Orkney Chair

We met Lady Findhorn when we lived in Scotland in 1974. I really don't know what we would have done without her. Not only did she introduce us into the curious culinary ways of the Scottish people, instructing me in how to cook mince and what to do with Marmite, but she helped us find a place to live and a school for our young children. Our friendship was both immediate and lasting, and we have visited Scotland numerous times since.

Two of the things I admired most in Lady F’s house were the Raeburn cooker and the child size Orkney chair that was always in their sitting room. The Raeburn cooker would never work in California, so I had to give up on that notion, but on one of our visits when I admired the Orkney chair for the umpteenth time, the indomitable Lady F suggested that she locate an Orkney craftsman and see if he would make one for me. "You'll have to let me call him", she said, "because you won't be able to understand him." 

Not only would he make me a chair, but he would ship it to me she reported, saying that he told her he had made one and sent it to somebody in Texas. The chair was ordered and we went home at the end of our holiday. Months passed and we had almost forgotten about it when the postman staggered up our front steps with a cardboard wrapped, chair shaped and very heavy parcel. The entire top of the parcel was covered in ordinary British mail stamps! I could almost picture him with the Orkney postmistress pasting all those stamps on the parcel and hoisting it into some corner of the post office, but I could not imagine their American counterparts dealing with this curious (and very heavy) parcel as if it were a simple letter with a 25p stamp on it. How things have changed from then until recently when I wanted one of Lady F's hand knit beanies and  how difficult (and expensive) it was to mail. It seems that the cheapest way to do it was to put it in an ordinary envelope with a stamp on it.

I'm only sorry that I didn't save that large piece of cardboard covered in stamps....I conjures up a smile every time I think about it!

It's the Orkney version of the wing chair. The drawer probably was designed to hold knitting wool and needles. The back is woven sea grass which the Orkney gentleman probably went out and harvested himself. the seat was beautifully made of a different kind of grass and alas had to be replaced with a piece of plywood since there were no Orkney craftsmen in Berkeley who knew how to repair it. The least I could do was make a cushion for it....

It's now in the corner of the bedroom and I still love it even though, truth be told, it isn't terribly comfortable....