This was a beloved story when I was young. It wasn’t just sweet it really touched on themes of identity when all the adults in her life kept giving her hot water bottles when really she wanted a puppy.

So when it came time to do a self directed piece for my Diploma of Performing Arts I knew I needed to reference it.

So for this piece we had to work to a time limit, we used tech for effect, and we needed music. I was stumped on the last. But I knew what I wanted to do with the space.

I wanted it filled with roses. Visual, scented, I wanted realistic ones, I had at least one book on gardening too.

I wanted to essentially be Phoebe but in my piece for me to have people keep giving me roses because that’s as much as they know about me. A mix of not knowing, and not wanting to know. And I really still needed music and I still needed a way to go from isn’t this lovely, she’s talking about her passion, to oh, this is actually bad.

At the time I was living about a 40min walk (maybe more, yes it was more, it was more than an hour) which gave me a lot of time to listen to the radio (yes) and play back lessons to practice singing. Nothing builds core strength and for a lifetime like speed walking and maintaining a smooth line in singing.

And one day I was listening to concert FM and it was some Early Music. It was 16thC French songs and dances and I settled in to listen. And you won’t believe the name of the album.

“Le Jardin De Melodies” by The King’s Noyse.

The garden of melodies.

Okay, so I keep listening and it’s Pavane and Galliarde “de la Battaille” and I’m loving it. Still doesn’t quite feel like what I need. It’s so close though. This mix of gentle and then passion. I could work with it. I’m just enjoying it anyway.

So we get to the “Almande / Saltarello” And hey this is nice. And then really quickly you feel like you’re slightly forward with the music. Then you get a bit of relief, then you fall forward again and… bang. Right into “Schiarazula Marazula”

I got goosepimples.

And the best part, is the music then starts to right itself. We’ve had this music that seemed so standard but felt wrong, to this music that startles with the instruments, but it feels like we’re coming back together.

So in my piece the Almande reflects external expectations, but it feels wrong, then the start of Schiarazula is my own recognition of how I’ve been part of the same expectations. As the music builds I started to look for anything but a rose, breaking them all up on stage. When the music pauses is the start of calmness and rebuilding, but by my own hand and imperfectly a rose that is now entirely my own. It’s about rebuilding and keeping what was good. The music builds faster again, but this time it feels like heading to new place.

PIAS represents the Harmonia Mundi label and they’ve created playlists of many albums including Le Jardin:

And:

Also yes. If you’ve ever heard me sing anything at an SCA event it’s likely Helas Fautil. It took on a different meaning for me in 2016.

But my voice is classically trained and getting a vibrato let alone the ability to do trills was so very difficult that I’m not giving up the placement I use which also has protected my voice from wear.

Yep, growing up with this song has meant some phrases really stick, rather than being a very catchy song.

Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves

It’s something I think about a lot because the pressure I put on myself to produce my work is because I can’t repay in kind the kindness I receive. I wouldn’t need it if I could do it. So I try to express that in ways I can. And that is my vast library that is digital, physical, and everything that is still stuck in my head.

I desperately want to get my work on tailoring and Anne of Cleves published. It will probably have to be self published because I’m just so very stuck with having to rebuild my sites, my pc, my archives. It means I’m finding it harder to work towards a timeframe than ever before.

And currently relearning to walk in this protected recovery from my Achilles injuries. It’s starting to work, but it’s so much harder than other injuries I’ve recovered from. The amount of time and energy and appointments to just be able to stand steadily really does take so much out of me.

I went from literally throwing myself across the stage to not being able to move overnight. Quite the thing to have gone from studying immunology to feeling the full power of it. Essentially my immune system thinks my own tissue is an infection and that tissue is literally everywhere. Nose to toes. Joints, tendons, ligaments, organs.

In RA, the synovial tissue becomes markedly expanded, with a striking increase in cellular infiltration. This leads to hallmark “pannus” formation at cartilage-bone interfaces; pannus can be composed of macrophages, FLS, leucocytes, plasma cells, and mast cells (14), and behaves like a locally invasive tumor, mediating damage and erosion formation in later disease (15). 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2019.00045/full

I’m celebrating surviving all of this.

Last time I wrote about wanting to make a mantua with my taffeta it was quite hard to get really nifty views. Still true for a few but my word! The Shrewsbury mantua! It looks brand new. And all the wonderful joins are now recorded. And what’s really exciting about these early examples is that they were developed outside the work of tailors.

I think we can recognise how the rules dressmakers/milliners had to follow in not cutting seams to fit- the curved darts do this- but I think it’s always why you get the wedge panels through the sides. Tailors still used side seams, with classic extensions that go to the selvage then over. They had centuries of records of how to do this.

Milliners/dressmakers did not. But they probably had a lot of experience with linen goods.

And the diagonal to straight seaming might be something to pin experiments on.

Because this was all pretty new.

I was only supposed to be looking in my files to really have a bit of fun and recover from a very heavy week of sadness and stress.

I’m actually going to make my Elsa mantua.

I just got way too excited about all this new imagery!

Yes it is! Despite some weird OS update stuff (I got the welcome screen but then couldn’t find any new updates) and explorer breaking, again, I’ve actually been doing some really nifty work finding art in places not previously recorded. The only downside is it means I have to go searching for “Flemish” art to find even more.

But I kind of need to stop where I am because I need to write up why I’m so sure about two images in particular- because it’s not “just” what I know about frocks. It’s also what I know about how artists worked in different forms. It’s even in legal proceedings some artists undertook to recover their own sketches. One of the ways you get influences in art is through the kind of theft this reveals.

In many ways the reason there is so much work to do is to not believe there is this rich level of information in depictions of frocks.

So if I can write up why these depictions are so easy to spot then conservators and historians with access to the art can continue that work.

I’m sad to say I am not able to present my research at the IMCS. While I seem to be on the path to recovery in regards to my PC I’ve just been put so far behind that I haven’t been able to practice. The reality is also that regardless of whether my CNS issues are fibro or vanilla RA it does mean I have to practice more and put in place many more stress relievers.

On the plus side my work isn’t in vain. When I put my paper up for consideration I was mostly working with a negative space around Anne of Cleves. Much of what I could do was really limited by the quality of images and a lack of open access written work. It’s been further hampered by the curation of catalogues that remove depictions of women. Luckily the efforts to digitise collections has rectified this but it’s taking time to fold all this new information in.

The last year has been a particularly bad year but I kept working on this project because I do believe it’s important not only to people interested in Anne or even in North Rhine fashion, but more widely in how much we don’t know because the information is so broken and separated.

But now I need to take a break. Missy seems to have had a fright overnight so she wasn’t on my chair this morning and she’s only eating outdoors. Fluffy is now back to being in my room, which he shared with Carlo until we needed to protect Carlo by keeping doors closed while he was in my room or also when he was in the lounge. So we’re all a bit out of sorts.

Today my PC decided to break down. If I’m very lucky indeed it is resolved-ish (there is still a problem in booting.) But spending all of my good hours on it today is not recoverable. The unpredictability means it’s unfair to keep the organisers waiting. It was going to be hard to pay for registration anyway but today was the day I would have.

Unfortunately I can’t even say “well I can put it towards a new PC” because I am still paying for physio and I need to see the dentist. I can put off glasses for a little longer as my last set of glasses were too strong and I’m only now fitting them. But that’s not a good solution.

If none of this happened I was on track. My health limits how many hours I have to spend on everything so while I know my health would not let me fit in the hours I’ve spent on this over the next week it is still my PC failing that has put me in this position. It’s something that would be an issue for anyone who can’t just rock up to by a new PC on the same day. Because that too would have given me a good chance of recovering.

Disability tax is real. It’s also both obvious and not obvious at the same time. The tech fail I’m experiencing is in and of itself no different than for anyone trying to do what I am doing. Where the difference lies is the cost in terms of percentage of time and percentage of health and very much as a percentage of pain.

I have only a few hours in a good day to do everything that would otherwise fill the 16 hours of day sans 8 hours of sleep. So take 16 hours and try to do it all in what, 4? You can’t scrimp on health so that 2mins of tooth brushing is now more like 10mins.

So far so easy.

Where things get harder to calculate is pain time. It’s not like 1 hour in pain is like 4 hours otherwise. Or rather it is but then you have a cost for many days after to include “recovery” that is less like recovery and more like recalibration. Sometimes I can do half an hour of pain and it be like 2 hours with no cost days after, but that’s rare now.

So where I’m heading with this post is that I’m in the last few days of time left to know if I can do K’Zoo because I have two days to pay registration fees but the next two weeks might be almost entirely tech rather than actual research (*). If I had 3K spare for a new PC with specs for research (think gaming x data centre) it would be fine. But I don’t. So that cost comes out of my time (remember at least a 4x cost) and health and pain.

It’s close enough that I might have just a day or two in which to really know for sure. And again, that amplitude of cost doesn’t include bad days. I don’t even have space for one (4x) bad days. They tend to have a long tail. So one bad day is more than a week in both actual time and disability time.

(*) I think there is actual memory leak. I turned off all “visual effects” other than thumbnails and yikes. Explorer still ratches up private and working set bytes (because everything works within explorer/desktop) but instead of crashing I’m just not getting pdf thumbnails then no image thumbnails created and instead defaulting to icons. It’s difficult to work with but for what I’ve been doing it’s enough to have made enough progress I might be able to switch different effects back on. But oh boy it also physically hurts my eyes due to font rendering being so messed up. Again, browsers operate within explorer so turning off visual effects messes with that.

Well. I knew I needed to tackle my folder of secondary images for Anne of Cleves at some stage. When I share the file names I created for them? You get an idea of how this is crushing my will to read. Me? Tired of reading?!

So we have “no.jpg” “reallyno.jpg” “lolno.jpg” for line art of Anne in costume books. It’s important as the bigger picture is revealed and it tied to my first paper: The Public Gaze. This refers to our tendency to be lead by what people say we should see. Recently the Louvre shared incredibly high resolution images of their portrait that has finally been cleaned.

You’ve think they unearthed new information by the way people are reacting to it.

For me she’s exactly who I have been looking at for 20 years, her smile was always there, her eyes looking directly at us, her cheekbones. What I appreciate now is the very specific pigments revealed. The blue background and the red dress are not a surprise, the specific tones are appreciated.

It turns out my harddrive is indeed failing, it’s down to 56% health according to HDS. I’m incredibly lucky that I have so many back ups. Platter drives, solid state, internal, external, the cloud. But I’m just unable to progress my research until I have a stable boot drive and that means I can’t make any mistakes in the meantime. It used to be very easy. Format a drive and boot from the mobo.

I can’t afford the time, health, and money this is taking to fix.

I really can’t.