I got it from hokohoko shop too-- 'Opportunity for Animals', my favourite op shop-- but I'm pretty sure it came from the Costume Cave, hence the military buttons. I think of it as my Moby Dick jacket
Oh WOW!!! Sorry to be so exclamatory but what you've written, deduced and thought about here is magnificent. I'm so touched by it, and all your photos and images. Thank you so much ♥️♥️♥️
The Velveteen Rsbbit is one of my favourite books. My daughter (15) still has her comfort toy a rabbit. He looks like a shadow of his former self and has had all limbs stitched at various points.
Fabulous! Thank you so much for this – the thought, the feels, the depth, heart. It's really touched me.
Funny, I hadn't really thought explicitly about the "sheep good, goats evil" divide before. Goats intrigue me. When I was very small, there was a goat at the place where my grandparents lived. He scared me, but I also felt that we had a bond. He was dead by the time I was four, but even then I liked to stand on the mound where he was buried, where daffodils sprouted in the spring. He was called Baphomet, a name I've always loved.
Nowadays, I hanker after soay sheep (when my youngest daughter was 7 or 8, she cared for some at our local urban farm).
I also keep finding myself wondering where Ted, my imaginatively-named childhood toy, has got to of late. He must still be here, somewhere.
Probably around the same time as Baphomet died, I was butted in the arse by a billy goat in Switzerland. Trauma-inducing. A while back, my mum dug out all my dad's old photographic slides and we revisited our childhood and... there was a photo, taken in Switzerland, of me and my sister and... could this be the very same goat??? https://www.instagram.com/p/CtCpw8Dsfay/
“Probably around the same time as Baphomet died, I was butted in the arse by a billy goat in Switzerland.” has made me laugh about ten times now. It sounds like the first sentence of a goat-themed Bildungsroman…
I am *so* deep in procrastination mode right now that I might actually end up writing that Bildungsroman before I get around to writing the thing I'm actually *supposed* to be writing.
I have a theory called the Procrastination Pyramid. Essentially, you harness the mighty power of procrastination and use it to achieve lower tiers of tasks, & so on down… the key is, you have to have one really big scary ‘capstone task’ to fuel the avoidance cascade
Ha! So, if I make the Bildungsroman my main task, then the task I'm currently supposed to be working on might suddenly become more achievable? I like it! Procrastination judo!
I'm sure I've told you this before, and you can see it in your analytics, but I read your pieces so many times, because there is always so much magic in them. I feel like I should be reading them on paper, that somehow already has that old paper smell.
I agree with Kev, The Animal really does look like (my favourite animal of all time) a Nubian goat to me.
Rosie, I’ve been away from Substack for a month, and this post was one of the first I read on my return, today, reminding me why I love it here. Oh, that last paragraph! Thank you.
I can feel (I imagine) on my fingertips the burr of the remaining nap and pile of the fabric in your animal’s unworn spaces. And those pink stitches on its muzzle.
The face of your animal reminds me, very strongly, of the the face of the big-enough-to-ride-upon horse I was given for my first birthday (1963, so your animal and mine may be around the same vintage). My Dobbin was – in my memory – leather-covered, though I suppose it was more likely a kind of vinyl. He was creamy white, with a red bridle. I suspect (maybe I mean: I hope) he was filled with horsehair. I don’t remember Dobbin being in our house after I was about ten years old (we moved house around this time); I’ll ask my mother what happened to him.
Ah, and there’s a most beautiful beast I saw at Nairn Street Cottage in Wellington on my first and only visit there, maybe 5 years ago. A wheeled toy perched on one of the beds. Probably a cat? Unclear. But I clicked with him (why ‘him’?), very much. The beauty in the wear; the aura, the ‘resonant pastness’.
PS: I’m sad that I didn’t see you at Nadine’s launch last week (I was hanging out on the fiction side of the shop, but didn’t linger after the speeches). I would’ve said hi.
So the book I was buying when I saw the animal was The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin. I almost didn't buy the book, but then I did, because I did my test of randomly opening the book and reading a few sentences. They were: "On my way out I passed the fat man floating upward in the pool. There was a scar on his stomach, as if the skeleton of a fish had been impressed on it."
There is a (wonderful) book-within-the-book consisting of notes about nomadic peoples from Chatwin's notebooks. (Moleskines-- he dedicates quite a few paragraphs to describing how he had to buy as many as he could because he could only get them at a small stationer's in Paris that then closed down...) This book-within-a-book chapter has many goat & sheep related passages, including this one, witnessing the Quashgai spring migration between Firuzabad & Shiraz:
"A woman in saffron and green rode by on a black horse. Behind her, bundled up together on the saddle, a child was playing with a motherless lamb; copper pots were clanking, and a rooster was tied on with a string.
She was also suckling a baby. Her breasts were festooned with necklaces, of gold coins and amulets. Like most nomad women, she wore her wealth.
What, then, are a nomad baby's first impressions of the world? A swaying nipple and a shower of gold."
There were many other passages I could have quoted, but this was the most specific: the child playing with the lamb.
Oh Songlines! I have to read this again. I read this in my early twenties and I ended up walking all over northern India. It just resonated so much. One time I had traveled by bus in the Himalayas and there'd been landslides and I got stuck with Freddy, a German who had a small talking elf inside him, he just wouldn't shut the fuck up. Instead of enduring the bus ride back with him I instead walked 3 days across the landslides, shitting myself stupid because I'd had food poisoning. What a great book, thanks for the reminder.
Lovely essay by the way, I'm thinking its definitely of my parent's generation or older, 80+. I wanna say its a dog, who the heck would give a kid a toy goat or sheep? Maybe its a NZ thing.
I love this story so much. I love your mysterious, magical animal.
I grew up on The Velveteen Rabbit. I also had a small set of tiny books with hyper abridged versions of Pooh stories. I didn't really dive into pooh properly until I became a mother-- although I was given a very nice clothbound two volume set of the Pooh Stories and the Poems by a friend when I was in college. But I never actually read them.
My family are all lovers of stuffed animals. My oldest two daughters had a family of penguins who went on adventures. One of them, Waddle, had a time-traveling space ship and was also an archaeologist. They also had plastic animals who had names and families and grand adventures. And even the toy cars had names and personalities. Recently Lucy the duck was rediscovered and there was great reminiscence about her stories.
Maybe they've held onto the magic longer because they were homeschooled and didn't learn from their peers to be ashamed of their imaginary friends and their beloved toys?
My 19 year old daughter has a pink pig that she's slept with since she was a baby: Piggy. Piggy is well loved. My 17 and 1 year olds had attachment blankets rather than animals when they were younger. But the 15 year old is now a collector of squish mallows and they all have names and personalities and some of them travel with him to dentists and doctors offices.
My youngest daughter has an array of dolls and stuffies who very much have personalities and stories, though she doesn't share them as much.
But my fourth child was never much of a toy lover. He mostly wanted toys because his siblings had them. But his toys became part of the other children's games. Oh except there was the gorilla that he loved when he was five. That was actually a beloved friend.
The feeling that made you buy her/him is so much there in the screen and I immediately thought of Eeyore too (one of my faves, but possibly because my father could read the book with different voices for everyone and the Eeyore voice was so melancholic, slow and ironic).
But this is a softer version, perhaps just a bit sad, rather than depressed.
One of your most lovely pieces here, in my mind :)
Oh I love this. That magic space of childhood you talk about, it’s still there. Video games & etc bio at it early, but when the screens go dark the funniest little objects / toys / slugs under rocks take in epic meaning. But it’s impossible as a dad to watch & love this without some note of morning for the Nothing that will pass and the loud somethings that will chase it away
That jacket’s fabulousness is a microcosm of the essay’s!
I got it from hokohoko shop too-- 'Opportunity for Animals', my favourite op shop-- but I'm pretty sure it came from the Costume Cave, hence the military buttons. I think of it as my Moby Dick jacket
It is a most fabulous jacket.
I'm hoping Rosie brings it with her if she ever comes to New York!
Oh WOW!!! Sorry to be so exclamatory but what you've written, deduced and thought about here is magnificent. I'm so touched by it, and all your photos and images. Thank you so much ♥️♥️♥️
The Velveteen Rsbbit is one of my favourite books. My daughter (15) still has her comfort toy a rabbit. He looks like a shadow of his former self and has had all limbs stitched at various points.
The jacket is lovely as is the lamb/goat.
Fabulous! Thank you so much for this – the thought, the feels, the depth, heart. It's really touched me.
Funny, I hadn't really thought explicitly about the "sheep good, goats evil" divide before. Goats intrigue me. When I was very small, there was a goat at the place where my grandparents lived. He scared me, but I also felt that we had a bond. He was dead by the time I was four, but even then I liked to stand on the mound where he was buried, where daffodils sprouted in the spring. He was called Baphomet, a name I've always loved.
Nowadays, I hanker after soay sheep (when my youngest daughter was 7 or 8, she cared for some at our local urban farm).
I also keep finding myself wondering where Ted, my imaginatively-named childhood toy, has got to of late. He must still be here, somewhere.
There were a few scary goats in my childhood too, now I think of it. Poor lonely tied up billygoats
Yeah, definitely scary. Those eyes!
Probably around the same time as Baphomet died, I was butted in the arse by a billy goat in Switzerland. Trauma-inducing. A while back, my mum dug out all my dad's old photographic slides and we revisited our childhood and... there was a photo, taken in Switzerland, of me and my sister and... could this be the very same goat??? https://www.instagram.com/p/CtCpw8Dsfay/
“Probably around the same time as Baphomet died, I was butted in the arse by a billy goat in Switzerland.” has made me laugh about ten times now. It sounds like the first sentence of a goat-themed Bildungsroman…
I am *so* deep in procrastination mode right now that I might actually end up writing that Bildungsroman before I get around to writing the thing I'm actually *supposed* to be writing.
I have a theory called the Procrastination Pyramid. Essentially, you harness the mighty power of procrastination and use it to achieve lower tiers of tasks, & so on down… the key is, you have to have one really big scary ‘capstone task’ to fuel the avoidance cascade
Ha! So, if I make the Bildungsroman my main task, then the task I'm currently supposed to be working on might suddenly become more achievable? I like it! Procrastination judo!
That's an amazing photo, though
I'm sure I've told you this before, and you can see it in your analytics, but I read your pieces so many times, because there is always so much magic in them. I feel like I should be reading them on paper, that somehow already has that old paper smell.
I agree with Kev, The Animal really does look like (my favourite animal of all time) a Nubian goat to me.
Thank you Sarah, I'm honoured! (I try not to look at analytics because they make me uneasy...)
Velveteen Rabbit goes hard. I was gifted a copy from my 12 step sponsor on an anniversary. Lovely as always ❤️
…you could make a million stories from that stuffie…what a delightful thing…
Rosie, I’ve been away from Substack for a month, and this post was one of the first I read on my return, today, reminding me why I love it here. Oh, that last paragraph! Thank you.
I can feel (I imagine) on my fingertips the burr of the remaining nap and pile of the fabric in your animal’s unworn spaces. And those pink stitches on its muzzle.
The face of your animal reminds me, very strongly, of the the face of the big-enough-to-ride-upon horse I was given for my first birthday (1963, so your animal and mine may be around the same vintage). My Dobbin was – in my memory – leather-covered, though I suppose it was more likely a kind of vinyl. He was creamy white, with a red bridle. I suspect (maybe I mean: I hope) he was filled with horsehair. I don’t remember Dobbin being in our house after I was about ten years old (we moved house around this time); I’ll ask my mother what happened to him.
Ah, and there’s a most beautiful beast I saw at Nairn Street Cottage in Wellington on my first and only visit there, maybe 5 years ago. A wheeled toy perched on one of the beds. Probably a cat? Unclear. But I clicked with him (why ‘him’?), very much. The beauty in the wear; the aura, the ‘resonant pastness’.
PS: I’m sad that I didn’t see you at Nadine’s launch last week (I was hanging out on the fiction side of the shop, but didn’t linger after the speeches). I would’ve said hi.
Thank you for your beautiful words Tracy! To be honest that last paragraph took me a day... or two...
As I was writing this, I received Sarah Crowder's beautiful piece on nostalgia (here: https://onestonetwobirds.substack.com/p/the-museum-of-nostalgia-and-the-shrine ), then just after I posted it, Caroline Ross's one came through, about touching things with our hands (here: https://carolineross.substack.com/p/ultra-processed-things ). Tripletting! More & more I think writing is about materiality, trying to conjure the textures of the world.
Yes sorry to miss you at Unity! Next time
Thanks for the links to your triplets.
Conjuring the textures of the world – yes!
So the book I was buying when I saw the animal was The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin. I almost didn't buy the book, but then I did, because I did my test of randomly opening the book and reading a few sentences. They were: "On my way out I passed the fat man floating upward in the pool. There was a scar on his stomach, as if the skeleton of a fish had been impressed on it."
There is a (wonderful) book-within-the-book consisting of notes about nomadic peoples from Chatwin's notebooks. (Moleskines-- he dedicates quite a few paragraphs to describing how he had to buy as many as he could because he could only get them at a small stationer's in Paris that then closed down...) This book-within-a-book chapter has many goat & sheep related passages, including this one, witnessing the Quashgai spring migration between Firuzabad & Shiraz:
"A woman in saffron and green rode by on a black horse. Behind her, bundled up together on the saddle, a child was playing with a motherless lamb; copper pots were clanking, and a rooster was tied on with a string.
She was also suckling a baby. Her breasts were festooned with necklaces, of gold coins and amulets. Like most nomad women, she wore her wealth.
What, then, are a nomad baby's first impressions of the world? A swaying nipple and a shower of gold."
There were many other passages I could have quoted, but this was the most specific: the child playing with the lamb.
Oh Songlines! I have to read this again. I read this in my early twenties and I ended up walking all over northern India. It just resonated so much. One time I had traveled by bus in the Himalayas and there'd been landslides and I got stuck with Freddy, a German who had a small talking elf inside him, he just wouldn't shut the fuck up. Instead of enduring the bus ride back with him I instead walked 3 days across the landslides, shitting myself stupid because I'd had food poisoning. What a great book, thanks for the reminder.
Lovely essay by the way, I'm thinking its definitely of my parent's generation or older, 80+. I wanna say its a dog, who the heck would give a kid a toy goat or sheep? Maybe its a NZ thing.
Ha ha, Bruce Chatwin, spiritual father of many a food poisoning / German-buttonholing crossroads of the way, I'm sure...
I love this story so much. I love your mysterious, magical animal.
I grew up on The Velveteen Rabbit. I also had a small set of tiny books with hyper abridged versions of Pooh stories. I didn't really dive into pooh properly until I became a mother-- although I was given a very nice clothbound two volume set of the Pooh Stories and the Poems by a friend when I was in college. But I never actually read them.
My family are all lovers of stuffed animals. My oldest two daughters had a family of penguins who went on adventures. One of them, Waddle, had a time-traveling space ship and was also an archaeologist. They also had plastic animals who had names and families and grand adventures. And even the toy cars had names and personalities. Recently Lucy the duck was rediscovered and there was great reminiscence about her stories.
Maybe they've held onto the magic longer because they were homeschooled and didn't learn from their peers to be ashamed of their imaginary friends and their beloved toys?
My 19 year old daughter has a pink pig that she's slept with since she was a baby: Piggy. Piggy is well loved. My 17 and 1 year olds had attachment blankets rather than animals when they were younger. But the 15 year old is now a collector of squish mallows and they all have names and personalities and some of them travel with him to dentists and doctors offices.
My youngest daughter has an array of dolls and stuffies who very much have personalities and stories, though she doesn't share them as much.
But my fourth child was never much of a toy lover. He mostly wanted toys because his siblings had them. But his toys became part of the other children's games. Oh except there was the gorilla that he loved when he was five. That was actually a beloved friend.
The feeling that made you buy her/him is so much there in the screen and I immediately thought of Eeyore too (one of my faves, but possibly because my father could read the book with different voices for everyone and the Eeyore voice was so melancholic, slow and ironic).
But this is a softer version, perhaps just a bit sad, rather than depressed.
One of your most lovely pieces here, in my mind :)
Oh I love this. That magic space of childhood you talk about, it’s still there. Video games & etc bio at it early, but when the screens go dark the funniest little objects / toys / slugs under rocks take in epic meaning. But it’s impossible as a dad to watch & love this without some note of morning for the Nothing that will pass and the loud somethings that will chase it away
Thanks Dan. Glad to hear. Funnily enough my friend's 3-year-old is in a big slug phase. (Molluscs forever!)
The goat cup... https://substack.com/@samkriss/note/c-125521040?r=1vdpq9