Beware the idea of March.

Ravens. Weird dead guys. Eyeballs.

This swan is nothing to do with anything but he’s the best picture I’ve taken in ages. Looks like a love heart.

Hello hello! How the devil are you? I have been better, but I am popping on because I wanted to say hello to you as there has been an influx of new subscribers which is exciting because it takes me very close to a big number, which is actually trivial in comparison to my big news of the week, which happened on Friday, as I was wandering along to check the status of the bluebell leaves in the woods. Two weeks ago I was happy to see if you brushed aside the leaf litter and forest floor ivy you could see the first tracings of cow parsley and bluebell leaves; on Friday they had moved into prime position, well on the way to carpeting the place. But I haven’t discovered that because I am still stranded smitten at the foot of a chestnut tree.

I was strolling when my daydream was punctured by a familiar sound, unsettled by a sensation of wrongness. It dawned on me slowly as l listened to the kronking in the tree above. Ravens are talking, and we do not have ravens here. They are not terribly far away, but I’ve only ever heard one near my house once, very high up and flying to somewhere else. Today there are two. Two ravens, kronking to each other while I stand with rapt delight. Obviously a pair of ravens in a tree is a message, I’m not entirely sure what, but I was hoping it was a long the lines of ‘We’re going to nest here, and have a bunch of babies that you, mighty crow witch, can train so they might teach you the language of the Ravens and we can then communicate more effectively’.

Something like that, and not that my eyeball is going to fall out. I’ve spent the week trundling up and down to specsavers (who do the NHS eye clinic) getting increasingly strong eye drops which seem to be making everything incrementally worse, which is why there hasn’t been a newsletter recently and why there isn’t really one today. Because hopefully by now I’m at the eye hospital instead.

Incidentally, the triage nurse on the phone asked me to rate my eye redness on a scale of 1-4 with one being white, 2 pink, 3 ‘red like a strawberry’ and 4 red like a ‘beetroot or a lobster’ I suggested this less vegetable based and therefore far more reliable scale:

1 white, normal

2 slightly pink, such that a specsavers receptionist insinuates you are wasting their time even though your GP referred you and it is absolutely not her job to do so

3 red, so red that people say ‘that looks sore’ from quite a distance, including the specsavers receptionist who I haven’t forgiven and never will

4 redder than red, children flee from you because the assume you’re the undead.

Anyway. It’s very upsetting. And I haven’t printed anything or listed anything for ages. In fact, this combined with the state of my brain health being quite poor I decided to abandon trying to force the ole electric salami to do what it should be doing. Forbidding myself to do fun things until I’d done the ‘proper’ work has resulted in nothing getting done at all, and doing things you aren’t supposed to d is better than nothing.

Instead I made this. This is a linocut reproduction of a medieval diagram usually referred to as ‘planetary man’ or ‘zodiac man’. At the time ‘as above, so below’ was taken quite literally, so it’s really just a (excessively macabre) diagram of which organ is controlled by which planet or constellation, depending on the diagram. The thing that fascinates me about this guy is he turns up in various books of days, in different similar but different diagrams. The actual diagram is slightly different each time and it’s a different woodcut but they’ve definitely recycled the very unwell looking guy. Here’s one in Edward Worth’s Book of Hours and another similar but different guy here and yet another here. Fascinating.

I’m also kinda obsessed by the way he and the celestial bodies are looking so utterly done. Genuinely feeling it.

I’ve always wanted a rubber stamp of him so and I’ve got at least 500 more important things to do so I got onto it right away. I didn’t bother get my desk easel out because it was only small but there’s an insane level of detail in there, it took probably five hours and my back hurts.

Not bad for someone with a scratched cornea though.

Might even stick him in the shop incase some weirdo wants to buy him. You never know. But not this week. One of the other ones when I’m not ill. Managed to make it to March though! It’s bound to disappoint by being fantastically similar to February and it’s the hope that kills you but yay! March.