Thursday 29th March 2012
To the Royal Academy early, to hand in two small paintings for the Royal Academy Summer Show. I haven’t had anything accepted since 2000, just D notices since then, but hope springs eternal doesn’t it – at least in me.
Mooched about a bit afterwards in this delinquent Spring sunshine which is so unexpected. Bought some delectable cheese in Paxton’s and some rose creams in Fortnum’s, to give out at Easter.
I had a sandwich in the café attached to St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, had a look inside and saw there was an exhibition going on called, A Graceful Death.
It’s not the death that’s the problem, for me it’s the lead up to it. I usually avoid all reminders of this horrible prospect, but I was attracted by the portrait of a dying man on the poster.
Antonia Rolls painted her husband Steve while he was dying of liver cancer, and there were paintings of a few other people who had allowed her to paint them at the end of their lives, including one old cat.
Antonia.rolls1@btinternet.co.uk
It was a poignant show. In the visitor’s book someone called Sogyai Riaponche had written rather desperately:
“Moment to moment I live with the possibility of imminent death.”
I wondered if she was a tourist, going round in big trainers, trying to take her mind off things by looking at London. Some hope.
Many people like to say glibly, “We all die. I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. It could happen any time,” but they don’t really know what the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness is like, anymore than they know what it’s like to sit on death-row.
When will it come, how will it be?
I’m stuffing in veg, drinking green tea,
Sitting in the sun, grabbing Vitamin D.
Listening to the wireless all night,
Sleepless, as if waiting for news of war.
Tell me, how long now, it's almost a bore,
Like some long expected catastrophe.
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Davy Jones
It was a shocked to hear about the death of Davy Jones last week. (7/2/12) A heart-attack, aged sixty six. It also felt a little creepy as I’d been thinking about him the night before, after not doing so for years. Remembering my childhood in the 1960s, he’d somehow floated into my mind – that ever cheerful boy’s face and sweet voice.
I realise that he was twenty two when aged eleven, I first saw him on TV and became obsessively in-love with him.
From the age of seven I had been a committed Beatles fan so I held out against the Monkees for as long as I could. In my last year at Primary School I went on a school cruise, and every morning in the Mediterranean, they woke us up in our sweltering cabin by playing loud music over loud-speakers. One record they chose was called, “Take A Giant Step Outside Your Mind,” sung in a soft nasal drawl by Micky Dolenz, the Monkee’s drummer.
I really liked it but didn’t admit that I liked them until I saw the TV show and instantly became besotted with Davy. Their famous song, Daydream Believer became the continuous sound track of my life. If we’d had those things you stick in your ears back then, I would no doubt have been annoying people on buses and trains by playing it at full volume.
Like the Beatles, the Monkees were all very different characters, but were all young men behaving like children. This offered us real children a sexed up version of the old Enid Blyton fantasy of children going off and having adventures in secret places where no adults were permitted. This captivating new version of adult hood was just like childhood, but without any of its pains or frustrations. They didn’t go to school, their only work was singing, they had endless time for play, they had sex, they had money. Perhaps because they were a produce of the swingingest years of the 1960s, 1966-68, they offered us children a highly optimistic view of the future.
Once I became a Davy fan, like millions of others, I started buying fan magazines I’d never bothered with previously. I once spent 3/6 on a magazine, way beyond my pocket-money, because it had a photo of him on the front, a rather bad one at that. “Sun, sand, surf and sex,” I read in one of the expensive black and white magazines showing his photo. My mother looked on it all with great disapproval, as if I was about to run away and join him.
But I didn’t want to put these photos on my bedroom wall. I didn’t want to elope with him that much, although that was there, what I wanted was to be him. On the cusp of adolescence, I could already see that my own sex lagged behind when it came to fun and freedom. Girls were already losing out, worrying about how boys would see them if they spoke up in class, appeared too clever or independent. There would be no taking giant steps for most of them. I wanted to be a young male just like Davy. He later made a record called, “I Wanna Be Free,” which he sang in a plaintive, yearning voice. From what I could see he was absolutely free, an almost grown up version of Just William, living out a perfect extended adolescence on Venice beach.
I gazed for the first time at grainy photos of wide roads lined with swaying palm trees. This confused and excited me. Brought up in a Staffordshire village, the nearest town being Wolverhampton, I couldn’t understand how L.A. a city, could look like a paradise island. The Monkees travelled those broad boulevards in open top sports-cars, shirt-less and covered in girls. They showed us a shiny new world of youth and beauty.
The summer of love came and went and I was too young to do anything other than catch its scent. By my mid-teens I had forgotten them. When I became a journalist in the late 1980s and spoke to Davy Jones on the phone, I thought he sounded nice, still chirpy, but dull.
About ten years ago when I was in Dublin, staying in the plush Shelbourne Hotel, I was told that the Monkees, who had reformed, were in the bar. I stared at my Bruchetta wondering whether to go and meet them, but what can you say when you meet your former idols? It’s tricky. Unless drunk you can’t easily tell people that they made the last part of your childhood special, gave you a psycical if not physical escape from home into a fantasy where you had an entirely different self-image and fulfilled all your ambitions. I did once say something like that to an author whose writing had made a big impact on me when I was very young. He had stared into his beer without any sign of interest.
Of course they would be nothing like the young men I remembered from puberty. They might be sporting Botox, be ravaged by drink or boring. What I was really thinking of course was that I would be the let down – what would they see now apart from a tired, sad, middle-aged woman?
I didn’t venture into the bar but as I walked past on my way out, I glanced inside. It was empty. They’d all left too, if they were ever really there and not some tribute band. I was relieved.
I didn’t think about them again until the night before Davy Jones died, and listening to the obituaries. His death was still a real shock, connected as he was to the fun in my early life. We don’t expect our childhood idols to die. They remain some how intimately connected with our own sense of well-being, a hang-over from the time when life itself seemed to depend on collecting their images and seeing them every Saturday evening.
Of course people can have heart attacks at any age, his death doesn’t mean that my generation are old and also about to peg out, but it points that way and spells out a message that it is still impossible for most of us to hear and believe – our childhood is not only but long gone.
It’s so easy for us optimistic children of the 1960s to forget this, and so hard to accept that if we haven’t driven up Hollywood Boulevard, in an open topped Cadillac, to our beach front mansion by now, we are probably never going to do it. Still being a day dream believer may amount to delusion.
I realise that he was twenty two when aged eleven, I first saw him on TV and became obsessively in-love with him.
From the age of seven I had been a committed Beatles fan so I held out against the Monkees for as long as I could. In my last year at Primary School I went on a school cruise, and every morning in the Mediterranean, they woke us up in our sweltering cabin by playing loud music over loud-speakers. One record they chose was called, “Take A Giant Step Outside Your Mind,” sung in a soft nasal drawl by Micky Dolenz, the Monkee’s drummer.
I really liked it but didn’t admit that I liked them until I saw the TV show and instantly became besotted with Davy. Their famous song, Daydream Believer became the continuous sound track of my life. If we’d had those things you stick in your ears back then, I would no doubt have been annoying people on buses and trains by playing it at full volume.
Like the Beatles, the Monkees were all very different characters, but were all young men behaving like children. This offered us real children a sexed up version of the old Enid Blyton fantasy of children going off and having adventures in secret places where no adults were permitted. This captivating new version of adult hood was just like childhood, but without any of its pains or frustrations. They didn’t go to school, their only work was singing, they had endless time for play, they had sex, they had money. Perhaps because they were a produce of the swingingest years of the 1960s, 1966-68, they offered us children a highly optimistic view of the future.
Once I became a Davy fan, like millions of others, I started buying fan magazines I’d never bothered with previously. I once spent 3/6 on a magazine, way beyond my pocket-money, because it had a photo of him on the front, a rather bad one at that. “Sun, sand, surf and sex,” I read in one of the expensive black and white magazines showing his photo. My mother looked on it all with great disapproval, as if I was about to run away and join him.
But I didn’t want to put these photos on my bedroom wall. I didn’t want to elope with him that much, although that was there, what I wanted was to be him. On the cusp of adolescence, I could already see that my own sex lagged behind when it came to fun and freedom. Girls were already losing out, worrying about how boys would see them if they spoke up in class, appeared too clever or independent. There would be no taking giant steps for most of them. I wanted to be a young male just like Davy. He later made a record called, “I Wanna Be Free,” which he sang in a plaintive, yearning voice. From what I could see he was absolutely free, an almost grown up version of Just William, living out a perfect extended adolescence on Venice beach.
I gazed for the first time at grainy photos of wide roads lined with swaying palm trees. This confused and excited me. Brought up in a Staffordshire village, the nearest town being Wolverhampton, I couldn’t understand how L.A. a city, could look like a paradise island. The Monkees travelled those broad boulevards in open top sports-cars, shirt-less and covered in girls. They showed us a shiny new world of youth and beauty.
The summer of love came and went and I was too young to do anything other than catch its scent. By my mid-teens I had forgotten them. When I became a journalist in the late 1980s and spoke to Davy Jones on the phone, I thought he sounded nice, still chirpy, but dull.
About ten years ago when I was in Dublin, staying in the plush Shelbourne Hotel, I was told that the Monkees, who had reformed, were in the bar. I stared at my Bruchetta wondering whether to go and meet them, but what can you say when you meet your former idols? It’s tricky. Unless drunk you can’t easily tell people that they made the last part of your childhood special, gave you a psycical if not physical escape from home into a fantasy where you had an entirely different self-image and fulfilled all your ambitions. I did once say something like that to an author whose writing had made a big impact on me when I was very young. He had stared into his beer without any sign of interest.
Of course they would be nothing like the young men I remembered from puberty. They might be sporting Botox, be ravaged by drink or boring. What I was really thinking of course was that I would be the let down – what would they see now apart from a tired, sad, middle-aged woman?
I didn’t venture into the bar but as I walked past on my way out, I glanced inside. It was empty. They’d all left too, if they were ever really there and not some tribute band. I was relieved.
I didn’t think about them again until the night before Davy Jones died, and listening to the obituaries. His death was still a real shock, connected as he was to the fun in my early life. We don’t expect our childhood idols to die. They remain some how intimately connected with our own sense of well-being, a hang-over from the time when life itself seemed to depend on collecting their images and seeing them every Saturday evening.
Of course people can have heart attacks at any age, his death doesn’t mean that my generation are old and also about to peg out, but it points that way and spells out a message that it is still impossible for most of us to hear and believe – our childhood is not only but long gone.
It’s so easy for us optimistic children of the 1960s to forget this, and so hard to accept that if we haven’t driven up Hollywood Boulevard, in an open topped Cadillac, to our beach front mansion by now, we are probably never going to do it. Still being a day dream believer may amount to delusion.
Monday, 5 March 2012
Stats about life and death
5/3/ 12
Had to go to the hospital for my 3 monthly results this morning. It's like facing the death sentence every few weeks, not nice at all. For a few days before I go I feel shredded, knowing that on a certain date my life could easily stop. There is also the thought that, if it's OK this time what will happen when one day it isn't OK, how will I cope with getting that news?
My CA125 which is a cancer marker in the blood was low as usual. "Your tumour doesn't show any signs with this test," said the doctor.
What was she on about - "my" tumour?? I thought I had given it away in May 2010. And if it doesn't show up in the test, may be it isn't there? Doctors seem to think that an ovarian tumour is a permanent guest which never goes away entirely. That is their view, I think mine has gone!
An examination showed that everything is still OK. The doctor said that 70 % of people have a recurrence within two years, but my two years is up in May, and if I get there, I can "relax a little."
"Perfect," she said, optimism again like the last time. I floated out of her surgery out of the clinic and across the road to the bus stop.
You always hear different things though. I remember Proff Gabra, head of the department, saying that I could start to relax in 2014.I wrote it in my diary.
They used to say that 37% of ovarian cancer sufferers survived after seven years, but that recently went up to 40%. But this doctor seemed to be working on a 30% figure. Or maybe the survival rate after seven years is an entirely other set of stats.
As soon as I got home I went out again for a swim. It feels almost prayerful to me, this pushing water, rhythm building, the feeling of being transported into another element, sunlight shining through the windows onto the blue and yellow tiles on the bottom of the pool, it's almost like being in church.
8/3/12
So it's three months until I reach a marker, where I might be able to say that statistics are now more on my side - just over eight weeks away. But does it count as the beginning, middle or end of May? In which part of the month will I be more safe than I am now? And after that - no, I cannot allow myself to relax, not for may be seven years. Suddenly this has become rather tough, a three month wait in hope, a sprint to the end, or just a long excruciating holding of breath.
The doctor was trying to be helpful, being so positive, "perfect," she said smiling as I was going out the door, but now my mind has gone into knots.
Swimming today I had gone into something like a calm trance, but able to think clearly. Not far from the end of the lane I was enjoying the lights you can see underwater when a begoogled, fat arsed woman swimmer, wet and round as an orca, swam straight into me, smash, then plunged away. I had committed the cardinal sin of going too slowly in the fast lane. Perhaps they should put a notice up on the wall, along with the "No diving," could be "No praying."
Had to go to the hospital for my 3 monthly results this morning. It's like facing the death sentence every few weeks, not nice at all. For a few days before I go I feel shredded, knowing that on a certain date my life could easily stop. There is also the thought that, if it's OK this time what will happen when one day it isn't OK, how will I cope with getting that news?
My CA125 which is a cancer marker in the blood was low as usual. "Your tumour doesn't show any signs with this test," said the doctor.
What was she on about - "my" tumour?? I thought I had given it away in May 2010. And if it doesn't show up in the test, may be it isn't there? Doctors seem to think that an ovarian tumour is a permanent guest which never goes away entirely. That is their view, I think mine has gone!
An examination showed that everything is still OK. The doctor said that 70 % of people have a recurrence within two years, but my two years is up in May, and if I get there, I can "relax a little."
"Perfect," she said, optimism again like the last time. I floated out of her surgery out of the clinic and across the road to the bus stop.
You always hear different things though. I remember Proff Gabra, head of the department, saying that I could start to relax in 2014.I wrote it in my diary.
They used to say that 37% of ovarian cancer sufferers survived after seven years, but that recently went up to 40%. But this doctor seemed to be working on a 30% figure. Or maybe the survival rate after seven years is an entirely other set of stats.
As soon as I got home I went out again for a swim. It feels almost prayerful to me, this pushing water, rhythm building, the feeling of being transported into another element, sunlight shining through the windows onto the blue and yellow tiles on the bottom of the pool, it's almost like being in church.
8/3/12
So it's three months until I reach a marker, where I might be able to say that statistics are now more on my side - just over eight weeks away. But does it count as the beginning, middle or end of May? In which part of the month will I be more safe than I am now? And after that - no, I cannot allow myself to relax, not for may be seven years. Suddenly this has become rather tough, a three month wait in hope, a sprint to the end, or just a long excruciating holding of breath.
The doctor was trying to be helpful, being so positive, "perfect," she said smiling as I was going out the door, but now my mind has gone into knots.
Swimming today I had gone into something like a calm trance, but able to think clearly. Not far from the end of the lane I was enjoying the lights you can see underwater when a begoogled, fat arsed woman swimmer, wet and round as an orca, swam straight into me, smash, then plunged away. I had committed the cardinal sin of going too slowly in the fast lane. Perhaps they should put a notice up on the wall, along with the "No diving," could be "No praying."
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Lucien Freud exhibition
22/2/12
I am still playing the role of cheerful little Miss La Creevy in Nicholas Nickleby, the good soul who makes herself of use to people instead of sleeping with them, and keeps her own counsel, because she has to. Not the way I envisaged myself in middle-age. To think I once saw myself growing up to be a kind of Eleonora Duse.
On Monday I went with two friends, Eve and Nigel, to the Freud exhibition at the NPG.
I was struck by how different the crowd were from the people at the Hockney the week before. Those coach loads of people, mainly well dressed women, were all the type who like art the way they like TV. It has to some how makes them feel good, like the Antiques Road Show and “Downton.” Nothing political or edgy please!
The people at the Freud were real art lovers, clued up, working very hard as they walked slowly round, and almost completely silent, as studious as if they had to face a viva-voce on the exhibition as soon as they’d seen it.
I think Eve and I were the only people talking and even at times laughing. Freud’s work is magnificent in many ways, masterly paint work, wonderful marks, but his perspective is sometimes odd, floors and beds shooting out towards the viewer and Eve noticed this about the female genitals.
“They are in the wrong place,” she exclaimed, pointing out that in correct perspective from where we were, they would have been entirely vaginated, but he had painted them exposed. They often looked like floating raw shell-fish.
What was the matter with the man? I wish I knew more detail about what happened with his mother.
In a recent TV documentary, his friend David Hockney contributed a terrible clichéd piece, all “ee-by-gum, ekky thump, ee were a right lad that one, very shy but he loved the ladies.”
There was no love of the ladies on show, unless ploughing and furrowing is love.
It was a great exhibition I must say, relating some of the story of his life, as he wished. He wanted his work to convey his feelings and worked hard to achieve that. One painting of himself and Lady Caroline Blackwood in Paris, is like a short story, a terrible tale of love turning to dust and ashes, or two spoilt people driving each other crazy.
As I walked around I amused myself by trying to imagine Freud, hawkish, ruthless, atomised, unyielding, totally preoccupied by his art, father of at least 15 children while insisting that he was “no family man,” as a woman. It wouldn’t work would it – no woman could ever take so much from life and be rewarded the way he was.
I am still playing the role of cheerful little Miss La Creevy in Nicholas Nickleby, the good soul who makes herself of use to people instead of sleeping with them, and keeps her own counsel, because she has to. Not the way I envisaged myself in middle-age. To think I once saw myself growing up to be a kind of Eleonora Duse.
On Monday I went with two friends, Eve and Nigel, to the Freud exhibition at the NPG.
I was struck by how different the crowd were from the people at the Hockney the week before. Those coach loads of people, mainly well dressed women, were all the type who like art the way they like TV. It has to some how makes them feel good, like the Antiques Road Show and “Downton.” Nothing political or edgy please!
The people at the Freud were real art lovers, clued up, working very hard as they walked slowly round, and almost completely silent, as studious as if they had to face a viva-voce on the exhibition as soon as they’d seen it.
I think Eve and I were the only people talking and even at times laughing. Freud’s work is magnificent in many ways, masterly paint work, wonderful marks, but his perspective is sometimes odd, floors and beds shooting out towards the viewer and Eve noticed this about the female genitals.
“They are in the wrong place,” she exclaimed, pointing out that in correct perspective from where we were, they would have been entirely vaginated, but he had painted them exposed. They often looked like floating raw shell-fish.
What was the matter with the man? I wish I knew more detail about what happened with his mother.
In a recent TV documentary, his friend David Hockney contributed a terrible clichéd piece, all “ee-by-gum, ekky thump, ee were a right lad that one, very shy but he loved the ladies.”
There was no love of the ladies on show, unless ploughing and furrowing is love.
It was a great exhibition I must say, relating some of the story of his life, as he wished. He wanted his work to convey his feelings and worked hard to achieve that. One painting of himself and Lady Caroline Blackwood in Paris, is like a short story, a terrible tale of love turning to dust and ashes, or two spoilt people driving each other crazy.
As I walked around I amused myself by trying to imagine Freud, hawkish, ruthless, atomised, unyielding, totally preoccupied by his art, father of at least 15 children while insisting that he was “no family man,” as a woman. It wouldn’t work would it – no woman could ever take so much from life and be rewarded the way he was.
Monday, 20 February 2012
Holiday
Ah, Quinquagesima at last!
I’ve just had that rare thing for a person on a low to non existent income – an exotic winter holiday, before Lent.
There I was basking in turquoise waters, along side brilliant yellow Emperor Angel fish, electric blue parrot fish and sleeping sea cucumbers. I felt fit. I felt brown. I almost felt slim but kept prodding myself in the new concave areas of my body that were appearing, looking for tumours like some relentless diver seeking for pearls.
Mass on Sunday and sometimes during the week. Holy Mass in my head and in my heart, but please God, no mass in my belly.
I’ve just had that rare thing for a person on a low to non existent income – an exotic winter holiday, before Lent.
There I was basking in turquoise waters, along side brilliant yellow Emperor Angel fish, electric blue parrot fish and sleeping sea cucumbers. I felt fit. I felt brown. I almost felt slim but kept prodding myself in the new concave areas of my body that were appearing, looking for tumours like some relentless diver seeking for pearls.
Mass on Sunday and sometimes during the week. Holy Mass in my head and in my heart, but please God, no mass in my belly.
Saturday, 18 February 2012
David Hockney Exhibition
Returned from the Maldives on Friday 10th Feb, a day late as our little sea-plane was felled by a storm, landed unexpected on an island inhabited by Club Med, and we missed our Sri Lankan flight back. It took ten hours to get there and 24 hours to get home.
After I’d put my case down on the bed-room floor and fed the cat I went to bed with cat, and slept for about three days. I got up to go to Mass, how’s that for virtue, and to discover that I was getting a horrible ear-infection. On Sunday night I took some Tramadol, powerful painkillers left over from my last time in hospital and went back to sleep again.
Yesterday, Wednesday 15th, got up long enough to visit the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. I was very drowsy but had no choice as I’d already got the tickets and my friend Gillian only had one day free before she had to fly back to her home in Monaco.
I was stunned by the queues outside. Every elderly lady radio 4 listener and her mother was there, plus a few game old buffers with sticks.
There were three lines of well dressed folk snaking back past the statue of Sir Joshua to the main road. I ignored them as I had been told on the phone to collect my tickets from the Friends' Desk. I waited for Gillian in the redoubtable “Friend's Room” where there are not enough seats and no magazines these days, and the coffee costs nearly £5 a cup.
She arrived on time but went off to the loo and didn’t come back for twenty minutes because of the crowd there. At 12 noon, the appointed hour, we went to collect the tickets and discovered that we had to join one of the queues outside before they would hand them over. Only people with a special bar-code got them right away with out any torture. Instead of lounging about we should have been out there – queuing for dear life.
I had already given my coat to the cloak-room, but when I went to retrieve it I saw there was another great long shuffling line, like something from Soviet Russia so I stood outside without it. As it started to rain, everyone was grumbling at the absurdity of standing there when we had tickets, but remained amiable about it, in that great British way.
We got in to see the paintings at about 12.30. As I was pushed and jostled into the first great gallery, I heard a young girl say that she’d been to an exhibition at Buckingham Palace Gallery recently and cried because of the crowds. I wonder if she managed to hold up in this one. I also heard a posh elderly lady say she wasn’t sure what part of the country the paintings described, but she thought it might be Yorkshire. She made it sound as exotic and unlikely as a remote region of Burma.
The Leonardo was like a five mile hike before breakfast and this was even more strenuous, but was worth it. There was so much variety in the work despite the common theme, and as we made our way through the large rooms, it became like a long walk in the woods, albeit very crowded ones.
I liked the oil paintings with their wild, rich purples and reds and the creamy yellows. As a painter Hockney is fearless, a very masculine characteristic. He is far more genuinely bold than most people, certainly most amateur painters. I heard some of those alpha-male Sunday painters grumbling about his colours as they pottered around. And because Hockney is accessible, there was a certain jealousy in their voices.
Despite his wild bursts of Mediterranean colour he somehow evoked England in all its sumptuous seasons, with May Blossom foaming like beer in hot summer scenes, and cow parsley shivering like an aerosol mist in others.
I wasn't so interested in the flat iPod paintings or the final giant painting. All that astonishing effort, and there are people who really think it is unseemly for a man of his age to still be painting so avidly, did not lead up to one great masterpiece. Most of the smaller works were just very, very good. That should be enough, at least compared to what we normally see from contemporary celebrity artists.
Not many people were looking at his watercolours which were quite different and much less ferocious than the oils. They were highly competent without being at all showy. I admired his charcoal drawings too. Almost every line was individual and distinctive, the mark of a true artist.
We were too fatigued to fight our way into the film about the paintings in progress, and the paintings for the "Sermon on the Mount" were disappointing, resembling Picasso's tiresome, pointless homage to other artists.
After two hours we got out and struggled into the restaurant. I knew this was a risk but hadn’t the energy to get any further. They sat us in an alcove on hard round stools, and we waited for an hour between soup and main course. The kitchen was clearly overwhelmed by the numbers. Same as the loos. I was told about a secret disabled loo and went off to find it, but able bodied men were using it, while people in wheel-chairs were waiting. It had an atmosphere of that ship going down, with the strongest pushing others out of the way.
When we came out again the crowds were still coming. It reminded me of a royal lying in state. Perhaps Hockney is the last great representational artist we have, the end of a long line and we were all paying tribute to an art form which is dead. Some historian of the future will have to work it out.
After I’d put my case down on the bed-room floor and fed the cat I went to bed with cat, and slept for about three days. I got up to go to Mass, how’s that for virtue, and to discover that I was getting a horrible ear-infection. On Sunday night I took some Tramadol, powerful painkillers left over from my last time in hospital and went back to sleep again.
Yesterday, Wednesday 15th, got up long enough to visit the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. I was very drowsy but had no choice as I’d already got the tickets and my friend Gillian only had one day free before she had to fly back to her home in Monaco.
I was stunned by the queues outside. Every elderly lady radio 4 listener and her mother was there, plus a few game old buffers with sticks.
There were three lines of well dressed folk snaking back past the statue of Sir Joshua to the main road. I ignored them as I had been told on the phone to collect my tickets from the Friends' Desk. I waited for Gillian in the redoubtable “Friend's Room” where there are not enough seats and no magazines these days, and the coffee costs nearly £5 a cup.
She arrived on time but went off to the loo and didn’t come back for twenty minutes because of the crowd there. At 12 noon, the appointed hour, we went to collect the tickets and discovered that we had to join one of the queues outside before they would hand them over. Only people with a special bar-code got them right away with out any torture. Instead of lounging about we should have been out there – queuing for dear life.
I had already given my coat to the cloak-room, but when I went to retrieve it I saw there was another great long shuffling line, like something from Soviet Russia so I stood outside without it. As it started to rain, everyone was grumbling at the absurdity of standing there when we had tickets, but remained amiable about it, in that great British way.
We got in to see the paintings at about 12.30. As I was pushed and jostled into the first great gallery, I heard a young girl say that she’d been to an exhibition at Buckingham Palace Gallery recently and cried because of the crowds. I wonder if she managed to hold up in this one. I also heard a posh elderly lady say she wasn’t sure what part of the country the paintings described, but she thought it might be Yorkshire. She made it sound as exotic and unlikely as a remote region of Burma.
The Leonardo was like a five mile hike before breakfast and this was even more strenuous, but was worth it. There was so much variety in the work despite the common theme, and as we made our way through the large rooms, it became like a long walk in the woods, albeit very crowded ones.
I liked the oil paintings with their wild, rich purples and reds and the creamy yellows. As a painter Hockney is fearless, a very masculine characteristic. He is far more genuinely bold than most people, certainly most amateur painters. I heard some of those alpha-male Sunday painters grumbling about his colours as they pottered around. And because Hockney is accessible, there was a certain jealousy in their voices.
Despite his wild bursts of Mediterranean colour he somehow evoked England in all its sumptuous seasons, with May Blossom foaming like beer in hot summer scenes, and cow parsley shivering like an aerosol mist in others.
I wasn't so interested in the flat iPod paintings or the final giant painting. All that astonishing effort, and there are people who really think it is unseemly for a man of his age to still be painting so avidly, did not lead up to one great masterpiece. Most of the smaller works were just very, very good. That should be enough, at least compared to what we normally see from contemporary celebrity artists.
Not many people were looking at his watercolours which were quite different and much less ferocious than the oils. They were highly competent without being at all showy. I admired his charcoal drawings too. Almost every line was individual and distinctive, the mark of a true artist.
We were too fatigued to fight our way into the film about the paintings in progress, and the paintings for the "Sermon on the Mount" were disappointing, resembling Picasso's tiresome, pointless homage to other artists.
After two hours we got out and struggled into the restaurant. I knew this was a risk but hadn’t the energy to get any further. They sat us in an alcove on hard round stools, and we waited for an hour between soup and main course. The kitchen was clearly overwhelmed by the numbers. Same as the loos. I was told about a secret disabled loo and went off to find it, but able bodied men were using it, while people in wheel-chairs were waiting. It had an atmosphere of that ship going down, with the strongest pushing others out of the way.
When we came out again the crowds were still coming. It reminded me of a royal lying in state. Perhaps Hockney is the last great representational artist we have, the end of a long line and we were all paying tribute to an art form which is dead. Some historian of the future will have to work it out.
Monday, 16 January 2012
Nail it down. Reflections on the gloomiest day
16/1/12 (The gloomiest day of the year)
Fifty years ago England was a different place; there were penalties, there was shame and social oblique. In those dark and distant times, alive in the memory of only a few, TV pundit and panel game star Isabel Lady Barnett committed suicide after being caught stealing a tin of fish from her local shop. One Proff Joad, a popular broadcaster lost his whole career, popular and academic, after being caught without a ticket on the underground.
The accusation of theft no longer brings with it great shame, in fact it’s the norm. Last Sunday our church held its annual charity auction of our advent calendar. This was made of paintings done by local artists, a somewhat truncated affair this time as four of the paintings had been stolen.
Last year we had all the lead from the roof lifted. Outside the church there is a mournful notice pinned to a tree showing a drawing of a stolen tortoise. It joins the numerous notices lining our streets showing pet cats, usually ones with good thick coats, eager looking dogs, and fashionably lop eared rabbits, all vanished from their gardens into oblivion. Coarse fish are stolen from our rivers, and I’ve just heard news about the grave of a poodle being smashed apart as there was a rumour that it had been buried in an expensive collar!
London is now more than ever a place of strangers and thieves but this nonchalant attitude towards honesty seems to be nation wide.
It seems that teenagers regularly shop-lift and their parents now regard it as a bit of a lark. Or perhaps they are at it themselves. Some £4.4 billion worth of goods was stolen from British shops last year, and prosecutions for shoplifting are rising.
Something called the “Global Retail Theft Barometer” estimates that British shop-keepers losses add £70 to the bill for every man, woman and child in the country, compared to £65 in France and £50 in Germany.
In picturesque, law-abiding Henley, where many people go to escape from the crime in the Great Wen, a wealthy TV chef has just been nabbed for stealing from Tesco’s self-service checkout machines. Fishermen on our coasts can no longer leave their lobster pots on the harbour or they will be snatched, even if empty. A friend of mine in rural Staffordshire, a former farmer, who has advanced cancer managed to chop some wood for his stove last week. It took him a lot of effort but he relished any chance to do physical work. When he went to collect the logs they’d gone. One of his neighbours did it, he could tell by the tracks of his vehicle in the mud.
If you want to keep it, nail it down, keep it in doors, put up CCTV and only take your dog to the park accompanied by heavies.
This is England; a soft touch, a place of kind prisons, un-paid fines. Our institutions are racked with cupidity and peculation at every level, and externally we are being overwhelmed by barbarians whose custom it is to steal. I once used to think that the “barbarians” must be allowed to come, but now they’ve arrived life is somehow degraded for everyone.
Fifty years ago England was a different place; there were penalties, there was shame and social oblique. In those dark and distant times, alive in the memory of only a few, TV pundit and panel game star Isabel Lady Barnett committed suicide after being caught stealing a tin of fish from her local shop. One Proff Joad, a popular broadcaster lost his whole career, popular and academic, after being caught without a ticket on the underground.
The accusation of theft no longer brings with it great shame, in fact it’s the norm. Last Sunday our church held its annual charity auction of our advent calendar. This was made of paintings done by local artists, a somewhat truncated affair this time as four of the paintings had been stolen.
Last year we had all the lead from the roof lifted. Outside the church there is a mournful notice pinned to a tree showing a drawing of a stolen tortoise. It joins the numerous notices lining our streets showing pet cats, usually ones with good thick coats, eager looking dogs, and fashionably lop eared rabbits, all vanished from their gardens into oblivion. Coarse fish are stolen from our rivers, and I’ve just heard news about the grave of a poodle being smashed apart as there was a rumour that it had been buried in an expensive collar!
London is now more than ever a place of strangers and thieves but this nonchalant attitude towards honesty seems to be nation wide.
It seems that teenagers regularly shop-lift and their parents now regard it as a bit of a lark. Or perhaps they are at it themselves. Some £4.4 billion worth of goods was stolen from British shops last year, and prosecutions for shoplifting are rising.
Something called the “Global Retail Theft Barometer” estimates that British shop-keepers losses add £70 to the bill for every man, woman and child in the country, compared to £65 in France and £50 in Germany.
In picturesque, law-abiding Henley, where many people go to escape from the crime in the Great Wen, a wealthy TV chef has just been nabbed for stealing from Tesco’s self-service checkout machines. Fishermen on our coasts can no longer leave their lobster pots on the harbour or they will be snatched, even if empty. A friend of mine in rural Staffordshire, a former farmer, who has advanced cancer managed to chop some wood for his stove last week. It took him a lot of effort but he relished any chance to do physical work. When he went to collect the logs they’d gone. One of his neighbours did it, he could tell by the tracks of his vehicle in the mud.
If you want to keep it, nail it down, keep it in doors, put up CCTV and only take your dog to the park accompanied by heavies.
This is England; a soft touch, a place of kind prisons, un-paid fines. Our institutions are racked with cupidity and peculation at every level, and externally we are being overwhelmed by barbarians whose custom it is to steal. I once used to think that the “barbarians” must be allowed to come, but now they’ve arrived life is somehow degraded for everyone.
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