Inside Out

Working on a Navy base has its perks. Every meal is a good solid portion designed to keep a sailor going through his watch. The facilities are excellent and as a civvy you are treated with politeness and respect (at least to your face).
However, being surrounded by barbed wire and phase one trainees being marched in circles and balled at by men with little moustaches isn’t exactly my natural environment so it was time to “go ashore”, turn in my pass and leave the concrete frigate behind.
Heading for the coast and parking up next to an old coastguard station, now manned by volunteers, I pull on my running trainers and set out along the coastal path. It’s steep going, the track rising and falling but it is spectacular, especially as a set of steps leads to a chapel perched on a narrow isthmus of land.
Free of the confines of the base, the wildlife is plentiful and I pull up sharply as five dear cross my path twenty feet ahead. Gulls and terms reel overhead and rabbits scatter as they hear me coming.
Driving back through the camp gates, I begin to understand why shore leave means so much to sailors.

“For London is like prison for children, especially if their parents are not rich. Of course there are the shops and theatres, and entertainments and things, but if your people are rather poor you don’t get taken to the theatres, and you can’t buy things out of the shops; and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves—such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And nearly everything in London is the wrong sort of shape—all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, like things.”

Edith Nesbit, Five Children and It

Unsurprisingly, we are rather fond of Totems here. The diversity of  methods, colours and crafts that go into making these anthromorphic representations is amazing.

This one, from the Howies website is one of our recent favourites, a skateboard with totemic stylings. It was created by 45rpm for Howies Deckades collection.

Courtesy of Indexed