Robert De Niro hit the nail on the head when he said there’s no right or wrong in art. “There’s only good and bad. And “bad” usually happens when you’re trying too hard to do it right.” Kate Semple‘s ceramics are a glorious example of the possibilities available to an artist when she, as De Niro says, “feels loose enough to create what you want to create.” Conventional forms –– vase, bowl, cup –– take on a life of their own in Semple’s hands. Each piece is just a little bit lopsided. Seams are unfinished. She makes no apology for running glazes or wonky rims. Quite the opposite, she celebrates them. “Getting it right” often means denying ourselves the eccentricities that make us unique. That render a piece (or a person) interesting. Human. This is a slow and painful learning curve for me. I’m grateful to have a studio space, finally, where I am “free to try anything. To have choices.” I hope to “loosen up” a little more every year. What I’m most drawn to in Semple’s work is exactly that, that it feels free and unfettered. And what is more beautiful than that?

I rarely saw my Mum cry as a kid, but I do remember the time she cried over the Christmas lights. Tangled wires are enough to make most of us cry. I think it was a string of burnt-out bulbs that sent her over the edge. Seeing my Mum, the very essence of Christmas magic, cry like that was my first glimpse into another side to Christmas, another side to her, one that didn’t become clear until many years later. Now that I have three children of my own, I understand. Christmas is a fraught and intense season for parents, mainly because we’re now the magicians. We’re the conjurers of twinkling lights, gifts in shiny paper and amaryllises in golden pots. We’re icing gingerbread houses and stuffing turkeys with chestnuts and dried fruit. We’re filling charity boxes with toothpaste, winter woollies and cans of tomato soup. We’re filling stockings with slime and tangerines, scoffing down carrots and leaving trails of biscuit crumbs in the fireplace. We are the magicians. We are the dancing elves. We are Father Christmas and his herd of merry reindeer. No wonder my Mum came undone over the lights. No wonder we all do. Heavy is the head that wears the magician’s hat. And the elf’s hat. And Santa’s hat. And the chef’s toque. It’s a lot. And I’m learning that it doesn’t have to be. In recent years, thanks in part to a pandemic that showed me how wonderfully blissful a no-fuss, zero-events, paired down, steak-lunch-for-five can be, I have given up the hats. And the sugar plum fairy’s wings, too. So much so, that when our ten-foot Balsam Fir, fully decked in lights, bunting and baubles collapsed into the sofa yesterday like a drunk teenager, I actually considered leaving it there until boxing day. Two hours, three arguments and eight billion needles later, the tree was once again standing in all its festive splendour. No one person can be responsible for the magic, and no one person can be responsible for the mess. The best part of the tree falling down was all five of us putting it back up together. It really is a beautiful tree.

The biggest spoon I’ve ever seen was at a periptero in the suburbs of Athens near the port where my Dad docks his boat. Peripteros, our little pavement kiosks, carry everything from chips, chocolates and cigarettes to batteries and bubbly drinks. Just picture the tiniest supermarket in the world. This one was special though. Positioned just metres away from the roadside, the old man inside the kiosk –– we called him, “O Koutalas,” the big spoon –– would deliver our snacks on a large wooden vessel with a metre long stem. This was my earliest experience of a drive-thu. We’d throw our drachmas into the spoon and whizz onward. The smallest spoons I’ve ever seen were the tiny silver ones we’d use to scoop up mint jelly at our Sunday roasts. My half British Dad loves pomp and ceremony –– crystal salt and pepper shakers, porcelain gravy boats, sterling silver forks for every course –– as much as he does Sunday lunch. My only frustration with the tiny spoons was that I could never fit very much mint jelly on them. Maybe that was the point. When my maternal grandmother died, I inherited her silver. I still keep it wrapped in her flannel washcloths. We try to use it as often as possible. The soup spoons, beautifully shiny and round, like miniature antique gilt mirrors, are my favourite pieces in the set. I once gave a set of vintage ice cream spoons to a dear friend as a wedding gift. It makes me smile to think of her family eating Ben & Jerry’s off silver spoons. I’m not alone in my affection for spoons. There’s something in their soft shape that’s so appealing. They are also a vessel for soups, stews and vanilla ice cream, all comforting foods. Is our fondness for them somehow connected to the fact that our first tastes of solid food come mashed up on a spoon? Look through your kitchen drawers, and I’m sure there are wooden spoons with a hundred memories embedded in the grain. You may even have a beloved one. Given my love for spoons, I’m not sure why it took me so long to make ceramic ones. I was inspired by Paula Grief‘s spoons. And Suzanne Sullivan‘s too. Both potters have elevated the simple spoon to something of an ornament, something we can treasure for years to come. And how wonderful is that?

There’s a brief moment when the clay is almost bone dry and awaiting its first firing, when glazes haven’t been brushed on, or any markings rendered, when the kiln hasn’t had its way yet. There’s no colour or surface decoration to distract us from shape and form. This is my moment. This is what brings me back time and time and again. There’s something so honest and vulnerable about this stage of the process. All I see is possibility, and the hope of what might be. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking all at once because I know that the clay can’t stay this way forever, and that whatever will emerge will never be as satisfying as this raw and hopeful state. And yet, it’s the hope that keeps bringing me back. I’ve made dozens of these spoons in the last two weeks. I love the idea of taking a basic, utilitarian object and making it special. That’s what pottery is. An everyday, functional object that someone made with hand and heart.

Saturday was one of those Autumn days with a brilliant periwinkle sky and a sun so warm that we had no choice but to peel off our layers and bask in its rays like worshipers of Ra. I sat on a large rock in a small Annex playground with my three children flapping all about me like birds flying towards the sun and relished in the light and the warmth and the feeling that my children are still young enough to want to swoosh down a slide and cuddle up beside me, and old enough to leave me alone to breathe in the sun. Even my teenage daughter, tired from a party the night before, was content to swing on a swing, to sit on a rock. There was a time (yesterday, and a century ago) that all three of them were attached to me like barnacles and the local playground was an extension of our home. Every mother thinks (read: hopes/dreads) that life might stay that way forever, that one day a plaque will go up next to the swings that reads, “she was a good Mum and she swung really high.” Lucky for all of us, it doesn’t. Lucky for all of us, the children find independence, as do we. They latch on from time to time to remind us of that life, and that forever is a flash.

I’ve been listening to some Don Williams lately thanks to an Uber driver who played his songs all the way home from my daughter’s riding class last week. Ruby Tuesday, You’re My Best Friend; I know the songs, I’ve just never connected them to a person. I learned that Williams was especially popular in Africa, where he had enthusiastic fans in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast. “He was my Dad’s favourite singer,” he said. “Africa loves country music.” It makes sense that it’s a genre that resonates with people all over the world, with anyone struggling to make ends meet, feed a family, put kids through school. Anyone who feels let down by their government. “He loved Dolly Parton, too.” Kamel told us how his dad was strict, how he held him back from playing professional football. “I listen to the way you talk to your daughter, my Dad never talked to me like that.” I told him how I used to ride in the backseat of my Dad’s car every Sunday night listening to Neil Diamond, how Diamond is my Williams. It’s funny how music weaves its way into a soul, how twenty, fourty years later, we listen to the music from our childhoods and remember.