Locals

It's a noticeable aspect of modern life in Britain that to be a genuine "local" is, nearly everywhere, becoming unusual. Although it is a process that has been going on for some time: the recent arrival at the British Museum of the Bayeux Tapestry is a reminder of quite how long strangers of one denomination or another have been rocking up on these shores and moving people about as a consequence. Unrest and resentment provoked by "replacement" of local populations seems to be a universal of human life: just ask the inhabitants of the Celtic nations how they feel, even today, about the "Saxons" squatting on the prime agricultural land of what became "England". Those of them, that is, who can actually claim descent from those displaced aboriginal Brits. I don't suppose the Sikhs of Swansea care very much at all, although they may have something to say about the activities of the British as a whole in India.

My mother grew up in a village in North Hertfordshire in the 1920s and 30s, surrounded by cousins and the descendants of families who had lived in the area for centuries. Remarkably, however, her father was a blow-in from, of all places, Liverpool, brought into the area by the army during WW1. By the time my grandparents died in the 1970s their village was becoming populated by incomers, mostly commuters from the professional classes buying into some imagined idyll of rural life, the precarious reality of which they were actively destroying. No need for a village shop when you can drive into a nearby town and stock up the freezer from the bountiful shelves of a supermarket. Who wants to use a pub full of unwelcoming flat-capped old geezers talking rural gibberish? And a bit of street lighting and some proper metalled roads wouldn't go amiss, either: let's get onto the Parish Council.

To be "local" is more a state of mind than the outcome of genealogy, however. There was significant unrest when the first New Town was designated in North Herts in the 1940s. The small town of Stevenage was to be developed into a grand utopian vision of a new life for many thousands of poorly-housed working-class Londoners. The inhabitants of what would come to be known as "the old town" – little more than a large village, really – protested, accusing the Labour government of Soviet-style central planning. When Lewis Silkin, the Minister for Town and Country Planning, arrived by train from London to put the case, some jokers had replaced the platform sign "Stevenage" with "Silkingrad". So, as it came to pass, in 1954 I was born in Silkingrad, and by the the time I left home in 1976 I felt about as local as it is possible for a young person without any "propertied interest" in a place to feel. However, as one embodiment of Silkin's vision of "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" – I know! – I was determined never to come back.

Old Stevenage

New Stevenage

After some years of post-university precarity, my partner and I arrived in this semi-detached house in a modest street in Southampton in 1988, which we had bought from a pair of doctors who, like us, were moving on in pursuit of professional careers. Our children grew up here, but moved on themselves years ago, also in pursuit of opportunities in the wider world. Our street has gradually changed its personality over nearly 40 years. Old neighbours have died or moved away. Houses that were formerly owned or rented by single families like ours have become HMOs ("houses of multiple occupancy"); many of the occupants are not – or not yet – British citizens. The number of cars parked in the street seems to double every few years, and many if not most front gardens have been paved over to accommodate them.

When one of our oldest neighbours, a widow who lived directly opposite, sold up last year in order to live in Australia with her daughter – a migration saga in itself – her next-door neighbours on either side held a small "Goodbye to Mary" party for her: on one side a French family, on the other a South Asian family. The party was organised by the former and hosted by the latter – both families' relationship with Mary was a lot closer than ours – and the curries laid on at the sit-down meal were delicious. Apart from ourselves, the other guests were from two doors down, an elderly couple who had lived in the street longer than any of us, but whose names I did not know and with whom I had never before exchanged more than a few polite words of greeting as I passed by. It turned out that of the nine people in the room they were the only true locals, with long-standing family connections to the docks and many lively stories to tell of the former occupants of all our houses.

The new occupants of Mary's house are a Turkish family. Our own next-door neighbours are, on one side, a Filipino couple who bought the house long enough ago for their baby son Elijah to have grown up and left home, and on the other side is what is now an HMO, serially occupied by Filipino trainee nurses who work at the nearby hospital. This is a typical story of present-day suburban Britain, and it seems to be one that is making some self-declared "locals" very angry.

Without resorting too far to stereotypes, I'd say the angry locals fall into two broad types. There are the ones who probably found schooling uncongenial, stayed in or near the place they had been born and grown up, and really just wanted things to go on as they were forever, but who paid a heavy price when neo-liberal global movements of capital left them without work or prospects. I expect a lot of them may even have been conned into voting for this. Then there are the ones who made a success of their lives, moved on, and settled in "nicer" neighbourhoods, and who resent the arrival of new neighbours who are not like them, or at least do not look like them, and often turn out to be competitive business rivals. They definitely did not vote for that.

At its worst, at its most poisonous and most dangerous, this anger can take the form of a militant ethno-nationalism, a nostalgia for a country that never was: a fondly-imagined paradise of full employment and low taxes occupied by a people who shared a single ethnicity. This white-supremacist anger now trades under the false flag of "patriotism" and even – this would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic – of "Christianity": I read that the black-clad "patriots" who recently turned up mob-handed in Dover and Portsmouth to protest the arrival of yet more small inflatables overloaded with would-be asylum claimants were chanting "Christ is king!".

What? Seriously? This is all so profoundly un-British that the interference of certain foreign hands with money and malign disruptive intent seems certain. It has a distinctly musky pungency. Why, it seems every protester had been assured in advance of the best legal representation possible, should that become necessary. I suppose there may be a few sympathetic right-wing lawyers out there prepared to offer their services pro bono, but that seems uncharacteristically generous, especially at the scale that might have been required if things had kicked off in the usual mindlessly violent fashion. Which they didn't: it seems these present-day blackshirts had been well-briefed on how to stay within the law. A restraint which must have hurt: a triumph of the will if ever there was one. Which is also troubling: these guys are learning their way through (or being guided through) the legal maze.

It has been said that there are really only two stories: (a) someone goes on a journey, and (b) a stranger comes to town. Which are essentially the same story, told from opposing points of view. It is clear that this story is being played out in real life today, on a global scale, as the world begins to smoulder and burn. So now would be a good time to consider our role in this story, and how we want to play it. I'd also like to invite those black-clad self-styled "Christian" vigilantes to acquaint themselves with the source text of their newly professed beliefs:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Matthew 25

Crusades, witch-burnings, and pogroms may have been carried out by Christians, even endorsed by church leaders, but they are not Christian; neither is a person of "Christian heritage" who can't tell the Lord's Prayer from the National Anthem. There's a difference.

Now, I do not understand the motivations of those who risk everything to cross the Channel for a chance to live here in Britain – you're already in France, people; France, FFS! – and, yes, there are frauds, criminals, and bad actors among them. But we already have quite a few frauds, criminals, and bad actors of our own, which is why we have laws and police and a judicial system to enforce them, however unsatisfactorily slowly the mills of justice grind. And, yes, it is concerning that between 700,000 and 900,000 unauthorised immigrants have arrived in a country where housing, schools, medical and social services are already stretched to the limit. OTOH our birth-rate is in serious decline, and someone is going to have to be paying taxes to fund stuff, not least my care when I'm really old.

But to deport precisely those incomers on whom these services have already come to depend will solve nothing. People such as my neighbours, for example, who are now British citizens, and probably already feel more like locals than I do, born and bred as I was in faraway Silkingrad in a long-ago era, a barely remembered time when creating "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" was high on the social agenda. Talk about nostalgia for a country that never was...

Of course, the sad truth is that in old age we will all become strangers in a strange land, even if it is nominally the same one we grew up in. As George Orwell put it:

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

George Orwell, England Your England

It's curious to think how much closer we are now to the unimaginable England of 2040 than to the England of 1940 – the heyday of my parents' generation, and not so  much "our" as their finest hour – or even to 1984, the year I turned thirty and arrived in Southampton. Nineteen Eighty-Four... Orwell's dystopian vision – with the UK absorbed and rebadged by Big Brother's authoritarian empire Oceania as Airstrip One, not to mention the Thought Police, doublespeak, newspeak, and all that – somehow feels a lot less like a warning than a prediction today, doesn't it?

So perhaps it's time to force open a few windows and let in some sunlight to banish that musky smell? We must not allow angry "locals" to get in the way of our next attempt to build Jerusalem / Utopia / New Atlantis / Nowhere / Silkingrad in our still sort-of green and reasonably pleasant land. Let's put the creation of "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" back on the agenda. Although we should probably scrutinise that "civic pride" bit more closely; I know what Silkin meant but, wrongly interpreted, it's the sort of thing that can sometimes lead "locals" into trouble. [1]

But, top tip: do keep an ear open for any clocks striking thirteen...

1. Far be it from me, as a non-local, to stoke the traditional rivalry between Southampton ("scummers") and Portsmouth ("skates"), but... It seems that yesterday, in the town that allegedly confused a paediatrician with a paedophile (not actually true), a contingent of angry Portsmouth locals really did confuse the arrival of a Pakistan under-19 cricket team by coach at a hotel with the arrival of more unwelcome unauthorised immigrants, so they entered the hotel and started knocking on doors, presumably with the intention of intimidating the new arrivals.

[BTW Apologies for the paucity of pictures. Part-way through writing this post Blogger stopped uploading images. Hopefully this is a temporary glitch.]

Something to Say

I was idly browsing in the Waterloo Station branch of Foyles bookshop recently, when I found myself in front of a surprisingly large display of "recent fiction". There were at least a hundred books there, maybe even twice that – presumably itself a curated selection from the latest publications – mostly by authors I had never heard of or seen reviewed, and who, according to recent figures – if they're among the lucky ones – will be earning a typical income of around £7K, which is not very far from just half of the new UK State Pension. Most must therefore still be living with parents, supported by a partner who has a reliable income, writing in the spare time afforded by a full- or part-time job, or have some sort of independent income. The days of cheap living in garrets, bedsits, and squats surviving on generous state benefits have long gone. [1]

As someone who abandoned the idea of living the writing life decades ago, I find it hard to understand why so many people still feel the need to write fiction that practically no-one will ever read, and which will never earn them a living wage. It's not as if finishing a novel worth reading and then actually getting it published is either easy or quick. It's even harder to understand why the publishers keep pushing out such overwhelming quantities of not particularly outstanding fiction. It surely cannot make sense as a business model, unless the gamble is that one or two mega bestsellers will emerge every few years that are able to pay for all the rest; apart, that is, from those who do not even make it into the pension-level "mid-list" and who are doubtless regularly and unceremoniously culled.

I am not and have never been a publishing insider, and have no insights to offer on that front. Self-evidently, though, I am a writer of sorts. See? This is me writing! I can't help it. I enjoy it. So much so I don't even ask you to pay to read what I have written. What an idiot, though: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money", as Samuel Johnson reportedly said, and he's not wrong. But today there is an irresistible alternative to adding to some publisher's "slush pile" for those of us blockheads who enjoy writing for its own sake, which is, of course, self-publication on the Web. Blogs, Substack, Bluesky, even Facebook and that other thing that used to be Twitter... The internet is packed with so many thousands of self-styled writers like me asking for your attention, sometimes even for your money, that the very idea of being a writer has been diluted into something approaching homeopathic status. We're all scribblers now.

Finishing a novel may be hard, but banging out short pieces like this is relatively easy, certainly as compared to singing or playing the piano (which is actually impossible, as I have previously demonstrated to my own satisfaction, if nobody else's). In effect, a social-media writer is like one of those prolific letter-writers of earlier centuries, in love with the new communication technology of the postage stamp. I think of John Cage's often-quoted words:

I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it
(Lecture on Nothing, 1949)

Just substitute "writing" for "poetry" and there you have most social media. How far anyone else needs it is a good question.

You don't need some fancy literary theory to realise that there are two main variables that add distinction to any sort of writing: content and quality. And also, I suppose, entertainment value... There are three main variables... Plus, of course, an appreciative target audience... There are four main variables... [Stop it. Ed.]. But, being able to write well and even entertainingly is one thing; thousands of us have that capacity. Good content, however – having (or at least believing you have) something to say – is rather different.

I'm not talking about originality, which is both rare and overrated. Even the most celebrated "original" things usually turn out to be versions of other less-celebrated things, and mere novelty fails to inspire that most sincere tribute, imitation. True innovation, like evolution, is wary of freakish outliers; four legs good, five legs ridiculous. Often, when writing these blog posts, I have been convinced that I'd just come up with some amusing expression, perhaps some twist on a familiar phrase, that had surely to be a first. Sometimes I check, and almost always Google instantly assures me that I was wrong. Almost always...

[A digression: whenever I think about "originality" I have a flashback to an upstairs classroom around 1968, where one of my secondary-school English teachers – George Partridge, a gaunt, elderly eccentric, a survival from an earlier age and perhaps the very last man still to wear an academic gown in a state school – is striding between our rows of desks, and declaiming:

I want to do something original
But I don't know where to begin
For there's nothing original in me
Except an original sin... [1]

George was given to random corporal punishment for real or imagined transgressions, and the way he was whacking his fist into his palm to pound out the metre implied an ear-clipping for someone was imminent. Frankly, I doubt whether any of us had the faintest idea of what "original sin" might be, although we knew well enough when to shut up and look innocent when George was off on one.]

So, forgetting about originality, writers are sometimes classed as either foxes or hedgehogs, as in "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing": an idea often attributed to Isaiah Berlin, but which – see "originality" above – appears to have proceeded to Berlin by a road that leads from Ancient Greece via the Renaissance Netherlands. Writers of fiction tend to be "hedgehogs" – not a few famous novelists have been accused of having one idea that they tackled multiple times from slightly different directions – as do bloggers and allied social-media trades, where the stakes are low but the ego is high. We have this thing, and we keep bashing away at it.

The main thing we have to bash, of course, is an endless fascination with the various Just-So stories that account for the bottomless source of wonder that is our own really quite ordinary life. You've probably noticed. We may try to disguise it by making ourselves exemplars of broader themes, but the underlying self-obsession always shows through. Of course, virtually none of this Web-scale torrent of self-scrutiny will ever make it into print. Certainly not as the equivalent of those multi-volume collections of some luminary's correspondence, marginal notations and unpublished leftovers: you need to be known for something else, something rather more substantial, for those scraps to have any value. The not particularly exciting or unusual tale of how, say, a heterosexual white male was transformed from a mildly rebellious teen with a taste for the safer recreational drugs into a responsibly sober citizen and family man with, oh, let's say an administrative job in a university and a sanity-saving sideline in some sort of art is not a story that is of much interest to a publisher these days, if it ever was. Just, you know, to pick an example at random.

Genre fiction aside (that's a very big "aside", I realise), what many readers seem to crave – that is, those people who actually buy books, and keep publishers in business – are misery memoirs, true crime, tales from the wilder fringes of identity, and above all stories of triumph over adversity. Combine three out of these four, and we're talking potential bestseller. So if, for whatever reason, you suffer from the urge to see yourself in print, one way is to write a jazzed up, fictionalised version of "what you know best" – i.e. your own life  – calculated to satisfy that public appetite. Which is not a problem, if you choose to go down the fiction route; this is, after all, pretty much what all first novels have always been. I don't read much "literary" fiction these days, but I understand that tricksy "autofictions" where the protagonist has the same name as the author, or the book is a self-scrutinising account of how it came to be written, are all the rage with the smart set. So there's that, too. But I'm a simple-minded guy at heart, and I'm happy with the idea that an author is just making it all up; it doesn't excite me to be invited into some unhappy soul's hall-of-mirrors jousts with "language" and "reality", with everything safely insulated within multiple layers of ironic stylistic scare quotes. Besides, I'm never sure how far such obsessive probing of metaphysical wounds is genuine or merely a fashionable writerly pose, a ticket of admission to some inner, alienated circle of "important" readers.

But autofiction is clearly a rarefied taste, and first novels rarely make the bestsellers list. What the mass readership really wants – apart from ripping yarns, romantasy, and tales of swords 'n' sorcery – are The Juicy Facts and The Inspirational Truth, with the emphasis on "facts" and "truth". So it's not surprising if outrage explodes when it is revealed that your allegedly True Account of My Amazing Journey From Darkness Into Light is a self-serving pack of lies.

There is a revealing list on Wikipedia of "fake memoirs and journals", from the 19th century to the present day. It is astonishing how fake Holocaust memoirs have come to be published to great acclaim, for example, not to mention the military fantasies of saloon-bar SAS fanboys and phoney combat veterans. You'd think publishers would be wise to this sort of thing by now; maybe even do a little rudimentary fact-checking before drawing up a contract? But somehow offerings like The Salt Path and Great and Unfortunate Things keep hitting the shelves, tasty and marketable concoctions that, after someone else does do a little rudimentary fact-checking, turn out to be hovering somewhere rather too near fiction than fact. [3]

Of course, if they're well-enough written, and tick all the right boxes – content, quality, entertainment value, and target audience – such made-to-measure fabulations are probably enjoyable and even instructive to read anyway, and all publishers know that the publicity value of exposure and scandal may even boost sales. After all, hasn't the whole point of "literature" always been that "something to say" can be attractively wrapped up in a pack of lies? See, for example, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's big, bold, bare-faced fibathon, the fake memoir that is usually held responsible for kicking off the whole subsequent tradition of literary fabrication for fun and profit, a.k.a. the writing of prose fiction in English.

Well, perhaps not so much for "profit"; not for the authors, anyway. Would-be writers should take note of Defoe's lifelong familiarity with the inside of a debtors' prison. I mean, really? £7K a year, if you're one of the lucky ones? No, listen to your parents, kids, and get a proper job first. And we don't mean teaching "creative writing"...

Frontispiece and title page of the first edition, 1719

Note: "Written by Himself"

1. The new UK State Pension is about £12,500 p.a. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but the general picture seems to be that the typical traditionally-published novel will sell fewer than 1,000 copies in its entire "lifetime". Typically, a publisher's advance for fiction will be around £5,000 or less, but the author will only receive a 10% royalty on copies sold after that advance has "earned out" for the publisher, probably somewhere approaching those 1,000 copies? Lots of luck, guys... Call me a philistine, but I'd love to see a book along the lines of "Bank Statements of Some Well-Known Writers" (maybe it exists?), setting out just how their bills got paid. Although see the example of Daniel Defoe in the final paragraphs below...

2. Actually a misremembered rendering of some occasional verse,  "To a Young Lady, Who Asked Me to Write Something Original for Her Album", composed in 1840 by the now largely-forgotten, but apparently once well-known and influential Scottish poet James Campbell:

   An original something, fair maid, you would win me
      To write—but how shall I begin?
      For I fear I have nothing original in me—
      Excepting Original Sin.

3. You might be interested to read of a particularly curious case of self-fabulation in this post from 2013, Second Acts. Or, even better, the astounding true story of Count No Account, Charles DeRudio.

Mistakes and Miscalculations

David Hockney, Sonny Rollins, James Burrows, Duane Michals, J.H. Prynne, Edward Lucie-Smith, Maureen Duffy, Carol Rumens, Desmond Morris, Andy Kershaw, Roy Hattersley, Clive Davis, Garfield Sobers, Kevin Keegan, Bill Oddie, Raoul Vaneigem, Phyllida Law, Jay Maisel, Dolly Parton, Yayoi Kusama... [1]

Recently, there has been something of a pile-up of significant "passings", as people seem to like to refer to death and dying these days. I suppose it's a handy way of fudging whether you think people have "passed" like a storm, or were "passing through" to a further stage of existence like some cosmic traveller. Or perhaps when people say the dead have "passed", they're thinking of life as some sort of exam? Which, of course, many religions do. None of the above have "failed", however, at least as far as I know. Although it's true that some religions do believe in resits. 

Obviously, that particular roll call is mostly meaningful to those of us who are now entering our own latter decades. Brits in particular: who but us remembers Zoo Time or The Goodies? I'm sure there must be an equivalent list for, say, 70-plus Hungarians. As you would expect, the people now vanishing from the scene are the ones who gave the years between the 1950s and 80s their particular flavour, and who presided as senior figures over the succeeding decades. Most of their lives will already have become a well-rounded story: biographies will have been written, and obituaries would have been on file, waiting. You might even have been surprised to learn that some of them were still alive in 2026.

The life stories of important and influential people have an obvious intrinsic interest. But we all have a story, just as we all have "ancestors" going way back to wherever and whenever the story of humanity began. Like the lives of those countless nameless ancestors, however, the vast majority of our stories will go untold. Which is just as well: unless there really is some improbably vast divine data-centre tracking and recording an inventory of our every move, to be assessed on some future Day of Judgement, what on earth would be the point? But, as old age creeps up on you, and you look back over what turns out to have been your "life" – how did that happen? – something of the shape of your own story emerges, and it becomes clearer where the main inflection points were. Good choices, bad choices, happy and less happy accidents... All lives have a shape, some more bent and twisted than others, but all are nonetheless leading in one direction, like those aerial shots of wiggly animal tracks converging on a waterhole in the savannah. 

As for my own emerging story – like most of us, I expect – I made some crucial choices in my younger years, some of which were essentially mistakes. By "mistake", I don't mean some error I stumbled into; I mean a decision taken in good faith that turned out rather differently to what I had intended. Perhaps "miscalculation" would be a better word. Unlike a straightforward mistake, an important miscalculation, just as much as a good decision, needs to have been given a suitable degree of forethought and preparation. In that cartoon scenario of a guy sawing off the branch he is sitting on, or the one in which he has painted himself into a corner, I can well imagine that he has given rather more thought to the right saw or paint for the job than to the nature and outcome of the job itself.

So, setting aside some genuine mistakes such as a couple of ill-advised and ill-fated late-teen "romantic" entanglements  – I'm hardly the first to fall foul of those – my own first real miscalculation, the one that put the first interesting kink in my trail through life, was twofold.

My secondary-school teachers were in little doubt that I was a pretty good linguist, and that I should double down on that at university. To the extent that my little "prize", bought by my English teacher for having the top exam result in English that year, was a compact edition of one of Thomas Mann's short stories: in German (hint, hint...). But, out of an idiotic combination of contrarianism and a suspicion that to pursue languages at university would involve actual work and thus cramp my style, I settled on English as the next best thing to Advanced Hedonism Studies, which wasn't on offer in those days. So that was Miscalculation One, Part 1.

Part 2 was that, having achieved a full hand of top grades in my A-level exams, I allowed myself to be persuaded into applying to Oxford, and in particular to Balliol College, which to me then was just another one of those weird "Oxbridge" names, but, as it turned out, is actually one of Britain's elite springboards for notable political and academic careers. Who knew?

Now, I had already reluctantly conceded that choosing art school rather than university might be a silly idea, but I had an instinctive inverted-snob's aversion to Oxbridge, at least as portrayed in the popular imagination. Besides, I had already made my applications to a range of universities with a reputation for English, so I now had an assured place at Bristol University, and my escape from small-town life was guaranteed.

But... By 1972, I had begun to imagine that I might be a Special Case (I know... Alarm!), an impression that is all too easily gained in a small school in a small town where the only competition is essentially your own little circle of friends and antagonists. It didn't help that getting top grades in my exams had cost me comparatively little effort. As one of my geography teachers warned in his final report, "He has the ability to make much out of little, but I would reinforce the comments about detail and width of reading". In other words, "FFS do some actual work, you arrogant little prick, or you may come to regret it!" But, as it seemed to me then, I was good with languages, a decent writer and artist, and an insightful interpreter of great literature. I mean, come on, was this boy on track for an exceptional life, or what? So in the end I allowed myself to be talked into it. Oh, go on then...WTF... Why not give Oxford entrance a go, if the place is all it's cracked up to be?

I think we may have miscalculated here, old friend... 

However, getting into Oxford is one thing, being there quite another. Nothing pricks the bubble of inflated self-esteem quite like encountering genuinely brilliant minds, truly dedicated scholars, and the ruthlessly ambitious or, worst of all, those intimidatingly exceptional types who combine at least two of these attributes, often seasoned with a certain arrogance. In a college like Balliol these alien beings are surprisingly thick on the ground, and you realise quite quickly that there is a difference not just of degree but of kind between a certain ease in the exam room backed up by a good line in improvisatory self-promotion – my own "superpowers" – and an A++ mind possessed by someone who, at age 18, is already planning ahead for a stellar career among the movers and shakers in their chosen field.

That rude awakening is the core university experience for most small-town undergraduates anywhere, of course. But it is rather ruder at certain Oxbridge colleges, and, in the 1960s and 70s at least, was a destabilising experience for many of those who found themselves immersed in it, not least those of us from families with no prior experience of university, never mind of Oxbridge with its baffling vocabulary and mad college traditions. [2]

Even so, was this a mistake or a miscalculation? After all, I did have a great time – in those days Hedonism Studies was an acknowledged if unofficial subsidiary, on a par with sport and theatre – and I made some lifelong friends, not least the woman I have shared my life with for fifty years. If I had not blown the second of my two "vivas" – just one is more typical – I would have landed a first-class degree. Not quite the customary "much out of little", but so very close... So wasn't that "mission accomplished"? Yes, of course it was; but, on the other hand, wouldn't much the same have happened at any other university? Perhaps a more congenial alma mater with less extreme Tiger Mom expectations and fewer Brainiac aliens to contend with?

They walk among us...

Beyond a certain salutary humbling, though, there was the Oxford Way. In those days – things have changed for the better since, I believe – the famous Oxbridge college-based tutorial system was a perfect disguise for some truly terrible teaching and "pastoral" neglect. You generally only hear about the good, life-changing aspects of this set-up. In my own college, for example, many who studied, say, PPE (no, not "personal protective equipment", but "philosophy, politics, and economics") admired their tutors, and some even made lifelong two-way connections with them. But in my experience, and in that of many others, that was very far from the case.

The Oxford Way was a "sink or swim" arrangement, ostensibly because we were assumed to be capable of working unsupervised: a case, I suppose, of "Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown" (Swallows and Amazons). But this chilly neglect of even quite vulnerable and disorientated undergraduates, some of whom did indeed sink, was mainly intended to free as much time as possible for the academic staff to get on with their "real" work, whatever that was: finding cures for deadly and debilitating diseases, say, or editing literary texts, or in some cases not doing terribly much at all.

A humanities undergraduate usually had two tutorial commitments in each week of three very short eight-week terms, in which they would read out an essay to their tutor, along with one or two others of their tutorial group. In the case of many – most? – the need to produce two essays a week with unlimited, unstructured, unsupervised time in between – inevitably taken up with the desire and pursuit of whatever actually turned you on, whether it was friends or music or rowing or theatre or journalism or any one of a hundred ways of evading actual study – was a contradictory combination of pressure and leisure that resulted in a permanent "essay crisis" mode. That is, apart from the library-bound scholarly types who, weirdly, happened to be turned on by their actual degree subject. But, unlike the bracing intellectual jousts of legend, in my experience these weekly all-night lash-ups were generally received with a few perfunctory comments from a tutor who might not even have taken the trouble to, ah, refresh their acquaintance with the particular author's works you had chosen to discuss. And there was definitely no sherry on offer. It was all a bit of a let-down after the exciting intellectual awakenings of the school sixth form.

Worst of all, for English students Anglo-Saxon was compulsory in the first year. Damn, actual work after all! But were any language lessons on offer? Maybe an interactive audio-visual course linked to a novice-friendly textbook of the sort we had become accustomed to at school? Not a chance! You simply had to buy or borrow a copy of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer and grind and groan your way through it: a truly grim task to impose on anyone unfamiliar with the tables of declensions and conjugations of an inflected language (competence in Latin as an entrance requirement had been dropped in 1960).

"Bird"

singular: se fugol, þone fugol, þæs fugles, þæm fugle

   plural: þā fuglas, þā fuglas, þāra fugla, þæm fuglum... 

So there was that. But there was also the tenor of the times, man. For a decade or two after the War, young working and lower-middle class students who were finally able to gain places at university had seen it as an exciting opportunity for social mobility. Regional accents and attitudes were dropped as soon as a stripy college scarf was wrapped around a fresher's neck. Most of our schoolteachers were of that pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed generation – well, the men, anyway – and did not feel like idiots being expected to own and wear an academic gown on formal school occasions. But by the 1970s a lot of us had actually taken on board the anti-establishment, anti-careerist rhetoric of the late-60s counterculture. We rejoiced in our regional accents. We bought no college-branded merch, wore no jackets and ties, grew our hair long and adopted the scruffy jeans-and-dressing-up-box fashions of students everywhere. Finding ourselves standing on a springboard for notable political and academic careers like Balliol, we decided to jump up and down on it instead, like delinquent teens at the swimming pool. Or at least some of us did. We were not a popular generation, and quickly forgotten as an aberration by the university.

Oxford Examination Schools Occupation 1973

(from "Fight For A CSU!" by Fiona Thompson)

Oxford Indian Institute Occupation 1974

In the end, though, whether some life-altering choice you have made is a mistake or a benign miscalculation comes down to the unpredictability of what Brian Eno has called "scenius":

So I have this idea of ‘scenius’. Genius is the brilliance of an individual. Scenius is the fertility of a whole scene of people. So much of art history doesn’t acknowledge that at all. You know, it’s like: Picasso, Kandinsky, Rembrandt, these great individuals. But look at the world that they were in. There were a lot of other great individuals around them, and there were other people who don’t even get called artists, who facilitated. Curators, dealers, critics, people who ran salons, girlfriends, mistresses, wives, children.

At Oxford and Cambridge, divided into many small, self-contained colleges, each with its own history, traditions, and ethos, I think it's probably much more difficult to find a "scene" in which you might thrive than in a more typical university, especially if you have landed in a college that is so uncongenial that you're forced to go looking elsewhere for friends and entertainment. In my time there wasn't even a central Students Union where the like-minded could congregate, the famous Oxford Union being a members-only debating society which most 70s students shunned on principle. 

As fate would have it, though, a good many such peripatetic misfits gravitated to my own college, then headed by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill and famously liberal (apparently it was known as the Hotel Balliol in the stricter colleges, with their "gated" hours and severe disapproval of overnight "guests"). Consequently, I arrived to find there was already a lively scene happening, primarily political and aggressively left-wing. Although it wasn't exactly the sort of scene I had anticipated it was congenial, convenient, and exciting, so I was happy to play a walk-on role in the more histrionic aspects of student politics with its occupations and demonstrations, and as a provider of late-night entertainment and emergency accommodation for the more hedonistically-inclined comrades, square pegs, and oddballs. [3]

In the end, for me, Oxford-plus-English was a "miscalculation" that turned out pretty well, and not the radical mistake it could easily have been. I made little impression there beyond my immediate circle of new friends and antagonists – who does? – but, as Eno points out, the significant beneficiaries of "scenius" are dependent on the unacknowledged participants who do the unglamorous grunt work. Not everybody is prepared to creep around central Oxford in the dark, dodging the police while flyposting with a carrier bag full of wallpaper paste, or to spend the entire night laying-up and sometimes knocking out cover illustrations for the weekly left-wing 'zine, Oxford Strumpet. I was, and it was fun just to feel part of something new and happening, as we used to say.

So, if you, too, had a small part in some "scene" somewhere, some time, you are probably also anticipating with mixed feelings the appearance, some day, of a few familiar names in a roll call of recently-deceased members of the great, the good, and the notorious, like the one above. Alas, poor So-and-So! I knew him / her / them, Horatio! There won't be any point in looking for your own name in the index of any biographies, though: no scene is ever about the also-rans, helpmeets, and temporary expedient friends. But I'm pretty sure that we are the ones who got the most fun out of it.

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –

Not so when I have danced for an hour:

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and

sit in corners alone, and glower.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Scene fragment reconvened, 2004

1. I started this post early in the summer, and the list just keeps getting longer. I suppose it was never going to get shorter, was it? "Hey, I'm back! Just kidding...". I must try to finish it before any of my real senior heroes join it...

2. I do not exaggerate. It would have helped to have had an introductory booklet, explaining the meaning of everyday jargon like "battels", "buttery", "collections", or "handshaking". Perhaps also a few initiatory pointers, such as "be aware that this college has been involved in low-level warfare with the college next door since the 17th century".

3. For a fuller account of all this, see my post The Long 1968.

RA Summer Exhibition 2026

Flat Tyre, by Gavin Turk (Sculpture | Painted bronze)

I gave up on the RA Summer Exhibition some years ago, both as a potential exhibitor and as a visitor. Despite its reputation as one of the traditional peak art-viewing experiences of the year I had never actually been to one before 2017, when on impulse I had successfully submitted a couple of my own digital prints to the show, and naturally went up to London to have a look. In the following few years I was shortlisted a couple of times, but never made it onto the actual wall again. After a few more visits it became clear that the whole thing was in a nosedive of confused priorities – I don't think this was just "sour grapes" talking – a lottery in which the standards of competence which would apply to any "open" submission anywhere else seemed to have been subordinated to the judges' desire to make the RA appear less stodgy and hidebound by "elitist" conventions of art-worthiness. I blame Grayson Perry, the main co-ordinator of the 2018 show, for starting this downhill slide. Frankly, the Summer Exhibition had become hilariously bad, and not worth the price of a train journey to London.

But this summer I was looking for a place to meet up with an old friend in London, the exhibition was in its last weeks, and it seemed like a handy venue, if only for us to have a bit of a laugh at this year's selection and a therapeutic moan about life in general over coffee. I might not think much of the Summer Exhibition, but the RA's cafe facilities are pretty reliable.

The Summer Show is enormous, filling nine huge rooms floor to ceiling with art; 1851 items, to be precise, of all sorts imaginable, but actually mainly 2D wall-hung pictures. Now, there are several things in that previous sentence worth expanding upon. Let's start with "art".

Things have clearly not improved since I decided they had become too bad to bother with. If I had to characterise the show I'd say it was a celebration now not so much of "Sunday painters" (the traditional jibe) but of sixth-form art. By this I mean work by artists whose competence in handling a medium is incommensurate with the earnest intentions motivating it. Typically, these are poorly drawn and composed scenarios, simply filled in with a paint-by-numbers indifference to any painterly properties other than colour. Feigned cack-handedness with paint is fashionable, of course, as I have noted before (see The Last Time I Saw Richard). Many competent artists have adopted this style, presumably as a democratising, dressed-down, faux-naive "spontaneity", but most of those selected from the open submission are authentic native cack-handers, the unvarnished Real Thing.

Take as a representative example these two works by comedian Harry Hill:

What is there to say about these, other than "Don't give up the day job, Harry..."? Notably, though, both have been sold. All submissions are allegedly judged anonymously, so the panel must have agreed on their merits, unaware that they were by everyone's favourite bald ex-medic comedian. All selected work is also hung without names or titles: I wonder, did the buyers know these were by a celebrity before or after looking them up in the catalogue? Or maybe Harry bought them back himself, as a nice way of supporting the RA's activities? If so, well done, Harry.

But then, what about this:

Heh, remember Spirographs? Or have you ever got carried away getting a set of dried-out biros to flow again? But this is "Entangled Bodies" by Conrad Shawcross, a Royal Academician, no less, and it has sold out its edition of fifty at £330 each. I'm not sure what "ink on paper, print" means – it does sound a bit evasive to me – but that's how this is described in the catalogue, so it must mean something. Hopefully not the dreaded and outlawed variety of "giclée", though, i.e. an original work scanned and marketed as a "print".

Or, consider this remarkable effort:

This is "Spot the Missing Letters" by James Kaye Harris, also sold, for a cool £1,200. I'll save you the trouble: the missing letters are A R T. Got it now? (No, not "rat" or "tar", fool). As Max Miller used to say, "It's all clever stuff!" And congratulations to the new owner: you can anticipate years of visual pleasure ahead gazing at this wonderfully cryptic conversation piece, and what an investment!

The man in the blue shirt is about 6' 3" tall (~190cm); 

the tiny grey painting top left ("Soft Monsters" by Yewon Lee) is 20cm square...

Next to consider from that sentence (surely you haven't forgotten about the sentence?) we have "floor to ceiling". The so-called "academy hang" is a traditional feature of the Summer Exhibition, but surely one of its worst. Faced with hundreds of small-to-medium sized pictures of no particular distinction or coherence, the temptation to treat them as elements in an interior decoration scheme is clearly irresistible. But how frustrating must it be, to have your little picture selected from the thousands submitted – hooray! – only to find it hung 10 or even 20 feet above ground, and rendered invisible by the reflections of the lighting in the glass? You'd need a ladder or binoculars to get a proper look at it. Or, just as bad, to have your quietly toned etching overwhelmed, jig-sawed into a matrix of attention-grabbing shapes and colours? Come on, you Academy judges: why not break with tradition, and select fewer, better pictures, and hang them with the respect they deserve?

Although it's true that a closer examination does not do some of these pictures any favours:

Um, great stuff... And yet two of them have sold: in the middle "High Jump", a lithograph by Peter McDonald (£1,100 framed as seen plus two from the edition at £960 each) and on the right "Trees Connecting the Past to the Present" by Paul Broomhead (£500). Truly there is no accounting for taste (and I am clearly under-pricing my own work). This room was hung by artist Oona Grimes, who – now I come to look at her own work – may well have chosen these as the sort of fun pix she could enjoy playing around with.

Then, finally, there is the physical challenge of those nine enormous rooms. My phone's step recorder tells me I walked the equivalent of over five miles that day, most of which will have been inside the Royal Academy. Admittedly, I'm in my 70s and my stamina is not what it was, but that's a respectable walk at any age, and I think you can be forgiven for starting to feel "arted out" beyond the halfway stage. After that, it all becomes a bit of a blur and a literal pain in the neck, and what you mainly want is to head for a chair, a cup of coffee, and a chat. Which is what we did.

So didn't you see anything you liked, Mr. Sour-Grapes? Well, yes, I did, but it was hard to spot buried amongst all the colour-forward dross, and doubtless I overlooked many things I might have admired under better circumstances. Anything in the last couple of rooms didn't stand a chance. I didn't photograph much, but there were two works in series that caught my eye.

First, a set of mock eye-test charts by Ron Arad RA, this one a "Duchamp Eye Test", hung in a row next to Warhol, Wilde, and Picasso versions of the same familiar chart layout. TBH, it was the size and shape, the layered transparent colours, and the quasi-Japanese brush-strokes that appealed to me as much as the conceit of a quotation rendered in ever-smaller rows of letters. Clever, sure, but random letters could have worked for me just as well.

image from Opera Gallery

Then there was a set of twenty-five "Golden Puja Tanmatras" by Stephen Cox RA, made from Indian basalt and gold leaf:

I had no idea what these were all about when I came across them: I just thought they were rather attractive. But, apparently, the "Tanmatras are the fundamental sensory perceptions of humans. The five Tanmatras correspond to the five senses: hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. Each Tanmatra is also associated with a specific element (Mahabhuta), giving them a central role in Ayurveda philosophy and in yoga." So, there you go: make of that what you will. I confess that, at the time, I thought the ones with ears were meant to be monkeys, and rather enjoyed that misapprehension... As I say, there's no accounting for taste.

One last thing. Since (I think?) 2019 the RA's Summer Exhibition co-ordinator has been asked to declare a theme. This year it was Ryan Gander, who stated:

The 2026 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition’s theme is Interconnectedness. It will aim to explore ideas of entanglement, as well as the unexpected and fortuitous connections and associations between disparate things, no matter how abstract or illogical. Proof that, as humans, our outputs hold more commonality than separation, without us intentionally seeking it.

Really? I saw very little evidence of this in the works selected. Complex scribbles maybe, but cars on fire? A pole vaulter? Silly wordplay? I don't think so. Besides, pretty much all of the "name" artists whose work I recognised were simply showing their latest versions of the same-old same-old: that's how I was able to recognise them! Just between ourselves, whisper it, I think the judges simply picked the ones they liked, and paid little or no attention to any "theme"... Don't tell Ryan. But you do have to feel sorry for anyone who did try to interpret the idea of "interconnectedness" in a creative way and lost out to... Well, can anyone explain to me the sort of "interconnectedness" expressed by the print "Jamie Lee Curtis" on the wall above? Or of the one to its left, that cartoonish Simpsons-style portrait? Go on, why not have a go!

Oh, I nearly forgot. Another old friend had alerted me to a standout piece that I didn't manage to encounter myself. It was probably obscured by an admiring crowd. Here is its page on the RA website:

Genius. I'm not surprised it took two artists to come up with it. How could the RA not show it? It simply screams "Interconnectedness!" And, incredibly, it's still unsold. I mean, "One bottle of San Benedetto still water, label removed" for just £10,000? There really is no accounting for taste.

Phew, What A Scorcher!

In case it's lost on you, the title of this post is the traditional tabloid front-page splash headline to mark a couple of days of hot weather in a typically wet and mild British summer. But so far this year we have had a succession of five designated "heatwaves", and most of the UK is now officially in drought. This is distinctly not normal. If I hear another idiot say, "If this is climate change, bring it on!", I will... Well, let's not be specific. We don't want "premeditation" added to the charge sheet.

Never mind two days of "scorcher" somewhere in mid-August, it has now been too hot and too dry since May, with no end in sight. I sat my university final exams in the famously hot and dry summer of 1976 – eight (or was it nine?) three-hour papers sweltering in "subfusc" (a black suit with white tie, plus academic cap and gown) – and it was nothing like as bad as this, and all I have to do now is write the odd blog post and venture out for a walk and a bit of shopping in shorts and sandals. For the first time ever I am using sunscreen: that's how bad it is. Others have it far worse, of course: it's hard to imagine losing your entire home and belongings to a wildfire, especially in the knowledge that it was sparked by irresponsible or even deliberate behaviour.

These harshly bright and contrasty conditions are never ideal for photography and, besides, who wants to lug a camera around in such heat for essentially unrewarding results? This is where a phone comes into its own and, even on those occasions when I did actually put a camera in my bag, it was the phone I pulled out of my pocket more often than not. I think you'd be hard-pressed to tell which were taken with which, though, in this little gallery of Summer So Far photographs.

West Bexington, Dorset

Bristol Downs, green grass reduced to felted straw

Fishing on Clevedon Pier, North Somerset

Clevedon Pier

Jubilee Gardens, Belvedere Road, London

Forde Abbey, Dorset

Morcombelake, Dorset

Chesil Beach from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

(and, yes, the sea really was that amazing Mediterranean colour)

St. Catherine's Chapel from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

Thanks, but when I said it's so hot I fancy a cone...

(Abbotsbury Gardens)

Southern view from our Bristol flat's kitchen

Slightly later western view from the kitchen

(Get on with the cooking, Mike, you can't eat gaudy sunsets...)

On the early evening of 12th August we had the very rare spectacle of an almost complete solar eclipse (92.55% in Southampton). There won't be another one here for 80 years; I doubt I'll be very interested by then. TBH a  partial eclipse is a fairly underwhelming spectacle, anyway, unless you're properly set up and situated to see the solar disc being covered up without permanently damaging your eyesight, especially when it's happening low in the sky, not long before sunset. It occurred to me to wonder how many folk were walking around with impaired vision in ancient times, having gazed for far too long at the uncanny solar spectacle taking place overhead. I was also surprised by how few commentators remarked on the absurdly mind-blowing coincidence that the moon and sun are exactly the same size when observed from our planet. I mean... Wow, WTF, man?

But, as it happened, we didn't have to go far to see what was going on in a surprising and moderately spectacular fashion. In fact, we simply stepped outside the front door and gazed at the walls of the houses on the opposite side of the road, where multiple images of the sun were being pinholed and projected by the leaves on the trees behind our house.

 No cardboard, sticky tape, or mirrors required. Unlike our eclipse craft project last time round, on holiday in Norfolk in August 1999. Happy days!

image: The National Archives, cat. ref. MFQ 1/712