The Importance of being Spotted

Spots and dots, what do they do? Leap, walk, march and polka over yards and yards of fabric, breaking up po-faced planes of plain colour into exuberant labyrinths that evoke fun, innocence and happiness. Their expounders range in type and temperament from Damien Hirst to Cath Kidston, to Pudsey Bear. The more brightly-coloured the spots are, the better, bringing to mind Smarties, those mouth-watering candies of childhood.
Coloured spots evoke long, sunny, salad-filled days; flowers, rainbows, babies, nursery walls and cuddly toys. No wonder there is a dessert called Spotted Dick. And how can you not love a critter that is covered in spots? Just look at the adorable Dalmatian. Spots denote nobility too, witness the invincible cheetah. Any successful actor/singer/writer will tell you how they went from nowt to acclaim the day they were spotted – har!

Why I love ducks!

The duck has been getting a bad press lately, especially when the media uncovered a number of them living in Westminster-subsidised housing. Indeed, our ire has been such that we are in danger of throwing away the meat with the left-over sauce. After all, the duck has contributed to so many arenas of life, from the arts to the dinner table, that it deserves a sound-out now and again.
Throughout the ages, the duck has inspired creativity, from those wonderful dog-and-duck public house signboards, to the flocks of flying ornaments that grace the walls of household halls up and down the country, to the Marx Brothers movie of 1933, Duck Soup. The duck has contributed to the English language with words like ‘duckboard’ and ‘duckweed’. The duck has provided a word that means a female bird, a way of avoiding things, a type of cloth, and an indispensable bathroom-furniture cleaning thingummy.
So let’s not begrudge our feathered friend his subsidised home. After all, the taxpayer provides housing for humans. Instead, on this fine spring day, let’s sound for this web-footed wonder, one great, resounding quack….

When men wore tights...

Some time ago, I pronounced on the extraordinary cult of the female leg and how, in order to get anywhere in this world, a girl has to have hers eternally on display. It wasn’t always thus. In the Middle Ages, it was the male leg that endowed a man with status, while drawing orgasmic gasps from many a young maid. Just look at all those medieval images of men in tights. No wonder Robin and his merry men led such a successful Sherwood Forest campaign.

A few centuries down the line and Renaissance ladies swooned at the sight of illustrious alpha males such as Henry VIII prancing about in court dances devised especially to show off their pins – no wonder the Monarch drew six wives! The cult of the male leg continued until the eighteenth century although by now the appeal, like the leg, had been halved. Knee breeches covered the top half of the shank while the calf and foot were resplendent in silk stocking and buckled shoe.

By the nineteenth century, the cult of the male leg was on the wane, what with the advent of long trousers. However, there is in existence a painting of the young Queen Victoria in company with her beloved Albert, (name of the artist escapes me). The bright, red boots that encase his legs signal dangerously his most (to Queen Vic) erogenous zone. The curtain rises on the twentieth century and along with it, the hem of the female skirt. The male leg is dead forever. Methinks, what irony? Just as woman is freed from her whalebone corset, she is handed another zone to maintain. Ah me, if I could go back in time, it would be to when knights were bold and maidens young and old could conceal their less than perfect pins under full-length skirts. I’ll bet it was much warmer, too.

Dolls, dolls and their little molls.

Over the years, dolls have become increasingly sophisticated. In my day, it was enough for a doll to be dressable and have glorious long hair to tease into different styles. Since then, we have seen dolls that walk, talk, cry, feed from bottles, perform bodily functions, sing, dance…maybe I go too far? But I foresee a time when a doll will have to be in possession of a PHD if it is to attract the love of a little girl. On that note, am I alone in finding very sophisticated dolls kind of creepy?
But maybe the little ‘uns are wiser than the toy pundits? Among her Christmas presents, my little niece received the simplest, silliest doll you ever did see, its only claim to sophistication being a pair of eyes that open and shut. Doll has a bald, plastic head and a soft, non-jointed body dressed in the daftest baby outfit since they made high heels for the little ‘uns. But friend, my little niece loves that doll. You only have to say: Baby, bring out your baby and Little Niece totters away, then returns with toy buggy bearing doll. For a short while, Little Niece totters around with buggy, proud as a Victorian matron on a seaside promenade. Then, she takes doll from buggy, hugs and kisses her. It brings tears to my eyes, really it does. I say again, the toddlers are wiser than the toy technologists. Long may simplicity – and simple dolls – reign.

The Brickmaker's Arms

I am not one for Christmas television but I have to make mention of BBC's Victorian Farm. I could have done without their cracker-making and bon-bon pressing, and as for their marbled wrapping paper, if a body wants to cover their gifts in layers of Jackson Pollock-had-a-nightmare type stuff, then I can think of easier ways to bag it then by filling a vat with expensive, coloured dyes. Nor can I see me stitching flannel underwear or making pots of frightful goo to rub on chilblains. Outside was better. I adored Clumper the horse, loved their exploration of early farm technology, and the scenes of their choosing a ram to impregnate breeding ewes had me rolling in hysterics. The most intriguing item, however, was their demonstration of Victorian brick-making.
Farmers generally didn't make bricks but the team wanted to restore a derelict forge with authentic brickwork, so they called in experts in historical brick-making. Their techniques were a revelation; the preparation of the clay, the moulding of the bricks in wooden frames, their drying out and firing. The last process was the most captivating of all. There is nothing spookier than a kiln filled with items for firing being sealed with spade-loads of clay, then being lit and fed with fuel for days to keep the furnace at the required temperature.
There was another method, more fuel-efficient than kiln firing but taking longer to complete. It involved building rectangular pyres of thousands of bricks, covering the outside layers with clay and then firing with furnaces lit beneath the stacks. According to their firing expert, entire suburbs were built this way, millions of bricks at a time fired on pyres a quarter of a mile long. The one big advantage of this method was that the bricks could be fired, then used on site, rather than relying on the mass-transportation needed for industrially-fired bricks.
It makes my hair stand on end, the thought of suburban skies alight at night with the glow of millions of baking bricks.
The VF team had, of course, great fun during it all, throwing about bits of building history along with potatoes they baked in the ashes of their pyres. It was all very comfortable, filled with camaraderie and self-congratulations - and totally belie-ing the conditions that brickmakers actually lived in. Readers of Bleak House (Charles Dickens) will recall the squalor and misery of the brick-making family, a strand in the complex plot of the story. This family was lost to that Victorian scourge, alcohol, but in reality all brick-makers lived short lives, succumbing to lung disease from ingesting dust, fumes and other byproducts of their trade. Or they simply dropped dead from years of punishing, unrelenting labour, the average of death being forty. They say civilization was built on sacrifice, a sobering thought on looking about the average, Victorian-built suburb.

Oh dear, no deer...

It is almost a year to the day that I reported on an extraordinary happenstance in the south of England. A group of angry people claimed that they were duped into handing over money to gain entrance to a “Lapland” theme park in Hampshire’s New Forest. When the punters arrived, they found themselves in a muddy field surrounded by wooden builders’ hustings, instead of the expected vista of Arctic snow. The only visible “reindeer” were ponies with antlers attached. According to one punter, the promised Christmas bazaar resembled a car-boot sale. At a level, these people had a grievance. All had young children and many had travelled a long way to the rather remote Lapland, believing it be an off-shoot of two other, more successful Laplands. To make a long story short, the angry punters were reputed to have “rioted” in frustration and Lapland was shut down only two days after it opened.

On reading all this I wondered: why do we go to theme parks, at all? Theme parks and themed events bring a dimension of fun and fantasy into our humdrum lives. We go to a theme park in the same spirit that we go on summer and winter vacations. When we return from afar we pour over our photographs and souvenirs, treasuring them as little pieces of the places we have left behind. The desire for pastiche is as profound as the need to keep possession of a lock of hair from the head of a loved one. Without artifice life would be unthinkable. Without our ability to create artefacts we would still be living in trees. Man has pushed this atavistic longing further and further. It brought the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the ancients, gothic cathedrals to medieval citizens and Stourhead to Gloucestershire. In more recent times it has brought us Las Vegas, every Disney park on the planet - and Palm Jumeirah.

Christmas is the ultimate pastiche. We all create it in our own way, every year; in our dwellings, shopping malls, streets, hospitals, schools and factories. Just take one plastic tree strung with baubles, a supply of wine and mince pies, add a few people and – hey presto! Wherever it’s at, it works. To pay a pile of money to travel many miles to find seasonal pastiche in a place that is a take-off of someplace else seems rather sad to me. Of course, it was novelty punters were seeking, rather than the place. – what will we do when the novelties run out, I wonder.

The Nature Of Modernism

Early last week it was reported that the roof of the London 2012 Aquatic Centre has been lowered into place at the Olympic site in Stratford. Designed by leading architect, Zaha Hadid, it is described as an iconic, wave-shaped structure. Indeed, one newsreader compared it to the sting-ray, a large, tropical fish.

The Aquatic Centre has been paralleled with the Birds’ Nest stadium in Beijing in that both structures have been inspired by nature. This has directed my mind towards other parallels between nature and modernism. The nose of an aeroplane reminds me of nothing so much as the head of a swan. Trains – when they’re not on strike – thread their way about the countryside like giant, speeding worms. And certain types of speedboats duck and dive through water like trusty dolphins. Architects like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright took nature to heart.

Corbusier’s Villa Savoye built in 1929 offered the dweller an unparalleled view of the surrounding countryside. In summer, those famous strip windows were filled with the greenery that grew outside while on top of the building was the famous “natural” sun bed. Falling Water, built by Frank Lloyd is fused so completely into its environment, that it is impossible to separate one from the other.

The late JG Ballard famously said that modernism lacked mystery and emotion, but I always disagreed. Modernism won’t sweep you back to a twilit past but fly you to a heady and exciting present. Interestingly, while leafing through my copy of The International Style (Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, 1932), it struck me how dated much modernist architecture and furniture now seems. I’ll bet one day, in a few hundred years or so, some old coot will be waxing nostalgic over shiny surfaces, chrome trim and streamlined bodywork.