Today we took a trip down to Troon beach and enjoyed watching some dude kitesurfing whilst I dug a large hole. For some reason this was extremely therapeutic.
Waiting for my mother to come out of hospital is a big worry as apparently carers are supposed to go to the jobcentre when their charges are in hospital, and find extremely short term work to prevent them visiting their patients or catching up with house related work. Eating is apparently unnecessary according to our benevolent government, as is keeping up your property since you are also deprived of any income for the property holding patient. I wonder if anybody in government considers that since they already spend more on lunch than people who are ill get in an entire week, perhaps they might like to consider those of us on a 24 hour commitment for sixty pounds per week?
Once I had enjoyed all of an hour on Troon beach, I returned to work and prepared the materials for the Theresa May piece, which I will be unable to work on until my income is restored, provided my mother makes a recovery. Iain Duncan Smith is proving to be a fairly complex piece of work, since it has rather operatic overtones and a fairly deep level of expense. I also need to test part of it to see if the ink will survive the process, although I did find a rather nice glass eye for it earlier this week.
Bordello Rhetoric may require some professional help for the hinges, as I have tried two types now and they are not working as well as I had hoped. I polished a couple of lovely Georgian handles for it, and they have also rebelled, so it will be some time before I can consider this a success.
Boris without artifice, which will probably be called Al once it is finished, is coming along nicely, but even when the design is finished, the work will only be a third of the way along as it is a technically complex and very novel piece of heavy textile engineering. It is fascinating that textile artists will spend hundreds of hours on something that people maybe take 20 seconds to look at and write off, or on depending on how they feel. I remember reading about another artist that had forgone her alternative career of being a GP to earn six pounds an hour messing with textiles and agreeing with her Indian relatives that she was probably making the wrong decision.
Two massive boxes are awaiting my attention, so I am certainly not short of work, despite not really having a hope of making a living out of it for another year or two. I am not sure if Wolfish is really worth pursuing as it is a good three months of work to finish, for an animated and yet functionless bit of spectacular fun. It might be worth doing for the sake of future Wolfe books, but I cannot help but think it is really just a nice picture, which I should then remake into a carpet. I also have a chair to do for the Wolfe related work, which is going to be pending for at least another year.
So, things are coming along in their usual juggled and complicated way as I seek to create entirely new products which may or may not capture somebody’s imagination once they are finished. You basically have to cling to the idea that somebody, somewhere will look at it and decide that you are a genius. In the meantime you suffer messy clothes, messy hair and a messy life as you stagger about scraping together the money to do anything in the first place, in the absence of hope of the life you worked for before your loved one became ill.
I did manage to get the shoes for the shoe collection, so I hope to release them later in the year. I think I should probably make them a priority for this year, as the prototypes will at least pay for some materials if some mere mortal likes them.
In the meantime, I have enough to keep me working for about a week. Thereafter I will be seriously struggling to keep everything going, since I am responsible for making sure my mother has a home to come back to if she does not die.
Enjoy your bollinger.
Ina