Much missed

About 6 months ago I signed up to the I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue newsletter, planning to attend a recording next time Humph and the crew stopped off a motorway with a 6 in it.  Then last week I got an email saying that the next season of ISIHAC had been postponed because Humph was ill.  It seems the spam mail of destiny, etc.

Here, In tribute to one of the funniest, filthiest, cleverest of gentleman-broadcasters is an illicit recording made earlier this year.  Thanks to the person who posted it, and thanks to Humph, for so much sly good humour over the years.

I didn’t know I’d miss him quite so much.  Monday nights will never be the same.

Unsung National Treasures - 4 - The National Plant Collections

The National Plant Collections are what they say on the tin, collections established “to conserve, document, promote and make available Britain and Ireland’s rich biodiversity of garden plants”.   “Why bother?” you ask.  Well plants can disappear surprisingly quickly because gardeners, like the rest of us, follow the whims of fashion.  The range and variety of plants available to the casual gardener has been drastically reduced by the supermarkets and DIY stores, even though they have made their limited stock so widely accessible, because they have destroyed our independent nurseries as much as they have destroyed our independent grocers.  It’s not just historical plants: who’d have thought that a plant that was widely popular only 40 years ago could have disappeared?  However “the shasta daisy ‘Fiona Coghill’ was thought to be lost from cultivation. The Collection Holder, Lady Hagart-Alexander … discovered that Reg Maxwell … still held a plant. He had received it from Philip Woods, who was in charge of propagating ‘Fiona Coghill’ when it was first marketed in 1968. … the plant you can buy today is exactly the same as the popular plant in the late 1960s.”

This is not a matter of vague good intentions and a romantically English blend of aristos and plantsmen.  It is about botany, as much as it’s about anything and each National Collection is “as complete a representation of a genus or section of a genus as possible” and the National Collection Holders undertake to “document, develop and preserve a comprehensive collection of one group of plants in trust for the future”.

So where do you go to see them, these catalogued collections of plants? These are the gardening equivalent of the British National Library or the cellars of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and you’d think that the National Plant Collections would be held at Kew or Wisley, but in fact they are held on allotments and back gardens, in large estates and municipal parks.  Almost half the collections are in private ownership, and others are held by councils, commercial growers and universities.  I don’t know about you, but I find the robust practicality of accepting the help offered by dedicated individuals over creating something flashy and unsuportable from scratch to be surprisingly  moving. It is confirmation that all you need to do to make a difference in this world is roll up your sleeves, pull on your wellies, and - well - make a difference.  This is what gardening geeks do for fun: think of it as our national gardening wiki.

If you fancy taking it on, then there is still much to be done, and the The National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens publishes a list of missing genera.  Be warned, though, that holding a National Plant Collection is no sinecure, and Collection Holders have to document their plants and work with others to ensure that their collection can withstand whatever disasters might occur: “Oak trees need space and it may not be practical to hold a full back up collection, however, Lathyrus spend the winter as seed in the fridge. Collection Holders must propagate their plants so that if an oak tree is hit by lightning, or the fridge fails, the plants are not lost from the collection (and possibly horticulture) forever.”

The National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens is a surprisingly new organisation, being founded as a registered charity in 1978 as an independent offspring of the Royal Horticultural Society.  This contrasts with the many batty British conservation and social campaign groups which were founded between the two world wars or during the outburst of change at the end of the 19th century.  This blend of amateurs and professionals combining their expertise into a national force to be reckoned with is, however, quietly and quintessentially English.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the allotments and cold-frames, the gardens and parks, the aristocrats and nurserymen, the plastic labels and extensive database that form the National Plant Collections.

Plunged into Kaos

I’ve just discovered that the Arts Council have decided to stop funding my favourite theatre group.

Kaos Theatre have a reputation for productions that are loud, colourful and bawdy. What the slapstick can hide, though, is the intelligence that goes in to these productions.  They aren’t just great physical theatre, they are witty, subversive, considered, highly-rehearsed and fun. And I’m puerile enough to dearly love hearing the word “cunt” used appropriately on stage.

My earliest memories of Kaos are of their rehearsals for “Caligula” in the Brewery Arts centre in Cirencester in the mid 1990s. I didn’t go to see the production, but anguished screams punctuated the life-drawing classes I was attending. They seemed serious and rather heavy, and I had enough seriousness and heaviness in my life at that time, and I don’t remember going to any of their productions. I was aware of them though, and I took a young Frenchman to see “The Importance of Being Ernest” five years or so ago and fell in love with the company then. I hadn’t seen camp like it. It’s indescribable, because anything I say will give you a watered down impression. Imagine a cross between Liberace and Pantomime played at racing speed, and you’ll get the general idea. It was very very funny, and very very clever. Then I took the one I go to the theatre with to see “Moll Flanders” and was delighted by the complexity and sophistication of thought underneath the rudeness and crudeness of the action. Oh and the cross-dressing was fab. Gender-ambiguity: bring it on.

So it’s no surprise that I’ve been looking forward to their “Midsummer Night’s Dream” ever since they announced it a year ago. The Dream is one of the most under-rated plays. It’s full of darkness and menace, but it’s either played as candy-floss or as commedia dell’arte.  I’d like to see a gothic version please:  I want to see a Tim Burton Dream, with Johnny Depp as Oberon and Helena Bonham-Carter or Christina Ricci as Titania, and Pete Postlethwaite as Bottom.   Kaos is not afraid of darkness, and much of their work has no slapstick to it at all, but explores all sorts of violence.  Their dream promises to be:

… a fantastically lurid vision of Shakespeare’s classic play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The KAOS DREAM plunges this famous story into a contemporary urban cabaret of strip-clubs, pimps and pole-dancers, subverting all convention in true KAOS style.

And now I discover that the Arts Council in it’s infinite wisdom have decided to throw away the decade the company have spent growing as a troupe and building a brand and an audience.  More worryingly still, I hear that many of these decisions were taken based on inaccurate information about audience sizes and so on.  If you are going to have criteria for ripping away someone’s livelihood and for destroying something that took a decade to create, at least apply those criteria fairly.

I have of course written to the appropriate Arts Council officers to register my protest. But this is more so that the Council cannot pretend that no-one minded and no-one objected than because I have any expectation that it’ll make a blind bit of difference.

Hey bloody ho.

Diana again

Is it me, or is the Diana inquest turning into a long slow public humiliation for Mohammed al Fayed?

The Stevens report concluded that there was no conspiracy, and was damning in the number and quality of the details on which it based its conclusions. No - she wasn’t pregnant. No - she wasn’t going to marry Dodi. Yes - the French medical and post mortem professionals had all behaved professionally and - yes - Henri Paul was drunk. Accidents happen, and marrying royalty doesn’t change the laws of physics.

But though it was impressive to read the details of the Stevens report, it had nothing like the effect of the slow drip-feed of partial, personal, idiosyncratic evidence coming out of the inquest. It’s a compelling glimpse into the lives of the idle rich; lives cluttered with drivers and body-guards and butlers and spiritual healers and other odd and trashy acolytes.

Everybody seems to have been using everybody else; al Fayed was using Diana for headlines and glory, Diana was using Dodi to provoke Hasnat Kahn, Dodi was using his father to bank-roll his wooing of Diana, Diana was using al Fayed to sponsor her charities, al Fayed was using the press to puff up his own importance, the Press were using Diana to sell newspapers, and Diana was using the press to publicise her affair with Dodi. It’s almost as if al Fayed was buying Diana, with Dody as his proxy. Ach, that’s my imagination. Like everyone else, I am over-egging a summer fling.

So far we have discovered:

• Diana thought that al Fayed was bugging the yacht
• Diana thought that al Fayed was tipping off the press about her movements

• Diana was on the pill for the whole of that summer
• Diana’s letters to Prince Philip were articulate and thoughtful, but her letters to Dodi were inanely polite

We already knew:

• The photographs supposedly showing Diana was pregnant were taken before she was in a relationship with Dodi
• al Fayed regularly over-ruled the advice from his security staff, in particular on the night of the 31st August
• al Fayed employed a chauffeur who was known to be an aggressive driver, who was an habitual drinker and who had drunk a lot of alcohol that night
• al Fayed approved the plan to leave from the back of the building

Two inescapable sub-texts come from the press coverage of the inquest: al Fayed was beside himself with excitement at the idea of ensnaring Diana as a trophy daughter-in-law, and he strutted around Paris and the Med overruling his professional advisers, showing off his tin-pot entourage which did not have the numbers or professionalism to be up to the job.

I still feel sorry for al Fayed because, as the details come out day by irritating day, it’s clear that he was the one whose decisions more than anyone else’s brought about his son’s death, and it’s equally clear that he has spent the last ten years blaming everyone else. But there’s another picture emerging from the inquest, a picture of a greedy opportunist, bullying his staff, exploiting his family and their friends, manipulating everyone - his son, his son’s fiancée, Diana, the press, us - all for his own aggrandisement and glory. I used to think that the events of the 31st of August 1997 were the final pay-off of a beautiful and insecure woman’s faustean pact with the press; I am beginning to think it was more a matter of Saturnus eating his own children.

Silver in the gold

Ten years or so ago I was invited with my ex to celebrate his boss’s silver wedding anniversary. I wept throughout their rather fabulous party, which was embarrassing for all concerned. This was bang in the middle of a time when my ex was barely speaking to me because he was silently working it all out in his own head before announcing a fait accompli, a trying stage which lasted well over a year in his case. It was the most difficult and lonely time of my life. My reaction to watching other people celebrate a long and happy marriage (graced by financial success and splendid sons who had beautiful girlfriends) did not amuse my then husband. Oh well. At least I found a remote corner of the marquee and sat well away from the light.

At that time his boss and his wife seemed to be a different generation; ludicrously so. We identified more with their only just grown-up sons, and considered the parents to be middle aged. Well, they say that the definition of middle aged is anyone who is 10 years older than you are, so they obviously were middle aged then and I obviously still am not.

Looking back, I suspect that the Boomers’ parents probably celebrated more Silver Weddings than any other generation. Before them, short life expectancies made for short marriages. So far as the Boomers themselves were concerned, more of them got divorced and fewer of them married in the first place. I know of several couples who’ve been together 25 years but didn’t have a wedding to start the clock ticking. Ach, after all this time I don’t suppose it matters. Even so, I find Silver wedding anniversaries moving; increasingly so as I get older and am hitting in to the age where I could be (should have been) celebrating one myself. Another Aphra, in another world, perhaps.

I remember my parents’ Silver wedding anniversary: I’d have been 10, and my siblings in their teens and early 20s. There was a strong sense of duration, of family, of a safe emotional container, of continuity and of the different generations. All this is with hindsight of course - at the time my brother was bouncing off the walls with excitement about my parents celebratory first colour TV.

So for years, in my mind Silver Weddings were one of the things that grown-ups did, which I guess is why I placed my ex’s boss and his wife on the other side of the generational divide just a decade ago. And I’m Boomer enough myself to still have trouble considering myself a grown-up. Now I’m going to be hitting into a spate of Silver Weddings as my peers start celebrating them. Diff’rent strokes. Diff’rent folks. It’s not as if my present life is dull.

I think where all this is leading to is the sense of shocked recognition that 25 years can go in a flash. Where this all came from is another matter entirely. Let me give you a word of advice - if you wake up at three in the morning, don’t make yourself a couple of tea and settle down to writing a blog.

It’s clever but is it art?

Kipling’s rather mannered poem “The Conundrum of the Workshops” asks “it’s clever, but is it Art?”

Most of the time, it isn’t.

We don’t send teenagers to writing school, get them to live exclusively self-referential lives once they graduate, and expect them to produce work that is either interesting or thought-provoking. However we send our artists to art-school when they are still high on hormones and coherent thinking, expose them to nothing other than cheap drugs, grubby sex and their peers, and expect them to produce art. It’s no wonder that most of their pieces are self-indulgent wank-fests: self-indulgent wanking is what teenagers do, and with some artists you see no evidence that they have grown out of their adolescence.

These past two weeks I’ve some superb imagery by graphic masters and some deeply-felt and hard-won experiences expressed as narrative paintings and I’ll let you know about them in a minute. Let’s start with the wank-fests. Three spring to mind.

The first was a series of films of a bloke in a bear-suit wandering around an empty Berlin art gallery several nights in a row. I cannot remember what it was supposed to be about. Alienation, probably. (There is a reason why the perpetrators of such self-indulgence feel alienated from the rest of us: it’s because they are so self-obsessed. It isn’t us. It really is them). Apparently the bear-suit referenced the fact that the symbol of Berlin is a bear. Presumably the fact it was in the Berlin kunstgalerie references the fact that the artist is a c**t, otherwise why not do it in Warwick, which is also symbolised by a bear. I’m sorry, but if an installation needs a page of A4 to explain itself, then what we have is a writer who embellishes their writing with really complicated illustrations. The woman who put the crack in the Tate Modern would have been an artist if she’d left it at that, but the explanation that it was about alienation (dur) and racism reduced her work to mere illustration. Shame really. As a crack in the floor it was really cool. Unlike Bungle in Berlin, but there you go.

The second was more fest than wank, but precious little of either. The artist’s page of A4 burbled about sensuality. Essentially she tried to eroticise food. However, a pair of melons with a couple of vine-eye bolts and a chain is no more than a visual pun: it’s not even as if nipple rings are that outré any more. It isn’t Mapplethorpe’s Robert having his Nipple Pierced. The rest of the photographs would have made good magazine shots, but they weren’t witty, nor erotic, nor particularly clever and certainly not art. Nice production values, though.

The third was just cheap sensationalism in a Hirsty kind of way: dead animals enlivened with fluorescent paint. There was a mounted head of an Aberdeen Angus, where the nose and horns had been painted the sort of orange you get in highlighter pens. There was a stuffed fox snarled up in a bunch of brightly coloured bailer twine which was almost interesting. And a pair of white rats turned into salt and pepper pots which were, well, a pair of white rats turned into salt and pepper pots. You get the idea.

By contrast, the one I go to art galleries with and I saw some Modiglianis, a Mondrian and a couple of Picassos the other weekend. Now, they were boys who knew how to put colour and shape onto canvas and who knew what they were painting about. The reason they produced master-pieces is not just that they had mastered their craft (though they had) it is that they had progressed beyond their apprenticeships and journey-man days as people too.

The idea that war is hell is trite. It’s a cheap non-idea, like the cheap non-eroticism of the fruit. However, if you’ve experienced atrocities, then that will come through in your expression of them, which is why Guernica is so powerful and the Kandinskys I saw last summer, come to that. And why, based on her art, sex with the melon woman would be banally predictable while she thought it was exotic and edgy. Rather like sex with Rik from the Young Ones. Which confirms my point about dull adolescent thoughts expressed as dull adolescent art, really. (You want eroticism on the edge? Check out Buck Angel’s transsexual porn. Not likely in a provincial art gallery, I’ll admit.)

Experience informs art, and I am coming to think that the way we put our artists into art school actually hamstrings them.

The final exhibition I saw yesterday was a series of narrative paintings of coal-miners mining coal. The artist was himself a miner, though had he been a different generation and class, maybe he’d have spent his time wrapping up aubergines in wire or wandering around museums in animal costumes. Instead he went down the pit and then went through the miners’ strike. The paintings are illuminate the world that George Orwell described as being “like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are if there–heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.” The paintings, like Orwell’s essay, bring out the physicality of the men and the work: “the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron. … It is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere.” I found the paintings of the coal-mines powerful and moving, and full of purpose and integrity which was not even slightly ridiculous.

So, if you want to do art that’s worth doing, then you have to have something to say that’s worth saying. And if you have to have a page of A4 stuck on the gallery wall in order to say it, then you aren’t an artist at all. You’re an illustrator.

Driven to distraction

Should I give in and get a Satellite Navigation system for my car? I think they are over-priced, not particularly exciting, and shouldn’t be necessary in a well ordered universe. And I don’t trust a Sat Nav system to choose a safe route from A to B: far too many grossly inappropriate lorries have got stuck in the lane for me to think that Sat Nav’s safe.

On the other hand, is it unreasonable of me to expect maps offered by organisations to show roads clearly, using standard mapping conventions? Or to expect written directions to be complete and presuppose no local knowledge? It shouldn’t be unreasonable of me, but I have a horrible feeling it might be.

I spent a lot of time in the 1990s driving round industrial estates trying to find whichever company I was visiting at the time. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t easy. (I remember Abingdon as being particularly time consuming for some reason). So I know that there never was a golden age. I have clocked up between 20,000 and 30,000 miles every year for each of the last 15 or 20 years, many of those miles on roads I didn’t know. I can read maps. I can follow directions. Well…. I used to be able to read maps and follow directions, but now I struggle with both.

Am I getting older and less capable? Is traffic moving faster and more scarily? Or are road signs less reliable, corporate maps less accurate and directions less well written? Or is it the fault of the internet, which provides us with ludicrously detailed and incredibly inaccurate directions and mapping? I finally realised that it was the internet, and not me, when I confirmed that the road numbers and directions I had for crossing Bristol from the M32 to Clifton stipulated junctions and road numbers that did not in fact exist in this universe. Perhaps in Lara’s, but not here.

So, given the shittiness of the alternatives, is it foolishly ludditte of me not to want to spend my next spare couple of hundred quid on Sat Nav?

Yesterday I tried to find a hotel between Glasgow and Edinburgh in the dark, using the map I’d printed off their website. I drove down a road that wasn’t marked on the map, counting roundabouts that didn’t exist on that road or any other, with no idea whether my destination was 500 yards away or 5 miles. Their map had no scale on it. Some genius had used circles to denote interchanges with slip-roads rather than roundabouts. Oh, and there was a road missing at one of the few actual roundabouts. The fact that the writing was too small too read was a minor problem compared with the mapping inaccuracies. To her credit, the girl on the desk wrote all my comments down and handed them in to the manager’s office. But. But…

Then today I spent two hours during rush-hour in Newcastle with irritable geordies up my arse, looking for a building for which I’d been given no street address, to be reached on foot after parking in a car-park which was not mentioned in the directions, on a road called Claremont Road on the map and Claremont Place on the street itself. I gave up in the end and decided I deserved better, so I then spent 45 minutes looking for the A1(M) (crossing the Tyne three times in the process) and drove home.

Am I whining? Am I being unfair? Am I expecting too much? If I buy a satellite navigation system will it cure my Manchester-induced tourettes?

Bummer

I bought a pair of trousers yesterday which were very nearly comfortable.

This is streets ahead of any trouser-wearing experience I have had for two or three years. I have, as Luther so graphically explained, “a wide fundament to sit upon”, but that’s not the problem when I buy trousers.

The problem is that the clothing manufacturers are more than happy to cut six inches off the length of a pair of trousers at the waist while pretending it’s down to customer demand. This is ludicrous. It’s a collusion between cost-cutting manufacturers and a fashion industry run largely by gay men who are disgusted by any kind of feminine curve. As my grandmother would have said “I am the customer, and I demand waisted trousers”.

It’s hard to think what I have in common with gang-obsessed American teenage boys who like the jailhouse look, other than a shared need for oxygen. I certainly don’t like having to hitch my trousers up all the frigging time when I have a perfectly good waist that - with another 6″ of cloth - they could have been cut to sit upon.

I think the last time I bought a pair of comfortable trousers was in late 2000. Seven years.

Enough already.

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I couldn’t resist re-offering you this painting by John Woodwark. Alas, my bottom is nowhere near as wonderful as hers. Is it just me, or doesn’t this painting just make you want to bite it?

What I did over Christmas…

What I did over Christmas was hang around in my PJs, drink tea, listen to podcasts, play spider patience and study.

What Missed Manners, his brothers and his friends did over Christmas was recreate the Battle of Pelennor Fields in his Mom’s living room. In candy. You don’t need me to tell you how cool this is. Just go and have a look for yourself.

Real people Living real lives. They rock.

Wuthering ASBOs

One thing I don’t do here is literary criticism. Either you’ve read the book already and know what you think about it and won’t care what I think, or you haven’t and still won’t care. But (you knew there was going to be a “but”, didn’t you?) but tonight I’m going to rant about Wuthering Heights which was our book group’s Christmas read.

Most people there enjoyed it.

I hated it from the snowstorm in the beginning right through to the rainstorm at the end, though I’ll admit to being amused by the detail of Heaton (or was it Hindley) hanging a litter of puppies in the door frame which Isobella has to rush past when she escapes. Yes, we know that everyone in the book is nasty, brutish and short. Enough already. No need to labour the point.

Wuthering Heights is a load of adolescent tosh which confuses self-indulgent bullying for passion. It’s not big. It’s not clever. It’s not grown-up. It’s an early 19th century version of Big Brother. As Dorothy Parker said of another book entirely “this is not a book to be tossed aside lightly, it’s a book to be hurled away with great force”.

Anyway, when I asked myself whether or not I thought it was credible that an entire cast of characters should be so unremittingly selfish and unpleasant I realised that you could set the whole thing on a sink estate or a trailer park, add in a cast of social workers and probation officers, tell exactly the same story, and it would be entirely credible. Which leads to the question of why I assumed that the West Riding of Yorkshire wouldn’t be ASBO-central among the landed gentry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I guess Miss Austen has a lot to answer for, we most certainly aren’t in Hampshire any more.

Amusingly, MTV made the first half into a movie in 2003 with a contemporary setting, with the following viewer review: “the film … seriously lacks any warmth or emotion … If you’re a fan of disjointed and heartless romantic dramas … then by all means rent this movie.”

Sounds like a faithful adaptation to me.