Winter Palette

The main photographic challenge at this time of year, even on the south coast of England, is finding enough light. Even a sunny afternoon is pretty dim in the shade, and come 4:00 p.m. it's all fading fast into darkness. The contrasts are extreme, and can make for ugly photographs. A little cloud helps, diffusing the light nicely, but that also brings on the late afternoon gloom a lot quicker.

This Sunday I was chasing a variety of afternoon light conditions all round St. Catherine's Hill. It just never stopped changing. I was also taken by surprise by the extremity of the change of the sun's angle to the SSW since my previous visit a couple of weeks ago; all illumination was cut off to the west face of the viaduct, and the rays of the setting sun were not beaming straight up the Twyford Down cutting as I had expected. Too bad: photographers in the landscape are like hunter-gatherers, and must interpret the situation on the ground to their advantage.



After criss-crossing the road next to the viaduct for a bit, and dodging the constant stream of returning Christmas shoppers in their cars, I opted for height and decided to climb St. Catherine's Hill the steep "back way". On the way up I met a work colleague, who occupies the office next to mine, jogging effortlessly down the track in shorts and a tee shirt. He lives nearby in Winchester, and has that enviable light build that (presumably) makes cross-country running a pleasure and not a leaden-legged torment. I have to say I could never understand running for pleasure even when I was young, fit, and two stone lighter.

I can walk though; once up high, the rich warm light of the setting sun was raking the tree tops, and was very pretty, but close to unphotographable. The case for some kind of "high dynamic range" procedure -- merging multiple identical images in software, made at different exposures -- was compelling, but I didn't have a tripod so that was that. One of these days I must give HDR a try. Done with restraint, it may be the answer to the "white skies and purple twigs" syndrome that disfigures so much digital landscape photography.

In allen Wipfeln spürest du kaum einen Hauch...

There is some detail in those shadows, honest, but probably not much in the JPEG you're seeing. In fact, the range of dark and golden tones in there is very subtle, and makes for a very pleasing print. I'm getting quite a taste for those rich, dark, blended colours setting off glowing, warm highlights, like fruit-cake or pumpernickel. It's a true winter palette.

Four Dawns

Once upon a time, I was a quasi-nocturnal creature, getting to bed in the small hours and rising in the late afternoon. Thirty years of work and twenty years of parenting have put a stop to that way of life, and these days my alarm is set for 6:00 am.

There's not a lot to be said for early rising (I can't say I've noticed any great accumulation of the proverbial health, wealth or wisdom) but one compensation at this time of year is that I get to see the sun rising, an event that usually puts the world into photo-opp mood.

These four were all taken this week, as the cleaners and the early staff were exchanging greetings going home and coming in, respectively. As any office worker knows, it's vital to have a good understanding with your cleaner, or you'll come in one morning to discover your papers neatly rearranged into irretrievable tidiness, and your whiteboard scrubbed clean.

Snails In A Bucket

Many years ago, aged 18 or so, I was home from university during a vacation, and went for an early evening drink in a town centre pub. By any standards, my appearance had changed since I was eight years old. Apart from the fact I had grown (a bit, anyway), I had a full beard and shoulder-length hair. I was therefore taken aback when another lad came up to me and said, "You're Mick, aren't you? Do you remember me? I'm Garry, from down the road. I used to help you collect snails in a bucket!"

It seems that our true colours shine through, no matter how heavy the disguise. Inside, I suspect, I will always be that boy from down the road that collects snails in a bucket. And not only snails. Everyone -- neighbours, schoolfriends, relatives -- knew that I was mad about "nature". No-one minded if I strayed into their gardens in pursuit of caterpillars -- we kids were like cats, anyway, liable to turn up anywhere -- and a steady procession of moribund bits of the natural world found their way to our front door. "Dad found this and wondered if your Michael would like it!"

Among the prizes donated by neighbours was a Privet Hawk-Moth, a magnificent creature, wonderfully large compared to even the biggest moths that settled on our windows on a summer night, with a pink and dark chocolate hooped body, white cabled antennae, and business-like wings swept back like a fighter plane. Even dead, it looked like it might zoom across the room if carefully launched like a balsawood glider. I kept mine in a polythene bag sellotaped to the wall. I used to love comparing its numinous reality with its picture in the Observer's Book of Larger Moths. To be its custodian gave me an enormous sense of privilege.

I also had a terrifying black and yellow wasp, about 1.5" long, with a sting almost as long as its body. Luckily, like the hawk-moth, it had been found dead, or else someone would surely have smacked it flat with a rolled-up newspaper. Again, I had the deep satisfaction of matching it, unmistakably, against its image in an identification book. It was a Wood Wasp, which -- despite the name -- is not a wasp but a sawfly, and uses its preposterous "sting" to lay eggs deep in rotten tree trunks. As a user of protective mimicry, you can't help but feel the Wood Wasp has gone over the top, being waspier than the waspiest wasp. I used to keep it in the matchbox it arrived in.



For years I wanted to be a naturalist, until it gradually dawned on me that I would never make it as a scientist. Not just because "science" was too hard (which it was) but because I clearly didn't get any science which didn't involve using coloured pencils to draw things. I'm sure you have heard the cliché, "I must have been away from school the day X was explained." Well, cliché or not, I'm pretty sure I was off sick the day they explained the point and purpose of chemistry, at least as taught in my school (and assuming the point wasn't to try and secretly fill another boy's blazer pocket with water from a lab squeeze bottle). I also found that I lack the component in the human brain that enables mathematics to take place there.

Still, there was always one sort-of science in which an ability with coloured pencils was an asset. One of the themes that has developed in this blog is "paths not taken", and this is yet another one: I might once easily have become a geographer. Even at 6th form level, entire geography lessons could be taken up happily copying elaborate coloured chalk drawings from the blackboard, which explained climate patterns, mountain formation or population distribution in graphical form.

Even better, there were field trips into the landscape, where terminal moraines and hanging valleys could be rambled over, fossils collected, and the strike and dip of strata pondered. There is no question that my two years studying geography enhanced my later life just as much as studying literature or languages. I think there are few greater pleasures than being out in a striking landscape on a bright, frosty winter's day, properly dressed and in good company, with a pub meal or even just a good hot cup of tea in prospect.

Unless it is, on such a walk, to come across a freshly dug quarry yielding museum-quality fossils to stuff your pockets with, like the one we found in mid-Wales a couple of years ago. Once a collector, always a collector. Or even just to see something, some perfect alignment of landscape and light, and to photograph it, hoping as always that what you've got will not just be a pale reflection of what you saw, but a transmutation of it into something rich and strange that will convey something of the depth of what you felt to others; the magical reverse of the pretty pebble collected on the beach that turns into a dull stone as it dries.

November 2009

You Can All Join In

Do you know that famous tease by Virginia Woolf, that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed" (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown)? Well, on or about, let's say, December 1968, I think something similar happened. Amongst other things, British pop and R&B mutated into "rock", and a brave new world began. Or so it seemed at the time.

I remember the moment well: it coincided with that snowy winter 1968/69 that followed the release of the Beatles' White Album, their failed attempt to come to grips with the new "progressive blues" paradigm. Next thing you knew, the Beatles were gone, and the likes of Led Zeppelin were shaking the stage. Personally, I never really liked that twee, psychedelic phase that dominated British pop in the mid-1960s, but as soon as I heard the new, riff-driven, "heavy" blues, I felt that thrill you only get a few times in a lifetime, when something sets up an overwhelming sympathetic resonance in your soul. Well, you're only 15 once, and if ever there was a music for 15-year-olds (15-year-old boys, anyway), this was it.

If you are of a similar age to me, you will probably remember those "sampler" albums that the new rock-oriented labels started putting out: most significantly, for the nascent British Prog Blues generation, You Can All Join In and Nice Enough To Eat from Island Records. These were loss-leading prospectuses aimed right at YOU; it was clear that someone really wanted to get their hands on your pocket-money.

Popular music has always been a business, naturally, but 1968/69 marks the point when music tipped over from being an accessory to social life to becoming a lifestyle package, a brand you could adopt and live inside. For a while, the word "alternative" was loosely stuck on the front of "lifestyle" as part of the packaging, but that label fell off somewhere in the early 80s. There's nothing alternative about getting your lifestyle off the peg in a High Street shop.

It suddenly seemed normal for youngsters from any background to imagine themselves as leading characters in a far more exotic and colourful narrative than the one lived by their parents, or even their older brothers and sisters. A sort of mass permission was granted, by some mysterious sprinkling of Zeitgeisty fairy dust, that allowed thousands of us to fantasize about becoming poets and vagabond musicians, rather than teachers and chartered accountants. It was as if, having unprecedentedly more choices in our lives, we had decided to add the powers of flight and telepathy to the list. Hey, why not? (Well, lots of reasons why not, but that's another post).

It was the spirit of the times, of course. Primary schools at the cusp of the 1950s and 1960s were all about free expression, play, and the untrammelled development of personality. We were encouraged to grow, imaginatively, and not to limit our horizons to a dull job at the nearest shop or factory. Typically, there was a dressing up box in the corner of every classroom, full of oddments of adult clothing and accessories, bags and scarves and hats. If you had the imagination and inclination, you could dress up and go anywhere and be anything between the morning milk break and dinner-time. See Emily play!

The new music was, in a sense, an extension of that dressing-up box attitude into adolescence. It might have been assembled from off-cuts of blues, folk, and R&B (with maybe more than a bit of Black and White Minstrel Show "blacking up" thrown in), but joining in didn't require anyone to become a musician. There was a symbiosis, a "scene", between performers and fan-base that created a new paradigm for popular culture.

Getting into the music, adopting the look – and no-one should underestimate the aggro it caused back then simply to let one's hair grow long – was to be more than a "fan". It was an elective affinity, a freemasonry of youth that crossed boundaries of class and geography, whose clandestine handshakes were the LP record sleeve tucked under a great-coated arm and the packet of Rizla papers with the mysteriously missing top.

The essence of that era is nicely captured by the cover of You Can All Join In. All the musicians on the album are herded together in a group photograph, like a school outing with a hangover, dressed in the DIY surplus-store uniform of early prog rock; smirking, scowling scruffs in donkey jackets and army greatcoats, with unstyled, grown-out thatches of unruly hair. Sandy Denny, the only girl, wears a charity-shop fur coat, and the cheeky boys from Jethro Tull are pulling faces at the back. It wasn't a difficult look to aspire to, and very low-maintenance – we could all join in!

Ever since, fresh generations have revelled in those feelings of conspiracy and solidarity, of having a delightful shared secret, that being part of a Scene engenders; I suspect the 1980s "rave" scene may even have taken it further and done it better. But, we wrote the book or, if you prefer, we opened Pandora's dressing-up box.

Just another teenage dirtbag...

So far, so nostalgic. But there is a down-side to all this.

When he was 12 or so, my son became interested in those fantasy-gaming models branded as "Warhammer", and sold in Games Workshop stores. If you don't know them, they are miniature versions of those grotesque creatures that populate Heavy Metal album cover-art, all spikes and fangs and improbable armour. It's a phase many boys go through, but they seem to pass unscathed out the other side (though one of my younger colleagues did tell me of her dismay at discovering boxes and boxes of the stuff under her 30-year-old boyfriend's bed).

So, there I am, in about 2003, standing for the first time in a Games Workshop, doing some Christmas shopping. A bunch of kids in Heavy Metal tee-shirts are sitting round a table, dabbing paint onto models, and nodding their shaggy heads rhythmically. The muzak is loud and, I notice, oddly familiar. My God, I realise: that's Black Sabbath... These boys are listening to Paranoid! This music is thirty three years old!!

It was as if we, in 1970, the year of that album's release, had been listening without irony to music by Glenn Miller or Fats Waller. Very, very weird.

A style like Heavy Metal crystallised out of the primal progressive blues soup quite quickly, and has been with us, essentially unchanged, ever since. This is astonishing. And it's not just Heavy Metal: I can't remember the last time I heard something and thought, "Hey, this is new..." Even rap is 30 years old. Something odd is going on, wouldn't you say, when the latest musical scene for the style-conscious teen is yet another retread of musical styles established 30 or 40 years ago? In some weird way, 1968 has become the Year Zero of pop music – anything before is "retro", anything after is "contemporary".

Seeing those 14-year-olds nodding along to Black Sabbath in 2003 made me think: this music has infantilized so many of us. We are stuck, unable to grow out of the sounds that intoxicated us before we had our first serious affair, before we had raised children, before we had experienced the full range of adult emotions. We have mistaken nursery rhymes for poetry. It's no wonder so many of us have a problem choosing music for a funeral.

As serious as your life...
John Coltrane, by Roy DeCarava

Part of the problem, of course, is that an alternative is hard to find. Unless you enjoy visiting those musical museums called "classical" and "jazz" (I do), there is very little accessible, serious contemporary music being broadcast. It doesn't help that screeching monsters like Harrison Birtwistle are blocking the way – "serious" has become synonymous with "unlistenable".

A handful of listenable pieces by the likes of Arvo Pärt do get played to death as background (amusingly, there is a campaign on BBC Radio 4's Feedback programme to stop Phillip Glass's haunting Facades being used as "atmosphere" more than twice a week) but, infuriatingly, such pieces are rarely identified and as a consequence it's hard to put a name to these attractive, oddly familiar sounds. It's a real challenge, trying to break the rock/pop stranglehold, and find contemporary music by and for adults.

But let's not get too gloomy. Music isn't everything. And I find I never tire of seeing the parade of ageing geezers wheeled in as talking heads on rock nostalgia TV shows, one-time rock-dandies now looking like welders or accountants. Who'd have guessed that Nick Mason, Pink Floyd's drummer, was going to turn into Dennis Healey? Or that the elfin John Martyn of 1970 would become a one-legged, bloated Falstaff before he died in 2009? You may be forever 15 in your head, but your body is telling a very different story.

Surely, though, if only for the sake of preventing the human race from dying of boredom, we're overdue for another change? On or about December 2011, perhaps? By definition, of course, at 57 years old I will hate it; but even so I really, really look forward to it. Come on, kids, let Dads' Music be Dads' Music! Get your own groovy noise!

Tree Encounters

Three very different encounters with trees and autumn light from today; just after dawn, mid-morning, and early afternoon. The yellow spire in the middle one is not a church, but a spectacular gingko tree, seen through the mulberry tree outside my office window.

Golden Planets -- Final Result

For those of you following the story of the 200 million golden planets, I have added an Addendum to the post When This Old Hat Was New (posted on 10/11/2011).

To save you the trouble, here is the quote that sparked the enquiry:

A few years before Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, “One penny, put out at our Savior’s birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold. But, if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and sixpence.”

My challenge was this: "That's surely the 18th century equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson-esque 'gonzo journalism' -- too much coffee and snuff, probably. Can anyone out there do the maths?"

Well, here is the answer, provided by old friend Andy S., a.k.a. Science Man:

1d invested for 1780 years at 5% would yield 1 x 1.05^1780 = 5.2 x 10^37 d

Price of gold was fixed by Isaac Newton in 1717 at £4 8s 9d per Troy ounce (it stayed this way for about 200 years)

1 Troy ounce = 31.03g

Therefore price of gold = 4x240 + 8x12 + 9 d/Troy ounce = 1065 d/Troy Ounce

1065d/31.103g = 34.32d/g = 34,320d/kg

Therefore 5.2 x 10^37d could buy (5.2 x 10^37)/(34320) kg of gold = 1.52 x 10^33 kg

The Mass of the Earth is about 5.978 x 10^24 kg (OU Science Data Book 1978)

Therefore 1.52 x 10^33 represents (1.52 x10^33)/(5.978 x 10^24) Earth Masses = 2.54 x 10^8 Earth Masses

i.e. about 250 million Earth Masses (at 1780 Gold Prices)

How about that? Thanks, Science Man! Seems it wasn't the snuff talking, after all.

Small Ads Dept.

Anyone out there want a Panasonic GF-1 body? Last year I had some "funny money" and decided to spend it on a second GF-1 body, but it turns out that I have barely used it. It's the silver version, and as you would expect it is boxed, with all accessories (charger, manuals, etc.) intact and mainly still sealed in their polythene bags.

I've got it for sale on Amazon at £225, but I will sell it to any regular reader of this blog for £195 plus post & packaging to wherever you happen to live. Email me to do the deal (PayPal would be fine).

Remembrance Sunday

Two friends, photographed one after the other in front of an improvised sheet backdrop, somewhere in Northern France, probably Noeux-les-Mines, 1914. Both recently promoted to sergeant in the 1st/1st Battalion, Hertfordshire Regiment, a territorial regiment that went over to France in the British Expeditionary Force of 1914, the so-called "Old Contemptibles" who fought at the retreat from Mons.



This is my grandfather, Douglas William Chisholm, a bookbinder, who moved from Edinburgh to the Elephant & Castle in London, and then to Letchworth in Hertfordshire to work at the Temple Press of the publishing firm J.M. Dent.



This is his friend, Frank Edward Young, also of North Hertfordshire. Eventually, as the army ran out of proper gentlemen, Douglas and Frank were both promoted to 2nd Lieutenant -- "temporary gentlemen", as such promotions were known. Amusingly, the form for admission to officer training asks, amongst other things, for "Schools or Colleges at which educated" and "Whether able to ride". Grandad's answers were "Sayer Street, Southwark" and "No".

Frank won a medal, in the last year of the war. His citation reads:

On 18 September 1918 south-east of Havrincourt, France, during an enemy counter-attack and throughout intense enemy fire, Second Lieutenant Young visited all posts, warned the garrisons and encouraged the men. In the early stages of the attack he rescued two of his men who had been captured and bombed and silenced an enemy machine-gun. Then he fought his way back to the main barricade and drove out a party of the enemy assembling there. Throughout four hours of heavy fighting this officer set a fine example and was last seen fighting hand-to-hand against a considerable number of the enemy.

The medal was the Victoria Cross. Frank died, aged 22, and is buried at Hermies Hill British Cemetery, Pas-de-Calais.



Here they are, waiting for the train at Letchworth station at the very start of the war (the woman in the white hat is my grandmother, the amazing Daisy, also a bookbinder and an active trades unionist). It looks like a renactment club outing, doesn't it? Funny how the "real thing" can look so banal. Even the caption is misspelled (or perhaps it's a feeble pun).

Apparently grandad (who died the year before I was born) would never talk about Frank's medal, except to say, "He earned it, boy, he earned it". Like my father after him, he had no patience with the sentimental, militarist aspects of Remembrance Day. Perhaps it sounds odd, but I always don't wear a poppy, in remembrance of him, Frank, and all the other poor devils, British, French, German, Austrian, Italian, Russian, and whoever else, who set out in uniform from stations at little towns all over Europe. It seems the least I can do.

Modern Classics

"Not for the first time I find myself thinking what a privilege it was to grow up in a house without books — or art. Those Penguin Modern Classics did not have the allure of drugs or under-age drinking; there was nothing illegal or subversive about them (except insofar as the constant infusion of knowledge steadily undermined parental authority), but consuming them was an expression of independence and discovery. Let’s put it as modestly as possible: acquiring and reading them provided an opportunity to accomplish what every adolescent craves — going somewhere and doing something without one’s parents."

Geoff Dyer, The Art of the Novel, NY Times, 3/11/2011

I have long been an admirer of Geoff Dyer, ever since picking up a copy of The Missing of the Somme in a Dublin bookshop. His acute but sporadic insights always dance around areas I find interesting -- we clearly have very similar enthusiasms -- and one of these days he's going to write something really good (miaow!). Actually, I think his collection of jazz stories, But Beautiful, is really good; his portrait of Thelonious Monk, in particular, is very moving.

But the quote above, from an online article I read recently, really set me thinking. The importance of Penguin Modern Classics in the formation of young minds in the 60s and 70s is beyond dispute; the attractions of under-age drinking and drug consumption are also clear (well, to a 17-year-old, anyway). But to put the two together -- to assert their equivalence -- in the context of growing up in a bookless, culture-free suburban home, really spoke to me.

It's hard to imagine being 17 again. Being 17 now is not the same as being 17 forty years ago; well, obviously, but easy to forget. My son's enthusiasm for Nintendo games like Pokemon, or my daughter's addiction to "must see" light-entertainment TV like Strictly, are a mystery to me; the way they use social media and smartphones to maintain 24/7 contact with their friends is a source of wonder. Penguin Modern Classics are still around, but I doubt many teenagers today are watching that row of uniform spines gradually accumulate on their bookshelf with any degree of fascination or satisfaction. They're just part of a much richer media mix.

But, actually, when I think back to that time, I think Geoff Dyer misses the point here. The real impact on bookish, counter-cultural teens of the 1970s was not made by Penguin Modern Classics, but by the brand new "trade paperback" sized imprints like Paladin, Picador and Abacus, with their elegant white spines and seriffed typefaces. When they first appeared in bookshops their taller size meant they were on a shelf apart from the regular paperbacks, literally and figuratively, and they immediately offered an alternative syllabus to that of those really rather staid and worthy Penguins.

The titles say it all: The Old Straight Track, The View Over Atlantis, Bomb Culture, Mythologies, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pricksongs and Descants, The Devil's Picturebook, The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, Black Elk Speaks, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Trout Fishing in America, First Love Last Rites ... Remember those? I owned them all and more, and I expect you did, too. They spoke to a post-60s generation looking for something a little less ponderous than Camus, a little more trippy than Huxley, a lot more far out and revolutionary than D.H. Lawrence.

Yes, our parents may not have read T.S. Eliot or George Eliot, but our teachers had. They had gone to college during the 1950s and early 60s, worn those awful stripey college scarves, puffed on their pipes, and read Sartre and E.P. Thompson. They were the That Was The Week That Was generation -- so serious, so self-satisfied, so very responsible in their engagement. They did not read Richard Brautigan or Ian McEwan, or watch The Old Grey Whistle Test or Monty Python, and had no interest whatsoever in ley lines, shamanism, or magic mushrooms. We did.

In truth, many of us wanted to differ from our teachers more badly than we wanted to be different from our parents. We had stopped believing in their story and, as G.K. Chesterton said, the problem when people stop believing is not that they believe nothing, but that they will believe anything, ley lines included. So I think there was a double move, a knight's move: a move in the direction of bookish culture that separated us from our parents, but also a sideways move in the direction of counter-culture that separated us from our teachers.

Not surprisingly, our generation was regarded by our earnest elders as a bit of a disappointment; a bunch of selfish hedonists and posturing ironists, straws in the wind, signs of a more fragmented, less community-minded consumerist society to come. They were partly right, of course, but as Geoff Dyer says, "In its provincial and limited way my formation by, faith in, and subsequent growing beyond Penguin Modern Classics reproduced the collapse of the grand narratives that is a staple part of Postmodernity 101."

In other words, in that mysterious way that 17-year-olds always are, we were already ahead of the curve, for good or ill. We knew we wanted something new, but were unable to say what it was -- in the Sex Pistols' witty inversion, "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it..." Did we ever get it? I honestly couldn't say. Post-modernism, as a sort of academic Punk, seems in retrospect more like a terrible virus than a vital new force.

Ah, well, forty years have passed, and now I'm the parent. At least my children will never be able to complain of growing up in a house without books, though I realise growing up in a house where tripping over stacks of books or being brained by falling books is a daily hazard may not be ideal, either. But, hey, kids, we like it like this: if you want to live in a tidy, minimalist loft with a flat-screen home-cinema TV, you know what to do. It's your turn.

When This Old Hat Was New

According to our Records Department, this is the 500th post on this blog since October 2008. How about that? Where does the time go?

Of the many mysteries that surround us, the destination of time, and the reasons behind our precious but really rather miserly share of it, are probably the greatest. Personally, I favour the theory that, shortly after the Big Bang, some kind of collateralized loan obligation scam was perpetrated, and large quantities of time shares ended up hidden under a rock, resulting in the subsequent uneven distribution, devaluation and short supply of time. I can't recall whether this is my theory or Terry Pratchett's, however.

Anyway, thinking about time passing, it struck me the other day that a hypothetical very, very old man, who had been sitting on the same bench every day since the year 1011, would have heard our language change from Anglo-Saxon through Middle English to whatever it is we're speaking now (Post-Modern English?). The change would be even more imperceptible than trying to see the hour hand move on an analogue clock, but real all the same. One day, he's going to a church which is little more than a wattle and daub hut, and intoning the Lord's Prayer as "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum", then, in the blink of a geological eye, various stone structures have been erected on the same site, and the few people who are still going to church are now thinking that "Our Father, which art in heaven" sounds incomprehensibly old-fashioned. Old English, innit?

You don't have to be 1000 years old to experience this, though. Listen to any archived radio programme and the voices are as dated (and dateable) as the graphical style of vintage adverts. When I was a child in the 1950s/60s, broadcasters were still required to affect the clipped accents of the 1930s as the price of entry into the BBC. So-called "received pronunciation" was a clear and non-negotiable marker of class and aspiration. "End nigh, the knee-ooze!" No longer, thank goodness. But I'm really not sure if that continuity guy with the preposterously fruity Caribbean baritone who is all over Radio 4 these days counts as progress.

A thousand years ago, of course, the Vikings were busily carrying out an aggressively proactive programme of linguistic mash-up on these shores. I've been watching a lot of Scandinavian thrillers on TV in the last year, and it has started to bring on a curious sensation, like the awakening of semi-dormant, atavistic elements in my linguistic brain. It reminds you how much Northern Europe is a veritable plasticine ball of languages smeared one into another. After a bit, you feel you almost, but not quite, know how to speak Danish or Swedish. But, if I watch one more series of The Killing or Wallander perhaps my immersion treatment will be complete, and I'll be shouting "Va fan?!" (roughly = "WTF") with the best of them.

I found a nice little anecdote about the cumulative effects of time when reading a piece on "Methuselah trusts" in Lapham's Quarterly (hey, I get around). The idea is that a modest amount of money placed in a "1000-year trust" and invested at compound interest could, if actually brought to maturity, trash the world economy (though I think we now have better ways to do the job on a far shorter timescale). It's rather like that proposition that if you were able to fold a piece of paper in half 42 times, you'd find that it reaches the moon. The Methuselah trust would eventually require a payout that would far exceed anyone's ability to pay it.

Apparently Benjamin Franklin started one of these mad investments in 1790, in his will. Here's the quote from the Lapham's Quarterly article:

A few years before Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, “One penny, put out at our Savior’s birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold. But, if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and sixpence.”

Hmm, maybe. Show your working, please. That's surely the 18th century equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson-esque "gonzo journalism" -- too much coffee and snuff, probably. Can anyone out there do the maths?

That mention of 7s 6d reminds me of the now long-ago pre-decimal days in Britain. I had forgotten the strangeness of doing mental "money" arithmetic when there were twelve pennies to the shilling, and twenty shillings to the pound (not to mention one pound and one shilling to the guinea). It makes me wonder whether the only reason our children are still learning the eleven and twelve times tables is because, once upon a time, we had an insane system of coinage. Do other countries make their kids learn multiplication tables up to "times twelve", or do they stop at a rational ten?

But enough ramblings about time. Happy 500th post to you all.


Addendum 14/11/2011:

As hoped, nay expected, my old friend Andy S., a.k.a. Science Man, has come up with the goods:

1d invested for 1780 years at 5% would yield 1 x 1.05^1780 = 5.2 x 10^37 d

Price of gold was fixed by Isaac Newton in 1717 at £4 8s 9d per Troy ounce (it stayed this way for about 200 years)

1 Troy ounce = 31.03g

Therefore price of gold = 4x240 + 8x12 + 9 d/Troy ounce = 1065 d/Troy Ounce

1065d/31.103g = 34.32d/g = 34,320d/kg

Therefore 5.2 x 10^37d could buy (5.2 x 10^37)/(34320) kg of gold = 1.52 x 10^33 kg

The Mass of the Earth is about 5.978 x 10^24 kg (OU Science Data Book 1978)

Therefore 1.52 x 10^33 represents (1.52 x10^33)/(5.978 x 10^24) Earth Masses = 2.54 x 10^8 Earth Masses

i.e. about 250 million Earth Masses (at 1780 Gold Prices)

How about that? Thanks, Science Man! Seems it wasn't the snuff talking, after all.

Broken Images

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

Robert Graves (1895–1985)

And Now, The Weather

The Weather

I'd like to live a slower life.
The weather gets in my words
and I want them dry. Line after line
writes itself on my face, not a grace
of age but wrinkled humour. I laugh
more than I should or more
than anyone should. This is good.

But guess again. Everyone leans, each
on each other. This is a life
without an image. But only
because nothing does much more
than just resemble. Do the shamans
do what they say they do, dancing?
This is epistemology.

This is guesswork, this is love,
this is giving up gorgeousness to please you,
you beautiful dead to be. God bless
the weather and the words. Any words. Any weather.
And where or whom. I'd never taken count before.
I wish I had. And then
I did. And here
the weather wrote again.


John Newlove (1938 - 2003)

Mr. Stubbs Takes A Photo

There is a certain late-afternoon light at this time of year that, in the right sort of location, instantly calls to mind the paintings of the 18th century landscape tradition. There's a painterly quality to the moulding of the landforms and foliage, and especially to that eye-pleasing trick of combining complementary russet-reds and greens. My knees may no longer appreciate the autumnal mix of cold and damp, but my eyes like what it does to all that relentless green of summer.

This particular knee-taxing, eye-pleasing view is St. Catherine's Hill, Winchester, seen across the plague-pit valley from the very top of the Twyford Down road cutting. We were on our way home from a muddy Sunday afternoon walk when the sun emerged briefly over my left shoulder. I got out the LX3, leaned against the fence, and popped off a couple of auto-everything shots.



What it really needs for the full-on George Stubbs effect is a couple of improbably glossy horses up front, of course, but I'm not a bloody magician. A couple of sleek joggers in lycra might work, I suppose.

If you really want to bring out that sculptural moulding in the landscape, then a monochrome conversion is the thing. I use the Imaging Factory plug-in for Photoshop Elements.



Looks like a mezzotint engraving, doesn't it? I think the impression is enhanced by the LX3's relatively small sensor -- there's sometimes a "watercolour" effect to the pixels viewed at 100% which, under certain unpredictable circumstances, can be pronounced. I only shoot RAW, so this is not some kind of JPEG artefact, though it may be related to the sneaky in-camera lens corrections that the LX3 performs, even on RAW files. I have to say I like it.

The Real Thing

Today being Hallowe'en reminds me that I was deeply pissed off at one point over the summer. My daughter is studying English for one of her A Levels, and I discovered that one of the set books was, of all things, Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I'd already been annoyed by the triviality of some of the texts my kids have had to study as "literature", but this seemed to take the blood-sucking biscuit.

Never having read the book myself, I thought it would make sense to actually read it before driving a stake angrily through its heart. For all I knew, it might turn out be a brilliant classic, even if only in a camp, knowing way. Well, it isn't. It is possibly the dullest, most pointless book I have ever read. It is a Pile of Poo. It is an insult to our children, especially the girls, to make them study this drab thing as if it were "literature". As I say, I was deeply pissed off.

So, how has it come to this, that kids at this most wonderful stage in their intellectual development -- when their entire, freshly-minted sensibility and intelligence ought to be concentrated on a few well-chosen true classics, an experience that should shape them for life -- are being required to study trash?

In a way, I sort of feel it's my fault. Back in the mid-1970s, having taken a three-year stroll down Literary High Street (a.k.a. an English degree), I became interested in literary theory. Questions like "Who decides what counts as a classic?" and "What does the reader bring to the literary experience?" seemed worth asking. All a year's further study brought, though, was some puzzling and dispiriting half-answers. I had had every intention of embarking on an academic career, but suddenly I was not so sure. I knew what the problems were, but I didn't see any way forward; indeed, I suspected there was no way forward, and -- looking ahead -- all I could see was an inevitable crisis looming for the Humanities, and unemployment for me. I left the field to others, who were inventing increasingly sterile post-modern games to play.

My killer question at the time (my heuristic device, if you prefer that fancy talk) had been to ask: "Why is the pastime 'reading and writing books' sufficiently well-regarded to be studied at university, when stamp-collecting and mountain-climbing aren't?" Ask yourself that question, and the whole thing falls into place. Or rather, crumbles into dust, like Dracula on a sun-lounger.

At bottom, once you've cleared away the accidents of history and habit, and got bored with the sociological aspects, the problem is an argument over the existence and nature of The Real Thing. It's practically theological.

Before, let's say, 1965, there was pretty much universal agreement about where the Real Thing could be found. In most of Shakespeare, indisputably; in much of Keats, Milton and Chaucer; and in variously-sized bits of a whole pantheon of lesser writers. However, its presence in, say, Arthur Conan Doyle or John Buchan was small, and in the case of writers like Ian Fleming, homeopathic. The presence of the Real Thing was not something that could be objectively measured -- you just knew it was there, or accepted that people who knew better than you said it was there, so you went looking for it. Learning to recognise The Real Thing was the point of the exercise.

Hmm. The trouble is, once the challenge is made -- "Who says this is the Real Thing and that is not, and by what authority?" -- Pandora's Box is opened. There is no way to justify the preferences of a self-appointed aristocracy as the definition of "good taste"; you simply end up playing an upmarket game of "U and Non-U". And once "judgement" has been devalued to "opinion" (as in, "It's just your opinion that David Copperfield is better than Dracula") no-one can agree what the Real Thing is ever again, and never will. It's game over, and "literature" gets devalued to "reading matter".

This process has been going on for 30 years, and the result is that genuine rubbish like Dracula ends up as an A Level set text, because enough people think it is the sort of reading matter that 17-year-olds will find accessible. Hey, it's about vampires, and vampires are cool! It surely cannot be because they think it is any good? Can it? In the words of the Steely Dan song, "Reelin' In The Years":

You wouldn't know a diamond
If you held one in your hand
The things you think are precious
I can't understand

As it is, I'm still pretty sure I know I know what a diamond is, and what makes me angry is that something quite different is being pressed into our children's hands.

A Place to Stand

As the wind gusted and the light came and went on Sunday, I found myself walking away from the Twyford Down motorway cutting for a change, rather than towards it. This gave me a whole new set of views on that little bit of landscape. I can feel a set of pictures developing, not unlike Henri Rivière's Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower -- itself a conscious riff on Hokusai's "36 Views of Mount Fuji".






Talking of which, Rivière's Thirty-six Views book is back in print, and well worth buying if that japoniste woodblock print look is to your taste. Long an expensive rarity, it's now been republished in semi-facsimile in connection with an exhibition in San Francisco at an extremely reasonable price. Get it while you can.



Just think, 100 years ago, even the Eiffel Tower was a half-constructed novelty! I find the meeting of japoniste exoticism, the industrial-modernist "shock of the new", and traditional pictorial values in Rivière's work very sympathetic. It's a very French moment -- no wonder those Edwardian Brits escaped to Paris at the first opportunity. So poignant, to know that A War to End All Wars was shortly about to put a stop to it all.

Optics

David Hockney has this thing, explored at length in his book Secret Knowledge, about the use of optics by the Old Masters. When you look at his evidence, it's obvious that he's right. Lenses and projected images have been around for a long time, and it would be an odd artist who wasn't intrigued by them or who refused to take advantage of them.

At this time of year in northern latitudes, as the low angle of the rising sun comes later in the day and coincides with the rising of those of us lucky enough to have jobs to go to, projected images are everywhere. It makes you very aware of how photography must have been prefigured, in principle, for hundreds of years before anyone figured out how to do it.

Talking of optics and old masters, if you know the poem "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery, and the painting by Parmigianino on which it is based, consider the poem's opening lines:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose.

Now consider the painting:


Um, right hand?? It strikes me someone should have had a quiet word with Mr. Ashbery before the poem was published. Too late now.

Stage Sets

Since the start of the new academic year, I've begun doing two "old" things again: walking to work, and carrying the Panasonic LX3. These are not unconnected, obviously -- even compared to a GF1, the LX3 is so light I can forget it's round my neck, but it's right there when the bright, low autumn light transforms the scene at around 8:00 am into a stage set.





The LX3 also has a way with colour and tone in contrasty scenes that is quite special and can sometimes seem a little supernatural. The camera does have a Leica lens, of course. It's certainly not my impeccable technical mastery that is capturing that full range of tones from deep shadow to bright highlight -- I'm simply underexposing a bit, and taking my reading from the brighter part of the scene. Simple stuff.

I also like the way three different image aspect ratios can be selected by a simple twist of a switch on the lens barrel. A curiosity of the LX3 is that all three ratios are crops of the "full" image sensor: you get your 10-ish megapixel image cut out of an 11-ish megapixel sensor ( 3968 x 2232 pixels at 16:9, 3648 x 2736 pixels at 4:3, and 3776 x 2520 pixels at 3:2). The idea is that the same angle of view is maintained, with each ratio getting a much more similar overall pixel count than you'd get from a crop of a "full sensor" image. Brilliantly eccentric. You just have to wonder how they got it past the marketing guys ("Um, explain that bit about the angle to me again?").

Curriculum: the E-Book

OK, this is unknown territory for me. Blurb has started offering an e-book creation service, which is exciting, but it's Apple Only (for iPad, iPhone, iPod) which is annoying. Not least because I own none of those things, and therefore can't see how well it works.

I have set up the final version of Curriculum as an e-book download, at the low, low price of £3.49. If you go to my Blurb Bookstore you should be able to see it as a purchase option there.

What happens when you have bought it (I think) is that you get the option to download it. These are the instructions:

You can view your ebook on your iPad by manually transferring it to iTunes.

* Download the epub file
* Open iTunes on your computer and then drag the epub file to your iPad folder, under Devices
* Connect your iPad to your computer
* Click Sync
* On your iPad, open iBooks and you should see your book.

You may also be able to find it in an Apple bookstore somehow (via iTunes?).

Does that make sense to you Apple people? If anyone out there wants to give it a go (come on, just £3.49!!) please let me know how you get on. Does it work? Does it look good? Any hitches or gotchas? Can you see it on an Apple Mac, even if you don't have an iThingy?

I can then alert the wider (Apple using) world to this development. Thanks.

Pit Droids

Over the summer I had a bit of a clear-out of of some of our stuff, a project which is ongoing. At times this feels like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon, but the journey of a 1000 miles starts with a carrier-bag full of old bits of bubble wrap. Is bubble wrap the new string, I wonder? Just as the previous generation had a thing for string, saving it obsessively in drawers and boxes, so we seem to be incapable of throwing away protective packaging. It looks so useful.

A major delaying factor in this domestic archaeology is the discovery of buried treasure, or at least buried treasure maps. You can be merrily tossing old paperwork into a rubbish bag, when you encounter something -- a child's drawing, a letter, a scribbled note, a bill, even -- that stops you in your tracks, and causes you to make a coffee and sit for a while, lost in the past.

I was surprised to discover, for example, quite how many rejection letters I had accumulated in the period 1995-2005. I had forgotten about all those rounds of developing a project, putting together a proposal, applying for funding or an exhibition or publication, waiting for a response, and the inevitable disappointment of a rejection letter. Back to square one. In those days, in my 40s, I had the fantasy of finally escaping from my "day job", and launching a late-start career as an artist -- all it would take was hard work, a few exhibitions to establish a reputation, maybe a book or two, and I'd be part of the international art circus. Yeah, right.

A more positive moment came when, rattling through a stack of old CD-ROMs containing software that used to entertain our kids when they were small, I found our copy of Star Wars Pit Droids. My son was just the right age to be caught up in that second round of Star Wars fever that accompanied the release of the "prequel trilogy", starting with The Phantom Menace in 1999. If you didn't raise your children in the 1990s or after, you probably don't really understand the impact of brand marketing on family life. The confluence of branded products aimed at children (generally based on a film or TV series), the advent of home computing and video, and the realisation that children were an untapped market was remarkable to witness, and impossible to resist. Think Jurassic Park, Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, above all, Star Wars. I expect PhDs are being written right now about all this.

Most of this flood of merchandizing was bubble-packed ephemeral junk -- action figures, weapons, bits of costume and insignia, and the like -- but some was a brave attempt to slip a little developmental or even educational content into the mix. Lego got on board the Star Wars branding gravy-train very successfully, for example, and not a few ten-year-old brains will have benefitted from constructing a Lego Death Star or Millennium Falcon. Certainly, the business of shopping for Christmas and birthdays is vastly simplified when your offspring can cite exact product codes downloaded off the Web for the precise items they want, or when you can wander through the aisles of Toys'R'Us and spot when the bubble packs and boxes change to the particular branded colourway you're looking for.

But a few products launched on the back of these enthusiasms were outstanding, and Star Wars Pit Droids was one of them. If you're not familiar with the Star Wars universe (lucky you) then you need to know that a "pit droid" is a tireless, multi-tasking robotic grease-monkey, fixing up dented starships and hunting out spare parts in the breakers yards of dusty, faraway planets. The pit droids "game" is well described by Children's Software Revue:

An amazingly strong exercise in logical thinking, the program presents a series of successively more difficult puzzles all housed within graphically rich Star Wars settings. The overall goal of the game is to lead a group of robots called Pit Droids through various obstacle courses until they reach their final destination, The Podrace Arena. Kids have to figure out how to program the Droids so they'll move the right way through each puzzle. They do so by manipulating tiles that have varying functions. For instance, a red arrow makes red Droids turn a certain direction, while a 1:2 ratio tile divides a column of Droids in two directions at the ratio of- you guessed it- one to two. As players correctly navigate each puzzle, they rack up points and can open up deeper levels of the game. Why is this so engaging and educationally robust? First of all, the Droids are downright cute and pretty funny as well. Kids and adults naturally take to these creatures and want to help them reach their goal. Second, the challenge levels are designed so that each hurdle is just a little bit tougher than the last- doable, but tricky.

In a word, it is a brilliant and totally praiseworthy use of a child's brand-stimulated attention. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that playing Pit Droids on the PC raised and reinforced my son's (admittedly already high) intelligence. Frankly, schools should be using Pit Droids to teach logic and creative lateral thinking. It's fun, too. Needless to say, I have kept our copy.