Don't Miss Today

At the weekend I went to the Lake District. It has been quite a few years since I was there last and I had not entirely forgotten what a beautiful part of the country it is, but had neglected to remember just how important it is to get out of the city and put yourself in a place like that as regularly as possible.

Hello, Hi, Hill!
All the more special as we ignored weather forecasts, which proved to be a falsehood anyway, and embraced our good feelings and had a gorgeous time.

The sun comes out, we go swimming in the tarn, we rest our feet.

Some photos:

I would like to do the Coast to Coast walk.

The Coast to Coast Walk is a 192-mile (according to a recent re-measuring the real distance is almost 220 miles) unofficial and mostly unsignposted long distance footpath in Northern England. Devised by Alfred Wainwright, it passes through three contrasting national parks: the Lake District National Park, the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and the North York Moors National Park.

Wainwright recommends that walkers dip their booted feet in the Irish Sea at St Bees and, at the end of the walk, dip their naked feet in the North Sea at Robin Hood's Bay.

It makes me think, who sets out the footpaths we walk on. A track laid down and set upon year after year, but one person would have decided to walk there, would have thought that it was worth other people coming this way, sharing their views. The more well trodden, the less these first steps are remembered.

Coast
I am slightly obsessed by the BBC program 'Coast'. I don't think it is showing currently, I believe there have been two series made and is regularly repeated. The landscapes are typically British, magnificent and inspiring at best, simply beautiful the majority of the time. However, the most uplifting thing I find in this program is the collection of local experts along the way. These people would be usually no more considered experts than you or I but they all have one uniting fascination in some minutiae of their surroundings. Some telescopic focusing on one specific nugget of their microcosm that the rest of the population would generally ignore. It is like turning on Radio 4 at any point in the day and listening just for 5 minutes, you are bound to learn some small point of information that is truly special to someone and delivered with such enthusiasm that it enthuses in myself a quest to divine some unique knowledge, to be an expert in some triviality, not for obscurities sake, but to know that you know something others do not, with the hope of one day departing this knowledge onto some interested party that will hopefully in turn send them on some searching mission.

I feel this when I find myself in my old University library, surrounded by such a treasure chest of knowledge and learning I can barely catch my breath, this want to find and transmit learning is told far better than I could explain in a passage by Hesse in 'Peter Camenzind':

"And gradually as I read more and was more strangely moved by my view down onto the roof-tops, streets and everyday life below, the feeling, mixed with doubts and hesitations, came over me that I too perhaps was a visionary, and the world that lay before me was waiting for me to collect some portion of its treasure, to lift the veil from the accidental and commonplace and through my creative power of poetry, save from destruction and immortalize what I might discover."

I haven't been looking at the internet much this week, I am busy trying to screen print a poster for the Print Club Secretblisters show, which is exciting, finishing off our book which will form a document of our residency as a part of Morphic Resonance and trying to work on new drawings for a set of zines. We are soon to be starting work on what we think will be an exciting project with Liverpool based design studio Thoughtful. We met James from thoughtful yesterday and it was an inspiring visit, to hear someone who we hold in regard talking of the same frustrations we find, but never regretful, always confident and positive. There is hope.

What got me excited in the library today:

































































































And finally:

As found on the great Reference Library blog, something Charles (Eames) said to Ray, and so she wrote it down: "Any indication of not knowing how constantly great you are is merely a lapse into insanity. C.E. to R.E., Jan. 3, 1975"