Some old drainpipe and a wallpaper-stripper made a surprisingly effective steam-bender, even if the pipe is now banana shaped. Once dry, the three ash laminates will be glued together then shaped to form the inner stem, to which the ends of the strip planks will be fixed. This has been a lovely job on a very rainy day.
I fortuitously pulled up alongside this sign while checking the map for the way to the river. With apologies to Stevie Smith, it gave a good cue for a title.To see the video on YouTube, click (or double click) the link below:
It should auto-play, but if you get a big red splodge with white dots, click on that.
Gnu Gnu, as she is now known, has form if not substance, and she is beautiful in her transcendence, but her metamorphosis from sleek long planks of red cedar is in abeyance. Over the phone the timber yard had said they could cut the planks into 1/4″ strips and profile the edges into bead and coving, but face-to-face they demurred, so it will be my hands that give shape to Gnu Gnu‘s intimate hidden detail. Which will be a lot of work. And a lot of sawdust and a lot of wood-shavings. Isn’t there something about that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ?
When Oscar Goldman murmurred these words prior to reconstructing Steve Austin he certainly wasn’t about to go for a paddle. But I was, and in searching for a title afterwards I first considered ‘As I Went Out One Morning’ (Bob Dylan), ‘Quite Early One Morning’ (Dylan Thomas), or or ‘As I Went Out One Mid-Summer Morning’ (Laurie Lee). Dylan won the Tom Paine Award for the song, which references Tom Paine, and Tom Paine had a strong link with Chichester, so it all goes round and round.
I wanted to post a video here, but it would cost me 60$ a year for the facility, so double click the following link to see the footage on YouTube:
As I Paddled Out One Mid-Summer Morning
The video is crudely edited – I’m still low on the learning curve – but things can only get better, as we once believed before TB cosied up to GWB.
Postscript: The video originally had Dylan’s song, from the John Wesley Harding album, as a soundtrack. Due to understandable copyright restrictions, it was blocked by YouTube. I have replaced it with a free-to-play track by Lunasa, but which carries a payload of adverts. Sorry!
The new canoe is in the making, and one of my worst (?best) puns may yet become its name. The photo shows the strongback in the making, and on which the canoe proper will be built. The plans were bought from Bear Mountain Boats in Canada, and the Western Red Cedar for the planking will come from Canada too, via a timber yard in Southampton. The design is old-school ‘Prospector’, proven and pleasing.The construction is modern: strip-planking soaked in epoxy and protected with glassfibre mat. It won’t be a quick build.
The pottery, and therefore the blog, have been dormant for a year. I miss them both, but just now I’m paddling much more than potting. Of course, if you want to take your cue from the Moody Blues’ second hit single, I won’t be offended. For my part, I’m with Heraclitus, and further, browsing a new translation, I see that he actually wrote “You cannot paddle in the same river twice”. He was also a bit of a riddler…..
