The Love jug

Before Hannah and I got together we had been best friends for years.

We'd been to the States together to do demonstrations, made numerous pots together in each others workshops, fired wood kilns together, looked out for each other, looked after each other, talked to each other about slips and glazes and brown pots and Issac Button and medieval jugs in the V&A in wonderful phonecalls that would last for hours.

A couple of years ago, I came to Scotland to visit her. She had made a big jug which was sitting there still wet on the shelf. When I looked at it I could see the culmination of influences from the tradition that we celebrate, but more than that, I could see a synthesis of the two of us.

It's difficult to explain and I don't know if this will make sense, but upon seeing that pot, it struck me that we had grown together so much in our work because we had grown together so much in our lives.

We are obsessed and focussed potters, we live for our art, it is all of us. This jug was both of us, a shared perception. It seemed so clear to me that there was no way that we couldn't be together. So I told her!

I told her that one day this pot would be on the top table at our wedding.

She didn't believe me, (or was actually completely freaked out!) and sent me home to Devon.

I knew full well that we were in each others heads and hearts and that we had become a massive part of one another's conscience. We made our pots for each other, (it was like flirting with clay!). I knew I was in love with her and I also knew that she was with me.

We didn't speak for a few days - that hadn't happened in years, but the silence and the distance were so important - this was what life would be like without each other.

I sat in my workshop and thought about that pot and wrote a poem. I've never written a poem for anyone before and it's no great literary work, but I saw that jug as an analogy for us and it represented in my eyes, our at oneness.

I wrote it out in my best handrwriting and posted it to her.

We spoke on the phone, we laughed, we cried, I told her I loved her, then I asked her to marry me. A very shocked Hannah asked for some time to get her head around it.

I asked her to keep the jug for me and again promised that one day I would decorate it for our wedding.

Two weeks tomorrow we will be married. The jug, with its love poem will be on our top table and Hannah will be beside me as my wife. I love her completely. Great poetry it isn't, but it says it all.

Our wholeness, our consciousness
Proclaimed within a brown clay jug
Our Earth, our clay, our harmony
As  integral as marl and grog
Our slip, our glaze, our synthesis
Layered, shining bright and bold
Our kiln, our fire, our burning light
Our tale of Love set in stone..