Another Writer Contributes to the Site - Welcome Nick Cotton
The Lockdown has certainly caused people to look around for new sources of interest and inspiration and the internet can, of course, offer a rich and endless treasure trove. However, being so vast and amorphous, searching it for the good stuff can be very much a hit and miss experience - which is why I decided to throw this site open to other writers with other interests.
As everyone who comes here will know, the site is non-commercial, so I’m not paying any of these other contributors or profiting from their labours - just putting their stuff up here for the pure pleasure of seeing good writing get out there to a wider audience. And it seems to be working because the number of people coming to this site has been growing massively during the coronavirus lockdown.
Some people will know of Nick Cotton, who runs the excellent Lynda Cotton Gallery in the old port of Watchet, in Somerset. Others might know him for his work the Watchet Conservation Society - you can click either of those links to learn more.
But Nick is a fine writer and thankfully he’s agreed to send over the odd piece or thought to me to put up here - like this one, about one of the many well-loved objects he has in his Watchet home…
This clock is an inherited heirloom and was made in my native Gloucestershire. I am particularly fond of it. Made in about 1720, it must have many interesting tales to tell. It really is quite early for a domestic clock and the quality of the workmanship is superb. The eight inch dial has just a single hour hand, not because the minute hand has fallen off but because in the countryside, it mattered little as to whether it was five to or ten to the hour - the day was pretty much dictated by the hours of daylight.
You had to be reasonably well off to own a longcase clock, the correct name for these wonderful pieces of history. For the majority, the population relied on the church clock to tell them the time. These country clockmakers were all over the UK and by the mid eighteenth century many even relatively small villages could boast their own clockmaker, although often they combined this occupation with other crafts and skills. How these skills were learnt is rather complex but basically the first country clockmakers were blacksmiths, developing through the generations to clocksmith and then finally clockmaker. I have had a lifelong interest in this type of clock and have written about them, and bought and sold literally hundreds. I have no mechanical skills and even the tin-opener can represent a serious challenge on a bad day. This post has made me question how the interest came about.
As I child I remember visiting either my aunt or grandmother (I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember which) and in the hallway stood a grandfather clock, the common term for a longcase clock and popularised by the American song ‘my grandfather’s clock’. It towered over me, its slow lugubrious tick somehow very soothing even today when I hear it. The big fascination however was that in the arch was a ship on a painted sea that rocked backwards and forwards to the motion of the pendulum - it remains a most vivid memory. It occurs to me now that children may very well not have heard a clock ticking, although perhaps I was only three years of age, when only a few memories are recalled. Another is that we had chickens and I remember feeding them. I love chickens!
I had a phone call yesterday with a friend and we were discussing fish and that they were able to get rock salmon from their chip shop in London. Well, I’ve always known it as dog fish (I believe it’s of the shark family) and I have tasted it on one occasion when it was served to me at a supper with some people I didn’t know very well. I congratulated my host on a wonderful supper and beautifully cooked fish, even though I thought it tasted disgusting! Please, wherever my hosts are, I hope you are not reading this. To continue with the telephone conversation, I went on to say that salmon was regularly on the menu at home, along with venison. This sounds rather like I had a very privileged background, but in reality salmon was readily available if you lived near the Severn and had the right connections, as was venison from the estate. It’s all about who you know! Sadly, when I moved with my family to Somerset, the supply of salmon went into rapid decline and the once familiar sight of those ancient woven conical baskets would be nothing more than a memory. I’m fairly certain that these are still used by Mr. Sellick at Stolford and I guess that in the future, the unique mud horse will also be consigned to the past.
Sorry to muscle in on Nick’s writing but here’s a photo I took of Brendan Sellick 35 years ago
The interesting and unexpected result of writing these posts is that one memory sparks another and it seems infectious. Jo wrote charmingly about a particular experience she recalled in response. My childhood in a fairly remote village in Gloucestershire is sadly something children can no longer enjoy today. On reflection, I realise how closely I was connected to the countryside, being able to wander freely and pretty much carefree. I read a number of books that I found I could easily relate to as a child by the Victorian author Edith Nesbit and her book ‘The Treasure Seekers’ and Arthur Ransoms ‘Swallows and Amazons’ and to some degree the ‘Wind in the Willows’ and even ‘Just William’, so easy for me to identify with. There must be many others, even girly ones! That last outrageous remark reminds me again of a line from ’The Famous Five’ where Julian says to George, “George you’re almost as good as a boy.” Even if you have never read EB, I think you get the idea.
I wrote in my last post that in my childhood, I lived in perpetual sunshine, within the confines of memory of course. I was a member of a gang of course and various adventures were undertaken with more risk sometimes than I care to relate. I never went scrumping which almost seemed like a rite of passage growing up in the early sixties, nor was I caught committing some offence by the village bobby and receiving ‘a clip around the ear’, which of course I could relate to in adulthood, stating that ‘it never did me any harm’. So there are a couple of omissions, although it may not be too late to fulfil the former. I did get into trouble on a good number of occasions of course and this incident has just come to mind. When visiting a friend with a good sized garden, his father, keen on vegetables, had planted an impressive and seemingly forest-like patch of cabbages. The game was on and both my friend and I spent a most enjoyable time transported to the Malayan jungle hacking our way through in search of a lost city and its golden treasure. When I left to go home, imagine my surprise when a little time later, the irate and fuming father of my friend could be heard shouting on our doorstep and using expletives that I was completely unfamiliar with. I can’t exactly remember the outcome, but I think we were both kept apart from each other after that.
I seem to have come some distance from my treasured clock, but I suppose these posts are about the passage of time and my clock has marked it for 300 years.
