Threadbare (notes on my class)

I love my embroidery class, more and more because it is attended by a bunch of hilarious, gossiping and friendly eccentrics. Sometimes it is utter chaos, and if that sounds like an exaggeration, believe me it is not.

• Bag Lady is a former senior nurse with bipolar, who produces sample after sample of crude bold designs but has no idea how to mount or organise them in a sketch book, and labours into each lesson carrying about five bags and her kitchen sink, muttering about how the stress is bringing her out in cold sores, and what an old twit her husband is.
• Blackbird is a quiet, enduring rock of good sense, whose esquisite, delicate work hides years as a punk loving anarchist, and who was over-the-moon to receive a vintage parka for her recent 40-something birthday.
• Tintin is a sweet old lady who spent 20 years stuck in her home suffering agoraphobia, tempted out lately only by the embroidery class. She is wryly accepting of her husband's 30-year affair, grateful for the occasional lifts her gives her when she does leave the confine of her own four walls.
• Jack is a wonderful, self-depracating chef, who married a younger man, refused to have children, and declares herself staunchly catholic and pro-life, whilst also admitting (without so much as a blink) that "of course" she had two abortions when she was young because her parents would have gone wild if they'd found out she was pregnant. She is reeling from the news that her husband has had just been disgnosed with inoperable cancer of the oesophagus, and admits to secretly asking her priest to say prayers for him (her husband is strongly no-faith) whilst warning his parents (Jehovah's Witnesses) that they shouldn't try and exert their beliefs on him just because he is dying. I have no doubt that she will look after him well, if in her own peculiar and brusque manner, as he endures his final months.
• Seashell is a vulnerable epileptic, who was beaten so badly by her ex-husband that she was partially blinded, and left with the mental age of a nine-year-old (according to the courts). He also kidnapped their children, who were eventually put in care because she was no longer deemed fit to look after them, due to her injuries. Once an artist, she now lives in a bedsit with a full time carer, and embroiders intense, painstaking and rich embroideries (against the wishes of the doctors) even though she can barely make out the colours, and her weak eyes get further strained. She was born to Muslim parents in Belfast, and was delivered by a British soldier, who laid down his arms when he found her mother in labour. Her birth-story sounds like a fairytale (and may well be) but her life is so extraordinary that you just can't rule it out. She can be both moody and gregarious and heartbreaking.
• Hornsey is a creative Caribbean spirit, whose only vice is men and smoking like a trooper, and who is at the heart of all things arty, creating community craft groups, and fashioning amazing designs out of paperclips, rubber bands, any, in fact, that she finds lying about her house.

And finally my teacher, Mrs. Essex, who is the life and soul of the class - chaotic, dyslexic, fun and irreverant. She refuses to do any exercise (despite the constant badgering from Jack), curses her children lovingly, and gently encourages everybody to push themselves, to ignore traditional boundaries, and to enjoy themselves. She doesn't think the Embroider's Guild would have her, because she is too "common" and remembers saving her pennies as a child to get pie and mash from Le Manzes in Walthamstow.

It is difficult not to love each and everyone of them. And, for that reason, I thought I'd dedicate this blog entry to them. If I feel gloomy or bored or cynical about the world, they always remind me of why it doesn't have to be. Which is really rather lovely.