How does something so squidgy, so mutable and pliant become a solid hard tough piece of pottery? Tough yet still brittle, fragile and beautiful. Day to day I guess we are numbed to the real wonders of it; plates, cups and bowls are all derived from the primordial sticky stuff we know as clay. It’s very strange between fingers. You can squeeze its wet face and it leaks out in the gaps between your fingers and then it can be all rolled back into a compact shape or ball , sort of Play -Doh for adults.

I remember high school classes where we had to make long faggoty snakes which were then joined into coils and we built a pot or a jug from the ground up. There’s a sort of earthy smell and sense about it as you do it, ’cause of course that’s where it’s come from. I remember the clay lying in the back of the pottery room in big bricks wrapped in plastic, the size of over sized housing bricks.

Once our projects were finished [ash trays were popular] they would be fired in the kiln. I have a vision of it in the rear yard of the school huffing and puffing, but it was probably gas fired. Did we first fire the pot to finish it and then apply the glaze or did it all happen at once? Now, that glaze has magical properties. A pudgy powder applied with paint brush that melts into glass dots. It was hard to imagine the pattern before it was fired. When it was finshed it came out like a boiled sweet, rock hard candy, ready to be licked, though I doubt it would taste of strawberry or anything similar, just, probably a dusty earthy taste like you get when you trip up and get a mouthful of dirt playing football…..