A Boat, a Mosaic, and 9-Year-Olds Designing Logos

—04.10.2000—

My time at Pengold is almost over. I can hardly believe it—it’s just flown by. I know we always say stuff like that and still it’s a surprise. After that I’ll be moving into a shed across from Elder. It’s basically a 7' x 10' stone box with a corrugated tin roof that’s held down by rocks. It looks like a place you’d see on a tour of historical landmarks in which the tour guide says, “And blah-blah was born in the one-room shed in 1846, the youngest of seven children...” and you think, “Wow, I can’t believe people used to live like that.” Well, that’ll be me...

Actually, I’m overdramatizing it a bit (not the size though!). There is kind of a romance about it. It’s as simple as you can get, really: a good-sized bed, a desk, and a window onto the sea. So that’s where I’ll be and perhaps on Gugh, which Patricia as said is always open to me.

Did I mention I’m building a wall on Gugh? I’ve moved up from by days as a rubble in-filler to wall builder. It’s nice to feel like I’m getting the hang of it though it’s not really a skill that’s transferable to the rest of my life. Still, it’s amazing to think, “I can build walls out of rocks, with my bare hands, a mallet, and a chisel.” Actually, my hands aren’t really bare. I wear these big, fuzzy, leather gloves, the fingers of which have been worn right through by the granite even though I only bought them two weeks ago. They’re all taped up now with duct tape making them look like they came off of a second-hand muppet.

So I did that this afternoon, then I came back here to the cottage and did some cleaning to help Hans get the house ready for the holiday season. He asked me to wipe down all of the ceilings and walls with bleach, which seemed a little odd. I mean, it’s not like I’ve spent the last six months sneezing all over the ceilings. Perhaps that’s standard procedure though?

After that I went down to Periglis Cove and gave Jon a hand with Bustle. He had just made a water level (a hose filled with water, with a section of clear pipe at both ends). We used it to make sure the water line of the boat was level with the earth from front to aft. This we did by lining up the water level in the clear bit of tubing at one end of the hose with the waterline of the boat at the stern. Then Jon carried the other clear end of the hose, through which he could also see the water level, around the boat and compared it to waterline on the hull. In this way he could see if the boat’s waterline was lined up with the horizon. He said it made it easier to see what he needed to do with the bow when the boat was lined up in this way.

She was a few inches out of alignment at the front so we jacked up the bow and threw a few more wooden blocks under the forward end of the keel. He thinks he’ll paint her black when she’s finished, which I thought was cool. He’s also not going to change the name. Every good sailor knows it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat once it’s been christened. So he’s stuck with Bustle.

—04.11.2000—

I’m tired today. I only lasted for a couple of hours wall building on Gugh. Cold northwesterly winds and stones that wouldn’t fit hampered progress. Spring has dropped her skirt again, abruptly.

I may be reading into things here but I’m getting the sense that Jack isn’t particularly enthused about having me on board for sailing this summer. Maybe I’m wrong—don’t know.

—04.19.2000—

At 8:30 p.m. this evening the light was fantastic: cool, gray-blue and dim. As the daylight bled out of every corner it left everything white and glowing like glacier ice. I crossed the bar to Gugh tonight on the heels of the receding tide, running to go feed the cats I had left stranded at 5:00.

—04.21.2000—

Last week really got started on Wednesday afternoon when Jon and I went to go meet Zoe at the quay in St. Mary’s as she arrived on the H.M.S. Scillonian from Penzance, where she had climbed aboard, literally, having arrived at the ship moments after the gang plank had been raised. She was coming down to make a mosaic on Gugh and have a little holiday on this trip that Patricia had paid for.

After we all got back to St. Agnes we went over to Gugh to have a look at the site. It was bigger than she expected, a 6' x 10' patio around the grill in the garden which Patricia had described to her as “about the size of a double bed.” But Zoe didn’t flinch. She and I headed over there the next morning to start.

We lagged a bit and just managed to make it across as the tide swept in. She didn’t have any wellies, only her purple London stomper boots, so I carried her over to Gugh through the thin waves just starting to wash over the bar. Half an hour later Jon followed, wading barefoot through the knee-deep spring tide.

We spent a day preparing the foundation, just grading, laying down rubble where there wasn’t previous concrete, etc. The next day Jon gave me lessons in how to operate the cement mixer attachment on the back of Patricia’s tractor while Zoe got started laying the mosaic background in broken pieces of slate and terracotta tile and left “puddles,” amoeba-shaped open spaces where bits of mirror and colored tiles would later follow.

The days, and the plans we all made to hang out, fell by the wayside one after the other. Zoe didn’t finish the piece until the day before yesterday, a few hours before she had to get back on the boat going home. Midway through Jon and I were starting to feel a little miffed at Patricia for getting Zoe to come down and tackle the project for only the price of her travel expenses. To make a long story short, Patricia gave Zoe a little bonus though it was still a fraction of what we thought the mosaic was worth. Though this all seemed to irk Jon and me more than it did Zoe. It really turned out amazingly well. At night the mirrored bits reflect the sky like strings of pearls and lost diamonds. It’s really amazing.

One of the funniest things I heard all week was a story Zoe told about a neighbor’s three-legged, one-eared cat that used to hang out at her flat in Peckham in London. She and her roommates dubbed it Vincent van Tripod.

——

On Tuesday I went to volunteer at the Scilly Kids Club on St. Mary’s as part of their Easter Holiday play scheme in which they brought in professionals from various fields to do activities with the kids. My charge was to lead a group of 9–12 year olds in designing a logo for the club. Hey, my first job as design director.

We talked about what logos were supposed to do and what made them work, sketched out concepts and laid them out for a critique on the low platforms of the club’s drama room. I had to keep them from stepping on each others work (literally and figuratively) and try to elicit more meaningful feedback than “That’s stupid.” Other than that it went fine.

After another hour the design team had dropped concept generation in favor of pencil throwing. Nikki, Jon’s cousin who was down from Leeds, was helping me out and we got everyone calmed down in time for snacks.

In the end though, I was impressed with the things they came up with. They did really well for a group so young. The classic line of the day, was delivered by one of the youngest in the group when we questioned him about the apparent lack of meaning of his abstract logo sketch made up simply of a few intersecting shapes. He protested, “But it’s art!”

Sorry, kiddo. Good design can be an art, but art is not design.