The Secret Garden

Thanks for the strike, SWT

Thank you South West Trains for your strike yesterday, without which I wouldn't have had to catch the bus, and I would have missed this existentialist graffiti, scrawled on the side of an Estate Agents.

It's guerrilla counselling on the streets of Kingston.

Where I'm coming from

I thought now might be a good time to introduce myself, and to tell you a little bit about where I’m coming from. I’ve always been curious about the world – I was one of those annoying "why" children – beloved of teachers and hated by just about everybody else, mainly because I forced people to have to think. So naturally I became a scientist.

Until four years ago I was a lab rat. White coat, clipboard, the works. Even when I was working as a scientific editor, I was still toeing the party line. It wasn’t until I signed up to an MSc in Science Communication (to preach the good word to the masses) that I had the shock of my life. I had the rug ripped violently from under my feet and I landed on my arse. The offending party was the Philosophy of Science, which at its core seemed to be saying that “Uh well we know that the foundations of science work – we’ve put man on the moon didn’tchoo know – but, ah well, the foundations are built on kinda shaky ground”. Huh?

While nobody can argue that science doesn’t do its bit for humankind, its claim to intellectual hegemony was on the ropes. In essence, I had stumbled on the arguments for the grounds of validity of scientific reasoning and my inner “why” child was going nuts. I could go on about this – it was enough to give me sleepless nights for months – but the point is that once science was denied dominion over theoretical knowledge, all it was left with was logic and reasoning and, well, you can apply that to anything.

So today, I have come to terms with this revelation. I have a little more respect for the Renaissance men (and women - they just had quieter voices) of history and I have broadened my own horizons accordingly. Science still plays its part in my life, but now I make it work for a living and it is the science of the everyday. My science lives in the soap pot, the dye vat and the pestle and mortar and it rubs along quite comfortably with the other Arts I cultivate.

I'm sending her my love

My Nanna is ill. Not the sort of thing you recover from, so I'm doing things to make her feel better. She doesn't like a fuss, but I noticed that her hot water bottle lives in a tatty old grey cover, so I'm making her a new one. I found a warm woollen jumper in the Cancer Research charity shop (I figure they need my £4 about now) and I felted it. It went into the washing machine man-sized and came out Barbie-sized. For some reason that really appealed to my inner child.

I cut out the felt and stitched it up, using big buttons because my Nanna's fingers are sore and she will find them easy to manipulate. It is by no means perfect - it is far too wide for my hot water bottle because I over-estimated how big the seams would need to be, and the curve on one side is not smooth, but it is full of my baraka. Baraka is a Sufi word that is difficult to translate into English. It means prayer, but it also means personal energy. It means that every stitch that I make is infused with my well-wishes and my love. My hot water bottle cover will be there for Nanna when I can't be, radiating good feeling. It is a similar concept to an American healing hands quilt.

It is not quite finished - it needs a hood to cover the top of the hot water bottle, and I will add a button to the hood, so the cover can be opened from the top or the bottom, but you get the idea.

If a handmade object can hold something so abstract in concept as a stitch (a stitch only exists in context with fabric and thread) then surely it can hold an abstract concept such as love.

The seed of an idea germinates

I think deep down I always wanted a blog. Well, maybe not a blog exactly, but a place in the world where I could share my ideas, and most importantly where people could share their ideas with me. I imagined a website with a door into a secret garden, made from gnarled oak and blackened iron. Knock and you may enter. But back at the turn of the century (roll your eyes, go on) websites were built by computer geeks in their ivory towers and they spoke another language. WYSIWYG sounded like a character from a children’s programme. Six years is a lifetime in IT.

And it seems that I am waking up to find that everything has changed. Now, I have a website from a takeaway box that I picked up in a clothes shop at the end of a shopping trip with Bex. Within an afternoon, The Hedgewitches’ Kitchen had a website. We existed. Properly. Anything is possible it seems. So now, six years down the track, I am opening the door to my secret garden.

Knock, and you may enter.

Pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable. There might even be a webring in the offing.