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 an 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...] 

Dad Club

I mentioned in a previous post the idea that pretty much everybody has unrealised ambitions. Never getting scouted for a professional football career, perhaps, despite two outstanding seasons in a  local amateur team; failing to write a prize-winning novel (or, more likely, to finish any novel at all); never getting a cabinet post (or even winning a seat on the local Council) despite years of scheming and collegial sabotage; or even just to ride through Paris in a sports car, and so on. You cain't always git what you want... I suppose an important part of any ambition is that you have to know what it is, even if that knowledge is relatively content-free. You can want to be a doctor or the owner of a bookshop without much idea of what either job entails. Ambitions can be mutually exclusive, too: did Tony Blair want to be the singer in a band or to become Prime Minister? You certainly can't be both. Yet, anyway.

If I think back, what I really wanted to be when I was a kid was the David Attenborough of the Zoo Quest TV series or, failing that, the Gerald Durrell of his various creature-catching books, which were my main reading-matter at age ten, after I had been given The Bafut Beagles as a school prize. [1] I suppose I assumed there was a job called "naturalist", but had no idea of the job description or the credentials required beyond a beard, a way with words, and suitable knees for shorts. But by the time I was of an age to flaunt those credentials my ambitions had changed. Mainly, I think, what I wanted was to write the sort of book that would cause women to pester me with their attentions. So, sadly, having a beard (tick!), a way with words (tick!), and suitable knees for shorts (tick!) were now irrelevant, and having failed to publish any sort of book didn't help much, either.

One ambition I certainly didn't have as a young man was to be a father. I sort of assumed I would probably become a father at some point – although TBH I was mainly haunted by the worry that I might become one by mistake – but it had never really figured high on my "bucket list", as people say. And yet, as it turned out, becoming a father at the relatively late age of 37 has probably been the single most fulfilling experience of my entire life. I have loved being a father, with all its ups and downs, far more than any other identity I  have worn over my seventy-two years; which is just as well as – unlike, say, "student", "librarian", "photographer", or "blogger" – this one is permanent and non-negotiable.

It is easy for other identities to get swallowed up by the all-consuming role of "parent". I'm sure this is the main reason some suffer from an "empty nest" crisis when their children leave home, especially in the case of those for whom becoming a parent had been high on, if not at the top of their list of ambitions, and who had not really developed any competing identities before starting a family when still quite young. Middle-age can be enough of a crisis in itself, without suddenly realising that, without any children around, you have no idea who you really are, or what you might have been. Which is one very good reason for becoming a parent later in life, I suppose. It worked for us, anyway, and I like to think it worked out well for our children, too.

Given justifiable claims that we still live in a "patriarchy", you'd think being a father would be a pretty well-defined job. "Here you are, son: these are the rules of Dad Club. Pay particular attention to the sections on Dad Jokes and Dad Dancing..." But "being a father" is actually a very fuzzily defined condition, on a spectrum ranging from irresponsible absentee through unapproachable family CEO to the annoying sort of kidult dad who wants to be his children's best friend. So you pretty much have to make a role up for yourself, and find a way of dealing with the helplessness, guilt, and irrelevance you feel as you watch the woman you love go through trial by childbirth. 

I found myself happiest somewhere towards the "hands-on" end of the spectrum. There is a practical man inside me, a maker and fixer, and having children to entertain was all the encouragement he needed to come out. When the kids were small, I really enjoyed the endless improvised making of props and playthings with card, scissors, and tape, whether it was an elaborate crawl-through tunnel of joined-up cardboard boxes or a carefully painted and fitted Power Rangers mask made from robust watercolour paper. It was a bit like being a primary school teacher with a class of just two. Or perhaps more like home-schooling, where the only lesson is always Art & Craft. But I'm afraid putting up the occasional shelf, fixing a dripping tap, or redecorating the bathroom just don't hit the same spot, and Mr. Inner-Fixit does have a tendency to put his feet up and put those jobs off.

So being a father is an occupation with an open and evolving job description. The world has changed a great deal in the last 70 years, and it's impossible to know what part any one of us has played in bringing about those changes. I certainly make no grand claims to agency, but I can claim to have participated in a quiet revolution that has been reconfiguring the acceptable spectrum of paternal masculinity, and I take some pride in having nudged that dial, even a little.

[Waits for the jeers and loud scoffing noises of the mothers out there to die down]

If you want evidence that things have changed, just look on any high street, and count the men pushing prams and pushchairs. Not so long ago in Britain, for a man to be seen out with a shopping bag, never mind pushing a pram – or, bloody hell! Carrying a baby in a sling! – would have been like being caught trying on a dress. [2] Even when I was a child the division of labour around "man's work" and "woman's work" was still strictly gendered: not even an unemployed man would have been expected to take on any of the burden of housework or childcare. No wonder so many of my friends' mothers seemed always to simmer with barely repressed frustration and anger. I remember hearing from a girlfriend how her mother had exploded over the weekend, and thrown the family Christmas tree through a window. I don't recall now whether the window was open or shut at the time.

That said, in common with quite a few post-war working-class families, my parents seemed to have developed their own home-grown progressive theory of parenting: there was little smacking, much kindness, and bemused indulgence of my somewhat Martian personality. Times were changing. Mum was out at work part-time as soon as I started school, and full-time before I was eight. The money was welcome, of course, but I think Dad recognised that she needed the independence and a life outside "family" rather more. At home he was not some remote, unapproachable patriarch hidden behind a newspaper, never to be bothered with silly kid's stuff, but was always available, whether to help me in my efforts at drawing and painting, to patiently explicate the lyrics of the songs we would hear on the radio, or to play ball games in the back garden. Although it is also true that he had never cooked a meal in his entire married life until Mum had started to disappear into dementia, when he did finally figure out how to use a microwave oven.

1932: my paternal grandfather almost pushing a pushchair

In the 1970s some of us felt a rising wave of change – a metaphorical wave powered by the very real energetic output of angry young women – and began to push (or to be pushed to push) at the boundaries of our inherited ideas of masculinity. I am talking about housework and childcare here, not trying on dresses, although it's true that in 1972 I did once encounter a home-town friend on a remote Greek beach wearing his partner's long red Laura Ashley number in order to alleviate all-over sunburn, and to my surprise I learned not long ago that at least one college-era friend has since changed from Matthew to Matilda.

To arrive at Oxford University in the early 1970s – at that time an epicentre (or, perhaps more accurately, a distribution centre) of radical new ideas – meant that, for me, a traditionally-raised boy from a very ordinary family, the "learning curve" was dauntingly steep, and beset with pitfalls, tripwires, and the occasional landmine. I was constantly putting my foot in it, on it, and through it, when it came to the manners and shibboleths of my chosen new tribe. But I'm a quick learner, and it's no exaggeration to say that I entered university as one person and left as another. This was not without cost: I fell out of phase with old friends, and for many years felt at odds with a world where so many old certainties had turned out to be lazy choices, and not the eternal truths I had been led to believe.

So becoming a "hands on" dad may have come more easily to me than to many. Changing nappies, getting kids ready for school, or waking in the small hours to calm the big anxieties of small children simply became part of my daily routine. More than that, though, these small but significant things, taken together, felt like a rite of passage into a fully adult life. Although, as I never really enjoyed the bedtime preparation rituals, for example, I agreed to do all the cooking instead; no small undertaking, as anyone who has tried to keep up with their children's ever-changing food fads will attest. This was a deal which suited us both – my partner has never enjoyed cooking as much as I do – and still stands to this day, despite the fact that our "children" are now in their 30s and living busy lives in London (I really ought to check the wording of that contract). Somewhat annoyingly, though, for their one-time bespoke short-order cook, they are now truly adventurous diners who will eat, or at least try anything, up to and including durian-flavoured ice cream.

Sometimes a pram just can't get you where you want to go

Inevitably, though, there are problems when fundamental changes happen in a society which has not planned for them. Double income households with children have become the norm, pretty much as a financial necessity, and are no longer confined to the poorest families who need the cash or the professional classes juggling two careers. But small children still need to be looked after, and long and frequent school holidays – not to mention parental absences due to work commitments – need to be accommodated. Contracting this work out to childcare professionals is not cheap, whether in the home or a commercially-run nursery – it can eat up an entire second salary – and comes at an emotional cost, too. Which is why so many boomer-generation grandparents have found themselves back on a childcare duty roster, rather than out in the world enjoying a carefree retirement. So much for having "eaten all the pies".

As it happened – and I appreciate how infuriatingly privileged this will seem to many – my job entitled our children to attend a subsidised and well-staffed university day nursery from a very early age: six months! Obviously, this was an enormous benefit. My partner could pursue her nascent academic career and I could spend every lunchtime with our kids until they started school, sharing a meal and then, as they grew, taking them for exploratory walks around the campus. I loved taking them through the landscaped grounds, usually ending up in the Valley Garden, back then an Edenic, post-human spot, with ruined greenhouses, overgrown taxonomically-arranged plant beds, and gigantic, fairy-tale Gunnera manicata plants along a stream that would flood after heavy rain, turning the valley bottom into a marsh. We would gather fat windfall apples from the abandoned orchard and check on the progress of the frogspawn in what had once been an ornamental pond. This, now I come to think of it, laid the groundwork for what were to become my lunchtime photographic expeditions, daily walks which continued right up until retirement, fifteen years later. See my book, The Garden.

Unless you are wealthy enough and ideologically inclined to abandon your children into the "care" of private boarding schools – unimaginable to me, I have to say – there does come a point when the relative priorities and practicalities of both parents' working lives and ambitions have to be assessed. So I persuaded my bosses that it would be the progressive thing to do to allow me – a key member of the technical and middle-management library staff, even if I say so myself – to go part-time at work. This was a very unusual request at the time, not least for a male member of staff, and they did take a lot of convincing. But, as I have often said, whereas my partner's star was clearly on the rise, mine had chosen to stay in bed, so it was not a difficult choice to make. Whatever ambitions I might once have had, career-wise, were spent. Besides, as the children grew older and more independent the more time I would have to pursue my own real interests and unsalaried ambitions at home.

In those days, the 1990s, I would collect them from school in the afternoon, and I was often the only man waiting in the school playground; being rather older than most of the mothers, some barely more than children themselves, I was presumed to be their grandfather. Sometimes I was also an awkward – and not entirely welcome – male presence at occasions like birthday parties. But I was not there to make any point, other than the fact that, unlike some families, our kids had two fully-functioning parents rather than the conventional one and a bit. I suspect – indeed I hope – this may have caused some righteous questioning in some of those other households. "OK, Darren, how about I wash the car this afternoon, and you take Jimmy to that little shit Luke's party? Hmm? I'm sure it'll be fun! Isn't that what you said?"

But kids quickly grow up and start building their own adult lives. It's the "journey" we're all on, after all, and for them, as it was for us in our own day, leaving home is something that can't happen too soon. [3] So the hands-on stage of being a parent doesn't really last very long. Tweenies and teens are far too busy inventing themselves and figuring out how, where, and with whom they might fit in out there in the wider world to require much attention from you. But I am so grateful that ours grew up before social media had parasitised young lives so completely.

Plus, let's be honest, to have finally become little more than a 24/7 cash machine, taxi service, and short-order cook does get old very quickly. But this awkward last phase is just nature's way of putting a cordon sanitaire between you and any unhealthy nostalgia for those adorable but long-gone little toddlers. You might shed a sentimental tear when you find those old photographs in a drawer, but then you recall the night your daughter called you [unpleasant names] for chucking some boy out of her bedroom at midnight, or came home incapably drunk at 3 a.m., or... Well, any parent will know the sort of thing I mean. These teen-parent traumas do make letting go rather easier.

But, if you're as fortunate as we have been, such memories are anaesthetised, if not entirely erased, by the knowledge of the delightful and responsible adults your children have since turned out to be. You might even allow yourself to reflect that things have turned out pretty well, family-wise, even though you say so yourself. It seems that, after all, the best ambitions are the ones you didn't even know you had, until you finally realise in retrospect that you had been working towards and have finally achieved something perfectly ordinary and yet totally remarkable. Wow, did we do that? Well done, us!

So wear that Dad Club tattoo with pride, but do go easy on the Dad Jokes, and please avoid any further dancing in public at all costs.

1. At that age I was immune to Durrell's condescending humour, verging on racism. I read his best known book, the autobiographical My Family and Other Animals many, many times, cover to cover, at bedtime for years. As a keen collector of moths, fossils and any natural historical debris that came to hand I was Gerald Durrell, in my dreams, at least. When they were of a suitable age, I gave copies to my children, fondly anticipating having to retrieve the book at night from across their sleeping faces, as my parents had. But: they found it unreadable, and I can understand why. The archness of Durrell's writing belongs to another era; what was once a model of imaginative writing handed out as school prizes has become irretrievably class-bound, its voice toe-curlingly patrician and smug. Just like the real Gerald Durrell, in fact.

2.  See this recent SMBC cartoon: Invisible...

3. Although I read that the average age to leave home is now 24 and even older in the case of young men. Something to do with all those pies we boomers are supposed have eaten...

A Wide Game

I realise that to some this is heresy, but I like to crop my photographs. Not, in the way of most wildlife photographers, in order to isolate some tiny area of interest in a vast sea of indifference (although I have given that a go, too, as in last year's post Go Large), but to try out "aspect ratios" other than the standard 3:4 or 2:3 delivered by most cameras. You've probably noticed that I have a particular liking for the square, but I am also attracted to "panoramic" formats, most recently a more extreme, almost cinematic 6:17 crop across the whole width of the image. It doesn't always work, but when it does I like the result.

Obviously, this seems to work best with strongly horizontal compositions, and I'm drawn to those with a strong central element, or at least something eye-catching going on in the middle. This may be because I envisage using them in a "layflat" book, where a degree of symmetry about the central fold works nicely, or it may simply be that the standard advice to place key elements of interest artfully off-centre actually unbalances an image made within this format. As always, like the Pirate's Code in Pirates of the Caribbean, any bits of compositional advice are more by way of guidelines, than actual rules...

With limited height to play with relative to the width, one danger is that the detail can seem a bit too densely packed in. In particular I was conscious of the slightly claustrophobic lack of sky in those first four, so I sought out some more "airy" images to work with:

N.B. that storm over South Wales, seen from Clevedon on the other side of the Bristol Channel, is no exaggeration. Newport and points east were taking an apocalyptic pounding back in August last year, while we stood marvelling and completely dry at the end of Clevedon pier.

I did also try converting some into monochrome, but with less satisfactory results. Some work well enough, and have their own strengths, but for me the colour version is always stronger. I suspect I'm just not sophisticated enough for black and white...

 

Of course, there's no reason not to crop in order to isolate some small area of interest, especially given the remarkable ability of today's software to enlarge ("up-rez") an image without discernible loss of quality. Walking through the Sports Ground this week, for example, my eye was caught by the way the afternoon light was falling on the renovations taking place on the ski slope on the opposite side of the valley. So I took this photograph:

Meh... Too confusing, and the main attraction is relegated to support-act status. But with a tighter crop and a modest 1.5 times enlargement using Topaz's Gigapixel it becomes this 6:17 "panorama", entirely compatible in size, resolution, and aspect ratio with the images above, and (to my eye) a much more compelling picture:

Back in the days of film I did have a bit of a fling with "proper" panoramic imaging. I actually owned one of those Russian swing-lens Horizont cameras that record a 120° view onto 35mm film. I think I was probably inspired by Josef Koudelka's work with a similar camera. Basically, the lens actually rotates using a geared mechanism, rather like a scanner, producing a very characteristic distortion, especially if you haven't levelled the thing properly. It's a very different "look" to a simple narrow and wide crop, and not one I enjoy much these days: that exaggerated panoramic sweep quickly becomes its own cliché, and tends to dictate the sort of subject matter that is suitable.

In the early days of digital I did also have a brief enthusiasm for some panoramic stitching software (Panorama Factory, I think it was) but, as you can imagine, getting a suitable row of images to "stitch" together successfully is very dependent on the use of a tripod, plus ideally a special head that rotates the camera around the lens's "nodal point" [1] and, well, that's just not the way I like to work. Besides, as I say, "real" panoramas get quite boring after you've seen a few, even in the hands of a master like Koudelka. I much prefer the natural, undistorted perspective of these "letterbox" views.

1. Apparently, what you really need is "the point of no parallax", which is subtly different from the actual optical nodal point of a lens, but frankly I don't care what you call it, or which it is, I'm still not going to lug a tripod around, either way... 

What Is The Point?

Given the many causes for anxiety out there in the world, I mainly try to keep things light on this blog: a bit of photo-phluff, some personal stuff, nothing too rough or off the cuff [Oh, do stop it. Ed.]. TBH I'm mainly equipped and inclined to entertain, not to inform or educate: I'm not the BBC.

But... Six months ago I did post some thoughts on AI (Nisi Dominus Frustra...). Now, although we are still at the stage where "AI" is essentially just a catch-all term for various ways of mining vast stores of data and sticking the results together in a convincing way, it's clear there are issues here that are not going to go away, and that will become more urgent as the technology either improves or, more likely, its bubble bursts; either could be catastrophic. The main, admittedly pedestrian conclusion I came to was this:

When, I wonder, will it dawn on them [employers and investors] that the pursuit of efficiency, productivity and profits by automation and the elimination of expensive, fallible "human resources" is not the point? That people are the point, and not the problem? Not any day soon, it seems. 

As the TUC’s assistant general secretary, Kate Bell, said recently:

"AI could have transformative potential, and if developed properly, workers can benefit from the productivity gains this technology may bring." She added: "The alternative is bleak. Left unmanaged and in the wrong hands, the AI revolution could entrench rampant inequality as jobs are degraded or displaced, and shareholders get richer." (Guardian, 27 August 2025) 

Cleverness unconstrained by wisdom may yet be the downfall of our species. AI might usefully be regarded as humanity's attempt to outsource our own most distinctive feature, perhaps best represented by that traditional cartoon of a man sawing off the very branch he is sitting on. Over my working life I have witnessed several waves of happily-employed, ordinary, decent people being made redundant and their lives rendered purposeless by technology; some of it, I'm ashamed to say, implemented by me. It sometimes seems that clever technologists will not rest until the last opportunity to enjoy a meaningful life through work has been eliminated.

Obviously, a "wot I fink" piece on a blog that, without exaggeration, is nothing more than a tiny slip of paper hidden under a small rock in an enormous quarry full of similar rocks is not going to be changing any tech-titan's mind, but we do what we can, don't we? Besides, I expect the collapse of the global economy will make the case more effectively than I can. However, I thought it might be worth adding a few words about my point that "people are the point".

I've been watching episodes of Digging For Britain, a BBC TV series of round-ups of the latest archaeological discoveries, presented by my second favourite professor, Alice Roberts. Fun as they are to watch, the episodes are quite formulaic. At some point, Prof Roberts will kneel, Hamlet-style, in the dirt beside an excavation and – gazing at some skeletal remains or some time-worn and rusty bling, buried by or dropped from the leaky pockets of our forebears – she will deliver some well-informed words about prominent supraorbital ridges and worn joints. But, unlike Hamlet, she can have no idea whose remains or lost property she is contemplating.

Similarly, in that graveyard scene we hear Hamlet reflect, "To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?". In imagination, yes; but archaeology instead finds a bunghole, and is unable to hazard any guess as to whose dust might be filling it. It's a roundabout, one-way trip from corpse to clay – apparently a cloud of red Saharan dust is due to pass over us in Britain this very week – and imagination is all we have to link Humpty Dumpty with the mess of eggshell unearthed among the rubble of what seems to have once been a wall. [1]

But surely few things are as poignant as the ruined skeleton of some unknown individual, interred with varying degrees of ceremony centuries or millennia ago and now exposed to view on a popular TV programme – bad teeth, characteristic syphilitic bone damage, and all – simply in order to be cleaned  up, measured, analysed, and stored in a box in an overfull warehouse somewhere. To this favour we must come...

So, as we get older, those of us prone to fits of reflection may find ourselves wondering, what is the point of all this?

Me, too! Apparently it was made by CPO, Worthing, UK (poster bottom left),

who seems to take August off

Generation upon generation of suffering humanity – and the skeletal evidence demonstrates abundantly that this is more than just a trite expression – have been comforted by stories about an afterlife to be enjoyed in assorted Happy Hunting Grounds or, for the wrong 'uns, frightened into better behaviour by the prospect of Hot Hells of Eternal Torment. The point was to ensure you got the right stamp in your eternal passport, as determined and supervised by the Belief Police. It's hard for us 21st century sophisticates to grasp, but those beliefs were real enough for, say, 16th century sophisticates to literally go to the stake over them. You? No, me neither.

Countless thousands upon thousands of bodies have been laid to rot in peace in that most secure of storage facilities, the solid ground of Britain itself. Every episode of Digging For Britain shows that, once you scrape the surface to start work on something like a new housing estate pretty much anywhere on our islands, ancient burial grounds will be revealed. Call for the archaeologists! But for all their efforts, we have little to no understanding of what beliefs were held within those empty skulls, not least those found in so-called "deviant burials" – heads ritually decapitated, and placed in the grave at the owner's feet – but we can be sure that what we're seeing is the work of the Belief Police, keeping society in check by enforcing certain useful shared fantasies about an afterlife, however bizarre.

But, to return to Hamlet, his most famous soliloquy becomes rather meaningless, once that "dread of something after death" has faded away. [2] Quite apart from a precipitous decline in religious belief, we are the first generations to know – as a matter of plausible scientific fact, not baseless belief – that our planet itself will be rendered uninhabitable in about a billion years by the sun's expansion, if not sooner, and that beyond that lies the prospect of the "heat death" of the entire universe. I mean, really, sub specie aeternitatis, and minus any belief in an afterlife, what is the fucking point? So go ahead, Hamlet, mate, pick up that knife and make your own "quietus". Why not? Even though you've never carried a fardel, whatever that is, in your entire privileged (albeit fictional) life. BTW, seen Ophelia lately?

Which is all pretty depressing. But enter humanism – hooray! – stage left, to rescue the idea of there being a point to it all, after all: people.

Alice Roberts happens to be one – a humanist, that is, as well as a striking example of a people – and is in fact a past President of Humanists UK, who define a humanist as someone who

Trusts to the scientific method when it comes to understanding how the universe works and rejects the idea of the supernatural (and is therefore an atheist or agnostic)

Makes their ethical decisions based on reason, empathy, and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals

Believes that, in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.

Which is, admittedly – compared to the Nicene Creed, say – a bit on the woolly side. I mean, how are your Belief Police ever going to interrogate, torture, and execute people with that comfy chair of a catechism? Nonetheless, I suspect that considerably more of us in Britain are passive signatories to a humanist manifesto than to the stated beliefs of the Anglican Church. I mean, when you look an obviously brilliant man like former archbishop Rowan Williams, you have to think: Seriously? This is the imaginary ladder you chose to climb, all the way to the top? Idiotic hat and all?

So, look, I know you don't really expect me to divulge the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, at least free of charge (although I can reveal it's not "42"). But I will simply repeat my previous conclusion, putting it like this: the pursuit of maximum profit in the most "efficient" (i.e. people-less) way is a theology, and essentially anti-humanist in its disregard for "human wellbeing". AI is just the latest attempt to extract more profit for a few at the expense of the many under the false manifesto of "doing away with tedious, repetitive tasks", supposedly freeing us all up to be, I dunno, poets or something. And yet at the same time AI dangles distracting and supposedly time- and effort-saving baubles in front of us, saving us the tedious, repetitive chore of actually creating anything; "Hey, AI, write me a poem in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets about Rowan Williams' dark night of the soul after he met Alice Roberts". This is consumption disguised as creativity. Getting bored with that yet?

But the sort of work that 21st century sophisticates might regard as tedious and repetitive, dangerous even, is not necessarily seen that way by the people who actually do it, provided it is reasonably well-paid, comes with a pension, plus some flexibility in hours and time off. Not everybody wants to sit at home all day or in an office looking into a computer screen. As I wrote in a post, Trouble, all the way back in June 2009:

It's easy to dismiss the likes of the BNP across Europe as merely the ignorant politics of an underclass of unemployables – alienated, tattooed, violent, foul-mouthed and hedonistic – who resent the arrival of successive waves of the eminently employable; most recently, le plombier polonais. But the rise of this new underclass is really the bewildered, self-harming response of a vital stratum of our society to its perceived abandonment, and it's a shocking development to anyone who grew up in the working class of the 1950s and 60s. It didn't used to be like this.

"This" needs to be taken seriously. Very seriously. Above all, there has to be meaningful, decently-paid work (skilled and unskilled manual work, for the most part) for the legions of young, strong, not particularly bright people born in this country, or there will be trouble. Lots of trouble.

Or, as perhaps more succinctly put by Raoul Vaneigem:

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

The Revolution of Everyday Life

1. I notice many diggers on the programme wear ironic t-shirts, some bearing this definition: "Archaeologist: someone who does precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge".

2. I've mentioned this before, but as an ultimate example of meaninglessness, consider the fact that the words "To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ..." can – improbably, unbelievably, outrageously – be arranged into an anagram: "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten ..." (The author of this anagram has apparently been identified as Cory Scott Calhoun). Actually, it does have a meaning of sorts: get a life...

More Mysterious Barricades

As will be obvious to anyone who has been visiting this blog for a while, I am something of a connoisseur of barrier-tapes, fences, and improvised obstacles of all kinds. I can only speculate why this is the case. Do I feel shut out or shut in in some literal or metaphorical sense? Not especially. Do I have gnostic intimations of a hidden reality beyond this one? Kinda sorta, usually on wet Mondays. Have I been blocked by circumstance, background, and prejudice – not to mention personality, preferences, and life choices – from achieving significant goals in life? Well, no more than most (which is to say: yes, of course...). We can't all be [insert your own unrealised ambition]. Although I think my problem (or saving grace?) has been more that I never could settle on which of a number of unrealised ambitions I should have pursued relentlessly and ruthlessly, with no regard to the consequences to the health and happiness of friends, family, and the world in general. You're welcome!

Many years ago now, in 2009, I made a little book I called The Mysterious Barricades, featuring photographs of various ineffective, odd, or imagined barriers I had encountered in the landscape. As I wrote then:

This series of photographs takes its name from a short keyboard piece by François Couperin (1669-1733), Les Barricades Mistérieuses. A recording by Angela Hewitt has been described as "a beautiful, undulating meditation on cycles of fifths and chord changes in B flat". No one knows to what the title refers, but I am by no means the first to borrow it, and it will resonate with anyone who has, at some time in their life, felt the frustration of unseen barriers, or encountered inexplicable or apparently pointless obstacles.

Now, I should confess that I first came across and appropriated this title after reading a description of that Couperin piece in William Wharton's novel Last Lovers. [1] It seemed a perfect fit for that series of pictures, which became one of my first Blurb books, and also one of the last uses I would make of my photographs made on film. I scanned the negatives, mainly colour medium-format film, converted them to monochrome, and imposed a circular framing onto them, in imitation of / tribute to Emmet Gowin's early work where he used a lens that was, technically speaking, too small for the 4" x 5" format, and therefore projected a circular image onto the view camera's rectangular negative.

However, my ability to convert colour images to monochrome at that time was nowhere near as good as it is now, and I was never very happy with the book, anyway, so didn't give it much exposure. Its legacy lives on, however, and I seem still to find mysterious barricades everywhere. The ones in this post are all from January and February this year.

As I have now reminded myself of that book, however, I decided to put The Mysterious Barricades onto Issuu as a PDF flipbook, which you can see by clicking the image below (as usual choose a "full screen" view, to lose the adverts, etc.).

Just for good measure, I have also added another little book of a similar vintage, which contains a mix of film images processed in the same way as those in The Mysterious Barricades and some early digital images, and which – ostensibly, at least – treats another subject that has attracted me over the years, crows. N.B. at the very end of this book there is a joke which – although long experience reveals that not many seem to find it as amusing as I do – is, in its way, a Great Teaching.

1. William Wharton, by the way, was a very fine writer whose work seems to have vanished from view. His first novel Birdy was once famous because of the film made of it by Alan Parker, but if you're looking for something new to read I'd urge you to try Dad or A Midnight Clear. Both outstanding books in my reckoning, FWIW. In fact, I'm going to dig them out and re-read them myself.

Didn't It Rain, Children...

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

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

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

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

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

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