Not the end of the world

Usually, I go out for a walk in the morning but today I felt like I wanted to watch the sun set on 2020. So here it is.

It was about this time last year that I was experimenting with adding longer fur to my animals. I was working on a series of twenty dogs for a workshop that I was teaching at ArtisOn near Masham in early March. I had no idea then that it would be the last time I would travel anywhere further than about twelve miles from my house for the rest of the year. I feel the months have slipped by so quickly, yet time has seemed to stand still. I was hoping to make some room in my days to work on some bigger and more detailed pieces. I think that kind of worked out. Though I have found, like others I have spoken to, that it's very difficult to focus when faced with a constant and invisible menace. Even though I know, in more normal times, I can only ever do approximately one third of the things I plan in day, it still feels as though I could have done more. But, I think New Year's Eve is as good a time as any to be kind to ourselves, accept our own failings and move on.

I've been trying for years make a squirrel I was happy with. Their heads are such an odd shape, their hands so tiny and their tails so flamboyant. I'm pretty happy with this one though. I couldn't show it to you before because it was a Christmas gift. A commission for my friend's husband. A secret squirrel.

Here in North Yorkshire it has been very cold and yesterday I found myself out on the moor in a horizontal snow storm. Snow never really stops being exciting, even though its promise of a world suddenly ground to a halt is not quite so novel as it once was. Today we find ourselves in tier three, which I find indistinguishable from our previous tier two. In my pretended travels with Daniel DeFoe around the whole island of Great Britain we have never heard of tiers. We are living in a glorious post pandemic world and are travelling through the New Forest to the south coast. He once proposed a grand plan to cut it all down to make way for more farmland. He wanted to see the land used to resettle refugees from Germany. He had the whole thing designed and costed and is keen to show me a sketch of it. It didn't work out and I gather it went particularly badly for the refugees. I sense he doesn't want to talk about it.

We pass through the county town of Dorchester and reach the coast at Weymouth and the Isle of Portland. Here, very fine white sandstone is quarried. It is a tiny place, but it has done pretty well for itself. Having provided the stone for the recent rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral following the Great Fire of London, Portland has actually made more money than Dorchester. Further along the coast at Lime (Lyme Regis), Daniel is very impressed by the Cobb. It is a huge sea wall that has been there for at least 400 years. It certainly is impressive to build a harbour where no natural bay or inlet existed. It must have been a huge endeavour, carried out by people who had enormous faith in their engineering skills. From here, it is a long journey inland to a town he calls Strabridge (I think Stalbridge) a place once famous for knitting very fine stockings. It's not so great now though because someone has invented a knitting-stocking engine, so hand knitters are not needed so much. I haven't seen one but an engine sounds like quite a large piece of equipment to knit stockings, but perhaps it is not as heavy-handed as it sounds.

By the time we reach Yeovil (which is also apparently called Evil) he tells me he has a great deal of difficulty understanding what people are saying. We hear a boy read aloud from the bible. The passage goes 'I have washed my coat, how shall I put it on, I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them?' but the boy reads 'Chav a doffed my cooat, how shall I don 't, chav a washed my veet, how shall I moil 'em?' Daniel says he can't help but admire this and I agree. To simultaneously take in words, translate them to your own dialect and read them out loud is rather remarkable.

Further west is Honiton which I know mainly for lace because my mum made a switch from Fair Isle knitting to lace making in her retirement. But here there is a stream running along the side of the street that has ‘a little square dipping place at every door’ which sounds delightful. Everyone has fresh running water. At St Mary Otery (Ottery St Mary) there are, well, not a surprising number of otters which is disappointing. At Totnes we witness a man (our landlord actually) catching salmon by trapping them in a mill race. He has trained his dog to chase them into a net. At Dartmouth we arrive in time to see a huge shoal of pilchards driven into the harbour by porpoises. It is a huge and exciting thing for this fishing community. We send our servant (I'm only just learning we have a servant) to the harbour to buy some. He buys seventeen for half a penny. The cook at our inn prepares them for a farthing so we all eat a good supper for only three farthings.

The next large town we visit is Plymouth. There is a massive and dangerous rock at the entrance to its harbour called the Eddystone. Daniel has a frightening story about Mr Winstanley who built a lighthouse on it 1696. He also had enormous faith in his engineering skills. So much so that he spent a terribly stormy night there in 1703 just to prove it. In the morning the lighthouse was gone and so was Mr Winstanley.

Beyond Plymouth, we are in Cornwall. Here we see lots of the 'famous kind of crows' called Cornish Choughs. Nobody cares for them much because they steal stuff. Stuff they can't even eat, like knives and forks or your washing. People say they even sometimes steal firebrands or bits of lighted candle and lodge them in haystacks or thatches. Choughs are wicked fire starters. There are still many tin and copper mines in this county. Daniel says the rocks seem to be soldered together with veins of metal and it makes them strong. He really feels in makes the whole island strong. Rocks and metal run into the sea at Penzance where the waves are 'storming on the neck of one another'

We are at Land's End. Look beyond the crashing waves and you might be able to see the Isles of Scilley. The last lonely outpost of our island. Slip out 1723 for a moment and put on your 2020 glasses one last time. Can you see what they're doing there? They're doing the thing we can't. They're all in the pub.