Journal
Vintage linens in Naples
Two years ago I stumbled across a market stall tucked into a side street behind Via Toledo in Naples. It was piled high with household linens - table cloths, napkins, pillowcases - all from somebody’s nonna. I bought some heavy linen or hemp napkins and cursed my hand luggage suitcase the whole way home.
Last year I went looking for it. Walked round and round, asked people, found nothing. I assumed it had been a one-off.
This morning I was heading back from the bookshops (I’d been picking up books for the next Studio project, Almanac) and instead of turning right along the music shop street, I went straight on. Past some bins, past a car park. And there it was.
Not quite as piled up as before, but the same stall, the same linens. Table cloths, hand towels, pillowcases, all with matching initials. A family’s dowry, sold off piece by piece.
I bought two things: a heavy linen bedspread with an elaborate red cross stitch monogram, three hand loomed strips seamed together with hand stitching (though the hems are machine stitched), and a hand-woven shift that I’d put at late 19th century, possibly very early 20th. Twenty-five euros for both. I left everything else and walked away quickly before I could regret it.
If you find yourself in Naples and want to try your luck: go along the Via Toledo to Piazza Dante, up the Via Port’Alba through the bookshops, then straight on towards Piazza Luigi Miraglia. The stall, when it’s there, is on the right. I’ve found her twice by accident on a Tuesday - I can’t tell you more than that.
Ancient cordage and a mummified crocodile
I promised in a Studio Bee that I would go back to MANN, the archaeological museum in Naples, and take some photos of the mummified crocodile there — to show you how the string used to bind its wrappings is exactly the same at heart as the string we made in Threaded at the end of last year.
Cordage rarely survives. It’s organic material and it rots. What we usually find at archaeological sites is an impression in clay or a stain in soil. To see the actual thing, still holding its twist after two thousand years, is unusual. This crocodile dates from 664-332 BCE.
These crocodiles were offerings to Sobek, the crocodile god - present in the Egyptian pantheon from the Old Kingdom right through to the Roman period. He was seen as the creator of the Nile, a god of fertility and water, believed to have risen from the primordial dark to bring order to the world. His nature was deliberately double: dangerous and protective at once. The crocodile was feared and revered for exactly the same reasons. Live, jewellery bedecked, crocodiles were kept in some temples.
Crocodile priests wrapped these animals with the same care used for human mummies. The wrapping was ritual work - linen, palm leaves, and rope, wound carefully around the body. In this particular mummified crocodile there are six different kinds of weave in the bandages and two baby crocodiles included as symbols of fecundity.
In some cases the cordage had served an earlier purpose too: gruesomely, some mummies show evidence that the crocodiles were tied and left in the sun to die before being prepared for burial.
The Colours of Naples Fishing Nets
The flat I stay in in Naples is about a three-minute walk from the sea. Most days I walk right along the promenade from the shops at one end, past the ice cream shops and the disused park, all the way to where the fishermen land their catches.
It has been so stormy here lately. Nets have been piled up into big bins, discarded, tangled together. I walked past them on the way out and didn’t think much of it. But on the way back, I stopped.
Layers of red and rust and deep orange tangled up with turquoise and yellow, all faded and salt-stained. I took out my phone and snapped these images.
Working materials age in ways you can’t design on purpose. The sun and the salt have done their own slow altering of hue.
Every net is a different weight, a different mesh, a different stage of wear. The rust coloured floats sit in the folds like worry beads. The whole thing looked more like a textile installation than a working harbour.
I have no particular plan, no project in mind. Just colour and texture worth paying attention to.
New Years Walks in Northumberland
Sand crunched underfoot, frozen solid where the tide had left it, a smattering of fresh snow.
Each morning we walked along the beach in front of the cottage, Teasel zigzagging between rockpools glazed with ice, stopping to investigate every piece of driftwood, every knot of bladderwrack stiff with cold. The light was sharp and clean, the kind that makes you squint even on grey days, and the wind came straight off the North Sea with nothing to soften it.
What draws me back to winter beaches is how much becomes visible when everything else strips away. The bones of the coast show through—ancient timber posts bristling with barnacles, worm casts writing cursive across wet sand, lichen bright against dark rock.
Birds work the waterline in an urgent, focused way as the weather turns, eluding my attempt to catch them in the moment before they scattered.
Then back to the cottage as light faded, peeling off frozen layers by the fire, hands wrapped around tea, Teasel asleep on the hearthrug still smelling of salt and seaweed.
Walking by Loch Lomond in Midwinter
The loch is high, swallowing the beaches completely, and what little light there is in midwinter gets caught and held in the still water.
Old oaks line the shore, their trunks patterned with moss and lichen in the same way bracken and heather patch the hills beyond - holly grows thick beneath them, a remnant of an industrial past when oak bark tanned leather and holly wood was carved into fine-grained blocks for printing textiles.
A single tree stands stranded in the water, its reflection doubling it against the grey.
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