Art gets me every time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My un-birthday continues as my mind works reality into a progression of gifts (free swimming lane; excellent cup of tea in the café; delicious menu del dia; a glimpse of sunshine etc) as well as an actual gift, the catalogue from the National Gallery’s exhibition of Poussin and The Dance, which I have now read.  It always helps the process when so many of the pages are illustrations!

     I have a soft spot for Poussin, even though I often find his paintings repulsive in their Classical, static, theatricality.  He was the first painter that I studied in the History of Art section of my O Level Art.  The list of French painters we were asked to consider stretched from Poussin to Picasso – even though Picasso was Spanish, born in Málaga, Andalusia, in southern Spain (though Catalonia claims him, and Picasso himself said that his soul was Catalan) though I think that the course talked of French Painting rather than French painters, so with the amount of time he spent in France, and the importance of his early work being completed in France, they might have a claim as well.  I might add that all the painters were white and male – surely something that would not be tolerated today!

     The Catalogue of Poussin and The Dance is something that can be held in one hand and the essays which make up the academic content of the tome are very readable and approachable.

     As is usual for me, the art that I find the most engaging is the preparatory work of sketches.  There is one compositional sketch where you have to keep telling yourself that this artist was born in 1594 – because the sketch looks like something that could have been produced by an artist from one of the -isms of the early twentieth century!

     The catalogue ends with a concentration on A Dance to the Music of Time, which was painted in the 1630s, and is now in The Wallace Collection in London.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     If you have not been to The Wallace Collection, then you should go.  It is free, it’s in the centre of London and it has treasures – as well as an excellent café in the refashioned courtyard.  I always enjoy pointing out that The Wallace Collection and the building in which it is situated (Hertford House, Manchester Square) was given to the nation in an astonishing gesture of generosity by the FRENCH widow of Sir Richard Wallace in 1897.  

 

     

 

 

 

 Just remember that when the Brexiteer cretins start bad-mouthing our closest neighbours.

     Go to the Wallace Collection website at:

https://www.wallacecollection.org/art/collection/history-collection/

to get a flavour of what is FREE for you to visit in real life.

     I am conscious, as I urge others to go to see a collection, that I have not been to an art gallery for far too long.  Admittedly in this benighted country, national collections are not free to view, and I am sure that if many Conservatives had their way (as they did under the odious Heath) they would impose museum charges.  In my view FREE ENTRY TO NATIONAL COLLECTIONS is a right, there should be no restrictions for a person to view what is a distillation of their heritage.  To get a sense of the range of FREE entries to places of wonder that I greedily visited when I was resident in Wales, check out:

https://museum.wales/

     It is about time that I revisited MNAC in Barcelona which, even if it is not free, I do have a very reasonably priced season ticket, so I am never under the obligation of “having to see everything” when I go there to “get my money’s worth”!

     One thing that reading about Poussin has prompted me to do, is think about reading A Dance to the Music of Time sequence by Anthony Powell, in all its volumes.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have one or two of the novels lurking on my bookshelves, but I have never started it because I hadn’t collected the “full set” – a specious reason for literary inactivity, but one I think I will begin to remedy.

     If I can find the books in the grotesque disorder of my so-called library!  Whatever, it is always fun searching and I will probably end up reading something entirely different, having been seduced by the magic of long closed pages.

Present depression; future hope!

 

 

“He looks like a homeless person,” my friend in the swimming pool said this morning before we started our swim, “With a tie!”  Perhaps it doesn’t need me to tell you which English political character he was taking about, given the international publicity that shuffling lummox has had over his latest U-turn.

     If it wasn’t for the unnecessary deaths that his ineptitude and indolence have caused, it would be rollickingly funny.  But it isn’t.  It’s a national humiliation as each new catastrophic missed opportunity or slipshod execution pushes the figures even further beyond the “optimistic” projected number of 20,000 dead by the end of the pandemic that was voiced with some belief in the early stages of the infection! 

     I hope that the increasing dead haunt Johnson’s every waking thought because it is his ‘”leadership’” that has pushed the figures into the national disgrace that they have become.  I think that the charges of “corporate manslaughter” that Johnson and his cabinet should face are becoming more and more of a necessity if the thousands of excess deaths are ever going to be properly laid at the feet of the architect of the political chaos that helped make them.  Indeed, I think that the term “manslaughter” is far, far too mild for what he and his low-life ministers have actually done.

 

However bitter my thoughts and how eager I am to see Johnson brought to justice; I know that my writing is just so much bile.  Even if Johnson were to read it he wouldn’t recognize the application to himself; he is so much of a narcissist that he would ‘naturally’ push the blame off on to someone else.  Responsibility has never been one of his strong points, well, not even a point really, so he would brush off any criticism as ‘inapplicable’ and carry on in the way that he has lived all of his life: falling upwards and ignoring negative opinions. 

     The only problem that I foresee is that his final comeuppance will come, but at a price that will involve the whole of the United Kingdom (for as long as that concept is going to survive his governance) in taking the hit for his failures, and he will gambol away (possibly humming a merry tune like Cameron) as he disappears into the lucrative lecture circuit and shallow book writing future that he has mapped out for himself.

     But wait, I was forgetting, as a past holder of his present post he will be entitled (?) to a peerage, Lord Boris of Bullshit, floridly resplendent in his (probably borrowed) robes, so that he can continue fleecing the country with his lordly per diems!

 

Enough!  We have only hours (or days, or weeks, or months, or years) left before the latest deadline for a Brexit agreement.  Has anyone bothered to count up the number of deadlines that have come and gone?  I do hope that someone has kept track of what we were offered and what we could have got at all the times in the past when an agreement was in the offing.  I am more than sure that what (if anything) we end up with will be a pale reflection of what we could have had if we had etc etc etc, and specifically if self-harming opposition of people like the Odious Rees-Mogg and the Unthinkable IDS had not been invented.  I have to admit that one finds it hard to imagine that those two (together with the unmentionables in the rabid Brexit gang) ever being ‘born’ in the normal human way.

With a lurch, I will try to stop foaming at the mouth with justifiable resentment and anger and become a trifle more composed.

     This evening I am going to a carol concert in Wales.  Not in reality of course, but virtually via Zoom.  The Cardiff Ardwyn Singers are presenting a Christmas Concert of carols dedicated to the memory of Gaynor Wilkins, wife of John, both of whom were connected with the Choir. 

     Money raised via the link below will go to the Haematology Unit for Cardiff and Vale Health Charity in recognition of the care that they showed in the treatment of Gaynor’s rare form of blood cancer Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS)

www.justgiving.com/fundraising/rhiannon-wilkins

Something real.

Rule breaker - rule suggester!

 

 We are building up to yet another Johnsonian U-Turn, in which department he is something of an expert!  And he is being aided and abetted in his Ballet of Deception by the President of the EC who keeps to the script of “some progress” and “real differences” so that the final agreement (at the last possible moment) makes it appear as if Johnson has actually mastered his way to something real and acceptable.

     Let’s face it, any agreement will be better than none.  But when the final Johnson scrap of paper makes its appearance, I will be looking to informed commentators to explain when in the last four years we could have had something similar, or exactly the same or better! 

     In truth Johnson is no negotiator: he lacks the patience, application, wisdom, detail, ethos and everything else that a true champion of British interests needs. 

     Yes, he can trumpet meaningless three-word slogans and he can jumble metaphor and simile in a lurid word salad; but do the hard, detailed work for complex negotiations?  Not a chance. 

     And his opposite numbers in the EU know him for what he is (a lazy chancer and liar) and know that they have to act as stooges to his stand-up to get anything done.

     The professionals in the EU must shrug with weary resignation as they accept yet another session of baby minding as the nappy-wearing infant wiffles into view tousling his hair as he goes.  They can’t treat him with the contempt that he deserves because they recognize (as he can’t) that there is more at stake in the negotiations than individual reputations. 

     It is indeed sad to realize that the only people with the interests of the United Kingdom at heart are the people that the Brexiteers have caricatured and rejected!

     Ah well, I hope that the adults in the room are able to convince the baby that an agreement is there for the taking, by giving the crowd-pleaser enough belief that he has managed to achieve something of moment that will keep the rabid sections of his carnivorous party away from his all too solid flesh!

     It is obvious from the latest news broadcast that this farce of negotiation is going to be drawn out until we are all bored with it and won’t look too closely at what Johnson will actually have achieved. 

     Well, on with the comedy, I’m still waiting for my first laugh!

 

 

 

On a more positive literary note, Tim Harford’s new book now shares a place with my first Peter Gabriel record.  I heard a snatch of Jeux sans frontieres on the radio years ago and immediately went into town and bought the Gabriel LP; a couple of days ago I heard a snatch of Tim Harford reading his book and immediately went to my computer and ordered a copy from Amazon – which arrived the next day. 

     I am sure that there is an historical lesson to be learned from the different approaches of the two purchases which are 40 years apart!

     Tim Harford is the presenter of the quintessentially Radio 4 programme, More or Less, a programme that studies and discusses the statistics and other assorted mathematical claims made in the media and gives a reasoned evaluation of the value of the numbers and how they have been arrived at.  His voice has an undemonstrative yet compelling quality to it, as witness my immediate order for his book  The book I purchased is called How to Make the World Add Up and is subtitled Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers.  His style is conversational, authoritative with being preachy; it’s full of examples and reads like a novel.

     The title might suggest a top-down sort of approach, but Harford writes as if he genuinely wants to inform and facilitate.  He is fair and gently provocative and uses his considerable experience to explain and expand.

     This is a book worth buying, not just reading!  I recommend it without hesitation!

     It is, by the way, exactly the sort of book that those in government should be forced to read and then be made to sign that they have done so and promise to let the Ten Rules guide their thinking!  We would live in a much better world if they did!