UFOs of the crafty kind

UFOs. How they do vex me! Don’t worry, I’m not one of those “I want to believe” people who sit around with tinfoil hats on their heads. I’m talking about crafting UFOs. Un-Finished Objects. You know, those projects you start with a hiss and a roar and all sorts of good intentions, but just never seem to get finished. After a lifetime of crafting, I’ve got a dossier full of them, let me tell you, and they “fool and confound me”* just like the flying saucer kind.

I promised myself a while ago not to start any new projects until I’d finished my UFOs. And I have been diligently working on the quilt for The Young Lad — I’d intended to have it made in time for his move from cot to big-boy-bed, but that was three years ago, and I’m still not half way done. But as for the clothes for myself, or the cushions and curtains for my sewing room… well, lets not even go there… And then, after making myself that promise, you know what I went and did? Only promised Grandpa a pair of hand-knitted socks for his birthday — which was in February, so they are rapidly becoming UFOs themselves.

BUT the library Gods smiled on me recently when Seed Bead Chic fell into my hands and gave me the inspiration I needed to finish a UFO that had been dogging my life for, oh, only about ten years already! This project was a necklace for a dear friend of mine. Not only did I keep changing my mind about what to use for the pendant, whenever I tried to work on it, nothing turned out at all the way I wanted it to, and I threw it aside in disgust.

Finally, it is a UFO no-longer. I actually, really and truly finished it! I even took a picture to prove it! What do you think?

I like it so much, I’m even thinking I’d like one myself. (Uh oh. Is that the sound of another UFO approaching?)

* To paraphrase Kevin D. Randle author of The UFO Dossier

W is for Wild

For an urban dweller whose forays into the natural world are, more often than not, limited to irregular visits to the beach, walks in the park and working in my demanding garden, Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk was a revelation. A taste of the wild, like a cold keen wind from a far off place where humankind is peripheral. I found it fascinating, weird at times and somehow refreshing. I should mention that it was the Costa Book of the Year for 2014.

The book describes a period in Macdonald’s life when her father dies suddenly and she falls into a deep and disorienting grief. In an attempt to find her feet again she buys a goshawk and sets about taming it. Not as strange as it may sound! As a young girl she had spent hours watching sparrow hawks with her father and in her 20s had become an experienced falconer. The hawk “was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life”.

What follows is an absorbing, brilliantly and beautifully written account of her life submitted to the needs and habits of a tamed, but essentially wild, predator. A time which takes her to the edge of madness and back. During the training of “Mabel” – an ironically genteel name – Macdonald occasionally and frighteningly finds herself losing her sense of human self.

To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand it’s moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next….Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own… I had to put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room, my humanity was burning away.

Well, it seems that’s what she wanted in her dark time of loss. However she does come out the other side and Mabel is integral to her healing. Not a method you’ll find in the self help books. Interweaving her own story is a biographical tale of the author T H White (The Once and Future King, The Goshawk) who, also in a search for peace within himself, engaged in agonisingly unsuccessful attempts at hawk taming. And woven through all of this again are fascinating accounts, and the arcane language, of falconry history. A rich tapestry of a read.

• Read our short interview with author Helen Macdonald
• Read about Helen Macdonald’s session at WORD Christchurch

After quaffing some rather more domestic reads the next “wild” book to catch my eye was Ocean Notorious by Christchurch writer Matt Vance. Vance is an intrepid sailor, expedition guide, photographer and fabulous writer with a long standing passion for the Southern Ocean. This is the ocean at our back doorstep, which most of us never encounter, apart from icy blasts blowing in from the south-east. It is the most feared body of water on our planet, infamous for it’s raging winds, monstrous waves and horizontal rain. But people willingly, even eagerly, go there!

Vance takes us to our neighbour islands, closer to our shores than Australia: the Auckland, Bounty, Antipodes, Campbell and Macquarie Islands then on to the wilderness that is Antarctica. He introduces us to people have gone there and sometimes never returned – ocean explorers, polar explorers, sealing gangs, Second World War coast watchers, crazy-brave sailors, wildlife enthusiasts, conservationists, research scientists, artists, writers.

Three sides to every story

They always say there are two sides to a story, but in this case there are three.

In 1987 Betty Mahmoody published her famous bestseller Not Without My Daughter, the story of her life as a prisoner of a violent man and an alien culture and her subsequent escape.

Recently her daughter has published her own book My Name is Mahtob telling what is billed as the ‘whole story’ of imprisonment, escape and her life after fleeing Iran.

Not to be outdone,  the ex-husband has now published his side of the story, Lost Without My Daughter.

Lost Without My Daughter is a cultural and political history of Iran, from the revolution to the present day. Perhaps more than anything, it is an exercise in truth, the last-ditch attempt of a father desperate to reach his daughter, to let her know that he is not the monster he has been portrayed to be.

So read all three and come to your own conclusions.