I was born in London.
And I grew up there. If there is a defining characteristic of me, it is that I am a Londoner.
I am not a unique in this. London is as famous today for its numerous population as it has been for cenies. It has been the largest city in England, and possibly in Europe for a long time.
The Picture Of London that constitutes my title in this post is the title of a second-hand book that I can't even remember purchasing.
I like to think of myself as a collector of old books, or in many cases a rescuer of old books. In other words, I have often felt compelled to collect books which I find fascinating, but which to any sane collector would be of little interest. Perhaps to be broken up for their illustrations might be their only value, financially.
But value resides in much more than simply the financial exchange that could be made, perhaps particularly with books. I have been aware for some time that books in our culture are completely undervalued.
So, for example, at a car boot sale, it is almost impossible these days to find something of value, that is not recognized as such by the person selling it.
The same, however, is not true for books. It is in books that the general public is perhaps least aware of values, and I can only think that this is because people no longer read and collect books. Of course, many people still do, and I am vastly generalizing.
But the simple fact is that books are in the main undervalued.
This was most famously made clear to me when I purchased an old leather-bound book at an Edinburgh car-boot sale, which I eventually sold at auction in London. I had paid for it 20p, the stall-holder from which I purchased it clearly did not appreciate its value, and in the end, rather than pay 25p for the book on its own, I bought five for £1. My way of ensuring that my interest was seen as general, rather than specific.
The simple fact was that I knew nothing of this particular books’ value, but I recognized it as being of a subject and of an age that made it of interest.
Quite how interesting it was I only discovered over a period of time.
Its particular story is an interesting one. The subject matter was clearly geographic, in the general sense. It was a collection of stories about journeys into the North, by way of exploration. I knew enough about a book of this age that this must be of more interest than the 20p price-tag allowed.
My suspicions were verified even before I had arrived home from the car-boot sale, which was only about a half hour's walk from where I lived.
On the way home, there was a second-hand bookshop of reasonable quality, and I couldn't resist asking them if they would like to purchase my recent purchase. And they offered me £50.
Since financial value was not my main preoccupation, needless to say, I did not part with it, but this simply raised my curiosity.
It was difficult for me to find out anything about the book or values for similar volumes, sold second-hand. I later discovered why.
It was dated 1786, and it contained at least one fold out hand colored map, not very large, but sufficient to make its fine leather binding even more intriguing.
My next attempt to find out more about the book took me to a specialist antiquarian book-dealer in Edinburgh, who explained a great deal more about the book, and at the end of our conversation, said that it was difficult to value, but that he would be prepared to take a chance on this uncertainty and offered me £100 for it.
I was getting even more curious now.
The uncertainty, it seems, derived from the fact that although it was a first edition, published in the same year as the English first edition, which was a translation of a German original, it was in fact a pirate first edition, published in Dublin at a time when respect for copyright was virtually non-existent.
The original German book had been published some years before, and the author it seemed had travelled with a naturalist that had later traveled aboard The Beagle, with that most famous of explorers, Charles Darwin.
Its unusual provenance, as a pirate first edition, gave it some uncertainty that didn't detract from its importance as a catalogue of seaboard exploration from the late 18th century onwards.
It was in this context that I suppose convinced me that I should take a risk on submitting it to a specialist London antique book auction, in which the focus would be on the subject matter in general to which the book belonged. I was completely surprised when it finally reached a sales price of £250, and I had the satisfaction not only of the money, but of having enabled the book to find someone that would have been particularly interested in its contents.
And so back to the picture of London, dated 1803.
This book was much more straightforwardly researchable from the Internet, and if it had been in better condition, it might have been worth about £450.
As it was, my copy needed rebinding, as it was split into two, and although lacking none of its illustrations, engravings of London mainly of the river. It is in the kind of condition that makes it more of a curiosity rather than suitable foreign investment.
On the frontispiece, it is clear that an edition in fine calf leather was available at a price of 10 shillings, and my research quickly identified that this would have been a book that would have been purchased by a Gentleman visitor to London, because it provided an invaluable guide to just about every aspect of London life at the time.
It seemed that it was an annual publication, something like the 1803 edition of The Rough Guide to London.
As such, it is an extraordinarily interesting guidebook to the metropolis at the turn of the 19th century. Where you could hear decent music, where to visit for just about any reason, and an indication of what was happening in just the same way as which specialist magazines published weekly these days details of what is going on in London.
I still keep it on my shelves, and often point it out to people as my Rough Guide to London for 1803.
I suppose it is one of my few sadnesses that my condition of multiple sclerosis makes it difficult for me to hold and handle the books on my bookshelf, and I no longer read as once I did.
But this does not detract from the fascination I still have with old books, and my shelves still groan with what can only be described as interesting artefacts.
Sunday 27 May 2012
Saturday 26 May 2012
In The Seraglio To Hear In Dem Seraglio
Istanbul is a wonderful City. With an extraordinary history, much of which is open to view for the visitor.
I was fortunate to be able to visit with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, for a series of concerts which were located in some of those most interesting locations.
Staying in Istanbul with a National Orchestra meant staying at a five-star hotel somewhere in the centre of the City, and having sufficient time between concerts to take in the principal sights, which I suppose Santa Sofia, and The Blue Mosque.
Santa Sofia is a 6th-century Church that has been a Mosque as well as a Christian Church during its long life. These days, it is a museum, filled with extraordinary cultural artefacts that tell us something of its story, and by doing so, explaining much of the history of Istanbul in its European context.
The Blue Mosque is one of the most sacred Islamic locations in the City, but tourists can visit, outside of the times when it is filled with Muslims that still pray here in vast numbers.
It is a place of extraordinary beauty, representative perhaps as one of the best examples of Islamic architecture in the Western world.
There were two extraordinary locations in which the Orchestra performed concerts, one of which although now a concert hall, was built originally as a Christian Church.
The other concert venue was quite simply an exterior location within what had been The Sultan's Palace, in fact where the Sultan's Harem, the seraglio, had been located.
This was where a concert performance of Mozart's opera In Dem Seraglio took place, and I suppose there will always be an excitement to seeing a performance in the precise location that had been the inspiration for that opera.
Strangely, my most vivid memory of that trip to Istanbul is in the purchase of an artefact.
Ostensibly, my being in Istanbul was to be able to have discussions about potential education links. These came to nothing, and yet as a consequence of this purpose, I was introduced to the Assistant Cultural Attache at the British Embassy, where a small concert was given by a chamber ensemble, a concert to which I was not invited.
But in meeting this Cultural Attache, someone fluent in the language, and familiar with local customs, I was able to purchase from a street-trader a tent fringe which I was assured had originated in Azerbaijan.
It was many colored silks sewn onto a black cotton background, about 14 inches wide, and at least 30 feet in length.
I do not remember how much I paid, but no doubt it was considerably less than the trader had originally asked for.
It must have been about a century old, and had clearly been much in use during that time.
It had the kind of beauty that is particular to something carefully crafted, but with purposeful use, and for years it was hung from a brass stair-rod in the three-storey staircase in our house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, a 17th-century house in which such an artefact sat appropriately.
The concerts were special as well, especially the consort performance in what would have been the Harem in the grounds of the Palace.
But it was the artefact brought back and carefully displayed, complete with its extraordinary history, that I remember most from that visit.
I was fortunate to be able to visit with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, for a series of concerts which were located in some of those most interesting locations.
Staying in Istanbul with a National Orchestra meant staying at a five-star hotel somewhere in the centre of the City, and having sufficient time between concerts to take in the principal sights, which I suppose Santa Sofia, and The Blue Mosque.
Santa Sofia is a 6th-century Church that has been a Mosque as well as a Christian Church during its long life. These days, it is a museum, filled with extraordinary cultural artefacts that tell us something of its story, and by doing so, explaining much of the history of Istanbul in its European context.
The Blue Mosque is one of the most sacred Islamic locations in the City, but tourists can visit, outside of the times when it is filled with Muslims that still pray here in vast numbers.
It is a place of extraordinary beauty, representative perhaps as one of the best examples of Islamic architecture in the Western world.
There were two extraordinary locations in which the Orchestra performed concerts, one of which although now a concert hall, was built originally as a Christian Church.
The other concert venue was quite simply an exterior location within what had been The Sultan's Palace, in fact where the Sultan's Harem, the seraglio, had been located.
This was where a concert performance of Mozart's opera In Dem Seraglio took place, and I suppose there will always be an excitement to seeing a performance in the precise location that had been the inspiration for that opera.
Strangely, my most vivid memory of that trip to Istanbul is in the purchase of an artefact.
Ostensibly, my being in Istanbul was to be able to have discussions about potential education links. These came to nothing, and yet as a consequence of this purpose, I was introduced to the Assistant Cultural Attache at the British Embassy, where a small concert was given by a chamber ensemble, a concert to which I was not invited.
But in meeting this Cultural Attache, someone fluent in the language, and familiar with local customs, I was able to purchase from a street-trader a tent fringe which I was assured had originated in Azerbaijan.
It was many colored silks sewn onto a black cotton background, about 14 inches wide, and at least 30 feet in length.
I do not remember how much I paid, but no doubt it was considerably less than the trader had originally asked for.
It must have been about a century old, and had clearly been much in use during that time.
It had the kind of beauty that is particular to something carefully crafted, but with purposeful use, and for years it was hung from a brass stair-rod in the three-storey staircase in our house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, a 17th-century house in which such an artefact sat appropriately.
The concerts were special as well, especially the consort performance in what would have been the Harem in the grounds of the Palace.
But it was the artefact brought back and carefully displayed, complete with its extraordinary history, that I remember most from that visit.
Wednesday 23 May 2012
Bullet Trains Are Best
I haven't travelled a great deal, at least not the kind of exploring travel.
I suppose I have been lucky to have been able to travel in my work, which has the added advantage that I have been paid to travel. And I have not had to provide the purpose for my travel, which is perhaps the hardest thing to discover.
Perhaps my most interesting traveling has been the furthest from home, in every sense.
12 hours on a plane to Japan is long in distance, and long in cultural difference.
Ostensibly, it was an orchestral tour for one of the National Orchestras of Scotland, and if you travel with a National Orchestra, you tend to stay in decent hotels. I wasn't a player in the orchestra, and so perhaps my schedule was more free than most.
The tour had come about because of links between Edinburgh and Kyoto, which explains why there were only two performances on the tour. Hardly an intensive or grueling itinerary. And in some respects, it meant that the education aspects of the tour, for which I was responsible, became more important as justifications for the trip.
Kyoto is the second city of Japan, and was once the capital. It may seem obvious once pointed out, but the same syllables make up the two names, the old capital and the new. Simply transversed.
And so we flew into Kyoto, to spend a couple of days overcoming jetlag, and during which I would undertake my education work, for which I had enlisted an English composer that was living and working in Japan.
Through his contacts, I was able to organize most of the project. Which given the language differences was fortunate.
After a brief discussion, our plan was simple. A quartet of musicians from the orchestra would be matched with an equivalent Eastern-trained quartet, and they would learn from each other and create something performable in a short time.
The composer was introduced to me by a friend in England, and since he lived in Japan on very little money, he was eager to take part in the project.
He was a master of the front blown Japanese flute, which has a haunting sound that most of us would associate with Japan.
Thus, I provided a flute quartet, flute, violin, viola, and cello. The equivalent Oriental musical grouping consisted of his flute playing, a Chinese violin that has two strings, a horizontal harp, and something that resembled the deeper resonant tones of the cello.
On top of this, we had the participation of a Japanese contemporary dance specialist, who had been trained in all of the skills for No theatre, but for whom his particular dance form had taken prominence.
He would typically dance naked apart from a loin cloth, with his body painted white. This form of contemporary dance had apparently grown out of a sense of guilt over what had transpired during the Second World War, but its impact was primal and deeply emotional.
As a venue, my slight contact had arranged that we would use for two days one of the temples in the Kyoto Temple complex, which were a cluster of 15th century temple buildings and somehow he had arranged that we could use one of them on a fairly intensive basis.
It was as if for 24 hours we would put our musicians and the dancer into a room, lock it, and after some intensive sharing between them, we would see what the result was.
And so, on the second day, my contact had invited an audience of about 60 or 70 people to attend to see what the results had been.
The instructions were simple, that each quartet might play something that came from their tradition and training, but that they would also create a number of pieces of music that involved all of them, sharing something of their particular skills in the process.
The event was extraordinary, I do not remember much of the detail, but what I do remember is traveling back to our hotel in the centre of Kyoto, after a day in which I felt as if I had been practicing sleep deprivation torture techniques on my quartet, so that my job on the return had been to make sure that I woke them up so that we wouldn't miss our stop from the bullet train.
Anyone that has worked with western trained classical musicians will appreciate that this in itself represented an extraordinary achievement, to have had them work so hard that they would fall asleep on the journey home.
And without any murmurs of complaint at all. Because they all loved what they were doing so much.
From Kyoto we moved to the venue for our second concert, which took place somewhere in the North in a very rural district, and yet which nevertheless possessed a 700 seater auditorium of the highest quality.
When we arrived at the resort hotel in which we were to stay, I remember that businessmen in suits arrived with their wives, only to disappear and then emerge dressed in traditional costume that remained their attire for the duration of their stay.
We gave our concert and then returned to catch our plane home, but my quartet were able to visit a primary school, somewhere on the outskirts of Kyoto, and make a brief visit in order to exchange musical gifts.
I still remember the extraordinary spectacle of 40 recorder players in unison playing something familiar from The Sound Of Music, something that is pretended for the purposes of the film to be like a national expression of Austrian culture. Edelweiss.
After an exchange of gifts with the headmaster, we too travelled to the airport, and began the long journey home.
Less than a year later, I was able to bring that same composer and the dancer over to the UK, where with that same quartet of western trained musicians, we undertook an extraordinary project in a poor community in Edinburgh. In which during the interval I arranged for sushi to be served for an audience that had never even heard the term.
We brought back with us a wooden flute that the flautist had purchased, and a horizontal harp I had purchased for the use of the education department, and that the cellist involved in the project set about learning to play.
Thus, my visit to Japan. Practicing sleep deprivation on superb musicians, and enjoying the kind of travel that I most appreciate, seeing something of a culture unfold before me.
I suppose I have been lucky to have been able to travel in my work, which has the added advantage that I have been paid to travel. And I have not had to provide the purpose for my travel, which is perhaps the hardest thing to discover.
Perhaps my most interesting traveling has been the furthest from home, in every sense.
12 hours on a plane to Japan is long in distance, and long in cultural difference.
Ostensibly, it was an orchestral tour for one of the National Orchestras of Scotland, and if you travel with a National Orchestra, you tend to stay in decent hotels. I wasn't a player in the orchestra, and so perhaps my schedule was more free than most.
The tour had come about because of links between Edinburgh and Kyoto, which explains why there were only two performances on the tour. Hardly an intensive or grueling itinerary. And in some respects, it meant that the education aspects of the tour, for which I was responsible, became more important as justifications for the trip.
Kyoto is the second city of Japan, and was once the capital. It may seem obvious once pointed out, but the same syllables make up the two names, the old capital and the new. Simply transversed.
And so we flew into Kyoto, to spend a couple of days overcoming jetlag, and during which I would undertake my education work, for which I had enlisted an English composer that was living and working in Japan.
Through his contacts, I was able to organize most of the project. Which given the language differences was fortunate.
After a brief discussion, our plan was simple. A quartet of musicians from the orchestra would be matched with an equivalent Eastern-trained quartet, and they would learn from each other and create something performable in a short time.
The composer was introduced to me by a friend in England, and since he lived in Japan on very little money, he was eager to take part in the project.
He was a master of the front blown Japanese flute, which has a haunting sound that most of us would associate with Japan.
Thus, I provided a flute quartet, flute, violin, viola, and cello. The equivalent Oriental musical grouping consisted of his flute playing, a Chinese violin that has two strings, a horizontal harp, and something that resembled the deeper resonant tones of the cello.
On top of this, we had the participation of a Japanese contemporary dance specialist, who had been trained in all of the skills for No theatre, but for whom his particular dance form had taken prominence.
He would typically dance naked apart from a loin cloth, with his body painted white. This form of contemporary dance had apparently grown out of a sense of guilt over what had transpired during the Second World War, but its impact was primal and deeply emotional.
As a venue, my slight contact had arranged that we would use for two days one of the temples in the Kyoto Temple complex, which were a cluster of 15th century temple buildings and somehow he had arranged that we could use one of them on a fairly intensive basis.
It was as if for 24 hours we would put our musicians and the dancer into a room, lock it, and after some intensive sharing between them, we would see what the result was.
And so, on the second day, my contact had invited an audience of about 60 or 70 people to attend to see what the results had been.
The instructions were simple, that each quartet might play something that came from their tradition and training, but that they would also create a number of pieces of music that involved all of them, sharing something of their particular skills in the process.
The event was extraordinary, I do not remember much of the detail, but what I do remember is traveling back to our hotel in the centre of Kyoto, after a day in which I felt as if I had been practicing sleep deprivation torture techniques on my quartet, so that my job on the return had been to make sure that I woke them up so that we wouldn't miss our stop from the bullet train.
Anyone that has worked with western trained classical musicians will appreciate that this in itself represented an extraordinary achievement, to have had them work so hard that they would fall asleep on the journey home.
And without any murmurs of complaint at all. Because they all loved what they were doing so much.
From Kyoto we moved to the venue for our second concert, which took place somewhere in the North in a very rural district, and yet which nevertheless possessed a 700 seater auditorium of the highest quality.
When we arrived at the resort hotel in which we were to stay, I remember that businessmen in suits arrived with their wives, only to disappear and then emerge dressed in traditional costume that remained their attire for the duration of their stay.
We gave our concert and then returned to catch our plane home, but my quartet were able to visit a primary school, somewhere on the outskirts of Kyoto, and make a brief visit in order to exchange musical gifts.
I still remember the extraordinary spectacle of 40 recorder players in unison playing something familiar from The Sound Of Music, something that is pretended for the purposes of the film to be like a national expression of Austrian culture. Edelweiss.
After an exchange of gifts with the headmaster, we too travelled to the airport, and began the long journey home.
Less than a year later, I was able to bring that same composer and the dancer over to the UK, where with that same quartet of western trained musicians, we undertook an extraordinary project in a poor community in Edinburgh. In which during the interval I arranged for sushi to be served for an audience that had never even heard the term.
We brought back with us a wooden flute that the flautist had purchased, and a horizontal harp I had purchased for the use of the education department, and that the cellist involved in the project set about learning to play.
Thus, my visit to Japan. Practicing sleep deprivation on superb musicians, and enjoying the kind of travel that I most appreciate, seeing something of a culture unfold before me.
Tuesday 22 May 2012
Another Country?
Th, but it isn't that far away. In fact, it is all around us, if we care to look. Or even simply talk to our older family members, who possess a wealth of information about how things used to be, good and bad.
Until I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I lived in a 17th-century house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in a small town that might be described as "left behind in the 1950s". This phrase was actually used in a Sunday supplement article, in The Telegraph magazine. It wasn't intended to be derogatory, in fact it was intended to be some kind of compliment.
I certainly found living in this left-behind place rather fascinating, because there were old houses waiting to be lovingly restored that had hardly been touched by the hand of modernism. such as our old house, that had been squatted and therefore had been abandoned for about 30 years. And thereby avoided much of the excesses of the 60s and 70s for making old houses modern.
And the town itself still had its wonderful selection of local shops, including one of those old-fashioned sweet shops, and for the first couple of years that we lived there a small wet-fish shop. which sadly closed, when the owners retired and could find nobody to take it on as a going concern. Probably because it wasn't.
It was a small town with no more than 5000 inhabitants, and divided into the old and the new. We lived in the old part, just yards away from the 16th century Butter Cross and the ruins of the mediaeval castle.
It had never been a particularly significant place, although it had its legends and many fascinating stories of old times.
So for the example, the author Henry Rider Haggard had lived just outside in an old house now flats and apartments, and his house had been the location of numerous seances. It was rumored to be one of the most haunted houses in England.
His granddaughter, also a writer, ghost-wrote the memoirs of her gamekeeper, in several volumes that captured the memories of an old countryman and of the places he inhabited from Victorian times.
These biographical writings, the first of which was The Rabbit Skin Cap, made something of a success of the originator of the memoirs, but he had entered up committing suicide in a house just opposite to the one that we work restoring. Something about the shame of his assaulting some young child.
Lilias Rider-Haggard wrote for the local newspaper a country column before she wrote the books, and one of her writerly friends, Henry Williamson, was the author of Tarka The Otter, had lived in Devon, and moved to Norfolk where he pursued his fascistic tendencies by working on the land.
In the late 16th century, Bungay is remembered for an appearance of the devil in the form of a black dog, that entered the parish church and caused the death of two parishioners on the spot. the scratch marks left on the door are apparently still visible.
We discovered our own version of history through the restoration of our strange survival of a house, which was built from Dutch bricks, with a pantiled roof, and with Baltic pine wall boarding that when we removed the plaster-board hiding it, revealed in places 300 years of wallpaper, and the extraordinary beauty of this vernacular form of room division.
When we bought the cottage adjacent, and opened up an already existing doorway between the two buildings, we discovered that the bricks used to wall up the doorway had been made locally at the St Cross brickworks, identified by the cross-mark in the frog of the brick. Some paper stuffed into the brickwork could be identified to 1851 from an article about the Great Exhibition, and so, 150 years from its being bricked up, we walked through this door into our expanded house, which now boasted four bedrooms, two full-sized bathrooms, and two kitchens. One of which became a utility room and led to the private garden for which we had purchased this property, as most of our land with the squatted house provided access over it for the neighboring houses.
Our neighbour from the garden, two doors away on the street, had purchased his property from the Haggard Estate, when he returned from imprisonment by the Japanese in Burma after the Second World War. He had a house and several outbuildings in a disorderly yard, where he hoarded historical artefacts and assorted building materials that local builders often purchased for their projects locally.
Mr Buck was well known locally to be eccentric, and his house contained on the ground floor the old butcher shop, which was filled with small bric-a-brac, but was never open as a shop. Visitors would often stand looking in at the shop with its inviting contents, but Mr Buck would never sell anything, rather he would give things away to people that he liked. who were few and far between.
As our neighbour over the garden at the rear, we got on well, and Mr Buck would leave vegetables grown in his own garden and flowers for my wife, often in old receptacles from his never opened shop. We were honoured indeed.
There was a public house opposite our house which guaranteed our security, as it never seemed to close. It was the only pub in the street, but there had been at least six in times past, as well as numerous places will you could simply knock and get a beer. In the days before water was piped to every home, and when drinking water that was not brewed into beer might not be safe.
There was a tannery at the end of the street, long since closed, and Shakespeare makes mention of the town at least twice, as the place where you would get your breeches bottomed.
At the end of the street, the small river was once navigable to the sea, 20 miles away, and the shallow bottomed Norfolk Wherries would once have been the source of the Dutch bricks and the Baltic pine. Almost to the door.
One of the buildings in Mr Bucks yard had once been the local slaughterhouse, hence the butchers shop, and there was much fruitless negotiation over the restoration of this relic of the town, which failed over access problems to the potential restored slaughterhouse and vets combined.
We didn't require planning consent to combine the two houses, because they had connecting doors. Which we reopened. And we had two staircases, the one in the cottage to the rear a small typically vernacular staircase, steep and accessed by what seemed to be a cupboard door.
The staircase in the house on the street was a rather different affair, it was very grand for a small townhouse, with balusters made of American cedar, and floating stair treads, seemingly unsupported as they thrust from the walls.
It rose all the way to the attic, three floors in total, and when we removed the old floorboards from the attic floor, underneath we found the original random width elm floorboards, badly worm-eaten but in remarkable condition, onto which a 1940s wooden floor had been built simply to straighten the original elm floor. We simply scrubbed and varnished with diamond-hard varnish this beautiful flooring, cannibalising a small section which we made into an ensuite bathroom where the floor had been damaged when the house was electrified.
We use this room as our main bedroom, 28 feet long, under newly installed old oak trusses which we had purchased locally from an architectural salvage yard. They were 15th century, and so much older than the house itself, which had been rebuilt (as had an much of old Bungay) after the great Fire of 1688, which had destroyed most of the old wooden buildings in the town.
It was one of my proudest moments when the local historic buildings officer visited and exclaimed at the fact that the house was older than he thought, and it was left to me to tell him that I had simply replaced rotten Victorian roof trusses with what I had purchased locally.
And because of the staircase, we felt that the house owner in 1688 that had rebuilt it must have had pretensions, not to say a little money. The upstairs door to next door was at least 2 feet higher than the floor of the cottage that had been built in about 1740, and we surmised that a wooden building that had served as his warehouse, built close by so that he could keep an eye on his property, meant that he had been a merchant of some kind, and so we called our house merchant house. After all, until the sluices were built into the river in 1932, the river was navigable to the sea. and the whole of our street had been the commercial quarter of the town.
Until I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I lived in a 17th-century house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in a small town that might be described as "left behind in the 1950s". This phrase was actually used in a Sunday supplement article, in The Telegraph magazine. It wasn't intended to be derogatory, in fact it was intended to be some kind of compliment.
I certainly found living in this left-behind place rather fascinating, because there were old houses waiting to be lovingly restored that had hardly been touched by the hand of modernism. such as our old house, that had been squatted and therefore had been abandoned for about 30 years. And thereby avoided much of the excesses of the 60s and 70s for making old houses modern.
And the town itself still had its wonderful selection of local shops, including one of those old-fashioned sweet shops, and for the first couple of years that we lived there a small wet-fish shop. which sadly closed, when the owners retired and could find nobody to take it on as a going concern. Probably because it wasn't.
It was a small town with no more than 5000 inhabitants, and divided into the old and the new. We lived in the old part, just yards away from the 16th century Butter Cross and the ruins of the mediaeval castle.
It had never been a particularly significant place, although it had its legends and many fascinating stories of old times.
So for the example, the author Henry Rider Haggard had lived just outside in an old house now flats and apartments, and his house had been the location of numerous seances. It was rumored to be one of the most haunted houses in England.
His granddaughter, also a writer, ghost-wrote the memoirs of her gamekeeper, in several volumes that captured the memories of an old countryman and of the places he inhabited from Victorian times.
These biographical writings, the first of which was The Rabbit Skin Cap, made something of a success of the originator of the memoirs, but he had entered up committing suicide in a house just opposite to the one that we work restoring. Something about the shame of his assaulting some young child.
Lilias Rider-Haggard wrote for the local newspaper a country column before she wrote the books, and one of her writerly friends, Henry Williamson, was the author of Tarka The Otter, had lived in Devon, and moved to Norfolk where he pursued his fascistic tendencies by working on the land.
In the late 16th century, Bungay is remembered for an appearance of the devil in the form of a black dog, that entered the parish church and caused the death of two parishioners on the spot. the scratch marks left on the door are apparently still visible.
We discovered our own version of history through the restoration of our strange survival of a house, which was built from Dutch bricks, with a pantiled roof, and with Baltic pine wall boarding that when we removed the plaster-board hiding it, revealed in places 300 years of wallpaper, and the extraordinary beauty of this vernacular form of room division.
When we bought the cottage adjacent, and opened up an already existing doorway between the two buildings, we discovered that the bricks used to wall up the doorway had been made locally at the St Cross brickworks, identified by the cross-mark in the frog of the brick. Some paper stuffed into the brickwork could be identified to 1851 from an article about the Great Exhibition, and so, 150 years from its being bricked up, we walked through this door into our expanded house, which now boasted four bedrooms, two full-sized bathrooms, and two kitchens. One of which became a utility room and led to the private garden for which we had purchased this property, as most of our land with the squatted house provided access over it for the neighboring houses.
Our neighbour from the garden, two doors away on the street, had purchased his property from the Haggard Estate, when he returned from imprisonment by the Japanese in Burma after the Second World War. He had a house and several outbuildings in a disorderly yard, where he hoarded historical artefacts and assorted building materials that local builders often purchased for their projects locally.
Mr Buck was well known locally to be eccentric, and his house contained on the ground floor the old butcher shop, which was filled with small bric-a-brac, but was never open as a shop. Visitors would often stand looking in at the shop with its inviting contents, but Mr Buck would never sell anything, rather he would give things away to people that he liked. who were few and far between.
As our neighbour over the garden at the rear, we got on well, and Mr Buck would leave vegetables grown in his own garden and flowers for my wife, often in old receptacles from his never opened shop. We were honoured indeed.
There was a public house opposite our house which guaranteed our security, as it never seemed to close. It was the only pub in the street, but there had been at least six in times past, as well as numerous places will you could simply knock and get a beer. In the days before water was piped to every home, and when drinking water that was not brewed into beer might not be safe.
There was a tannery at the end of the street, long since closed, and Shakespeare makes mention of the town at least twice, as the place where you would get your breeches bottomed.
At the end of the street, the small river was once navigable to the sea, 20 miles away, and the shallow bottomed Norfolk Wherries would once have been the source of the Dutch bricks and the Baltic pine. Almost to the door.
One of the buildings in Mr Bucks yard had once been the local slaughterhouse, hence the butchers shop, and there was much fruitless negotiation over the restoration of this relic of the town, which failed over access problems to the potential restored slaughterhouse and vets combined.
We didn't require planning consent to combine the two houses, because they had connecting doors. Which we reopened. And we had two staircases, the one in the cottage to the rear a small typically vernacular staircase, steep and accessed by what seemed to be a cupboard door.
The staircase in the house on the street was a rather different affair, it was very grand for a small townhouse, with balusters made of American cedar, and floating stair treads, seemingly unsupported as they thrust from the walls.
It rose all the way to the attic, three floors in total, and when we removed the old floorboards from the attic floor, underneath we found the original random width elm floorboards, badly worm-eaten but in remarkable condition, onto which a 1940s wooden floor had been built simply to straighten the original elm floor. We simply scrubbed and varnished with diamond-hard varnish this beautiful flooring, cannibalising a small section which we made into an ensuite bathroom where the floor had been damaged when the house was electrified.
We use this room as our main bedroom, 28 feet long, under newly installed old oak trusses which we had purchased locally from an architectural salvage yard. They were 15th century, and so much older than the house itself, which had been rebuilt (as had an much of old Bungay) after the great Fire of 1688, which had destroyed most of the old wooden buildings in the town.
It was one of my proudest moments when the local historic buildings officer visited and exclaimed at the fact that the house was older than he thought, and it was left to me to tell him that I had simply replaced rotten Victorian roof trusses with what I had purchased locally.
And because of the staircase, we felt that the house owner in 1688 that had rebuilt it must have had pretensions, not to say a little money. The upstairs door to next door was at least 2 feet higher than the floor of the cottage that had been built in about 1740, and we surmised that a wooden building that had served as his warehouse, built close by so that he could keep an eye on his property, meant that he had been a merchant of some kind, and so we called our house merchant house. After all, until the sluices were built into the river in 1932, the river was navigable to the sea. and the whole of our street had been the commercial quarter of the town.
Sunday 13 May 2012
Spring - And Hope Returns...
Where I live on the South Coast of Sussex it has been an uneasy Spring, with early signs of warmth followed by colder spells as if Winter were unwilling to relinquish its grip on the land.
Millions of Daffodils died unharvested on commercial farms, unable to find the human labour to pick these early harbingers of spring.
We have had Crocuses, and I have seen for myself the Bluebells in our ancient woodland. I have had my spies keeping lookout for the perfect time to visit, just on the edge of the small town in which I live.
And my spies reported this week that they had heard a Cuckoo, a sound they had not heard for some time, fearing it had perhaps gone away for good.
It makes the heart feel good to see and hear the sights and sounds of Spring, after Winter has kept us in our homes.
I sometimes wonder if Spring is universal, and if the same sights and sounds greet all of mankind after the Winter. I know that in the northern hemisphere the perturbation of the earth in its cycle brings Spring to all of us, but differently I am sure.
I was shocked to hear recently that in Australia they do not have Bluebells, though they have seen them in pictures. I cannot imagine the Spring without Sluebells. But then, I live in England, and my sight is partial.
It would be sad if the Gulf Stream ceased its warming, as has happened before. 300 years ago. The Thames froze, and Ice Fairs were held upon the ice. Stradivarius made his violins from the close-grained timber that grew in spite of the cold.
It lasted 100 years, that mini ice-age, a long-time to wait for Spring. In Narnia, the White Queen froze the land for 100 years, 100 years of winter without a Christmas. A story spellbinding for adults as well as children, though Spring did come, when Aslan was on the move.
Spring brings hope, for a season of growth and new life from the old. Let us hope that Spring is finally here, and that Summer will follow, and if the urban poor no longer spend their holidays picking hops in Kent, where perhaps my own parents found their first furtive kiss, then at least the farmers will have cause to celebrate another harvest gathered in.
Millions of Daffodils died unharvested on commercial farms, unable to find the human labour to pick these early harbingers of spring.
We have had Crocuses, and I have seen for myself the Bluebells in our ancient woodland. I have had my spies keeping lookout for the perfect time to visit, just on the edge of the small town in which I live.
And my spies reported this week that they had heard a Cuckoo, a sound they had not heard for some time, fearing it had perhaps gone away for good.
It makes the heart feel good to see and hear the sights and sounds of Spring, after Winter has kept us in our homes.
I sometimes wonder if Spring is universal, and if the same sights and sounds greet all of mankind after the Winter. I know that in the northern hemisphere the perturbation of the earth in its cycle brings Spring to all of us, but differently I am sure.
I was shocked to hear recently that in Australia they do not have Bluebells, though they have seen them in pictures. I cannot imagine the Spring without Sluebells. But then, I live in England, and my sight is partial.
It would be sad if the Gulf Stream ceased its warming, as has happened before. 300 years ago. The Thames froze, and Ice Fairs were held upon the ice. Stradivarius made his violins from the close-grained timber that grew in spite of the cold.
It lasted 100 years, that mini ice-age, a long-time to wait for Spring. In Narnia, the White Queen froze the land for 100 years, 100 years of winter without a Christmas. A story spellbinding for adults as well as children, though Spring did come, when Aslan was on the move.
Spring brings hope, for a season of growth and new life from the old. Let us hope that Spring is finally here, and that Summer will follow, and if the urban poor no longer spend their holidays picking hops in Kent, where perhaps my own parents found their first furtive kiss, then at least the farmers will have cause to celebrate another harvest gathered in.
Armageddon - 2012
Film is a powerful medium. Recently, I have begun to understand that I can watch too many films, so that the impact of them lessens as if I am full from eating wonderful restaurant food. It doesn't matter how good the food is, you will eventually become sated, and no longer able to consume more.
In some respects, the opposite can be equally problematic, you can consume a film, and its impact can be problematic.
Most of us will agree without thinking too hard that certain films will be damaging to a sensitive mind. But perhaps we don't think too much about the impact of films that are simply designed for our leisure. So called entertainment.
Recently I was lent a copy of 2012, one such film, the plot of which I will simply summarize as an End-Of-The-World as we know it scenario.
The director of the film is Roland Emmerich, someone that has become famous for his ability to work in this particular genre of film.
He is the Director that was behind films such as The Day After Tomorrow, in which climate change comes with a catastrophic impact upon the way in which the Earth's climate has been so taken for granted.
In the film 2012, the scenario is not unrelated to that of The Day After Tomorrow, except that there are some important differences.
The most important of these is the idea that the Mayan fascination with the solar calendar is based upon an understanding of solar events that are factually based, and that the fact that the Mayan calendar had been calculated to a specific date, and no further, had been because this was known by the Mayans to be the End Of The World. At least the world as we have come to take it for granted.
It wasn't until after I had seen this film that my friend that had lent it to me informed me that recently archaeologists have discovered that in fact the Mayan culture did foresee a calendar extending beyond this date in 2012, and that it did not represent an endpoint as such, but simply was the date to which their sophisticated solar calendar had as far as was known until recently been planned.
There is some particular interest in the date to which their calendar had been known to be planned until recently, as it is a date that is forthcoming. In fact, just a few months away.
The date concerned is one of those that for many people might seem to have a numerological significance, simply because it is the winter solstice of this current year. The 21st of December 2012.
Written as 12/12/12, it may seem to have that Kabbalistic ring to it of finality, and conspiracy theorists everywhere might see this as sufficient reason for it to be a date to be feared.
It certainly makes for an interesting date around which to fit an End Of The World film.
On this date, in the film scenario, several factors combine to make the earth's crust unstable, resulting in a catastrophic shifting of tectonic plates, so that the entire surface of the Earth becomes unstable, and resulting in the potential end of the human race.
Unless, of course, something is done by those nations powerful enough to afford to create some kind of means whereby enough of the population of the Earth could survive to commence a new beginning. In other words, repopulate the changed Earth after a catastrophic flood brought about by the tectonic changes that have taken place.
Needless to say, that the solution is the creation of a number of vessels that are comparable to the Noah's Ark from the Bible, giving this film scenario something of the mythological status of the Bible story.
Strangely, there is much truth woven into the fantastic scenario of the film.
For example, it is suggested that a substantive volcano will erupt in a location in the United States that is clearly identified as the location of an actual historic caldera, that has been shown by geologists to have an active cycle of around 600,000 years.
This is located in the Yellowstone National Park, and it is spookily true that this does seem to be founded in scientific fact. It is apparently true that about 600,000 years ago this was the location of a massive volcanic eruption, one that could have such an impact upon the earth's climate as to threaten all existing present day life.
It is also true that in recent years geologists have identified that the earth at this point has risen under magma pressure so that a lake at this point has been forced to run off into surrounding locations.
In other words, the scenario of the film has sufficient factual truth within it to give it a kind of credibility perhaps sufficient to make the credulous rather nervous.
And perhaps I must count myself amongst those that might be credulous enough for film to be rather scary, to say the least.
Let us just hope that we can get the Olympics out of the way before anything comes to pass to make this film seem to be an untimely warning that the world is really about to come to an end.
In some respects, the opposite can be equally problematic, you can consume a film, and its impact can be problematic.
Most of us will agree without thinking too hard that certain films will be damaging to a sensitive mind. But perhaps we don't think too much about the impact of films that are simply designed for our leisure. So called entertainment.
Recently I was lent a copy of 2012, one such film, the plot of which I will simply summarize as an End-Of-The-World as we know it scenario.
The director of the film is Roland Emmerich, someone that has become famous for his ability to work in this particular genre of film.
He is the Director that was behind films such as The Day After Tomorrow, in which climate change comes with a catastrophic impact upon the way in which the Earth's climate has been so taken for granted.
In the film 2012, the scenario is not unrelated to that of The Day After Tomorrow, except that there are some important differences.
The most important of these is the idea that the Mayan fascination with the solar calendar is based upon an understanding of solar events that are factually based, and that the fact that the Mayan calendar had been calculated to a specific date, and no further, had been because this was known by the Mayans to be the End Of The World. At least the world as we have come to take it for granted.
It wasn't until after I had seen this film that my friend that had lent it to me informed me that recently archaeologists have discovered that in fact the Mayan culture did foresee a calendar extending beyond this date in 2012, and that it did not represent an endpoint as such, but simply was the date to which their sophisticated solar calendar had as far as was known until recently been planned.
There is some particular interest in the date to which their calendar had been known to be planned until recently, as it is a date that is forthcoming. In fact, just a few months away.
The date concerned is one of those that for many people might seem to have a numerological significance, simply because it is the winter solstice of this current year. The 21st of December 2012.
Written as 12/12/12, it may seem to have that Kabbalistic ring to it of finality, and conspiracy theorists everywhere might see this as sufficient reason for it to be a date to be feared.
It certainly makes for an interesting date around which to fit an End Of The World film.
On this date, in the film scenario, several factors combine to make the earth's crust unstable, resulting in a catastrophic shifting of tectonic plates, so that the entire surface of the Earth becomes unstable, and resulting in the potential end of the human race.
Unless, of course, something is done by those nations powerful enough to afford to create some kind of means whereby enough of the population of the Earth could survive to commence a new beginning. In other words, repopulate the changed Earth after a catastrophic flood brought about by the tectonic changes that have taken place.
Needless to say, that the solution is the creation of a number of vessels that are comparable to the Noah's Ark from the Bible, giving this film scenario something of the mythological status of the Bible story.
Strangely, there is much truth woven into the fantastic scenario of the film.
For example, it is suggested that a substantive volcano will erupt in a location in the United States that is clearly identified as the location of an actual historic caldera, that has been shown by geologists to have an active cycle of around 600,000 years.
This is located in the Yellowstone National Park, and it is spookily true that this does seem to be founded in scientific fact. It is apparently true that about 600,000 years ago this was the location of a massive volcanic eruption, one that could have such an impact upon the earth's climate as to threaten all existing present day life.
It is also true that in recent years geologists have identified that the earth at this point has risen under magma pressure so that a lake at this point has been forced to run off into surrounding locations.
In other words, the scenario of the film has sufficient factual truth within it to give it a kind of credibility perhaps sufficient to make the credulous rather nervous.
And perhaps I must count myself amongst those that might be credulous enough for film to be rather scary, to say the least.
Let us just hope that we can get the Olympics out of the way before anything comes to pass to make this film seem to be an untimely warning that the world is really about to come to an end.
Saturday 5 May 2012
May The 4th Be With You...
Today is 4 May, 2012. As far as I know not a significant date as far
as representing the anniversary of anything in particular, although I am
sure it will have numerous significances for many people.
One such for me is in the fact that today I visited a Bluebell Wood nearby to where I live in Worthing, in West Sussex, just as I did about this time last year, in those couple of weeks when the bluebells are in bloom, in those ancient woodlands that we possess in the UK and which, at this time of year, are carpeted with the most resplendent sight.
I was surprised to discover recently that such a thing does not take place in Australia, where one of my blog followers lives. She had seen pictures of the bluebells in Bloom, but there is no equivalent event to that which in the UK has become so associated with the coming of Spring, and although the date might vary according to the weather, it will happen every year as long as there are tracts of woodland in which they can grow.
That this visit had taken place this year on May 4 is totally coincidental. It might have taken place on any day say a week either side of today, and the bluebells would still have been there.
But I will remember that it was today, May 4, that I visited the bluebell wood this year for perhaps a peculiar reason.
For fans of the Star Wars films, today has achieved a kind of significance that is both humorous and ridiculous in equal measure.
May The Force Be With You is clearly a memorable quote from the film, and the fact that today is May 4 has been adopted as significant because of the similarity in sound of May 4th with May the force be with you.
What this perhaps demonstrates is the way in which meaning can become associated with very slight things. Things of absolutely no consequence whatsoever.
It is simply a capacity of the human mind that exhibits itself in all kinds of ways, so that you can ask several people to look for example at an apparently meaningless set of marks on paper, and they will each be able to give some meaning if you ask them what they see, perhaps hinting that there is an image to be seen.
The human brain has the capacity to create meaning where none exists, and to some extent this is an essential component of our capacity to interpret things like writing. Which after all, is simply marks on paper.
That the coincidence of this date sounding something like that particular quote from Star Wars has had some particular consequences for me, is of course unique to me, as all of my own experience is.
So for example, the presenter of a radio show on BBC Radio 2 used the fact of this date in this week as an excuse to ask his listeners to send in their suggestions for music suitable because of this date for an interstellar playlist.
I was able to get my suggestion read out on the radio, because of the anecdote that I used in my letter sent by e-mail.
I suggested the music from Doctor Who that was used at the culmination of series three, when Rose, the Doctor's companion, is trapped in an alternative universe. Forever.
It just so happens that a good friend of mine was the singer that performed on this track, and the fact that she performed on this track was the cause of the BBC switchboard becoming clogged with enquiries as to whom the voice belonged, as it was so beautifully ethereal. Listeners were asking to whom the voice belonged.
I sent an e-mail to my friend, Melanie Pappenheim, to tell her that I had obtained a mention of her name associated with an anecdote about how you haven't lived unless you have been in a saloon car with a soprano warming up her voice before nine o'clock in the morning. With the windows closed.
Which is what Melanie would recognize and remember as the context in which we worked together when I was the Education Officer for Opera North in Leeds. We undertook many workshops together in primary schools, and I have watched in awe as Melanie's career has developed.
In return for my notification of the late night mention of the song in which she received so much profile, achieving her debut performance at the Royal Albert Hall in the Doctor Who Prom, I have been pleased to let her know some of the things that I have been up to since we last communicated.
It turns out that Melanie was on BBC 2 this week, as a guest on the Jools Holland programme where she was performing an extract from the opera she is performing in June at English National Opera, written by one of the founder members of the pop group Blur. Damon Albarn.
Everything has consequences, even those things which might have begun as some stupid joke on the part of Star Wars fans.
One such for me is in the fact that today I visited a Bluebell Wood nearby to where I live in Worthing, in West Sussex, just as I did about this time last year, in those couple of weeks when the bluebells are in bloom, in those ancient woodlands that we possess in the UK and which, at this time of year, are carpeted with the most resplendent sight.
I was surprised to discover recently that such a thing does not take place in Australia, where one of my blog followers lives. She had seen pictures of the bluebells in Bloom, but there is no equivalent event to that which in the UK has become so associated with the coming of Spring, and although the date might vary according to the weather, it will happen every year as long as there are tracts of woodland in which they can grow.
That this visit had taken place this year on May 4 is totally coincidental. It might have taken place on any day say a week either side of today, and the bluebells would still have been there.
But I will remember that it was today, May 4, that I visited the bluebell wood this year for perhaps a peculiar reason.
For fans of the Star Wars films, today has achieved a kind of significance that is both humorous and ridiculous in equal measure.
May The Force Be With You is clearly a memorable quote from the film, and the fact that today is May 4 has been adopted as significant because of the similarity in sound of May 4th with May the force be with you.
What this perhaps demonstrates is the way in which meaning can become associated with very slight things. Things of absolutely no consequence whatsoever.
It is simply a capacity of the human mind that exhibits itself in all kinds of ways, so that you can ask several people to look for example at an apparently meaningless set of marks on paper, and they will each be able to give some meaning if you ask them what they see, perhaps hinting that there is an image to be seen.
The human brain has the capacity to create meaning where none exists, and to some extent this is an essential component of our capacity to interpret things like writing. Which after all, is simply marks on paper.
That the coincidence of this date sounding something like that particular quote from Star Wars has had some particular consequences for me, is of course unique to me, as all of my own experience is.
So for example, the presenter of a radio show on BBC Radio 2 used the fact of this date in this week as an excuse to ask his listeners to send in their suggestions for music suitable because of this date for an interstellar playlist.
I was able to get my suggestion read out on the radio, because of the anecdote that I used in my letter sent by e-mail.
I suggested the music from Doctor Who that was used at the culmination of series three, when Rose, the Doctor's companion, is trapped in an alternative universe. Forever.
It just so happens that a good friend of mine was the singer that performed on this track, and the fact that she performed on this track was the cause of the BBC switchboard becoming clogged with enquiries as to whom the voice belonged, as it was so beautifully ethereal. Listeners were asking to whom the voice belonged.
I sent an e-mail to my friend, Melanie Pappenheim, to tell her that I had obtained a mention of her name associated with an anecdote about how you haven't lived unless you have been in a saloon car with a soprano warming up her voice before nine o'clock in the morning. With the windows closed.
Which is what Melanie would recognize and remember as the context in which we worked together when I was the Education Officer for Opera North in Leeds. We undertook many workshops together in primary schools, and I have watched in awe as Melanie's career has developed.
In return for my notification of the late night mention of the song in which she received so much profile, achieving her debut performance at the Royal Albert Hall in the Doctor Who Prom, I have been pleased to let her know some of the things that I have been up to since we last communicated.
It turns out that Melanie was on BBC 2 this week, as a guest on the Jools Holland programme where she was performing an extract from the opera she is performing in June at English National Opera, written by one of the founder members of the pop group Blur. Damon Albarn.
Everything has consequences, even those things which might have begun as some stupid joke on the part of Star Wars fans.
Wednesday 2 May 2012
Treasured
Things get lost, and sometimes they just turn up. If you are lucky.
I have always lived a cluttered life, collecting things like I couldn’t help myself, sometimes as if I had a duty to rescue the things that nobody else wanted. Or gave a value to.
Many of these things are still surround me, although I live a much more minimalist life these days. I have to.
One of the things that comes with becoming a full-time wheelchair user is that my apartment has to be kept clear of clutter, the kind of stuff that once upon a time would have just cumulated in piles.
Of course, I would have known what these piles consisted of, as everyone kids themselves they do.
I suppose I have tended only to keep the things that are most important to me, and that take-up least space.
When I had my apartment decorated when I first moved in, I chose what some people might consider to be an extreme minimalist style. Everything is painted white, ceilings have been smoothed from the way in which they had been stippled, and I suppose my concept has been the idea that I live in a white-walled gallery space, which I suppose is partly because I had been a collector of pictures as well as many other smaller items over the years.
I have many original pictures on my walls, but also many reproductions. I am fortunate to possess a printer that will print up to A1 in full color, from the days when I worked as a freelance graphic designer. The last work that I did before I stopped work completely.
But I still have the printer, and although difficult for me to use myself, because paper sizes above A3 must be hand fed, I have trained up one of my carers to be able to use this printer effectively.
Last year, in conjunction with another of my carers, we ran a charitable event to raise money for sustainable development projects in Lesotho, and my colleague purchased second hand picture frames from local charity shops, and I printed pictures that were copyright free, mainly scanned from some of the old books that I have collected over the years.
Containing hand coloured prints, or simply interesting engravings.
These we sold for the cost price plus whatever the purchaser wish to place as a value on the resulting pictures.
We raised over £120 simply by inviting people that we knew and that we thought would be interested in supporting what we were trying to do.
And so one would think that in my minimalist apartment with a laminated wooden floor throughout things would be easier to find. Think again.
One of my most favourite films disappeared several months ago, and only just suddenly turned up, thankfully, since it was recorded from television, and is one of those films impossible to get hold of. At all. It cannot even be borrowed from someone like LoveFilm.
It was made in 1947, and is called The Way To The Stars. On the surface, it is just another war film, but it is an extraordinarily unique film. I am very glad to have rediscovered it.
In the same way that Noel Coward’s film In Which We Serve opens with the declaration that this is the story of a ship, this film opens with the statement that this is the story of an airfield.
Derelict now, with all of the evidence of human occupation scattered around in the derelict buildings.
But in 1940...
I suppose what is most unusual about the film is that it includes a number of poems around which the plot is woven.
They have been specially written for the film, and in the film are supposed to have been written by one of the pilots using the airfield at the time.
They are good poems, in the context of the film. Perhaps not great poems, but I suppose as I consider myself to be a poet, I find the film fascinating. And it is a very good film.
A love story, of course, behind the surface story of a nation at war. But a love story nevertheless.
If you ever get the chance to see it, you should do so, but this might be difficult. As I have already said, I would have gladly replaced it when I thought I had lost it. But it seems it cannot be replaced.
Like so many of those small items that I still keep from the days when I would visit auctions, and buy boxes of things that were probably the result of a house clearance after the death of someone.
I have discovered some extraordinary things, like the handwritten and handmade book of poems which must be someone’s way of coping with the death of someone during the First World War.
It is dated 1917, and there is a name. And the writing is so precise and careful, on what looks as if it were handmade paper, bound into a book by a red ribbon.
Such personal items have no intrinsic value, that they are an extraordinary document of a life lived, and of a time past.
So. Lost and then found. And now, I hope never to be lost again, as I have been able to transfer it to my computer, as discussed in a previous blog. Much harder to lose.
I don’t think I will ever want to separate myself completely from those reminders of other people’s lives, just as in the opening scenes of the film, the camera focuses on the left behind evidence of the people that once used the derelict airfield. I think we all want to live some evidence that we once existed.
I have always lived a cluttered life, collecting things like I couldn’t help myself, sometimes as if I had a duty to rescue the things that nobody else wanted. Or gave a value to.
Many of these things are still surround me, although I live a much more minimalist life these days. I have to.
One of the things that comes with becoming a full-time wheelchair user is that my apartment has to be kept clear of clutter, the kind of stuff that once upon a time would have just cumulated in piles.
Of course, I would have known what these piles consisted of, as everyone kids themselves they do.
I suppose I have tended only to keep the things that are most important to me, and that take-up least space.
When I had my apartment decorated when I first moved in, I chose what some people might consider to be an extreme minimalist style. Everything is painted white, ceilings have been smoothed from the way in which they had been stippled, and I suppose my concept has been the idea that I live in a white-walled gallery space, which I suppose is partly because I had been a collector of pictures as well as many other smaller items over the years.
I have many original pictures on my walls, but also many reproductions. I am fortunate to possess a printer that will print up to A1 in full color, from the days when I worked as a freelance graphic designer. The last work that I did before I stopped work completely.
But I still have the printer, and although difficult for me to use myself, because paper sizes above A3 must be hand fed, I have trained up one of my carers to be able to use this printer effectively.
Last year, in conjunction with another of my carers, we ran a charitable event to raise money for sustainable development projects in Lesotho, and my colleague purchased second hand picture frames from local charity shops, and I printed pictures that were copyright free, mainly scanned from some of the old books that I have collected over the years.
Containing hand coloured prints, or simply interesting engravings.
These we sold for the cost price plus whatever the purchaser wish to place as a value on the resulting pictures.
We raised over £120 simply by inviting people that we knew and that we thought would be interested in supporting what we were trying to do.
And so one would think that in my minimalist apartment with a laminated wooden floor throughout things would be easier to find. Think again.
One of my most favourite films disappeared several months ago, and only just suddenly turned up, thankfully, since it was recorded from television, and is one of those films impossible to get hold of. At all. It cannot even be borrowed from someone like LoveFilm.
It was made in 1947, and is called The Way To The Stars. On the surface, it is just another war film, but it is an extraordinarily unique film. I am very glad to have rediscovered it.
In the same way that Noel Coward’s film In Which We Serve opens with the declaration that this is the story of a ship, this film opens with the statement that this is the story of an airfield.
Derelict now, with all of the evidence of human occupation scattered around in the derelict buildings.
But in 1940...
I suppose what is most unusual about the film is that it includes a number of poems around which the plot is woven.
They have been specially written for the film, and in the film are supposed to have been written by one of the pilots using the airfield at the time.
They are good poems, in the context of the film. Perhaps not great poems, but I suppose as I consider myself to be a poet, I find the film fascinating. And it is a very good film.
A love story, of course, behind the surface story of a nation at war. But a love story nevertheless.
If you ever get the chance to see it, you should do so, but this might be difficult. As I have already said, I would have gladly replaced it when I thought I had lost it. But it seems it cannot be replaced.
Like so many of those small items that I still keep from the days when I would visit auctions, and buy boxes of things that were probably the result of a house clearance after the death of someone.
I have discovered some extraordinary things, like the handwritten and handmade book of poems which must be someone’s way of coping with the death of someone during the First World War.
It is dated 1917, and there is a name. And the writing is so precise and careful, on what looks as if it were handmade paper, bound into a book by a red ribbon.
Such personal items have no intrinsic value, that they are an extraordinary document of a life lived, and of a time past.
So. Lost and then found. And now, I hope never to be lost again, as I have been able to transfer it to my computer, as discussed in a previous blog. Much harder to lose.
I don’t think I will ever want to separate myself completely from those reminders of other people’s lives, just as in the opening scenes of the film, the camera focuses on the left behind evidence of the people that once used the derelict airfield. I think we all want to live some evidence that we once existed.
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