Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

David Dimbleby, master of the significant pause, was on DID this week and came over with considerable charm. It was comforting to discover that he is another of the unfashionable band that dislikes hot weather and sun-soaked beaches, preferring shade with sudden darts of sunlight. He couldn't hack the heat of a tropical island and neither could I.

This preference has always left me at odds with friends, husband, partner and family who are all sun worshippers. Like depressed sloths they tend to slink about looking miserable on cold days when I am a bundle of energy, working outside in a shirt while they are wreathed in wool. When their turn comes to strip into shorts and not much else, I am hugging shade, covered and feeling like a boiled kettle. Mind you, I think I have the advantage in the British climate.

Abroad I suffer under the sun but love the places it embellishes - the scent of Cretan oregano and thyme baking on hillsides, the warm crystal waters of Florida, balmy Mediterranean nights. For those things I bore the embarrassment of hats and sunshades and thick white sun-block while the others were bare, bronzed and free.

I could never take the sun, but when I was young, slim and pale, people used to say how cool and collected I always looked and that was some consolation; the damned change changed all that with its internal combustion effects which turned (and still turn) me into a thermal freak-show when we hit 70oF.

A while ago, Dick Jones published a photo of himself in an outfit of his youth that he regards as ridiculous now. I found a similar item I had been looking for. This is me at sixteen in 1958, all togged out for a walk along the cliffs to Brighton - indeed looking pale and cool - but wearing the inevitable stiff petticoat and, for heaven's sake, gloves....

The Philip Glass score for the French documentary movie Animals in Love will be available on CD in the UK in March. The film promises equal measures of visual and aural pleasure. I presume that it will eventually go on release here. There's a music sampler at Amazon. Glass found it an enjoyable exercise - a film with no voices where the music must speak the narrative. It's a return to a comfortable format for him, he went big for the first time when he composed the music in 1982 for Koyaanisqatsi - an appraisal of human interaction with the world as described by its Hopi Indian title, "a state of being in need of alteration" or "life out of balance." I have a copy of it on VCR and find that the years have not dimmed its visual power - the edgy score is magnificently apt.

On my left wrist
A bump arose,
A squishy thing at first,
It hardened to an ugly knot
That wouldn't be dispersed.


I saw the doc,
She said "Aha,"
A ganglion, some lump!
I know the way to deal with that,
Just give it a good thump."

"Well do it then,"
I said to her,
"Just bang it, I won't look."
I can't," she said, "get someone else
To hit it with a book."

Well, no-one would,
Especially G
Who wouldn't swat a fly;
I thought we were forever,
My ganglion and I.

Until my sister
Came today,
She's made of sterner stuff.
She held aloft a great fat book
And aimed it at my cuff.

I set my teeth,
She whacked it hard
And I am glad to say
That, thanks to her, courageous girl,
My ganglion's gone away.

Yesterday I bought some ritzy Arm and Hammer brand toothpaste. Brushing for the first time with its strange name in my mind I had this phoenetically driven vision of a rather wispy young 19th century Parisian in a cravat and stained velvet coat who answered to the name of Armand Hamer.

It seems that he had acquired the skill of dentistry from an itinerant quack. Armand could pull teeth so quickly with his knee on your chest that the pain was negligible; he patented a filling material made from pigeon bones that much improved his quartier's blackened smiles. As his fame spread, le tout Paris was at his door. The shy Armand was feted by the aristocracy, made much of by grateful old courtesans who paid him in kind, though he wished they wouldn't.

Inevitably he was summoned to service les choppers de Louis XVIII who had just popped back on the throne while Napoleon was holidaying in Elba. However, Armand admired Bonaparte fanatically, having seen him looking very imperial with his hat on sideways at the Austerlitz parade. He gave Louis a hard time with his impacted molar just to spite him, with the result that he found himself on his back outside the Versailles tradesmen's entrance still clutching his bloody pincers. He was kaput, or as the French put it, foutu.

With nothing to lose, fired up with loyalty, Armand went to fight alongside the Emperor who now faced his Waterloo. During the Hundred Days he was put to work pulling the teeth of agonised matelots of the French fleet. The last time he was seen was in a dinghy between ships, covered almost entirely in blood. It is not certain if it was his own or the result of his great humanitarian effort. He is commemorated by a plaque - well he would be wouldn't he?

Just outside my window are some big, woody lavenders, so old and spent that they that must be taken out this year. Opening the curtains this morning, I saw the quick movement there as a tiny wren dived into one of them - I had a good view as it spent five minutes moving from bush to bush - checking out potential building sites or finding something edible. My eye had time to register the neat dark brown shape that was too fast and tiny for my camera to catch. The wren has such an inappropriately long name for its size - Troglodytes troglodytes.



The sighting recalled one of my collection of miniature books; Jenny Wren makes a moral tale out of the peculiar nesting habit of wrens. At great expense of energy the male builds several nests that he then presents for approval. When she has done the tour and selected one, the female lines it with feathers. The book ends with Mr. Lark chiding Jenny - "The house you live in does not much matter, for all your fads and pride - what matters is a nice little brood of contented folk inside." I obviously didn't take the lesson to heart; I certainly wouldn't have said no to a courtship where the choice of a few desirable residences was part of the deal.

'Bridgend was yesterday mourning yet another addition to the alarming number of suicides in the area, after a 16-year-old girl was found hanged in a wood five miles from the town. Jenna Parry is the 17th young person to take her own life since January 2007.'

I cannot get these young people out of my mind - each new death reported, each life gone is more insistently symptomatic of a crisis. Such a concentration of young people wishing to die is a mystifying and sinister phenomenon. Younger and younger people the world over seek escape through substances and the stimulus of violence. Depression and nervous illness is rife in children. I know a practicing child psychologist very well, he is almost overwhelmed by the number and seriousness of the cases he sees. Among these are the self-harmers and those that hate their self-image so much that they break mirrors, starve themselves.

There is plenty to escape from in a threatened world full of cruelties and inequities; it is a more frightening place than it has ever been because we are each forced to know more of it. Broad emotions of hopelessness, despair and anger may drive children to drastic behaviour, those feelings are born and nurtured in the smaller worlds of families, schools, streets and personalities where the pressure builds. This we can understand.

What isn't understandable is the inference being made that these deaths are cultish, fashionable, internet driven, done from peer pressure. If that is so, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were, then we are in deep trouble. The school mass-killers who have their hour of glory and die, the teenage gangsters who, with bravado, accept death as an everyday risk and at least some of the seventeen souls found hanging have been failed by the generations before them; adults too cowardly, too lazy or too busy to give the children values, to value them, to make them value themselves. Mea culpa, there were occasions when I could have made a difference by taking time with kids that came across my path, but didn't.

On their world tour REM are giving just one concert in England - to support the ICA. I tried to buy tickets 4 hours after booking opened and they were sold out. The question now is, do I love them enough to pay for the cheapest option available - tickets at £135 + commission for restricted view seats - to the sharp guys who got in there faster? No, I guess not, though I'm sorely tempted. If you add in fares and a stopover in London, there is the price of a short trip to Amsterdam or Paris. I guess I'll content myself with placing an advance order at Amazon for the new album 'Accelerate', dig out my old CD's and have a pretend or two on YouTube.

A brilliant short film - its theme, a disquieting metaphor for mental pain.

"All in the best possible taste", as Kenny Everett used to say. I apologise for finding this funny. Paticularly HMQ's expression

I'm going to be selfish, really self-ish. The parents took out an insurance policy when I was three (called, so help me, an "Old Age Endowment") that would mature at sixty-five. It cost two pence a week and was signed as completed after payments reached £49 in 1989. Being adequately old and aged, I sent off a claim a while ago thinking it might pay out a hundred quid or so. A cheque arrived that caused me to drop my boiled egg at breakfast - four figures. What a marvellous thing is compound interest. Mum and Dad would have been over the moon.

What do you do with such a windfall, not just a windfall but their gift? Somehow it seems intended for my welfare rather than my amusement. After a few good works, the rest is being ring-fenced as my Body Maintenance Fund. I have never had a facial in my life, nor a manicure (quite evidently). My neck aches all the time and improves with a £30 physio and massage. I've some minor imperfections that would be well-handled by a laser. There are greying eyebrows & the odd whisker that I can't see, you know the sort of thing. So, nothing revolutionary - just tidying up and comforting. There's enough in the kitty for a couple of years' worth.

So, today I had my first facial - a wonderful physiotherapist sorted out my top two vertebrae and unlocked my neck muscles then handed me over to his wife in her salon next door. First, warm shoulder massage, exfoliation, then 'deep hydration' and more massage. My face feels as soft as a baby's bum. And so clean. I'm going again in six weeks.

To crown it all, I'm about to book a course of one-to-one sessions on the Alexander Technique. I did a summer taster course ages ago & was really impressed by the potential benefits; it has always seemed too indulgent to take the dozen appointments that are necessary. Now I'll do it. It's not just a physical balancing, it gets you mind right at the same time. Harmony. That's for me, courtesy of The Pru.

Half a century ago
You came to Sunday lunch -
Our uncle's latest catch;
You swam happily into the net
Of our family and stayed there.

Unusual girl, you charmed us -
Striking, not pretty.
Willow-slim, with tapering hands,
Your ballet dancer's grace
Moved with you everywhere.

Fragile, vulnerable, dainty
Were the words one chose,
Yet you were tough, so tough:
A body, strong from dance,
An iron will from years of making-do.

Yesterday, touching your face
Grown old, pale on the pillow,
I remembered the young girl.
Kissing you goodbye, I wished
So much that I had loved you more.

Perhaps you are with John again,
Laughing in the sky. If not, sleep now,
And dream of all the fun you had
Making your mark on life, on me, on mine.

Edna Wolff Maschgan (1907-2001) Woman in a Library. c. 1930. Artist. Illinois. Studied mural painting in Mexico under Diego Rivera in the 1920's.
(ex: Treadway Toomey Galleries Sale Catalogue 2004)

Four of us drove up to Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London last Sunday; we took a picnic that we ate in sunshine among the week-end throng in the park. Happily discovering that this foresight had saved us forty quid and a tiresome queue in the cafe, we entered the object of the exercise - the exhibition "The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their contemporaries 1890-1930".

Having a passion for this period of evolving book illustration, I have collected one original edition - Edgar Allen Poe illustrated by Harry Clarke and a number of facsimiles of Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. So it was a delight to see originals at last, to realise how well the printers of their work had served them. The quality of drawing was exquisite, styles ranging from delicate-spidery to high statement black on white; how lovely to get one's nose up close and see the actual press of pen on paper.

The development of these artist illustrators extended from the decadence of Beardsley, through the exoticism of the aesthetes, Laurence Housman and Charles Ricketts, going Artsy Craftsy with Annie French and Jessie Marion King, then, finally, on to the inspired fantasy of Kay Nielsen

After a preliminary taster of the full-on richness of the Rubens and Gainsboroughs on show in the main collection, a walk through The Enchantment was an experience of a smaller, rarified, fantastic world where beauty of line and distillation of colour brought stories vividly alive. Each set of themed illustrations complements its tale and yet each plate can stand alone as a small work of art.

There's an excellent lecture on the background to the artists and their historical context by Director Ian Dejardin on the Gallery's website. He's a relaxed, amusing speaker with a charming Scottish voice - it's worth a listen. He has his own ideas, considers, for example, that we are now transported to a new age of enchantment by the cinema's extraordinary computer generated images.