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Charles Emmerson

@charles_emmerson

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Beautiful oddities. Books, history, nature, language, reading the world differently
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5.02am, 21 June 2026 by @charles_emmerson

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3 months ago

Such pleasing forms. taken in London, United Kingdom by @charles_emmerson

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4 months ago

@ahana.music Such calm bliss in this song. I could have listened forever I think. Actual birds seemed to like it too. taken in London, United Kingdom by @charles_emmerson

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4 months ago

Thank you Assynt, in no particular order, for: the utter majesty of Suilven, the best pie shop I have ever been to, the freshly painted emerald green on the door to the finest of bothies and whoever took the care to paint it so well, waking up in wilderness and feeling such deep reviving connection with the earth, the hidden garden at Leckmelm and the most extraordinary rhododendron I’ve ever seen (Fowler’s), the man in burgundy cords going up Stac Polaidh, the smallest castle in the world (German tourist for scale, probably an Ossian fan), white beaches and a (cold) bright blue sea that made me gasp and gasp again, gorse bursting across the landscape with the ferocious energy of Scottish spring, the house owned by an Atlanta semi-Scot with (very good) paintings by a relative who took after Ludwig Kirchner, David the potter’s experiments using natural materials (including seaweed and every imaginable found sand, clay and scavenged sediment) for ceramic glazes, the museum in Ullapool where you can learn about the herring girls, the Coigach cowboys who went to Montana, the barter trade of Soviet bloc fishermen in Ullapool in the 1980s and the reverse Highland clearances pulled off by the Assynt crofters trust in 1993, purchasing their land from a bankrupt Swedish land speculator. (Full story here: https://www.theassyntcrofters.co.uk/history/ - someone should make a film). And thank you Fife for East Lomond, the oldest tennis court in the world, the castle as a quick fire history lesson (I had no idea Charles II, in style at least, was the model for Captain Hook), a walk with dear friends, Bob Beveridge and his violin shop. What a feast for mind, body and soul. I now better understand the magic. Happy to act as guide next time. taken in Assynt by @charles_emmerson

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5 months ago

Obsessed. taken in Horniman Museum and Gardens by @charles_emmerson

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5 months ago

It has become clear to me that all conferences should take place in Italy, for the backdrop alone. taken in Perugia, Italy by @charles_emmerson

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5 months ago

Marblemania. A converted pottery works with a museum on pottery history (including display on how pots were made before the Romans brought the kiln) and marbles (which they also make on site). Small round spheres you can play with made from stone or china have existed for millennia (notably in India). But the glass ‘marble’ is really a product of the nineteenth century: the subject of a popular craze by its end and, if you squint hard, a symbol of Europe’s transformation in that century – a by-product of glass making, the basically miraculous (and dangerous) process of turning sand into something you can see through, yet protects you from wind and storm (essential to urbanisation). Making glass marbles artisanally is a multistage process: molten glass is distended into glass canes, constantly turned on the end of rods or pontils (hence the swirl of the colours in a marble), then shaped into spheres which are snapped off. The protrusion where the snap occurs is called the nipple. Beeswax is employed as a lubricant at some point. See more https://youtu.be/1cXy7gxUtbU?si=7GnVlTXNLrw-gcqb. I am sure individual glass blowers at any time in history would have taken pride in making a perfectly round marble as proof of their craftsmanship. But in the 1800s European glass making was transforming from cottage industry to furnaces and factories (Karl Marx took it as an example of the shift in production from handicrafts to capitalism – also involving child labour). Glass became cheaper. Then, around the time of Das Kapital, a German glassblower invented a kind of shears which allowed marbles to be cut from molten glass more easily. Production grew; sales boomed; children screamed for mehr, mehr, mehr! The era lasted a few decades. In the First World War – when European factories turned to other things and exports to the marble-crazy USA dried up – the Americans industrialised it all. There’s a marble making machine on display, built as late as 1982 in West Virginia, which made 15 million marbles before it “retired”. At the shop you can buy an extraordinary range of (locally made, I hope) marbles. My favourites are “cats eyes”. A small one is 20p. @houseofmarbles taken in House of Marbles by @charles_emmerson

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6 months ago

Madeira in March. Ten seasons in one day. Sometimes more. Atlantic air sweeps onto the rugged north and gives up its moisture to the witchy laurel forests, and the mosses which wreath them like pagan garlands. 1800 metres from ocean to peak: gorse and heathland at the top, subtropical by the sea, bands of forest in between (eucalypts where it’s steepest, mahogany elsewhere). Everyone is obsessed with weather apps no one trusts. The word “microclimate” fills the gap between promise and reality. Mud bespattered and awestruck, across the top from Porto Moniz to Caniçal, I wasn’t dry for a week. The soil is deep red, volcanic, rich. You can eat your way across by gorging on free fruit: my favourites, Japanese medlar and custard apple (exactly like apple crumble and custard). Villages are built around old footpaths too steep for cars. New roads wind between them. Madeira once grew sugar (with slaves: Guanches from the Canaries initially). Levadas were built irrigation channels snaking through the mountains. Madeira wine came later, popularised by/for the English when Napoleon’s wars put continental booze out of reach. Fortifying it with spirits made it survive the trip to India. I meet a taxi driver called Horatio, after Nelson; a forest ranger called Victor Hugo. Migration stories surprise me everywhere: Eduardo, born in Venezuela, where his grandfather moved in the 60s to escape island impoverishment; many talk about working on Jersey in the 1990s; Bisnu, the new arrival from Nepal. Older Madeirans gasp with pride and horror at the change. The island didn’t have an airport till the 1960s. Now, by the coast, they’re building golf courses. There’s remnants of a different life: one water mill left (grinding corn when I pass by, with a stone that might have been turning continuously for a century, photos of long gone ancestors, a tiny bed). Within living memory, steep roofed palheiro huts housed livestock. Now the thatched roofs are gone, corrugated iron replacements are rusted, and most are empty. Yet people still grow vegetables around their houses; and in tiny cliffside plots up perilous paths. I hope they always will. by @charles_emmerson

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6 months ago

Truly, what a thing of wonder is a wooden stool.

There is something so clever, instructive, humbling, beautiful even, about how a three legged stool can adapt to the imperfections of its maker, or accommodate itself to the unevenness of the terrain on which it stands.

What an awesome design. Without screws. The magical combination of forces that holds it together. The innate strength of the wood coupled with the forgiving nature of the three legged construction, so that even an unskilled first time furniture maker - if you don’t count bookcases and cupboards made with my dad along very rough DIY lines - can make something that stands up more or less evenly and you can actually sit on. I wonder about the humans - many generations I assume - who looked at the natural world around them, noticed how something fell or didn’t fall if supported a particular way, experimented, built, experimented some more, made tools, refined - and so found a way of building something so apparently simple and yet, if you really think about it, so totally amazing. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to sit on a felled log, rather than decide to cut it, craft it, turn it, and make this? And yet someone - or rather, over time, many people working together, even if not in the same exact place or time - must have. What collective curiosity, what drive. It’s a thought.

Amazing book collection too, including one with actual wood samples. Walter Segal, of course. And pro tips about how to choose wood in the lumber yard. And Japanese saws - I had no idea. Now I just want to make more.

Thank you @emma_leslie_work @newschooloffurniture (on Beechwood road, no less). by @charles_emmerson

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7 months ago

What a year of seasons. I am so grateful for the fullness of it, and the different parts so many have played in it for me.

Thank you for the love, for the food (and the cooking of it), for moments of beauty and tenderness and awe; for patience shown me at times my intentions and desires have been ill expressed or disconnected; for the sunsets and sunrises, for the forests and the seas and the noticing of it all; for words we have delighted in and humour shared; for connection in all its forms; for the pathways we have trodden together and the sand between our toes; for deep vibrations; for all the feelings, good and bad, which let us know we are alive; for the curiosity which sparks more curiosity; for invitations to explore outwardly and within; for collective projects we have hoisted into reality and the sharing of dreams for the future we have yet to build; thank you for fire; for music and playgrounds; for the privilege of seeing a child grow into her personhood and all the people (and non people) who have made her world so full of love and wonder; thank you for the things I have learned and am still learning about myself; and for the opportunity to grow, gather, adventure and build with those I love in the year ahead.

Thank you for being in this world with me. I am pleased to be in it with you.

I am sorry for the times my own past fears have got in the way of me holding space for those I cherish in the present; for times I have brought hurt rather than healing to the table of love; when I have reacted rather than taken a loving, listening pause; when I’ve tried to manage rather than resolve. I recognise my mistakes. I am sorry for their impact. I know the capacity to learn and grow is as great as the willingness to expand one’s present self into one’s future self. I choose this path. I know why I want to - for myself and for others. I am ready for the journey with whoever wishes to come along with me.

With a full and open heart, wishing us all love and growth and adventure and peace in the year ahead.

May the road rise to meet you. May you feel the wind at your back, and the sun warming your face; or the rain softly freshening it, as you prefer. by @charles_emmerson

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9 months ago

The sun coming up after the longest night of the year. Two birds flew up just when it did. A glorious reawakening. by @charles_emmerson

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9 months ago

Ceilings and walls in Topkapi palace. A lot of tulips, obviously, but what a variety of shapes, themes and geometries. The grid ceiling of one dormitory (for the harem guards) seems so Zen, so calming (hard not to fantasise about a Japanese Ottoman design connection - maybe there is one). The bold marble circle on the wall of the Erevan kiosk (the building where documents on the Ottomans’ eastern Anatolian domains, the Armenian homeland, would be kept). Such glorious Platonic forms. Of course there are flowers too - and fruits. There is a whole room decorated with images of flowers and fruit, probably my favourite in the palace. How succulent! How pretty (in the best sense of the word)! How I would love to languidly lounge here eating figs and bathing in poetic alliteration. There is so much refinement in this decoration, so much to please and relax. This is the Ottoman Empire at its peak of power and success, between the C15 & C17. One shouldn’t romanticise it too much: a brutal military conquest machine, one that enacted patriarchy and other hierarchies wherever it went, placed different codes and obligations on its inhabitants (a double edged sword) according to their religion (yet maintained a degree of diversity unimaginable in Christian Europe), publicly executed its enemies (the fountain where the axe wielder would clean his axe is in the palace courtyard), and sometimes murdered its own (as royal blood shouldn’t be spilled family members would be hanged - one sultan ordered the murder of several of his children). All this beauty and opulence was built on the backs of others. Can one gaze at such beauty - any man made beauty - and not think of how it got there? Yet it feels so different to the gaudy C19 palace addition, when the Empire was in decline, prey to western power, in the thrall of its technology, increasingly hollowed out by Europeans who now appeared more as colonisers rather than traders, crafty exploiters rather than equals (or as supplicants, as Europeans would have appeared to Ottoman rulers in a different era). The C19 palace feels like a bad copy of a stately nouveau riche home in provincial England. Even the tourists don’t linger long. taken in Topkapı Palace by @charles_emmerson

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a year ago