A Kind of Normal

Mum's stable. That's what I tell kindly, enquiring people who - like me, before - have usually heard only the good stories about stroke victims. The "After a few weeks he was up and about" and "When she's tired she walks with a slight limp" stories. After nearly a year visiting mum in the stroke unit, you almost get used to seeing the many younger and sicker stroke victims and their families. But outside, once these sufferers are back in their own homes, they are - of course - as invisible as they were before their strokes. This is one of the challenges for charities trying to raise awareness of this mysterious curse of a disease - the worse sufferers are behind closed doors, not in marathons or in celebrity magazines.

There are times when I wonder if my 'real' mother is simply on a long, long holiday. She'll be back soon, I hope. The lively wee chatterbox, always on her bicycle, nipping to the shops, has left behind this little, bloated and sleepy old person in her place - just to make us appreciate her more when she gets back home to us.
And then, at night as I stand by her bedside once the bustling carers have gone, she will fix me with the piercing gaze she has somehow developed since the stroke and we will speak about something intimate, something she has remembered from our past. Sometimes these conversations are deeper than anything we managed to find time for before. Now we are free from the workaday rituals of mother / daughter relations - sharing shopping, cooking, worrying - we have an odd, luxurious amount of time.

Sometimes I bring her a bit of chocolate in bed. The rules of our childhood have been unilaterally abolished by the stroke: There are no rules now - we can have sweets after bedtime, a CD on while she waits for the night carers; she's allowed to refuse to brush her teeth, yawn without covering her mouth and let the cat onto her bed.

Hugging a tub of flour

A few weeks ago, to my great shock, my mother suffered from what seems to have been a stroke. After last week's visit to her in hospital, where she lies immobilised down one side, I returned to her empty house alone. On a whim, I decided to fill the vacuum by baking my sister - who I was seeing the next day - a birthday cake from us both.
I opened her kitchen cupboards, searching out ingredients, tins and the like. Mum had had her kitchen refitted recently so I wasn't too familiar with the new layout. I eventually found her flour shelf (Mum was always a keen baker) and then the old Tupperware tubs of carefully labelled flours that she'd had since I was a kid in the 70's.
I found the self-raising and stood for a long moment, hugging it very very hard.

Class in the classroom

I was struck by the media's statement-of the-bleedingly obvious last week, about well-to-do and not-so-bright kids overtaking their more gifted peers from less affluent backgrounds.
When I was 8 or 9 years old, my class -like all others in Scottish primary schools at that time - had its fair share of 'wee nyaffs' as my soundly middle-class parents would call them. They'd have a more politically correct title now, but these were kids who lived 'up the back' (i.e in the housing estates at the back of Largs), often in single parent families, and with some quite serious behavior problems. With hindsight I now worry much more about the origins of their problems than I - or perhaps anyone at that time - did: There were a few very small boys who spent any free moment drawing and circulating obscene and anatomically accurate sexual drawings, for example. Much later, these young mens names would appear in the local paper linked to a small-town world of drugs and theft.

Anyhow, I remembered last week about a particular poetry recital competition I had entered for whilst at primary school. I am born on the same day as Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, and as a child had dreamt up a quasi-mystical relationship with the bard due to this concidence. (Virginia Woolf is also born on January 25th, but is/was not quite such an appealing icon)
Many of my fellow pupils competed in the memorising of tracts of Burns' poetry, which were to be performed in front of a stern and vaguely Dickensian panel of Scottish 'elocution teachers' as they were then known. It was a fraught and very competitive environment, given that few children of that age could memorise their full names and addresses let alone 8 verses of weird-sounding Scots poetry.

The school was to offer one star pupil forward to the next regional level of recitals, and as we were efficiently knocked out, a surprise contendor, I'll call him Ian McCabe, emerged. A tiny, under-nourished looking kid with a mum off the rails, he took the classroom floor aback with his energetic recital. Now, I can see Kenny could have grown up to be a Robert Carlyle-like actor, wiry, full of barely-surpressed anger.

As a child I had a prodigious memory (as evidenced by my Higher Maths qualification - didnt understand a single figure but could memorise and repeat all the neccessary data to pass with flying colours). I made it through to a final stand-off with Ian, where we both recited the same poem to the selection panel.
I don't remember the final event, or anything about how the decision was made, but I won the contest against Ian. And I am still haunted by the injustice of that decision, because even then I knew it was a done-deal before either of us stepped up to the podium - I felt it then, nearly thirty years ago, as I do now.

One flavour: Cornish

I was brought up on the West Coast of Scotland, where we know a thing or two about ice-cream. An adopted dynasty of Italians, the Nardinis, had (and I believe still have) the monopoly on the ice-cream outlets of my hometown Largs, and as a people we were so keen on our ice-cream that we were as likely to be seen with a ’99-er’ cone (what has a half chocolate flake got to do with the number 99?!) in a January hailstorm as in the July sunshine.
Cornish ice-cream seemed to me – at that time – something that Mum bought as a cheap ‘standby’, and economical alternative to a (gasp) whole family-size carton of Nardinis, which was a massive, and rare, treat. The Cornish ice-cream was invariably bright yellow, very soft, and tasted like margarine. It came from the supermarket and in one flavour – Cornish – only.

My first trip to Cornwall recently has - you'll be glad to read - expanded my appreciation of the place many times over.
At first I couldn’t quite get over the fact that Penwith sounds like just a comic mispronunciation of Penrith. Of course Cornwall’s bizarre place names are part of its charm, as all the Nibthwaites, Crosthwaites, Slappersgates and Backbarrows are in the Lake District.

I travelled to this far-flung county at the kind invitation of the Newlyn Art Gallery to do a bit of R & D...
Cumbria and Cornwall: From afar they seem broadly comparable – tourist-dependent economy, a far distance from the UK’s main cities, a conservation and heritage-minded public profile, dying industries (farming and fishing). Both counties have their diehard supporters in rose-tinted spectacles (is there a Friends of Cornwall?)...

However, in Cornwall I was struck by how a surprising number of dynamic, ‘can do’ people we met had jettisoned any reliance on the public funders or officially sanctioned ways of doing things; or had found imaginative ways to get round legislation or rules: One guy – a fish merchant whose pilchard-salting factory was had up by EU health and safety police – had turned it into a ‘living museum’ and this apparently meant that his product wasn’t bound by the same red tape. He continued his line of business until the bottom fell out of the Italian pilchard market (I’m not kidding – it did, didn’t you hear?) and now the museum was being converted into flats as he plans to go off fishing with his mate Rick Stein.
Another retired civil servant was restoring a lugger (a traditional kind of local fishing boat) to working order so that it could actually be used as a viable fishing vessel, not a museum piece.

Everywhere we went people - whether they were fishermen or business entrepreneurs - lamented the crippling rules of politicians and the EU. Most got on with it anyway and sadly I think this little shred of fight is what generally marked them out from the Cumbrians I tend to meet. One exception here is Carol, an incomer who fairly recently took on a nearby holiday let / tearoom business. She runs the excellent tearoom on an honesty / ‘pay what you think is right’ donation system, even corralling visitors into digging her garden in return for tea. Naturally this goes down with the various authorities like a lead balloon. I hope they’re not, but I fear the days of her business are numbered.

Anyway back to Cornwall:
The Newlyn gallery staff were a tad – and rightly - preoccupied by an eruption of discontent amongst their membership: the gallery is still has a membership with a say, a precarious situation for any progressive contemporary art organisation operating in the vigorous demimonde of en plein air painting that is Cornwall. During our visit, wherever we went people voiced ill-informed and at times downright bigoted opinions about what was going on at the gallery, the mental health of the exhibiting artists, their own rightful ‘ownership’ of the space as tax payers (surely that’s like me saying that I have a say in who Kendal NHS trust admits for kidney dialysis? Me, I’m happy to trust the appointed...)

The director James is a really nice guy and certainly didn’t strike me as spoiling for a fight, but like most contemporary art curators, he is more used to public apathy than this.

I know a bit about this scenario – a long time ago I worked at Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, a place with its fair share of revolting members. In fact, after my time there a successful coup was indeed orchestrated and various staff thrown out.
I asked my boyfriend Adam (he’s the director of Grizedale Arts) for a bit of advice: Grizedale had an – ahem – ‘tricky’ membership, when he joined seven years ago. But the contexts are so different: GA’s members were generally reliably apathetic to the new wave GA, though a few were nostalgic for the days of Ken Dodd in the Theatre in the Forest (they still call the office for his next gig) and Andy Goldsworthy in the leaf mould.

So Newlyn’s very vocal besmocked bourgoisie are a different kettle of fish as they clatter about the prom with their easels: I left wondering if a New Newlyn School of Contemporary Art Appreciation, Tolerance & Debate was needed.
Count me in as a speaker.

Va bene cosy? Italy again...

We're just back from a week in Tuscany and Umbria, a country I lived in for a year back in the mid 90's but have seldom visited since, except for the odd art weekend at Shoreditch-by-the-Sea, aka the Venice Biennale. Back in 93/94 I lived at the peculiar and charmingly archaic institution of the British School at Rome(BSR), a boarding-school like base for all sorts of scholars with all sorts of Italian fascinations - from topiary to Roman Republican coins to cottaging in the nearby Borghese Gardens (I had my own share of less welcome sexual encounters with the exhibitionist men of Rome there too - in particular I recall a dismounted motorcyclist clad in waterproofs who didn't mind at all feeling the rain on one particular body part).

My affectionate memories from the BSR at that time are of lengthy dinners, midnight jaunts to the fabulous library and much simmering sexual tension - could have been our youth, the heat or the epic discussions on Piranesi's 'Great Drain' etching, who knows. I shared a studio with Roddy Thomson, whose art-prank, deeply satirical letters in collaboration with Colin Lowe (later published to some deserved acclaim as The Harang-Utang Letters) were just beginning to be devised. The arrival of Colin's drafts by post were a source of regular hysteria and a good reason to postpone getting down to anything like real work. Roddy is still a close friend, and I remember his final BSR show included a straight jacket made out of one of the School's bedspreads - it seemed to say it all ;-)....I know that the BSR has been upgraded significantly since my time - in fact the Sainsburys visited, chequebook in hand, whilst I was still there - maybe a recent BSR scholar can post a comment and let me know what's changed.

Anyway, despite not venturing as far as Rome, it was of great interest to return to a country which had played such a large part in the early part of my career, if not in the way it strictly speaking was intended to. This return was made all the more intriguing by my holiday reading of Tom McCarthy's great novel 'Remainder' and of Duncan McLaren's 'Looking for Enid'. The author of the former I met a few years back during the R & D of an aborted exhibition on re-enactment by curator Sarah Cook. The book is everything it promised to be at that early stage - a creepy and forensic study of the power of memory and trauma.
Duncan I have known for some years and he was a participant in our film 'Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future', during which he met Kate, who features throughout his present investigation of Enid Blyton. Weirder still, Duncan - who has previously cast me as a re-incarnation of John Ruskin in his novella 'The Strangled Cry of the Writer in Residence' (don't ask) - includes the Bata-ville project in his book on Enid, albeit disguised as a trip in the name of Marcel Proust. Both books are mille-feuilles of memory, Duncan's a more robust (as you'd expect from something on the cheery and relentless Enid) confection than Tom's, but each prone to fissures through which glimpses of personal obsessions amid universal experiences can be seen.

My first impressions of Italy this time round were not great - the vast industrial sprawl between each exquisite hilltown seemed to merge each into the next; the roads were just as crazy but now even in towns the pedestrian seemed a rarity (except for for the enduring ice-cream eating flaneur's 'passigata'). It took a while for me to realise that, of course, 13 years ago I had probably arrived at most of these hilltowns by train, and been remorselessly carried along by the erudite enthusiasm of some BSR scholar so that by the time I was in front of the Piero Della Francesco in question, I was blind to anything but the aura of the treasure in front of me. I remember almost nothing of the journeys of these pilgrimages, apart from once when Nicholas May nearly drove into the car ahead in thick Umbrian fog. It can't be a coincidence that this excursion is not one for which I have find memories: Not only did we avoid near death on the autostrada, we also survived the vast Collezione Burri which was the destination of that particular trip - 5 ex-tobacco warehouses filled by the Italian painter before his death with his morbid abstracts. Bizarrely, we chanced upon the place again during this trip (whilst looking for the nearby folk art exhibition which we would have no doubt ignored as young art enthusiasts) - it felt smaller and more interesting, I nearly asked to see their old visitor book so I could be sure what I'd thought of it in 1993. Adam got the giggles over the ludicrously overblown guide text, and when the stern curator (God, what a job) declared that no they didnt have an available copy for us to take away, it definately wasn't for wont of a photocopier.


How different these 'grand tours' felt now, at once liberated by having our own set of wheels and enough cash for a fine lunch each day, and yet so much more complicated and filled with the distractions of maturity, the small portion that Adam and I have between us, that is.
Adam, this being his first visit to this, the motherload of art, was suitably awestruck at each new 14th century fresco we saw, whilst I dallied on the pews, trying to focus - futile, like I used to do before I gave up yoga. Each revisited masterpiece had, for me, the quality of a photograph or a reproduction - not from art history books, it's too long ago that I looked at any of those - but from my own past visits to see them whilst at the BSR. Tom's book resonated strongly in my mind, as I tried to flick backwards through my memory's card index, to re-experience the moment of their impact on me.

After a few days I began to recognise shreds of the old Italy I had been fond of: there are still old women everywhere, still wearing standard-issue flowery wrapover aprons over their huge chests, still carrying buckets (why? have they just cleaned the church?) or arched over a dusty vegetable bed. The infamous inefficiency of the country is still evident in queues of all nationalities all over railway stations, especially at the timetables which bizarrely are arranged by departure time instead of destination. There are still -magically- almost none of the usual high street suspects such as Starbucks or the Body Shop. The Italian teenagers still don't seem to rebel any further than ordering a chocolate wafer on top of their copettas of ice-cream.

Perhaps Duncan McLaren is trying to tell me something, next stop 'A la recherche de temps perdu' ?

Love shack bay-beee!

Praise be!
Some 4 years since we snapped up what seemed to be the only affordable rural property in the Lake District National Park, we have finally obtained planning permission for what has become known as the "Love Shack" - to replace the mouldy-log-cabin-the-size-of-a-static-caravan, with possibly the LDNP's first bit of domestic contemporary architecture since the portcullis crashed down some time in the 1970's. I'll spare you the details of this torturous and expensive planning process here, suffice to pass on these words of wisdom to anyone thinking of following our lead:
- Don't use a consultant - the LDNPA moves in too 'mysterious' a way for anyone to be much good at dodging their bureaucracy
- Don't expect neighbours and parish councils to hold to my mum's adage 'If you've got nothing nice to say, say nothing" - even if you go out of your way to be inclusive, nimbyism thrives in the LDNP
- Don't give up - go to Appeal if neccessary and make it clear to the planners you intend to see your plans through at any cost

So, many thanks to our friends and families and colleagues who have survived our endless moaning during the process, and here's to the next few months of creating a tiny bit of the future in the Lake District!

Potty time

Last week saw a visit from my three nieces who live in Glasgow, and hence many days and nights of me trying to recreate a temporary 1950's rural childhood for them as they looked on bemused - hiking, nature watches (owls and toads) and wholemeal bread. All things I hated as a child, but that's not the point of course.
Last night we broke out to Ambleside to see the latest Harry Potter film together, surprisingly watchable I thought except for the creepy thirty year old actors in school uniforms. I particularly enjoyed the none-too-subtle 21st c socio-cultural references, which were so leaden they made the Simpsons look like Kafka.
Most striking was the 'Ofsted' sub-plot whereby the 'Ministry' deems the Hogwarts magic school to be below standard and too focused on practical teaching and dominated by rather charismatic and arch staff who the kids love. This regime is replaced by a Ministry-approved Mrs Umbridge (dig the pink Jackie-O in a size 16 - costumes) who preaches theoretical-only magic (ie no wand-action), posts thousands of notices prohibiting absolutely everything and generally is torturous and snide. It's not a complex metaphor, and not unenjoyable either but I'd be interested to know how many kids see it as clearly as their parents must.

When in Barcelona

I was raking around in my handbag for my always elusive mobile phone last week when out came an old sugar sachet from a place we'd eaten last Christmas in Barcelona. It reminded me that I always meant to post a recommendation for the place online:
El Convent, Jerusalem 3, 08001 Barcelona, T 933 171 052
(It' s one minute's walk from the back of the famous food market Mercat de Sant Josep/ La Boqueria on La Rambla de Sant Josep)
There we had a 3 course meal for around 8 Euros, delicious, traditional rustic food in a fascinating old building with friendly but low-key staff.
If you fancy it, read one of my earlier food rants here

Keep the faith

Last weekend we held an Architecture Week event at a log cabin we bought in Cunsey in 2003. For 4 years we have been trying to replace the decrepit cabin with a small contemporary wood and glass house by Sutherland Hussey Architects. The design - on their website - has attracted everything from Sunday broadsheets to Grand Designs, and even if Adam wasn't related to one of them I'd find it hard to fault their credentials, and yet most meetings with the local planners end with them suggesting some design 'improvements' . Even the (failed) Appeal we endured on the first application ended with the Inspector making some 'helpful suggestions' and wondering why we wanted to bother with all this pretentious nonsense - why not just plonk another prefab down?
Thank God I'm not the architect, I'd have to be carried off shrieking, but being the 'client' is no easy ride either.
As anyone who has tried to engage with the Lake District National Park planners will tell you, they're not a bunch to embrace contemporary architecture readily, being much keener on slate-clad walls, cute pitch roofs (Brazilian slate since ours is too expensive, is fine tho') and faux-heritage trimmings. Being a very special National Park they can largely ignore the shift in national planning policy towards 'greening' architecture and accepting that Modernism is here to stay and actually rather nice to live in. Instead we see endless, poorly built perpetuations of Lilliput Lane / Beatrix Potter style houses - Disneyland actually does them better, using better building techniques and attention to detail.

Anyway, back to the event. An amazing 30+ people found our tiny, remote site and an informal support group for self-builders and lovers of good architecture, emerged over cups of tea. After years of neighbour trouble and planning friction, it was genuinely moving to meet like-minded people who loved the design and were willing us to succeed and not give up! I had heard of urban Architecture Week events with noone attending, so was amazed to find that in the heart of what seems the most conservative place in England, there is a healthy group of dissenters.
Let's hope we can keep the faith long enough to do everyone proud and build the darned thing.

You can read Adam's blog about the event here.

Catsnap

One of Adam's conditions placed on the acquisition of cats here at Lawson Park is that they match: Unsurprising for a man with more collections than hairs in his beard.
Since adopting feline no. 2 - the lavishly friendly but rather plain Maurice (named after Adam's grandmother's revolting pug) - I have periodically managed to gather photographic evidence of his matching feline no. 1 - the exquisite but aloof Tomas Bata the Fourth.

I think that's Hungarian for 'rearing stallions'

It's not often the rural laptop gets out and remembers to blog about it afterwards (is that a sign of a good or a bad night out?!). But in London recently during the final - and expensive (£300 an hour for a colourist, ahem) - throes of our film Living with the Tudors I managed a couple of how shall we say, diverse, cultural experiences:

I liked the shortswearing Hungarian Agaskodo Teliverek so much at their Resonance FM fundraiser so much, I bought their CD. If "sounding something like a cross between Captain Beefheart, Public Enemy & Venetian Snares" sounds good you you can find the duo online here.


Asparagus, the opera, an art performance I went to with Jet, was altogether weirder. A packed venue of art vermin, men in bad costume, music (good) by (I think) Les georges leningrad - but I didn't get it. I met Jonathan Griffin afterwards, reviewing it for Frieze (poor guy) who confirmed my suspicions that it might be a reenactment of some kind but also seemed bemused. Looking for online links to offer you I fail to find anything, if it wasn't for this picture I took I'd begin to doubt my own sanity.

This is Easter food

Mercifully far from M&S and their attempted monopoly on Easter edibles, we plough a different furrow up here:
1.
A pudding which should possibly be illegal , that's how calorific and delicious it is, is Sussex Pond Pudding , so rich I have only made it once before, for my appreciative friends Ben & Freddie. It's nuts-sounding - a ye olde steamed lump with a whole lemon in the middle - a WHOLE LEMON!
My recipe is Elizabeth David's but Waitrose has a good one online too here though it recommends clotted cream to serve - I mean, are they trying to get sued?!
2.
To offset such indulgence, I prepare a double bento box of vegan Japanese food one evening:
In the middle is some slices of carrot pickled in nuka - an ancient Japanese pickling technique mixing rice bran and salt, garlic and seaweed. Like a good bread culture, this mixture lives indefinately as long as you stir it daily. This resulted in a recent holiday in France for the nuka, as our absence from home for 5 days would have meant certain death...

Mr Potter's legacy

'Miss Potter' the movie is enjoying a seemingly limitless run in local cinemas here - when we saw it the soundtrack was barely audible under the locals screeching 'That's NEVER the real Hill Top!" and "I've never seen it as sunny as that!". I wonder if 'Brokeback Mountain' had the same popularity in Alberta, Canada or 'Cape Fear' thereabouts....

Whilst the locals are numbly relishing the image of a de- touristified Lake District populated by actual farmers and reasonably priced property , we find ourselves on the receiving end of a solicitors letter from none other than the company of one Mr Heelis, aka Mr Beatrix Potter. Yes, incredibly, the firm has endured as one of the major legal players locally, and a narky neighbour of ours has commissioned them to wrangle over a boundary issue with us.
Mr Potter's man meets us near the disputed boundary, and brusquely sets out his stall - no, his clients don't own this track, but yes, they'd rather we didn't obstruct it; no, his clents can't technically stop us from parking there but yes, they'd rather we didn't, etc etc.

Isn't it heart-warming to know that the great authoress' legacy is not restricted to chubby rabbits?

Gratuitous cat picture

Maurice guards a vast porcini harvest from this summer. Is that a handle-bar moustache?

I'm liking Ireland

It kind of makes you ask what went wrong with Scotland (where I was brought up). Or even England, except I can’t speak for the rest of the country from my willing encarceration in the theme-park of the Lake District.
In small-town Ireland there are highstreets full of independent shops - though this one in Clifden does have the oddest strawberries I have ever seen (the Body Shop is relegated to a small stand in a local pharmacy). Even very small towns like Ennis in County Clare, where the conference we’re at is, seem to still support bookshops of three varieties (charity, cheap and cheerful, and academic); diverse eateries serving everything from smoothies to Irish stew; real toy shops (I mean, I haven’t seen one of those since the 1970’s - I don’t count motorway-side Toys R Us) and numerous small butchers (enticingly called victuallers here). Ireland seems to be full of people of all nationalities living, working and studying, and not just in the cities.

Yes there are pubs and tat-shops aimed at tourists, too much Enya-esque flowing 'n fringed clothing on sale, and so much Celtic font-use in the signage you can at times feel like you have entered a Tolkien theme-park. But somehow the feeling of towns inhabited by and run for the benefit of busy locals remains. A bit like provincial France maybe, the visitor is welcomed but not pandered to.

Ireland has so many pale people like me that the clothes boutiques accomodate this by stocking flattering colours for the milky-skinned. The ubiquitous white trash fake tan of most of the UK isn’t present here except in Dublin – as in Japan where I was earlier this year – being pale doesn’t imply a shameful lack of disposable income. Speaking of disposable income I’ve been particularly struck by the massive new homes that line the busy roads connecting Ireland’s towns. At first these Gracelands-like gin palaces horrified me with their bald, curtain-less splendour, windows gleaming out onto freshly-laid roadside lawns the size of football pitches. Stone and stucco detailing, triple garages and porticos combine in infinite variations but – interestingly - always excluding any reference to modernism. However after a few days of awe I’m starting to find them rather cool – especially as they even extend into areas of true wilderness, with rock, gorse and sky reflected in their double height UPC windows.

Oh, (and I'm sure I can hear howls of derision from RSPCA affilated readers), and I rather liked that Ireland still has stray cats, not loads (a la Greque) but just a few picturesque and very healthy-looking ones. The bordering on the bizarre fanaticism of UK cat charities for neutering has eliminated these even in the countryside in England ...

Random acts of kindness

We have just returned from three weeks shooting our latest film,'Living with the Tudors' in rural Suffolk. It's been an epic experience, and though the shoot is over I will for some time remain in the peculiar aftermath of intense documentary filming - a state of heightened sensibility to, and awe of - human experience and survival. Despite the almost complete exhaustion of my emotional resources, as I watch people at the train station or eating lunch, I am scrutinising them for the tiniest perceptible scars of their life stories - perhaps an awkward gait, a shrill laugh or a hesitant look.
Reminding me of the day after I lost my virginity, I expect everyone else to detect this seismic shift in my sensibilities in my external appearance. Of course, they don't. In the supermarket, people examine the produce as usual, perhaps seeing me in their peripheral vision as just another tired-looking shopper.
One particular encounter reminds me of what can happen in this state of mind:
On the way home from shooting our first film Bata-ville I remained in the retro travel hostess uniform I wore throughout the film as I had no time to change. Arriving very late at Oxenholme Lake District train station, it was dark, windswept and raining heavily. I had practically slipped into a coma en route I had been so tired, and now I had to drive the next hour home myself. I was feeling unsociable and introspective. Then, I saw a young black woman with a large suitcase looking hesitantly at the empty taxi rank, and I felt utterly compelled to ask her if I could help. She seemed unphased by my appearance or my cluttered car and I offered her a lift to the nearby town Windermere, where she had a job in a care home. It was only as we reached the town's main road she admitted she did not have the address written down, or any idea where the building was. Once more, going utterly against what would have been my habitually irritable response to this spiral of chaos, I felt simply sorry for this woman and we continued to drive through deserted streets for another hour until the vast Victorian pile loomed into view. On offloading her case, my passenger reached into her handbag and asked how much she owed me for the lift. I explained that really I had been going her way anyway.
Today, rushing to buy some food at the supermarket, I impatiently freed up my trolley with a pound coin and noticed in the corner of my eye a very stooped old lady in the next row of trolleys. She was being very discreet, but she was clearly utterly baffled by how the coin system worked. I watched her struggling patiently and proudly for a little while, as other shoppers wrenched away neighbouring trolleys. Then - of course - I went and helped her.

My fledglings have left the nest

I recently left academia after a decade in part-time fine art lecturing. Like many life-long art lecturers slash artists who use their teaching to pay the bills, I had thought at best I'd last seven and was surprised to make it past this itch.

In fact I changed jobs after seven years, and left UCE Birmingham to work closer to home at St Martin's College (SMC) in Lancaster. The move was a wrench - I had made great friends at UCE, had - in some ways - grown up there. But in the last few years, a number of colleagues had died prematurely, after long illnesses, and in some ways the time felt right to move on. My new job promised a new course, built to the specifications that myself and another newly appointed colleague then spent several years crafting. There were many good times earlier on, and I learnt - at first anyway - to work a comfortable 8 hour day instead of UCE's unusual 11 hour one.

On my interview day, I toured the archaic and empty Apple Mac Suite and viewed the grimey Uglow-esque paintings in the Art studios with a band of fellow interviewees (one of whom described the job as a 'poisoned chalice' I recall). I wondered if there were any young people even on the course, it all seemed to careful and polite. But I really liked the staff I met, and I was excited about moving away from the safe haven of UCE and its largely middle-class intake. I remember now how long I took to accept the post when I was offered it - something in me knew I was in for a steep uphill climb. To cut a very long and arduous story short, the institution - very sadly - proved to be as backward as it had first appeared. Tens of thousands of pounds were wasted by the college fulfilling half our list of IT prerequisites, which would not function without the other half. The one half languished inoperative in cupboards and my angry and unreplied to emails built up.

Our course was finally aborted at a very late stage, with very little warning and no debriefing from management. I was disgusted, and no matter how fond I was of my colleagues by then, and how much good I felt sure I was doing the students, I could not remain working for management I had so little respect for. It's a very ordinary tale in academia....



Fast-forward then, till Friday night, when a small, diverse group of my favourite ex-students (I can say that now I'm not their lecturer any more!) hold a show 'The 9lb project' in the College gallery which I had helped design as part of my job at SMC. They had had the gumption to turnaround their usually lacklustre work placement module and organise the first real gallery show SMC had had outside of degree show every June. As I drove there, I had the usual mixed expectations of a student show. And I still was feeling considerable guilt for leaving them - as I saw it - at the mercy of a largely unsympathetic (or maybe uncomprehending) course team. I knew I had probably been the only lecturer who had really pushed their buttons, and that I had left them now. This probably sounds like I'm taking it all to seriously, but hey - this is how it goes in the post-partum mind.

These students were an almost crazily diverse group, but they'd put on - with our very committed technician Stephen Bentley as their institutional support - an incredibly fresh exhibition of energetic, articulate work. I loved it. It wasn't the best-installed show on earth, but I was just thrilled to see a decent turnout of young gallery-goers, some fine skate-boarding, some Paul McCarthy-seque gutsy performance (see image) and no politeness on the walls. It was as if finally some young artists had entered the building. Predictably there were no senior SMC staff in attendance (in some way just as well seeing as how hazardous the pissed skateboarding was getting) but I'm certain the exhibitors didn't give a shit. They all seemed elated, and I remembered how exciting shows are when you start out. I even remember Nina throwing up regularly before them - that's how exciting they were.

As I was getting ready to leave some of my former students began to lament my departure. One of the exhibitors challenged me "You said in drawing class you'd be really impressed if someone did a full-length self portrait - I did! You said you'd be impressed if someone did a bit of performance - tonight I did! What's you're next challenge !? - Bring it on!!!"
I sped home on the M6, the route suffused by warm early summer light and skipping through my iPod. I realised that for the first time in a long time I felt good about what I had left, and certain that they'd all be absolutely fine without me.

Paid to smile

I just enjoyed a pre-Easter minibreak in North Yorkshire, mainly to relieve the inevitable pressure valve of impending Easter in the Lake District, which is an endurance test of tourists driving, picnicking in your garden and allowing their dogs to chase your cats. I used my favourite guidebook to choose ur destination: Alistair Sawday, which Nina and I somehow discovered a few years ago when R & D-ing our Almanac project. It provided us with a series of characterful B & B's owned by characterful people who didn't - like us, but unlike the Tourist Board - overrate ensuite bathroom, central heating, or proximity to local attractions.
Alistair S once again led us to an appealling eccentric venue, in a little fishing village 'much beloved by artists' (I did like it, it's true) weirdly close to Middlesborough (no postcards available of that sadly) - a restaurant with rooms, famed for seafood. The room was nice - ensuite bath not shower (I approve) with rather odd but compelling view of sheer cliff face with gulls /wallflowers, and a cupboard full of DVDs to compensate for the crap TV reception. The energetic cook and co- owner sprinted up the stairs ahead of us, just the right side of warm and informal - a very hard thing to get right in the 'hospitality trade'. Then, downstairs he introduced us to his partner, who was pouring another guest a lovely looking Kir Royale.
She looked up fleetingly, and flashed a momentary and utterly superficial grin before returning to her evening of service. Now, as a 'directors wife' I recognise the ennui of the bored hostess more easily than most - it happens to us all at one time or another that you find yourself bored to death by somebody important to your partners work. Luckily Grizedale Arts generally delivers a gripping guest - Ken Russell for example - so this is rare. Nevertheless, this woman was clearly suffering from the syndrome badly. At dinner, she made sure to book us in to a strict 15 minute breakfast slot that rather belied the image of a 'relaxed getaway'.
Later that evening Mrs Happy described to some 'regulars' - well within earshot of us - her and her chef / host husband's recent 2 week break in California. "Hmmm, nice, but it was the first holiday we'd had since we started this place in 2003...". The regulars sympathised quietly, not quite sure what she was trying to say.
I felt sorry for her, but then I remembered we were paying them 200 quid. She was paid to smile and had somehow forgotten how to make this at least look sincere.
(Music reference in title for pop-pickers: The Lemonheads)

Looks familiar

I have recently left academia after a decade (the reasoning perhaps being a subject of a future blog entry...), and taken a freelance job leading Grizedale Arts 'Creative Egremont' programme - a year long public art project in the largely-unknown West Cumbrian town of Egremont, which sits cheek-by-jowl with Sellafield Nuclear Power Station.
My drive to the town takes me out of the condensed hyper-landscape of the Lake District across a spectacular stretch of moorland near Broughton (pictured). I'm told that at certain times of the day this empty road is filled with boy-racers escaping from their shifts at Sellafield, though I haven't yet experienced this.
What struck me when I first took this route was its familiarity. At first I put this down to its resemblance to my homeland Scotland, and also to the post-academic euphoria of the open road. Now, however, I have become convinced that this sinewy road and its 360 degree panorama is in fact the backdrop for the countless car commercials that bombard us from billboards (ok, not here in the National Park where such hordings are absolutely verboten...), sunday supplements and TV.
Is there no escaping the iconic landscape in this part of the world?

I love America and America loves me

(For non-art readers please Google ‘Beuys, Joseph’ right now)
I don’t think I saw so much as a plain old hound dog let alone a cayote on my recent trip to the ‘alternative’ bit of Texas – Austin - to screen our film ‘Bata-ville’ for the first time on US shores.
The Austin creatures I encountered in the ubercool SXSW Festival were altogether more exotic and strange to my eyes: Grown women screaming ‘Neat shoes!’ at me without alcohol or irony; a bronzed expat Johnny-Lydon-esque cockney guitarist jamming in a thrift store; people so large and immobile that when stationary they could be mistaken for one of those inflatable armchairs.
Film festivals: Tedious though it is to have to summarise one’s film to 75 different people a night, this is pleasingly facilitated by being whisked smoothly through 3 margarita-filled parties a night by friendly, interested and interesting strangers. I don’t get to party much up my mountain, so I like to take big bites of this kind of thing when I can.
During SXSW (music, film & interactive) the city becomes an international but compact circuit for bands, film-makers and geeks – ideal for the time-starved and jet-lagged, the programmes are stimulating but not epic so long as you know what you like. The atmosphere is like a much cooler (but warmer if you know what I mean) Edinburgh Festival for the young(ish) and hip – laidback, a little flirty, and (speaking about the films anyway) eccentric.....

Like many Britons I am ambivalent about America and Americans, though until last week I had never ventured further than New York City (which sees itself as a fashionable suburb of a farflung European city). It takes around 2 days to acclimatise to the relentless friendliness and (we’re more alike than we think) inability to give a straight answer. (I lost count of the times I heard ‘Well ma’am, I cannot give you a precise answer to your query at this time, however....’ instead of “I don’t know”).
And it’s hard to trust a nation whose addiction to fast food compromises almost every waking experience – even arthouse cinemas are filled with a rustling, snacking mob.
And yet there is so much to delight in – at least in Austin: sequins and neon gleefully adorn most stores as if a 7 year old girl has been given the shopfitting contract; potplant cacti growing as rampant and wild on wasteground as foxgloves do here; the literally countless re-interpretations (read ‘refoldings’) of the burrito; the dusk pet-shop cacophony of the vast flocks of grackle birds (spelling?!) roosting in the trees and competing with the live bands everywhere,