Two functioning memories
Feb. 7th, 2025 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI quite often skip the human interest stories in the newspaper; I certainly wasn't hooked by the headline I thought I understood my late father. Then I was forced to spend lockdown in his home. But the picture at the top of the article made me look twice. It showed a child climbing over a fence, in a landscape of water and round green hills (in the online version it has been moved further down the page) and I thought: "Orkney?" It doesn't take much to make me think "Orkney?", but I wasn't far wrong: this was Shetland.
The article begins:
Haven't I seen something like this before? The article continues to explain that this is the work of the author's late father, ceramicist Bill Brown; this name, too, seemed familiar. If I was right, I could check this journal, which I think of as my external memory -
- which turned out not to be so easy. I found photographs of what must surely be those eggs (though the description makes me think of something smaller, something you could hold in the palm of your hand...):
Another picture shows more of his work:
But I was beginning to think I had not after all posted about the gallery where I saw them, and that this post would be about the failure of my external memory (in a reversal of the usual situation, my organic memory seemed to be functioning better than my virtual one). All is well: I found it eventually hidden under a cut.
Two functioning memories: such riches!
The article begins:
I wanted to reach out and feel the weight of the speckled eggs in my palm. Guillemot eggs: longer than a chicken’s and slightly pear-like in form, so that when they roll, they do so in a tight arc, rather than towards the cliff edge. There are plenty of cliffs to roll off in Shetland, a group of wind-scalped islands where the North Atlantic and the North Sea crash together, as well as other wild delights, like the precious mosses and orchids threading through the craggy peat bogs. Just over the hill, a low orange glow served as a reminder of a very different island treasure: Sullom Voe, one of the largest oil and gas terminals in Europe.
I stood by the trestle table staring at the strangely static greenish-blue eggs. A closer look revealed they were not what they seemed; in fact, they were not eggs at all. They were ceramic plates so cleverly designed that the slightly concave base appeared to curve outwards. It took a moment to re-adjust my focus.
Haven't I seen something like this before? The article continues to explain that this is the work of the author's late father, ceramicist Bill Brown; this name, too, seemed familiar. If I was right, I could check this journal, which I think of as my external memory -
- which turned out not to be so easy. I found photographs of what must surely be those eggs (though the description makes me think of something smaller, something you could hold in the palm of your hand...):
Another picture shows more of his work:
But I was beginning to think I had not after all posted about the gallery where I saw them, and that this post would be about the failure of my external memory (in a reversal of the usual situation, my organic memory seemed to be functioning better than my virtual one). All is well: I found it eventually hidden under a cut.
Two functioning memories: such riches!
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Date: 2025-02-11 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-11 11:44 am (UTC)I've become so bad at writing letters: it's always "as soon as I'm caught up with DW I will..."
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Date: 2025-02-13 01:56 am (UTC)