DIVINE INSTALLATION <\/strong><\/p>\n On the other side of the river, the less fashionable side, in a quieter place, away from the bars with their big screen TVs and the site of the Sunday market, there\u2019s a rippling on the surface of the water as if a sudden gust of wind had blown in from the North Sea.\u00a0 Yet it is still, a breathless evening.\u00a0 A big harvest moon is rising.\u00a0 Men are locking the doors.\u00a0 Going home.\u00a0 Time for a beer.<\/p>\n On the other side of the river, three women are meeting and greeting each other, their arrival unnoticed by everyone except stray cats who rub against their legs.<\/p>\n The women have brought trunks and baskets, leather satchels and cloth bundles.\u00a0 A huge cart stands by, covered with sacking and there\u2019s an old army lorry just like your Grandad used to drive in the war, with a canvas back all laced up.<\/p>\n One woman wears an old fashioned naval uniform, a shiny medal pinned to her breast; another, flowing white robes stained with blood; a third the voluminous skirts of a lady born before Queen Victoria.\u00a0 Is this a girls\u2019 night out on the Tyne, the remnants of a hen party all washed up downstream from the Bigg Market?<\/p>\n The cats couldn\u2019t care less.\u00a0 The women have brought food \u2013 they always do.\u00a0 Women everywhere always provide, their hearts overflowing with the need to nurture.<\/p>\n Turn that wheel, power that engine, grind that corn, sing that song!<\/em><\/p>\n Hypatia has brought honeyed figs and Egyptian dates.\u00a0 The cats lick her fingers.\u00a0 Victoria offers a corner of her spam sandwich, the pink meat faintly obscene, wrapped in white bread.\u00a0 Sarah has delicate sugary confections to offer, concocted in her own Bristol kitchen courtesy of the family\u2019s refined sugar business, the produce of slave-labour.\u00a0 Her sweetmeats are greatly admired especially by her own innocent sweet-toothed children, all six of them.<\/p>\n Hypatia removes the clinging cats from her white robes.\u00a0 She takes an astrolabe from her leather satchel and turns her attention to the twilight sky.\u00a0 Victoria meanwhile has donned a heavy diving suit and Sarah is making detailed sketches of the embankment.<\/p>\n Women come to engineering in quiet ways yet their presence ruffles and disturbs like wind on the water.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is unpleasant to speak of oneself,\u201d says Sarah, noting a particularly unstable section of the riverbank in her technically excellent drawing.\u00a0 \u201cIt may seem boastful, particularly in a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI just kept my mouth shut, did my job,\u201d says Victoria putting goose grease on her arms.\u00a0 \u201cIn the end they saw I did it better than others.\u201d\u00a0 She puts on the helmet and flips backwards into the muddy water.<\/p>\n \u201cThe flow will be good tonight,\u201d says Hypatia eyeing the moon and the distant stars.\u00a0 \u201cA strong tide to make the muses sing.\u201d\u00a0 She rubs her body where the memory of bruised and ripped flesh still pains her.<\/p>\n Turn that wheel, power that engine, grind that corn, sing that song!<\/em><\/p>\n Coarse laughter is on the air.\u00a0 A woman\u2019s voice, a different timbre.\u00a0 She stands, legs akimbo, hands on huge hips, her frayed sacking skirts wet at the edges as she floats on a rough-hewn make-shift barge under the Tyne Bridge unseen and unheard by the evening revellers.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the Tide-Miller\u2019s wife,\u201d whispers Hypatia.\u00a0 \u201cI saw it in the stars, the summer showers, a portent of great girth and generosity.\u201d<\/p>\n Already Sarah is by the water\u2019s edge, searching for a safe mooring.\u00a0 It must be away from shifting sandbanks and mindful of eddying currents, deep enough for the undershot wheel to turn unimpeded.<\/p>\n Victoria surfaces a short way off, thrusting her hand into the air holding a dead cat.\u00a0 \u201cThis wouldn\u2019t look too pretty caught in the paddles,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cSing of muddy bottoms and filthy fishguts, turbidity tangled water droplets,<\/em><\/p>\n Sing of murky depths and prowling eels, electricity by a different name.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The barge comes gently to rest against the river-bank.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a canny neet, alreet!\u201d\u00a0 says the Tide Miller\u2019s wife as she throws a rope to Sarah and jumps ashore.\u00a0 \u201cAn\u2019 I\u2019ll hev mesel some of them titbits you lasses hev brought, if yiz divvn\u2019t mind!\u201d<\/p>\n The cats scatter as she ploughs a furrow through the debris of centuries, everything under the sun washed up here and picked through at some time or other, from pre-historic oyster middens to the throw-away cartons of a night on the 21st<\/sup> century town.<\/p>\n She\u2019s brought sacks of corn, useful ballast on her voyage downstream, soon to be ground to make celestial bread.<\/p>\n Turn that wheel, power that engine, grind that corn, sing that song!<\/em><\/p>\n Victoria is back on shore, her short hair damp at the edges dripping onto the collar of her navy issue jacket.\u00a0 She clambers up the back of the truck and unlaces the tarpaulin cover.\u00a0 Inside a perfect little wooden house waits to say \u2018Hello\u2019.\u00a0 The windows, like eyes, looking out at the full moon as it rises from the North Sea beyond Tynemouth, trailing misty skirts across the water.<\/p>\n The women love the little house; that is also their nature, to make home wherever they find themselves.\u00a0 They long to set curtains in the windows and put up hanging baskets by the door.<\/p>\n Victoria sets about unloading the little house using the hydraulic tail-lift.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a canny crank,\u201d remarks the Tide Miller\u2019s Wife.<\/p>\n The little house smells of forests.<\/p>\n \u201cI know this smell,\u201d says Hypatia.\u00a0 \u201cWhen the sun goes down on the Mediterranean, the cold air pricks all living things so they give up their perfume to the darkening night.\u00a0 I remember pungent mint, roasted lamb with rosemary, the odour of goats, the smell of the forest on the hills above my grandmother\u2019s house.\u201d<\/p>\n They all breathe deeply, lost in a reverie of childhood dreams.<\/p>\n \u201cI built camps in the forest,\u201d says Victoria.<\/p>\n \u201cI dammed streams,\u201d says Sarah.<\/p>\n \u201cI made mud pies,\u201d says the Tide Millers wife.\u00a0 \u201cAye!\u00a0 And baked them in the sun!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI made a miniature temple for Serapis and Isis,\u201d says Hypatia.\u00a0 \u201cPiled up columns of tiny white pebbles set amongst giant tree roots, perfectly symmetrical.\u00a0 I strewed a path with flowers and counted the number of steps to ascend and descend.\u00a0 Numbers are everything.\u00a0 Even as a child I knew the beauty of quantification and arrangements.\u00a0 As in maths so in music.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy!\u00a0 What\u2019s she on?\u201d cracks the Tide Miller\u2019s Wife.\u00a0 \u201cI could dee wi\u2019 some of that mesen.\u201d<\/p>\n The women haul the little house on a platform-trolley across the broken ground, wheels turning smoothly under their gentle strength.\u00a0 They make everything look so easy.\u00a0 Hypatia has only one hand on the rope, holding it lightly as if to skip.\u00a0 Such work is no chore for a woman who understands the science and purpose behind construction.<\/p>\n Sing of bubbling alchemy, chemical compounds in the key of \u2018sea\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>Sing of pumping, thumping, blowing, bellowing, bubbling phials of flotsam<\/em><\/p>\n Sarah leads the way.\u00a0 She knows best where the water cuts underneath the bank, giving one a false sense of security.\u00a0 The load-bearing weight of the earth and the things we put upon it are her speciality.<\/p>\n The little house is manoeuvred into place on the barge and fixed in place.\u00a0 Already a cat is on the roof, patting its paws at the sky, trying to knock down the stars.<\/p>\n The women meanwhile are back on land, giving their attention now to the items underneath the sacking on the cart.\u00a0 A huge wooden wheel, deep gold in colour, and a black cast-iron spindle lie waiting like strange lovers under coarse cloth covers.\u00a0 Sarah inspects the wooden paddles on the wheel, running her fingers along the treated surface.<\/p>\n \u201cI sent my special patented caulking device,\u201d she says proudly.<\/p>\n The lovers are parted temporarily, as wheel and spindle are rolled off the cart and down to the water\u2019s edge.\u00a0 Victoria is in her diving suit again, preparing to receive the moving parts and ease them into place.\u00a0 The Tide Miller\u2019s wife has rigged up a temporary hoist, threading thick plaited ropes through the cruck of a tree, the other ends tied to the wheel.\u00a0 Sarah meanwhile has suspended a rope-walkway between the vessel and the shore.<\/p>\n Hypatia has put on a large leather gauntlet.\u00a0 She swings a lure around her head and intones a bird-call.\u00a0 Not one, but seven sets of beating wings are soon heard. Now as then, her belief in logic and ancient magic combine to conjure awesome results.\u00a0 She harnesses her cast of phantom falcons to the ropes and, like a set of shire horses, they begin to pull away, their freight following on behind the flapping of feathers.<\/p>\n Divine installation is not a mode they teach at engineering school.\u00a0 By the light of a full moon pins are positioned, nuts and bolts are tightened, gears are greased, winding mechanisms neatly sprung.\u00a0 The undershot wheel begins to turn, the tidal Tyne flowing hungrily through the caulked paddles.<\/p>\n The little house sighs and settles down for a night-long serenade.\u00a0 The cat on the roof joins in periodically.<\/p>\n Sing of salty shores, seaweed fingers and sampled fish pheromes<\/em><\/p>\n Sing of cod and chips on a Friday night, sodium-fuelled sonatas<\/em><\/p>\n The women sit on the barge, dangling their feet in the water, their bodies resonating with possibility.\u00a0 Music flows all around them and food will soon be served.\u00a0 The Tide Miller\u2019s Wife has ground some corn.\u00a0 Sarah cooked up a kitchen in no time at all with gadgets to do most everything.\u00a0 Bread is rising in an oven.\u00a0 They catch fish to eat, using their hands to caress river trout.<\/p>\n And in the early hours, as gaggles of short-skirted girls make their way haplessly home, these four walk hand in hand, back along the riverbank, up the steep track onto the Tyne Bridge.\u00a0 Seen from a distance they seem to be just another hen party washed down from the Bigg Market, but we and the cats know better.\u00a0 Their mark on this world is indelible though mostly unseen and unheard.<\/p>\n Turn that wheel, power that engine, grind that corn, sing that song!<\/em><\/p>\n Author\u2019s Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n Hypatia<\/strong> (circa AD 350\u2013370\u2013March 415) was a Greek pagan and teacher of philosophy and astronomy in Alexandria.\u00a0 She was the first historically noted woman mathematician.\u00a0 Sometimes credited with inventing the astrolabe, hydrometer and hydroscope, she was savagely murdered by Christians in a political feud, her body torn apart and burnt in a library.<\/p>\n Sarah Guppy<\/strong> (1770-1852) <\/strong>was a prolific inventor living at a time when married women could not own property or take out patents.\u00a0 Amongst other things, she was responsible for inventing a new system of pilings for bridge foundations, given to Telford and Brunel free of charge in the interests of public safety.\u00a0 She also invented a range of extraordinary household gadgets for the kitchen and bedroom.<\/p>\n Victoria Drummond MBE <\/strong>(1894-1978) was the first woman marine engineer in Britain and experienced a lifetime of sexual discrimination before finally being made Chief Engineer in 1959.\u00a0 She was decorated for single-handedly keeping a ship\u2019s engines running whilst under fierce German bombardment in the Atlantic in 1940.<\/p>\n The Tide Miller\u2019s Wife<\/strong> is pure invention.<\/p>\n ~ ~ ~<\/p>\n As part of a series of engineering themed events that used ~Flow as inspiration, a group of writers were commissioned to produce a piece of original writing inspired by the engineering behind ~Flow. Engineering relies on precision and detail, as does good writing.<\/p>\n The writers worked alongside Dr Viccy Adams from the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, Newcastle University and Buro Happold to develop their work. The selected writers were:<\/p>\n Wes White ~Flow is proud to have worked in partnership with The Royal Academy of Engineering to develop the ~Flow Engineering Programme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DIVINE INSTALLATION On the other side of the river, the less fashionable side, in a quieter place, away from the bars with their big screen…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[247,248,252,80,151],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1345"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1349,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345\/revisions\/1349"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nStevie Ronnie
\nJulie Ward
\nGuy Mankowski<\/p>\n