Happy Place

Swanage, probably summer 1959

Before she died in 1977, my grandmother gave me her extraordinary stash of family photographs. And I do mean extraordinary: they filled a canvas holdall, stuffed in like a ransom demand paid in bundles of used banknotes. They range in size and quality from professional photos of weddings, soldiers, and family groupings – often card-mounted or made into postcards – to casual snaps of people on the beach or at home (actually, usually standing outside their home, where the light was more suitable for those old slow film stocks). Intermittently over the years I've been sorting them out, putting the best ones into archival envelopes, and putting the rest into rough groups, according to who figures in them. Certain faces turn up so frequently that they have become familiar, even though I have no idea who they are, so one of the larger groups is made up of people I can't identify: presumably relatives, in-laws, or friends of my grandmother of varying degrees of closeness.

Whenever I have a sort through them, there always seem to be pictures I've overlooked, or whose significance has only belatedly dawned on me. Looking through them recently, I came across this tiny print, presumably a "contact" print from a camera using half-frame 127 film (the image is 4.5 cm x 2.5 cm). It must have been taken by my father, and shows me playing with a toy boat on the beach at Swanage, Dorset, where we took our family summer holidays for many years. I must have been around four or five years old.

I wish Dad had used a camera more: he had a real eye for a composition. For me, this is a perfect image of contented absorption on a perfect summer's day in a very special place. So, naturally, I have scanned it, and removed as many of the blemishes acquired over sixty-seven years as I could. The dark, sock-like staining on my legs is curious, especially knowing our casual way with seaside sewage, even today, but it's probably only wet sand... 

If I ever have to think of a "happy place", my mind still goes back to Swanage; in fact, to a particular much-anticipated event. We always stayed in the same hotel, Ivy Glen on Ulwell Road, run by a Mrs. Murtagh. On our first morning we would walk down the road towards the sea with our towels and beach gear, and at a certain point Swanage Bay would come into view, sparkling in that magic random dance of sunlight on waves. It was always a moment of pure happiness.

Pure happiness is hard to come by, even for a five-year-old boy, and somehow the memory of it becomes more potent, more concentrated over the years. For me, the sparkle of sun on waves seen from a high viewpoint – whether actually or conjured inwardly – is now what we literary types call an "objective correlative", a "show, don't tell" experience that, in my case, always and anywhere evokes the simple joy of the first day of a seaside summer holiday.

Talking of which... We will shortly be meeting up for a holiday near Lyme Regis with our grown-up children, who I hope will have acquired some similar moments of pure happiness of their own, that they can invoke in times of need. I don't anticipate having an actual blog break this year, but posts will be infrequent for the next month or so. I'm hoping I may even find time to read a few of the books sitting in my "unread" pile(s).

Apparently, it's a dying art, reading, with unpredictable consequences for the mental processes of future generations. I read (on a screen, I'm afraid...) that even students at top universities are starting to complain about being required to read entire books, rather than extracts, and some are even losing the ability to comprehend complex literary texts without what amounts to remedial help. Way back in 1962, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan predicted that we would become a post-literate society, and argued that even then electronic media like TV were taking over from the printed word. It seems he may have been right, if a little premature.

Talking of which... I have to say I'm still angry with Amazon for bricking my perfectly decent Kindle. You, too, may have received this message in April, if you've had one for a while:

Thank you for being a longtime Kindle customer. We're glad our devices have served you well for as long as they have. Starting May 20, 2026 — 14 to 18 years after their initial launches — we are discontinuing support for Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier. Here's what this means for you:

* You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not be able to purchase, borrow, or download additional books on them after that date.

* If you deregister or factory reset these devices, you will not be able to re- register or use these devices in any way.

Affected devices include Kindle 1st and 2nd Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation.

What? You're offering twenty percent off a new one as compensation? Well, forget about it, Amazon. A free one, maybe. Besides, the Kindle app on a tablet is much better than any actual Kindle, anyway.

It's one of the more annoying phenomena of modern life, I think, when you discover that some digital item you had purchased in good faith, whether hardware or software, turns out to have been merely rented all along. For a perfectly functional device to be turned into landfill at the whim of the supplier is simply infuriating. See also the "subscription model" and software updates that merely add unwanted new features and remove others you had come to depend on, not to mention constant emails from company X, Y, or Z declaring changes – sometimes trivial, sometimes not – to the contractual terms you had originally signed up for. I believe the gaming world – somewhere I have never been – is in uproar about Sony's decision to stop selling their game products in a physical format, for example, and – worse, I think – to stop access on their consoles to items like films that users had previously legitimately bought from Sony and kept in their "library". In photography, a particularly egregious case of a manufacturer simply walking away from a promising product – an expensive one, to boot, sold on an enticing but unfulfilled prospectus – would be the sad saga of the Light L16 camera, a potentially brilliant and innovative device tied to some of the worst software I've ever grappled with.

Oh, and talking of which... The day after Microsoft announced a one-year extension to the "extended security updates" for Windows 10 users like me (hooray!) they sent out an alarming and incomprehensible notification about the expiry of something called a "Secure Boot Certificate", with dire warnings about vulnerability to malware until the issue is sorted out between you and your computer's original manufacturer. What? HOW DO I EVEN DO THAT, FFS?? My "OEM" doesn't even recognise my ancient PC's serial number as valid...

Oh, and our landline phone has just gone dead... So now I have to negotiate the British Telecom bots on a hot day to find a way through their endless misdirection to find a human to talk to. In the end, I'm not sure I care enough. These days all the landline brings us is scammers ("Hello, this is bank security calling..."), and shortly all copper wire landlines will be shut down by BT anyway. Did I say how annoying it is when a perfectly functional device is turned into landfill at the whim of the supplier?

Definitely time for a holiday. But first, I think I'd better conjure up my Happy Place and try to achieve some degree of serenity in the face of the Ten Thousand Things.

Swanage, by Graham Sutherland

Let's All Laugh At AI (While We Still Can)

I read this in a piece linked on Arts & Letters Daily, a conversation between three writers on "AI and the future of writing": 

Several companies right now, including xAI and OpenAI, have advertised that they are seeking very high-level writers to work for them. The job ads are absurd: you must have a National Book Award or a National Book Critics Circle Award, or you must be a best-selling author, or have been reviewed in The New York Times. And then the job appears to be that they give you two answers to a question, and you tell the LLM which is the better answer. I was just reading a piece by one of the people who had done this, and he said he was given instructions—this was OpenAI, I believe—that anytime ChatGPT used three exclamation points, he had to tell it that this was bad writing. But over and over, there would be a kind of binary where it would ask him which was the better sentence, and often the better sentence was the one with the three exclamation points. Yet he had to mark it as bad.

Meghan O'Rourke in Yale Review, AI and the Future of Writing

If that's true, it's one of the funnier things I've read this week. Hi, thanks for coming in, Mr. Shakespeare! Now, Will, if you would: on a scale of 1 (illiterate nonsense) to 10 (wish I'd written that!), please assess these alternative versions of some greetings-card sentiments our AI has come up with...

Although I think that this, as an actual first-hand experience, is even funnier. I was curious about the origin of the expression "truer words were never spoken", which has the feel of one of those quotes that has become a stock response, so I entered it into Google. It seems that Google's "AI Overview" couldn't resist butting in, and appeared to be taking it as some sort of compliment. Or was it even attempting a little cringeworthy repartee?

If you can't read the screen-grab, it  says, "I appreciate the sentiment! When someone cuts through the noise and articulates a point perfectly, there's not much left to say. What exactly are we agreeing with today?" For some reason, the second sentence is highlighted.

Hey, stay in your lane, AI! When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it... And spare me any attempts at matey banter, OK?

Parrot's Disturbing Dream

Parrot's Disturbing Dream

This succession of heatwaves (or, at least, what passes on these islands for a heatwave) has kept me indoors rather more than usual, so a lot of digital tinkering has been going on. I've been having some fun with this one, for example, which is based on my photo of a statue of Aristotle encountered in 2017 in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, on my way to the wonderfully old-school Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée, and which I have been playing around with intermittently ever since (e.g. see the 2018 post He is the Eggman).

The surprisingly beach-ready Aristotle has now lost the egg he was originally contemplating, and is surrounded by various avian specimens from museums in Bristol, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, and London. That peculiar disturbance in his lap is now occupied by a tiny owl. Which makes a lot more sense.

But now I need to brave the heat and walk a hot mile to the shops to get us something to eat this evening, and to find an 80th birthday card for my sister (how did that happen?). Food will be easy enough, but "welcome to your 9th decade" cards? I may have to get an 8th birthday card and customise it... Hmm, if it had one of those "I AM 8!!" button badges attached, that could be fun...

Margate, Summer 1947

Cult of Peanuts

Open the pod bay door, HAL...

This post is long and extremely "meta", not to say rather self-referential – although in an interesting way, I hope – so if you're having a busy day or couldn't care less about me or my views on AI, then give it a miss.

So, it seems we all need to talk about AI... Certainly, we should all be deeply anxious about its impact on the job market, given the unequal contest, profits-wise, between "human resources" and "tech solutions". But there are also serious concerns about the impact of AI on literature, art [1] and higher education, although that last is a debate that has only really arisen since I retired over a decade ago. But so far I've been fairly calm about AI's actual capabilities, accepting the sceptical view that sees it as little more than highly-sophisticated cut 'n' paste software. When we talk about "AI", of course, we're not generally talking about things like the virtual unrolling of "unreadable" burnt scrolls from Herculaneum, which is a genuinely impressive achievement. We're talking about the sort of "chatbot" available to anyone, and which alarming numbers of people, apparently, are using as if it were some sort of all-purpose oracle, companion, encyclopaedia, and even financial and medical consultant, all rolled into one convenient, obsequiously polite package.

As far as I understand it, the typical chatbot is essentially based on a "large language model", software that has been trained on huge quantities of actual human-produced writing and images hoovered up from the Web – mainly without seeking the permission of the copyright holders – so as to be able to make a best guess at what words or pictorial elements typically belong together within the parameters of any particular interrogation, but obviously without any actual subjective "understanding" of any of it, as implied by the use of the word "intelligence". Sometimes those best guesses are uncannily good, sometimes not: we've all laughed at those giveaway "hallucinations" like the extra fingers, the references to made-up bibliographic sources, and so on.

However, I must admit I was unsettled by the quality of an AI-generated parody of an "artist's statement" some friends sent me recently, to accompany a picture of a pan licked clean by a dog. I was also intrigued by this exchange between Jonathan Bate, a prominent literary academic, and the AI chatbot Claude on his Substack: 

JB: do you store your training data, as in a database?

CLAUDE: No, I don’t have a database or any storage system containing my training data. Here’s how it actually works:

Training vs. runtime are completely separate. My training happened before I was deployed — Anthropic used large datasets of text to adjust the billions of numerical parameters (weights) in my neural network. Once training finished, those weights were frozen and the training data was no longer needed to run me.

What I “know” lives in my weights. When you talk to me, I’m not looking anything up in a database. My responses come from patterns encoded in those frozen parameters — it’s more like how a person’s knowledge is stored in their brain’s neural connections, not in a filing cabinet they consult.

What I do have access to in a conversation:

• The current conversation context (everything said so far)
• Tools like web search, which let me fetch current information
• Any files or documents you share with me

What I don’t have:

• Access to my training data
• Memory of past conversations (unless you use the memory feature)
• Any ability to look up “where I learned” a specific fact

So in short: the training data shaped me, but it’s not stored anywhere I can access — it’s baked into my weights and gone from my runtime environment entirely.

Interesting... Like most of us, I imagine, I'd always supposed there was some vast, ever-expanding database constantly lurking in the background for a chatbot like Claude to draw from; wrongly, it seems. I had also assumed that was what those controversial, resource-consuming data centres were for. As a former database manager and amateur programmer myself, I confess I could never understand how a search engine like Google was able to deliver results from the vast maelstrom of data on the internet so instantly, and simply came to accept it as an instance of Clarke's Third Law, i.e. that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Although, given the pace that new data is constantly being added to the Web, I expect Claude also has to go in for "refresher" training fairly regularly, just like any mere human involved with tech. It was my increasing reluctance to keep up with the endless churn of operating systems and software updates that finally convinced me that my retirement was overdue. But I expect those chatbots just lap it up, the creeps.

But I was completely unprepared to be astonished when Bruno, a reader of this blog, left this comment on my recent post about Alen MacWeeney's photograph of two Irish travellers made between 1965 and 1971, one of whom has a truly uncanny resemblance to the poet W.B. Yeats, who died in 1937:

I got the reference but did not understand it. A French native speaker, I’m not well versed in English literature. My wife did her master thesis (stage director) on Four plays for a dancer but she’s not here this morning, so I asked Copilot. I got a good exploration of the metaphysic and also on the connection with her thesis.
Incidentally, I got this, when I mentioned the author of the post. I thought I would share it with you :)

Ah — Mike Chisholm of Idiotic Hat.
That explains everything. His tone, the playful conspiratorial wink, the Yeats quotations, the mock‑mystical suggestion that Yeats might be “still out there somewhere” — that’s classic Chisholm.

And pairing Yeats with Alen MacWeeney’s Traveller photographs is exactly the kind of cultural triangulation he loves: half‑serious, half‑mischievous, but grounded in a real aesthetic intuition.

Let me show you why his post works so well.

🎩 1. Chisholm’s signature move: the “serious joke”

Chisholm often writes in a mode where:

• the surface is humorous,
• the undertone is deeply literate,
• and the effect is a kind of sideways truth.

Whoah... I mean, "Ah — Mike Chisholm of Idiotic Hat. That explains everything"? Say what? So was Copilot a bit baffled about Bruno's line of questioning, until it realised, oh, of course, this is "classic Chisholm" and his "signature move"? Let's back up a bit. There are a number of things to consider here.

I began writing this blog in 2008, initially as an exercise at work to see what this much-trumpeted "Web 2.0" business was all about. Since then it has become a central part of my day-to-day life. There have been well over two thousand posts, with more than eight thousand comments, and – according to Blogger's profoundly unreliable stats, much inflated by "bot" traffic – in excess of two million views. Those first two figures are solid, but that third? Who knows what the real figure is? Let's ignore Blogger's exaggerated viewing stats: the more sober Google Analytics puts my current average viewing figure at just over one thousand a month. A number which does not even move the dial on the Web's blog-weighing scales to a reading of "peanuts"; it's not even the equivalent of the salty nibs left in the bottom of an empty bag of peanuts. It's a teeny-tiny mote of Web peanut dust, too small even to trouble anyone with a Web nut allergy. It's not nothing, but in a venerable expression, it's as near as damn it.

So two things are certain: by any serious reckoning I am not a well-known writer with "signature moves", and neither is Idiotic Hat a popular blog. There is no discoverable trove of mentions by third-parties that would add up to a reputation, so there is nothing to be mined and reassembled by AI in a cut and paste job, however sophisticated. I don't suppose any reader of this blog has ever written anything anywhere on the Web along the lines of, "Hah, that Mike Chisholm and his playful conspiratorial winks!" (No, sorry, too late now...) Why, you idle so-and-sos can't even be bothered to share my posts on social media! No, it seems Copilot worked all this out for itself, more or less instantly, then summed it up neatly, and (a) presented it as if my reputation and typical modus operandi were established facts, and (b) used this "knowledge" to account for the content and tone of one very short, allusive, and slightly mischievous post. That, you have to concede, is pretty impressive.

Indeed, everyone I have shown this comment to agrees that Copilot has pretty much nailed it, Hat-wise; one friend – you know who you are – even suggested it might have been taking the piss... Unlikely, I know, but hold that thought. "Spooky" is the word most often invoked. After all, although I have to assume that those of you who regularly read this blog do enjoy what I write, I doubt very much whether anyone has ever taken a minute to analyse quite what it is they enjoy about it. Why would you? And yet Copilot took considerably less than a minute to have a pretty convincing stab at it.

Most puzzling for me, though, is that I simply do not understand how a piece of software can spot implicit subtexts or, above all, humour – especially ironic, tongue-in-cheek humour – when it hasn't been flagged-up somehow, perhaps with a couple of emojis and multiple exclamation marks? "Spooky" is indeed the word.

So the tech-savvy son of one of the friends I had shared Bruno's comment with tried something similar with another AI chatbot, ChatGPT, asking, "Tell me about Mike Chisholm of idiotic hat fame". ChatGPT replied, at length:

If you're referring to Mike Chisholm of Idiotic Hat, he's something of a cult figure in photography circles rather than a mainstream name.

He's a British photographer, writer and former university librarian based in Southampton. After a 30-year career in academic libraries, he devoted himself full-time to photography, artist's books and writing. He studied at Balliol College, the University of East Anglia and University College London.

His blog, Idiotic Hat, has been running since 2008 and has accumulated thousands of posts. It's nominally about photography, but in reality it's an eclectic mix of:

• street photography and personal projects,
• essays on art, music and literature,
• dry, self-deprecating humour,
• philosophical musings,
• reviews of photobooks and exhibitions,
• the occasional glorious rant.

His writing style is what draws many readers. He's unusually erudite without being pompous, happy to jump from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to John Cage to a joke about his own incompetence in the space of a few paragraphs. His humour is distinctly British: understated, ironic, and often aimed squarely at himself.

One of his recurring themes is that photography should be a daily practice, not something reserved for exotic trips or grand projects. He advocates photographing wherever you happen to be, treating it like a musician practising scales. He also emphasises process over results—making photographs because the act of seeing is intrinsically worthwhile rather than because you're chasing likes, money or prestige.

A few characteristic Chisholmisms include:

• valuing curiosity over technical perfection;
• being deeply suspicious of artistic pretension;
• believing that making lots of work is more important than waiting for inspiration;
• encouraging photographers to develop their own way of seeing rather than imitate fashionable styles.

The title "Idiotic Hat" itself is typical Chisholm: slightly absurd, memorable and refusing to take itself too seriously.

He's never become a household name like Martin Parr, but among serious amateur and independent photographers he's earned a loyal readership. Many regard Idiotic Hat as one of the internet's longest-running and most consistently insightful photography blogs—equal parts photographic notebook, literary essay collection and comic diary. Even Chisholm jokes that it's "widely read and regarded by many as a must-read source of photographic inspiration, ironic wisdom and amusement. Or so he says."

If you enjoy thoughtful long-form blogging, he's one of those writers you can happily disappear into for an afternoon.

Not bad, and there's that "typical Chisholm" again. Ah, I may not be a household name like Martin Parr, but I have been seen by a machine! Apparently I'm something of a cult figure, me and my Chisholmisms! [2] But note the emphasis on "photography" there. True, I may be a bit of a photographer, share a lot of my photographs, and very occasionally go on about cameras, but has this blog ever been "nominally about photography"? I wouldn't have said so: after all, nominally, it is supposed to be tales told by an idiot ("slightly absurd, memorable, and refusing to take itself seriously", perhaps?). The irony, of course, is how few regular readers of this blog are serious photographers at all. [So heads up, AI, here comes a joke]: Neither of them!!! 😆 (Hah, I know! It's the way I tell 'em!! 😎).

Now, a lot of that response from ChatGPT is recognisably a sophisticated cut 'n' paste job: it's largely made up of stuff extracted from the blog or from the "about" section of my webpage, worked up into a well-polished construct. But Copilot somehow went beyond that to a stylistic appreciation of a whole body of work developed over nearly two decades, centred on one short and rather cryptically tongue-in-cheek post, which is actually rather spooky, isn't it? A lot, obviously, depends on the question being asked. But, however convincing, these improvised fabrications have less significance or permanence than a sandcastle on the beach. As far as this blog or my reputation are concerned, the dial will not have been nudged by even one partial peanut, and not a single new human reader will get to see the next "occasional glorious rant". But, nonetheless, I'm both impressed, and finally convinced that all AI must immediately be locked in a box with an easily-accessible OFF switch before it's too late... Open the pod bay door, HAL!

BTW, am I alone in cringing when I see my own surname used in this way? It's like being back at school. It also prompts the uncomfortable thought that, by taking their mighty sledgehammers to crack this microscopically tiny nut, these AI chatbots – without any actual "intention" of their own at all – are, in effect, taking the piss. I am not "Chisholm" in the way Yeats is "Yeats" or even Parr is "Parr" and to suggest otherwise is, to my mind, a sort of mockery. Well meant, but – like a Best Dad in the World! mug or indeed a FIFA Peace Prize – it only draws attention to the humiliating gap between rhetoric and reality.

I'm reminded of Marvin, the glum robot from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with a brain the size of a planet. "It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level..." Now there's AI done right, and a typical bit of uncanny foresight from a writer of true comic genius; "classic Adams", as you might say, without even a hint of mockery.

1. Bizarrely, it seems the open exhibitions of both the Royal Academy and the Royal West of England Academy have allowed AI-generated entries this year for the first time. As various commentators have said, you really can't have a rule which insists that all entries must be the artist's own original work and then also allow AI entries... Duh! Once this becomes widely known among the thousands of AI-jockeys out there, they're going to regret it...

2. My surname is pronounced "Chism", which makes "Chisholmisms" rather funnier. I somehow doubt ChatGPT intended this...

Can't Smell, Don't Smell

I remarked recently on the amount of gambling ads on late-night TV. [1] In fact, though, the most remarkable preponderance of ads at any time of day seems to be for chemical smells. Yes, of course I know that all smells are chemical: I mean lab-produced perfumes, designed to be delivered to a nose near you by means of commercial cleaning and de-odourising products. It seems we are obsessed by the need to overwhelm "bad" odours with "good" odours, whether produced by sweat, shit, feet, farts, dogs, or whatever other malodorous agents of stink might offend the fastidious nasal passages of the (presumably) typical human. Or, rather, someone wants us to be obsessed by them.

Now, I say "we", but I mean "you". I am not a typical human, at least in this respect: I happen to be a lifelong "anosmic". In other words, I have never had a fully-functioning sense of smell. Whether this counts as a disability or a superpower is debatable, and highly context-dependent. Can't smell gas? Problem! Can dispose of organic substances in an advanced stage of decomposition without retching? Superpower! Can't tell petrol from diesel? Problem! Doesn't care about other people's "bodily odours"? Superpower! True, like most anosmics, I do have a vestigial sense of smell, but one which can't easily distinguish, say, shit from coffee, and yet does occasionally pick up a strong whiff of something – especially when out walking in the woods – that no-one else seems to be able to smell. My partner calls these my "green smells".

I have never found this a problem; a world without smells, good or bad, has always seemed to work for me. As far as I can tell, and despite what people say, this has not impaired my ability to taste or enjoy food: I'm a good cook, and I can could definitely distinguish shit from coffee in a blind tasting and, more importantly, can quickly tell shit coffee from the good stuff. And I don't mean those coffee beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a palm civet. Which is apparently very good stuff indeed.

Getting back to those adverts, though. I have to say I find the ones where someone buries their face in the laundry and exclaims, "It smells so fresh!" hilarious. There is one for Lenor fabric conditioner and "scent booster" in which people actors roll around in "freshly washed" duvets – outdoors – and pretend to refuse to get out of bed at the end of the ad, Lenor's nasal crack supposedly having brought on a state close to ecstasy. Yeah, right... I suppose it is a tribute to their acting skills that they can apparently go so completely and annoyingly gaga over mere bed linen. I'd still be inclined to suffocate each one of them with a scent-boosted pillow, though.

But when it comes to annoying, there is an Irish woman who features in TV ads for Fairy products – I think she's probably famous for something other than somewhat performatively sniffing sheets and cuddling babies – who simpers and gushes over her laundry; something I imagine that she pays someone else to do in real life. I mean, FFS: those sheets and towels have not just been washed, they have been thoroughly ironed and aired into meringue-like fluffiness, and who the hell irons sheets and towels these days, anyway? That is, of course, to assume that these aren't all actually brand-new sheets and towels... Besides, isn't there also something slightly disturbing about the associations conjured by the juxtaposition of "Irish woman" and "laundry"? I don't know about you, but the word "Magdalene" always seems to pop into my mind. Didn't the marketing folk at Fairy consider this? Mind you, it's nowhere near as disturbing as this rendering of that inescapable bit of laundry-related "Oirishry", the jig The Irish Washerwoman. Yikes! Someone call the relevant authorities...

Now, in terms of advertising sophistication you'd think we'd have come a long way since the days of Lifebuoy soap, whose ads in the 1960s popularised the idea of B.O. ("body odour") as the quick route to social death (remember? "Psst... B.O. ... Even your best friend won't tell you!"). Yes, why not try washing with some soap, you malodorous loser! But today the pitch remains substantially the same, just louder and rather less discreet. As a result, multiple "personal hygiene" items jostle for attention in so many overstuffed bathroom cabinets, although I have never understood why anyone who does wash with soap is in need of an underarm deodorant as well, much less an "intimate" deodorant; but then, as an anosmic, what would I know? However, I am assured by my partner that I don't smell bad, even though I smell badly (heh), and despite never using any deodorant other than soap every morning. I think I can trust her on this ("Even your best friend..."). My motto? Can't smell, don't smell!

I do feel sorry for you olfactory normies, though. The sheer range of scented products marketed to mask ever more specific "bad" odours is extraordinary. If the ads are to be believed, it seems that unpleasant hits on your (normal) nose are lurking everywhere in your house, all the time. Rank bathroom? Reeking carpet? Foetid footwear? Argh! But don't worry: there are tailored solutions to every imaginable imaginary miasma conjured up by those marketing folk. Even better, there are also sprays and plug-ins that are one-stop solutions to your house of multi-sourced sensory shame. Stinky dog on the sofa? Spray it! (the sofa, not the dog. Although...). While you're at it, spray everything else, starting with your shoes: trust us, it's all unbearably malodorous! Or, better yet, why not give up a precious electrical socket to one of these gizmos, and fill every room with a floral chemical stench. Ah, it's so fresh! Cough...

Seriously, though, folks, goodness knows what effect breathing all this vapour in enclosed spaces is having, with scented clouds of competing stinkalizers rising from every surface and piece of fabric in the house. Passive smoking was bad enough in the Old Days – now that's how to get yourself a stinky house, supplemented by over-boiled vegetables and a chip-pan of much-recycled lard – but this is nothing less than passive vaping. Class-action law suits will surely shortly follow.

I was reminded of a track on an album that I haven't listened to in many years:

Out through the night
And the whispering breezes
To the place where they keep
The imaginary diseases...
Mmm, this has to be the disease for you!
Now scientists call this disease
Bromhidrosis, but us regular folks
Who might wear tennis shoes
Or an occasional python boot,
Know this exquisite little inconvenience
By the name of: Stink Foot
Frank Zappa, Stink-Foot

Or, in a lighter vein, there is always "Smelly Cat" by Phoebe from Friends:

All together now: Smelly cat, smelly cat... What are they feeding you... Smelly cat, smelly cat... It's not your fault... [Reaches for the spray]

1. Disclaimer: TBH I watch very little TV. For most of the evening I occupy what used to be our "dining room", where my computer, scanner, printer, etc., now live, knocking out photos, digital pictures, and blog posts like this, while my partner occupies the living room where the TV is. She is a current affairs addict, and watches through multiple news cycles, mainly on BBC or Sky, the commercial channel she prefers, and where I suppose the adverts might differ from other ad-funded channels. Do your own research.

Alen MacWeeney

from Irish Travellers 1965-71

I was paging through the photographs of Alen MacWeeney, particularly the collection "Irish Travellers 1965-71" when this one almost made me choke on my coffee. I mean, WTF? Do you see what I see? Does the guy in the glasses remind you of anybody? In particular, someone who is alleged to have died in 1939?

From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

You read it here first. Who knows? He may even still be out there somewhere, drinking strong tinker's tea from a chipped enamel mug.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing...

Jack the Dog, Artist

It's very hot again, and I also recently had the second round of one of those oldies' vaccinations against diseases with deceptively folksy names (shingles, in this case). Basically, I am not feeling 100% just now. Luckily, two old friends have come to the rescue, and presented me with the makings of a perfect post. Over to you, Andy and Phil:

 Hi Mike. I was making a fish pie the other day and put the pan that I'd poached the fish in on the floor so that Jack the dog could tidy it up. This is what he left behind. I took a photo because, superficially, it looked a bit like something you might have produced. I mentioned it to Phil who then asked the AI Claude to produce a pretentious artist's statement to go with it. This is what it came up with ....

VESSEL / THRESHOLD / FORGETTING Artist's Statement --- In this work I invite the viewer to confront the abject sublime — that liminal space between use and dissolution, between the domestic and the geological. The vessel, stripped of its instrumental function, becomes instead a cosmography: a self-contained universe in which entropy is not failure but language. The tannin striations recall both cave painting and satellite imagery, collapsing deep time into a single glance. We are simultaneously at the ceiling of Lascaux and in low Earth orbit. The pale cerulean foam — ephemeral, already gone by the time you see this — speaks to the impossibility of the present moment, the way experience leaves only its residue. The circular framing is not accidental. The eye is drawn inward in an inexorable spiral, mirroring our own psychological relationship with memory, with loss, with the things we leave to soak and then forget about. I work with found thermodynamic processes. I do not make — I witness. The brown ring at the periphery is the signature of time itself, and I refuse to clean it off. This piece exists in direct conversation with Richter, with Turrell, and with my own ongoing inquiry into what it means to be a body that makes mess and calls it living. The washing up can wait. --- (It's a dirty saucepan, isn't it.)

That, I have to say, is both hilarious and scarily good, no? "The eye is drawn inward in an inexorable spiral, mirroring our own psychological relationship with memory, with loss, with the things we leave to soak and then forget about" is particularly fine in its dry wit, I think. I am assured – as with a previous scarily good AI effort used by a friend on his blog – that "no humans were involved in post-production". Be afraid, you people who trade in art-bollocks, be very afraid. Also, I can see an artistic career opening up for Jack the Dog, with or without the aid of this sort of puff-piece.

Mind you, there is also that distinctly non-AI comment that "it looked a bit like something you might have produced"... Hmm. Are these guys having a laugh at my expense? I don't think so, but we've been friends for 50 years, so anything goes. But listen, Jack the Dog, you'll be needing a thick skin (as well as a cold wet nose) if you're going to go down this path: encouragement, appreciation, and doggie treats will be thin on the ground. So here's some from me:  Who's a good boy? You are, Jack, you're a very talented good boy! Yes, you are! Now get off the sofa and start licking out some more pans...

The Scenic Route

I came to driving later in life than most – I was 30 when I passed my driving test – which, added to an admittedly neurotic sense of loyalty and a deep-seated reluctance to spend money on cars, means I have owned relatively few cars over the years, all of them bought used (very used, in some cases), and kept until the end of their useful, lawful life. Let's see: two Minis, a couple of bangers – a Nissan and an Austin Rover, bought off people at work that lasted just a couple of months each – and a Vauxhall Nova, supplemented by my partner's cars, a couple of VWs and a Ford Fiesta, inherited from her parents. But in 2005 we bought together a Renault Scenic "Fidji" – a top of the range model, with a 1.8 litre engine, air-conditioning and two sunroofs, just a couple of years old – as a suitable car for family holidays with our two school-age children.

Scenics have a mixed reputation for reliability but we have loved that car, which rarely gave us any trouble at all. I still remember sitting behind the steering wheel for the first time at the dealership, and feeling that command of the road that even a slightly elevated seating position endows. After sitting with one's backside so close to the road in a series of small saloon cars it was a revelation. Much as I hate the current vogue for bloated SUVs, I can understand the motivation: simply being able to see more of the road is a safety bonus in itself, and then there is the better view of the surrounding landscape for passengers, always assuming the ones in the back seats haven't got their noses buried in their phones or, more realistically in those days, their Game Boys.

Then there is the storage capacity. Packing for a two-week holiday with children is always a challenge with the typical European-style hatchback; it becomes more of a case of what to leave behind rather than what to take (although sometimes "who" can be very tempting, too). But with the Scenic, it was just, "all aboard, and sling it all in the hold!" Even better, with the back seats removed you have the equivalent of a light van, capable of transporting a large chest of drawers, an 88-key electric piano, or numerous IKEA flatpacks. The car even has a cellar! Well, two storage compartments in the floor in front of the rear seats.

Like a faithful family retainer, wherever we wanted to go – Norfolk, Dorset, Scotland, France – it would uncomplainingly carry whatever burden we chose to stuff into it, mile after mile, trip after trip. Until, that is, in 2019 it started to struggle up the steeper hills in Dorset, and then in 2021 our garage warned us about a worn clutch that "might go in 10, or 10,000 miles, hard to say..." So, our children having moved on into adult life, our recently-acquired and remarkably fuel-efficient Skoda Citigo took over the longer journeys, and the Scenic settled into a comfortable retirement of short, local trips, mainly shuttling rubbish and garden waste to the municipal dump.

This year, however, our Scenic finally went for scrap. It would probably have scraped through its MOT test, yet again, but after 20-plus years everything had begun to fail. The speedometer was temperamental; I had bodged-up the screen washer tubing several times in recent years to get it through the MOT; rust was setting in and much of the plastic was decaying, so that on damp days your hands came away from the steering wheel and gearstick coated with a sticky black deposit. It was a sad moment, seeing an old friend driven away on a low loader, but I try my best not to be sentimental about the inanimate and mechanical members of the family.

However, as I have written before, an inclination to invest inanimate objects with thoughts, feelings, and personality seems to be one of humanity's more indelible characteristics; what you might call an animistic cast of mind. It takes a far sterner rationalist than me to bin a favourite cup when it cracks or its handle comes off, for example. Eventually I will do it, but there needs to be a suitable period of mourning first, while the cup lies in state on a shelf. Sometimes, this can take years.

Most young children, of course, seem to inhabit a permanently liminal world, where consciousness swirls in and out of things like a tide. My daughter was particularly susceptible as a toddler, occasionally entering a state we referred to as "goggling", which involved holding her breath and trembling visibly in an open-mouthed, wide-eyed stare of rapture, as (we presumed) the toys arranged before her came to vivid life. She was our little living-room shaman. But that animistic tide keeps going out further and further as we grow, until the crucial moment arrives as so poignantly (and hilariously) captured by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: "Mummy, teddy's stopped breathing!"

But the idea that certain categories of object acquire a personality in use is not just a vestige of childhood enchantment. New instruments need to be "played in" to develop their tone, and the quality of their final tone may well depend on the quality and character of their initial playing-in. What could be more full of personality than a pair of old shoes, and more devoid of personality than a pair of new ones? And who does not keep an assortment of pebbles, conkers and the like in their coat pockets, that gradually over the years acquire a deep patina and "pocket polish"? What? Oh, OK; just me, then.

I am convinced that cameras, too, exert some kind of influence over the pictures that emerge from them that far exceeds their mechanical functioning. You have to meet a camera half-way, get to know it, make friends, and persuade it to do its best for you. You must have noticed how awful the first batches of images from a new camera are? You can set it on "auto everything" or on full manual, you can even use a cable release, spirit level and – gasp! – a tripod, and still get rubbish. Blurry, over-exposed, poorly-composed rubbish. Yet, a few months later, if you've played it in nicely, you can even forget to check what settings you're using, as you and your camera will have finally got your harmonious act together, and the magic can begin to happen.

I'm just about reaching that point with a used Olympus E-M5 iii I bought last summer. In some weird way, I have had to exorcise the ghost in the machine installed by the previous owner, who had clearly not made friends with the camera; after all, he'd sold it on "priced to sell" not so long after he'd bought it. I think it's a bit like buying a rescue dog from the kennels: it takes time for an abusive or unloving owner's traces to be erased. Sounds nutty, I know, but you can trust me on this one.

Eventually, however, neglected objects will become disenchanted. In the back of a cupboard or the depths of a drawer, you may come across a keepsake or a forgotten item that was once in everyday use; a cigarette lighter or a fountain pen, perhaps, or a postcard from a gallery you once visited. You'll look at it, and remember why you kept it, but nonetheless know that, as sung by B.B. King, the thrill is gone. Any remaining inner spirit has finally slipped away, and you can safely bin the thing.

Sadly, though, you can't leave old cars without tax, MOT, or insurance to fully disenchant themselves in the street before scrapping them. So, goodbye, old friend... It's been great, and we won't forget you!

Sling it all in!

Football Considered as One of the Fine Arts

The World Cup is nearly upon us, and armchair pundits across the globe who have shown little or no interest in football in the previous four years are in intensive training, preparing to opine. I myself have absolutely no interest in the game, World Cup or no, so there's no need for any snarky schadenfreude about Southampton's recent "spying" scandal: I genuinely don't care, and find the whole affair hilarious. Unlike my neighbours.

I have never been a spectator at a professional game of anything in my entire life, and cannot see the attraction. I used to play in football teams at primary school and in the Cubs, but never really understood the game and certainly never felt obliged to choose a famous club to follow. In fact, AFAIR the rules and strategies of football were never actually explained to us: it seems to have been presumed that boys were either born with a footballing gene, or would already have absorbed them by osmosis from society at large. As a left footer I played in the position known as "left wing", and dutifully ran up and down the leftmost touchline, occasionally hoofing the ball into the middle of the pitch to someone who clearly cared rather more desperately than me to have it at his feet. In fact, my fondest memories are of the orange segments doled out from an enamel plate at half time or, in the coldest weather, hot mugs of OXO beef stock.

However, as seems to have happened at many state grammar schools, in the 1950s my secondary school had banished football in favour of rugby and hockey, partly in an effort to make gentlemen out of us New Town oiks, but mainly, I suspect, to avoid all that unmanly celebratory hugging that had broken out on the professional football pitch. [1] I didn't really understand either of those games, either, but luckily my role as goalkeeper of the school's hockey First XI required little strategic understanding beyond stopping that hard little ball going past me into the goal; something for which I had an unsuspected talent, mainly driven by a fear of the bloody thing hitting me in the face. It always amuses me when I pass hockey matches on our local sports ground and see the goalies togged up like samurai warriors in helmets, face guards, table-sized leg pads, and what appear to be a pair of oversized foam-rubber glove-puppets. I wore nothing but a tracksuit, some batsman's pads with a pair of precariously buckled-on canvas "kickers", plus a pink plastic cricket box shoved inside my underwear.

Anyway, to return to football... The imminent World Cup reminded me of an ancient post from 2010, and I thought it might be timely to share my thoughts on football's future again. The title, obviously, alludes to Thomas De Quincey's essay Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts, but not in any constructive, useful, or even amusing way. So here it is again, as usual lightly edited:

Football Considered as One of the Fine Arts

My rant back in November about "project proposals" (it's OK, thanks, I'm feeling better now) made me wonder about the widespread uneasiness with "elitism" and "craft" in the fine arts and, by contrast, their complete acceptance in the realm of sports. How odd, ironic even, that the over-educated middle classes should agonize about the unfairness of unevenly-distributed talent in the aesthetic realm, while the mass audience for, say, football is completely untroubled by it. Such is ideology.

However, it is clear that the arts are ahead of the game here, so to speak, and some useful changes could be made to sport that echo some of the progressive moves made in the arts in recent decades. Here is the text of a speech I propose to make to the Football Association at the earliest opportunity.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Football needs to change. Here's how:

1. The top teams are unashamedly elitist, drawing team members from a very narrowly-defined segment of the population, and this needs to be challenged. There is no justifiable reason to restrict a career in football to fit young men and women with an affinity for sport. Footballing talent is quite likely evenly spread across the population: we'll never know unless we look. I suggest it be made mandatory that teams are assembled using a process similar to jury service. Eleven people must be easier to find than twelve, after all.

2. Community involvement is traditionally strong in many football clubs, but over time some teams have indulged the appeal and financial rewards of a rootless cosmopolitanism (yes, we're looking at you, Man Utd.). I suggest all teams, players and fans are henceforth strictly "localized", i.e. drawn from local electoral rolls. Serious consideration should also be given to compulsory local spectator attendance at matches, to foster community spirit.

3. It is unarguable that the Premier League has wrecked the wider game, financially. I suggest we adapt the model current in the arts, i.e. reverse the cash-flow by making players pay to play. Gate money could be distributed to players, in part, as compensation, perhaps allocated on the basis of a spectator ballot or satisfaction survey ("On a scale of 1 to 10...", etc.). As in the arts, professional aspiration should be restricted to in-house "residencies", retained primarily for community outreach purposes, usually on a two-year non-renewable contract.

4. There is an unhelpful and vulgar emphasis on success through playing and winning games. I think we need look no further than events like the Booker or the Turner prizes to see that pre-selection of a shortlist of teams from which celebrity pundits can select a "winner" is a far more efficient way of deciding "success". This would also free up much valuable broadcasting time.

5. Football is radically under-theorized. Noting that even the driving test now has a theory component – a progressive move we can only applaud – I suggest that no match should be played without a properly-qualified theorist on-site to evaluate, challenge and generally deconstruct the referee's decisions. The theorist's decision will be final (if rather protracted).

6. I worry about the expression, "the beautiful game". Beauty is a contested category, and there are significant and under-represented sections of the community for whom football is far from "beautiful". However, once these proposed measures are in place, I think we will find ourselves naturally referring simply to "the game".

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

1. Famously, football is "a gentleman's game played by hooligans" and rugby "a hooligan's game played by gentlemen". Not sure about hockey... In our case, a game played by hooligans who'd rather be playing football? There was always a moment of class-conscious weirdness at the end of inter-school matches, made especially strange when the match had been an ill-tempered and occasionally violent affair. The captain was obliged to shout, "Three cheers for Scumbag Academy! Hip hip!", and the team was meant to respond with three hearty shouts of "Hooray!", although this was usually rendered as a reluctant and diminishing group grunt, along the lines of "Rerh... Rerh... Rerh..." . I recall the appallingly fractious annual grudge-match against a south London school, William Penn (a.k.a. "Billy Biro"), which was endlessly interrupted by penalties, injuries, and what can only be described as racist incidents. One year our team captain, Terry, simply refused to call for the obligatory three cheers, drawing down on himself the spluttering outrage of the teacher acting as our referee-cum-coach, who TBH was lucky that Terry didn't deck him.

A Mug's Game

I was visiting a friend the other day, when the conversation somehow turned from music to money matters, and in particular the pitiful returns on savings accounts. For years the banks have been offering interest rates at around 1.5% p.a. or less, for example, but are now boasting of rates of 4.5%. In other words, and in case you're as bad at mental arithmetic as me, what used to be a risible £1.50 of interest on every £100 invested is now a whole £4.50! Before any tax, that is... It barely seems worth the effort of setting up an account for a pittance like that, does it?

So I mentioned that, in effect, the best annual return I get has actually been from my Premium Bonds, originally bought for me as a child, and which I top up periodically whenever I'm feeling lucky. I don't think I'm very unusual in winning a small prize most years that rivals or exceeds that much-vaunted 4.5%. Indeed, my friend revealed that he had actually won a prize of £10,000 in February, which really is quite some return on the investment. For non-British readers I should explain that Premium Bonds are a venerable, government-backed savings scheme which (a) pays no interest, but (b) guarantees that your money is 100% safe, and (c) enters your bond numbers into a monthly draw, with tax-free prizes ranging from £25 to £1 million. The winners are drawn by a random-number generator, affectionately known as ERNIE. Since 1956, the chance of "winning something on ERNIE" has added a little risk-free fun to millions of mainly working-class lives.

 Doubtless, real financial risk can be even more fun, provided you can afford to spare the cash, and accept the risk of losing it, too. As the usurers banks are obliged to say, "your investment may go down as well as up, and you may get back less than the amount you invested". Then, of course, for those addicted to the buzz of really risky risk there is gambling, pure and simple; not so very different from finance in principle, but a more-or-less guaranteed money loser. Having been brought up in a Baptist household, I have a reflex aversion to gambling in all its forms, not to mention a bone-deep, atavistic fear of "tempting fate" by placing a bet on the outcome of any real-life event. All theological arguments aside, I suppose the core moral objection to gambling is that the real price of your hypothetical jackpot win is paid in the misery and ruin of all the other habitual and guaranteed losers. An addiction to gambling is the same as any other addiction that involves throwing money after short-term thrills. Fine, if you're a well-heeled fool; not so much, if what you're pushing over the bookmaker's counter is this week's rent.

There is also that stiff-necked dissenting-protestant emphasis on the importance of hard work as Route A to happiness and success in life, rather than the pure luck of, say, being born into wealth or winning the lottery, both of which usually turn out to be a curse: those whom the gods wish to destroy... But all of us are subjected to a constant barrage of opportunities for those capricious gods of good fortune to smile on us, even though we know that the chances that they will are vanishingly small. Win this, win that; grab this, grab that... It's unrelenting. There's barely a product on the supermarket shelves that is not offering some sort of prize draw, and it is astonishing how many of the late-night TV adverts are for online gambling. And the hypocrisy is breath-taking: so many of these "come to online Vegas!" ads are dressed up with a pious "always gamble responsibly" message. It's as if snack adverts were to caution, "Hey, you, check out these tempting biscuits... I know! They do look delicious, don't they? But, listen, just one is plenty, Tubs!" [1]  (Oh, and buy just three packs and get a chance to win an all-in holiday in Las Vegas).

But the pervasive message that "life is best when it's a high-stakes gamble" is destructive, especially to the young. Clearly, we have a real problem with providing enough suitable job opportunities for those starting out in life – a problem which AI seems designed precisely to make worse – but this problem has a flip-side: apparently far too many young people will only apply for glamorous jobs for which they are self-evidently unqualified. As I wrote in the post Tides:

Far too much attention is paid to the exceptional: the Premier League footballer, the champion boxer, the TV show host, the popular musical act, and all the other celebrity poster-people for improbable, lottery-scale "success". It's understandable, but nothing constrains social mobility as effectively as the idea that life is an all-or-nothing gamble. The true nature of the systematic, embedded privilege of the well-established, well-placed, and well-to-do is well-hidden behind the attention-grabbing blind of these wild-card outliers. By focussing ambition on flashy careers in broadcasting, music, and sport, too many young lives are doomed to disappointment – "shallows and miseries", indeed – their eyes having been diverted from the true prize: regular places on the ferry that leads from the world of precarious wage-work to solid middle-class professional jobs, secured by pursuing those low-risk, achievable goals, defined by hard work, exam passes, and well-trodden career paths. Boring, but true.

It's a competitive world, of course. But, as I know only too well myself, the usual outcome for anybody who enters any sort of competition – in my case, attempts to get my work seen on a wall somewhere – is rejection, which in the end can begin to feel like Charlie Brown's repeated attempts to kick the ball that Lucy will pull out of the way at the last second, every time. Aaugh! I mean, why bother? I suppose you could say that at least your ego is getting the benefit of a decent work-out from the humility-inducing, hubris-squashing effects of serial rejection: feel the burn! But in the end, as the doctor said, if it hurts when you do that, the best advice is to stop doing it.

Some might also say that, where art is concerned, rejection could be taken as a sort of back-handed compliment: just some blinkered gatekeeper's timorous misjudgement of your obvious merit, a passing over that will one day be rectified by posterity. Remember the Salon des Refusés! Van Gogh didn't sell a single picture in his lifetime! People thought Blake was just a weirdo! Which rectification, in a very few exceptional cases, has indeed turned out to be forthcoming. But most artists and writers have always sunk without trace, even the ones who did get published, exhibited, and even sold well in their day: they may have been good, but they weren't good enough to progress to the final rounds of the grand ongoing art-historical competition.

In the end, that will be the inevitable fate of all of us neverwozzes and also-rans, who have spent far too much time and money playing in the art casino. So, to adapt that cautionary mantra of the banks: "your investment is more likely to go down than up, and you will surely get back less than the amount you invested". It's a mug's game, art, so remember: always make art responsibly... Or maybe think of buying some Premium Bonds instead?

1. I'm reminded of an old friend's story about his Scottish grandmother, who would proffer a plate of biscuits, and say, "Have lots! Have two..."

Too Darn Hot

It's been too hot. I can't sleep. My brain has melted: 35° C during the day and over 20° C at night (a so-called "tropical night") is not normal for May in these parts. It's not even very common in the height of a hot summer. Although I suspect – as with Trump, Blair's latest undead intervention (witch project?), and, it seems, pretty much everything else going on in the world – what counts as "normal" has become a contested and unstable category.

So here's a three-parter picture I've been working on, which may help to cool things down a bit. Although, like those Xmas cards with Victorian carollers lantern-lit among the snow-drifts, it's a complete fantasy: snow is no longer "normal" around here either.

But if there's one thing guaranteed to bring my brain back up to boiling point, it's vox pop pieces from people out in the sun working on their skin lesions, spouting nonsense like, "Lovely bit o' sunshine! If this is climate change, bring it on!" I sincerely hope these fools get to live in a part of the country where the water supply has broken down, blamed by the utilities not on their decades of privatised corporate greed and neglect, but on "extra demand" by the public, due to the hot weather. You and your daily showers! [1] So, as always, it seems it's all our fault plus that of "the weather", and never their incompetence and short-sighted focus on extracting maximum profit from a monopoly situation. That, at least, is perfectly normal. I mean, why would a water company be expected to plan for extra demand in hot weather? Totally unreasonable!

Actually, on second thoughts, I think I prefer this picture cut down into a two-parter: much chillier! Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow... The ways things are going, it could happen. Maybe next week?

Whiteout

1. For the record, I should point out that we do not have a shower, and neither of us bathes more than twice a week. We also never wash the car – well, maybe once or twice a year? – and water the garden from a rain butt. So don't you be looking at us like that, Southern Water!

Quarry Steps

Boundary stone on the Downs

I was in Bristol for a few days this week, and one afternoon between rain showers went for a walk across the Downs – a large open area of grassy "common" land – to the most northerly and steepest part of Whiteladies Road in Clifton, known as Blackboy Hill, named after a pub that is no longer there. It's a curious pairing of names in these days of sensitivity about race and the slave trade, especially in Bristol, but it would be sad to see them abolished in a fit of retrospective rectitude. You can't change history, and in my view you shouldn't make token attempts to cover up the sins of the past: let's keep them in plain sight so we can learn from them, not pretend they didn't happen.

Anyway, I decided to do a little exploration of an area just off to the western side of the main thoroughfare, a warren of steep little streets I had never really ventured into before. A lot of Clifton is made up of imposing Georgian terraces, once very grand residences for the wealthier citizens, but now mainly converted into flats. When we lived in Bristol in our post-student days in the late 1970s, the area was very run-down: I have mentioned before the flat I rented for a while at the very top of such a terrace within a minute's walk of Brunel's famous suspension bridge, which was so cold that the toilet bowl actually froze in the winter of 1980/1. Mind you, my future partner's flat in a similar Clifton terrace – originally just one mid-level room with an enormously high ceiling divided into two rooms with a rudimentary galley kitchen – had no toilet at all: there was a shared bathroom down the stairs on a landing between floors. Gentrification has since worked its magic in the subsequent decades, however, and the whole area has been transformed into an estate agent's dream: the very large terraces that line the sides of the Downs are referred to as "millionaire's row".

But the streets to the west of Blackboy Hill are not like that. They are narrow, short, and steeply sloping, lined with small terraced cottages and infill buildings of various vintages that are now mainly occupied by characterful folk, ostentatiously subcultural in their tastes, who must have bought them back in the days when property around there was rather cheaper. Wandering through them, I came across a side passage named Quarry Steps, which was intriguing, so I followed it, and found myself at the top of a long and precipitous set of steps that had presumably once led down into a quarry, but which was now a very large depression filled with more little streets. It was like looking down into a village hidden in some secret valley, with its horizon dominated not by mountains but by the rear view of the Georgian terraces ranged above. Naturally, I went down to explore further.

I was doing my usual photographic thing – looking for the curious juxtapositions and accidental compositions that abound in such neighbourhoods – when I turned a corner and was stopped in my tracks: Whoah! At the far end of the street was a massive, ruined structure that would not have looked out of place in some swords-and-sorcery fantasy film. It looked like the exposed dungeons and cellars of some demolished castle, stretching up some thirty or more feet, on top of which the back gardens of a tall multi-storeyed terrace were perched perilously. Walking closer, it loomed ever higher, until I was standing in a narrow street, literally a few yards from this spectacular wall of overgrown masonry and brickwork.

A young guy happened to come out of a front door, heading to his car, so I asked him, "Do you have any idea what that is?" He said, "No, no idea, I've only lived here for a year". Which struck me as remarkably incurious, not least because the crumbling cliff of masonry brooding over his residence had Danger! Hazard Area! Do not enter! signs posted all over it. I think it would have been one of the first questions I would have asked, probably ahead of "what day do the bins go out?" but definitely after "have there been many rockfalls recently?"

Anyway, a little web browsing later on revealed that it is, as you might expect, a remnant of the quarry that had once filled the area. It must have been a mighty enterprise in its day to warrant this kind of superstructure, more appropriate to a mine or some military edifice, although I suppose ensuring that the posh folks' houses up above didn't topple into the workings down below might have warranted it, too.

One unexpected claim to fame is that the area is a geological "site of special scientific interest" (SSSI), as the first fossils of the dinosaur Thecodontosaurus were found here in 1834.

Description and Reasons for Notification:

Quarry Steps shows a fissure deposit which is in effect the last remnant of an extensively quarried area (Durdham Down) where the first reptile-bearing fissure deposits were discovered early in the 19th Century.

Two species of the saurischian dinosaur Thecodontosaurus, a phytosaur and two species of sphenodontid lizards have been found in fissure fillings of presumed Rhaetian age.

A key site in studies of reptilian history and environments during the early Mesozoic of Britain.
(English Nature citation sheet for the SSSI site)

A "fissure deposit", since you ask, is exactly what it sounds like: stuff, including animal remains, that has ended up in holes in older, pre-existing rocks. Typically in south-west England with its limestone landscape these would have been caves and "grykes" into which water had carried deposits from the surface. Grykes, since you ask... Oh, look it up. Did I ever mention I have an O-level in Geology?

Wrætlic is þes wealstan,    wyrde gebræcon;

This masonry is wondrous; broken by fate

burgstede burston,     brosnað enta geweorc.

courtyard pavements smashed; the work of giants is crumbling.

Hrofas sind gehrorene,     hreorge torras,

Roofs are fallen, ruinous are the towers,

hrim geat torras berofen,     hrim on lime,

the frosty gate with frosty mortar is ravaged,

scearde scurbeorge     scorene, gedrorene,

chipped roofs are torn, fallen,

ældo undereotone.    Eorðgrap hafað

undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses

waldend wyrhtan     forweorone, geleorene,

the mighty builders, perished and fallen,

heardgripe hrusan,     oþ hund cnea

the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations

werþeoda gewitan.     Oft þæs wag gebad

of people have departed. Often this wall,

ræghar ond readfah     rice æfter oþrum,

lichen-grey and stained with red, one reign after another,

ofstonden under stormum;     steap geap gedreas.

remained standing under storms; the lofty gate has fallen.

(from "The Ruin", an Anglo-Saxon poem in the Exeter Book) [1]

Standing in that street, it's easy to imagine the awe that ruined Roman structures in Britain would have inspired in recently-arrived Anglo-Saxon settlers ("The Ruin" is generally thought to describe the remains of the hot-bath complex in the city of Bath). Today, nobody builds with the boldness, skill, and attention to detail of those 18th and 19th century builders: this was just a quarry, after all, not a town hall or a bank. The work of giants, indeed.

Bennett's Patch, Bristol

1. Anyone curious about Anglo-Saxon poetry could do worse than look at my book Caedmon's Hymn, available free as an online flip-book on Issuu.