A smoky adventure

Last Friday I was shaking whilst sitting on a cold iron bench at the bus stop, waiting for my bus to my ceramic class. It wasn’t an earthquake but an elegantly dressed Spanish lady. Her leg was nervously making rapid movements which made the bench vibrate. My fantasy took her along on a journey of possibilities. From a dentist visit to an appointment with her lover to tell him that she was going to leave him. I was soon distracted from my thoughts by the spring bird song in the tall trees on the small roundabout in front of the bus stop. It was 22 January and rather worrying to hear these migrating birds singing their beautiful song. A far too mild winter, with far too little rain is confusing the local flora and fauna. I didn’t get much time to think about that as the bus arrived and I had to prepare myself for my weekly discussion with the bus driver. I have to get off at a bus stop that is not very familiar to most drivers and for some reason I have seen a different bus driver every week, which means I have to explain, plead and put my foot down to be allowed on the bus. This day was no exception. When I mentioned my destination the initial reaction from the bus driver, like most weeks, was “I don’t stop there”. I then insisted and explained where it was and mentioned some landmarks. This usually does the trick, but this time it didn’t. The bus driver wasn’t having it and told me there was no such bus stop. The queue behind me was growing but I remained calm and friendly telling him that I was taken there every week and that he could check the existence of the bus stop on his digital ticket machine. Reluctantly he did and I was allowed on the bus. I sat down on one of the faded chairs and looked at the chair in front of me which said “fasten seat belt” a reminder of the long-distance international trips of these now local buses. The seat belts had been taken out and nobody, apart from me, seemed to think that this half an hour journey, for some even longer, along a bendy road and often next to sheer drops down to the sea, with, it has to be said, breathtaking views, is a good enough reason to fasten a seat belt. I said a little prayer and sent some white light to the grumpy driver to get me safely to my destination. It worked, and I walked into the ceramic studio all in one piece. It was a special day and I was nervous. I have done ceramics for many years but I had not experimented much with glazing and had never done Raku. This was my main reason to join the ceramics class with a nice mixed group of people, (English and Spanish, me being the only Dutch person) both beginners and professional artists.

It was my very first Raku firing experience and I came prepared with a mask as I was told it would be a smoky event. Our teacher is an interesting, very knowledgeable, sweet bodybuilder, usually scarcely dressed in shorts and a vest, both summer and winter, and most nights delighting us with the smell of his four boiled egg whites that he brings along in a Tupperware box and consumes during the ceramic class. For the occasion he wore some highly flammable sports trousers, which I found rather worrying. He had been firing up a kiln earlier that day, filled with the statues that had been painted with special Raku glaze. After the class, when most of my classmates had left, the kiln was opened. It was an amazing spectacle. The red-hot statues were taken out with a special tool and then dropped into an old oil barrel filled with sawdust. Every time the teacher had dropped a ceramic object into the barrel we rapidly added a few handfuls of sawdust, which of course took fire immediately. As soon as all the statues were in the barrel it was topped up with even more of the stuff. Then the lid was quickly put on the barrel and subsequently covered with a wet cloth. There was smoke, a lot of smoke, so we made sure to wait at a safe distance.

Approximately 15 minutes later the statues were taken out of the barrel and put into a big basin filled with cold water, to then be cleaned with a hard brush under a running tap, revealing the end result. The colours were stunning, a mixture of purple, blue and copper with silver and turquoise touches, reminding me of the colours of an oil leak on a puddle of water. They were better than I could have hoped for, it was a magic moment.

My hair, my skin and clothes were smelling like a wood log burned in an open fire, but I didn’t care. With my statues safely wrapped up for the journey back, I returned home. It had been a great and satisfying adventure. Three days later I was lying in bed and shaking. There was no Spanish lady to be seen. It was an earthquake, 6.5 on the Richter scale, which had woken up the entire Malaga and Granada coast region!

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