Floral porcelain

For an afternoon birthday outing we went to the pottery shop in nearby Buchlyvie. The weather was pretty dreich - but it usually is on 30 June... memories of far too many rainy birthdays, and sure enough, when my Mum phoned in the evening - she joked about it too: North West Germany was grey as was the West Coast of Scotland. Never mind! I got some very cute summery porcelain:



It's a new range by Alison Borthwick, called Poppy - white glazed. delicate porcelain with stylised poppies placed across. This is a small coffe cup, and there's plenty more in the shop.

When we drove to the pottery I remembered that when I was in Scotland for the very first time in the mid-1990s I went up to the Orkney Islands, visiting a friend who was working there over the summer - it was a dry and very warm summer. I took lifts off people across the mainland, met many different folk - a retired diver who would salvage ship wrecks off Scapa Flow, and two elderly sisters who for the past twenty odd years would come to Orkney with their car for their annual holiday from the Shetland islands. At that time I had just started studying for a social science degree. But that week up on Orkney - which for me was pretty much at the end of the world back then - left me wanting to find a pottery in the North or West of Scotland and make vases, dishes and much more and nothing else.

More than 10 years on I still don't know how to work with a potter's wheel, let alone make evenly shaped vases... I suppose that that's for another time.