Conkers

The reference in the previous post to unharvested mistletoe reminded me of something I'd meant to mention earlier in the autumn, but somehow forgot: all the uncollected conkers. For non-Brits I should probably explain: "conkers" are the seeds of the horse chestnut tree (Aesculus hippocastanum); large, as glossy brown as a polished shoe, irresistibly tactile, yet strictly inedible, unlike those of their distant cousins the sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) of which there are a limited supply in this country [1]. When I was a boy – in the middle of the last century! – conkers were much sought after. Large horse chestnut trees are widely found in British suburban avenues, city parks, and on many village greens, and on autumn days these trees would be constantly attended by children gathering up the conkers. If the pickings were sparse, the bigger kids would throw heavy sticks into the branches to bring more conkers down, still freshly-packaged in their spiky, spongy capsules. If you didn't keep your wits about you, one of those heavy sticks could easily bring you down, instead.

Why? Because we used to play a game with them, also known as "conkers". This involved boring a hole through a conker, and threading it onto a knotted string. You would then take turns in whacking your opponent's conker with yours – not as easy as it sounds – until one or other was sufficiently damaged to fly off its string in pieces. Some rogues would attempt to harden their conkers by various alchemical techniques – typically, soaking or boiling in vinegar – but, if detected, this was denounced as despicable cheating. Some conkers which had grown as twins within a single capsule would have one flat side with an acute edge, not unlike a fat axe. These were known as "cheesecutters", and prized by some as particularly effective conker-smashers: a false theory with its origins in sympathetic magic, rather than empirical observation. The game, taken seriously, had various arcane rules which I can't be bothered to recall or explain ("stringsies", "stampsies", and so on). If nothing else, it gave a certain seasonal excitement to the playground.

However, the game has now fallen by the cultural wayside, not least because many schools have banned it from the playground on safety grounds. The main legitimate risk was getting a hard knock on the knuckles as you held your conker dangling at arm's length, but it was also not unknown to get sneakily "conkered" on the head from behind. Which really fucking hurts, I can tell you. I suppose a lot of playground energy did seem to go into finding ways of injuring each other, it's true, but what a shame it is when such only very slightly risky links with the past get thrown into the same bin as cock-fighting and bear-baiting. Even if they're not actually as ancient and venerable as we imagine: according to Iona and Peter Opie, those historians of the playground, the first reference to such a game using horse chestnuts was in 1848. Like so many "traditions", it may well be a Victorian invention.

The result, of course, is large quantities of uncollected conkers lying unregarded in the grass and gutters beneath every horse chestnut tree surrounded by the remains of their protective capsules, which seem to biodegrade incredibly rapidly from a tough, green, spiked, alien jewel-case into mere wind-blown brown dust. Sic transit gloria aesculorum... I may be 64, but I can never resist picking out a few prize specimens to keep in my coat pockets. They can stay there for years, polished by my fingers into increasingly knobbly "touch pieces" as they dry out, until the outer shell finally separates from the kernel, and starts to disintegrate into sharp little bits of conker shrapnel.

Talking of unregarded treasures, I'm surprised to discover that I also forgot to write about some photos I found residing in the same "October 2018" folder as the conker shots. I suppose the blog's tenth anniversary and my various publications did turn October into a bit of a meta-month [2]. Anyway, a few years ago I posted some photographs of the Moscow State Circus, which was taking place on Bristol's Clifton Downs. This year, as if to restore the geo-political balance, the Downs were hosting Circus Vegas, of which every available square foot was plastered with the Stars and Stripes or some other icon of popular Americana, up to and including Elvis Presley. It was giddily, hyperventilatingly American, positively Trumpian in its vulgarity.

Although quite how American "Circus Vegas" actually is may be questionable, despite all the hoo-hah and flag-waving, as the name appears to be under license to the distinctly un-American sounding European Entertainment Corporation Ltd. I suppose "American", in this most reductive sense, is more a state of mind – one composed entirely of faux-chauvinistic show-biz clichés – than any actual nationality. Which, if I were American, I would find more than a little annoying; it's as if a particularly gaudy Texas rodeo had elbowed its way to become, in effect, the purest summation of my great and diverse national culture. I wonder if anywhere has a British Circus, where the big top is a gigantic bowler hat plastered with the Union Jack? And the clowns are endlessly bumping into inanimate objects and saying "sorry"? Somehow I doubt it. We may be many culpable things, we British, and may have lost touch with much of our conkering heritage, but at least we've kept a reasonably firm grip on our brand.

1. Those of you who recognise "sativa" from certain other plant names may not realise it is a common botanical designation, meaning "cultivated". The phrases "distant cousins" and "limited supply" may also have prompted some of you to wonder, like me, whether conkers are the original big-eyed beans from Venus... Certainly, in America the equivalent Aesculus "nuts" are known as "buckeyes".
2. The blog is still in a bit of a meta-sulk about the surprising lack of acknowledgement of its significant birthday. No, no: too late now! It has been slightly cheered by a recent uptick in readers, though.

Strange Fruit

I was walking near a large block of flats in Shirley, Southampton, when I noticed there was something odd about one of the trees along the side of the road. Hanging from the branches were a dozen or more pairs of shoes, presumably tied together by their laces and flung up there by passing schoolkids, either as a bit of bullying or perhaps as some kind of ritual to mark the end of the school year, or some such occasion.

Curiously, the trees in the streets around those flats are also very susceptible to mistletoe: I've never seen so much of the stuff in so many trees in such a small area. I took the photo below in February this year, just before a massive hailstorm. Why nobody "harvests" it I don't know, but it's clearly been there, untouched, for a very long time. Perhaps the shoes and the mistletoe indicate the survival of some atavistic druidic cult in Shirley? Perhaps not.

Putting on the Style

In May, I was out walking on Southampton Common. The day was glorious: an early hint of the unusually long, hot summer to come, with clear air, fair-weather clouds, and strong sunshine casting bold shadows from trees that were just coming into leaf. As you would expect, I took a few photographs. The one above is fairly typical of the set.

It's a nice picture. The Fuji X-70 is a superb little camera, and I'm a pretty reliable photographer these days, even when working on autopilot with unremarkable subject matter: there's always a picture there, somewhere. The photo is sharp enough, with good depth of field; the colours are reasonably accurate (although I've partly de-saturated the colours: those famous "Fuji greens" are really over-excitable yellows); the exposure is good, and I've managed to avoid my technical bête noire, white skies and blown-out cloud highlights; and the composition is interesting, in an unassuming sort of way. But, as you probably realise by now, I have become restless with "straight" photography's ability to achieve, well, whatever it is I'm trying to achieve with picture-making.

Now, that photograph is doubtless a passably accurate and objective way of showing what that scene at that moment in time looked like from where the camera was positioned: those rays of light were actually reflected off those actual objects, gathered by the lens in its characteristic way, focused onto the array of little light-bins at the back of the camera, and then snapped off by slamming the bin-lids shut quickly enough to make a clean break and keep the tiny bits of light-ray fresh. Or however it is that a digital camera works. But, for me, it is not an entirely satisfying way of showing how it felt to be there: what is actually missing from the scene is me.

Some would say the absence of the photographer is photography's core strength; others would say that "style" is how a photographer inhabits a photograph. To an extent, the latter is true, or can be true. Photographic style exists, but is elusive. Sure, a good photographer makes many choices in the act of photographing, the sum of which may amount to a style. But, even in the days of film, "style" was really a product of second-level selection – choosing exactly the right frame from a contact sheet, for example – and skilled darkroom work [1]. It's worth checking out the book Contact : Theory (if you can find a copy: it was published in 1980 by Ralph Gibson's Lustrum Press); seeing the contact sheets of some big-name photographers quickly demystifies any self-serving nonsense about "decisive moments" and such. Style is a set of choices you apply to your raw material rather more often than it is some inherent quality of your unadorned photographs.

Curiously, one effective way of putting yourself in the picture seems to be to degrade it, to make it less photographic, but at the same time more expressive. How this is done is an entirely personal business – I have a favoured set of steps which suit my purposes, but probably no-one else's – but that is precisely why it can get closer to the way you felt, as a sentient participant in that scene, rather than as a robotic observer of it. If that's what you want. Also (and I think this may get to the root of a key difference between "straight" photography and other forms of visual art) by taking away detail and adding visual ambiguity you are giving the eye (or, strictly speaking, the brain) work to do. And it seems to be the case that the eye/brain combo takes pleasure in being asked to do this work, which it does whenever it looks at some ambiguous surface. Hence "pareidolia", our tendency to make faces and other meaningful patterns out of random marks and splotches. This may be one reason why so many people favour bad paintings over good photos to hang on their walls. Like a poor teacher, an unambiguous photograph, by giving the illusion of being a clear window onto reality, directs your response so firmly that there's nothing much left for your sensory apparatus to contribute to the transaction [2]. Even a bad painting is more generous, in the sly way of a good teacher, in the amount of work disguised as optical recreation it encourages your brain to do.

Degraded, or improved?

Another thing. The rectangular sample, edit, or interpretation of the world framed by most representational pictures, whether painted, printed, or photographed, is so basic to our culture that we hardly see it. It is the "normal" from which other shapes deviate. It's a good shape, no doubt about it, probably the best for most pictorial purposes. Attempts to "subvert" it usually end up looking gimmicky and attracting more attention to the unconventional "frame", at the expense of what is within it. But, being of a mildly contrarian nature, I do have a liking for the more unusual shapes and combinations: the panorama, the triptych, the arched top, the oval or circular image, and so on. The circle in particular says, now this really is an edited view, and yet everything always seems to compose itself gracefully within the even tension of its circumference. There is a satisfying harmony to the circular picture (in some contexts referred to as a "tondo") that is both highly artificial and yet somehow entirely "natural", a magical charge familiar to anyone who has been enchanted by the view through a telescope, or who has gazed down at a miniature world played out in real time on the white dish of a camera obscura. It's as if you can sense a lens-based image's essentially circular nature, out of which the rectangle has been cropped [3].

So, when I put the "degraded" version of the Southampton Common photograph into a circular frame, I think we end up with something that is much more like how it felt for me to be there on that May afternoon. Something rather like walking into the background of a Constable painting; heightened, slightly sentimental, even a little kitsch, and slightly soft... Blurry, even: the fact is that I really ought to wear glasses, these days, but never do, mainly because I find them uncomfortable and also distracting: the world was never that sharp – as sharp as an over-sharp photograph – to begin with.

1. Most people are blissfully unaware of the amount of work that goes into producing a top-quality print from a negative. Until you have watched a master printer perform the necessary darkroom prestidigitation in the dim red light, you don't know anything about top-end analogue photography. Really. Check out the first minute of this, for example.
2. I am increasingly of the view that most colour photographs are not best seen framed and hung on a wall. They look ... tacky. Whereas in a book (or on a screen) virtually any photo can look superb. I wonder if this has something to do with the inevitable "degradation" of the image by the process of reproduction?
3. I have always loved the "circle in a rectangle" photographs of Emmet Gowin, created by mounting the lens from a 5" x 4" camera on an 8" x 10" camera, so that the entire image circle is recorded on the sheet of film.

Catoptromancy

Mirror, mirror, in my hand, what fate awaits this marshy land?

Really, mirror? swamped and drowned? Time to move to higher ground...

The Same Stream Several Times

On the Itchen Navigation, the canalised section of the river Itchen that enabled barges to move between Southampton and Winchester, there is a rather fine pool of clear, rushing water, where the flow of the river is squeezed through a race that, presumably, originally fed a lock of some kind, although it's hard to imagine how a barge of any useful size ever got through it. Seasonally, it goes from being a deserted pool of frigid water, as above (November this year), to a densely populated pool of slightly less frigid water when, in the summer, it becomes a favourite spot for local teens to congregate, light barbecues, and generally thrash about in the water.

One of our regular perambulations takes us past this pool, or rather across it, as there are narrow bridges at both ends that used to operate as sluice gates. It's an oddly compelling spot, one of those locations that seems to focus the landscape around it, like Wallace Stevens's famous jar in Tennessee. Naturally, I photograph it most times I pass by: something worthwhile always seems to be going on there, even if it's only the light broken and scattered on the surging water. Several of the better shots from my England and Nowhere book were taken here in summer 2015, not least these two:

The outlier 

The headless man

But sometimes the best way to conjure the spirit of place is via a ring. So here's that pool on the Itchen Navigation...

... and here's a meadow beside the Axe. I think I can feel another little project announcing itself...

Lost in Translation

Innsbruck 2014, going on 1904

In summer 2014 I was invited to hold a solo exhibition and a ten-day residency in Innsbruck, Austria. At the time, despite my genetic distrust of good fortune, it felt like the beginning of an exciting new phase in my life; there seemed no reason not to believe that a round of similar exhibitions, opening-night parties, spots on TV and in the newspapers, and all the varieties of charmed bewilderment that attend the moderately-successful artist would not continue to be my lot, now that I was retiring from wage-slavery and free to be "at home" to any muse that cared to call on me. I know better now, of course, despite my unexpected success at the 2017 Royal Academy Summer Show. If that kind of "result" is not to be a random, once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck, it's simply not enough to make good work and wait and hope for a fair wind: it requires persistent and time-consuming effort put into self-promotion, backed up by unwavering self-belief. This reality had been forcefully pointed out to me in Innsbruck by Rupert Larl, the gallery owner who had invited me, but acknowledging the truth of it is not the same as acting on it. I, like so many self-motivated "practitioners", simply do not have it in my personality [1] to make myself into the kind of needy, squeaky wheel that gets the oil.

Talking of personalities, the other thing I discovered in Innsbruck was how easy it is to offend well-meaning people when dealing across ostensibly similar cultures. Especially, I should probably add, for me. I have a tendency to mistake the bludgeon for the rapier, when it comes to humour. However I may come across in these considered, much-polished written pieces, in person I can be oafishly blunt. I can't help it: it's who I am. Now, I don't know whether Austrians are particularly vulnerable to personal slights of a sort that pass unremarked as friendly banter in Britain, but I was appalled when I discovered that the man who had helped me get my opening-night remarks into serviceable German had been mortally offended by an exchange in the comments to a  blog post I had made at the time. Specifically, in my little speech I had quoted George Clinton of Funkadelic ("Free your mind, and your ass will follow") and a commenter had wondered how on earth that, as well as some very idiomatic British expressions, could have been translated into German. It's a good question: how can you possibly convey the mingled notes of psychedelia and "ebonics" that, for a native speaker, flavour that particular philosophical nugget? In my reply to the comment, I said,

Well, luckily a local photographer who is also an English teacher went over my text to iron out the bumpier bits...  "Your ass will follow", obviously, is "dein Esel wird folgen".  Seriously, though, folks... We went for "Befreien Sie ihren Geist, und der Hintern wird folgen!" Kinda politer, but talk about lost in translation.

Ah, now, "lost in translation"... Again, for a native speaker, that is a thing. You might not get the precise reference (Robert Frost: "I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation") but you know what's going on there; you may not have bought the T-shirt, but you may well have seen the film. However, it seems "lost in translation" was not a thing for my native guide, and he was deeply pissed off: he thought I meant his translation was not up to much. I tried to explain, but the damage was done: I get the impression that Austrians love to hold a grudge [2].

I was reminded of this when reading a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books by Stuart Walton of a catalogue, Kerouac: Beat Painting, derived from an exhibition of Jack Kerouac's paintings at the MAGA Gallery [3] in Italy. The review opens with a quote from a letter Kerouac wrote to Allen Ginsberg while travelling in Mexico in 1956:

Only good thing is I started to paint — I use house paint mixed with glue. I use brush and fingertip both, in a few years I can be topflight painter if I want — maybe then I can sell paintings and buy a piano and compose music too — for life is a bore.

Now, there's a lot of concentrated flavour in that extract. Even allowing for the fact this is a letter, the syntax and choice of words is idiosyncratic: there's a voice at work there, a voice that knows its audience well, and is playing with tone and register. "For life is a bore"? That world-weary, Noël Coward-ish inflection is ironic but, I suspect, far from self-deprecating; no-one who can claim on such slender evidence that "I can be [a] topflight painter if I want" is capable of self-deprecation. Out of curiosity, I looked at the MAGA Gallery's website, and found this translation of the same passage:

Dipingo solo belle cose. Uso vernici da pareti e colla, uso il pennello e le punte delle dita. In pochi anni potrei diventare un pittore di primo piano. Se lo voglio.
E quando potrò vendere i mie dipinti potrò comperarmi un pianoforte e comporre musica. Perché la vita è una noia.

Now, my Italian is pretty poor, and I have no idea whether this translation is from a published edition of Kerouac's correspondence or some local volunteer's brave attempt, but it's interesting how the meanings and subtexts appear to have been changed. "Dipingo solo belle cose" surely does not convey the deeply theatrical sigh of "Only good thing is I started to paint", and that oh-so-casual, coat-trailing "if I want" has become an emphatic sentence in its own right: "Se lo voglio." Similarly, the grace(less) note of "too" in "maybe then I can sell paintings and buy a piano and compose music too" has gone missing. Maybe the Italian does convey the irritating smugness of Kerouac's self-satisfaction, but I don't get that impression. Lost in translation? Decidi tu!

Of course, what the Kerouac exhibition really shows (pace Stuart Walton in his LARB review) is that, despite his own estimation, Jack was never a great painter. The work is noteworthy because of who he was, who he painted, and what he achieved as a writer and cultural player, but negligible, in the same way that the earnest efforts of Chrissie Hynde or Bob Dylan are of no great account as paintings in their own right [4]. In our celebrity-obsessed culture the fast track to getting some prime-time attention to what you might consider to be your real work is to become prominent in some other field first; you can then wow the world with the multi-faceted magnificence of your talents. Celebrity Sunday painters are not uncommon, but any number of celebs seem to fancy themselves as writers – Sean Penn, Russell Brand, Madonna, and even Frank Lampard come to mind (children's books seem to be the nursery slope of choice) – and publishers, understandably but shamefully, are not as quick as they might be to disabuse them. Remember Morrissey's instant Penguin Modern Classic?

This kind of promotional brand diversification is what celebrity "side projects" are all about. Having achieved peak visibility, your name and your endorsement, all by themselves, can become a key source of revenue. Isn't it striking, then, how few household-name visual artists or novelists seem to have considered diversifying into clothing lines, cosmetics, and the like? I mean, wouldn't you want to sport a pair of Hockney™ glasses? Or invest in some HirstWear™ aquarium accessories? Or maybe glam it up this Christmas in a Grayson Perry ™ ensemble? Or evoke the inscrutable allure of Ai Weiwei™ with an underarm deodorant, or sleep the profound sleep of genius between Tracey Emin™ sheets? Well, perhaps not, especially that last one. But it's clear these serious-minded people just don't get the importance of leveraging their brand; when did you ever see them on the chat-show sofa, or debasing themselves to appear in a TV advert? Oh... Really? Are you sure? On the Graham Norton Show? For a high-street department store? OK: point taken.

So, I concede what has been obvious from the start: working and waiting and hoping truly doesn't work as a strategy. Visibility – the optics – and shameless self-promotion are everything. That is, of course, if some measure of worldly success is the aim of your gig. It's easy to get confused about that, though, and I sometimes need to remind myself of what I really think. Or what I like to think I really think. Or what I make a virtue out of thinking because, frankly, I don't have much choice in the matter. But, just out of curiosity, to whom should I address my letter of self-aggrandising puff? If I were to write one. Just asking...

Innsbruck 2014, going on 1954

1. Best diagnosis: sociopath introvert with high-functioning anxiety.
2. I'm also aware that this may be an example of "Black Sheep Syndrome" (see the footnotes to this post), but, sadly, he wasn't the only one I managed to leave nursing a mysterious grievance. As I say, I can't help it...
3. MAGA?? No, srsly! Some things really do get lost in translation...
4. It doesn't automatically follow that "celebrity art" is bad. The work of Viggo Mortensen (an actor, m'lud) is worth checking out, for example. I'm not sure what I make of Joni Mitchell's paintings, but I definitely prefer the best of them to the work of Joan Mitchell, an accredited A-list painter.

Remembering to Remember in November

Oh look, I forgot to blog about remembering the War to End All Wars. What am I like? Especially as – 100 years on – the 11th November fell on Remembrance Sunday. Perfectly predictable, of course, as a calendrical matter, but still quite satisfying on a human level. But what on earth was that business with all the elevens all about? Hey, why not squeeze in a few more hours of slaughter while we can? It's been such fun!

It has been a long, hard slog, "commemorating" the centenary of the First World War from beginning to end in what feels like real time, hasn't it? What did you do in the Great Media Commemoration, daddy? I mean, did anyone actually listen to four years of soap-style acting in Home Front or Tommies on BBC Radio 4?  If you did, then well done you – long-service medals will be awarded – but perhaps now we can all finally dump our cosplay uniforms and get on with our 21st century lives. And if I hear the Last Post played one more time on a quavering bugle I will beat myself over the head with my copy of the Up the Line to Death WW1 poetry anthology until I get repatriated to Blighty. They also serve who endure relentless bombardments of solemn sentimentality delivered by the media's heavy guns.

I reckon I've done my bit, though, with regard to the Great War. For example here, and here. You're welcome for/to my service. But I confess I have become increasingly repelled by the tacky turn our commemorations have been taking, especially since Danny Boyle's 2012 Olympic ceremonies raised the bar of meretricious show-bizzery in public life to a whole new level of awfulness. It's a far cry from the simple dignity of the Cenotaph and the masterstroke of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, perhaps the most sincere and resonant act of conceptual art ever. As Ian Jack pointed out in the Guardian recently, the broad gestures of contemporary art may be popular, but are ultimately empty and inadequate to the tragedy of 1914-18. In the end, it just gets harder and harder to distinguish between "art" and the efforts of a particularly ambitious yet shallow set-designer or window-dresser. "This is not just commemorative public art, but Marks & Spenser commemorative public art" [1]. Bear in mind that booking in advance may be necessary; the queue for your selfie-opportunity starts here.

I think many of us these days have a problem with words like "service" and "sacrifice", when applied to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary premature deaths, to young lives squandered like some abundant natural resource, or to men forced against their will to endure inhuman conditions and follow unquestioningly the suicidal commands of inadequate and doltish officers. It's true that my grandfather was a volunteer soldier, practically a professional as a pre-war Territorial, but after 1916 the depleted ranks were filled by conscription: young men forced by the state to offer themselves up as fuel to an industrial engine of warfare. For what, precisely? I defy anyone to explain quite how or why the Balkan problems of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so quickly became a national priority for Britain, requiring the death of 800,000 young men and the maiming and traumatising of over a million more. I suppose "service" is not an unsuitable euphemism for such indentured labour, although "servitude" would be better. But "sacrifice" is just insulting. Nobody is "sacrificing" their life when forced to walk into a hail of machine-gun bullets, or getting blown to pieces by a random shell, unless of course what is meant is that men were sacrificed by the nation to achieve some grand but ill-defined end that out-weighed the value of their disposable little lives. Which is merely insulting in another way.

There seems to be something of a revisionist move under way among historians, one which regards the "lions led by donkeys" version of the war as an aberration, conjured up by a handful of over-sensitive poets and '60s lefties like Joan Littlewood. It seems those generals knew what they were doing, after all. It is certainly true that my father, born in 1918, was not given the forenames "Douglas Haig" with any level of irony whatsoever by his father, who had served the entire duration of the war as an infantry sergeant and, towards the very end, as a 2nd lieutenant. I suppose he must have thought of Haig as something of a hero, despite everything, and a quick search on a genealogical website suggests he was far from alone in this. Although I very much doubt whether he had been made privy to whatever strategic considerations had been passing through Haig's mind (old joke: "The general spoke to me the other day!" "Cor, really? What'd he say?" "He said, Get out of my fuckin' way, soldier!"). Whatever the case, from this end of the historical telescope it's hard to see any plan of battle that amounts to "send thousands of men to certain death; repeat as necessary" as anything less than compound madness.

Did we learn anything worth remembering from WW1? In a sense, you might say that the main lesson of WW1 was WW2. That is, that if you believe your own rhetoric and end up comprehensively punishing the defeated for – well, for what, exactly? – and keep trying to squeeze the world into a series of pleasing but ill-fitting boxes – boxes with labels like Versailles Treaty, Sykes-Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration – then you shouldn't be surprised if it all comes back to bite you in the arse as you sit on the lid. So, tragically, no, on the evidence of recent history it seems "we" (a.k.a. "they") have learned nothing much. Although, to adapt the Vietnam Era formulation, I suspect that if "they" were to give another proper war, that nobody would come. And, what's more, they know they won't be able to make us turn up, next time, either.

From the trench magazine The Wipers Times

1. A particularly smug TV advertising campaign by the British department store for its food products ("This is not just any [insert food product], this is Marks & Spenser [food product]").

Axminster

Approaching Axminster

Long shadows by the Axe

We spent last Christmas in a cottage not far from Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. As I described at the time, we had driven there in our venerable (2002) Renault Scenic, which had suddenly begun to have a crisis of faith in its ability to go up the slightest incline, never mind Wessex-scale hills. Fortunately, a small local garage in Axminster specialising in Renaults was able to sort out the problem. The guy so obviously knew and understood the psychology and physiology of Scenics that I made a mental promise to ours that, when the time for its next service came around, I'd drive it back down to Axminster. That time was this week, and so – mad as it may seem – that's what I did. While its innards and peripherals were being tweaked, calibrated, and wotsinated (I know nothing about the mechanics of cars) I stayed in a nearby B&B and took advantage of the garage's loaner vehicle to have a little R&R myself.

Axminster is one of those places that has an indelible (but usually long gone) manufacturing association, like "Sheffield steel", "Staffordshire pottery", or "Dagenham Fords": in this case, Axminster carpets. It is said that the church bells were rung each time a carpet was finished, which says a lot about the laboriousness of the process, and probably helps to explain why there's not so much carpet-making going on there any more. I doubt the factory hooter goes off in Delhi, or wherever they're made these days, every time one rolls off the line. In fact, the area's association with Hugh Fearnley-Wotsisname's River Cottage brand is probably of greater economic significance. River Cottage being the monetized apotheosis of the urban hippie's Escape into Rural Self-Sufficiency fantasy. I ate in the River Cottage Deli & Canteen, and it was very good. In fact it was better than good, as the free-range airheads working there had lost my order and I had a bit of an extended wait before eating, with the result that they waived payment, despite my protestations (I always worry these compensatory freebies get taken out of someone's wages, as in my observation hip entrepreneurs seem to frown on trade union membership). Free beer, too.

Lyme Regis skips

Black Ven & Golden Cap from the Cobb

I did make the obligatory excursion down to the coast at Lyme Regis – one of my favourite places, packed like a bucket of sand with memories of holidays with our kids – hoping to see the remnants of the annual November 5th beach bonfire and fireworks, but it had all already gone the way of all beachworks. There's something poignant about any holiday resort in winter, even one as ready for all seasons as Lyme Regis: no photograph ever quite captures the ringing and rattling of mainbraces spliced against bowlines in the bitter wind (I know nothing about the mechanics of boats, either), or the heads-down fortitude of dogwalkers tossing chewed-up tennis balls on the beach. By the end of the afternoon I was glad that the light had failed sufficiently to justify heading back inland.

I also had a productive walk along the River Axe, which by some strange coincidence runs past Axminster in the Axe Valley and down to the sea at Axemouth. It's an idyllic spot, only slightly spoiled by the incessant and industrial levels of noise coming from some housing developments on the edge of Axminster. Apparently, or so the B&B owner told me, they're filling in an entire little valley with rubble so that the estate can be extended further over this natural obstacle. As a New Town boy I'm far from opposing the building of much-needed new housing, but it does look a bit of an unsympathetic eyesore, and I think you can be pretty certain this will be at best "affordable" housing, rather than council housing.

Over the lush meadows on the rural side of the river I spotted a marsh harrier, a birding first for me – it looked rather like a buzzard trying to do an impression of a red kite – and, looking away from the town and the building sites, it all felt incredibly timeless. But I also saw a lot of improvised "KEEP OUT" and "KEEP TO THE FOOTPATH" signs on the gates of fields with livestock which suggested there was already an unwelcome level of encroachment from townsfolk, particularly those with frisky dogs and no "countryside sense". On the other hand, "Git orf my land!" is the timeless, traditional refrain of the farming community on encountering the non-farming community. Sadly, though, I suppose ever more dogwalkers and "recreational" countryside users may yet see harriers and other wildlife retreating ever further away from town, unless they can adapt to disturbance and living on scraps and refuse. It's what we do best, isn't it?

Meadow outside Axminster

Along the Axe

But why make them white?

The Guardians

Like some home-brewer performing heady alchemy with the fruits of a long summer, I have bottled and corked yet another book, and racked it on the shelf. This time, it's The Guardians, a selection of those composites I have been making this year out of various bits of statuary. It's less grandiose as a bookwork than Puck's Song, at a mere 8" x 10", but every bit as ambitious in its picture-making. There's more of it, too: 56 pages.

As always, I am offering it to readers of this blog first, via this link. This time there are three versions: a hardback at £34.99, a softback at £24.99, and a PDF at £6.49. As always, I'm not holding my breath when it comes to sales. So, go on, please do have a look (there's a full preview there at the link) but feel free to keep hold of your hard-earned cash. As it says in all the best bookshops, you are welcome to browse with no obligation to buy. To be honest, I'd rather hear what you have to say than count your money, although I wouldn't mind both.

For those who have asked, yes, there will be a wasp book, as well as a rather special little crow book, but I want to do my absolute best by those before releasing them into the wild. In other words, I'm still having too much fun with them to let go of them just yet. Soon, though, soon.

Night Flight

As we like to say in northern latitudes, now that the clocks have "gone back" an hour from British Summer Time, the nights are drawing in... That extra hour in bed on one Sunday is no compensation for the sudden lack of light in the late afternoons, when I tend to be out of the house walking with a camera in summer. Time to adjust habits, as well as clocks.

New To You, or: TL;DR

I seem to be going on about the nature of getting older rather a lot on this blog recently. Which, for readers of various ages, is probably boring, annoying, and anxiety-provoking in equal measure, but there we are. Let's put it like this: I may only be 64, but like any good driver I like to keep my eyes on the road ahead. Not too far ahead, obviously, as this road only goes to one place but, although the destination may be absolutely certain, the hazards and roadside attractions on the way are worth remarking upon, and even worth the occasional detour. Plus, being a good driver but a terrible navigator, there is always the chance that any detour I make may become an instructive dérive. As Chet Baker said, let's get lost. Or as my partner says, try not to get lost this time.

Some hope. I drove into deepest darkest East Sussex recently, to collect four of my pictures from a gallery in Ticehurst and, after following what I thought was an obvious route, realised I was lost in a labyrinth of unsignposted sunken lanes Somewhere in England. I knew I was off-course somewhat when a posh woman on a large horse rode up the lane and, on being asked how to get to Ticehurst, said, "Where??" Luckily, she was able to consult her smartphone and benevolently guided me out of the maze. I think I may have a naive faith in such guardian angels turning up at the right moment which is rather stronger than my sense of direction.

So, um, what was I going to say? Something about getting older... Oh, yes: Old MacDonald. There is a type of song, often "traditional", in which the chorus gets progressively longer, as a new element is added with each verse. I though this genre might have a nice name, but it seems they're simply known as "cumulative songs": Old MacDonald Had a Farm, The Twelve Days of Christmas, and There was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly (no, I have no idea why she swallowed a fly, these things happen, it's no biggie, and there's really no need to make a doctor's appointment... What? No, of course she's not going to die, you idiot) are all examples. The thing is, increasingly, I am struck by the extent to which our collective life is paralleled and parodied by these cumulative songs.

Not so very long ago, there wasn't a great deal for the average person to know. You had to know how to get out of bed, find your way downstairs, make gruel, and stagger down the lane to whatever field or workshop you were working in today, then reverse the process once it started to get dark. Your work was probably traditional, repetitive, and dull. You probably couldn't read or write. News came in the form of gossip and broadside ballads. Singing The Twelve Days of Christmas was probably the most rigorous workout your memory would get in a twelvemonth. After all, even the most advanced scholars of the day had yet to hear of pretty much everything we now presume to be common knowledge. Bear in mind that Bishop Ussher's rigorous calculation, based on the best available data, that the first day of creation fell upon October 23rd 4004 BC was made in 1650, not 650 AD; that is, around the time young Isaac Newton was learning his long division. So you might not have known everything, but you could be across most of it before plague, war, famine, or various lethal combinations of stupidity and ignorance wiped your slate permanently clean.

Today, you don't need me to tell you, is rather different. It's arguable that it was young Newton, in fact, and his uncanny ease with long division that started off the snowballing complexities of modern life. Simply making breakfast and getting to work today requires more knowledge than was possessed by an entire village in 1718, and quite possibly 1918, too. Balanced, of course, by an ignorance of world-historical proportions. I mean, who, thumbing their way through the night's crop of trivia on the morning commute, has the faintest idea of how a smartphone actually works? Worse, what you knew last week may not be enough to get you through the day. It only takes a few ill-considered legislative changes, or some new contradictory nutritional advice, or, ulp, yet another unasked-for Windows upgrade to throw your whole understanding of the world into chaos. But here's the thing: unlike a Windows upgrade, an awful lot of the new stuff doesn't replace the old stuff: life is not just a long song, it's a cumulative song.

This is especially true in science and technology. Newtonian mechanics still apply, and you can't skip that verse and go straight to the wacky stuff about string, although it's also true that you can't include alchemy or astrology and still be taken seriously. The Science Song may be long and cumulative, but you've just got to buckle down and learn it. This is a bit more of a problem in the realm of culture. People might debate who's in and who's out, but no-one can dispute that the list of candidates just keeps getting longer and longer, without really getting anywhere. In music, Bach wasn't replaced by Mozart, who wasn't replaced by Beethoven, who wasn't replaced by Mendelssohn, who wasn't replaced by Mahler, who ... Well, you can probably hum the tune by now, even if you don't know all the words. There has always been more and more to listen to, to read, to see, to appreciate, until – probably somewhere in the mid-20th century – there was finally too much, and "culture" broke into pieces. We call that event "post-modernity". Keats may have had good reason to hope that his name was not, after all, "writ in water", but then he knew who the competition were, and had probably read them all, often and with close attention. A contemporary Keats could spend a lifetime catching up before actually getting around to writing anything, but, given she's probably never heard of Keats, and is a 12-year old wannabe rapper living a precarious life in Los Angeles or Lagos, this hardly matters any more. There are any number of different cumulative songs, each invoking its own list of players. No-one is conducting the cultural song any more.

Which brings me to my main, grumpy-old-man point. Isn't it annoying, when some sparky youngster announces the discovery of some old hat in the cultural attic, as if no-one had ever seen or worn it before? Yes, yes, young 'un, that was your grandfather's hat: I'm sick of the sight of it, frankly... That's the only reason why I, ahem, nailed it to the rafters, rather than taking it to Oxfam. Which reminds me that some second-hand shops have taken to describing their stock as "new to you": a good label for most culture, really, it being both well-used and always new to somebody.

On Hallowe'en, for example, I was at the Ashmolean Museum's exhibition Spellbound, which brings together lots of material associated with witchcraft and popular magical thinking. No, I was not an exhibit myself, although I must admit I felt a bit like one. I've had an on-again, off-again interest in witchery since I was a teen [1], and – apart from some rather half-hearted art installations – there was disappointingly little there I hadn't come across before. Witch hunts, witch bottles, apotropaic devices, astrology, black mirrors, crystals, and mummified cats ... It was all a bit shop-worn, and also pitched at that "school project" level that museums seem to have adopted universally, so that it was spookily like being trapped inside a copy of a book like Dorling Kindersley's Witches & Magic-Makers [2]. I will admit it was good finally to see actual copies of classic texts like The Discovery of Witches, and also some manuscript depositions from witch trials, but the lighting levels and displays were not attuned to ageing eyes or prolonged scrutiny, if faded 17th-century secretary hand is not as immediately legible to you as it might be to some. But it seems you're not expected actually to read the things. It's a spectacle, grandad: move along, please...

Self-evidently, the young don't know – cannot know – what to us oldies is basic stuff, and yet we are obliged to assume (or pretend) that they do. Anything else would be tiresome and patronising. Of course you know who Harold Wilson was, and why he's standing in that photo with the Beatles. The Beatles? Of course you know who the Beatles were... Similarly, to have presumed that we knew, or would quickly come to know, everything our parents' or grandparents' generations knew was never more than a polite fiction. Of course I know who Benny Goodman was... Not so sure about Dan Leno, though... The communal cumulative cultural song is always falling apart, always starting again. In pre-literate societies, of course, you could make a decent living as an itinerant bard, recounting the interminable history of a people and the genealogy and heroic deeds of its rulers in epic eight-hour recitals, but these sessions were hardly singalongs. Today, as the chorus not only gets longer and longer, but also wider and wider, and spreads out into completely new and unknown dimensions, something has to give, and that seems to be personal memory. The ability to memorise and retain and recall is vanishing. In the title of a book I saw recently: why learn history when it's already on my phone?

So, ironically, in an age of information overload the typical individual's knowledge-base may be returning to something like its pre-modern village level. You need to know how to get out of bed, find your way downstairs, make breakfast, and stagger to whatever hot-desk, cash-till, or call-centre you are working in today, then reverse the process once your shift is over. Your work is probably scripted, repetitive, and dull. You probably don't read or write much. News comes in the form of social media chat and infotainment. Singing The Twelve Days of Christmas is probably the most rigorous workout your memory will get in a twelvemonth. And, curiously enough, this is pretty much exactly what Marshall McLuhan (who?) really meant by the Global Village.

1. Which has NOTHING to do with those objects nailed to the rafters. NOTHING.
2. Dorling Kindersley have pretty much trademarked a style of presenting reference works aimed at children that is big on white-background illustration and light on text, which is often reduced to the status of sidebars and labels.

Gutenberg

I was talking to a friend recently, and the subject of e-readers came up. He claimed he had an uneasy relationship with his Kindle, because of its exclusive linkage to Amazon. A lot of people, I know, are unhappy to use Amazon, partly because of its domineering position in the digital marketplace, and the negative effect this is having on traditional retailers, and partly because of the appalling working conditions in its warehouses. Frankly, I am a complete hypocrite in this regard. I have been an Amazon customer forever, since it was just a novel way of buying books and I experienced the pleasure of receiving a pristine, shrink-wrapped copy of a book that would, in a most regular bookshops, have suffered so much "shelf wear" and been so well-thumbed by previous browsers that it might as well have been a second-hand copy. I suppose I think of Amazon as a wicked but wealthy and well-connected uncle who sends the most brilliant birthday presents.

However, did my friend not know about other, alternative e-readers, such as Kobo or Nook, I wondered? Or, given he already had a Kindle, did he not know about Project Gutenberg?

I thought everyone knew about Gutenberg, but apparently not. If you don't, and might have an interest in almost 60,000 free e-books, which are proof-checked, transcribed texts of classic out-of-copyright material [1], then I suggest you check it out. Less surprisingly, it seems that even among those who do know about Gutenberg the business of how to get a Gutenberg book onto your Kindle is not common knowledge. Well, Amazon do not exactly advocate the practice. So let me revert to my former profession and turn you on.

To use a Project Gutenberg e-book on your Kindle, you first need to find your Kindle's email address. (I know! Who knew your e-reader had a private life?) To do this, open Amazon in your Web browser and go to "Your Account" and then "Manage Your Content and Devices".

You will be asked to sign in, and you will see what is, in effect, your Kindle management page. Go to the "Devices" tab, and you'll see your various Kindles and Kindle apps. If, like me, you've acquired several Kindles and set up numerous PCs and phones and tablets to read Kindle books [2] the list may be quite long. However, click on the "Actions" icon to the left of the one you regard as your main device, and – behold! – you will see it does indeed have an email address. Make a note of it.

Now click on the "Preferences" tab. Scroll down, and click on "Personal Document Settings". You'll see various things, but what you want to check is that your own preferred email address is listed under "Approved Personal Document E-mail List". If yes, nothing need be done, If not, simply add it.

You're all set. Go to the Project Gutenberg page and look for something: the search facility appears antiquated, but it works. Click on a book's icon -- for example, this one -- and you'll see the available download choices. A quick read in the online version is always a good idea, just to check it's what you really want. But, to get it onto your Kindle:

Click either "Kindle (with images)" or "Kindle (no images") in the download options. In the random example I've chosen, you'll see that the file with pictures is bigger, but in most cases you will probably want the pictures. This will download the book as a Kindle-compatible file onto your PC. Alternatively, if you use a "cloud" application like Dropbox or Google Drive and prefer to download stuff there, click the relevant icon over on the right. Dropbox (which I use a lot: please don't tell me they're evil, too) will automatically create a special "gutenberg" folder for you under "Apps".

Now, this is the bizarre part: send an email to your Kindle's email address with the Gutenberg file as an attachment. Shortly thereafter, you should see it either in your "Docs" (on more sophisticated devices like the Kindle Fire, where you can use "Send to Kindle" to add it to your Kindle Library) or in your library of books, ready to read. That's all there is to it.

However: please do respect your Kindle's privacy, and refrain from reading its email correspondence... Mind you, as Wittgenstein might have said, if an e-reader could email, we could not understand it.

Early prototype e-reader

1. In the USA, that is. Copyright is a complex business, but I'm not aware of any reported difficulties using Gutenberg material anywhere else in the world.
2. You do know that is possible, without even owning an actual Kindle, don't you? E-books look great on  tablet.

Crow Crockery

Look, if a man can't design his own crow-themed dinner service, then what is the point? Srsly!

What more perfect way to eat crow pie? Go on, have another slice!

Rook Takes Hare

One thing you start to notice, once you start regularly showing work in group exhibitions, is how truly awful so much self-styled "art" really is. I'm not talking about conceptual work here, which wears its truly-awfulness as a badge of pride; I mean the conventional paintings and prints and sculptures that meet with the approval of the gatekeepers – judges, curators, selection panels, gallerists, and the like – and populate the walls of a typical "open" exhibition or curated group show.

There'll be good stuff there, too, of course, and even one or two really outstanding things. But, once you've walked the floor of  a few mass artistic outings, and got over the indignation of seeing truly bad efforts on the wall, you start to realise how dull even most competent artwork is, repeating the same old subject matter and the same old techniques that have signified "art" for decades. You'd be forgiven for thinking the Bloomsbury Group or Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden were all still around and active. As, in effect, they are: people are still copying their much-admired moves and putting them up on the wall as original contemporary artwork. Again and again and again...

I don't mean to sound arrogant, here. Certainly, I like my own work well enough, and others seem to like it, too, but I am under no illusions about its quality or originality, or about my status as an "artist". I actually prefer to think of myself as a sort of illustrator; a good one, to be sure, with a strong personal style, and some clever home-made digital "secret sauces", but playing a different game in a different league to those of our contemporaries who will figure in the art histories and fetch awe-inspiring sums in the auction houses. Mind you, most of their work is crap, too.

In a recent post (Snake Oil) I wrote:

It may be unfair, but I'm reminded of those bargain "Can You Tell The Difference?" LP compilations of current hits that were popular in the late 1960s, made by what we would now call tribute acts. For every innovator there are 100 imitators, and each imitator is followed by 1000 impersonators. Can you tell the difference? Does it make any difference who made two more-or-less identical pictures, with what motivation, and with what level of creative innovation?

I was mainly thinking about photography then, but the same steep innovator-imitator-impersonator gradient applies in all art forms. Photographers are constitutionally inclined to feel inferior to more hands-on art-forms, but there's really no need. The effort and skill involved in producing a perfectly competent lookalike linocut in no way redeem the end result: its creator is an impersonator, not even an imitator, and certainly not an innovator. Especially if the subject matter is one of those lazy clichés of middlebrow taste that grace the walls of small but upscale galleries in so many small but upscale market towns.

Honestly, if I see another faux-naive, graphical rendering of a hare or of seed-heads or of upturned boats in tasteful "Farrow & Ball" colours I will ... Well, I won't be surprised. It seems there are legions of self-styled "artists" out there (presumably partnered to wealthy lawyers, dentists, or accountants) living a facsimile of the Good Life in the more desirable parts of the countryside, with their sights set no higher than the greetings-card market and the passing souvenir trade. You can't really blame anyone who actually wants to sell work for narrowing their scope like that (although one might rightly be suspicious of any poet who restricted their output to greetings-card verses) but you certainly can accuse them of complacency. I confess that I particularly dislike anything featuring hares. Hares are threadbare glove-puppets that say, "I'm a bit of a pagan, in touch with folkways, and the feel and flow of the land and its seasons. I'm earthy and yet spiritual. My kitchen is filled with the smell of baking bread, and the laughter of friends and children..." What could be more annoying? Crows, on the other hand, are just fine. Crows may be glove-puppets, too, but they say "Get over yourself, big ears!" to moonstruck hares.

If the recent Banksy kerfuffle showed anything, it is that the market for art is both irrational and vastly asymmetrical. At one end there are the bottom-feeding hordes creating disposable birthday cards and pleasant pictures to enliven the mantelpiece and the wall above the sofa, chosen in the main because the subject matter is benign, the "colourway" matches the curtains, and the price is right. In the middle there are hard-working professionals like Kurt Jackson, who have developed a style sufficiently distanced from greetings-card banality – but not too far – to attract a following and enough income to support a cottage industry, but who will nonetheless never warrant so much as a footnote in any account of 21st century British art. And then there is the stellar and stratospheric realm, thinly populated by a relative handful of canny practitioners, aided by their teams of assistants and other "people", who can sell a single picture for the yearly income of a High Court judge (but who to, I often wonder? they're generally too enormous to fit over even a High Court judge's sofa), about whom reverent TV documentaries are made, and whose places in the histories seem pre-booked. Although time does have a way of cancelling such bookings, it's true. If nothing else, Bansky has re-confirmed his own reservation by arranging a spectacle that enacted, simultaneously, quite how disposable vast surpluses of disposable income really are, and then how yet more burgeoning surplus value can be created out of nothing. Even out of the shreds of a flat piece of paper with some marks on it in an ugly frame. It's got "art history" written all over it.

Ooo, look at me bein' a moonstruck hare!

Money Money Money

Golden Wasp Game #7

Perfectly nice people can be strangely hesitant, not to say ungenerous, where parting with their own money is concerned. Someone who will happily invest thousands in a car, clothes, or, dare I say, in photographic equipment, will balk at the token cost of supporting another's artistic endeavours, whether this be buying a busker's CD, an interesting-sounding novel, or the modestly-priced painting of a young, unknown talent. Yes, you may like what they are doing, but probably best to wait until they fill a concert hall, get on the Booker shortlist, or have a retrospective at the Tate. There's no point in encouraging a loser, is there? Some people even make a virtue of their tight-fistedness. I remember being at a charity gig many years ago – it must have been Rock Against Racism or something like that – where my companions demanded their entrance money back, as the bands playing (for nothing, remember) were so hopelessly bad. "The Left should not be exploited like this", was their rationale.

Without wanting to sound too jaded, I was mindful of this when I recently launched my Puck's Song book and PDF. Obviously, I would never expect more than couple of people, at most, to spend £50 on a book, beautiful as it is. I wish it could be cheaper; I have to buy my copies from Blurb, too. But I trust nobody thinks I make anything like £50 profit? In fact, unless and until I bump up the price of the book from its current slightly rounded up "production cost", I make precisely £3.41 from each sale. Which is actually less than the profit from each sale of a Puck's Song PDF from Blurb. But (and seeing as we're talking about people's reluctance to part with their money) I won't embarrass anybody by saying how many PDF sales there have been so far. Except to say that, as Blurb won't reveal buyers' names, I can't thank, uh, both of you personally [1]. To be honest, I think I was more surprised that there were so few comments on the tenth anniversary post.

Some of my most instructive experiences in this regard came when "fulfilling" sales of the prints I made for the 2017 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. As you may recall (I think I may have mentioned this once or twice before), I was pleased to get two of my digital images into that prestigious show, one of which sold out its edition of 50 more or less instantly. That is, by the end of the first day of the private view, so-called Buyers' Day. I was astonished. In fact, for the next couple of months I was being badgered by people who'd been to the show and wanted a copy, despite being told by the RA that both editions had sold out. There was actually a waiting list for cancelled purchases. A waiting list! I have no idea what particular magic those two images held, but I have been unable to repeat it since.

It may sound cynical, but I suspect that a large element in their charm was their price. You get to be invited to next year's Buyers' Day by buying something this year. On walls covered by works with price tags in the thousands, a nice-enough little print at a mere £75 must be very tempting; a bit like the postcards in a museum gift-shop. And once the little red dots (indicating a sale) start to stack up under a picture, a certain "me, too" effect kicks in: next thing you know, the edition has sold out.

However, there's "selling" and then there's actually getting the money into one's bank account. A Summer Show buyer pays a 30% deposit plus 20% VAT to the RA, which in effect is their cut of the selling price. On a twenty thousand pound painting, this is a not inconsiderable sum. On a seventy-five pound print, it's small change. The RA having taken their cut, it then becomes the artist's responsibility to "fulfil" the purchases: contact the buyers, invoice them, chase the recalcitrant ones, collect the outstanding sums, and deliver the artwork. Out of my ninety-four buyers, I found a significant proportion failed to respond to my first round of emails asking for payment, sometimes because they'd gone away for the summer, sometimes because the details provided by the RA were inaccurate, and sometimes because they simply had better things to do than fork over £48 for some bit of paper they'd bought on impulse back in June. Consequently, the admin took up most of my summer; in fact, it took until November to finally extract the last payments. I became a familiar face at the local Post Office, clutching armfuls of A3 mailers for despatch [2]. What with that and keeping track of the invoices, it was all a bit too much like being back at work, and not very "fulfilling".

The demand for one of the two "Golden Wasp Game" prints was particularly great ("No. 7"). Some buyers had bought the other one ("No. 3"), I realised, simply because they couldn't have the one they really wanted. So, I decided the fair thing to do was to identify the subset of buyers who had bought GWG No. 3, and only No. 3, and offer them the chance to bid for the two copies of No. 7 I had intended to withhold for my own use. If nothing else, it would help me establish a benchmark for the true market value of my work. Enough of those I approached were grateful for another chance to get hold of the print to make the auction a success. More admin for me, but a lot more fun. Not everyone wanted to put in a bid, however, and one guy actually accused me of money grubbing. I quote: "Please remove me from this email list. I'm not interested in your continued pursuit for money and negative views of the RA. You should just be pleased your prints where [sic] choose [sic] in the first place." Quite right, sir, and I expect you, too, give away your labours for nothing more than the honour and pleasure of it.

Then there was the couple from Diss in Norfolk (I'm tempted to name and shame them, they annoyed me so much). Having seen No. 7 at the RA and discovered it was already sold out, they asked me for a "proof" print, on the grounds that these were what they really collected. I explained the difficulty of this concept in the digital context, but said I'd see what I could do when the administrative dust had settled. Although I was slightly bemused when they said they would usually expect a proof print to be much cheaper than one from the edition. Um, no... By the end of that busy summer I had forgotten all about it, but then they contacted me again. Again, I explained that I had no "proof prints" as such, but would sell them a copy of the "friends & family" hors de commerce edition I had made (identical, but slightly smaller and on an A4 sheet, unnumbered, and signed with my red Japanese-style seal) at the very good price of £50. I attached an image of the print to the email. They agreed to buy it. Only to send it straight back for a full refund because they were "disappointed" with it. The only people to do so out of nearly 100 buyers, and this after two people had made bids over £300 for the two auctioned prints of GWG No. 7 [3]. This was my (not unreasonable) reply:

I am taken aback: you *did* see the print at the RA, didn't you? Apart from a very slight difference in size, in what way does this differ from what you saw there? What were you expecting? I even sent you an image of what you would receive. I don't see how you can be "disappointed" with what you have received.

Frankly, this is annoying: you asked for a proof copy originally, and as I couldn't supply one I thought I was doing you a favour by letting you have a copy of this edition at a very good price. I am not running a mail order company here.

Anyway. If you want a refund, you'd better give me your bank details.

Should I ever pass through Diss, I may seek them out, if only to admire their collection of satisfactory (and presumably cheap) proof prints.

There were other strange and amusing things, too. There were the people who had to have a particular number from within the edition of 50. There was the guy who pretended he'd never received the print, and the print that "disappeared" inside an architect's office, despite having been irrefutably recorded by Royal Mail as "signed for" in both cases. There were the people who felt that buying a print entitled them to some kind of ongoing relationship with me, including arranging possible meetings, and inviting me to visit their houses. There were the ones who wanted to offer swaps with their own work in lieu of payment (David Hockney, maybe; you, no). Oh, and the mysterious vanishing Norwegian businessman and the ditzy Asian actor who were both the very first to buy and the very last to settle up, in November. In the latter case by cancelling the deal, after months of studiously polite emails and answerphone messages from me. Although this did allow a very grateful and surprised person on the waiting list to get print number 3 of "Golden Wasp Game #7". Which would have infuriated the woman who had demanded to be given the lowest possible number in the edition, had she known.

This year, as it happens, I failed to get anything into the RA Summer show (cheers, Grayson!), and once again got selected but not hung in the Royal West of England Academy's Open Exhibition in Bristol, which was frustrating, and although I did get three pieces of work into a show in the Cotswolds and four into another in East Sussex I sold nothing at all at either, despite keeping my prices modestly low. And now, as I say, my CD offerings have fallen rather flat. It's a funny old game, trying to exchange art for cash, and I'm glad I've never tried to earn a living this way. But, looking on the bright side, I suppose I have as a consequence ended up having an easy summer of it, free to bask in the unaccustomed sunshine, unsullied by any unworthy money-grubbing or foisting of unsatisfactory prints onto people, and above all without testing the limits of my reserves of patience, tact, and endurance. I should be grateful, really. And, besides, I notice the local Post Office branch has now closed.

Golden Wasp Game #3

1. That "both" joke never gets old, except that it's not an exaggeration in this case. I have to say that PDF seemed like a bargain to me, compared to a £50 book, offering the exact same content in a high-quality portable digital format for less than a sixth of the price. As I never tire of saying, the most sincere form of flattery is not imitation but cash purchase. But, so far, precisely two people have felt that flattery is appropriate in this case, which I suppose is fair comment.
2. The cost of which, a rigid A3 mailer sent as "First Class Signed For" mail, knocked yet another dispiriting chunk off my £48 "profit". I was glad to have chosen "Signed For" postage, however, as it enabled me to prove delivery, which sadly turned out to be necessary in a few cases.
3. These winning bids were so much higher than the nearest runners-up that I actually reduced the final sale price to them by quite a bit. I'm a fool, really.