Jaws

 Going through my backfiles looking for something completely different I noticed some overlooked pictures with a common theme. Which reminds me: I should probably arrange my six-monthly dental check-up.

Martin Parr

At 71, I am prepared for a generation of heroes, generally a decade or so older, to start dying out. Farewell, Sir Tom! Hold on, Joni! Not yet, Bob! But the swish of the Reaper's scythe can seem to be getting increasingly and uncomfortably close at times. Martin Parr has just died, at the ridiculously early age of 73. If you've already watched the film released earlier this year, I Am Martin Parr (it's on both Amazon Prime Video and BBC iPlayer), you'll have realised he was unwell: not many street photographers use a walking frame. Even fewer manage to look so grimly cheerful about it. Probably just him, in fact.

If you don't know who Martin Parr is then I really don't know why you are reading this blog. There will be plenty of obituaries, so I won't go over the obvious biographical ground. Let's stick to what Martin has done for me!

On London's Charing Cross Road, once known for its many bookshops, there used to be a famous art and photography bookshop known as Zwemmer's. In the days before the internet, the best way – really, the only way – to discover new publications and new artists was to visit such a specialist shop, and browse the stock. In the 1980s and 90s, whenever I was "in town", as we say, I would make a point of visiting Zwemmer's, hoping to find something special to add to my growing photobook collection.

Art bookshop browsers are a grubby, inky-fingered bunch, so Zwemmer's used to wrap the books on display in clear film, which meant that you at least stood a chance of buying an unblemished copy. Now that books generally arrive in the post in a pristine, shrink-wrapped state, it's easy to forget how "shop-worn" a substantial volume might get on the shelves before anyone actually bought it. As it happened, Zwemmer's also published a few books itself, and one of these was Bad Weather, which contained a series of wryly-observed black and white photographs of people in "bad weather" scenarios, some of them hilarious, by an up and coming photographer named Martin Parr, who had used an underwater camera to make them. There was a stack of them, unwrapped and in mint condition, so I bought one.

I became something of a fan, and bought everything of his that was published. I might even blame Martin for igniting my passion for collecting photobooks. although, unlike Martin himself, I am a collector and completist who knows when to stop. I mean, honestly, Saddam Hussein watches... Why, Martin, why? So, although I bought all his books of breakthrough colour work like The Last Resort when they appeared, I stopped after Small World, as it seemed he was repeating himself. Besides, flash photography of plates of baked beans and garish cakes were really not my thing; I preferred the hunt for abandoned Morris Minors in Irish fields (A Fair Day). I think the only subsequent volumes of his I ever bought were the magisterial three-volume The Photobook: a History, compiled with Gerry Badger.

In those days I was still only in the early stages of becoming a photographer myself. I had recently bought my first SLR – an Olympus OM-1n – and was feeling my way past the glossy honeytraps and gearhead porn of Amateur Photographer to the more austere monochrome art uplands of Creative Camera. As I have mentioned before, while starting our working lives in Bristol we happened to occupy the flat above some guy called Paul Graham, and I was still sufficiently photographically illiterate that the only reason I bought a copy of his first self-published book, A1: the Great North Road, when it appeared in a nearby bookshop on Whiteladies Road, was because it amused me that the address of the publisher, Grey Editions, was also mine.

But by the 1990s I felt I was finally getting somewhere as a photographer, but was in need of some direction and validation; I began signing up for workshops at Peter Goldfield's Duckspool establishment in Somerset, one of the best decisions I have ever made. So in September 1992 I attended a four-day residential workshop with Martin Parr.

Although I already knew that his style of "street" documentary would never be mine I was still an admirer of his work; my most recent Parr purchase had been One Day Trip, his photographs of "booze cruise" Channel ferry crossings, commissioned by the Mission photographique transmanche of the Centre régional de la photographie Nord-Pas-de-Calais. However, unlike the workshop I'd done with Thomas Joshua Cooper the previous year, this one was going to be an interesting but not transformative experience.

I think it's fair to say that Martin was not a great teacher. Great teachers who are also first rank practitioners are very rare. True, he was a very incisive speaker about his own work, and the work of others working in a similar documentary vein, but had little to say about other approaches to photography, or even about simply poor, derivative work, which is after all what mainly turns up at workshops. Where Cooper (also not a great teacher, but a very charismatic individual), confronted by shabby or complacent photo-club work, would reach for the verbal stiletto, drive it between the culprit's ribs and give it a twist, Parr was simply lost for words. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... I think he was basically too kind, too English perhaps, to criticise work that he didn't like or understand.

Coincidentally, Duane Michals was receiving an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society during the workshop, so Martin arranged for us all to travel over to Bath to hear him speak, which surprised and pissed off a number of participants – "not what we've paid for!" – but I suspect that I, at least, derived more memorable "takeaways" from that very entertaining hour than from the entire Parr workshop. I also had my one and only ride ever on the luxurious leather seats of an upscale Jaguar (is there any other kind?) belonging to another participant.

As it turned out, I had to leave a day early, having received an urgent SOS message from my workplace – by then I was the Systems Librarian at Southampton University – so I missed out on the intensive group "critique" of my own portfolio. Which was probably just as well. I don't think Martin would have found much to connect with in what I had brought along. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... Although I do treasure the memory of Peter Goldfield's comment – he had taken a preliminary peek at our portfolios – that the person who would really like my work was Fay Godwin, and that I should keep an eye out for the new direction her photography had taken. A few years later I spotted the gorgeous little Stella Press hardback issue of Glassworks & Secret Lives in the window of another Charing Cross Road bookshop, just published, and pounced on one of the signed copies inside.

It should go without saying that Martin Parr was a very admirable man, whose photographic style and chosen subject matter have exerted an enormous influence on documentary photography, and who also dedicated his considerable energies to the generous advocacy of the work of others and of photography in general, not least through the Martin Parr Foundation that he established in Bristol. But he is also much misunderstood, as people often mistake his wry critique – highlighting those visual incongruities that can illuminate society's contradictions as well as people's pretensions and well-meaning idiocies – for a kind of cruelty. But where someone like Bruce Gilden is in-yer-face cruel, Martin Parr was more like a fearless, clear-sighted stand-up comedian. [1]

If he had a superpower, I think it was a variation of that essential delusion of the "street" photographer: that is, he believed he was invisible, and yet able to emerge at will into a disarming display of avuncular affability, once he'd spotted a likely subject. He wasn't invisible – far from it – but that belief in his ability to pop in and out of awareness is surely what enabled him to point a flash gun at drunken booze-cruisers, and causes him to look so cheerful, plodding along the seafront with his walking frame in I Am Martin Parr. Heh, they can't see me! They don't know what I'm up to. Yet...

For what it's worth, I think it will be established that his very best work was done quite early on and that he never quite developed a "late style" that is the equal of his truly ground-breaking work in The Last Resort, say, or Small World. His very early monochrome work is gathering admirers, too, since the publication of Early Works in 2019 (I see copies are already going for silly prices). In the end, as a photographer he seemed to have become the prisoner of his own signature stylistic moves. But, what moves! Few photographers have created and inhabited such a distinctive style, palette, and subject matter, used to such consistent effect. It may not appeal to you, but you know it when you see it. As my partner (not a photographer) so often exclaims when we are out and about, "Oh, look! There's a real Martin Parr!" And, for a photographer, what better tribute is there than that?

1. OK, there is a certain cruelty about the one of a woman in Bad Weather, smiling shyly at the photographer, about to get soaked by the water thrown up from a puddle by a bus approaching from behind... But OTOH it's making me laugh just thinking about it. Thanks, Martin!

Duskier

Not an abandoned vehicle, just rarely moved...

Leaf or tree?

Another little gallery of some recent photographs from my daily late-afternoon walks in the neighbourhood, plus one from the kitchen window and another from a visit to Mottisfont Abbey, near Romsey. For some reason it is mostly trees and leaves that are getting my attention recently; I suppose it's hard to ignore them, really, at this time of year.

View from the kitchen

The enormous plane tree at Mottisfont

Outdoor Sports Ground

Illuminations, University Highfield Campus

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...)