Pantomime Time

Pantomime is one of those things that people either love or hate. I fall into the latter camp. I'm not averse to pantomime in its original grass-roots form, derived from ancient mid-winter mummery, in turn derived from the Roman feast of Saturnalia, a time when the tables of normality were subverted, with slaves being waited upon by their masters at heady feasts that could normally last for days. This glorious subversion cascaded through the ages, transformed and transmogrified into our own lampooning of politics and popular culture - which is why I would rather see Mother Goose at our local church hall, than the slick and sanitised Dick Whittington, starring Dame Edna, at the New Wimbledon Theatre.
In the days when pantomime was the realm of strolling players that were ever outside society, the pantomimic vehicle was a delightfully dark way of looking at the mores of the time. But the most popular entertainers are no ways 'outside', any more. Instead, they are hand in pocket with the politicians, the royalty and other famous people that they once effectively sent up. In short, celebrity-led panto just doesn't 'do it' for me. True panto is deliciously dark and sweetly subversive, affording a refreshing look at all of the 'rules', of driving a wedge into a society that is rotting in its own corrosive stasis. It is also gloriously entertaining, which is why I'll be going to the church hall...

The Eternal Triangle...

Geometrically, a triangle is a plane figure bounded by three sides, with three internal angles. At school, we learned there were three types of triangle. The scalene has three sides of unequal length, the isosceles has two equal sides and the equilateral has its three sides and internal angles, equal. Later on, we learned about love triangles, the Bermuda triangle, and the eternal triangle. Always, there is a magical association with the number three. The triangle crops up in nature, mainly as wedges of broken ice. A hunk of matter must have at least three corners, you see, and the triangle is a dead cert.
I learned to love Toblerone, that rather classy chocolate bar that I always associate with airports – though it can be bought in any supermarket or grocer. I still remember their advertising jingle from the 1970s or 1980s; something about a land with triangular bees, and triangular trees, and oh, Mr Confectioner, please…http://www.toblerone.co.uk/toblerone1/page?siteid=toblerone1-prd&locale=uken1&Mid=586&PagecRef=628

Vital Vidal and brand Sassoon...

Just recently, maestro hairdresser Vidal Sassoon was on television, talking about his life, work and products. When he mentioned the latter, I cheered and punched the air. Many posts ago, I wrote about an extraordinary VS hairdryer that I had bought in 2002 for £12.99 and that was/is still going strong; 1800 watts, folding handle, 2 heat/speed settings, worldwide dual voltage, and cool shot button. My only issues with Brand Sassoon are his prescribed hairstyles. In short, I just haven’t got the jaw line for a full-on ‘geometric’.
I can take Vidal’s line about the influence of modern art and the Bauhaus in his craft – how could I not? Witness the photo of me at that hallowed, Dessau location, c. 2001. Mondrian, Gehry, Foster; I worship them all. But a gal has to be built along modernist lines to walk the walk of Shrimpton, Hornby, Farrow, et al. Interestingly, Sassoon did for female hair in the 1960s what Coco Chanel did for female clothing in the 1920s. Her response to the emerging machine aesthetic was the cloche, a hat devoid of ornamentation that followed the line of the human head. But a gal could still whip off her cloche to reveal the fluffy, Marcel bob underneath – and I now bow my fluffy, unruly mop to these geniuses of hair, clothing and architecture.

Hexed again, or another idea that got away..

In geometry, a hexagon has six edges, or sides. On a regular hexagon, all of the sides are the same length and the total sum of its internal angles amount to 720 degrees, while its internal angles are individually 120 degrees. A hexagon is easy to visualise. Just think of the waxen honeycomb of the bee; it is made of a myriad of interlocking hexagonal cells. The cells interlock so that they take up the least amount of space, and the hexagon is the only polygon – apart from the triangle - that interlocks.
The bee ‘chooses’ to build her combs in a hexagon rather than a triangle, because the walls of a triangular cell would be longer and more fragile than the sturdier, hexagonal structure. The hexagon occurs elsewhere in nature. Ancient volcanic formations are often made of hexagonal columns of basalt, the most common volcanic rock. The rock is a crystalline solid, or a solid whose atoms and molecules are arranged in a repeating pattern, extending in all three dimensions. Even when solidified into monoliths, the rocks ‘remember’ the hexagonal shape. Before finishing this post, I thought of the most glorious marketing strategy…hexagonal honey jars…now why didn’t I think of that before? It turns out that many people already have...

http://www.modernbeekeeping.co.uk/item/175/8-oz-hexagonal-honey-jars-with-lids---box-of-94

Strategy in Stratford...

Ah, capitalism, the mechanism that promises so much, yet takes away so much more. Even since the west London Westfield shopping mall opened its doors, three years ago, I thought naively that the name ‘Westfield’ had some local significance, that there had once been a house, or street, or even hamlet of that name. But no, it is the name of a company – or group of companies – that has built a ‘Westfield’ in several UK locations.

Yesterday, fortune took me to Stratford. I had been there several years earlier, and in my innocence, expected to see the vistas as of five years ago. But, I had forgotten that Stratford is being ‘redeveloped’ in anticipation of a major sporting event, next year. Only a call of nature drew me into the new Westfield, the conveniences that were on the old plaza seeming to have vanished. It was horrible inside; overheated, with garish decorations and piped ‘seasonal’ music blaring everywhere. But when you’re desperate…ah me, what do I know? Maybe the good citizens of Stratford actually welcome a great banal, plastic mall being dumped strategically between the old train station and the new bus station?

Maybe they found crossing that main road to that older, grainier Stratford Centre just too much and possibly, too dangerous? Maybe the hordes of visitors expected in the town, next year, really do need another Boots, and another Marks and Sparks, and so forth…really, what do I know? But it all smacks of strategic capitalism to me, and I don't like it. Short of joining the woolly-hatted ones in front of St Paul’s, I don’t see what we can do about it. Over to you...

Making scents...

It is hard to believe now, but around about a decade and a half ago, I decided to venture into the making of cosmetics. After the world was taken over in the 1980s by nasty, big corporations there was a sudden rush back to nature in the 1990s. City workers sold their Barbican pads and suburban semis, and moved into the countryside to run ‘organic’ farms – was there ever any other kind? Entire tranches of a pampered, industrialized population turned their attention to personal counselling, reiki healing, jam making, jumper knitting, and more crafts than a coven of witches. Of course, I had to be in on the game. Farming was beyond me – never could stand the smell of manure – so I went in the opposite direction, scent-wise. Aromatherapy was the new cool, and making scents made perfect sense to me. Two (good) books on the subject and a set of oils later, my fingers were twitching to make facial concoctions, body lotions and rejuvenating potions.
No more of my hard-won cash disappearing into the coffers of Boots and Superdrug, I muttered, as I stirred a mixture of Brewer’s Yeast powder, almond oil and other forgotten ingredients, on my kitchen counter. So, why haven’t I knocked Jo Malone off the shelves? For starters, I didn’t understand the importance of preservatives in patent cosmetics and toiletries. Without them, you only have a limited time to use the homemade stuff. Then, it has to be stored in a refrigerator. Since I only own one ‘coolbox’, this meant tolerating food with a definite floral tang – and the sight of your homemade glop amid the comestibles. I’ll never forget the horror on a friend’s face when I inadvertently opened the fridge door and revealed the scatological loveliness of my face pack mixture in a clear, glass bowl. It was no small matter convincing her my place was perfectly hygienic. But most of all, I couldn’t bear the thought of never shopping again.
I just love buying cosmetics. I just love the glamour of it all, the whole experience; going into a well-ordered chemist store or cosmetic department and taking my pick of the elegant, sheeny bottles and jars on offer, going home and pouring over the glossy packaging of a product that promises perfect skin…aaah! At the end of the day, I can look up and say its because I was worth it…

Glitches and ellipses...

An ellipse is a closed curve that looks like a circle that has been squashed flat. Circles viewed from an angle – like the rings of Saturn – often look elliptical. Whereas every point on a circle is exactly the circumference divided by pii, divided by two in distance from the centre, a body would need a qualification in integral calculus to plot every point on the curve of an ellipse. The ellipse does not occur so readily in nature as the circle. Since a circle viewed from an angle can appear elliptical, Galileo thought he was seeing things when he plotted the path of a comet through the newly-fledged telescope. Well, he was. He was seeing an elliptical path, but the seventeenth-century genius thought it was all illusory. This was the only thing he was ever wrong about – apart from getting chummy with people who eventually betrayed him. In the meantime, I struggle to create a ‘simple’ ellipse with pin and string…

Age of Wisdom

I received one only this morning from a well-known organisation concerned with age; save yourself money and your loved ones worry and expense. They haven't stopped in the past year and a half; junk letters advertising life insurance policies, funeral expense plans, catalogues filled with 'age' aids like Stannah stair lifts, thermal underwear, incontinence gear, special shoes and walking sticks, and every bathroom aid imaginable for pulling onself in and out of bath and shower, on and off loo, and so on. My crime? A year and a half ago, I had the temerity to turn fifty - yes! Fifty, that grand old age that brings with it diminishing responsibility, decay and decreptitude...hang on! I'm still working my way through the works of Shakespeare. And after that, there is Webster, and Milton, and Camus, and...have these commercial chuggers never heard that the half-century is the dawning of the age of wisdom in man (and woman!), that the advancing years bring increased knowledge in life, deepening understanding, broadening philosophy? Instead of these eetie-tweetie, icky-ticky pastel-covered brochures with their patronising depiction of smiling, silver-haired models enjoying their twilight years, would someone kindly acknowledge my intellectual maturity and send me instead, books by ancients like Plato, Aristotle, Scorates....after all, soon I will be one of their number.

On track, at last...

In May 2009, I posted a column that included the paragraph: Just as we have been through the age of the mineral, vegetable, animal and human, the roads will no longer be dominated by hordes of bog-standard vehicles, but instead a mix of bicycles and ‘intelligent’ cars, attuned to specialist and special needs. Redundant plant and surplus labour can redeployed in one of the new ‘green’ industries, e.g., solar panel manufacturing. It is all easy to say, of course, but we have to face the future, and that future might just be now.
At the time, I was laughed from here to Tokyo. Now, newspaper columnist Alex Rayner has written: the golden age of motoring may indeed be over. (On the road to nowhere, Guardian Newspaper, 26 September, 2011) There will always be vehicles on the roads, of course. We have to get about, after all. But it is this ‘motorist as king thing’, that dates from roughly the 1950s, that is fading. For example, the percentage of 17 to 20 year-olds with driving licences fell from 48% in the early 1990s to 35%, last year. Apparently, possession of a licence is less cool of late, young people wanting to be defined by an ipad or smartphone, rather than a snazzy vehicle. However, it could also be a technology at play.
Already in Britain, there are a number of motor ownership and rental schemes in place; Streetcar, Zipcar and Whipcar, where, in place of buying a vehicle outright, you pay a sum of money to Toyota or BMW to buy ‘motoring time’. You can swap vehicles to suit your needs at the time; home removal van, family car for a holiday, or even hire a motor or bicycle. However, with these schemes, you will still need a driving licence, so roll out the ULTra system, driverless, electric ‘pods’ that run on guideways to specific locations, not unlike the Docklands Light Railway.
It will take time, planning and political will before this technology moves out of futuristic novels and into our everyday lives. Rayner quotes German entrepreneur, Stefan Liske: Cities such as London will, in ten years (have these vehicles) going along autonomously and you can hop in and out of them.
I can’t wait, really I can’t. Rayner fills the remainder of the feature with statistics that demonstrates how the wealthier among don’t necessarily want to travel more, but travel better – and ditto for the rest of us. This makes sense. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Time is too short to live it on wheels. Contemporary society has long needed a range of travel and commuting alternatives ranged between the poles of ground-shakingly expensive, private car ownership, and almost as expensive, inefficient and overcrowded public trains and buses. Let’s get it going – it could be the underpinning of the economy, after all.

Humble Pi...

When I was a little ‘un, I believed that the Greek number pi was called pi because it defined the circumference of a circle in relation to the diameter. Pies are round and so is the circle, see? Every school kid knows that pi = 3.1415….ad infinitum cm. If the diameter of a circle is 10 cm, then the circumference is 31.415….ad infinitum cm. Unlike the square, the circle and its solid, the sphere, occur everywhere in nature. Countless fruits are round, electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom in a circular path, and Earth and its orbit around the sun, are round. Why does the natural world gravitate (ooops!) towards circularity? In a perfect circle (actually quite rare) each point on the circumference is exactly the same distance from the centre. In a natural system where every piece of matter gravitates to the lowest level of energy, the circle pops up again and again.
The circle really is the microcosm that defines the macrocosm. In metaphysics, the circle is an important symbol of eternity, that is, without beginning and without end. Perfect, you might say, but like the moon, the circle has a dark side. A circular argument is one that no one can win because it goes round in circles. You can ride a bicycle (two circles) to get somewhere, but being trapped in a cycle means you are getting nowhere. Where do I finish this article?

Queen Anne Woman & Man

The Queen Anne house can be recognised by the curly-gabled façade. Objects protruding at its sides look like floral cake decorations. They are, in fact, hanging baskets. Queen Anne man is invariably a self-employed builder. He has to be, in order to maintain that fantastic Queen Anne gable. His wife is a cake designer. She derives endless fascinating inspiration from her dwelling place, baking cakes in the shape of a Queen Anne gabled house. Objects protruding at its sides look like hanging baskets. They are, in fact, floral cake decorations. When her efforts are documented in the local newspaper, Queen Anne woman attracts many customers all wanting cakes in the shape of a Queen Anne gabled house. The floral decorations come at extra cost. If you ask when Queen Anne lived or died, the QA family fall silent. That is, except for the youngest member, who is doing history at school. He mumbles something about ‘er who had her head cut off…

The Perfect Square

In the Oxford English Dictionary, the square is described as an equilateral rectangle, that is, a plane figure with four equal sides and four right angles. The square is an irreducible figure, one of the few in nature. There are no subdivisions in a square, only other, smaller squares. A figure is either a square, or it is not. QED.
The word square has entered our language to describe an entity or person that is solid, reliable, dependable, unmistakeable, e.g., a square meal, or a fair and square deal. But it has darker connotations. If a subject embraces definite, usually conservative, political views, or adheres to a certain mode of life, resisting all forces of change, we often describe him as square. Depending on your point of view, being square may or may not be a good thing. The square, born of Euclidean geometry, is almost always a human construct and almost never occurs in the natural world. Instead, we see it in architecture, in town planning, and it is used exclusively to construct the Platonic world of the chessboard. It is often used to represent the ideal, the unattainable, it being no accident that the mortarboard of the academic is square.

Wookey Cottage

Wookey Cottage is a small house with many windows, and gives the impression that many very little, very busy people live there. But you never see anyone, not even a Wookey man painting the bright pink walls, green window sashes and red door. There is an air of mystery about the place. The entrance is cowled and there is a spyglass in the door - could be the reason for your feeling of being watched?
In fact, there is a dweller, a retired man who worked as a railway clerk. He does not respond to your knocking on the door, so you take a trip round the scraggy little garden. There is a gnome with outstretched arm perpetually fishing in the pond that doesn't have any fish, and a dovecote without any doves - and a rose bower full of withered rose bushes. You stop to inspect a marble statue that is half-buried in the grass and a familiar shape darts out of the bushes and startles you. Now the reason for the lack of doves and fish becomes clear. It is the neighbour's cat. But there is still no sign of Wookey man.

Hall Stories

Many years ago, most people kept their telephones in the hall. Growing up in a telephone-free household, I pondered this, many a long hour. The only way to get a telephone account was to go to the one public company that offered them – far fewer people actually had one – and join a waiting list. At least one wisecrack has said that since public employees are considered of a lazy twist – note, I say considered – they didn’t want to move any further than the entrance to the house when putting in the telephone wiring. But I never bought any of it, having a theory of my own.
In most suburban houses, when few houses had central heating or decent seating, halls were chilly, comfortless places, devoid of privacy or intimacy – all the more reason to put the telephone there. For the majority of households, the making and/or taking of a call was such a momentous and/or expensive event, that the telephone had to be up front for all to see. The lack of seating combined with the presence of a winter mistral whistling through the eaves discouraged call maker/taker from talking too long, to the economic advantage of all parties.
Of course, it’s different now with teenagers paying for their own romantic follies through the medium of mobile accounts. It also means that they can conduct frowned-upon relationships in secret. There is downside to everything, it seems. Now, I ponder on whether the old or new way is the better – what do you think?

The Gothic Grange

The Gothic Grange. Gothic man does not want to be seen entering and leaving his house. Indeed, it is anybody’s guess where the front door actually is, since one is required to go round the outside of the house, searching the undergrowth for the sight of a doorknob on an ivy-covered wooden door. On this trip, the doorknob seeker is likely to be terrified by the sight of a sinister face staring through the diamond-pane of the ground-floored window. Gothic man would like us to believe that it is his Great Uncle Gus, locked up and grown mad over the years. But it is actually a mildewed, old portrait thrown in as a job lot when he bought the house.
Gothic man himself presents an alarming appearance. He wears shaggy beard, shaggy jumper, baggy trousers and shabby slippers. You will find out why as you enter the house; it is freezing. It also smells of mould. Gothic man would like you to think he inherited his pile, but he only bought it because it was going cheap when the previous owner couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments. The moth-eaten old trophy on the wall as you ascend the staircase was bought in a junkshop. The first room on the landing off the staircase has a pair of lancet windows, like those you see in an old church or castle. It is here that Gothic man keeps his computing equipment – he is actually a programmer, though he tells everyone that he is a poet.
Gothic man tried to keep a cat, but the comfort-loving beast deserted him for a centrally heated house at the other end of the road. The only evidence of livestock is a bat-shaped mobile hanging in the window. It comes into its own at night, when Gothic man turns on a red-shaded light. The bedroom boasts a turret. Here, Gothic man will tell you, a young maiden threw herself to her death, many years earlier, the night before her father was to give her in marriage to an undesirable suitor. But really, the only thing that ever fell from that window, pale and fluttering, was a pair of Gothic man’s own underpants that he was trying to dry after the clothes’ drier in the basement had broken down.

A life of harmony...

His alarm clock bleeps at five-thirty every morning. He spends ten minutes in the shower, ten minutes shaving, five minutes blow-drying, five minutes getting dressed and thirty minutes having breakfast. At six-thirty am precisely, he leaves home. At six-thirty pm precisely, he returns home, climbing the steps of the elevated portico, the entrance to the classic mansion. Nothing spoils the harmony of this façade. Classic man will not even park his car in front of the house, least it spoils the symmetry.

Inside the acanthus-scented dwelling, the visitor can minuet to piped Handel and Bach, witnessing a plethora of perfect triangles, rectangles and circles inherent in the decoration. Indeed, there is a triangle propped over every doorway. Ask classic man if he is a mathematician, he smiles mysteriously and touches the side of his nose. Columns flank the entrance to every room, the ornamentation on top of which denotes the use of said room. The discerning visitor will be able to tell what the following mean: a statue of Venus and Adonis, a plaster cast of grapes and vine leaves, a bronze boar’s head, a gilt chamber pot…

The Never-Ending Soap Opera or, Imperial Lather..

Imperial Leather, which has been around in one form or another since 1768, has never been so much a soap as an experience. As soon as I became old enough to care about such things, I demanded Imperial Leather gift sets for birthdays and for Christmas. How I relished the sensation of removing the glossy, red packaging from the beige, chamfered block, running my fingertip over that red and gold label, lying in warm, bubbling water and breathing in that heady, glorious scent taking me to places I never was. As the years went by, I dallied in other aromas, but now and again, I wandered back down memory lane, looking for that inimitable red packaging in supermarket and drugstore.
Just recently, it came to my notice that PZ Cussons has ceased to make Imperial Leather soap in 200g bars – said soap now only comes in 125g tablets. Mystery solved – since early this year, I have only been able to find the smaller size of soap. What a rude awakening – the old adage comes into play: use it or lose it. IL lovers, take action now. Use your favourite soap. Demand ever more IL products, or else…

Confessions of an E-queen: rubber cheese and other delicacies

Over the years, I have heard a multitude of protests against the phenomenon of ‘rubber cheese’, presumably the produce that comes ready-sliced and packed in plastic boxes. The company of these Stilton-addicted epicureans always makes me uncomfortable because, you see, I love rubber cheese. I love it, Lidl’s Schmelzkase being a particular favourite. I just love the sensation of the creamy, tangy, tasty stuff, melting on toast slice and tongue. And now that my low tastes have come out of the larder, be warned, there follows a confessional dossier of other excruciating addictions.
From my earliest days I have craved tomato ketchup, have thrilled to the sight of globs of the red stuff glistening atop golden chips and crispy fish. A youthful craving for Tuc biscuits, those salty, fatty slivers of sawdust and e-numbers left me with skin akin to Freddy Kruger. But this pales in comparison to my love of Pot Noodles, sauces dried in bags and, indeed, absolutely anything that required reconstituting. I was fascinated, and still am, by the notion that food could have the moisture squeezed out of it, be kept in suspended animation in foil packets and then be brought back to life when the consumer requires. Even the re-hydration process is alluring; the sudden rush of hot water, the gentle fizzing and popping as wizened husks of vegetable matter spring into being as green pea, orange carrot and red pepper – bless the scientists!
Any epicurean waxing lyrical about the ‘natural’ and the ‘organic’ can go bury himself in a pile of manure. And my (lack of) tastes do not stop at savoury, oh no. I love the sweet, too, every Frankenstein’s monster of tooth-rotting confection that the taste-chemists can come up with, please send gift-wrapped to me…

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?

I have just watched the DVD How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster? (Norberto Lopez Amado & Carlos Carcas, 2010), and all I can say is that it is a beautiful little movie about an outstanding architect in his twilight years, but who is far from declining in output, quantity or quality. That Norman Foster, who has already had one brush with mortality, won’t be with us forever, is a sad enough thought. More sad again, is the thought that I may never live in a place like Masdar City, the zero-carbon, zero-waste mini-city in the desert near Abu Dhabi.
As I watched the CG imagery of this place-to-be, a feeling of déjà vu crept over me. Many years ago, in my hapless beginnings as a creative writer, I wrote a sc-fi story – what aspiring writer hasn’t? – about a group of people in a zero-carbon, zero-waste city, where the streets were made for people, where cars were left outside the city walls and pedestrians, when they wanted to move from one side of the town to the other, travelled on an automated system below the level of the raised streets – aaah! By the same token, my futuristic city also embraced the shady streets and oases of green as Foster’s Masdar. My town was no utopia, however, nor a ‘totalitarian’ society, neither. There was still rich and poor, still deep class division, but rich and poor alike lived in an unpolluted atmosphere. Yes.
Too bad that I will never live the Metropolis dream, and it probably wouldn’t be a good idea, but there are some things worth salvaging. We have long trounced the notion of architect as social engineer, but I believe the idea of living in an unpolluted atmosphere, is one worth striving for. Nor is it an ‘impossible dream’. It is not that long ago since non-smoking employees were routinely exposed to the fallout of their smoke-happy colleagues. They don't get away with it, now. The zero-carbon city will happen, but for my generation and upwards, I fear it will be all too little, too late. What do other readers think?

Why I'm flying the flag for Kate M....

Will somebody please tell me: just what is wrong with the clothing of Ms Kate Middleton? I ask that question not as someone who finds anything wrong with the sartorial sense of the soon-to-be princess, but as someone who entertains the opposite view. In fact, I quite like her procession of pared-down coats and suits. They are exactly right on someone of her looks, age and, dare I say it, class.
The blue frock I could have left behind; too ‘eighties’ for me, but that’s just my taste. However, I would have, and still could kill for the black velvet coat. Again, just my taste in clothes, but to read the rants of the style columnists, you would think Ms Middleton had all the allure of a geriatric bag lady. In any case, who started this ‘princess-of-the-realm-as-style-icon’ thing? Is a drop-dead sense of style a requirement of her forthcoming job? In short, where is the precedent?
No doubt, as yet another fashion columnist suggested this week, they are all comparing Kate with her late predecessor. Well, yes, but Late Predecessor was hardly Lady Gaga. All I remember from the Age of Diana was a plethora of porkpie hats, awful frilly frocks and blouses, and a succession of decorative hosiery. Of course, Ms Middleton is beginning her royal career as someone much advanced in years – and learning – over Late Predecessor. And that is the point exactly. Some day, a fully-qualified Messiah will appear out of the clouds to single-handedly save the British fashion industry – has it not already been done? In the meantime, columnists, leave Kate to her elegant collection of genteel clothing. One day, we may all be wearing the same, branded as Kate M.

Remember those...?

The sight of an Activia-licking Martine McCutcheon swinging aloft in a post-mod take on suspended furniture brought the 1970s rushing back to me. Back then, I remember being thoroughly puzzled by the sight of a swinging basket chair in a newly-furnished suburban bedroom. Was it for him or for her to sit in, I wondered, since sharing the thing was nigh on impossible. And what the effect on the seated party was supposed to be, heaven only knew, since comfort was out of the question. Said party would only be able to teeter for a minute or so, before going in search of a real chair. I suspect the newly-weds used it to gracefully drape their discarded clothing upon each night, for a few years, before seeing the light and consigning the useless, dust-gathering shebang to an autumn bonfire. Well, we all have to grow up.
Another tooth-clencher is the memory of those ‘crinoline’ lampshades from the same era. I don’t know which was the most unsettling; the frightful, grinning plastic cadaver of a doll seated over the illumined area, or the garish bands of ruched fabric organised so as to travesty what was a most unattractive fashion to begin with. Or was it the sheer discomfort of being in company with a person who would even dream of putting such horrible schmuck in a place of prominence in the sanctity of their home – come back, flying china ducks! All is forgiven. Every age has its madness, I know. Two decades ago, many a motorist had a daily encounter with a seat cover made of wooden beads, and a pair of furry dice. More recently, matrons were going gaga over those arachnidan Philippe Starck lemon juicers. Maybe in ten years’ time, we’ll all look back in horror at the distorting of the human foot by a tide of flip-flops. In the meantime, my pen is gathering steam over carpeted kitchens, furry loo-seat covers and dancing plastic flowers – but that is for another day.

Wii conquer Wimbledon...

I have never been a ‘sportie’. From my earliest years, I hated having to chase a dratted ball around a pitch, either to get it to some place or stop it going to somewhere else – I was never sure which. School games were a nightmare. I simply couldn’t get to grips with the perverse plastic bubble that always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, namely, wherever I was. Why did it always seem to be shooting in my direction, however fast I ran from it? Why was it my job to stop it, or catch it, or whatever?
I didn’t invent the horrible game, nor lay down the tarmac pitch and paint the white lines, as mysterious and incomprehensible as prehistoric markings on a lump of old stone. I didn’t ask to be on the dratted pitch on a freezing Monday morning with a flock of lively, noisy females, whose credo seemed to be ‘I score, therefore I am’.
Even today, I break out in a cold sweat when I so much as hear a ball bouncing off of concrete. Netball was bad, volleyball horrible and tennis the worst of all.
In games like netball, you are shielded by gangs of said females – they did have their uses, after all – but in tennis, you are alone on the court, blindingly obvious for all to see. I couldn’t play the game, I just could not. I just could not run quickly enough to hit that white little blob that seemed to have a life of its own. When my long-suffering opponent cottoned on to this, she (if a nice person) made life easier by pitching the ball in my direction. But then, I just couldn’t return it to the ‘right’ part of the court. I always seemed to be ‘out’. Soon, I was ‘excused’ from tennis, at official levels. I grew up with a tennis phobia, unable even to watch Wimbledon for a goodly number of years. When I eventually overcame this, I found tennis an oddly watchable game, the more so because the television viewer is elevated slightly over the court. He or she sees what is happening on the entire pitch, the total picture, something the players cannot – just how do they do it?
When my young niece asked me to join in a game of screen tennis, thanks to a Wii delivered by Santa Claus, I had misgivings. No-one wants to look foolish in front of a very young relative., but, oh joy! The view on the screen is that of an elevated TV viewer, rather than the spot of a professional player. I threw myself into it. For the first time in my life, I saw the words game, set and match to… Delighted, I let little angel win the next game, and the one after that. One must encourage the young, after all.

No Mona Lisa?

Often, I speculate on what the world would have been like, if a certain Leonardo hadn’t been born in the town of Vinci, Tuscany, in 1452. By then, the Renaissance had sprung into being under the auspices of artists like Sandro Botticelli and Andrea del Verrochio. Without Leonardo, it would have been carried along by Michelangelo Buonarotti and Raphael Sanzio.
The world would not lack the helicopter, nor the submarine. Engineering teams in universities and in the better class of workshop would have subsequently developed these technologies. Nor did we need that vast collection of notebooks. William Harvey had laid down the human circulatory system by 1628 and in the following decades, Isaac Newton was busily unravelling the rainbow. On the balance, I would say the march of scientific discovery was not going to be hampered by lack of another genius. But, oh, what about Leonardo’s paintings?
Can you imagine a world without the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile? No generations of tormented men, no Nat King Cole hit song, no mysterious face drawing hordes of visitors to the Louvre museum – and without Leonardo slinking about Florence, Michelangelo would have been even more insufferably arrogant than he was, believing himself to be the only artist of note, in the universe. (The reader must refer to Vasari here.) In short, the scientific principles Leonardo happened upon would have been uncovered in the longer term, but the world would be greatly impoverished without his art. Even so, the multitude of drawings in his notebooks have inspired artists from Liechtenstein to Picasso – ah, there is another artist we could never have done without. Watch this space.

Lock Smith out...

In language and imagery, the key is both a symbol and very useful object. We talk about the key to the situation, with the same aplomb that we guard those items that allow access to our domestic and business kingdoms. The key came with the invention of the door, and the door has a particular importance as it opens and closes, makes visible and conceals. This has endowed the entrance door to a building with magical significance. In many cultures, the door is the subject of ritual, i.e., first-footing and carrying the bride over the threshold. The exit and entrance are one and the same, a fact not lost on surrealist artists like Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) and Max Ernst (1891 – 1976). In their paintings, open doors and windows appear as figurative routes to other modes of consciousness.
Ali Baba elided the key business with his cry of ‘open sesame’, but it is known that simple keys existed in ancient Greece and Rome. By medieval times, the chatelaine or keeper of the castle wore her keys on a belt on her waist, not only for convenience but as a visible symbol of her authority. By now, the key was also a symbol of power. In numerous medieval paintings, St Peter is seen holding a large key. The trade of locksmith had its own guild, the word ‘smith’ conferring a dark respectability to those with the knowledge to mysteriously open locked doors. The symbol of the guild was, of course, a key. By Enlightenment, people in high places began to take an interest in keys. Louis the Sixteenth was, reputedly, an amateur locksmith, a skill that did not save him and spouse, Marie Antoinette from an unfortunate end on the guillotine. Keys crept into literature.
In Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, locksmith Gabriel Varden is held to ransom until he opens the doors of Newgate prison. It is an act of protest by Chartist rioters, one that echoes the storming of the Bastille, in France. Alas, the danger to key-holding citizens have become all to apparent in our times. Many traditional entry systems have been replaced by magnetic cards, voice recognition, eye and face scanners, though these can be just as hazardous to the entry-authorized subject. When you think about it, it is better to have an object that you can throw to the infidels, and run...

Ceci n'est pas une movie?

I have just watched another one of those so-called compilation programmes (Great Movie Mistakes 2: The Sequel, presented by Robert Webb, BBC 3, January 30), and have come to one conclusion: boring. Aside from the (pop) corny name and the disorienting, quick-cut presentation style, what do programmes like GMM2 tell us, except that movie directors are human and do make mistakes. The entire format has raised questions in my mind. Who are these people who have seemingly nothing else to do by scan decades of film footage, and grow orgasmic when they spot a continuity error in the plot? Do they get paid for it, and how much? And are these errors so very deleterious of said movies, great and small, in any case?
So what if Johnny Depp’s dark glasses mirror the camera as he plays Willie Wonka, or Roger Moore is suffering from necktie confusion. Didn’t James Bond have a number of more pressing matters on his mind, like keeping the West secure against the nasty Commies, and the attractive young lady awaiting him in the hotel bedroom?
At one level, the errors will be of use to film historians in centuries to come. At another level, they raise questions about the nature of reality. A movie is a work of art; it is not ‘real’ any more than a book or painting is. The cinema audience knows this, as do the actors and the director. An error in a movie is akin to a pentimento in a painting, those charming blunders that become more apparent on the surface of an oil painting as it ages. But you don’t go into a gallery in search of the perfect painting, any more than a reader seeks the perfect book.
In any work of art, the artist seeks to create an illusion, one that can paradoxically be shattered by the over-earnest search for perfection by the artist. We all know that Leonardo’s grandly-dressed urban lady could not really have stood against a backdrop of fields and mountains, but from all over the world we flock to see the Mona Lisa. In my opinion, the worst thing they ever did during the Renaissance was to tell wannabee artists about Zeuxis and the grapes – but that is a story for another time.

Go compare?

The rumblings of discontent that were soft at first have grown louder and louder until they now reach a crescendo as loud and screechy as the advertisement in question – yes, that one, that dire travesty of an opera singer telling us to go compare. Newspaper columnists, footballers’ wives, my relatives, all, are rising in protest against Go Compare man. Yet, no-one seems to be able to do anything about him. Like the common cold, he just will not go away. My take?
I hate that man. I can’t stand him. I can’t stand his fright wig nor those twirly-twirly fake mustachios. I can’t stand the way they’ve stuffed his paunchy body into that evening suit. I can’t stand those cloying warblings that parody the entire notion of what real opera singing is – come back, Nessun Dorma. All is forgiven.
Just recently, I noticed that they have watered down the original advertisement into a monochrome, flickering, ye olde filme pastiche of its former self. But it is too little, too late. Go Compare man still takes centre stage, and an entire generation has been alienated from the opera. Significantly, in spite of his persistent bleatings, I still didn’t know what he was telling up to go compare, or how, or why. I took courage and paid a visit to the Go Compare website. To my horror I discovered that Go Compare man has an identity. He is named Gio Compario, writes a regular blog and, surprise, surprise, his blogging is just as appealing as his singing. Just recently, new words to his song have floated into my head. Join me now in singing I despair, I despair…

The Tangram...

Most board games leave me well, bored, but there are some delightful exceptions topping the boxed heaps of chaff. One of these is that tantalising Chinese puzzle, the tangram. Its origins are lost in millennia, and it arrived in America in 1815, shipped by a Captain M. Donaldson. It was an instant hit in the parlour-bound society of the West where countless ladies sat, looking for material to manipulate with relentlessly restless fingers. The tangram, also a brain teaser, proved an ideal distraction.
It consists of a square carved into seven definable geometric pieces, five triangles, a parallelogram and a small square, a fraction the area of its larger parent. These shapes can be formed into thousands of patterns that resemble people, animals, birds and so on. Their stylised nature is prescient of suprematism, an artistic philosophy that emerged in the early twentieth century. Kasimir Malevich found abstract, geometrical forms the embodiment of a higher reality. Whatever, there is something eminently soothing about the hours spent focused upon these shapes, forming and reforming them again.
The tangram presents a number of mathematical paradoxes best defined by experts in the many books written about it. The puzzle can be made of materials like plastic, cardboard, and so on. But for a more sensual touch, seek out a set in classy wood. My young niece has a ‘competitive’ version, where two players seek to outwit each other in constructing tangram forms selected at random from a deck of cards. But I would eschew the competitive element and simply get lost in the sheer pleasure got from working with ‘pure’ forms, a reminder that I once dubbed geometry visual poetry.