Handy But Sinister

In case you don't already know, or haven't guessed, I think you should know that I belong to a persecuted and misunderstood minority, one which is disproportionately represented in the creative arts, politics and entertainment, but which has inspired horror, revulsion and even cruelty in sections of the majority "normal" population. Surprisingly, it's something I have in common with six post-WW2 US presidents, and although it is sometimes described as a "preference", that is highly inappropriate and discriminatory: we're talking biology here. Curiously, Churchill and Callaghan have been the sole British Prime Ministers to be inclined this way, at least openly. What this says about our two nations I'm not sure.

I mean, of course, that we are all left-handed. There, I've said it.

Growing up left-handed is a lot easier now than it used to be, but it's still a challenge. Not so long ago, left-handed children were persecuted and forced into adopting right-handedness at school, with predictably negative developmental consequences. It probably took the pig-headed egotism and fuck-you privilege of a Churchill to resist such brutal attempts at conversion therapy. This may have seemed necessary and in a child's own interest to the right-handed majority, but I would say it is at least on a par with the socially-enforced denial of one's sexuality. And yet there seems never to have been a Left-Handed Liberation movement. We're just so damned adaptable, not to say compliant!

As someone who is completely left-sided – even though it has become weaker than the right, I still raise a viewfinder or telescope to my left eye, for example – I was reconciled long ago to my daily encounters with rectitude. Indeed, I have never knowingly bought or used a "left-handed" product, not so much as a pair of scissors or a computer mouse. You just learn to turn yourself inside out and back to front. Writing with an ink pen is a classic problem with a classic cack-handed solution, but just try operating a tin-opener with your left hand, for example, or opening a penknife, or to cut with comfort and precision with scissors. If you're right-handed, it has probably never even crossed your mind that there might be a problem there. Ditto virtually every device in the workshop, kitchen, or factory. Which side is the handle, the switch, or the main control? Where does the flex come out? If nothing else, being left-handed predisposes you to sympathy with other invisible minorities who are daily inconvenienced, or worse, by the unthinking majority.

The condition does not seem to be directly heritable: no-one else in my family is left-handed, and neither are my children. On the other hand it is not freakishly rare: generally estimated at around 10% of the population. Most of us are born lefties – sometimes described as "right brain dominant" – but, although I'm not aware of anyone who has chosen to achieve left-handedness, some unfortunates have had it thrust upon them. Two remarkably similar extreme cases were Paul Wittgenstein, brother of  philosopher Ludwig, a concert pianist, and Josef Sudek, the Czech photographer, both of whom lost their right arms as soldiers in WW1. Wittgenstein continued to play concerts with just the one hand, and commissioned pieces for left hand only from the likes of Britten, Prokofiev, and Ravel. Sudek managed to grapple with view cameras – unwieldy and awkward mechanisms under the best of circumstances – and produced an extraordinary body of work. Although goodness knows how he managed all those fiddly screws, knobs, and "movements", never mind working in the darkroom one-handed.

As a music-mad teen I learned to play guitar on a "normal" instrument borrowed from a friend, and as a result I ended up playing left-handed but upside-down, i.e. with the bass strings at the bottom. This does actually makes some difficult chords easier, but it's not ideal in the longer term. In fact, I gave up guitar altogether a few years ago, having developed arthritis in my right thumb's lowest joint; partly, I suspect, as a result of the contortions required to hold down the treble strings. Jimi Hendrix famously played a right-handed guitar left-handed, of course, but had the sense to restring his instrument, which is almost certainly the only reason I was never as good as him.

I'm not sure how southpaws fare in the armed forces, but I can't imagine mixing "handednesses" sits well with the super-tidy military mind. Hendrix would have known, of course, as he had been in the US Airborne, albeit briefly, as an alternative to imprisonment for getting caught in stolen cars once too often; maybe he fired his weapon upside down, too? The trouble is that you can't restring a standard-issue firearm. A bolt-action rifle like the classic British Lee-Enfield is designed to be operated with the right hand while cradled with the left. Worse, if not fitted with some kind of deflector, an automatic weapon will only eject spent shell-cases away from the right-handed firer's face: I have certainly read of at least one left-handed M16 user getting a hot ejected casing inside his collar and inflicting "friendly fire" on his comrades in the ensuing panic. Doubtless left-handed slingshotters, bowmen, and wielders of edged weapons of all kinds down the ages have created similar havoc from time to time. Perhaps that's why they call us sinister?

Sinister, not to mention gauche, cack-handed, maladroit, and so on. There's an interesting recent discussion of the Italian and Spanish word manco on the Language Hat blog – the word crops up in the spaghetti western For a Few Dollars More – where left-handedness is implicitly regarded as a lack of capacity or a form of disability, etymologically, at least. It seems the cultural prejudice against left-handedness is universal, and universally negative; we won't even get into the Islamic prohibitions enjoined upon use of the left "dirty" hand. This, despite the eminence and disproportionate contribution of the left-handed to culture and science.

So let's start at the top: Beethoven, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Newton, Nietzsche, Tom Stoppard, Charlie Chaplin, half of the Coen Brothers ... The list, as they say, is endless, although it's true the ink of the list has been smudged into semi-legibility along the left edge; clearly, it must have been written by some cack-handed scribe.

Of course, should you want to identify as left-handed you'd be very welcome. But you'll never really be a leftie... Here, catch! Thought so...

It seems the smaller culprit has one finger missing all but the top joint

(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea

Fulham Road, Chelsea

When you are as resolutely (incorrigibly?) provincial as me, your capital city exists mainly as a place of myth and legend rather than as a pavement-level reality. Despite never having lived more than a two-hour train ride from London, my knowledge of the place remains patchy to the point of threadbare. I know there are such places as Mayfair or Hampstead, Greenwich or Limehouse, and have a mental repository of associations (I'm pretty sure Berkeley Square is the go-to place for nightingales, for instance, as is Limehouse for opium dens), but have never actually walked the streets of any of them. They might as well be fictional, or somewhere in Australia.

This ignorance is not helped by the experience of using the London Underground (a.k.a. the Tube), and made worse by the diagrammatic over-simplifications of the brilliant but topographically misleading London Underground Map. You descend into a Tube station, endure a spell of subterranean purgatory, and emerge somewhere completely different, having followed a mind-map of various deceptively-straightened coloured lines: London as a wiring diagram. To the visitor, London is a theme park of experiences, connected in time but not in space. Most major cities with a "metro" system are the same, of course. I imagine that, one day in the far-distant future, inter-planetary travel will be very like this: you will pop down a wormhole located somewhere near Earth, and emerge blinking into the purple sunlight of some faraway planet where coffee is much more expensive.

Until last Saturday, for example, I had never been to Chelsea. I am seventy years old, but not even during the heyday of Swinging London, punk, and all that did I ever think to visit the fabled King's Road. I hadn't even understood the proximity of Chelsea to South Kensington, where the Natural History, Science, and Victoria & Albert Museums are, as well as the Royal Albert Hall, so a part of the city I have visited many times; on school trips, for meetings as a library professional, and as a music fan, a museum fanboy, and as a diligent parent.

True, when my father's place of work, the engineering firm of Geo. W. King, treated us "King's children" to our annual Christmas outing to a theatre in the West End, the coach would drive along the Thames-side bottom edge of Chelsea, so slowly at times that you could take in all the granular detail, such as the strangely exotic "street furniture", things like blue plaques, lamp posts, railings, sash windows, and even street nameplates. For New Town kids, London might as well have been in Hungary. For some reason "Cheyne Walk" lodged somewhere in the back of my mind: a name that would pop up again in later life, like an old half-forgotten friend, when studying the lives of London's bohemian artists in the 19th-century. But, again, even then it never occurred to me actually to go there myself, any more than one would make plans to visit Neverland or Brobdingnag.

So, anyway, on Saturday 13th July I had to deliver a picture which had been shortlisted for an exhibition in the gallery of Green & Stone, the venerable artists' materials supplier, which used to be located on the King's Road but is now on the Fulham Road, also in Chelsea. Finally, there I was, walking the pavements of one of the more storied parts of the city, with a framed picture under my arm, safely stowed in bubble wrap inside a bright orange Sainsbury's carrier bag. Stylish! However, there I was again, on Friday 19th, taking it away again, "not selected". Oh, well.

I must admit, this is a predictable pattern that has begun to annoy and frustrate me: submitted, shortlisted, rejected. You might almost suspect there is a deep-seated prejudice against digital work in the gallery world (irony alert: see my post Original Print). I just wish they'd be more upfront about it. Or perhaps the problem is that the ones who write the prospectus ("Digital work welcome!"), the ones who winnow the submissions to make a shortlist ("Ooh, this one is digital, but I like it!"), and the ones who make the final judgements ("Digital? No way!") are all different people, with exponentially negative attitudes towards, you know, computers. True, if your business is selling paint, brushes, and canvas you can't have much of a stake in promoting digital work – you may even see it as something of a threat – but you should have seen some of the painted dross that appears to have made it onto the walls at Green & Stone. Besides, that's not an excuse that more typical galleries could use.

This may sound conceited, but I notice that – whenever I deliver my work to and, as so often, subsequently take it away again from a gallery – the junior staff always seem to admire it. I'm used to hearing words like "wow!" and "beautiful", and even "sensational" as it lies face up on the table between us. No doubt they were the ones who did the shortlisting. Or perhaps they're just under instruction to soothe bruised artistic sensibilities. Whatever, it's just annoying to hear someone cooing over a rejected picture as you stuff the fucking thing back into its bubble wrap.

You do have to wonder quite how blithely ignorant galleries are of the sheer expense of submitting work to their "open" exhibitions. For a start, especially if you are foolish enough to submit several pictures, there is the upfront "ticket of entry" cost to consider. In the case of Green & Stone, I entered two, at £20 each (relatively cheap, actually). Not so bad if you get rejected straight away in what, these days, is always a preliminary online round of judgement: it's a mere tax on folly. But if you do get shortlisted, you are then required to deliver your work to the gallery, framed to their exact specifications, for further consideration.

Now, framing is not cheap. Personally, I've managed to constrain this cost by keeping my work small and in standard sizes, ordering ready-made frames from a reliable online supplier, and doing the fitting and finishing myself. It's a useful skill to have, and it generally works out at around £50-£75 for a picture A3 size or smaller. But goodness knows what it would cost to have larger pictures professionally framed; hundreds, I expect. Then there is the question of actually delivering the work. In this case, a return train journey to London, 1½ hours each way: not exactly a bargain at £60 (open off-peak return, although ignoring my "Senior Railcard" discount), plus some Tube fares.

So far, that's around £150 for one shortlisted item. But then if it's rejected (or even accepted but unsold by the end of the show, the most likely outcome) you'll have to go and fetch it on certain specified days, or face more expense for "storage": so that's another £60 rail fare. In total, that's something in the order of £210 for not getting a small, self-framed picture into an exhibition, and travelling from somewhere reasonably near London. But I'm just a cheapskate bottom-feeder rocking up with his little digital print in a supermarket carrier bag: by way of contrast, I saw some very large paintings being taken away in hired vans. Wallet says Ouch! And I haven't even factored in the cost of materials – which must be considerable if your thing is to cover several square yards of support with impasto oil paint – never mind the hours of labour and travel involved.

All in all, it's a mug's game, isn't it? And one you wouldn't even consider playing if you were already an established name, and should definitely pass if you aspire to make a living from your art. In the end, it's a classic "gentlemen vs. players" arrangement that favours amateurs with time and cash to spare, like me, and hardly "open" in the sense that anyone could afford to ante up and play. Although, having just learned that I have also failed yet again to get anything into this year's RWA show in Bristol, I may finally have had enough of it myself. What is the point? The spiritual benefits of absorbing serial disappointments are oversold, I think. You can only bank so much humility... [1]

This is the picture in question, by the way, just one foot square, basically the size of an old vinyl LP sleeve:

Mr. Darwin Regrets...

Have I "explained" it before? It's a photo-collage based on the statue of Charles Darwin by Sir Joseph Boehm, enthroned at the top of the staircase in the main entrance hall of the Natural History Museum. The title reflects two sentences of humblebragging from Darwin's autobiography (which surrounded the collage as a framing text in the original version):

"My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week."

The volume in the foreground is my battered copy of the "Moxon Tennyson", a collected works published in 1857 with illustrations by Rossetti and various other Pre-Raphaelite artists, just two years before On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

I don't know about "beautiful" or "sensational", but I do think it works, and it is the result of much thought, multiple revisions, and many hours of skilled labour, and is definitely not some click-of-the-fingers AI fabrication. Neither is it a giclée reproduction of some "real" painting that I'm passing off as a print. Yes, it has more in common with illustration than the sort of self-expressive paint-abuse galleries still seem to favour, but in my view that's a good thing. As I say, you should see some of the painted dross...

But to return to the subject of London. The sheer size of the place means that a casual visit to a single, relatively central destination, even using public transport, requires a fair amount of walking to be done. By British standards Friday was extremely hot and humid – well over 30° C – so I chose to travel to Chelsea by first walking over the Thames from Waterloo station via Hungerford Bridge to the Embankment tube station, catch the Circle Line to South Kensington – horribly over-crowded, hot, and screechingly noisy – and then walk south and west to the Fulham Road. Once I'd collected my picture I found a cool spot to sit and eat the lunch I had brought with me, and then simply reversed the journey. It was just too hot and sticky to be worth hanging around or exploring. So when I checked the Health app on my iPhone later, I found to my surprise that I had walked 7731 steps that day: that's just over three miles, slightly more than I would do on my typical daily walks at home. Excellent! Although, shame about the terrible air quality...

There was one thing that did brighten my day considerably on Friday. Seated opposite me on the Tube were two young girls, probably around sixteen and dressed in the sort of "you're not leaving this house looking like that!" get-ups that only a sixteen-year-old can wear without irony. They were clearly heading for some kind of party or gig, and were enjoying drawing attention to themselves in that loud, Adele-style cockneyfied banter that them London gals affect these days. Next to them was a rangy black guy in jeans and a battered Chicago Bulls hoodie; we both stared into space, too cool and mature in years to be even slightly interested in a couple of attention-seekers with rather too much tattooed teenage skin on display. No, sir! But then one of them pulled up a trouser leg, produced a roll of bandage, and proceeded to tape two miniature bottles of vodka to her calf. Hoodie guy and I laughed, exchanged smiles and a wink, and then returned to gazing into space. It was a nice moment.

Briefing for a descent into Hell the Circle Line...

1. Same experience: one work was "pre-selected" but didn't make the final cut. Although, interestingly, this year both rounds of selection at the RWA were made online, at least avoiding the expense of framing, delivery, and removal. Maybe the message is gradually getting through?

For a rather different perspective from the other end of the spectrum of artistic success, check out Wim Wenders' documentary about Anselm Kiefer. Apparently it's a 3D movie, but the 2D version is available free on Amazon Prime Video, surprisingly. I've always been intrigued by Kiefer's work, but watching this documentary I couldn't help but think that this scale of success is not good for anyone's spiritual and/or mental well-being, no matter how deserved, or how hard-won... No-one should be able to afford to buy a disused factory and populate it with hired help, merely in the service of their own obsessive artistic grandiosity. Cue up "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"...

Insular and Absurd

Paris, October 2018

Look out, the Olympics are coming! [Stifles big yawn]... I'm not much of a fan of sport – I certainly couldn't be bothered to watch England stumble their way to the recent Euros final – but I am completely baffled by the appeal of watching athletic events, especially now that the Olympics are packaged up as a glossy international game-show, like the Eurovision Song Contest in shorts and vests. Can it be long before the 100 metre sprinters are surrounded by choreographed "interpretation"? The bonkers opening ceremony of the London Olympics of 2012, far from being a national triumph, struck me as a new national low; talk about your society of the spectacle. Embarrassing... And so ruinously expensive! Who can blame Hamburg, Rome, or Budapest from having second thoughts and withdrawing their bids for 2024? So now it's the turn of Paris to host this sweat-fest race to the bottom. I imagine it will be a little more stylish than our own cringe-worthy effort at promoting our national stereotypes to the world, but who cares?

Although I was intrigued to learn that in the 1924 Paris Olympics there were medals for painting, poetry, and architecture. No, really! "On your marks, get set..." Bang! "Start painting / composing / building!" [1] Forget synchronised swimming, skateboarding, and break-dancing: bring back competitive Olympic poetry! Although French, Italian, and Spanish speakers will have an unfair advantage, when it comes to rhyming, it's true... Team UK's hopes for gold will be pinned on the freestyle and blank verse events.

[It's hot. Please insert your own hilarious sketch about art as a competitive event, modernist art-styles of the 1920s, national stereotypes, etc. For example, "Oh no! The German team have been disqualified! They're insisting to the judges that Dadaist cabaret is a valid form of painting!"] [Nowhere near funny enough, but that's the sort of thing. Ed.]

The high spot of the 2024 Olympics so far, though, has been the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, taking a swim in the Seine. Eek.

"Hidalgo’s historic swim, which was postponed twice because of fluctuating pollution levels, came just 10 days before the opening of the Games on 26 July and after fears a large cleanup operation had failed. The work included the construction of a €1.4bn (£1.2bn) holding and treatment tank to contain bacteria-laden stormwater during heavy rains, which came into operation a month ago, and improvements to the city’s wastewater network.

Until very recently, the river was still failing water quality tests for E coli bacteria – an indicator of faecal matter – and showing levels above the upper limits imposed by sports federations."

Guardian 17 July 2024

Brave, but foolhardy! (in French: C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la natation!) A gesture in the grand tradition of all those other politicians who have carried out performatively prophylactic stunts; for example, feeding their children burgers, to prove that Mad Cow Disease is perfectly tasty when properly cooked. So we will follow Mme. Hidalgo's progress over the next few days with interest, and no little concern.

Not least because I'm inevitably reminded of the fate of novelist Arnold Bennett, who died on 27th March 1931 after contracting typhoid from tap water he drank in Paris in January, against the waiter's advice, while dining with James and Nora Joyce, just to prove it was perfectly safe. As his wife, Dorothy Cheston Bennett put it: he had said that "nothing was so insular and absurd as to suppose that the ordinary water of Paris, indeed of France, was dangerous, since hundreds of thousands of French people never drank anything else. Drink it he would." C'est magnifique, mais ...!

To be honest, I had no idea that the French never drink anything but water. Possibly one of those sweeping, unfair, and misrepresentative national stereotypes! Odd, really, then, that they go to the trouble of making quite so much wine; pure international altruism maybe? If so, thanks, France! Although... In the late 1950s, because he knew a little schoolboy French, my father was dispatched to help oversee the installation of some conveyors – the main product of Geo. W. King in Stevenage, his employer – in the Simca car factory at Poissy, France. He and the other members of the King's team were appalled to discover that many French factory workers habitually downed a bottle of red during their extended lunch break, returning to work later in the afternoon in an unsteady condition. Which is far from the ideal state to be handling heavy machinery, at least in the stereotypically puritanical English view. But perhaps that was just a local deviation from the "nothing but water" rule?

I can attest that the tap water in Paris is now as perfectly potable as Perrier, and I'm sure a little alcoholic refreshment will be tolerated, at least while the world is watching and wandering the streets. Although, as in St. Petersburg before the World Cup in 2018, I'm also pretty sure any clochards, ivrognes and allied trades will have been mysteriously disappeared for the duration; perhaps they'll be sent back to Poissy. But, please, you aqualetes (?), do try not to swallow any water in the Seine, guys, or you may wish you'd entered the break-dancing, instead.

Anyway, here's my entry for the imaginary poetry Olympics (sonnet sprint event), which apparently always had to be on a sporty theme:

They claim the filthy waters of the Seine
Are almost free of floating faecal matter;
They claim it's safe to swim and row again
And take part in the water-sports regatta.
Almost: so, if you do, remember spit, don't swallow
Like the Boat Race crews on London's toilet
Thames, or technicolour yawns will surely follow!
Myself, I know I'd really want them to boil it
First or, failing that ridiculous ambition,
At least do something more about the pong,
Or else withdraw my oar from competition.
But if you truly crave a sporty gong
Prepare yourself to stand upon the podium:
Invest in several boxes of Imodium...

And it's gold for Team GB, despite failing under pressure to find a rhyme for E. coli!

Paris, October 2018

1. Although if it's "bangs" you want, apparently the 1900 Olympics (also in Paris) featured "cannon shooting" as a competitive event... Probably dropped as tasteless and de trop after les événements of 1914-18.

Ships in the Night

Living in Southampton, where big ships constantly come and go, we sometimes hear the booming of foghorns in the night; they make an eerie basso profondo accompaniment to the mewling and hooting of the owls that hunt in the copse beyond our back garden. You can't help but wonder, half asleep, where these slow global voyagers are headed, or arriving from, as they cautiously navigate a misty Southampton Water.

The expression "ships that pass in the night" is obviously rather less figurative when you live near a major port. But for those unfamiliar with it, Wiktionary defines it as "Two or more people who encounter one another in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance; two or more people who almost encounter one another, but do not do so." That's quite a lot of words to explain one now rather hackneyed image, which would suggest that it is nonetheless still doing its expressive work effectively. [1]

It also strikes me as the definition of two rather different things. You might well say of some brief liaison, however intimate or important at the time, "We were just ships that passed in the night" (not so much "Strangers in the Night" as "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", perhaps). But how often do you find out (or care) that you had almost met someone, but didn't? I mean, how would you even know that the young man sat next to you on the train to London was your best friend's daughter's partner, or some up and coming young poet whose work you had been reading about just yesterday?

It can happen, though. I remember being at a workshop with gallerists Zelda Cheatle and Sue Davies when it emerged that Zelda had been hanging around on certain Greek islands in the summer of 1973, as had I. There were not many places to spend time on the smaller islands in those days – just the one bar on Ios, I seem to recall – so we could easily have been sitting at adjacent tables all evening and never so much as said "hello". Mind you, such places did seem made for remarkable encounters. It was on Mylopotas beach on Ios – in those days an undeveloped haven for backpacking blow-ins – that I was sitting self-consciously naked in the sand with my travelling companion – de rigueur on that beach at that time – when another couple from our home-town of Stevenage happened to come traipsing along the tideline, the bearded male half draped in a long red dress borrowed from his companion, due to severe sunburn. You tended to take that sort of coincidence for granted, back then: "synchronicity spoken here", and all that [2].

Similarly, as I described in a previous post (By the Tide of Humber), poet Angela Leighton and I are exact contemporaries, born in February 1954 [3], and we both happened to study English at Oxford in the years 1973-76. Our paths may well have crossed many times, but as it is we were at most "two or more people who almost encounter one another, but do not do so". Clearly, such notional non-encounters have no significance at all; they are, by definition, "unknown unknowns", close-but-not-quite coincidences of time and place. They do very occasionally become the subject of retrospective speculation, as in this case, but generally only because the other person was or has become well-known enough – famous even – for the waymarks and calendar of their life-story to have become public property. One party is a big ship, setting out on a favourable tide and headed for somewhere remarkable, and the other is some much smaller craft, bobbing along anonymously in the dark.

But enough with the nautical metaphors! I was put in mind of "ships in the night" when photographer Dragan Novacović was kind enough to comment on a recent post here. Dragan's name rang a bell, and I realised I'd seen some of his photographs of Britain in the late 1970s before, perhaps in one of the Café Royal Books. Looking through his work online, it struck me that many of the locations and even individual characters in his "street" photographs of London's East End echoed remarkably closely those to be seen in the photographs of Markéta Luskačová, who was active in exactly the same area in those exact same years. I remarked that he and Markéta must have been tripping over each other at times. Dragan replied:

As a matter of fact I did see Marketa once. One day in the Brick Lane Market I was standing at a crowded stall when I spotted right opposite me a young woman in a white dress with something looking to me like Japanese letters on the back, snapping away with her silver chrome Leica. Out of curiosity, with my own camera hanging idly around my neck and begging to be used, I merely watched her for a while and, having no idea who she was, I finally moved on.

Some forty years later I visited Marketa's website and when I saw her portrait something rang a bell. I wrote to her, describing the incident and the dress (as it turned out, it was a gift from a well-known Japanese photographer whose name escapes me), and asking whether it was her that I saw. In her reply she confirmed my guess and asked whether by any chance I had any photos of her from that day to send her. I felt like kicking myself. Oh, well...

Like ships that pass in the night, as you might say: although, in this case somewhere in between "two or more people who encounter one another in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance" and "two or more people who almost encounter one another, but do not do so". Rather like the the time my 11-year-old son saw one of his heroes, naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham, in our local camera store, but firmly resisted my urging to go up and say "hello". [4]

I'm intrigued by the hint of extra dimensions given by that "or more" in Wiktionary's definition, though. Who knows who else with a photographic connection or some other claim on our attention might have been in Brick Lane Market on that same day? Or on Ios in summer 1973, for that matter? But then, how could you ever know? This "time and place" variant of "only connect" is essentially a speculative game, and imaginary or retrospectively-constructed close encounters without significance, resonance, or outcome are not really connections at all.

There are, of course, other connection games to play that don't depend on the elements of simultaneity and, um ...; remarkably, it seems English lacks a word for "in the same place". Cospatiality? Whatever, there is the game generally known as "six degrees of separation", as anticipated as early as 1927 in the song, "I've Danced with a Man, Who's Danced with a Girl, Who's Danced with the Prince of Wales". Or, more interesting, there is the chain or "genealogy" of artistic influence, as laid out by Tom Phillips, for example, who taught Brian Eno, and was himself taught by Frank Auerbach, whose teacher was David Bomburg, who was taught by Walter Sickert, himself taught by Whistler and Edgar Degas, mentored by Ingres, and so on in an unbroken line that leads back to Giulio Romano of Mantua and from him to Raphael. Very cool. But, when it comes to "ships in the night", another well-known phrase or saying comes to mind: a miss is as good as a mile. Nobody cares!

It reminds me of a joke my father used to tell.

Private 1: I bumped into that General Monty bloke yesterday, and he spoke to me!

Private 2: Cor, what did he say?

Private 1: He said, "Get out of my fucking way, soldier!"

Ships that pass in the afternoon...

1. Apparently it's originally from a poem by Longfellow ("The Theologian's Tale"):

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

2. See Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

3. Aquarius with Scorpio rising, since you ask.

4. Probably the wisest choice, actually, as Chris has since declared himself to be mildly autistic (Asperger's), and might easily have been thrown by such an unanticipated encounter with a young fan.

Is It Jon Or Is It Hugh?

I'm assuming you are likely to be familiar with comedian Jon Stewart, who used to present The Daily Show, among a host of other things. He's a very funny guy, with a wryly liberal take on politics, and to many of us in these troubled times, I suspect, he is the voice and face of The Old Sane America. So when I recently came across a series of photographic reviews on YouTube under the title "Three Blind Men and an Elephant" I was amazed. My immediate thought was, I had  no idea Jon Stewart was into photography! And my second thought was, what a hilarious imitation he gives of a ponderously wordy pundit obsessed with impossibly expensive high-end gear. It's even filmed in oh-so-tasteful black and white! Heh...

If you don't know those reviews, follow the link, and I'm sure you'll see what I mean. The giveaway, to my mind – the "tell", if you will – is that characteristic one-sided smirk, the twinkle in the eye, as he suppresses and at the same time signals his own amusement, remaining throughout in character as an ironically self-aware pedant with an over-weighty verbal delivery, as if that other Stewart, Patrick, were giving the full-on Shakespearean treatment to an advert for Pop Tarts... Hold that thought... [1]

I then realised that, as the presenter of these reviews, Jon is occupying the persona "Hugh Brownstone"; clearly a nudging reference to the classic New York brownstone architecture. No surprise there: after all, "Jon Stewart" is not Jon Stewart's real name, either. Now, as a professional cataloguer, I have spent many hours tracking down pseudonyms, in order to collate works by the same author by means of "see" and "see also" cross-references. In genre fiction these can proliferate – John Creasey (a name few will recognise today, but who was once an English bestseller) used twenty-eight different pen names, for example – and one of the meaner pleasures of indexing is to unmask a formerly pseudonymous writer. So I did the obvious thing, and checked on the Web to see how transparent the connection between the names "Jon Stewart" and "Hugh Brownstone" was. Incredibly, I drew a complete blank. It seems that everyone believes "Hugh Brownstone" is a real person. Perhaps he is!

The satirical magazine Private Eye has a regular feature, Lookalikes, where readers write in to remark on the resemblance between a public figure and someone (or sometimes something) else. Two pictures are placed side by side, and the standing joke is to reverse the captions. Like much in Private Eye, it's rather juvenile, but amusing in a cruel sort of way (do an image search for "private eye lookalikes" and you'll get the idea). Now, it's true that the perception of facial resemblance is quite a subjective thing. I've mentioned before how a friend at university, Jude Woodward, used to call me Ed, somehow seeing a resemblance to Captain Beefheart's drummer Ed Marimba; another, even more improbably, saw a likeness to hatchet-faced actor Lee Van Cleef of the spaghetti westerns. Really? But in the case of Stewart v. Brownstone, I seem to stand alone. Am I crazy? See what you think.

1. I hope you realise I'm attempting a rambling "Brownstone" sentence here. "Hold that thought" seems to be his catchphrase.

The Morning After

In case you hadn't noticed, we The People of Britain™ had an election yesterday, and got the predicted result: a massive Labour landslide and humiliation for the Conservatives, including multiple "Portillo Moments", where former cabinet ministers – and in the case of the ridiculous Liz Truss, Prime Ministers so ephemeral the word "former" seems an exaggeration – lost their seats. So why am I so strangely unexcited by it all this morning?

I suppose it boils down to that old anarchist's sigh of disillusion, "no matter who you vote for the government always gets in". True, Keir Starmer has thoroughly pre-prepared us for the Great Disappointment that always follows in the wake of a Labour victory, but I do feel sorry for those young voters and activists who have not been here before. Brace yourselves, young 'uns: you are about to experience one of life's great lessons, as laid out well before this election in Psalm 146:

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of a tool-maker, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his default setting; in that very day his policies perish.

I paraphrase a bit.

But then, I remember 2nd May 1997. It was a gloriously sunny morning, Tony Blair had won the previous day's election by what passed in those days for a landslide, ending over twenty years of Tory misrule, and I drove all the way from Southampton to Peter Goldfield's establishment at Duckspool in Somerset with a song in my heart (no, it wasn't bloody "Things Can Only Get Better"), destined for a long weekend workshop with photographer Paul Hill. I was convinced, given the scale of that mandate, that the cautious pre-election manifesto would be torn up and thrown to the winds, and an alternative, full-on socialist programme of reform would be pulled from its hiding place in Blair's jacket pocket. What an idiot... Still, the workshop was great, with quite a few of us floating on air throughout.

Interestingly, Labour's share of the popular vote yesterday is put at 35%, just 1.4% higher than the alleged "disaster" of 2019, and actually 5% lower than Jeremy Corbyn's share in 2017, and on a smaller turnout, too.  I haven't done the maths – I'm sure someone will – but I've a suspicion that, were it not for the egregiously far-right Reform Party splitting the Tory vote so comprehensively, the scale of the Labour victory would be rather more modest. Those who advocate for some form of proportional representation to replace our venerable "first past the post", constituency-based system might want to take a good look at Reform's vote share and ponder. The banished Corbyn, meanwhile, has unsurprisingly kept his seat running as an independent. Now, I'm no great follower of the contortions of parliamentary politics, but Starmer's persecution of those on the left of "his" party has always seemed opportunistic, vindictive, and above all performative: "See how tough I can be on these leftie losers!" How convenient the confusion between anti-semitism and opposition to Israel has been for him; what a nuisance he'll have to walk that line himself in government now. Not to mention immigration, gender identity issues, and all the rest of the things that get people hot and bothered and yet have no clear position for a weather-vane politician like Starmer to take.

I have to confess that we were secretly pleased that our own MP, the Conservative Caroline Nokes managed to fight off the challenge from the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems had been pushing election pamphlets and personalised letters through our letterbox every day for weeks. Their line was basically "Labour can't win in this seat" (true) so vote Lib Dem to kick out a Tory. But, Tory or no, Nokes has been a good constituency MP who has responded positively and promptly to a number of communications we have had with her, who has a respectable interest in "women's issues" and was openly hostile to Boris Johnson and the proto-Reform tendency in her party. If this country is not to see one of its two major political parties take a sharp turn to the extreme populist right, there will be a need for moderates like Caroline Nokes in Parliament.

And that's about all I have to say. We'll just have to wait and see what a Labour government can do with the appalling mess it's just been handed. They've landed themselves in the paradoxical position that, having campaigned in prose, they will now have to govern in poetry. A bit of competence, less cronyism, and a desire actually to govern would be nice, but it won't be enough. That's not the "change" people want, even if it's the change that was unambiguously on offer. "For the many, not the few", though... That has a certain ring to it. Now, where have I heard that before?

Sitting on the fence? Two for joy? Storm clouds approaching?

Pick your metaphor...