Technology makes it simpler for us

My fabulous new camera has 17 buttons on its outside.  That's including the one you press to take a picture.

It was a Haunting picture

We were staying in a cottage, inaccurately named ‘Coastal View’, in Porthgain, and we’d arranged to meet up with our friends for a meal at Harbour Lights, the restaurant across the square.  They were staying  in their caravan three miles up the road at Mathry.  I don’t remember the meal, but afterwards I know we went back to our place, had a few drinks and decided to go next door to the Sloop Inn. 

I know that I was drinking whisky of some sort, and so was Paul.  A few artists lived in Porthgain, still do, and Paul got into an argument with one of them, called Bryn.  Bryn was drinking brandy, and we worked out next day that the glasses might’ve got confused.  He did pretty good representational landscapes of the local scene, which Paul decided to challenge on the grounds that he was hypocritically exploiting the tourist trade whilst simultaneously decrying it and thereby squandering his talent, or some such stuff.  Paul is good at challenging when he’s in the mood, and Bryn was in the mood too. 

The pub ran a gallery in the back room in those days, and they dragged each other out there, getting a bit rough.  I was sitting at the bar holding hands with Caro, because she’d reached her weepy phase and I’d reached my amorous one, so I don’t know exactly what happened out there.  Reconstructions suggest that blows had nearly, possibly actually, been exchanged.  They wouldn’t have been very harmful by this stage, but what is sure is that a picture got knocked off the wall, and the frame got slightly damaged.  We popped in the next day and viewed it: an impressionistic depiction of a coastal scene – Druidstone, I think – in a rather abstract style.  Good, but certainly nothing to have a drunken conceptualistic fight over.  We all, Bryn included, laughed and forgot about it.

A few months later, V and I were in Narberth, visiting the old aunts, Margaret and Ray.  They still lived at home in those days, in the house in Spring Gardens that their father had built in the early years of the century.  The carers came in twice a day, did what caring had to be done, and left.  Ours was a duty visit, and the aunts were still just interesting enough for conversation, but there are limits, so we made our temporary excuses and wandered down the Drang and through to the High Street.  There used to be a nice gallery down next to the second-best butchers’, before it failed and got turned into yet another tat shop.  There in the window was the Picture.  We told Paul and Caro about this, and next time they were in the area they went to have a look, but it had moved on. 

On subsequent visits to Pembrokeshire, though, we all seemed to come across it every so often in various unexpected locations.  I don’t remember the details now, but it kept cropping up.  It was clearly stalking us.

That winter, we were invited to Paul and Caro's house for a meal.  When we arrived we were instructed to close our eyes, turn around, open them and look at the wall of the stairwell.

“Well, we had to, didn’t we?” said Caro.

Sky over here, this evening

Mare's tails?  Mare's nest?  I dunno.  Vapour trails, probably.

More or Less?

To Tate Modern, to view the Matisse ‘cut-outs’.

Also, in my case, to view Tate Modern from the inside.  I’d spent many a happy lunch hour(ish) admiring the Bankside Power Station, amongst many other attractions (St Paul’s, the Cannon Street station San Gimignano-esque towers, many passing young girls) from the riverfront platform of the Anchor, back in the late 70s when I worked in a (thankfully) long-gone Seifert office block called New London Bridge House on roughly the site of what is now the Shard (about which, externally, I love everything except its location… but that’s another story).

Anyway, I’d never been inside Bankside Power Station before yesterday.  Not back then, obviously – it was still generating pollution until 1981.  (I’d love to have seen that turbine hall full of humming oil turbines.)   Frankly, I was a bit disappointed.  It’s all a bit too organised, corporate – I like my museums and galleries to be intimate, a bit chaotic, even tactile.  Go to Burrell in Glasgow, Lyme Regis, or (if you’re venturing to foreign parts) the Wilson Museum in  Narberth.  I’m being churlish, I know – the scale of the Tate Modern project is stupendous.  But I found myself people-watching rather than absorbing the art on roped-off display.  And I couldn’t find the Rothkos.  Bah!  (Though a single stumbled-upon Bacon portrait was sufficient compensation.)

And the Matisse?  Well, you have to admire the energy (although he did have a lot of help), and the film of him carving the precise form out of the huge sheet of coloured paper with a pair of scissors, like Michelangelo with his marble and chisels, removing the irrelevant bits to expose the vision within, was enthralling.  But there were too few Davids, too much wallpaper.  Maybe a couple of dozen images out of hundreds (the famous ones, obviously) jumped out and lodged in my emotional memory.  A small exhibition of the few undoubted masterpieces, rather than hundreds of bits of work-in-progress.  Too much is too little.

It was great to wander along the Bankside though, soaking up the sights and the sounds.   (Buskers seem to be actively encouraged, except where they’re banned.)   The views across the river have evolved, mostly upwards (the Gherkin is now dwarfed by the Cheesegrater, St Paul’s dwarfed by both – although it’s interesting how the cathedral re-asserts itself the closer you get, across the wibbly-wobbly millennium bridge).  

A faint memory of an old cartoon: two old geezers leaning on a gate, gazing across open fields.  “I remember when this was all Banks.”

Memories are made of something

I was hunting through an old wine box up in the spare bedroom for a notebook containing the first chapter of a children's story I'd started to write about twenty years ago, when instead these are what I found.

Is there anyone out there old enough for this to bring tears to their eyes?

I can do the backs of the EP sleeves as well, if coerced - and I might even have the records that used to live inside them.

Here's an interesting place

http://www.vonkameke.com/