comfort and joy

what do you do, to quiet the wringing of your hands?

For much of my life I have been an anxious person. Little M, at the grand age of ten, would tell you that I don’t know how to relax, and to a large degree that is true. If being busy was an olympic sport, I would be a gold medallist. I’m not advocating this as a good thing, it is simply a statement of fact.

My busyness is partly borne of necessity. I have three boys, a dog, elderly parents, elderly surrogate parents and a full time job. Since covid, I no longer have a cleaner. I sit on the board of a Housing Association, a theatre and a health watchdog. Simple mathematics will tell you that keeping the wheels turning therefore doesn’t leave a lot of downtime. In all honesty, for the most part that suits me well. I have the attention span of a gnat, which coupled with a very low boredom threshold makes for a whole lot of busyness.

I am not, however, superwoman and nor do I want to be. The notion of having it all, in my opinion, is unhelpful and unrealistic. Or bollocks, if you will. There is always a price for the decisions we make about how we choose to live our lives. I am no cook. I have no interest in it, it just isn’t how I want to spend my time. My house hovers somewhere between broadly passable ( cleanliness and tidiness) to an absolute tip. I do mind about this – but just not enough to spend my few precious spare hours hoovering lampshades. There is a degree to which being the only female in a house full of males (including the dog) means that if I don’t make peace with it, I will spend most of my waking hours wailing about the aroma of socks/ armpits/ testosterone along with empty packets put back on shelves, plates left under beds, and my best tweezers going missing ( they might be boys but some of them are into a groomed eyebrow!). I swapped the school run for working full time. For the most part, I don’t regret that one bit, but I am grateful now for a job, when I am in the office, which allows me to be around more for the boys. Right now, being based completely at home enables me to see little M off to school and still be online at 9am. Five years ago I was at my desk in the City by 8.30am at the latest having completed a two hour commute. Times have changed and thank goodness for that.

Of course some will say that being overly busy is an avoidance technique, and again, I would agree with that to some extent. At least for me, I know that there is a lot of truth in that.

I instinctively see a gap and want to fill it, both physically and metaphorically. My house is testament to that. I periodically decide to go for that pared back, spare look, which lasts about a week or two at best, until I find the next oddity that I can’t live without. I am a collector, of experiences, memories and mementos. Borne of nostalgia, romanticism and comfort, however hard I try – I come back to it. Unless I am on my own, where I relish it like a prized gem, I am inclined to fill a silence. I see any space in a conversation as potentially hazardous – a loss of connectedness that I have the urge to preserve. I have long been a peacemaker, I do not like disharmony in any shape or form. Being an empath, I feel all the feels, and whether I am directly involved in a situation or merely an observer, I find it hard not to go in, invited or not, like some sort of amateur UN envoy, to calm troubled waters.

A gap in time – a day stretching ahead with nothing planned and seemingly nothing to do has for a great part of my life felt daunting and mildly threatening, in case the silence gives the space to dwell ever longer on the critical voice that is my companion. On a good day, I can embrace a day with nothing planned as a rare gift. On a good day.

So what choices do I make about filling that time? The answer is many. When circumstances allow I spend a good deal of my spare time with my mother, with whom , now she is 83, I feel the urgent need to talk to, have fun with, and feel the sun on our faces.

To say my mum has had a difficult life would be the understatement of the year. As a child she waved goodbye to her parents and set sail from Sumatra to the Netherlands. She was in some ways considered to be the lucky one. Her parents could only afford passage for one, so the rest of her siblings remained. She didn’t know it as she waved goodbye, but she never saw those that she left behind ever again. She was eventually adopted and grew up round the corner from the opera house in Amsterdam. More trauma followed, and that is another story, but what is certain is that her coping mechanism, then and now, is to pretend none of it ever happened. I am sure that trauma has both blighted and her suppressed her memory. She has little recollection of life before she arrived in the Netherlands save for a few tantalising, random glimpses of another life. So fleeting, they appear from nowhere and in the most unlikely places and circumstance – and as fast as they arrive they are gone. She can remember the ship passing through the Suez canal. Heat, noise, shouting. Whilst standing a few years ago in a cookshop, we were looking at a wok that stood atop its own burner. “My mum had something similar to this” she murmured, and then the moment was gone. You don’t speak of it, you don’t dwell on it, you simply endure.

My overriding childhood memory of mum is of her gardening – she was nothing if not resourceful. She built huge fruit cages in which she grew strawberries and raspberries, sour gooseberries and big plump blackcurrants which we would make us wince when they popped in our mouths. She grew honeysuckle and roses that we made “perfume” with, grinding petals with water and imagining that this would mimic her Chanel no 5, curiously her only nod to any kind of luxury for herself, along with a vibrant lipstick that we would try every now and then, until one day we broke it and feared we would not live to tell the tale. I see mum perched on an upturned bucket or her knackered gardening school, smouldering cigarette omnipresent with a great head of ash teetering precariously until it would eventually fall off into the flowerbeds. She had two main modes – either pretty silent or shouting – prone to saying nothing for a very long time and then eruptions like the angry pixie in the Faraway Tree – all arms and legs waving and wait till your dad gets home. She was a crack shot with whatever she had to hand at the time – a shoe, a toy, a block of butter.

In quiet mode though, more than anything I have an over-riding memory of the the unmistakable rhythmic murmur of the treadle of her Singer. It was stationed in our living room, behind an enormous battered cream leather chesterfield that was home to two mice. Too hot to sit on in summer, too cold to sit on in winter, although sit on it we did, until we had cause to get up and peel ourselves painfully off it. In front of that, an open fire, the only means of heat in the whole of our large, draughty tied house. To the side of the fire, a solitary winged armchair. My dads chair, from which he would leap up and down on a Saturday lunchtime, his fist either in his mouth or jabbing at the air, as he sat watching the wrestling. We were required to be quiet when the wrestling was on, which was pretty much impossible, since dad looked like a man possessed and would leap into the air with such abandon that it would cause his comb-over to swing out of place, causing even more merriment. Mum observed all of this, glaring at us ominously if our hysteria was in danger of spilling over, and treadled on. Is that a verb? It should be.

On bath night we would head straight for the fire afterwards, huddled in crunchy greying thin towels, drying off whilst mum treadled. It was in all respects, a thin veil for rocking back and forth, as my mum would have inappropriately said at the time, like an idiot. She said little but saw everything. In retrospect you knew from the speed at which she was going whether it was a quiet therapy or if she was taking out the frustrations of the day. On those occasions, she moved like greased lightening, a kind of fury filling the room. It’s a wonder there wasn’t smoke coming off it, although the air was frequently punctuated by swearing.

I had a very strained and difficult relationship with my mum when I was growing up. I felt she didn’t love me, and I know now that she didn’t know how to show it, for she had nobody to show her. We are very close now, and of course I realise that we are not so different after all. Like her, I bloody love a good swear.

Of course mums sewing was not just for relaxation, or distraction, it was also out of necessity. These were the days where it was cheaper to make your own, and so she did. We were not at all grateful, for mum didn’t have the luxury of nor the inclination to be selective in her fabric or styling choices – it was a very functional typical 1970s wardrobe of corduroy, polyester, refashioned shirting and anything else she found at the village jumble sale. It’s a wonder that at some point I didn’t emerge from the house dressed rather rigidly in leather britches made out of that bloody chesterfield. Back then I longed for something of my own that was new, and bought from a shop, rather than handed down or handmade. You’d have thought that this formative wardrobe would have meant I have an aversion to any notion of re-using or upcycling, but I guess old habits die hard.

And so it is that I have found a great deal of comfort in many creative pursuits, probably none more so than stitching. Louise Bourgeois said that the act of sewing is a process of emotional repair – and to a great degree I agree with this. At it’s best I find the quiet art of stitching is almost meditative. In the right environment, on the right day, it is possible for hours to steal by and to be lost knee-deep in your thoughts. Better still, to have no thoughts at all other than your needle and thread, passing in and out of fabric that yields to your touch, for that is to be truly meditative.

The collection and curation of fabrics is a very personal thing. I have friends who are not sewists but still find great joy in collecting fabrics, often the older and more damaged the better. For some, fabric stroking is an activity in itself.

There are days when I get up and the need to sew is urgent. A friend talks of her palms itching, emanating a curious heat which only dissipates as the sense of familiarity and comfort descends with a gathering of thread, scissors and fabric.

Vintage darning thread, once used for the mending of stockings, the typography and brand speak of another age. Scissors, of many types depending on the task at hand. Fabric shears, heavy, functional and purposeful, embroidery scissors, some beautiful and ornate. Selecting the right scissors for the task is as important to me as a cook selecting the right knife in the kitchen. A fabric tape measure, I love the uncoated kind, which I wear around my neck with the importance and gravity of a doctor with stethoscope. I mean business. The fabrics. Brushed cotton for comfort and familiarity, a throwback to childhood. Wool, for security and warmth. Old timeworn linens, perfectly imperfect and each with a story to tell. Each one better with age, and better still with old darns and repairs. Somebody, somewhere, before you has worked that fabric diligently and with care. Cotton for utility and summer days, silk for occasion and pure unadulterated pleasure. Old lace for indulgence and to remind you of who you were, once, when those things mattered. Best of all, old soft linen floral curtains, Sanderson being a favourite. They speak of times past, their glorious bloomsbury colours rich with age and story. A faded leading edge sometimes deliberately worked in to the pattern placement. I am a hopeless nostalgic. A gathering then, of the cast.

I tend to move between dressmaking and embroidery. The embroidery is not well executed, but that doesn’t matter, it is for noone elses benefit but mine. I started in earnest when I was commuting to London, for I had four hours a day to fill. People do funny things on trains, and on my commute I had seen all manner of things – funny, sad, gross and frankly indecent. I once sat next to a man who was openly watching hard core pornography on his laptop, with the sound on, on the 6.40pm to Oxford Parkway. I don’t actually think he was getting his kicks from the pornography. I think that came from me, watching him, watching the pornography. Of course, he wasn’t to know I was the mother of two teenage boys and was therefore not at all phased by this. I gave him the eyebrow and offered a polo mint, before returning to my stitching. Confused, he shut his laptop and instead opened the Daily Mail, which I imagine was possibly mildly more salacious. I digress, as usual.

On my commute, I started with people watching, I moved onto email, I did a lot of social media, and then I found solace in a travelling sewing kit which felt like the perfect foil to the anticipation of, or antidote for, a day in the City. Most of my work during this time was words onto scraps of vintage cloth, a literal outpouring of emotion, thought and grief. I once spent months embroidering onto a tired tea towel from a pile I had rescued from a village WI who were throwing them out. They thought I had taken leave of my senses and perhaps at the time I had, but I found great solace stitching into that tea towel, and it eventually formed the pages of a book I made, which are the images in this post. You can see a video of the whole project on my IGTV. Strangely, I completed the last stitches of that project as I sat next to AJs bedside in the days after The Terrible Awful.

When dressmaking, I nearly always know exactly what I am setting out to do. It is almost always a dress, invariably a romantic, impractical confection of ruffles and trains, puffed sleeves and bows. I love a bow, the bigger the better. There is almost never a pattern, and I work quickly. Too quickly. I am still learning to slow down. Time is forgotten, meals go unmade and uneaten, dishes go unwashed. I am absorbed and in charge. With only the radio for company ( filling that silence) I work on and on, often into the night. I have realised in recent years that on occasion this obsessive working away can tip from restorative therapy into the complete opposite, and become frenzied, making me agitated and on edge. I have learned to recognise this and find the motivation to step away. I see my mother with her treadle moving angrily, and I know I need to stop.

At some point, she hangs, resplendent, on her hanger in my workroom. Fantastical, indulgent, unique. It is always something of an anti-climax. For it is not the finished garment, or project, but the making of it.

Find the thing, the thing that transports you to somewhere else, the thing that quiets your mind and stills your hand. Find the thing that brings you comfort and joy, and do that.