shewhomust | Entries tagged with arctic

We were severally not at home on Tuesday.

durham_rambler was at the Lit & Phil for the opening of Gail-Nina's postcard exhibition (back by popular request) and I was at the Graphic Novels Reading Group - I'm going to miss the next two sessions, so I was keen to be at this one. Afterwards I trotted down to the Lit & Phil, with just time for a glass of wine, a quick look at maybe two frames of postcards, and some conversation - and the conversation carried on into dinner at Pizza Express, which was very agreeable, both for the company and for a degree of reconciliation with Pizza Express. For a long time it was our pizzeria of choice, but after a couple of unsatisfactory meals, I had rather gone off it. Tuesday was fine; I'll give it another chance.

So it wasn't until last night that I was able to watch Hunt for the Arctic Ghost Ship (repeated on 4seven, a channel I'd never met before).

I have a continuing interest in the Franklin expedition, and knew that one of Franklin's ships had been found last year. I guessed that a programme called 'Hunt for the Arctic Ghost Ship' was going to play up the sensational, play down the tedious detail (and I, of course, am all about the tedious detail). So I wasn't expecting too much, and I'm not going to grouch about them not even mentioning Rae, I understand how that happened (though we had time for Dickens telling him off). But I'd have liked a little more hard information (there are things in this newspaper report which weren't in the hour-long programme).

In its favour, the programme was very easy on the eye, with lots of footage of chunks of ice floating through a sunlit sea, and of distant sailing ships in the ice (how did they do that? are they models, or cgi, or what? I think we should be told). And footage of divers swimming round the wreck, looking into what must, apparently, have been Franklin's cabin, bringing up the ship's bell - this was worth the price of admission.

The big Gothic exhibition at the British Library overshadows all else, but there is also, tucked away in the foyer, a small exhibition called Lines in the Ice: Seeking the Northwest Passage, which we visited while we were in London. It is a little random: the blurb promises to explore and examine various themes, which I would describe it rather as mentioning and illustrating - but it did tell me some things I hadn't known, and I enjoyed some of those illustrations very much.

The first section, in a side-room, is accompanied by an unexplained soundscape of groans and gurgling, as if the Library itself had indigestion. It looks at the early years of exploration, and mentions, almost in passing, the belief that the open sea does not freeze. I dont know the origin of this conviction (other than ignorance) but it does explain why people were so confident that there would be a navigable route to the north and west of all that known, frozen, territory. There was a volume of Hakluyt, open at an illustration of the crew on foot breaking a passage in the ice for their ship, observed by a very unimpressed polar bear. I would like to know more about Martin Frobisher; anyone who can label a geographical feature "the Mistaken Straightes" is worth investigating. There was a map of Thule (which doesn't seem to have made it into the BL's online gallery, though an image search turns up a variety of detailed maps of this entirely imaginary island). There were also some Inuit stick maps, wooden rods carved into a tactile representation of the coastline (these may not have been as old as their inclusion in this section sugests, but still, wonderful things).

The second section of the exhibition brought us into the nineteenth century, and inevitably to Sir John Franklin. The bee in my bonnet on this subject is always the treatment of John Rae, and on this occasion whoever wrote the captions has done him justice in describing his discovery of the fate of Franklin's exhibition, and the shabbiness of his treatment thereafter. They haven't, though, found either pictures or books to represent him in the exhibition itself (with the exception of one book, which may have been McClure's account, on whose title page his name appears, though smaller than those of the author and of Franklin). The Bookhunter's interesting and enthusiastic account of the exhibition manages to overlook Rae altogether, though it does include an image of my favourite thing from this section, William Scoresby's careful drawings of snowflakes (what is the BL thinking not offering this for purchase as a Christmas card? But they have precisely nothing available from this exhibition.) There was also a listening post, with audio from Martin Carthy, Stan Rogers and some Inuit players of a throat-singing game.

The bearded seals under the ice were in the next section, as was a map showing Inuit place names, and some material about Amundsen, but I found it a little incoherent. Blame my memory, since, as I said, no supporting material, no flyers to bring home...

Nonetheless, good exhibition, free entry, do look in if you're passing.

Last weekend was the annual open studios event in the Ouseburn, Newcastle's "creative quarter" where derelict warehouses have gradually been converted into artists' and designers' studios (not to mention Seven Stories). There must be a limit to how far it can grow, how many paintings and pots, how much hand-made furniture and architectural glass the city can sustain: but new studios keep opening, so apparently we're not there yet. Many of the studios and workshops are extremely smart, yet the area retains an air of semi-dereliction: there's a lot of mural art, mostly rather well done.

We were meeting friends, and since Gail had arrived early and gone for coffee at the City Farm, we started our visit there, enjoying the sunshine, and the golden foliage, and the giraffes and other livestock (there was a very fluffy Shetland pony). The photo is taken from one of the Lime Street studios, though.

Our first stop was Northern Print, where there was much to like (although mostly I had already liked it last year), then Lime Street, where much the same applied. I liked Zoe Garner's glass work, especially the piece illustrated on the home page of her website, vertical rods of differing lengths, each somehow glowing at the tip - in fact it may be a theme of the day that I liked the glass, since another artist who stood out for me was Effie Burns, who has been casting romescu cauliflowers in glass (her website shows mainly much larger work, though the strawberry is rather fine).

Up in the attic I was interested to see Stevie Ronnie's photographs of his recent trip to the arctic, but unsatisfied by them. Perhaps when he's written something about it... The first time I met Stevie, he talked about Gontran De Poncins' book Kabloona about life in the arctic, and I reminded him of this - at which he fetched out the book and we both enthused over it. Much of the current work he was showing was book sculpture, which tends to make me uneasy. Here's an example of the sort of thing (though not one I've seen): "A poem, composed in a new form which utilises the structures of rope, has been twisted into a paper rope and mounted onto a salvaged Arctic weather balloon winch" - which makes a pretty object, but how do you read the poem? I liked some little pictures which had been made by tracing the outlines of geographical features from Google maps, then cutting them out of coloured paper: Kielder reservoir, Seaham harbour, the line of Newcastle's city wall... They made pleasing, almost abstract shapes.

We hadn't planned to eat at the Cluny - in fact, we had actively planned not to eat at the Cluny - but although the Open Studios didn't seem very busy, it was still standing room only at the Ship, and we tumbled back into the Cluny almost by default. We won't do it again: they have succumbed to the tyranny of the Sunday roast, and weren't doing it very well. I enjoyed the beer, but it's not a place to eat. Gentrification still has a little way to go, clearly.

That's all, folks.

During the white days after Christmas and the New Year, I was reading ( a book about John Rae )

Since it was still snowing, I picked off the slush pile another book about the arctic: ( Kabloona )

New Year's Day saw better weather: sunny, breezy, and, with a high of -24 degrees Fahrenheit, almost balmy. After an excellent breakfast of fat venison steaks, the men spent some hours at yet another spirited game of football. The snow was hard and slippery, and again the players fell often, roaring and laughing and threatening each other with revenge. After dinner - hare, venison, and reindeer tongue, with a currant pudding for dessert - the non-drinker Rae served brandy. On the whole, he wrote, "I do not believe that a more happy company could have been found in America, large as it is. 'Tis true that an agreeable companion to join me in a glass of punch, to drink a health to absent friends, to speak of by-gone times and speculate on the future, might have made the evening pass more pleasantly, yet 1 was far from unhappy. To hear the merry joke, the hearty laugh and lively song among my men, was itself a course of much pleasure."

Fatal Passage, Ken McGoogan

Meanwhile, here in Durham, another couple of inches of snow have fallen, but the council has replenished the salt box, and we feel quite intrepid about risking the seven-mile journey to Brancepeth Castle.

On the Sunday of our weekend in London, we visited

durham_rambler's family in Essex; all the expected pleasant family things, plus a surprise bomus walk in the snowy afternoon, at Warley Place - a local nature reserve which is not exactly 'natural', but one of the many sites where a country house has fallen into ruin and been abandoned. In the case of Warley Place, the last resident owner neglected the house in favour of the garden, planting trees and constructing an 'Alpine ravine' which survive alongside the walled garden and the ground plan of the house (the conservatory at one end, the ceramic tiled stairs leading down to - or was it from? - the kitchen at the other).

Although the literature (and the information boards) tells you that the best time to visit is in the spring, it was a magical place in the snow, particularly in the golden evening light (between three and four o' clock; this was the day before the solstice) and I took lots of photos. It's also, in Essex terms, quite high up, and we could see CAnary Wharf floating in the apricot glow of the sunset.

The next day,

durham_rambler and I were at Canary Wharf itself, on our way to the National Maritime Museum, whose exhibition about the North West Passage I had read about in the summer and resolved to visit at the next opportunity. It's a long time since I've been to Greenwich, and it was tempting to wander off and explore the park and the Observatory and the river - but the exhibition was in its last days, while Greenwich itself endures. But first, a distraction: we had barely arrived at the museum (I was in the ladies', in fact) when I heard an announcement that there was about to be a short talk about Jack Cornwell somewhere upstairs, so we dashed off to hear that. Then we tried out both of the museum's cafés (recommended: soup downstairs, coffee and viennoiseries upstairs) - and then we were ready for the exhibition.

( Too much information about the Northwest Passage exhibition )

By the time we had had enough of the museum, the snow was falling again, gently, wetly, out of a dark sky among the floodlit buildings of old Greenwhich and the silver balls strung across the street for Christmas. We headed for the pub, and by the time it had stopped, it was time to go and meet

helenraven for dinner.

At this point, please imagine a key change. Hereafter it's all spending time with friends, sociable chat and sociable meals (hey, it's Chritmas: as Thea Gilmore says, "Faith, hope and gluttony") and snow gradually thawing, with the occasional cold night turning all the meltwater into a sheet of ice, just to stop us growing complacent. Happy to do, but not interesting to read about.