Whitework wedding monogram: C&R (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Wheat in the field behind the vicarage was harvested two weeks ago, while we were in London for a brief intensive bout of museum visiting.  Having been robbed of the enjoyable, time-wasting rural spectacular of watching the combine harvester beast at work at close quarters (which usually includes one night of son et lumière) we hastily cast off our disappointment and turned to considering the demands of September. For me this involved going back to work, but for the vicar (in theory a part-time job of two and a half days a week) this includes 2 weddings, a baptism and the preparation and delivering of a series of art history afternoon talks cum perambulations at the Ashmolean. Serendipity will no doubt add yet more to this already heady mix.

Wedding monogram C&R: detail of hand embroidery

Before going to London, with unprecedented efficiency I had more than half completed the embroidered monogram to be given as our wedding present to the couple my husband married on Saturday. Seized by the desire to finish this in order to give it to the couple on their wedding day I spent every spare moment of last week at work with needle and thread, a job made even more pleasant by my husband’s marathon bouts of reading out loud to me. We finished Victoria Finlay’s ‘Colour’ which I have now read twice and some bits of which I may even remember. A recent ‘Country Living’ magazine had an article on woad farming in East Anglia and pictures of the cultivated plant surprisingly looked very like spinach. And there you have it, the parable of the hunt for colour. Time and time again in her book Victoria travels to some inhospitable, inaccessible place in search of the pigments that have made paintings and treasured objects vibrate with colour and at the end of her trail, she inevitably finds the object of her search to be some anonymous looking plant or dun-coloured lump of earth.  Such is life in so many ways.

Wedding monogram C&R: detail

From ‘Colour’, we moved on to  Harry Mount’s ‘How England made the English: from hedgerows to Heathrow’ the central idea of which is to remind us of how Britain’s varied geology manifests itself not simply in what goes on beneath us but on on what we do on top of it too. Albeit fascinatingly informative in general, there are occasions when you want to stamp on the book in frustration. Opinions, stated as facts, leave you gasping for elucidation while at other times he rushes through listing facts and figures as if we’re in training for an appearance on QI. I was slightly affronted that when mentioning Bunter Sandstone, he chose it’s appearance in the West Midlands to comment on. I admit to being somewhat proprietorial about this rock formation in its manifestation in Nottinghamshire as I travelled to school twice a day along a road cut dramatically through this bright orange-red rock. Such partiality amounts to no real criticism of the book but placing Wallingford in Berkshire is, as it has been part of Oxfordshire since boundary changes in 1974. 

Wedding monogram C&R (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

The embroidery, however, was finished, mounted and framed by the wedding rehearsal on Friday evening – a bit of a first for me.