Lugg's Log

An angry response

2011-07-06T05:37:00.000-01:00

This is a response to a fellow car forum member reproducing an "article" from a website called thedailymash satirising Public Sector workers defense of their penson rights. The "article" hit all the usual cheap right wing targets - strikers who act like pigs, teachers who can't spell, all the usual Tory bullshit:

God knows what sort of society "thedailymash" wants. Doctors are talking about strike action now. Another triumph for the ConDems.

Some people need a lesson in what the Trades Unions have done - and are doing - for the working man and woman. The Tories under Thatcher, Labour under Blair, and now the ConDems under Cameron are ruining this country. Our industrial base is disappearing (only yesterday the train manufacturer Bombardier announced 1400 redundancies), our politicians are in thrall to Murdoch and his murky empire, and the Bankers are still paying themselves huge bonuses. The public sector Unions seem to be the only ones who have a grip on reality. Why shouldn't they defend their members interests? At last (and at least) someone is taking a stand.

I wonder when the working people who support the coalition will wake up. When their nearest hospital is privatised? When families by the thousand are thrown out of homes they can no longer afford? When their local schools all have to be sponsored by car dealers? When this country is sucked dry by Osborne and his banker pals and unemployment hits three and a half million again? Or higher?

Who is going to look after your interests then? I suggest that all workers who don't already belong join a Trade Union, and that those who are members get active and open their eyes to what is really going on here.

How many Charity shops do you want in your High Street? How expensive do you want your weekly shopping basket to be? How much are you prepared to pay for a litre of fuel?

Never mind, eh? Roll over and laugh while they screw you!

The review that caused the fuss . . . .

2011-07-03T14:24:00.001-01:00

Here's the review I wrote on Amazon about Edmund de Waal's book on his family history. Certainly caused a fuss. Follow the link at the end if you want to see the posts it engendered on Amazon.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (Hardcover)

I really wanted to like this book and, as far as literary craftsmanship is concerned, I do. It is beautifully written. But I can't help feeling that there is something important missing. We read about the fabulous wealth (and it was really fabulous) of the Author's forebears (the Ephrussis) going back five generations. These were men - and a few women - who commissioned works of Art from such as Renoir and Manet; who lived in huge palaces in the centre of Paris or Vienna; who owned huge estates in the Czech countryside and homes in many different cities; and who assembled their massive wealth, not through invention or production, but through banking and brokerage in foodstuffs. In living as the Author describes none of them, I am certain, meant any harm to anyone. They saw themselves, surely, as model employers, as philanthropists. They floated above normal Viennese (and Parisian) society; they were hardly affected by the First World War; the slump and depression of the early 1930s didn't affect their standard of living much; only the Nazis were able to bring down their world of privilege after the Austrian Anschluss of late 1937. And, unforgiveably, this happened because they were Jewish, as it happened to so many at the time. But the consequences for this particular very rich family were not as serious as for many of their fellow Jews, since they were able to buy their exits from Nazi Austria, albeit at the expense of almost their entire fortune, and with a huge amount of very stressful anxiety (which circumstance, the Author indicates, sadly killed his Great Grandmother). But those members of the Family who ended up in England for the duration of the Second World War lived in more comfort than many of the English, in a villa in Tunbridge Wells. Distant connections and some friends had their lives ended, tragically, in Nazi death camps, but these cultivated, educated, privileged people survived, although in very reduced circumstances.

The account of events immediately after Anschluss are very interesting. At first the local Austrian Brownshirts trashed the Ephrussi Palace in what seems, from the descriptions in the book, as much like undirected class resentment as political violence and sequestration. Only when the Germans arrived did the systematic theft of the family's treasures take place. The poor (or poorer) people of Vienna wrought a sort of violent anti-capitalist vengeance before the serious work of the German SS commenced. All this was and is deplorable, of course. But, rather like the Bankers in our present society, I wonder if the Author's forebears had any idea of the resentment that they had stoked up against themselves with their fabulous and unreal standard of living.

So I read this book with great interest and enjoyed it for the most part. But from fairly early on I had an unworthy feeling that "they had it coming". Not the anti-Jewish persecutions - which, it surely goes without saying, were utterly barbaric and inexcusable - but a reckoning with and by the poor and the dispossessed, even if their poverty and dispossession was only relative. (I sincerely hope that no-one reads this as any sort of apology for or justification of, the atrocities of the Nazis' vile regime; I have simply tried to be scrupulous in my explanation of the uneasiness I felt at the story told in this book.)

And I was left with an interesting question. Just how civilised are (were) the very rich? Of course, they have all the hallmarks of civilisation - appreciation of high Art and Culture, a code of behaviour which appears to be the epitome of politeness, often a great philanthropy, a facility with languages, a wide reading, cleanliness, reliability, and (that elusive quality) character. But - you have to accept - the very rich are very rich because they are able to make a profit from the labour and from the needs of their fellow men. At what point on the sliding scale does "a fair profit" become rank exploitation?

It is always fruitless to say "this would have been a better book if . . ." but a little more empathy from the Author for the poor and the dispossessed who formed the foundations of the society in which the Ephrussis flourished so remarkably would have been welcome.

The review and the posts it engendered.

Greer versus GBS

2011-02-03T11:23:00.000-01:00

Ten days ago Germaine Greer had a go at the reputation of George Bernard Shaw in the Guardian; yesterday the post graduate student who set her going by sending her his paper on GBS. Then last night there was a bit of chatter in the paper's "Comment is Free" site. This was my contribution:

Let's have a think about some of the right-on things Germaine has forced on us over the years. Well, before "The Female Eunuch" there was the full-frontal picture she posed for in "Oz"; as I remember, quite titillating but not particularly feminist. Then there was her Latin Lover period, when she urged women to take a Latin Lover because they could keep on having sex for ages and made it a matter of pride not to ejaculate inside a woman - or even at all, as I recall her account of her very own Latin Lover. There were the aforementioned pops at Tom Paine for abandoning his Wife (er . . . no!) and at poor old repressed A E Housman who managed to write some pretty little things in his day but did have the audacity to offend Greer by fancying "lads" rather than lasses and inspiring - apparently - the whole greetings card industry. She also suggested that a degree of moral and cultural relativism is OK when thinking about Female Genital Mutilation, seeming to make the assumption that it was wrong for us to judge the traditional acts of another culture. This was denied, but her words upset a House of Commons Select Committee at the time. And that Shakespeare! He was a bit of a bludger, wasn't he? After "The Female Eunuch" she co-hosted a sort of Comdey show for TV with Kenny Everett. And a few years back she appeared as a participant in the "Big Brother" house. So that's her extra-academic career. She's a bit of an old windbag really. Funny how you never see her and Clive James together in the same room.

Anyway, the poor old girl wrote one goodish book back in 1970, since when she's flailed around. I like GBS. I think he'll outlast her.

I hate Michael Gove

2011-01-30T13:42:00.001-01:00

Michael Gove has embraced the idea of "Boot Camps" to sort out disaffected young people. There's been a lively debate on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" website, to which I just had to respond:

Just shows that the Tories haven't changed at all. Still the Nasty Party. The Thatcherite "short sharp shock" re-emerges as the Govian boot-camp. Just as prisons breed criiminals so boot-camps will breed either thugs or suicides. I was amused by the comment that Gove probably gets a semi at the mention of "boot camp".

Seems to me that the current crop of Tories put problems into two categories. First come "the problems that affect me". These need careful analysis and complex schemes of action. "How do I get to be filthy rich?" "How do I keep the bloody Oiks off my land?" "How do I find a little man who will do all the jobs I can't be arsed to do myself, preferably for virtually no money?" And "Where shall I keep all the money I hope to make?" (This last question is perhaps the most important.)

Then there are "the problems which affect society at large". These are easy to solve; they require no depth of analysis or thinking; a short phrase will get us off the hook here! So the problem of inequality in society? "Tell the proles we're all in this together". Economic woes? Huge budget deficit? "Throw another million out of work to drive wage costs down." Disaffected and disruptive youth? "Boot Camp".

But then the hacks in the various Ministries get hold of the soundbite and may even try to act on it. God help us if they take Gove seriously.

Kenneth Baker, Tory Education Minister in the late eighties and architect of the National Curriculum, said in a Guardian interview in 2008 "I think anybody doing educational change should begin slowly." Would he please talk to Gove?

Charles and Camilla

2010-12-11T15:59:00.000-01:00

After the student protest in London on Thursday over the increase in tuition fees and the axing of the Education Maintenance Allowance for poorer students, and the attack on Charley Saxe Coburg Gotha's Roller, I loved this comment from "softMick" on The Guardian website today:

"Irony could not have wished for a more timely coincidence, as young people out in force to show their revulsion at the raising of tuition fees and abolition of EMA by a government headed by very rich ex-public schoolboy Cameron and his side-kick comfortably rich ex-public schoolboy boy Clegg, subsequently barring access to higher education for kids from low income backgrounds, find themselves confronted by two royal parasites shmoozing along in the old Rolls, probably wearing clothes and jewellery that would cover a poor student's tuition fees for an entire degree course, with all expenses thrown in. The sheer obscenity of the tableau will be lost on the better offs, including the royals, and completely ignored by the media intent upon gaining knighthoods for their execs and toeing the government line. But it sickened me to the core, and makes me feel ashamed of my country and my government."

For your enjoyment, here's the pic again.

Schools to change . . . . . again.

2010-11-25T19:23:00.000-01:00

So Michael Gove wants to revolutionise English schools. Yet again an ignorant politiian sticks his oar in.

I gave up secondary teaching ten years ago. One of the reasons I did so was the constant meddling in our education system by politicians of all parties.

Once upon a time (in the 1960s) Governments commissioned reports before making changes. We had the Plowden report for Primary Schools and the Newsom report ("Half Our Future") for Secondaries. Then everybody sat around and debated them for a while, and finally changes were made. By and large this worked, and we could do a lot worse than go back and read those huge reports again.

Now, a politician gets appointed to the Education Ministry (whatever it's called this week!) and immediately starts making changes. Why? Because he or she needs to Make Their Mark before they're moved on to another post. Result: schools haven't finished implementing the last lot of changes before the next lot are on them. You couldn't run a business that way. Oh, hang on . . . . the Railways. Same management model, and look at the mess they're in.

Also Education Ministers seem to be prepared to listen to whatever charlatan shouts the loudest that schools are getting it all wrong. That started with the awful Chris Woodhead under Thatcher (he was a comparative failure as a teacher, and shagged one of his female pupils - what a star!) and the process seems to accelerate with each new Government. Blair and co seemed to think that Reg Vardy, the evangelical secondhand car dealer, knew more about schools than anyone who'd ever worked in one!

I despaired when I gave up teaching, I despair more with each passing year and each new education Minister. I want to rewrite the old Floyd song "Brick In The Wall": "Minister: leave them Schools alone!"

Here's Steve Bell's take on it from this morning's Guardian.

And then?

2010-10-10T17:47:00.000-01:00

I've reached the point where the function of Art changed, and it changed because of two technologies: photography and printing. A photographer, even in the mid-19th Century, could record an accurate image in a fracton of the time it would take an artist to do the job less accurately. Using the new print technologies the image - or any image - could be reproduced as amny times as required, and very cheaply. Of course these are both monochromatic technologies at this point, but the writing's on the wall for painting. Just as Art came to terms with how things really look, just as the skills of the painter reached a zenith of maturalism, so those skills - as far as strict reportage is concerned - were becoming redundant.

What I'd like to carry forward is the idea that a painting has different meanings to different people right from the beginning, even before it is completed in some respects. The Artist will have a view: s/he may be obsessed with the conception and execution of the artwork as a pure work of art; s/he may have a mercenary attitude, concerned to please the commissoning patron; whatever, s/he will be concerned about achieving the desired outcome, either in artistic terms, or in terms of fulfilling the commission, or (most likely) both. The patron will have a view. How prescriptive was the commission? How well is the artist fulfilling the brief? Is it value for money? Will it enhance the patron's prestige? The casual viewer - perhaps in a saleroom or a gallery, will have a view too. What is it? Do I like it? Is it well executed? Is it any good? Does it move me?

All this is not unimportant. Consensus is harder to reach with so many different viewpoints. To take a simple example, here are some of the comments I've heard about J M W Turner's work:

* he couldn't paint people at all accurately

* he is the forerunner of the Impressionists

* he is better than the Impressionists

* his eyesight was wonky

* he is the greatest British artist of all time

* he was a hack, only in it for the money

And so on. Obviously these views are not all mutually exclusive; some people like one part of Turner's opus, some another. But there is no complete consensus, despite the historical perspective we have. Generally, what there is is a canon of work regarded as being worth looking at. And that applies to all Art up to, say, the 1900s. And then, and then . . .

Painting's different functions in the 18th and 19th Centuries

2010-09-22T20:08:00.001-01:00

And then there's landscape; views; the picturesque. Here is one of Canaletto's views of the Thames, painted in 1747 and showing the Lord Mayor's Day Regatta. It speaks of London's importance and grandeur. It exaggerates the width of the Thames and the scale of St Pauls, but remains an astounding panorama of perhaps the most important city in the world at this time. It makes you want to be there, as does this famous painting by John Constable from 1826:

"The Cornfield" is in the long tradition of the English pastoral. We know that it subtly improved on the actual view at the time, but this doesn't matter. It's an ideal English rural view, and actually affects the way we see the countryside. It conditions us to look for the picturesque in our own countryside. It doesn't matter that we know that the lives of those working in the picture were far from idyllic; that they died young from preventable diseases; that they lived in poverty in an unequal society. It captures a moment on a hot summer's day when any of us would be happy to be in the shade and to take a drink from the same stream as the boy in the red waistcoat. It's a landscape which we can navigate in our imagination, through the gateway into the cornfield, and on to the church in the distance.

And then, from four years later there's this:

Samuel Palmer's "Magic Apple Tree" is further removed from reality, drawing on a different tradition which takes in William Blake and the Christian symbolism of the New Jerusalem. You couldn't navigate anywhere from the information in this canvas. This is a mystical picture of a strange and idealised landscape. It speaks of the spirit of place rather than topography, and as such is one of the most famous landscape pictures of the 19th Century, despite having languished in the office of the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for a number of years, kept there presumably for his private delectation. This is far removed from Thomas Gainsborough's famous double portrait and landscape of Mr and Mrs Andrews:

This has been called the ultimate 18th Century Capitalist portrait. Painted after the Andrews' wedding in 1750, it shows the happy couple in front of the landscape which they own. I detect a slightly smug air about them. Someone once said (tell me who, please?) that Mr Andrews is saying "This is my dog, this is my gun, this is my land, this is my Wife" - with the emphasis on the possessive pronoun. But there is another view which takes into account Gainsborough's recorded dislike of the "Landed Gentry" - he has painted them as being at odds with the idyllic landscape, him with his gun, she with her inappropriate dress. It's worth recording that he painted this a year after the wedding, when Mr Andrews was 23 and his Wife 17.

And now another strand which grows in importance as we enter the 19th century: animal portraiture.

This is "Whistlejacket", painted for his owner, the Marquess of Rockingham in the early 1760s, when the horse was about 12 years old. By definition racehorses have a short useful life, and rather than rely on memories of Whistlejacket's great victory over a four mile course at York in 1759 (which netted him 2,000 guineas), the noble owner commissioned Stubbs to record him. This huge canvas - almost 10 feet high - shows the animal and nothing else, a real departure in this sort of picture. While we can read this as a statement of pride in the ownership of such an animal, the sheer presence of the horse and the accuracy of the depiction, transcends such a view. This is a horse for everyone, the essence of racehorse. Unfortunately this magnificent portrait leads us on to the cloying sentimentality of the Victorian animal picture.

Painting's different functions in the 18th Century

2010-09-21T19:39:00.052-01:00

In 1735 William Hogarth painted this last of eight pictures in his great series "The Rake's Progress". The Rake has wasted his fortune on gambling, whoring, drinking, and false friends; he has jilted his pregnant fiancee, been thrown into the Fleet Prison for debt, and ends up in this picture on the floor, sans everything, pox-ridden and mad, in Bedlam - The Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, in London. It's a morality picture; it shows the wages of sin and debauchery. Hogarth was genuinely disgusted by the excesses of the metropolitan beau monde of the early 18th century and painted his series of images as a warning about the results of those excesses.

So in some ways this picture is not too different in intention from the devotional works of earlier centuries, although it's unlikely that it would ever find a home in a church. Like the paintings in my last post this shows how to live a good life - or rather, in this case, what to avoid in order to live a good life. It is, for most of us in the 21st Century, a more powerful image than a picture of the Holy Family, or a saint or two, no matter how much gold-leaf the latter may display. But this is still a "morality picture" in a tradition which stretches from mediaeval church wall paintings through both Breugels, Goya, and such 20th century painters as C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash ("We Are Making A New World"), and even Picasso ("Guernica").

Another form of painting which changeded over the three hundred years between 1450 and 1750 is portraiture. Always slightly questionable as a display of wealth and egoism, the only portraits with which the mediaeval peasant would have been familiar were those of the patrons of their local church who paid the artist to insert them into a corner of the altarpiece, perhaps next to an obscure saint or martyr, possibly in the belief that the painting would predict their stature in the afterlife. But now, look at this fine portrait by Thomas Gainsborough from around 1786:

This is Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan. As the famous soprano Elizabeth Linley, and a lifelong friend of Gainsborough, she had eloped with Sheridan, the playwright and politician twelve years before this portrait was painted. It is a "speaking likeness" - she was instantly identifiable. But Gainsborough has taken her out of the studio in which he painted her, and given her an invented rural setting. It is an utterly romantic portrait, and the wild brush-strokes with which the Artist has built up the almost impressonistic background and the details of the costume give way to a careful and masterly rendering of Mrs Sheridan's face. It is a wonderfully tender portrait. But who was it for? Only for family and friends, not for continuous public display. This is private Art, not public. You could say it is still devotional Art, but only in so far as it expresses the devotion of her husband - and of her friend the artist. The great shame is that this painting in the Mellon Collection in the USA is not on display.

Of course some portraits become famous over time, and have been adopted into the public consciousness. But there is a distinction between the portrait for public consumption (think Queen Elizabeth, Horatio Nelson, T E Lawrence) and the portrait for private satisfaction, the "this is me, this is my Wife, this is my child" sort of likeness - of no great personal interest to anyone outside the sitter's circle. Here are those public images:

The "Armada Portrait" attributed to George Gower is absolute Elizabethan propaganda.

The 1800 portrait of Nelson by Lemuel Abbott, already a National hero five years before Trafalgar.

The Augustus John portrait of T E Lawrence from 1919; taken up by a nation desperately in need of heroes who hadn't drowned in the mud of the Ypres Salient.

In contrast here's my favourite private portrait, William Chalmers-Bethune and Family painted by David Wilkie in 1804.

As a "warts and all" depicton this can hardly be beaten. And yet such tenderness is in this family portrait; I see it as a triumphant artefact of the Enlightenment in Scotland, brilliant in its unflinching honesty. Initially its appeal must have been limited to the family and friends of the Chalmers-Bethunes. Now, we see it as a window on its period, fascinating precisely because of its humanity.

Thinking

2010-09-20T19:59:00.003-01:00

In a 1906 edition of "Punch" there's a cartoon of an old man with an injured foot sitting in a chair. He explains to the vicar's wife how he passes the time: "Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits." Thinking is like that. If you set out to have a "thinking" session the chances are you won't come up with anything, Of course, if you're trying to solve a particular problem you may well be able to concentrate and find a particular, peculiar solution. But to think - in the abstract, unfettered - you'll probably end up wondering whether you should have that coffee yet, or where that list of things to do (that you wrote yesterday) has got to.

So most times when I set out to think about what Art is (and isn't) I either end up with a couple of trite truisms before drifting off to think about something else, or I find myself thinking how much I despise Tracey Emin, or Nick Serota, or . . . . insert your own pet hate; you know what I'm getting at.

Recently I've tried to change tack and go back to basics; to work forwards from a basic, incontravertible position. What was Art for in the millenia before Fox-Talbot, the Daguereotype, and photography generally? What did the artists think they were doing? What did the patrons think they were paying for? And what do we think those Artists achieved? On the surface these are easy questions to answer. But when you try to put together what they felt then, and what we feel now, you run up against a problem. To illustrate what I mean, consider a piece of devotional Art. This is Fra Angelico's "Annunciation" from around 1440:

What's happening here? Well, the Angel of the Lord has appeared to tell the virgin Mary that she's going to bear a baby who is the son of God. Mary is struck dumb, apparently, as who wouldn't be? Apart from everything else, the Angel is in awe of her, and is bending the knee . . . to a humble carpenter's wife! Amazing. The poor people who saw this painting would never have seen anything so lifelike.

These days we are struck by the painter's astounding competence and ability given the context of the times. The painting doesn't carry the spiritual, emotional weight it did five and a half centuies ago. We admire the technical skill of the Artist; his contemporaries wouldn't think like that. They were having the story of the Annunciation made flesh in their own village church - or as near as could be. Think high definition 3D for us. Or hyper-reality. That's what they saw. And it confirmed what they were told every Sunday and feast day of their lives.

I remember going round a gallery of religious images from the 12th Century through to the beginnings of the Renaissance, in Sienna a few years ago (the Pinacoteca Nazionale). After the first two rooms it left me cold. Wall after wall of religious pictures. Nativity after nativity, miracle after miracle, saint after saint. Boring. It was utter overkill. But, of course, this was a collection from the whole of Tuscany and beyond - from little churches in tiny communities. Each church might have had just one or two images. The people who worshipped in each church might be familiar with three or four other churches in similar communities - and that would be the limit of their experience of Art, and of the accurate representation of life - of simulacra.

Here's a lesser known painting from Sienna:

This is The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine and St John the Baptist by Michelino da Besozza in about 1420, now in the Sienna Gallery I visited. We cannot understand this image now unless we see it as an elaborate allegory. We cannot understand the idea of a spiritual union between a humble but saintly virginal woman, and characters who had been dead for over a millenium, or who were local dignitaries who paid for the image. But to humble "parishioners" who saw this every week in their church - and who saw no other accurate images - it was a deep reality; in some ways a deeper reality than that of their own daily existence, since it spoke of their own imminent eternity, which was going to be so much better than their earthly life.

It's taken me more than twenty years to understand the significance of those rooms and rooms of devotional Art I saw in Sienna. The paintings still do not really move me as objects in themselves. But their significance to the men and women who saw them when the paint was fresh - well, if I can respond to any work of Art in such a sincere way, I would count it a good day. No, a great day.

So now I need to think about how a more secular, less naive society looked at its Art. I'm going to move forward 300 years and think about the 18th Century.

Birmingham Art Gallery

2010-08-22T16:15:00.006-01:00

I visited this gallery last Friday and was amazed at the quality of the 19th Century painting which they have. There's a fine version of Ford Madox Brown's "The Last of England", almost identical to that held by the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge:

There's what must be almost a full size water-colour study for Burne Jones' "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid":

There's Millais's "The Blind Girl:

There's a half size copy by Ford Madox brown of his "Work", the original of which hangs in Manchester:

This is Rossetti's final version of "Beata Beatrix", left unfinished at his death in 1882:

All these and many other fine Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Birmingham's modern collection is much sparser, and the very recent stuff is mostly the usual rubbish that will probably be in a skip within 20 years (we can but hope), but there is a reconstruction of Epstein's amazing "Rock Drill" from 1913 - twelve feet high and very imposing:

Finally a couple of works from about the same period. First is C R W Nevinson's "Column on the March" from about 1915 - stunning, and I've never seen it before:

And from a few years later, Munnings' "Arrival at Epsom Downs for Derby Day":

Lifted from a Google extract document - Dr David Kelly's death

2010-08-17T15:53:00.007-01:00

I was alerted to this web page by a post on the Guardian's "Comment Is Free" website. I tried to link it to my Facebook page, but FB would not accept it - I wonder what's going on. Is it being suppressed?

Dr David Kelly: The damning new evidence that points to a cover-up by Tony Blair’s government

By Miles Goslett and Stephen Frost
Last updated at 9:24 AM on 26th June 2010

The official story of Dr David Kelly is that he took his own life in an Oxfordshire wood by overdosing on painkillers and cutting his left wrist with a pruning knife. He was said to be devastated after being unmasked as the source of the BBC’s claim that the Government had ‘sexed up’ the case for war in Iraq.
A subsequent official inquiry led by Lord Hutton into the circumstances leading to the death came to the unequivocal conclusion that Kelly committed suicide. Yet suspicions of foul play still hang heavy over the death of the weapons expert whose body was found seven years ago next month in one of the most notorious episodes of Tony Blair’s premiership.

Many believe the truth about the manner of Dr Kelly’s death has never been established properly. Some even fear that the 59-year-old, the world’s leading expert in biological and chemical weapons, was murdered.
Of course, it would be easy to dismiss these sceptics as wild conspiracy theorists — but for the fact they include eminent doctors and MPs. The blanket of secrecy thrown over the case by the last Labour Government has only fuelled the sense of mystery. In January this year, it emerged that unpublished medical and scientific records relating to Dr Kelly’s death – including the post-mortem report and photographs of his body – had been secretly classified so as not to be made public for 70 years. Lord Hutton, who had been appointed by Blair, was responsible for this extraordinary gagging order, yet its legal basis has baffled experts accustomed to such matters. Against this shadowy background, we have conducted a rigorous and thorough investigation into the mystery that surrounds the death of David Kelly. And our investigation has turned up evidence which raises still more disturbing questions. Our new revelations include the ambiguous nature of the wording on Dr Kelly’s death certificate; the existence of an anonymous letter which says his colleagues were warned to stay away from his funeral; and an extraordinary claim that the wallpaper at Dr Kelly’s home was stripped by police in the hours after he was reported missing – but before his body was found.

Until now, details of Dr Kelly’s death certificate have never been made public. But the certificate was obtained by a group of leading doctors who have spent almost seven years investigating the case; doctors who believe it is medically implausible that he died in the manner Hutton concluded and are alarmed at the unorthodox way the death certificate was completed. Near the top of all British death certificates is a box headed ‘Date and place of death’, in which a doctor or coroner should declare the exact location of a death, if it has been established. Dr Kelly’s certificate gives his date of death as July 18, 2003. It then states in reference to place of death: ‘Found dead at Harrowdown Hill, Longworth, Oxon’. Why was the word ‘found’ used? Why was the crucial question of ‘place of death’ not answered? The death certificate should be precise about the time, cause and location of death. The doctors who have investigated the case believe the failure to answer this question leaves open the possibility that Dr Kelly died somewhere other than Harrowdown Hill, the wood where his body was discovered. If this was the case, they are concerned the law may have been subverted over Dr Kelly’s death.

Any such irregularity would inevitably add to the pressure to reopen the case. Indeed, earlier this month it was revealed that Justice Secretary Ken Clarke and Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who have the power to undo Hutton’s 70-year gagging order and demand a coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death, are poised to re-open the case. To this day, the location where Dr Kelly died remains a mystery — yet it is surely the most basic requirement of an investigation into any violent or unexpected death. Nor was the question of the location of death raised at the Hutton Inquiry. Amazingly, Chief Inspector (now Superintendent) Alan Young of Thames Valley Police, who headed the investigation into Dr Kelly’s death, did not even give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry. Significantly, it emerged via a Freedom of Information request in 2008 that a police helicopter with heat-seeking equipment which searched for Dr Kelly on the night he disappeared did not detect his body.

At 2.50am on July 18, 2003, the helicopter flew over the exact spot where Dr Kelly’s body was found by a search party less than six hours later, at 8.30am. Yet the pathologist who took Dr Kelly’s body temperature at 7pm on the day his body was found determined that Dr Kelly could still have been alive at 1.15am on July 18 — just 95 minutes before the helicopter flew over the patch of woodland. If that was the case, the body would have been warm enough to be picked up by the helicopter’s heat sensors. Why didn’t the helicopter pick it up? Was it because Dr Kelly did not die where his body was found? A full coroner’s inquest, which, by law, must be held following any sudden, unexpected or violent death, would have addressed these discrepancies. But no full inquest was ever held. Oxfordshire Coroner Nicholas Gardiner opened an inquest on July 21. But on August 13 the then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, Tony Blair’s former flatmate, ordered it to be adjourned indefinitely. Falconer used an obscure law to suspend proceedings, and for the first time in English legal history he replaced an inquest with a non-statutory public inquiry to examine a single death, seemingly without any public explanation.

When we tracked Mr Gardiner down, he refused to say whether he was ‘either happy or unhappy’ about this decision, but he did admit: ‘Public inquiries of this sort are very rare creatures. I think this was only about the third there had ever been.’ In fact, it was the fourth. Using a public inquiry to replace a coroner’s inquest – under Section 17a of the Coroner’s Act – in order to examine a death has only ever happened in three other cases. And in each case, it was where multiple deaths have occurred. These were the incidents in which 31 people were killed in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash in 2000; the 311 deaths connected with Dr Harold Shipman; and the 36 deaths associated with the Hull trawler Gaul which sank in the Barents Sea in 1974 and whose case was re-opened in 2004. The public was led to believe that the death of Dr Kelly would be investigated more rigorously by the Hutton Inquiry than by a coroner.

But it is now clear that the opposite was in fact true – for Hutton lacked the powers of a coroner. He could not hear evidence under oath; he could not subpoena witnesses; he could not call a jury; and he could not aggressively cross-examine witnesses. Astonishingly, on August 18, less than three weeks into the Hutton Inquiry, which opened on August 1, Dr Kelly’s death certificate was mysteriously completed and the cause of his death officially registered as haemorrhage. Put another way, five weeks before the Hutton Inquiry ended on September 24, 2003, and while the judge was still taking evidence about Dr Kelly’s death from witnesses, the official record of the cause of death was written and the case effectively closed. Misleadingly, the death certificate states an inquest did take place on August 14 – even though we now know no inquest actually happened. And extraordinarily, though it bears the signature of the registrar, it is not signed by either a doctor or a coroner as every death certificate should be.

Dr Michael Powers QC, a former coroner and an expert in coroner’s law who is working to secure a full and proper inquest, said: ‘This death certificate is evidence of a failure properly to examine the cause of Dr Kelly’s death. It is evidence of a pre-judgment of the issue. In a coroner’s inquest the cause of death would not be registered until the whole inquiry had been completed. As we see here, the cause of death was registered before the Hutton Inquiry had finished. ‘This is remarkable. To my mind it is evidence that the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death was window-dressing because the conclusion had already been determined.’
Since January 2004 a group of doctors has worked unstintingly for a fresh inquest to be held into David Kelly’s death because of the blatant shortcomings of the Hutton Inquiry. They are radiologist Stephen Frost, trauma surgeon David Halpin, vascular surgeon Martin Birnstingl, epidemiologist Andrew Rouse and internal medicine specialist Christopher Burns-Cox. Their investigations have raised many doubts about the widespread assumption that Dr Kelly killed himself. A letter they wrote to the Press in January 2004 marked the first time anyone had raised the possibility in the mainstream media of Dr Kelly’s death not being a suicide.
In 2009 they spent almost a year researching and writing a medical report which disputes Hutton’s assertion that Dr Kelly died from haemorrhage after severing the ulnar artery in his left wrist. The doctors argued that the wounds to Dr Kelly’s left wrist would not have caused him to bleed to death.

In January this year they discovered that Lord Hutton made the extraordinary 70-year gagging order.
Since then they have asked via their lawyers Leigh Day & Co to see the classified records, but under the last Labour Government, the Ministry of Justice – the department which holds them – repeatedly denied them access in the run-up to the last General Election. No reason was given. Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who in 2007 wrote a book suggesting that Dr Kelly was murdered, used the Freedom of Information Act in January to apply to the Ministry of Justice to see the records.

His request was also denied. Using section 41 of the Act – known as an ‘absolute exemption’ – the ministry said it was not obliged to reveal the information. Mr Baker, now a transport minister in the coalition government, has appealed against this decision. But he and the group of doctors are not the only ones who harbour suspicions about a cover-up of Dr Kelly’s death. Only last month one of the doctors, David Halpin, received an anonymous and carefully worded letter from someone claiming to be a relative of a former colleague of David Kelly’s at the Ministry of Defence. The correspondent said Kelly’s colleagues were ‘warned off’ attending his funeral – presumably by MoD officials, although this is not made explicit.
Similarly, in his recently published book ‘The End Of The Party’, the political commentator Andrew Rawnsley (who has close links with the Labour high command) claims that Geoff Hoon, Defence Secretary at the time of Kelly’s death, was so furious about being removed by Tony Blair as Leader of the House of Commons in May 2006 that he wrote out a resignation statement. According to Rawnsley, ‘he planned to make a speech about the [David] Kelly affair that he told friends could trigger the instant downfall of the Prime Minister’.
Frustratingly, there are no more details in Rawnsley’s book about what Hoon was referring to – but Hoon visited Dr Kelly’s widow shortly after his death and has never publicly denied this explosive charge.
Equally inexplicable is the attitude of Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist who attended the scene when Dr Kelly’s body was found on Harrowdown Hill. Dr Hunt’s duty as forensic pathologist is to help uphold the rule of law. In March 2004, after the Hutton Report was published, Dr Hunt contacted Channel 4 News and said he thought a full coroner’s inquest should be held. Yet mysteriously, he says now that – despite contacting the TV station – he has ‘maintained a silence on this [matter] on behalf of the [Kelly] family for a very long time’.

Adding further to the case for a proper inquest is a new fascinating claim by a woman who has also worked closely with the doctors and helped Norman Baker with his book. Rowena Thursby, a former publishing executive who became fascinated with the case and started looking into it, told us that Dr Kelly’s widow, Janice, admitted to her that on the night Dr Kelly was reported missing in July 2003 – but hours before his body was found -Thames Valley Police asked her and her daughters to leave their house and wait in the garden. It later emerged that while the Kellys were outside, officers stripped wallpaper from their sitting room. Why would they have done that? Could they have been ‘sweeping’ his property for listening devices?
It is certainly a possibility. Despite the fact that the Labour government patronisingly dismissed him as a ‘Walter Mitty character’ and nothing more than a middle ranking official in the Ministry of Defence, Dr Kelly was arguably the world’s pre-eminent expert on biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.
We have established that he had access to the highest levels of the security services and was cleared to see the most highly classified intelligence. The claim that police removed wallpaper from his house has never been confirmed or denied by Thames Valley Police — they refuse to make any comments about the Kelly case.

All these new revelations add weight to the list of unanswered questions surrounding Dr Kelly’s death, such as why were no fingerprints found on the knife with which he allegedly killed himself — even though he wore no gloves. As with the extraordinary details of the helicopter search, this vital information was only obtained using the Freedom of Information Act almost five years after the Hutton Inquiry ended. It was not heard at the inquiry. The doctors insist that concern about Dr Kelly’s death will continue to deepen until a full coroner’s inquest is heard. If one is finally granted, many will expect Tony Blair and Lord Falconer to be called to explain under oath why they went to such lengths to avoid the normal, rigorous and respected course of this country’s law. Until this happens their reputations will continue to suffer, as will the reputation of the British legal system. The unavoidable conclusion must be that a full coroner’s inquest is the only way the whole truth about the Kelly affair, however uncomfortable, will emerge.

(This is the link to the original post: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Cl286XvduWAJ:conspiraloon.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/dr-david-kelly-the-damning-new-evidence-that-points-to-a-cover-up-by-tony-blairs-government/+Why+did+Thames+Valley+Police+begin+their+high+intensity+operation+around+Kelly)

Hilaire Belloc: "The Four Men" - one of my favourite books.

2010-08-11T09:10:00.000-01:00

This has just been republished and is available from Amazon, so I contributed this review (of which I'm quite proud) to the site:

You need to come to this book with an open mind. It is not "Cautionary Verses". Unless you are well-read in Belloc's work it will be a surprise to you. It is, ostensibly, an account of a walk through the County of Sussex at the very beginning of the 20th Century. Four men meet by chance at the border between Kent and Sussex and agree to travel west together on foot, telling each other stories as they progress. It is still possible to follow the route they take (although the M23 gets in the way) and the area around Tilgate and "The Troll's Hut" is probably the most changed. So you might suppose this is a travel book with historical interest; partly this is so. But, like most of Belloc's books - and he published scores in his lifetime - "The Four Men" is a vehicle for Belloc's opinions on many different topics. Wealth and greed, first love, the nature of friendship, Public Houses and Inns, poetry, drinking, ageing - the list could go on for a very long time.

A digression: you may have heard it said that Belloc was very right-wing; you may have read that he was anti-semitic; but you need to bear two things in mind. This book was written before the First World War, and some of the attitudes have dated - but not as much, say, as those which T S Eliot exhibited in many of his poems. And the second thing to remember is that, with G K Chesterton, Belloc proposed the political theory of Distributism; this proposed that every family should have the means of maintaining itself ("Three Acres And A Cow") and that land ownership should be taken from the rich and handed to the common people in fair and equal shares. And in many respects you could argue that Belloc had more in common with William Morris, or with the Hippies of the late 1960s, than with any Conservative philosopher. Indeed, he was a liberal MP for a short time - until he decided that politics was a corrupt game.

This is one of my favourite books; I re-read it often. It is more accessible than "The Cruise of The Nona" or "The Path to Rome", and although there are quasi-mystical tropes there are also passages of pure comedy, and of pathos. If some of the writing is vaguely reminiscent of Conrad, some of it is quite close to Jerome K Jerome.

It becomes apparent as you read that this book is a meditation on the twin themes of ageing (which comes to us all) and on the interplay between the person and a much-loved place or landscape (which some of us are unlucky enough not to experience). It also becomes apparent that each of the Four Men are facets of Belloc's own personality. I have an original copy of the edition reproduced in this repint, and can thoroughly recommend it as a thing of style and beauty. Give old Hilaire a chance - I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Unearthed - exhibition at The Sainsbury Centre, Norwich

2010-08-09T19:20:00.000-01:00

Yesterday I went to see this exhibition at the UEA, Norwich. In the main it consists of two collections of small, ancient humanoid figurines from Japan and from the Balkans, two areas which were never in contact but which, in this instance, produced remarkably similar artefacts. There are several ancient specimens from other cultures which reinforce the point that the making of such figurines was a pretty universal human activity.

The figurines are of varying degrees of complexity in both imaginative and technological abilities.

All this is very interesting in various spheres. It might well interest the archaeologist, the historian, the ethnologist, the sociologist, even the technologist and the craftsman. Well and good. But with typical obtuseness the exhibition seeks to point out non-existent links with (gulp) modern Art. So one of the exhibits is this:

I think it's by the Chapman Brothers (Jake and Dinos) and I think it's called "Dead Guys" - but I'm open to correction here. Anyway, it's supposedly inspired/based on one of Goya's macabre etchings of body parts hanging in a tree.

But what on earth does it have to do with the rest of the exhibition? It's not alone in its inappropriateness - there's a sort of Barbie Doll presented in a glass case, and a 1960s Japanese plastic toy featuring small figures of an Emperor and a concubine. It's part of this loony desire to establish modern Art as the inheritor of a hundred thousand years of human creativity. But these ancient figurines are a mystery. We do not know what they were for, what purpose they were created to fulfil. We do not even know whether all the old artefacts in this exhibition were created for similar purposes. We cannot know this. We do not know how the creators of these artefacts and their societies functioned on a physical level, let alone the intellectual or spiritual context in which they were made.

But we can be sure of one thing: the creation of these ancient figurines was not attended by the cynical money-grubbing of the modern Art World. And the shaping and firing of the simplest of the figurines required a great deal more technological sophistication in the manipulation of materials than that needed for sticking a few bits of Lego together. Or putting a barbie Doll in a plastic case.

Possibly the best supper ever

2010-05-25T19:51:00.001-01:00

I'm currently reading Frances Spalding's biog of John and Myfanwy Piper ("Lives In Art"), and one of the suppers Myfanwy would rustle up for family and guests during the hard days of WW2,with strict rationing but with her chickens' free range eggs, was simply to fry a couple of 'em and put an anchovy fillet on each egg. It really works, But here's my ultimate version of this - steam four or five shoots of fresh asparagus per person for 12 minutes; fry two good eggs per person; cut a thin slice of good bread per person. Put the eggs on the bread, drape one anchovy slice over each fried egg, arrange the asparagus spears around the bread, and serve with butter and a little salt for those who want it. We had this tonight and it was just heavenly.

French toilet habits

2010-05-25T17:14:00.001-01:00

A rant. Why do the French seem to delight in crapping in the bushes and among the picnic tables in their (very nice) Motorway Aires? Nearly all of them have decent loos now (sit-ons as opposed to the old squatters) so why don't they use them? The worst example we found was in the very pleasant small Aire on the road between Dreux and Evreux. OK, so it's not motorway. But the picnic area was covered in small heaps of bogroll and - how shall we put it? - ordure of the human variety. What's wrong with the bloody loos? They're open 24/7; they're free; they're even quite clean. Is it the right of every Frenchman to crap where-ever he likes?

Oradour sur Glane

2010-05-23T14:27:00.004-01:00

In France recently, staying with friends Roy and Michelle, we went to see the town of Oradour, west of Limoges - or what's left of it. 200 SS soldiers killed the 640 inhabitants and burned the town in 1944. And they killed all the inhabitants - right down to babies of a month old. It wasn't some out-of-control unit either - they were acting under orders, and it was carefully planned as a reprisal for resistance activity. A year later De Gaulle visited the site and asked that it be kept in perpetuity as a reminder to the world of the barbarity of the Third Reich.

I took a lot of photos and wept a bit as we walked round. What was somehow more dispiritng was the discovery that some of the SS troops were in fact French, conscripted from Alsace-Lorraine. Anyway, here are a few of the photos.

The trams used to run between Oradour and Limoges. Oradour was a favourite picnic spot for the city dwellers.

The car (a Renault I think) has been there since 1944, as the Germans left it.

Below - a few of the names on the village memorial. Note the ages.

I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of the "inner discourse", but there's an article on Wikipedia which gives this as an example of the process: An inner discourse takes place much as would a discussion with a second person. One might think, "I need $27 for the paper boy. I have some paper currency in my wallet. Ten plus ten plus five... I have $25. Damn. Maybe I dropped coins in the sofa. Ah, here they are..." The ideal form of inner discourse would seem to be one that starts with statements about matters of fact and proceeds with logical rigor until a solution is achieved.

What (I kept wondering as we walked round Oradour) was the inner discourse of the killers? What did they tell themselves they were doing as they machine gunned terrified, unarmed men and boys? As they walked over the dead and dying to administer the coup de grace with a luger to those who were still twitching or crying out? What did they tell themselves they were doing as they herded all the women and children - yes, down to infants of one month - into the town church and set fire to it with incendiary devices? As they machine gunned those women and children who tried to escape the conflagration? As they piled up the bodies to burn them, or dug pits hastily for mass burials?

They knew what they were doing - they lied about it immediately afterwards in official documents, and later at the few trials which dribbled on into the 1980s. None of them stayed in prison very long; the French SS were pardoned because they said they were acting under duress.

This was shock and awe on a local scale. How have Bush and Blair escaped prosecution for their city-wide shock and awe in Iraq?

Election news

2010-04-11T14:05:00.001-01:00

Well, Tracey Emin has come out for the Tory Party. That should scupper their chances. Well done, Trace!

Oh, in case you've forgotten, here's one of her "artworks" complete with used condoms and blood stained pants. Very life enhancing.

Andrew Graham Dixon

2010-01-29T13:32:00.000-01:00

Watched The Culture Show on Beeb 2 last night, and finally worked out why I so dislike Andrew Graham Dixon. He's such a Groupie! Seeing him sucking up to Chris Ofili made me want to puke. And I like Chris Ofili, I think he has an interesting talent. But AGD - no thanks.

A S Byatt - The Children's Book; Lenny Henry on Pollock

2010-01-24T19:31:00.000-01:00

I'm currently reading this - about halfway through the 600 odd pages at the moment - and I'm amazed by the relevance of the story to the main obsession of this blog. Loosely based on the lives of several late 19th/early 20th century British artists, writers and connoisseurs (E E Nesbit, Eric Gill, D H Lawrence etc) and their families, A S Byatt has written a gripping tale which highlights the centrality of skill and craftmanship in Art. Very much worth reading.

And then there was a programme on Radio Four this week which featured Lenny Henry trying to come to terms with Jackson Pollock's work, with the help of a couple of critics, including Brian Sewell who concluded that Pollock's dribble paintings would make good designs for linoleum. Let's see:

Hmmm.

2010-01-15T18:11:00.000-01:00

It's a long time since my last post on here, but a lot has happened; late at night on the date of the last post my Ma-in-Law died in her Nursing Home, since when we've been dealing with the fall-out, not forgetting Christmas, New Year, and loads of snow. But I've been stung to publish again by an idiot (on a forum I belong to) who said that immigrants were all Muslim benefit scroungers who sought to destabilise British society, all on the strength of one anecdote supposedly from his wife. It prompted me to this response, of which I'm quite proud:

I find it interesting that the outraged Brits seemingly need to exaggerate in relating their anecdotes just as much as the radical Muslims who are outraged by the "baby killer" British Soldiers. It does no-one any good to quote bar-room anecdotes like the one about the pram. Those sort of stories have always gone round about any minority group. My Father (bless him) used to tell me "there's no such thing as a poor Jew. They always look after their own." He firmly believed this, despite the fact that the man over the road, to whom he spoke every day, was a poor Jew.

I happen to think that radical Islam is very dangerous to the western world because it operates a completely different morality from the rest of us. Its world view is so perverted that it thinks indiscriminate killing is all right because Allah will sort out the good from the bad after death. If you're an unjustly killed good person Allah will see you right. It's not the responsibility of the killer. He won't burn in hell for killing an innocent.

But of course Christians thought that too, for many centuries. Hence the Crusades. Hence the Inquisition where, in its later stages, it was OK to torture someone to death slowly and horribly because it might cause them to recant their sinful views, and if it sometimes killed a "good" man, it didn't matter, because God would see him all right in the afterlife. It's not the responsibility of the killer. He won't burn in hell for killing an innocent. Snap.

The good thing about Western liberal society is that it's now largely secular. Most of us don't buy that old religious mumbo-jumbo. So we no longer torture people to death. We no longer stone adulterers. We don't lock up homosexuals any more (or stone them to death). We know, deep down, that this life is all there is and we'd better make the best of it.

Empathetically we know that this is also true for the RadMus suicide bomber. He (or she) is not going to hell. Nor heaven. They're just dead and gone. For ever. Their degree of self-delusion is heartbreaking, just as the bomb victims' deaths are heartbreaking.

So let's expel the rad Islamists - or lock them up properly. And let's not allow anyone else of that ilk in - ever, for whatever reason. And let all Muslims understand that the more they look like and sound like their radical, suicidal brethren, the greater risk they run of being treated like them.

But let us not forget that most normal British Muslims live decent lives like the rest of us; that they want to see their children grow up in health and safety; that they are as scared of death as the rest of us; and that they are the victims of RadMus as much as we are - if not more. Don't marginalise them - that wins the RadMus' battle for them.

Especially for Winnet

2009-11-29T14:04:00.001-01:00

As requested, and in terms of the content of this blog:

Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa soeur la duchesse de Villars

Lesbianism and incest!

Dance? I don't get it . . . .

2009-11-26T17:22:00.000-01:00

My Wife and some of our friends went to see Ballet Rambert last night at the Norwich Theatre Royal. I never go to the ballet or to any dance productions because I simply don't get it - I know it's a blind spot, but there you are. So I was a bit annoyed to hear that friend had said to Linda "What a pity John's not here. I'm sure he'd enjoy it if he'd give it a chance."

Errr . . . . no. I've tried. I've given it a chance and I simply don't get it. But the implication is that I'm some sort of Philistine because I don't go to Dance productions.

Now, what really pisses me off is that, among some of our friends, there's a sort of smug acceptance of any "creative" effort, no matter how truly dreadful it is. A sort of "It must be good because it's Art" attitude. Any attempt to criticise anything is rubbished. If you don't like it, they imply, the fault is in you.

Now here's what really gets me - among all these friends I am the only one who engages in any creative work. I paint; I try to write. But I don't "consume" Art in the approved way, so to them I'm a bit of a Pariah as far as Culture is concerned. I suspect a breach is just around the corner!

Conceptual Art is a con

2009-10-24T19:14:00.000-01:00

All the expressive arts have groups of practitioners who push the boundaries of their art form.

In music the avant garde were experimenting with dissonance and strange time signatures from the beginning of the 20^th Century, pushing the boundaries until we arrive at “found” music on one hand, and John Cage’s 4’33”, three movements for any instruments the players choose to bring, as long as they don’t play a single note for the duration of the piece. Music could go no further out. The boundary had been reached. Most composers currently working are back to producing music for an individual or a combination of instruments, including electronic devices, and no matter how inaccessible it may sound to the average MOR fan, it is recognisably part of a continuing tradition.

In English literature we had “found” poems; we had BS Johnson publishing a loose leaf novel that the reader could tackle in any order they chose; but in many ways the boundaries were reached much earlier with “Tristram Shandy” by Sterne, published in the decade from 1759, with its totally black page, its concentration on the hero’s conception and birth, its learned references, and a concentration on the minutiae of domestic life and its mishaps – all foreshadowing Joyce. Joyce could be said to have pushed at the limits with “Finnegans Wake” with its reinvention of the actual language. But there has been a retreat from the extremes and currently esteemed practitioners generally produce accessible work which can be understood and appreciated by almost every literate person.

But the avant garde in the Visual Arts, having reached the limits with “found” pieces such as Duchamp’s “Fountain”, with the dribblings of Jackson Pollock et al, with reductionist sculptures such as Caro’s painted girders, with the use of collage by such as Richard Hamilton, still insist that the boundaries can be pushed further, until anything can be “Art” if the artist says it is. And anyone can be an “Artist” if they say they are. They don’t actually have to produce anything. It has been suggested that all that’s needed is for the “Artist” to think a work.

By that definition I’m the best visual artist in the world . . . . . because I say I am.

Bellowhead

2009-10-21T09:41:00.003-01:00

Not the visual arts for once, but music - Folk music at that. Last night, with Linda, Anthea, Naomi and Paul, I went to the Norwich Waterfront to see Bellowhead.

They were excellent, as always, and we all ended up bopping and jumping up and down to their music. If you don't know about them they're an 11 piece band, all of them multi-instrumentalists. Among their instruments are guitar, banjo, concertina, accordion, bagpipe, trumpet, trombone, saxophone, sousaphone, tuba, guitar, banjo, mandolin, bouzouki, fiddle, cello,swanee whistle, tin whistle, loads of percussion, etc etc. Here's a taste of their music, although this is not from last night, but from a concert last year:

"Fakenham Fair"

Incidentally, since last night my new catch-phrase is going to be "Look at the Lesbians". I'll explain. For the first 20 minutes or so of the concert Naomi and Anthea were standing near the front of the crowd, behind two rather large young women who were clearly great fans of the group, and who were constantly dancing vigorously and energetically, if in a somewhat ungainly and quite dangerous way - dangerous to other people's toes, that is. After a while it was all too much for Naomi who came and stood with Linda and I, further back, saying "I couldn't see the stage because of those two bloody Lesbians dancing in front of me!"

Disclaimer 1: at this stage I should make it clear that Naomi would not normally dream of being so un-PC as that, but enough is enough, and the two dancers were very annoying, even from where we were standing.

Disclaimer 2: neither myself, nor anyone in our party last night, has any information about the sexual orientation of the young women concerned.

As the concert went on and the tempo of the music increased, so these two young women threw themselves even more energetically into their pogoing. I couldn't resist drawing Naomi's attention back to them as they leapt up and down with their arms over their heads, hair flying, horn-rim spectacle lenses glinting in the spotlights. It was noisy, and I heard myself shouting into Naomi's ear "LOOK AT THE LESBIANS!"

So that's my new catch-phrase. Now I expect to get told off. Especially by Naomi.

From The Times

2009-10-18T15:48:00.005-01:00

Rachel Campbell-Johnson doesn't think much of Damien's little show either:

"Hirst has been painting. And by that he doesn’t mean employing a team of assistants to produce the paint-by-numbers-type canvases familiar from recent shows. Hirst has been alone in his studio working with palette and brush.

"The result is No Love Lost — a show of 25 pictures. Seen from a distance they don’t look too bad. Their dark expanses are seductively presented in traditional gilt frames. They fill the galleries with an eerie blue Insect-O-Cutor-style glow.

"But take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.

"Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.

"These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.

"Look to the end of the galleries and you will see Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time. Hirst appears to hope that his heavy handed memento mori will make him part of the line-up of art historical tradition. But the artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad. And who knows, maybe this is his trick. Is his brand so strong that we can’t resist turning up to look — even at works on which we know no love will be lost?" (The Times, 14th October 2009)

Here's the Poussin:

and here's one of the Hirsts, called "Requiem: White Roses and Butterflies 1":

It makes you want to weep, doesn't it? But not in the way Damien wants you to . . . . .

Sewell on Hirst - from the Evening Standard

2009-10-17T07:29:00.007-01:00

Utterly hits the spot:

Sewell on Hirst

Thanks to Nick for pointing me at this.

Does no-one love Damian any more? Peter Conrad in The Observer doesn't:

Conrad on Hirst
.

A pic to make you sick?

2009-10-15T14:39:00.005-01:00

Yes, that's Nick Serota, Director of The Tate Galleries, schmoozing with the sainted Damian. The best comment on his relationship with the YBAs is Charles Thomson's 2,000 painting

"Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision":

So what have you done lately?

2009-10-14T18:24:00.006-01:00

I hear you saying. It's all very well slagging off other people's work, but what have you done? So, to prove I'm not a critic (as if you couldn't guess that already) I'll occasionally stick in a piece of my work. Not because I'm claiming any particular merit for it, but just to prove, in the words of Archie Rice, that "I have a go Missus, I have a go!"

This is an imagined view of the Sussex Ouse valley seen from the sea and a thousand feet up, with Newhaven in the foreground and the inland "Cliff" of Lewes upstream. It's the third version of this subject I've painted, and interested me because it was the first large painting I'd made using acrylics. I normally use (and much prefer) oils. So I do have a go - and I'll post some more later.

Excuses for Tracey Emin

2009-10-14T17:04:00.000-01:00

Number 1:

The fact that she can't spell, yet uses words as an integral part of many works, reveals a wonderful vulnerability.

No. It reveals that she can't spell and that she has total contempt for the consumer of her "Art".
Have a look at "Helter Fucking Skelter" (sic) above. "Atitude", "Envey" Everythig", Steel". How hard would it have been to check those words?

I've just found this blog which says stuff about Ms Emin better than I can - I'm too angry! Have a look:

http://kirstyhall.co.uk/blog/2008/08/tracey-emin-20-years/

If it's not Art, what is it?

2009-10-07T18:04:00.004-01:00

So before I let myself go about Tracey Emin, a few words about what YBA crew have actually produced. In some of the reviews of the big Pop Art Exhibition currently filling the coffers of the Tate Modern the point’s been made that most pieces of Pop Art were comprehensible in a matter of seconds. You look at it, get the point, and move on. There is no depth; you don’t “lose yourself” contemplating a Lichtenstein or a Warhol. This may or may not be a criticism; but the lesson the YBAs (Young British Artists as were – they’re mostly in their later 40s now) seem to have learned is that extreme novelty is a selling point. That might take the form of gruesome dealings in dead animals (slaughtered for the occasion, let’s not forget), extreme sexual explicitness, or a sad parading of the detritus of their daily lives. I would argue that, whatever these pieces may be, they are not Art. So what are they? How about reviving a term from the 19^th Century – they’re “Conversation Pieces”; an updated version of the sort of thing a rich Victorian might keep in his salon to provide an ice-breaking topic of conversation with his guests. It could be an interesting arrangement of stuffed animals, like this one from among many produced by Mr Walter Potter from Bramber,

Sussex

in the second half of the 19^th Century (click on it to enlarge):

Actually, that's both more fun and more gruesome than anything Damien Hirst has dreamed up. And nobody's called it Art - it's Taxidermy.

The "Damien Hirst Is A Knob" movement - Brooker strikes

2009-09-30T18:12:00.002-01:00

Worth a read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/14/charlie-brooker-damien-hirst

Art, Craft and Skill

2009-09-30T15:35:00.007-01:00

It's probably not the best time to quote an incestuous child abuser, with Roman Polanski sitting in a Swiss jail for having sex with a 13 year old in 1978, but Eric Gill said:

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

So can there be Art without skill? If so, then clearly Conceptual Art is a valid form. The artist merely thinks the idea, and he/she or other people can try to put it into existence - or not. But if skill, in whatever medium, is a prerequisite, then we have a valid standard which we can apply to any piece of Art. So let us consider a couple of "Works Of Art" and see where we get. I'm choosing well-known works so that we are not confused by novelty.

This is Gainsborough's famous portrait of "Mr and Mrs Andrews" from about 1750. It has been interpreted of late from a Marxist perspective as a comment - if an unwitting one - on a society based on the holding of property. But I'm not interested in that here. Let us consider skill. Gainsborough can clearly handle oils. The rendering of surfaces is well done, there is real delicacy in the application of the paint, and there is a convincing, if conventional, handling of sky, cloudscape, scenery, perspective and clothing. The painting falls short where the Artist has used the conventions of the period rather than observation and drawing. So the figure of Mrs Andrews is almost fatally compromised because he has given her excessively narrow, "feminine" shoulders, and an anatomy which, if you stripped the clothes away, would look distinctly odd unless she is sitting on a surface inclined at 45 degrees. The trees owe more to looking at Flemish School landscapes than looking at real trees. And the sky seems to be adding something portentous without it being really clear what. The painting, of course, is regarded as the masterpiece of Gainsborough's early life. But he did so much more, and better, later. So is this a Work of Art? That must seem like a daft question. And the answer has to be "Yes". But it's yes because, despite the shortcomings of draughtsmanship, we know what these people looked like and we know quite a lot about their life together simply through the skill - or artistry - of the Artist.

Now clearly this is a work from a period before photography , and its purpose is somewhat different from that of a modern portrait. It is first and foremost a likeness. These people really looked like that (apart from those shoulders). Secondly it is a record. This is how these people wished to be seen and to go down to posterity - for paintings such as these were seen as permanent artfacts, not fashion items to be changed with the colour of the walls. Finally, it is an object to look on many times - there is no sell-by date. Such a picture might also be contrived to be thought provoking, stirring, sexually appealing, funny, scary, devotional, educational, or just plain pretty. Painted pictures served all of these purposes because, together with engravings and other prints, they were all there was to look at in a domestic context: no TV, no photographs, no home videos, no colour magazines. And of course, a major difference would be that the Artist was commissioned to paint the picture - such things were not done "on spec" - the outlay of time and material was simply too great. Such a picture would take months of work to complete - perhaps the time scale was even longer: a year? Perhaps two? It is quite a big painting - roughly four feet wide by two and a third feet high (69.8 x 119.4cm) and the surface is minutely covered with brush work.

One final point: the painting of Mrs Roberts' lap appears to be unfinished; the speculation is that the Artist was requested to make space for a possible future child to be painted in. This was, in a small way, to be a dynastic picture

Now I'd like to look at a picture from 165 years later:

This is Walter Sickert's 1915 painting of a Concert Party on Brighton Beach. It was almost certainly painted "on spec"- it is doubtful if Sickert had a particular buyer in mind. It is probably not a recogniseable portrait of any of the performers. But it is a record of a particular time and place. The topography of Brighton seafront has not changed, although the stage is not there any more. It is a summer evening in 1915. The First World War is less than a year old, and the British Army and its allies are far from being in the ascendent. The Pierrot troupe are playing to a small audience, and the whole setting is just a bit run-down. You sense that these performers have either seen better days, or wish they had. It is quite possible to read the painting as an early comment on the decline of Empire: this is not the fabled Edwardian Summer, rather it is the start of the era of the common man, what Alan Bennett describes as "an NCO's world" in his play "Forty Years On".

The technique is heavily influenced by photography. There is a distinct snapshot quality to the picture; the figures are partially obscured by the structure of the stage; one, indeed, exists only as a pair of legs coming in from the left. It may be that Sickert worked from a photograph - he used them extensively later on. You can see how Impressionism has influenced the Artist - the effects of the various lights (including the natural evening light) are as much the subject as the people. But what the painting does, skilfully, is to evoke the feeling of a specific time and place, and associate that with a slightly tired, brittle glamour which we feel was somehow typical of that first disillusionment with the military and diplomatic might of Britannia.

Like the Gainsborough, this picture is enjoyable on several levels; as a gorgeous object to look at; as a historic document, as part of the record of England, and Europe, at a stage in its development and change; and as a caller-up of emotion, as a touchstone for the emotions. In neither case did this happen by chance. The skill (to use Eric Gill's term) of the Artist has done it for us. What has happened to such skill in the world of "Brit Art"?

" So you don't think it's Art. So what?"

2009-09-23T08:56:00.003-01:00

At this point I think I should explain how this thread arose, since it may look like the senile ravings of a traditionalist. I don't think that's so, and here's why.

For many years now I've had debates or discussions with friends, many of whom are involved in the Arts to varying degrees, about this central topic - what is Art, and what's it for. And, as a corollary, what isn't Art. And does it matter? Some of these debates have become furious, polarised arguments (occasionally fuelled by too much wine), to the extent that we no longer raise such topics with each other. So on that level at least it does matter. It matters enough to have friends shouting at each other and feeling hurt by the exchanges.

But it also matters because Art has a function in Society. It is not unimportant. It is not a means for a few favoured late adolescents to make a lot of money at the expense of gullible Investment Bankers and Advertising Executives (and Russian Oil Billionaires, for all I know). Because they also make money at the expense of our great public collections - because of the gullibility of the Directors (or Curators or what you will) - and hence they impoverish those collections both financially and culturally, because the money wasted on evanescent "Brit Art" (or whatever) could actually go towards buying something worthwhile - or even displaying more of the huge stock of Art works which these places usually have in their storerooms and offices.*

At that point I should add (in text-speak) IMHO - in my humble opinion. Because, obviously, many many people don't agree with me, although many do, and an even larger number don't give much of a toss. Which, is part of the problem. If Art is only for the select few then it goes into that category of esoteric interests such as matchbox collecting or shoe fetishism - something that can be indulged in by those who enjoy that sort of thing. Of course, you can buy matchboxes for very little money, and you can indulge shoe fetishism cheaply on the Internet (or so I'm told . . . . ). But Art is usually big and expensive, especially if many people like a particular work, so the only fair way to enable access to such works is through large scale public collections. And fortunately, in the UK we are blessed with these.

But Art does speak to most people, given the opportunity - look at the story of the Pitmen Painters, the play about whom is revived at the National Theatre this Autumn. And my argument with much of contemporary Art is that it shuts out most people. I'll have to go into the reasoning behind this next time.

* Did you know, for example, that for years one of Samuel Palmer's masterpieces, "The Magic Apple Tree", painted in 1830, and given to The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge by a Mr Anderson in 1929 in memory of his dead brother, for years that painting hung in the office of the Director of the Museum, and could only be seen by special arrangement? For all I know it's there still. I'll have to email Dr Timothy Potts to ask if it's still on his wall. How many thousands of Art works are thus squirrelled away?

Some more thoughts

2009-09-22T19:40:00.001-01:00

Back to what has become the main topic of this blog: I want to think about Conceptual Art. As I understand it, the Art is in thinking up the concept. But there seems to be some disagreement about whether or not the Artist has to do anything other than formulate the concept in his or her own head. So by one definition, if the artist formulates a concept s/he has created a work of Art. Or, in other words, "it's Art because I say it is".

I have relatively little experience of Conceptual Art, I freely admit. But I have looked at a few different pieces. One that springs to mind was the runners tearing through the Tate Gallery last summer when we went to see the "Art of the East" exhibition. It was a bit hair-raising - you didn't want to get in the way of the athlete in case you were knocked down. I freely admit that I don't understand why this was Art.

Another that I recall was a Video Installation in the Liverpool Tate when we went to see the Klimt exhibition last year. It was a series of shots of urban settings with the camera swinging through 180 degrees in both the vertical and horizontal planes. It made you feel nauseous simply by the camera's movement. Again, I don't understand why this was Art.

In fact all the "Video Installations" I've seen have looked rather like amateurish home videos. I often wonder why the Artists who make Video Installations didn't do a Film Studies degree and at least learn to use the equipment proficiently.

Now a confession: when I was a student (Brighton 1967-1971) I made three pieces which you might call Conceptual Art. The first was a triptych altarpiece which opened to show three scenes which seemed to me, at the time, to be desperately important. If I remember right, one of the side pieces was a portrait of Bob Dylan, and the centrepiece was a painting of St George slaying the dragon. Don't ask me why - I can't remember. Then there was the metal grille from a heater which I partially melted with an oxy-acetylene torch to demonstrate (if I remember properly) the precariousness of our civilisation's dependence on Technology. And finally the mock French-Cafe table with its centre cut out and a card index (like half a Rolodex) of designs for restaurant fronts inserted in the hole. I spent months on these over a two year period. They were all rubbish - by any standards, if we may still use a term like "standards" in this field. But I wonder what a Saatchi would have made of them had they been in the right place at the right time? Would I now be rich?

But, take the mickey out of them as I have, I think that there was more artistry in any of these three pieces than in a Damien Hirst "spin painting" actually made by one of his technicians, or a Tracey Emin drawing of her own crutch. And honestly, there's no sour grapes in that statement. For each of those three pieces I learned, pracised, and utilised new skills, adapting them to the needs of the work as it progressed. And those pieces were not done for money, obviously, as Hirst's spin "paintings" were (by his own account).

In the end the piece I made as a student which I most value is a little coil pot about eight inches high. I spent an age making this look as much like a thrown pot as I could (this also smacks of "Concept" Art, I'm afraid). But now, 40 years on - to hi-jack a school song and a Play title - I like it just for the unassuming craftsmanship of its making. Here it is:

Art and what it's for . . . .

2009-09-19T10:14:00.001-01:00

Last night I watched Peter Capaldi's guide to Scottish Portrait Art, an excellent progrmme from the BBC (hands off, Murdoch, you bastard). In the programme the one-time Art student (Glasgow School Of Art - that wonderful Mackintosh building) and Actor looked at portraiture in Scottish Art from the famous 1559 portrait of Mary Queen of Scots onwards. Ramsay, Wilkie, Raeburn, the Victorians, the Glasgow Boys, the Colourists and so on - all of the work we saw was executed with consumate skill, which was learned and practised over the years. There were insights into how the artists worked, and glimpses into their studios.

This is Sir David Wilkie's portrait of William Chalmers-Bethune, his wife Isabella Morison and their Daughter Isabella. It was painted in oils in 1804. It is not intended to be a flattering portrait. It is an accurate record of how Wilkie saw that little family. The sheer skill is obvious. And to those of us who have been taught to actually look at paintings, the insights into the people portrayed are richer and deeper than any photograph could convey.

And this is John Byrne's 2007 portrait of his partner Tilda Swinton, executed in chalks. And the same comment applies. It tells you far more about the Actress than any photograph could. The technique is completely different apart from one thing. Both Artists, separated by 200 years, have looked and looked and looked at their subject; have interacted with their subject, and have put their insights down on canvas or paper. Wilkie's must have taken months to complete; John Byrne's perhaps much less time. But they are both the result of an applied art, craft or skill, call it what you will, which values intelligent, thoughtful analysis over cheap sensation.

It was a brilliant programme, and offered a vision of Art so far removed from Saatchi-World that it could have been a different planet.

Tim Minchin at Norwich

2009-09-16T04:37:00.001-01:00

Obviously, sincerity is the stock-in-trade of performers like Tim Minchin, and you can't always believe they are as right-on as they would have you think (Ben Elton - you've got a lot to answer for), but TM had a full house at Norwich's Theatre Royal eating out of his hand on Sunday night. For me the highlight was "Storm", a spoken piece which utterly nails mysticism, new age nonsense, religion, homeopathy, creationism, science deniers, etc etc. Have a listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s

Then go and see him if you can.

Just ahead of himself . . . .

2009-09-06T12:15:00.000-01:00

Following on from my last diatribe, this quote from Damien Hirst (part of a longer profile which I'll fillet when I have more time) was in today's Observer Magazine:

"I had a big dance with conceptual art," he says, "but there are things in art that are a dead end. Conceptual art, abstraction, they're total dead ends. You start thinking, there's enough bloody objects in the world, why are you making more of this shit. If I'm being brutal about it, that's what I'm thinking right now." Suddenly, the empty studio next door makes a whole lot more sense.

Errr . . . . that's Damien Hirst speaking!

Fishy Business

2009-08-31T16:16:00.006-01:00

The problem with much of “Brit-Art”, and current Art in general, stems from a confusion between Creativity and Originality. These terms are not synonymous. We could change them slightly and call them “Having Something To Say” and “Novelty”. In these terms, novelty is a relatively trivial thing; it could be a new sweet, a new hair colour, or a new way to sell soap. It is rarely original, though it is quite often a synthesis between two or more existing objects or ideas.

Let us think about Damien Hirst’s shark. For the moment forget what it’s called. It’s a big dead shark pickled and hanging in formaldehyde in a big glass tank. It’s novel as far as Art Galleries go. You might expect to see it in a Museum. But does it have anything to say to us? Apart, of course, from “ooh, I’m a big dead shark”. No. It is not an object with any profundity, any more than stuff you can see hanging in a Butcher’s Shop or on a Fishmonger’s slab.

Now let us consider the title. It’s called “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”. Does this alter the way we see the dead shark? Does it refer to the death of the shark or the death of the viewer of the shark? If we, for the sake of argument, say that the title makes a difference to the way we perceive the dead fish, precisely why does it do that? Are we then saying that the shark, as a work of Art, is dependent on words to give it meaning? If so, which could we dispense with more easily without losing the sense of the piece - the shark or the words? I’d say the shark. It has become redundant because of the words, which somewhat clumsily posit a powerful facet of human existence. I would argue that if, as an Art object in itself, the shark in the tank was the result of the “creative impulse” - for want of a better term - this would not be the case.

It is hard to think of another work of Art which both utterly depends upon, and is subverted by, its title. Dali’s title “La Montre Molle” is at least witty and rude; Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” has the virtue of being a rude pun; “Duchamp’s “Fountain” is interestingly accurate. But “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”? Too many words, too much adolescent profundity.

The following is lifted from Wikipedia on 31st August 2009:

Referring to another of Hirst’s works, “Away from the Flock” (a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde), Brian Sewell said, "I don't think of it as art ... It is no more interesting than a stuffed pike over a pub door. Indeed there may well be more art in a stuffed pike than a dead sheep."

In 2003, under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch shop, JD Electrical Supplies. Thomson asked, "If Hirst’s shark is recognised as great art, then how come Eddie’s, which was on exhibition for two years beforehand, isn’t? Do we perhaps have here an undiscovered artist of genius, who got there first, or is it that a dead shark isn’t art at all?"* The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have got the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.

So if anyone out there is prepared to defend the poor old shark, please comment.

Frances Spalding on John and Myfanwy Piper

2009-08-31T12:45:00.001-01:00

This is part of the text of the article which started me thinking again about Art and its place in the World. It's the author Frances Spalding's account of her own joint biography of John and Myfanwy Piper. The article appeared in The Guardian on Saturday 29th August 2009.

"Six months later, in January 1935, the first issue of Axis appeared. Its cover was strikingly modern. Designed by John, it had a bold, uncluttered layout, sans serif lettering and crisp delivery. A quarterly magazine, its contemporary focus caught the attention of Nicolete Gray who, with Myfanwy's help, organised the "Abstract & Concrete" exhibition in 1936, the first truly international display of abstract art in Britain. But shortly afterwards, as Ben Nicholson and Mondrian became ever more purist in their pursuit of abstraction, the Pipers began to waver in their commitment to it. Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth came to Fawley Bottom to straighten them out. They failed. Myfanwy Piper's diary for 13 May 1936 records: "Ben and Barbara. Hell."

"The following year, the Pipers saw Picasso's Guernica at the Exposition Internationale in Paris. Picasso's personality and aggression, Myfanwy recollected, "acted upon us like rape just when we had settled for the Mondrian cloister". John now lost interest in the anonymous, flat surfaces of international modernism. This art had deliberately sought to override national divisions and belonged to no particular country. But with the approach of war and the possibility of invasion, it suddenly mattered very much to which country you belonged. Moreover, the threat of destruction gave England's heritage a new preciousness. With this, Piper found that a sense of place and history were elements he could no longer overlook. From now on, he sought to marry his interest in the modern with his love of tradition. Myfanwy upheld his change of stance. "If art is to have any importance," she wrote, "it must be intimately related to life in its own time."

"And so, in his paintings of ruined abbeys, country houses and bomb-damaged churches, John Piper opened his art to location, belonging, identity and memory, all issues very much to the fore in today's world. He can nowadays be seen as a pivotal figure in the history of 20th-century British art, the artist who licensed the return of much in the human psyche. But in the late 1930s, Nicholson and Hepworth looked on him as a traitor to the modernist cause, faithless to its creed. Herbert Read was another who regarded him as "an apostate". Since then, art historians have sometimes accused him of insularity, of helping to bring about a Romantic revival incompatible with wider and more cosmopolitan values. But, though surprised by the vehemence of the antagonism he had aroused, Piper did not alter his change of focus. To Paul Nash he wrote: "After an abstract period, what a release one feels! The avenue at Stadhampton, or the watercress beds at Ewelme, are seen with such new intensity! But if one abstracts them finally, so that the posts are areas of colour, and the waterfall into the watercress bed becomes like a Ben [Nicholson] relief, then the result can be hung perhaps in Cork Street, but not against one's heart."

"Both Pipers now distrusted ideological straitjackets. Looking at Picasso's cubism, Myfanwy realised its modernity lay not in the shattering of form, but in the need to find a way of dealing with the remaining fragments and remnants of objects. For her, these paintings represented "not a new world but the old world in new and shattered circumstances". And it was here she found art history in the making; not in the idealist embrace of a modernist utopia, but in the negotiations and reconciliations between rooted experience and innovative methods."

I hope I may be forgiven for quoting such a large chunk of Prof Spalding's article - which she wrote as publicity for her book (John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art, by Frances Spalding, is published next month by OUP (£25). I would like to develop my thoughts on the place of Art at the beginning of the 21st Century with the above paragraphs as my starting pint. Watch this space . . . .

Time to revive the blog

2009-08-31T10:00:00.001-01:00

Four years on from refurbishing the boat, I've decided that it's time to start putting some thoughts down here on other matters. It seems to be a pretty permanent way of logging life, so watch this space.

Maiden Voyage

2006-06-21T15:54:00.000-01:00

(first published on the 13th September 2005)

This was yesterday - the 12th of September (I'm not superstitious, but I wasn't going to launch today!) The first photo shows son Ed pushing the boat out - literally.

The second shows trials under power - Lugg rows easily and tracks well, although the rowlocks jump out of their sockets a little easily if you get the oar blade at the wrong angle.

The third and fourth show the little bugger actually sailing - which he does well: stable (I started out sitting on the floor but soon realised that it was fine to perch up on the centre thwart), a fair turn of speed for the hull length in a breeze, and safe. We had winds of force 1 to 3 only, but it seems that Lugg won't tack through less than 120 degrees in winds this light - inevitable for a small lug-rigged boat, I imagine.

I had a great time and I think Ed enjoyed himself too.

It's finished!

2006-06-21T15:51:00.000-01:00

(first published 24th August 2005)

The past four weeks have seen a stream of visitors staying at our house (they all remembered Norfolk this summer), and it's been great to see everyone. But it hasn't helped Lugg's progress. Nor has the very changeable weather - no danger of a hosepipe ban here. But at last, by fitting in the work between visitors and rain, it is done.

The first thing was to get the hull finished completely (note the rowlocks - they were a fiddle):

Then I made the new rudder - a higher aspect ratio than the original, and with some attempt at a chord section (don't laugh when you see it, James):

The rudder was made from 12mm ply and the Optimist rudder fittings used. The hard part was the lump at the top for the tiller (I reused the original tiller as it looks nicely of an age with the boat. The original rudder just looked tatty.) Next I refurbished the centreplate, cutting out the soft part, filling and reshaping (another pseudo-chord section):

I think the colours clash nicely here. I might think about a bare wood handle for the centreplate at some point. Edmund will be pleased to hear that I took his advice and used a matt poly varnish on the rowing thwart - it now looks like the other oak in the boat; much better.

Finally I wheeled it out and stepped the mast and hoisted the sail:

The halyard is a foot too short and very old and ropey (Ha!), the sheet is an old bit of blue polyprop and also has to go, and I need a mooring cleat, so it's off to Wroxham this afternoon. Maiden voyage at the end of the week, weather permitting?

Look at that finish!

2006-06-21T15:48:00.000-01:00

(first published 21st July 2005)

Three coats of epoxy on the gunwale timber and it's looking good if I say so myself! The centre thwart is not varnished 'cos your arse would slide all over the place when you were rowing if it was - it's bare oak.

(The blob on the nose is a piece of oak stuck on as a finial which is awaiting shaping - I've since faired it in and it looks good too.)

And here's a view of Lugg's derriere:

I've just started remodelling the centre plate, and I've ordered rudder fittings from some place in the Midlands called Purple Marine. Found them on the Internet and they're charging about one third of the price asked by the local (Wroxham) Chandler for these items.

Prediction: one more week.

Dunlaminatin'

2006-06-21T15:44:00.000-01:00

(first published July 13th 2005)

That's what we should rename our house. It's been hours and hours of cutting and glueing and, latterly, planing and sanding, but now the gunwales are finished and ready to be varnished (with epoxy, of course!)

Now I should be able to make some real fast progress - after I've fixed the Landcruiser's clutch hydraulics, that is. But it is only a couple of weeks now if the weather holds; then, the maiden voyage.

Back again (in progress)

2006-06-21T15:42:00.000-01:00

(first published 24th June 2005)

Not much done in the last week and a half due to very pleasant family life interlude, but I've got an outer skin of oak on the gunwales and started to laminate the tops, I've started to trim around the stern thwart, and I've roughed out a new centre-plate, though much remains to be done there. This shows the gunwale as it is at the moment.

Clearly the completion date has gone back at least a couple of weeks, but it won't be long!

Over, under, sideways, down

2006-06-21T15:39:00.000-01:00

(first published 9th June 2005)

Time to turn Lugg back over, the paint having had three days to harden and me three days to garden. In this photo I've propped him up to extract the old centre plate.

This was struggle on my own (Linda having gone to RHS Wisley for the day), so when it was time to get him on his trailer I enlisted the help of Adrian, my next door neighbour, who seemed to welcome the break from fixing his brother in law's Land Rover.

Just the finishing touches now - a few more days work.

Gettin' there (as they say in Norfik)

2006-06-21T15:37:00.000-01:00

(first published 4th June 2005)

This is starting to look something like! One coat of International One Pot Polyurethane Norfolk Green over one of Berger's Lead Grey Undercoat over three of Blake's Waterproof Primer. Am I getting sick of painting this hull? Is the bear a Catholic? But it's worth it.

There’s the rub

2006-06-21T15:34:00.000-01:00

(first published 3rd June 2005)

Thought I was running out of corny titles did you?

The past three days have all been spent on the keel band and bilge runners. They're of English red oak and although not very thick they're almost tough enough. The most difficult bit was around the centre plate opening. I originally intended to make the whole keel band in one piece, but it was just too complex because of the original shape of the hull (it went up and down in the middle like nobody's business). So there are separate pieces each side and fore and aft of the opening. It's all held together with SP Systems best Epoxy Resin so it ain't gonna fall apart. The photos show it and the bilge runners finished and coated with epoxy. The next job (which may get done before the end of the day if the showers stop) is to undercoat the outside of the hull. Not long until we turn it back over for the finishing touches.

We have the technology . . .

2006-06-21T15:32:00.000-01:00

(first published 28th May 2005)

There are now three coats of primer on the exterior, with rubbing down between, principally to get rid of the mini-dings that are all over the hull and which didn't show up until I painted it and then looked along the lines of the planks with the light in the right direction; so some I spotted in the morning and some in the afternoon - and each time I cursed! In each case it was a necessary to scrape off the paint in the area of the little ding, scratch up the surface of the gelcoat to ensure adhesion, level with polyester filler, sand it smooth, and repaint. So that's done now, t'ankeegod (cf Gerald Durrell), and it's taken three bloomin' days (cf Raymond Briggs).

The next job is the keel rubbing band. I started by epoxy-ing a thin (6mm) strip of red oak to the keel. I wasn't sure how to make the wood conform to the curve of the keel while it was glueing, but after much thought I arrived at this very high-tech solution. If you want to restore a dinghy like mine I can provide the major parts of this laminating kit very reasonably - say £10 per brick or slab?

Tomorrow I hope to be glueing a thicker (8mm) strip of oak to this initial strip given the time and decent weather. But it's a Bank Holiday on Monday, so I'd best get as much done before the rain as possible.

How I kept losing my wet edge, Missus

2006-06-21T15:23:00.000-01:00

(first published 25th May 2005)

As today progressed the temperature went slowly up, the wind dropped and the sun came out. As this was the appointed day for applying the first coat of waterproof primer on the stripped and repaired hull it was interesting, to say the least. Keeping a wet edge on the paint was all but impossible, and it was touch dry in about 25 minutes instead of the three hours it said on the tin. And this is what it now looks like.

Two days ago I tack-ragged the hull to get any dust off and then primed all the rough patches with pink primer. Then today I sanded all those patches with a detail sander (triangular head) until I'd levelled all the imperfections (well, nearly all - I kept on finding fresh ones). When you start to sand the pink primer off paint is left in all the depressions, so you have a very good idea of the size and shape of the mini-dings you need to get rid of with the detail sander. Once this was done and the hull was pretty smooth, I applied the Grey Metallic Waterproof Primer (Blake's Marine Paints). There'll have to be a bit more sanding tomorrow to get rid of the remaining imperfections that this coat has revealed (and a couple of runs) and then two more coats of primer before we proceed.

While I was watching the paint dry (who said my life isn't full of excitement?) I pulled the centreplate up (down really, but the boat's the wrong way up remember) to have a look at it. It'll have to be replaced as it's made of ply which is starting to delaminate. Another job, but at least I've got the ply sitting in the garage.

Launch date in four weeks time?

Dealing with dings and holes

2006-06-21T14:36:00.000-01:00

(first published 21st May 2005)

Here's Lugg upside down with the dings inked round with a Magic Marker to remind me where to excavate and where to put the filler. Some of the pits in his surface are just where years of badly applied paint have cracked and flaked - these disappear when the old paint is removed, a process I've nearly finished; and some are the result of past collisions and crunches - sometimes just cracks which need raking out, sometimes holes which go right through into the glass cloth in the laminate. This sort need a bit more preparation; rake out all the loose stuff, then drip in polyester resin to replace that which is missing; sand smooth when it's gone off, and fill and fair with car body filler. So far this process has taken me about six hours and I reckon I've got about another four hours to do before the first coat of waterproof primer is on and I can see all the minor imperfections that will need attention before the gloss is applied. You can see from the photo above that Lugg's had a hard life. More dings than you can shake a big stick at.

And here's the repair I had to make to the back end of the hull after I discovered there was a crack which led straight through the bottom of the skeg from underwater into the aft buoyancy tank. I had to enlarge the crack when removing all the loose material before I could repair it. You can see the resulting cavity under the layers of GRP I applied - it's the two black bits in the middle of the upper surface. No wonder the boatyard drilled a drainhole from the aft buoyancy tank into the cockpit!

It seemed immoderately to please Jack, my 87 year-old retired farmer neighbour, to see the hole. He said: "You need one of them so you don't have to bail, Boy!" Then he laughed quite a lot. I didn't - I was up to my ears in polyester resin and chopped strand mat fixing it. Anyway. there are three layers of one ounce cloth over the hole - about the same thickness as the original hull minus the white gelcoat. There will also be a wooden rubbing strip glued to the bottom of the skeg - in fact all along the keel - so there will be plenty of material between the water and me.

The weather's forecast to be lousy tomorrow, so I feel a trip to Wroxham coming on to buy rowlocks and their sockets. And some waterproof primer. And anything else that comes to mind. Just like Tom Dudgeon at the beginning of Coot Club - except older and fatter; much older.

The World Turned Upside Down

2006-06-21T14:34:00.000-01:00

(first published 18th May 2005)

Yes, after about 45 minutes of thinking how to do it, Lugg is now upside down on his trailer. This is because all that's left to do on the inside is to finish everything with the oak trim, and I don't want to do that while I'm still slopping about with paint and resins.

I lifted one end of the boat (about as much as I can manage these days!), and Linda very kindly manoeuvred the trailer underneath it. It's resting on a wood strongback which I lashed across the two side hull supports on the trailer.

Given good weather I'll be getting on with fixing the dings in the outside of the hull now. Then oak keel strip and bilge strips; then paint, lovely green paint..

More woodwork

2006-06-21T14:30:00.000-01:00

(first published 17th May 2005)

Not a lot of progress in the past couple of days, mostly due to the continuing miserable weather. It’s perked up for a day or two now, though, and I’ve done two small jobs.

The first job was to start on the breasthook - the horizontal knee that joins the two gunwales just abaft of the stem head. This is a strengthening member, but I decided to make it decorative as well by fabricating it from a few offcuts of both white and brown oak. It won’t be finished until the final decorative oak strip is applied to the inside of the gunwale, but it’s a start.

The second job really was one of those “two steps forward and one back” efforts because I changed my mind and decided to give the rear thwart a wooden surface. I bought some quite reasonable WBP ply from B&Q with a good veneer face and cut it to fit on top of the rear thwart/buoyancy tank. Before I could epoxy it onto the GRP I had to remove all the paint - including that which I put on a week ago! I suppose I’d painted it without really thinking how it would look when finished - I just wanted the boat to look as if I was making real progress after weeks of taking it apart. But now it’s going to look much better.

'Sgonna look good when the oak trim hides the raw edge of the plywood.

Thwarted at last

2006-06-21T14:27:00.000-01:00

(first published 16th May 2005)

Yes, it's in. And here's a photo to prove it. The excess glue needs cleaning up, and the whole thing will need to be sanded to a well-worn smoothness, as if caressed by the sea for a hundred years - oh, all right, slightly eroded is more the look I'm going for. But it's there, in place, done. The thwart hangs from the gunwales on each side and rests on the centreplate case (actually, is glued to the centreplate case). This has been the most difficult task so far, and it seems to have worked. In the words of Hugh Laurie in Blackadder 3 - "Well, huzzah for that!"

Oh, and here's a detail photo to follow on from the last entry about knees. Here they are in all their glory:

Now for the rowlocks and rudder, then we turn the hull over for keel and bilge bands, and painting. I could have a boat by the end of the month at this rate!

British Knees

2006-06-21T14:25:00.000-01:00

(first published 14th May 2005)

A tutorial on knees - not the thing halfway between your foot and your naughty bits, but the wooden boat variety. Basically a knee is a wooden triangle which supports or reinforces two other bits of structural woodwork which meet (at approximately a right angle) in a wooden boat. Think of it as a bracket. Now, because wood has a grain and because wood is normally stronger along the grain rather than across it, knees need to be thought about. In fixing the main thwart in Lugg I will be using hanging knees, which is to say that the knees will be above the thwart, hanging it from the gunwale. To avoid the wood splitting under stress I have used oak instead of softwood - much tougher - and I’ve cut the knees so that the grain runs diagonally.

You can see from the diagram that when the grain runs vertically, if the wood splits, the thwart would detach from the gunwale; whereas if the grain runs diagonally the thwart will not become detached even if the wood splits.

In the photo you can see at top right the triangle of oak I cut for each knee, then the paper template I made up for the actual shape required and at bottom left the knee cut to (more or less) its final shape.

In this photo you can see the knee roughly in place (I’ve doctored this pic a bit to remove all the props and wedges I used to hold the knee temporarily in place). You can also see the direction of the grain. QED.

Today we have mostly shampooed all the carpets in the house and mowed the grass - not much boat time - and I'm tired now, so cheap epoxy putty (special recipe) next time. A bientot.

Working in the sunshine again

2006-06-21T14:21:00.000-01:00

(first published 12th May 2005)

Yes, the weather's improved and the epoxy is going off in reasonable time again.

Yesterday I spent about two hours fitting watertight screw hatches to the fore and aft buoyancy compartments - basically I wanted to get inside them to have a look for any nasties, and it's always handy to have somwhere to stow small, light items safely when you're sailing. (Yes, I promise not to compromise the reserve buoyancy!)

The difficulty with these hatches was that they were bought as four inch diameter - handy, because I have a four inch hole cutter. Unfortunately they were actually four and a quarter inch diameter, which meant I spent a long time filing out the holes to fit after I'd used the tank cutter. Still, they look good, and seem pretty watertight.

Inside the buoyancy tanks there was a very little damp right in the bottom, but as some idiot had drilled small holes in them at some stage this was not surprising. The holes may have been drilled because water seepage - possibly osmosis - led to the sound of water sloshing about in them, but I've seen no sign of any problem yet. I've decided to epoxy the hull on the outside anyway, so for daysailing it shouldn't be any problem. And I'll block up the little holes with epoxy putty.

Incidentally, the tops of the two buoyancy tanks are made from threequarter inch thick end-grain softwood with GRP on both sides - it took an age to cut through and even longer to shape. Fortunately the vertical faces of the tanks are just an eighth of an inch of GRP - that rear one was a lot quicker.

Now this is getting to be something like: today I started on the main thwart, using one of my nice pieces of oak. The pic shows the thwart wedged in place with a temporary strut and a couple of folding wedges, and you can also see the clamps securing the final laminations of the inner gunwale where it's thickened for the thwart supports and rowlocks. At the back you can see the hatch in the aft buoyancy tank.

Since I took the photo I've roughly shaped the hanging knees which will support the seat; I promised a diagram of them ages ago and I'll explain them in more detail in the next article; I must also mention my patent epoxy putty next time - it's very cheap and very strong. Tomorrow should see the main thwart in place: fingers crossed!

Oak and teeth (a minor hobbit character)

2006-06-21T14:13:00.000-01:00

(first published May 10th 2005)

The front thwart - the mast support - is in place, and there really is nothing like oak. It looks so good. Of course, it needs sanding, not least to get rid of the pencil marks and gluey fingerprints, but I’m sorely tempted to leave it plain and unvarnished when the boat’s finished.

Two steps forward and one back this morning again: the air temperature has slumped in the last couple of days down to about 12 degrees C in the day and about 5 by night. This is a full 10 degrees colder than we had last week. So when I grasped the lovely new mast support thwart this morning the glue joints broke - the epoxy was still plastic and squishy after 18 hours. It takes three hours to start to harden at above 15 degrees - below that it takes forever. Still, I was able to remodel the supports for the thwart, and it looks a bit more elegant than it did last night. The weather hasn’t warmed up yet, so it’s going to stay clamped up until the sun returns.

The last couple of days have been dominated by the toothache - I haven’t had one for years and years, but it’s been an absolute stinker, and today I went into Norwich and had a wisdom tooth pulled by my South African dentist, Albertus Joubert (really). Now I feel like a spring lamb; well, a spring old goat anyway; a pretty knackered spring old goat, but I hope for many good nights’ sleep from now on. A demain, mes enfants.

At last

2006-06-21T14:11:00.000-01:00

(first published 9th May 2005)

At last a positive step forward. The painting of the inside of the hull is finished, and the mast support (forward thwart) is in place and the is glue hardening overnight. I couldn't resist taking a pic with the mast in place - looks something like a proper boat at last. I'll post details of the fixing of the thwart later; but for now, in the words of the execrable Maggie, "Rejoice!"

VE Day - and the paint starts to go on.

2006-06-21T14:06:00.000-01:00

(first published May 2005)

The preparation of the inside of the hull for painting has been three days (admittedly fairly short days) of temptation and frustration: frustration at not being able to get on faster because of the amount of scraping, sanding and making good to be done; temptation to simply slap some paint on to hide the defective surface and pretend everything was all right. But now, finally, the first coat’s on and, although I didn’t manage to remove all the blemishes with scraper, wet-and-dry paper and filler, it looks more like a boat and less like a camouflaged bath tub now.

The trouble has been that curse of the painter and decorator - poor preparation in the past, paint slapped on over a previous layer of gloss with no sanding. It lasts for a year or two, then starts to flake off the unkeyed surface. But the problem is that it doesn’t flake off uniformly - you end up picking at bits of it with a penknife blade or even fingernails. Then you have to sand the layer underneath, which should have been done last time, to give the new paint something to key to. On Lugg there were three layers of paint like this, all of them flaking. In the words of Terry Pratchett’s Witches - bugrit!

Now that the new paint’s on the inside of the hull I can see the few little places where I didn’t manage to get all the old loose paint off - they really weren’t visible on the tatty, multicoloured surface. Still, it’ll be an easier job to tackle them now, before the second coat of Danboline Bilge Paint goes on tomorrow.

Speaking of which, what a good investment that stuff is. I know of no paint that lasts so well under boaty abuse. When I had Fram I painted the bilges with Danboline and it was the only coating which was still intact 7 years later - despite being half-submerged in bilge water for much of the time. The bloke who bought Fram from me just left it sitting on its mooring for 7 or 8 years and did no maintenance. The varnish and the paint on the topsides and deck were in a sorry state, but the submerged Danboline was still OK. (I’ll have to tell the story of Fram’s new owners some time - it’s a salutary tale.) So use Danboline - accept no substitute. Can I have that sponsorship now please, International Paints?

Wheezing but happy

2006-06-21T14:02:00.000-01:00

(first published May 2005)

Yesterday I dodged the showers and prepared the inside of the hull for repair and painting. (If all this is familiar to you then skip the next four paragraphs.)

Explanation - when a small GRP dinghy is popped out of its mould the outside shows the same high standard of finish as you see on any yacht or motor cruiser; but the inside is as rough as a badger’s bum. A yacht has a set of GRP internal mouldings which means that you see the same smooth shiny gelcoat finish inside and out, but a dinghy like Lugg - because it’s small, relatively cheap, and has to be kept light - has no internal mouldings. The inside of the hull is just the rippled surface of the Polyester resin over the rough chopped strand mat. This is usually painted so that it feels OK to the touch, but no real attempt is made to achieve a smooth finish - it would take too long and cost too much.

So Lugg’s insides were rough - not just because of the production process, but because he’s been repaired a number of times over the years in various places on the hull, and each time it added to the irregularity of the inside surface. First I sanded as much of the existing paint as practicable, with a power sander where possible, but also by hand; then I levelled the bigger irregularities in the surfaces with Polyester filler and sanded that to a reasonable finish. Finally I had to repair the joint between the centre-board case and the hull as I mentioned in a previous article.

Having cut glassfibre chopped strand mat to suitable sizes, I mixed some polyester resin and painted the surfaces to be repaired with it fairly generously. (You have to work quite fast once you’ve mixed the resin because it hardens in about 20 minutes.) Then I laid the shaped mat into the wet resin and stippled more resin into the surface until it was completely saturated. I worked around both sides of the plate case with an initial layer which was local to the damage, then laid another layer over the whole area of the join on each side. I worked about two inches up the plate case and about six inches on the horizontal hull surface. This picture shows the mat and resin laid up in the hull - it’s a reddish colour, although the light wasn’t good for the photo.

Finally I skimmed the whole lot with a thin coat of filler to make the repair look like the rest of the hull and sanded it smooth. This photo shows the grey filler being sanded and a bracing strut in place to hold the plate case vertical while the resin hardened (it was leaning slightly to the starboard side).

You can see the sanded surface of the (grey) original paint in these shots. Tomorrow - all being well - it’ll change to dark red when I put the new paint on.

Using polyester resin is always dodgy - the fumes can make you ill - so I did the lay-up in the open air. I still ended up wheezing. Mind you, when I was teaching in Sussex a colleague and I made a GRP kayak in a workshop in one week after school hours. It was winter and cold, so we kept the windows closed. I was laid up with styrene poisoning from the fumes for about a week afterwards. I won’t do that again!

Two steps forward and one step back . . .

2006-06-21T13:58:00.000-01:00

(first published May 2005)

Starting to strip off the paint from the inside of the hull yesterday I noticed that the centre-board casing will need a bit of reinforcement where it joins the hull. When the boat was built (by a fairly unsophisticated builder in a pretty crude way) the hull moulding had a slit put in it along the keel for the centre board, and then the centre board case was just glued on above the slit with glass fibre and polyester resin forming a continuous L-section join all round, as in the diagrammatic cross-section.

But polyester resin is not as good a glue as epoxy and, over the years, the join has started to break down. Now, before I paint the bilges again, I’ll have to renew the joint between centre board case and hull with glass cloth and resin. Another trip to Norwich, I suppose!

Meanwhile, here’s a list of jobs done and still to do:

1) remove and discard fendering around the hull (done)
2) separate hull and deck, discard deck after measuring (done)
3) make new gunwale - spacers, inner and outer (done)
4) repair stem, make and fit new stemhead (done)
5) make and fit new rubbing strip and capping to gunwale
6) make new sternpost and fit (done)
7) cut holes and fit buoyancy tank screw hatches
8) design make and fit thwart and rowlock support beams (done)
9) design, make and fit thwart
10) design make and fit mast support thwart
11) design, make and fit aft thwart to top of buoyancy tank
12) prepare and paint inside of hull
13) reinforce hull to centre board case joint
14) fair off and paint outside of hull
15) fit rubbing hardwood strips to bilge runners and keel
16) fit deck hardware, rudder hangings etc
17) acquire new sail
18) fit mast and sailing gear

That’s it so far, but in the spirit of this article I bet there’ll be more to come!

Slow progress

2006-06-21T13:56:00.000-01:00

(first published May 2005)

Slow because it rained a little this morning, and then I had to mow the lawn and cut down an old bullace (wild plum) tree. Then, after lunch, the sun came out and I was able to get on with Lugg's nose.

You may wonder why he's called Lugg; apart from the fact that he's a lugsail dinghy, Lugg is a character in the Albert Campion novels by Margery Allingham published in the first half of the last century. He's Campion's manservant, a semi-reformed thug with a heart of gold. He's reliable, solid, and not really built for speed. If Campion could be seen as a rather tippy racing yacht then Lugg is a sturdy, steady, safe lugsail dinghy. But a bit of a bruiser. Here's a description of him from 'Look To The Lady': ". . . . a mountail of a man with the largest and most lugubrious face . . . . his great muscular arms were bare to the elbow. For the rest, his head was bald, and the bone of his nose had sustained an irreparable injury."

My Lugg's nose had sustained a pretty awful injury if you remember. Here's a reminder of what I found when I started to take him apart:

So today I continued rebuilding his nose. Oh alright, the stem. I used chopped strand mat and polyester resin to start with, then finished off with body filler. Here's his new profile:

Having done that (and it needs a final touch of filler and more sanding) I started on the seat and rowlock supports. Here's the port side one clamped up and glueing:

My current thinking is that I'll brace the seat (thwart) with hanging knees from these supports. I'll try to include a diagram tomorrow. Hope the sun shines.

An unpleasant surprise

2006-06-21T13:53:00.000-01:00

(first published April 2005)

It’s been an interesting afternoon. The stem fairing was going quite well until I saw what I thought was a loose bit of paint about two inches along from the stem. I put my thumbnail under it and a big lump of filler came away from the “plank” and the stem. One of those hurried Saturday boatyard repairs - they’d bodged the filler in on top of greasy dirt and green algae without even roughening the surface of the GRP. There was no adhesion at all. I had to fill it with a mix of chopped mat and resin, then fair it with more filler when that had gone off. Now, last week it was so cold that the epoxy glue (setting time 3 hours) was taking 12 to 24 hours to go off. Today, with temperatures in the low twenties celsius, the bloody filler was going off in about five minutes. There was no time to get a finish - just bosh it in and sand when hard. And that’s despite only using about a quarter of the catalyst recommended. (Car body repairers will know what I’m talking about.) Here’s a picture of another bodged repair I found - when I raked out the loose filler this hole was about half an inch deep in a quarter inch thick hull. Yes, they’d filled it on the outside and whapped some chopped mat and resin on the inside. It’s looking better now, I promise.

So loads of sanding tomorrow. Never mind, it’s going to be a good day for weather again. In between the filling and sanding I managed to make a new stern post/rudder mounting and glue and screw it in place on the transom. Here’s a photo of the old and new mountings side by side.

Don’t know what’s been chewing the old one, but the new one’s oak, and epoxy coated, so any wood eating worms are going to have blunt teeth, I hope. Here's a shot of the new stern rudder mounting in place on the transom.

Wax on, wax off

2006-06-21T13:48:00.000-01:00

(originally published April 2005)

There’s a sort of Zen about doing these jobs on this little boat. When I had the “Two Brothers”, my 22 foot clinker sailing cruiser, I seemed to spend all the time doing desperate remedial work. The idea that it should be laid up for a few months while it was thoroughly sorted never entered my head; it had to be ready to sail when I wanted it (on one occasion on Boxing Day, I remember). So the maintenance was always rushed, always crucial and always present. A bit like keeping an old car running if it’s your only means of transport - except that the need to keep the boat going was only in my head.

But the work on the little dinghy is interesting - everything is a problem to be thought through instead of a disaster to be averted, and there’s no rush (except my desire to see it on the water before the summer’s gone; well, before the summer starts really). So I do a bit, make a coffee, have a think, do a bit more, make a note or a sketch, feed the chickens, do a bit more, walk the dog, and so on. I’m enjoying it so much that I’m thinking about the next boat already. Ray Mears’ programme on BBC last night (canoeing down a Canadian river) made me think it would be good to have a Canadian canoe; but then I’ve just seen some plans and an article about a 19 foot double-ended open boat, yawl-rigged, suitable for camp-cruising (another one from the Salle quiz - “Carry On Camp Cruising”) which I’m thinking about. Don’t know where I’d keep it, but it really looks nice. I’ll try to post some pictures later. Now back to fairing the stem.

Gunwales and transom

2006-06-21T13:45:00.000-01:00

(originally published April 2005)

Now then, where was I? Oh yeah, in the garage.

To show what I’ve done around the gunwale I took some photographs and drew a diagram. I think that it’s important to make the gunwale as stiff as possible; with the original GRP deck in place it was virtually immovable because of the large horizontal area of the deck moulding bracing it. Now the stiffness will have to be provided by the wood laminations I have glued in place. So far there are four 10mm layers of soft wood around the gunwale, glued to the steel band on the outside of the hull, and to the GRP on the inside, with epoxy adhesive which has been just brilliant. There will be more wood, with a further 10mm thickness on the outside (possibly even hardwood - oak?) And a capping piece to run right along the top of the gunwale. Then I have to fix in a hefty member each side roughly amidships to support the rowing thwart and the rowlock sockets.

The next photo shows the hull starting to look a bit more like it with the wood in place around the gunwale - albeit with clamps.

There’s also a shot of the transom after I removed the old rudder mounting - a piece of hardwood which over the years had been eaten away by rot and what looked like worms.

Some other photos

2006-06-21T13:41:00.000-01:00

(first published April 2005)

Here's some I took earlier - I've got to catch up a bit as this blog is almost a week behind the action.

This is the hull after removal of the deck. You can see that the mould must have been taken off an old dinghy. I've forgotten to mention that Lugg is ten feet long and four wide, with a pivoting centreplate and transom hung rudder.

And here's the deck moulding that I'm discarding. The more you see the boat without it the more you realise quite how ugly the deck was.

This shows the damage to Lugg's nose and the method of construction with the steel band around the top of the hull moulding.

And this shows how the steel band is fastened to the hull moulding with stainless screws and nuts. To avoid removing them and removing much of the rigidity from the hull moulding I epoxied strips of softwood 10 x 25 x 150mm between them on both the inside and the outside of the hull, to which I have subsequently glued a continuous strip of softwood 10 x 25 x 3,200mm. Diagram and picture to follow, but now the sun's shining and I've got to get on with it.

Decisions

2006-06-21T13:39:00.000-01:00

(first published April 2005)

When I started to look at the boat I had bought I realised that although he was sound enough to be sailed as he was for the time being, he would need fairly major work in the near future. This became more obvious when I started to remove the nasty black rubber fendering around the gunwale. This was clearly an old boat (for GRP), and was constructed in an unusual fashion. Instead of the deck being bolted and glassed to a flange around the top of the hull as normally found in GRP boats, a piece of stainless steel angle had been bolted around the top of the hull to make a flange. My guess is that the hull moulding was originally designed to be finished with a wood gunwale and thwarts, but that it had been adapted to take a GRP deck with thwart and mast step moulded in. This would require less upkeep, always desirable in a hire boat. The horizontal part of the angle steel had been sawn through every eight inches so that the metal could be bent round the top of the hull moulding to form the flange - otherwise the metal simply would not bend. Here’s a sketch cross section of the hull/deck join:

Although this was odd construction it has meant that the hull has withstood the battering of the years pretty well. Although the hull moulding has been split and repaired a couple of times in the past (between waterline and gunwale, I’m glad to say) the hull has never lost shape due to any of these impacts, as the steel band is really strong. I have seen a dinghy similar to Lugg squashed between a forty foot hire cruiser and the wooden quay heading; the hull became about a foot narrower before the pressure was released, and although it more or less sprang back into shape, I would not have been happy if it had been my dinghy.

Anyway, Lugg was strong except in the deck. This had broken up around the rowlock sockets and been repaired several times, and as you can see from the photos the very front of the deck moulding simply wasn’t there any more. I decided to remove the deck, discard it, and replace it with a wooden one. This would look better - varnished wood instead of swimming-pool-blue GRP - and would enable me to alter the deck layout and attach fittings more easily. So I went for laminated wood gunwales and framing with a marine ply deck.

I went to our local specialist hardwood Timber Yard and nearly bought a plank of Mahogany 150 x 25mm x 4 metres long for the laminated parts; the bloke at the desk said it would cost me “about thirty quid” but when he came to measure it the price (with VAT) went up to fifty pounds. As one object of the exercise is to get afloat in a decent looking boat as cheaply as possible I decided to go with soft wood instead. From experience of my other wooden boats I knew that provided you choose the straightest and closest grained, most knot-free softwood and build and coat with modern epoxies durability is not a problem; and such woods can be stained to resemble mahogany or whatever. And they’re more environmentally friendly. So I spent seventeen pounds (and a lot of time selecting my pieces) on softwood and started to saw up 10mm wide strips for laminating.

Meanwhile the original deck was retained to provide measurements for positioning of rowlocks, mast step and seat.

With the acquisition of a dozen and a half clamps and the spending of another seventeen pounds on SP Systems 106 Epoxy, I was ready to begin.

A look at the worst

2006-06-21T13:14:00.000-01:00

(originally published April 2005)

And this is what I saw when I removed the fendering! Having been towed around behind 40 foot hire motor cruisers for the last three or four decades, Lugg has taken a bit of a pasting on the stemhead. There are about 16 different holes where the towing eye has been repeatedly ripped out of the GRP and replaced, new holes being drilled each time; these dinghies lead a very rough life. The very top of the stem is missing altogether. The repairs over the years were quick and dirty, since most of them will have been done between one hirer bringing the boat back at 10.00am on Saturday morning and a new hirer taking it out again at 4.00pm the same day. Doesn't make for craftmanship.

Taking off the black rubber fendering took about four hours - it was held in place by all 56 stainless steel nuts and bolts which held the deck on to the hull moulding. Every single bolt had been nipped off close to the rubber under the gunwhale, making it very difficult to remove the nut. You can see the detail in this photo.

What's it all about?

2006-06-21T13:07:00.000-01:00

(originally published 22nd April 2005)

This will, I hope, be an account of the rebuilding of a Norfolk Broads ex-hire fleet GRP lugsail dinghy.

I haven't owned a boat for four years and was beginning to get withdrawal symptoms, having had various dinghies and other sailing boats for the previous 24 years.

He needs quite a lot of work - the top of the stem has been bashed away to nothing over the years as a hire-cruiser tender, and there are cracks and scrapes at various places on the hull. The deck is knackered and will need some thought.