a grey view from the room, but I always love this view. the overlapping framing of the distant wedge of sky and roofs, with its rusty marks and cool grey lead, stucco, and stone, intensifies the cloudscape which was constantly changing its watery greys and creams.

the grey outside a complete contrast to the room inside this time, which was decorated with various wallpapers of 60’s vintage, ceiling and walls full of clashing colour vibrating and reflecting against the cool external light.

it made the low ceilinged room feel even smaller, but very special and like a jewel box.

curving stairs and ancient hexagonal tiles make the bright and patterned room even more of a surprise on arrival.

nearby the Tuillerie gardens have formal clipped tree plantings juxtaposed with English style border planting. those pinky purples look wonderful next to the just-beginning-to-turn colours of the trees.

these huge 16th century slate roofs of the Palais du Louvre, with their towering chimneys and carved decorations, dominate the riverside. the typical french renaissance style is echoed in the Hotel de Ville and in the chateaux of the Loire valley. they make Paris a very distinctive city. even the stock market is housed in a beautiful early 19th century building, the domed Palais de la Bourse.

in the tuilleries I found two examples of hat design very similar to my knitted hats. they are actually meant to be helmets tipped back so that the face mask forms a peak.

perhaps I should think about putting a crest on a hat.

and I had to add a very pretty and delicate Diana the huntress with her beautiful hound.

looking for textures, the lime tree bark shows how clean the air must be in Paris, there are lichens growing here.

and lime leaves just beginning to colour.

and fall in the wind

onto the grey cobble stones of the Quai Voltaire on the left bank of the Seine.

this is a beautiful barge used as a house boat on the Port de Conti, opposite the Île de la Cité.

Elza is enormous and must be a comfortable home

with the most amazing views

the river is quite low in these photos, but it has been a lot higher from time to time. I saw it racing so close under the bridges that there would have been no room for any boat in 2001.

according to these marks that was the lowest of the river’s highs. there is one mark, not included in this photo, at the top of the quai wall, level with the Paris streets.

next to Elza, a piratical boat.

along the Port des Grands Augustins, the Pont Neuf has carved gargoyle heads just for fun.

the water-worn stone of the port wall shows quite well that floods and high water are common. this limestone is full of shell fossils.

monumental rings for tying up boats are all along this section. once it must have been a busy wharf full of boats bringing supplies to Paris.

and we crossed onto the Île de la Cité, the centre of Paris, via the Pont Saint-Michel. more extraordinary 17th century slate roofed buildings opposite Notre Dame.

this is the least exciting view of it, I think, I prefer the rounded east end with the enormous flying buttresses - but we didn’t walk that way.

a pause here to give our feet a rest, then across the Pont Notre Dame to the Marais, shopping and lunch.

and finally, we found the Palais Royal and its very formal gardens, on our way back to the Avenue de l’Opera.

these clipped rows of trees are like hedges on legs in the white sand.

luckily the lorry delivering the tiles could drive onto the paddock and hi-ab the crates into position next to the back of the shed. by the end of the day there were two rows on the front part of the roof.

next week the electrician will insert the light and power point wiring so that the walls can be completed. I will have a light in my kiln shed.

two deer sightings today. at the edge of Bale wood there was a fallow deer with a well grown youngster. unfortunately too far away to get a good photo, but here is another of my very poor wildlife pictures. it’s not easy while trying to restrain a lurcher on the lead. of course, once she realised they were there T got rather noisy and there was no more chance for photos.

the other was far too distant to attempt a photo, in the stubble field next to H’s wood. I was talking to the builders, Alan and Peter, behind the shed, and I could see a moving dot. it was a roe deer, probably the same one I had seen last Sunday in the same place. they seem to like the late sunshine in that field, it was the same time of day. on Sunday I was in the stubble field with Sal, and much closer. there was a large dark coloured doe and a very red coloured buck, sunbathing. they didn’t put up with our presence for long and disappeared into the wood. (this is the anenome wood).

some more pots are emerging. this time I have applied blips or bumps to some of them - a direct inspiration from the African pots I have been looking at.

this is the terracotta crank. I also tried the industrial crank. it’s not very plastic, cracks very easily, and won’t stand up enough to make a really big pot. I tried, and ended up with two medium sized pots. that’s the first time I haven’t managed to make a pot. I think there’s a lot of sand in it, it’s meant for making saggars.

so perhaps I should try combining the two cranks.

this one I attacked with the comb.

until the sheds are finished I can’t really attempt to fire the kiln, and Paris fashion week is rather imminent, so not much more making for the time being. its a shame as the weather is very pleasant and it would be good to be in the workshop.

the shed is shaping up; now all the roof structure is done and tomorrow Peter and Alan will start covering it with a sandwich of plywood, thinsulate (foil and insulation layers) and roofing felt. then we will need about a thousand reclaimed Norfolk pantiles - old handmade ones. but at least the shed will be watertight by the end of the week. then I think they are going missing to work on another project for a week or so.

I managed one big pot so far this week. its taking a long time for the clay to lose moisture and I have a few other things to do. I am making an edited version of the anagama blog into a little book, and while I am at it I thought I would make a look book as they call it in the fashion world, of the Spring collection. I have worked out how to use Page Setup and the printer to make book pages which print up in the right order for book fold.

the pot continues what I was doing on the last batch to be fired, combing loose looping furrows into the porcelain. next I have some “industrial crank” - basically saggar clay - to try out. it fired pale toasty and rough textured when tested in the last firing.

while on the subject of furrows, I got some photos of the big stubble field being ploughed today. swirling snowstorms of gulls in attendance.

it’s fascinating watching the tractor tipped up in the furrow, smoothly turning the moist earth, which smells so sweet.

all the flowering plants are seeding now in the lanes. here’s rosebay willow herb; it was bright pink, now it’s a feathery mass of tufted white fuzz.

hogweed stems make strong patterning against the sky.

a chemical smell like bleach keeps attracting my attention; it’s the ivy flowers, which are out everywhere. I have a jar of ivy flower honey. it is last year’s and it is crystallising.

this morning I had a glaze firing to unpack. it was a weird firing. the kiln gained heat when I closed the gap on the flue for reduction, and lost heat when I opened it up. the opposite of what it normally does. I discovered a large amount of flame leaking out of the side of the flue, here, just under the top. I can fill this space up with ceramic blanket after I have pushed the side of the flue back out to where it should be, it’s leaning in about half an inch at the top. that’s the red stained section in the middle.

anyway, the firing was fine, up to temperature, with just about perfect reduction. I was very worried as there seemed to be very little reduction between 1000 and 1100 degrees, no soot to speak of, and no back pressure. but there was plenty of green copper staining on the barium glaze over porcelain, and the barium went quite dark gold where it was double dipped as on the centre band of this big bottle.

although I was a little at a loss as to what to do with this pale grey clay body, it’s fine with the porcelain overlay, and works perfectly well with the crawling shino glaze. the copper/tin/dolomite glaze gave some quite garish oranges on top of it, but that’s quite fun for a change.

the first pieces I made with it were the two rectangular dishes, and this is the more exciting of the two. it was tucked quite close under a shelf and I set some cones at each end. the greenish-blackish end got cone 11 (porcelain temperature, 20 degrees higher than stoneware)  lying down flat and cone 12 starting to bend, but it doesn’t seem to have affected it at all. the porcelain overlay is quite thick, so it cracked in the biscuit firing; a nice crackled effect.

I put the last of the terracotta crank pieces in this firing, somewhat circumspectly in a cool-ish corner,with the barium glaze on it. it certainly had no problems with the temperature it got, which probably was not cone 11, more like 10, but that’s still 120 C higher than it’s supposed to go. I am surprised at how pale the barium glaze is over it.

the rest of the pots are here.

only part of the hedgerow has been cut however, and there are still wonderful places covered in red berries of various sorts. unripe blackberries add to the colour, with rose hips in the background.

the dog roses were spectacular in flower this summer, and the display of hips is equally gorgeous.

near the culvert and the arm of woodland which reaches out from Bale wood, there are quite a few guelder rose in the hedge. this is a poisonous plant, every part is harmful.

and the haws, the fruit of the hawthorn, is very important to wild birds. it also makes great itching powder for nasty boys to put down girls’ necks as I remember from my childhood.

while I was photographing the hips I saw three roe deer out in the middle of the stubble field on the Hindringham side of the wood. two of them were playing, or play fighting, and I thought they were hares when I first spotted them. I am not sure whether this is a doe with two well-grown youngsters - I think really they are too big to be this years’ fawns - or a buck, on the left, as I think I can see a suspicion of antler between the ears, and a doe flirting. whether the other on the right would be another buck or a doe I can’t tell but it does look bigger than the little one in the middle. they were being quite skittish, and only looked at me, or my head, and then I could see they were listening as we walked up the road and caught sight of them through various gaps in the hedge. the dogs had no idea they were anywhere near deer.

back at home, shed building is proceeding apace. now the framework is up it’s very quick. I had some donated windows which went in on Tuesday, and some old doors which were used as partitions in the original sheds. the windows don’t open, but I am having roof-lights which will open.

there is a breathable membrane behind the lapped larch boards.

and the walls will be lined with cheap insulation wool and covered with plywood on the inside, which I will paint white, to keep it light.

at the end of the day the rest of the walls are nearly finished. there will be a door in the back wall, with windows, my old kitchen door.

however, the rebuilt sheds will block this out, as well as winds from the north and north west. I will have a couple of windows, but we are planting a hedge along the boundary, so unless I am allowed to cut a window in the hedge too, I will lose the view eventually. the co-owner of the boundary lives in a house which overlooks this meadow and he needs the trees we are removing to be replaced by some sort of landscaping. Peter and Alan hired a mini-digger on Friday and cleaned up the ground behind the sheds.

I have a group of pots sitting outside in the sun and breeze (August’s last day is very warm and humid) to dry for a biscuit firing. they are all made with the pale clay and most have porcelain overlay. humidity has been high all week although we have not had any rain, and the pots have been drying unexpectedly slowly.

the combed lines on these pots are beginning to remind me of the decoration on old African pots or carvings. I suppose this should be no surprise since I recently bought “For Hearth and Altar”  a beautiful book on African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection by Kathleen Bickford. the shapes are vaguely totem-like as well.

I hope to have a biscuit firing and then a glaze firing this week, before the new pitched and tiled roof goes on the sheds. I am keeping my double corrugated tin roof, with its sandwich of rock wool insulation, over the kiln; but there will be a stainless steel duct wrapped in ceramic fibre to take the heat from the chimney to the gable end rather than through the roof, and I may not get this for a little while.

while the harvest is in, due to the dry week we have just had, (although many farmers cut the wheat very damp and have had to spend a fortune drying it; it wasn’t dry enough until four or five in the afternoon most days) I am hoping for more dry for the shed building. tomorrow two of the five sycamore trees will be cut down, and from Tuesday things should be progressing with some speed. there is the concrete floor to lay, with the rest of the posts in, and then the framework should go up.

today we are forecast thunderstorms later, but meanwhile the butterflies are busy on the buddhlias. there are a good few small tortoiseshells. this is the first time I have seen them this summer, but they are supposed to be a very common garden butterfly.

my garden is full of goldfinches too, chattering and whistling away in a delightful fashion in the sycamore trees. I can hear them in the pot workshop.

a found photo of a male goldfinch.

I have had to stop feeding the birds as the greenfinches and chaffinches had begun to die from a parasitical infection called trichomoniasis which lives in the upper digestive tract of the bird, and its actions progressively block the bird’s throat making it unable to swallow food, thus killing it by starvation.
the RSPB says;
“birds with the disease show signs of general illness, for example lethargy and fluffed-up plumage, but affected birds may also drool saliva, regurgitate food, have difficulty in swallowing or show laboured breathing. finches are frequently seen to have matted wet plumage around the face and beak. in some cases, swelling of the neck may be visible.
the parasite is vulnerable to drying out and cannot survive for long periods outside the host. transmission of infection between birds happens when they feed one another with regurgitated food during the breeding season and through food or drinking water contaminated with recently regurgitated saliva, or possibly from droppings of an infected bird.
good hygiene practice, specifically the regular cleaning of all feeders, bird baths and feeding surfaces, is an essential part of looking after garden birds and will help to lower the risk to birds of diseases, including trichomoniasis.
if trichomoniasis is suspected, it is recommended to temporarily stop putting out food, except in tit feeders, and leave bird baths dry, for around two weeks, or until sick or dead birds are no longer found in the garden. this is in order to discourage birds from congregating together, which may increase the potential for disease spread between individuals.”
I have taken down the feeder and used Milton steriliser on it. I wonder if the wet weather we have had through August has made transmission of the parasite easier.

this is a found picture of a male greenfinch.

the week I had been dreading arrived, but it turned out a lot better than I expected. Alan and Peter are so efficient that day one saw the sheds emptied, contents stored under a tarp, burnt, or put on one side for skip or dump, and the roofs off. day two was yesterday, and the demolition is complete. I have a huge stack of old wood to cut up for fuel. on the down side the horrible bonfire is still smouldering. Alan is one of those bonfire addicts; he merrily stuck everything on it - roofing felt, carpet, plastic roofing, mouldy and moth-eaten yarn, and many other unspeakable objects which had been hidden away in the darkest recesses. two trees may be a bit the worse for wear - the rowan and the olive tree, which has only just been planted out in the wild garden after a sheltered life in a pot, have scorched leaves nearest the fire. and there is another of those terrible craters which I so often end up with, difficult to get anything to seed in it.

today one skip goes and another replaces it, bringing a load of ballast for the post holes and to add to the concrete floors, to produce a damp-proof level base for the rough plank floor. but until the two sycamores which were impinging on the old shed are cut down, not a lot of reconstruction can begin, and the guy who is doing that can only manage Monday.

meanwhile I am having a new duct made in stainless steel to take the heat from the kiln chimney out sideways through the gable end of the shed, which will be wrapped in ceramic fibre to insulate the roof. no more climbing on the shed roof to open up the top and drop in the chimney. my shed bedroom is a lot less cosy now it’s no longer screened by the montana and the ceanothus which had grown so enormous and now are stumps, cut away so that the sheds can be worked on.

Sal had a disaster almost two weeks ago; we were walking at Morston, near the freshes, when a dog initiated a fight with him and then got hold of his neck and wouldn’t let go. Sal screamed in fear and pain, and the dog’s jaws were unclamped by one of the lads in charge of the dog. which looked to me like a cross between a staffordshire bull terrier and a whippet or greyhound. when I got home I discovered that more damage had been done than I had realised at the time, one big deep hole next to his shoulder, and a smaller one under his ear. so far the vet’s bill is £400 and Sal has a huge stitched wound after they cut out dead tissue on Tuesday. in terms of pain and stress and worry (not forgetting he is nearly twelve), this is bad enough, but the bill adds insult to injury. this August there have been a lot of dog biting dog incidents, and a spaniel died at the vet’s on tuesday morning after being savaged by a greyhound on the beach the day before. I won’t be walking on the coast again with Sal until the holiday makers have gone home. a very nasty picture follows - sorry about this, but it brings it home. Sal’s shoulder looks like the Sunday joint before its cooked.

it’s a shock to see banks and ditches which were high with flowers, grass, bramble and bracken reduced to this dry, dead, shaved bristle. in several places around Bale and Hindringham farmers have started tidying up, although they haven’t been able to finish harvest yet because of the rain. the corn marigold, hard heads and scabious I photographed a week or two ago along the roadside are all gone, and the smaller trees given a flail too. bits of branch lie in the verge.

but there is a small field full of wild flowers, the Hindringham side of “Botany Bay”, alongside the narrow neck of woodland which extends out to the road from Bale Wood, where I saw a roe deer last week.

it looks scruffy because there are docks and thistles and a bit of ragwort in there, but the corn marigold rules, along with rosebay willow herb.

I hope it doesn’t get cut too soon. walking today there was the ominous presence of this storm to the South, but it veered off, and we basked in some welcome sunshine until the next system, three hours later; that missed us too though.

yesterday was spent photographing the knit collection, editing and getting the photos on line. they are here.
we were in and out with the weather, but my neighbours’ house makes a fantastic backdrop, so a huge thanks to them, and to Sid for being the face of Jane Wheeler once again. I’m pleased with the results anyway, and it is very nice to see the knits which were just ideas a few weeks ago, on a person and working, I think.

I enjoyed using the cucumber plant as a prop, but we had fun with the doorways; it gave Sid a frame to interact with. it may have got a little obvious and repetitive, but it helped.

yesterday was a butterfly day. the buddhlias in my garden had about forty big peacocks, a couple of commas and one red admiral.

it’s worth having buddhlias just for the butterfly show, even though they have to be cut right back every spring and disposing of the prunings is a nuisance.

our early morning walk in strong sunshine revealed a wall brown, basking on a wall, true to its name.

I haven’t identified one of these before. in Cake’s Lane there were plenty of speckled woods flitting around. an eighteenth century name for this butterfly was wood argus, after the character in greek mythology with many eyes.

I managed to catch a female meadow brown resting in the sunshine too; maybe a sunny early morning is a better time to photograph butterflies as they sunbathe before starting the serious business of the day.

I cleared the table in the workshop, put all the anagama pots on one side and started making again. there is a lot of grey stoneware clay to use up which I bought and mixed before I got started on the iron-rich darker stuff, so it takes a little thought about glazing and firing. however, I have hardly any really big pots that I like at the moment, so that’s the next project. on Thursday I made two rectangular platters in this clay, the sides bent up by supporting them with rolls of bubble wrap, with porcelain inlay and scraped on. of course the difference between this clay body and the porcelain, especially under a glaze, is very subtle.

it looks like quite a lot when the clay is wet like this, but fired its more the quality of the surface, and under a glaze that’s not so visible, nor is the blue-white of porcelain against grey to buff to toasty clay body depending on the atmosphere in the kiln. still, subtle is always good. and if I use the barium glaze, with a lot of copper glaze in the firing, over porcelain it turns a pale turquoise green.

its hard to see the shape in a photo, but basically they are flat bottomed with the sides turned up. with these rectangular shapes the biggest problem is getting them to dry and fire with the flat bottom staying even.

my first big bottle of this series - just plain, and seriously near collapse during the first stage of making.

inland most of the barley has been harvested and the fields tilled, making them sadly drab and autumnal. cold wet weather is holding things up as usual, and there are still a few fields standing, and of course all the wheat, which is not quite ready yet, though the heads are turning down, and if the wet continues I doubt it will be a good harvest.

we walked almost to Hindringham and then back early this morning, in the sun, with a blue sky and a strong wind. from parts of the road there are great views of the coast at Holkham and Blakeney. blackberries are forming on the hedgerow bramble bushes; it’s a wonderful place for picking them in mid to late September.

the hedgerow is particularly rich, especially in the little valley where a tiny stream, which flows through Bale wood and eventually joins the Stiffkey, crosses the road through a culvert. there is always a flow of water on the surface of the road there, from some spring welling up. a big clump of corn marigold grows next to the corner of the stubble field, several stands of meadow sweet and great willow herb line the banks, and alder is a predominant tree.

guelder rose competes with ash and hazel in the hedge, water mint grows in the ditches

and common knapweed or hard head is everywhere along the road. I saw a hare in one of the fields; Tilda smelt it, but what really got her going was a field vole in the middle of the road. she and Sal completely missed its trail through the bank in their excitement.

I am in the middle of Roger Deakin’s Waterlog now; an intense evocation of water, immersion in it, and its varying qualities. it’s a chilly read, as he skinny dips in river pools and wanders the banks of rivers and lakes, and beaches of Britain in his swimming trunks. I think I prefer the comfort of my sofa to experiencing the real thing, unless the weather improves.

the garden is at its zenith, and the wind and rain means I have been spending some time tying dahlias, sunflowers, tomato and bean plants up with green string. the lilies are at their most intense.

but of course it’s not good weather for sitting outside and enjoying them.