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Round at the in-laws for lunch. They've been donated a big garden trampoline (to replace the smaller one that their neighbours had also given them) and a goal so I played football with the kids and Catie then bounced on the trampoline with them.
As fun as these garden trampolines are, they seem like an accident waiting to happen. It's a lot of fun playing on the train tracks until a train comes along . Luckily there were no serious injuries today, but it's only a matter of time. I can't understand how conkers got banned because there was danger of getting shell in your eye, but trampolines are fine. No one got a head injury or a broken limb playing conkers.
It's like the hospitals realised that post-conker ban they weren't getting enough business to keep running, so persuaded the government that a trampoline in every garden would kill and injure more kids than the Hunger Games.
I am maybe just jealous of how brave/foolhardy my kids are. I would have been too scared to have a go and still am. Though I did once have a go on a proper trampoline when I was maybe 6 and 7. And in our day there wasn't an ineffective net around a trampoline to give you the illusion of safety. I can't really remember doing any bouncing though. I think I might have got on, been too scared and then got off again. Still bold for me. And this cowardice is what has got me to the age of 59 with only one cracked rib and a lost testicle and incurable blood cancer.
It was show 3 of Pottery Throwdown tonight - spoilers incoming, so watch here first.
I had felt mildly awkward about being Star Potter twice, so was relieved to be a bit more under the radar today. We recorded the first two eps sort of simultaneously - so we did the builds for both and then a couple of days later did the painting for both, so we couldn't really learn too much between episode 1 and 2, as we hadn't been judged until the end of doing both. Everyone upped their game considerably and Layton especially was superb this week. He definitely has the finesse and subtlety that my stuff lacks, but I am good with creating cohesion and funny little additions and covering up my shoddy work with paint. Fatiha is also doing some amazing work - we had bonded quickly and were already firm friends, but we'd had quite a moving dinner one night where we'd all talked about our frailties and problems so it was a tight knit group and the supportiveness on the builds is genuine. We were creating a lot of work with emotional resonance, even if our attempts were inevitably naive and it was a gruelling schedule of 12 hour days and travel back and forth to Stoke (on the days we were waiting for stuff to dry etc).
At the start when I'd been given the brief of what we were supposed to create in these first four episodes, I had looked at the proposal for this one - that we create a three dimensional animal- and thought there was no way I would be able to do it. And scaredy cat that I am, the idea of firing it ourselves in a Raku oven was also terrifying
The builds in the first couple of weeks were mainly sticking slabs together, but this build used a lot of complex techniques and I could see no way I could achieve it.
And there isn't time to show how difficult this was or how I struggled to do the build or find a way to get everything together into a vaguely feline shape. Having already made Wolfie as egg cups I decided to build my first cat Oscar - who was the strangest thing I'd found in the embers of a bonfire (he had snuck into our fire on November 5th in the mid-70s in Loughborough and badly burned his side). It seemed apt to be recreating him partly via fire and I had a slightly arty idea of having a flash of fire on his side. I could have left him all black, but I wanted to get a bit of colour into his coat, but it was difficult to know what the fire would do to the oxides and what colour you'd get.
So I had been amazed to have something that looked like a cat (that had maybe been hit by a car) and was really pleased with the subtle colours of his eyes and mouth. When it came out with the coat looking very blue and the face still being quite sooty I was a bit disappointed. I was trying to honour my first pet and had hopes that this might be something special and didn't like the results when I first saw him.
But it's actually the piece that I decided to display in our lounge and he's been up on our mantlepiece for nearly a year. He looks much blacker from a distance and the sooty face works well - he's supposed to have just come out of a fire after all. I love him now and he's lovely as long as you don't look at him from certain angles where the proportions don't quite work!
It says a lot about how much I didn't want to let my two dads, Rich and Keith, down and how far my expectations had grown from zero at the beginning that I was initially disappointed with this masterpiece. I didn't want to win the episode - I was very much hoping not to place. I just wanted to do my best.
Now I look at him and think - how the Hell did I do that with next to know practice and a very basic training?
It still seems insane to me that I could have made something more than a pile of dust. He is a testament to Oscar, which is great, but also to the fact that one shouldn't underestimate what one can achieve. It's one of my favourite items that I made (my favourites come next week - you're going to get a kick out of them!)
