ON EGGS & TEA TOWELS: EXPERIENCE & EXPECTATIONS

Living on a small island makes one closer to many things that city dwelling keeps distant, remote, hidden; graveyards come to mind, but this is another story. Island life is the same, but different; one brings oneself and all that this means to the situation, the changed circumstance that embodies the body and its presence and identity in history and now: the old, that has shaped the present ‘me,’ with the new context. Without the hustle and bustle of the city, from time to time one finds oneself pausing to reflect on something that might just be there before one’s eyes, in the ad hoc milieu of the everyday; things like eggs and tea towels that grace the ordinariness of the kitchen. It is a casual observation that city life ignores as it rushes by with the mind dwelling elsewhere, and being constantly encouraged to be this way. The attraction involves a dismissal stimulated either by the daily pressures that distract, or because of the defining context of the organised mass supply and distribution of goods for the many, where scale takes over and changes things, dominates the situation with persuasive brands and slick, attractive packaging that force images and messages into minds to shape understandings as well as conjectures: maybe both these city aspects distort ordinary experience, transforming it into an excitable exaggeration of expectations.

Islands do not have the grand, promotional displays that crowd out city spaces; signs and billboards have a different sense, intent, and scale on the island, if they exist at all. They are more modest, promoting the local shop simply with 75mm high ‘SHOP’ hand lettering with an arrow: the city is cluttered with huge, slick signs like ‘BIG W’ in 750mm lettering, illuminated for 24 hour dominance that shares its size with more of the same nearby, or as part of an ‘LA’ set. Displays like this define place in the city, like Times Square in New York. Cities are light and bright; small islands are dark, with specks of light identifying habitation or services rather than declaring products or hyping places. There is a native simplicity on islands, a raw innocence that touches ordinary living in a different way; there is less puffery and propaganda.

On the island, the opening of the half-dozen egg carton in preparation for breakfast reveals the six eggs purchased from one of the nearby croft egg boxes passed on a recent drive: £2 for 6. There is always the surprise of the unexpected when looking into these tatty, worn, re-recycled – returnable - containers that sometimes come with quirky, homely branding, or, more frequently, just with a scrawled ‘£2.00’ on the rough surface left from the removal of the original commercial label. One discovers large eggs; small eggs; green eggs; dark brown eggs; speckled eggs - from large speckled chooks or small brown birds: who knows? Sometimes duck eggs are available. The surprise of opening the egg carton is much the same as opening the egg box itself, and finding that there are eggs available; the cartons sit there like gold nuggets to the eye. Unlike the city’s certainty of supply, farm eggs rely on the mood of the birds that varies with time and weather: “They’re not laying today” is sometimes the message from the crofter if there is a chance meeting: these are honesty boxes. There is always a quiet disappointment when the box is bare – “Well, maybe next time.”

One is used to seeing the set of identical eggs served up by the city supermarket, so the island’s variety is always visually invigorating. Yet there must be some differences in the supermarket eggs, as I have seen ladies, young and old, European and Asian, going through the packs on the shelves, sorting out, I have been told, the preferred brown ones, as if colour varied the quality and taste; or were the shoppers wanting all the larger eggs of the category and colour? Again, who knows: the cynic might wonder if these eggs have been dipped into coffee or tea to provide the preferred colour to cater for such interests, as cities are full of shrewd ‘wheeler-dealers.’ One wonders: is this colour preference ‘eggy’ racism, or a simple ‘motherhood’ belief? The statement of the old, island shopkeeper to the local who questioned the price of an article tells a lot about island life: “Do you think is is London where cheats live by chance customers?” Small islands are, in many ways, not London.

A supermarket egg with a farm egg.

One also gets excited with the egg itself, the colour of the yolk, that is perhaps less of a challenging ‘colour’ analogy than brown is in our culture: cracking the eggs open is always something to look forward to. One gets a sense of the toughness of the shell that, unlike the standard items of the city, varies. The rich, golden hue of a deep orange is revealed in the yoke instead of the insipid, pale lemon one usually discovers in the graded, washed, and stamped, ‘guaranteed’ supermarket choice where the birds have been raised on pellets alone. In the city, one forgets about the golden hue, the rich browns, the olive greens, and the dancing speckles; even the daggy, feathered dirt and droppings that eggs gather in the nest has gone – “Dirty!” Instead, we are sold neat sets of eggs that are hygienically clean, and identical - if not in exact colour, then in size - and complain if things are otherwise. One is offered ‘free range eggs; barn eggs; caged eggs; and organic eggs; small; medium; and large; in packs of 6; 12; or a mixed 18.’ On the crofting island, things come just as they appear in the nest: dirty, random, mixed, in all colours, sizes, and patterns - happily ad hoc like the free-range hens themselves; washed and unwashed: then there is always the chance of a surprise ‘double-yolker.’ Graded city eggs dispose of the double-yolkers in other ways; they do not conform to the desired requirements of a standard ‘commercial egg’ which customers are told to prefer, so find their way into factory production lines. Preparing the island breakfast becomes a happy revelation.

A 'faulty' egg.

Frequently, the tea towel gets involved in this experience of opening the eggs, cracking, and scrambling them: a tea towel is usually spread on the table as a working surface, something like a horizontal apron.# It is this piece of printed Irish linen that catches the eye when one is not looking, with its illustrations and explanatory texts that stimulate memories and inform. The roughly sketched images and messages are usually spread out, printed piecemeal on the fabric as a casual collation of collected ‘iconic’ images, those cliché images usually seen on souvenirs, with one illustration fading into another; and with each diagram itemised with an explanatory title. The prints on the fabric are annotated for the individual who is to receive the tea towel as a gift on the traveller’s return home, to inform. With tea towels from home, anything from the Jenolan caves in Australia; a map of Australia complete with its flora and fauna; or the recipe for Irish bread – and much, much more in both scope and variety - is likely to be the working surface: Australian tea towels are also likely to have kangaroos, koalas, and other native fauna and flora scattered over the Irish fabric, along with maps that seem to be an attractive subject for this genre of illustrative decoration. The themes are international: flora; fauna; maps; places; buildings; recipes. It is not unknown to have all of these on one tea towel, Australian or anywhere else, all, ironically once printed on Irish linen.

Tea towels used to be popular souvenirs; in spite of proudly declaring themselves to be ‘Pure Irish Linen’ irrespective of the printed subject or country of origin, they come with the most unexpected ‘Un-Irish’ images which, in different contexts, can be seen to be crass and clumsy: commercial, sentimental kitsch smudged onto the linen for travellers to take home. Glimpses of these illustrations around the utensils and bowls used in the kitchen become ad hoc sources for remembrance, recalling places visited or things seen elsewhere, and other associated references, now displayed on the crofters’ island on the other side of the world – a koala; a harbour bridge; an outback cottage; a country town; a gold mine; a cave; a beach; . . . can all catch the eye from time to time and unexpectedly bring to mind a place; an incident; a memory; a sky; a day; . . . It has been a deliberate strategy to collect such items just for their quirkiness, and because linen makes an efficient, effective drying cloth; the new cotton cloths, mainly “Made in China” tea towels, are stiffer and less absorbent than linen. With this interest in these souvenirs, one has to overcome the categorisation of this ‘art form’ as ordinary, cliché rubbish; as the ill-informed, popular depiction of familiar, romantic visions that promote a crass poetics that defaces subtle meanings in references. One discovers some sense and importance in what one has been told is pure kitsch: tasteless, inarticulate, insensitive, crass expression; that souvenir tea towels have another remarkable function beyond being the traveller’s gift and an item for wiping things dry. They can be loved because of their innocence that touches on an easy, guileless remembrance.

Graveyard at Lund, Unst.

But the island draws together more than eggs and remembered places; just as life is more acute here, death is always close by. Graveyards, centres for remembering and honouring, are a part of the community on the island; rather than being placed in some distant, remote, ignored location, well out of the way of the everyday that they usually occupy in the city, graveyards hold a special, walled, revered, declaratory presence in the island landscape. Here death is identified and defined gracefully, without artfulness, by nearby, local graveyards; they are passed daily, sometimes taking the high spot of the village, dominating it: they hold history as stories on headstones, new and old. One is always aware of the graveyard that is filled with those of the ancient past, as well as those one once knew, their friends and relatives, and other island dwellers. Wives sometimes live looking onto the graveyard that holds the husband; mothers and fathers stare at the walled space that holds their children. Death has an intimacy here, as a lived reality that the city turns into the ignored anonymity of convenient forgetfulness, allowing everyone to ‘get on with things’ like shopping at ‘BIG W.’

The graveyard at Norwick, Unst.

Small islands – here I am thinking of one 12 miles by 5 miles - change proximity and intimacy; and one’s tolerance. Landscapes are known and named just as the residents are; residents are known by the land, the place they live in; the location. Remnants of this understanding remain around the cities which have roads named in older times by the places they lead to, like ‘Beaudesert Road’ and ‘Gympie Road.’ Outside the city, in the landscape, one sees creeks named ‘Halfway Creek’ – half way between the towns. Locations used to be references, markers of place.

With island life, one is familiar with beginnings and endings - personal involvements - things that city life glosses over with its managed hype that brashly manipulates outcomes and attitudes that ignore neighbours: even the scale of relationships differs. As an analogy, one recalls the sailor and his relationship with land: the oceans require an aware adeptness, an alert subtlety that notices and responds to constant change: the island is more ocean than land – requiring a quiet, fluid response; the city is more land than ocean - stable, predictable, solid, making one’s responses likewise. City life requires conformity: rules. Island life has rules with a different ambition.

One could see the comparison - island and city life - as the ad hoc eggs on the remembrance of the tablecloth, an interplay of uncleaned, unedited life, free from the distracting, overbearing charades of the city, with expectations and experiences as printed on the tea towels. Island life is entangled in the surprising richness of the everyday little things that the city layers with its bold distractions that are prescribed as a given, establishing a different starting point for what and how one sees things.

NOTE

The remembrance referred to is, in the understanding of the Sufi world, a ‘horizontal’ remembrance - more a reminder of other times than a spiritual symbolic recollection which the Sufi sees as a ‘vertical’ remembrance.

EGGS & TEA TOWELS

AND GRAVEYARDS

THE MUCH MALIGNED SOUVENIR

Souvenirs have a reputation for being kitsch: things that appeal to popular or lowbrow taste and are often of poor quality, in a tacky or lowbrow condition. (Merriam-Webster). One might like to equate an interest in souvenirs with the fashionable, pretentious promotion of ragged or minimal clothing, old technology, and broken things – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2024/03/gehry-in-uralla.html; but there is a difference here. One is not superimposing a highbrow interpretation onto the subject; and there is no interest in exotic display; no desire for praise or recognition. It is merely an intellectual pursuit that has reverberations in architecture relating to memory and identity. Souvenirs can help us understand how we pine for lost places: see Peter Read Returning to nothing: the meaning of lost places, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996 – and how place, space, form; and memory and experience are meaningful to us.

See:

https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-souvenirs-place-memories.html

and

https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-souvenirs-place-memories.html

#

NOTE

It is interesting how apron has a vertical and a horizontal meaning:

apron

/ˈeɪpr(ə)n/

noun

1. 1.

   a protective garment worn over the front of one's clothes and tied at the back.

   "a striped butcher's apron"

   Similar:

   pinafore

   overall

   pinny

2. 2.

   a small area adjacent to another larger area or structure.

   "a tiny apron of garden"

   (Oxford languages)