In Town

I went up to Brixton, London, this week, to see an old friend who emigrated to the USA back in the late 1970s, briefly back in the country with her family in tow.  As with people, it's salutary to revisit a place after a lengthy period of time, if only to remind yourself that it hasn't been standing still in the meantime.  London is not so much a "place" as a city state, of course, constructed out of interlocking statelets like Brixton.  You can be intimately familiar with one corner -- say, Islington, Camden and Hackney -- but have only the vaguest idea of what goes in remote fiefdoms like Hampstead or Hendon, let alone in fabled places south of the river like Bromley or Dulwich.

The last time I visited Brixton, not so very long ago, I was advised not to walk back to the tube station alone after dark.  It was not an outright dangerous area, but unpredictable -- "sketchy", as my friend's American son put it.  The famous riots of the 1980s were, seen one way, race riots, but might just as accurately be seen as anti-police riots (like the St. Paul's Riot in Bristol in 1980, at which I happened to be present).  Single-race enclaves are rare in London, and those that exist are quite small, but Brixton has always been strongly associated with the Caribbean community since the days of the pioneers of the Empire Windrush, as has Notting Hill north of the river.*

The first thing that struck me as I emerged from the tube onto Brixton Road was the elevated mood. Admittedly, it was an idyllic, sunny day, but it seemed nearly everyone, and not just the rastas in the park, was smiling contentedly.  The second thing was the greater mix of ethnicities and classes -- lots more young professionals, student types, and a big admixture of what our young niece used to call "shepherds" i.e. Islamic women of assorted origins with their various styles and degrees of head-covering.**  The third thing, not unconnected with the other two things, was the degree of "gentrification" the area has undergone.

Gentrification is an odd term for a common process of urban transformation.  Around 1980, I lived in several squats in Dalston and Clapton, then the most run-down part of East London's most run-down borough, Hackney.  Entire streets of houses had been "tinned up" by the council as unoccupiable; that is, their doors and windows had been sealed with sheets of corrugated iron.  It was a dismal spectacle.  Even on a sunny day, no-one had much to smile about round there.  But a few years after I had moved on, ambitious young professional couples began buying up the run-down properties in places like Dalston and Stoke Newington, as neighbouring Islington had become mega-gentrified, and therefore mega-expensive.  These middle-class pioneers lived separate lives, by and large, from the poor white, black, and other ethnic communities that surrounded them, swapping competitive tales of street shootings and bank robberies with their guests at dinner parties.  So authentic.  I haven't ever been back, but I'm told the area is now highly sought-after.

The problem with gentrification is the squeeze it puts on those in the middle and at the bottom of the pile.  Sure, nobody wants to live in a crumbling, cold-water bedsit in a high-crime area, but people with minimal resources -- financial and social -- have got to live somewhere.  London property prices are now so absurdly high that even a professional couple with both earning "normal" public-service salaries could never contemplate buying a house.  A 2-bedroom flat in Dalston will now set you back somewhere between £400,000 and £800,000.  You want a 3-bedroom house? What kind of dreamer are you?

Where the teachers, nurses, and street cleaners of that great city state are supposed actually to live is a mystery.  Not to mention the young, who might have found a congenial squat in years past.  First rob your bank, I suppose.  Or, more likely, let your bank rob you, in the form of a massive loan that amounts to indentured servitude.

Of course, the process also works in reverse.  A 4-bedroom terraced house bought in 1980 for less than £100,000 is now worth around £1,000,000.  Sell up, and you have enough money to buy somewhere comfortable virtually anywhere else in rural Britain or Europe, and live out the rest of your life in modest idleness on the change.  You meet such people everywhere, ex-Londoners with a permanently bemused sense of guilty good fortune.  Not so much trustafarians as equity hippies, pretending to paint or make pots.

Though, since 2008, the ones who tried to play double or quits with their chunk of change in the boom years by gambling with it (a.k.a. "investing" it) rather than simply banking it may be feeling rather less lucky, these days.

*  I have always enjoyed the fact that, on the ubiquitous and wonderful London Underground map, Notting Hill is the only confluence of red, green and yellow lines, the Rastafarian colours.

**  In Britain, children representing the flock-watching / sock-washing shepherds at a school Nativity play traditionally wear similar but home-made headgear.  Look very closely at the top photograph, btw.

You Wear It Well

I don't normally post pictures of people (or, indeed, take that many) but couldn't resist these two.  Not many can carry off the idiotic academic hat look, but this pair certainly do.

Congratulations, Dr. Dreads...

Flying Ants at 12 O'Clock

Flying ants spotted on the Highfield Campus today at noon, on my way back from an unpleasant dental appointment.

Conditions at 12:15 pm:

29° C
Humidity 42%
Wind SSE 2mph
Barometer 1014.0 mb rising slowly

These were large black critters, about 0.75 cm long. As there's a degree ceremony today, I will shortly be heading out to look for ant/graduate interaction.  As soon as I can feel my face, that is...

Cattle Grids of Dartmoor

Listening to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, I have realised, is not the ideal way for me to wake up in the morning.  I'm not talking about John Humphrys' toe-curling attempts at whimsy, Evan Davis' eternal benign haze, Sarah Montague's head-girlishness, or even James Naughtie's helium-quality windbaggery.  No, those I can tolerate.  They are familiar background noise, easily ignored, like the sound of the gas boiler kicking in at 06:30.

I'm talking about the way certain out-takes of information lodge in my subconscious, as it grumpily and somewhat clumsily swaps places in my head with my waking mind, like two local-radio presenters negotiating a changeover at the top of the hour. For example, for 20 or more years I have been haunted by the image of a wet cricket pitch being dried off by hovering helicopters.  Did this ever really happen?  Apparently so.  But in my mind it has acquired that portentous, archetypal feeling that belongs to a persistent dream.  It's tricky enough having to live with one's own, self-generated dream-life, without the BBC dropping its contribution into that murky pool.

Worse than this, though, is to be roused to wide-awake indignation from a sleeping start.  By, let's say, a presenter's determination to treat a serious issue as mere light-hearted "human interest" filler between the heavy stuff.  "Come on, Humphrys," my mind yells as it roars into life, "This is the ONLY opportunity this man will get to raise national awareness of Restless Leg Syndrome this whole YEAR, and you're using him as a straight-man!"  Or there's the unquestioning veneration that is ladled over people who actually deserve the sort of merciless verbal thrashing unleashed on politicians and spin-doctors. The other morning, it was a bunch (a clang?) of "sound artists" who were getting the unwarranted easy airtime.  Though it must have been a toss-up in the pre-programme conference whether they'd get the pious or the piss-take treatment.

Sound-artists... I'm very wary of formulations like that.  Not just because it sounds like a roundabout way of saying "musician", though there is that.  Is David Hockney a "paint-artist", or would that apply more appropriately to Jackson Pollock?  In the end, though, "artist" is just a job description, not an honorific term, or a state of mind, or an aspiration. It means "someone who makes a living from making art".  What counts as art is up for grabs, of course. So I suppose it does help to say what kind of artist you are, or hope to be.

Obviously, if someone wants to sample sounds in an interesting way, and produces compelling work that people want to listen to, then good luck to them.  For example, I admire the work of Richard Skelton:  I actually buy it myself.  But as I listened to these sound-artists describe their "practice", I knew that sooner or later -- here it comes! -- it would turn into a sermon on the need for us all to pay closer attention to our surroundings, which is never anything more than a presumptious, preachy moralism disguised as aesthetics.

John Cage never intended 4'33" as an opportunity for Thought For The Day sanctimony.  Any more that Marcel Duchamp intended L.H.O.O.Q. to leverage the market for "appropriated" art.  I am so fed up with hearing what I think of as the Gospel of the God of Small Things. This has nothing to do with the novel by Arundhati Roy, though it has a lot to do with what people who have never read that book imagine it must be about (a classic example of a Takeaway Title).   It's annoying to hear work (including my own) damned with the faint praise that it helps open our eyes (or ears) to the little things we fail to notice in our everyday lives.  Grr.  As I say, from a sleeping start to cold fury in five seconds.  Thanks, BBC.

A large part of the theology of the Gospel of the God of Small Things is the belief that "everybody is an artist, and everything is art"; all we need is a little help to see it. Well, I disagree: no they aren't, and no it isn't.  That's why some artists can make a living, and most can't.  Is everybody a plumber, and everything plumbing?  No.  Such people need a serious dose of some hallucinogen -- preferably something spiky and unforgiving like LSD --  to teach them that to notice more is a problem, and potentially a nightmare.  There's an awful lot going on out there: be grateful for pragmatic simplifications*. Noticing less but in a more interesting way is the thing.  Good artists do that.  But it's not so much what they notice, but how they notice it and what they make out of it that matters.

Actually, that spot on Today bothered me in another way, too.  Somewhere in that brackish area of my mind, between the ebb and flow of the conscious and unconscious tides, the information was floated that a sound artist called John Drever has a CD out called Cattle Grids of Dartmoor.  What?

That had me thinking involuntarily about cattle grids all day, when I had other things I needed to think about. There was the one where I rescued a lamb, trapped inside it like a cage.  The one that had rolling bars that made it impossible to walk over.  The one where the pit underneath was so full of stones and rubbish that even cattle wearing high-heels could walk across it.  Oh, and the one which some local cattle-grid artist had painted gaudily in candy stripes.  And so on.  But, Cattle Grids of Dartmoor, what a great title for a CD!

Though I would probably have had something loud, guitar-driven, and kind of post-punk in mind.  The sort of thing that emanates from my daughter's bedroom.  But, you know those satisfying zzzzing! or brrrrrat! noises that cattle grids make when you drive over them?  Well, apparently John Drever has been systematically recording them.  All over Dartmoor.  And he's made a CD.  Go on, treat yourself!

*  I like the quote usually attributed to physicist John Wheeler, that "Time is what prevents everything happening at once.  Space is what prevents it all happening to me!". Though Wheeler himself attributed it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas".  Yeah, I can hear that, sung -- Guy Clark style -- to a guitar accompaniment...

Heads Up

Sometimes a walk in the woods is just a walk in the woods, sometimes it's not ...

Found this picture from 2007, looking for something else.  Don't know if they're still there, but try looking in the woods of the Chateau de Marqueyssac, in the Dordogne.

Cats With Wings

I was pulling into my favourite parking space one morning last week when I spotted a couple of birds flying strongly but erratically over the campus.  If you're a halfway decent birdwatcher, you'll know the birds you see most frequently by their characteristic size, shape and behaviour, what in twitchers' argot is called a bird's jizz (hey, don't blame me).  The merest glimpse is usually enough to know whether it was, say, a Robin or a Wren that just flew into a nearby bush.  By the same token, you just know when you're seeing something rare or unfamiliar.

These two were distinctly unfamiliar.  Hawk-ish? Yes.  But maybe just a bit pigeon-like?  Yes but no, definitely hawks.  But not Sparrow-Hawks, and not Kestrels.  Well, if it looks like a hawk but makes you think of a pigeon, then by common consent it's a duck Peregrine Falcon.  Surely not...  Without binoculars I couldn't say for sure, but as I watched them sparring, swooping and gliding, the conviction grew.  I have seen Peregrines before, but still retain an idea of them as romantic, rarely-seen aristocrats of the wild places, despite knowing they have taken to nesting on inner-City tower blocks, where the pigeon-pickings are easy.

Later in the morning, I heard an insistent mewling sound through my open office window, and looked out.  There they were again, high up, rolling and tumbling together.  This time I shoved my camera out and took a shot of a lot of sky and two tiny bird-specks somewhere in it.  No doubt about it:  Peregrines, probably youngsters.

It turns out this was old news.  A pair had chosen to nest on a Vodafone mobile phone mast atop the improbable, unoccupied and still-undemolished Faraday Building, disrupting the signal to a large part of northern Southampton, and thereby making themselves very unpopular.  Being protected birds, of course, they cannot be disturbed until their chicks have applied to university.  This may also explain why applications from pigeons to study at Southampton have diminished dramatically in recent times.
 
A spokespigeon said: 

Yeah, yeah, Lord and Lady Pigeon-Killer set up home, and everyone's like, Oooh, they're so special, leave them alone!  But, a coupla hard-working pigeons try to raise a family and it's, Get the fuck outta here, you scum, you're just rats with wings!  Rats with wings? Listen, from where I'm standing, those things are cats with wings.  And I hate cats! Ooops, sorry about the upholstery...  Come on, it'll brush out...  Shall I stand somewhere else?

The pigeon's Room 101...

The Long Grass

Long grass is everywhere this year.  Not sure whether this is because everyone has taken an ecological turn, or because all the gardeners and groundsmen have been laid off.  

It's too hot.  I'm re-reading The Wasp Factory, after 30 years -- re-reading is something I rarely do -- and realising how little of what I have read I retain in my conscious mind.  I suppose it's all in there somewhere, but it's as if I had never read the book before.  Which is fine:  perhaps I'll stop buying new books and simply start all over again with the same ones...

Holy Catfish

 I was idly surfing the Net the other evening, and came across a reference to an essay by artist Paul Nash, "Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism".  Well, that had me hooked right away.  Swanage is the Dorset coastal resort where we went for our family summer holiday probably five or six years in a row, which -- when you're a child -- feels like forever.

In various contexts -- therapy, grief-counselling, pain-relief, and so on -- you may be asked to identify your Happy Place, in order to be able to go there in your mind.  For me this is very easy: I am 8 years old, walking down the hill to the beach from our hotel in Ulwell Road, on the first, brilliantly sunny day of our holiday.  As you turn a certain corner, the whole sweep of Swanage Bay comes into view spread out below you, the morning sun glittering on the waves in a complex, hypnotic dance -- a pure instance of what literary types call an objective correlative.  But Swanage and Surrealism?  It's not an association that happens in my mind.

Idiot on the beach

Looking for a text of the essay, I came across this picture in the Tate's collection:

Paul Nash, Swanage c. 1936 © Tate

It's a typical Nash production, a portentous mixed-media collage, with no obvious purpose or connection with Swanage beyond that all-purpose Modernist symbolic heavy-breathing (I blame Freud).  The Tate's description, including a blow-by-blow account of the objects invoked, is worth reading, if only because it makes a dull picture (the original is in 1930s monochrome, too) rather more interesting.  But what caught my eye, though, was this passage:

The bleached bony object to the right of the ‘Lon-gom-pa’ is a crucifix fish. Eileen Agar, who herself spent the summer of 1935 at Swanage told the compiler in conversation (4 July 1974) that she met the Nash’s through Ashley Havinden who was also staying at Swanage, and they subsequently became close friends. In a letter of 6 March 1974 she wrote ‘I also had a crucifix fish (the white object in the centre), and we used to compare notes as to who had the best example.’

A crucifix fish?  More surfing led to the discovery that a certain common ocean catfish (Ariopsis felis, or the Hardhead Sea Catfish) has an extraordinary secret.  Common down the coast of the southern United States and in the Caribbean, this fish is easily caught and tastes pretty good.  You can imagine the scene:  a pirate crew are sitting on the beach, enjoying a catfish barbecue.  One of the guys is especially hungry, and breaks open the roasted catfish head -- mmm, finger lickin' good!  When he's done licking out roasted catfish brains, this is what he finds he is holding in his hands:

© Brian W. Coad

OMG WTF??  On your knees, sinner man!  Check it out:  let a little rum-induced pareidolia run loose over that catfish skull, and it's practically like looking at a mediaeval carved ivory Calvary.  Amazing.

Needless to say, these things have attracted folklore, and (I believe) are widely sold as tourist items.  Apparently, if you shake one, there are loose bony bits inside that make the sound of dice rattled in a cup, calling to mind the soldiers gambling for Christ's garments, if you're that way inclined.

Why Paul Nash thought to include a photograph of one in a Swanage-influenced collage is hard to say.  It's a long way from Swanage Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.  In the end, I suspect he may have brought his own surrealism to Dorset, rather than found it there.  Mind you, if it's surrealism you're after, there is one very peculiar thing about Swanage.

Back in the 19th century, Swanage exported boatloads of Purbeck marble from the local quarries up and around the coast to London.  It is a very hard-wearing stone, well-suited to building and paving.  The returning boats, empty of rock, needed a compensating ballast, and very often this took the form of scrap metal, generally old ordnance or redundant iron street furniture. Which is why, if you check out the street bollards in Swanage, a lot of them are either old cannons or bollards bearing the name and shield of the City of London.

Oh, and there's that ridiculous Portland stone globe, carved in 1887 in John Mowlem's stone-yard (yes, founder of the building firm).  I suppose that's a bit surreal, too.  And, look, London bollards!

Globe at Durlston, Swanage

Painting by Job Hardy, 1908

Same Old Log

Same afternoon, same log, same tree trunk, same viaduct pillar. Just facing one way, then the other.  For this kind of work you really need a view-camera, but the G3 in a steady hand does the job well enough.

The hardest thing to convey about the Viaduct is its scale, experienced close-up.  The largest arches are about 40 feet high, I'd guess, and the brick-clad pillars have a solidity of presence that is positively Ancient Egyptian.  It's a gateway -- an emphatic dotted line -- between the frantic motorway madness of the M3 and its sliproads and the tranquility of the Itchen meadows.

Borrowing Ballads

This will be old news to long-time folkies, but I've only just come across the renderings of Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads by Peter Bellamy.  It's the main benefit of using a streaming service like Spotify, that you can explore at will corridors of the House of Music that you would not normally enter, not least because the price of entry would be prohibitively high.  True, I often find myself backing out of a (metaphorical) new room fairly quickly, but occasionally I find myself somewhere so congenial I'm amazed Ive never been there before.

Frequent visitors will know about my developing interest in Kipling. You'll know the name, obviously, but  will probably not have actually read much of his output.  I certainly hadn't.  He seems to have suffered the same sort of eclipse in the shadow of a small, over-studied modernist canon as other once well-regarded writers such as Arnold Bennett or Ford Madox Ford, never mind oddballs like John Cowper Powys or W.H. Davies.  I'd swap any amount of D.H. Lawrence for Kipling's best work.  Yes, he was an imperialist, but he's also one of our most imaginative and empathetic writers, with a positively Shakespearean gift for inhabiting the minds of others (what Keats called "negative capability", and that great headologist Granny Weatherwax calls "borrowing"). 

Peter Bellamy's story is a sad one.  I saw him once in a folk club above a pub I used to attend as an underaged drinker around 1971.  It was a startling performance from an extraordinary man.  To say his voice was very loud with a distinctive braying timbre is to put it mildly.  He also had the dress-sense and camp manner of a down-at-heel Restoration fop.  I came to own a couple of albums by his group, The Young Tradition, and had a particular liking for their raucous renderings of sea shanties like "Chicken on a Raft" and "Hanging Johnnie".

Unlike most folkies, Bellamy's interests went wider than the simple performance of songs  -- probably "collected" from someone else's album -- that had somehow emerged from a vaguely-understood "folk culture".  He had an interest in the history and culture that had given rise to broadside ballads, and ultimately this led him down a road that might be called "Victoriana".  He became fascinated by Kipling, who was himself fascinated by the lives of "ordinary" people, and made the intriguing discovery that many of Kipling's "ballads" -- often a tricky read on the page -- would come to life when set to Victorian popular ballad tunes.  Sounds obvious but, like any stroke of genius, it's only obvious in retrospect.

The problem was, not many people could be bothered to follow him down that road at the time.  His alleged masterpiece (I have yet to listen to it) was a ballad-opera called The Transports, which told the story of the first transport ship to land in Australia.  It was well-received, critically, but it was 1977 and people were looking in a completely different direction, musically.  What could have been less fashionable then than a "ballad-opera"?  Bellamy's career dried up, and he eventually committed suicide in 1991, baffled by his own lack of success.

If you know the Barrack-Room Ballads but don't know this work and I have piqued your curiosity, I recommend you listen, if you can, to Bellamy's versions of "Tommy", "Route Marchin'", and "Danny Deever".  No matter how well you know these ballads, I think you'll find that Bellamy's rendering adds considerably to your understanding and enjoyment of Kipling's work.  He has got inside them in a true act of creative "borrowing".

Ant Alert

 St. Catherine's Hill from Five Bridges Road

Sunny days are here again.  For a bit, anyway.  In the interests of phenological science, allow me to pass on this appeal to you:

Dear all,

It is now just weeks to go until we are expecting flying ants on a large scale. Last year the two peaks were 24^th July and 8^th August, and we will be very interested to see whether we have two peaks again. Earlier sightings often come from houses, greenhouses and compost bins.

Sorry for the delay with sending out the sample tubes, but the addresses are with the printer so they will be coming very shortly.

We are ready for you to submit your records and look forward to the first sightings. Thank you for all your help, and please do spread the word to any friends and family who would be interested.

Best wishes,

Rebecca

Dr Rebecca Nesbit MSB

0207 685 2553

07714 594862

www.societyofbiology.org

Follow me on Twitter @Society_Biology and @RebeccaNesbit 

Find us on facebook

Read our blog

Seen flying ants this year? Please report your sightings!

Why she wants us to send her a sample is not entirely clear -- do they need to be sure ant-spotters are drug free? -- but, whatever, I don't mind.  As soon as I get the tube the sample will be on its way, Rebecca!

St. Catherine's Hill, approached from the SW

Demob Happy Planet

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, at the moment I'm telling anyone who will listen (and plenty who won't) that I intend to take early retirement next year, with the intention of making it too humiliating for me not to retire.  It may work.  However, I have become fairly immune to embarrassment over the years; it's the price you pay for being an idiot.

An unforeseen consequence of this is that I have already become a bit "demob happy".  That is to say, things that it had seemed important to keep on top of and ahead of at work have started to look, well, unimportant.  In less than a year they will be someone else's concern.

I like the folk wisdom encapsulated in a phrase like "demob happy".  It's far more expressive than a technical term like "dissociation".  People misunderstand it, though.  It doesn't simply mean "happy because something burdensome is coming to an end".  "Happy", in British military slang, tends to means mad or disorientated (as in "bomb happy").  In the army, soldiers approaching demobilization were a lethal menace, as their handling of weapons and machinery was likely to become sloppy.

Life on Earth

I, along with 7 million other half-awake listeners to Radio 4's Today programme,  had a sobering experience this morning.  Among the other headlines -- Egypt, Edward Snowden, child abuse, the usual temporary litany -- the newsreader intoned that scientists have predicted that, using models of the Sun's increasing heat and brightness, life on Earth will become impossible for all life-forms but "extremophile" bacteria in a billion years.

Right. Compared to the ending of a career, that's a biggie.  It may not be Bowie's Five Years ("my brain hurts a lot") but it's a definite horizon and terminus of expectations.  Beyond which, nothing.  Even not running the tap when brushing our teeth won't get us past that.

Of course, a billion years is a long time.  But long times have a habit of passing.  Just the other day I walked past my old flat and wondered whether there might be any mail for me there.  Would it be worth asking?  Then I realised I hadn't lived there for 25 years.  I bought that flat in 1984 aged 30.  If someone had come to the door asking after mail delivered to that address since 1959, when I was 5 years old, I would probably have shut the door rather quickly.

Will humanity become demob happy?  I think it's a serious question.  In times past, a belief in having a stake in an afterlife took the edge off the expected Apocalypse and, indeed, led some to anticipate it with pleasure.  Day of Judgement?  Bring it on!  Nowadays, very few people believe in an afterlife, but thankfully very many don't yet realise they don't.  They aren't continually brooding on their personal extinction, or conducting their lives in the expectation of no greater sanction than what the local magistrate might hand down, if caught. Luckily. "What's the point?" is the question that all civilisation seeks to overcome.

I suppose no-one said that knowledge would bring happiness.  There is a world of difference, psychologically, between the hope of a judgement scenario -- "No, sorry, all you spam and malware merchants go in the Red Channel queue, please" -- and the certainty of a grim, indifferent, baking, irradiated, lifeless plain, littered with melting golf balls and unopened blister-packs.

Did I mention I'm thinking of retiring next year?

Really Wild

Hobbies and "interests" are a normal part of growing up though, sadly, this seems less the case these days, when children's behaviour is much more closely policed by peers, parents, and -- worst of all -- multinational companies determined to move product via pester-power.  I've already described my youthful interest in "natural history", but I also had school-friends who bred pigeons or raised jackdaw nestlings, ran a stamp-dealing business, made model aircraft from scale plans, restored machine-tools, built movie-quality miniature worlds out of plaster and plasticine, and so on.  The spectrum of "normal" was very wide.  Though it's true my early-teens obsession with Australian aborigines did take me a little far out, at times.

The usual thing, of course, is for such intense interests to take a back seat in adolescence, when even more compelling interests come to the fore.  What is unusual is for them to come back to the front seat again, once the hormones have settled down.  [ Yes, I realise there's an amusing front seat/back seat joke lurking here, but remember British adolescents never own or have access to cars].  Even more unusual is for there to be a living to made out of them: it is an enviably happy person whose life-work is of a piece with their childhood hobbies.

I remember, when my son was about nine and still deep in his own dinosaurs and natural history phase, going one Saturday afternoon to our local "real" camera shop, City Photographic, probably to buy my weekly supply of film.  I gradually realised that he was rigid with focussed attention, like a pointer dog.  Following his gaze, I saw a familiar face and haircut and heard a distinctive, rhotacized voice.  It was Chris Packham, expert wildlife photographer, and one of the presenters of a favourite TV programme (and a much-watched "Dinosaur Special" video), The Really Wild Show.  It turned out he is a local boy.

Now, Chris is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. He is one of that select band of wildlife presenters who are potential Attenborough heirs, and there is a reason for that: his enthusiasm and knowledge go all the way down. You won't find many TV celebrities who can talk about a childhood spent delving for snakes in heathy tussocks in the New Forest, then going to bed unwashed, in order to keep the (allegedly) delightful smell of grass snake on their hands. Or who know a certain woman who is an authority on slugs, who says the only way to distinguish certain species is to taste them.  Such people are a precious resource.

Most of us fall by the wayside.  I remember at university meeting a guy who was studying life sciences, and discovering we had a childhood enthusiasm for moths in common. It turned out that very night he was going to be running a mercury vapour trap in his college garden -- something I'd often read about but never done -- and he invited me along.  It could have been the start of a beautiful friendship, and a revival of entomological passion.

But later on some other friends invited me to the bar, one thing led to another, and I forgot all about the light trap.  So it goes.  As in politics and all fields of endeavour, the crucial distinction in life is between those who express an interest, and those who show up.

Emmet Gowin,

 Mariposas Nocturnas. Edith in Panama (2006)

Twyford Down

So far, this is the best place I've found to stand, that gives the fullest sense of the scar that the M3 cutting has made through Twyford Down.  As I've said before, I'm ambivalent about the place.  True, it is a massive act of vandalism, but it is also a rather magnificent presence in the landscape, isn't it?  And (whisper it) I do love to drive through that chalky canyon.

From here, you can see the scope of many of my recent weekend rambles.  We are looking more or less due north.  The cutting runs SW-NE.  Beyond it to the NW is St. Catherine's Hill and to the SE are Twyford Down and the Hockley golf course.  Why sliced golf balls aren't continually raining down onto the traffic I don't know.  You find them everywhere else underfoot on the downs, like toadstools.*

The Hockley Viaduct is on the extreme left of the picture, concealed by trees.  The River Itchen (which for some bizarre reason I keep referring to as the  River Test, which actually flows in a parallel valley several miles over to the West) and the Itchen Navigation canal run across the centre of the picture, within the dark green trees.  Winchester city is directly over the hill to the north.

In between rain, we've managed to enjoy several breezy, sunny afternoons, ambling across this chalk downland. It's at its prettiest now, in the early summer, when everything still holds on to its own shade of green, but is beginning to make a harmonized whole.

* And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

My Brilliant Career

As you get older, there are certain days when you can see the shape of your own life.  It may not be a pleasing shape but, like the face you see in the mirror, it's the only one you've got.  Today was such a day.

Today we had a farewell lunchtime "do" for our Chief, who is retiring.  It went as well as these tribal things can, with warmly awkward words from people unaccustomed to public speaking, jokes, a presentation, and lots of familiar, semi-historic faces whose associated names have somehow evaporated from one's mind. The Ur-Chief was there, the one before the current one, the one who appointed me.  His opening salvo ("What, are you still here?") I took in good part, as he was looking frail and, after all, he'd given me the job 30 years ago on the understanding I'd be moving on to greater things in five years.  Old enough to appreciate my reference to the "pram in the hallway",* he is nevertheless of a generation that will never understand why any man's career would be halted by the arrival of children.  He, after all, had six.

Looking forward, the shape of my employed life -- a.k.a. my brilliant career -- is about to take a curious twist.  For the Chief's successor will be a woman who was once a trainee at the same time and place as me, and whose boss I was for about a year, before she did move on to better things.  That's going to be interesting.

But only for a short while.  I have now told enough people that I intend to take early retirement next year when I turn 60 to overcome any degree of cold feet when the time comes.  It will simply be too humilating not to have gone.  What, are you still here?

I must admit, I recoil at the prospect of one day having to stand up there, having the shape of my life described by a virtual stranger to people who have only the vaguest idea who I am. I have often said that the problem with retirees is that there's never anyone left, by the time they go, who remembers them when they were good at their job.  It may already be too late, but I intend to be moving on before that happens.

Who was that masked man?

* It comes from a once-famous essay by Cyril Connolly, "The Enemies of Promise", describing the life-factors and choices that work against the realisation of early "promise" in a career.

Water Meadows

All along the Rivers Test and Itchen are water meadows or, strictly speaking, the remains of what used to be intensively-managed water meadows.  They were an important part of the agricultural scene, pasture that was deliberately flooded to encourage grass growth, using a system of side-channels known as "carriers", from which water was flooded over the meadow using a series of sluices and hatches.  Down by the river near Twyford you can still see them, little brick arches half-buried in the lush grass, like hump-backed bridges in some Beatrix Potter fantasy of trouser-wearing rabbits.

Although their agricultural importance has diminished, they are important habitats for wildlife.  What you can't see in these photographs are the dozens of swifts, martins and swallows skimming the grass at improbable speeds for insects in a mesmerizing aerobatic display. The Prof and I like to lean on a gate and watch them together for what seems like hours.  It seems incredible that so much energy can be generated from eating insects.  Insects! It also seems so unfair that the laws of gravity have been suspended just for them.

If you're lucky, a kingfisher will zip by, a blue spark sensed more than seen.  Not this weekend, though.  On a casual walk on Sunday we did see several herons, reed warblers, water voles, and various other species of what are technically-known as "brown jobbies" -- those small, furtive brown birds that are impossible to differentiate without binoculars (we'd forgotten them, again), an identification guide, and years of dedicated watching.  At times, you can appreciate the Victorian naturalist's approach to identification:  just shoot the bugger and take it home.

The highlight was a large, chestnut brown raptor that went up as we entered some trees -- not a buzzard, not a kite.  "Marsh Harrier" were the words that sprang to mind, but it was gone before I could get a good shot at of it.

Chain of Fools

People of a certain age and inclination may recall Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's satirical (and, um, inventive) album of 1968, We're Only In It For the Money, deliberately mocking [gasp!] the then not-yet-inviolably-iconic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and its knees-up psychedelia.  Younger folk may not realise that the whole hippie thing (not to mention the whole Beatles thing) was already ripe for parody by 1968. I cringe when I am asked, as if it were a matter of membership of a club, "Were you a hippie, old fellow?"  No, young 'un! I was a small-town stoner with a mistrust of vegetarians, a love of certain narrowly-defined currents of rock and folk music, and a taste for extreme-left politics and dressing like a tramp.  I realise this is the vanity of small differences, but these things matter.  Hippie?  Pah!

Anyway, on that album, there is a doo-wop parody, "What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?"

What's the ugliest part of your body?
What's the ugliest pa-art of your body?
Some say your nose
Others say your toes
I think it's your mind...
I think it's your mi-ind...

A good joke, but also a profound one, at least to a know-nothing teen.  That one's mind is just a part of one's body -- and not the most attractive part, either -- is a "disruptive" thought, to say the least, and you may wonder how it occurred to a musician with no formal education to speak of beyond high school.*  Well, one of the uglier mind-forged manacles is certainly intellectual snobbery.  If pop culture has taught us anything, it is that creativity and fresh thinking rarely flourish among the highly-educated; indeed, the wrong sort of "education" is a prison from which few escape.

Is NOTHING original? (see bottom right)

William Blake (whose coinage "mind-forg'd manacles" is) was nothing if not original, yet entirely self-educated.  Perhaps if his work had been less profound, he would be regarded as the great-great-grand-nobodaddy of all those "outsider" artists, obsessively painting out their personal demons, assembling miniature Sagrada Familia accretions out in the desert, or developing their very own theories of everything.  Come to think of it, that's exactly who he is.

Blake (or, at least, the Blake of the Songs of Innocence and Experience) was an important figure to the Beat Generation (who, when it comes down to it, set the agenda for the "alternative" 1960s).  He is as close as English poetry gets to the condensed, gnomic, portable work of those Eastern poets writing in the Zen and Taoist traditions.

In particular, Blake's poem "Ah Sunflower!" seems to have been a key work for them, as it had been for a previous generation of English modernist-romantics (Nash and Britten, for example).  I really couldn't say why, but it clearly struck a resonating chord.  It was famously the subject of Allen Ginsberg's "Blake vision", and was even a track on The Fugs' first album, sung by Ed Sanders.

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Songs of Experience, 1794

It's been all over the place in the last 60 years.  So it was with some astonishment that I read that a children's poem by Nancy Willard, which riffs on Blake's poem, is being disseminated on the Web -- and even taught in some American schools -- as a work by Blake himself.  What?

Two Sunflowers Move in the Yellow Room

"Ah, William, we're weary of weather,"
said the sunflowers, shining with dew.
"Our traveling habits have tired us.
Can you give us a room with a view?"

They arranged themselves at the window
and counted the steps of the sun,
and they both took root in the carpet
where the topaz tortoises run.

(from A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, 1981)

How anyone in a position to teach poetry, even at primary school level, could mistake this for a poem written in the late 18th century is a mystery to me.  It's true, intellectual snobbery may be one mind-forg'd manacle, but blissful ignorance posturing as expertise is surely its partner-in-chains.

* You may also wonder how that same school, Antelope Valley High, produced both Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, not to mention ethnobotanist psychedelitician Terence McKenna.

Scuffing, Slapping and Thudding

There was a  review by Terry Eagleton of Paul Morley's new book, The North (And Almost Everything In It), in this week's Guardian.  It's worth reading, especially if you still calibrate your sense of humour by the Monty Python benchmark, and have a suspicion of the Competitive Cult of Authentic Origins.  If the dismissive cry "Luxury!" brings a smile to your face, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I, and a select band of my contemporaries at university, once sat at the feet (occasionally literally) of the esteemed Dr. Eagleton.  We formed the vanguard of a literary Marxist-Deconstructionist revolutionary cadre that, like the intergalactic invasion fleet in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, prepared for war, only to vanish into the yawning maw of the small dog we call Real Life.  Ah, well.  As the other Marx pointed out, inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

But Eagleton knows his stuff, and his strictures -- sometimes good-natured, sometimes not, but always apposite, always amusing -- are worth attending to.  In this case, he shows two yellow cards to Morley.  First, over-writing:

This affectionate piece of anthropology is marred by a tiresomely rhapsodic tone. "I found it, my north," he gushes, "smoking and babbling, battling and loving, scattered and glittering, lush and brisk … rickety and plush, conspiring and crackling." Reticence is not this author's strong point. There is a compulsive use of the couplet: "brilliance and persistence, acceptance and slyness, dirt and glamour". There is also a reference to northerners who speak "with a certain sort of tough, scuffed and striven fluency", preferring the "slap, twist and thud" of their own speech to "the slur, sting and snap of near neighbours". There is certainly a glut of scuffing, slapping and thudding in these extravagantly overwritten pages, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley become "charred, trapped scraps of frustrated northern will". It makes them sound even worse than serial killers. Liverpool, predictably, provokes Morley to a bout of severe verbal flatulence: "Liverpool, passion. Liverpool, moving, Liverpool, moving cotton, sugar, slaves, invoices, music, ideas here, there and everywhere …"

 Second, self-obsession:

Yet if some of it suffers from a rather slipshod lyricism, the auto-biographical sections are too flatly naturalistic. It is interesting to know that the Beatles were turned away from the restaurant of Manchester's Midland hotel for being inappropriately dressed, and that Les Dawson was able to pull such grotesque faces because he broke his jaw in a boxing match, but not that Morley used to catch the bus at five past eight so as to be at school by a quarter to nine. He grew up in a part of Stockport called Reddish, and the book's obsession with the place is so relentless that one begins to wonder whether it is meant to be self-parody.

Of course, what Terry doesn't know is that this portentous over-writing is the house-style of music magazines.  Paul Morley bought his media access-all-areas pass with his purple prose in the New Musical Express in the 1970s, but he seems not to have twigged that writing, like people, needs to grow up.  That self-consciously rhapsodic, allusive, swooning style works in small doses, done well, but it's far too much like hard work at book length.  What can possibly be being said that is worth that much of a reader's attention?

Also, Morley, like so many media types today, really does need to get over this obsession with the minutiae of his own upbringing, as if they were the seal on some sort of certificate of authenticity.  No-one cares about bus-stops in bloody Reddish, Paul.  You're a journalist, mate, not David Bowie.

But, hmm, purple prose and self-obsession?  We know all about those things -- and forgive them -- in Blogland!  But if the blogging money's not good enough, here's a thought, maybe he should write some songs of his own...

Vernacular, verbose; an attempt at getting close to where he came from.
In the doorway of the stars, between Blandford Street and Mars...

Ian Anderson, Baker Street Muse

The Barricades of Heaven are as easily found in Reddish as in the hills of Orange County.

The O-Filler

I was sure I had already posted this poem, but it seems not, so here it is. I was a bit suspicious of the text I found online -- rightly so, as it turned out -- so I went downstairs on Friday into the paper periodicals crypt, and found the original issue of The Atlantic Monthly (needless to say, it's a great privilege and very convenient for a curious mind, to work in a university library). I love looking at old periodicals: the adverts, typography and layouts in the pre-digital age can be truly appalling. Standards and expectations have risen, not fallen, in the last 50 years. Though this poem is an exception. It has been set in a box on a whole page within a border of text with filled-in Os. Nice.

The O-Filler, by Alastair Reid

One noon in the library, I watched a man --
imagine! -- filling in O's, a little, rumpled
nobody of a man, who licked his stub of pencil
and leaned over every O with a loving care,
shading it neatly, exactly to its edges,
until the open pages
were pocked and dotted with solid O's, like villages
and capitals on a map. And yet, so peppered,
somehow the book looked lived in and complete.

That whole afternoon, as the light outside softened,
and the library groaned woodenly,
he worked and worked, his O-so-patient shading
descending like an eyelid over each open O
for page after page. Not once did he miss one,
or hover even a moment over an a,
or an e or a p or a g. Only the O's --
oodles of O's, O's multitudinous, O's manifold,
O's italic and roman.
And what light on his crumpled face when he discovered --
as I supposed -- odd words like zoo and ooze,
or -- joy! -- oolong and odontology!

Think now. In that limitless library,
all round the steep-shelved walls, bulging in their bindings,
books stood, waiting. Heaven knows how many
he had so far filled, but no matter, there still were
uncountable volumes of O-laden prose, and odes
with inflated capital O's (in the manner of Shelley),
O-bearing Bibles and biographies,
even whole sections devoted to O alone,
all his for the filling. Glory, glory, glory!
How lovely and open and endless the world must have seemed to him,
how utterly clear-cut! Think of it. A pencil
was all he needed. Life was one wide O.

Anyway, why in the end should O's not be closed
as eyes are? I envied him. After all,
sitting across from him, had I accomplished
anything as firm as he had, or as fruitful?
What could I show? a handful of scrawled lines,
an afternoon yawned and wondered away,
and a growing realization that in time
even my scribbled words would come
under his grubby thumb, and the blinds be drawn
on all my O's. And only this thought for comfort --
that when he comes to this poem, a proper joy
may amaze his wizened face, and, O, a pure pleasure
make that meticulous pencil quiver.

(Atlanric Monthly, February 1960)

Of course, we have a special re-education cellar for anyone caught O-filling our stock, or worse. I was down in The Crypt a while ago looking for something in the Strand Magazine and discovered that someone had been busy, razoring out the Sherlock Holmes stories. I know! Flaying alive is too lenient. You may be interested to know that the worst razorers of academic journal articles are Law students. Figures...

Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?

The chances are that, if you're interested in photography, then you probably read Mike Johnston's The Online Photographer blog (or TOP, as it has come to be known).  And if you read TOP, then you're also likely to recognise the name Ken Tanaka.  Ken is a regular commenter and occasional contributor, and one of his signature high-viewpoint views of Chicago was offered as a print sale a while back.

So it was with interest that I saw that a video by Ken Tanaka was featured in the "Daily Video" slot on Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury site.  I hadn't realised that he was also involved in video production.  It turns out to be an amusing take on ethnicity, visible and invisible, called What Kind of Asian Are You?  So I thought I'd check out some of his other videos on YouTube.

Now, it's at this point you have to make allowance for my idiocy.  I only share these foolish things with you because I find my own stupidity interesting.  I suppose a more sensible person would simply brush such stuff under the carpet.  However...

After viewing a couple of the videos I discovered, to my amazement, that Ken Tanaka is a very unusual person.  I had always assumed he was, in the American style, a "Japanese-American".  But he is, in fact, a "caucasian male", as they say on the cop thrillers, who was adopted and raised by Japanese parents in Japan.  An "American-Japanese", no less.  To see him on one of his videos is to experience serious cognitive dissonance, as he is a very caucasian male (large, ginger-haired, coarse-featured), but one who speaks imperfect English with a major Japanese accent.  At first you think he's hamming it up, but he clearly isn't.  It's hard to take in, and sometimes quite hard to understand, too.

Then, of course, the penny dropped.  Just a minute, I've seen Ken Tanaka on TOP and he doesn't look at all like that.  This must be ... another Ken Tanaka.  As indeed it is.  There are one, two, three, many Ken Ts!  Sixty-four on LinkedIn alone! And let's not mention the fictional character "football coach Ken Tanaka" in the egregious TV series Glee.

OK, so Lesson One For Idiots is that an apparently unusual name is not enough to identify someone. I should know better:  I have a moderately unusual name myself, but nonetheless have dozens of namesakes in Canada, where people of Scottish descent are like highland midges in August.  After all, comedian Dave Gorman made a career out of finding other Dave Gormans.

But Lesson Two is more interesting.  The "other" Ken Tanaka's accent is a vivid demonstration of something that shouldn't need demonstrating, but does: that culture trumps essence pretty much every time.  The Japanese stumble over certain English sounds, not because they are Japanese, but because they have learned to speak Japanese, with its distinctive set of phonemes.  In a world still strongly divided by "race", this is not as obvious as it sounds.  To believe the opposite, that essence trumps culture (in other words, that attributes like gender, race, and class are in and of themselves determining factors in a person's relative intelligence, athleticism, and so on) is to be, well, an essentialist, of which one extreme version is racism.

It's sort of what Other Ken's video is saying:  Asian-Americans may only be tenuously connected, if at all, to the cultural baggage associated with their ethnicity.  So why presume that they are?  Though, as a broad principle, this case may be overstated.  After all, some "white" ethnic identities are much stronger in their cultural persistence than the "Englishness" lampooned in the Tanaka video.  Setting aside Jewishness, Italianity and Irishry, where would Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon be without its stereotypes of Scandinavian-ness?

But there's nothing essential about these gift-shop and cook-book identities: you don't have to be "English" to be English.  The nature of English-ness changes with the nature of the whole set of those entitled to claim to be English.  A claim which few now, I suspect, would regard as having "won first prize in the lottery of life"; at least, not without a certain English irony.

If there's one lesson these islands still have to teach the rest of the world it is that mash-ups -- of race, of cultures, of classes, of music, of cuisines -- work.  It can be a bit sparky at times -- assimilating the Vikings was a bit hairy for a while -- but the resulting amalgam is usually something more useful and more durable than its constituent parts.

Well, some mash-ups don't work out, of course...

By the way, if you watch the What Kind of Asian Are You? video, do look for the out-take versions of the girl's "English stereotypes" frenzy, which are very funny.

For a Dancer

Author Iain Banks (or Iain M. Banks, if you're a sci-fi reader) died this week.  He had been "officially Very Poorly" for just a couple of months. I've always felt a certain affinity for Banks, as we are exactly the same age, and he was my first literary "discovery"; that is, a contemporary I felt I had identified and claimed for myself  from the slush-pile of books published in 1984, despite the negative reactions of the reviewers.  Easily done, as I, too, had a thing about wasps at the time.

People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... A genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.
Iain Banks, The Crow Road

Iain chose Jackson Browne's "For a Dancer" as his second record on Desert Island Discs, and also as an "inheritance track" on Radio 4's Saturday Live.  It's a personal favourite of mine, too; there is really nothing more to say about our existence and its mystery than Browne says in this beautiful song.  Though there's no harm in keeping on having a go, is there?

It's also the time of year when some of us remember John Wilson, and "For a Dancer" is for you, too.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown,
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own,
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive,
But you'll never know...

Something for the Weekend

In recent years I have got into the habit of having a single, annual haircut, generally at the point in the early summer when the prospect of combining heat, humidity and the still relatively generous head of hair my genes have bequeathed me starts to become an unpleasant reality.  This week was haircut week.  I went from scruffy collar-length to neat above-the-ears in fifteen minutes.

Conveniently, there's a hairdresser located in our university's Student Union, so I use that.  I'm sufficiently a boy of the "long 1950s", though, never to feel entirely comfortable in its unisex atmosphere.  As so often, "unisex" here means "a female environment in which men are tolerated".  There are too many mirrors, smells, lifestyle magazines, and pastel colours for a graceless lump like me to feel at home.  The pounding club-style music does nothing much for me, either.

I liked the old-fashioned barbershop that closed a decade or more ago, where I used to go with my son.  It was one step up from a well-run car-maintenance garage in ambience, but only one step.  Functional, sparse, with tools laid out ready to hand, and reassuringly under-decorated.  The barber, George, knew his trade, how to match cut to head, and how to read personality.  I never had to ask to have a bit more taken off, and the question, "Would you like anything on it, sir?" was a question expecting the answer "No".  George's well-honed instincts also told him that I did not require interrogation about my holiday plans, or the prospects of England against Australia in the Ashes.  He would work in a deep, austerely contemplative silence, broken only by the snip of scissors and the buzz of the electric trimmer.  Back in the day, I imagine those ten minutes getting a trim were the longest most men ever spent looking at themselves in a mirror.  Prolonged eye-contact with oneself fosters uncomfortable self-appraisal -- no wonder most customers preferred to chat about the weather.

However, there was also none of the passive pleasure of having two young women -- one to wash, one to "style" -- in intimate contact with one's head.  In the mind-set of the 1950s, that would have been verging on the scandalous: positively Profumo.  Habitual segregation by gender meant that any physical contact fizzed with erotic charge.  A casual touch of the hand when passing change in a shop was tantamount to an indecent proposal, and therefore carefully avoided.  But sex did rear its dodgily-coiffed head in the barbershop.  Alongside the scissors and razors, dangling leather strops, and tubs of Brylcreem, boxes of condoms were openly on display.  The barber's famous final question, "Something for the weekend, sir?" was the cue to palm a packet of three discreetly to the customer.

Where I realise I probably differ from those men of old, and most men even today, is in a willingness to be seen with radically different lengths of hair.   It's curious how rigidly guys stick to a chosen length and style. It's a high-maintenance approach.  I lost the habit of "popping in for a trim" when I let my hair grow to chest length after leaving school, and never regained it.  Now, I enjoy the shape-shifting effect of gradually changing demographic, as seen in others' eyes, like a slow-mo werewolf.

It's curious how your tacit approval or disapproval rating shifts. You start off neatly barbered, bristly, and a little hyper-masculine.  The suit-and-tie crowd acknowledge you. The edges gradually get knocked off that look, and you become Mr. Windblown-Casual, who lives for the weekend out on his boat.  Then, somewhere around three quarters of the way through the year you pass through a barrier of respectability, and find yourself back in the fold with the sub-cultural types.

I don't know whether my body-language mirrors the hair, but I suspect it may: in the final weeks before haircut week my partner tells me I have a positively (or perhaps negatively) defiant, two-fingers vibe.

But just now I'm Mr. Respectable again!

* Adverts from the Advert Museum at historyworld

Kodachrome

An alert for those of you equipped with iPads:  you can now get Luigi Ghirri's Kodachrome for £4.99 from MAPP / MACK:

In 1978 Luigi Ghirri self-published his first book, an avant-garde manifesto for the medium of photography and a landmark in his own remarkable oeuvre. Kodachrome has long been out of print and on the 20th anniversary of Ghirri’s death, MAPP is proud to publish the first digital edition of Kodachrome.

This edition is published as a facsimile of the original, adopting the original design, text layout and image sequence, but using new image files scanned from Ghirri’s original film to take advantage of modern technology. Also included is an essay by Francesco Zanot, which offers a contemporary perspective on the historical impact of Kodachrome, alongside French and German translations of the original texts from the book (which were published in English and Italian).

‘The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory… The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.’ Luigi Ghirri

You can get the e-book onto your iPad via the iBooks store (search for "Luigi Ghirri").  MACK are also publishing Kodachrome as a conventional, physical book.

 I only came across this book for the first time last year.  It is one of those books that is so perfect, so beautiful, that has anticipated so thoroughly everything you have ever done that you thought was original, that it makes you wonder why you bother.  Or that inspires you to get out there and fail again, fail better.