Nothing Lasts

Man with a  mission

(plus more hair and a red beard)

When I was writing the post Ships in the Night last year, it occurred to me that it was quite possible that I or someone I knew might actually be in some of those photos from London in the late 1970s, quite by accident, especially the ones of political protest marches, most of us having been reliable members of the Left's rentamob in those years when it still seemed possible to push back the tide of Thatcherism, simply by shouting at it. However, I could see no familiar faces, not even those ships-in-the-night acquaintances encountered, to quote the dictionary definition, "in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance".

But the main thing that strikes me now on looking at those sets of work is how very different the country of my youth was from the one we inhabit now. The old, weird pre-war Britain was still hanging on in our poorer and more neglected neighbourhoods, and in particular – to pick up a thread from another earlier post – you can't help but notice how different the old were back then, almost a separate species. If you thought I was exaggerating in that post (The New Old) then take a look at those stooped, toothless, pre-NHS ancients in the photographs of Markéta Luskačová, probably not much older than I am now, their backstories already reduced to bric-a-brac on a shabby market stall, remnants of lives cruelly stunted by poverty, limited opportunities, and lived out in the back-to-back terraces and tenements then undergoing demolition.

Things move inexorably on. Incredibly (to me, anyway), two weeks ago I turned seventy-one, and my own youthful years receded yet another click beyond a half-century into the past. A past now as long ago as, say, the 1920s heyday of some 71-year-old bystander watching bemused as I tramped past in 1979, holding up the banner of our Bristol University branch of the public service trade union, NALGO. Back then, it was the old Victorian buildings that were being turned into rubble; now, even the brave new post-war world of a place like Stevenage New Town is feeling its age. The house I was born in, the primary schools I attended, and even the block of flats I lived in during my adolescence have all already been demolished.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
T.S. Eliot, from East Coker (Four Quartets)

"Ah, it's the being so cheerful as keeps me going, sir!", as Mr. Eliot liked to quip after a few pints, although he would never admit he'd stolen that one off the radio. Odd, really, given the obvious amount of "borrowing" in the lines just quoted, not least from the Byrds (sorry, I'm just being facetious).

But, it's true, though: nothing lasts, does it? Although it can get better. We don't live in a version of the ship of Theseus, where every part gets replaced, exactly as it was, generation after generation. Time may not be on our side, individually, but as a society we have choices over what to replace, what to add, what to remove, and the quality of the components we use. After all, even the worst new-build house (and some are pretty bad) is better than the best Iron Age hut, and is better furnished with heat, light, and appliances than some crumbling ancestral stately home, once state-of-the-art architecture built with no expense spared several hundred years ago.

Although being able to afford to pay the utility bills that fuel your heat, light, and appliances is a different matter; there are always more choices for society to make. For example, should we be putting yet more superfluous cash into a few wealthy pockets, or providing modest comfort for all? You wouldn't think that one would be such a hard choice to make, would you? But, clearly not: yet more superfluous cash flowing into a few absurdly overstuffed pockets it is! True, in return we get Facebook, X, Amazon, Netflix, and the rest of it; fine, if echo-chamber social media, effort-free shopping, and on-tap entertainment are a priority over an equitable redistribution of wealth, as they clearly seem to be. It's "bread and circuses" all the way, but with lots of circus and very little bread. As someone said, as a society we are in danger of amusing ourselves to death.

I read a conspiracy theory somewhere that the goal of a certain secret sub-set of the oligarchic few is, essentially, not just to do away with the need to pay the rest of us to continue generating their obscene wealth, but simply to do away with the rest of us, full stop. Which struck me as ridiculously OTT, until I read in the New Yorker – and you won't find many better sources of fact-checked, responsible reporting – that Elon Musk intends to replace the American equivalent of the Civil Service with AI. Follow that link, and – at the very least – be concerned, be very concerned. Nothing lasts. And things can also get worse, much worse.

But, bad as things might get, I'm afraid my protesting days are pretty much over, reduced to shouting at the radio and the occasional email to my Member of Parliament, Tory though she be (Hi, Caroline!). Any march I might want to join would have to be carefully planned to pass by several public "facilities", and any picket or protest not require too many hours of standing around in the cold. I suppose I am becoming that bemused 71-year-old bystander, whose youthful heyday was more than fifty years ago in a very different world; one where strong trade unions were unconstrained by spiteful anti-labour laws (which, shamefully, no Labour government has seen fit to reverse), and radical left-wing ideas and affiliations were commonplace – almost de rigueur – among the more thoughtful young.

Talking of which, I had a true blast from the past the other day looking through the second-hand books in a local Oxfam shop, where I saw the spine of a 1970s-vintage Oxford University Press paperback of the first volume of Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed: not something I would ever have expected to encounter on Southampton's Shirley High Street in 2025. Of course, in my student and squatting days it had once seemed that everybody had a copy of that on their improvised brick-and-plank bookshelves. No doubt many of them still do.

Not me, though. I've never owned it, never read it. As I've explained before, in 1973 I was an ignorant, unserious, thrill-seeking aesthete, an introvert trying on extroversion for size (didn't fit, made me look silly), who fell among committed leftists and serious-minded politicos at university. Some of it rubbed off, but I'd have to admit that my own three-volume touchstone in those years would instead have been the first three books by Carlos Castaneda. But I doubt many thoughtful youngsters today are reading either Deutscher on the Russian revolutionary Trotsky or Castaneda on the Mexican brujo Don Juan. So 1970s, boomer... After all, despite the fact that I can state with a high degree of confidence that, unlike Don Juan, Trotsky definitely existed, both he and his ideas must seem increasingly insubstantial from this distance in time to anyone under 30. Nothing lasts, does it? [1]

1. It is a nicely symmetrical irony – perhaps only amusing to me and a handful of my old college chums – that whereas I went on to spend many years as a trade union activist, one of the more committed and indeed aggressive "Trots" of those long-ago student days, Neil Whitehead, went on to become an anthropologist studying shamanism in a perilously hands-on way. See the post Walking the Dead.

As the Crow Flies

May 2024

Like (I presume) many people entering old age, I keep getting ambushed by sudden collapses in the internal mental timeline of my life, like a landslip or sinkhole opening up as the years accumulate into an unstable mass. This can be somewhat startling. In a recent post on Mike Johnston's Online Photographer blog he remarked in passing that the film Das Boot is over 40 years old. Forty years? What? How did that happen? I can still remember as if it were... well... not exactly yesterday, but quite recently that I was glued to my 8" portable TV when the six-part mini-series of Das Boot (far better than the film, I think) was broadcast on BBC2 in 1984 – the year I moved to Southampton from Bristol to take up a new job – sitting on the sofa in the flat I had just bought. Sure, 2025 minus 1984 equals 41 but, somehow, simple arithmetic doesn't correlate with lived, felt experience until – bang! – something triggers a collapse, and you're staring across a chasm of time, wondering, where did it all go?

So now it seems that it was exactly ten years ago – impossible! – that it was my partner's turn to make a move in the employment-and-property game: she took up a post as a professor in the University of Bristol, and bought a rather pleasant flat overlooking the Avon Gorge as a place to stay during the week. However, after a few years she became disenchanted with that job, left Bristol, and returned to work in London's University College. But she kept the flat as a handy bolthole in a city we had enjoyed together as young adults in the "punk and reggae" years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and where we still have friends and family.

February 2025

Ever since, that flat has been something of a Happy Place for both of us. The spectacular view, especially, has been a constant source of enchantment. The best part of half a mile of airy void lies between our fourth-floor kitchen window and the matching elevation on the far side of the Gorge, a crow's flight that crosses over some woods that lie below our block of flats, then the busy Portway, the tidal rise and fall of the river Avon in its muddy bed, the Portishead railway branch line, and ends in Leigh Woods opposite. That window faces roughly SSW, so the sun passes from left to right during the day, sometimes creating spectacular lighting effects at dawn, especially if the Gorge is misty, and igniting dramatic sunsets when low in the west. Naturally, I keep a camera on the kitchen table, and open a window to take a photograph or two whenever something interesting is going on, often before getting dressed in the morning or while cooking in the evening. Most often, though, I simply sit at the table and gaze out at the sort of view you'd be happy to walk many miles to find.

October 2015

We were there last weekend, and it was very cold and very foggy most of the time. On Saturday morning I rolled up the kitchen blind and the far side of the Gorge had vanished behind a bank of impenetrable mist. At the edge of the woods below us, just across a lawn, there is a venerable oak tree that often acts as the focus of my leisurely picture-making. It, too, was barely visible. But as the mist started to thin, its gnarly, truncated shape was silhouetted against the faint background, and a crow was sitting at the very top, having just seen off two magpies from this desirable perch. Perhaps it, too, was contemplating the misty void as a perfect metaphor for the passage of time. Or, more likely, it was wondering which side of the Gorge was most likely to provide a decent breakfast on such a chilly morning. Crows are smart, opportunistic, and adaptable, but haven't yet figured out the advantages of double glazing and central heating. Although they'd probably reply that them two-legged wasters of perfectly good food would be better off figuring out the advantages of feathers, wings, and a decent beak. 'S all I need, mate. Though some pockets would be nice, it's true...

February 2025

February 2025

Night Light

Cathedral Close, Winchester

We had a family meal in Winchester's Brasserie Blanc on Sunday, in anticipation of my birthday this week (I had poulet à la moutarde, very nice, thanks!). Afterwards, we went for a stroll through the centre of town, before our dining companions had to catch their train back to London. It was a cold day, and a drizzly rain had started to fall, but passing the entrance of Winchester College – one of the country's most prominent public (i.e. private) schools, fees a mere £60K p.a. for boarders – my son noticed there was free entry to some kind of museum within the grounds, so we decided to take a look.

Winchester College was founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, a sort of mediaeval prototype of that Tudor mover and shaker, Thomas Cromwell, with a similar c.v. but a happier outcome. William had also put his trust in princes, contrary to biblical advice (Psalm 146), but got away with it, handsomely, dying as one of the most influential and richest men in the country. Over the centuries Old Wykehamists have donated all manner of stuff to the school, which mainly seems to have ended up as teaching aids or stashed away out of sight in various lofts. So a few years ago the old Treasury building was made into a museum, open to the public, where displays of the school's treasures, curiosities, and knick-knacks can be seen. (But if you think this will justify your charitable status, chaps, think again... Come on, Starmer, FFS just do it!).

It's very professionally and tastefully done, in the universal "modern museum" style, using honey-coloured wood and plate glass. On Sunday afternoon we were the only visitors the entire time we were there. We enjoyed ourselves: it was like having our own private Wunderkammer. How often, for example, do you get the chance to get up close to a set of casts of the Parthenon frieze (a.k.a. the Elgin Marbles)? Or gaze at early editions of Paradise Lost, Lyrical Ballads, or Blake's illustrated edition of Young's Night Thoughts? Apparently the displays are regularly refreshed, and the inevitable Jane Austen 250th birthday tribute is upcoming later in 2025. Who knows, I might even read one this year, although not ever having read any Austen probably gives me more pleasure, and is certainly easier to achieve.

For me, though, there was one truly stand-out item, lurking in a cabinet of Chinese porcelain. Which was this:

I have often fantasised about a spontaneous smash-and-grab raid in various museums and galleries, but this was particularly tempting. Apparently, it is a night light, an early ancestor of the softly illuminated bedside lamps you can get today. A candle would have been placed inside (there's a hole in the top), and the cat's eyes would glow (there are holes in the eyes surrounded by thinner, white porcelain). Allegedly such night lights had a dual purpose: to comfort children who were afraid of the dark, and to scare off rats. Hopefully not both at the same time in the same room. Never mind rats, though, I imagine the thing could be equally unsettling to any nervous child, waking up in the night to meet the unblinking gaze of this glimmering goggle-eyed guardian: miaaow! It's hardly Hello Kitty, is it?

It seems these Chinese porcelain cat night lights were once a Thing, and – disappointingly – I see actual originals go for thousands at auction. If I were the entrepreneurial type I'd immediately knock up a battery-operated prototype and join the queue outside the Dragons' Den, confident I was about to become extremely wealthy. But I'm not, and I won't, and therefore never will be. Extremely wealthy, that is. But, seriously, wouldn't you love to have one of these on your bedside table?

Really?

Self portrait (one of many similar), by Celia Paul

I noticed this forthcoming item from MACK books, from which the dreary smeary painting above – like Anselm Kiefer's sad little sister in a hospital gown – seems fairly typical of the works collected within:

Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025. The prolific British painter’s body of work is collected in a luxurious and authoritative volume, alongside new texts by writers including Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hilton Als, Clare Carlisle, Edmund de Waal, as well as Paul herself.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's contribution to the volume was published recently in the New Yorker ("The World-Changing Gaze of Celia Paul"), an account of a couple of meetings between these two dedicated self-obsessives. It's a curious read, I have to say. The encounter of two such people has a sort of self-cancelling chemistry of tepid mutual admiration that is actually quite funny. True, I've never read any Knausgaard: there's been so much written about him that it has always seemed superfluous actually to read him talking about himself, and I'm pretty sure that Scandinavian "autofiction" is not my thing. Yeah, right, hilarious, you might say, coming from a guy who blogs; but there's one of those irregular verbs in there, isn't there? You know the sort of thing: I blog; you over-share; he navel-gazes... 

I have to say that my reaction to painting like this is one of baffled amusement. I think I will never understand the criteria by which alleged excellence in contemporary art is judged. I mean, really? I keep coming across top-rated work that – to my admittedly untutored eye – seems little better than the sort of thing you'd see at the open day of a sixth-form college: well-intended, heartfelt – full marks for sincerity, youngster! – but short of real skill and with most of its pictorial appeal deriving from the accidental effects of a slapdash lack of control. But this much-lauded stuff is not the result of juvenile enthusiasm, but the deliberately faux-naïve, calculatedly cack-handed work of successful, fully-trained and competent artists who, it seems to me, are essentially faking the "authenticity" of outsider art (now there's irony for you), presumably to evade the charge of using shallow sophistication, facility and – yuk! – "beauty" in order to con us art-rubes and civilians into... Well, I'm never sure what it is we're being shielded from by this solicitous self-censorship. But, really, guys, there's no need! We couldn't afford your stuff even if we liked it.

But MACK is a prestigious photography and art publisher, Paul is a Big Name painter – not only (?) because of her former relationship with Lucian Freud – and that's a fairly A-list roster of contributors. Although admittedly they are also fans of Alice Neel, another painter currently in vogue whose faux-naïve daubings I simply do not "get". I am sufficiently humble, however, not to mention magnanimous and open-minded – I am a saint of self-deprecation, though I do say so myself – to concede that the problem may be mine, not theirs. After all, I do enjoy the work of Pierre Bonnard and his present-day admirers, like Andrew Cranston, which might well be seen to be open to the same criticisms. Oh well, as Oscar Wilde wrote to excuse the contradiction between Whistler's written theorising and his actual painted work: consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative...

It may be that I was irreversibly formed, aesthetically, by an early and enduring love for comics and commercial graphic art. I suppose you can't spend your impressionable years poring over the revved-up box art of plastic model kits, copies of War Picture Library, Mad, and then LP record sleeves, and not absorb something of their made-to-please values, shallow as they may be. So I tend to prefer art that takes reality, hypes it up a bit, even to the point of decorative abstraction, and makes you feel something positive on the spectrum from "Wow!" to "Interesting..." I'm not a fan of art that takes reality and distresses it, or depresses your mood, intentionally or not (apparently, Rothko's declared intention with his notorious paintings commissioned for the Seagram Building's Four Seasons restaurant was to "ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room"). But, in particular, I avoid obsessively self-therapeutic work that wants me to empathise with some heroically sad or damaged individual. But then I suppose that may just be the incorrigible and annoying white male in me speaking: "Come on, sad sack, never mind all that, let's play!".

Sports Ground, Southampton

Talking of commercial graphic art, recently I came across the remarkable fact that just one man was responsible for nearly all of the most striking and memorable movie posters of the 1970s and 80s. Seriously: if you can remember it – let's see... how about Chinatown, or [deep breath] The Last Picture Show, The Last Tycoon, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Murder on the Orient Express, Nashville, Papillon, The Shootist, The Sting, Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark? – then he most likely painted it. It seems Richard Amsel was something of a graphic-art genius, but died of AIDS at the age of just 37 in 1985. It is incalculable, really, how much creativity the worst years of AIDS will have removed from the world.

Of his own work, Amsel said:

Commercial art can be and sometimes is art, but if someone hangs a poster, it is still a poster pretending to be something it's not. My work is basically for the printed page, and not for hanging in living rooms.

Well, that's as maybe ("consistency..."), but – resale value and insurance premiums aside – between an original Celia Paul painting and a Richard Amsel poster I know which I'd rather have hanging in my living room. Apparently a feature documentary is being made about Amsel, and I'll be interested to see it. I just hope it's more about the work (wow!) rather than the life (sad...).

One of my Top Ten favourite films...

NOTE 1: I have recently updated my website. Nothing dramatic, just added some recent work and tidied up some loose ends. If you haven't visited it for a while – I confess I have rather neglected it – why not take a look? It's here. Feel free to give it a drubbing, Celia!

NOTE 2: If you have ever been a reader of Thomas McGuane, Richard Brautigan, or Jim Harrison, you'll probably enjoy this documentary video, All That Is Sacred, from the outdoorsy people at Yeti Films (as featured recently on Daniel Milnor's Shifter blog). It rather reminds me of the film about the "outlaw country" music scene around Guy Clark, Heartworn Highways, also worth a watch. What was that about "scenius"?

In and Around the Lake

After weeks of drab and stormy weather, we finally had one of those afternoons illuminated by low raking sunshine that start to pop up after the dark dip of the solstice is behind us and the days first start to lengthen noticeably, so I headed out for a walk on Southampton Common.

I decided to take along my Fuji X20. This is a small "compact" camera that I had formerly only really used on holidays, but I had been closely examining some comparative image files (mainly in order to decide which of my, um, several cameras really ought to be sold on) and came to the surprising conclusion that in most respects and under most conditions this camera may actually be the best all-rounder I have. Portability and its unique "fast" built-in collapsible zoom aside, and despite its small sensor and vintage processing (the camera was first marketed in 2013), there is a unique quality to the images it produces that I really enjoy.

For example, here is a 100% detail of the photo above: taken hand-held, just before 16:00 on a late January afternoon, standing behind one tree, looking towards another stand about 75 yards away. The depth of focus, detail, and contrast are just right, I think, and give the "dry", semi-graphical style I prefer. 

But what about bokeh, you say? (a.k.a. "the out-of-focus backgrounds that everyone seems to love and will pay silly money to achieve")? Sorry, that's not for me, if I can avoid it... I'm OK with a bit of softness, but my preference is for front to back focus wherever possible. That's where small sensors win, every time. [1]

Out on the Common, the warm, steeply-angled light falling on the so-called Ornamental Lake was particularly eye-catching: pale reeds, dark reflective water, blue skies... For once, it was living up to its name.

Then, at the southern end of the Common and towards the end of the usable afternoon light, I entered the Old Cemetery, an inexhaustible source of picturesque combinations of weather-worn stone, thick undergrowth, and venerable trees. Well-worn territory for photographers, it's true, but who cares? You could waste a lifetime looking for something that nobody else has photographed. Besides, it's the way I tell 'em...

But there's an underlying reason why I've picked up the X20 again, which is actually a question: what is the purpose of making these photographs? Given the end uses I make of them, is there really any advantage in carrying around a larger, theoretically "better" camera just to get a little more resolution, or a slightly bigger file? The chances are slim that I will ever have another solo exhibition, and even if I did, I'd never print larger than "A4 image on A3 paper", tops. Besides, there comes a point where you don't even need to use a camera to "take pictures". I'm doing it all the time, now, after so many years: just by looking and composing the world into satisfying, occasionally revelatory or amusing shapes and juxtapositions. [2] There are times I do regret not having a camera with me to record and share something, but the essential 80% of the work has been done in my head: look at that!

Like a musician practising scales or idly improvising, the habit of creative looking, if we can call it that, will eventually school your eyes and give you the pleasure of seeing something pretty much anywhere, any time. So when I share my photographs, either here on the blog or as prints, a calendar, or a book, it's really only to say: look at that! Isn't that something? With the hope that someone else's eyes will in turn give them at least a decent fraction of the pleasure I took in seeing that particular something, and framing it in its rectangle.

That's it; anything else is whatever you have brought to the party. Photography has other, more important uses, but that's what I am doing; nothing more, nothing less. And a little camera like the X20 – or, more often than not, these days, my phone – is perfectly matched to the task.

1. I suffer extreme gear lust whenever I look at the Hasselblad X1D – what a beauty! – but know that I'd never get on with the shallow depth of field physics imposes on such a large sensor. I also know that spending that much money on a camera is bloody ridiculous...

2. This often involves shutting one eye to get the full 2D effect, which can sometimes look rather too much like a wink. So far, this has not yet got me into any trouble. Luckily, people are not often the subject of my "creative looking"...