”Nah then — and do come closer, because one mustn’t shout about this. Behold a hand-stitched work of considerable discretion, alongside a pamphlet of the most delicious indiscretion.
Three hands, seven centuries apart, each guilty of the same charming crime: keeping what ought, by every rule of good sense, to have gone ont’ fire. A thirteenth-century priest, unable to resist the finer details of a confession, commits them to parchment. A Victorian gentleman-scholar, tidying a dusty binding, finds rather more than he bargained for and — scholar that he is — simply must see it printed. And a third creature — younger, better dressed than he has any right to be, and not nearly so far from home as he likes people to think — sews the whole affair into cloth and keeps it close.
I had it read to me as a lad — Ivanhoe, and all that — knights and Yorkshire and men who kept their secrets under armour. We’ve almost nothing of day-to-day life on such a farm, and less still of anything we’d call a life of inversion — certainly not ‘sodomy,’ that wonderfully elastic word the medieval church applied to any pleasure not strictly in service of procreation, regardless of present company.
The conditions speak for themselves: men, alone with nothing to do but work and — one assumes — talk. Absence of evidence is not absence of activity. It’s only absence of someone daft enough to write it down.
A plain blanket cloth is closed on three sides, and on the fourth, politely shut. What’s inside is not my finest stitching, if we’re honest, but it’ll hold — a hand still learning to copy its betters, what it guards stops here.”
- Title: Pastoral Fragments
- Year: 2026
- Media: Mixed media – textiles and printed matter (hand-stitched prose excerpt on handkerchief; wool blanket sleeve with glass button, sleeve contains pamphlet and photograph).
- Size: 300mm x 300mm – depth is less than 10mm.
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Jon Eland 