Dilys Pryce, 78, of Kings Heath, Birmingham, has used the same Bialetti spiraliser as her object of meditation since the fourteenth of February 1974, when a man named Ron, at the Kings Heath Working Men’s Club, advised her to give up the cigarettes and find something to do with her hands. The spiraliser, a 1972 model with a snapped handle and a kink in the blade, has served as the focus of nineteen thousand consecutive daily sessions of eleven minutes, each one recorded in a Basildon Bond notebook in blue ink. She has not missed a day, including the day of her mother’s funeral, which she attended afterwards, and she wishes it to be understood that the implement is not a religious object, and that anyone who calls it one may expect a letter.
The museum accepts it as a secular reliquary
In June of this year the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery accepted the spiraliser on loan, listing it as a secular reliquary and displaying it in a case with a laminated card describing it as a focus of daily practice since 1974. The council’s culture department, which is still answering questions about the Temple Row car crash in which a motor-car struck a woman and a building, says the loan forms part of its wellbeing offer, a phrase your correspondent has now heard four times to-day and has begun to hear in her sleep.
“The spiraliser speaks to the city’s contemplative tradition,” said Belinda Chuff, Head of Participatory Wellness at Birmingham City Council.
The museum has insured the object for £450. Dilys asked whether the case was alarmed and was told that it was not, because the case cost £450.
Your correspondent attended the opening with a small sherry about her person, which she took in the disabled lavatory, and can report that the card is laminated to a standard one normally associates with instructions for a fire door. The whole business, she had intended to write, is a shew of municipal cowardice and a stain upon the connexion between a city and its past. Then she looked at the notebook. Nineteen thousand days. It is not nothing.
A steward asks her to leave at half past four
At the opening, Dilys sat upon a folding chair before the case at four o’clock, as is her custom, and at thirty-two minutes past the hour a steward informed her that the gallery closes at half past four and that she must leave.
“I am not insured for mid-session,” said Kevin Nott, Gallery Steward (Visitor Flow), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Dilys observed that she was midway through her eleven minutes. Mr Nott observed that this was not his concern. She completed the session in the foyer, between the cloakroom and a poster for the Staffordshire Hoard, and found it better. She has since written to the museum director, the council and her Member of Parliament, Shazia Begum, who replied that she was delighted to hear about the spiraliser and asked whether it might be moved to a community centre in Sparkbrook, where your correspondent understands there is already a table tennis table and a dispute about the boiler.
The foyer has better light and fewer tourists
Dilys now meditates in the foyer each day at four, upon a chair she brings herself, and reports that the light is better, the tourists fewer and the cloakroom attendant, Marie, quieter than any gallery. She has been joined by four others: a retired bus driver, two sixth-formers conducting the exercise for a project, and a man who believed it was a smoking cessation group and has stayed out of politeness.
The museum says it is reviewing the placement of the loan. The council says the foyer is not a designated contemplative space. Dilys says neither was the kitchen in 1974.
Here your correspondent must make a confession, and she makes it with a second, smaller sherry, produced from the same pocket. Somewhere between the laminated card and the folding chair, she stopped despising the spiraliser and began to admire it. She is aware that this is a reversal. She is not sorry. It is a better object than most of what this city has lately put in a case, and it has never once been to a meeting.
The spiraliser is now worth four hundred and fifty pounds
A valuation from a Birmingham auction house puts the spiraliser at £450, which is also the insurance figure, which is also what the museum paid for the case. Dilys bought the implement for seventy-nine pence in 1972 and says the money is beside the point, which it is. The council confirms that the loan will be reviewed in March 2027. Dilys has already booked her chair for March 2027. She says she will keep going until she cannot, and then she will stop, and that will be that.
Your correspondent left the museum at dusk, in the rain, with the sherry gone and the foyer already emptying, and reflected that in the end every city becomes a museum of itself, and every one of us a loan, briefly displayed, unalarmed, and worth rather less than the case that holds us.
