Lost Property

The previous post's mention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (not to mention the inescapable imminence of effin' Hallowe'en) reminded me of a notable biographical detail in the life of this solidly second-rate Victorian poet and serial painter of curiously similar-looking women. In case you were unaware of this, shall we say, unusual event, I have summarised it from Wikipedia thusly:

In 1849 or 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, who had entered the Pre-Raphaelite circle after being noticed by Walter Deverell while working in a milliner's in Leicester Square. Over the next decade, Siddall became Rossetti's muse and pupil, and after 1851, modelled exclusively for him. The couple were married in 1860 after a long engagement, during which Rossetti was serially unfaithful, and Siddal became addicted to laudanum. In 1862, Siddall died of an overdose of laudanum, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. After her death Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and when Elizabeth was buried at Highgate Cemetery, he interred the bulk of his unpublished poems with her. In later years Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. In 1869 he did so, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. The collection included some translations, such as his "Ballad Of Dead Ladies", an 1869 translation of François Villon's poem "Ballade des dames du temps jadis".

A number of comments suggest themselves. Let's bullet-point them:

• Do the maths: 1862 to 1869... Eek. Enough said.
• Surely it would have occurred to any idiot to make some copies before committing this histrionic gesture? Clearly not.
• Before doing something even more crazy, Gabriel, you might have considered the possibility that your so-called friends might just have been winding you up. [1]
• Laudanum... Just say no. See also absinthe.
• "Ballad of Dead Ladies"? You're kidding, right, Gabe? What, you're Bertolt Brecht now?
• Generally speaking, it seems best to stay well away from any involvement with poets and painters. It never seems to end well. "Scenius"? Steer clear...

I think I'm speaking for every sane person reading this blog – obviously, there are a few lunatics out there – when I say that most of us would regard any such "stuff stashed in a coffin" situation – maybe some extremely valuable keepsake or heirloom – as irreversible. Damn, I wish I hadn't done that, but what can I do about it now? Nothing, obviously. To request an exhumation – seven years later – would not (I trust) even cross your mind as a possibility. No, you'll just have to leave that Rolex for the detectorists of the future.

Which is probably why most of us are not even within shouting distance of ever achieving fame as a second- or even third-rate anything. Our names will never trouble the biographies of our more prominent contemporaries, even as a footnote to a footnote. Sane people lack the extremity of motivation that brushes off bad reviews, repeated rejection, impoverishment, personal tragedy, or any other sort of obstacle that a halfway-normal person will stand before, shrug, and say, "Oh, well! It was never meant to be. Better recalibrate and get a proper job..."

Whereas the crazy, narcissistic types simply say, "Fetch me a spade, a crowbar, a ladder, and some bolt cutters... This is very fucking far from over!"

It's in there? Not a problem, more of a challenge...

1.  A dialogue:

DGR: So I finally did what you said. I've got all those poems back now.

CAH: You did what? You mean the ones in Lizzie's grave? No way, man! Jesus H. Christ! Say you're kidding me!

DGR: No, really: they're at the dry cleaners just now, though. What a mess...

CAH: I can't believe you're serious... That's... insane...

DGR: Insane? But it was your idea! You guys kept going on about it, and I finally saw it made perfect sense!

CAH: We were winding you up, mate! We all enjoyed the look on your face whenever the subject came up, that was all...

DGR: Well, I've done it now, and I'm glad. Some of the bits I could still make out through the, uh, residue were pretty good.

CAH: What can I say, Gabe? You're a legend, mate.

In actual fact, though, it was CAH (Charles Augustus Howell ) himself who arranged the exhumation. Howell (a.k.a. "Owl") was a rogue with a reputation for blackmail, a manipulative art dealer and "business manager" who insinuated himself into the affairs of several prominent figures – Ruskin, Swinburne, and Whistler, for example – and whose life of lies and extortion and extraordinary death (go on, follow the link to Wikipedia) seem to have been rather more interesting than most. There was a biography by Helen Rossetti Angeli published in 1954 (Pre-Raphaelite Twilight, which Evelyn Waugh reviewed in The Spectator with the enticing title "A Mid-Victorian Spiv"), but I suspect a fresh, properly-researched biography is long overdue. His story would also make a cracking caper-cum-costume-drama film, with colourful touches of "body horror"... Or – here's a thought – how about a musical? The songs practically write themselves!

Mr. Rossetti

Do not forgetti

I am the man

Who's got a plan

For your sonnetti!

Yo, Lloyd-Webber, get your people to talk to my people.

October Light

                Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
                How the heart feels a languid grief
                Laid on it for a covering,
                And how sleep seems a goodly thing
                In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

                And how the swift beat of the brain
                Falters because it is in vain,
                In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
                Knowest thou not? and how the chief
                Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?

                Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
                How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
                Bound up at length for harvesting,
                And how death seems a comely thing
                In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

                Autumn Song, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Jesus Christ, Dan, ain't you got something a bit more cheery to sing? I told you to lay off that laudanum shit, it's not doing you any good at all. And what's with the "knowest thou" stuff, man? It's 1848, not 1648! Besides, that rhyme scheme is just stupid. Gimme that guitar!

Think I may have to stab him with this fork...

(Thomas Eakins, Home Ranch)

It's hard to believe that I was once signed up, full grant and all, to spend three precious youthful years, 1976-79, researching the maudlin mock-mediaeval ramblings of the so-called, self-styled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. A narrow escape, and it was all really only due to one poem, "The Burden of Nineveh", as described in this post from 2010. I remember that at the time I was also convinced that Duke Luke – the name of the villain in a truly silly Rossetti poem, "The Staff and Scrip" – would make a great name for a rock band, and I see some Lithuanian dude has since made off with it. You're welcome! And no, I have never watched The Dukes of Hazzard, featuring Luke Duke, first broadcast in 1979, apparently. I wonder if the show's writers had also been reading Rossetti? Somehow I doubt it.

Psycho-Raphaelite in the V & A

Poster-Books

I've written about the sticky, solvent-scented joys of model-building before (e.g. see the post Regifted). Like many of us who enjoyed making models when we were kids and who may well have rediscovered that pleasure with our own children, I'm sure, I often found that contemplating a kit in its pristine, unmade state was in many ways the peak experience, a useful early lesson in the way that so many of life's keenest pleasures are as much about anticipation as fulfilment.

As a visually-oriented person, I always responded with a special interest to the ancillary design aspects of a model: the box art, the instructions with their "exploded" views, the sheet of transfers ("decals"), and so on. This was particularly the case with the sort of paper-engineering model where you have to cut out and assemble the constituent pieces, all printed on a single sheet of card alongside the instructions and other descriptive matter. It was always with a certain reluctance that I finally took up the scissors. There were cottages, castles, and theatres with a cast of cut-out characters, but the best were the life-sized versions of birds in flight made by BirdMobile which, cut out and assembled with appropriate care, were uncannily convincing, and also provided a useful early opportunity to instruct children in the safe use of sharp knives, scissors, glue, and so on.

So a few years ago, I amused myself by designing some little concertina-style booklets that imitated the look of paper engineering and could, in theory, be cut out and assembled, but were really intended as 2D wall-pieces, a sort of book in the form of a poster. Then, having admired variations on the palm-leaf book at an exhibition on Buddhism at the British Library, I started making my own "bar" books that then evolved into a style in its own right. No-one else seemed terribly turned on by these efforts, however, and that burst of cut 'n' paste creativity lapsed.

Summer grasses: /  Traces of dreams / Of ancient warriors

(Matsuo Basho)

Recently, however, Blurb have been bombarding me with special offers – never a good sign of company health, IMHO – culminating in a two-day-only "50% off + free postage" offer, which seemed too good to pass up. I had been thinking it was about time I put a new book together, so – although there are several other, but more time-consuming alternative projects waiting to be made into a book – I settled on simply putting a selection of Bars & Poster-Books into a large (30cm) square book. You can see a preview of it here in my Blurb bookstore:

Or, as usual, in the form of a much higher-quality PDF flip-book at Issuu:

It will be a great shame if the business model of Blurb is no longer working out. Each time I launch a new Blurb book into the world, it strikes me that most people – even the genial and well-informed folk who are the readers of this blog – do not understand what makes an on-demand self-publishing service different from other publishing services, and why it is such a brilliant idea. So I thought now might be a good time to repeat a few words from a previous post:

The basic Blurb model is this:

• You sign up for an account. This costs nothing. You get a personal "bookstore" where your publicly-available books will be displayed for sale, plus various administrative tools.
• You download some free book-making software onto your computer, BookWright, which is regularly updated. There is also an online book-creation tool for really simple stuff, or at the other extreme you can design your own complete PDF file in something like Adobe InDesign and upload it.
• You choose a size and binding style for your book, and either use a ready-made "look", or assemble your own from page-templates which enable you to choose combinations and placement of text and image, plus essential features like page numbering.
• You insert your text and images. Images need to be 300 dpi JPEGs or PNGs. Text can be typed in directly, cut and pasted, or uploaded from a text file. The book will sit on your own computer to be tinkered with for as long as you like.
• When it's complete and free of errors (and you need to be very sure about that) you upload the book to Blurb.
• To keep it there, you have to buy one copy, at basic production cost. Now, this is the point at which most people who have never tried self-publication before balk. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds? Plus postage? For one copy?? But that is not a rip-off, that is a bargain. Why?
• Here's the thing: you yourself need never buy another copy. Repeat: you need never buy another copy.

Once it's uploaded you can invite people to buy it, privately, or open it for sale as an item listed in your personal bookstore, available in whatever formats you choose, and at the prices you decide. There are also various free tailored publicity tools available for insertion into social media, your blog or webpage, wherever. But here's the really important thing: you hold no inventory at all, and every copy that a customer buys is made on demand by Blurb, who handle the whole transaction, from payment to delivery. Any profit you have added onto the basic production cost will be passed on to you by Blurb, provided it exceeds a certain accumulated monthly total, currently £12.50. If it doesn't, it's rolled over into the next month. [1]

So your book is out there and easily available – you can even sell it on Amazon, something I have never tried – and you will not have paid a ton of money up front to a printer for a quantity of books you will never be able to distribute or sell, and which will sit unsold in boxes under your bed and in your closet, your loft, and probably also your garage forever like a bad dream. Have you ever seen a "small" run of 500 copies of a hardback book? I have (thankfully not one of mine), and you should be very afraid. Worse, if you intend to go down the classic self-publication route more than once, the only certainty is that you're going to need a bigger house. Plus a willingness to write off many thousands of pounds, all for the sake of a vanity project. [2]

The really big plus of on-demand publishers like Blurb, I think, is that the relatively low cost of entry (and the zero cost of failing to sell any copies) means that producing new books regularly is not just feasible, it is addictive. And, if you're serious about your writing, or your photography, or your recipes, or whatever it is you do, there is no better creative discipline than imagining, editing, and sequencing a book. Plus you will have a permanent, compact, and convenient record of your work, which is far more likely to survive the coming decades than boxes of prints or ephemeral image files. Best of all, it's the sort of fun, self-motivating challenge that can shift your work into a higher gear.

But you should never imagine that you might sell more than, say, 10 copies. Dream on! Also, although their stats will tell you how many copies of your books have been sold in the last 45 days (none at all, usually), Blurb will not disclose the name, email, or location of anyone who does buy a copy, so gratitude from you, the author, to your tiny group of fans has to be taken for granted. But then, Lee Child doesn't send a thank-you note to everyone who buys his books, so why should you?

So who is this "Mike Chisholm", anyway?

1. I suspect that a significant flaw in the Blurb model, from a profitability p-o-v, is that (a) few people who make Blurb books are interested in buying the books of other Blurb users, and (b) habitual book buyers are unlikely to be looking at Blurb as a primary source. I'm pretty generous in my own book-buying, but have only ever bought four Blurb books other than my own.

2. The dirty secret of "real" photo-book publishing is that you will be expected by the publisher to cover anything between 50% and 100% of the cost of publication. Sure, your book will get a certain amount of publicity and distribution, but sales and profits will still be low. It's really just a way of taking vanity to the next level.

Classic

 Now that I've been writing these blog posts for a while – 18 years, actually, which is rather more than "a while" – there are quite a few that, if I were to write them now, I might well do differently. I've learned a lot about myself and my views by thinking about me and them out loud in public, as it were, and no doubt my ability to write has improved along the way, too. So at moments like this, in a (hopefully brief) post-viral lassitude when fresh subject matter seems elusive, I find it a useful exercise to excavate posts that are more than a few years old and polish them up to 2026 specifications.

This one is a substantially revised version of something I first posted in 2016, and which was subsequently published in the online magazine "On Landscape", where it kicked up a certain amount of unrest (no, that's not a misspelling of "interest"), even provoking a written response from Mr. Landscape himself, Joe Cornish. [1] Well, you just know when you're doing something right... I don't think my views have changed much, but they have softened, and I do think I can make a better job now of expressing them. So here we go.

Southampton Mayflower Park Pier

So let's say I'm reading the review section of the Guardian newspaper one Saturday and above a review of Yuki Chan in Brontë Country, a novel by Mick Jackson, there's a photograph of what I suppose has to be the North York Moors, given the context. Even printed small on newsprint it's striking: a long vista over a craggy moor, alive with the russet and green tones of moorland in scudding sunlight. You can practically feel the wind tugging at your clothing. In the mid-distance there's a crag that could be a house, or a house that could be a crag. So I look to see who the photographer is; to do this I have to turn the paper sideways and squint at the tiny picture credit at the bottom right-hand edge of the page. It reads ALAMY. Nothing else. It seems this beautiful image has been sourced, merely for illustrative purposes, uncredited from a stock photo agency.

Later, looking through Landmark, an intelligent and interesting anthology of contemporary landscape work compiled by William A. Ewing (Thames & Hudson, 2014), I found myself wondering: is landscape photography over, finished with, exhausted?

In one sense, clearly not: more and more people are producing more and more landscape photographs, and this major photographic genre has also become an important ancillary to other activities, such as walking, climbing, travelling, and even the pursuit of spirituality and mental health. But... Sheer populousness is generally a sign that something has peaked, and that its exciting, pioneering days are over. Now that it has become necessary to arrange an orderly queue to the summit of Everest, you can be forgiven for suspecting that the challenge is not quite what once it was.

Once doubts had begun to creep in, other questions followed. Given how varied the world is, and how different people are, I asked myself: why do so many landscape photographs look exactly the same? And why are they so unregarded? To the extent that they can be bought by the yard from an agency, and published uncredited as decorative filler in a newspaper?

Southampton Mayflower Park

There is no denying that landscape photography has become very popular, of  course; both to do, and to look at. I would think no other self-consciously "artistic" genre of photography is so widespread, with the exceptions of fashion and food. Since the advent of digital colour, there has been a tsunami / avalanche / deluge / (pick your own landscape-related simile) of outstanding landscape images of every conceivable kind. From the highest, snowiest peaks to the grimmest, most litter-strewn edgelands, someone will have parked a high-resolution camera on a tripod and composed something that is, for however brief a moment, compellingly new.

Brief, because originality is inevitably followed by hundreds of "me too" imitators, few of whom will have improved on the pioneering work, a cycle of discovery and repetition that is repeated again and again until pretty much every accessible landscape has been photographed many times over, at every time of day, in every kind of weather, leading to a queasy sense of repletion. I mean, just enter "skye storr" into Google, and scroll through the images. Depressing, isn't it? Travel has become cheap and easy, the world is finite, and so are the places to stand and admire its beauty. Even the relatively recent novelty of aerial drone photography has worn pretty thin surprisingly quickly; it has already become just the same-old same-old, following that same cycle of discovery and copy-cat repetition ad nauseam.

When it comes to art, democratic inclusiveness has never really been a useful evaluative benchmark. Art is an essentially elitist pursuit. Or rather, it is when it comes to art as outcome. If instead we choose to regard art-making as an activity which, regardless of the quality of the outcome, is capable of refining and advancing our aesthetic, social, and spiritual instincts and impulses, then clearly it's something which as many people as possible should be encouraged to do. Yes, get out there with your brushes, paints, cameras, sketchbooks, whatever turns you on, and just do it, in the same participative spirit that animates sport and exercise, whereby millions do yoga or zumba, play football or tennis, walk, cycle, and jog; why, you can even train for a marathon if you're the goal-oriented sort. Of course! But the gold standard of anything is always about outcome. Of 60,000 participants, who will actually win the London Marathon? Will they have broken a record?

Bristol Sea Mills after flooding

So how has the predictable same-old-sameness of what has come to count as "gold standard" landscape photography come about? For a start, I don't think it's a false impression that very many, if not most landscape photographers seem to share an identity: male, middle-aged, bearded, a bit weather-beaten and scruffy, and fond of solitary pursuits. But then, these do tend to be the sort of people who find themselves out in the world at dawn or at dusk, having endured rain and cold or heat and thirst to lug many pounds of expensive kit into the wilderness, just for the prospect of a decent photograph. Plus, in what is still a very "gendered" world, landscape photography is one of few outlets for masculine self-expression that combines nicely with physical engagement with the outdoors and that very male obsession with gear and craft. In the end, although there are many people who like to look at landscape photographs – they do make a nice calendar – there are far fewer who are prepared to go out there and get actual landscape all over their shoes and clothes in order to make them.

So perhaps landscape photographs look so similar simply because the people making them are so similar? Might encouraging more, different demographics to want to get "out there" make a difference? Would they end up in different places, with different gear, and with a different point of view? It's certainly a thought. But that initial desire to go out and play in the wind, rain, and mud is both a crucial motivating factor and the main barrier to entry, obviously. Provided, of course, that your definition of "landscape" is restricted to picturesque and remote semi-wilderness. Other vistas are available.

One way to get past the saturation point of sameness is gimmickry. Some landscapists have managed to break free of photo-purist objections to digital manipulation, as well as the slightly bonkers obsession with sunrises and sunsets, and various other hidebound "camera club" traditions relating to landscape photography; the exclusive use of wide-angle lenses, for example. But these newer approaches still have a tendency to converge on well-worn paths, on certain "looks". On a visit to our local hospital I was struck by a row of impressionistic landscape prints running down one corridor. These are now quite old – probably lithographs made in the 1980s – but they have more than a slight resemblance to a lot of "new" landscape photography being done, for example, with the use of overlaid texture layers in Photoshop, or in-camera effects like multiple exposures or ICM ("intentional camera movement", a name I always find hilarious). Scratchy, spattered, blotchy, blurry, painterly: these are well-established clichés of art-school print-making, and no less of a cliché when achieved by new means or arrived at by a different evolutionary pictorial path. As with the law, ignorance of art history is no excuse if your ambition is to be taken seriously as an artist. Too many photographers only follow photography.

Southampton Common, Cemetery Lake

Sadly, getting somewhere new in picture-making is even harder than finding somewhere new in the landscape to photograph, and really has everything to do with developing a strong personal sensibility and very little to do with technique. You can joggle your camera all you like, but it is no substitute for the unique choices made by a visually-educated eye. Typically, landscape photography – despite the way it attracts the word "romantic" to itself – is actually rather classical at heart, in the sense that it is largely about the imitation of established models and masters, and thus has a tendency to produce "school of" works. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, how many Michael Kenna tribute acts there are at work out there, shamelessly reproducing his signature moves with long exposures, trees, fences, and snow. Hey, what's the big deal? I can do that, too! (Yes, you can, now...).

Like 19th century academic painting, conventional gold-standard landscape photography is polished, highly-wrought, rather rule-bound, and suffused by a strong tendency to idealize. A truly dedicated landscape photographer doesn't simply document what happened to be there when they happened to be there, the way you or I might, but studies the times of sunrise and moonrise, waits for the right weather and time of day, and thinks nothing of revisiting the same remote site on multiple occasions until conditions are just right. Just right, that is, to invest a photograph of a landscape with certain supplementary properties, which can be summed up with one word: wow. But, inevitably, photographs of such rarely-observed syzygies in which all the elements are in perfectly picturesque alignment are by definition a freak, a distortion of reality, especially when amplifed by a taste for over-saturated colours and apocalyptic skies.

Have another look at those images of the Old Man of Storr, for example: exactly what planet were they made on? Clearly, there is a landscape photography "look" that is rather different from the appearance of any actual landscape, and it is this look that wannabe landscape photographers aspire to, not least because it wins competitions; even ones that claim to be looking beyond the usual overcooked clichés, like the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. I discussed this at length in my post about the results of the first NLPA competition in 2021 (Extreme Locations & Iconic Conditions), so I won't repeat what I wrote there, other than to say this: "An unfortunate side-effect of all competitions is that the virtues perceived and admired by the judges in their chosen winners tend to be noted and imitated by the thousands of aspirants seeking the validation of a competition win, or in pursuit of more social media 'likes'. Hey, look, I can do that, too!". (Yes, you can, now...).

Southampton Holyrood Church

Then there is that question of the lack of regard for and the disposability of landscape photographs, as exemplified by their uncredited use as illustrative filler in a newspaper review. Need an illustration of "Brontë Country"? A search on the stock photo agency Alamy for "bronte country" yields over 5,000 images; "north york moors" 25,000. Phew... But that one there will do nicely; no, it doesn't matter who made it, just pay the fee and credit the agency. I'm reminded of the discovery of Japanese woodblock prints by European artists in the 19th century, little enough regarded in Japan that they were used as packing in crates of exported porcelain. In Europe it didn't matter that the individual signatures couldn't be read, and a Hiroshige print distinguished from one by Hokusai; what mattered was that exciting "japoniste" look they shared, and which offered a stimulating way forward from the conventions of academic painting.

Of course, the pursuit of originality of vision, individual renown, exhibitions, and publication is an inherently quixotic enterprise, these being goals that few are ever likely to achieve, especially using an essentially anonymous technique like photography in a field as overpopulated as landscape. Besides, an imitative classicism does have its own well-defined, achievable satisfactions and, like running the London Marathon, the training, the participation, and the receipt of the equivalent of a "finisher's" medal – having your work accepted into a stock photo agency, perhaps? – can be reward enough. Ten years of innocence and experience on from my original combative post, I feel less inclined to be dismissive of such realisable ambitions.

In the end, it's no surprise that one competent photographer's rendering of classic subject matter in the classic landscape photography manner – whether it be (yawn) a stand of receding birch-tree trunks, or the Old Man of Storr, or Tuscan hillsides in raking sunlight, or Provençal lavender fields, or (zzzz) autumn leaves, or mountain tops catching the sunrise, etc., etc. – will be pretty indistinguishable from any other's. For all the effort that will have gone into getting the shot, however spectacular and hard-won, the result is generally just one more ephemeral, calendar-quality piece of eye-candy, a picture that has little to say beyond bearing witness to the undeniable fact that – despite humanity's best efforts to trash the place, and nature's escalating attempts to burn us out – in certain combinations of lighting, weather, and time of day some parts of the world can still be very beautiful indeed. In a word: wow. The photographer – whose name you may never even discover – has spared you the effort of trekking out there yourself, and the probable disappointment of seeing the place in a less than flattering light.

Something which, as I say, I'm less inclined to disparage today than I was a decade ago. I'm probably still incurably quixotico-romantic in outlook, but perhaps the older Goethe wasn't so far off the mark when he declared "I call the classical health and the romantic sickness" (Conversations with Eckermann, April 2 1829), although I think what he really meant was that he called the healthy classical, and the sickly romantic. Whatever, I doubt that he had envisioned that the end purpose of a "healthy" strategy would be to dump one's lookalike work into a tank into which anyone could dip their bucket for a small fee, or indeed one in which AI could splash about "training" itself, absolutely free of charge.

So, to return to my original question: is landscape photography over, finished with, exhausted? No, not yet, but like me it is very tired, and could do with a holiday and a change of scene...

Winchester, bridge near Hockley Viaduct

1. A joke I was once told:

A: You know what would improve that landscape shot?

B: No, what?

A: A JCB in the foreground...

B: What, a big yellow digger? Are you mad?

A: No, not a digger, a Joe Cornish Boulder.

Needless to say, I had removed this joke from the version published in "On Landscape"...

A Thousand Years

I probably did mean to produce an updated version of a post that I originally published in November 2011 to mark the 500th post on the blog when the 1000th and then the 2000th posts appeared – both some while ago now – but either forgot, or thought better of it; I can't remember now. But here it is, heavily tinkered with, for no better reason than I'm in need of a way to distract and entertain myself, as I'm suffering from an unpleasant bout of tonsillitis. Which is ironic, if irony ever applies in medical matters, as my tonsils were surgically removed when I was a child, which seems to have been the go-to solution in those days for any childhood ailment short of an actual broken bone. Your boy gets into mischief, or has too much imagination? Let's take his tonsils out, and see how it goes.

Fashions in medical intervention aside, we are surrounded by many mysteries, and of these the ultimate destination of vast quantities of time, and the reasons behind our precious but really rather miserly share of it, must rank among the greatest. As so many have asked, whether as the verbal equivalent of a deep sigh or in moments of profound philosophical reflection: where does the time go? Great question! (as in: pointless question, with no known answer!).

Personally, I favour the theory that, shortly after the Big Bang, some kind of collateralized loan obligation scam was perpetrated by Big Time, and large quantities of time shares ended up hidden within various as yet featureless rocks by certain malevolent parties, resulting in the subsequent uneven distribution, inflated value and short supply of time. This does sound awfully like Terry Pratchett, but it's possible I may have made it up myself, but I really can't be bothered to check. Time is definitely too short for what John Keats called, in his definition of "negative capability", such "irritable reaching after fact and reason". Although I suppose that much-quoted Keatsian "negative capability" might also justifiably be defined as "lazy complacency", and I'm never sure why we're supposed to regard this as such a Good Thing just because some 22-year-old med-school drop-out said it was. Decent poet, though.

Anyway, thinking about the passing of time, it has often pleased me to speculate that a hypothetical very, very old man, who had been sitting on the same bench every day since the year 1000 CE, would have heard our language change from Anglo-Saxon through Middle English all the way to whatever it is we're speaking now; Post-Modern English? The changes would generally have been even more imperceptible than trying to observe the movement of the hour hand on an analogue clock – the so-called Great Vowel Shift didn't happen during one Thursday afternoon in June 1447, hilarious as that would have been – but those changes were happening, all the same. So one day he's going to a church which is little more than a wattle-and-daub hut, and hearing the Lord's Prayer intoned as "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum", and then, in the blink of a geological eye, various stone structures have been erected, levelled, and rebuilt on the same site, and the few people who are still going to church are now thinking that "Our Father, which art in heaven" sounds incomprehensibly old-fashioned. I mean, FFS, that's Old English, innit? Actually, no, since you ask, it's not.

But now that voices can be recorded you don't have to be 1000 years old to experience this. Listen to any archived radio programme and the voices will be as dated (and dateable) as the graphical style of vintage adverts or book dust-jackets. When I was a child in the 1950s/60s, broadcasters were still expected to acquire the clipped accents of the 1930s as the price of entry into the BBC. So-called RP ("received pronunciation") was a clear and non-negotiable marker of class and aspiration. "End nigh, the knee-ooze!" No longer, thank goodness. Although I'm really not sure whether that continuity guy with the preposterously fruity and poshed-up Caribbean bass-baritone who is all over Radio 4 these days counts as progress. I'm sorry, there is no such thing as the Bayou Tapestry, Neil, or the Kunservative Party, although I can see where you're going with that one. But to notice that "your" language is being bent into new shapes by the young is finally to take your place on that bench alongside the 1000-year-old man.

A thousand years ago, of course, the Vikings were busily carrying out their own aggressively proactive programme of linguistic intervention on these shores, once they'd got the raiding and looting thing out of their system. Consequently, bits of Scandi-talk are embedded deep in our mongrel language, so-called "English". As it happened, around the time I was writing the original 500th-post post the latest Big Thing on TV was Scandinavian thrillers – subtitled, of course – and I noticed that after I had watched a few I was experiencing a curious sensation, which felt like the awakening of some semi-dormant, atavistic elements in the deeper language-oriented parts of my brain. Not unlike a full-immersion language course, I felt I could almost, but not quite, understand Norwegian or Swedish. Although not Danish, obviously; even the Swedes scratch their heads over that Nordic-language smoothie. So, after watching enough episodes of The Killing, Wallander, and The Bridge, the ancient Viking synapses were lighting up, and I was gasping "Va fan?!" (roughly = "WTF?!") with every new plot twist.

Back in 2011 I had also come across a link to a piece on so-called "Methuselah trusts" in Lapham's Quarterly. Methuselah being the grandfather of the more famous Biblical Noah, who apparently died just 31 years short of his 1000th birthday, although how much time he spent sitting on the same bench is unrecorded. (A lot, if he was typical of 1000-year-old men). The startling idea is that a very modest amount of money placed in a single "1000-year trust" and invested at compound interest could, if actually brought to maturity, trash the world economy (although I think we have now found better ways to do that job on a far shorter timescale); essentially, a Methuselah trust would eventually require a payout that would far exceed anyone's ability to meet it. It's reminiscent of the proposition that if you were able to fold a piece of paper in half 42 times, you'd find that it reaches the moon. Which, on the face of it, does sound an awful lot cheaper and simpler than rocket travel, although to ask whether anyone could actually sit on the top of a sheet of paper folded in half 42 times is a classic example of that "irritable reaching after fact and reason".

Apparently Benjamin Franklin started one of these mad investments in 1790 in his will. Here's the quote from the Lapham's Quarterly article:

A few years before Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, “One penny, put out at our Savior’s birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold. But, if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and sixpence.”

Hmm, that certainly puts the frankincense and myrrh in their place, but show your working, please. Otherwise that's surely just the 18th century equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson-esque "gonzo journalism": too much coffee and snuff, probably.

But, no, it turns out that it wasn't the snuff talking. As I'd hoped, my old friend Andy, a.k.a. Science Man, came up with the mathematical goods:

1 penny (d) invested for 1780 years at 5% would yield 1 x 1.05^1780 = 5.2 x 10^37 d
Price of gold was fixed by Isaac Newton in 1717 at £4 8s 9d per troy ounce (it stayed this way for about 200 years)
1 troy ounce = 31.03g
Therefore price of gold = 4x240 + 8x12 + 9 d/troy ounce = 1065 d/troy ounce
1065d/31.103g = 34.32d/g = 34,320d/kg
Therefore 5.2 x 10^37d could buy (5.2 x 10^37)/(34320) kg of gold = 1.52 x 10^33 kg
The mass of the Earth is about 5.978 x 10^24 kg (OU Science Data Book 1978)
Therefore 1.52 x 10^33 represents (1.52 x10^33)/(5.978 x 10^24) Earth masses = 2.54 x 10^8 Earth masses
i.e. about 250 million Earth masses (at 1780 gold prices)

Actually, most online sources say that Newton, in his role as Master of the Royal Mint, fixed the price of gold at £3 17s 10p per troy ounce, but I can't be bothered to redo the sums (well, let's be honest and admit that I probably can't do that, bothered or not). But, point taken; to quibble over a few million solid gold "Earth masses" here or there would be nothing more than the worst sort of "irritable reaching after fact and reason", wouldn't it. But, I suddenly wonder, has anyone checked Franklin's or indeed Newton's savings accounts lately? Could this be another of those collateralized-loan-obligation-style scams in progress? If so, why, Ben, why?

 

The mention of pounds, shillings and pence and difficult arithmetic is a salutary reminder of the now long-ago pre-decimal days in Britain. It's easy to forget the sheer oddness of calculating twelve pennies to the shilling, and twenty shillings to the pound (not to mention one pound and one shilling to the guinea for upscale purchases like racing horses or golden planets). In those days before electronic tills, shop assistants had to be pretty nimble with their mental arithmetic. Thinking about this, for me the penny finally dropped (sorry!) that the only reason our children are still being made to learn their eleven and twelve "times tables" is because, over half a century ago, we had an insane system of coinage, not to mention our weights and measures. It seems other, more rational countries only make their kids learn multiplication tables up to a sensible ten. Wimps! Makes you proud to be British, and the inheritor of multiple systems based on our national negative capability, doesn't it? To quote John Keats again, "Time is money, and money time, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Ode On What Does A Grecian Earn).

So, here's a fairly typical primary-school level question of the sort we grappled with back in 1960:

Mister Brown has ordered half a ton of coal: how much will that cost him at 11s and 6d per hundredweight sack? Quick, boy, quick, the lorry driver is waiting! [1]

But just look at the time! Where does it go? I have my next appointment with various medicinal compounds coming up, including 500 mg of Amoxicillin or, if you prefer, 7.72 troy grains "in old money" (a little boilerplate joke we Brits have yet to tire of making. Give it time: it's only been fifty-five years...). But I have to say that fiddling about with this post has done the trick, and taken my mind off the sore throat, the coughing, the croak, and general medicated wooziness for the past few mornings, and today I'm feeling a lot better. Time to stop polishing this one into a mirror shine, and start on another.

Someone has surely got their quantities wrong with these mint humbugs?

(We're going to need a bigger jar)

1. The answer is £5 15s 0d. How? There are 20 hundredweights (cwt) in a ton (not 100, duh!), so half a ton is 10 cwt. Multiply the units separately: 11 shillings × 10 = 110 shillings; 6 pence × 10 = 60 pence. Convert the pence to shillings: 60 pence ÷ 12 = 5 shillings exactly, no pennies left over. Add the shillings: 110s + 5s = 115 shillings. Now convert the shillings to pounds:115 shillings ÷ 20 = 5 pounds with a remainder of 15 shillings. Simple! What took you so long?

Close Encounters

But where is everybody?

Enrico Fermi

The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be the Earth – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Arthur C. Clarke, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century

The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Two Dawns

Sadly for us, our regular Easter rental in mid-Wales, an award-winning barn conversion – yes, there is such a thing – is no longer available: the owner's son and family moved in directly after we had enjoyed the very last available booking slot this Easter. It does seem a pretty remote location to be bringing up four young children, not to mention the patchy phone reception for two adults working from home – I'm not even sure how a reliable WiFi service could be provided – but I'm sure they'll manage. Or, if they don't, maybe the property will become available again... 

One of the attractions of the place for me has always been that it sits high on the west-facing shoulder of a valley, and our bedroom has a small balcony, so I could roll out of bed at the crack of dawn, and – if the lighting and weather conditions looked promising – lean out and photograph the expanse of the valley below and the hills beyond without even getting dressed. Inversion fogs, driving rain, pretty sunshine, even snow; anything could be happening out there in Wales at Easter, and as every admirer of landscapes knows, elevation is the key to opening out the elements in the view. In the absence of anything else a photographer can always climb a tree, stand on the roof of a car (probably best to stick to your own), or even lug along a stepladder. No, really: several view-camera users have described using a stepladder to me, including the estimable Jem Southam.

So over the years I've accumulated some striking examples of barefoot, pre-breakfast landscape photography; the sort of thing you'd have to do a substantial pre-dawn uphill hike to achieve otherwise. Some of which I have cropped into a panoramic format, like the two above (both taken with a telephoto lens steadied on the balcony rail), as that best conveys the expansive feel of the bedroom prospect.

But on my recent visit to the RA Summer Exhibition I saw this:

Olivia Wells, Pulmo 8

Which is actually a 2D print, and this reminded me that a couple of years ago, by using a bit of elementary Photoshop wizardry, I had already mocked up some concertina-folded "leporello" booklets in a similar, but to my eye more convincing trompe-l'œil fashion:

A riddle (answer: tinnitus. I later added a title, "This Is Not A Drill")

It seemed a bit gimmicky at the time but, having had my interest re-piqued in that approach, I wondered: why not do something similar with those Welsh panoramas? If nothing else, doubled up they would fit nicely into one of the cheap 60cm x 30cm frames I have lying around. So that is what I have been playing around with lately, and I think it does add a certain something to the "straight" versions. Bear in mind that the result is a single entirely flat sheet of paper and is also not a photograph of two actual folded and opened out concertinas, although I suppose I hope that at first sight – but only at first sight – you might think it was in some way "real".

So, might I bother to submit something like this to next year's RA Summer Exhibition, or anywhere else, come to that? Probably not: the open exhibition lottery game gets old (and expensive) after you've had rather more misses than hits, and it's a shame to spoil the innocent fun of "creativity" as an end in itself by inviting the judgement of a random assortment of know-nothing, boss-eyed ████s, usually practising artists who, like so many job interviewers, seem generally to be looking for clones of themselves. [1]

RA Summer Exhibition 2026

(the pigeon, by Humphrey Ocean RA, was sold for £14,000)

1. Incidentally, if a young person near you is looking for a job, they could do worse than read my post Inflexible Attitude, Hates a Challenge, my guide to job applications based on decades of experience as an interviewer.

BTW: if anyone else is finding that Blogger is refusing to add images to your posts (since, I suspect, a recent Windows 10 upgrade) I know the answer. Email me (see "View My Complete Profile" for an address).

Locals

It's a noticeable aspect of modern life in Britain that to be a genuine "local" is, nearly everywhere, becoming unusual. Although it is a process that has been going on for some time: the recent arrival at the British Museum of the Bayeux Tapestry is a reminder of quite how long strangers of one denomination or another have been rocking up on these shores and moving people about as a consequence. Unrest and resentment provoked by "replacement" of local populations seems to be a universal of human life: just ask the inhabitants of the Celtic nations how they feel, even today, about the "Saxons" squatting on the prime agricultural land of what became "England". Those of them, that is, who can actually claim descent from those displaced aboriginal Brits. I don't suppose the Sikhs of Swansea care very much at all, although they may have something to say about the activities of the British as a whole in India.

My mother grew up in a village in North Hertfordshire in the 1920s and 30s, surrounded by cousins and the descendants of families who had lived in the area for centuries. Remarkably, however, her father was a blow-in from, of all places, Liverpool, brought into the area by the army during WW1. By the time my grandparents died in the 1970s their village was becoming populated by incomers, mostly commuters from the professional classes buying into some imagined idyll of rural life, the precarious reality of which they were actively destroying. No need for a village shop when you can drive into a nearby town and stock up the freezer from the bountiful shelves of a supermarket. Who wants to use a pub full of unwelcoming flat-capped old geezers talking rural gibberish? And a bit of street lighting and some proper metalled roads wouldn't go amiss, either: let's get onto the Parish Council.

To be "local" is more a state of mind than the outcome of genealogy, however. There was significant unrest when the first New Town was designated in North Herts in the 1940s. The small town of Stevenage was to be developed into a grand utopian vision of a new life for many thousands of poorly-housed working-class Londoners. The inhabitants of what would come to be known as "the old town" – little more than a large village, really – protested, accusing the Labour government of Soviet-style central planning. When Lewis Silkin, the Minister for Town and Country Planning, arrived by train from London to put the case, some jokers had replaced the platform sign "Stevenage" with "Silkingrad". So, as it came to pass, in 1954 I was born in Silkingrad, and by the the time I left home in 1976 I felt about as local as it is possible for a young person without any "propertied interest" in a place to feel. However, as one embodiment of Silkin's vision of "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" – I know! – I was determined never to come back.

Old Stevenage

New Stevenage

After some years of post-university precarity, my partner and I arrived in this semi-detached house in a modest street in Southampton in 1988, which we had bought from a pair of doctors who, like us, were moving on in pursuit of professional careers. Our children grew up here, but moved on themselves years ago, also in pursuit of opportunities in the wider world. Our street has gradually changed its personality over nearly 40 years. Old neighbours have died or moved away. Houses that were formerly owned or rented by single families like ours have become HMOs ("houses of multiple occupancy"); many of the occupants are not – or not yet – British citizens. The number of cars parked in the street seems to double every few years, and many if not most front gardens have been paved over to accommodate them.

When one of our oldest neighbours, a widow who lived directly opposite, sold up last year in order to live in Australia with her daughter – a migration saga in itself – her next-door neighbours on either side held a small "Goodbye to Mary" party for her: on one side a French family, on the other a South Asian family. The party was organised by the former and hosted by the latter – both families' relationship with Mary was a lot closer than ours – and the curries laid on at the sit-down meal were delicious. Apart from ourselves, the other guests were from two doors down, an elderly couple who had lived in the street longer than any of us, but whose names I did not know and with whom I had never before exchanged more than a few polite words of greeting as I passed by. It turned out that of the nine people in the room they were the only true locals, with long-standing family connections to the docks and many lively stories to tell of the former occupants of all our houses.

The new occupants of Mary's house are a Turkish family. Our own next-door neighbours are, on one side, a Filipino couple who bought the house long enough ago for their baby son Elijah to have grown up and left home, and on the other side is what is now an HMO, serially occupied by Filipino trainee nurses who work at the nearby hospital. This is a typical story of present-day suburban Britain, and it seems to be one that is making some self-declared "locals" very angry.

Without resorting too far to stereotypes, I'd say the angry locals fall into two broad types. There are the ones who probably found schooling uncongenial, stayed in or near the place they had been born and grown up, and really just wanted things to go on as they were forever, but who paid a heavy price when neo-liberal global movements of capital left them without work or prospects. I expect a lot of them may even have been conned into voting for this. Then there are the ones who made a success of their lives, moved on, and settled in "nicer" neighbourhoods, and who resent the arrival of new neighbours who are not like them, or at least do not look like them, and often turn out to be competitive business rivals. They definitely did not vote for that.

At its worst, at its most poisonous and most dangerous, this anger can take the form of a militant ethno-nationalism, a nostalgia for a country that never was: a fondly-imagined paradise of full employment and low taxes occupied by a people who shared a single ethnicity. This white-supremacist anger now trades under the false flag of "patriotism" and even – this would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic – of "Christianity": I read that the black-clad "patriots" who recently turned up mob-handed in Dover and Portsmouth to protest the arrival of yet more small inflatables overloaded with would-be asylum claimants were chanting "Christ is king!".

What? Seriously? This is all so profoundly un-British that the interference of certain foreign hands with money and malign disruptive intent seems certain. It has a distinctly musky pungency. Why, it seems every protester had been assured in advance of the best legal representation possible, should that become necessary. I suppose there may be a few sympathetic right-wing lawyers out there prepared to offer their services pro bono, but that seems uncharacteristically generous, especially at the scale that might have been required if things had kicked off in the usual mindlessly violent fashion. Which they didn't: it seems these present-day blackshirts had been well-briefed on how to stay within the law. A restraint which must have hurt: a triumph of the will if ever there was one. Which is also troubling: these guys are learning their way through (or being guided through) the legal maze.

It has been said that there are really only two stories: (a) someone goes on a journey, and (b) a stranger comes to town. Which are essentially the same story, told from opposing points of view. It is clear that this story is being played out in real life today, on a global scale, as the world begins to smoulder and burn. So now would be a good time to consider our role in this story, and how we want to play it. I'd also like to invite those black-clad self-styled "Christian" vigilantes to acquaint themselves with the source text of their newly professed beliefs:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Matthew 25

Crusades, witch-burnings, and pogroms may have been carried out by Christians, even endorsed by church leaders, but they are not Christian; neither is a person of "Christian heritage" who can't tell the Lord's Prayer from the National Anthem. There's a difference.

Now, I do not understand the motivations of those who risk everything to cross the Channel for a chance to live here in Britain – you're already in France, people; France, FFS! – and, yes, there are frauds, criminals, and bad actors among them. But we already have quite a few frauds, criminals, and bad actors of our own, which is why we have laws and police and a judicial system to enforce them, however unsatisfactorily slowly the mills of justice grind. And, yes, it is concerning that between 700,000 and 900,000 unauthorised immigrants have arrived in a country where housing, schools, medical and social services are already stretched to the limit. OTOH our birth-rate is in serious decline, and someone is going to have to be paying taxes to fund stuff, not least my care when I'm really old.

But to deport precisely those incomers on whom these services have already come to depend will solve nothing. People such as my neighbours, for example, who are now British citizens, and probably already feel more like locals than I do, born and bred as I was in faraway Silkingrad in a long-ago era, a barely remembered time when creating "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" was high on the social agenda. Talk about nostalgia for a country that never was...

Of course, the sad truth is that in old age we will all become strangers in a strange land, even if it is nominally the same one we grew up in. As George Orwell put it:

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

George Orwell, England Your England

It's curious to think how much closer we are now to the unimaginable England of 2040 than to the England of 1940 – the heyday of my parents' generation, and not so  much "our" as their finest hour – or even to 1984, the year I turned thirty and arrived in Southampton. Nineteen Eighty-Four... Orwell's dystopian vision – with the UK absorbed and rebadged by Big Brother's authoritarian empire Oceania as Airstrip One, not to mention the Thought Police, doublespeak, newspeak, and all that – somehow feels a lot less like a warning than a prediction today, doesn't it?

So perhaps it's time to force open a few windows and let in some sunlight to banish that musky smell? We must not allow angry "locals" to get in the way of our next attempt to build Jerusalem / Utopia / New Atlantis / Nowhere / Silkingrad in our still sort-of green and reasonably pleasant land. Let's put the creation of "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" back on the agenda. Although we should probably scrutinise that "civic pride" bit more closely; I know what Silkin meant but, wrongly interpreted, it's the sort of thing that can sometimes lead "locals" into trouble. [1]

But, top tip: do keep an ear open for any clocks striking thirteen...

1. Far be it from me, as a non-local, to stoke the traditional rivalry between Southampton ("scummers") and Portsmouth ("skates"), but... It seems that yesterday, in the town that allegedly confused a paediatrician with a paedophile (not actually true), a contingent of angry Portsmouth locals really did confuse the arrival of a Pakistan under-19 cricket team by coach at a hotel with the arrival of more unwelcome unauthorised immigrants, so they entered the hotel and started knocking on doors, presumably with the intention of intimidating the new arrivals.

[BTW Apologies for the paucity of pictures. Part-way through writing this post Blogger stopped uploading images. Hopefully this is a temporary glitch.]