Matchmaking

While the world goes mad, swooning over the nonsense taking place in London today, I have nonetheless been grateful for (yet another) day off work, so I can get on with putting together a book of my "university walls & windows" photographs.

It's a severe discipline, editing a picture sequence. Matches which seemed made in heaven must be put asunder (sorry, for some reason marriage vocabulary is leaking into my brain from somewhere) in the interests of the wider whole. Some favourite images won't make the final cut, because they don't fit, or seem to send the sequence in unwanted directions -- an image can actually be too good or too self-contained for a book.



This is a screen shot of me using BookSmart this afternoon, the (free) Blurb book composition software (yes, I am still using Windows XP at home). It makes the whole business of viewing page spreads and sequences so much easier. I used to make 6"x4" prints and assemble them in a "landscape" slip-in photo album, and it was a lot of work. Worst of all, it worked against wanting ever to change your mind, once parts of the book were assembled -- the frustration of simply moving everything up a page was immense. It reminded me of work in the days before PCs (ever typed an office memo with carbon-paper copies? Those were not the days). With BookSmart you can tinker endlessly.

I have a pool of 400 plus photographs to draw on: of these, about 150 are in the "select" category, i.e. resized and saved as JPEG files, ready for use in BookSmart. As I think I've said before, I'm keen to keep the book to 80 pages (it will keep the price down) and am using paired, facing images. That means the final book will have something like 100 images in it, which is a lot.

Both of these are useful constraints. It's too easy to let a book grow into a baggy monster by simply adding more and more. Also, creating suitable pairs and then ordering them into a satisfying order demands a lot more attention to the flow and "narrative" of the book than the usual "blank page / photo / blank page / photo" arrangement, not least because the book's viewers will have no choice but to notice that I'm up to something a little more sophisticated than just shovelling the pictures in. I hope so, anyway. I suspect most photo-book users pay little or no attention to the ordering of the images, which is a pity, given the effort that will have gone into it.

So, I'm set for the extra long weekend, and almost hoping for rain. An odd stretch of days this, with royalist pomp and circumstance at one end and May Day marches at the other. I must re-read Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" sometime soon...

Other Arches Are Available

There are other substantial bits of transport infrastructure near St. Catherine's Hill, in addition to the romantic abandoned viaduct. Two large underpasses go under the elevated motorway; one allows the B3335 to pass beneath, the other carries the River Itchen on its way to the old water meadows beyond.

They're less obviously photogenic, but that only makes them more interesting.

Home Art Gone

Today is the day traditionally assigned as the day of William Shakespeare's birth in 1564, and also his death in 1616.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun;
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!

Cymbeline, Act 4, scene ii (for DJO)

Good Friday

I live on the mountain
no one knows.
Among white clouds
eternal perfect silence

Han Shan, Cold Mountain Poems, no. XCV (trans. J.P. Seaton)




When men see Han-shan
They all say he's crazy
And not much to look at
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don't get what I say
& I don't talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
"Try and make it to Cold Mountain."

Gary Snyder, Cold Mountain Poems 24

Hot Tub In The Rain

I have mentioned that we have been returning annually at Easter to the Welsh Borders for over thirty years. Quite a lot has changed in that time.

In the 1970s this upland area was, despite -- or perhaps because of -- its proximity to the lush English borderlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire, isolated and surprisingly "backward". Tumble-down farms without electricity, and ancient, muddy men in string-tied coats who had retreated to the one habitable room in their timber-framed farmhouse were commonplace. If you have read Bruce Chatwin's novel On The Black Hill, you will know how it was. There was a strong sense of a pre-WW2 Britain.

Indeed, if you have an affinity for such things, you can still sense a continuity with the standing stones, burial mounds and hillforts that litter the place, often used as the basis of improvised shelters for livestock, combined with rattling sheets of corrugated iron and flapping feed bags. It is a place where History telescopes in and out quite dramatically.

In those days, the many second-hand shops in towns like Llandrindod Wells and Presteigne were Aladdin's Caves of Victoriana. As farmers died and farms were cleared, large quantities of crockery, ornaments, books and furniture emerged into daylight, and were carted off to the nearest market town. My partner having a weakness for Victorian plates, and me having a weakness for books and bizarrerie, we spent many happy rainy-day hours rummaging through the heaped boxes and bookshelves in damp back rooms.

In the intervening years, much has changed. Things like quad-bikes and EEC grants have rejuvenated hill-farming, and many younger farmers are bravely trying to make a business out of what is, at heart, a way of life. But the main agent of change has been a steady influx of incomers, especially those in pursuit of alternative lifestyles and "quality of life". For all its remoteness, it has always been remarkably easy to buy organic wholemeal bread and even tofu in the Welsh Marches. Galleries, craft shops, meditation centres and the like are easier to find than a Post Office. Large properties with land have been relatively cheap, and communities of sophisticated, like-minded settlers are scattered everywhere.



This last week, we had an odd encounter. The Prof and I drove out to a pretty valley in the hills, where we intended to do a modest circular walk in the rain. Now, though we've walked for recreation most of our lives, we have never been "lifestyle" walkers, and have always found amusement in the people you encounter on long-distance paths like Offa's Dyke, kitted out with matching cagoules, gaiters, and those preposterous ski-pole type sticks people have started using, often with one in each hand. To be honest, we probably look more like a couple of tramps, in our battered wellies and improvised multiple layers of clothing, than public-sector professionals on vacation.

As we came out of a muddy field onto a track, we noticed up ahead that a farmer had recently built a little cluster of some truly ugly, wooden chalet-style holiday lets in a field. As we came nearer, I could hear music, which gradually resolved itself into the unmistakable, plangent sound of Adele singing "Someone Like You". And then, as we passed one of the little chalets, we saw something amazing: a naked couple sat in a garden hot tub, drinking wine with the stereo pointed out of the window, as the gentle rain fell and the sheep grazed.

I'm no Martin Parr, so I didn't have the nerve to get the truly brilliant shot that lay before me. Besides, we were giggling so much I doubt I could have held the camera steady (MP, of course, would have blasted the scene with his flash, then pretended to be looking up at the hillside). Another one that got away. Ah, well.

Ones That Get Away

It was good weather for colour photography last week -- overcast with occasional light rain and occasional soft sunshine, just right -- and I got some "pleasing but predictable" images. Hey, I was on holiday, not working for National Geographic, get off my case!

But if I ever needed a demonstration of why I'm not working for National Geographic, I got two. The first happened as we were walking across a field just below the brow of a hill. My hearing is not great these days, but I started to hear a strange pulsing noise, something like a cross between a hairdryer and an old-fashioned lawn mower. Just as I formed the words "What the...?" in my mind, a huge prop-driven aircraft came up from behind the hill, about 50 feet off the ground, and travelling at the speed of a fast bicycle. It was surreal.

The plane was clearly military, painted grey all over, and completely unmarked. No insignia, no numbers, no nothing. It was also very quiet, given it passed close enough overhead for me to count the rivets (that's a figure of speech -- I didn't actually count the rivets). We just watched open-mouthed as it hugged the ground and passed slowly into the next valley. We are used to jet aircraft screaming out of nowhere, but this was new; it was like something out of a Miyazaki anime movie.

On reflection, it was probably the SAS rehearsing their next humiliating encounter with pitchfork-wielding yokels. They were probably lost and looking for a phone booth (does their brand need urgent repositioning, or what?). But, more importantly: did I take a photograph? Did it even occur to me to get a camera out? Don't ask.




The second demonstration came at the end of a walk, in those final minutes as you amble back to the car, and start to contemplate a nice cup of tea. We passed through a churchyard, and I thought some of the monuments, especially the angels seen from behind, looked interesting against the landscape. I was tired, and took a couple of perfunctory snaps, without even checking the camera settings. Only today, as I go through the haul, do I realise how close I came to something really interesting. But: aperture wide open, shutter speed slow, focus off... All I have are some blurry, "what if..." pictures. Maybe next time.

Sunshine & Showers

Contrary to appearances, I've been away most of this week in Mid-Wales. It's handy the way Blogger will let you schedule posts in the future -- it keeps things ticking over. I'll get around to reading any comments as soon as I can.

Unfortunately, the week began with some appalling and tragic news from the family of one of my oldest friends; please don't ask, as I'm not going to talk about it here. However, the reverberations from this devastating bombshell continue, and I keep catching myself brooding about families and relationships, mortality and rebirth, and the way we all try to steer a steady course through a constant bombardment of surprises and setbacks. The imperative to "keep on keeping on" can sound idiotic, but it's all we've got. Gramsci's stoical formula -- "optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect" -- is the best anyone has to offer on the subject, I'm afraid.

It may be my puritan soul speaking here, but it seems to me that there is a profundity about Bad News with which the joy of Good News can rarely compete. Good News is generally about beginnings, hopes, and sometimes well-deserved success, though the best Good News is always a miraculous escape or an unexpected, life-changing gift. Good News, as we all know, is relatively rare, and its effects are short-lived; it's a counter-intuitive experience, and the fear of "tempting fate" through enjoying good fortune is deeply ingrained (at least, in those of us of Scottish descent).

Bad News is what most of us have come to expect, and is usually about endings, frustration, or disappointment. But the very worst Bad News has the dispiriting effect of confirming the futility of our best efforts, and invests the world with a malevolence; it underlines the fact that catastrophe will, one day, overtake us all. To keep on keeping on can come to seem overwhelmingly pointless. Despite our love for new things, fresh starts, rebirth, and the remarkable persistence of life in an indifferent universe, I suppose our hearts can't ignore the deeper, levelling tug of entropy.

Easter, of course, is all about this tussle between life and death, decay and resurrection. I have always found the idea of the Christian Easter ritual of Tenebrae very moving, in which candles are extinguished during the night-time service, one by one, until the last one is concealed beneath the altar, leaving the church in darkness. A bible is slammed shut, and then the single lit candle is returned to the altar, and everyone leaves in silence. As a piece of symbolic theatre, it's hard to beat. That astonishing piece of polyphony, Allegri's Miserere, was composed specifically for this service in the Sistine Chapel, and it was long forbidden to perform it anywhere else or to transcribe it. Famously, the 12 year-old Mozart wrote it down from memory in April 1770, after one hearing, leading to its publication in England by Charles Burney in 1771.

The view from my bedroom on Monday

Anyway. April in Wales is a season of sunshine and showers, of sudden transfiguring sunlight and brooding hilltop clouds (though, as it happens, we've had an unusually dry winter across Britain, and drought threatens). It's good to pull on some boots and walk across an open landscape for no better reason than the pleasure of it. As I said to the owner of our holiday let, to my amazement I had realised that we've been coming to the area once known as "Radnorshire" every year at Easter for over thirty years now. We like it. I expect and hope that we'll be back next year.

Five Finger Exercises

There's an old joke that I like very much, which can be varied to taste. A man is walking along the street in New York and asks a musician in the street, "Can you tell me how I can get to Carnegie Hall?" The musician answers, "Practice, baby, practice!" Sometimes the musician is a classical virtuoso like Jascha Heifetz, sometimes it's a jazz legend like Miles Davis, and sometimes it's just a busker, but the answer is always the same: "Practice!"

It seems most aspiring artists, of whatever stripe, choose to ignore the significance of practice -- it's boring, it's too much like work, it requires an uncongenial level of self-discipline. That's why most aspirants, however talented, never get to Carnegie Hall. They prefer to believe in (and blame) luck. But, in the retort also attributed to various "lucky" bastards, "It seems the more I practice, the luckier I get!"




It's no different with photography. You can't expect to see pictures unless you constantly practice visualising them, and you can't expect to capture the pictures you see unless you constantly practice using the camera. It's that simple; it's like playing scales, or sketching. Except, of course, it's nowhere near as boring.

Now, I don't know where the photo equivalent of Carnegie Hall is, and I also know that, wherever it is, I won't be going there any time soon. But, like the busker in the joke, I'm here to tell you to "Practice, baby, practice!" Get out there and take some pictures.

Animals Inside

Longer-term readers of this blog may recall a post from June last year (Snails in Outer Space) in which I was startled by an exhibition of work which closely resembled some of my own. I attributed the resemblance to a sort of "morphic resonance" (see the post Blogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home from way back in 2008), whereby the same ideas are bubbling under all over the photographic world, and then emerge simultaneously in various places, like cicadas.

Well, perhaps not surprisingly, it's happened again. This time, it is the exhibition and book, "Animals are Outside Today", by Colleen Plumb. When my kids were small and my interest in photography beginning to grow, I found that I was taking a lot of pictures that featured toy animals, or animals in zoos and museums, and became fascinated by the way these ambassadors of wildness had found themselves imprisoned in these domesticated scenarios (yes, thank you, Dr. Freud, we'll let you know). It was, I suppose, my first real "project"; as a consequence, it wasn't terribly good.



This all came about in the time before digital, of course, and most of the images are on 35mm film. I did scan quite a few, but scanning gets old pretty quickly, once you've started to use a digital camera. It's a tedious process with mixed results, at best. I still like some of the individual images, though. But they are now so associated with what now seems like such a very long time ago -- a time when toy animals would turn up arranged in parties and patterns all over the house, or a weekend visit to the local zoo was an Event -- that I almost don't feel I "own" them any more; it's as if someone else took them.




As another example, Paul Graham's new book Films will surely strike a similarly (morphically) resonant chord with many. Who hasn't toyed with the idea of making a set of pictures with those attractive pointilliste colour fields that you see, either using a grain focusser in the darkroom, or at a 100% view in Photoshop? But it seems that Paul Graham didn't, like everyone else, make a few and then think, "Nah, too easy..." Maybe he's running on empty, and looking for a new direction? Or maybe he's had the courage to go all the way down a road that many have contemplated, but few have dared follow?

In a way, that's the essence of "morphic resonance", if that's not too pretentious a term, in this context: many people seem have the same ideas at the same time, but most of us distrust our instincts, and only a few pioneers take the leap into practice. Thereafter, of course, the idea is obvious and available to everyone, and is doomed to become a commonplace. Bluetits pecking the tops off milk bottles? So last century.

April is the Busiest Month

A busy few weeks ahead, as I try to work around the ridiculous run of public holidays coming up -- April is one long holiday this year. And can Easter get any later than this? Posts will be thin, I'm afraid.

As a non-royalist, I'm contemplating the best response to the wedding. Maybe we should demand the right to work on the "extra" bank holiday, a sort of anti-strike? I'm not a militant anti-royalist, more like those peasants in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, unaware that they even had a king ("Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government").



Isn't it odd, how startling originality quickly becomes a commonplace? I think by now probably most people think that "April is the cruellest month" is a piece of folk wisdom, which probably has something to do with tax returns. It's possible, of course, that they're right.

The Necessary Subject

An interesting exchange between photographers John Gossage and Lewis Baltz, part of a joint interview by Monte Packham, which you can read in full on the American Suburb X blog:

"LB: I think this is one thing we have in common: that the subject of the work is the person looking at it. If you want to get a little more Zen about it, the subject is necessary for the completion of the work.

JG: Yes.

LB: And the intellectual or imaginative engagement of the viewer is what makes the work finally a work. And if you interpose another human in the work, then he or she becomes the subject, which I think is too simplistic.

JG: I think it’s to be used incredibly sparingly and delicately.

MP: Do you see yourselves as the first protagonists when you take photos, so that you are actually the subjects of the work?

JG: No. The work isn’t autobiographical, at least not intentionally.

LB: That’s another ‘chasing the tail’ thing. In a sense everything you do is autobiographical, even the decision to be objective is subjective and so on. But if you place us next to any kind of work that’s ‘subjective’ or ‘autobiographical’ you see immediately that we’re not about that. It’s not about our journeys through the world; it’s about a universe we’re trying to look into."

I know, I know, my pictures couldn't be less like Gossage or Baltz in either intent or execution if I tried. But I admire their work, and it's always interesting to hear intelligent voices discussing and edging jokily around the most important subjects.

Wondermark

I knew I should have heeded the warning, he was totally upfront about it. But I went and read Ctein's post on "My Favorite Web Comics" and have paid the price. I think Wondermark, by David Malki, is superb -- try this one, and if you find it funny start hitting the "random" button, and say goodbye to your evening. If you liked the old Punch caption competitions, based on Victorian and Edwardian cartoons, you'll love it.

Several of the others mentioned by Ctein are pretty good, too. So much talent given away free of charge on the Web. Makes you wonder why on earth the Guardian still employs the radically unfunny Steve Bell. Are they hoping that one day (a) he'll learn to draw and/or (b) recover his 1980s Falklands-era form?

Viaduct VII

A couple more pictures from Sunday at the Viaduct.

As it happens, these ones were taken with the Olympus E-P1, which I had reboxed for resale several months ago. What with one thing and another, it had remained parked in its box under my table ever since, and I felt like taking it out for a trot. Somehow the elapsed time has made the hole in my wallet feel less acute.

The sharpness of the photographs is not entirely convincing, though this may be the result of combining Panasonic in-lens and Olympus in-body image stabilisation; one or the other probably ought to have been turned off. I guess some more tests are in order. On the plus side, I always like Olympus colours. And cameras have personalities -- I like to give them a chance to show what they do best, rather than nail them to a tripod and insist on doing it "my way".







As I think about it currently, I am doing several things with these pictures:

• Trying to give a sense of the presence of an abandoned man-made landscape feature which is too large to photograph in its entirety;
• Letting the formal idea of "arches" and "spans" inform the imagery.
• Trying to capture the "here-ness" of a particular place.
• Playing my usual games with scale and spatial relationships.
• Relating the Viaduct to the cluster of prominent landscape features nearby -- the M3 motorway, the Twyford Down cutting, St. Catherine's Hill, the River Itchen and the "Itchen Navigation" canal.
• Giving myself a reason to get out of the house at the weekend, and a creative focus. For example, one day soon (?) I will get up at the crack of dawn and be there on top of the viaduct -- with a stepladder -- to capture the long arched shadows of the viaduct cast across the Itchen's meadows at sunrise. I know they're there because the Google satellite image shows them!

N.B. I had a notable failure on Sunday, which was photographing the motorway bridge over the river, which runs parallel to the Viaduct. I had wanted to capture the blur of a large articulated lorry seen through the tangle of branches, but traffic was light that afternoon. Why? Because I was going to title the post "Why A Truck". Heh. Another time.

Viaduct VI

Another Sunday afternoon wandering about on, under, and around the arches at Hockley Viaduct. The spring sunshine came and went, and rain threatened but never fell. Most of the time I was whistling (attempting to whistle) the Aria of the Goldberg Variations, or singing (attempting to sing) the theme from the Sharpe TV series, "Over the Hills and Far Away". I have no idea why. It's what I do when I'm out on my own, trying to get "in the zone".

Oh, What Can It Mean?

I've been off work Thursday and Friday, feeling unwell. I've been burning a lot of plates at both ends, spinning a lot of candles in the air, and generally mixing my metaphors; never a good idea. It's finally given me a sore throat and a splitting headache. As I'm normally up at 6:30 (a.m. these days, sadly) just those couple of extra hours in bed are enough to take me into Oddly Meaningful Reverie territory. Once, I would spend most of the daylight hours wandering around in there, my favourite form of exercise. Given half a chance my daughter would, too. She has inherited that idle daydream-believer gene.

Thursday morning, I found myself inwardly contemplating a colour scheme. A table-cloth, in large pastel-coloured squares. Then a sort of bold pattern of hooped stripes, running round a cylinder. Very bold, same colours as the table-cloth -- pink, yellow and green. A roll of sweets. Pastel-coloured round tablets, with a concave surface. Smooth on the tongue, then fizzy... What the hell were they called? The effort of trying to remember the name brought to mind a sequence of corner-shop sweets, packaged in a similar way: Smarties, Fruit Pastilles, Fruit Gums, Rollo, Munchies, Spangles, Love Hearts, Trebor Mints, Polos, Fruit Polos... No, none of the above.

Then my inner eye was distracted by the large glass jars of loose sweets on the high shelf behind the counter. Sherbet Flying Saucers, Liquorice Allsorts, Dolly Mixtures, Murray Mints, Chocolate Rainbow Drops, Sweet Peanuts, Aniseed Balls, Cough sweets, and various other soft, hard, moulded, dusty, fuzzy, lemony, and medicinal-looking lozenges I never quite got around to trying. So many sweets, so little pocket money!

Yeah, yeah... Sweets, sweetshops, childhood, nostalgia, etc. I can go there any day. But what were those concave fizzy things called? Not knowing and not being able to remember steered me into some more unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Frequently, these days, I'm getting these "senior moments" when the names of things seem to come adrift from the things themselves. If I am destined to get dementia in old age, I expect this is how it will start. For all I know, it may already have started.




When I finally roused myself and started stumbling around the house, I asked my partner, working at her laptop in the kitchen, if she knew what these sweets were called I'd been dreaming about, and described them, but she gave me The Look. One of the reasons our life together works is that she doesn't put up with any of my nonsense. There is an entire alternative life story, probably spent dreaming in bed, which that Look has saved me from. My life may not have turned out quite as I'd imagined -- whose does? -- but I dread to think what might have happened if I'd managed to hook up with another lazy daydreamer. It was a silly question, anyway: in the families of the professionally moral middle-classes, kids didn't spend their time with noses pressed against the glass display of confectionery in the local cornershop honing their connoisseurship of brands, flavours and trends, consumers in training.

In the end, Google saved me. Refreshers! Of course. How could I possibly have forgotten? Good question, but I don't think I'm a candidate for the brain scan quite yet.

Diagram Awards

You've probably heard of the Darwin Awards, awarded posthumously to those idiots who have successfully and often spectacularly removed themselves from the gene pool simply by exercising their own poor judgment. Funny as these can be, there's something more than a little adolescent about revelling in tragic mishaps, however, and after a while it simply becomes depressing.

Other awards are available, of course -- the Ig Nobel prizes "for improbable research" are a Silly Season fixture beloved by hard-pressed media editors everywhere, and the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award always attracts a lot of attention, for obvious reasons. But for something a little quieter and more sophisticated, you might want to know about the less well-known Diagram Award from The Bookseller magazine, awarded to the book published in the previous year with the strangest title.



The contemporary taste for ironic or deadpan humorous titles in recent times has somewhat taken the wind out of the Diagram Award's sails. For an odd title to be truly noteworthy it has to be unintentionally funny, obviously. On the face of it, for example, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification is a real contender, but is actually an artist's book, disappointingly short on the kind of taxonomical identification marks that might have founded a new hobby of "trolley spotting". The attention-grabbing title of A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian served merely to bring the attention of likely readers to what is actually a good comic novel. The spoilsport authors of such titles have shot the Diagram's fox, so to speak.

Previous winners of the prize have included Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes. But few can compete, to my taste, with a mere runner up from last year, Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich. Simply superbly strange. And all of these have the added spice of being sober books on genuine subjects.

Computering

Have you got a smartphone? I don't. I don't particularly want one either -- I think I'm probably too old, now. I like having separate devices for separate jobs, in the same way I like getting my gas from a company with "gas" rather than "electricity" in its name. I know, I know, convergence, convenience, interoperability, mash-up, blah, blah. But, listen, if you do have a smartphone, have you any idea how much trouble you're causing me, with your frivolous desire to twirl data around with a fingertip, or flip through apps like someone trying to get something nasty off the screen?

Let me explain. As I enter the final straight (strait?) of my employed life and can see the finishing line marked "retirement" approaching, I begin to realise I have lived through an extraordinary period in human history. Well, sure, OK, who hasn't? But, just as our grandparents were born into a world without aircraft and ended up having bombs dropped on them from a great height, so those of us who were not "born digital" are entitled to feel things may be getting out of hand.

When I was at college in the 70s, it goes without saying that no-one had a personal computer, but -- get this, kids -- no-one had a phone, either. No, really! If you wanted to know if someone was going to be around at 9 o'clock tonight, you either had to plan ahead, or simply go round to their house and find out. I would make one phone call a week, back home to my parents from a payphone next to the college bar. Now, when I cross the campus, I seem to be walking through a permanent all-day mass telephone conversation, with students at every turn talking on phones and gesticulating like TV news correspondents rehearsing a piece to camera.

Well, apparently, with the coming of these new-fangled smartphones, a lot of students now want to use them as well as (or even instead of) their laptop as their primary platform for communications of all kinds. So, because the university likes to see itself as responsive to the "student experience", and feels that we may have fallen behind in this respect, I and various other substantially better-informed techno-types have been summoned from our dark, cabled caves to put a smartphone offering together in a hurry.

As an English graduate with linguistic and artistic tendencies, I do not have the typical profile of a person with IT responsibilities, especially nowadays when you can actually take a degree in Computering. But, back in the day, almost anyone could find themselves in charge of a "system", and a roomful of green screens. Libraries have been in many ways pioneers in the adoption of automation, and I found myself in such a position in the mid-1980s.

Those were exciting times. The first micro-computers had begun to appear, but most serious computing involved "dumb" terminals (text only, typically green or orange on black, no graphics, no mouse, no software, no memory, no nothin') permanently connected to a host computer which performed all the heavy lifting. I remember sharing an office with our library mini-computer -- a steel box about the size of a large refrigerator, with a row of incrementally blinking lights and fans loud enough to inhibit any conversation, connected via two permanent leased telephone lines to a VAX mainframe in Bristol. The only souvenirs I now have of it are the two tiny padlocks that prevented any idiot trying to make a call with the telephone handsets that sat on top of the cabinet. Oh, and tinnitus.

In those days you could get a long way with not very much. I got the very first IBM PC in the library, a twin floppy disk model with no hard drive and 640K of RAM (640K!), a completely freestanding item of equipment like a typewriter, with all the hi-tech design flair of a 1970s caravan. Having grappled with WordPerfect and the like, I decided on a whim to teach myself to program with GW-BASIC.

You could get a wonderful little hand-lettered, spiral-bound guide from Cambridge University Press by Donald Alcock called Illustrating BASIC that told you everything you needed to know. It was very reminiscent of those hands-on, can-do alternative lifestyle manuals like John Muir's How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, if you remember them. To my surprise, I discovered I had an aptitude, and got stuck in. My life changed.

Without a graphical interface, of course, programming was both very simple and very free of constraints -- you made it up from scratch every time. You didn't use vast ready-made libraries of handy routines written by experts, you had to figure it out and write it yourself. If you wanted to sort data, hey, you wrote yourself a sort subroutine. It was very empowering, and a lot of fun. The association with alternative lifestyles was not misleading -- a lot of misfits found their niche via IT, and the early days of the Web in the 1990s, especially, were like a second coming of the late 60s. It didn't last of course, once the graphical dead hand of Microsoft Windows and the Apple Mac imposed businesslike conformity on everything. The "open source" movement is a last vestige of that pioneer impulse.

Anyway. Since those years I have noticed what seems to be a characteristic experience of modern technological life. That is, every few years you discover you've not been paying attention, and have missed out on some crucial new development, and then have to spend a week or two catching up in a hurry. It happens to everyone -- we're all such specialists these days -- but no-one likes to admit it. That's why sales of books with titles like "Teach Yourself Utopian Turtletop 3.0 in 24 Hours" are so healthy. A true geek will always prefer to read a manual or handbook in private to the humiliation of attending a course.

This time, for me, it's "Web Services". The use of XML as a lingua franca for web commerce (WSDL, SOAP, and all that) had passed me by, until now. In the library world, we get by pretty well without it -- we have long-established standards for data exchange which have suited us very well, and regular HTTP/HTML/CGI has been a pretty good platform for public interactions. That is, until those pesky students decided they'd like to look things up and get notices about their overdue books on their darned smartphones.

Never mind. From my perspective, it does seem like an appalling diversion, to have to read several 200 page manuals just so that information which is perfectly freely available on the Web can be pumped out to some rich kid's smartphone. Not least because the estimate is that only 25% of students have smartphones, and also because there are multiple, different smartphone platforms to accommodate. But, as always, the alternative is to be left high and dry by the crowd moving on to the next Big Thing. It doesn't do to wish things away. I remember, when I was being trained in the use of HTML, being told not to use graphics in webpages -- according to the instructor they were a distraction and an unnecessary burden on bandwidth. Oh, really?

Ignoring the trends can have very negative consequences. The supplier of that original, VAX-based library management system failed to spot the trend towards Unix as an operating system for platform-independent systems, and as a direct result went out of business. My office wall is furnished with the beautifully-produced manuals of various obsolete systems, services and languages I had to learn to love in years past. Who now remembers the McDonnell Douglas version of the Pick operating system, hubristically named "Reality", with its clever, data-dictionary-driven, programmable enquiry language, equally hubristically named "English"?

If nothing else, a life in IT teaches you that all things will pass. Plus the knowledge that, underneath even the glossiest, whizziest user interface, it all comes down to pages and pages of plain text coding in the end, laboriously entered at a keyboard in an office somewhere. Writ in water, unfortunately, all of it.

Why A Duck V

A nice Sunday afternoon in late March, what better time for a walk underneath the 33 arches of the Hockley Viaduct? The air was pretty filthy with dust, mist and smoke from a nearby bonfire, but close up it made little difference (and probably improved the third one):











And here's something that happened the other day, a true astronomical harbinger of Spring -- the sun finally made it round the corner into the kitchen, and hit the side of our stainless steel kettle, decorating our as-yet undecorated kitchen wall:

The Waiting Area

One way or another, I've spent a lot of time sitting around in hospitals in the last decade. This is a shame, as I hate hospitals; truly, madly, deeply. But both of our kids have the misfortune to have a chronic condition (Crohn's Disease) that has required periods of hospitalisation and regular checkups with their consultant, so we have had an enforced intimacy with the interior of our local hospital.

This week, for example. My daughter had a checkup scheduled, in that oh-so-amusingly precise way that hospitals use, for 16:20 pm. Effort was expended to uphold our end of the deal honourably. For once, I left the office the second I stopped being paid at 15:00 pm, drove across town to fetch her, dumped our things at home, arrived at the reception desk at 16:19 precisely, and handed over the paperwork. But, as usual, now that we were entirely in its hands, The Hospital seemed to lose any feelings of honour towards us, or the other thirty or so other parents with squirming babies, rampaging toddlers or sullen teenagers already crowded into the "waiting area". We had simply to wait.



At first -- for about twenty minutes -- there were no chairs free. Everyone was hot, fed up, bored, irritable, not least at having to endure the hell that is other people's sick children. Medical staff came and went. Then a name was called, and an enormous tattooed woman who had been spread impressively over two chairs gathered up a child from the "play area", and we got to sit down. Then my daughter was called to be measured and weighed. Another 30 minutes passed.

Now, our consultant is a decent bloke. An affable Pakistani with a dry sense of humour and a genuine, personal interest in "his" kids, the ones like ours that he has been seeing year in, year out since they were first admitted to his care. He constantly pops in and out of his consulting room, badgered on every side by nurses, junior doctors, and administrative staff. He is the walking definition of a Terribly Busy Man. But he seems blissfully unaware of the fug of frustration, as thick as pipe smoke, that is building in the "waiting area" (and presumably thickens every day), and the daggers looked at him every time he emerges and fails to call the next patient. We are, it seems, mere materiel, until our brief moment in the sun.

Hospitals seem to function on the (false) assumption that time is elastic. But, the only elastic element is our time, those of us who have been waiting an hour or two for our appointments. Today, as it turns out, was a good day -- only an hour's wait for a ten minute review, followed by a 40 minute wait for blood samples. Other days have been bad -- it only takes a mislaid form, or an emergency elsewhere in the building, and it can end up feeling like you have been forgotten. And, sometimes, you have been.

I've never been good at anything involving blood. Some years ago, I had to give a blood sample and came over faint and dizzy. The nurse hauled me into an ante-room for a lie down on a bed, and said she'd be back, and not to try to get up before. After a bit the feeling went away, and I began to enjoy the feeling of deep relaxation that follows a dizzy spell. Not being a watch-wearer, I had no way of judging the time that had elapsed. I supposed that I had better wait, as instructed.

Deep relaxation shaded into reverie, which faded into sleep. I was woken, an hour or so later, by a new nurse demanding to know who I was, and why I was there, snoring on the ante-room bed. Apparently the original nurse had forgotten I was there. At the time it seemed unique and amusing, but I now know that hospitals are like vast three-dimensional video games, where the staff are made almost randomly to follow multi-tasking paths that branch off constantly into fresh, more urgent or interesting realities, until the original reason for stepping out into the corridor has been long forgotten.

Meanwhile, in the "waiting area", unhappy people are slowly twisting in the wind, waiting for a call that has begun to seem as improbable as a lottery win.

The Pond

Now this is compulsory viewing. John Gossage talking to Toby Jurovics of the Smithsonian about his landmark photobook The Pond. Look and learn, my friends, look and learn. It's 51 minutes long, so you'll have to set the time aside, but it will be time well spent, if you want to understand the thinking and the process behind what is probably one of the most significant photobooks of the last 20 years. I insist that you watch it.

As it happens, I own two copies of the first edition of The Pond. I was in Hay-on-Wye some years ago (despite being in rural Wales Hay is famous as a centre for second-hand books -- a curious story) and stumbled over them, sitting forlornly on a shelf in one of the back rooms of a bookshop. I'd never heard of John Gossage at the time, and both copies had torn dustjackets, but I was so bowled over by the contents and the graphic appeal of the cover that I bought them both. At £10 each, how could I not? You may hear a reference to the value of these books in the introduction to the Gossage interview. I doubt mine, with their damaged dustjackets, are quite that valuable to a collector, but they are definitely "pension fund" items.

my pond -- the Pentagonal Pool

Talking of pensions, I have been on strike today. Our union, the University and College Union, is trying to bring the employers back to the negotiating table over changes they are unilaterally trying to make to our pension scheme. Grrr. So, I spent 8:00 - 9:30 am this morning standing on a picket line, propping up a placard, and handing out leaflets and waffles.

Waffles? Yes, I was surprised about that, too. But Heidi, one of our colleagues, is Norwegian, and she had made several trays of waffles filled with cream and jam -- apparently in Norway you simply can't have a strike without waffles. Obviously. It does sort of take the militant edge off the occasion ("Care for a waffle, you strike-breaking scab? No, I insist, have two!").

Richard Skelton

Another week, another new musical enthusiasm. I came across references to Richard Skelton on Andrew Ray's consistently excellent blog Some Landscapes. Skelton seems to be the musical equivalent of a "land artist" like Richard Long or Andy Goldsworthy, making site-specific musical works captured from and inspired by the landscape, using instruments that have been allowed to weather outdoors, with some ambient sounds, although the music is actively composed / constructed rather than passively captured "soundscapes".

If it sounds a bit hippyish, well, it is. And none the worse for that, from where I'm sitting. If you have a taste for long-form, minimalist, solemn, ambient, modal music which really does seem to emanate from a very British engagement with landscape, you should give him a listen. Think "the Third Ear Band meet Michael Nyman on the way over the moor to Thomas Tallis's house". A bit over-dependent on drones, repeated figures and some favoured harmonic effects, perhaps, but I found this music strangely capable of returning me to the root of why I love landscape and why I feel impelled to make art from it. Another time I must post about the deep, awe-inspiring drone I once seemed to hear emanating from the mountains in the Picos de Europa in Northern Spain, which I have always called "El Tiburón" (the shark).

Skelton records under various names: Broken Consort, Heidika, and Clouwbeck, for example, and self-publishes what look like exquisitely-made books and recordings. His imprint Sustain-Release can be found here, and samples of the music can be heard there and on a blog relating to a recent release Landings here.

My instinct, whenever I come across someone like this -- creating single-minded art that flies in the face of every commercial imperative -- is to offer the only support that means anything, i.e. buy something. For £15 via PayPal you can have a copy of a 250 copy limited edition signed booklet and CD of Landings. Now that's what I call an impulse purchase.



No doubt, like the music of Guy Clark in an earlier post, this will turn out to be a rabbit-hole into a previously unsuspected parallel universe of enthusiasm. The walls between musical genres and allegiances, in particular, do seem to be remarkably soundproof. But I've started to glance nervously at The Wire magazine, also a new discovery (for me), and I'm already getting that vertiginous feeling...

House and Garden

I have no idea who lives here, but their taste in low-maintenance "wild gardening" is to be admired. The mixed flock of tits and finches that flew through as I was taking the photographs certainly seemed to think so.

Soil

Is Spring the light at the end of the tunnel, or the oncoming train? For me, it's the train, as Summer is my least favourite season. Look out, here it comes. I keep quiet about it, though, as I know it's a minority view. Most people, it seems, can't wait to rip off their togs and show off the new tattoo.



This field is always remarkable, as despite many year of ploughing, it still shows clearly the abrupt change in soil colour from the chalk uplands to the rich black river deposits of the Test Valley. In fact, I doubt whether the "brown" sloping parts were ever ploughed until recent years, when EC subsidies became available for converting upland grazing into arable. We were shocked, a few years ago, to see whole hillsides in Wales that had been ploughed up (quite a feat, given the angle); it won't take long for all that soil to find its way to the bottom of the hill.



Anselm Kiefer is back in town (he has an exhibition at the White Cube Gallery) and I found I had taken an Anselm Kiefer tribute photograph yesterday. I have resisted the temptation to scrawl references to Elgar, Churchill and the British Empire on it.

Borderline

A couple more page spreads from the ongoing "mirrors / windows / walls" book:




I have reached the point in this project where I need to put it away for a bit, so that I can see it again with fresh eyes in a few weeks. I can't decide whether it's a work of outstanding originality or just a bit dull and repetitive, really. Ah, the borderline between "outstanding" and "a bit dull" can be very fine! (actually, no, it never is, really, is it?).

By the way, great news for anyone out there I've turned on to Blurb: the new release of their (free, downloadable) book-making software BookSmart contains two much-anticipated new features.

First, you can now resize a book project, which (assuming it works without complications) is something I've felt the need for several times. You start out making a 7"x7" square book, say, then realise it should have been landscape 8"x10" all along. It's been such a pain starting all over again. This new facility looks like a real time-saver.

Second, you can now drag and drop your photo into an image box that spans a whole double page-spread. This is less obviously brilliant... Yes! You, too, can now make annoying photobooks where part of the image disappears into the centre gutter-fold! But, if you're into that "full-bleed" look where the image is printed right to the edge of the page it could be just what you need. I might give it a try.

The Remains of Ben Gunn

I always enjoy reading poet Hugo Williams' "Freelance" column in the TLS, though it's hard to believe anyone can lead quite such a haplessly charmed life, or get away with being quite so self-consciously hopeless. This week's installment of the Adventures of Hugo made me laugh out loud (that's right, LOL!):

Does anyone seriously consider pre-heating their oven before throwing in some horrible ready meal? You'd think Tesco's Beef Cannelloni was a finely tuned piece of culinary art from the way they insist on exactly fourteen minutes' cooking time on Gas Mark 4, rather than what it tastes like -- a rolled-up piece of parchment containing the remains of Ben Gunn.

This is a man whose relationship with food and cooking is clearly under stress. You'd probably have to be British to fully understand his comment that "My antipathy to food goes back to my childhood in the 1940s when people were naturally thin because the food was so awful". Austerity Britain lasted officially until 1954, when rationing was abolished, but its spirit lived on well into the 1970s. Even the good times always had something irredeemably cheap and meagre about them, like the filling of a baker's shop sausage roll.

The true awfulness of much British food is one of those legends that happens to be true. Hugo mentions the Vesta range of instant Chinese and Indian meals, and unless you have attempted to eat a Vesta Chow Mein you have no idea how criminally low our expectations of food once were. I have eaten quite a few such simulacra of food in my time, as the child of working parents left to my own devices through most of the school holidays. The term "meal solution" had not been coined back then, but would have been very appropriate; I suppose they did seem an excitingly modern approach to malnutrition at the time. Rickets à la mode.

Unbelievably, Vesta meals are still made and sold in all the major supermarkets. Indeed, there is a special aisle in every supermarket which sells the Great British Convenience Foods: tinned pies and stews, jellies with chunks of fruit, tinned fruits and rice pudding, Camp Coffee, instant custard and Angel Delight -- a 1960s cornucopia. Who buys this stuff? How is it possible brands like Ambrosia, Fray Bentos, and Birds are still in business? I can only imagine they are in receipt of subsidies from the National Lottery, to preserve part of our tinned, boiled and stewed British Heritage.

We are most exposed as a nation, gastronomically, in the area of "treats". Although -- having grown up with the stuff -- most of us retain a fondness for the waxy compound sold as "chocolate" by the likes of Cadbury, there is no revelation quite like the moment a Brit first tastes European chocolate. Now, obviously, something like a Mars Bar is a sort of apotheosis of industrial confectionery -- it defines its own category of sublimity -- but no-one who has once tasted Lindt Excellence 70% Cocoa chocolate is ever going to eat Cadbury's Bourneville again. And is there any more depressing sight than a High Street baker's window, filled with greasy, misshapen jam doughnuts, "buttercream" pastries with a perfunctory grafitti of icing, and bulbous apple turnovers crusted with sugar and filled with nothing but apple-scented air? It says a lot about our tolerant national character that we can still put up with this roadkill patisserie. "Mustn't grumble"...

Amusingly, we have started to pat ourselves on the back as a nation of gastronauts, in recent years. So many top class restaurants, so many cooking programmes on TV, so many celebrity chefs! So many new ingredients, and a hundred different microwaveable ready meals! It's all so much better than it used to be. Have you tried these new Red Leicester Cheese and Caramelised Onion crisps?

And yet, how many simple, nutritious meals get prepared from basic ingredients in British kitchens most nights? The guy who installed our kitchen last year told me only old people and hippies use ovens these days. Have you ever heard that famous and profound remark by Sir Thomas Beecham, that "The British may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes"? I think the truth is that something of the sort applies to food, too. We may not like cooking, but we absolutely love filling our supermarket trolleys with meal solutions.

If British comedians wants to make thumbnail sketches of social stereotypes, especially about class and pretension, they reach for food items; I must admit I am always very amused whenever I remember the joke about Peter Mandelson, as aspiring parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool, mistaking mushy peas for guacamole in a chip shop. But can anyone explain why "the remains of Ben Gunn" is so funny? It's a long time since I read Treasure Island, but I don't recall Ben Gunn ending up as spag bol.

Viaduct IV

Of course, when an object is 2,014 feet long, and consists of 33 fancy brick arches, it is quite hard to convey its presence in the landscape in a simple photograph. Sometimes it's better just to hint than to attempt to represent.



Somehow, I can feel the adjacency of this abandoned viaduct, the busy motorway cutting through Twyford Down, and the looming presence of St. Catherine's Hill with its joggers and dog walkers becoming a "subject". If nothing else, it will give me a reason for some enjoyable walks over the coming weekends.

Viaduct III

Talk about two peoples divided by a common language. I suppose I may have muddied the waters by naming a post "Viaduct" which actually shows an image of a road cutting.

This is the Hockley Viaduct:




The point is, I have finally got to stand on top of it (where the railway used to run), in order to look over at the mighty cutting where the M3 motorway runs through Twyford Down.

Viaduct II

Here's a pretty one from Sunday's walk:



You'll need to click on it to get the full sense of it, but it's a good example of why I like an elevated standpoint (even if another 50 feet would have been handy), and also why monochrome is here to stay. The colour version is too pretty.

Viaduct

There was better light, this Sunday, when I visited my current favourite metaphorical landscape. Bright, but diffused by cloud; just the thing. For the first time, I went up onto the old viaduct, only to discover that you'd have to be 7 feet tall to see over the parapet (or, yet again, have remembered to bring an inflatable ladder). Previous frustrated photographers had obviously demolished sections of wall, however, so I was able to find the proverbial place to stand.

For those who do not follow these things, that cutting was driven through a unique and historic landscape in the teeth of protracted and inventive opposition from environmental groups in the 1980s. Despite what it represents, I have come to like it, and it always denotes "nearly home" when I drive through it. You would have thought a tunnel would have been the obvious solution, though, even if only one of the "dig and fill" sort.



An elevated position really opens up the forms in the landscape, and a good light means the monochrome treatment can open them up even further. This is nothing more dramatic than a riverside path on the Itchen running towards the viaduct. The long lens has compressed the perspective, too, giving a little drama to those simple shapes.

Tsunami

Talking of the news, there's an interesting discussion on Mike Johnston's TOP, which picks up on the funny-if-it-wasn't-so-tragic reaction in PhotoWorld to the realisation that, my God, Sendai is where the Nikon factory is...

Another mirrors/windows/walls pair