Don't Mention The Carbuncles

A propos of my last post, I have been tactfully informed by my architect brother that I am in imminent danger of beginning to Rant about Carbuncles. To which I say, Forsooth! Not so! It is my contention that Sir Norman Foster's Crime lacks sufficient Character for proper Carbunclehood. It is, indeed, its unremitting Blandness which offends me most. That, and its utter lack of functionality. Believe me when I say that the steadily rising piles of pigeon Guano which now top his Pseudo-Neo-Classical cornices form by far the most amusing and aesthetically pleasing notes in the whole design. Now, I am neither a Primitivist of the Carolingian sort - in fact, I love a good Carbuncle, me, and am looking forward with hand-rubbing glee to the new developments at the Royal Academy (have they plenty of smelling salts at the ready? Phalanxes of upper-class Aesthetes will be keeling over like Dominoes...) - nor am I delusional as to the general attractiveness of Victorian monuments. The British Museum is not, to put it plainly, a pretty girl. If they were making a film of her life, Meryl Streep would be a dead cert for the title role, probably in a frightening wig and a Mancunian accent. But why, Mr Foster, why so dull? I rather feel that, as we have paid for this glorified Conservatory, it might as well be made into somewhere that's slightly more pleasant to spend time in. If Sir Norman had built that article on the side of my house, he'd find himself in the Small Claims Court, sharpish. A homely lady like the BM has two choices in the manner of Dress, as it were. She can try to be self effacing and dissimulate her worst and most prominent features - which, when you are the architectural equivalent of a twenty stone redhead is perhaps a bit too much of a challenge. Or she can get theatrical. This is at least a more interesting option. It makes me think - laterally? strangely? - of some other public Monuments whose wardrobes and other refits we all have to shell out for. By which I mean Europe's Royals. As an Anthropological study, they hold some little interest. Some fulfil the role of living public sculpture better than others. To take one example, the Spanish Royal Family have not, historically speaking, ever been renowned for their great Beauty. And the Infanta Elena, the eldest daughter of the current Kings (the Spanish King and Queen are collectively referred to as "Los Reyes", "the Kings") is nothing if not a traditionalist in this respect. In fact she has very much the air of one whose Grandmother may have known Goya rather well. But in that lies her secret - she has style. Class. Panache. Not the dingy, dirgy sort of style that wears beige shoes and inoffensive headgear. No, the Infanta Elena went to her niece's christening dressed from head to foot in a bright green Matador's outfit, complete with bicorne hat. She carried it well. It made the deluge of obligatory tabloid shots in the Spanish media a touch more bearable. I would go further here - I would even say a word in defence of our own Princess Beatrice. Of the young woman's finer personal qualities, or if she has them, I know nothing. It interests me less. I only know -  although someone who as a matter of course takes very scant interest in the doings of celebs of whatever breed, and finds the prurient scrutiny of their "Toilets" a source of irritation rather than style tips - that, despite my own strong prejudices, I must confess to having really enjoyed her Hats. Youth apart, HRH Beatrice has not precisely lucked out in the matter of looks. Her rocking-horse overbite, Fanta-coloured hair, and eyes that, as Hans Christian Anderson would have said, go round and round in her head like cartwheels, (or the Round Tower at Copenhagen), make the poor kid a veritable Japanese Nightmare. It's a caricature of a face, that begs to be crowned with imaginative eccentricity. To which challenge, she has so far risen. I adored the Enchanted Looking-Glass Hat. I kept expecting it to start singing. En fin - as long as I, and my fellow-citizens, are footing the bill for the Hats, the Frocks, the Golden Coach, and the fancy Extensions and Rebuilds, I for one do not want my money spent on boring suits and Restrained Chic. From Ghosties, and Ghoulies, and Long-Legged Beasties, and Things that go Bland in the Night, good Lord deliver us. If we absolutely have to have Princesses - I don't really see why, but I fully recognise that there are other people out there who can't see why we have to have the British Library or the World Service, either - then I would rather Pass on the Duchess of Cambridge and the Princess of Asturias, with their drab clothes that send the gutter press into pointless raptures over their "style icon" status. In my view, a Princess, as she can do little else, should make the effort to dazzle and sparkle in a parodic Suit of Lights, or drift into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot with her ginger head buzzing inside a cloud of butterflies. I think this is a lesson that applies as much to the renovation of public buildings as it does to the styling of public figures. If you can't be either useful, or beautiful, be bold. At any rate, be Something. Try to be a Spotlight, and not a Dimmer Switch, even if nature didn't make you a Star.

O Rage! O Desespoir!

O horror, horror, horror, as that moody bint in the Scottish Play was wont to go about saying, when stuck for words. What - what - WHAT has Sir Norman Foster been allowed to do to the British Museum? What fresh Hell is this? (Sorry if I seem to be harping on the same theme here). I'm afraid I hadn't been inside the old place since the, er, "renovations" took place. Now I know the hideous operation was over quite some time ago, and I must be the last citizen of the civilized world to have been ignorant of it, but it was a terrible shock. (I spent the last decade trapped inside a collapsing shepherd's bivouac in Bosnia. Want to fight about it?). Anyway, during my recent sojourn in the Britannic Capital, I felt it behove me to pay at least a courtesy visit to the BM. As a student in the Metrop, I whiled away many a happy hour in its dusty rooms and gloomy corridors, surrounded by the eclectic loot of centuries, usually while I was supposed to be doing something else. I think you can probably see why I didn't have many friends. Not live ones, anyway. So it was with certain natural expectations - preconceptions if you prefer - that I mounted the steps to the familiar, stodgy, solid Neo-Classical portico, so archetypally museum-like - is Museic a word? Let it be one. The frontage of the British Museum, then, is archetypally Museic. And so I passed between its Museic columns, neatly skirting that big perspex box that wants you to put money in it, as ever I had, (briefly noticing that it seems to have grown larger and more insistent) and found myself in the largest, emptiest, most barren-looking public toilet I have ever seen. I'm not sure that I feel fully recovered even now. It was like going out to work on a perfectly ordinary day, coming home in the evening looking forward to a nice hot mug of tea and putting your feet up, to find that in your absence, someone has completely redecorated your house. In neon plush with nylon shag pile. And really nasty chintz curtains. (You know the sort I mean). And terrifying posters of big-eyed bunnies. And hidden the spoons. I looked wildly about me. Have I fallen through a hole in the earth and come out inside some sort of Californian shopping Mall, I asked myself. I may have spoken aloud. I was beyond caring. Slowly I realised that the cylindrical object in the centre of the hall, that I had at first taken for a view of the gasworks from a suburban angle, and brought back hazy memories of those constructions that children are encouraged to make from eggboxes and the inside cardboard tubes from toilet rolls in Primary school, in fact contained the mummified cadaver of the Reading Room, cruelly swaddled in synthetic, textureless, expensive concrete like a literary Chernobyl. The roof certainly lets in light - so does the awning in the Gardening section at any standard B&Q. And for the Love of whoever the Patron Saint of Industrial Design happens to be, (drat them), why, when he has done his level best to make the very heart of a great national institution look and feel like an Airport washroom, does he (ironically? Sadistically?) make it so bloody difficult to find the actual bloody toilets? Is this some sort of ghastly Post-Modern practical joke? Is it simple incompetence? Or is it, as I prefer to think, simply a crude, blatant manifestation of the architect's utter unconcern with, and disrespect for, his fellow human?  Answers on the back of a petition addressed to the RIBA and calling for Foster's blood/head on a plate/ resignation from the profession, please. (Have I overused the "blood" word? I'm seeing red...) And I'm sorry, but vast empty spaces, littered in a perfunctory fashion with miserably uncomfortable steel benches like a Texan prison governor's vision of a school canteen, and horrid little stalls selling frighteningly expensive scones and perfectly disgusting coffee in dissolving paper cups, are not, to my mind, what museums are all about. There are many ways of handling space. A large central space, such as we find in the BM, can be grandiose, it can be awe-inspiring, it can be dizzyingly light and open, or it can be overwhelmingly majestic. It should never, and particularly not in a building designed to house objects of great cultural value and aesthetic beauty, be Heathrow. Which brings me to my central point. Whilst the British Museum lacks sufficient space, overall, to display anything but a fraction of its huge collections, how can this wasteful, nasty lobby be justified? Museums - and I realise that I am perhaps a tad old-fashioned in my views here - are all about the Stuff. When we visit a museum, Stuff is what we want to see. Otherwise we'd go to Centerparcs. The BM has loads of stuff, from weird, functionless items dug up in fields and back gardens (but proven by expensive and highly technical analysis to be Very Old) to all the glorious, multifarious, wonderful Stuff Wot We Pinched Earlier. For that was, historically, the principal point of public Museums - a display of our cultural dominance over, and ownership of, the rest of the world. Oh, very well, these days it is probably a little like saying "Yeah, so she got the house, okay, but I kept the record collection. And the Le Creuset. And her mother's Capodimonte (which I never liked anyway, but it's the principle, know what I mean, yah? I could always use them to practice my golf swing on, snicker, chortle)". But it's there, and we want to see it. Just so that we can say to ourselves - that's Ours. Because, in theory, all that Stuff belongs to us. Not in the sense that one can take it out of the cabinet and go home and stick it under the bed, or flog it at a Swiss auction - that's still disapproved of, apparently. Piking should be done on the Grand scale or not at all, as any fule know. But we want to know that we can go and boggle at it any time we want to. We want American and Japanese tourists to come and boggle, too, so that we can feel just a little smug about all the Stuff we've got to be boggled at, that presumably they haven't (it may be, of course, that that's because we pinched it. Not the Americans, obviously). Look at our Stuff, we can say. Bet you've got nothing like that at home. "Item 12345, clobbered off the Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Fuziwuziland, 1871". "Item 987654, chai-iked in Johnny Foreigner Territory, Totally Fair and Justified Military campaign of 1865". "Walloping Great Statue Gratefully Donated by the People of Dagoville following their Liberation by British Forces from their own Home Grown Imperialist Despot, subsequently replaced with one of ours,Grahamgreeneistan, 1903". "Generously donated by Lord and Lady Bloated-Facetrampler in return for a whacking Chunk of Tax Relief, and never mentioning the War again, 1957". I want it all put back how it was. Please. And while you're at it, put the blasted Dinosaurs back in the Natural History Museum. When I go to the Natural History Museum, I do not want to see a bunch of other people's children screaming and squabbling over broken animatronic toys. If that's your bag, fine. Find yourself some friends or neighbours with school-aged kids, and pop round on a Saturday afternoon to gaze in wonder at their living room. Take as much time as you need. But when I go to the Natural History Museum, I want to see the Wonders Of Nature. I want to see extinct things (Stuff Wot We Killed Earlier). I want to see a hundred types of beetles in a box, and stuffed lions on strangely hued plaster savannahs. Dead stuff patiently and methodically collected by dangerous monomaniacs. Most important of all, I want to see really Big Dead Stuff. Really, really Big Dead Things. That's Nature. That's what Museums are all about. And if some day, in future times, I take my grandchildren down to South Kensington on a Bank Holiday weekend, I expect the Dinosaurs to be back. Exactly where I left them, if you don't mind. I think we understand each other.

Happy Bloomsday, or Ulysses in CalvinoLand

I have just been home. Or rather, I have recently spent a few days in Bloomsbury, where I passed an important chunk of my early adult life, a life's time ago. Now firstly, I feel it is important to point out that Bloomsbury, like Neverland and Hogwart's, does not, in fact, exist. It has no boundaries. No street or landmark shows where it begins or ends, therefore it does neither. Some Objects are definitely In Bloomsbury, and some definitely Outside, but it's an arbitrary rule, that to the foreigner can look like no rule at all, for Bloomsbury is a paradigm whose self-administered laws allow it to exist concurrently with an external reality which has, frankly, Moved On. And if Bloomsbury does not exist, still less does Fitzrovia, which doesn't even have a real name, but goes by a moniker which refers to a shadowy group of very-nearly-also-rans who were Known to Those In The Know, and who drank (and usually did little else) in a pub that was named for the illegitimate descendant of some King who got his nooky here in the days when the London Boroughs were leafy villages bristling with wholesome milkmaids (and ploughboys, if your tastes ran that way). Here Jeffrey Bernard Was Unwell, and I was too, once or twice at least. Fitzrovia is probably best understood as an imaginary annex to an Imaginary City, an extra Wing added on to house the Billiard Room, or a larger dining hall. Parts of Soho also fit this plan, as does the entirety of the Charing Cross Road. Of It, but not In It, yet somehow pertaining to the whole.
 Anyway... we stay in the Jenkins Hotel, which is somewhere Dylan Thomas should have stayed, but unfortunately never did. We arrive late, so we have to get the keys from next door, and set off to find our room. Up we go, up one creaking staircase, and another, and so up and up till we come to a set of stairs so steep and slippery that we ascend hanging on to the rope-swag bannister rail by our teeth (not really, but a rope would have been handy), and find ourselves in an attic bedroom where a housemaid in an Agatha Christie novel might have concealed pearls stolen from a wealthy, but unpleasant, guest, and plotted in her scant leisure moments her revenge against a cruel and stifling hierarchy. The room is entirely furnished in 1930's style - not as a deliberate, chic decor choice, but because the furniture was already there. And tired as we are, we go straight to sleep. In the morning the kind, possibly Eastern European, receptionist tells me that he is going to change our room - the night porter had noticed that my companion has some mobility problems, and there is a room available on the ground floor, so I move our things downstairs. The new room is decorated in a similar style to the first: none of the furnishings - a battered wardrobe with a walnut inlay, a dark wooden chest of drawers, a pair of bedside tables topped with drunken, blinking brass reading lamps which we are afraid to use - date from a period later than the 1940's, and some items, such as a large, heavy circular mirror aiming for an Arnolfini Wedding look, but with several balls from the molding missing and the gilt gone, look to be considerably older, as do the curious early nineteenth-century glass paintings hanging in the lobby opposite, where the hotel desk at which you have to leave your keys every morning seems flimsy and insubstantial in comparison to the solid Georgian drawing-room fireplace facing it. The total impression is that nothing has been added to the place since the War, and certainly nothing has ever been taken out. I must admit that I like the Jenkins Hotel very much. If we go back, we shall stay there again.
  After our room-change has been effected, we go out for coffee before commencing the business of the day. We sit down outside a caff that sells salt-beef and kebabs and huge, greasy fry-ups, and order two large, stewed cups of coffee. My partner mistakes the salt for the sugar - no matter. His cup is replaced instantly - no charge. And now, it strikes me, like a warm breath (though it is pretty cold even for English June, in truth), an air, a worn-in, slightly shabby, (but never replaced because nothing else would ever quite fit or be right for the place) kind of an air, neither pleasant, nor, because of its familiarity, precisely unpleasant, (the steam rising from the basement kitchen of a friendly local restaurant where you keep coming back, even though the food isn't really all that good) - I am back. And nothing has changed, as nothing ever does here. A rickshaw hurtles by, bell ringing cheerfully, between two black cabs. Nobody turns a hair. A middle-aged man in a bright yellow suit strides down the street, lapels flapping in the breeze, glowing in the london grey like the Sun King, incongruously imagined by Frank Auerbach, and a small, unobtrusive Vicar sidles like a bi-curious mouse into the Lesbian and Gay bookshop. A party of exchange students are lost, and always will be. Louise Bourgeois and Gertrude Stein share a tisane between the pot plants (probably they are Geraniums, but don't tell Alice!) in the window of the Vegetarian Wholefood Bistro, and Virginia Woolf and Amy Winehouse stroll arm-in-arm across Russell Square towards the Tube station. Sssssshhhh! Quiet now. Nobody has told them that they're dead.

Llareggub Again

It was enjoyable to hear an excerpt from "Under Milk Wood", as read by the late (and therefore probably quite cheap these days) Richard Burton, on Radio 4's "Poetry Please" this weekend (I count myself as one of their most undeceased listeners). Sadder, though, to think that the whole caboodle would stand little chance at air-time now, in this era of short attention spans and tight schedules, on account of its length. Whilst musing on this sorry state of affairs, I found myself inspired to pen a little tribute, a precis which I think conveys the Essence of what Dylan was Trying To Get At, (with a wink and a nod to a few of his Chums thrown in, how's that for value, Mrs Protheroe?)  in a today-radio friendly format of not more than five minutes or I'm switching over to listen to Steve Wright In The Afternoon. So here it is;

"LLAREGGUB AGAIN"

"It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge Sunday in a remote village in West Wales - Water, Water everywhere, nor any Drop to Drink. Mr R S Dylan Thomas shambled down Chapel Hill, nursing his spiritual decay like an old goat's rotting molar. Suddenly from the hedgerow in front of him burst Ted Edward Thomas Hughes, as it were the stink of a three-days-dead ferret. 'Lend us a fiver, R S Dylan, or I shall drive your Missus to suicide by shagging her and reading aloud from the collected works of Philip Larkin. And then I shall go back in time and lie tits up in some Flanders field.' 'Bugger off, Ted, I 'aven't got any. I just been to Aber and spent the lot on booze and tarts.' 'Right you are then.' Silence. Ahead of them in the Tregaron-grey fog loomed the impressive figure of Caitlin O'Brien Plath, the love of both their lives, half-naked with a bottle of Milk Stout clutched to each bare breast. She called out to them with the age-old cry of seduction of every true Welshwoman. 'What the bloody 'ell time do you call this, Boyo, it'd be bloody closing time if it wasn't bloody Sunday, R S Dylan, fach!' Her hair blazed fierily in the weak afternoon sunlight. 'Diw, you've never been at putting your head in the Aga again, have you, Caitlin love? Oh, she's been a Martyr to bad hair days since we switched from gas, Ted, and that's the truth.' Briefly, R S Dylan considered extinguishing her with the Stout. Then he drank the Stout. 'And put something on, woman, you look like you've been modelling for Augustus John.' 'Sooner or later, we all model for Augustus John,' she muttered darkly, in a voice pregnant with meaning (and probably Augustus John). Then, together, they fell into The Sailor's Arms, which was, and were, always open, although it was Sunday, and a Sin."

Just the ticket for a Sound-Bite, I thought, and how cleverly have I interwoven passing (but box-ticking) references to a good half-dozen of our modern Bards, Celtic and otherwise, thus potentially freeing up weeks of programming (and let's face it, they do go on a bit, your Poets). Let me know what you think, BBC.

[Footnote: the title of this piece was to have been "Llareggub Revisited", but then I thought, No, Evelyn, no. You stay out of this. I can't see Anthony Andrews in a leading role anywhere here.]