It’s about me, actually

TV reviews are not really my style, but there’s one programme I enjoyed the other day that I feel the need to comment upon. Sean Fletcher, who I hadn’t seen before (my televisual habits being somewhat ungenerous), was walking a stretch of the River Lea towpath in east London. A real treat, offered to us by a man almost gurgling with excitement about his subject, yet who – unlike so many presenters – didn’t get in the way of his material. Instead, what he gave us was half an hour of easily digested information, a useful sample of statistics, explanations, reasons, history, intelligently simplified maps, glorious aerial vistas - plus the stylistic riot that is the Abbey Mills pumping station, the golden gasometers of Bromley-by-Bow and the funny little lighthouse where the Lea meets the Thames.

More importantly, what he gave us – gave me - was his enthusiasm, and a subtle and seductive invitation to explore a part of a great city that many people surely dismiss, if they ever think of it at all, as a drab, post-industrial edgeland. It isn’t, despite the encroaching plasticised banalities of the Olympic Park and done-over Docklands. It’s every bit as varied, as quirky and as fascinating as the rest of London.

What Sean Fletcher demonstrated implicitly is that these sort of place-based programmes (of which there are many) are best aimed at the viewer, at you and me, rather than being about the glorification of the presenter. We see far too much of the sort of characters - some of them genuinely worthy personalities, others less so – who are whisked off to places we might want to visit ourselves, and then encouraged to be embarrassingly inept at skills that require a lifetime to master, or undergoing peculiar procedures, therapeutic, masochistic or otherwise, or gawping at something you’d give your right arm to see, and mouthing “wow” and finding everything “iconic”.  Or someone the other night exploring Sydney, allegedly, and all we saw was the inside of a very ordinary room supposedly at the Opera House, the inside of a tattoo parlour in a seedy suburb, and the inside of a club - full of odd and sweaty people - that could have been (almost) anywhere. What a wasted opportunity.

No, I like to watch a travel documentary that’s all about me – that is, about what I will find at a particular destination, how it will improve my quality of life, why it will make me happy, why I should be interested in it, why it’s visually or otherwise stunning, why it should be important to me and my understanding of the world, why I should go there. Call me egocentric but - with respect  - unless you, the guide, are specifically the subject matter or have a rare talent for inventive presentation, I don’t want a programme about you.

 
So, on that basis I shan’t be going to Sydney in the near future. Admittedly easier and cheaper for me to reach, I will, however, most definitely be revisiting stretches of the River Lea as soon as I can. Thank you, Sean Fletcher, for whetting my appetite, and for channelling that remarkable waterway directly into my field of vision.

We shall soon be arriving at Somewhere Very Dull

No, not Brexit. No chance. Bus announcements, and three observations based on recent travels.

1) Recorded audible announcements, while helpful to the minority, are an intrusion for the majority. Especially if the announcer sounds stroppy, officious, has a weird accent, or thinks that railway stations are called train stations. The technology may be available, but does not necessarily have to be used. If so, why can’t it be focused directly – narrowcasted - to those equipped with properly tuned gadgets? A broadcast to everyone isn’t generally necessary, unless something very unusual (a diversion) or potentially calamitous (an approaching Duke of Edinburgh) is about to occur.

2) If we must have announcements on buses, they should be useful and meaningful. Something like “next stop, town centre”, or “the High Street”, or “the market”. If you are in a rural area and are coming into a small and unfailingly delightful village, you want to hear “Groping Sideways” or “Farting Slightly”, or whatever its name. You don’t want to hear “Boggins Farm” or “Arthur Daley Mansions” or the name of some small thoroughfare of poxy little townhouses that went up last week, “Stoat Droppings View” or whatever, that nobody has ever heard of. Neither do you want to be told what the next stop is, just yet, if it’s four miles away. Nor, if you’re travelling for miles and miles along a very long road, say Watling Street, do you want to be told that “the next stop will be Watling Street”.

3) Again, if we must have these announcements, we don’t want too much of an anticipatory build-up. Not too much preamble and poetry. We don’t need to be teased that “we shall very shortly be arriving in the vicinity of Chlamydia Avenue. Alight here for the Dorothy Clutterice Academy”, or made to get all worked up because “in a moment or two we will be pulling into Salmonella Gardens. Unless it’s Wednesday you can get off here for the Smegma Research Institute”. Least of all do we need a breathless declaration that “we are now commencing our final approach to Horatio Bagwash Crescent”.

If you’re a regular, you’ll know already. If, like me, you’re an old geezer with a bus pass, you won’t be able to stand the excitement – especially as you know very well there’s absolutely no chance that “we are now stopping right outside A&E”.

An Appreciation of Paddy Apling

I was saddened to learn recently of the death of Edward Chatterton “Paddy” Apling on 4th October last year, at the age of 93. From various references on the web it appears that there was much about this man of which I was personally unaware, and so I can only write from my own experience. I never knew him as “Paddy”, only as “Mr Apling”, or by his initials, which I shall use here.

I first met ECA during Fresher’s Week at the University of Reading in October 1968. I had arrived to do a preliminary year prior to a 3 year course in Food Science, and I had been assigned ECA as my tutor, someone who would keep an eye on my progress, someone to whom I could turn if in need of support or advice. Along with another nervous new student I went along to see him, on the London Road “main site” of the university. We’d read all the bumpf about what was expected of us, and presented ourselves in academic gowns. I remember nothing of the meeting except that ECA was affable and pipe-smoking, seemed as nervous as I was, didn’t know what to say, bit his nails, and that as we were leaving he remarked “by the way, I never want to see you wearing those bloody ridiculous garments again”.

Clearly, he didn’t tolerate fools, and could be moody. Around the start of 1970 he began to grow a beard, which eventually settled down into a bright white, but was the subject of some disrespect for a while, as it was going through a badger-like phase of contrasting colours, his head hair being jet black. In one early Food Science lecture someone asked a question which revealed a profound lack of understanding of some particular point and resulted in ECA delivering the rest of the lecture at a painfully slow speed. Obviously he thought he was talking to a bunch of morons. On one occasion around this time he lectured with his flies undone, and on another, admitted that he had forgotten his notes, and talked to us instead about his childhood in Dagenham. On yet another occasion – a double lecture – he said that he “really couldn’t be buggered” and cancelled it. A man with his own agenda, who sensed what was really important, and what didn’t matter all that much.

Although he could and did lecture on most aspects of food science, ECA’s speciality was cereals, and the science and technology of baking and brewing (I think his father had worked as a drayman for Truman’s brewery in Whitechapel). Under his leadership we learned to bake some extremely tasty bread (which by the next day was as hard as concrete), and found out all about the Chorleywood breadmaking process, and the arcane specialisation known as dough rheology, featuring the much derided Brabender apparatus.

 In 1972

ECA, for all his irritability and dislike of pompous authority, was a kind man, and I recall being embarrassed when he made a fuss of me one day when I was going down with flu and feeling terrible, insisting that I went home and had a good sleep. I met him once, not long after graduation, at his home in Sonning Common, when he was in a bad mood because he was jet lagged after a trip to Canada. Thereafter we kept in touch, however, and he was helpful with references for job applications, and then after he retired to rural Norfolk we continued to exchange Christmas cards.

 
I assumed I wouldn’t see him again, and so it was with considerable astonishment that one day in 2008 I received a phone call from him, saying that he was touring the country, dropping in on old friends and colleagues, and that he would like to come and see me. Sure enough, the next day, he turned up in his large camper van, and we enjoyed a pleasant lunch and a natter. We had a good laugh about some of those fondly remembered old times – and people - in Reading. A complex, private, multi-talented man, who I was privileged to know and to count as a friend.

 

In 2008

Happy New Year

At the start of this year I blogged a bit of a moan about how I hated leaving an old year behind, one into which I’d grown comfortable, and how suddenly – after the short period of reality-denial called Christmas – I had to plunge into a new, cold, bleak, year and build everything up again.

Well, here we are again, and this time I don’t feel quite so bad. Rather, I’m glad to be putting a bad year behind, and hoping for some fresh chances in the new one. On a personal level, 2018 was a year of sadness and loss, frustration, failure and fatigue (though I did enjoy the long hot summer). On a public level, well, I try to keep politics out of these blogs, but the world is hardly in a happy state, is it. Depression, anxiety, boredom, apathy and anger should not be healthy, rational, everyday responses to how things are, but it is so. And that’s before we think about jumping off the white cliffs 

on 29th March.

So the opportunity for a new start is always to be welcomed. An artificial contrivance, like a date – January 1st, say – is always a good catalyst for a change of mood.

I recall, as a child at this time of year, being encouraged (a) to write “thank you letters” and (b) to make New Year Resolutions. The former was a creative challenge; what would be a really respectable intended use for a five shilling postal order? The latter sounded very grown-up and tedious, but I had my own response, which might take the form of tidying up the big flat Kodak film box in which I kept my Meccano parts. Having done so, and organised my trunnions and angle girders, I would resolve that this year constructional activity was going to be different, and I would build something bigger and better than before. And so, one fine morning, before school re-started, I would settle down on the living room floor to build the Forth Bridge. Not full size, obviously, no, just to a reasonable, modest scale. By around half past nine I would have run out of parts, and life would continue exactly as before. If only I’d thought of building HS2; it would probably be finished by now.

 
Happy New Year.

Recent Paintings at Bingham Library

Today marks the opening of an exhibition of 14 of my recent paintings at Bingham public library, Nottinghamshire. The library is in Eaton Place, close to the Market Place and to the main free car park.

Paintings are for sale upon enquiry to the library staff, and purchases may be collected on the last day of the exhibition, Saturday 22nd December. Prices are as follows:

Hyde Park Corner     £250

Portland Place     £250

St Pancras Skyline     £280

Secret Island     £150

Portobello Haar     £100

Fittee     £150

The Doctor’s In Winter     £100

Hot Prefab     £100

Awayday     £100

The Classic Murder     £120

Sissinghurst     £150

The Deal Castle     £200

Pavilion Gardens Café     £150

Dungeness     £200

The subject matter is varied, although some of the works recall the long hot summer this year. Scenes include Sissinghurst, Brighton and Dungeness in the south of England, and “Fittee” (Aberdeen) and “Portobello Haar” from north of the border. As usual, there are London scenes – busy traffic at Hyde Park Corner and in Portland Place, and the atmospheric tenements which used to fringe the eastern side of St Pancras Station, a familiar sight to many a rail traveller from the East Midlands.

“The Classic Murder” is an imaginary location inspired by Tolmers Square, Euston, while “The Deal Castle” is based on a pub just across the road from the wonderful church of St George in the East, in east London, but renamed and relocated to a fictional setting. “Hot Prefab” and “Secret Island” are idealised portrayals of humble surroundings on a summer’s day, while “The doctor’s in winter” perhaps recalls childhood emotions surrounding medical appointments. This painting was inspired by a visit to the Ranmoor district of Sheffield earlier this year. “Awayday” tries to recapture something of the childhood experience of waiting to go on a train journey from a country station, the location being very loosely derived from childhood trips on the Crewe line west of Derby.

 
If you can get to Bingham during December, please go along to the library, and enjoy.