Ceramics and globalization

Thursday May 17, 2007

This is by way of being a two-day entry, two days having merged imperceptibly into one. We stayed up late last night, chatting and laughing and pretending to watch a couple of episodes of my new box set of the entire Teachers series, eating an extended dinner, and sipping a bottle of bubbly Pinot Chardonnay. The hours do slip by  when you’re so pleasantly engaged.

No real news. This morning the parcel delivery man came bearing a gaudy box from a lady in Germany. A complete mystery to me.

“You been buying stuff on eBay again?” I demanded.

“Who, me?”

“Well, it’s not me and it has your name on it so I reckon…”

“Oh. Alright. It’s a fair cop. You’ll like it, though, see if you don’t.”

And so, from the depths of a maze of recycled packaging material, two new ceramic tiles emerged. Made in the mid-70s, we reckon, by a bloke called Ed Ruscha, in Germany. These are a much later relation of the piece we acquired back in February. Heavy grogged clay, hand rolled, carved when leather hard and glazed onto a biscuit-fired state, leastways, that’s our diagnosis. The result is a pair of tiles, each about 17 cm wide by 23 cm deep and perhaps 1.5 cm thick. They have proper hanging brackets embedded in the back and were hanging in the kitchen within an hour of arrival.

“Well?” he demanded.

“OK. You win. They’re georgeous. Expensive?”

“Seven pounds 50.”

“That’s ridiculous. You do seem to be awfully good at eBay.”

“Thanks. There are likely to be more in the future.”

“Fine. I am grateful for the advance notice.”

Needless to say, the postage, even within the EU, came to rather more than what we paid for the ceramics. Goodness knows what the shipping would be from the States or Canada, because these are not lightweight pieces.

Something will have to be done about the rip-off charges levied for international shipping if globalization is going to work at all levels for all people on our planet. There’s a great hoo-hah here in the UK today over the forced closure of some 2,500 local post offices. I hate to see them go, but if in return the way is opened for some entrepeneurial enterprise which makes shipping a properly costed part of our lives instead of supporting a central monopoly, it’ll be worth it. Almost.