Nurofen puns downhill

Somehow, in my morning dream, I knew it was 1st August. In a dream shopping street somewhere – possibly Broad Street, Reading – I commented to my dream companion, “Would you believe it? August 1st, and Christmas decorations up already”. Well, it won’t be long, as they say.

Traditionally, in the early part of life, August is a dead month. After the intense scarlet of June and the blazing orange of July, the best we can hope for is a polluted murky magenta, or more likely a grey Deganwy day, one accompanied by the disgusting odour of sandy seaweedy bilingual  public conveniences /cyfleusterau and steamy plastic rainwear. August is the one month of the year that you don’t get to learn in French, août, ironically the one month for which it would be handy to have some advice on spelling and pronunciation. OK, it’s probably the sort of sound a rude French owl – owling in pain and in need of analgesia - would make (not so much a discreet aspirin as a silent aspirate, un hibou profane (oh, do shurrup – Ed.)). August is the hiatus between the long sweaty haul of revision and exams and the return, ideally on a refreshingly nippy September morning, to new intellectual challenges and opportunities.

At the start of this year I blogged complainingly about the discomfort involved in starting a new year, and in having to build it up out of nothing. By August, I’m comfortable in the year, and ready to enjoy coasting downhill again towards Christmas. Yes, I’m ready for that. Once September is out of the way time will speed up alarmingly through the all-too-brief season of getting serious again, of getting things done, of increasing soup frequency and decreasing salad obligations, more plausible excuses for comfort food, the lights coming on earlier and earlier and – eventually – before tea. Sodiumtime. Bliss.

 
August is the month for taking stock and recognising that one hasn’t done half the things one intended to during the year, but there’s still time … When panic finally kicks in it will be too late anyway, and at that point the projects that one really doesn’t want to undertake can be effortlessly deferred into next year. However, so far this year I feel smugly that I have attended to my blogging duties satisfactorily. And as for this week’s effort, well, that’s it.

Quarter Poundbury with Cheese

Over recent months, while working on my projects related to subjective approaches to geography – “Tourist In Your Own Town” and “The Perfect Spot”, both still seeking a publisher – I’ve been struggling with the seemingly mutually-defining duo of place and non-place. Increasingly I’ve been finding it hard to define what a “non-place” actually is, particularly as some of the regularly considered candidates – motorway service areas, theme parks, business parks, retail malls – are such crucial components of our everyday existence, and also considering that the less well known parts of our towns and cities often display quirks and character in ways that more celebrated districts fail to do. Gaps between “places” have a placefulness of their own. Truly awful places are still places.

Following the standardised approach to both menu and service adopted by the 37,000-plus McDonald’s outlets worldwide, a convention has arisen that one may prefix any commonplace species with Mc. Thus we might have a McPlace, one lacking distinctive and positive attributes. A McPlace would lie conceptually somewhere between place and non-place. I’m not sure, though, and the more I think about it the less I understand what a “non-place” might be.

Until Friday of last week, as I thought, initially, finding myself deposited off a Number 10 bus in Poundbury, the royally promoted development on the western edge of Dorchester, the ancient county town of Dorset. My instinctive reflex was, aha, now I understand, now I’ve caught a specimen ! But wait a moment. From this still-developing location (construction scheduled for completion in 2025) glimpses of the surrounding gorgeous Dorset countryside are frequently available, including Maiden Castle, the Thomas Hardy (Kiss Me Hardy, that is, not Madding Crowd Hardy) Monument, and Dorchester itself - so any glib accusations of placelessness are surely off to a wonky start. Poundbury is very definitely what it is.

I don’t know what the inhabitants think – I imagine they find it workable and pleasant enough in a cheesy kind of way – but I found it uniquely unsettling. The few pedestrians I encountered looked fearful and solitary. At least the housing isn’t as gratuitously forbidding as some recent developments on the Isle of Portland – also Dorset – which evidently feel the need to commemorate that particular peninsula’s role as a penal colony. Cheesy, again, is an appropriate overall descriptor for Poundbury’s building style. But it’s not as simple as this, not even as simple as cheese with holes in it or as bland as Dairylea slices.

Friday was a very hot day, so imagining that I was in some hostile enclave of Los Angeles where casual sightseers and people on foot aren’t welcome wasn’t difficult. Architecturally, Poundbury is a surreal mix of the parodic and the pastiche, the fake and the phony, the kitsch and the corny, perfectly Trumpesque, and reminiscent of Disneyland (but without the insistence that one should have a nice day), Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (but without the deep sincerity), and odd corners of Islington or Notting Hill (but without the grittiness or gravitas), with bizarre hints of Cheltenham or the pricier parts of Bristol thrown in for good measure. So, lots of stylistic associations.

Does the mere fact that Poundbury reminds one of so many other places inevitably condemn it to being a “non-place”? It’s tempting, but I think not. And what about the reverse? When I ogle the backwaters of Canonbury or the Italianate towers and turrets along Kensington Park Road in W11 will I inevitably think of Poundbury? Only time will tell. Placefulness can be enhanced by effortless comparison. Mental association and perceived similarity should not automatically impose a verdict of McPlacelessness. Poundbury, in its random pseudo-stylistic inclusiveness, is surely – hopefully – unique, and thus indubitably a place. Of sorts.

 Queen Mother Square

As I wandered round Poundbury’s confusing layout – at one point convinced that the helpfully provided map on Peverell Avenue West had been printed with left-right inversion - I was constantly pursued by cars and white vans, psychologically almost mown down by them, and depressed by the truth that this supposedly genteel habitat has been completely given over to vehicles. Lacking any genuine sense of centrality, or the anticipatory aura that surrounds centrality, but rather resembling a stage set for a Piccadilly Circus designed by someone who had never been there, Poundbury’s  “central place” is called Queen Mother Square. It is essentially a car park overlooked by a pretend airport control tower, and a plastic pub or two. Plus a statue of the QM. Send for another G & T immediately ! 

Poundbury falls well short of the over-the-top absurdity and amusing grossness which justifies, for example, Ricardo Bofill’s Antigone development on the outskirts of Montpellier. Though stuffed with improbable fusions and abrupt adjacencies of style, it lacks surprise and humour. It is timid, bland, postmodernist at its most supremely dull, and, in its way, oh dear, so very English. No doubt about it, anywhere that can arouse such a negative reflex reaction cannot be accused of being a non-place.

But … I still don’t know what a non-place is.

Painting with two fingers

In too many places around the world we see odious, corrupt, thuggish, hypocritical, criminal regimes holding on to positions of absolute power - evidently for the primary purposes of personal greed and self-preservation. Sickos and their henchpersons who want a controlled reality to stay the same for ever, regardless of the fate of millions or the wellbeing of the planet. Luckily we are relatively free from that kind of thing here. In the UK, though our politicians routinely ignore the wishes of the common people, though – if you read ‘Private Eye’ – corruption is endemic, though so often our news is a saga of incompetence, betrayal and hypocrisy, and though voting changes nothing, we are fortunate that we can – if necessary via the medium of paint – stick two fingers up to the lot of them, without fear of arrest … or worse. 

Therefore it is particularly gratifying that this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the 250th, and overseen by the wonderful Grayson Perry, includes a great deal of two-fingered content. Much of it is funny, makes a point, might even be seen as subversive. Well, I hope so. The spectrum of material ranges from visual puns and absurdities, bling poodles and carpeted bears, via parodies of famous paintings and a standard yellow ‘new development’ direction sign reading “Unaffordable Housing”, to the Korean Kims studying a Duchamp-esque urinal, and a POTUS strategically placed against a spread-legged Miss Mexico.

Protest against the freaks and monsters who run our world is always healthy, and it is good that art can be harnessed in this way – as it always has been. Art, protest, humour, propaganda, subversion, and resistance have a long, intimate, and worthy history. Art as fun, art as protest. Totalitarians and obsessives of all sorts have a phobia of fun, for that is invariably their Achilles heel, and – anatomically improbably – their blindspot too. They never see how unintentionally and absurdly funny they and their strutting little empires are. 

So far so good. There’s nothing quite like humour for getting one on side. Piss-taking can be irresistible, especially when there are brightly decorated rooms full of it. However, expressing a political opinion or being disrespectful are not the sole purpose of art, nor is being hilarious, as it so often is at this show. This exhibition is brilliant as a one-off, but I hope it doesn’t become too much of a habit. Equally I hope there won’t be a return to the years of accommodating the endless dreary fixations of elderly academicians (there’s only a handful of that sort of thing this year), views of smug studios with window views of south-west London or overpriced (and also smug) excursions to European art cities, or a return to the shock-horror of the shock-horror merchants, or to the studiedly difficult genre of the deeply meaningful daub that only clever people ‘get’, a world where any old rubbish can be said to be Angst No. 93 or Dalston Junction or made into a neon sign. Let’s have art that is enjoyable, understandable, and well made.

As ever, the Summer Exhibition this year is eclectic, and there is far more to it than I have suggested so far. Besides the humour and the schoolboy smirking, there is great painting as well. There’s imaginative and technically accomplished design, as well as the usual contingent of the dire and the WTF. I’m not even sure what Hockney is trying to achieve this time, and the Anish Kapoor contraption in the courtyard is only slightly less meaningless than his oversized red twisted paperclip thingy at Stratford East. But I bet the Japanese visitors like it.

Overall, though, I found the exhibition hugely enjoyable, as did, very evidently, others who were there at the same time, on Saturday. Most of them grinning, some laughing their heads off. More than anything, as I emerged afterwards into a blisteringly hot Piccadilly, it made me want to get out my paints again.

Things that look like they should

According to prototype theory (Eleanor Rosch, University of California at Berkeley, and others), as we discover our world from the earliest days of childhood onwards, for the many kinds of object and situation we encounter, we subconsciously select our “best” example, our favourite or “central” one. Often this is the one we run into first, or the one closest to home, or the one with which we are most familiar. So it might be an armchair, a TV set, kettle, tree, bicycle, greenhouse, Christmas dinner, snowstorm, dogturd, uncle, or whatever – or a little further afield, a cinema, lollipop lady, seaside resort, windmill, football match, classroom, mountain, or motorway service area. Subsequently, those early experiences influence our preferences and even our understanding and use of language. While the most insistent effects soon wane with age and exposure to many other instances, to an extent we always retain those homely, local, paradigm examples, against which all other instances are likely to be found wanting - even official, important, generally rated as best, or “metropolitan” examples. Not that we normally make that comparison consciously or deliberately.

Never mind; it’s only a theory. On Friday I visited Oakham, the county town of Rutland. Oakham (slightly remarkably) still has a station, originally on the Midland Railway from St Pancras to Nottingham via Corby, the Harringworth viaduct and Melton Mowbray. Though still sometimes used as a diversionary route for the Midland line, these days most trains calling at Oakham are en route along a rather tortuous journey between the West Midlands and East Anglia. During my brief visit on Friday the electronic display was advising that the train to Stansted Airport was delayed. No clue as to how much delayed, although it was already some 15 minutes overdue. A predictably uninformative recorded announcement was hectoring the victims waiting on the platform to “remember the Three Esses”, which as far as I recall stands for “Screw you, Suckers, Sod off”. I was so glad not to be enduring that familiar irritating predicament, and could walk away from it.

At the south end of Oakham is a level crossing, for a main road near to wide and complex junctions, and though modernised, it is the sort of set-up that makes you (or at any rate, people like me) think about model railway layouts. At one side of the road is a footbridge, and on the other side a signal box. Both look absolutely perfect for capture and installation on a model railway. What I didn’t realise until later is that they have been.

The footbridge dates from 1901.

 The signal box dates from 1899. 

Both are listed structures, and it turns out that both have been used as the basis for Airfix models. In other words, for the purpose of constructional play, for model making, they are evidently prototypical structures, and therefore presumably perceived as the best of their species, the most typical, the most archetypal. What, archetypes in England’s smallest county? You must be joking ! You’d never run into C. G. Jung in this neck of the woods.

 
Although I did make a couple of Airfix aeroplanes as a child, it’s not a label of which I have any great knowledge or intimacy, for my imaginary constructional realm primarily involved Meccano and Hornby as its two core brands. Hornby station architecture tended towards the modernist and the deco, very Southern Region, shades of Richmond or Surbiton or the Chessington branch. Fine in their way, but here in Oakham I could see that the Midland Railway features as adopted for this footbridge and signal box were spot on. They looked exactly like they should. More so, in fact.

A loss of innocence and a lack of transparency

There’s a priceless moment in the 1979 film “Being There”, based on Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel of the same name, in which the character played by Peter Sellers, in one of his last film roles, is asked about his sexual preferences. Sellers plays a nice but dim gardener, charming and innocent and gentlemanly, who has spent most of life in the employee of a wealthy family in Washington, DC. His name gets distorted - as the plot unfolds - to Chauncey Gardiner, although his real name is Chance, and his occupation, gardener. Most of his spare time is spent watching television. He becomes embroiled with media and political types, and before long seems headed for the White House. Well now, who could imagine such a thing, a complete idiot becoming President of the United States?

Anyway, back to the priceless moment. Because of his evident naïvety and asexuality, enormous humour is elicited when he’s asked about his tastes. “I like to watch”, he declares. “I like to watch TV”, he adds, with innocent hints of further deviancy.

Liking to watch. Hm. So we’re back to last time’s uninvited theme – voyeurism. The trouble is, there appears to be no technical term that means “liking to watch”, without sexual connotations. Scopophilia and scoptophilia, as with voyeurism, both imply liking to look at activities or items of erotic interest, although their Greek roots are not so restrictive. It’s just us, with our nasty take on everything. Can there be no innocent vision? Even without a word for it?

So be it. I like - not so much to watch - as to look. As someone who has always drawn or painted, I have always liked to look at the world around me. I was blessed with a pair of eyes that have served me well. My dad, who was a proper artist, taught me to observe. Not everyone is so lucky. However, these days most people carry around a device that can be used as a camera, and as such it can be used as an aid in learning how to see, to frame, to compose, to crop. If they practise this, in time, they won’t need the device; they’ll see that way out of habit, and their world will be that much more interesting, more artistic, perhaps even more beautiful. Looking at things is good.

When I’m travelling I often like to look out of the window. I even do this on the tube. On aircraft I love to look at clouds, down at the ocean, at the strangely flattened mountains, at cities where I’m about to land, at everything. So when I read this week that Emirates wants to introduce planes without windows, I was horrified.

Building aircraft without windows can no doubt improve their structural integrity, and prevent passengers from being sucked out into the pale blue yonder. I’ve never  flown with Emirates, so I don’t know if this is a peculiar problem that happens to them a lot. But, no – quite apart from the arguments about safety and claustrophobia – this is a perfectly daft idea. I want to look out at real sky, at what’s up there and what’s down below, not at some televised real-time version of it, however technically clever, however good for the airframe and not getting sucked out. I’ll take my chances. All right, many people don’t want to look out, they want to work or read or play or watch films or listen to music; trans-oceanic flights (and others) can be very long and boring; many flights operate at night. But do you think the airlines are going to be happy for long just showing you the passing scenery? Nope, there’ll be a commercial break just as you get to that interesting glacier or high level view of Paris or Chicago, the very moment the Bay of Naples comes into view. There’ll be a trailer for your destination, its hotels, its car hire firms, movies showing next month. Some airlines – no guessing which ones – will charge you for the privilege of having / not having this facility. And what they do for aircraft they’ll want to do for trains, cars and buses, and certainly for underground systems. Once again, the curse of electronics (though if your next station is Neasden, they may be able to brighten your day). And of course if they do the same thing for office windows your workspace in Slough or Swindon may suddenly become more appealing. “If it’s Monday it must be the Maldives”. No, bad idea.

Transport planners never get it, do they. It’s always all about money and business opportunities, never about journeys or places or being left on your own. None of these people understand that the enjoyment of travel as it is, is something that some people – mostly old duffers like me from the pre-digital age – want and value. Travel as places, as geography, as what you see out of the window. The sort of inconvenient people who don’t respond to advertisements but who want as much freedom and privacy as possible, not being dictated to by some teenage nerd with a techno-fetish or a marketing wazzock with a product, and most of all, not wanting to be the victim of some inarticulate announcer (“this is Alison, your train manager”)  fond of their own amplified voice (“remember the three esses”). People who like the real, natural, world, not a virtual replica of it. Already it’s bad enough being stuck next to a “pillar” on a train, or being on one of those trams plastered with hideous mesh-like adverts, or on a plane not being able to get near a window.

If Emirates get their way and other airlines follow, then as far as I’m concerned they can create a virtual me, stick me next to a virtual window, and send me to a virtual destination far away. As for the real me, I’ll stay at home, then take a walk and look at some trees.

Sorry, windows were invented a long time ago so you can look through them. That’s what they’re for.

This story reminded me of a brief folly of mine at the age of about nine, when I was going through an inventing phase. I’d seen a sundial somewhere, only the sun wasn’t shining, so it didn’t work properly. “I can do better than this”, I thought. So I “invented” a device which consisted of a horizontal clock face, with a spike sticking up in the centre, and a light bulb affixed to a rotating plate worked by an electric motor. The plate would complete one revolution every 12 hours, and the bulb and spike would produce a shadow that would travel round the clock face so you could tell the time. Brilliant. A sundial that would work 24/7, even when it was raining or nighttime. Disappointingly, I never thought to invent a window that you couldn’t see through.

 
Next time: reinventing the wheel.