This blustery Summer is moving on - the lanes are puttering with ancient tractors on their biannual outings making hay, teenage buzzards shriek demandingly at their parents and it is the marvellous season for galloping in stubble fields.
The garden is a riot of californian poppies, bee busy lavender, fragrant phlox and sweet peas, often with a cat asleep in a flower bed.
Holiday time is helped by lockdown lifting with everyone responding in character, it seems - everything from reckless to beyond anxious - a confusion of rebirth and resignation.
The familiar comfort of daily home life sustains plus precious tentative, grabbed getaways even if just to dine out on the chancellor Monday to Wednesday!
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People seem to have cottoned on to the great thing of working from home - it started for me in 1986, thanks to the firm base of an Aldermaston pottery training. It is often distracting but richly grounding and I can still spend all hours potting, intensely lost in the pleasure of making majolica.
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And this lockdown time has been rather creative here: I see subtle twists on old patterns and new shapes sporting new designs. And there is a new order into the organisation of the pottery.
Rory McLeod is now throwing regularly, filling the drying shelves with large, clean forms - so far cache-pots (or jardinieres / flower pot holders or planters - any suggestions welcome) alongside his usual very fine lamps.
And it is a truth that ribald, calm company makes potters’ lives tick .
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The total star tech guys have been immensely hard at it developing the website amazingly. Later this Summer the whole ordering process will be SO much easier - it is a revolution.
For now, take a look at the Online Shop www.nicolawerner.com/shop - it is now flooded with pots and tiles and lamps etc to be posted off pronto!
P&X’s charity Sale has gone great guns ( thank you all ) - 20% to your chosen charity should you wish to host one too - please contact me for details, it does seem to be the way forward.
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My work is available at the Devon Guild and Contemporary Ceramics in London which have reopened and there may be the odd fair in the run up to Christmas.
Visitors are again welcome at the Pottery by appointment and Course days are now possible, following careful guidelines - please book in to redeem your vouchers too.
I hope the change in your lives has been as positive - just off to pick a lettuce for lunch and another sneaky monster courgette.
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Warm wishes from Fitzhead,
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The Summer Pottery Garden Cafe is in demand but sadly we will not open until we are absolutely sure it is right to do so, for all of us.
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