Yesterday morning was one of those where I needled to assist the single carer to get Meg up and ready in the morning. Although the carer is relatively new and to some extent inexperienced, she seems to be a quick learner and to like attending to Meg (despite a sit a week ago when Meg went into one of her agitated states) The carer and I made a good team this morning but Meg showed some signs of entering an agitated state again so I gave her a pill which sometimes helps. Then another carer arrived to do the sit whilst I do the weekly shopping but things did not run smoothly. Although I had given Meg a special pill half an hour before the carer arrived, it did not seem to have much effect and when it was time for me to go shopping Meg was in a truly agitated state (and did not recognise me either) She calmed down a smidgeon and then I went and raced around the shopping as fast as I could do, actually returning within an hour - nonetheless, Meg had proved to be very agitated and somewhat aggressive in my absence so the care worker, despite her best efforts to keep entertained with teddy bears, books, soothing music and all of the other things that we try on occasions like this, had unfortunately had a very hard time. Upon my return we wheeled Meg into the kitchen whilst I unpacked the shopping and eventually got Meg to calm down a little and enter a type of doze.
When Meg and I go on our little ventures down the High Street, as we did yesterday, I often pop into the charity shops to see if anything takes our fancy. I tend to make a beeline for the ceramics/pottery/kitchenware shelves where experience suggests that I might find something to my tastes. When Meg and I moved into our present house some seventeen years ago, we treated ourselves to a full set of good Denby crockery and tableware but our experiences have not been entirely happy. For example, some of the Denby has chipped although we cannot remember giving it a knock and some of the glaze on the interior seems to be breaking down as if we make tea in the cup, which we often do, then the resulting caffeine stain is proving difficult to remove. So we are of the view that the quality of Denby has drifted down over the years or perhaps we got a particularly bad production batch but certainly our own Denby ware has by no means fared as well as the set purchased by our son only a year or so previously. So our search for tea and coffee mugs has a utilitarian as well as an aesthetic element attached to it. Over the past few days, I have purchased seven pieces, each with a bit of provenance attached to it. The first piece I acquired was a cup of white porcelain decorated with stylised blue flowers which was an elegant little piece and when I saw a second exemplar of the same a few days later, I bought that to be a companion. The base of the cup reveLS the name 'Nicola Spring' who according to the website is a well known designer of kitchenware and artefacts and it could be that the pieces I have acquired are actually handmade. The third piece I might be describe as a whimsical choice is a white porcelain piece decorated with some grazing sheep which rather took my fancy and to accompany this I also bought a porcelain mug decorated by hedgehogs. When I last visited my suburban (i.e.not town centre shop) of AgeUK I saw a collection of miscellaneous cups and mugs and actually bought quite a wide and deep mug for 10p as it has the advantages of being quite wide and deep so is particularly easy to clean of coffee residues as I can fit the whole of my fist inside it. Now I come onto my sixth piece which was a piece of porcelain by the famous PortMeirion pottery made for the National Trust and decorated with garden herbs where the quality speaks for itself. My seventh and final piece I found in a trolley load of goods donated to the Salvation Army and not yet priced up. The piece I bought was one of those wider at the base than at its top and decorated by a deep blue glaze which gives rise via a way line do a lighter blue - subsequent investigations of this mug on a website indicates that this is meant to represent an ocean or seascape. The manufacturer was a specialised maker called Abbeydale and one of their specialisms (of which my mug was an exemplar) is the utilisation of a 'reactivated glaze'. This glaze relies upon the fact that the various minerals and compounds in the composition of the clay together with higher kiln temperatures result in each piece being produced being unique i.e. no two pieces will ever look exactly the same as each other. For this reason, some cognoscenti hunt out this type of pottery because it adds a level of uniqueness to each individual piece thus making a change from the mass production style of pottery where every piece is meant to be identical. This, actually, is my favourite of the recently acquired purchases and one can see why they end up in the charity shops. They are often made in small and specialised craft potteries and small production runs. For this reason, they are often marked in stores such as Marks and Spencer as 'one offs' and would be purchased as a gift item for somebody rather than being purchased as part of a complete pottery set. As these are priced at anything from £12-£20, you can almost hear people saying that they are not going to pay that kind of price for a single piece of pottery and hence I imagine that they remain on the shelves unsold until they are swept away and find their way into into the charity shops. But here one has to shop with a certain degree of discernment because right in the middle of the pedestrian, utilitarian and sometime it must be said the downright tawdry, one finds a complete gem and I think it takes a discerning eye to spot these items of real quality. I suspect that antique dealers are the same for they can sweep their eyes over a load of old rubbish until something remarkable catches their eye and they purchase at a bargain price but later sell on at an inflated one.
© Mike Hart [2024]