The Presence of Absence

          Lately, I’ve been buying pink grapefruits from the local supermarket. I’m so addicted to them that I daren’t look to see the country of origin, lest it be too far across the globe for the carbon footprint not to prick my conscience. I take pleasure in juicing them on a vintage, electric Moulinex that is activated by pressing the halved fruit down on the rotary spindle, which alternates direction each time it is engaged. That is, until the motor packed up and my efforts to fix it came to nought. So, I trawled eBay for a replacement and saw the same model, in an authentic 1960s shade of custard. Nostalgia tempted me (and it was reasonably priced), but reason prevailed. Old electric motors die, don’t they.

          Thus, paralysed by indecision, the matter was put aside while we executed a plan to make the most of the mild weather. We went on an excursion in the campervan – the last, perhaps, before the clocks change and the days get shorter overnight. A previously unexplored section of the north coast of Cornwall was our target for a stint of hiking, sampling local produce and engaging with nature in general.

          I found a strategically located campsite at Delabole, a name that intrigued me because it sounded French. Norman, perhaps? Cornish placenames tend to have prefixes, such as “Tre” (homestead), “Pol” (pool or pond), “Pen” (head or end) and, of course, “Saint” (saint), but this place is different because it was named after a hole in the ground. (Not a Norman nobleman after all.) I didn’t know it until I went there, but Delabole is the site of a “world famous” slate quarry that continues to be productive, six hundred years after it was first excavated. As for the name, Deliou Manor, near the present site of the quarry, was listed in the Doomsday book. By 1284, it had become known as Delyou Bol – a translation of the old Cornish – “delyou” meaning flakes or leaves and “bol” a pit – which gives us the Pit of Flaky Stone.

          We did go to see it, walking past the vacant coach-parking lot and standing, alone, on the viewing platform (sightseers are more numerous in the holiday season, apparently). We watched an excavator poking noisily at the prized sediment and tried to imagine the time when more than a thousand people worked there. Now, there are five men and three machines, so there wasn’t much to see. We continued along the path to the coast and a café at Trebarwith, a placename more familiar, insofar as it is easily confused with a hundred others.

          There’s something sweet about seaside holiday places at the end of the season. There are few if any other customers, so staff are friendly and relaxed. You feel smug if the weather’s fine and privileged, as if you were in First Class. It was in this kind of bubble that we set off on a five-hour trek. Yet, there was also an eeriness, induced partly by the lack of a breeze, the stillness of the ocean and the absence of any other hikers. This might have been something to savour, yet we were not gratified by such exclusivity, especially as it applied also to the wildlife. During that walk, not once did we see any creature emerge from the sea. Apart from a few sheep and cattle, the only fauna we spotted were three caterpillars, three butterflies, two black beetles and a slug. Had the end of the world occurred since we left Trewhatsit?

          More likely, it’s just a quiet time for nature, but now that we’re back in the city, it’s business as usual. I was going to resolve the matter of the citrus juicer but, having opened the freezer and seen the gallons of frozen apple juice stashed within, I have put it on hold again – which, incidentally, gains me respite from the carbon-footprint anxiety.

Pressing Engagements

          It’s that time of year again: the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – and influenza. Actually, it’s been so long since I had the flu that it seems now like one of those childhood afflictions one no longer need worry about. I am, of course, not uniquely immune to the virus; regular vaccination has saved me from the dreaded lurgi. So, I was pleased to be invited this week to the local clinic for the annual flu jab.

          My appointment was set at 09.22 (which did strike me as being improbably precise) and when I arrived ten minutes early, I was perplexed to see a queue snaking out of the entrance and into the carpark. My first thought was that I could have stopped for coffee at that nice little café I walked past, but I observed the queue shuffling forward at a fair pace, so I took my place. Before long, I was inside, with just enough time to banter with one of the attendants, who told me they were doing 850 jabs that morning and that the reason it was organised so efficiently was because “the boss is ex-military”.

          ‘Military precision’ is one of those assumptions that, in my view, deserves to be questioned. I may be biased but, with a father who served in the armed forces, I was accustomed to hearing stories to the contrary. The terms ‘balls-up’ and ‘cock-up’ were familiar to me from an early age and, later, I learned the US forces equivalent, SNAFU. It was with scepticism, therefore, that I viewed footage during covid lockdown of army personnel taking charge of vaccine distribution. I took the cynical view that it was just a morale-boosting stunt. Nevertheless, here I was, rolling down my sleeve and being ushered out of the back door, with my phone displaying 09.23!

          Anyway, now that I’m jabbed, I can relax and enjoy autumn’s delights, especially as the weather is clement and there’s plenty of sunshine to enhance the colourful, turning foliage. The bumper harvest has already given us a freezer full of stewed apples and there is no end in sight to the season’s plenty. Now there is apple juice. A friend, who lives in a farm cottage next to a small orchard, invited a group of pals for an afternoon of sharing both the labour and the produce of an apple-pressing session. She had hired, or borrowed, the equipment and we were required to bring suitable containers. Glass-bottled juice can be pasteurised and kept, plastic-bottled juice can be frozen and kept, but untreated juice will soon ferment.

          Had I realised the scale of the abundance, I would have brought a wagonload of vessels. She has no more than a dozen fruit trees, but they were loaded with fruit. Even so, there was no need to reach up for them. Heavy winds had deposited so many on the grass that we could barely cope with the gathering. I soon became expert at throwing them into the hopper that chops them into a mulch that is then then put into a screw-press. The juice flows from the base and is collected into buckets for bottling.

          At the end of the afternoon, each of us took away our filled containers, leaving sacks full of unpressed apples, the fate of which may be to rot. I put plastic bottles in the freezer (in the spaces next to the stewed apple), gave glass bottles to neighbours, took some more to a workshop next day and put the remainder in the fridge, where they will turn into cider if I don’t drink them pronto.

          But I can’t help worrying about all the surplus left languishing in orchards around the country. All that nutritious produce going to waste, for lack of a viable distribution system. Perhaps we could call in the army.

Wakey, Wakey!

          Last night, I dreamed that the house in which I was living, and with which I felt smugly satisfied, began to disintegrate around me. If this was a classic case of subliminal insecurity syndrome, who could be surprised? I might feel safe and sound in my present circumstances, but life is a pitfall waiting to happen – and that’s before you factor in the steady progress being made by authoritarian tyrants and their billionaire accomplices making short work of capturing power via wealth, limiting political freedom and destroying the ecosphere with their extractive, destructive economic policies.

          So, now that’s off my chest, and notwithstanding the slough of despond into which I am trying to avoid sliding on account of foresaid doom scenario, I want to make it clear that I live in an apartment, not a house, though my point is somewhat pedantic in that respect. Whatever the form of dwelling in which one happens to reside, the important thing is not to confuse it with ‘home’. Is it just me, or do others shout at the telly when politicians promise to build new “homes”, when what they really mean is habitations? A house is not a home. Home is where your heart is – or where you hang your hat. Just ask anyone who is homesick. What’s more, it is misleading to refer to people as homeless, when what they really lack is shelter. It is perfectly possible to be at home, i.e. on the street, in the town of your birth, yet without a residence.

          If you happen to visit the Tate Modern, London, you will be able to see exhibitions by two artists that illustrate the difference. Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kan Kngwarray painted her home, whereas South Korean artist Do Ho Suh reconstructs the houses he has lived in.

          The traditional lifestyle of the Aboriginal Australians did not involve the building of permanent dwellings, therefore in referencing her home pictorially, Kngwarray had no problem of definition. She painted the landscape and the flora and fauna that inhabited it; in other words, her homeland and that of her kin – which included its non-human inhabitants, whose spirits are revered. This was the sole subject of her work. She hardly ever left the Northern Territories (her region is called Utopia, so named in 1978 as a result of aboriginal activism) and she certainly never travelled abroad.

          Do Ho Suh, on the other hand, has lived and worked in three cities that he has, at one time or another, called ‘home’ – Seoul, New York and London. By his own account, all three have shaped his experience of life and deposited memories into his subconscious mind. His ingenious re-creations of the houses he lived in contain these memories and illustrate his point that ‘home’ is not necessarily a fixed place. It evolves over time and is redefined as we move through the world.

          This last point might be contested by those who have experienced the trauma of forcible expulsion or who have become refugees from war and other disasters. Their experiences have nothing to do with lifestyle choices. The visceral pull to one’s home is not simply geographical; it is tied up with community and tradition as well. It is also surprisingly local. Studies of statistics in the (relatively small) UK indicate that the average UK adult lives 25 miles from where they were born, only a slight increase on the 19 miles that was recorded in 1921.

          So, as I sit comfortably in our well-maintained apartment, in the city of my father’s ancestry (though I spent my entire working life elsewhere), I feel at one with the statistics, though uneasy about the latent, snugness-induced tendency to smugness. Perhaps my dream was a wake-up call.

 

It's Politics, Stupid!

          The autumnal equinox is not usually on my radar but, this year, having been invited to join friends around a small bonfire they lit to mark the event, at last I felt some sense of the need thus to ritualise our connection to nature’s cycles. The fact that the night-sky was calm and the stars twinkled over the stilled waters of the estuary probably helped lull me into a fleetingly, semi-mystic state of awe from which I found myself questioning the temporal strivings of humanity. It was a fitting start to a week I had earmarked for taking a break from the relentless and depressing news of politics to turn my attention, instead, to art and jazz.

          It began with standing under a suspended, giant model of the sun – Luke Jerram’s Helios – that is being shown, with an accompanying and appropriately spooking soundtrack, at various National Trust venues. The potentially mesmerising effect was somewhat diminished by the fact that, it being a rainy Saturday morning, young families were there in great numbers. But for my self-imposed schedule, I would have gone at a less busy time, so I made the best of it and reminded myself that ‘art is for all’, not just the leisured class.

          Thence to London, where, if you can afford the price of entry, there are always exhibitions of interest. At the National Gallery, the show Radical Harmony examines the works of the Neo-Impressionist painters of the late 19^th century, as represented in the extensive collection of a wealthy industrial heiress. Whether you simply like to admire the paintings, or consider the artists’ different approaches to the same subjects, or get up close to the technique popularly known as pointillism, there is another, underlying theme, explained in the notes – radical politics. Many of the artists in this movement were supporters of the anarchist communist agenda that championed working people’s rights to dignity and rest and supported the ideals of harmony with nature and non-exploitative government.

          Next, to the Royal Academy and the exhibition titled The Histories, comprising works by the American artist, Kerry James Marshall, who is celebrated for his figurative paintings that “unapologetically” centre Black people. As the title implies, the artist digs into history for his subject matter and, in so doing, engages with the socio-political issues of the times. His images are strikingly colourful and overtly political, taking a bold, brash approach to messaging, unlike that of the pretty, pointillist face behind which the Neo-Impressionists hid their political activism.

          Then I went from the grandeur of the West End institutions to the tiny Estorick Collection of Italian art, in Canonbury Square. The permanent collection there is full of the work of artists who engaged, not only with modernism, but also the rise of fascism pre-WWII. Their involvement in politics seemed almost de riguer. And, in the temporary gallery space, there is an exhibition of work from the 60s and 70s by Ketty La Rocca, a “trailblazing figure of Italian conceptual and feminist art”. Her interrogation of consumer culture and gender dynamics later became an exploration of alternative forms of communication. It’s all quite complicated to explain. Better to go and have a look. But there’s an element of visual poetry in her later work.

          Then there was jazz. At the suggestion of my friend and fellow afficionado, we went to a performance by an outfit called Lucid Dreamers. If anything could be labelled ‘experimental’, this was it. Leaning on a vocal, poetic base and eschewing regular structures, the music could have descended into incoherent cacophony. Yet there was form and a sense of purpose. And, played with passion by seasoned, talented musicians the music took me to places of tenderness and excitement – as I’m sure was the intention.

          I didn’t detect any obvious political content in the music, but who knows what drives such artists? However, on the walk home, I passed a parked-up, beaten-up old VW van that sported a bumper-sticker proclaiming “Everything is politics!” I’m inclined to agree.

 

 

 

Dream On

          There was a piece in the paper that caught my attention, perhaps because, as I turned the pages, it was the first story not to be about the geopolitical nightmare that is the background to our lives and the daily, debilitating fodder of journalists, commentators and readers such as me. What attracted my eye was a photograph of the interior of “the world’s smallest theatre”, with its youthful, creative director standing there, radiating her pleasure, pride and optimism with a glorious, uninhibited smile.

          The theatre, which is in a former public toilet in Malvern, seats only twelve, so its financial viability must be a challenging prospect (you see what a pessimistic mindset I have been reduced to), but micro-theatre and micro-economics can be made to work, bringing sustenance and happiness to those involved. Not every venture has to be scaled up to succeed.

          The very next day, we saw theatre on the grandest scale, with Donald Trump featuring in a lavish production that, were it to be given a title, might be called The King and I – but for the small matter of copyright law. Insofar as we were not physically present at the show, what we actually saw was the equivalent of ‘the film version’. But that was the producers’ intention, it seems, as stage-management was of the essence in this case. We, the audience, had to be convinced – despite the shaky acting and implausible plot – that the story being told was leading us all to a happy ending. Dissenting voices must be kept away from the stage for fear of discrediting the fantasy.

          As this charade works its way to a flawed finale, what I see is a tale as old as humanity: two individuals, who have come into power by villainous methods (Trump by lying and inciting hatred, King Charles by inheriting unquestioningly the common wealth acquired forcibly by his ancestors), engaged in a tentative dance, choreographed to boost the power and prestige of the President on the one hand and limit the damage to the economy and independence of the UK on the other. The outcome has been predetermined. Since it is well known that the President is something of an Anglophile, an admirer of our monarchy and a sucker for flattery, the UK government has played the appropriate cards to best effect. New money meets old money and as is its wont, seeks its validation and approval.

          Some will argue that it’s as well we have a monarchical heritage resplendent with pageantry. “You see, it does have a role to play”, they say. But what if we had used the nation’s riches not to glorify an unelected family but to invest, instead, into a renewed common wealth? Would our national economy then be as impoverished as it is and as subservient to that of the USA?

          We peasants can be distracted easily from seeing the bigger picture: dangle baubles that are just beyond our reach, divert our attention from their power-grabs by creating enemies for us to hate – it’s a universally successful technique. All these ingredients are mixed into the script of the show currently playing. The Americans are offering to boost our economy by investing billions of dollars into our digital infrastructure (something we should have done ourselves), creating jobs for blue- and white-collar workers alike. But they will be calling the shots and the price we will pay is fealty to the economic and political values they preach and want us to espouse.

          And what of the existential problems of the world: eco-destruction and the wars driven by it and the naked greed of nationalism? These themes, apparently, have no place in their programme. I’m hopeful they will find a spiritual home, at least, in theatres where they do still dream – like the one in Malvern.