Mistakes and Miscalculations

David Hockney, Sonny Rollins, James Burrows, Duane Michals, J.H. Prynne, Edward Lucie-Smith, Maureen Duffy, Carol Rumens, Desmond Morris, Andy Kershaw, Roy Hattersley, Clive Davis, Garfield Sobers, Kevin Keegan, Bill Oddie, Raoul Vaneigem, Phyllida Law, Jay Maisel, Dolly Parton, Yayoi Kusama... [1]

Recently, there has been something of a pile-up of significant "passings", as people seem to like to refer to death and dying these days. I suppose it's a handy way of fudging whether you think people have "passed" like a storm, or were "passing through" to a further stage of existence like some cosmic traveller. Or perhaps when people say the dead have "passed", they're thinking of life as some sort of exam? Which, of course, many religions do. None of the above have "failed", however, at least as far as I know. Although it's true that some religions do believe in resits. 

Obviously, that particular roll call is mostly meaningful to those of us who are now entering our own latter decades. Brits in particular: who but us remembers Zoo Time or The Goodies? I'm sure there must be an equivalent list for, say, 70-plus Hungarians. As you would expect, the people now vanishing from the scene are the ones who gave the years between the 1950s and 80s their particular flavour, and who presided as senior figures over the succeeding decades. Most of their lives will already have become a well-rounded story: biographies will have been written, and obituaries would have been on file, waiting. You might even have been surprised to learn that some of them were still alive in 2026.

The life stories of important and influential people have an obvious intrinsic interest. But we all have a story, just as we all have "ancestors" going way back to wherever and whenever the story of humanity began. Like the lives of those countless nameless ancestors, however, the vast majority of our stories will go untold. Which is just as well: unless there really is some improbably vast divine data-centre tracking and recording an inventory of our every move, to be assessed on some future Day of Judgement, what on earth would be the point? But, as old age creeps up on you, and you look back over what turns out to have been your "life" – how did that happen? – something of the shape of your own story emerges, and it becomes clearer where the main inflection points were. Good choices, bad choices, happy and less happy accidents... All lives have a shape, some more bent and twisted than others, but all are nonetheless leading in one direction, like those aerial shots of wiggly animal tracks converging on a waterhole in the savannah. 

As for my own emerging story – like most of us, I expect – I made some crucial choices in my younger years, some of which were essentially mistakes. By "mistake", I don't mean some error I stumbled into; I mean a decision taken in good faith that turned out rather differently to what I had intended. Perhaps "miscalculation" would be a better word. Unlike a straightforward mistake, an important miscalculation, just as much as a good decision, needs to have been given a suitable degree of forethought and preparation. In that cartoon scenario of a guy sawing off the branch he is sitting on, or the one in which he has painted himself into a corner, I can well imagine that he has given rather more thought to the right saw or paint for the job than to the nature and outcome of the job itself.

So, setting aside some genuine mistakes such as a couple of ill-advised and ill-fated late-teen "romantic" entanglements  – I'm hardly the first to fall foul of those – my own first real miscalculation, the one that put the first interesting kink in my trail through life, was twofold.

My secondary-school teachers were in little doubt that I was a pretty good linguist, and that I should double down on that at university. To the extent that my little "prize", bought by my English teacher for having the top exam result in English that year, was a compact edition of one of Thomas Mann's short stories: in German (hint, hint...). But, out of an idiotic combination of contrarianism and a suspicion that to pursue languages at university would involve actual work and thus cramp my style, I settled on English as the next best thing to Advanced Hedonism Studies, which wasn't on offer in those days. So that was Miscalculation One, Part 1.

Part 2 was that, having achieved a full hand of top grades in my A-level exams, I allowed myself to be persuaded into applying to Oxford, and in particular to Balliol College, which to me then was just another one of those weird "Oxbridge" names, but, as it turned out, is actually one of Britain's elite springboards for notable political and academic careers. Who knew?

Now, I had already reluctantly conceded that choosing art school rather than university might be a silly idea, but I had an instinctive inverted-snob's aversion to Oxbridge, at least as portrayed in the popular imagination. Besides, I had already made my applications to a range of universities with a reputation for English, so I now had an assured place at Bristol University, and my escape from small-town life was guaranteed.

But... By 1972, I had begun to imagine that I might be a Special Case (I know... Alarm!), an impression that is all too easily gained in a small school in a small town where the only competition is essentially your own little circle of friends and antagonists. It didn't help that getting top grades in my exams had cost me comparatively little effort. As one of my geography teachers warned in his final report, "He has the ability to make much out of little, but I would reinforce the comments about detail and width of reading". In other words, "FFS do some actual work, you arrogant little prick, or you may come to regret it!" But, as it seemed to me then, I was good with languages, a decent writer and artist, and an insightful interpreter of great literature. I mean, come on, was this boy on track for an exceptional life, or what? So in the end I allowed myself to be talked into it. Oh, go on then...WTF... Why not give Oxford entrance a go, if the place is all it's cracked up to be?

I think we may have miscalculated here, old friend... 

However, getting into Oxford is one thing, being there quite another. Nothing pricks the bubble of inflated self-esteem quite like encountering genuinely brilliant minds, truly dedicated scholars, and the ruthlessly ambitious or, worst of all, those intimidatingly exceptional types who combine at least two of these attributes, often seasoned with a certain arrogance. In a college like Balliol these alien beings are surprisingly thick on the ground, and you realise quite quickly that there is a difference not just of degree but of kind between a certain ease in the exam room backed up by a good line in improvisatory self-promotion – my own "superpowers" – and an A++ mind possessed by someone who, at age 18, is already planning ahead for a stellar career among the movers and shakers in their chosen field.

That rude awakening is the core university experience for most small-town undergraduates anywhere, of course. But it is rather ruder at certain Oxbridge colleges, and, in the 1960s and 70s at least, was a destabilising experience for many of those who found themselves immersed in it, not least those of us from families with no prior experience of university, never mind of Oxbridge with its baffling vocabulary and mad college traditions. [2]

Even so, was this a mistake or a miscalculation? After all, I did have a great time – in those days Hedonism Studies was an acknowledged if unofficial subsidiary, on a par with sport and theatre – and I made some lifelong friends, not least the woman I have shared my life with for fifty years. If I had not blown the second of my two "vivas" – just one is more typical – I would have landed a first-class degree. Not quite the customary "much out of little", but so very close... So wasn't that "mission accomplished"? Yes, of course it was; but, on the other hand, wouldn't much the same have happened at any other university? Perhaps a more congenial alma mater with less extreme Tiger Mom expectations and fewer Brainiac aliens to contend with?

They walk among us...

Beyond a certain salutary humbling, though, there was the Oxford Way. In those days – things have changed for the better since, I believe – the famous Oxbridge college-based tutorial system was a perfect disguise for some truly terrible teaching and "pastoral" neglect. You generally only hear about the good, life-changing aspects of this set-up. In my own college, for example, many who studied, say, PPE (no, not "personal protective equipment", but "philosophy, politics, and economics") admired their tutors, and some even made lifelong two-way connections with them. But in my experience, and in that of many others, that was very far from the case.

The Oxford Way was a "sink or swim" arrangement, ostensibly because we were assumed to be capable of working unsupervised: a case, I suppose, of "Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown" (Swallows and Amazons). But this chilly neglect of even quite vulnerable and disorientated undergraduates, some of whom did indeed sink, was mainly intended to free as much time as possible for the academic staff to get on with their "real" work, whatever that was: finding cures for deadly and debilitating diseases, say, or editing literary texts, or in some cases not doing terribly much at all.

A humanities undergraduate usually had two tutorial commitments in each week of three very short eight-week terms, in which they would read out an essay to their tutor, along with one or two others of their tutorial group. In the case of many – most? – the need to produce two essays a week with unlimited, unstructured, unsupervised time in between – inevitably taken up with the desire and pursuit of whatever actually turned you on, whether it was friends or music or rowing or theatre or journalism or any one of a hundred ways of evading actual study – was a contradictory combination of pressure and leisure that resulted in a permanent "essay crisis" mode. That is, apart from the library-bound scholarly types who, weirdly, happened to be turned on by their actual degree subject. But, unlike the bracing intellectual jousts of legend, in my experience these weekly all-night lash-ups were generally received with a few perfunctory comments from a tutor who might not even have taken the trouble to, ah, refresh their acquaintance with the particular author's works you had chosen to discuss. And there was definitely no sherry on offer. It was all a bit of a let-down after the exciting intellectual awakenings of the school sixth form.

Worst of all, for English students Anglo-Saxon was compulsory in the first year. Damn, actual work after all! But were any language lessons on offer? Maybe an interactive audio-visual course linked to a novice-friendly textbook of the sort we had become accustomed to at school? Not a chance! You simply had to buy or borrow a copy of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer and grind and groan your way through it: a truly grim task to impose on anyone unfamiliar with the tables of declensions and conjugations of an inflected language (the requirement for competence in Latin as an entrance requirement had been dropped in 1960).

"Bird"

singular: se fugol, þone fugol, þæs fugles, þæm fugle

   plural: þā fuglas, þā fuglas, þāra fugla, þæm fuglum... 

So there was that. But there was also the tenor of the times, man. For a decade or two after the War, young working and lower-middle class students who were finally able to gain places at university had seen it as an exciting opportunity for social mobility. Regional accents and attitudes were dropped as soon as a stripy college scarf was wrapped around a fresher's neck. Most of our schoolteachers were of that pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed generation – well, the men, anyway – and did not feel like idiots being expected to own and wear an academic gown on formal school occasions. But by the 1970s a lot of us had actually taken on board the anti-establishment, anti-careerist rhetoric of the late-60s counterculture. We rejoiced in our regional accents. We bought no college-branded merch, wore no jackets and ties, grew our hair long and adopted the scruffy jeans-and-dressing-up-box fashions of students everywhere. Finding ourselves standing on a springboard for notable political and academic careers like Balliol, we decided to jump up and down on it instead, like delinquent teens at the swimming pool. Or at least some of us did. We were not a popular generation, and quickly forgotten as an aberration by the university.

Oxford Examination Schools Occupation 1973

(from "Fight For A CSU!" by Fiona Thompson)

Oxford Indian Institute Occupation 1974

In the end, though, whether some life-altering choice you have made is a mistake or a benign miscalculation comes down to the unpredictability of what Brian Eno has called "scenius":

So I have this idea of ‘scenius’. Genius is the brilliance of an individual. Scenius is the fertility of a whole scene of people. So much of art history doesn’t acknowledge that at all. You know, it’s like: Picasso, Kandinsky, Rembrandt, these great individuals. But look at the world that they were in. There were a lot of other great individuals around them, and there were other people who don’t even get called artists, who facilitated. Curators, dealers, critics, people who ran salons, girlfriends, mistresses, wives, children.

At Oxford and Cambridge, divided into many small, self-contained colleges, each with its own history, traditions, and ethos, I think it's probably much more difficult to find a "scene" in which you might thrive than in a more typical university, especially if you have landed in a college that is so uncongenial that you're forced to go looking elsewhere for friends and entertainment. In my time there wasn't even a central Students Union where the like-minded could congregate, the famous Oxford Union being a members-only debating society which most 70s students shunned on principle. 

As fate would have it, though, a good many such peripatetic misfits gravitated to my own college, then headed by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill and famously liberal (apparently it was known as the Hotel Balliol in the stricter colleges, with their "gated" hours and severe disapproval of overnight "guests"). Consequently, I arrived to find there was already a lively scene happening, primarily political and aggressively left-wing. Although it wasn't exactly the sort of scene I had anticipated it was congenial, convenient, and exciting, so I was happy to play a walk-on role in the more histrionic aspects of student politics with its occupations and demonstrations, and as a provider of late-night entertainment and emergency accommodation for the more hedonistically-inclined comrades, square pegs, and oddballs. [3]

In the end, for me, Oxford-plus-English was a "miscalculation" that turned out pretty well, and not the radical mistake it could easily have been. I made little impression there beyond my immediate circle of new friends and antagonists – who does? – but, as Eno points out, the significant beneficiaries of "scenius" are dependent on the unacknowledged participants who do the unglamorous grunt work. Not everybody is prepared to creep around central Oxford in the dark, dodging the police while flyposting with a carrier bag full of wallpaper paste, or to spend the entire night laying-up and sometimes knocking out cover illustrations for the weekly left-wing 'zine, Oxford Strumpet. I was, and it was fun just to feel part of something new and happening, as we used to say.

So, if you, too, had a small part in some "scene" somewhere, some time, you are probably also anticipating with mixed feelings the appearance, some day, of a few familiar names in a roll call of recently-deceased members of the great, the good, and the notorious, like the one above. Alas, poor So-and-So! I knew him / her / them, Horatio! There won't be any point in looking for your own name in the index of any biographies, though: no scene is ever about the also-rans, helpmeets, and temporary expedient friends. But I'm pretty sure that we are the ones who got the most fun out of it.

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –

Not so when I have danced for an hour:

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and

sit in corners alone, and glower.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Scene fragment reconvened, 2004

1. I started this post early in the summer, and the list just keeps getting longer. I suppose it was never going to get shorter, was it? "Hey, I'm back! Just kidding...". I must try to finish it before any of my real senior heroes join it...

2. I do not exaggerate. It would have helped to have had an introductory booklet, explaining the meaning of everyday jargon like "battels", "buttery", "collections", or "handshaking". Perhaps also a few initiatory pointers, such as "be aware that this college has been involved in low-level warfare with the college next door since the 17th century".

3. For a fuller account of all this, see my post The Long 1968.

RA Summer Exhibition 2026

Flat Tyre, by Gavin Turk (Sculpture | Painted bronze)

I gave up on the RA Summer Exhibition some years ago, both as a potential exhibitor and as a visitor. Despite its reputation as one of the traditional peak art-viewing experiences of the year I had never actually been to one before 2017, when on impulse I had successfully submitted a couple of my own digital prints to the show, and naturally went up to London to have a look. In the following few years I was shortlisted a couple of times, but never made it onto the actual wall again. After a few more visits it became clear that the whole thing was in a nosedive of confused priorities – I don't think this was just "sour grapes" talking – a lottery in which the standards of competence which would apply to any "open" submission anywhere else seemed to have been subordinated to the judges' desire to make the RA appear less stodgy and hidebound by "elitist" conventions of art-worthiness. I blame Grayson Perry, the main co-ordinator of the 2018 show, for starting this downhill slide. Frankly, the Summer Exhibition had become hilariously bad, and not worth the price of a train journey to London.

But this summer I was looking for a place to meet up with an old friend in London, the exhibition was in its last weeks, and it seemed like a handy venue, if only for us to have a bit of a laugh at this year's selection and a therapeutic moan about life in general over coffee. I might not think much of the Summer Exhibition, but the RA's cafe facilities are pretty reliable.

The Summer Show is enormous, filling nine huge rooms floor to ceiling with art; 1851 items, to be precise, of all sorts imaginable, but actually mainly 2D wall-hung pictures. Now, there are several things in that previous sentence worth expanding upon. Let's start with "art".

Things have clearly not improved since I decided they had become too bad to bother with. If I had to characterise the show I'd say it was a celebration now not so much of "Sunday painters" (the traditional jibe) but of sixth-form art. By this I mean work by artists whose competence in handling a medium is incommensurate with the earnest intentions motivating it. Typically, these are poorly drawn and composed scenarios, simply filled in with a paint-by-numbers indifference to any painterly properties other than colour. Feigned cack-handedness with paint is fashionable, of course, as I have noted before (see The Last Time I Saw Richard). Many competent artists have adopted this style, presumably as a democratising, dressed-down, faux-naive "spontaneity", but most of those selected from the open submission are authentic native cack-handers, the unvarnished Real Thing.

Take as a representative example these two works by comedian Harry Hill:

What is there to say about these, other than "Don't give up the day job, Harry..."? Notably, though, both have been sold. All submissions are allegedly judged anonymously, so the panel must have agreed on their merits, unaware that they were by everyone's favourite bald ex-medic comedian. All selected work is also hung without names or titles: I wonder, did the buyers know these were by a celebrity before or after looking them up in the catalogue? Or maybe Harry bought them back himself, as a nice way of supporting the RA's activities? If so, well done, Harry.

But then, what about this:

Heh, remember Spirographs? Or have you ever got carried away getting a set of dried-out biros to flow again? But this is "Entangled Bodies" by Conrad Shawcross, a Royal Academician, no less, and it has sold out its edition of fifty at £330 each. I'm not sure what "ink on paper, print" means – it does sound a bit evasive to me – but that's how this is described in the catalogue, so it must mean something. Hopefully not the dreaded and outlawed variety of "giclée", though, i.e. an original work scanned and marketed as a "print".

Or, consider this remarkable effort:

This is "Spot the Missing Letters" by James Kaye Harris, also sold, for a cool £1,200. I'll save you the trouble: the missing letters are A R T. Got it now? (No, not "rat" or "tar", fool). As Max Miller used to say, "It's all clever stuff!" And congratulations to the new owner: you can anticipate years of visual pleasure ahead gazing at this wonderfully cryptic conversation piece, and what an investment!

The man in the blue shirt is about 6' 3" tall (~190cm); 

the tiny grey painting top left ("Soft Monsters" by Yewon Lee) is 20cm square...

Next to consider from that sentence (surely you haven't forgotten about the sentence?) we have "floor to ceiling". The so-called "academy hang" is a traditional feature of the Summer Exhibition, but surely one of its worst. Faced with hundreds of small-to-medium sized pictures of no particular distinction or coherence, the temptation to treat them as elements in an interior decoration scheme is clearly irresistible. But how frustrating must it be, to have your little picture selected from the thousands submitted – hooray! – only to find it hung 10 or even 20 feet above ground, and rendered invisible by the reflections of the lighting in the glass? You'd need a ladder or binoculars to get a proper look at it. Or, just as bad, to have your quietly toned etching overwhelmed, jig-sawed into a matrix of attention-grabbing shapes and colours? Come on, you Academy judges: why not break with tradition, and select fewer, better pictures, and hang them with the respect they deserve?

Although it's true that a closer examination does not do some of these pictures any favours:

Um, great stuff... And yet two of them have sold: in the middle "High Jump", a lithograph by Peter McDonald (£1,100 framed as seen plus two from the edition at £960 each) and on the right "Trees Connecting the Past to the Present" by Paul Broomhead (£500). Truly there is no accounting for taste (and I am clearly under-pricing my own work). This room was hung by artist Oona Grimes, who – now I come to look at her own work – may well have chosen these as the sort of fun pix she could enjoy playing around with.

Then, finally, there is the physical challenge of those nine enormous rooms. My phone's step recorder tells me I walked the equivalent of over five miles that day, most of which will have been inside the Royal Academy. Admittedly, I'm in my 70s and my stamina is not what it was, but that's a respectable walk at any age, and I think you can be forgiven for starting to feel "arted out" beyond the halfway stage. After that, it all becomes a bit of a blur and a literal pain in the neck, and what you mainly want is to head for a chair, a cup of coffee, and a chat. Which is what we did.

So didn't you see anything you liked, Mr. Sour-Grapes? Well, yes, I did, but it was hard to spot buried amongst all the colour-forward dross, and doubtless I overlooked many things I might have admired under better circumstances. Anything in the last couple of rooms didn't stand a chance. I didn't photograph much, but there were two works in series that caught my eye.

First, a set of mock eye-test charts by Ron Arad RA, this one a "Duchamp Eye Test", hung in a row next to Warhol, Wilde, and Picasso versions of the same familiar chart layout. TBH, it was the size and shape, the layered transparent colours, and the quasi-Japanese brush-strokes that appealed to me as much as the conceit of a quotation rendered in ever-smaller rows of letters. Clever, sure, but random letters could have worked for me just as well.

image from Opera Gallery

Then there was a set of twenty-five "Golden Puja Tanmatras" by Stephen Cox RA, made from Indian basalt and gold leaf:

I had no idea what these were all about when I came across them: I just thought they were rather attractive. But, apparently, the "Tanmatras are the fundamental sensory perceptions of humans. The five Tanmatras correspond to the five senses: hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. Each Tanmatra is also associated with a specific element (Mahabhuta), giving them a central role in Ayurveda philosophy and in yoga." So, there you go: make of that what you will. I confess that, at the time, I thought the ones with ears were meant to be monkeys, and rather enjoyed that misapprehension... As I say, there's no accounting for taste.

One last thing. Since (I think?) 2019 the RA's Summer Exhibition co-ordinator has been asked to declare a theme. This year it was Ryan Gander, who stated:

The 2026 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition’s theme is Interconnectedness. It will aim to explore ideas of entanglement, as well as the unexpected and fortuitous connections and associations between disparate things, no matter how abstract or illogical. Proof that, as humans, our outputs hold more commonality than separation, without us intentionally seeking it.

Really? I saw very little evidence of this in the works selected. Complex scribbles maybe, but cars on fire? A pole vaulter? Silly wordplay? I don't think so. Besides, pretty much all of the "name" artists whose work I recognised were simply showing their latest versions of the same-old same-old: that's how I was able to recognise them! Just between ourselves, whisper it, I think the judges simply picked the ones they liked, and paid little or no attention to any "theme"... Don't tell Ryan. But you do have to feel sorry for anyone who did try to interpret the idea of "interconnectedness" in a creative way and lost out to... Well, can anyone explain to me the sort of "interconnectedness" expressed by the print "Jamie Lee Curtis" on the wall above? Or of the one to its left, that cartoonish Simpsons-style portrait? Go on, why not have a go!

Oh, I nearly forgot. Another old friend had alerted me to a standout piece that I didn't manage to encounter myself. It was probably obscured by an admiring crowd. Here is its page on the RA website:

Genius. I'm not surprised it took two artists to come up with it. How could the RA not show it? It simply screams "Interconnectedness!" And, incredibly, it's still unsold. I mean, "One bottle of San Benedetto still water, label removed" for just £10,000? There really is no accounting for taste.

Phew, What A Scorcher!

In case it's lost on you, the title of this post is the traditional tabloid front-page splash headline to mark a couple of days of hot weather in a typically wet and mild British summer. But so far this year we have had a succession of five designated "heatwaves", and most of the UK is now officially in drought. This is distinctly not normal. If I hear another idiot say, "If this is climate change, bring it on!", I will... Well, let's not be specific. We don't want "premeditation" added to the charge sheet.

Never mind two days of "scorcher" somewhere in mid-August, it has now been too hot and too dry since May, with no end in sight. I sat my university final exams in the famously hot and dry summer of 1976 – eight (or was it nine?) three-hour papers sweltering in "subfusc" (a black suit with white tie, plus academic cap and gown) – and it was nothing like as bad as this, and all I have to do now is write the odd blog post and venture out for a walk and a bit of shopping in shorts and sandals. For the first time ever I am using sunscreen: that's how bad it is. Others have it far worse, of course: it's hard to imagine losing your entire home and belongings to a wildfire, especially in the knowledge that it was sparked by irresponsible or even deliberate behaviour.

These harshly bright and contrasty conditions are never ideal for photography and, besides, who wants to lug a camera around in such heat for essentially unrewarding results? This is where a phone comes into its own and, even on those occasions when I did actually put a camera in my bag, it was the phone I pulled out of my pocket more often than not. I think you'd be hard-pressed to tell which were taken with which, though, in this little gallery of Summer So Far photographs.

West Bexington, Dorset

Bristol Downs, green grass reduced to felted straw

Fishing on Clevedon Pier, North Somerset

Clevedon Pier

Jubilee Gardens, Belvedere Road, London

Forde Abbey, Dorset

Morcombelake, Dorset

Chesil Beach from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

(and, yes, the sea really was that amazing Mediterranean colour)

St. Catherine's Chapel from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

Thanks, but when I said it's so hot I fancy a cone...

(Abbotsbury Gardens)

Southern view from our Bristol flat's kitchen

Slightly later western view from the kitchen

(Get on with the cooking, Mike, you can't eat gaudy sunsets...)

On the early evening of 12th August we had the very rare spectacle of an almost complete solar eclipse (92.55% in Southampton). There won't be another one here for 80 years; I doubt I'll be very interested by then. TBH a  partial eclipse is a fairly underwhelming spectacle, anyway, unless you're properly set up and situated to see the solar disc being covered up without permanently damaging your eyesight, especially when it's happening low in the sky, not long before sunset. It occurred to me to wonder how many folk were walking around with impaired vision in ancient times, having gazed for far too long at the uncanny solar spectacle taking place overhead. I was also surprised by how few commentators remarked on the absurdly mind-blowing coincidence that the moon and sun are exactly the same size when observed from our planet. I mean... Wow, WTF, man?

But, as it happened, we didn't have to go far to see what was going on in a surprising and moderately spectacular fashion. In fact, we simply stepped outside the front door and gazed at the walls of the houses on the opposite side of the road, where multiple images of the sun were being pinholed and projected by the leaves on the trees behind our house.

 No cardboard, sticky tape, or mirrors required. Unlike our eclipse craft project last time round, on holiday in Norfolk in August 1999. Happy days!

image: The National Archives, cat. ref. MFQ 1/712

Mottisfont Abbey 2006

It is often said that it can be useful to leave off evaluating your photographs until you can see them as if they had been taken by somebody else. Certainly, twenty years seems to have been long enough to do the trick.

In summer 2006 I was still tinkering with a project photographing at Mottisfont Abbey, a National Trust property near Romsey in Hampshire. I had started the project a few years earlier, concentrating on the river Test that flows through the grounds, and using an old Agfa Isolette folding camera that used 120 medium-format film. This led to my first real solo exhibition, The Colour of the Water, which was on display in the Abbey for eighteen months, March 2003 - November 2004, and then – augmented with digital photographs – to my self-published book Downward Skies.

By 2006 I had acquired a Canon EOS 350D digital camera (eight megapixels!), and had broadened my attention to the whole of the grounds at Mottisfont. I ended up making a portfolio of monochrome images that, until very recently, I had forgotten all about. Looking for something completely different, out of curiosity I opened a folder labelled "Mottisfont" on a backup drive, and was amazed to see the work of this other person, who is apparently me aged 52 years.

So here is a little gallery of a dozen of those photos taken by that stranger. They are "as found". I wouldn't choose to make them that way now – too contrasty! Do something about those blocked-up shadows and clipped highlights! – but that's the whole point. This is how he liked to do it then, and why I find them so striking now. Not a bad effort, young man, not at all bad.

Hmm, I wonder if I might be looking at next year's calendar? There are plenty more to choose where these came from... 

Everywhere I Go

Although the onset of tinnitus and partial deafness mean that I listen to music sparingly these days – "listen" in the sense of actually putting a CD into the stereo (and I'm afraid I will always think of whatever a music-playing machine is actually called as a "stereo") – I do nonetheless frequently dip into my bookmarked YouTube musical offerings and even explore their accompanying suggested playlists while I'm sitting here at my computer trying to think up fresh ways of continuing this self-imposed Reithian mission to inform, educate, and entertain. It seems that pair of cheap little desktop speakers don't rattle my hearing apparatus quite so badly.

I don't know how typical this is, but I am highly susceptible to that irritating phenomenon known as an "earworm" or, less disgustingly, "involuntary musical imagery" (INMI): songs and tunes that become an inescapable inner soundtrack, in my case sometimes lasting for days. I regularly find myself singing and humming along sotto voce to the same song, quite often finding in the process that I haven't yet got the tune or the lyrics – particularly the phrasing – quite right. For a long time I was tormented by Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", for example, but I think I've got it down now. Nonetheless, that song with its tricksy guitar accompaniment still takes up residence in my head whenever I hear it, or even when just a fragment of the lyrics flickers into consciousness. [1] Add to that the dozens of other mental musical squatters in there and it can feel like I'm a walking jukebox, but an annoying one that tends to get stuck, playing the same track over and over on repeat.

Regular readers will know that I have often mentioned the music of Jackson Browne. I wouldn't describe myself as a "fan" –  apart from the two-CD Solo Acoustic collection, I haven't bought an actual album since 1973's For Everyman – but there are individual tracks from across his entire subsequent output, mainly encountered via streaming or on YouTube, that have come to take a significant place in my personal playlist. Curiously, Jackson Browne was a dormant taste I only rediscovered as recently as 2010 (as described in the post Something Fine), and generally these "later" songs – i.e. released after 1973! – are heavy-duty numbers like "The Barricades of Heaven" or "Sky Blue and Black". When you're in the mood for lugubrious soul-searching, nobody does it quite like Jackson Browne. 

However, when I've been feeling the need for a little light musical snack lately, I've been playing this engaging short video on YouTube of Bonnie Raitt and long-time Browne sideman David Lindley rehearsing "Everywhere I Go", a bouncy, reggae-style number they were recording for a Jackson Browne tribute album. Watch the video, and I suspect you'll be humming it for days, too, everywhere you go. Yes, it seems there's always room for one more rent-free tenant in my involuntary musical lodging-house. Plus, if my own "INMI" experience is anything to go by, parts of the tune and phrasing are trickier to get right than you might think. Damn, I've started to hum it again already. People say I must be a fool...

1. Fun fact: Vincent Motorcycles were made in a workshop on what would become the expanded grounds of my secondary school, Alleyne's Grammar in Stevenage. In my day the Vincent workshop was long gone, but directly opposite the school across the "bowling green" was the motorcycle shop owned by George Brown, a record-holding bike racer and an ex-Vincent mechanic.

M.H.G.A.

Sometimes it can take half a century for the penny to drop. A curiously antique expression, that, dating back to the cash-only days of coin-operated telephone boxes and arcade machines and public-lavatory cubicles [1] when our enormous pre-decimal pennies would sometimes lodge in the mechanism, before finally crashing into the cash reservoir. Anyway, I was sitting quietly in the kitchen, when for some reason the opening lines of the second book of Milton's Paradise Lost, memorised when studying it for A-level and never forgotten, popped into my mind:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl & Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd
To that bad eminence...

Wonderful resonant stuff. But, figuratively speaking, I suddenly felt a penny which had been stuck in my mental mechanisms since around 1972 roll loose and drop: Hey, I wonder if "Ormus" is "Hormuz", of recent Strait of Hormuz media notoriety? And it turns out that, yes, it is.

Now, even if I had diligently read and inwardly digested the notes in our classroom edition of the text, I doubt that the information that Ormus refers to a once wealthy island kingdom in what is now known as the Persian Gulf would have meant anything to me whatsoever. Paradise Lost is packed with similar classical and Biblical allusions that may, I suppose, have been common currency among a small fraction of the educated elite of 17th century England, but which, without already having scaled an intimidating preparatory mountain of background reading, could never have fallen within the comfort zone of the typical 17-year-old Brit in the 1970s. You'd read the note, get the general idea, and carry on to the next annotated stumbling block. Or, more likely, let the music of the verse carry you on past. I'm not sure "Ormus" would actually have meant that much to Milton, either; it's really just a way of saying, "Cor blimey, check the bling on that imaginary throne!". I also doubt whether you'd score any lit crit points at all for grounding Milton's rhetorical splendour in mere fact. Sadly, geographical pedantry counts for little in literary circles (although if you fancy a taste, try this. Thanks, Professor Yaffle...).

There's a problem there, obviously. So many of our English poetical touchstones are "intertextual", in the academic jargon. That is, works that quote, parody, refer, or allude to other works, although rarely explicitly, and often by nothing more than a name-drop, or even a simple choice of vocabulary. That strange adjective "wine-dark", for example, only ever points in one intertextual direction. But if you're not intimately familiar with the Greek and Latin "classics", the Bible, or a whole heap of mythologies, nor equipped with the linguistic and bibliographical tools to make yourself familiar (not to mention the time or even desire), then it's a massive KEEP OUT sign. Which, of course, it always was. Like Samuel Pepys slipping into Latin and macaronic code when recording his sordid sexual adventures in his diaries, it was a way of defining and flattering your intended audience of "equals" and at the same time excluding any other literate person who might come across your efforts. As the lead prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley trial put it in 1960 (!): is this book something "you would even wish your wife or servants to read?" Quite right, sir! After all, at least Catullus had the decency to write his filth in Latin.

However, it's easy to exaggerate the ease of past generations with the "classics", and the idea that Latin and to a lesser extent Greek formed a lingua franca and shared culture between educated European elites. For example, in the famous encounter between Patrick Leigh Fermor and the captured German general, Heinrich Kreipe. If you don't know the story, Leigh Fermor had just kidnapped Kreipe on Crete in a Special Operations raid during WW2, and the general was understandably not best pleased by this change of fortune. At some point, gazing upon the landscape from Mount Ida, Kreipe muttered the opening lines of Horace's ode 1.9:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus…

Leigh Fermor heard him, and supplied the rest of the first stanza:

Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto.

[Do you see how Mount Soracte stands, white with deep snow, the struggling trees can now no longer bear their burden, and the rivers have been frozen by sharp frost?]

Although, if my experience in a German classroom is anything to go by, they may each have been rather startled by the other's pronunciation of the Latin. However, as Leigh Fermor noted in his memoir, Abducting A General: "For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace". 

Which all sounds very impressively erudite, but this was schoolboy stuff for privately-educated men of that generation, forced on pain of punishment to memorise poems, such as that very Horatian ode. If necessary, it was literally beaten into them, and Leigh Fermor was far from the obedient scholarly type (although it seems he did take a Loeb edition of Horace – i.e. a pocket-sized volume with parallel translations and notes aimed at the "amateur" reader – on his famous tramps across pre-war Europe). I suppose the modern-day equivalent would be if some special forces captain were to hear a captured officer mutter "How many roads must a man walk down..." and offer the rest of the first verse of Blowin' in the Wind. Just before waterboarding the poor devil for information, obviously. Gentlemanly conduct towards opponents hors de combat being one of the many civilised things we have abandoned since 1944.

Which brings us back neatly to the Strait of Hormuz, which is no longer just a curious footnote to a 17th century epic poem that attempts to "justify the ways of God to men", but the centrepiece of a 21st century attempt to justify the ways of a loose-cannon American president to... Well, it's not exactly clear who to, is it? But, what's that you say, Satan?

... Farewell happy fields
Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
Paradise Lost, Book 1

So I think the takeaway message I'm hearing is let's "Make Hell Great Again", right?

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God,

and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell is because he was

a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell)

1. Hence that other antique euphemism for a visit to any toilet, "to spend a penny".