Absent Friend

Ingelheim Exchange, Easter 1971

(Mike, Steve, Tony)

Sad to say, one of my original crew of home-town "besties", Tony Collman, has just died. Most of us, I imagine, get to hear of the death of the friends of our youth belatedly, if at all, and with little or no awareness of who they became or what they did in the years after we chose (or drifted onto) our divergent paths through adult life. The person we remember almost certainly bears little resemblance to the person who has died, most likely in some town you don't know, and mourned by family and friends you will never have met.

This was not like that. Although, curiously, if I had never started this blog I would probably never have heard from Tony again after the last time we met in (I think) 1981, and I might never even have discovered he had died, unless it was many years later, as happened with another good friend, and no doubt with others I have yet to hear about. There seems to have been something oddly prophetic about Jackson Browne's "Song for Adam", from an album that was something of a favourite in our little small-town circle of friends:

When we parted we were laughing still, as our goodbyes were said
And I never heard from him again as each our lives we led
Except for once in someone else's letter that I read

Until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead.

Except we were not laughing, that last time. Tony had changed, and by no means for the better, it seemed to me.

But before getting to that, I should probably describe who this old friend used to be.

We attended a boys' grammar school in the New Town of Stevenage, 1965-72, that became a "comprehensive" in 1968/9. Tony, when I first knew him, was a mild-mannered, un-sporty, bespectacled boy who usually ended up without much effort somewhere in the top 5 ranked by academic ability in our year. His small size (that is, before a dramatic late growth spurt), heavy-rimmed glasses, and habitual briefcase led him to be given the slightly cruel nickname "Joe", because of his resemblance to Joe 90, the puppet character in the British children's TV programme of the same name. His mother Lena was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-era Berlin who worked for the same patrician chain-store, John Lewis, as my mother, and his father Jim was a bricklayer from London, a Communist, and a very tough customer. Necessarily, as he was the local organiser for the building workers' trade union AUBTW (later UCATT), and played a very significant role during the construction of our New Town.

Tony was by inclination a scientist, but also a very competent linguist, and we first became good friends around the age of 16 on our school's Easter exchange visits with our German twin-town, Ingelheim am Rhein. We shared a taste for intoxication, in-jokes, and improvised goofy humour of the sort that probably only appeals to smarty-pants adolescent boys. We had a lot of fun together, some of it quite foolhardy in retrospect, most notably when we hitchhiked from Amsterdam down through Germany as far as Munich in the summer of 1971, bonding over the sort of memorably mad (and sometimes scary) adventures you could have in those days as footloose 17-year-olds at large in Europe.

At the end of our schooldays Tony went off to Bristol in 1972 to study Physics, and I (after a further term of study and two terms working as a teaching assistant) finally left Stevenage in 1973 to study English at Oxford. For the next couple of years we exchanged letters and visited each other and our friends who were also away at university, as well as those establishing various dens of iniquity back home, and probably spent rather more time entertaining ourselves than was compatible with serious study, certainly of lab-bound Physics, although less so of that slacker's degree, English.

Tony, Bristol 1975

(photographer unknown)

Then, somehow and quite quickly, it all fizzled out. Fast friends went their separate ways, and in those days of frequent changes of address (and no mobile phones or internet) communications would be intermittent for a while, at best, then cease. Around then Tony's hedonism and habitual mood seemed to have darkened in spirit; he went off to Egypt to teach English language for a few years and returned a different, more difficult and even dangerous man. Despite efforts to establish himself as a software developer and resorting, among other things, to taxi-driving, at some point he acquired a profound animus towards the police and other authority figures, resulting in a series of court appearances, fines and ultimately jail sentences, mainly for assaults (such as allegedly deliberately driving a car at two police officers). He also endured periods of homelessness, including a spell living in the woods back in Stevenage, where he was burned out of his encampment by young thugs. In his own words, he had "disappeared into the night" during the 1990s.

Eventually, however, the Stevenage local authorities found him accommodation in a small council flat, and he seems to have settled into a relatively contented life in the new century living on state benefits, helping to edit Our Stevenage, an online archive for reminiscences about the town's history, and pursuing his two enthusiasms, cryptic crosswords and the "abstract strategy board game" Go. As a fan of comedy, he would catch the train into London to join the audience for BBC show recordings: somewhere there's a video clip of his enormous beard getting noticed and riffed on by comedian Paul Merton and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on the long-running TV show Have I Got News For You. It seems the idea of ever getting a job, never mind a "career", had dropped off his agenda altogether, along with any prospect of a family life: AFAIK he never settled into any steady relationships. That darkness seems never to have completely dissipated, either, but we won't go there: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

But that is all retrospective knowledge on my part. Whatever did or didn't happen to Tony in the 1980s that resulted in his effective self-immolation in the 1990s – I can only speculate – his personality had undoubtedly changed from the brilliant, mischievous and essentially benign jester I used to know into a glum, paranoid misfit with a gift for alienating people (including most of his old friends from home and those he had made at university) and, even more puzzling, someone capable of occasional fits of violence. The word went out that, in the Byronic formula, he had become "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". I didn't have any more contact with him for the three decades after 1981, as I did have a career and serious family responsibilities to consider, and the few rumours that reached me were sufficiently troubling to put up some solid precautionary barriers.

Then in 2011, quite aggressively at first, he began turning up as a transparently pseudonymous commenter on this blog. After a spell of light skirmishing in public we began a wary email relationship – he was clearly quite bitter about the friends he felt had abandoned him, and I was nervous about bringing this volatile stranger back into my life – but things steadily grew warmer over the years. I started posting him the TLS crossword every week – he was an active and expert participant in various cryptic crossword solving and setting circles – and he clearly enjoyed inducting me into the baffling conventions of cruciverbalism, sometimes asking for help with the more recalcitrantly literary ones. Despite some occasional spikiness – he would vehemently reject any offers of financial help, for example – it seemed that the old friend of my youth could still be detected somewhere in the voice and personality animating these email exchanges.

Knebworth Festival 1973

(photo: Martyn Cornell)

However, I only actually met Tony once in these latter years when our friendship was reviving, and that was entirely by accident. To celebrate my birthday in 2018 we travelled up to London to meet our children at the Hayward Gallery for the Andreas Gursky exhibition there. On that day, behind the galleries and theatres on the South Bank, there was an open-air market selling food, and as we walked through I heard someone calling my name. It appeared to be an elderly derelict with a long matted and plaited chest-length beard sitting on a wall, eating a curry from a cardboard tray. My partner and daughter hurried on, but I was curious. I walked over, and asked, "Sorry, do I know you? How do you know my name?" To my amazement, it was Tony, utterly unrecognisable to me, even standing face to face in broad daylight. Given we had been in regular email contact for a few years by then, it was a very unsettling experience [1].

Anyway, in September last year he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, had declined any treatment (wisely, I think), and been given "weeks to a year" to live. He asked me to keep it a secret from our mutual friends – I really don't know why, unless he thought this would be a suitable posthumous reproach for their neglect – and (with one or two honourable breaches) I respected his request. Which was not difficult, as in all honesty it was hard to think of many mutual friends whose contact details I still had or would be able to find who, sad to say, would be particularly interested in his state of health. As I say, from somewhere, somehow, he had acquired a true gift for alienating people.

Then, at the end of January this year, he was hospitalised with shortness of breath, and was discovered to have Covid. They put him into intensive care with an oxygen supply and intravenous antibiotics. He still seemed chirpy enough via email, though, and quite his normal self – he asked me to send the latest TLS puzzles to the hospital – so I agreed to set up a Skype video call. Sadly, this turned out to be a bit of a wasted opportunity, at least from my point-of-view. It was clear that there was much he wanted to say, but his laboured, widely-spaced attempts to speak between breaths kept getting snagged on some idée fixe about a locally-sourced brand of sausages. Now, I'm a patient listener, and I like a sausage as much as the next guy, but this seemed rather beside the point under the circumstances. It was such a bizarre contrast to the lucidity of his emails, but then I suppose he may well have been under heavy sedation. So I listened to him ramble on for an hour or more until some nurses appeared, made my excuses, and closed the session, feeling that this was not an experience I was in any hurry to repeat.

Nonetheless, the Covid cleared up and, after checking out his flat for fire hazards, a hospital-style bed was installed so that he could sleep upright with a supply of oxygen, and he was sent home on the 8th February. He had already asked me to post the next TLS crossword to the flat in anticipation of his imminent discharge, and on the 12th he acknowledged its receipt by email, as he always did.

There was then was an ominous silence, that stretched on and on for ten days. Nothing. Eventually I decided to ring the hospital to see whether he had been readmitted. But the doctor I spoke to informed me that, as I suspected, he had died. When? On the 12th February. I found this hard to believe: not so much that he had died, but that he had died ten days ago, on the very day that he had sent me that last email from home. But by checking his name, address, and approximate date of birth it was confirmed: yes, he was dead, or "had passed", as the doctor kept saying, as if he had been sitting some kind of exam.

So, there it is. To be honest, it's a relief no longer to feel conflicted about whether to make the trip up to Stevenage to say a final goodbye, even though I knew in my heart that was never going to happen. We always like to think we will "do the right thing", don't we? Despite knowing that we'll generally choose the comfortable thing instead. Less selfishly, it's also a relief to know he won't have to suffer the final painful stages of a terrible disease.

Tony sent me a selfie from hospital, an honest portrayal of himself in the gaunt days before his death, still with that matted and plaited chest-length beard, but it's not easy viewing, and so I choose to remember him as he was in summer 1971, a bright young man of 17 experiencing full liberty for the first time, with every prospect of an exceptional life of achievement and happiness ahead of him. That this was never to happen is, in the long view, perhaps just a simple twist of fate, an unexpected kink in the narrative, or even – as I suspect the later, belligerent version of Mr. Collman might have argued – just your opinion, mate. And who asked you, anyway?

Tony, Ingelheim, summer 1971

1. In a typical Collman move, when I emailed him to apologise about this the next day, he replied, "SO tempting to reply 'What the hell are you talking about? That wasn't me!'"...

A Second Lustrum of Calendars

Every year since 2010 I have produced a small number of copies of a simple spiral-bound A4 calendar featuring my own photographs or artwork, for distribution as a Christmas / New Year gift for close friends, family, and – before I retired in 2014 – my more esteemed co-workers. The numbers in those categories were never large, and are inevitably declining, so the costs involved in this largesse have always been manageable. The standard of art reproduction I choose is quite high (I use and recommend Vistaprint) so that each calendar constitutes a little portfolio of some of the better work I have produced in the preceding year. If nothing else, it's a nice way to be present in the domestic environment of some people I never get to see often enough.

It occurred to me – calendars being essentially ephemeral items – that it would be worth putting together a book to record some of them. So in 2019 I made a Blurb book with the title A Lustrum of Calendars (a "lustrum" is a fancy way of describing a five-year period, although it also had a more specific meaning in Ancient Rome), as I had decided to record the run from 2014 to 2018: the five-year sequence in which I seemed to have hit my calendrical stride most convincingly. To make the book more interesting, I also paired the calendar image for each month (on the right) with a photograph taken by me during that particular month of that calendar year (on the left).

Why? Well, a calendar picture is a very public kind of divination (a hostage to fortune-telling, you might say): in November you pick what seems like it might be a suitable image for, say, June in the following year, without any idea of what those few weeks in the future will be like, not least in the lives of those who will be living with that picture for the whole of that month. By pairing the two pictures I thought the book might suggest how each month in each of those five consecutive years had turned out for me, even if only as captured in a single photograph. I also thought it would be curious to see how often there might or might not be a connection of some sort to be made between the two images, the one as prophecy and the other as actuality.

This produced quite a big book of 134 pages, which in hard copy is inevitably also an expensive book. I had really only produced it for my own amusement, however, and didn't seriously expect anyone else to buy a copy (do I say that every time I make a book? I might as well...). So, now that another five years have passed, I have made yet another book for myself with an identical format and the unsurprising title A Second Lustrum of Calendars. But, in the spirit of my decision to use Issuu, I'm making it freely available as a PDF flip-book.

Here it is: you can either run it in miniature here within the the blog page, or – if you click the little circular device in the centre – you can go to a full screen view (recommended). From full screen press <ESC> to get back here on the blog.

Whether I'll still be sending out calendars every year until 2028 and then making a third five-year collection of them in 2029 when – with any luck – I'll be 75 and still "sound in body and mind" remains to be seen. It's remarkable how passing a milestone as predictable and inconsequential as a seventieth birthday can nonetheless compress, confuse, and complicate one's projections into the future. "Five years from now" – once the vast and storied distance between ages 8 and 13, or 13 and 18 – now seems both incredibly brief and alarmingly ephemeral as a span of time.

Kafka's very short short story The Next Village – which to a 17-year-old me seemed so hilariously surreal – now reveals itself as a glittering shard of cold-eyed, gritty realism:

Grandad always used to say: "Life is amazingly short. Looking back, even now, everything is all so closely crowded together that I can scarcely imagine, say, how a young person can make up their mind to visit the next village without the fear that – quite apart from any mishaps – even the length of a normally, happily unfolding life will be anywhere near enough time for such a trip."

OK, I exaggerate, but I recall writing in a post on that story in March 2009, not long after my 55th birthday, "is it not amusing ... that life, as lived, has an exponential quality which makes the banal, the eminently possible, as daunting as a trip to Mars?" Well, not so much amusing at 70, young 'un, as baffling. Why on earth would anyone want to go to Mars, anyway?

But if that vision of befuddled stasis seems a bit too comfily chair-bound, let me put before you another short, single sentence "story", one of Kafka's first published pieces, Wanting to Become an Indian, which embodies much the same idea, but filtered through Karl May in an exhilarating, ecstatic inversion:

If only you could be an Indian, ever-ready on a galloping horse, tilted against the wind, jolting again and again over the jolting ground, until you lost your spurs – there were no spurs – until you threw away the reins – there were no reins – and could barely see the land before you as smooth cropped heath, with the horse's neck and the horse's head already gone.

(my translation)

That's a vision of old age, too. Hoka hey!

Threescore Years and Ten

Would you give up your seat for this man?

So, over the weekend I turned seventy, and should probably now reluctantly concede that I am old. Or, at least, getting there. Possibly. In a few years. I have to admit, though, that I was taken aback, standing on a very crowded train back to Southampton from London a few weeks ago, when an Asian woman made her daughter get up and offer me her seat. I refused, naturally, but it did make me wonder: maybe I look older than I think? Perhaps it's time to reboot the magic bathroom mirror...

Anyway, rather than ramble on about how young I still feel inside, despite appearances, I thought I'd offer you a small celebratory anthology of blog posts, one for each decade, and selected from the Top Twenty most-read posts according to Blogger's statistics: current No. 1: Bee Boy at 3.5K reads since it was published in April 2017.

These posts do seem to cluster around the years 2016-18, which may well have been peak blog, who knows? But I have published 1,992 posts since 2008 – so close to a neat 2,000 – and quite a few not listed here would figure in my own personal Top Ten, if I could only find the energy and motivation to dig them out (did I say I am seventy?). Maybe another time. But I'm happy to hang my idiotic hat on these few for now, as chosen by The Wisdom of the People. So here they are:

Bee Boy: In which I interrogate Gilbert White.

Snake Oil: In which I investigate the nature of art.

Mister Unsafe: In which I invent a new musical genre.

The Height of High Culture: In which I fail to read Emma. Again.

Hey Presto!: In which I contemplate politics and astrology (Aquarius with Scorpio rising, since you ask).

Culloden: In which I look askance at tartanity.

Moscow Rules: In which Gomer nods.

And one for luck:

Homeopathic Ancestry: In which I consider the making of my mark.

No need to read them all at once, obviously... Or indeed any of them at all, although I'd be pleased if you did dip into a few, and found them to your liking. I have no idea why these particular ones out of the 1,992 available posts should have attracted the largest number of hits, and I also have no way of knowing whether these were actual "reads" or hit-and-run glances resulting from searches for, say, "metheglin" (Bee Boy) – not to be confused with methedrine – or "Yevtushenko" (Moscow Rules).

As for the birthday, I'm not big on celebrations, but to mark the occasion we met up with our (now very adult) children at the Royal Academy for a pleasant chat and then a stroll around the exhibition Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now. This show is a very mixed bag, especially compared to something as solid as 2017's Revolution : Russian Art 1917-1932 discussed in the Moscow Rules post. It can seem that a lot of second- and even third-rate art gets a free pass when "message" is prioritised over quality in an exhibition, but this one does have enough outstanding moments not to deserve the panning it got in some reviews.

Should you be able to visit the RA while it's on, my recommendation would be to head straight for the three-screen video installation by John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea: take a seat, and settle down for an awe-inspiring 45 minutes. The experience is completely mesmerising, in the way a Tarkovsky film is mesmerising, and I could have happily watched it repeatedly for the entire afternoon. You might, of course, rate just as highly the other video installation, Lessons of the Hour, by Isaac Julien, which is clearly very popular, but which I didn't watch as it was too crowded; you had to step carefully over the legs of those seated on the floor in the darkened room to pass through. But Vertigo Sea is probably the best video installation I've ever seen, aided by a superb soundtrack, and worth a trip to London all by itself.

Justice for All, by Yinka Shonibare

The Gloves Are Off

For many years now I've been noticing the personal items that get dropped onto pavements and roads, and which – if not found or picked up by someone – can spend a lengthy afterlife getting kicked around, trodden on, and slowly degraded into roadside rubbish. What these items are tends to change over time, along with fashions. For example, once upon a time easily the most frequently encountered escapees used to be black plastic combs, but these are no longer carried by men precariously in a trouser back pocket, and have become a rarity. Similarly, biros in varying degrees of distress and destruction used to be a much more common sight than they are now. The sheer variety of such kerbside casualties seems to have increased in recent times, although people have become such terrible litterbugs that it's hard to tell whether an object has been "lost" or simply tossed carelessly away, along with all the empty cans, snack wrappers, and plastic bottles.

I had often considered assembling a photographic series of such items but never did, partly because it seemed such an obvious idea that far too many others must already be doing the same thing. I enjoy the "taxonomic" work of Michael Wolf, for example, collating the rubber boots, coat hangers, stray bits of laundry, and plastic chairs to be found in the backstreets of Hong Kong, and no doubt he had his own precedents to follow and now has hundreds of Wolf-wannabes all over the world. But my resistance was also because I had developed a prejudice against such mechanically cumulative "projects" which, in lesser hands than Wolf's, have in the end nothing much to say about anything other than the desire to have something – anything! – to photograph. Which didn't stop me photographing them myself, of course.

During Covid and in its wake the quantity of lost and tossed facemasks and "disposable" protective gloves in the street became ridiculous, even allowing for the fact that we do live quite near a hospital, where you might expect the odd one to be discarded or dropped. The grimy things are everywhere, almost rivalling the crisp packets in number, and naturally nobody wants to pick them up and do something with them. By "do something" I mean put them in a bin, of course, not create a sculpture or collage, although no doubt someone somewhere has been doing exactly that. Again, I rejected the idea of a photographic "masks and gloves" project, as I expected that dozens of people will have been documenting these strange years in precisely that indirect but handily material way.

But I found that this did prompt me to notice other varieties of lost glove lying around all over the place, and in particular what struck me was that they usually seemed to have made their bid for freedom one at a time. Perhaps the other in the pair gives the escapee a boost on its way out of a pocket or bag, or off the back of a builder's truck? Whatever, single escapes seem to be the runaway's rule, and it occurred to me that I had actually already been photographing them casually whenever they turned up, not least because they seem to retain a level of personality that other lost objects lack (the two giving the finger here date from 2018). I suppose that is because, unlike most articles of clothing, even when discarded they closely resemble what is probably the most emphatically expressive part of our anatomy, and in many accidental configurations they would seem to be trying to communicate something ("Oh, shit... Help! This is not what I imagined...", in the main).

So I started looking and photographing less casually, primarily with my phone, and now I've almost gathered enough to put together a little PDF-only booklet, as proposed towards the end of last year (see Pentagonal Pool on Issuu). It's not ready yet, but will be as soon as I can fill a couple of gaps in the intended sequence. Which, given I'm relying entirely on chance finds, might take longer than I'd intended. But, no, I'm not going to start posing my own gloves in the street: that would be disrespectful – gloves are clearly quick to take offence – and I don't want to inculcate any fantasies of escape.

Brief Encounter

We spent most of last week in Bristol, as my partner had to take part in the viva voce interrogation of a PhD candidate there. Unfortunately for me, this coincided with not one but two "named storms", Isha and Jocelyn, so I spent much of the time admiring the view through the streaming rain being flung against our fourth-floor flat's window with surprising violence. So when the weather cleared up on Wednesday, I was keen to get out.

The extensive green area at the top of the Avon Gorge known as Clifton Downs is conveniently nearby, so that was where I headed. The atmosphere was still pretty waterlogged, so everything beyond a hundred yards or so was softened into a mist, which is not ideal for photographic purposes, mine anyway, but you work with what you're given. Unless, of course, it's an unwanted gift: Wednesday afternoons are traditionally devoted to "games" at British schools and universities, so the Downs get temporarily converted into a dozen or so football pitches where muddied oafs (oaves?) can chase balls and shout abuse at each other. It's very lively, but I lost interest in all that when I left school, and it's just not my thing; I don't even pretend to follow any football team, despite living among fervid Saints fans. But, running down through the western cliff of Clifton Downs, all the way down to the Portway 300 feet below, is a narrow rocky ravine once known as Walcombe Slade but now called Goat Gully, for the simple reason that it is inhabited by a small herd of goats, introduced in 2011. I decided to head there instead.

Goat Gully makes a remarkable contrast to the grassy plain of the Downs, which – even on non-Wednesdays – is always busy with runners, dog-walkers, and groups doing various outdoor exercise routines. You pass into a bit of woodland, through a narrow barrier gate, and suddenly you're in a different world: in summer, when the rock has been absorbing sunlight all morning, it can feel as if you were somewhere like the Dordogne: hot, scrubby, rocky, and precipitously steep. I love it, not least because it has that magic combination of elevation, voluminous void, and a spectacular view, plus surprisingly few people ever seem to go there, so it's always peaceful. For obvious, goat-related reasons, dogs are banned.

The misty, soft light meant it was clearly not going to be a great day for photography, so after clambering around for a bit I ended up standing on a rocky edge near the venerable rockslide, polished smooth by the backsides of many generations of Bristol's children, back when "children" were still a species often spotted in flocks playing out of doors, a rarity now. Like many people inclined towards visual art, I enjoy just gazing in a contemplative, switched-off mood which, paradoxically, seems to make one more, not less aware of what is going on around, especially at the periphery. I imagine our distant ancestors on the grassy plains of Africa entered a similar state of all-around unfocussed watchfulness as they foraged for roots and berries, or discussed the advantages of bipedalism. 

So it was no surprise that a movement off to my left interrupted my reverie. Now, there may no longer be large predators like wolves in these parts, but their human counterpart is not unknown, and there is a particular silhouette – narrow track-suit bottoms and dark hoodies – and a particular purposeful slouch that can trigger a mild alarm, particularly when three such silhouettes are heading towards you, when standing on the edge of a steep rocky drop.

But the closer they came, the more I relaxed. It was late afternoon, and these young lads were clearly coming off some labouring job – they were covered in what looked like plaster dust and shreds of paper – for a crafty spliff or a couple of beers and a laugh before heading home. It was also clear they realised they had nothing to fear from me: in the old formula, you can take the boy out of the tribe, but you can't take the tribe out of the boy. Fifty years may have passed since I was their age, but it seems you acquire some indelible markers in those youthful years. Perhaps it's the way I stand, perhaps it's the clothes I wear. Whatever, they sidled up in a friendly way – I was clearly standing in their favoured spot – and we began a companionable chat, gazing down towards the Suspension Bridge, only half visible in the mist.

After a while I decided I needed to head back, and leave them to their fun. But before I went, I said, "Listen, guys, do you want to know a secret?" And this is what I said, in spirit, but perhaps not entirely in these words:

You don't know it now, but these are the best years. You've got work, but no real responsibilities, and nothing to spend your money on beyond whatever fun and mischief you've got lined up for the coming weekend. You've got good friends – I bet you've known each other for years – and you're having adventures you'll remember for the rest of your life. Sure, if you're lucky sometime you'll meet a girl, settle down, have kids, maybe even start your own business and buy a house, and that will all be great, but when, like me, you're a few weeks away from turning seventy, it's these days that will start coming back to haunt you, and you'll wonder why you can't go back to the way it was at the beginning, when everything and anything was possible, and life was still your best friend. So, enjoy it now, and maybe in fifty years or so one of you will come up here again for old times' sake, sit on the edge and remember your old friends and the stuff you got up to, and perhaps even recall how, long ago, some white-haired geezer told you that this was how it was going to be.

And, to my enormous gratification, not one of them laughed as I walked away. Job done! And I didn't even tell them the thing about shooting the albatross...

What Just Happened?

I've been entertaining myself by compositing some recent photographs, mainly those taken with a telephoto lens on various cameras, including a Panasonic TZ70 (ZS50 in the USA) that I picked up surprisingly cheaply on eBay, looking for a more camera-like substitute for the Canon Zoom monocular (it has an insane 30x zoom, which is equivalent to 24-720mm in 35mm terms). Actually, this is not so surprising, really, as the camera's image quality is somewhat less than stellar (well, what do you expect from such a ridiculous lens on a tiny 1/2.3" sensor, even if it is badged "Leica"?), the image files are just 12MP in size, and the thing was launched in 2015, which is the digital equivalent of the Pleistocene; put those together, and I imagine that's why nobody else felt like bidding. Their loss: used with care, it's almost a decent camera...

Something interesting happened with the trees in this last picture below, but I'm still not entirely sure how. It has a certain Samuel Palmer vibe, I think.  When I "get in the zone" with digital imaging I keep trying things out quite rapidly until I've got something promising to work with. Sometimes I will have gone a number of steps beyond before I realise what just happened, and – as in this case – have no real idea how it came about. Photoshop Elements can step back through many stages in the image editing process, but frustratingly does not name or describe them: unless you yourself can remember or it's self-evident, there's often no way to know which filter, layer, blend mode, tool, etc., was used in any particular step. But that element of serendipity is a large part of what makes it so enjoyable to do, and can often lead to new "secret sauces" to add to your digital recipe book. Although only if you can remember how you got there, obviously... 

 

Winter Woodland

Having become intrigued by the perspective and possibilities opened up by playing with a Canon Zoom (see the post Zoom!), but not really being satisfied by the quality of the results, I decided it would be worth mounting a decent telephoto lens onto an actual camera – something I rarely do – and venturing out on a recent sunny afternoon to see what I could see.

I have always been attracted to the shapes made by trees in winter, and a long lens enables you to get right in among the gnarlier, more baroque branches. These two pictures are not entirely "straight" photographs – I don't think anyone would guess, but the extra processing steps I had to use on the Canon files to get an attractive result did prove instructive – but they do manage to capture the feeling of sunlit winter woodland even better than the originals from which they have been derived, I think.

New Year, Same Old You

Postcard from Mephistopheles

(from Goethe's Faust, remembered from German A-Level, 1972)

The first weeks of a new year are a suitable time for self-reflection, even if those of us who blog might seem to be doing little else for the rest of the year, too.  Advice on leading a better, healthier, more successful life seems to be everywhere, but is mainly offered by the sort of semi-celebrity whose too-white teeth and addiction to "life hacks" instantly make me distrust anything they might have to say. Particularly if it has anything to do with alleviating the stress and unhappiness brought about by trying so hard to succeed and get ahead in whatever competitive game it is they imagine themselves to be playing. We rarely hear tips from the sort of quietly sane people who have arrived at a contented compromise with life, and in particular those people who have not been made unhappy or embittered by failing to measure up to some unrealistic metric of "success", whether self-imposed or the result of fashionable media-pressure. For most of us, a new year is just that: a date in the calendar with no particular magical resonance. When we wish each other a "Happy New Year!" it is in the understanding that everyone will have had highs and lows in the preceding 365 days, and will have them again in the next 365, but that it is not an unrealistic hope that these will average out into a state approximating "happiness". What, you want more than that?

Despite the witless urgings of "follow your dream" fantasists, for most people the pursuit of celebrity-scale "success" is not a question that has ever arisen. School does a pretty thorough job of squashing any illusions a child might have about their abilities and relative brain-power, swiftly followed by the ritual humiliations of working life. Pick that warehouse parcel, stack those supermarket shelves, work that call-centre headset! But the feeling that one might be cut out for better things is nonetheless not uncommon. It's one of the mixed blessings of the post-1945 settlements in Britain that the former reservoir of frustrated talent in working-class communities was drained by the opening of channels of opportunity previously kept firmly shut, such as – but not only – free access to secondary and higher education. It's a mixed blessing because – excellent as social mobility and meritocracy are (or, increasingly, would be) – much of the former progress of working people had been down to the efforts of precisely the sort of folk whom education and opportunity tend to remove from positions of community influence and solidarity.

Exhibit A has to be Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", a poem once so well-known that, like Hamlet, it seems to have been entirely constructed out of quotations. I can never read lines like

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
         Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
         Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

without thinking of an Alan Johnson rising through the Post Office trade union ranks or a Tony Iommi plugging in a cheap guitar in a back bedroom. Post-war opportunities came thick and fast for those with the inclination and ability to take them, although always seasoned with a massive handful of luck. "Right place, right face, right time", and all that.

But for every stellar career there have always been a thousand that faltered, fizzled, or fell to earth. Exhibit B, I suppose, has to be that sad symphony of self-pity, Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. But the realisation that you are not, or are not going to be the person you had imagined should never be characterised as "failure" if it has been a realistic revision of expectation, a putting away of childish things, and a strategic withdrawal in the face of unfavourable odds. For anyone cursed with talents but blessed with a counter-balancing sense of social obligation (or indeed of self-preservation), the attractions of a life spent on the road, climbing the proverbial greasy pole, or plugging away at yet another unpublished novel quickly fade before the more benign prospect of an ordinarily successful adult life of family, friends, and a quietly useful contribution to the smooth running of society; followed, if you're very lucky, by a decent, index-linked pension. Result!

So I have a question for some of those taciturn workaday sages who give every appearance of being well-adjusted to life in 2024. It is not, "Does taking a daily ice-bath enhance your well-being and attention span?" Neither is it, "Do you really need to go to the gym every morning? Or at all?" It is this: "So when was it that you realised you couldn't or shouldn't become who you thought you were going to be?"

If I may be allowed the honour of counting myself among those who have made that crucial recalibration of their expectations (if only temporarily for blogging purposes), in my case it was during the summer of 1977. (What follows is purely self-indulgent autobiographical reflection, lacking any self-improving life-hacks, so you can skip the next five paragraphs, if that won't be of interest to you).

In October 1976 I arrived as a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, to study for a master's degree in Comparative Literature. I suppose at the time I was still at least 90% committed to the idea of myself as a literary academic. I had initially signed up and been awarded funding for a three-year research degree at Oxford, pretty much as a reflex follow-on from my undergraduate years. But I had come to be interested in the new areas of study grouped under the blanket term "theory" that were emerging then, and realised that somewhere like lively, cross-disciplinary UEA was the place to go if I really wanted to find out what was going on rather than conservative Oxford, which was still stuck in the literary worldview of the 1960s. People thought I had made an odd choice, but it seemed pretty sound to me.

Stuck out on a campus on the outskirts of Norwich – a city pretty much on the edge of the known universe – with my future life-partner away backpacking somewhere in South America and with few other distractions, that year was the most serious spell of actual academic study I have ever engaged in, certainly in comparison with the idle, permanent essay-crisis mode of my three undergraduate years. It was fun, it was intense, it was challenging. At the end of the year I was awarded a distinction (no, really), but rejected the offer to stay on for a doctorate with an "adjunct" teaching role. I had decided, to the surprise and indeed the disbelief and derision of some, to become an academic librarian. Another odd choice, perhaps.

But it was one of the better decisions in my life: I had realised that, yes, this new "theory" stuff was interesting, but, no, I didn't want to spend my life pursuing it. This was mainly the result of the dawning self-knowledge that I simply didn't have the personality to be a professional scholar; I find things deeply interesting for a while, a year or so at the most, then move on. But there was also the insight (one that has proved prescient) that, if this was really the way things were going to go, then literary study was about to embark on a self-destructive collapse into irrelevance. To put it another way, it seemed to me that we were busily investigating multiple ways to saw off the branch we had been sitting on so comfortably for fifty years; I decided to climb down carefully to a more solid lower branch rather than fall.

It did take a few years for my self-image to adjust, but it wasn't as if I'd decided to become a plumber or to raise goats on a smallholding. I liked universities as an environment, loved accumulating the broad but shallow knowledge-base that is the stock-in-trade of an academic librarian, and the role seemed like a good-enough fit, at least until I had become the prize-winning literary author I realised I had really wanted to be all along. Duh, of course! How could I have forgotten? But, above all, what I wanted was to keep my evenings and weekends free for activities that had always been very close to my heart, but which had necessarily been side-lined during the years of earning my academic credentials. There was writing, of course, but also making pictures, and – finally! – simply reading for its own sake: I can still recall the feeling of absolute liberation when I was finally free to read whatever I wanted, without any need to make notes, analyse, extract quotations, or write essays. I had never before read so much for pleasure as I did in those years of the late 1970s. And let it be said, just as an aside, that "people reading for pleasure" is the whole point – the true subject matter – when it comes to literary study and, in the end, the only justification for studying novels, plays, and poetry for examination purposes. Something it is easy to forget (or even come to denigrate) when you're a professional literary scholar. 

But, hey, listen, whatever did happen to that prize-winning fiction you were going to write, I pretend to hear you ask, as if you were a character in a prize-winning novel? Well, you would need to put that same question to me once more: that is, when did you realise for the second time that you couldn't or shouldn't become who you thought you were going to be? But the truth is that some self-knowledge only comes gradually, in stages. It's so easy to keep moving the same pencilled-in personal goal or ambition down the "to-do" list for decades – that's what "New Year's resolutions" are for, isn't it? – until "this year" becomes a way of saying "never". But I know you're too polite to ask me about that.

If you read a few biographies of major figures in our culture, you will probably conclude that many, if not most were unhappy, driven monsters of ego, who left a trail of emotional and financial wreckage in their wake: great books, wonderful paintings, truly terrible people. Which is why, I suggest, those who have arrived at that happy compromise – the ones who have not been embittered by not measuring up to some foolish and ever-receding measure of "success", who have made a realistic revision of expectation, put away childish things, and conducted a strategic withdrawal in the face of unfavourable odds – are the real successes in life. In fact, "they" are most of us, even if we don't always realise it: the engaged citizens, the hobbyists, the readers, the willing tax-payers, the adequate parents, the caring friends, and the paying audiences.

So, well done, us! Never mind those attention-seeking, applause-hungry freaks up on the stage, let's turn the spotlight on the audience, please, and have everybody take a bow. New year, same old you... But in a good way. So, for whatever it's worth, let's all exchange with each other our sincere but silent best wishes for the coming year. You never know, despite everything, it might even turn out to be an exceptionally happy one for some of us. Sometimes it does, mostly it doesn't. What, you wanted more than that? Dream on...

"Whatever we were to each other, that we are still"

(apparently from a sermon by Henry Scott Holland)

Zoom!

The price of cameras and lenses can seem outrageously high, camera bodies especially, which are mass-produced electronic items with very few mechanical moving parts these days. That a new camera body aimed primarily at hobbyists can approach £1.5K and still be described as "affordable" is just silly; insulting, even. So, despite my enthusiasm and a reasonably healthy bank balance, I usually buy my gear second-hand, and prefer to use bottom-of-the-line lenses such as kit zooms, together with cheap third-party accessories like lens hoods, grips, and so on. Admittedly, buyers of used kit depend on someone else somewhere having paid full price, but the same is true for cars and even books (except photo-books, which invariably seem to increase in value...). The fact is that I am instinctively tight-fisted, the sort of person who is still wearing shirts bought a decade or more ago (as I realised recently); but then that is why my bank balance remains healthy.

However, I do have a fascination with the more unusual byways of photography – the weirder and less-travelled the better – and, like anyone with a bit of cash to spare, I enjoy treating myself now and then. Being an incorrigible cheapskate, though, I mainly keep an eye out for items "on sale" online and browse the used-equipment sites to see which of yesterday's intriguing novelties are now being sold off at knock-down prices: my various experiments with the Light L16 "computational" camera were a typical bargain-basement adventure. So when it came to pass, back in October, that the Canon Powershot Zoom – a clearly absurd device (reviewed by a sensible person here) that had nonetheless intrigued me ever since it was announced in 2020 – could now be had at some outlets for under £200, I made my move. Well, OK! Here, take my money.

Actually, "absurd" is unfair. The concept of a digital, image-stabilised, step-zoom monocular combined with a camera able to record whatever you happened to point the thing at is actually a really great idea. Sadly, Canon either lost their nerve ("Wait, who the hell is actually going to buy this thing? Cut the specs!") or gave the design brief to an idiot. Whatever, the result looks like a timid toe-in-the-water compromise, and something no serious photographer or nature enthusiast was ever likely to buy. Optical focal lengths of 100mm and 400mm sound impressive (and are, in camera terms) but in binocular terms 400mm is only equivalent to "eight times" magnification, no better than your bog-standard birder's 8x30 bins [1]. The third zoom setting of 800mm is seriously impressive in camera terms (ever seen an 800mm lens?), but sadly is merely a digital crop of the 400mm lens. And the camera... Well, we'll get to that.

I'm not going to describe and review the thing, other than to mention its two obvious advantages: its size and its weight. The Powershot Zoom weighs just 145g, and fits comfortably in the palm of one hand, like a sleek pocket torch. Even the very smallest micro 4/3 camera – the truly tiny Panasonic GM1 – fitted with a 45-200mm lens (equivalent to 90-400mm in 35mm camera focal lengths) weighs 565g and is a cumbersome object, especially when zoomed out to its fullest extent. Here you go:

Little camera, meet Wooz!

Crazy!

Now, if the Zoom had a superb viewfinder and could record excellent pictures, it would be a wonderful thing to keep permanently in a coat pocket, wouldn't it? After all, it's not as if Canon don't know how to make a superb camera. But frustratingly it doesn't, and it can't: at best, in the absence of binoculars it's quite handy for deciding whether those are sheep or goats in that field on the other side of the valley. But, frankly, my first impression of the Zoom's photographs (12MP JPEGs) was: huh? WTF! And my second impression merely added another exclamation mark. These were quite possibly the worst digital photographs I had ever seen; hilariously bad, like something out of a toy camera.

"Out of the camera" JPEG...

Admittedly taken through the double-glazed window of our Bristol flat...

 But... They had something... And the thing is so convenient... And I have always really enjoyed the isolating effect of a long telephoto lens, but could never be bothered to tote one around on a just in case basis. Long-lens photography is never spontaneous, so something like this could and should have been a bit of a game-changer. So I began mucking about in Photoshop to see if the photos could be rescued, perhaps with a more graphical look in mind, and – behold! – some much better images started to emerge from the fog:

That's a bit more like it... In fact, after fiddling about with a few more, I realised that there was hidden potential in these pictures: with the application of various Secret Sauces and printed on an A4 sheet they look great. Of course, no pixel-peeping photo-enthusiast who lugs around a proper grown-up's camera and is possessed by an urge to print REALLY BIG would ever be happy with these, but a picture-maker with a taste for small prints (that would be me) might just have stumbled across something quite handy. Plus I really don't think anyone would imagine that shot of the far side of the Avon Gorge had been taken with a pocketable gizmo the size and weight of a bar of soap, and from a distance of 325 meters through a double-glazed window.

And who would ever imagine that a truly dreadful JPEG file like this:

might be hiding something rather more beautiful behind that drab and fuzzy facade:

Hey presto! It's magic!

Obviously, just as with stage magic, a certain amount of well-practised sleight of hand is required to deliver a convincingly polished performance. And, yes, such prestidigitation can be a lot of work, and not every shot can be rescued, but it is well worth the effort, I think, if only because this has opened up a whole new field of interest for me and, best of all, I'm having a lot of fun with my new bargain-basement toy, which has turned out, against all expectation, to be something of a pocket rocket.

1. These are "35mm equivalent" focal lengths, of course. To get the binocular magnification equivalent of a 35mm lens, the convention is to divide the lens focal length by 50 (a 50mm lens is assumed to be equivalent to "1x" magnification). Thus the equivalent to a "ten times" binocular magnification is a 500mm lens, which is why a decent pair of compact 10x25 binoculars are (is?) such a Good Thing to have hanging round your neck, whereas a camera mounted with a 500mm lens is not.

Getting There

It being New Year's Eve, and me being in a lazy mood, I'm going to repeat some rambling sententiousness I wrote a few years ago, in the hope nobody notices I'm repeating myself. Athough I may have given the game away already, I suppose.

Anyway, a while ago I was reading something, an essay or a review probably, in which the author referred to Theodor Adorno's idea of "open thinking" as it applies to poetry, which was characterised as "seeking those thoughts that are not yet in the world because they lie in the future of thinking, as coming moments of poetic truth". I liked that a lot. It seemed to encapsulate much of what I have felt and thought, in a fuzzy kind of way, about the sort of poetry and indeed photography and art in general that I enjoy.  Unfortunately, I wrote down the quote without noting its source, so I'm not sure whether these are the words of Adorno, the writer, or some third party under review. But if you think I'm going to wade through Adorno's work looking for the original quotation, or to determine how far these words reflect his actual intended meaning of "open thinking", you've clearly never read any Adorno.

Then it occurred to me that, like so many would-be profundities, it might also be seen as a statement of the bleedin' obvious: that a new idea – or the poetic framing of a space where a new idea seems to be lurking – belongs to the future. Well, no shit, Socrates; where else? In fact, I'd suggest it is the fate of most of today's profundities to become tomorrow's platitudes. The only exceptions are genuinely difficult ideas – I can't see String Theory ever being taught at primary school – and authentic art, what Ezra Pound called "news that stays news". Plus the sort of eternal truths that need to be rediscovered and restated for every new generation, because people never learn, do they?

It put me in mind of two rather well-worn nuggets from the Big Book of Inspirational Quotes. The first is Keats' famous idea of "negative capability", as expressed in a letter to his brother:

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Sunday 21 Dec. 1817

There are two quite incidental things that I love about that letter. First, there is the bizarre but wonderful idea of John Keats at a Christmas pantomime [1] ("He's behind you!"; "Clap if you believe in the Penetralium of Mystery!"), which is not the bit of the letter usually extracted and polished up for the mental mantelpiece. And then there is the fact that one of the great and abiding ideas of literary criticism came to one of the great and abiding English poets in one of those intense, happy post-gig chats, walking home through the late-night streets, or waiting for the bus. We've all been there, I think, albeit usually minus the great and abiding idea part.

The second bit of literary pokerwork that came to mind is from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:

You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.

16 July 1903 (translation by Charlie Louth)

"Live the questions for now..." Isn't that great? Definitely news that has stayed news. Rilke's ten letters to Franz Xaver Kappus are worth reading, if you don't know them: the Penguin edition quoted is less than 100 pages in length, but packed with quotable wisdom (he's surprisingly interesting on sex, for example). Indeed, it can seem that these letters are far more widely read than Rilke's actual poetry, which is notoriously difficult, and the very embodiment of that Adornioid idea of "seeking those thoughts that are not yet in the world because they lie in the future of thinking, as coming moments of poetic truth". Which is both humbling and hilarious: in 1903 Rilke was just 27 years old, had not yet published any of the work for which we remember him now, and the "young poet" Kappus was 20. Ah, the wisdom that comes with advanced age! But then Keats was a mere boy of 22 at the time of the "negative capability" letter. Just twenty-two! The uneven distribution of precocious genius is simply not fair, is it?

Which reminds me of yet another quote, one which is probably less famous in the Anglophone world:

Dreiundzwanzig Jahre, und nichts für die Unsterblichkeit getan!

Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos, 1787

That is, "Twenty-three, and I ain't done nuffink!", or something along those lines [2]. Well, I'm going to be seventy in February, and have been trying to live the questions, done my best to be in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, and have patiently waited for those coming moments of poetic truth since I was twenty-something myself. I suppose I have achieved a few things over the years (if nowhere near as many or of the quality I'd hoped or intended), and have certainly had my share of moments and, yes, even found some answers, but the prospect of any immortality is now impossibly far out of reach. But that is hardly the point. To get truly sententious, it's the journey, not the destination, that matters, innit? I have always been a Coleridge fanboy, and don't mind a little reaching after a reassuring bit of fact and reason myself, but I think it's true to say that – as on a very long car journey – by far the most irritating, irritable question ever heard coming from the back seat is: are we there yet?

So, listen, you next generation sitting back there, here is an eternal truth for you: we may never get there, I don't even know where "there" is, and I'm not sure we'd know it if and when we did get there, so settle down and enjoy the ride, and I can promise that there'll definitely be some wonderful things along the way... Meanwhile, there are some biscuits in that bag on the floor. And don't eat them all.

Best wishes for 2024!

1. The tradition of the British Christmas pantomime is, by common consent, a unique and splendid cultural treasure ("Oh, no it isn't!" "Oh, yes it is!"). Those of you unfortunate enough not to have drawn a winning ticket in the Lottery of Life can read about it here. 

2. Literally, "Twenty-three, and done nothing for [my] immortality!"