy-lizzies lurk in the concrete flower pots next to the village pump, although one is broken thanks to a child using it as a stepping-stone to climb over the fence on to the green.

If Charles II were to suddenly appear here today, no-one would think much of it. He probably would not get a passing glance, like the white bearded tramp who turned up on Christmas Eve and sat forlornly on a step, his head in his hands. Village folk passed him by, until I insisted Mr Grigg go out to ask him if he would like a cup of tea and toast.

I mean, he could have been Jesus, or at least Father Christmas, and I was not risking losing out on a full pillowcase the next morning.

But hold fast, I have just seen a very tall man with rather large feet walking purposefully towards my front door. Could it be him? Could it be Charlie Boy travelling through time and coming to pick up a birthday present?

The moment of fancy passes and I open the door to the carpenter, clutching a hammer and nails.

Were it not for the whistling of ‘Billie Jean’s not my lover‘, he could be Jesus. Well, you never know.
29/05/2010 No comments

Bridport Open Studios: Kit Glaisyer on painting West Dorset’s ancient landscape

ST MICHAEL’S Studios in Bridport are open to visitors this Bank Holiday Weekend, 10-5pm Sat – Mon. Kit Glaisyer writes here about his participation.

I GREW up in ‘deepest darkest’ Dorset, several miles from any town, so the nights were truly dark, and the stars were bright in the sky, with just the sounds of nature, the wind and rain, and the strange noises of howling animals in the surrounding woods and fields. It was an unusual and magical childhood, free of television and pop culture and politics and the rest of the modern world. I didn’t know any of the TV shows that my friends watched, but I didn’t miss them either, because together we’d explore the world of trees and streams, in sun and rain and snow, as hunters and adventurers, and we felt like we had discovered something that the rest of the world had forgotten.

After school I went to London, in order to find like-minds and create a career as an artist. I loved the energy and excitement of the city, it introduced me to great art, and gave me a sense of the development of art and culture over the centuries. It also inspired my first serious works – an ambitious series of abstract paintings, through which I found my voice and developed my own language of expression.

But after a few years, and despite all of these amazing encounters and adventures, I began to miss the feeling of nature surrounding me, along with the deep sense of the sublime it inspires. And one day, while on holiday in Dorset I was introduced to an artistic community in Symondsbury, just outside Bridport, and within a month I’d moved back to live in the countryside. The following year I started a new studio in an empty warehouse on an old rope-making estate in Bridport, and St Michael’s Studios has now grown to become one of the most vibrant art venues in the West County. Our Open Studio events have become very popular, and I find it’s a great way for me to share my work, as it allows visitors to experience the gradual evolution of my paintings over several months.

Lewesdon Tree, May 2010, Kit Glaisyer

My recent series of landscape paintings are inspired by the landscape of west Dorset, particularly around the Marshwood Vale, and they are intended as a contemporary update on the historic tradition of landscape painting. While I love the work of the Impressionists and Expressionism, I feel that these styles ultimately led to the idea that anyone could make a painting, and so much of what we see now seems so lazy and stylised. I’ve followed a different path, one closer to post-impressionist Paul Cézanne, who left Paris to go and live in rural France and painted around Montagne Sainte-Victoire for the next 25 years. He said he wanted “to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums”, and desired to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition. Cezanne’s dogged pursuit of these principles led to the birth of Modern Art.

I also return to the examples set by the great masters, who all demonstrated this conviction to a personal vision, also evident in the great works of the British artists JMW Turner and John Constable, who were in turn inspired by the Dutch 17th Century painters like Jacob van Ruisdael and Filips Koninck – some of the first painters to establish Landscape as an independent genre. Turner and Constable were associated with Romanticism – the complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th Century and included artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Eugène Delacroix and William Blake. It also inspired the Hudson River painters, a mid-19th century American art movement of landscape painters that included Jasper Francis Cropsey, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church.

One thing all these artists shared is a deep respect for nature, and a determination to do justice to the subject. They all set out to achieve very ambitious paintings, requiring many months or even years of work, as well as the development of accomplished new painting techniques, and that’s also the way I like to work these days – gaining confidence as I tackle ever more complex subjects.

I now feel like I’m beginning to do justice to my feelings for nature. I’ve learnt the necessary patience required to give my work the time it needs in order to capture the intricate subtleties of light and atmosphere, and to honour the incredible complexity and rhythm of this ancient landscape.
29/05/2010 1 Comment

The answer is £5.44…

… TO THE QUESTION that has seen me tossing and turning at nights over the years and has, no doubt, troubled most of you in a similar manner. It is such a relief to have, at long last, learned this figure.

I am indebted to Mr Graham Burridge, Bridport’s affable postmaster, for finally putting my mind at rest. What, on earth, a very few of you might be asking, is the question?

I would have thought that it was obvious. How much does it cost to send a policeman’s helmet by first class post to another address in this country?

Now, just like me, you have the answer and will be able to stun your friends and relatives with the breadth of your knowledge.

So how did I come by this invaluable piece of information?

Well, just the other day, I was killing a few minutes in the post office queue idly wondering if I should just buy a couple of stamps or be really annoying and ask for a form allowing me to export a consignment of jam and Dorset Knobs to Botswana.

Anyway, whilst my mind was pondering the question a Bobby, as we used to call them, was using the counter service. All the better to bellow at old cloth ears behind the barricade that keep us out and the staff in, he removed his headgear and placed it on the scales beside him

That’s when the huge glowing red LCD numbers lit up and gave me the fascinating nugget of information which I have now shared with Bladderistas around Dorset.

Say what you like about realwestdorset but you can never claim that it isn’t both informative and educational.
27/05/2010 No comments

The Great Dorset Jellyfields Mystery

First things first

ONLY the village of Walditch near Bridport boasts a real place called Jellyfields.

It’s a 3-hectare Local Nature Reserve off Lower Walditch Lane, with grass, woodland, stream and small pond and it’s managed for West Dorset District Council by Dorset County Council’s Countryside Service.

The NEWS is that a resurfaced path is being officially opened at 10am on Tuesday, June 1. 

Volunteers, countryside rangers and Dorset Wildlife Trust staff have all worked hard (see picture by DWT’s Emily Brown) at tidying the place up.

It’s all part of a project, says the county council, that will “see the development of the site as a local education and community participation resource”.

Ok, enough of that.

The Jellyfields Mystery

The mystery is – why is it called Jellyfields? 

Margaret Milree, the assistant curator of Bridport Museum, urged me a while ago to write about Jellyfields. “It would be just your kind of thing,” she said. “And you could find out why it’s called Jellyfields.”

Well, I haven’t, not for sure, but I’ve spent quite a long time thinking about it and I’ve got plenty of ideas.

As Dorset County Council are also now asking why it’s called Jellyfields, here’s just a small selection of possibilities.

I thought it might be somewhere that somebody once found a buried hoard of jelly moulds, or built a giant jelly castle.

I thought it might be somewhere famed for its fecundity as a source of jelly-making materials.

I thought it might be somewhere that people felt scared – as if they were turning to jelly.

I thought it might have been a good spot for courting – “jelly” is old slang for a pretty girlfriend.

I thought it might have once belonged to someone called Jellaby (colloquially shortened to Jelly).

Perhaps it was just muddy and slippery like jelly.

Shooting stars

In the end I decided that it probably had something to do with algae and falling stars.

I’ll explain.

Nostoc

There is an alga called Nostoc that swells up like jelly on dry soil after rain. It was called Star Shot or Star Jelly because people used to think that glutinous colonies of Nostoc were the trembling remnants of falling stars or meteors.

As Dryden once wrote: “The shooting stars end all in purple jellies.”

At the moment, I have no proof that Nostoc is the reason for the name of Jellyfields, but I like the idea for its very West Dorset combination of poetry and science.

If you have any other notions, I would love to hear them, and I am sure that thousands of readers would too.
26/05/2010 No comments

Photographs from Burton Bradstock’s Spring Tide Food Festival

MORE than 1000 people went to the National Trust’s first Spring Tide Food Festival at Hive Beach in Burton Bradstock.

A farmers’ market sold produce grown, reared or made within 40 miles of the marquee, and there were craft stalls and free entertainment.

If you weren’t there and you want to see it was like, or you were and you want to look at some pictures, here’s eight courtesy of Graham Wiffen.

Extreme Knitting with Rosemary Gameson of Dorchester Stitchers

Clive Sage of Wyld Meadow Farm

y'Strel's Band

Mace from Bodgers Barn

Annette Lee of Woolsery Cheese, Sydling St Nicholas, with John Gundry of Scottish Choice over to the left

Fun at the Olives & Things stall

Stallholders included Wyld Meadow Farm, Ashley Chase Estates, Bridge Farm Cider, Capreolus Fine Foods, Dorset Visual Arts, Chapell Studio, Dorset Cereals, Scott McCarthy, Olives & Things, Lovingtons, Bridfish, Filberts Bees, Parrett Preserves,  Forest Preserves, Woolsery Cheese, AONB, Simply Cooking, Stockland Venison, Olga’s Art, Jamie Butcher, Dorset Treasure Trails, Dorset Village Bakery, Woolton Dairy, Clare Colby, Sarah Cooke, Simply Cooking, Pinks Organics, Homemade by Lizzie and Bekki, Barrington Court, Lyme Wash Soaps , Bodgers Barn, Tamarisk Farm, Eggardon Hill Natural Foods, Piddle Brewery, Town Mill Bakery, Guy Furner, RSPB, NT – Barrington Court, Dorchester Stitchers, The Fossil Workshop, Dorset Community Action, Direct from Dorset, Love Food Hate Waste – Dorset County Council, John Bullock & y’Strel’s Band and Treewise- Children’s craft/forest School.

Supporters included Dorset AONB, Steve Attrill and his team at the Hive Beach Café, National Trust wardens, staff and volunteers and Clive Sage, who co-ordinates Bridport Farmers Market.

Caroline Richards NT Visitor Services Manager for West Dorset, said: “I kept being asked when we were going to do it again. Something like this really brings the people together, it’s wonderful to see.”
25/05/2010 1 Comment

How to be a Dorset cider thrower

CIDER THROWING isn’t a Dorset thing. Not yet, anyway.

I say not yet, because I suspect it’s one of those things that – once you’ve seen it done, or even just read about it – you’ll feel irresistibly impelled to try yourself.

Probably when you’ve already had a bit of cider… which could actually be a bad time to start because your hand wouldn’t be so steady… but anyway…

What is cider throwing?

It’s the art of pouring cider from bottle to glass from a height of about three feet.

The body has to be straight but not rigid.

The arm that holds the bottle has to be stretched over the head; the arm that holds the glass has to be stretched downwards in the centre of the body.

Why? Because it aerates the cider. It enhances the bouquet and the natural carbonation; it produces the gas Spaniards call “estrella” (star). 

I only know this because there’s going to be a demonstration of cider throwing in the Orchards and Cider pavilion at The Royal Bath & West show on Thursday, 3 June, and the Royal Bath & West has told me about it.

Asturian cider maker Natalia Menéndez Ruiz (pictured above) will be the star performer – she’s won numerous throwing competitions.  

The custom in Asturia, once cider has been thrown, is to pass the glass quickly from hand to hand.

It’s also usual, apparently, to add a word of warning: “Cider oxidises quickly so the whole bottle should be consumed in one sitting.”

But, somehow, I suspect that consuming a whole bottle is never that much of a problem. 

Further instructions

If you want to have a go at throwing yourself some cider, here are some more tips, courtesy of the Bath & West Show and the Spanish regulatory body the Denominacion de Origen Sidra de Asturias.

The organoleptic theory

The flow of the cider has to break against the rim of the glass. In this way, the air mixes with the carbon dioxide of the cider and the organoleptic characteristics of the cider, such as taste and perfume, became significant and are released. (I like the word organoleptic).

The ideal way to validate the importance of pouring the cider from a height is to drink a small amount both with and without pouring in this way. The difference is noted by the appearance of bubbles and a “shine” to the cider that is poured from a height and the flatness of one poured in the conventional way.

How to pour cider in the correct way?

Corporal posture should be firm, but not rigid.

The bottle should be sustained with the arm outstretched above the head.

The arm holding the glass should be extended downwards and orientated towards the middle of the body.

The body of the bottle should be sustained by the first, second and ring finger, with the little finger on the bottom.

The glass should be held by the thumb and first finger with the second finger on the bottom of the glass. The ring finger and the little finger should be folded over the palm of the hand.

The glass should not be displaced from the center of the body as this indicates that the cider should find the glass.

The cork should be held by the ring and little finger of the hand holding the glass.

On serving the glass of cider, the thumb is removed to facilitate the service.

The person serving the glass of cider should always attempt to prevent frothing of the cider poured.

How is cider drunk?

The glass of cider should be swallowed rapidly (not as a shot, for example of whisky). The cider will loose its spark and organoleptic qualities due to the traditional way of pouring if sipped or swallowed slowly.

Why are few drops of cider finally left and thrown from the glass?

Last part of the cider in the glass is emptied onto the floor. This is traditionally linked to the consumption of cider in Asturias.

This peculiarity is due to:

Ancestral tradition – whereby part of the cider is returned to the earth in gesture of gratitude for her generosity.

A question of hygiene – traditionally everybody drinks from the same glass, and the last drops of cider are used to clean the glass by throwing on the floor in readiness for the next drinker.

This is a part of cider culture. Using the same glass we are all equal. This act becomes a social event inducing conversation, reunion with friends etc.

This all takes place in a friendly and tranquil atmosphere in the pubs of each locality.
25/05/2010 2 Comments

West Dorset: Village Idiot Preservation Society launched

THE PLIGHT of the villages of West Dorset is fast becoming dire. The shops, Post Offices and pubs are closing like the rat traps in Hamelin before the arrival of the Pied Piper. Yet that is only the tip of a very worrying iceberg.

As well as these important ingredients of rural life an historical tradition that dates back to the centuries before any of these other facilities were even imagined is also being lost. I write, of course, of the lamentable dearth of idiots in our villages.

There are a few, I will grant you, but they are nothing like of the standards that our grandparents would have expected and, even, demanded. Action must be taken and it must taken now before this vital ingredient of village life is finally and irretrievably lost forever.

To that end I am, today, announcing the formation of the Village Idiot Preservation Society (VIPS). Unless immediate action is taken the management consultancies, the major political parties and the merchant banks will have removed all of our local half-wits from their natural environment and grabbed them for themselves. Why should the big cities have them all?

Our first action must be to press this government for speedy legislation. A legal obligation must be placed on each and every parish, town district and county councillor to ensure the comfort, well being and comfort of any idiot in the area which they represent.

This will often require little action from our duly elected representatives beyond tucking themselves up warmly at night, eating three square meals a day and not randomly casting clouts until May is out. The idiots must become a protected species. Blow the newts, the bats and the hedgehogs. What about putting out own native dolts first?

This must become a rallying call for mass action. There must be petitions, marches and even sit-ins, on nights when there’s not much on television, of course.

Let the clarion call ring out “Hand off our idiots”.

In this, as in so much else where West Dorset leads, the rest of the country will follow.

Please join with me and help restore the village idiot to his rightful place in our society. Join with The Red Bladder and do this, if not for yourself, for future generations and for England.