Exhibition of Paintings at Bingham Library

From now until the end of February I have an exhibition of recent paintings at Bingham Library. Opening hours are: Mondays 9 – 1 ; Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays 9 -7 ; Wednesdays 9 -12 ; Saturdays 9 – 4 ; Sundays closed.

Bingham Library is situated in Eaton Place, off the Market Place, and there is free car parking nearby (access via Newgate Street).

The works on display are unframed oil paintings. They are mostly townscapes, with locations in West Bridgford, Nottingham, and London. Details are as follows:

Autumnal North London    £80

Inspired by a visit to York Way in Islington

 

Browne’s and Bellamy’s    £100

The location is Cyril Road in West Bridgford. The title refers to former nearby residents

 

By the Park    £80

Imaginary West Bridgford. A hybrid of Holme and Albert Roads

 

Hickling    £80

The Grantham Canal basin

 

Hopperesque at Hoylake    £80

The breezy north west corner of the Wirral

 

Midland, bound for Cricklewood    £100

The title is from Sir John Betjeman’s “Parliament Hill Fields” (1945). An imaginary version of Lismore Circus, an area now demolished and rebuilt

 

Notting Hill night    £100

Ledbury Road, as it might have been before gentrification

 

Place de Dublin    £150

This strange road junction in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, the “Europe” quarter behind the Gare St Lazare, was also the subject of a famous 1877 painting by Gustave Caillebotte

 

Road near the Park    £100

Based on Edward Road in West Bridgford

 

Ryde Pier    £80

The pedestrian pier at Ryde, Isle of Wight

 

Summer Shadows    £150

Holland Park Avenue in west London

 

The Old School    £100

The path in front of Musters Road Infants’ School in West Bridgford. A Christmas Party is about to end, and a steam train on the adjacent Midland Railway has just passed. Otherwise, “Nothing has changed it’s still the same”.

 

The Test Match    £150

An optimistic view of a much loved pub in Gordon Road, West Bridgford

 

Weekday Cross Junction    £150

A Nottingham location, where the Great Central Railway entered the tunnel leading northwards into the Victoria Station. A spot now almost unidentifiable beneath concrete and trams

Happy New Year from the Robagraph

The Robagraph is back again for 2015. During the year I hope to be covering some of my creative pursuits, and making the occasional comment about transport proposals and anything else that brings out the inner rant in me.

Learning from Dawlish

The UK Environment Agency has been taking a lot of stick in the last few days, and apparently deservedly so, given its evident role in the causation of the disastrous floods in Somerset. The only dealings I have had with this body, over a trivial matter a few years ago, revealed an astonishing level of incompetence and bureaucratic absurdity (and that was in dealing with just one person – so think what an entire organisation can achieve !). I had written to point out that an information board provided by the Environment Agency not far from where I live contained several gross factual errors. The initial response I received thanked me for my Freedom of Information request, and supplied details of how to proceed. So I wrote again, trying to explain my purpose – which was to help the Agency improve its educative service to the public, by providing correct information. The reply came back that the board was nothing to do with them, so I then supplied photographs which showed the words “Environment Agency” plastered all over it. The next reply was that the matter would be forwarded to the appropriate person, but was immediately followed up by a letter from the same person, telling me that the board was not their responsibility – and seemingly unaware of our previous correspondence. At this point, deciding that sarcasm, anger or even humour would be lost on this witless minion, I gave up. I would like to think that today she’s up to her eyes in it in Somerset, but I’m very confident that she’s somewhere far more comfortable.

If you’re going to provide information as a public service, it’s important to get it right. If you can’t believe the Environment Agency when they’re dealing with establishable, uncontroversial, and fairly trivial facts, why should you believe their stories about climate change, or follow their advice when you have reason to believe you are  threatened with flooding? Oh no, you mustn’t object; they’re the experts you see, they understand these matters. The Environment must at all costs be protected, even if submerged by water or forested with wind turbines. No, not the countryside; The Environment. Sorry, you’re not getting it, are you. Not the land, not that place where some people live and work and find beauty, as they have done for many generations, no, not that, that isn’t important, but The Environment. That’s what matters. Being green, being sustainable, being carbon-footprint-guilt-free, protecting the rights of newts, rodents, and unusually brass-necked tits.

But enough of Lord Whatsisname. One of the most memorable images from this disastrous week in the West Country has been of the wrecked main line railway at Dawlish. This has resulted in the loss of rail services from Plymouth and Cornwall to and from the rest of the country, a situation which is likely to pertain for some time. Inevitably suggestions have arisen concerning the resurrection of lines long closed – in particular the direct inland cut-off between Exeter and Newton Abbot – while other comments have questioned the relevance of current discussions about HS2 when parts of the existing network are so in need of attention. I hope these suggestions and arguments will bear fruit, inevitably after the present crisis has subsided.

One thing we appear not to have is a national railway strategy (or indeed any kind of national strategy as far as I can see, other than for self-destruction), although doubtless there are think tanks, working parties (another fancy cake, dear ?), focus groups and quangos all expensively beavering (or, indeed, quangoing) away at such things, well insulated from reality and from each other, as well as local groups and rail professionals who know their history and are cognisant of the issues. I’ve recently been reading books on railway art and architecture, and on closed branch lines and stations, and the thing that struck me was that – even until well into the 1960s – there was so much stuff – so many tracks, alternative routes, stations, locos, carriages, personnel. There was a sense of safety in numbers; if something went wrong, there was always something you could do about it, someone nearby who would help, something else available  – well short of having to call in what’s left of the military or disturbing some fatuous slob in Westminster. Go to some other countries today – Belgium is a good example – and you’ll see how it used to be here, plenty of spare stuff, extra tracks, other routes, alternatives. Call them old fashioned? I wouldn’t. Here, however, ruthless efficiency (oh yes ?) has been achieved so completely that when disaster strikes there is no alternative, no resilience, no built-in redundancy to call upon.

Cornwall may have been cut off by exceptional weather conditions, but if you look at a railway map of Britain you will see that there are only two routes across the Anglo-Scottish border (so, then, only two sets of customs posts, minefields and guard dogs needed after 18th September), and only two major routes between England and Wales. Post-Beeching the network is so skeletal that major incidents – floods, other types of weather damage, accidents, terrorism – can have a paralysing effect across large areas. There are many pinch points in the network that are highly vulnerable to these sort of events; a glance at a map will readily identify them.

One of the precursors of the internet, the US Darpanet, was built with the idea that if any part of it got knocked out, e.g. by a nuclear strike, information could easily be re-routed. When planning HS2, or other improvements to the network, it will be as well to bear this kind of strategic thinking in mind. Sadly, it takes a meteorological  calamity to make the point.

Why Cinders did not go to the Hôtel

There’s a certain character who is ubiquitous on the telly these days. Allegedly he’s suffered personal misfortune in recent times, so I won’t name him or be too hard on him. The Beeb is evidently trying to find something for him to do, something that he can do. Some time ago he did a history of the railways of Great Britain that included a lot of film of  himself doing various things, like pretending to be a navvy and being in Canada, while managing to omit both Brunel and Beeching; more recently he’s appeared on quiz shows looking like a spare part, and the last time I had to switch him off was when he announced that Hitler came to power in 1934. I get heartily sick of being warned about news items containing flash photography; this particular individual should come with a “faulty fact” warning.

At the beginning of the year this hapless soul was scheduled for some other worthy venture at exactly the same transmission time as the new mini-series of “Sherlock”. What a shame. This mischance does, however, provide a link to a discussion of other factual errors. “Sherlock”, starring The Cumberbatch, with Martin Freeman as Dr Watson, is hugely enjoyable television, albeit baffling at times, and the episode featuring Holmes’s best man speech at Watson’s wedding was simply wonderful. The initial use of “postmodernist” cut-and-paste techniques, head-up displays, tag clouds, vast data bases and other I.T. references was inspired and compelling, and not incompatible with the original Holmes. Sadly, by the time of the last episode in the most recent season, the fast moving exhilarating irreverence had degenerated into a load of self-referential, nod-and-wink, smirking metafictional tosh. Amusing, but tosh all the same.

The first episode in the recent series featured a “lost” Underground station between Westminster and St James’s Park stations on the District and Circle lines. “Lost” tube stations are a well researched niche fascination, much is known about them (York Road, City Road, Down Street and South Kentish Town among many others) and one would not have to be particularly fanatical to know that such a station – supposedly directly beneath the Houses of Parliament - does not exist. Never mind, it might do, for that is in the nature of this slightly paranoid transport specialisation. Fair enough.  Holmes and Watson were indeed shown on location in the splendid concourse of Westminster station. As one would expect, other locations, perhaps the disused Aldwych station, were used for filming. Fine. What was unacceptable, and something that millions of people would have spotted, was that on the supposed CCTV images, a deep level tube station was shown – I don’t know which one it was, but it was definitely not a District Line station. Presumably it would have been possible to film in the correct location. Viewers of “Sherlock” are not likely to be stupid; one felt insulted. Apparently there is an entire website devoted to the glaring errors in this episode.

OK, that was fiction, and the annoyingly evident inaccuracy perhaps doesn’t matter very much. Errors in supposedly scholarly works are less excusable. I’ve recently been reading a biography of Napoleon, which refers to the exhumation of the well-preserved body in St Helena, then the transfer of ashes to and through Paris, and finally the re-burial of the body under the great dome of the Hôtel des Invalides. In passing the author, a proper historian, not the hapless TV presenter, refers to the Invalides dome as one of the world’s great domed spaces, like Westminster Abbey. Oh, not St Paul’s Cathedral then? I wonder what line he was on (I suspect him of being an American).

Confused, I read and re-read the section. Was the mighty emperor buried or cremated or what? The impression I formed was that the author didn’t actually know, was copying from some other confused source, and wasn’t taking any chances. I mean, it’s kind of important, and it would be embarrassing to get it wrong. I looked at the English language version of the official Hôtel des Invalides website, which – astonishingly – said much the same thing: body, ashes, body. Recourse to Wikipedia and several other sources established that it was a body throughout, but that the French expression “La retour des cendres” refers specifically to this postmortem Napoleonic homecoming, and that “cendres” refers not to cremated ashes or cinders, but to mortal remains. “The Return of the Ashes” is something quite a few people would like to see ! It would have helped if the biographer had bothered to unpick the details for us.

Some people like to slag off Wikipedia for supposed inaccuracies; used sensibly, I think it’s wonderful, and I’d like it to get even more wonderful, more detailed, more comprehensive in its coverage. Though, you would kind of expect errors in a resource like that. What is more worrying, though, is when supposed authorities – the makers of would-be convincing fictions, historians and biographers – are seemingly happy to allow errors and very doubtful assertions through in this way.

The death of Colin Wilson, encyclopaedic outsider and cultural portal

I was saddened to learn last week of the death at the age of 82 of one of my earliest intellectual heroes  - though some would sniff “pseudo-intellectual”. Colin Wilson was a man curiously both slightly behind and slightly ahead of his time. He was an autodidact with an almost nineteenth century concern for self-improvement, a man with highbrow tastes seemingly unimpressed with modern popular culture, and someone driven by an urge for knowledge and experience who battled with his own information explosion long before the internet made that phenomenon a commonplace for every active, thinking, culturally engaged person.

The basic facts of Colin’s life are well known, including the hype - the early instinct for adopting a mediagenic persona (polo neck sweaters, sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, the horsewhip episode) – and the unwise declarations of genius which were soon to backfire on him with such long lasting and devastating effect, revenge from the stuffier, less imaginative parts of the English establishment with whom he had not been to school or university.

My first awareness of him, in my mid-teens, a decade after his first (and possibly best) book “The Outsider”, was when he co-authored a rather juicy encyclopaedia of murder which provided a factual background for furtive explorations of dubious locales that I made with a friend, seedy sites that included Hilldrop Crescent, Rillington Place and Hanbury Street. It was evident to me from the start that Colin was a tad pervy, exactly in what way subsequently  revealed with embarrassing detail in his later autobiography, “Dreaming to Some Purpose”. Too much information, Colin.

And that was always it: too much information. As the years passed he became a one man encyclopaedia not just of crime but of … everything, or so it seemed. Eventually almost a self-caricature.

Over the years I gradually caught up on his back catalogue and bought each new book that he brought out. I was never very keen on his novels, but I devoured his non-fiction avidly and was intrigued by his concepts of, for instance, Faculty X and the St Neot margin. His writings acted for me like a portal to the works of philosophers, psychologists and others who otherwise would have remained unknown to me, at least for a long time; his writings provided a gateway and a short cut into areas that I was unfamiliar with, having had primarily a scientific education. Probably the most important thinker he “turned me on to” was Abraham Maslow, with his now-famous hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualisation and his accounts of peak experiences. I could relate to that kind of thing, and to many other descriptions of essentially subjective experiences that were rarely discussed elsewhere, even in textbooks of psychology. Especially in textbooks of psychology. Colin wrote about things, as it were, from the inside. But he was obviously not quite respectable, for he was too omnivorous, not discriminating enough, with too evidently a taste for intellectually dodgy characters, would-be supermen and deviants of all kinds; there were far too many references to sadism and to what he always spelled as “fetichism” (which made it sound even kinkier than it was) - yet that degree of self-revelation was part of his attraction. Emerging into public life in the same year as Elvis, he built up quite a fan base around the world.

Subjective experiences like involuntary memory, peak experiences and déjà vu – things which, though unusual and disturbing, I thought everyone had - were fascinating to me, and Colin Wilson’s output furthered my interest in what I would call “normal” subjectivity. When he published “The Occult” I was briefly enthralled, but within a few years I began to feel that he had been “taken in” by many aspects of parapsychology and mysticism, which is not to say that even now I necessarily dismiss all such claims. Indeed, Colin was right at the leading edge of the 1970s popular infatuation with all things that became dubbed New Age. I remember going to Claude Gill’s bookshop in Oxford Street sometime in the mid-seventies; Uri Geller was there bending keys, on (I believe) his first visit to Britain, and he kept talking about Colin Wilson, asking if anyone knew him, and he said he was meeting him the following day. I don’t know if Geller is genuine - no one does - but from where I was standing I was convinced – perhaps fooled. Even so, my interest in parapsychology soon declined, and my scepticism grew. I felt that Colin may have been gullible in some respects; I was happier with “normal” subjectivity than with the supposed “paranormal” variety.

For me, Colin was an inspiration not only for what I read, but an encouragement to try writing myself. In more recent years I’ve read anything by or about him that came my way, rather more critically than formerly, while becoming increasingly irritated by his predictable lazy repetition and recycling of earlier themes. But there are other interesting aspects of the “flavour” of the man that enhance his appeal – for instance his association with Soho in the Fifties and Notting Hill in the Sixties, moody periods and places in our recent cultural past – the Angry Young Men, “Absolute Beginners”. And there is the parable of the provincial lad growing up in a town of – as he described it “cow like people” – feeling the draw of the metropolis as a place where he might meet like minded souls and achieve the success he craved; this is such a frequent and popular trope in modern British cultural life.

Colin was someone I could relate to. As a young adult, unsuccessful, provincial, often lonely, working in uncongenial surroundings but interested in ideas, in creativity and psychological phenomena, it was easy for me to identify (pretentiously, perhaps) with the “outsider” condition that he described – but then, unfortunately, so do the Anders Breiviks and Mark Chapmans of this world. The five percent of the population who fall into this bracket, according to Colin, include some very unpleasant people indeed, as well as your average misfit, not to mention your average person who perhaps thinks a bit differently from others and has different interests and concerns from the majority (me on a good day), plus the occasional oddball genius (Bowie fits the mould perfectly and, indeed, once cited “Col” as an influence). Outsiders are motivated by, driven by or tormented by their awareness of mortality, of the limited time available to try and make sense of “it all”, the few years in which to try and leave something behind that will survive a short while and establish that “they were here”. They struggle with the basic existential conundrums long after many people abandon them as impossible, and seek to make the best use of the talents they have been given, and of their allotted time here. It may be, of course, that “the outsider personality” is an overblown concept, and that we all sit somewhere on a spectrum of relative outsiderness.

Where Colin’s work particularly strikes home to me is his urge to devour information. In “The World as Information” (published by Intellect in 1999, immediately before the internet became such a central aspect of our lives), I described in some detail his huge appetite to consume and digest knowledge. In various publications he has given figures for the number of books and recordings he possessed, which were gradually taking over his Cornish bungalow, along with outbuildings constructed specially to house them. For instance, in “Dreaming to Some Purpose”, published in 2004, he wrote: “In July 1961 I note that I had 5,000 books and 1,500 records in the house. By 1963, I had 10,000 books and 4,000 records. Today I have about 25,000 books and the same number of records. This probably goes a long way towards explaining why we never had any money”. In the era we are now entering, when increasingly we are encouraged not to collect but to freely download from the internet, one wonders how he would have reacted and coped.

Being an outsider offers plenty of scope for pathology, but charitably one may say that Colin’s collecting instincts were part and parcel of his larger than life personality, the central motivation that drove his career as an author, and a feature that made him – to the distant reader – so human, so likeable, so easy to identify with. The outsider, whether it’s an exaggeration or not, is a personality type that increasingly we will encounter and will need to understand, to accommodate and to enable to succeed. Whatever the potential dangers, it is so often outsiders who drive things forwards, rather than those who are at ease with themselves, psychologically comfortable - with or without the infamous pram in the hall.

Arguably, Colin’s best output was early on. He once said that he had to write in the same way that a dog with fleas has to scratch; surely, he wrote too much, but quite apart from the dog that had to be scratched there was also the wolf that had to be kept from the door. With his passing, a serious re-evaluation of the life and works of Colin Wilson, especially one in the context of relevance to present day concerns, would be timely.

Colin Wilson was born in Leicester on 26th June 1931 and died in Cornwall on 5th December 2013.

Making it up as you go along

It was amusing to see the Fat Controller on the news this week, launching the microminimally speeded up East Midlandzzz Trainzzz services to London, with four whole minutes shaved off some journey times between Derby and London, and an entire minute saved between Leicester and the capital. He failed to mention that, in the new timetable, some of the services from Nottingham by this most unattractive of train operators are actually taking longer.

When asked whether this thrilling, paradigm-shifting, quantum-leaping acceleration that so underwhelmed interviewed potential passengers didn’t obviate the need for HS2, he countered that more freight was travelling by rail, that we needed more capacity and that, er, more people were travelling. So, three absolutely compelling reasons then. Or maybe two (but what’s mere numbers to politicians, eh ? It’s always being right that counts). Travelling into Birmingham last weekend I couldn’t but help notice the cleared site adjacent to the Curzon Street relic that will form the projected HS2 terminus in the Second City, and I also observed how far it was from New Street and from most of the city centre.

Birmingham, as both a major city and a national transport hub, needs a radical improvement to its rail services, but neither HS2 nor the current redevelopment of New Street Station are the answer. Something with twice (or some multiple, I’m sure the experts would know) the capacity of New Street, incorporating HS2, is needed; perhaps, somehow, a New Street “deep” station, to use the terminology of the Berlin Haupbahnhof. It would cost a vast amount of money and cause huge disruption, but other countries – the Netherlands, for instance – are tackling similar problems in an imaginative way. If only the inspiration lying behind the splendid new Library of Birmingham could be redirected towards relieving the desperate congestion of the existing rail facilities.

More positively, I’ve now completed my promised painting, and though it hasn’t photographed very well, here it is.

It’s a composite, located in a semi-fictional setting in the vicinity of Westbourne Park and Kensal Town in west London, between the Paddington Canal and the Western Region main line, and it has the provisional title, with obvious debts to Algernon Newton and Edward Hopper, of “Terrace by the canal”. Hope you like it.

 © R. Abbott 2013

Hideous buildings for hideous people

This last week has revealed new depths of the quality of UK financial institutions, namely the revelations about the Co-op Bank and its fatuous chairman. This news is hardly a surprise. When I was at school nobody of any intelligence wanted a career in finance, and the only person I knew who became a banker obtained one ‘O’-level at the second attempt, and that was in woodwork. He was, as far as I know, basically honest, though, merely not very bright. We keep hearing how important it is that our bankers don’t run off to Frankfurt or Hong Kong or somewhere, but really, who needs them?

What is surprising, though, at least to someone of a sensitive aesthetic disposition, is the way that the City of London has been allowed to erupt with massive, bulky, bizarrely shaped excrescences of no recognisable geometry, containers for financiers, placed so as to cause maximum visual offence, as per the illustration above. Who has permitted this? Has Boris fallen down on the job (as it were)?

Where’s the Luftwaffe just when you need them? Frankfurt and HK have hideous skylines already; let the bankers go there and let us have our City back, free from shards and spikes, gherkins and gonads, cheesegraters and mutant mushrooms.

On other points – “Tourist In Your Own Town” is delayed while I try to understand US tax requirements (useless financial bureaucracy again), and the painting of Kensal Town, referred to in the previous posting, is nearing completion, and will be featured very soon.