Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 16

So we worked out what we needed and made a list and then found out we could get development grants to create jobs in the remote bits of Scotland and we persuaded our bank to lend us the same amount of money.

We even got a grant of £400 to blow up rocks and build the road to our house. So we bought two electric potter’s wheels, because my thighs still hadn’t recovered from weaving the tweed, two electric kilns and bags and sacks and jars of all sorts of stuff that looked like it might either be very useful or interesting.

Then we set to work.

And that was when we discovered the secret the book had not told us about.

Making pottery is really, really difficult.

But I did get quite good at shooting, as the bottom of our garden became littered with the remains of all the pots I stood on our fence posts and shot to bits with my BSA rifle.

We bought another book about pottery, but all that one taught us was that lots of potters are very pretentious and all their glazes have Japanese names. We named our glazes after birds with nice names and appropriate colours. Our best one was Sandpiper.

The money seemed to shrink away, but before it ran out completely people began to turn up wanting to buy our pots. We were the only pottery in the Outer Hebrides and they wanted souvenirs to take home.

‘But they’re awful,’ we kept saying, which is a professional ceramic term for ‘They’re crap.’

But they still bought them.

Our two daughters sat in their playpen eating lumps of red clay while we kept practising. Fortunately we were young and enthusiastic and naive enough for it to never occur to us we might fail.

And we didn’t.