Didn't It Rain, Children...

 Despite the fact that it hasn't stopped raining for weeks – some parts of the West Country have had rain every day so far this year – we spent last weekend in our Bristol flat, really just for a change of scene. The drive on the M4 motorway was positively apocalyptic, however, both going up and coming back. At times, the intensity of the rain was astonishing: pounding on the roof of the car it sounded like gravel was being emptied over us, and even when it had slackened off the constant spray from the wheels of all the other vehicles was severely impairing visibility, with the wipers struggling to clear a view through the windscreen.

So the drive required complete concentration – there are some very bad and inconsiderate drivers out there, who have clearly never come across or understood terms like "stopping distance" or "aquaplaning" – but very occasionally I'd sneak a look sideways, and the contrast between the roiling tunnel of spray along the motorway and the placid countryside, with its intensely, um, saturated colours under a heavy downpour on either side was remarkable. Rain in a muddy field and rain on a busy motorway are radically different experiences, separated by a few yards and a fence. It would probably make a great drone shot, if drones can even fly in such weather.

Frequent spells of heavy rain do mean great clouds, though, much appreciated when I was out walking on the Downs or along the Avon Gorge. For a guy once notorious for the absence of skies in his photos, I've become something of a cloud fanatic. Unless there's something interesting going on up there, I'm less inclined to take the photo. Give me empyrean drama, please, not boringly bland blue or grey skies.

It's clear there is some sort of geothermal action going on in parts of the Gorge; I suppose the name Hotwells is a clue. It doesn't have to have been raining for large plumes of water vapour to rise up from certain spots in Leigh Woods on the far side of the Avon, opposite our fourth-floor kitchen window. When I first saw these I assumed they were the fires of people camped out in the woods, as they always seemed to come from the same places. Confusingly, smoke does also rise up from time to time, presumably from foresters' bonfires, but "steam is white, smoke is grey", I seem to recall someone, probably my father, saying at some point in my childhood. I remain puzzled, however, how even tiny individual clouds, barely more than wisps of water vapour, can be dark grey in an otherwise cloudless sky; I will have to look it up one of these days. Summink t'do wiv refraction, I expect. Maybe my old friend Science Man will intervene.

Of course, frequent outbreaks of heavy rain also mean that the few people out on the Downs – togged-up plodders with dogs, joggers, and the odd dogged blogging photog (heh, sorry, couldn't resist that) – have the entire space more or less to themselves. Even the designated viewpoints, normally busy with visiting sightseers, were deserted: you can just about make out the Clifton Suspension Bridge at the far end of the Gorge in the photo below.

But that's quite enough rain for now, thank you very much. Let's hope that those slick roads and puddled pavements don't freeze over, and some sunshine gets a chance to work its alchemy first, transmuting leaden skies into bright, beautiful cloudscapes.

Ephemeral

I was in the mood for a bit of experimentation, so I decided to combine into a single text the "two-part rant" Original Print that I referred to in a recent post, edit it a bit, and create a cheap Blurb booklet from the result. You can see it here on my Blurb bookstore, or (probably better) as an Issuu flipbook (go for "full screen" to lose the adverts, etc.):

This struck me as a neat way to highlight and preserve some of my better posts, particularly the ones that are text-heavy and argumentative; a sort of pamphleteering. With over 2,000 posts to choose from, there's plenty of scope for more of the same. It must surely be a troubling thought at the back of the mind of any blogger (or, these days, substacker) who has put serious time and energy into their efforts that they are only as permanent as the platform they're made on. As I've mentioned before, I do send a copy of everything I have self-published to my old college library, and – so far – they haven't refused to take any of them, but these 2000+ posts will sooner or later vanish, leaving not a rack behind.

Sadly, though, Blurb's high shipping charges [1] mean that even a very cheap publication becomes prohibitively expensive to buy – in the UK, at least – so I'll continue to offer free-to-view flipbook versions on Issuu of all my Blurb efforts. You lucky people! In some ways these are better than a paper copy, it's true, although how long either Blurb or the Issuu platform will continue to be available (or affordable) is anybody's guess. We live in an increasingly ephemeral world.

BTW, I added this little illustrative two-page Appendix to the Original Print text, which you may find interesting:

If nothing else, it suggests how much thought and work can go into creating a digital image from a simple starting point. Although in its final version this one is relatively simple – just five layers altering or adding to the original scraperboard image – more recent projects may have thirty or more interacting layers.

That is, assuming an image is not AI-generated, of course. I probably should have added a paragraph or two about AI image-generation to that Original Print text, but I've never used AI, don't intend to, and consequently have nothing of value to say about it, other than the well-justified fear that people who do use it will royally fuck things up for us honest hard-working digital picture-makers, simply by reinforcing the prejudice that already exists. Troublingly, I notice that in recent times ChatGPT is listed among the regular visitors to this blog. I also simply don't believe that I have had 14,800 genuine page-views in the last seven days. These surely must mainly have been robotic scrapers, spammers, and whatever other allied AI-adjacent trades there are crawling all over my "content". Similarly, it seems Chinese robots (at least, I presume that's what they are, not actual, you know ... Chinese people) can't get enough of my webpage, which I have rather neglected and has remained unchanged for quite some time: 74 visits from China in the past 30 days, for example, compared to 7 from the UK or 6 from the USA. Nothing new to see here, comrade robots, please move along.

So, when it comes to the urge to make something more permanent out of these blog posts, readers of long-standing may recall that back in 2020 I had begun to produce a series of "best of" publications (see the post Idiotic Hat Selections 1 & 2). However, I soon gave up on that vainglorious project, partly due to a complete lack of interest [sad face emoji], but also because I had found that it was possible to save an entire year's worth of posts, images and all, as a PDF file via various "blog to book" services; something, moreover, that I recently discovered I can easily do for myself and entirely cost free. [2]

Consequently, I began to save compilations of these PDF files onto DVD as The Idiotic Hat Annuals. See, for example, the 2018 post Ten Idiotic Years, marking this blog's 10th anniversary, with files made using a slightly unsatisfactory (but cheap!) "blog to book" service, which is now, inevitably, defunct. These DVDs will serve as a handy archive to set against the inevitable day that either Google withdraws the free Blogger service or I decide to stop blogging, whichever is the sooner. Although, in this ephemeral world, how long either DVDs or PDFs will remain readable is yet another digital "known unknown".

There's still really no long-term substitute for ink on paper, is there? How lucky we are that Shakespeare's chums decided to commit his plays to print, saving fully half – half! – of those 36 plays from oblivion: no First Folio would have meant no Macbeth, no Measure for Measure, no Tempest... By comparison, of course, a mere blog seems a little, what? Insubstantial? But then, as Dogberry says in Much Ado, comparisons are odorous, so, let's save whatever we can from the inevitable Great Digital Forgetting to come. Crank up the pamphleteering! [3]

DVD case insert (my design skills have improved since 2018...)

1. Before adding any "profit", a single copy of this 24 page, 13 x 20 cm paperback on "economy" paper costs £2.99. Excellent! But the shipping charge for a single copy is £9.99 (unless I need it urgently, in which case "priority" shipping is £23.99...). For two copies, the shipping charge is £12.23, and for five copies £18.95 (£41.92 priority), and so on. There are discounts for larger quantities – for example, to order 100 would bring the per copy price + shipping down to £3.21 – but that rather defeats the whole point of "on demand" publication: you would be back in the self-publisher's nightmare of having boxes of unsellable items under the bed, that you would have to market and "fulfil" yourself... Been there, done that: no thanks! "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity... What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" (Ecclesiastes 1). That Preacher bloke knew what he was talking about...

2. Any bloggers out there who want to know how to do this? Just send me an email and I'll explain. It's very simple, and requires no technical knowledge at all, although it probably does require the use of the Chrome browser.

3. And FFS do something about those precious photos on your phone! How ironic, if our selfie-crazed generations leave fewer images behind for posterity than their great-grandparents did...

Access All Areas

December 2013

I mentioned in a previous post that, following an external drive failure, I lost most of the image files I had made with a camera I had bought – second-hand, as usual, a Panasonic G3 – some time in the latter half of 2012, and which I was still using as my main camera during my Innsbruck residency in summer 2014. It was an excellent camera – still is – but shortly thereafter I made the move to Fuji, persuaded that the larger sensor would give even better results.

How much did I lose? Well, I save my files in monthly sub-directories ("folders", if you must), so there will have been something like twenty or more G3 folders on that disk, of which just four have survived, dating from October 2013 to January 2014. It was entirely my fault: instead of sending the failed drive straight to a professional recovery service, I attempted to do it myself. Duh. Luckily, some of the better photos have survived because I had saved them elsewhere; not least on the CD of exhibition-quality images I sent to Innsbruck in 2014 as a backup, just in case my box of eighty or so prints failed to arrive intact, on time, or at all. But many of the pictures you would have seen (still can see!) posted on this blog during those months from 2012 to 2014 have gone. [Sad face emoji...]

So I thought I'd take a nostalgic trawl through these surviving images, just to see what is still in there, and also what the subsequent decade-plus of experience in processing "raw" files might enable me to make of them now. At that time I was in my last year of working at the Southampton University library, and still taking more or less daily photo-excursions around the campus during my lunch hour. As so many have remarked, access is a photographer's most useful tool, and my staff ID card coupled with familiarity and curiosity were pretty much an "access all areas" pass and, if necessary, skeleton key. I doubt there were many people other than, say, the security and janitorial staff who knew the more interesting nooks and crannies of the Highfield Campus as well as I did in those days.

I'm sure I must have become a familiar curiosity on campus over the years, that bearded loony with the camera, although perhaps not on the scale of the sometime professor of mathematics who used to wander the place shouting incomprehensible greetings and occasionally losing his half-mast trousers, precariously belted with string. As a result, I rarely seemed to attract any unwanted attention when I was out and about, conducting my lunchtime photographic explorations in odd corners.

Graduation ceremony marquees, October 2013

I remember one day in April 2014, however, that was different. I was hunkered down inside my favourite telephone box one lunchtime, squinting through the viewfinder at the array of fresh tape-marks, stickers, and abrasions, all nicely backlit in the spring sunshine, when the door was pulled open. By malign coincidence, it seemed the one and only person on campus not in possession of a mobile phone wanted to use the pay-phone. "Sorry," I said, standing up, "I'll come out." "No, it's OK," he said, "I just wondered what you were doing?"

Now, I suppose it's possible that, from the outside, it may have looked a bit odd, suspicious even, to see a man squatting down inside a phone box. Phone boxes do sometimes get used for purposes other than telephonic communication, although rarely in broad daylight in the centre of a university campus. Nonetheless, it takes a certain kind of guileless curiosity actually to open a kiosk door simply in order to find out what someone who is clearly not on the phone might be doing in there. I must admit I was tempted to play the situation for laughs, but instead I waggled my camera, and said, cheerily, "Taking photographs!"  "But why? What on earth of?" he replied.

This is always a tricky one to negotiate. I could see he was genuinely baffled, and perhaps even concerned for my sanity. It's easy to forget quite how far beyond most people's conception of "normal" any photography is that does not involve close relatives, holidays, or safely-accredited subjects like sunsets, cute kittens, porn, etc. The beauty of a digital camera, however, is that you can show, not tell. "Here," I said, "Have a look", and put the camera into "chimping" mode. I showed him an image or two not unlike the ones below, taken a few months earlier.

I could see he wasn't convinced. Which was quite disappointing, and even a little insulting, so – with my best "Good day to you, sir!" expression – I firmly shut the door and carried on. There's none so blind as them as will not see, as the old folk used to say.

So, to double down on the nostalgia, this week I walked over to the campus for the first time in quite a while. I might look a bit scruffy and timeworn these days, but at least my trousers are secure. I used to go over there quite regularly as part of one of my walking circuits, but as the years passed I saw fewer and fewer familiar faces, and I began to feel like a ghost passing unseen through the lives of hundreds of young students, an ever increasing percentage of whom were now clearly Chinese.

This week I saw no one and nothing much that I recognised. "My" campus has pretty much gone: demolition and rebuilding have been non-stop during the past dozen years. The telephone boxes have gone, of course, but the whole look and feel of the place has changed, the way a house you used to live in will have changed after several subsequent inhabitants have altered and added and updated the place to their satisfaction. I remember hearing that the architects had been given a "nautical" brief (it's Southampton, geddit?) and much of the campus does now look as if various massive cruise ships have run aground. Of course, massive cruise ships actually look more like office blocks than ships, so that's perhaps not so surprising.

Oh, and my ID card no longer lets me through the library turnstiles. Do I care? I'm not sure that I do. To get in, I'd have to explain that, some twelve years ago, I was once a person of some substance hereabouts. "Cringe", is the word, I think. And besides:

Terrific... First you lose the TV remote...

Still, if you know where to look, there are still a few spots where the shop-worn pleasures of wabi sabi can be found; ageing 60s architecture, mainly – although the Faraday Building, once thought worthy of celebration on a stamp, is long gone – plus some tatty portakabins, that once served as stopgap offices, labs, and workspaces. No doubt they'll be gone soon, too. It may be some time before I come back again to find out.

Right is Wrong

Self-portrait in a convex mirror

David Hockney has this thing, explored at length in his book Secret Knowledge, about the use of optics by the Old Masters. When you look at his evidence, it's obvious that he's onto something, but – when you think about the practicalities of painting in oils in the centuries before electric light – it equally clearly can't explain everything that looks a bit "lensy", such as objects that appear to be out of focus. A painting isn't a passive reproduction of what can be seen via some lens-based viewing device. But lenses and projected images have been around for a long time, and it would be an odd artist who wasn't intrigued by them or who refused to take advantage of them.

When it comes to optically-assisted art, most people probably think of something like the camera obscura, a distinctly immobile set-up really only suitable for (very) still lifes, landscapes and the like. [1] There is one permanently installed in a small room at the top of a tower near to the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol, which – unless it is an uncharacteristically sunny day – projects a dim, rather uncanny live image of whatever is going on outside – traffic on the bridge and visitors admiring the Avon Gorge, mainly – onto a large white concave disc, around which a dozen or so people can stand in the darkened room, like a sort of optical seance. It's a little underwhelming, to be honest, and impossible to photograph (don't think I haven't tried).

But there is also a cunning and portable optical device known as the camera lucida which, in ordinary daylight, will display a virtual image of the subject, viewed through a prism, so that it appears to be projected onto a paper surface below, where it can be traced. I once had the opportunity to try one of these and, although it does take a bit of getting used to, it really can help to get a sketch onto paper quickly and accurately, so long as the subject doesn't move. The end result, obviously, is still entirely dependent on the user's drawing skills. There's a nice explanatory video on YouTube, made by a guy who 3D-printed his own version of a very portable camera lucida. It would be unfair to make any comment on his actual drawing skill.

I have no idea how much something like a camera lucida would actually have been used by artists – after all, the ability to draw from life was once a basic art-school discipline – but the convenience, sophistication, and simplicity of photography has clearly replaced any such optical devices, as well as, regrettably, diminishing the importance of life-drawing skill in much contemporary practice. Which has had consequences. I have to say it amuses me when I see amateurish photographic distortions – converging verticals, say – transcribed into their paintings by artists who have simply reproduced their own lens-based source material. You do have to wonder whether a certain feeling of shame about this semi-secret dependence on photographs – what, you can't draw from life? – may partly explain the ongoing prejudice in the art world against photography as an art medium (see my two-part rant Original Print).

Of course, the low angle of the rising or setting sun will cast images of a shadowy sort onto any suitable surface, most noticeably at this time of year in northern latitudes. It makes you very aware of how photography was prefigured, in principle, before anyone worked out how to preserve such evanescent projections as these, that solidify, shift, and fade with the changing mood of the sunlight. Plato's allegory of the cave might well be seen as an early imagining of the camera obscura; we might even say that our modern-day obsession with the images and dubious information laid before us on our various screens makes Plato's actual philosophical point more acutely. That is, that we mistake those pretty shadows for the Real Thing, and are deludedly happy to go on doing so.

Now, I've had the following rant before but, seeing as we're talking about optics and old masters, I think it's worth indulging in again. You may know the highly-regarded poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery, and the painting by Parmigianino on which it is based. Well, whether you do or not, I invite you to consider that poem's opening lines:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose.

Now consider Parmigianino's painting:


Um, the right hand?? It strikes me that someone should have had a quiet word with Mr. Ashbery before the poem was published. Too late now. As a proudly left-handed man, this peculiar error has brought me to a spluttering halt every time I have attempted to read this lengthy and difficult poem. I mean, honestly! If you're going to be making clever play with mirror tropes, this would be a good one to get right, right from the start.

I know... I'm aware that this does make me sound like one of those pedants who couldn't watch the film Zulu because Lieutenant Bromhead (Michael Caine) uses a Webley Mk. VI rather than the Adams Mk. III actually used by officers at Rorke's Drift, or because so many extras are using anachronistic Lee-Enfield rifles in place of Martini-Henrys (no, not that sort of martini or that sort of Henry, idiot). Although TBH there are much better reasons for not watching that film. But these things matter... Don't they?

OK, maybe not so much in a film, where anachronisms and improbabilities abound – why is everyone always so effin' good-looking, and with such perfect teeth, for a start? – but it surely casts doubt on a major poet's powers of observation if he doesn't get something quite so elementary right (especially when it's indisputably left...). It's very strange. But the even stranger thing, though, is that I seem to be the only person ever to have noticed this, or at least thought it worthy of comment (although I'd be happy to be corrected in that regard, if you happen to know better). I have even checked by practical experiment whether, by some optical wizardry, a convex mirror reflects differently to a regular one (it doesn't, although a concave mirror is another matter altogether). [2]

Perhaps all poetry commentators and critics are right-handed, or try never to look at themselves in a mirror? It wouldn't surprise me. Or perhaps they just think, Hmm, that's odd, must be deliberate, Ashbery's no fool... I wonder what he can have meant by that?

Experimental proof: this leftie's self-portrait in a convex mirror

1. Photographer Abelardo Morell has invented a travelling camera obscura tent, with which he photographs the scene outside the tent as projected onto the ground inside. The resulting images can be very intriguing indeed.

2. One possible explanation: The poem was published in August 1974. Is it possible Ashbery saw the painting reproduced in a book in which the image had been flipped horizontally, either accidentally or on purpose? It does happen. AFAIK Parmigianino's painting was not reproduced in the early editions of Ashbery's book of the same name, whereas – tauntingly – it is now routinely put on the cover.

January 2014

Southampton University campus

Southampton University campus

Southampton University campus

A photo I took on New Year's Day on Clevedon Pier reminded me of one I had taken some years previously, featuring two women silhouetted in a bus shelter in Brighton. Seeking it out in my backfiles I finally discovered it in one of the few surviving folders of image files taken with my Panasonic G3, most of which were lost in a hard drive failure. The pictures in this post are all from that folder, dating from January 2014.

In retrospect, January 2014 was a major turning point in my life. Both of our children were away at university, I was a month away from my 60th birthday and just six months from taking early retirement in the summer, when I would also be having a second solo exhibition of my photography and a 10-day residency in Innsbruck, Austria. I think I could have been forgiven for feeling a certain cautious optimism about the coming years. I would finally have time, motive, and opportunity. The prospect of a modest late-life, alternative career didn't seem unrealistic.

Brighton bus shelter

Brighton seafront

I don't think you have to have "experimented" with psychotropic substances of any sort to have sometimes experienced a certain overwhelming feeling of impending revelation, a conviction that the veil of appearances is about to be lifted to reveal the true nature and workings of the world. Or maybe you do. Whatever, that's the sort of feeling that comes back when I look back at these photographs; you probably see them rather differently. Similar veils, screens, reflections, and Platonic shadows have always been a recurring feature in my photography. However, so far at least, what has been revealed behind them has been nothing more than pipes, wires, and scaffolding. Perhaps that's all there is, and the world is simply what it seems to be? I'm not sure whether that's comforting or deeply disappointing.

Brighton seafront

Brighton seafront

Brighton seafront

As it happens, this piled clutter of pillars and fixings is what was recovered of Brighton's West Pier, after it was destroyed in 2003 by a great storm and two arson attacks, and then carefully sorted and stashed beneath the seafront boardwalk, like skeletal remains awaiting some future resurrection. Or perhaps it's more like some enormously complex assembly kit for which the instructions have gone missing. Lots of luck with that... One fully-functioning pier is quite enough, really.

Turnstable Country

As a birthday celebration for my partner, we went up to London last weekend to see the exhibition Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals at Tate Britain with our two children and their partners. I don't know whether it's a symptom of advancing age or an impatience with the desire of our national art institutions to pack 'em in (both pictures and visitors) as often as possible, but I have to say I am not very keen on these so-called "blockbuster" exhibitions. As I wrote in the post Go Van Gogh, following a visit to the National Gallery's Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers show:

All blockbuster exhibitions are exhausting, I find, particularly when they feature an overwhelming quantity of work by just one blockbuster artist, some of whose blockbuster pictures are so familiar – from posters, coasters, postcards, tea towels, key fobs, fridge magnets, and whatever other gift-shop tat can carry a reproduction of an image – that they have ceased being works of art and become a blockbuster brand, even recognisable by people who don't care about "art" at all. To be honest, I'd rather come across a few deservedly famous paintings when walking through a gallery, like bumping into old friends on the street, than navigate whole roomfuls of major and minor masterpieces which, however thoughtfully curated, is always more like attending a reunion or a wedding, where the meeting-with-people quotient of a "high-functioning introvert" like me gets stretched a little thin. "Hello, 'Trunk of a Tree', I believe you know 'View of Arles', we were at Montmajour together in 1888? Oh, do excuse me, but I've just spotted 'The Yellow House' talking to 'The Bedroom', and I must have a word..."

I mean, I enjoy a top-quality Constable or Turner as much as anybody, but to trudge through room after room after room of not dissimilar paintings, a good 80% of which fall somewhat short of "masterpiece" status, eventually becomes a negative experience. The first couple of rooms always feel revelatory – Good grief, Turner was sixteen when he painted that? – but thereafter most shows are bogged down by the curatorial desire to impose some thematic orchestration, in this case to construct a parallel narrative out of the lives of what were, in the end, two rather different professional painters trying to make a living in a very different world to ours. In those days you were entirely dependent on sales and patronage: there were no grants or lucrative prizes to reward your personal artistic "genius", not even for turning the lights on and off, or letting gallery visitors remove your clothes with scissors.

In the end, it can feel a bit too much like being trapped inside a catalogue raisonné, and I, at least, always find myself looking for small visual pleasures as a relief from the, um, bigger picture superimposed by the curators. Which Constable paintings show swallows skimming the water? for example. Or amusing trivia: I enjoyed the name of this particular donor, for example:

E. Farquhar Buzzard... Now there's someone who must have had some character-building experiences at school. Or, look, here's yer actual John Constable's collapsible sketching chair on a plinth:

Very nice... Don't think I wasn't tempted to hop up and give it a try.

Which is not to say that the exhibition didn't have an effect on me. On a very brief visit to Mottisfont Abbey on Saturday I seemed to be walking through a landscape of just the sort conjured up on canvas by the painters of that time. The light and the clouds were exhilarating – all four of these photographs were taken within a single 20 minute period – even though the meadows were very marshy underfoot, and almost impassable in places. What wouldn't the likes of Turner or Constable have given for a device that could sketch a view with such fidelity in just 1/200th of a second? But then, what wouldn't you give to be able to sketch like a Constable or a Turner?

It is an Ancient Blogger

So, Christmas and New Year...

Fun as it is to see it enacted on a primary-school stage, not many of us in these sceptical days – surely even those of a "Christian heritage" – put much credence in the enchanting but somewhat dubious Christian origin story. After all, its more credibility-stretching aspects must rely, at best, on the sole testimony of mother Mary, stand-in dad Joseph having quietly and somewhat mysteriously dropped out of the narrative along the way (what, you'd never noticed that? So much for "patriarchy"...). Angels, too, seem to have become even more scarce than shepherds in subsequent centuries, which is a pity, I think. [1]

I dare say the theologians have neat, hand-wavy explanations to tidy all this up to their own satisfaction, but they have never seemed particularly inclined to share these with the rest of us: too difficult and too profound, no doubt, for their simple-minded flock of metaphorical sheep to grasp (that would be us). Or perhaps rather too transparently aligned with Old Testament messianic prophesies and cunningly superimposed onto long-standing pagan winter festivities (see my post It's All About the Children).

More prosaically, of course, not everyone on the planet regards January 1st as the start of a New Year, or even as "January 1st", but let's not get into that. Packaging the two events together works for us, not least because such propitiously-timed seasonal goings-on have been going on in these light-starved regions forever. Come back, sun, please come back! Oh, all right, since you ask so nicely... Hooray! Party Time! For school-kids, working stiffs and wage-slaves (that's most of the population, I'd imagine) it's a welcome break from the workaday norm, a week or two studded with twinkling lights, seasonal treats, and officially-endorsed occasions for anticipation and celebration.

It has been becoming a much more private and secular holiday over the years, too. It has been a while since any kids came round to knock on our door "carolling", even in its vestigial form, i.e. waiting for the door to open and launching into a truncated, 10-second chorus of "We wish you a merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!" Unlike Hallowe'en's trickle treating [2], I don't think either carollers or most carollees had much idea of what was supposed to happen next, which led to nothing more than a series of awkward doorstep moments. Even the Rotarians seem to have given up trawling the streets around here with their canned carols blaring from a van, and rattling their collecting buckets. I don't miss it; "Silent Night", indeed.

Speaking purely personally, Christmas lost most of its charm for me around age 11 when my sister – eight years older than me – left home under the very traditional shadow of a hastily-arranged marriage. My parents seemed suddenly to fade into a perpetually-tired middle-age but then, and worse from my p-o-v, quickly settled into the role of doting grandparents. Christmas from then on rarely took place under our own roof, and I found I had been handed a minor walk-on part as "churlish teenage uncle". So I would take every opportunity to escape and begin the study of the ways of delinquency with like-minded friends, hanging about in various dark and frosty corners. Which was actually a lot more "magical" than Christmas, although not without risk: I was careful and I was lucky, but a few of us didn't make it out of our teens alive or without the unwanted gift of a brand-new criminal record. 

Having your own children revives the fun of Christmas, of course, but brings with it the stress of actually having to make the fun happen. It takes some kind of domestic saint to prepare a celebratory meal with unaccustomed ingredients and for an unusual quantity of diners, including at least one vegetarian and/or other dietary restrictions, or to take joy in ensuring that the right gifts have been bought and that an acceptable balance of generosity between recipients has been achieved. The whole thing is a nightmare of potentially disastrous pitfalls: a turkey that has resisted roasting for hours beyond the calculated timing, let's say, and served up by an angry cook far later than scheduled to a sullen and sarcastic family – accompanied by overcooked, warmed-up vegetables – is nobody's idea of a festive feast. Or so I'm told. 

Sadly, any compensatory seasonal sparkle does begin to fade once your children are no longer lighting up the house with the exuberant wattage of their excitement, and really just want to escape and study the ways of delinquency with their like-minded friends. Nothing brings on the indigestion quite like lying awake at 3 a.m., wondering when your teenage daughter will stagger home from a night out clubbing, all the while mentally apologising to your deceased parents for having done much the same to them. Or, ah, so I imagine.

Since those anxious years, for us Christmas has evolved into a more relaxed family get-together on neutral ground: generally a rented cottage near the sea in Dorset, big enough to let the different folks indulge their different strokes – it is frankly impossible to read in the same room as whooping kidults playing Mario Kart – but cosy enough for congenial gatherings around the table or a log-burning stove. From there, the two of us will generally retreat to our Bristol flat for a quiet New Year, returning here to Southampton before Twelfth Night, like Tudor aristocrats. Which reminds me of one of those strange marginal annotations Coleridge added to the 1817 edition of The Ancient Mariner, from Part IV:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

No servants await us at home, of course, but we have their 21st century equivalents: there's milk on the doorstep, the heating is on, there's food in the freezer, and the Wi-Fi leaps eagerly back into action. As does the Ancient Blogger:

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

 

1. My partner's niece, having grown up in the distinctly cross-cultural environment of Bristol, as a child referred to Muslim women in hijabs or other head coverings as "shepherds", due to their resemblance to children dressed up for a Nativity play. I know! I'm afraid it's a coinage too cute not to adopt, at least safely in private.

2. Another cute and useful coinage by a neighbour's small son.

Raking

I really meant to put up some of the photographs I took over our Christmas / New Year break today but, unexpectedly, it SNOWED here during the night on Sunday – a whole five millimetres I'd guess, easily enough to bring the entire county to a standstill – and Monday was a classic blue-skies freezing-cold winter day, so... What else was I going to do?

Although, actually, once I'd got over the novelty of the sugar coating on the pots and frozen water dishes in the back garden (sorry about that, thirsty birds, but the hammer just bounced off!), it was the brilliant raking light that kept me outside all afternoon. There is something exhilarating about the sensory contradiction between bright sunshine and temperatures hovering around 0° C. It's a sort of natural sauna effect that is probably deeply boring to those living in frostier latitudes, but down here on the south coast is a rare treat. I did keep all my clothes on, though.