News from Nowhere

On Thursday I went into Newcastle for my Reading Group, and as I had promised myself, I took my camera with me.



The town was heaving - the station was heaving, the train was heaving, and Durham station was pretty busy, too - mostly with people in black-and-white football strip. At first I thought there must be a home game, and muttered to myself about there being no closed season these days, but it turned out to be in honour of Sam Fender, local lad and superstar, who was playing that night, the first of three concerts at St James' Park. Much of this I learned from a lady who accosted me as I was sitting on a bench in the town centre: she told me I was the image of her sister-in-law, and wanted to take my photograph. It wasn't yet five o' clock, but the party had already started.

Even in Forth Lane there had been people (it's usually very quiet) but not enough to deter me from photographing the murals. I've started at the end, because that magpie is a detail of a mural which spreads across the wall at one end (the far end, if like me, you started at the Central Station): the lane is too narrow, and the light and shade were too extreme, for more than this detail of the picture, but it's an appropriate detail.

( The Forth Lane Gallery )

Then I went to the Library and had fun talking about comics.

A Guardian article describes the annual art exhibition in which the chosen works are displayed in front of the Pyramids. I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I enjoy site-specific art, art designed to do whatever it is that art does wihin a specific landscape; on the other hand, osn't it cheating, using the Pyramids to make your art look good? But I liked the picture of Shilo Shiv Suleman's giant lotus blooms, and I scurried off to the internet in search of more pictures.

Well, the bad news is that the more I see of those flowers, the more I suspect that what I really lie here is the photograph itself (credited only to 'Forever is Now'); other pictures leave me confused. There's a good one on the artist's website (scroll down) all golden light and with a gaggle of cyclists included for scale; elsewhere, a clearer representation makes me wonder whether flowers are improved by being hugely magnified: I don't want to imagine the insects that they might attract ...

The Art d'Egypte website has more pictures of this and previous exhibitions: it is so designed that the pictures (one per artwork) are awkwardly cropped. This German site has some better images of the 2022 exhibition.

Pretty pictures: it's what the internet is for...

Fortified by a truly remarkable breakfast, we set off to explore Harwich, hoping to encounter some shanties along the way. A leaflet about a Maritime Heritage Trail (not identical with this one, but passing the same points in a different order) led us to a selection of interesting buildings, and we were never far from the sound of singing: mission accomplished.

If I have to choose a single image to represent the day, it has to be this one:



Esturiana, the Goddess of Creativity, Harwich and the Estuaries, stands on Ha'penny Pier: she is the work of
Anne Schwegmann-Fielding (whose award-winning toilets at Colchester Arts Centre look well worth a visit) and there's more information about the commission here. She was created by covering an old boat with broken blue and white pottery - exactly my kind of presiding deity!

We spent a day at Auckland Castle; it was ten days ago, but it's never too late to post, is it? We accompanied J. to visit the Walled Garden,the most recently opened component of the Auckland Project:



Unlike any other walled garden I can think of, it slopes steeply down from the castle towards the river, so I didn't have that sense of being in an enclosed space, even though the walls did block any view of the outside world. Well, almost: you might just see the top of the Faith Museum peering over the wall. I enjoyed pottering about in the sunshine, admiring the way flowers and vegetables had been planted side by side, here some orange trumpets contrasting with some purple cabbages, there some gleaming black tomatoes, and an abundant garlic harvest laid out to dry under the concertina roof of the glasshouse.

We lunched in the castle's café, which was fine - and very convenient - but not special: another time I'd go out into the town. But I wanted to spend the afternoon touring the castle, which I haven't done since - oh, well, since before the current renovation, anyway. J., who lives more locally, has, and wasn't tempted to do so again, so we parted company at this point.

Until 2012, Auckland Castle was the home of the Bishop of Durham (initially, one of his homes, but in 1832 Durham Castle was given to Durham's then new university): the Auckland Castle Trust renovation takes you thhrough a sequence of rooms, each presenting the period and activities of one of the bishops, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. (You could stretch that, I supose, and argue that the chapel with its elaborate carved wooden screen is a nod to the restoration Bishop Cosin.) This is Quite Interesting - Hensley Henson appears to have been a force to be reckoned with; and it's a curious sensation to see events you remember presented in such a historical context (hhello, David Jenkins!).

There's a sequence of rooms which contain an actual art gallery, hosting temporary exxhibitions, currently 'Rare European Masterpieces'. I was surprised how much I did not like these. The still life with lizard which heads the linked article (sorry, I don't remember the name of the artist) was the only one I liked at all; the star exhibits, a pair of portraits allegedly by Rembrandt, were disappointing. I note in my defence that the label in the gallery described them as being from the workshop of Rembrandt - but possibly they were touched by the hand of the master, and it's just me.

These two themes come together in the Long Dining Room, set up as if for a dinner party in the time of Bishop Trevor, displaying the thirteen paintings which he bought in 1756, Zurbarán's immense Jacob and his Twelve Sons. I have seen these before, but for some reason was very much more impressed with them this time round: were they cleaned while they were visiting the States while their home was being renovated? Or is the lighting much improved? I don't know, but they have great presence. Here's some background:



And here is a Flickr album with nice big images of each one.

So now I'm confused. Am I immune to Old Master paintings, or not? Clearly we need to visit Bishop Auckland's Spanish Gallery and find out: and before mid-November, when our season ticket runs out.

Two years ago, I posted about seeing Luke Jerram's Museum of the Moon in Durham Cathedral. Yesterday we went back to see his new piece, Gaia:



Things I never expected to hear myself ask about the Earth: "Is it bigger than the moon? Or just nearer?" According to the dedicated websites, both pieces are seven metres in diameter, so if the Earth looked larger, maybe it's because it hangs at the west end of the nave, and you look up and see it as soon as you enter the cathedral (well, as soon as you've navigated the cash desk). People were treating this as an invitation to photograph each other standing beneath the globe, arms outstretched and partly raised, holding up the Earth.

( I didn't do that; I did this instead. )

I asked durham_rambler "What did you think of it?" After a short pause, he answered "I'm glad to have seen it." Me too.

It's been an eventful ten days, which is why there's been nothing from me but a piece of drive-by snark - and that's eventful not on the national stage, a rabbit hole I do not intend to go down right now, but here at home, where it counts.

Last weekend, then, as anticipated, family visit number one, durham_rambler's great-nephew and his girlfriend. I don't know which disconcerts me more, that we have a great-nephew (two, in fact, of whom this is the elder, and a university student) or that no-one else finds it in the least unexpected. They had been in Newcastle for a wedding, and took the opportunity to spend a couple of days with us. First visit to our house, we think, for Great-Nephew, first visit to his family for Girlfriend. We asked if there was anything in particular they wanted to do while they were here, and being well brought up young people, they asked to visit Durham cathedral.

I was hesitant about walking in to town and walking back (yes, I know; things have changed) so we took the car as far as Pimlico, and walked down and over Prebends' Bridge. So we came into the cathedral through the cloisters. Here's something I'd never noticed before:



( Detail - and more - under the cut )

Last night there was a very different family visit, my cousin A and his partner "up for the match". Once or twice a year they come north to see Sunderland play, and we join them for a post-game meal at an Italian restaurant in Sunderland. Saturday's match was cancelled, of course, but they decided that they had packed, and booked the hotel, and they might as well come...

On Tuesday, for the first time in a very long time indeed, I took myself down into town. We've been managing fine without Durham's increasingly limited retail opportunities, but I had a little list of errands, and since durham_rambler was busy addressing the planning committee at County Hall, this seemed like a good opportunity.

So I went to the market, and replaced my watch strap and battery (the battery had expired, with perfect timing, a couple of days earlier); while these were being fitted, I checked the bookstall, and although they didn't have any of the books I was particularly looking for, this did mean I could order them elsewhere with a clear conscience (and have done so). I went to the bank, who have locked my bank card, and established that I have definitely and incontrovertibly forgotten my pin, and they will put a new one in the post. I shopped half-heartedly for a condolence card, and didn't find one. And then I went to the cathedral, which seems to have captured a satellite:



This is Luke Jerram's itinerant artwork Museum of the Moon, which I had been looking forward to even before steepholm posted about seeing it in Bristol. Her verdict was "It won't keep you enthralled all day, but it makes quite a visual impact!", and I couldn't have put it better myself.

( Not better, but at greater length, ... )

We did not go to Danny Boyle's Pages of the Sea last Sunday, although we could quite easily have gone to Roker, one of the participating beaches. Why did we not go? As you know, I was feeling ambivalent about all this remembering, and marked the moment of the Armistice by composing a post about it. And I was afraid the event would be horribly crowded, that too. Seeing photographs of the event, I think I was wrong on both counts: here's my favourite picture (the photographer reserves his rights, but it's worth clicking through. Also, a description of the event, and more photographs in this set.).

Why Pages of the Sea? It's a line from Carol Ann Duffy's poem, The Wound in Time, which also does a fine job of balancing solemn commemoration with actual remembering.

We did, though, watch Peter Jackson's film, They Shall Not Grow Old, though I watched a fair bit if it with my hand over my eyes. It's an astonishing piece of work, opening with the familiar jerky black and white film flickering in a small square in the middle of the screen, the men's voices telling cheerfully how they had signed up, singly and in groups (and many of them so young) and been trained for war. And as they set off for France, the image began to fill the screen, the motion became smoother and more natural, until suddenly there was colour. Like Summer Holiday, only completely different.

It was fascinating, but I wasn't as moved by it as I had anticipated. There were moments when I had to look away (not always fast enough!) but overall it left me with more questions than emotions. I'd have loved to see an accompanying 'making of', not so much for the technical 'how did they do that?' questions (some of which are answered by this Radio Times article) as the editorial questions: who filmed this in the first place? And how, and why? What choice did Jackson have from the material available to him? Likewise for the commentary, which is compiled from oral archives recorded in the 60s and 70s by the BBC and the Imperial War Museum. Jackson comments on its extraordinary stoicism, which is true, but only part of it: against the background of every idea we now have about the war, it is positively cheerful. Not just in the opening scenes, when you might expect the film-maker to select extracts which reflect the light-hearted, optimistic expectation of a war which would be over by Christmas, not just the matter-of-factness of the descriptions of life (and death) in the trenches, the cold, the mud, the rats, the man next to you falling dead from sniper fire, but at the end of the film, the men who looked back and 'wouldn't have missed it for the world'... These were, of course, by definition the survivors, and more, the survivors who were prepared to speak to authority about what they had survived.

Meanwhile, the camera reminded you all the time of what voices were not saying. Who was the intended audience of these scenes? The cheerful groups at mess tables, or marching past the camera shouting "Hello, Mum!", I can imagine these scenes being shown: but the squalor of the trenches, both in tragic mode (those youthful faces now looking up from corpses half eaten by the mud) or comic (the rows of bare bottoms strung along a pole above a latrine pit), would this ever be shown to those at home? The footage of life in the trenches was so immediate and candid, too, it was a struggle to remember that it wasn't filmed on the ubiquitous iPhone, but on heavy cameras that had to be manhandled into position.

'Manhandled'. that's another thing: this was the war as we have only recently learned not to think of it, exclusively male and white. Was it Jackson's decision to focus in this way, to exclude the women who overcame official opposition to do their bit at the front? Or are they absent from the IWM's archive, neither seen nor heard? Similarly, it's a very European view of the war to be made by a New Zealander: Jackson talks about his interest in the war beginning with stories of his grandfather, who signed up (admittedly with the South Wales Borderers) in 1910, but fought at Gallipoli as well as in the Somme.

Against all this, my last question is trivial, but I stumble across it every time I try to think or talk about the film: how did they decide on the title They Shall Not Grow Old? The phrase draws so much power from Binyon's For the Fallen, and then stumbles, because it's wrong: I keep wanting to say the familiar words, ",They shall grow not old..." Does it work with that association? Someone must have decided it does.

And that's it, a century plus a week has passed. Will World War II be commemorated in the same way? I find that unthinkable, it seems such an entirely different matter (don't ask me why).

Belsay Hall is an English Heritage property in Northumberland, and one which is, depending on your point of view, either somewhat anomalous or ahead of the curve. There are gardens, including a spectacular quarry garden, and there is a genuine ruined medieval castle, which is the sort of property I associate with English Heritage. But the Hall itself is early nineteenth century Greek Revival, and not ruined. Neither is it furnished like a stately home: English Heritage explain "Under the terms of the guardianship agreement by which it passed into state care in 1980, the hall is displayed without furnishings, revealing to visitors the fine craftsmanship that went into its construction." It's an empty shell, in other words, and this is deliberate. They don't, however, leave the visitor to appreciate that fine craftsmanship and classical severity unaided. Each year the Hall hosts a different art exhibition or installation. This year's offering is Susan Philipsz's The Yellow Wallpaper.

( Meandering account of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' )

( Fringe benefits )