Island 2000 Trust Blog

Twenty-five years after her disappearance in a mysterious canoeing accident, Jo walked into East Cowes police station, apparently unaware that she had ever been missing.

The latest exciting instalment of the Island 2000 newsletter is now online. To read the November issue, or any of the back issues, just visit the newsletter page.

Take a look at this rather beautiful thing. It’s about 3×2 cms and looks like polished metal.
My youngest son found it when we went beach-combing down along the shoreline at the end of Fishbourne Lane. We were looking for good skimming stones (there are loads of nice flat flints and slates there) and whatever else we could find when Jerry picked this up. At first I thought it was a bit of seaweed holdfast or a lump of old Sugarkelp until I held it and realised that it was stone. I stopped Jerry from hurling it into the Solent by giving a much nicer pebble and carefully pocketed the whatever-it-was. And, having scanned it in and sent a picture to expert palaeontologist Martin Munt at Dinosaur Isle, I ‘ve been waiting keenly to learn what it might actually be. Well, it wasn’t disappointing that’s for sure! It is a ’scute’, that’s a piece of body armour, from a 35 million year-old crocodile called Diplocynodon!
How completely fantastic.

missing image

The Arts Team asked local basket maker and artist Tim Johnson to give I2k staff an expert guide round the fabulous ‘East Weaves West’ exhibition at Quay Arts last week. This was an incredibly inspiring and rich exhibition showcasing Basketry from Japan and Britain and it has been received with great enthusiasm from gallery goers on the Island. A whole spectrum of basketry was on show, from the strong and functional to the decorative and fragile and all things in between. We wanted to look at the show in relation to the variety of work we do at the Trust. In particular we realised that the natural materials that are cleared in some of our conservation work could be channeled back into arts and making projects and that our fledgling ’scrapstore’ we are developing should have a ‘natural scrap’ section too.

The picture to the left shows Danny and Ian modeling (Chinese and Dutch respectively) woven shoes. Warm, comfy and good for sliding across galleries apparently but very creaky.

Whilst out checking a fairly remote spot for its likely reptile habitats I came across this wonderful hat. It seemed to have been there for a long time. It has ‘Happy Birthday’ written across it and some candles on top and since it is nearly my birthday I took it as a sign to pick it up wear it.
I believe it may have been left there quite deliberately by a reptile community grateful for the time and effort we spend on their behalf. After all (and with apologies to Eddie Izzard) if bees can make honey why shouldn’t slow worms make hats?
If I look quite emotional it’s at the thought of animals with no hands struggling to make hats.

Dan is on a creative trip to Sweden, and has just emailed in some pictures. I was particularly taken with this one, where he has decided to turn himself into an art installation, carrying the simple title “warmth”.

Is it art? This question is now faced by Island 2000 tea drinkers on a daily basis. Opinion is divided. If only we had that Nicholas Serota automaton to resolve the matter.

http://www.timhunkin.com/76_isitartcollecting_box.htm

What’s this? A demonstration of how life in East Cowes could be if polar ice-caps continue to melt? A budget reproduction of ‘Titanic’? No - it’s the next stage in the East Cowes
No Barriers project taking shape. Look out for these forms fixed to the blue hoardings in coming weeks (possibly not Jo and Hannah).

This remarkable photograph was taken at 14.51 on Tuesday 11th September. The complete and unpredicted solar eclipse was visible only from within the lift at Venture Quays, East Cowes.

How many times have you sat on Shanklin or Sandown beach and looked out at the big ferries passing by? Well, here’s the view of someone standing on deck 11 looking back at you.
Actually I guess you wouldn’t be sat on the beach in the gloom would you? But it really didn’t seem quite so murky from on board the P&O ‘Pride of Bilbao’. Perhaps that was because I was still jubilant at having seen huge Fin Whales on a short jaunt across the Bay of Biscay and back. Amazingly you can see over a third of all the world’s whales and dolphins from this ferry; the 4km deep oceanic trench and plankton-rich coastal shelf around it have only recently been recognized as a world class location for watching cetaceans. Take a 3-day mini-cruise, stand on deck from dawn all day and you could see extraordinary things. It’s not just the whales and dolphins though, you might also see Basking Sharks, Sunfish, Tuna and even a turtle. Have a look at http://www.biscay-dolphin.org.uk/sightings.html
And as we came round into the Solent it looked like this:

Gateway to the Promised Land?