Hello lovely people.
I was going to write about linen mètis this week, and I may still, but for the past two weeks something has been happening that is making me really mad, and today a solution became a bit clearer, but it involves you people so I thought I would ask you. But before I ask you, here’s today’s post :)
On the weekend I went to a brocante I haven’t been to for several years, because it was quite a way away from my old house, and I stopped going for a while. Which is a little bit crazy because it is actually even further away from my new house, but I think I will make an effort, at least during summer, because it is in the town I started my French life in, and I hadn’t realised quite how much I love that place, how much I miss it, and how many people I knew there.
At the brocante I went to, people I haven’t seen for several years were asking where I had been, which made me feel warm and fuzzy. But the best was when I went to buy coffee from Jean-Mi who runs the little buvette van, a portable coffee-shop that sets up every market day at one end of the long concourse where the market is held. I ordered a grande crème, a coffee with milk, and went to pay him €1.20 like it was written on the board. He handed me back the 20 cents and said, “You’re a local, the board price is for the tourists”. The Thursday before the market had been our 7-year anniversary of arriving in France, and I told him so. He pointed out that a traditional artisan apprenticeship is seven years long and said - “So now you are French.”
I know it seems a little sentimental, or cliched, but I did almost cry. The first few years were so tough, and it was the people I met at the brocantes, people like Jean-Mi, who sustained me and reminded me to laugh and eat more cheese when things got really tough. So there. I passed my apprenticeship. And I don’t think I ever would have survived without the brocante people, who were initially tough, direct, sometimes difficult, but eventually kind - they have taught me much of what I know here, not just about things that I buy, but about being in France, and whatever skill I have with the French language is largely due to them, and to my overwhelming need to understand and to give back as good as I get!
So now this week I am working my way through a mountain of beautiful pieces - a lot of cotton clothing and a number of mid-to-late 18th century and very early 19th century engravings, but this poster came from my friend Yves and it is a keeper that I will frame and put on the wall. I had to show it to you though because it makes me laugh.
This is a large poster from a village called La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, in the Loiret, close to Orléans, and I’m guessing it’s late 30’s to early 50’s. As an aside, I often find it difficult to date French things between these two dates - the styles of writing, the typesets, the decorations, the labels on clothing, seem to have remained much the same and then when you remember that WW2 took up most of the intervening decade, and was absolutely devastating to younger French people and to French industry, you begin to see why. It is not until the mid-50’s that France really begins to find its feet again, and then there is an absolute resurgence in fashion and style and decoration, as though making up for lost time.
So that’s my guess of the age - and even a look at what this says doesn’t tell us much else.
This is advertising a village-wide competition of the card-game belote. First prize - and this is where it starts to get very funny - is a pig, called Nestor III (he has a name even) and he weighs 90kg. This is a seriously good prize, and you can get an idea of Nestor’s value when you look at the second prize, which is a vacuum cleaner, and third prize, a flash camera. The minor prizes are electric appliances, and some nice poultry. Below that it says that there will be a special prize for the first woman to place, and a surprise for the last woman to place.
This really is such a country town poster. My own village now has a digital signpost next to the church, currently telling us that there will be a Portuguese Chicken Feast in aid of the local football club, whilst across the road the noticeboard informs us of a dance in the neighbouring village, and a flea market in another neighbouring village. Probably women no longer get special prizes for placing in card games, but I would never bet on anything in country France. I am sure though that Nestor III ended up as bacon.
Now, some, very few of you will recognise this as yesterday’s Instagram post. More on why I am reposting it here in just a moment. On the post, someone pointed out that perhaps I could make a better guess at the date by finding out how much the amounts of money mentioned in the poster were worth. So I went to an online historical currency converter - this one (hours of fun!) - and had a go. Now I cannot vouch for accuracy or truth but here is my answer to that comment:
Oh now that is a good idea. Based on an online currency converter, in 1930 seven French Francs would have been equivalent to 3.26 euros, in 1935 it would have been 6 euros (!) and in 1950 it would have been .45 euro cents (seriously, inflation must've been insanely difficult during the war) and then in 1952 it was .16 euro cents. If this is in any way accurate, or even slightly near accurate, and given the value of the prizes so that they would at least need to make the cost of entry something akin to paying a bit for the prizes and also contributing to the local council pot, I am thinking this is more 30's than 50's. French currency changed from Old Francs to New Francs in 1960, and at that point 7 francs becomes almost €10 - I don't see a bunch of farmers putting out ten euros at that point to play a card game, even if the prize was Nestor III because I am also guessing that most French peasants and villagers wouldn't have had much disposable cash - €3 maybe but not €10. Of course we also don't know how much Nestor III was worth, or a vacuum cleaner, or a flash camera, during any of those years, but they wouldn't have been cheap. The entire value of the prize pool is set at 1200 francs, in 1930 this would have been worth €553 and in 1961 it would have been €2540. I'm going with mid-30's, but hey, it could be 70's, I mean honestly there are sometimes still raffles around here where the prize is a duck! That was a fun exercise!! Thanks for the suggestion!
Now that we have looked at the historical value of Nestor III, I wanted to explain why I have reposted my instagram content here as a newsletter.
On average, it takes 20 minutes to 1.5 hours to make a post, depending on the amount of styling and editing the photo needs, and how much text there is. This one maybe took 25 minutes - not so much but still a chunk of time. I posted it around 11.30 am and by now, at 4.04pm on Monday, it has 23 likes. Maybe more people saw it and didn’t like it, that’s fine, but what is certain is that it is not being shown to many people. It used to be that instagram wouldn’t show boring posts to many people, but lately, for the past couple of months, and increasingly in the past two weeks, my posts are barely being shown to anyone. I usually get between 120-350 likes, so 23 likes is an indication that my post is barely visible. And I know why, and you probably do too.
The reason is my reposting of Palestinian content, and Instagram’s increasingly terrible censorship of any news relating to the genocide happening in Palestine. In short, while I can multitask a number of things, I can prepare and photograph and write about textiles, I can reply to comments, run a whole business, manage a household, cook balanced and appetizing dinners, keep my kids clean and housed, and still find time and energy to advocate for a whole population of incredibly fragilised people who are being tortured, starved, and brutally massacred by a colonial occupation, Instagram would like me to do only the first bit.
So now, firstly, if the above paragraph makes you want to come write messages defending Israel’s actions towards Palestine and Palestinians in my comments, save me the trouble of blocking you here and on Instagram and just hit the unsubscribe button.
Next - I will not stop talking about Palestine, or Congo, or Sudan, or Indigenous rights, or racism, or white supremacy, or colonialism, or any of it, not ever, and anyone who has followed me for a hot minute will know that and is possibly here because of that, not despite it, because textile history is and has always been linked to global economic and political structures.
But, BUT! My work is also important to me, and I don’t just mean the bit that makes me money. I LIKE, no … I LOVE! talking about, showing, sharing, exchanging about textiles, about my brocante finds, about old artisan trades, about rusty keys and ridiculous posters with Nestor III the pig as first prize. And I think a lot of you do too! The worse the actual news gets, the more I think we need reminding of things like Nestor III!
And I am sick of Instagram hiding my posts as some sort of punishment for advocating that people not be brutally massacred. I am tired of making beautiful photographs and writing carefully-thought-out words, and then having them hidden.
So the solution came to me yesterday. What if I simply wrote posts and put them on Substack instead? What if I just put the pictures up on Instagram, and regularly mentioned that all the information going with those photos was over here in newsletters, where it can’t be hidden, where people have chosen to come subscribe and to see what I am writing. I wonder if this would work? I wonder if this would mean that my work wasn’t lost to an algorithm that wants me to betray my principles and be silent in return for visibility.
What this would mean for my free subscribers is that you might get three posts a week, short ones, the sort of thing you could read over coffee, rather than longer rants (although knowing me, with no word limit, they might still sneak in there!)
The thing that worries me is if you would feel like you were being spammed. If you got two, three or even four Substack newsletters from me a week would this annoy the heck out of you? Would you think “oh for gosh sake shut up!” Because if I were to post here like I do on Instagram, there might be weeks where you get one post, there might be weeks where you get three or more.
So that’s my question to you, and I’d love to know what you think in the comments, or if you have other ideas that could be a solution. I honestly don’t think that the powers that control Instagram have quite realised that their censorship, far from making us comply, is sending us off in various directions trying to find ways to keep our more valuable and labour-intensive content off of Instagram. In the medium term, if Instagram persists with this censorship, coupled with the annoyance many of us already feel about the persistent targeted ads and recommended Kardashian-like accounts, I think it’s going to force itself into irrelevancy. And my view is, I’d like to keep working doing what I do, because I love my work, and I think it has some value to others, because sometimes people tell me so. And so I’d like to be able to put that content somewhere a bit safer and more accessible. Initially this newsletter was started to write more in-depth articles about textiles, but I see now that it could be easily used for short-form, Instagram-style posts.
So please, do tell me what you think. I am really interested to hear. Have a brilliant day!
Postcript: Another commenter on the instagram post just pointed out that transistor radios were not invented until the 50’s, and looking up Wikipedia I find the precise date was 1947. I never thought about this, I was thinking about the episode of Downton Abbey where they get a radio and all salute the king and its 1910 or something. But a huge radio is not a transistor, and here is the thing I learnt today. So all my sums above using the historical currency converter were in vain, but the rest of this newsletter still stands and long live Nestor III !!
These responses are making me so happy and also confirming what I thought about Instagram engagement and how people feel about that space. I will still show up there, for sure, I have a fondness for it despite how awful it has become and how low it has sunk, and also that it is a good space to advertise my existence still. But having my work here seems to be the way to go. Things change, we adapt. I will however keep yelling about politics on instagram and here, so those people who wanted a happy place devoid of politics, you probably won't be getting it consistently from me!
Despite my Covid-wracked brain (four years - and I've unfortunately finally caught it on holiday!), it occurred to me that a particular date falling on a particular day doesn't occur that often, and in fact between the end of WW1 and 1960, the only options are:
1926, 1932, 1937, 1943, 1954, 1960
You keep doing what you're doing. We're on the right side of morality and history.
Stuck in my MIL's spare room in Dunsborough,
Anne