OECD

Not North Hertfordshire

Recently, the word "headland" came up on the blog Language Hat (no relation, as I always feel obliged to point out, despite the fact that this is perfectly obvious). As an American, blogger Steve Dodson had not come across this word before in its specific British usage as the unploughed area at either end of a field, where the tractor (or horse team in the past) turns round, as it makes each freshly-ploughed "land" on the field.

I don't suppose many Brits have come across that sense of the word, either, but I grew up in a New Town plonked like an island of concrete onto the claggy arable fields of North Hertfordshire where a good many of my ancestors had laboured away their brief and muddy lives. On Sunday visits to my grandparents' village I used to play in a field just over the road, where I was told to stay on the "hedluns", and not venture out into the deep ploughed furrows, waist-high to a small child and treacherous, even after harrowing and the crop had grown. Did you ever put a whiskery head of barley up the sleeve of your jumper, by the way, and wait for it to reappear at your collar? Crazy but slow fun: we used to make our own entertainment in those days.

I was also reminded of one winter's day at school when our class had an outing to a nearby field – a literal field trip, you might say – where local magistrate, school governor and farmer Mr. Powell-Davis inducted us into the theory and practice of growing stuff in mud, standing on a cold and windy headland, dressed in flat cap, tweeds and wellies, and gesturing with his stick like some socially-awkward general briefing his troops, while we shivered in our school blazers and leaky lace-ups. I have no idea why this visit had been arranged: it wasn't as if this was ever likely to be something that lay in our futures.

Although, for some, it did. Several of my less academically-inclined friends left school at the first opportunity and started their working lives as agricultural labourers, and they enjoyed teasing us townie swots with their newly-acquired skills and jargon. It was not a life I envied. One Christmas I earned a few pounds stretching the necks of turkeys and plucking them as they hung by their feet from a noose in a cold barn; it was a horrible job, and after a couple of days I packed it in. Working as a temporary Christmas postman was much more my style, and better paid.

One of these friends – I can't remember who – eventually had a "tied cottage"; that is, a building on the farmer's land that could be occupied by a labourer for the duration of his employment, but no longer. It was the first of a series of similar rural hideaways where our little gang of about a dozen friends and associates could gather safely out of the public eye, united by our primary hobby, which was getting as stoned as possible, listening to records as loud as possible, and talking gibberish for hours. We were young, it was fun, and there wasn't much else to do in North Herts.

I remember one occasion in particular. Several of us were home from university and we were getting down to the usual activities one evening in one of these cottages. A friend called Nick was living there, and had arranged on the wall various agricultural implements he must have found lying around. One of these was like a short spade handle, but tipped with a metal cone rather than a blade. I wondered out loud what it was; Nick said it was a dibber, anticipating incomprehension. But when I said, "Oh, of course!", he countered, scornfully, "OK, then, clever Dick, what's a dibber, then?" But, to his unfeigned amazement, I did actually know. [1] As would any clever Dick, of course, who had enjoyed a teenage obsession with rural folkways – I was a keen reader of the books of George Ewart Evans – as well as the lifestyle and art of various indigenous peoples (surely not just me?).

Now, I don't suppose anyone else who was there would remember that exchange of dibberish (sorry). Frankly, I'd be amazed if anyone had remembered anything about that evening at all, even the very next day. But I do, mainly because I received two insights – revelations, really – that were both saddening and sobering.

As an urban flat-dweller, I had long hoped one day to live somewhere like that, an anonymous little house up an unlit private lane and remote from any neighbours, in a spot that was truly dark at night beneath a full starry sky and open to all weathers. I still do, but probably never will now. But what struck me that evening was that, if I ever did, for me it would always have to be a quiet and very private retreat, and never the setting for raucous gatherings like these. Second, and not unconnected, it dawned on me that, as an over-educated clever Dick with academic career ambitions, I was only ever tenuously and temporarily part of this aimlessly hedonistic mob. I was feeling that bitter-sweet blend of regret and impatient anticipation that marks the passage from one phase of your life to the next: the sense of an ending. [2]

Over-Educated Clever Dick, 1973

I have written before about the ways we are sent onto different paths by education. In the post I'll Never Forget Old Wotsisname, for example, I wrote this about a former best friend from primary school:

But that friendship came to an abrupt end when the secondary school selection process sent us on separate paths. My friend went through the door marked "secondary modern", and I went through the one marked "grammar" (or "snob school", as it was more generally known). When that door shut behind me I looked back, and all but a couple of my closest playmates had gone; the door might as well have had "EDEN – NO RETURN" written on it in letters of fire. It was the first instalment on the price of seizing certain opportunities (or having them thrust upon you), and in particular of choosing to walk the steep and poorly-signposted path of "social mobility".

In those years of the mid-70s when I was away at university I would only return home as briefly as possible in the vacations. My father had been made redundant, and my mother had suffered a disabling heart attack, forcing her to give up work; the atmosphere in our little two-bedroom council flat was oppressive, and I would escape as often and as soon as I could. But they would worry if I didn't come home at night, and more worry was not a burden they needed. Which meant that when out at one of those fun-fuelled rural gatherings I had to rely on at least one car-owner being "together" enough, as we used to say, to drive me home in the early hours. Which was obviously unfair and unpopular, and that sense of an impending ending became ever more acute. It was painfully clear that I couldn't both be at home and be my emerging adult self at the same time, and that, anyway, my future was taking shape in another, more exciting place, among a new and different set of friends; I needed to be back there, getting on with it, not marking time in a scene that had, for me, finally run its course. [3]

As I also wrote in that old post, nobody ever warns you that to choose social mobility is also to choose a form of exile; many thousands of us have experienced, and presumably do still and will always experience the truth of that. I never did return to live in that flat, and by the time my parents finally moved away to Norfolk, to live out their final years in a static caravan in my sister's back garden, my few closest friends had also moved on. I no longer had any reason to go back to my home town, and I never did.

Except once. Driving up from Southampton to my mother's funeral in 2007, I thought I'd make a detour to take a final nostalgic look at "our" flats and get some decent photographs, and maybe even take the lift up, if it was working, and knock on the door of number 47 to see who was living there now. It was the first time I had ever actually driven a car through the streets of the town where I was born and grew up, which was an odd feeling, like one of those lucid dreams where you are aware you are dreaming and yet have a certain degree of agency over events. Then, turning a very familiar corner in this very unfamiliar way, I discovered to my utter amazement that the entire block had been demolished, and building work was already under way on the site.

It was hard to take in. My bedroom, the theatre of so many vivid teenage dreams, fears, aspirations, and fantasies, had simply become an empty, dusty space, fifty feet up in the air. Gone! But I had no better response than to laugh... It was one of those ridiculously overcooked movie moments in life when you simply have to ask yourself: who writes this stuff?

Gone...

1. Feigned amazement was very much the style in vogue, as in "Oh, wow! That's amazing!" Not sure by whom or how this started, but it took me years to shake off...

2. As Corey Mohler of Existential Comics puts it: Your childhood is over when you first get the feeling that you've wasted a weekend because all you did was mess around and have fun.

3. The amusing thing is that to my new university friends, many of them privately educated, my tales of sybaritic scenes among the lower orders were as fascinating to them as their hilarious and hair-raising accounts of the goings-on in our most prominent public schools were to me. The truth was, though, things could get pretty sordid. I'll never be able to unsee the time that ... But no, Watson: that is a story for which the world is not yet prepared. 

No Comment!!

 A quick follow up on yesterday's post, which might prove enlightening to anyone who trusts their viewing statistics, on Blogger, anyway. Here is the current state of play at 12:30 today:

Three THOUSAND views this morning, and an unprecedented 142 reads of the latest post? Really? No, not really... Two comments, though, that's true.

LATE EXTRA:

At close of play (i.e. bedtime around 23:00) the final score is:

Crazy...

No Comment

One of the most long-term commenters on this blog asked me recently, in effect, "Hey, where'd everybody go?" Which is a good question. The number of comments on this and most other blogs has fallen off considerably in recent times, and it's worth pondering why. But if this is not a question that interests you, then move along: nothing to see here. Something more to your liking will be along soon, I'm sure.

So: it has never been the case that every post on this blog has stimulated a response from my honoured and respected readers, but once upon a time the ones that did could sometimes accumulate quite a long tail of lively commentary. This has been one of the more rewarding aspects of writing a blog, and I always try to make a worthwhile response to anyone who has taken the trouble to comment. We never did get into the extraordinary length and depth of the comments on, say, Language Hat (no relation) [Oh, do stop it, Mike – they know you don't do that blog! Ed.], but, on the other hand, neither was I plagued by the numerous inanely phatic comments that other blogs seemed to attract like flies.

Such comments as do appear here I "moderate" – sadly, this doesn't mean I can edit comments (wouldn't that be fun?), merely choose whether or not to make them public – but I rarely suppress them, even when things veer off topic or get testy; it's all part of the game. Sometimes, I even used to find myself writing a piece in order to provoke a response from one or other of the more frequent commenters. Or, in the case of my old and now late friend Tony (who commented as "Zouk Delors"), carefully stepping around certain issues that I knew would trigger his less, um, reconstructed attitudes and sensitivities.

So here are the stats Blogger provides for a seven day stretch (I started writing this on 21st November, but any recent seven days would do): 

Now, the comment figures are accurate, but the viewing figures are inflated by passing robots and in-and-out ricochets from people looking for something that they didn't find (most likely camera-gear chat). I'd say you could safely knock off at least 1000 or so as fakes and "false drops". So, from about 750 more-or-less meaningful views over those seven days – which is perfectly respectable by my standards – only eight comments were left, and those were from just two readers, doubled by my replies. Which indicates not so much a fall-off in readers, as is only to be expected in Ye Olde Blogge Worlde, as a dramatic decline in the urge to comment. Which is more interesting, no?

There can certainly be problems with leaving a comment on a Blogger blog, which doesn't help. Blogger is a free service from Google, which inevitably means you get what you get, whether you want it or not. For a start, in order to fend off the spammers and click-baiters I have to require commenters to hold an active Google account, which is obviously a barrier to many. Then, quite regularly new tweaks and "features" are introduced without warning which often disrupt the smooth functioning of a blog, most often from the creator's point of view, but which also affect readers. Lately, for example, I notice that the header text setting out my comment moderation policy has vanished. More troubling, though, is when I hear from fully-qualified would-be commenters who say that they tried but failed to leave a comment, and I imagine that for every one of those heroes of perseverance, there are several who think, sod it, who cares? I'm pretty sure I would, too.

In fact, the majority of comments I get these days are private communications from people on my email list, almost entirely actual friends who seem to need a direct prod in the mailbox to be persuaded to read my rantings. Again, this was something I had to set up myself when Google disabled the original "Follow by Email" widget, and didn't replace it with anything similar.

Having a number of regular commenters can itself create problems. As anyone who has given a seminar or workshop will know, a few voluble individuals can silence all the other members of group, unless the seminar leader takes steps to ensure full participation. Many people need time to develop their thoughts, which may be uncertain and provisional, and will often have to be asked a direct question before summoning the courage to speak. Similarly, when visiting any blog with a well-established commentariat, it is always hard to avoid the impression that you have stumbled into a private party, with its own unspoken etiquette and rules of engagement; better to say nothing and "lurk" for a while. In any situation where one-to-one interaction with the silent majority is impractical –  I even hear of so-called "seminars" in our universities now with 200+ participants! – it's next to impossible to devise strategies that might encourage the unknown unknowns to speak up. After all, you're hardly likely to tell your best commenters to shut up for a minute and let the lurkers get a word in, when there may well be no-one else out there with anything to say, anyway.

It's clear that it's the chattier venues like Twitter/X, Threads, and newcomer Bluesky where most people are going for their social media fix, and has been for some time. They may still read a few blogs like this one, but no longer feel the need to participate as commenters. I suppose we blogging hold-outs are rather like old-fashioned charity collectors, rattling a tin on the street, in a world where the charity-conscious mainly donate via standing order and online clicks. You want actual cash, you say? I'm sorry, but who carries loose change in their pockets these days?

In the end, it's pretty obvious why the newer "share, link, and follow" social media have succeeded at the expense of blogs. Let's set aside any condescending remarks about "TL;DR", appropriate as that seems to be for so many of us now. No, it's clear that fewer and fewer people are bothering to share their views with just one self-obsessed stranger in the quiet cul-de-sac of their blog – too much like sharing your opinions about Life, the Universe, and Everything down at the local pub – when there is the very real possibility of being read and followed (or at least me-too "liked") by dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of like-minded strangers; why, you might even attract the attention of Someone Famous, or that crucial mover and shaker who will advance your career to the next level. There's no getting round the fact that a blog is more like a funnel than a megaphone: same shape, but a radically different device.

So I keep thinking I've almost talked myself into signing up for Bluesky. But then I think: just 250 characters? Hmm... Unfortunately, I seem to need to write, and to write at length, more than I need even to be read or "liked". Or, indeed, famous: it goes without saying, obviously, that the massive, world-wide fame and notoriety that would inevitably and instantly follow if I were to join up would seriously disrupt my daily routine and lifestyle. I'm pretty stuck in my ways, now, and to back into the spotlight I seem to have evaded so well so far in my 70 years on the planet would be an intolerable inconvenience. Garn, clear orff, 'fore I sets the dogs on yer! 

Seriously, though, folks... Fewer comments than previously? Not a problem as far as I'm concerned. You are reading this, and that's good enough for me. But, please: don't feel you have to come up with some comment, just to prove me wrong... As John "Cockney" Keats said of poetry, if it comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, me old china, it had better not come at all...

Anticyclonic Gloom

Anyone who thinks photography is not, in the end, all about the light has probably never experienced the sort of glum "anticyclonic gloom" that has been squatting over southern England for what feels like months. A static high pressure system has created a thick grey layer of cloud and trapped all the atmospheric crap beneath it while at the same time sealing off the sunshine, rendering everything joylessly flat, like a vast neutral density filter, or the visual equivalent of an anechoic chamber. [1] Once upon a time, before the Clean Air Act of 1956, these would have been perfect smog conditions in any city worth the name, and Southampton's air is still not the cleanest or clearest at the best of times.

The shortening days have not helped, either. I had to drive over to an auction house near Salisbury recently – I'm finally disposing of some "edged weapons" that have been hidden from children in the back of a cupboard for decades – and was amazed at the reduction in visibility by mid-afternoon. Beyond about the width of one field on either side of the road everything faded into indistinct grey silhouettes: even the imposing remains of Old Sarum were practically invisible. Admittedly, there was some sort of photographic opportunity there, but this kind of weather seeps into your soul – I know, I should probably get myself re-souled – and I simply couldn't be arsed to stop the car. There are precious few safe stopping places out there in rural Wiltshire on a misty day and, besides, I didn't want to attract the attention of any passing police, in case they might wonder why I had a Japanese sword and a bayonet in the boot.

But you can't keep a good obsessive down, and I've been tinkering with this idea of an "angels" project, as foreshadowed in the post Every Angel Is Terrifying. As it's not been worth going out to hunt for fresh angelic manifestations I've been scouring the archive, selecting and converting suitable candidates into monochrome versions so as to impose a certain uniformity of style. I don't think the weather has influenced this "creative decision", but I suppose it might have. I will also concede that I may have got a little carried away with the monochrome filters. Whether this array of slightly antique looks will survive into the project's final form I'm not sure, but I'm enjoying it at the moment, and it feels appropriate.

BTW, talking of grey skies, has anybody out there signed up for Bluesky? I'm curious about it and might be just a little tempted, but I was never on Twitter so have no story to tell here, other than the sanctimonious "why are you wasting your life on social media?" one, which you will have heard many times before (and yet still you tweet!). Doubtless, though, if I were to join then the thing would immediately go out of fashion / be ruthlessly monetised / be bought by some billionaire twit and renamed Z or something. I should probably be public-spirited and stay well away.

1. A subject about which I happen to know something. See the post Thoughts From an Anechoic Chamber (a good read that one, I think).

Close Encounters

I keep reading about the decline in the study of the humanities at university level – English literature especially – usually attributed to the shift since the 1980s towards a narrow view of higher education as "credentialisation" for the workplace, plus the ever greater value placed on so-called STEM subjects (essentially anything that might require you to wear a lab coat and/or be able to handle maths). Certainly, it can be hard to explain the relevance of your grasp of Coleridge's theory of the imagination in a job interview, when your interviewers have never heard of Coleridge and are suspicious of imagination, never mind any theories whatever-you-said-his-name-was had about it.

Of course, I'm sure the same could be said for your understanding of stochastic optimization or Fourier transforms, although they do at least sound more impressive. No, what employers want to know is: Are you a team player? Where do you see yourself in five years? Or, in the trinity of job interviewing that I was taught: Can they do the job? Will they do the job? Will they fit in? (see the post Inflexible Attitude, Hates a Challenge for my finely-nuanced take on recruitment as seen from the interviewer's side of the table).

Now, I am biased here: despite my inclination towards visual art, I took English Language and Literature as my first degree, and then did a master's in Comparative Literature, and was on the brink of a doctorate and an academic career when I finally came to my senses. But that was the 1970s. I'm really not surprised youngsters today are losing interest in English as a three-year course of study, now that it has to be considered primarily as an investment: a substantial amount of real capital exchanged for an indeterminate amount of cultural capital. That, plus so few real academic job prospects in a declining field. It was bad enough in 1977; now...

I think there has been a problem with literary study at university for quite some time, however, which is that children who have discovered a love of reading at school do not find themselves doing mo' betta readin' at university, but learning to choose from an assortment of critical pins and probes to stick into the mummified remains of an activity which no longer really exists, if it ever did. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but it is surely simply a fiction that there is a meaningful fraction of the population who still read "the canon" of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Joyce, and the rest of the usual suspects, other than for exam or academic purposes? That includes most English graduates: it's easy to confuse a love of "literature" with the deep joy of being a smart seventeen-year-old exploring your bookishness for the first time, and it's hard to sustain that level of passion into adult life. Besides, reading is a time-consuming activity, and hard to combine with raising children, doing a job, watching films and TV series, and so on. It takes a certain determination to make the time, which you're only going to do if you continue to feel the need for it.

It's also hard to avoid the impression that many of today's literary academics do not themselves get much time for reading for pleasure. Nobody is going to pay you a professional salary for kicking back on the sofa every day with some poetry; papers need to be written, and those essays and dissertations won't mark themselves. No, for academic purposes literary works are there to be mined for evidence in an ongoing series of inquisitorial trials which have little to do with any reading and writing that was or is taking place in the real world – never more than a minority-interest branch of the entertainment industry, anyway – and have everything to do with various arcane theoretical tussles which verge on the theological. "Texts" exist not to be read and enjoyed and discussed, but to have their inky souls examined and those of their sinful creators interrogated, and usually found wanting. "I put it to you that there is not a single mention of the slave-trade or sugar-plantation profits anywhere in Pride and Prejudice, is there, Ms. Austen? No? I rest my case...".

Meanwhile, across the campus someone is working on some STEM miracle – let's say "a cure for cancer" or "green energy" as catch-all placeholders for whatever it might be – and yet is having to waste far too much valuable time and attention scrabbling for funding and lab space. Harassed administrative eyes fall on the humanities departments yet again: what is going on in there? And why is recruitment falling?

Why? Because eventually the word gets out, and kids stop applying to spend three expensive years wandering around lost and confused in what is a peculiarly hermetic and often angry cultural space. Unpopular and therefore underfunded departments go into decline and, in the classic formula, as the stakes get smaller the disciplinary infighting gets more vicious. On the plus side, however, this might mean that at least some of those kids might study something more practical – I always regretted not choosing geography, myself – and carry on reading simply for pleasure, while the dwindling number of academic literary theologians keep sawing away at the branch they are sitting on.

Is any of this really a problem? Some would argue that your "culture" is like your native language: you don't need to learn it, you are already fluent in it without the trouble of grammar lessons or vocabulary lists. Which is, as far as it goes, true. A mumbling idiot speaks a version of the same language, more or less, as that used by the most grandiloquent public speaker. The point of the comparison with language is that what people do or don't do is their culture; there is no higher or lower, it just is what it is. Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone! But, hold on there...This is not an argument you'd want to apply to diet or exercise, is it? And it is a view that too easily excuses passive consumption and cultural complacency, which are a problem, aren't they? If you don't think they are, you might as well stop reading now.

In a well-ordered society, the job of humanities education has surely always been to identify and activate the life-affirming cultural traces that lie latent within us, to help us to see that there is more to life beyond the imaginary bars of our comfy cage, and not merely to equip us for an unquestioning existence within it. But how far does or should higher education really play a part in this? Obviously, just as you don't need to attend drama school to stop speaking like a mumbling idiot – hey, I'm still working on it – you don't need a university degree to enhance your appreciation and understanding of the magnificent literary culture you've had the great good fortune to be born into. You'd think those three years ought to make quite a difference, but they don't seem to: in fact, English graduates are notorious for having had any love of reading trashed at university. 

However, at some point aspiring readers do need to be helped to progress beyond the ABC basics in order to meet the more ambitiously "literary" works halfway. So let's pretend there is such a thing as a poetic license. To earn it, you will need to work on your attention span, to be open to uncomfortable and edgy imaginings, be at ease with obliquity, ambiguity, allusion, and playful obscurity and, to fully qualify at the highest level, have developed the skill known as "close reading". But our universities, it seems, have lost interest in this particular form of credential.

Close reading, like drawing, is a skill that is best built on a foundation of talent – yes, there is such a thing as a talent for reading – and this is best done not at university, anyway, but at school. You will know this, if you have been been lucky enough to grapple with a few well-chosen set texts – a little "difficult", perhaps, but not daunting – and pored over them with a group of like-minded peers, guided (and, if necessary, provoked and goaded) by a good teacher. Not everyone is so fortunate – I was – but there is really no better time or place to awaken a hunger for "the best which has been thought and said", in Matthew Arnold's formula. After that, though, you're on your own.

There's no doubt that in time even the keenest appetites can wane. I find I don't read anything like as much now as I used to; "literary" fiction, in particular, tends to sit unopened and to sink ever lower in my tottering stacks of unread books. As novelist John Banville remarked in an interview:

When I was young I remember arguing with George Steiner about an essay in which he said old men don’t read fiction. Well, I’m an old man and I don’t read much fiction; whatever fiction gives you, I don’t seem to need it any more.
John Banville, interviewed in the Guardian, 12/11/2022

Very true, that. Still, it is now obvious to me that the time I spent at school learning to close-read worthwhile texts – poetry in particular – has had lasting value in my life. The time I spent as a postgraduate grappling with various theoretical-theological speculations? Not so much... Take those speculations of Coleridge on the nature of the imagination I mentioned above, that had once seemed so significant to this sometime would-be scholar. They have now utterly faded from my memory, but his poem "Frost at Midnight" has not. It may not be "the best", but whatever it is that a good poem does, it does for me.

There's an important distinction to be made there. Personally, I rarely crave "the best" in most things: we drive a Skoda Citigo, live in a suburban three-bed semi, I wear the same cheap but practical clothes until they wear out (and sometimes beyond), and generally acknowledge the truth that "the best is the enemy of the good". To argue over what does and does not count as "the best" in any creative field is pointless – fashions change and tastes differ, and quietly eloquent voices are all too easily drowned out by the loudest shouters and their most insistent advocates – which is why all competitions and prizes, from the Nobel on down, are essentially ridiculous. They are looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

Which reminds me of one of the tales of Mullah Nasruddin I read many years ago, which goes something like this:

A man saw Mullah Nasruddin on the street searching for something under a lamp post.
"What have you lost, Nasruddin?" he asked.
"I have lost my keys," said Nasruddin.
So they both got down on their knees and searched for them.
After looking for ages they were still unable to find them, so the other man asked:
"Are you sure this is where you dropped them?"
"No, no – I dropped them back there in my house", said Nasruddin.
"Then why on earth are you looking for them out here?"
"It's too dark inside my house, but there is plenty of light out here under the lamp post".

Or maybe they're looking for the wrong thing in the right place? Obliquity, ambiguity, allusion, and playful obscurity... If that's a problem for you I'm going to have to ask to see your poetic license, sir. Please step away from the lamp post.

America Decides

Swamp thing

Honestly, what a right old how's your father, eh? What is wrong with you people? Rhetorical questions, obviously; you do you, America...

Swamped

Go Van Gogh

Yes, I know that the American pronunciation of Van Gogh as "Van Go" is annoying to all right-thinking people, but it makes a nice header for the post. Besides, "our" version as "Van Goff" is only marginally closer to the actual Dutch, probably for reasons of decorum. I mean, seriously? Can you imagine a seminar in which all three versions are in competition, or worse, a roomful of English-speaking pedants all using the correct, throat-clearing version? Hilarious. There's a Monty Python sketch right there.

Anyway, on Thursday I went to see the Van Gogh blockbuster currently at the National Gallery, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. Quite why the National chose that curious "poets and lovers" tag for this show is a bit of curatorial hand-waving not really worth exploring. Basically, they have assembled a lot of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings from the astonishingly creative two-year period spent in Arles, spread generously over six large rooms. Sixty-one, in fact, borrowed from galleries and private collections worldwide, of which by my count just five came from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, which apparently holds 200 paintings and about 500 drawings. It seems there is rather more Van Gogh out there than I, at least, had imagined.

I was accompanied by two old friends of school-days vintage who, conveniently for me, have married each other, which makes staying in touch so much easier. We met in Trafalgar Square at 1:30 pm for a 2:30 booking, forewarned by a blogger who should know that the queues were horrendous: up to an hour at popular times. But in the event there was no queue at all, and we were waved through a whole hour early.

Security has been tightened since Just Stop Oil activists bafflingly decided to attract attention to their (worthy) cause by throwing soup over one of the paintings. Liquids are now banned inside the gallery, bags are searched, and everyone must pass through an airport-style metal-detector gate, although thankfully without removing shoes, belts, and loose change, which might make you suspect it isn't actually plugged in. Also, I'd forgotten to empty a half-full bottle of water inside my shoulder-bag, and it was only on the train home that I realised this had been missed – or possibly allowed through? – by the bag searcher. Well, at least it wasn't soup or superglue.

All blockbuster exhibitions are exhausting, I find, particularly when they feature an overwhelming quantity of work by just one blockbuster artist, some of whose blockbuster pictures are so familiar – from posters, coasters, postcards, tea towels, key fobs, fridge magnets, and whatever other gift-shop tat can carry a reproduction of an image – that they have ceased being works of art and become a blockbuster brand, even recognisable by people who don't care about "art" at all. To be honest, I'd rather come across a few deservedly famous paintings when walking through a gallery, like bumping into old friends on the street, than navigate whole roomfuls of major and minor masterpieces which, however thoughtfully curated, is always more like attending a reunion or a wedding, where the meeting-with-people quotient of a "high-functioning introvert" like me gets stretched a little thin. "Hello, 'Trunk of a Tree', I believe you know 'View of Arles', we were at Montmajour together in 1888? Oh, do excuse me, but I've just spotted 'The Yellow House' talking to 'The Bedroom', and I must have a word..."

There's also the problem that the rooms become so crowded that actually getting to see the paintings is a contest of sharp elbows and strength of will, especially once the afternoon sessions pile in. At times, it can feel less like an exhibition and more like the mid-session interval of some large assembly, where people are passing the time before reconvening by admiring some pictures that happen to be on the wall. So, rather than join the slow clockwise shuffle from picture to picture, I always make a swift pass through all the rooms, noting where the points of interest are, and then circling back, looking for opportunities to get in front of a genuine piece of Awesome. I will then stand there, and actually look at the gorgeous thing: up and down, side to side, for as long as it takes, searching for some of the secrets of its awesomeness, and ignoring the seething annoyance of the phone-snappers you can feel on the back of your neck. How dare you get in the way of my photograph? How inconsiderate, to be standing there, just looking! Honestly, I do wonder whether it is time all photography was banned in popular exhibitions, the way it used to be? I wouldn't object, and I don't see why anyone else should, either.

Blockbuster exhaustion is a pleasant sort of exhaustion, though – one of my companions was positively giddy with a mild case of Stendhal Syndrome – mostly felt as an ache in the feet and the small of the back, plus a certain light-headedness; you simply know when you've been arted out, and it's time to find a cup of tea. Later, I was surprised to discover that my phone app had recorded 8,334 steps that day, roughly 3.3 miles: that's a lot of gallery floor covered and stairs climbed, given that the walk from Waterloo station to Trafalgar Square and back is barely two miles. I'm beginning to wonder whether gallery visiting ought to be be recommended as a pleasant exercise regime. [1]

As for Vincent van Gogh (oops, sorry! Here, use my napkin), what is there to say, without lapsing into gushy "Starry, Starry Night" mode? A troubled man who probably only ever sold a single painting in his lifetime is posthumously recognised as a visionary genius and catapulted into the TOP TEN ARTISTS EVER! super-league? Improbable, romantic, sad, infuriating, but true. Highest recent auction price: USD 117,180,000 (that's well over 90.5 million pounds sterling) for "Verger avec cyprès", a pleasant-enough painting of impeccable provenance, sold at Christie's in 2022. [2] Life simply isn't fair, is it?

1. I'm reminded of my experience of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, swarmed by seemingly endless throngs of confused-looking elderly Chinese. See the post Hermitageous.

2. How far any painting is truly worth 90.5 million pounds is an interesting question. Had the purchaser taken it out onto the street and set fire to it (rather than putting it into a Swiss vault or hanging it over their fireplace), how impoverished would the culture really be? What if, instead, they had donated their £90.5 million to an art school or public gallery, or endowed some new "genius award" for artists with difficult to pronounce names? Discuss...

Appearances

There were some comments that the angels in the previous post didn't look very terrifying. Which, obviously, means those people hadn't really grasped Rilke's point about the nature of the beauty of angels, but never mind. Sometimes appearances are everything: they get straight to the point. So, today being Hallowe'en and all, how about these dark and fallen angels? Scary enough? Sleep well!

Every Angel Is Terrifying

I have always had an admiration for moody, blurry, grainy, expressionistic black and white photography, as practised by people like Chris Friel, Trent Parke, Irma Haselberger, or (a recent discovery via Tomasz Trzebiatowski's Photosnack) Olga Karlovac. I have no talent for it myself, and my many attempts over the years have rarely made it into the "keepers" box. Which is fine: much as I enjoy listening to Glenn Gould play Bach, I can barely tap out "Happy Birthday" on a keyboard. We are who we are, and I suppose I'm just not a moody, blurry, grainy, expressionistic sort of person. To invert Joni Mitchell, I'm not frightened by the devil, but I'm drawn to those ones who are afraid.

So, talking of the devil [checks behind his left shoulder, oh so casually: nothing... Must be busy today...] I've been doing my own, rather different monochrome thing with some angels I've been meeting around the place, as part of a longer-term angelic project. As mentioned previously – and I'm beginning to wonder, after sixteen years of blogging, whether there's anything I haven't mentioned before, at least once – I've been having fun with some cheap second-hand compact cameras, the sort that offer a ridiculously huge built-in "super zoom" range, inevitably coupled with so-so image quality. Or, in the case of the intriguing Canon Zoom device, truly appalling image quality (see the post Zoom!).

These little compacts fit comfortably into a coat pocket, though, and I enjoy being able to wander about, relatively unencumbered, and choosing between getting up close, taking a broader view, or isolating tighter compositions out of the middle distance; something I'd never do if I had to tote around the Fuji X or Micro 4/3rds equivalent of a 24-800 zoom, even assuming such a beast exists and I could afford one. 

The fact is that you can discover an awful lot of useful post-processing tricks when you try to rescue interesting images of inferior quality, tricks that will also find application in your more usual work. With these angels – spotted doing their apotropaic and tidings-bearing thing in various locations – I have converged on a range of monochrome "looks" that I find both satisfying and appropriate. Moody, blurry, grainy, and expressionistic they're not – don't think I haven't tried – but angels, after all, are ambassadors of clarity and light. Apart, that is, from the ones who are not. About whom, the less said the better.

For beauty is really nothing
but the onset of a terror we can only just endure,
and we marvel at it so because it serenely disdains
our destruction. Every angel is terrifying.

(Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.)

from Duino Elegy 1, by Rainer Maria Rilke (my translation)

Here's my favourite angelic annunciation, by the way. Greetings! 

How's Your Father?

For no particular reason I've been thinking about the expressions I would often hear in my childhood that seem no longer to be current. Things like, "You daft 'a'porth!", "I'll put salt on your tail!", "Corks!", "So 'elp me!", "That's enough of your sauce!", "Done up like a pox-doctor's clerk", and so on. If that sounds like I grew up in a parody of a Cockney sit-com, that's not entirely inaccurate. Although my family were local yokels, most of our New Town friends and neighbours were East Enders displaced by the Blitz. My godparents, Auntie Win and Uncle Les, could easily have been characterful extras in the Queen Vic.

So the other day, like a bubble rising to the surface of my memory-pond, I seemed to hear my paternal grandmother's voice exclaiming, "What a right old how's your father!" Which is certainly not something you'd hear anybody say today, but then Daisy Mabbit was born in 1893. Although I have to say that, now it's bubbled up again, I quite fancy saying it myself whenever a particularly intricate cock-up presents itself. I like its Britishness, it's mouth-filling resonance, and the way it avoids both unnecessary crudity and imported Americanisms like "snafu" or "clusterfuck".

But it made me wonder: what does the expression "how's your father" actually mean? Where does it come from?

Obviously, the essential underlying reference is to sex. "Fancy a bit of 'ow's yer farver, sweetheart?" is unambiguous, but as a direct invitation to a knee-trembler, a leg-over, a bit of the other, or some rumpy-pumpy, it is curiously circumlocutory, not to say periphrastic. I mean, never mind love, what on earth does the state of health of anyone's father have to do with it?

It seems all roads lead to Harry Tate, a popular comedian of the British music hall's glory days, now completely erased from the communal memory. The appeal of Tate's routines has gone the way of all historic humour: you really had to be there (1920, that is). But it seems some of his catchphrases entered the language, and one of these was "How's your father?" According to Wikipedia:

Several catch phrases he used became popular in Britain in the twentieth century, including "Good-bye-ee!", which inspired the popular First World War song written by Weston and Lee; "How's your father?", which Tate used as an escape clause when his character was unable to think of an answer to a question; and "I don't think", used as an ironic postscript, as in "He's a nice chap – I don't think".

It's a bit of a leap from there to a euphemism for sex, though, and even further to an expression for an all-encompassing malfunction, a complete and utter balls-up. Most examinations of the phrase I've come across conclude that the most common use of Tate's catchphrase in its day was as a neutral placeholder like "thingummy" or "wotsit". Although I suppose in the sniggering culture of innuendo that has characterised British humour for so long, any allusion to an unnamed activity or thing inevitably gravitated to, ah, down there; a man's wotsit was never going to be his nose.

My own theory, FWIW, is that the superficially innocent question "how's your father?" carries within it a concealed anagrammatic barb: who's your father? That is, are you sure you know? As the eternal wisdom has it: mater certa, pater semper incertus (mummy's baby, daddy's maybe...). Which easily short-circuits – or perhaps nudges is the better word – the receptive mind to, you know, that. And from a bit of the other on the wrong side of the blanket it's not far to the moral chaos that the churches and the authorities feared would be unleashed if sex were ever to come out from behind that prophylactic barrier of euphemism and nudging concealment.

Now that it has, though – wotsits, thingummies, and everything! – there seems to have been a tidal drift in the other direction, where "language" is concerned. The word "fuck", for example – not so long ago absolutely taboo, even partially-clad as "the F-word" – has itself become a naughty-but-neutral placeholder, declared fit for use in publicly broadcast adult entertainments, as famously demonstrated in the episode of The Wire in which detectives Moreland and McNulty examine a crime scene using variations of just the one multivalent word. In Mark Lawson's telling timeline ( in "Has swearing lost its power to shock?"):

• 1965: Kenneth Tynan says 'fuck' on TV and four motions are tabled in parliament
• 1976: the Sex Pistols use it on a teatime show and are banned from TV
• 2004: more than 10 million people watch John Lydon use the 'C' word and fewer than 100 complain.

To declare that, for example, some fuckwit knows fuck-all about fucking photography does not remotely hint at any sexual activity, and it would be weird if it did. It merely shows that the speaker is quite annoyed, and not afraid of using a little salty language to let it be known.

If you want to be genuinely offensive you need to look elsewhere today. Ethnicity has always been a minefield, of course. Stay well away, or tread very, very carefully. Some careful terminological tiptoeing is also often required now that "blended families" have become so commonplace. Father? Mother? Not so fast with your reductive tick-boxes, chum... Things are a bit more complicated than that around here! People have become quite touchy about really basic items of vocabulary, too. In some circles the use of an inappropriate pronoun – a.k.a. "misgendering" – can induce outrage, although I'm afraid at my age the idea of anyone – however vague or comprehensive their gender might be – demanding to be referred to as "they" is both strange and not a little confusing. Not least as this (presumably?) mainly happens in their absence. I had always thought I was being pretty progressive by using "they" as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, but the world will keep moving on, won't they?

It seems there will always be new and exciting ways to set yourself up for the satisfaction of being appalled and insulted. How very dare you! I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you! It's all very confusing to anyone who grew up carefully stepping around one set of taboos, only to be tripped arse over tit by another. Flippin' 'eck! Oops, excuse my French! Um... How's your father, by the way?

Gypsy Grove

I have perhaps six to ten walks that I repeat three or four times each month; I return to these places, exposing myself to the possibility that something will happen there. There's something I'm searching for and trying to discover. If I organise my life around these walks, there is a possibility I might find this. My ideas and thinking are illuminated by the thoughts of other people, conversations, things I read or listen to. I feel I am walking with these ideas, yet also retaining a mind open enough to allow the unexpected to occur.
Gary Fabian Miller, Adore, p.204

I bought a copy of the attractive little book accompanying Gary Fabian Miller's exhibition "Adore" at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol when we visited it back in May last year (see the post Miller Light), but have only just finished reading the text, which is where I found the passage quoted above. In some ways it's a statement of the bleedin' obvious, but it does nicely encapsulate the way I feel about my own regular, if rather more urban walks.

One of these walks – the roughly 2.5 miles down into the town centre (followed by the 2.5 mile slog back uphill) – takes me past a mysterious alleyway between two buildings in a little run of suburban shops. I had always wondered where that alleyway went, but never bothered to find out. Partly because it was only halfway along my intended walk, and partly because it seemed to breathe that mix of possibility and danger that unlit, unpaved, unfrequented urban byways do: going down there would be a little adventure into the unknown.

But a few weeks ago I had reason to visit the pharmacy in that run of shops. It was a pleasant sunny day, I had nothing better to do, so thought: maybe now's the time to see where that alleyway goes? So I did.

To my surprise it ran in a straight line for about one third of a mile between walled back gardens on either side, eventually emerging onto the noise and bustle of Shirley Road, one of the grittier thoroughfares through the city, and another of my walking routes. The entire length of the walls on either side of the uneven and muddy path were like a linear gallery of colourful and competent sprayed graffiti, not at all your casual tagging, much of it old enough to have been partially covered by ivy and other climbing plants, like the remains of some vanished civilisation in the jungle. At various spots chairs and old car seats had been placed, whether by those graffiti artists, the homeless, or by the inhabitants of the houses with garden gates that opened onto the alleyway it was impossible to say: I didn't meet a single person along the way.

Like any little urban adventure, the sense of discovery – that exciting mix of fun and apprehension – probably outweighed its actual significance, but I enjoyed myself, exploring and photographing somewhere entirely new. Looking at Google Maps later on, I discovered the path actually has a name: Gypsy Grove.

I should say, these days the "camera" that accompanies me on most walks is my iPhone 12 mini, but on this occasion I was using a sweet and petite Panasonic GM5 that has lately usurped most other cameras in my shoulder bag. I love its compactness – it has the size and build quality of the best "small black compact cameras" like the Sony RX100 series – and am impressed by its image quality and flexibility: despite its diminutive size, it's a fully-capable micro 4/3rds interchangeable lens camera. It even has an electronic viewfinder.

I'd recommend the GM5 to you, except for the fact that you'd probably never be able to find one: they're very rare beasts indeed. Launched in late 2014 as a follow-up to the even tinier GM1, Panasonic hasn't seen fit to produce an even better successor. We can hope, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Actual single-purpose cameras are no longer where it's at, sales-wise, now that most of us can get perfectly satisfactory results from a decent phone. In fact, with a bit of care and working within its limitations, you'll probably get better results from your phone than from a "proper" camera, especially if you only occasionally use one. I just wish Apple hadn't abandoned the "mini" format for its iPhones... I really don't want a phone the size of a small tablet! Some of us are not plus-sized Californian giants...

There Will Never Be Another You...

We're often told that every human being, like every snowflake, is unique. I've never been sure how either assertion has been (or even could be) verified, but I have my doubts about both. A lot of people do seem awfully reminiscent of somebody else and, although it's true my acquaintance with snow down here on the South Coast is limited, snowflakes do all seem to have an uncannily strong family resemblance. Besides, AFAIK we only have the word of pioneer snowflake photographer Wilson A. Bentley to go by, who was self-evidently bonkers. I suppose "unique" may be a question of scale: I expect all hydrogen atoms are unique, too, once you get to know them up close.

There was this song you used to hear a lot in the 1950s and 60s, "There Will Never Be Another You". It became what used to be known as a "standard", a song or tune that was covered by pretty much everybody, from Frank Sinatra on down, including any number of instrumental interpretations; I suppose its melodic structure and chord changes invited the sort of musical mucking about that the arrangers and improvisers of the time loved so much. Lyrically, however, the song is a massive disappointment: it's not a rigorous philosophical or biological investigation into the eternal uniqueness of your particular instantiation of the human genome, just some schmaltzy romantic yearnings for someone's ex. So, now that it has provided a catchy handle for this post we won't be mentioning it again.

The other day, I received a curious email. An artist – a sculptor and painter – in the USA was asking me, "Is this your work?" He had acquired a copy of a semi-abstract photograph of a figure reflected in some wet cobblestones with the title "The Radiance of Opposites, Prague C.R.", and signed "Michael Chisholm 96". Now that, as I am constantly being reminded, is my name, although I generally go by "Mike", and although I have been known to take photographs of that sort, I have never yet been to Prague, despite it being the home town of my man Franz Kafka.

Now, I think we will all, at some time, have been given cause to wonder whether we have indeed been responsible for something we had either completely forgotten about, or never actually done. The experience probably has a name ("Kafka-esque" springs to mind). I have often awoken from troubled dreams, not to discover that I have been transformed into a gigantic cockroach, thankfully, but nonetheless confused as to whether I have or have not, at some time in the past, committed a murder or some other appalling crime that had somehow slipped my memory. Only to realise with immense relief that – phew! – it was all just a dream.

So, looking at this photograph by "Michael Chisholm", I briefly experienced that troubling sensation of self-doubt: no, wait, is it one of mine? It does look eerily like some transparencies I took in northern Spain around 1990... Have I, in fact, been to Prague, and somehow forgotten? But, um, no: not mine, never been there, not guilty.

A little searching on the Web revealed that although there may never be another me, as such, there is no shortage of alternative candidates. There are actually quite a lot of Michael Chisholms out there, mainly Canadians, not a few of whom are photographers or artists. It's a little disturbing. But a bit more searching narrowed it down to one prime suspect: the late Michael Chisholm of Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose book of photographs taken in Prague, Bridging East and West, bears the exact same photograph as the one in question on its cover. Busted! Whether this is the same Canadian Michael Chisholm as the author of Around the Bend: the whimsical world of Michael Chisholm ("112 pages of Chisholm's lawn art, folk art, lawn dummies & animals") is a known unknown that I'm not inclined to investigate. I really can't be held responsible for every act of idiocy committed in my name.

It all reminds me of the Graham Greene impostor. Do you know that story? In 1954, Greene received a letter from a man who had met him at the Cannes International Film Festival. Problematically, however, Greene had never actually been to the Cannes Festival. Over the years, Greene would keep hearing stories about this other Graham Greene who was passing himself off as the novelist in various locations around the world, and getting into some very Greeneland-ish scrapes, ultimately getting arrested in Assam for gun-running and – hilariously – then trying to get money for bail from Hulton Press, publisher of many of Greene’s magazine pieces.

Eventually, Greene wrote about his troublesome shadow ("The Other … Whom Only Others Know", Daily Telegraph Magazine, Jan. 10, 1975). He tells how, after a meeting with Salvador Allende, then President of Chile, a local newspaper accused him of being his own double. "I found myself momentarily shaken with a metaphysical doubt ... Had I been the impostor all along? Was I the Other?"

He wasn't the first, of course. Doppelgangers and impersonators are the stuff of legend, sensation, and gothic fiction, from Martin Guerre via the Tichborne Claimant to Tom Ripley. I have already exposed Jon Stewart's unnerving duplication as "Hugh Brownstone" (see the post Is It Jon Or Is It Hugh?; I can't believe some of you don't agree with me...), and I can't be the only one to have been spooked by my own appearance out of left field when passing an unexpected mirror. You again!

Then I suppose there's this:

When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he saw was Tigger, sitting in front of the glass and looking at himself.
"Hallo!" said Pooh.
"Hallo!" said Tigger. “I’ve found somebody just like me. I thought I was the only one of them."
A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Sorry about that. I haven't actually read that appalling effusion of whimsy, just watched the Disney version with my kids. When it comes to all things Pooh-related, I'm with Dorothy Parker:

And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

(Parker's Constant Reader column, New Yorker, October 12, 1928)

Now, there may well never be another Dorothy Parker – and if Google and Facebook are any guide, she seems to have taken a patent out on a name you would have thought fairly commonplace – but I think any confidence in one's own uniqueness is easily shaken. Certainly, when it comes to photography, it seems one Michael Chisholm's work is all too easily mistaken for another's. And how quickly might someone trawling the Web, in possession of a vague memory of some earlier draft of the one and only me, be convinced that I had relocated to Canada, gone Around the Bend, and dedicated my life to the creation of lawn art, whatever that is. Or even – noooo! – branded myself as Mike "Chizzy" Chisholm and taken to churning out sub-psychedelia in Detroit? It doesn't bear thinking about. I may yet have to change my name.

A few minutes of anagrammatic experimentation yields Mike Mohlisch... Possible? Or Michael Imholsch? Both names are as singular as stand-offish snowflakes and, until now, completely unknown to Google. The trouble is, these guys don't exist and haven't done anything. Yet... But there is something curiously enticing – liberating, even – about the idea of working under a one-off pseudonym in a world cluttered with namesakes who are busily appropriating, diluting, or polluting your nominal "own brand" with their efforts. It could be fun, and it could happen! Indeed, it may already have happened...

You again!