Twyford Down

What, December already? For one reason or another, this year I've ended up stalled on a number of projects that were intended to end up as Blurb books (angels, lost gloves, chairs in odd places, Twyford Down, etc., etc.). Partly because I keep adding photographs – people will keep dropping gloves (230 so far), and abandoning chairs (just 95 to date) – but also because the bookmaking and picture editing urge that has usually delivered two or three books or magazines a year just didn't seem to get up a sufficient head of steam to get things rolling. But I thought I'd better not let 2025 go by without putting something new on the shelf, so I have quickly put together a magazine of some of the photographs of Twyford Down I've accumulated over many years of walks there. 

This is not so much a carefully designed and sequenced book as a portfolio of thirty-two images selected out of 300 or so. I really like these Blurb magazines, as the quality is the same as the photo-books but they are much cheaper (I'm charging £10.50 for the magazine, and £5.99 for a PDF download). I don't actually expect anyone to buy one – no-one ever does – but it's easily the best way to preserve something of one's work for posterity to stumble across and wonder, did this man have nothing better to do with his life?

So here is a mini preview of the magazine, with a link to my Blurb bookstore:

Twyford Down

Mike Chisholm

I have also put it as a PDF flipbook onto Issuu, which is much the best way to see it, and here is a mini preview of that. To go to the full-screen view, click the four-arrow device in the centre:

As always, any comments are welcome, not least as this magazine will probably become the basis of a more extensive selection in book form. I'm already having second thoughts about that brown cover, for a start...

Dusky

Southampton Common

St. Catherine's Hill

As the days grow shorter, sunset is beginning to arrive well before I come to the end of my usual afternoon walks. No matter how lovely the morning is – and autumn mornings can be truly beautiful – mornings are not a great time for me to be out and about these days, for reasons of (in)convenience most late middle-aged / elderly men will understand, so I need to make the best of whatever the afternoon provides. Which can pose challenges, photographically, both technically and aesthetically. 

Technically, because the overall drop in available light means slower shutter speeds, bigger apertures, and higher ISO ratings, all of which combine to give unsatisfactory results when using a very small pocket camera, hand-held. [1] In compensation, the bright raking beams of warm sunlight that penetrate the general gloom and illuminate the autumnal colours can make for exciting moments of contrast that may only last for seconds, before gathering clouds or the slow roll of the planet shut them off.

Aesthetically, because, well, sunsets... As I say, I try to make the best of it.

Southampton General Hospital

Hollybrook Cemetery entrance

Southampton Outdoor Sports Ground renovations

Somewhere in Lordswood, Southampton...

1. Apart from my phone, my current go-to pocket camera is a Panasonic LF1, a miraculous feat of engineering that packs an image-stabilised 24-200 (35mm equivalent) f/2-5.9 zoom plus a viewfinder into a body the size of a tin of sardines, and which will take a decent photo even at full zoom with suitable care. The bottom four here, for example. Leica were happy to put their name and "Summicron" tag on the lens, and I believe sold a red-dotted version of essentially the same camera as the Leica C, with a much higher price tag, obviously...  

Shades of Grey

Southampton Old Cemetery

I was never much good at black and white film photography in my darkroom days. Most people weren't. What you generally used to see were dull grey renderings of a colourful world that lacked either a true black or a true white, and had little or no graphical impact. These were also usually pictures made of, rather than from something, to use a distinction I like to make. That is, if you're curious what a particular High Street looked like in 1936, a photograph of it is perfect, the more documentary the better. Colour would be even more useful, but unavailable at the time. If OTOH you were looking for an expressive, wall-worthy artwork then both you and the photographer will have been working to a different set of expectations, and the fact that it was made in (from / out of) that particular High Street is probably irrelevant. Most photographers were, and to a large extent still are documentarists. It is, after all, photography's USP.

The darkroom was never my happy place, but I tried to make the best of it, the only alternative being to pay someone else to make even worse prints from my negatives. Obviously, some people are B&W film darkroom wizards. I watched Thomas Joshua Cooper give a printing demonstration on a Duckspool workshop I attended in 1991, and it was a revelation. Although only in the sense that watching some maestro demonstrate their pianistic accomplishment up close would be a revelation: as I determined many posts ago, playing the piano is impossible. The photographs of, say, Finnish photo-maestro Pentti Sammallahti or Emmet Gowin are similarly revelatory. Who wouldn't want to be able to do that? Sadly, it seems I can't.

Somewhere in the 1990s I realised that colour was more my thing, but then discovered that the colour darkroom was an even more hellish experience, essentially a mechanical process using vile chemistry and with little of the scope for hands-on creative intervention typical of monochrome printing (a.k.a. "dodging and burning"). Yes, you could twiddle some colour balance dials on the enlarger, but this was generally guaranteed to make things worse. So I did finally embrace the alternative, which was to pay someone else to make satisfactory prints from my negatives. This was convenient, but very hard on my bank balance.

Then – hooray! – digital cameras, image-processing software, and excellent colour inkjet printers for home use arrived, and everything changed. I was free to indulge my preference for making colour prints, and cook an evening meal for two small children at the same time. Three cheers! In fact, you didn't even need to make a print to see and to share what you'd done: photos look terrific on a computer screen. So, when the Web arrived, a lot of photo-enthusiasts abandoned prints altogether (a mistake, in my view), and simply posted their work online.

However... I still admire the well-crafted B&W print, and image-processing software has put this within reach of anyone similarly inclined. You can simply feed your colour image in at one end, make some tweaks and choices, and out comes a perfectly decent monochrome image. Print it on some paper with a surface resembling a wet darkroom paper, and you'd have to be truly expert to tell that what you are looking at is essentially a fake, or rather (in one of my favourite ugly words), a skeuomorph: an object that copies the defining features of a similar object made from a different, more prestigious material, even though these features are not intrinsic to or serve any function in the skeuomorphic object. For example, the pores and wrinkles on imitation leather, the fake stitching on shoes with a glued-on plastic sole, or indeed the weight and carefully-textured surface of a "baryta" inkjet paper.

"Tintype" shopping bag (made on my phone)

Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, unless deliberate deception is intended. It may seem a bit daft to mimic the "look" and imperfections of wet-plate photography, say, or of a Polaroid snap by using some slick app or plug-in, but where's the harm? The fetishisation of "authenticity" when it comes to different media is one of the more reactionary features of the art world: if you've read my two posts on the exclusion of photography and digital art from open exhibitions (Original Print and Original Print 2), you'll know my views on this. In a nutshell: new technologies for image reproduction (e.g. woodcut, engraving, or lithography in their day) become respectable media for artistic "print making" only when they have become obsolete in the commercial world. Ditto all those toxic, messy, and labour-intensive photographic techniques of the past like wet-plate, tintype, and the rest; see Sally Mann or Joni Sternbach. Lovely pictures, but, crikey, the faff involved...

Monochrome images have also benefitted from this retro-fitted respectability. Once, there was only wet-chemistry B&W photography. When colour film arrived, alongside cheap full-colour printing, it was dismissed as vulgar stuff, only suitable for commercial work, and monochrome was promoted to an art medium. It is doubtless true that colour, badly handled, can be tasteless and a distraction, and that if you drain the colour out of a photograph your attention is re-focussed on wholesomely arty aspects of a picture like shape, tone, and composition. Oddly, though, no-one has ever said this about paintings. "Grisaille" is a pretty niche technique.

But: in our digital world, is it daft or dishonest to take an image file, in colour by default [1], and pass it through software that will render it as a monochrome photograph, in a range of B&W "looks", from faded album snap to selenium-toned exhibition print? Any more or less than it is to turn it into a skeuomorphic "tintype" with those characteristic plate and processing imperfections ladled all over it? I don't think so, not if what you want is a picture made from something, rather than a documentary rendering of something. After all, journalists must tell the truth, or something very like it, but fiction writers can just make stuff up. Spoiler alert: there is no such person as Sherlock Holmes, and never was. Sorry! And as for poets, well:

In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was he or she had loved for many years without knowing it. So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen. They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, – and not recognized it."

R.H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press, 1952)

Southampton Old Cemetery

("And did those feet in ancient time...")

1. Unless, of course, you buy a super-expensive monochrome-only camera or have your camera's sensor doctored to only produce monochrome files. Both of which strike me as pointless and extravagant, but each to their own...

Unfinished Business

Like anyone with a strong visual bent, I keep a scrapbook of pictures I come across, and want to keep for reference and inspiration purposes. As all of these are found on the Web these days, I use a digital scrapbook. In my case, it's Evernote, but I'm sure there are similar packages that can do the job just as well. In fact, there might well be something better out there: the trouble is, like so many software packages, Evernote's developers have ambitions for it to become something more – yet another does-it-all multi-user one-stop organiser for busy worker bees – but all I want is a digital scrapbook to dump my cuttings in plus the occasional note, thanks very much. It's ironic, really: they think I might leave them for another package if they don't keep shoving new stuff at me, but that's precisely why I might.

Anyway, one thread that connects a number of the things I've dumped in there is that they relate to my home town, Stevenage, a "New Town" begun in the post-War optimism of the late 1940s (I know, I know... I think I may have mentioned this just once or twice before, and I'm sure this won't be the last time...). A few of these are aerial views of the town in its pristine, just-built state. It looks so neat from up there that it could be a scale model of the town, rather than the real thing. Pete Seeger's condescending song "Little Boxes", heard so often on the radio in the mid-60s, comes to mind. Although we actually rather liked our little boxes, which were all made of good solid brick, not "ticky tacky", whatever that is, so fuck you and your stupid banjo, Pete.

In my mind, I can still walk those streets and play in those fields and woods just as I did for the twenty or so years I lived there, before finally leaving home for life in older, dirtier cities with more complicated stories to tell. The one above, for example, was my immediate neighbourhood from about 1957 until 1964, ages 3 to 10. As we were the first occupants of our house in Peartree Way, this must have been taken around 1956/7. How white the pavements are, how neatly uniformly the houses stand in their rows, and how few cars there are to be seen!

Obviously, there are also none of today's typical custom add-ons like stone cladding, porches, conservatories, loft extensions, and front gardens paved over to accommodate more cars; at least, not yet. Back then the council (actually, the Development Corporation) didn't allow alterations, and every house here, and in the entirety of the New Town, was rented from them. Before, that is, Thatcher gave everyone the "right" to buy their council house, and the whole idea of decent social housing for all at a fair rent was wrecked forever. So fuck you, too, Maggie.

And here is the neighbourhood of my teenage years, 1967-73. We lived on the fourth floor (fifth in US terms) of that large block of flats with its tall white chimney: Chauncy House, named after Henry Chauncy, a local antiquarian. It seems those flats, now demolished, were the very first part of the New Town to be built, in order to accommodate the architects and supervisory types who planned and managed the vast scheme of construction. No doubt they had all returned to Hampstead or settled in some nearby village once the job was well under way.

I never really knew those streets with the same intimacy as those around Peartree Way. Only free-range children roaming and playing outdoors get to know every nook and cranny of their patch in the way the local cats and dogs do: doors and gates were rarely locked, and we'd be in and out of each other's houses and gardens all day long. But as a restless adolescent in those flats I mainly wanted to escape the tedium of home life whenever possible to wherever the action was: friends' houses, youth clubs, pubs, and music venues – even the public library was more exciting – and later there were the secluded rural "tied" cottages occupied by some lively lads who'd left school at the first opportunity to become farm hands, and where an all-night "scene" would flourish over the weekend.

I know... You may well wonder at my continuing obsession with this small town of no great intrinsic interest beyond its network of cycle paths, the progressive spirit of its foundation, and its subsequent betrayal and decline. Not least because I left it at the first opportunity myself and never went back, other than for parental visits, kept as brief as possible: two nights good, one night better. The name "Stevenage" itself has since become a byword for "nowheresville" in Britain, and a handy punchline for any joke about "chavs" and white-van drivers. So, yes, it is a little odd, I admit. Our children, born and raised in the historic port of Southampton – on the face of it a rather more interesting place – could not care less about their home city: they're Londoners now!

But something about our nowhere town seemed either to repel or to draw us back with equal force. It surely couldn't just have been the presence of "family", although it is true that some of us did have Appalachian quantities of parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins scattered liberally about the place: nourishing for some, toxic for others. In the end, I suppose it might simply come down to the difference between those who said, "There are worse places to live than Stevenage", and those who replied, "Yes, but there must be much better places to live, too!"

In the "repulsion" camp I have pals and playmates who, in the venerable expression, have shaken the dust of Stevenage from their feet, and put the greatest possible geographic distance between themselves and our town (although often from "Britain and the British", too). They enjoy expatriate lives in France, Greece, the United States, Canada, even South Africa and Australia, and I doubt they give a second thought to the scenes of their New Town years, and if they do, it will not be with any great pleasure. Certainly, none are blogging about the place or downloading old postcards and photographs with a certain obsessiveness.

But then there are those who somehow failed to escape the town's gravitational pull, and ended up walking the same old streets, maybe even living in the same old house if their parents had managed to buy it. One of my very oldest friends abandoned a promising social-work career in angry despair – he "retired hurt" as they say in cricket – and retreated into semi-monastic, off-grid isolation in a flat in one of the town's largest tower-blocks. Another, after a disastrous life of serial failures, homelessness and imprisonment, returned home to live out his final years in a small council bedsit, still sufficiently sound of mind and devoted to all things Stevenage to help edit a website dedicated to its history and nostalgic reminiscences. Others simply never left, of course, tied to the town by the conventional bonds of friends, family, work, and (it has to be said) complacency and inertia.

Whatever, I seem to have fallen somewhere between the two extremes: I left home for good in 1977, but have never stopped thinking about the place.

Setting aside any egotistic over-regard for the facts of one's own life (as if!), the best explanation I can offer for my constant return to the subject is that I have unfinished business. We were the children of a great utopian experiment, the very first New Town, of which an important element was the intention not just to house but to create strong local communities for people who had abandoned the blitzed slums of London. They had a common desire to start a new life, one as far away from the hierarchies, miseries, and disadvantages of their old life as possible. Added to their number were the construction labourers who had built the place and decided to stay and raise families, plus those fleeing the "idiocy of rural life" in nearby villages [1], which created a rich, if occasionally volatile mix. Here, finally, were to be the "homes fit for heroes" promised after the First World War.

For the best part of three decades it worked, too. We New Town natives grew up in the understanding that community mattered: in the words on the town council's coat of arms, "The heart of a town lies in its people". More specifically, it lies in those people who can be bothered to show up and take part. My grandmother, for example, a veteran trades unionist (she had been "mother of the chapel" at publisher J.M. Dent), ran the town's Over-60s Club. Several construction-union activists were prominent town councillors and at least one, Alf Luhman, became mayor. During the long school summer vacations Play Leadership schemes were run by volunteers such as my sister, who did their best to keep us youngsters out of trouble.  As did the various churches with their youth clubs and societies; again, my mother was captain of the Girls' Life Brigade troop at our local Baptist church.

But in the late 1970s it all began to crumble; or rather, it was undermined by political malevolence, and toppled by the inward-looking, self-centred spirit of the times. All things communitarian had begun to seem unfashionably earnest, a bit too churchy: frumpy folk arranging jumble sales and home-made cake stalls, running clubs, mimeographing and distributing newsletters, and attending tedious meetings in draughty community centre halls, which always seemed to be timed to clash with the good stuff on TV. So boring.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that some of us – having been given the massive mobility leg-up of good schools and life-enhancing opportunities – find ourselves looking back, pondering how things might have turned out if this experiment in social engineering had been allowed to continue and encouraged to spread out across the country, rather than killed off just as we, its first-born generation, were coming into maturity. It is as if some promised inheritance had been stolen, just as my father's pension was stolen when in the 1970s Tube Investments took over and dismembered the Stevenage engineering firm where he had worked for decades, George W. King, making him and seven hundred others redundant. As I say, unfinished business.

So you'll have to forgive me if I seem to go on a bit about a place most people will, at best, have merely glimpsed as they speed past on the motorway or on a train heading into London, or laughed at as some lazy comedian's punchline because, well, it's that sort of place, Stevenage, isn't it? And perhaps it is, now, but it didn't use to be; once, it was a special place, a modest beacon of hope, where I had the great good fortune to be born and brought up.

However, "never go back" is very wise counsel, and I don't suppose I ever will go back: instead, I can indulge in time-travel and a bit of Blakean "mental fight" through the medium of old pictures like these, downloaded into my digital scrapbook. Stevenage has changed, I've changed, the world has moved on. Besides, pretty much everything I remember has since been demolished, built over, renovated, or repurposed. There are already so many ghosts hanging around the place, I'd just be another revenant looking for somewhere, something, or someone to haunt. In the end, my "unfinished business" is also Britain's unfinished business, and will remain unfinished until there is a substantial change in the political weather of our country. It could be a very long wait.

I also remain unconvinced that some return encounters are a necessary form of "closure", as we like to say these days, or might even turn out to be a revelation of sorts, waiting for us at the end of the road:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.
from "Little Gidding", by T.S. Eliot

Well, maybe. These are fine, evocative words, much quoted by people who crave a mystical fix, but I don't think Eliot had anywhere like my home town in mind, and AFAIK never did return to his own starting point, St. Louis, Missouri, either. Maybe the gate he had in mind was the gate back into Eden? If so, lots of luck with that.

But when I consider that skeletal clock tower in the Town Square that appears in so many images of Stevenage, cooling its feet in the pool where we used to sit on the wall idling away the sunny afternoons, surrounded by shops that had seemed such solid pillars of ordinary, everyday life – Woolworths, W.H. Smith, the Co-Op, all now long-gone – I realise that it does still stand for something. If only as a defiant sixty-foot finger to all those who resisted, and still would resist the construction of New Towns; something that, to my surprise, is now back on the government agenda, in name, if not in spirit.

In fact, to my even greater surprise, it seems that both the tower and the pool it stands in were actually "listed" in 1998, to protect them from the predations of the developers, and the whole Town Square itself has been placed on the Heritage At Risk Register, for whatever that is worth. Not much, I suspect.

But what a shame nobody thought to do something similar for our true heritage before it could be stolen from us and sold off, house by house, until Stevenage was no longer a bold new idea, but just another run-down nowhere satellite town, thirty miles from London.

Summer 1972...

1. A phrase from the Communist Manifesto. Apparently this is a mistranslation: the German word "Idiotismus" does not mean "idiocy" ("Idiotie" in German) but something more like "isolation from the general community". Although, TBH, it was more the intrusive and unrelenting busybodiness of rural life that caused many village folk to flee to the brightly-lit, well-provisioned anonymity of town life, which was perhaps a foreshadowing of the way the community-building project would collapse back into thousands of atomised TV-watchers and screen-gazers.

A Walk in the Woods

Even a dull afternoon's walk through the woods can yield what look like a couple of "keepers". I particularly like that pre-figuration of a tastefully-decorated Christmas tree in the first one. And, orange barrier mesh! Need I say more?

Late Light

It poured with rain most of Monday, but the sun broke through mid-afternoon, and I managed to get in a walk through the Sports Ground, where millions of pounds are being wasted on a refurbishment project – a typical example of "hypothecated" money won by a local authority in a bidding competition – which requires all the perfectly decent football fields and cricket pitches to be excavated and the customary pathways closed off, so that we're forced to walk around the muddy edges, feeling like trespassers.

Never mind, I like "edgelands" and brilliant corners, and the raking late-afternoon light brought something extra to the scene, which I was happy to exploit. The burnt-out car was particularly fetching illuminated by the warm sun, I thought. The detailing created by the burning paint is spectacular, like an intricate artwork using a limited palette of oranges and browns, cross-hatched by the shadow of the temporary fencing, or perhaps the hide of some heavily-tattooed elephant. Maybe they should leave it there as a spontaneous public sculpture.

Oh well, nice while it lasted!

Autumn Colours

What says "autumn" (or indeed "Bonfire Night") more eloquently than a burnt-out car amid the drifts of leaves on a gloomy late afternoon in November? Or a fly-tipped vacuum cleaner and frying pan in subdued Hallowe'en tones, carefully arranged against a tree?

Or how about this bizarre mash-up of religiosities at our local cemetery, all for a child who died well before his first birthday?

I suppose these trees at Mottisfont Abbey, near Romsey do also have something more conventionally seasonal to say, but we've heard all that before, haven't we? Nice, though, if you're into that sort of thing.

There's some interesting "negative space" action going on in that first one: cropping it square brings it to the foreground, so to speak:

A square crop also worked best with this arboreal wrestling match on Southampton Common:

That's it. A pictorial post of few words, this time, but lots more words coming up soon.

The Bonfires of Yesteryear

If you feel you might have read this one before, you'd be right. I started to write a November the Fifth piece, and the words and phrases were coming suspiciously easily, as if dictated by something or someone – spooky! – and then I realised I was simply recalling a post I'd written some years ago, itself an expansion of one the earliest things I wrote for this blog. So here it is again, lightly edited. Light the blue touch paper, and stand well back...

The Bonfires of Yesteryear

I've always liked Autumn, it's my favourite season. As a child I used to look forward to those first nights after the clocks had gone back an hour, bringing the darkness on to around the time you were heading home from school. There would be an edge of frost and smoke in the air, and you would think, "Bonfire Night is coming soon!" Except that now these early autumn nights are generally mild and wet – very mild and very wet lately – and nobody at all lights a bonfire in their garden on the 5th November. It's not just that a lot of the energy has been drained out of the occasion by Hallowe'en: the very idea of filling the streets with smoke from fires and fireworks belongs to a world that has now passed into history, along with the open-hearth fires in every house in every street with their sooty smoking chimneys, and a morning harvest of cold grey ash to be cleared and dumped.

In the 1950s and 60s, as they had for so many decades previously, the children of every household would have scavenged every scrap of combustible material for miles around to build a bonfire heap at the end of the garden or, where this was impractical, helped to build an enormous communal pyre on any suitable green or wasteland. By 9 o'clock at night on the 5th the smoke would be drifting in thick layers illuminated by fires, flashes, and haloed streetlamps. You could point a torch up, and its clear-cut beam was a stiff, smoky wedge, like an anti-aircraft spotlight. In our town – a New Town largely populated by people cleared from the slums of East London, devastated in the Blitz not so long before – strong memories and emotions were evoked by the sights, smells and sounds. You might say that the War was the invisible guest at everyone's firework party.

Or perhaps, the Wars. The stuffed "guy" that burned on top of everyone's bonfire was Hitler, the Kaiser, Napoleon, Guy Fawkes, the King of Spain, Harald Hardrada, and maybe even Julius Caesar: every bogeyman who had ever chanced his arm against the truculent tribes of these islands. It was a night for telling tales, as rockets crackled and popped overhead, and potatoes baked in the bonfire embers; "swinging the lamp", as my father's generation called it, a naval expression that implied such stories might have acquired a little exaggeration and polish over the years.

There are still fireworks, of course, although nowhere near as many, and there are official public bonfires, but somehow the spirit of it all has been lost; children haven't spent the preceding weeks scouring the woods for sticks, or making a stuffed effigy with a moustachioed paper-maché mask for a face out of an old shirt and trousers, in order to squat beside it and beg small change for fireworks: "A penny for the guy!". The tribal memories are weaker, too. "How I endured the Great House Price Collapse of 1987" or "Tales from Covid Lockdown" are hardly worth swinging a lamp for, compared to hair-raising yarns from the Somme, Dunkirk, or Monte Cassino. Our world seems that bit thinner, more disposable, slightly fake; even the weather no longer lives up to the occasion, and every year the frosts that make the moon shine and the stars glitter seem to come later, if at all, and the equinoctial gales that shake the sticks and conkers down from the trees a little wilder and more unpredictable.

What was originally known as "Gunpowder Treason Day" – but then successively became known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night, and now most generally as Fireworks Night – is supposed to be all about remembering – "Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot!" – but is now almost entirely about pyrotechnic spectacle. What little we do remember of the actual causes of the commemoration has lost practically all of its historical flavour, reflected by those changes in name. I can't speak for the inhabitants of more sectarian cities like, say, Belfast, Liverpool, or Glasgow, but I don't think the original anti-Catholic and royalist element has been particularly prominent in living memory. However, you don't have to be a practising neopagan to think that a bonfire festival at this time of year does have deeper roots and resonances. It is notable that November 5th falls exactly midway between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, and thus coincides nicely with the Celtic Samhain festival (pronounced "sar-win", obviously...), which is generally marked on 1st November. It is also an unlikely coincidence that practically everything known about that ancient festival seems like a mash-up of Hallowe'en and Bonfire Night, if you substitute turnips for pumpkins and the ritual sacrifice of some scapegoat figure for burning a "guy".

But I will resist this slide into melancholy reflection, or I'll end up thinking about what has happened to Christmas: difficult to avoid, now that the mince pies and Christmas puddings have already been crowding the supermarket shelves since mid-October. I don't think this feeling is merely the reflex nostalgia of a man entering old age. So many of us in the "first world" live with the paradox that the more materially comfortable our lives have become over the years, the more widely Good Things are available to more of us, the less sweet they seem to taste. Like the very wealthy, even we ordinary folk can get bored with the uniform OK-ness of our lives, and look back with something resembling regret to a time when the Good Things were tasted just two or three times a year.

Well, OK, perhaps this is just the reflex nostalgia of a man entering old age, remembering when simple things like oranges, nuts, and even baked potatoes were seasonal treats, and beef and chicken were luxuries, reserved for special occasions, not a cheap staple bought ready-jointed in multi-packs from the supermarket. Nobody in their right mind would want to go back to those smoke-filled streets, unappetising meals, or lives shortened by endless repetitive and unrewarding labour.

I suppose you might justifiably say that this is also a down-market, own-brand, off-the-peg version of nostalgie de la boue, an aristocratic vice in which we can all now afford to indulge. But I prefer to think that I am remembering with pleasure a time when we in Britain were passing out of some very bad times into some very good times, with just enough seasoning of the best of the bad times still surviving to add piquancy to the transition. Years when, for example, for the first time a nasty accident with a bonfire or a firework, however idiotic, led straight to hospital, with all necessary treatment free of charge, and even the poorest could depend on the state for housing and financial support. How miraculous that must have seemed to the pre-War generations, how heady the transformation must have felt, and yet how easily we may be letting it slip away. So, please, let's do everything we can to prevent this precious legacy from fizzling out like yet another wet Bonfire Night.

Have a Nice Rest of Your Day

A nice day

(seen from inside the Courtauld Gallery)

Have you noticed it, too? How "Have a nice day!" has mutated into "Have a nice rest of your [insert time period]!", e.g. "Have a nice rest of your evening!"? I'm hearing it all the time now. The first few times I thought, that's a bit weird, maybe he / she has jumbled up a couple of idioms? (my partner does this all the time), but it has clearly become a thing in its own right, with a more acceptable variant (grammatically, anyway), "Enjoy the rest of your [time period]!".

I do seem to recall that "Have a nice rest of your life..." pre-existed this as a sarcastic brush-off – that odd grammatical wobble between "have a nice" and "rest of" gave it a certain rhetorical force – but this is different; clearly a new, faux-friendly formula: counter staff and checkout operators, for the use of. Perhaps it is mandated by management? It wouldn't surprise me. I even heard it used the other day as a sign-off by a BBC Radio 4 news presenter, who may well have unconsciously borrowed it off the nice young man who sold her a latte that morning. That's the virus-like way these thing spread.

For some reason I find this awkward formula even more annoying than I found "Have a nice day!". I have yet to come up with a snappy rejoinder, situated somewhere on the spectrum between "You, too, babe!" and "Fuck off, you twerp...", but I will, Oscar, I will. Although I suppose an uninflected "Thanks..." might be enough. After all, retail assistants shouldn't be on the receiving end of constant "micro-aggressions" from elderly pedants as they enjoy the rest of a dull spell at the till.

It is possible that this is yet another Americanism imported by the younger generations, along with "can I get" (what, no "please" or "could I have"?) and "Gen Zee" (not "Zed"). Seen from over here, American speech-ways have always had an attractive vivacity to the young, no matter how conventional (or deprecated) they might be back home in the States. Talking of which, I'm currently intrigued by the way Americans say "it's not that big of a [thing e.g. problem]", not (as a Brit would), "it's not that big a [thing e.g. problem]", or perhaps more likely, "It's not such a big [thing e.g. problem]".

So far I have yet to hear or read anyone saying, "It's not that rusty of a car", but I did see today "It's not that scary of a situation", so I wonder if it might have something to do with "expressions of magnitude when relating to abstract nouns"? Would any of you, my esteemed American readers, ever say, for example, "It's not that scary of a dog"? By the same token, would a Brit ever say "It's not that scary a dog?" Probably not? More likely, "It's not such a scary dog"? It may also have something to do with the similar, but subtly different formula "it's not that much of a problem", which we would also say, not to mention "it's one hell of a problem", ditto. The "of" is clearly doing two different sorts of work here, one of which seems oddly superfluous to a British English speaker. Who knows? Someone probably does. Call a linguist!

Anyway, doubtless sooner or later some of us here will start saying it, and insisting that they always have, and that it is correct. See also "bored of" vs. "bored with". Nobody was ever bored of anything when I was a kid, although it's true you might get bored with boring stuff like homework, eventually. I'm not generally a language peever-pedant, though: language is as language does. Or rather, language is as people do it. It's just that some people do it so annoyingly.

What intrigues me is how quickly these speech trends find their way into general usage. Now, for example, nearly everyone interviewed on the radio kicks off by saying, in reply to the first question, "Thank you for having me on the programme!". Which is bizarre, isn't it?, as if BBC Radio 4's Today programme were a children's birthday party. It's not as if they haven't been held on the line or in a side-room, kept warm by some editorial assistant (no, not like that), with plenty of time to have expressed their gratitude for two minutes of fame. Perhaps – here's a thought, BBC – that assistant should warn them, "Please, do not on any account waste valuable airtime by thanking your interviewer, asking after their health, or using any other fashionable throat-clearing phatic noise you may have heard others use!". "Good afternoon, Sarah!" is another one; essentially an implied rebuke to the interviewer's lack of manners, for not having wished them the same (especially if their name is not Sarah). More recently I'm also hearing the deeply patronising reflex response, "That's a great question!", as if a professional radio presenter was just some idiot sitting in the audience who'd unexpectedly put their finger on something important. Well done, you!

Some of these fashionable adoptions enter the language permanently – "gotten" seems to be sneaking back into British English – while others have a very short life. It seems like only yesterday that someone, somewhere came up with "good boy" as a cute synonym for "dog", for example; now it's everywhere. A recent article heading in PetaPixel, for example: "Good Boys and Girls Star in the Dog Photography Awards 2025". But hasn't this already started to seem like a tired cliché? I'm reminded of the rise and fall of "wally" in Britain: I wrote about this way back in 2009, and I see no point in repeating it here. But if you have ever wondered where expressions like "he's a bit of a wally" came from (ah, but which bit?) , then follow the link. All will be revealed.

The rise and fall of such linguistic items reflects the endless churn of the 10,000 things, obviously. Not heard of Dubai chocolate yet? Neither had I. When I did, I thought it was a joke, perhaps some sort of euphemism ("Dammit, I've just stepped in some Dubai chocolate!") or shorthand for a figure of speech ("It melted away like a bar of chocolate in Dubai"). But then neither you nor I are much influenced by influencers, if at all, are we? So let's not even get started on the idiotic "six seven" thing, as I expect that will already be over by the time I get to the end of this sentence, with any luck. Kids, eh?

Then there's talking too much, and much, much too fast in an inaudible croak or mutter... But that's a different post. File under "I'm a tolerant man, but..."

That'll do. So have a nice rest of your web-surfing! Or maybe just have a nice rest. But don't forget to take your good boy out for a walk, you wally. Six-seven!

Walkies! (It's not that scary of a dog...)

Rockers and Poets

Searching...

I was idly scrolling through the streaming services looking for something to watch, when up popped a video of a Bruce Springsteen concert, Live in New York City. So I thought, Why not? I used to enjoy the early Springsteen albums, but never did see him live, and those concerts are legendary. Although "epic" might be a better description: it turned out to be a non-stop three hour and ten minute Boss-athon from 2001, no doubt with some of the more tedious bits edited out. It was exhausting just to watch, even broken over three nights. I mean, crikey, what is that man on? Perhaps they'll tell us in the biopic that's just coming out.

Anyway, Bruce Springsteen... He's everywhere at the moment, presumably because of that forthcoming film. Some love him as a blue-collar, truth-telling rock 'n' roller, others loathe him as a bombastic poseur: in his own words, he has become "a rich man in a poor man's shirt", who has never done a proper day's work in his life. I have to say I was pleased to have confirmed recently what I had always suspected (in a Q&A with Todd Rungren): that the risible "Bat Out Of Hell" by Meat Loaf (actually written by Jim Steinman) was conceived of as an affectionate parody of the early Springsteen's grandiloquent crescendos, histrionic story-telling, and dramatic changes of mood and tempo. This, Springsteen's signature style, is what we in Britain refer to as a "Marmite taste": people who are passionate about their music tend to love it or hate it with equal intensity.

There's more to Springsteen than those famously theatrical rock-outs, of course. Myself, I always admired Nebraska, his solo, Americana-flavoured acoustic album, and also the spikier of the releases of the early 90s, Lucky Town. But it is those first three albums, and in particular The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, that I know in that intimate, deeply personal way that you absorb and embody the music of your youth. I happen to like Marmite, I suppose.

One of my college playmates, Gerry, occupied a commodious room which tended to function as our recreational space. He had a good stereo, and wide musical tastes. I was passionate about music myself in those days, but I was chauvinistically narrow in my repertoire: if it wasn't British, and ideally released on Island Records, then it was probably just foreign rubbish. It was Gerry who introduced me to the likes of Steely Dan, Little Feat, Can, and Weather Report, and who attempted but failed to turn me on to Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill. Also lurking in his box of LPs was an album with a silly title by some American bloke with a weird name which, for some reason, I always refused to give a hearing. Perhaps it was a case of once bitten, twice shy after the ear-bashing of Escalator. So one evening – this was probably winter 1974 – when we were all lounging around, suitably sedated, he slipped it onto the turntable. I was electrified. I may even have got up and danced, but I may be making that up. Wow! Amazing! Who is this?

Ah, youth...

Music may have been all-important to me then but today, partly due to hearing loss and tinnitus (I suppose I have to blame that early love of loud, live gigs) but also due to a general disengagement, I only very occasionally listen to music. What was an essential part of my younger life – along with thrill-seeking (by any means necessary), protesting (what have you got?), or writing essays and taking exams (my superpower) – has simply not followed me into my later decades. I still like most of the music I loved then, but have not "kept up", either with the later output of my favoured artists, or with whatever the young folk are listening to today. I have never, for example, listened to a single Rolling Stones album since the disappointment of Goats Head Soup in 1973, even though Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers are permanently engraved, note for note, word for word, somewhere on my synapses.

Of course, for anyone born in or around the 1950s (in my case '54, the year the first Fender Stratocaster guitars went on sale) proper rock 'n' roll – think Little Richard, think Chuck Berry, think Jerry Lee Lewis – occupies a level even deeper than those synapses, infused into whatever it is that constitutes a person's soul. For us, all subsequent "popular" music is an edifice built on that solid foundation, itself laid down upon the bedrock of rhythm and blues. As it turned out – and it's a curious connection to make, perhaps – those early Springsteen albums sat very comfortably on what was then a more recent archaeological layer of "my" music, the verbose lyrics and the stop-start, quiet-loud dynamics of Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull.

Yes, reader, I was a teenage Jethro Tull fan, and not ashamed to admit it. If you've never leapt around your bedroom to classic Tull workouts like "My God" or "Locomotive Breath", then you won't really know what I'm talking about. As with the Stones, though, I abandoned Jethro Tull with the release of those tedious, pretentious, prog-style "concept albums" of 1972/3, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play. I tried to like them, but the tricksy musical formulas had grown stale, the punning wordplay seemed juvenile, and Anderson's trademark modulation from sarcasm to sincerity and back again had passed its use-by date. Above all, as with so many musicians around that time, even the sainted Joni Mitchell, it had all gone rather too "meta", as we would say now; that is, mainly concerned with the travails of success and failure within the music business, and the burdens of fame. I mean, frankly, who cares? I certainly didn't. So Springsteen arrived at just the right time to fill that musical void quite nicely.

I'm not going to write some sort of critique of The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, other than to say it's one of the most perfect albums I've ever heard. If your idea of Springsteen is dominated by the overheated bluster of "Born to Run", then give "Wild Billy's Circus Story" a listen. If nothing else, it's proof that school dropouts can write poetry. I suppose "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" is the standout track for me, and not just because it arrived in my life when a girl called Sandie had put my emotional life through the wringer.

Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk, she was always the girl you saw bopping down the beach with the radio
The kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of them cheap little seaside bars, and I saw her parked with lover boy out on the Kokomo
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do
For me this boardwalk life is through, babe
You ought to quit this scene too...
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

A deeper dive...

I was reading Seamus Perry's review in the TLS of some recent books on Sylvia Plath ("Lioness of God", TLS 6389, October 3 2025). In it, he discusses the challenge of "imaginative overload" in some of Plath's poems in Ariel such as "Daddy" –  in other words, the disproportion between the nut of the subject matter and the sledgehammer poetical means deployed to open it – and he mentions Coleridge's criticism of some of Wordsworth's more overblown poems:

Such characteristic imaginative overload vividly exemplifies, in its own way, the phenomenon that Coleridge observed disapprovingly in some of the poems of Wordsworth. He referred to those passages in which Wordsworth deployed “thoughts and images too great for the subject” as “mental bombast”. It is a complaint about getting things out of proportion, not seeing things in their own right, and the moral edge to the criticism is a charge of self- absorption.

At first this struck me as a very apposite criticism of so much rock song-writing: so many power chords, so much screaming, so little to say. But then it occurred to me that you might equally well say that, unlike Sylvia Plath or Wordsworth, the more earnest rock writers are trying to crack some enormous nuts with a very small hammer. They want to tackle the Big Issues – religion, politics, the meanin' of life, an' that – but are imprisoned in a mode of expression best suited to the concerns of adolescence; excess energy, sex, lack of sex, cars, clothes, and oedipal rage, essentially. It's a stance and a style which can only be looked back on with nostalgia, if and when you have outgrown it – we were all wearing L-plates at the time, after all, just "Learning the Game" – but also with a certain bemusement. I hear the opening bars of "Gimme Shelter" or "Brown Sugar" now and a thrill runs down my ageing spine; but then I hear the lyrics, and I think, Really? Rape, murder, slave markets? What were we thinking? (They still make me want to get up and jump about, though...).

John Keats is perhaps the exemplar of adolescent poetic romanticism: what more sexy teen-dream poem is there than "The Eve of St. Agnes"? But had he lived to, say, my age – he would have been 71 in 1866 – what might he have been writing then, in the year of the completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable? Those years were something of a turning point in Eng Lit, when morally-serious works like George Eliot's sturdy literary keystone Middlemarch were still being set into the fabric of the Victorian Cathedral of Art, [1] but that edifice was under threat of subsidence by a recent turn to "aestheticism", epitomised by the rather more naughty and indeed Keatsian Poems and Ballads (also of 1866) by the Isle of Wight's prodigal son, Algernon Swinburne. Times had changed since the Regency, and were changing again.

So perhaps Keats would have been the eternal adolescent, a Mick Jagger for his times, an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" living legend, swinging in and out of fashion with the passing years? Or maybe a Springsteen, maturing his work to match his age and the zeitgeist, but still happily confined within the limits of his chosen toolbox? Or  – just imagine – might he have produced a late style to compare with Goethe, Turner, or even Shakespeare?

We'll never know, of course. He was just 25 when he died: like Shelley, dead at 29, nearly but not quite a founder member of the 27 Club. But we do have the example of so many poets and rockers who also arrived like blazing youthful comets but then, having failed to die young, went on to leave behind them a long, dusty tail of mediocrity. So perhaps Keats was prescient: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter..."

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
from his Ode on a Grecian Urn

A bit sappy, perhaps, but not bad for a kid, really. Rock on, John.

Canned Keats

1. Or indeed Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer. I know, who?, but apparently she sold one and a half million copies of this evangelical tosh... 

Resilience

I've never been one of those extroverted types who feel the need for a whole galaxy of friends, spread across a wide spectrum from soul-mate to nodding acquaintance. My Christmas card and calendar lists are fairly short – exclusive, even, you might say – and my birthday card list is even shorter, pretty much restricted to family and a handful of my closest friends. Add to those my email "address book" – not a lot bigger – and I'm pretty much in touch with everybody I want to be in touch with, from my oldest friends, dating back to my school and university years, to a few ex-colleagues and those I have met – whether IRL ("in real life") or electronically – through my blogging and creative endeavours.

That "pretty much" is definitely a grey area, however. It's small, and populated by a handful of off-grid, uncontactable people – possibly still out there, possibly not – that I once knew and am still curious about. I think of them as interrupted, unfinished conversations that could still be worth having, if the opportunity were to arise. Some have gone silent in recent years, some I have not heard from or even about for four, five decades. They may be dead, on the run from the law, or just assiduously minding their own business.

From time to time something will arouse my curiosity about one of them, and in an idle minute at the keyboard I might feel like searching them out on the Web. However, this always feels a little bit creepy to me – after all, if they had wanted to get back in touch I'm not exactly hard to find – so I generally resist the urge and, on those occasions when I have succumbed, have never yet actually attempted to contact anyone I did manage to find. Although, in fact, it's surprising how few of them have left any trace at all on the internet, which takes quite some effort these days. Besides, at our age – early 70s and older – you really don't know who or what you might find. Which, when I think about it, is probably the reason why they may never have got back in touch with me, either. Time takes its toll, and some things are best left in the past where they belong.

After my old schoolfriend Tony Collman died in February last year, I passed on the news to the very few people who might care one way or the other (Tony had done his best to alienate everyone he had ever known). One of these was another old classmate, Ian Cropton, who, like Tony, had returned to our home town of Stevenage in his latter years; in Ian's case to care for his ageing father. I was disappointed but not entirely surprised not to get a reply to my email: I knew that the two of them had "fallen out", as we say. It was inevitable: Tony's talent for destroying friendships was truly world class. I also knew that Ian was suffering ill health himself, and had since retreated into a fragile, monk-like existence in Colchester.

After I'd heard nothing at all from him for eighteen months, it seemed that Ian might have moved into that grey area of lapsed contacts, so in the summer I thought I'd better look him up, only to discover that he had died in April 2025. Again, I was saddened but not entirely surprised. Sometimes it can feel that the swish of the Reaper's scythe is getting uncomfortably close. But, as I say, at our age...

Ian came to mind again recently when I read an ex-colleague's blog post about a road accident he had witnessed as a child, in which another child had been hit by a car when walking to school. It reminded me that, after he had got back in touch a few years ago and we were sporadically emailing each other, Ian had told me a very similar story about his walk to school in 1963, with the difference that the child seen lying dead beneath the car was his own younger brother, Malcolm, just seven years old. He was understandably haunted by this tragedy for the rest of his life, although it was something he had never mentioned – not even indirectly – in all the years I had known him at secondary school. How far a person is formed by such an extreme early trauma it is impossible to say – the lad I knew was a gentle soul with a lugubrious personality and a slightly pessimistic outlook, who later went by the self-deprecating internet tag of "Eeyorn" – but as a foundational story it did seem to make sense of a lot of things about Ian and his stop-start life.

It goes without saying that too many young lives in places like Gaza and Sudan are being impacted and quite likely distorted into unpredictable shapes every day by events like this, in tragically large numbers, and for unacceptable reasons. Nobody, and certainly no child, can witness the loss of brothers, sisters and parents in the bewildering chaos of bombardment and military invasion and come away unchanged. But people are resilient. Human history is a history of ineradicable, cockroach-like persistence through untold plagues, wars, and famines: we are all the descendants of survivors. The fragile triumph of "western" civilisation is that we are less likely to be subjected to these things than at any other time in the history of our species. So much so, that it can seem that we now experience a perverse, atavistic hunger for life-haunting memories, preferably of rather less traumatic intensity, and ideally experienced vicariously. Which is where art and entertainment step in.

Horror films and violent thrillers are the obvious examples. The body count in a two-hour cinematic diversion can be off the scale: see my (light-hearted) post A New Union calling for the typically nameless victims of movie massacres to organise as the Amalgamated Representatives of Guards and Henchfolk (a.k.a. ARGH). But dramatised dread will seek you out, uninvited and unasked, whatever your age. I was terrified by the volcano-dwelling "goons" in the Popeye cartoons, and the dreams of a lot of children of my age were disturbed by watching the early years of the TV series Doctor Who, and in particular by those relentlessly psychotic aliens, the Daleks: Destro-oy! Exte-ermina-ate! In fact, those tea-time episodes of the mid-1960s, best experienced by peeping from behind the impenetrable safety-barrier of the sofa, had an unsettling family resemblance to that pioneering BBC sci-fi horror of the 1950s, Quatermass, which my parents would watch after my sister and I were safely asleep in bed.

And yet somehow something of the essence of Quatermass still seeped into my subconscious mind: I suppose horrified shouts and screams on the TV have a way of making their way upstairs and penetrating the sleeping brain, like some marauding extraterrestrial creature. I'm sure I can't have been the only one to have watched the film Alien twenty years later with a mounting sense of a familiar dread: no, not you again... An ersatz, self-imposed, first-world terror, no doubt, but no less real for that. Then, the very next year, as a Jack Nicholson fan and against my better judgement, I saw The Shining, which scared me into white-knuckle rigidity, I have to confess: I vowed "no more horror films for me" after that.

Not least because I had seen it at an afternoon screening before, as a junior assistant at Bristol University Library, doing a solo evening duty at the Law Library situated within the university's imposing Wills Memorial Building. This was a mistake. At the end of that winter's evening session my job was to close up the library, nerves still thoroughly jangled, by turning out all the lights one by one in each room until it was perfectly dark, then lock up the door behind me, still inside a gothic cathedral of a building that would make a perfect setting for a Hammer Horror vampire movie. I pretty much ran out of there.

So that was at least one promise to myself I have kept: I haven't watched another self-declared horror film in the subsequent forty-five years. And yet, as if to illustrate something about our incremental generational resilience – might there be some sort of inherited inoculation against bad experiences? – horror films are my film-buff daughter's favourite genre, the grislier the better. Go figure, as they say.

But, perhaps there is hope that one day there will be a world in which future generations everywhere can enjoy the thrill of scaring themselves silly with fake horrors that sublimate things their ancestors had to suffer in real life. It could happen, and – please, you princes, potentates, presidents, and prime ministers – make it be soon. Sadly, a sofa offers no protection at all against bombs, bullets, or soldiers bent on mayhem.

A linocut I made in 1980...