Ch-Ch-Changes

Sometimes, I'm sure, this blog does veer into the lane labelled "too much information". After all, why should anyone care about a succession of just-so stories about me, my rather uneventful life, and my inconsequential opinions? So be warned that this post is an edited extract from an ongoing project of "life writing", and there's no need to read it if you're not as interested in my life as I am... Although if your life has been even slightly similar you might enjoy the resonances.

Also, note that some of what is in here has been recycled from previous posts – apologies if you find yourself experiencing déjà lu – and the editing may have given a certain sense of disjuncture in places. All is true, but names may have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and those subject to a "not proven" verdict.

Evidence...

If you've ever done any programming, you'll be aware of the concept of "epoch time". That is, a more-or-less arbitrary start date from which all other dates are calculated, generally by the number of seconds elapsed since or before the chosen zero point. It has always struck me as highly appropriate that in the Unix operating system (and thus much programming) the "epoch date" is January 1st 1970. My personal epoch may have begun, technically, early in 1954, but my own real life as an independent human being began in 1970. If ever there was a good time to be sixteen – debatable – 1970 may well have been it. In the sense that some people in the 1940s had "a good war", I had a good sixteen.

Of course, no year stands in isolation: everything that happens during a calendar year is the result of what happened in the preceding years, or is preparation for the future. Also, when you are of school-age, life follows the rhythm of the academic year, so the year I am remembering is really a fuzzy subset of the school years 1969-70 and 1970-71, divided and capped by the long vacations of summers 1969, 1970, and 1971. In my case, this span marked the transition from the end of compulsory education, when by far the majority of my contemporaries left school to find work, to the minority pursuit of voluntary sixth form studies. Ah, we few, we nerdy few, we band of brothers! For me, those years were the fulcrum around which my life turned, when the prospects of a wider world finally came into view.

In the years before about 1968, I was a quiet, obedient, and introverted boy who did well at school and, to the best of my memory, never gave my parents the remotest cause for concern. But the onset of my adolescence coincided with the turbulence of the late 1960s and some unexpected changes in our family circumstances that began my transformation into a more troubled and questioning youth. At that time we moved from our three-bedroom semi-detached council house into a fourth-floor, two-bedroom flat in a six-storey council block known as Chauncy House, one of the first edifices built in the New Town of Stevenage, which has since been demolished. It is strange to think, now, of that vacant space in mid-air that was once my bedroom, and the site of so much teenage hope, anxiety, excitement, and tedium. 

My parents were good, law-abiding people, very typical of the aspiring working and lower-middle classes of the time who – having grown up in the pre-welfare environment of the 1920s and 30s, and endured long wartime years of military service and the subsequent deprivations of rationing – were committed to doing nothing very much other than to enjoy the peace and material bounty of the 1950s and 60s, and to reap the benefits of conformity: a telephone, a fridge, a washing machine, a car, and for my father promotion from the shop-floor into an office job, which meant driving into work and wearing a suit, rather than riding the bus and pulling on overalls.

By 1970 they had also come into a new role as devoted grandparents, my sister having left home and married in something of a rush five years before. We spent an awful lot of weekends visiting her in a succession of locations as she and her husband raised their two girls while pursuing teaching careers, finally fetching up in deepest darkest Norfolk. Having always having felt something of an outsider in my family – my sister and our closest cousins were all the best part of a decade older than me – I now began to feel distinctly surplus to requirements. If I'm honest, at that age I found my parents and family deeply boring and, worse, clearly intent on cramping my style as the temptations of teenage life beckoned; I could not wait to leave home.

However, it had always been clear that education would be my route out of the tedium and limitations of an ordinary life in a small town, so leaving home would have to wait until I had got a decent set of exam results in my back-pocket. I had never doubted my abilities in the exam room and, as it turned out, not without justification: I finished the academic year 1969-70 with eleven O-levels, eight at the highest grade. True, I did also fail one (so-called "Additional Maths"), partly as a deliberate protest at having been made to do it, but mainly because I am profoundly mathematically-challenged. But that was a decent haul, by any standards. I remember buying a bottle of cider and drinking it in the sun to celebrate, sitting by myself on the grass beside the town centre pond where, eight years earlier, I had often gone fishing with my best friend from primary school, who may well have been somewhere else in town, celebrating his final release from school – in his case a "secondary modern" – into the real world of work.

But that is to jump ahead. In many ways, one of the most important, shaping experiences of that time was, for want of a better word, romantic. For an entire year, from Easter 1970 to Easter 1971, I "went out", as we used to say, with one of the most vivacious and life-enhancing girls in town. How on earth did that happen? Well, there were two necessary preconditions. I'll need to back up a bit more.

I used to walk to school in the morning and back again in the afternoon, usually in the company of my closest friend of those years, Alan, who lived nearby. He'd call at our flat, and we'd walk the familiar mile and a bit that took us out of the New Town and through the streets of the "old town" to the back gate of our school, which had been founded in 1558 as a classic, Shakespeare-era grammar school on the Great North Road. It had been substantially refurbished in the 1950s to accommodate the New Town population as a state boys' grammar, and then in 1968 had become a non-selective, "comprehensive" school. After lessons ended at 4 p.m. we'd walk back, alternately talking earnestly and joking tastelessly as teenage boys will. Now, as it happened, a coach that transported the girls back home from their own grammar school – situated at the other end of town – often pulled up just as we arrived at a particular point on the route, and a few girls would disembark. They would look straight through us as we gawped, while the seated occupants waved and made various other gestures at us, and one of them would then walk diagonally across a scrubby patch of grass to her house on the far corner. I thought she was awesomely, unattainably attractive, and – although I didn't know it then – her name was Jane.

The second thing was that our school took part in an annual "exchange" with a boys' Gymnasium (the equivalent of a grammar school) in what was then West Germany. Stevenage was partnered with Ingelheim-am-Rhein, a pleasant small town situated in wine-growing country on a bend of the Rhine between Bingen and Mainz, and home of the Boehringer pharmaceutical giant. We would alternate home and away exchanges, and at Easter 1970 those of us who were studying German were hosting the second visit of our exchange "partners" in our family homes. Easter that year fell in March, and it was cold and snowy. By then we knew each other well enough to acknowledge that most of us were in utterly incompatible pairings – the single thing my partner Achim and I had in common was that, unusually for both towns, our families lived in a flat – so once the Easter break had begun we'd all go our separate ways, and meet up in more congenial groupings. Mostly, the German lads seemed to like hanging out together at the bowling alley or the swimming pool; there wasn't much else to do in Stevenage on a cold day, after all. In the evenings, though, there were parties and youth clubs and the occasional concert. I found I was more than ready to come out of my swotty shell and discover night-time social life. So that was where all the girls had been hiding!

One Friday night soon after that break-out Easter, in a scene worthy of Gregory's Girl, I was in the Undercroft, a youth club situated in the crypt of a church, when a girl came up to me and asked, "My friend wants to know, would you like to go out with her?" I glanced over at her friend and nearly fell over: it was her, the girl from the school-bus... Asking me if I wanted to "go out"! Well, yeah, I s'pose... Why not? Apparently it had something to do with the lurid green straight-leg cord jeans I was wearing, although it was possible she hadn't been looking straight through me all those times at the bus-stop after all.

My life changed. Quite apart from having a steady girlfriend, I now found myself included in a magic circle of "boys from the boys' grammar with girlfriends from the girls' grammar". As some of those girls were sisters of older, sixth-form boys whose families lived in the more upscale parts of town – of which there were few, and all previously terra incognita to me – it was like gaining entry to a secret parallel universe. It was great; I was suddenly visible, somebody in what seemed, at the time, like a highly-sophisticated milieu. How I ever managed to concentrate on those upcoming O-level exams is a mystery. It helped that Jane was not yet 16: her parents insisted that she be home by 10:30, 11:00 at weekends, when her mother would make us milky coffee in the kitchen, before leaving us alone for a while in their front parlour. I don't think I had ever before been quite so profoundly happy as when walking that mile home from their house, sometimes at midnight when all the town's streetlights switched off simultaneously, a magical moment. And no-one has ever made milky coffee quite like Jane's mum.

Then in the long summer of that year I had two memorable holidays.

The first was a week camping in California with friend Alan. No, not that California, sadly: this was California, Norfolk, five miles north of Great Yarmouth, on a campsite situated on a low sandy clifftop that was inexorably crumbling into the cold, land-hungry North Sea; a precarious spot that finally vanished from the map in a storm some years ago. It was the first time we had been away from our parents without other adults in loco parentis. Our O-level exams were over but the results were not yet in, so we were in that pleasant limbo that lies like a lazy, sun-baked borderland between life's phases. To paraphrase Wordsworth, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be sixteen was fucking brilliant, with everything turned up to maximum volume. The juke-box and radio hits of the time instantly bring the good feelings back: "All Right Now", "Big Yellow Taxi", "Lola", "Tears of a Clown" – all brand new yet somehow all already classics. We'll pass quickly over the inescapable earworm of summer 1970, "In the Summertime" by Mungo Jerry.

With our parents 120 miles away, we savoured that first, heady thrill of simple freedom. We marauded up and down those five miles of coast between California and Great Yarmouth, drinking, hanging out in amusement arcades and the bars and discos of the holiday camps and caravan sites strung along those precarious clifftops. Provincial and unsophisticated stuff, it's true, but however limited the imagination of youth may be in scope, it is nonetheless intense in application. One evening, separate adventures caused us to stagger off on different paths. Later, exhausted by the weary slog back up the beach, I fell asleep in the sand dunes amongst the marram grass and cigarette ends. I woke up, hung-over, damp and covered in wind-blown sand, as the sun cleared the bleary eastern horizon far out to sea. I found my hand was clutching a smooth, palm-sized rock, which on closer inspection turned out to be the worn heart-and-star fossil of a sea-urchin. I still have it, half a century later.

The second holiday was the last I would ever spend with my parents, a ten-day package holiday in a hotel in Cala Millor, Majorca. It wasn't great – as a surly 16-year-old who had just tasted pure uncut freedom, I behaved like a sullen half-wit with an unappeasable grudge – but it did have its moments. There were some memorable group trips, such as a descent into the caverns and lakes of the Cuevas del Drach, and a simple barbecue in a light rain shower, with freshly caught fish grilled right on the beach, raindrops spitting as they splashed the hot griddle. I also had my own room for the first time, so I could slip out at night and sample the nearby bars. ¡Rum y Coke, por favor! Most memorable, though, was one of my earliest and closest brushes with death.

Rather than sit with my parents lazing on the beach, I had got into the habit of going for long, solitary walks into the Majorcan countryside which, away from the hotels and bars, is truly amazingly beautiful. One afternoon I was walking along a nearby rocky peninsula, Punta de n'Amer – head down, dazed and dazzled by the heat and lost in my own thoughts – when I nearly stepped straight over the cliff at the end of the promontory. I can still recall the shock of gazing between my feet at the waves lapping jagged rocks seventy feet below. I particularly remember the dramatic change in the ambient acoustic: one second it was all shrill insects, up close and intimate like the tinnitus I now endure, the next it was the vast echoing antechamber of a lonely, painful death, narrowly avoided. It would have been a true "Musée des Beaux Arts" moment: out to sea a fishing boat was chugging by, and you can imagine the fishermen remarking (to paraphrase Auden, this time) "something idiotic, a boy walking off a cliff", but sailing on, with a fresh catch to unload.

So, that was the context into which my O-level results fell: it couldn't have seemed more natural, more appropriate. I had tasted freedom, I had tasted first love, I had even tasted mortality, and now the academic world had stamped my passport with a provisional visa to anywhere. Or, at any rate, to the sort of freedoms and privileges that can be obtained in exchange for paper credentials earned in an exam room. I experienced those middle months of 1970 as an escalating rush of self-awareness and exultant justification, and it changed me, I think. I probably became insufferably cocky for a while. My father, a patient and tolerant man, clearly found living with the bolshie know-all his quiet little boy was turning into a bit of a challenge, and we nearly came to blows several times. But the next year, 1971, would deliver some blows of a sort calculated to restore a measure of humility and self-questioning.

A regular stop-off on the way home from school would be a couple of stores in the Town Centre where empty 12" LP sleeves were kept in protective plastic covers, alphabetically arranged in racks that you could flip through. Those LP racks were a sort of library: for small-town, working-class kids like us, short of cash and cultural capital, the record displays that sat at the back of those shops offered a free creative education in art, photography, design, and typography, one square foot at a time. In a town like Stevenage there was no such thing as a "record shop": the first LP I ever actually bought came from similar racks in an electrical store, which otherwise mainly sold TVs, radios, and toasters. As it happened, it was the studio half of Cream's Wheels of Fire, with its psychedelic silver sleeve by Martin Sharp, but I had already handled and pored over many, many more, admiring and absorbing their pictorial styles, the more excessive the better, along with all the small-print details of music I would never actually get to hear, often made in places I had never heard of, never mind expected ever to visit. I mean, where the hell was Nashville? Or Detroit? Why did people keep going on about them? Like travel brochures to exotic destinations, or the copies of National Geographic in the dentist's waiting room, record sleeves were documentary evidence of and an invitation to a fuller, more colourful world that existed out there somewhere, if only you could break free of the gravitational pull of small-town life. And along with that invitation came a huge, new challenge: did you dare to be different?

For most of us boys who wanted to remain at school to secure the all-important higher-education passport, and yet who also wanted to be visibly part of what was going on in that wider world, this usually came down to hair. School rules are a good index of post-war teen fashions: in 1970 there were already rulings against excessive grease, sideboards (sideburns), exaggerated quiffs, and hair below the collar. "Conformity" and "non-conformity" were keywords of those years. Schools saw an important part of their social role as enforcing the conformity that so many of our parents had bought into so willingly, or that had been drilled into them in the armed forces. It seemed it was not enough to attend lessons, pay attention, and pass exams: you were required to wear a uniform, be obedient to what often seemed arbitrary rules, and to take part in the "life of the school". Well, for many of us that ran counter to the spirit of the times. Those who were too cool for school left, and took their A-levels at the local FE college. The rest of us resisted as far as possible. I wish I had a group photograph of some of the hairstyles that could scrape by on a technicality. The best I can offer is that "International Student Identity Card" from 1972 above, a finely-judged display of collar-length topiary; if only my hair was that bushy now.

In fact, my most frequent conflicts were over shaving. I was one of those boys who had to start shaving relatively early and, worse, I had a substantial growth of tough ginger stubble the entire length of my neck, which would get sore under the razor. I hated shaving, and would put it off until taken aside by a teacher, and told not to come in to school tomorrow looking like that. What sort of example did it set the younger boys? My fast-mouth replies about 12-year-olds growing beards never did go down well.

I suspect I was only tolerated because I was an Oxbridge prospect – nothing mattered more to the old state grammar schools than a handful of Oxbridge successes every year, unless it was victory on the games field – and refusenik tendencies that would have led to a swift exit from school in other cases – and did – were accommodated as mere eccentricity. Sandals? Suede walking boots? Provocative hair-length? Wrong tie? Won't shave? Don't worry: he's one of our academic "characters". Wait and see how the A-levels pan out... I wasn't the only one, of course, and it must have been around then that I realised that the "awkward squad" was my natural home.

Of course, it was also around then that, for perhaps the next couple of decades or so, the awkward squad became the coolest gang to be in. Certainly, sporty types and tough guys could command a certain respect, but the combination of exciting new music and the novel, non-physical kinds of daring introduced by the "counter culture" – stuff like long hair, drugs, loud music, poetry, and radical politics ( at least as filtered down into the imaginings of naive small-town teenagers living well away from the major cultural centres) – meant that the disaffected, the bespectacled, the nerds and refuseniks – the Whole Sick Crew of misfits in general – finally had their place in the sun. Although many preferred the strobe-lit darkness of a concert hall or youth club, where you could perfect your slouch and sneer of disaffection, and even "idiot dance" to Led Zeppelin like an electrocuted marionette.

Chasing girls...

This all gave an additional edge and substance to one of the happiest moments of my young life, which took place around 12:40 pm on my 17th birthday in  February 1971. I was by then in the lower sixth form, and at around 12:30 I was hanging around in our common room, with its usual noisy, hormonal lunchtime hubbub. However, I became aware of a quietening, a tension, and then whispers of "Where's Mike? Where's Mike?"

I looked around, not a little apprehensively, only to see three familiar grinning girls in the uniform of their grammar school standing in a line, each holding a chocolate cupcake with a lit candle in it. It was Jane, and her two best friends, Pat and Anne. They proceeded to sing "Happy Birthday" and then each gave me a birthday kiss, right in front of the astonished, envious, open-mouthed sixth form, before muttering a few words of explanation, and scampering off. It was a coup de théâtre that left me feeling like the proverbial dog with two tails. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

I should explain. In an operation worthy of Mission Impossible, these three girls had broken their school's rules by leaving the school premises, crossed from one side of town to the other on public transport, entered the grounds of an unfamiliar boys-only school, found the sixth form block, entered into its inner sanctum, found the lucky boy whose birthday it was, performed the ceremony described above, and then reversed all the previous steps without mishap, detection, or detention. I'm not sure, being a typical teenage male dirtbag, whether I ever expressed an appropriate degree of gratitude to Jane, Pat, or Anne, or even how far I believed I was worth all that trouble. Certainly, it never even occurred to me to reciprocate with some similar act of imagination. Duh... But I'll never, ever forget that day.

It is almost certainly not entirely unconnected that, sadly for me, the relationship with Jane that had begun just after Easter 1970 had run its course by Easter 1971. She "chucked" me, as we used to say, on my return from that year's away exchange visit to Ingelheim. I didn't see it coming, and it broke my heart at the time; the first cut really is the deepest. We had become close and – as I realise now, reading through a diary I was keeping at the time – surprisingly and perilously intimate at times. But I think she was simply bored with me and the routines we had fallen into – 17-year-old boys know nothing about keeping the unsteady flame of romance burning – and there may have been parental intervention, too: nobody wanted to see a pair of promising young people follow Route A to truncated lives of frustration at such an early age. So, much of the rest of my transformative year had a dark cloud over it, even if somewhat dispelled by a couple of briefer romances, and the company of good friends.

Unless you too have been to a single-sex school, you probably won't understand the almost surreal hunger that can develop for contact with the opposite sex. I can't speak for any gay pupils at single-sex schools, of course, but then nobody – absolutely nobody – would ever have dared to openly express same-sex longings at a state boys' school in those days. For me, there were times when simply seeing the word "girl" in print was mysteriously mood-altering. Sadly, and sometimes alarmingly, many pupils of single-sex schools enter the wider world with the mystery of gender still wrapped inside its enigmatic packaging, but during that year I had discovered that I was one of those fortunate boys who found girls fun to talk with and listen to, and that they – who'd have thought it? – could be the best of friends. Luckily for everyone concerned, I was too short and too plain-looking ever to exploit this facility but it may, I suppose, have made it much easier to throw off the casual misogyny of my upbringing in my university years.

There were more changes in store for me. For example, one Saturday night later that year I found myself around the back of a pub on the High Street of the "old town" in the company of three or four friends, all crowded into the small lobby that contained a pay-phone and doors to the bars and the toilets. I can't remember what we were doing there; that pub was not one that we drank in – not all Stevenage pubs welcomed underage drinkers – but I suppose we may have been using the telephone. The door to the public bar opened suddenly, hitting me in the side. By reflex, I must have said something along the lines of, "Ow, watch it, mate!" as the door-opener headed to the toilet. A minute or so later he re-emerged, a small, wiry man, probably in his 40s or older. "Do you have something to say to me?" he demanded, in an unmistakably Irish voice. "Um, no, I've got nothing to say ...", I began to reply, interrupted by a crashing right-handed punch to my mouth that swayed me backwards like one of those free-standing inflatable punch-bags. By the time I'd recovered my wits he had vanished, and I was spitting teeth onto the floor. Those three or four friends had meanwhile been mere spectators to the whole event, frozen to the spot in open-mouthed disbelief.

There was a coda to this story. One of those friends was the son of the local organiser of the builders' trade union, UCATT, and described the assault to his father, a tough guy of some standing locally: it seemed likely my assailant was working on one of the building sites in town. So he asked around the sites on the following days: "Anyone know anything about hitting a little guy in the White Lion last Saturday night?" To which eventually came the reply, in that same Irish voice: "He wasn't that bloody little!" Which is true: my memory is that he was actually rather shorter than me. As far as I know nothing came of this self-incrimination: it certainly never occurred to anyone to prosecute the man. You didn't back then, did you? Besides, my own father was quietly disgusted that neither I nor any of my mates had got any retaliation in before the guy had managed to disappear from the pub. Young people today...

The less amusing long-term consequence has been that those two broken front teeth – one replaced with an implant, the other crowned – have been nothing but trouble ever since, constantly falling out, and I was glad to have to lose one of them permanently a few years ago. I think the gap adds to my charm; others may disagree, but I am never going to use the pink plastic partial plate my dentist made to replace it, with its single tooth. You'd have to be very vain (and a very careful eater) ever to feel it was worth putting up with that.

The final summer of this sort-of year set a pattern for the next few years. I and a friend would head off into Europe – in this first instance in 1971, it was the son of that UCATT organiser, Tony – crossing the Channel by ferry, then hitchhiking or Eurorailing to wherever took our fancy (but avoiding France, which had a terrible reputation as a hitchhiking deadspot). The roads from Amsterdam and all points south were swarming with young backpackers in those days, and youth hostels and "sleep-ins" lined the major routes. There were two types of sleep-in. First, there were the cheap dormitories with bunks and basic facilities, not unlike youth hostels, and plentiful in popular destinations like Amsterdam. These were oriented to youth culture, and usually had a few very basic rules like "no dealing on the premises; no tripping in the dormitory". Then there were the emergency municipal sleeping spaces, often a school hall or gym, aimed at getting the young summer backpackers off the streets as they passed through town. This was European civic-mindedness at its tolerant best: pretty much anywhere you ended up you would be able spend the night in your sleeping bag on a hard floor alongside maybe 50 or more other young pilgrims. Gibt es hier ein Sleep-in, bitte?

It was a lot of fun, but at times dangerous and anxiety-provoking, especially for female and solo backpackers, but few who wanted the experience let the dangers put them off. In fact, one of those briefer "romances" I referred to above came about when two young women we knew from our home town who were travelling together broke up for reasons I don't recall, and one of them travelled solo across Germany on the off-chance I might still be staying in Ingelheim at the house of a former exchange partner, having sent a letter that I only received there the very morning before she arrived. Things like getting woken up in the small hours on a railway station with a prod from a nightstick and then being interrogated by American MPs looking for deserters – these were the Vietnam years – could be scary, as could the occasional lunatic driver, or getting lost at night in the sketchier districts of large cities. But at that age "danger" is spelled "adventure", isn't it?

Probably the most memorable of these for me was the trip in 1973 with another girlfriend that took us far down into the Greek islands, oblivious to the military coup taking place there, as described in the post Blue, but each of those four late-teen summer excursions was an adventure in its own right that deserves a proper account. Another time, perhaps. It is amazing in retrospect, though, that our parents were willing to go along with all this, but then I suppose if you had spent six prime youthful years enduring the boredom, privations, and dangers of wartime military service, hitching lifts through peacetime Europe and occasionally sleeping rough must have seemed fairly benign. Perhaps littering Europe's towns, cities and roads with their scruffy, ungrateful, and impecunious kids might even have counted as some sort of revenge. Although whether on Europe or on us is an interesting question. Certainly, though, in those days before mobile phones and the internet it would have given them a well-earned break from our restless generation with its baffling concerns, idiotic fashions, and exasperating self-importance.

Rotterdam, 1971

Shakespeare's Globe

St. George? Who? Today is, of course, universally celebrated as the (putative) date of both the birth and death of the secular saint of world literature, William Shakespeare. Most years I try to remember to do a Will-themed post on 23rd April, so, conveniently, on Saturday we happen to have gone up to London to meet our son and his partner for a guided tour of the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe on the South Bank.

Of the four of us, I was the only one who had never been there for an actual performance – TBH I'm not a great theatre-goer – but we were all keen to get a literal look behind the scenes. These guided tours are clearly a popular activity: there are fifteen bookable slots every half hour, 9:30 - 4:30 every day, and there were at least twenty of us on our 2:00 pm tour on Saturday. At around £30 a head, that's clearly a useful source of income for the Globe.

It was fun actually to be inside that famous "wooden O" and feel something of what those earliest audiences must have felt. Although not what they would have smelt: according to our guide the standing-only groundlings were packed in shoulder to shoulder and known as "penny stinkards", not least because many of them would have worked in the nearby tanneries and breweries. To be honest, though, the tour would only be truly informative if you knew little or nothing about Tudor theatre, and disappointingly there is no actual looking behind the scenes: the guide takes you into the theatre space, delivers a lecture at various suitable locations, and leads you out again, inevitably ending in the gift shop. So, no dressing rooms, or any other working spaces used by the actors or technical members of the company, which is surely what you want to see if you are interested in theatre as such. Our son, for example, seriously considered a stage management career after enjoying his theatrical involvement at university, but (thankfully) followed a different path; Covid must have hit precariously-employed theatre staff as hard as the plague years did in Shakespeare's time.

The guide's lecture obviously has to take into account the possibility – indeed, the likelihood – that some in the group will not have fluent English, barely know the name of any of the plays, or even be aware that electric lighting was not yet available in the 16th century. It will also be coloured by the presence of young children, and there were several in our group. So our guide could only hint at the other sorts of entertainment on offer on the South Bank in the years when it was beyond the jurisdiction of the City proper. Although, amusingly, present in our party was a ten-year-old – clearly a future literary scholar – a solemn, red-haired, bespectacled girl who could answer all of his "can anyone guess" questions, including the one about how had someone extinguished his companion's breeches that had caught fire during the conflagration that destroyed the original Globe. My guess would have been that he had pissed all over his friend, but her hand went straight up: she actually knew that he had used his pot of ale. Impressive, young lady, but you'll need to learn how not to be so annoying. Knowledge may be power, but feigned ignorance is the way to deploy it...

A few things our guide pointed out about the way the physical reality of the place governed the stagecraft did strike me as noteworthy, however.

For example, I had never before realised that those in the very expensive "lord's gallery" boxes, well away from the stinkards – if you had to ask, you couldn't have afforded one – were facing the players from behind: their lordships were primarily there to be seen and admired, not to watch the play. So the suggestion was that the frequent verbal descriptions of the action on the stage – which are what make the plays so readable – are not just intended to cover the inadequacies of 16th-century stage business, but also there to help anyone follow the action who either can't see because their view of the stage is blocked by some inconsiderately tall groundlings, or who is rattling their jewellery in those prestigious but awkwardly-placed seats. I'm not sure I buy that, but it's an interesting idea.

He also mentioned that rehearsal time was minimal: sometimes just a day or two. So, where today's actors can spend months workshopping a drama and exploring their character's motivations, back then each actor had a ready-made specialism: you can imagine that one might make impressive kings, another hilarious clowns, while the more mellifluous young boys would do noblewomen and others, less well-favoured, do "hostesses", and so on. Crucially, they would stick to their métier, like a prefabricated dramatic component. It would have made for a very different experience, and who happened to be available to play parts might well have driven the writing, too. It is often commented, for example, that the change from Will Kemp to Robert Armin as the company's "comedy" actor marks a change in Shakespeare's comic characters, from the simple clowning of Dogberry in Much Ado, say, to the melancholy "wise fools" of As You Like It and ultimately King Lear.

Now, as I say, I'm not really a true theatre-goer, so my opinion counts for little in this regard, but, for what it's worth, I think the Globe has strayed from its original purpose. There are many theatres in London where fine productions of Shakespeare's plays are put on, and which often put a premium on breaking new theatrical ground, whether it be gender- or race-blind casting, present-day and controversial settings, or whatever other innovations a director seeking to make an impact in a competitive space can come up with. But the American actor Sam Wanamaker went to an awful lot of trouble to get the Globe built on London's South Bank as a replica of Shakespeare's original theatre in every practical way. So you would think that if there is one place where authentic Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatic conventions could be seen in action – perhaps even down to having boys play the female parts? Probably not? – then the Globe would fit that bill. And that was the case to start with, under the artistic direction of Mark Rylance, with the billing "original practices". But since then it seems to have become just another venue for much the same sort of interpretive innovations as in other theatres, such as setting the most recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a winter snowscape. Yes, very clever, I bet no-one's thought of that before. Hey, it's Sauna Shakespeare!

Because a set-change for the next production was in progress – again, perversely IMHO, it's going to be Brecht's Mother Courage, of all things – we were asked not to photograph the stage. Hence the rather cramped view above. We were also forbidden to get onto the actual stage, which was a shame, as I did not get a chance to declaim one of my favourite bits of Shakespeariana:

O, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O pardon, since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth,
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning th’ accomplishment of many years
Into an hourglass; for the which supply,
Admit me chorus to this history,
Who, prologue-like, your humble patience pray
Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.
Prologue to Henry V

Or at least belt out whatever garbled, misremembered bits of it I could come up with on the spot, anyway. Which is probably just as well. But, by Harry, what a speech, and what could be more appropriate to the Globe? They should employ someone to do it, once every half hour, as part of the guided tour.

But a little magic was still in store for us. As our guide delivered his final words in the inescapable gift shop, he gestured to the glass case beside me, in which I had already spotted the ultimate Shakespearean treasure: a genuine copy of the First Folio, open at Macbeth, one of the eighteen plays we would not have now, had this unprecedented, celebratory and posthumous volume not been compiled in 1623 by the great man's friends and colleagues. WTF. OMFG. Not for sale, sadly – a copy sold at auction in 2020 fetched $10 million – although a facsimile can be bought for a mere £125. And, besides, you can scrutinise the Bodleian Library's copy online absolutely free: I am proud to be listed among the donors who made this wonderful project possible.

Happy 462nd birthday, Will!

April 2025

After getting home from a very wet walk to the shops I recalled that, by contrast, last year we had a particularly lovely edition of this volatile month. So I looked at last year's April photos, and decided to give some of them the wide treatment, for no better reason than it was something to do on a rainy afternoon. Or rather, an enjoyable way of postponing some other things I really should have been doing instead.

Last year Easter Sunday fell on April 20th, close to its latest possible theoretical date (April 25th), and much later than this year, when it was April 5th. With the result that we were in Wales an entire month earlier this year, so the chances were always that the weather would be rather different.

Apparently the earliest possible date for Easter Sunday is March 22nd, because of the linkage to Passover and thus the lunar calendar: it is determined as the first Sunday after the first full moon that follows the Spring Equinox. That's the "ecclesiastical" equinox, fixed on March 21st, but further complicated by disagreements between the various Christian churches on pretty much every other factor involved in working out the date, the so-called computus paschalis: see Wikipedia. No wonder it's so tricky determining the exact date of the Big Bang: the smart ecclesiastical money has always been on an unspecified Monday morning, which seems about right.

Gold Star Ghost

 You may remember this photograph I took in Wales at Easter 2022:

It's a classic example of what photography does best: simply to record the strange "imaginings" of reality, so often superior to anything our own minds could come up with, albeit as seen through our capacity for wonder and a desire to share the wonderful.

Well, we passed the same stretch of fence this year, and saw this:

Is it the same balloon in a sad state of decay after four years of exposure to Welsh weather, or is it a different one? I suppose there may be much to celebrate in the valley below, and balloons may constantly be blowing up into the hills, but it's quite a coincidence. I can say with a high degree of certainty that those are not the same clouds, though, despite any superficial similarity.

I'm pretty sure that this is the same section of the fence; it even looks as if it is the same sheep's wool, even more firmly attached to the wire than it was four years ago, too. It seems it doesn't just blow away, or dissolve in the rain like candy floss, but becomes ever more tightly wrapped and compacted, until it looks more like electrical insulation than wool. I doubt very much that any hardy peasants come up here wool-gathering these days, although it's true my partner does stuff the cleaner, fluffier bits we come across inside her boots.

The one at the top, incidentally, is an iPhone 12 mini photo. The one below was taken with an Olympus E-M5iii. Obviously, the Olympus files stand up to close scrutiny rather better: 20 megapixels vs. 12, and a much larger sensor; no contest, technically-speaking. But, apart from the weather and lighting conditions (and of course, the subject matter), I don't think there's actually that much to choose between them, quality-wise, in "real-world" terms; either would print nicely up to about A3 size, and for online purposes as small JPEGs there's really no difference at all.

I was going to make a comparison between a cheap digital watch and a Rolex – you know: both tell the time, and wearing either will make you look like a prat in someone's eyes – but then I remembered that the phone cost me rather more than that camera... But, "same difference", as we say. And, besides, I don't own a watch: my phone has that job covered, too.

Phoning It In

Southampton Common

Twyford Down

The weather has been unseasonably [1] warm (around 25° C /  77° F), and I'm still rather tired from all the driving and walking in Wales and Bristol, so I'm just going to post some iPhone photos from March with a little commentary.

My first comment, of course, is that I cannot understand why anyone still considers their phone to be an inferior device to a "proper" camera, albeit one of similar specifications. I'm still using my iPhone 12 mini, bought in August 2021 and – by using an app, ProCamera, that delivers 12 megapixel "raw" DNG files – get perfectly adequate photos in most circumstances, and have no great urge to upgrade it. It fits in my pocket, does a respectable job, and "camera" is not even its main purpose. Although I suppose anyone who insists on always using a DSLR on a tripod will find plenty to fault; but are their photos really that much better? Similarly, anyone for whom a BMW or Range Rover is their base level of satisfaction for "car" won't find much to like about our Skoda Citigo.

Radnorshire

Hergest Ridge

Hail storm approaching near Kington

I'd love a phone that had the classic set of three lenses – wide, "normal", and telephoto – and still use a "proper" camera most of the time, but I can live with what my iPhone delivers. Plus, of course, for certain ongoing projects, which by their nature require the ability to grab any unexpected opportunity that presents itself, only a phone or a very portable pocket camera will do. The dropped gloves I have been collecting – 259 so far – are an example. These three beauties turned up in March.

And, just to slip one in from April, here is the magnificent view across the Avon Gorge from our Bristol flat:

1. "Unseasonably" is increasingly a word without meaning, isn't it? How anyone can deny the reality of climate change is baffling. Although why they do is less so...

Wide in Wales

Our Easter procession continues: we left Wales at the weekend, and are now in Bristol. The weather in mid-Wales was typical for the time of year; that is, we had heavy rain, light rain, fog, hot sunshine, and one day of snow. How the poor bloody sheep with their new lambs cope I don't know; no wonder they look so grumpy. Sadly for us, this was our last stay in our cottage of choice since 2011 – an excellent, eco-conscious barn conversion perched on the shoulder of a hill overlooking a picturesque valley – as the owner's son will be moving in with his two sets of twins. I'm not sure it's somewhere I'd want to bring up four children, but I wish them luck...

It's nice to have Wi-Fi and a solid phone signal again, but I'm relying on my laptop here which is not equipped with my full set of photo-processing software, so this little gallery of wide views is a sort of rough preliminary draft of what I will be doing when we get back to Southampton next week.

Obscured by clouds...

Obscured by smoke...

The next five photos are all from one lovely walk we usually make at Easter that leads up to what the Ordnance Survey map marks as a "recumbent stone", a large boulder on top of a hill with commanding views of the landscape in every direction. Whether this is some ancient ritual marker or just a glacial "erratic" (a boulder that a glacier eroded in one place, carried in its icy pockets along with tons of other rocky trash, and dumped in another place, usually hundreds of miles away) is debatable – it may well be both, of course – but it certainly feels like a place of significance: there are stone circles in the valley below and an alignment of four upright stones next to a man-made mound further along the hill.

Technical point: Actually, one thing I'm noticing using this laptop to edit these photographs is that my customary downsizing settings – 22cm long dimension @ 96 dpi for "normal" images, or 30cm long @ 96 dpi for "wide" images – result in rather smaller pictures on this higher resolution screen than what I see on my usual desktop display at home, which is quite old now. Basically, the one on this laptop is 2256 x 1504, whereas the one at home is 1600 x 900... So I really do need to reconsider these settings when I get back to Southampton. Apologies to those of you who have been struggling with postage-stamp size images on this blog forever (Hi, Kent...).

Eighteen

Recently one of my oldest friends, Dave – a friendship dating back to our schooldays at a state grammar-turned-comprehensive in Stevenage New Town – mentioned to me the remarks written by the headmaster in his report at the end of our final year of sixth-form studies, and before the A-level exams that would determine our next step on the educational ladder, in summer 1972. I won't quote what was written, but, to me, those three brief sentences seemed oddly barbed, verging on the downright impertinent, although the reason Dave mentioned them was that he regarded this gnomic parting shot, in retrospect, as insightful and quite prophetic.

I honestly couldn't remember what that odd and ill-starred man [1] had written in mine, although the general tenor of all my reports through the years at that school had been remarkably similar: he's a very bright lad, capable of outstanding work, but so careless when it comes to detail that he is quite capable of falling short of his own potential. Also slightly barbed, I suppose, but also, as it turned out, insightful and quite prophetic. Maybe those teachers knew a thing or two after all.

I knew I'd got my own school report book somewhere, and after a bit of digging around managed to find it in a box of documents. Turning to that last page, I read some surprisingly fulsome reports, qualified as usual with those comments about "detail" (yawn), not to mention the head of sixth form's words, "All this, despite his apparent slovenliness!" Hey, it's a happening look, man! Get with the times!

But all the head had written was, "I concur and add my own good wishes". That was it; no snarky psychological insights, no nothing, just, "wot they said, have a good one". Might as well have been a birthday card.

That aside, I have to say that the rush of reminiscence delivered by opening those pages after so many years was a bit overwhelming. It was not entirely nostalgic – I doubt anyone remembers seven adolescent years in an all-boys school with unalloyed pleasure – but rather more a hefty dose of "seeing ourselves as others see us", followed by a stiff nostalgia chaser.

Now, it's true – although I shouldn't exaggerate this – I had started secondary school as an obedient little "swot", as we say, but became something of a rebel over the years, although not enough of a rebel to leave (or be asked to leave) at 16, and either join the real world or take my A-levels at the local FE college, which is what the bone-deep rebels did. Not everyone likes being at school; I was ambivalent about it myself. By the sixth form I was regularly carpeted about my scruffiness, hair length, laziness, and so on. Hilariously, I was often told that not shaving set a bad example for the younger boys. My attitude was tolerated, though, simply because I was clearly an Oxbridge prospect, and – second only to sporting success – nothing mattered more to small-town ex-grammars than a few Oxbridge entrance successes each year. So, along with a few similarly-minded chums, I walked the wobbly line between "characterful" behaviour and expulsion, confident in the safety net provided by my uncanny ability to ace any exam put in front of me, despite my apparent slovenliness.

However, although I could remember the general tone of the reports of the various teachers I had encountered over those seven years, I had completely forgotten the actual words they had written. After all, school reports are primarily aimed at parents, not pupils. So, reading that final report, two quite similar comments stood out, and suddenly I was indeed seeing myself as others saw me. The report of one of my English teachers was one: "His outstanding, but modest, contributions have been invaluable and have helped to raise the standard of the group as a whole". The report of my German teacher was the other: "I thank him for the distinguished contribution he has made to group discussion & atmosphere, where his spontaneous & uncynical approach has been invaluable".

I was actually quite moved by those remarks. Despite my introversion, I can be quite the little loudmouth and show-off in the right circumstances, and there were certainly occasions when I know I went a little over the top. You do not win friends by diverting an A-level geography class on population statistics by disputing the use of the word "random" in "random distribution" for rather too long, for example. But I could easily imagine how unrewarding, even depressing, it would be, trying to raise a spark of interest out of some dull bunch of teenage boys, year after year, and what a difference getting to engage with the occasional lively group would make. Their gratitude was clearly real, not just some formulaic well-wishing for the future, but I don't think I'd even noticed these two little tributes at the time, or cared about them if I had. But it seems I had made a positive difference, both for them and for our subject groups, and that felt very good, fifty-four years later.

This was swiftly followed by that stiff chaser of nostalgia.

I had forgotten how much I had enjoyed those "group discussions". State secondary schools here in Hampshire, for whatever reason, do not have sixth forms; instead, students wishing to study A-level courses must attend one of a few post-16 colleges with anything up to 3,500 students in each. It can be a bit impersonal, as there are multiple large classes in the popular subjects, drawn from all the schools in the catchment area, so my children's experience was very different from my own long-ago sixth-form years in Hertfordshire in the last century.

Our German group, for example, was made up of just nine of us, boys who had all sat in the same classrooms for many years; in the case of three of us this had been from the age of eight, as we had been in the same primary school class. In fact, one of them even had a surname very similar to mine, so we had actually sat next to each other for years at our alphabetically-arranged desks. It's an odd word to choose, perhaps, but it felt cosy. Most of the time anyway; it could get pretty chilly if we hadn't performed up to our teacher's expectations (see, for example, the post Aieee!).

In German we got to study Goethe, Kafka, and 20th century poets like Rilke, Celan, and Trakl; in English Shakespeare, Milton, and 19th century poets like Browning, Tennyson, and Arnold. What a menu, what a feast! Those sixth-form sessions will likely be the closest encounters with great literature you will ever have, a sort of intellectual growth spurt, in which you feel yourself growing into something approaching your full mental height for the first time. We were no longer a class of 30 boys sitting in rows of desks, some paying attention to the blackboard, some daydreaming, some plotting mischief, and a few even [um, no, let's not mention that. Ed]. We were now a little collective, a band of brothers with a common academic purpose, guided by excellent teachers. I found it intoxicating; it's no exaggeration that you could occasionally get high on the flashes of insight as they sparked around the room.

In comparison, university was a let-down.

That same old friend and I both did well enough at A-level to be encouraged to stay on for an extra term of tutoring before sitting the Oxford Entrance exam. Both of us were successful, and after interviews were admitted to Balliol College to study English: no small achievement for a couple of lads from our sort of background. But Oxford's much-vaunted collegiate tutorial system was not what I had imagined it to be, at least as far as English at Balliol was concerned. Other subjects like PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) were the source of the college’s renown, and other colleges had built a greater reputation for English. I suppose I had expected a higher-voltage version of what I had experienced in the sixth form, but it never even came close.

The nadir for me came when I read out an essay on Virginia Woolf's The Years – a book I admired very much – and it turned out that the junior tutor leading the session – he was on loan from Reading University, I think – had never actually read it himself, and therefore had nothing to say beyond, "Hmm, interesting...". Yeah, well, you're not wrong there, chum. So, after three years of this, in our final farewell session with our senior tutor Dave angrily accused the college of running what was, in effect, a correspondence course, which was about right. I believe things may have improved since then.

But, remembering those sixth-form years, I'm reminded of how, back in March 2009, I drove my son and a friend from their sixth-form college all the way from Southampton over to Guildford to see Measure for Measure at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre (with Alistair McGowan as the Duke, and the action transposed to a "Victorian" Vienna). They were studying it for A-level, so this rare chance to see one of Shakespeare's weirder plays in performance was very opportune, and easily worth an hour's drive each way.

Driving back home through a very dark, very starry night – partly concentrating on the road, partly turning the play over in my mind, and partly listening to the chatter of two very bright soon-to-be 18-year-olds – I finally felt the true weight of my subsequent thirty-seven years of reading, listening, looking, learning, working, succeeding, screwing up, and daydreaming. I was no longer eighteen, no matter how much it might feel that way inside. I was fifty-five.

It was not an unpleasant feeling, and I remember sitting in a happy silence, slightly high with the realisation that just continuing to turn up and to be open to whatever "life" presents – having learned how to pay the closest possible attention to it and to give your best possible response – is perhaps the only achievement worth the name. Although just now what I'm mainly aware of is just how quickly "eighteen" became "fifty-five" and then "seventy-two"...

Question: Where does it go? Discuss. You have three hours. Write on one side of the paper only.

1. For reasons that are murky and much-rumoured, this headmaster was dismissed just a few years later.

Left in the Loft

Here comes yet another round in my ongoing grapple with the values of the contemporary art-world; this time the bell was sounded by the Victoria Miro Gallery's newsletter. Seconds out!

So, imagine this scenario: you've moved to a new house, and in the garden shed, or up in the loft, you find the painting above. It's on a canvas not much larger than a sheet of A4, just like the ones you can buy ready-stretched in any art store that caters to hobbyists. Do you think:

a). Wow! This is an amazing painting, and might even be worth a lot of money! We'd better decide whether to keep it – it would look great on the living room wall – or take it to an auction house for a valuation. What idiots, to leave something like this behind!

or

b). Bloody hell! Why won't people do something with their junk before they leave? Mind you, I'm not surprised they left this risible piece of crap behind. Somebody out there needs to find another hobby! I'll break it up and put it in the bin.

Your call. I think you can probably guess that I'm going with (b).

This particular painting is by an artist I had never come across before, Etel Adnan. It is just 24 x 30 cm (9.5" x 11.75"), so very small by today's standards; as I say, not much larger than a sheet of A4. Note the effusive puff to the right. If you can't read it, it says, "Etel Adnan juxtaposed brilliantly coloured geometric forms to evoke with bracing succinctness the eternal landscape verities of sun, sea and sky", and is signed by Christopher Riopelle, who happens to be curator of post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, London. So someone who, let's be honest, ought to know a lot more about painting than you or me.

Here is how the gallery describes Atnan:

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925 and died in Paris, France, in 2021. An acclaimed poet, novelist and artist, she began painting in her thirties and gained widespread recognition as a visual artist through her inclusion in Documenta 13 in 2012. Adnan developed a distinct visual language, one rooted in colour, form and intuition, as her abstract paintings sought to capture the essence of land, sea, sky and cosmos. She revered nature and believed that its power was revealed through colour. She described painting as an impulsive act, completing each work in a single sitting, working indoors and entirely from memory. Laying the stretched canvas flat, like a page on a table, she applied oil paint directly with a palette knife, creating planes of colour that convey a placeless landscape from afar and reveal a brilliant intensity upon close observation.

So here is yet another apparently notable figure whose name I, in my casually parochial way, had never come across before, but whose work looks to me, I'm afraid I have to say, like the efforts of some well-intentioned but cack-handed Sunday painter. A fuller account of her life and career can be read here, courtesy of the White Cube Gallery. It seems she is one of that populous diaspora of cosmopolitan, multilingual academics and artists who fled the Middle East at various junctures and found congenial new lives in Europe and the USA.

Now, it goes without saying that you don't get to exhibit in such upscale spaces as Miro and White Cube, where the prices are such that they're only available "on enquiry", without having made something of a reputation for yourself. How such reputations get made is an interesting subject, but one you could only really tackle at book length. Many are called, but few are chosen, and all the roads to a bankable reputation are treacherous. But it is revealing that, according to the White Cube biographical sketch:

It was not until her mid-thirties, while teaching Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, that she started painting. The head of art, Ann O’Hanlan, asked how she could teach philosophy of art and not practice art herself. Adnan replied, 'Because my mother said that I was clumsy.' 'And you believed her?' At first she used crayons, scraping them flat over remnants of paper from the art department before using up the ends of oil tubes with a knife. This new language of spontaneous gesture, infused with Californian light, offered a liberation from the constraint of writing in the formal language of her upbringing. ‘I didn’t need to write in French any more’, she said, ‘I was going to paint in Arabic’. ’

So, in effect, Adnan was a Sunday painter, but one with a ready-made reputation in other fields. And it seems that being an academic and poet brings more cachet and more gravitas to your painting efforts than, say, being a Rolling Stone, a Beatle, or even a James Bond.

What strikes me more, though, is that her mother had a point. Paintings like these (and hers are all like this) are clumsy: an idea for an image has been transferred to canvas with no apparent regard for skill, or the subtler qualities of paint and mark-making. Talk of "spontaneous gestures" seems very far from the mark: this is graffiti by numbers. I am very much reminded of some work I came across back in June 2017, described in the post So Bad It's Bad.

Compare that painting with this print, say, by Richard Smith, to pick something pretty much at random from my digital scrapbook:

Sun Curtain, 1971

How much more "spontaneous" it seems, despite the comparatively laborious process involved in its production (it's a lithograph). Simple, abstract, lively, and uncluttered: for me this really does warrant a description along the lines of "juxtaposing brilliantly coloured geometric forms to evoke with bracing succinctness the eternal landscape verities of sun, sea and sky" (as per the puff next to the Adnan painting).

Or what about this, by Idris Khan, someone who blends his multiple cultural heritages to great effect:

Time Present, Time Past (Azrag III), 2025

"In these new works, each panel is carefully inscribed with layers of musical notation or Arabic text, applied by hand using gold leaf. These inscriptions, often poetic or meditative, are overlaid repeatedly until only their edges remain legible. In this process, language folds in on itself and meaning dissolves into form." Um, OK, if you say so; looks good, though, however it all got there.

Of course, handwavy stuff about "quality" in art is very dated. My impression of the various strands of contemporary art philosophy may be out of date, too, but in general they have always seemed to converge on the reductive but irrefutable idea that a "painting" is nothing more than some marks made on a two-dimensional surface, intended for no other purpose than to be looked at. Any meaning we might derive or emotion we might feel when looking at one has not been put there by the painter – so, thankfully, it seems you can ignore whatever grandiose claims are made in any accompanying "statement" – but is brought to the encounter by us. Seen in this light, an abstract painting is not that different from some interesting textures and colours you might notice on a distressed fence or wall (a view photographers would encourage, of course).

It follows that all judgements of whether a painting is "competent", "good", or even "excellent" are also supplied by the viewer, and clearly some viewers of greater influence and sophistication than me have supplied some very favourable judgements indeed when gazing upon the work of Etel Adnan. Obviously, we are all entitled to our strong views about the sort of thing we like, but it will always be people who have arrived at positions of aesthetic authority, like Christopher Riopelle, who will ultimately determine whose work is dismissed as derivative kitschy crap and whose gets elevated to a world-class contribution to culture.

To the typical art civilian, though, the difference between the two can seem ... confusing. Jeff Koons good, but Jack Vettriano bad? Huh... OK, if you say so... Few people who care about art have the confidence (or the ignorance) to be totally independent in their tastes, and if you are aware of what the cultural authorities think, then you may well realign your views accordingly, whether consciously or not. The story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is so insightful in this regard. Except, in its contemporary version, the ending has been changed. The wisest, most art-savvy advisor to the Emperor says to the boy, "But of course he has no clothes! That's the whole point... Here, read the artist's statement!" 

So if you, like me, admire Smith's "Sun Curtain" or Khan's "Time Present, Time Past" – I'd love to find one of those hiding in my loft – but consider Etel Adnan's "Untitled" canvas to be merely bin-worthy, then good for you. But our opinions do not matter, when it comes to the mysterious and distinctly undemocratic business of making artistic reputations. With the result that, whereas I think it's safe to say that anyone could easily knock out something similar, or indeed identical to an Adnan canvas, they would surely never be able to persuade anyone to buy it with the "wrong" name attached to it, never mind hand over however many thousands the "real" thing sells for. Unless... No, stop right now, don't even think about it. But the temptation must be there: bankable paintings as characterless and technically crude as this are surely any art forger's dream.

Some interesting textures and colours on a distressed fence...

As a loosely-connected afterword, in the Guardian's review of David Hockney's latest show in London – a gigantic frieze of 100 joined-up iPad paintings – Ben Eastham makes an interesting observation:

Hockney’s work, for a decade after about 1963, should likewise be treasured for disproving the lie (maintained by those who prefer to read about paintings than look at them) that great art must be difficult to comprehend, despise the everyday world, and remain inaccessible to a wider public.

But then, lamentably, the critical sniping seemed to catch up with Hockney. Whether because he was anxious to be taken seriously or had run out of steam, an era-defining painter retreated into ill-advised historical dialogues with Picasso and Van Gogh, and started experimenting with media from set design to fax machines (with mixed results). And so our greatest pop artist entered his jazz phase.

"Those who prefer to read about paintings than look at them", "jazz phase": nicely put, I think. And, as someone very nearly said on BBC Radio 4's Front Row: Will somebody do us and Hockney a favour and hide that bloody iPad?

Some more interesting textures and colours...

[NOTE: As usual, we'll be away in mid-Wales over Easter with no WiFi, so comments may not get posted straight away. There might just be a phone signal out there somewhere, though...]