Collectables 1: Black Forest Clothes Brush Holders (in the form of an owl).

In every room of The Pink Pig Farm, including the larder but excepting the understairs log cupboard, there is a brush holder in the form of an owl. Daniel began this 'project' shortly after we moved in and, within six months or so, owls were everywhere. Now, guests can play 'find the owl', downstairs and up.

Each owl is almost identical except for its colouring so they were obviously mass produced, probably in the 1930s. Daniel has always had a penchant for Black Forest carving and these have to be the most basic example of that art there is. Unfortunately,  good Black Forest objects from the nineteenth century and early twentieth - bear chairs and coat stands, stag heads, clocks - are now extremely sought after and vastly expensive. We did contemplate a bear bench once, a snip at £8,000. An owl clothes brush holder on the other hand ranges between four and ten pounds on ebay...
 

 Some of the owls no longer have their clothes brush tucked inside so I have stuffed them with feathers: pheasant feathers from our garden, barn owl feathers from a corpse I found balanced on a fence near the graveyard in Freckenham, and tawny frogmouth feathers I picked up on a walk in Sydney six years or so ago, again plucked from a rather fresh-looking corpse. I also used to collect feathers as a child and I still have a box of everything my family and I found on our walks so have brought some out from their thirty-five year reign of obscurity. I remember imploring zoo keepers to go into cages at Whipsnade and London Zoo to pick up feathers that lay on enclosure floors and have parrot, flamingo and stork feathers as a result of their efforts.

Others are serving as candle holders...

The odd thing about Black Forest carvings is that they have nothing to do with the Black Forest of Germany. Rather they are made in Switzerland where the tradition began in the town of Brienz, situated slap bang in the middle of the country. Perched by a lake at the foot of a mountain, Brienz is beyond picturesque - archetypally Swiss. As a tourist hotspot in the early nineteenth century it began to cater to visitors' insatiable demand for souvenirs and thus, the Black Forest carving industry was born.  By 1910 there were 1,300 carvers beavering away at their craft - and presumably one or two of them, no doubt apprentices, specialised in owl clothes brush holders...

 Even within the limits of the very basic carving of the owls, some are decidedly better than others. Their individual characterisation relies on the shading of colour and when this is done badly they fail to come alive at all. But as I lie in bed of a night listening to the shrieks of barn owls and the twit twoos of tawny owls (actually only the males twit twoo) I can see the outline of an owl on the top of our bookcase and sometimes, just sometimes, I'm almost convinced its real...