Student Demonstration Time

Since my last posting we have been on our travels with trips to Oxford and to London. Our past few visits to Oxford have been during university vacations and we have been able to stay in one of the colleges. This isn’t necessarily a budget option but it does place you in the heart of the city and gives you an experience of what makes the place unique. It is great to have access to the ancient buildings, to look out onto a well trimmed quad (as in the photograph of Jesus College taken earlier this year) and to have breakfast in the grand surroundings of a college dining room. On this visit, however, we were obliged to stay in a fairly grotty Travelodge but we did get to experience the bustle of the city in term time.

On the trip to London we were carrying a large bass guitar for our son as well as our luggage so we decided to take taxi. However, our arrival coincided with a student demonstration against increased university fees. We didn’t actually see any demonstrators but our taxi kept coming up against road closures. The driver did his best to get us through and, with his crazy driving style, to impersonate scenes in The Italian Job. We ran up a bill of £30 only to end up one tube stop away from where we started. We ended up on the underground after all while the taxi driver made his way home to Essex.

Having met a cockney geezer taxi driver, the following day we had an encounter with some other interesting characters. A group of teenage girls boarded the bus we were traveling on towards Clapham and it became clear very quickly that they were on the way home from a shoplifting spree on the King’s Road in Chelsea. They didn’t care who overheard them as they discussed their techniques for distracting shop staff and negotiated the sale of their loot on mobile phones; the whole thing was both fascinating and appalling.

As a footnote, when they left the bus they were followed by a policeman.

Picture Palaces.

When I was growing up in Manchester, cinemas still played an important part in people’s lives. There would be occasional trips to the big venues in the city centre but, more regularly, there were visits to the local picture houses: The Wycliffe on Princess Road in Moss Side, The Imperial at Brooks Bar or The York in Hulme.( I have no idea how a cinema came to called The Wycliffe, by the way!). Films would do the rounds and these local flea pits would show them long after they had been seen by town centre audiences. At times old films would be given an airing; I remember making my way to see Lord of the Flies at The Temple (another great name) in Cheetham Hill years after the film’s release.

There was a cinema in Rusholme which had a serving hatch at the back selling hot patties from the West Indian café next door. In the weeks before it closed down some movie buff on the staff arranged to dig through the old reels and have festival of horror films. What you got to see was pot luck; I don’t remember any publicity or who told us what was happening – we just turned up, paid our one and six and watched Harryhausen monsters with a strong background smell of curry. Nobody asked our ages or bothered about ratings.

Last week we thought we might go to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The film is hugely successful, it has just been released and we have several multi screen complexes nearby so we naively assumed we would be able to pick our time and place. No such luck! Le Carre had vanished and all that was available was an array of moronic nonsense. I don’t even want to start listing the films in case I get carried away or fall foul of libel laws. Suffice to say that Mark Kermode wouldn’t have had a good word to say about any of them. The only venue we could find showing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was nearly thirty miles away with a start time of 21:30. Ironically it was in a Manchester suburb.

Clearly, if you are not quick off the mark you miss your chance and have wait for the DVD or for the film to be on TV the Christmas after next. The days of films ‘doing the rounds’ are clearly long gone. Or perhaps we just happen to live in a bit of a cultural desert.

Images from the Venice Biennale

Images from the Venice Biennale

The publicity surrounding the opening of the Turner prize exhibition in Gateshead has reminded me of some of the exhibits I saw at the Venice Biennale. I have been thinking about contemporary conceptual art and, more generally, about my responses and expectations when visiting exhibitions and galleries. Sometimes I’m delighted and inspired, sometimes I’m given food for thought; at other times I think: ‘so what?’ and, sadly, sometimes I think: ‘that was just a waste of time.’

I get irritated when artists seem hell bent on ‘shaking me out of my complacency’ or, as they love to say: ‘challenging preconceptions’. The room with plasticine stuck on the wall by visitors is case in point: it was ugly, taught me nothing and seemed to display no evidence of skill or talent on the part of the artist.

The animated heads and the human candle were more interesting and displayed more evidence of skill than many exhibits that I saw. The UK pavilion allowed visitors to take an uncomfortable trip through a dusty labyrinth; this installation was more of an exercise in construction than art. The artist’s idea was more important than his skill and the fact that wordy explanations need to accompany the work doesn’t help: visual art should have a visual impact that works on its own.

George Shaw’s entry for the Turner prize at least seems to be skilfully painted but the images are grim; why does it all have to be so heavy and miserable? I don’t need to travel to Gateshead to see paintings of depressing council estates; I can see the real thing much closer to home.

"I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad:and to travel for it too!"

Or perhaps a better line would be:

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

However, to end on a positive note, here’s an image from the Biennale that I thought was amazing. It is a tapestry based on a photograph of the crowd at a concert and I would certainly travel a long way to take another look at it.

A Visit to Lichfield

On Wednesday, despite heavy rain, we set off to visit Lichfield, one of my favourite places within striking distance of where we live. The weather seemed to change as we arrived and we were able to spend a pleasant afternoon strolling around the shops and the cathedral.

I always make a point of looking at the inscription placed on one of the houses close to the cathedral commemorating the death of Lord Brooke during the English Civil War. He must have thought he was well out of harm’s way but, somehow, a shot fired from the battlements of the great steeple struck him in the forehead and killed him. It was quite a shot given the distance and the primitive nature of the muskets used at the time and, I suppose, it was the royalists who eventually erected the inscription to celebrate the marksman rather than mourn the victim.

What strikes me is the wording; Mr Dyott had placed himself on the battlements to ‘annoy the besiegers’. This makes it sound like he was making rude gestures or playing loud music to keep them awake. As for Lord Brooke, I don’t think his last words, if he had been able to deliver them, would have been: “Oh, that’s a bit annoying! How rude!”

The stained glass has been removed from behind the altar in the cathedral for renovation. The clear glass, which is in place temporarily, gives the interior a strange brightness which seems all wrong. It also looks as if some extra lucky double glazing salesman has pulled off the biggest con of his career: “Nobody has coloured glass these days. I could give this place a lovely modern look!”

Now that would be annoying!

Having helped bolster the economy of Lichfield (we bought some poop scoop bags from Wilkinsons) we made our way home – in the rain!

A Good Read

I picked up a copy of Juliet Barker’s Agincourt in a charity shop and within days I ordered a copy of Conquest from Amazon. Both books succeed in being both scholarly and readable. The level of detail is fascinating; there is a particular focus on money and finance which is really illuminating for someone who, like me, has obtained most of their knowledge of this period of history from Shakespeare’s plays.

Characters emerge as they would from the pages of fiction. Henry V was an amazing organizer with real talent for logistics and, despite Barker’s objective, and unemotional presentation, Joan of Arc emerges as a very sad individual.

At first Joan appears to be like some fifteenth century X-Factor contestant: ambitious, deluded and full of a sense of entitlement (with the Dauphin in the role of Simon Cowell!). However, I found myself really moved by the simple accounts of her initial recantation in the face of the scaffold and of her eventual death; she just seemed like a very young girl in a world of cynical and manipulative men.

Sticking my neck out

The chill in the air on the past two mornings has made me think that it is time to dig bring a warmer duvet down from the loft and dig out the cold weather dog walking gear. As I feel the first hint of chill around the throat, I think, as I often think at this time of year, that it is a great shame that the cravat has fallen out of fashion as an item of casual wear.

Actually, they were probably never really in fashion apart from being favoured by the well heeled in the 1950s when they went into a self conscious relaxed mode at the golf club or some similar watering hole. (I’m thinking of Kenneth More playing Douglas Bader at this point). It is not an image I would ever want to cultivate – whatever the practical benefits might be.

Last year my wife visited a lady who sells Japanese silk and kimonos. She brought back several off-cuts of fine fabric, one of which I appropriated to use as an extra layer on cold mornings. Yes, I used it as a cravat. But I wore it like a guilty secret: tucked in and hidden away. I made sure that my jacket was zipped up to cover my shame.

The benefits were excellent; a piece of silk covering the chest really does keep you warm. It is comfortable and practical; it avoids the bulk of a woolen scarf. I reflected that my coyness over this accessory was pure vanity and that I should seek out a proper, more masculine alternative which I could wear with pride i.e. a proper cravat.

One look at the image of Nicholas Parsons shown here was enough to persuade me otherwise. I’m just not ready to enter the world of the 1950s knitting pattern.

I must check whether my woolen scarves are hand wash only!

A View of Venice

The sight of a gigantic cruise liner crossing the end of one of Venice’s narrow canals as it makes its way along St Marks Basin towards the Guidecca Canal is really amazing. People bustling between the beautiful buildings of the city will stop and gaze as a tower block on the move glides by.

I don’t suppose I should find it surprising that a city which is built in a lagoon and which grew on the back of seafaring and trade should play host to these floating pleasure palaces but, somehow, they seem incongruous, almost a threat to the delicate buildings which they seem to dwarf.

The wash of a liner may not actually sweep away the palaces which it passes but one real downside to this spectacular display is that these vessels disgorge up to two thousand passengers at the port at the western end of the city; two thousand people who make their way to St Mark’s Square and then proceed to lose their individual identities in the crowds or, even worse, the queues at the tourist attractions.

I have to confess to being guilty of committing the cardinal sin of making a one day visit to Venice not just once but three times. On the last of these visits, seeing the lived-in buildings on Guidecca made me determined that we should give Venice the time it deserved and not just treat it like the world’s most elaborate theme park. It took a few years to get around to fulfilling this ambition but this September we hired an apartment and spent a week exploring and discovering this unique city.

We had a great week and, in what may be some kind of record, we didn’t visit Saint Mark’s Basilica or the Doge’s palace and we didn’t have one of the famous gelati!