These are the workings from a five day course in anatomical life drawing with Stuart Elliot. The course was just the tip of the iceberg. The more we learned, the more it became clear how vast the subject of anatomy was. The more we looked at the skeleton, the more complex it showed itself to be. And this was without the addition of the muscles, of weight and movement!

>>Click on image to go to Flickr album

The thresher or thrasher machine uses its drums and shakers to separate grains from the stalks and the husks. In other words, it separates the wheat from the chaff.

Threshing was done by hand for thousands of years before the machine was invented. The wheat sheaves were laid on the ground and  beaten with flails. This was slow, hard work.

The remnants were then thrown into the air from baskets to separate the loosened chaff from the grain. It kept a great number of people in work.

So when the threshing machine was invented and came into use in the 18th century, it was seen as a threat to the livelihoods of the agricultural workers. In Kent and Sussex, and later as far as the Midlands, farm workers set out the destroy the machines. These riots were called the Swing Riots and part of the anti-machinery Luddite movement.

The first threshers were set in the barn. But when a horse or engine could be used to power the machine, it meant that the thresher could be taken into the fields.

There is a film listed on the BFI website of a threshing machine>>

Jean Francois Millet: The Winnower

The rain comes down on festival goers at Vintage Goodwood. The three day event celebrated fashions, music and design of the 1940s through to the 1980s.

Camping and light mud clashed with sculpted hair dos, evening frocks, suits and stillettos.

Looking around, I thought the 1940s Land Girl style was a clever choice of outfit as it was designed to be worn in the countryside and in changeable weather.

During a day out walking in the Kent countryside, we came across  Eagle Heights Wildlife Park. Within a moment, I found myself watching a display of eagles, storks and a cheetah against the backdrop of wheat fields and villages.

After the visit, which involved looking at many eagles, owls, snakes, lizards and porcupines, we walked across the fields in the evening sun to find the train station. The howls and barks of the pack of Arctic huskies rose up in the air behind us.

For more on animals, see categories >>

The lightweight, blue and red airmail envelope is hardly used anymore, replaced by the sending of emails which is quicker, cheaper and easier than posting a letter. It is set still more firmly in the past with it’s Woolworths branding and price tag.

For more on packaging, see categories >>

Smoke houses in Hastings on the South Coast of England and in Mallaig on the West Coast of Scotland.

The New Decor exhibition is on at the Hayward Gallery. In the show, sculptures and installations ‘take interior design as a point of departure’.  German artist Nicola Werners has made a perspex bench which encases a row of boulders, each a different rock. She has also made an edition of ‘Rock Dispensers’.

A dispenser is rather mundane. I imagine a metal serviette dispenser. The pebbles are multi-coloured and created from unimaginable geological processes. The joke is that the rocks hardly need stacking and dispensing.

Bottled thermal spring water, not for drinking, a souvenir of Bath Spa.

We found the well at the centre of a radiating development of low houses. It was enclosed in a newly designed monument and surrounded by lavender. This was the source of the famous Epsom Spa.

Henry Wicker, a villager, was grazing his cows on the common during the very dry summer of 1618. He saw a water collecting in a hoof print on the dry ground. The next day a hole he had dug was full of water. The parched cows wouldn’t drink the water, but Wicker tried it. He found that it was salty and soon felt its purgative effect. With proof of its cleansing qualities, he then set out to tell of its curative powers. In this way, the cow herd Wicker was the discoverer of magnesium. The story reminds me of the farmer and his wallowing pigs, in the German spa town of Bad Oeynhausen, whose foragings were the start of the salty resort.

The ‘Epsom Salts’ in the water are magnesium sulphate. It is abundant in seawater and effects the way sound travels through the sea; it allows only low frequencies to travel a long way underwater, like the sounds made by whales.

As visitors came from Europe to take the waters, by drinking and bathing in them, a circle of shops and refreshments grew around the well. After this came the inns, taverns, gaming rooms (casinos are often connected to spa towns), a bowling green, a cockpit and the assembly rooms.

Celie Fiennes in her travel journal notes the ‘ raceing of boyes, or rabbets, or piggs; in the evening the Company meete in the Greenes, where are Gentlemen bowling, Ladyes walking, the benches round to sitt, there are little shopps, and a gameing or danceing-roome”.

Some visitors drank 16 pints of the water a day from stoneware jars and followed this with a walk as the effects took place. In 1750s you could buy Epsom water at the Mineral Water Warehouse in Fleet Street.

Nemiah Grew was the author of The Anatomy of Plants, Seawater made Fresh, and The nature and Use of the Salt contained in Epsom and other such waters. He began to produce the salts to sell in chemists and there was no need to travel to Epsom common to take them. Epsom was also out run by other fashionable spa towns like Bath Spa and Tunbridge Wells. The spa was in decline but the gaming and racing lived on.

A RELAXING BATH

Put 2 cups of Epsom salts in a bath. Soak for more than 15 minutes.
You can buy 1kilo bags of Espsom Salts from the chemist.