Table of contents for August 2018 in Womankind

In the Harry Potter series of fantasy novels, students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are offered an elective course on Care of Magical Creatures. The students study flobberworms, fire crabs, as well as the unicorn, a magical white creature with a single horn and golden hooves, which inhabits the Forbidden Forest. For Harry’s eleventh birthday he’s gifted a snowy owl with majestic yellow eyes for transporting his wizard mail. Dragons, rats, werewolves, spiders, snakes, cats, and magical plants such as the violent Whomping Willow play leading roles in an enchanted world, the type of world we all wish we could inhabit all of the time, not just in books and on screens. Psychiatrist Carl Jung describes it as a “soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age…

If you could describe the person you’d most like to become, how would you describe her? What activities, habits, and hobbies would she enjoy that you simply don’t devote time to? And if someone were to suggest that it is, indeed, possible to become her, would you scoff at such a suggestion? According to psychologists, most people believe that they’ll remain pretty much the same over the course of their lives. Ten years from now, most of us have an inbuilt ‘belief system’ that our values, preferences, and personalities will be closely aligned to those we have today. This belief in a rather static self affects our decision making, our goals, and how we plan out the course of our lives. As we project into the future, we base our…

When the world’s greatest swimming champion, Michael Phelps, was nine years’ old his mother took him to the local paediatrician to help explain his fidgety nature. The sixth grader was jumpy and unfocused, and Phelps was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which they describe as a disorder of brain function, characterised by excessive busyness. Phelps was prescribed a drug to help combat his naturally bounteous energy, a medication he took for several years before he pulled himself off it. At the same time his mother enrolled him in swimming lessons as a way to drain away some of his ‘unnatural’ highs. Our focus on the mind as the seat of consciousness and intelligence stems from western philosophers, notably Descartes, who taught that the ‘thinking’ mind was distinct from…

One winter evening the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, listened to his kettle sing in chorus with the wind outside his tower for more than an hour. Jung had put a kettle on to the fire, and, as the water began to boil, the kettle started to sing. “It sounded like many voices, or stringed instruments,” wrote Jung. “It was as though there were one orchestra inside the Tower and another one outside.” It was for Jung an “outpouring of sounds” with qualities of water and of wind so strange that it was simply impossible to describe it. For many years the psychiatrist had employed the craft of writing to express his inner life and to channel a nagging sense of meaninglessness that often haunted him. However, in 1922, he suddenly…

Four years ago I was crossing the road at a very busy junction near my apartment. The Commonwealth Games had started in Glasgow and I’d just returned from a teaching job in Spain. I was elated. I was coming home. It was afternoon. A car racing at 50 miles per hour took the wrong turn and hit me. I flew up and hit the underside of a bridge. I grew up in a town called Barrhead, the youngest of three sisters. My mother had been married and divorced, and had me when she was 34. My father, who she never married, was 10 years younger. At that time she was considered an older mum. Her family was Catholic and I was brought up carrying my mum’s surname from her previous…

Last week I spent an hour in a house in Glasgow with an elderly woman who had decided to sell her husband’s books. It’s a two hour drive each way, so a considerable investment in time, particularly on a warm summer’s day. This is how I spend much of my time. I bought The Bookshop in 2001. It’s in Wigtown, the small town in rural Scotland where I grew up. Well, strictly speaking I grew up about a mile away, on a 200-acre sheep farm. After I’d left university, I’d moved away and was living in Bristol. I had been visiting my parents at Christmas the year before when I went into the shop to say hello to John, the owner. He’d asked me what I was doing for work,…

If you were to gather a collection of items in your home that had meaning for you, it’s unlikely that an item of clothing would make the list, unless of course it was once worn by a friend or relative, and this act alone has meaning for you. However, it’s possible that a bespoke piece - a treasured jacket, or coat - something you purchased long ago, spending more than you should have at the time, could make this list of treasured things. In the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, on the isles of Harris, Lewis, Uist, and Barra, there are artisans who specialise in making the fabric of treasured garments, the type you buy and wear forever. Hand woven by artisans in their homes, Harris Tweed, as it’s commonly known,…

It’s common knowledge that a deeper connection with nature is good for our health. Nature provides, not just in the food we eat but mentally and spiritually. Being ‘connected’ to nature, it seems, makes us happier. In his book The Biophilia Hypothesis Edward O. Wilson notes that humans have been immersed in nature for most of history, having only migrated to urban living relatively recently. This need to relate to nature in some way, it seems, remains embedded in our psychology. It’s ‘natural’ for us, so to speak, to be close to the land, trees, animals, rocks, rivers and streams. In fact, in the days of Plato, Thales, and Spinoza, the general thinking went that all non-human beings, and that includes pebbles, sand, flowers, and leaves were “full of gods”,…

Day one - corn soup: My fingers fly across my phone typing things like, “easy dinners,” and “quick dinners easy”. I stumble across a corn soup recipe and I storm through the grocery aisles snapping cans of creamed corn from the shelf. I’m standing in the kitchen, regretting telling my new housemates about this cooking challenge especially since there’s a big emphasis on communal dinners. However, I can’t help but think cooking is a complete waste of time. I open the cans of corn, tip the contents into a pot with ginger and spring onion, stir it a bit and I’m done. My housemates compliment me that the soup is quite tasty and I think to myself that it wasn’t so bad after all.  Day two - spinach & feta muffin:…

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND Edinburgh, Scotland Pin-Ups | Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity OCTOBER 2018 - JANUARY 2019 Paris in the fin-de-siècle was known as the “city of pleasure”; famed for its cabarets, dance halls, and cafés. Most famous of all were the nightspots of the bohemian district of Montmartre, where Toulouse-Lautrec lived, worked and socialised. Pin-Ups: Toulouse Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity will focus on Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographic posters, portfolio prints, and illustrations which made stars of Montmartre’s venues and their entertainers. Toulouse-Lautrec’s career coincided with a revolutionary moment in the history of western printmaking - the development of the poster as a means of mass-marketing - and lithography and poster-making were central to his creative process from his first experiments in the medium in 1891 until his…

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the…

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“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”– Rollo May When we think about our own garden, or the type of garden we’d like to own one day, few of us think about starting a forest. Mostly, we settle on the merits of a nice, polite lawn, some well-maintained hedges, and a row of eternally-budding roses. It is not normal, we believe, to dream of creating a mossy woodland in suburbia, screaming with vines, nut trees, medicinal plants, and fruiting fungi. But according to Irish gardener Mary Reynolds, a forest garden is what nature intended, and so the technique of ‘forest gardening’ is to work with nature - and not against it - to create an environment that’s self-sustaining, with minimal…

At Stirling castle in central Scotland, seven handwoven tapestries, each 12 feet tall and 14 feet wide, adorn the Queen’s Inner Hall, home in the 1540s to King James V’s wife, Mary of Guise, and their young daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. They were commissioned in 2001 after royal inventories revealed that when James V built the palace, he owned more than 100 tapestries, though there is no record of what happened to them. Their fate is a mystery.  The inventories describe a set of dazzling tapestries depicting “the historie of the unicorne”. Something like that now hangs on the walls, modelled on the famous late Gothic tapestries that portray the Hunt of the Unicorn, held in the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval art collection, in New York. In lush…

It took me a weekend to leave my flat, my husband, and my job. I was age 33 when I decided to cut the rubble of my previous life. I had been married for nine years but had been thinking about this change for a long time. I needed to end my marriage, to change my job, and to give myself a new life. I was child-free, which made the decision easier. I am Rosemary Janet Steed and I am 60 years old. I was born in Edinburgh but my family moved to Perth in 1966, and then to Larbert in 1975. My dad worked as a manager and my mother was a housewife. My mother married at age 25 and in those days she just got paid by the…

When I was 21, I had a recurring nightmare. I was in a car with friends heading to a music festival. We heard on the radio that a lunatic had escaped from a local asylum. The traffic stopped on the motorway, because people were leaving their cars and running away in terror. The whole motorway was deadlocked with abandoned cars. My friends also ran away but for some reason I kept going forward. The motorway turned into a foggy country lane at night. A figure stumbled out of the fog. It was a man in an overcoat, clutching his side as if he was wounded. I realised with horror that this was the escaped lunatic, and that in his hand he was holding a gun. I turned to run away,…

“Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognise as modern; they are experience captured.” - Susan Sontag When I unzipped my tent one June morning, I found myself amongst the Machair, the lush dense grassy swathe beside the sand dunes. It was now covered in snow-peaked meringue. I arrived on the Isle of Harris in February and was told that it was one of the harshest winters they’d had. For six months, I was to sleep in a tent for five nights, and a B&B for the other two; but towards the end of my stay on the Isles, I took residence in a croft, a boat distance away to civilisation and milk. Living in this way changed my…

In the days leading up to our move to Shetland I became hooked on the webcams that stream live images of these islands around the world. It was a mad rush of packing whilst caring for my nine-month-old son but every now and then I would open my laptop and watch. Not the cliffs with all their seabirds or beguiling island shores, but people going about their business in the main town of Lerwick. It was as if I was searching for a glimpse of what it might feel like to be an islander, to live in a place that seemed to me then, so remote and so remarkable. I’d read the tourist blurb, that Shetland is an archipelago of over one hundred islands, sixteen of which are inhabited and…

The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn. This is not in fact quite as weird as it might appear (though it is pretty odd). Although most countries have selected animals that are typical, or even unique, to their location - like the Australian kangaroo - at least nine other countries have, like Scotland, chosen mythical species as their national symbol. The UK rather specialises in this: the Welsh dragon is as ‘unreal’ as the Scottish unicorn and there have been no lions in England for over 100,000 years. Ireland, meanwhile, more unusually, has no official national animal at all. The unicorn has been associated with Scotland for a very long time. If you look at the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom you will see that, standing over the…

Almost precisely half a century ago I left my family home in Galloway, in rural South West Scotland, and went off to England to be a ‘grown up’ - or rather more precisely a student. It was 1968. Paris and Chicago were rioting; the Vietnam War, and the protests against it, went on; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; Humanae Vitae was published; Russia invaded Czechoslovakia; my skirts were spectacularly short. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” I left a home of beauty and privilege - the privileges of social class, of financial security, and (perhaps unusually then for girls from that sort of family) of an excellent education. But even more I now realise the privileges and…

The Last Days of Mary Queen of Scots Queen of Scotland from 1542-1567 and Queen Consort of France from 1559-1560, Mary’s complicated personal life and political immaturity eventually led to her execution by Elizabeth I. “This is a very simple existence and it is a very addictive kind of existence. You get up in the morning and you put everything you own into one bag and you walk.”Walking the Camino Walking the Camino The documentary Walking the Camino: Six Ways To Santiago illustrates the gruelling pilgrimage on foot to Santiago de Compostela - a spiritual experience for many, despite the long, arduous miles, and humble living conditions. The Truth Behind The Loch Ness Monster For centuries, people have reported sightings of a strange creature lurking within the gloomy waters of…

Antonia Case:  Antonia Case is the Editor-in-Chief of Womankind and the Editorial Director of New Philosopher. In 2016 she was awarded the AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media, and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the Stack Awards in 2016 and 2017. Sara Maitland: Sara Maitland is a fiction, short story, and non-fiction writer. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1978. She has written 16 books of fiction, and 13 non-fiction books including A Book of Silence, How to be Alone, and Gossip from the Forest. Lucy Treloar: Lucy Treloar’s novel Salt Creek won Debut Indie Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin, Australia’s most prestigious literary award. Lucy…

At age 28, I fell in love. He was 39, and Scottish. It was overwhelming for me. What if I had fallen in love with the wrong person? What would happen if my children didn’t like him? What would happen if he proved to be like my ex-husband? Once, we were in a bus together and a young, drunk man shouted at him, “Paki lover!” I was born in Northampton, England in 1976, into a Pakistani family. My father worked in a factory as a mechanic. When I was age 8, my father moved our family to Glasgow, Scotland, where he ran a grocery store. I went to primary school in Glasgow and everything was difficult, right from the beginning. I was a pale-skinned Asian girl with an English accent,…

On a clifftop fortress during the winter of 1543, an infant girl was anointed Queen of Scotland. The crown was held above her head, for its weight would have crushed the child. Her mother, the widowed Mary of Guise, had secured an impenetrable castle to house her, lest Henry VIII abducted her daughter - the King wanted her to wed his son. Though Mary Stuart was only a baby, the question of who she would marry affected relations between several countries. The solution was found by sending the child to France, where betrothed to the heir apparent of the throne of France, she was raised in the royal household. It was not a solution that lasted, for sixteen years later, with her husband dead, young Mary was no longer Queen…

For most of history, humans have talked to plants, flowers, streams, and birds. It has been only recently, it seems, that we’ve forgotten the art of nature talk - too busy are we, interacting with our phones and each other. For the following quarter, we encourage you to spend just a minute each day interacting with nature - whether that’s designing a pebble garden, feeding your plant, singing with the birds, or cuddling your favourite tree. Just one minute. And once done, tick the box on the following page.…

I witnessed manufacturing at its purest, with human and machine working in tandem within a fully working system unchanged for decades. “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”Oscar Wilde The scouring mill is where the fleece is washed. The fleece is taken to the mill where, on the first instance the metal and non-biodegradable debris is separated out - three scouring bowls for solid washing and two for rinsing. Off to the drying area, then to the packing area. Everything is recycled, water is cleaned, and used again; an on-site horticulturist uses the fibres from the fleeces to make organic slug pellets for the garden and the plastics and metals are recycled. The lanolin washed from the fleece is cleaned, ready to use in household products, and excess products from…

Tell us a little about yourself. I’m a freelance illustrator and my work is heavily inspired by flora and fauna. I love travelling, going on walks with my dog, and reading tarot. I studied illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design, but I’ve been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember. My parents would set up easels in the backyard for my sister and me when we were just toddlers, and I think that shaped my love for art and nature. We’d collect little rocks, leaves, cicada shells, and then paint what we’d find.  Can you describe for us your everyday life as an illustrator. I get up every morning and take my dog Molly for a walk around the neighbourhood with my husband. We’re really…

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”Cicero Mary Queen of Scots By Antonia Fraser Mary Queen of Scots became Queen of France at the age of sixteen. Widowed less than two years later, she returned to Scotland as Queen after an absence of thirteen years. Her life then entered a tempestuous stage, including struggles with the unruly Scottish nobility, the fatal marriage to Darnley and his mysterious death, and her marriage to Bothwell, the chief suspect, that led directly to her long English captivity at the hands of Queen Elizabeth. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie By Muriel Spark At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher Miss Jean Brodie is unmistakably, and outspokenly, in her prime. She is passionate…