The Woman I Would Save

It is always an interesting question, what object would you save if you had to exit your home quickly because it was burning down.

For me, this is particularly interesting, as I am severely disabled, and getting myself out would be an interesting challenge.

If I were in bed, I would be able to contact the emergency services through the panic button that I have attached to my wrist.

This would enable me to call either emergency services, or my first named contact, which is a carer that lives just a few minutes from where I live.

So it is a difficult question without a straightforward answer, however, for the sake of answering the intended nature of the question, I would reach for a photograph that hangs in my kitchen.

I do not know the person in the photograph, but I have in some strange way adopted her, as a kind of honorary family member.

It is not that I do not care to keep photographs of my closest family, far from it.

Although I do not have that many photographs, as my sister is rather camera shy, and my elderly mother is equally camera shy these days, far too concerned that she cannot appear as glamorous as once she did.

She is after all in her 90s, and I remember how embarrassed she was when she once confessed to me that she could remember as a young child of about 13 queueing to see the first ever talking film.

As she lived most of her young life in the east end of London, this may well have been in the early Thirties, rather than when the film was first released in 1927.

My mother was born in 1919, and this was very much a confession, of which she was rather embarrassed because it revealed her age.

I on the other hand felt quite privileged to have had this fact shared with me, and it is one of those extraordinary reminders that elderly relatives can provide an almost direct link across vast stretches of time.

The photograph that I would save was purchased by me some years ago, when I lived in Glasgow. My then partner and I lived close to a regular auction house, and every fortnight and auction would take place which always included many small items that had probably simply been cleared from the homes of the recently deceased.

This particular photograph has always intrigued me, and I have often referred to her as my enigmatic woman.

It is a studio photograph from perhaps the 1920s, and it is of a relatively young woman, perhaps in her 20s. She is wearing a fur stole, glasses, and is clearly well to do and perhaps unafraid for a studio photograph to show that she wears glasses.

Perhaps hinting that she is proclaiming that she is an intelligent woman, unafraid to be seen with something that hides her face to a limited extent.

Although the spectacles are those kind of glasses that do not have solid frames, and are therefore obscuring less of her face than might otherwise be the case.

So why the importance of this photograph to me?

This is difficult to give a direct answer to, quite simply she is someone that I have felt an interest in over the years, and there are questions that I would love to have answered as to whom she may be.

The only clue has been the frame within which the photograph is mounted.

I had hoped that their would be a name of some kind pencilled into the cardboard frame, but there is not.

However, there is a clue to her identity from the name of the photographic studio that took this studio portrait.

It was taken at the Lafayette Studio, and a small amount of Internet research enabled me to identify quite quickly a little about this company.

And this has only served to increase the enigmatic nature of the person captured in the photograph.

The studio had branches in Dublin, London, and Glasgow. It was founded in the 1860s, and finally closed in the 1960s.

It seems that the great majority of the glass plate negatives from the studio in London were saved by the fact that some rock musician in the late 60s observed that they were simply about to be trashed, when the Studio closed and everything was being cleared away.

He had the connections and foresight to ensure that the glass plate negatives were temporarily stored at the Pinewood Studios, which presumably had the space for such a speculative set of objects to be stored. They must after all have taken up quite a lot of space.

It seems that the Victoria and Albert Museum quickly became very interested in what the pictures in the collection represented, because it seems that the studio were well known for having photographed the wealthiest people of just about every year between the studios opening in the 1860s through to the 1960s.

And thus the overall collection represents a fascinating insight into fashion for this entire period, specifically for the fashions of the well heeled, and indeed many of the photographs proved to be of the crowned heads of not just European royal houses, but also Royal families or their equivalent from every corner of the British Empire.

And one of the very interesting collections within the collection is of a fancy dress weekend held at the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth, one of the most magnificent country houses in England, and the guest list represents an extraordinary social selection of the great and good. All photographed by the Studio, who had clearly been required to send a photographer to catalogue this extraordinary event that took place in about 1910.

My curiosity about whom this woman might have been, was of course raised enormously by this discovery. And many of the photographs in this extraordinary collection can in fact be seen online on the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This meant that I have been able to send a copy of my photograph to the specialist curator at the museum, and in fact we exchanged a couple of e-mails.  He had not seen this particular photographs at all before, and had no idea of whom it might be.

But he agreed with me about my suggestion that it was from the 1920s.

And no doubt as an expert in fashion and costume across this span of time, he must be right.

So, I was no closer to identifying my enigmatic woman, but her enigmatic qualities have only been enhanced.

I don’t think I can have paid more than about £16 for the photograph, but it is one of those found objects whose value to me is irrelevant to its financial value, it is simply something worth keeping.

As indeed were the rest of the contents of the studio stock when it was simply destined to be thrown out as rubbish.

Shock And Awe At The Wonders Of Life

Professor Brian Cox is a particle physicist.

He has a tendency to emphasise the way in which everything adheres to the basic laws of physics.

In a new BBC documentary series that he has been hosting on BBC1, he has been leading viewers through an extraordinary perspective on the way in which life may have originated on this particular planet.

He is fascinated by chemistry, and the way it which chemicals work. And he has a facility to be able to explain complex chemical facts in a way that can be understood by the lay man.

You should try to see this series if you can, as it will be available on the BBC’s play again system for at least a couple of weeks. It is worth it.

Step by step, he explores the wondrous variety of life on Earth, and in the process he explains the circumstances required to enable chemical reactions to have taken place so that it happened almost spontaneously.

But this does not remove from the equation a sense of wonder at the circumstances in which so many things have conspired together to make life possible.

Constantly, he reaches the conclusion that this planet is quite possibly the only one that we will ever have knowledge of as having all of the factors necessary in which life became possible.

It is as if the crucible of the Earth were constructed uniquely to be a vehicle for life, in all of its variety and wonder.

He spends much time looking at the question of water, and exploring the nature of water as a compound. It seems to have been perhaps the single most important requirement for life to develop.

And in the context of this particular planet in this particular solar system, he talks about his theories as to how the circumstances in which life might have developed may have come about.

There is always a sense of awe involved, and quite a few shocks along the way.

Such as the idea that a most of the Earth’s water may have in fact arrived through a collision with a comet or an asteroid that was composed primarily of water.

So that at a time when the earth was sufficiently cool, water arrived in a sudden and extraordinary cosmic event.

It seems that planetary bodies have been observed that do emit the kind of tails that indicate the presence of water commonly enough for this theory to be a reality.

And he goes on to explain the detailed chemical properties of water that make it an ideal medium within which for certain long chain molecules to have been created.

It seems that all of the carbon required for such chemicals to be created must have come from stars, where carbon would have originated, in the fusion furnace of stars.

And so we have a vision of a chemistry set at a planetary scale, in which so many factors have to be present.

But once the complex double helix of DNA is created, it seems that there is no stopping life evolving into all of its diverse forms.

It is quite simply a self replicating chemical that can be affected by ultraviolet light so that it is vulnerable to change, or development, and of course because it is passed from generation to generation of whatever life it results in, then natural selection takes place, so that it is the successful alterations that survive.

What is extraordinary about the programme is that it encourages a sense of wonder at life in all of its diversity, whilst at the same time referring always back to the basic laws of physics to provide a reference from which everything must adhere.

It does not remove a sense of awe from the majesty of life, even though it makes it clear that in the right circumstances, which may indeed be unique on this one plant, it can come about almost spontaneously.

Given water and it few billion years of stability to process everything.

It makes it quite clear that sun has been a vital component in this mix, but also that it is a double edged sword.

Whilst it provides the essential energy for most of the chemical reactions needed, it is also capable of destruction through the dangerous ultraviolet emissions, particularly when it was young.

Strange concept that, that our Sun was once young, young and dangerous.

But then most of the concepts in this programme are complex and if not controversial, then certainly surprising.

Be Wary In The Information Age

I am embarrassed.

There is no other way of putting it, I have made an unfortunate blunder.

Hopefully, nobody has been hurt by my mistake, and I have certainly learned something from it.

Perhaps it is a common mistake when we are presented with so much information at our fingertips.

Put simply, we must learn to distinguish fact from that which we are seeking.

This phenomenon is not new. It has even been given, incorrectly I believe, a name in a recent Hollywood film.

The da Vinci Code, and it was used to describe the facility that we have to see what we wish to see. Or what we are looking for.

In that film it was called schotoma, which is more accurately defined as the capacity our eyes possess for seeing what we wish to see.

My understanding of it is that we have a blind spot at the back of each of our eyes, where the optic nerve goes from the eye to the brain.

But none of us has an obvious part of our vision that is simply blank, although it is possible to discover this blank spot by simply moving something visible across our eyes until it disappears briefly.

In other words, millions of years of evolution have made it helpful for the brain to be able to fill in this gap in our vision, so that we appear to be able to see continuously.

How this blind spot has recently confused me is in the creation of my most recent blog entry, when I mistakenly believed that I had discovered from an online newspaper story that there had been a recent earthquake in Italy, frankly because I didn’t read the information on my computer screen correctly.

What I had done is found the article published in 1997 about the earthquake that badly affected Assisi and northern Italy more generally, but I had failed to appreciate that this was in fact an article written in 1997, mainly because at the top of the page, quite naturally, the online newspaper published yesterday’s date.

The date of the article, written in 1997, was in smaller type further down the page.

Because I had been undertaking research for my current writing project, sacred places, I had failed to appreciate this fact, and I believed briefly, that in fact there had been an earthquake in northern Italy on 7 February.

In some respects, this was entirely because if there had been such an event, it would have suited the purposes of my story perfectly.

It was a case of seeing what I wanted to see, because I had not checked carefully what precisely the article in fact reported.

Fortunately, I did that this morning, and so I can publish my sense of embarrassment, and talk about what I have learned from my failure to read fully and properly what I had taken for granted when my Internet search revealed something useful for me.

This is a useful lesson for anyone using the Internet regularly for research, and I am sure that everybody can give examples of where they have read something that they have interpreted as fact without questioning whether it is in fact fact at all.

There is no doubt that the Internet and the information age is a great boon to all of us that have access to it, but it is important to realise that it is easy to be misled, and not only by the actual content of an article, but by failing to appreciate its true context.

Hopefully I will not make the same mistake again. In terms of my characters about to visit the town of Assisi in Umbria, I may well use this experience creatively, perhaps making my central character experience a realistic dream that matches with what I briefly thought was the case.

Who knows. This is the nature of creative writing, it is up to the reader to be careful to always judge whether they are reading something that is truthful or indeed designed to mislead.

The only positive thing that I can rescue from my embarrassment he is what I have learned about how gullible I can be, and I will certainly be more alert to the genuine context of what I am reading in future.

Perhaps my last words in this article should be an apology to anyone that has read my previous blog article, and even for a moment, believed that it may have been true.

It wasn’t, it was my mistake. I was wrong. And I am embarrassed by it, even though it may well serve a useful creative purpose in the end.

Art Reflects Life......

It’s not my fault. Honest.

This morning is 7 February, and I have been awake since just after 4 AM, engaged in my latest writing project.

It’s just a couple of weeks since I decided I would complete my novel, Sacred Places, which I began a couple of years ago. Since more recently completing my first novel, Bela, which had lain 95% complete for almost 20 years, I had finally recently got down to the work of finishing it. It is just at this moment with one of my carers, an inveterate reader, for final corrections and proofing.

And so I have decided recently that I want to be a novelist.

Everybody, so they say, has a book in them. Few have the time needed to write it.

When I wrote my first novel, I was single and able to be sufficiently selfish so that I could get up at six every morning, write for a couple of hours, before going to work and then editing what I had written that morning in the evening.

I did this six days a week for the best part of a year.

For my second novel, I have set myself the task of writing 500 words a day six days a week, so that my average should be about 3000 words a week.

By my reckoning, this should mean about 150,000 words in the course of a year.

That is the kind of selfishness that novel writing requires.

Although of course you can do university writing courses and so forth, I don’t believe there is any magical formula for writing a novel. It just requires the kind of obsessiveness I have described above.

My opening denial stems from the fact that this morning, from about 4 AM, I have been writing about my character Tom visiting Assisi with his girlfriend Kitty, as part of a tour of Umbria, in a sideways connected section of my novel. Assisi, of course, is an important sacred place, and I had known about the earthquake of 1997, which had prompted me to take my characters there.

Imagine my chagrin when this morning, having completed my daily regimen of words, I thought to check on the earlier earthquake by a simple Google search.

Straightaway to discover that this morning’s Independent newspaper front page has the news of a more recent earthquake, from yesterday morning. Six on the Richter scale.

And the entire basilica of St Francis, with its important Giotto frescoes, has been destroyed.

Needless to say, I feel responsible. Who wouldn’t.

But of course it’s only a coincidence, I tell myself. But what a coincidence. I am beginning to wonder if I should be much more careful about the subjects for my future chapters, and I will certainly keep an eye on the press, just in case I seem suddenly to have become the cause of what I write about actually happening.

Now there is a story for a Hollywood movie, but one of course that nobody would believe.

Have sympathy for me, please, as I feel so responsible for the destruction of those magnificent frescoes.

A Film Fan Becomes A Time Consultant

I have a hard-disc recorder, and therefore a film collection approaching 500 films.

I have recently discovered that I can copy broadcast films recorded by me to my computer directly, and avoid keeping space consuming DVDs.

This also has the advantage of making all of my films available to me, and only leaves me with the problem of choice. Which is of course a considerable one.

Because I have a hard-disc recorder, I can also edit advertisements from my film collection, and watch films uninterrupted.

I almost said as they were intended, but in some respects of course this is to fail to recognize that films have always been a commodity, like almost everything else, and it has probably been true since the invention of the purpose built cinema that as much has been earned from the peripherals such as ice creams and popcorn as from the display of pictures.

I can just about remember the time when films were shown continuously in cinemas, so that you could pay your entry fee, and join the film at the point at which you arrived at the cinema, presumably staying as long as you are needed to catch the entire beginning.

This practice presumably came to an end as part of the process of cinemas becoming smarter places with more comfortable seats, and giving time between performances for the mess left by users to be cleaned up.

And possibly as part of the process of poverty being eradicated as a general component of everyday life.

I am sure that these open all day cinemas, just like public libraries, must have provided a useful place for the homeless to keep warm in a degree of comfort all day.

At a time when entry fees were considerably less than they are at present.

And thus cinema has developed as society has developed, and as I have become adept at removing adverts from my films, I have also begun to be aware of the way in which the length of films has developed over time.

Of course, broadcast films shown with adverts take up considerably more disc space and time duration than when edited.

Thus I would estimate that that the average film length is about two hours.

It used to be much less, perhaps in the days when we had much less time to spend watching them.

I would say that many of the older films that I have in my collection are as short as an hour and a half, and although this length is not by any means unusual in modern times, it is noticeable that average length has become around two hours.

I suspect that a film historian would be able to tell me that in earlier times, even shorter films were more common, and that this was the consequence of reel length, in the days when actual film was used as the means of displaying films.

Thus, films would be described as a six reeler or a four reeler, each reel containing about 10 minutes of film.

I suspect there are forgotten sociological reasons for film length, so that in the early days of film with an inexperienced audience, shorter films would have been what the audience could cope with.

As audiences became more sophisticated, and indeed as films became more sophisticated, longer films would have become more acceptable. And more saleable, because we must remember that film is a commodity, sold as much on its merits as much as its less obvious factors, such as the comfort of where they are shown.

And their duration must have been affected by the amount of time available to the audience.

I would imagine it would have been unthinkable to show something of the duration of the Lord Of The Rings to an audience from the 1950s, although I may well be wrong.

So for example the Wagner operas have been shown for many years and at the original theatre in Bayreuth, the seats for these five or six hour epic performances were famously hard on the bottom.

I have had the good fortune (as I consider it) to have been able to see Tristan And Isolde half a dozen times without having to pay, when I worked in the world of opera. Not as a singer, I hasten to add.

The intervals in such epic performances are of sufficient duration for the audience to eat a restaurant meal, often with associated restaurants. Such is the stamina required for such performances.

Interestingly, the average opera performance duration is about three hours, but for the operas of Puccini such as la Boehme it is closer to two hours.

And these were targeted in effect at a broader social audience, and represented as being more realistic in their context and style.

And perhaps shorter because the attention span of the intended audience was considered to be less than that for a three or four hour opera.

I suspect there may be commercial reasons for the subtle increase in length of the average film, such as the number of advertisement breaks when it is shown on commercial television.

But pay attention, we talk about our time being our own, but I sometimes wonder if we are not always being somehow manipulated in the way that we spend it.

And over time, as we spend money and time differently, business will always find ways of making us spend it to its advantage.

The Product Of Our Forefathers

A few days ago I was asked an interesting question, which made me think long and hard. The question was a simple one, to name some of my favourite websites.

Perhaps like many apparently simple questions, this is one of those that can be very revealing, and much more interesting than at first glance.

And perhaps typically, I have only just realised that I omitted to include what I think of as a very important website.

Important for all sorts of reasons, but perhaps the key reason is one of those aspects of the Internet which make it so interesting and important.

Because this particular website, in my own case, is particularly helpful in understanding something of the origins and circumstances of family members, particularly from the Victorian period.

The website is William Booth's poverty map of the east end of London.

This map was put together by the man that went on to found the salvation army, and throughout his life he threw much attention on the issues caused by poverty in the east end of London in particular.

I was born and brought up in the east end of London, which I suppose in American terms might have been described as downtown London.

Throughout English history, the East end has been an important factor in the wealth of London, and has certainly played an important part in the wealth of what was once the British Empire.

This is perhaps for one particular reason, and that is the fact that it is the location for the London docks.

These docks were once at the heart of this trading nation, where ships from all over the world would bring their wealth and produce. And where there was always a willing workforce to undertake any aspect of those trades which contributed to the wealth of the united kingdom.

For it was always to the slums of the East end that immigrants to this thriving metropolis came perhaps for the first start in making a new life for themselves, in one of the largest cities in the world.

My father was a stevedore in those London docks, and I lived most of my early life within a stone's throw of where my father worked almost his entire working life.

In modern London, dockland is a place where much modern development has taken place, creating part of the new infrastructure from which the city makes much of its money.

Many gigantic multi-storey buildings have been constructed perhaps where once stood the dockside places that received and stored the produce of the world.

Many of those warehouses have been converted to loft apartments which are some of the most expensive places to live in London today, often boasting wonderful views of the River Thames and located centrally in what has been reborn from its grimy working past.

The poverty maps of London were created by a small army of Christian evangelists keen to do something to challenge the problems created by this poor and disadvantaged environment, in which so many people grew up.

So many communities of refugees have made this part of London their first home, such as Huguenots fleeing Catholic persecution in the 18th century from Holland, through to in more modern times Bengali and Indian immigrants from the former Empire.

Much of the east end was for many years the place where Jewish communities, so often persecuted even in England, found sufficient toleration for a thriving cloth and tailoring community to be founded, along with so much of the cultural associations of that diverse community.

The importance of the poverty maps is the way in which it can give an extraordinary insight into the living conditions of relatives that in my case so often grew up in the heart of this community. Shoreditch is where so many of my ancestors grew up, and as I have researched my family tree, like so many people these days with the help of the Internet and online databases that can give access to Census information which in this country is available from 1841, which so often provides an address.

The poverty maps can provide an extraordinary insight into the wealth or otherwise of individual streets, and a clear indication of the social status of the people living in particular houses in particular streets.

In most cases, my family roots lie in the middle strata of the poorer classes living and working in London in the 19th century, rather than the criminally poor whose location is identified so clearly in the poverty maps.

So often the trade pursued by parents stretches back to their parents and so forth, so that my stevedore father had as a father a merchant seaman.

Genealogy is perhaps one of the luxuries that we can appreciate in the modern world where we have more leisure to spend than most of our predecessors.

It is though one of those most valuable of pursuits, which can give some sense of perspective on the modern lives that we lead.

It is unfortunate that I totally forgot this important website in my list of websites, as it really is an important insight into the person that I am, the person that I have become thanks to the innumerable antecedents on whose shoulders I stand.

Strange And Unexpected Connections

There is a strange and unexpected connection between my first novel plot and my second.

It is one of those subtle connections that I only discovered recently when I was researching the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in 1941.

This was partly because I was looking into the background of Lord Halifax, for a blog article.

What I discovered was that Rudolf Hess commissioned a survey of all Ley lines in Germany, when he was Hitler's deputy and perhaps more ‘respectable’ than he became after his flight to Scotland.

These lines were first explored in Britain by Alfred Watkins in 1924, when he published first a short pamphlet, followed a couple of years later by a more developed book on the subject.

The Wikipedia article about Nazi interest in the occult does not have a citation as yet, but in the article about Rudolf Hess information is provided about his commissioning of a survey of all such lines in Nazi Germany.

This is interesting to me, since my second novel, as yet not completed, is very much based upon these "lines of power".

In my story, the first four chapters of which are published in my collection of short stories which can be read online, the exploration of a particular ‘line of power’ called the Dragon Line, is central to my plot.

What is unusual about this line is that it can be drawn very accurately on for example Google maps and it connects a whole series of sacred sites in the South of England.

Including Glastonbury, Avebury, and numerous others that fall precisely on the dragon line, or on one of its subsidiary lines which travel either side of the main line in much less direct fashion.

These are called the Michael line and the Mary line, one represented as the female line, and the other as the male.

There is a wonderful story about the way in which all three lines intersect in the nave of Bury St Edmunds Cathedral, and it is said that those that are sensitive to such lines can detect the way in which these lines "kiss" in the nave of that cathedral.

To be honest, the truth or otherwise of the existence of these "lines of power" and their purpose is of less importance to me then the simple fact that they are given some credence particularly by "new age" thinkers.

My novel is planned to be a a kind of riposte to Dan Brown's best selling conspiracy theory thrillers, in that my story it is partly about the credence given to these lines, and the obsessiveness with which one person in particular explores them in the late 60s, but it falls to his son to complete the work of the father, who dies mysteriously young, leaving behind a body of research that he expects his son to complete.

Given that the library of the father, absent from the household because of his demise, contains so many works that capture the interest of the growing young man, he studies anthropology at university, and when his studies are completed his father's bequest and request that he continue and complete what he had begun all those years before sets in train my story.

I won't reveal any more of the plot, but suffice to say that it involves a practical exploration of the Dragon line, and is I suppose a quest story. There are some strange true facts which might be considered surprising coincidences, so for example where the Dragon Line leaves the land at the extreme east of England, is exactly at the point where North Sea gas is piped into the mainland, just south of great Yarmouth.

There is much opportunity for false trails and conspiracy theories, but ultimately it is a human story, and one that like in any quest story, is more about the person undertaking the quest than what is being sought.

Since it has taken me more than 20 years to complete my first novel, I don't expect this one to take less time. But then I do have the help of modern technology like Google maps, which is just as well since my severe disability means I would not be able to walk the line myself.

I have also linked it with an unusual antiquarian book that I am fortunate to have a copy of, published in 1676, and containing the first ever representation in pictorial form of what the Druids looked like.

It contains a number of interesting engravings of fine quality, and what is remarkable is the way in which all images of Druids after this date, such as those presented by Stukeley who attributed the site at Avebury which he first surveyed in the 18th century, resemble in substantial detail those first images or from 1676.

And that first image remarkably resembles Gandalf the Grey from the Lord Of The Rings, so perhaps that series of films also involved someone looking at this volume, which any university library would be proud to own.

It is famous for being the least accurate history of Britain that exists from this period, and it also includes genealogies of the English kings, tracing many of them back to Noah.

In the style of the day, it has one of those titles that is quite lengthy, so that it is Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, a history of Britain from the Phoenicians to the present day, and its inaccuracy gives me great latitude to extrapolate and explore such seemingly unrelated things as the trade routes for Cornish tin across Europe and the known world, tin of course being the essential ingredient added to copper to make Bronze.

It is another unusual fact that there are a very limited number of sources for tin across the world, and so I suppose I like to think of my second novel as being a novel about the way the earth itself has guided human development. Perhaps the first Gaia novel. Or perhaps not......