Travel by Proxy, and various sorts of Art.

Well, now we're in lockdown again - sort of.  When it comes to this isolated life we lead, I'm with Jeanie Croope, one of my favourite bloggers.  Jeanie's recent post "Stolen Time" says it all for me, and, judging by the comments, for a lot of other people too.    It's sad to miss all kinds of things, but missing kids growing up is really hard, because that time can't be regained. 

For various reasons T and I haven't spent the night away from home for a while, even when it was allowed, but the twins' parents have been taking them to YHA youth hostels and keeping us in touch with lots of photos, and the twins have also written us postcards which they give to us on their return.   A sort of travelling by proxy, and we do appreciate it very much.  

A couple of weeks ago they went to the New Forest, staying in a land pod in the large grounds of Burley hostel, near Ringwood, We've stayed there in the past, and remember it as right in the middle of all the trees, a gorgeous location.  They saw wild ponies, pigs foraging for acorns, wandering cows, and, as Girl Twin wrote on her card, "wasps and skwirils and baby skwirils."  

(photo: YHA)

And they saw shooting stars, and had a wonderful meal and breakfast at the pub next door, and saw a  tapestry in the church at Lyndhurst showing Alice in Wonderland, who lived in the area after she grew up. They came home and stood on the path telling us all about it, leaping up and down with glee as they did so. 

The week before that, they went to Michelham Priory in Kent, staying in a tent in the grounds of South Downs hostel, near Lewes and Eastbourne - photo below. I think the hostel was once a farm and I recall it had a fine rural location right on the steep downs.   (Love the way the YHA takes its publicity pictures on overcast days or in the rain,  by the way)   

 

 Nearby Michelham Priory has a historic working watermill and a forge, lots of modern sculptures, a great teashop, and tours by volunteers.  The twins loved their tour, they were intrigued to see a witch bottle and discover how olden days kitchens worked. 

Everyone was so nice to them that they insisted we put Michelham Priory on the list to visit as soon as possible. Historic and unique places like this rely on visitor income and really need people to visit, so that they can keep going for us all. So it's top of our list for a post-Covid visit when we can start doing real life travel with a clear conscience.  

 

Right now we can't even walk over and visit them in their home, though, so Boy Twin had the good idea of a Zoom Club, so now we zoom sometimes and they think of things we might like to do if we were there with them. In the most recent club meeting they had a pillow fight.  They really did love doing it, and as they whacked each other Girl Twin puffed to us, "Do you wish you were here yet?"  We had to admit we did!  

Our older grandkids, who are now teenagers, live the other side of London but we met about ten days ago near St. Pauls Cathedral.  They are avoiding public transport, and you can't park, so they walked there and back from their home in South London, a 7 mile round trip. (We did not underestimate the sacrifice required of teenagers to get up early on a Saturday and walk 7 miles in the rain to see us.)  

Despite the vile weather, we had fun looking for chewing gum pictures (see last post). Ben Wilson had told T. about his Millennium Bridge trail, which leads directly across the bridge to St. Pauls.  We soon found some of his distinctive images.    Here are my favourites, a homeless man called Mark and his dog Gizmo. The pound coin is to show the scale;  It's about the size of a nickel.....

and here is St. Pauls. 

 

And we learned that Oldest Grandson is helping at a food bank.   He loves it.  Apparently instead of everyone being depressed or angry, they're all friendly and positive and trying to help the customers, so good vibes all round. (I heard also that they let him eat some of the items the customers never choose, which are generally unusual, expensive and "healthy" things, such as long-life turmeric latte. He's willing to give it all a try).

Ah well, we can't even see them again till early December.  I do think lockdown is vital now that things have been left to get almost out of control. The stricter the better from a medical point of view, though I'm not sure enough is being done to help small businesses. I noticed how quiet and asleep everything seemed even when we cycled to St. Pauls before lockdown began. Many shops and cafes appeared to have closed down, and we had quite a job even finding a coffee stall. Imagine that in a major London tourist area like St. Pauls!  London really shouldn't be that way.  

You'll notice I haven't said anything about the US election.  Right now we're waiting for the result from Georgia, and the whole thing seems scarily close-run. I avoided being on the computer at all the last 2 days, because I didn't want to be spending every minute on tenterhooks. Instead, we used the beautiful weather and went to Hampstead Heath again. I think I have a low boredom threshhold,  so I feel incredibly lucky to live near somewhere so unusually varied, when so far I have not been bored at all. 

This time we visited the Pergola, originally built about a century ago by the millionaire Lord Leverhulme.  It was part of the grounds of a mansion which I dimly remember as a public orthopaedic convalescent hospital, but which has now been taken over by someone else who has transformed it into something from the hundred-million-dollar property pages, with high fences and huge notices everywhere saying it is guarded by patrolling dogs so keep out.  Charming.  However, the pergola still has oceans of period charm and faded glory. It's not the the season for its wisteria and roses, but there were plenty of vines with coloured leaves growing up its columns. 

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It seems to go on for miles and has lovely views over its surrounding park and gardens as well as the wild heath beyond the fence. We had it almost to ourselves and I couldn't think of anywhere nicer to be on a sunny day with T.   

Before that, we'd decided to do some litter picking on the heath, and had brought with us a long handled picker,  gloves and plastic bags to hold whatever we found.  Litter is cleared daily on the heath, so it is usually clean enough except that a few people obviously feel that if they throw their junk into the bushes, it will mysteriously disappear forever. In fact, it festers there for years, or forever.  We make it our mission to find these bits of indestructible trash and take them to their rightful place - the bin.  

We mostly pick up plastic bottles and food packs,  that brightly coloured wrapping material used for sweet packets and party balloons, plastic party ribbons and, (yuk)  wet wipe tissues which don't biodegrade and ought to be banned. (We're always glad of the gloves, picker and hand sanitiser.)  We braved the brambles and collected a bagful of the usual junk from the bushes, and were just about to walk back to the road and find a bin when all of a sudden there was the crunching noise of something jolting along the muddy track to the glade in which we were standing.

It was a ranger's vehicle, bumping across the leaves and roots, and it stopped on the other side of a big oak. Two men climbed out with huge plastic bags and much more professional looking long handled pickers than ours.  They were the real litterpickers, and so we took the chance to have a bit of a chat. 

Seems they get 110 bags of litter a week from just this tiny section of the heath, but the man in charge loved the job because he felt it was doing something really worthwhile. He didn't have a massively high opinion of the habits of the general public, hardly surprisingly, but he was very pleased with us and thanked us several times for giving him our little hoard of horrors to add to one of his 110 sacks.

So that meant we could carry on looking around without having to carry the bag of rubbish and eventually we set off and left him doing his work. Can you spot him in the picture below, with his big black sack, blending in with the trees?  

 I may have mentioned I was starting a short course at the Royal Drawing School.  I've now done two days of the five, and I'd love to post something I'm proud of but so far all I've done has been aimed at solving problems and it doesn't always look great. (I guess the truth is that I don't usually solve the problems, but I do keep trying.) I've had a lot of fun doing it and it's been an excuse to buy myself some new soft pastels to do some sketching of my own.  I have a box of good quality Rembrandt soft pastels,  but they're almost used up. 

Soft pastels are much smoother in texture than brittle hard pastels which quickly crumble and get dusty, but good ones can be so expensive that I've been balking at buying them new.  Then I spotted a box of 24 by Conte of Paris on eBay, and managed to get them for £15. They're used, but barely, and I don't mind the occasional broken one, so I'm well pleased.    

I've become a big fan of eBay lately. (It's also cheaper than Amazon for books.) My latest eBay purchase is Ronald Blythe's book, "The View in Winter."   The best parts of the book are  where Blythe interviewed villagers in Suffolk in the 1970s, all of them born in the Victorian age. He asked them to describe their lives and their thoughts on living and being old.  I read the book once when I was young, but I just couldn't care much about old peoples' lives then, so not a single thing of it stayed with me.  Now, I find it riveting!   What incredible social history, a glimpse of rural Suffolk nearly gone, and very different views and experiences than now, all in their own words, many of them in dialect.  I felt that this was also a kind of travel by proxy - but this is time travel. 

 

Ronald Blythe is now 97 and I imagine that doing all those interviews may have helped in his own ageing journey.  I attended a lecture by him about 10 years ago and he seemed to be in good shape. 

    

Well,  that's me up to date.    I hope the election comes out the way that I (and everyone else I know) wants, and wish you all a good Friday and a good weekend!  

Charles Keeping in South London

I'm identifying with this dog, sitting there and thinking, wow... I used to like writing my blog almost every day, now weeks seem to go by!  Is my life really getting that uneventful?  Oh, and it's raining.... 

The weather has been pretty bad so I've mainly been sitting indoors writing the Durrell stuff, babysitting, and that kind of thing. So it was great to go out the other day with T's cousin and her husband, who live in Bromley, a suburb in Southeast London, to visit a most fascinating house near where they live. It is the family home of the illustrator Charles Keeping. and his artist wife Renate. Both of them are now dead, but once you have seen their work it is hard to forget it

Their daughter Vicky lives in the house, with her brothers and their children nearby - they were a very close family. She is a trained artist too, so the interior is full of quirky and interesting objects - many of them small art works, family photos or strange souvenirs from travels in faraway places.  I took photos but it was difficult to convey the atmosphere, which was bright and spacious, colourful, welcoming, arty and rather glitzy too, with sparkly cushions and golden braid here and there.  And what a nice lady Vicky was - she even gave us tea and chocolate biscuits!



Charles was a printmaker, a master of black-and-white. And, although he was by all accounts a very happy and well loved family man, he also did some very sinister, ghostly pieces. As his daughter said when we were at the house, he must have bottled up all his bad feelings to release them in his work!

He was also one of the best horse painters I have ever encountered.  Here is one of the unpublished lithographs in the hallway. He came from a poor background, and as a small child had been fascinated by the huge dray horses stabled next door. His biggest treat was to be picked up and put on one of the horses. He never forgot the feel and the smell of them.  and remained obsessed by working horses all his life.  This large print shows one of the stables that used to exist in London, where the horses had to go to their first and second floor quarters up a ramp.   He captures so well the atmosphere of the London he grew up in, (and which I also partly remember), with its soot stained brick and faded advertisements painted on the walls. 

His wife came from a posh German Jewish background, and her art work is mainly stitched or else delicate watercolours. She did several major projects, including one on temptation: these cakes are all created from fabric.

Her piece de resistance is an entire room of incidents in her life, created in needlework, and based on styles of newspaper ephemera.  I found it almost more interesting than Charles' work, really. Although she did not have the same commercial success as he did, she was a true artist.  She has now passed away but there are some films of her here on the website if you are interested. 

And on Saturday we went out for a rainy walk on Hampstead Heath; it was very peaceful and beautiful.  Here is a little video.  The quiet music in the background came from what I think was a homeless man sitting on a bench not far away, with his dog. I thought it was wonderful. 

On another rainy day we cycled into London thinking the rain would stop later  (it didn't). We saw an exhibition in always-interesting Wellcome Collection, called "Smoke and Mirrors."  It is about the science behind magic. I always think people who put on exhibitions about magic have a bit of a problem since they're not supposed to give any secrets away, but here they managed very well by having psychologists explaining about misdirection, about building the audience's assumptions, and directing them to think in certain ways. (Which is a subject more than relevant in these political times, I think!)   Some tricks rely on physiological characteristics of the human brain - for instance, that there is usually a 1/10th of a second lag while our brains process what our eyes report. 

I must confess I was a sucker for most of the tricks they talked about, some of which were so obvious that I can't believe I didn't spot them.  There were numerous little films by real magicians doing versions of these tricks.   I once spent a few months doing articles about top professional magicians, and ended up having great respect for their skill.  But there is no doubt about it, they were all rather unusual people, many of them quite obsessed with their wish to baffle and amaze, and willing to practice many hours a day to perfect extremely difficult routines.       

   

I definitely fell for this charming man pictured below, an early 20th Century magician called William Marriott, who wrote a piece for "Pearson's Magazine" debunking the type of frauds used by spiritualist mediums. Here he is posing with some of his little fraudulent friends. 

and here he is with some not-so-disembodied hands!  The photo on the left shows how it would have appeared in the seance. 

So, even in the rain it is possible to have fun, but I do hope we get some weeks of summer soon!

Heath, Ghosts, Grafffiti and a Mysterious Ad.

I need to start posting more than once a month :) but anyway glad to say that the bug has finally left and I'm back to normal energy levels. And Spring is on the way. This and the coming 2 months are my favourite time of year, and I'm so delighted to have crocuses and a few early daffodils showing.  Here are some crocuses lit by the sun.

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I'm trying hard to get fitter again, having sat around like a slug for 6 weeks. Our older daughter is a tai chi fan and has made a short video for us of a daily routine. It keeps some flexibility but more importantly is a daily focus on how my body is moving, and reminds me to exercise it more. 

T has also been ill with the same bug and he's only just getting better, but we've taken some walks on Hampstead Heath. This is still wintry but, as ever, there is always something to see, even if only shadows and reflections.  

                            In the sunshine, the lakes shone, and bare tree branches glittered.  

One morning our walk took us across the viaduct quite early in the day. (The viaduct is a whole story by itself but let me just say it was built about 1890 and stands alone in the woods.) The low sun cast the carvings into bold relief.  I had never noticed them before, and liked the variety of the carvings. This one I thought very elegant. 

I also wondered who worked so hard and for so long to carve "STONED HERE ON DAY"?  What they were trying to say isn't quite clear ....but perhaps that's to be expected.

Some of this stone graffiti had the air of primitive carvings. What do you think this might be?

About ten minutes walk from the viaduct is Kenwood House,  the Heath's big mansion.  If you click the link you might recognise it from many movies, most recently, I think, Belle.  I am a big fan of English Heritage which keeps the house and its treasures open all year, free of charge, complete with its interesting art collection, grand interiors and other treasures.  I liked this gilded lion lurking on the side of an 18th century table

And this detail from an early JMW Turner painting shows what his work was like when he was not being quite so abstract. I love it, and it makes me wish I could have known the seaside when these old boats were a common sight.  

A days ago T and I got the tube to a Southwark pub and attended to an amusing and interesting talk at the Southeast London Folklore Society by the artist and ghost-hunter Sarah Sparkes. She was talking about the magical library and extraordinary life of Harry Price, ghosthunter. Here's a photo I took of one of her slides projected on the screen. I think Harry looks quite the lad.  

  The library is held at Senate House, of University of Central London, which dates only from the 1930s but is said to be riddled with ghosts, including several haunted elevators.   Not sure I would take that too seriously. 

Sarah also touched on Borley Rectory, Essex, a large old house which Harry Price once owned. It was for many years famous as the Most Haunted House in England.  In fact, my parents had a book about when I was a kid and I have to say that even at the age of 8, I was not convinced by Borley Rectory! But Harry Price's life story is a great, sometimes laugh-out-loud tale of a humble-born magician and born entertainer, who was determined to be remembered one way or another. 

I also did a clear-out, and found this little book dating from 1852. I'm not that interested in Paris's Principal Monuments (which at that time, of course, did not include the Eiffel Tower) but the book was only 50p at a car boot sale, and although small, the engravings are beautiful when looked at through a magnifying glass.  But what is this building on the cover? Does anyone recognise it? 

T felt recovered enough at the weekend to take a walk with me over to Highgate, where we spotted this interesting advert stuck on a community notice board. It really ought to be the beginning of a novel or a movie, don't you think?  How do you think it will pan out?

By the way, since this is a real person's real advert (even though they are advertising on a public message board) I've blocked out some of the phone number.

So that's been me - and I wish you a very good week! 

Dogs Etc.

Are you settling down to autumn?  I'm reluctant to, as I love spring and summer, but there's no doubt it's really on its way, with its seed heads and the the falling leaves. The rosebay willowherbs (those pink flowers in the picture below) are just about over, but at least it's still warm enough to sit outside in the sun.  I haven't had much time for blogging lately but I've taken every chance to keep in touch with nature, and I've seen some strange things.  Like, the other day I was on Hampstead Heath (below) picking blackberries, when I kept hearing bangs.



I looked around and eventually saw this - a woman throwing balloons into the air.



Her very clever dog was chasing the balloons and heading them onwards



but every now and then he got too excited, took a snap at the balloon and - bang!



I spoke to her just as she was packing the balloons away, to her dog's disappointment.She explained that he gets so excited that she has to give him a break - so now, they were off for a nice, quiet walk!

I am not sure you can call stuffed animals "nature".  In fact, they're almost the opposite. I saw lots of them, though, when a historical society I belong to made a trip to Quex Park, in Kent. The house belonged to a Major Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton, who was obsessed with hunting, and, like many dedicated hunters, was also very interested in the animals he shot. I never understand why someone who loves animals would want to spend their life shooting them, but there we are. And he did want to share his fascination with the folks back home. The specimens are beautifully stuffed and set against carefully researched and painted backgrounds and if you like that kind of thing they are really wonderful examples. More information on their website, here.

In his travels to exotic locations, the Major had really quite "Boys Own" type adventures and barely escaped alive at times from tribesmen - in whom he was also very interested.  (To be fair, he wasn't also trying to kill them, like the animals - but they certainly tried to kill him, on occasion.)

So the museum also contains all kinds of ethnographical curiosities, and altogether it is a very interesting period piece. The gallery shown below not only displays lots of antlers and dismayingly large numbers of elephant tusks, but there are also native spears arranged on the ceilings, and glass cases of objects reflecting a way of life which has almost entirely vanished - certainly for Westerners who travel abroad.

T6his particular room was used as a ward for convalescent soldiers during the First World War.  Imagine recovering in here!  Through the archway you can see a lion and its prey, although to be fair I imagine all the floor space in those days was given over to soldiers' beds.

Two of the Major's daughters shared his passion for faraway places. Both were highly intelligent women, and they devoted their lives to doing medical work among Africans. They also catalogued and recorded the way of life of their patients, (who were also their friends) so that now we know what they made and did and looked like.

There really is some splendid stuff to see - I particularly loved this bowl with six heads from Nigeria. 

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In search of a bit of my own history I have been sorting out some old albums passed down in my family.  For a hundred and fifty years, one branch of the family worked to bring the wonders of the electric telegraph to far flung places ranging from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and their families followed along - only a minority of my grandparents and great-grandparents were born in Britain, and neither of my parents were.

Some of the albums are very interesting.  Here is HMS Renown - the original battleship, built in 1895, pre-dreadnought.  She was scrapped in 1914. My relatives were pretty bad at labelling things but I'd guess this was probably somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Here is a snap with the following title.  It looks like "Becalmed Boat in Mediterranean"....but I think that must be wrong...

because no way is this the Mediterranean, surely. Anyone got any ideas? The robe looks a bit Turkish to me.

And a more homely note, here is "Tinker on the Horse" was taken in a farm that was very likely at in Tolleshunt Major,  Essex, about 1920.

I'm still wondering what this picture represents. It dates from around 1910, and seems to show women from all nations.  But which nations? The one in the centre could be Marianne of France. I don't think she is Britannia because she doesn't have a Union Jack.

The girl in tartan must be Scotland. I see a pre-war Japanese flag and a lady who might be dressed in a kimono.  Perhaps an Afghan lady in the centre.  An Indian, and a Russian in that white hat, do you think?



As for the event itself, goodness knows what it can have been.

I also visited the area where my parents spent most of their retirement, in West Berkshire/East Wiltshire.  The weather, as you can see, didn't really cooperate but I enjoyed the trip, anyway.  The photo is taken from the steps of the antique arcade in the centre of Hungerford.

While I was in the arcade I bought someone else's family photos, an album dating from the early 1940s.  I don't usually buy other peoples' family photos, but this album, although damaged, wasn't that expensive, and it was so carefully laid out,  with photos that were worth seeing. The owner listed all the places where he had served with the Army. 

 There is no name on the album, and I was rather sad to think that there were no descendants who wanted to keep it, because he was a good photographer.  I liked the way that the camels and people in the foreground here seem to be making no effort to escape what I suppose is a sandstorm approaching in (according to the caption) Khartoum.  Looks mighty scary - have any of you ever been in a sandstorm? I wonder how quickly it would typically move.  Do you think this was about a minute away, or half an hour away?  

Here is an air raid over Alexandria, Egypt, with searchlights criss crossing the sky. Or could it be a time exposure of tracer bullets?  

 Alexandria is where my father grew up.  I didn't notice Dad in any of the photos though!

And here are a couple of our anonymous soldier's colleagues at El Alamein, in the Western Desert.

I don't think I would have liked living then at all, but looking at this album I do sense that this owner felt a certain wonder that he had gone to so many places and seen so many things. The final picture in the album shows troops marching in a VE Sunday parade through the streets of Melton Mowbray, photographed by Heawood, a local photographer.   I wonder if the soldier did anything interesting with the rest of his life, and whether he was glad to back home in Leicestershire.  

My cousin lives near Melton and drove down to see us in London last weekend. I don't know why it always seems like the ends of the earth to me to go to where they live from here. It's actually only about two hours in the car.  I was glad she came though as they've just got what must be the nicest dog in the world.  He's a bit of a crossbreed I think, mainly a Pom.  Such a good tempered, friendly and altogether delightful dog.   He loves having his tummy stroked. 

He seems to have a lot of cats in his life, which he is on the whole pretty good friends with.  But then he seems to be friends with everyone.  Definitely my No. 1 dog of the year!

We stayed in a friend's cottage in East Anglia, and I was impressed by a couple of cars I spotted in Raveningham, Norfolk. The one on the left is surely a hearse, but its front seats are upholstered in gold, so there is obviously a story attached.   Both were looking a little dusty, as if they hadn't been driven recently. I don't suppose their original owners ever thought they'd end up in the depths of the Engish countryside.

I plan to visit everyone's blogs over the next few days, I am sorry for my absence and lack of comments. I seem to have a lot of work to do at the moment.  It all seems to be to do with art, so I hope I'll have a lot to tell you about it in due course.   One thing is sure at the moment though - and that is that I certainly have a lot to learn!

The last couple of weeks.

So what have I done in the last couple of weeks? Bits and pieces. I finished some Lewis Carroll work, and went with my friend to see "Men and Chicken" one of the weirdest films I've seen. In it, five seriously dysfunctional brothers make gruesome blackly humorous discoveries on a remote Danish island.  I can't describe it. And I certainly don't recommend you to watch the trailer. Like most trailers, it makes you not want to see the movie.   I'd say it's not very politically correct, but my friend adored it. 

We saw the last of the roses, at least for now. Some of the bushes will bloom again at the end of the summer. 

 On Wednesday I happened to be passing the Jewish Museum in London's Camden Town and realised I'd never ever been inside.  It's a modern building hidden inside an old one, and larger than it looks at first. My favourite exhibit was this cape, the property of Doris Benjamin, a nurse in World War 2.  Like the other nurses, apparently Doris begged  regimental badges and shoulder flashes from the men that she nursed, and sewed them on her cape. A nice way to remember them, and a discussion point for the patients, too, I bet.  

About half a mile away, in Primrose Hill, I spotted some bas-reliefs decorating the large, grand 1950s stone doorway of Cecil Sharp House. Named after England's most famous folk-song collector, Cecil Sharp House is the HQ of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and its library is a treasure trove of curious customs and songs going back centuries.  

This carving shows a Hobby Horse, a creature in English folk dancing.  The Hobby takes all shapes and forms and often disrupts the dance by weaving in and out of the dancers, or else it dances on its own.  They must go back many hundreds of years, possibly even before Christianity. This one makes me think of a witchdoctor as it capers about.  

Cecil Sharp House runs all kinds of activities, some rather unexpected - I even once attended a class to learn how to dance the quadrille (don't ask) and last time I went with T's cousin, there was a whole Regency costume ball going on in the basement. I snapped this pair queuing up for coffee in the interval. 

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 At present Cecil Sharp House has a display of artworks it has commissioned or bought over the ages, including a gigantic patchwork quilt from 1992. This is one of the panels. 

And for those of you who have not had enough of English folk dancing, this is the Shepherd's Hey mentioned in the panel. The first few minutes will probably be enough, and the jingly sound is the bells on their legs, in case you aren't familiar with morris dancing. 

T and I went to the British Library's exhibition "Shakespeare in Ten Acts" about the way Shakespeare performances have been reinterpreted over the centuries. It reminded me of all kinds of movies and performances I've seen, and made me long to see Derek Jarman's wonderful "Tempest" again. (Here's one of my favourite clips -  Elisabeth Welch singing "Stormy Weather."

And I spotted this Shakespeare teapot, which I would love to own. 

Saw a White Admiral butterfly - don't remember having seen one before. 

And the heather was out in a sandy bit of Hampstead Heath, London felt as if it was miles away. 

I had a staring match with Ol' Four Eyes, the cat. First time I saw him peering in through the window, those markings gave me quite a shock. 

And caught the end of a beautiful sunset.