The Cult of Apple is now the Cult of Moleskine

The first stationary was, appropriately, immobile.  Early Man used cave walls and ceilings to record pictures of Woolly Mammoth hunts and other cardio activities.  The first cave painting was probably followed by the first scathing review, possibly followed by the first critic being chased from the cave, and being trampled to death by a Woolly Mammoth.

Fast forward a few thousand years to dawn on the Nile, where Pharaoh has gathered his architects for the latest tomb project management meeting.  Folk are still putting stuff on walls, although this being a more modern society they carve as well as paint.  That’s progress.  Papyrus is the latest thing but wait, one of the younger architects has papyrus that is somehow thicker, creamier and of a heavier weight than the sheets of papyrus used by the other architects.  Surely, this fellow must be cleverer.  He gets to speak first and suggests that if they cut costs by making the tomb pointy instead of a cube as was originally suggested, Pharaoh can afford to take another two dozen handmaidens with him into the afterlife.  Good help is hard to find and so Pharaoh agrees, meeting adjourned, Pharaoh goes off to stand in profile for the rest of the day for his official portrait, and the rest of the architects know two things, that they too must get this papyrus of authority, and that this cocky kid will be crocodile fodder by sundown.

Vegetable matter continues to be pulped for paper to this very day.  There have, of course, been a couple of diversions along the way.  Velum is the writing surface of choice if you want to record something for posterity and really, really, don’t like goats.

Today, despite technological advances such as the Apple Newton, stationary and paper is more popular than ever.

Indeed, it’s reached cult status.  When Apple were opening up their new stores all over the planet, they were likened to temples, with all the staff dressed like members of a religious order and Apple users showing a devotion to the company’s products that is surely more faith based than reasoned.  Like the Church, Apple continues to rely on the devotion of its followers to get it through scandals or, as Apple prefers to call them, iOS updates.  I’m not saying that changing the interface on my iPhone is as bad as diddling choirboys, I’m just saying that at least the Church has acknowledged that that kind of behaviour is a problem.

The analogue equivalent of the Cult of Apple is the Cult of Moleskine, or stationaryphelia.

Over the last few years, the Moleskine has made something of a comeback.  For all I know, or care, the brand was invented in 2005 but the thing looks as though it has been in the pocket of the combat jacket of war correspondents everywhere from the Normandy landings to the bars of Saigon.  It is, it has to be said, a fabulous product, having a cover thick enough to act as a reasonable writing surface on its own, and bearing paper that can take the ink of a fountain pen without blotching like a teen in a titty bar.  I don’t think it could stop a bullet, blade or broken bottle but I do think it’s sturdy enough to beat off an enraged artist who has read your piece on her latest exhibition and is trying to pummel you screaming, unaccountably, ‘to the mammoths with you!’.

The value in a decent notebook is twofold.  The first is that even if you are writing ‘eggs, milk, foot cream’ during a meeting, it looks like you are the sort of person who is writing ‘synergy’.  A good notebook is, in business or art or recreation, a commitment to a serious attempt to do something.  Once it’s in there, it’s there forever.  This is not thermal fax paper, this is a cave wall.

The second is an extension of the first.  If you treat yourself to a decent notebook, you make a commitment to yourself to be worthy of those who the advertisers would have you think used this brand before you.

Or choose a new brand, and be the one others will follow.

Rembrandt in the Cellar

There is a notion that is trotted out, reliably, by commentators, possibly not informed commentators, possibly self appointed commentators, but commentators none the less, every time a famous or at least expensive painting is sold, that the painting will never be seen again by ordinary folk.  That it will, instead, spend the rest of its existence in a vault, or in the Secret Basement Gallery of the wealthy purchaser.

Art is an investment, and it is often bought by banks and other financial institutions in the hope that the value of the piece will appreciate and it can be flogged on.  In the meantime, banks do what banks do, and store their wealth in a vault.  Probably a nice vault, but a vault nonetheless.  This causes consternation among those who espouse the view that famous art should reside in a public gallery, preferably near them, where it can bore schoolkids and never be seen by those ignorant sods who have the poor taste to live some distance away.

Special resentment is reserved if the buyer is suspected to be an individual.  In such a case, commentators choose to ignore the evidence of the countless little plaques placed discreetly beside works of art on temporary or permanent display that read ‘On load from’ and instead intimate that the artwork will now reside in the Secret basement Gallery of the wealthy buyer, possibly illuminated by a single spotlight, while the new owner squats in a leather armchair facing the art with a glass of brandy in one hand and his cock in the other as he feverishly goes to town on himself like a lusty gibbon, drooling over a classical nude.  Or a Pollock, there’s no knowing with these perverts.

Rich people, it would appear, love an underground room, be it wine cellar, art gallery, panic room, murder room or simply a well appointed sex dungeon.

The message of the commentators though is that art should be for the masses and should not be hidden away in dimly lit rooms.

This despite the fact that the masses prioritise other stuff above art.  Do huge crowds go to their local art gallery every Saturday?  No.  Do they go to watch the footie?  Yes.  Even if this means travelling long distances, which is more than most people would do to get a glimpse of a painting, even of sunflowers.

Art began in dimly lit rooms.  Banksy’s ancestors painted the walls of a cave, not with Neolithic Farrow and Ball but with pictures intended to bring luck to the Woolly Mammoth hunt.  And there is good reason why some art is exhibited in dimly lit rooms.  This is not because the owner is a Bond villain.  Well, not always.  It’s because some images, such as watercolours, fade over time with prolonged exposure to strong light.  Watercolours, it would appear, are intended to be viewed in a Victorian drawing room, either by gaslight or by daylight filtered through windows tinted with the smoke of industry on the outside and the smoke of enthusiastic pipe smokers on the inside.  The best way to preserve a watercolour painting is to cover it in tissue paper, put it in a cardboard folder, and put it in a draw.  Then close the draw.

This provides problems exhibiting the piece.

As a result, delicate drawings are usually exhibited in artfully lit galleries for short periods.  This is done to preserve the piece and so prevent the embarrassment of having to hand back to the lender of the artwork a blank piece of paper on which once resided a delicate watercolour, probably of a canal.

The National Gallery in London takes measures to avoid just such an embarrassment by placing their Rembrandt exhibition in the basement, of the annex.  It was not quite a case of descending a rickety staircase with a torch, there is after all a brightly lit gift shop.  And the exhibits themselves are magnificent, if you like unsmiling folk in ruffs, which I do.  Also on display are delicate sketches of landscapes, mostly canals and cottages, occasional tree, which look as vulnerable to sunlight as vampires.  A good thing then that they are secure in this art bunker.

Remember

For a nation that frequently declares itself conservative in its tastes when it comes to matters of art, there’s nobody quite like the British when it comes to bestowing ‘beloved’ status on what appears to be a challenging piece of art.

If you looked at top tens and public polls, you’d probably conclude that the nation’s favourite artwork was either ‘The Haywain’ or ‘The Fighting Temeraire’.  And the first clue about just how unconservative the Brits really are is there, because whilst the former is a traditional and bucolic scene, it’s more usually photoshopped to show what it will look like with a windfarm in the background than it is seen in its original state these days, and the latter is both an impressionist masterpiece and a melancholy statement of declining power.

In the analogue age, you could guess the nations favourite art by the number of reproductions of images sold.  That’s why it’s fairly certain that up to a few years ago, the nation’s most beloved artwork was either that tennis playing bird scratching her arse, or ‘The Singing Butler’.

Recently, the best gauge of the popularity of an image has how many times it is reproduced in media.  Judging by the number of times the same picture has appeared on television and in print recently, the nation’s favourite image would appear to be a gurning twat with a pint in one hand and fag in the other photographed in a pub the morning after a by-election.

Until this week.

The British really do embrace the new.  Apparently, originally, it took some convincing by a lone Gateshead councillor to persuade everyone that ‘The Angel of the North’ was going to be sensational.  Now we can’t imagine Britain without it.  It was probably the same when one lone crazy druid was trying to convince everyone that a stone circle on Salisbury Plain would be really cool.  This is the country that produced the YBAs, who may be on their way to being OAPBAs but without doubt had an impact on public taste.

Which brings us to the poppies at the Tower of London.

What brought me to the poppies at the Tower of London was a taxi.  I’d always intended to visit them as close to 11 September as possible, when the moat would be full of poppies and the installation would be complete, before being (rightly) dismantled.

888,246 ceramic poppies fill the moat, one for every British and commonwealth soldier killed in the Great War, a war where my Grandfather took a German sniper bullet in his open mouth and out his cheek (interesting scar) and where, stretchered into a field hospital, he was looked after by his own brother, a medic, who apparently gave him his own medal for bravery explaining ‘you deserve this more than I’.
In the taxi, the traffic ground to a halt around the Tower.  London traffic (taxis, busses, white vans) was slowly supplanted by coaches and people, people people.

We bailed out early and walked the last stretch.  The last time I was in a crowd like this was the Olympics, where you have people walking towards something, in that case the Stadium, with a sense of expectation and people walking away from it with a look on their faces that meant they would never be quite the same again.  So it was here.

The crowd.  The Crowd.  The crowd are as much a part of the installation as the poppies.  Quiet, respectful, immense.  There’s no pushing or shoving, there are only a couple of people in hi-viz anoraks and even they just stand there.  Everybody just sort of knows.

Then you see the moat, a river of blood pouring from the windows of the Tower and, because it’s not Armistice Day yet, volunteers still planting.  Another poppy hammered in, another life snuffed out.

And it’s right that it should go.

Never mind that people have already bought their poppies, that’s not the point.  The point is that the impermanence reflects the frailty of life, that it is special because it is temporary and because it teaches us to cherish precious, fragile things that are not forever.

It’s extraordinary, humbling, marvellous and magnificent.

Write on spirits

Famously, Laurie Lee, one of the nation’s most beloved novelists, wrote ‘on wine’.  Whether or not he was ever drunk in charge of a typewriter is unclear but one has to entertain the possibility that, as a poet, he typed without due care and attention.  He did his writing in the Greek Islands, presumably because in the days before bargain booze, affordable New World wines or even Blue Nun, this was the only way he could become sufficiently inebriated to welcome the Muse should she come to visit.  Also, proximity to Mt Parnassus may have helped.

Rock stars smoke, inject, inhale and presumably occasionally insert for inspiration.  Writers drink.  Christ alone knows why, as excessive booze normally leads to feelings of alienation from the world and a profound sense of being under-appreciated and misunderstood, all of which is achievable through the simple act of publishing a slim volume of verse.  Alcohol also inhibits early morning creativity, and certain writers famously were at their creative peak at first light.  Presumably this meant they could post the latest chapter of their novel off to their publishers at eleven in the morning on their way to the pub.

However, in the spirit of enquiry G&P is embarking on a five-part special to explore the effects of various types of alcohol on writing, beyond those of not being able to remember that fantastic idea for a novel you had last night (something about a boy wizard?) just before you passed out, or not being able to decipher the notes scrawled on a beermat that could be a poem, or somebody’s e mail address.

We continue with…spirits.

Shall we mention ghost stories?  Let’s not.

Shall we mention Hemmingway?  Earnest, not Wayne.  Well, there’s a school of thought that spirits make one mean, and certainly EM appeared to have it in for bulls, fish, Big Game and many of God’s creatures that had never harmed him, but are we to blame that all on spirits?  Let’s not.

Spirits are a man’s drink.  Ignore those adverts that come on at Christmas featuring a girl in a glittery frock with a tumbler of some brownish liquid.  This is a game, but ultimately doomed, attempt to extend spirits sales past the saturated male market to women.  Does that advert also have the same woman, with perfect lipstick, pulling on a thick cigar?  Thought so, the famous and famously successful advertising company of Malefantasy and Wankjet (London, New York, Pontypool) strikes again.  The only spirit women drink is vodka, and that’s only because the makers of cranberry juice really, really know how to market that stuff.

No, spirits equal men.  Spirits, ingested, throw everything into sharp relief, including emotions.  That’s why gin makes women sad and why scotch, and any other spirit, at all, makes men angry.  The drinker of spirits writes about manly stuff.  Spies, war, sports, and of course, drinking.

The spirit drinker, one feels, is above all an adventurer.

Spirits are ideal when travelling to places where you need to take the maximum amount of drinkable alcohol for the minimum encumbrance.  When the first man lands on Mars, he’ll have scotch with him (this is after Scotland gains independence and launches a hilariously ambitious, but surprising successful, space programme).  If you need to go further, faster, spirits are your friend.

The same goes with drinking them.  If you don’t have time to faff around with beer, or enjoying your drink by droning on endlessly about the complexities of the nose, as you do with wine, then reach for the hard stuff.

Because drinking spirits is not enjoyable.  If it was, mixers wouldn’t exist.

Spirits also bring, as aforementioned, and depending on the spirit in question, a certain clarity of thought.

Gin.  Instant Hogarthian and Dickensian purity, being able to describe with absolute clarity the cruddy undersole of the human condition, be it sociatial or personal.

Vodka.  Ah, vodka.  The easy association would be with Russian novels so thick they look like normal novels that have fallen into the bath.  And that’s about right.  Always, always be suspicious of any alcohol that is clear.  Rule of thumb, if it looks like you could clean spark plugs with it, avoid ingesting it.

Bourbon.  Interestingly, not actually a drink in and of itself.  Bourbon is Scotch and sweetness, like the classic cocktail of Scotch and Irn Bru.  Bourbon is one of those wonderful drinks that foreigners make.  It’s like one of those ‘fuLl engliSH breaKFasts’ that you see advertised on Greek island tavernas, with an image of the Full English that the attempt on your plate bears little resemblance to.  The genius of bourbon production is this; just as Scotch is named for a geographical area which enables the purchaser to build brand loyalty based on faux clan association, so naming your beverage after a backwoods hillbilly, Confederate general or similar will enable your customers to decide whether they are Daniels or Beam, without realising that because of the amount of sugary syrup added to the booze required to make the muck drinkable, they are all Colas.

Scotch.  The associations are largely positive.  Spies (of the right sort).  Men with the right sort of beard.  The sort of chap who has an estate in the Highlands and who vacates London during August.

In fact Scotch is the only spirit to write on, and to read on.  Picture an author with a tumbler of scotch by his (lady authors are also available) side.  Pull back.  Typewriter?  Helicopter extract?  Very possibly, and more importantly, possibly not just on the page.

Spirits, never in the form of ‘shorts’ which in any civilized society are never a measure of alcohol and only ever the apparel of adolescent schoolboys, but rather served as the more manly ‘large one’, are also the preferred drink, or ‘lunch’, as the technical term has it, of journalists.  In particular, whisky is the go-to drink of foreign correspondents.  This is because it not only helps them blot out any horrors of war they may encounter, but, back in the day when wars had not yet migrated to the dusty arsehole of the world where people didn’t drink (hence: war), whisky was currency.  Apparently during the 1970s, it was standard practice to produce at any border crossing, in this order; a litre of Johnny Walker, a carton of 200 fags, your passport, your press credentials.

Single malt may be the tipple of choice for fiction writers and for heroic explorers who publish bestselling accounts of their travels (possibly posthumously).  For the journalist though, it has to be whisky and for the epitome of the journalist, the foreign correspondent, it has to be Johnny Walker, named for the famous Radio 2 DeeJay.  Classy.

Of course, today, a foreign correspondent today is more likely to be holed up in Costa sipping latte, weaving a story out of unsubstantiated tweets and blog posts, Wiki entries and Google Earth snapshots than actual reportage.

Chess

Chess.

More than just a fabulous musical, and arguably more than just a game.  Well, actually, plainly more than just a game, as mentioned in the previous sentence, it’s also a fabulous musical.  It takes a few minutes to learn the basics of the game, then a few more to learn how the knight moves, then some more to learn about castling and en-passant.  Basically it takes about forty, forty-five minutes to learn the basics of the game, but a lifetime to master.  That’s why chess is so popular in prison.

Chess is a game of strategy.  It’s actually the game of strategy and don’t ever let any tosser with a games console and a strategy-‘em-up tell you differently.  His (it’s always a ‘his’) new game set in a distant magical kingdom does not, despite the guff on the packaging and several hysterical broadsheet reviews filed by sleep deprived nerds, ‘have the complexity of chess’, although I can quite believe it has ‘the epic scope of the finest of fantasy novels’ and ‘female NPCs with really huge boobs’).

Chess requires you to think many moves ahead.  There are a finite number of openings, and established strategies, and end games tend to be relatively simple too, iso t’s in the middle where the drama is.

Chess, unusually for a board game, frequently ends in a draw or, when played between siblings, a fist fight.  As well as mastering the strategy and tactics, you also have to compete with the smug tosser on the other side of the board, smirking every time you make a move, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that will bet you into trouble on ‘C Wing’, by the way.

The other fabulous thing about chess is the variety of chess sets.  Even the simple ones are things of beauty.  I have an old (not antique, not valuable, just ‘old’, c1970s) travel chess set.  The board has little holes in it and the chess pieces slotted into it like pegs.  In the 1980s these sorts of chess sets were replaced with magnetic sets with the different pieces printed on little magnetic tiles.  Now, it’s probably an app.  Pah.

Once you start playing, you start to accumulate chess sets.  Although, oddly, new kit does not improve performance.  You need to get a robust one if children are learning, as the pieces have to be tough enough for handling by kids, but not heavy enough to do any lasting damage when they are used as weapons to augment the aforementioned fist fights that result from use of the word ‘checkmate’ in an enclosed environment.  You also get a really, really nice one that you plan to get out when playing with friends, but actually won’t let anyone else touch.

You even start to tinker with making your own.  This usually happens around seven in the evening on Christmas Day, when you have accumulated enough champagne/cava/prosecco corks to serve as Kings, Queens, Bishops, Rooks and so on, and enough bottletops of various colours to make pawns.  Board?  Back of a Cadbury’s selection box and a sharpie and you are good to go.  Warning, if this set is not assembled, painted and varnished by 27 December, it will be ‘tidied away’.

Oddly, the most charming chess sets tend not to be the ornamental, onyx, marble, ebony and Swarovski affairs that decorate the living rooms of the apartments of oligarchs’ tarts (although given the fate of some oligarchs, a nice chess set would be handy in their cell), but the ones with history.  This includes, let’s be clear, the Lewis chess men, but more often are the modest but beautiful sets one finds in what used to be known as ‘junk’ shops but, thanks to the proliferation of programmes featuring bargain hunting antique experts on daytime telly, we must now refer to as ‘curio emporiums’ or something.

These are objects that are loved.  Battlefields rightly become places of pilgrimage, a square of turf where sacrifices were made, deeds noble and ignoble done, where history was made, heroes crowned, villains vanquished.  The same goes for that small square chequered battlefield.

Also, you can get Star Wars chess sets!  How cool is that?

Inspiration

If you’re lucky, there’s beauty all around you.  If you are very lucky, it’s in the mirror too and you can make a living selling make up or clothes that normal people can’t afford or look good in.

There’s an art to appreciating beauty though.  In the appropriately titled film ‘American beauty’, there’s a scene where a boy shows a girl a video of a plastic bag caught in a breeze, endlessly circulating.  This, he breathes in solemn tones, is the most beautiful thing he has ever filmed.  This, 400 people in a cinema auditorium think, is a reflection on the need for American youth to get out more.  It’s at this point that you realise that any movie containing such a scene must be more up its own arse than a video of a rectal exam.  Anyone who has witnessed a plastic bag on the wing in the wild will know that they are not to be trusted and can attack, wrapping themselves round your leg or shoe and leaving you no option but to shake off said plastic bag by doing a ritual dance that, performed in public, makes you look like a one-man Morris troupe.

It does pose the question though, whether true beauty is to be found in nature, in mankind’s creation or, like a plastic bag in an updraft, in a combination of both?

Picture a new cathedral.  Beautiful?  Unlikely.

Now picture a proper Norman job, the sort that took a good couple of centuries to build, where you capped out the building your great-grandfather dug the foundations for and which has stood sentinel over the landscape for a good few centuries.  Fresh carved, gargoyles and grotesques are probably not best described as beautiful but, after a couple of hundred years weathering, the carving that was started by man is finished by nature as the lines and features of the stone are smoothed and, through architectural botox, a building becomes landscape.

And that’s just the outside.  Wait until you get to the gift shop and tea room.

Or not, the thing to do is head straight for the gift shop and pick up a guide to the cathedral, because if not you will spend the rest of your visit wondering what’s the nave and what’s the choir.  Like being able to name every wildflower in a hedgerow (ragwort, bramble, pornmag, tizercan) knowledge of the correct architectural terms for different parts of medieval buildings is something you think you should have, and feel guilty about not possessing.  Like an ethnic friend.

Places, and people, can be described as inspiring.  The Greeks, early market leaders in matters poetical and theoretical, outsourced inspiration to muses.  These creatures were capricious and could be found in various places, oddly enough frequently attractive places that were quiet and allowed a chap to think about what rhymed with ‘trireme’, or how to found a new branch of philosophy that would get you the girls, or just how to fuck goats.  That last one is a bit of a shocker I concur, but these were less sophisticated times and hanging around in a glade can get lonely.

Muses persist to this day.  Usually they are women.  Unusually they inspire men.  Usually they have really, really good cheekbones.  Rarely do they advise on advanced trigonometry or how to romance ruminants, and the world is arguably a poorer place for it.

Other places where inspiration can be found evidently include the bottom of bottles of alcohol, especially if one is a poet.  And stimulants appear to be a common feature, as, given the number of people sitting in coffee shops with laptops open in front of them with the phrase ‘SCENE ONE’ or ‘CHAPTER ONE’ on the screen, followed by a big white space, latte would appear to inspire.

Anyone who has ever picked up a bat, a ball, a pen or a brush has, at some point, probably been inspired by somebody or something.  It can be a moment of genius or a moment of heroism.

And some of those that have been inspired may go on to inspire others, and not even know it, like the master mason who carved the gargoyle.

Hard time, no Hard Times

Pickled predators and bisected bovines do not impress me, nor do unmade tents or embroidered beds.  I am not a fan of the YBAs who are, if not yet quite OAPBAs, certainly now MORBAs.
Nor am I a fan of VYBAs, a group who, denied conventional gallery space, appear to exhibit their work on the partitions of open plan office veal crates, countless fridge doors and occasionally framed on the wall in the home of indulgent to the point of misguided middle class parents.
Apparently the best selling reproduction of an artwork (that's 'postcard' for those of you not fluent in bollocks), unjustly unseating that poster of that bird playing tennis scratching her arse, is that one of the butler and the dancing couple on the beach.  But I'm not so sure.  Based on personal observation the most popular artwork in the homes of, certainly couples aged twenty five to forty, is a dun-coloured splodge of paint radiating a few spidery lines with the word 'Dady' crudely crayoned in the corner.
Denied a traditional commercial foothold in the art world, it's surprising that VYBAs appear to be responsible for such a large amount of the output of the greeting card sector.  Possibly this is because it is considered charming, and socially acceptable, for a child to labour over a piece of folded A4 with some paint and glitter, the result bringing a tear to the eye of many an affected relative, possibly encouraged by their third breakfast birthday sherry of the morning.  A cynic might remark that if the little sod hadn't spunked their pocket money on Haribo, they might have been able to spring for a decent, shop bought card, possibly featuring a beloved syndicated cartoon cat or a vintage photograph with a humorous caption.
What's undeniable is that the are occasions when a hand-made card featuring splodges, glitter and ill-spelled words of affection are of incalculable value (maybe that's why the work of VYBAs does not appear in galleries, the owners find it hard to calculate their commission of affection), most importantly when a parent is separated from their child.  A child can't write you a two-thousand word letter with news from home like your mother, or send you racy poleroids of themselves in their scanties like your partner, but when it comes to communicating love across distance, a little bit of glitter of a bit of folded coloured card goes a long way to letting you know you're being thought of on your birthday when you are far from home, or worse, far from a Greggs.
Which is why the Government's policy of preventing prisoners receiving home-made cards would appear to be actual, calculated, wickedness.
Prisoners are possibly the one group in this country that the Government can penalise even more freely than public sector workers, who at least have a union to speak for them.  The latest announcement from the Home Office (once described by Armando Iannucci as 'twinned with Mordor', a joke far too good not to repeat here and often) is that prisoners may no longer receive books as presents from the outside world.  Apparently they have to work in the salt mines or whatever to earn the cash to buy such 'luxuries' (good to see the policies of the Department for Education, which has long considered books in state schools luxuries, spreading, like a shitty tide).  Que outraged Bleats on Blather from outraged authors, and not just the ones popular in prison like Jeff Archer, condemning this, Bleats which also revealed that this policy extends to packages containing underwear and, wait for it, home-made birthday cards.
In a masterclass of evasiveness, twisting like a sweating peado in a vigilant's head-lock, the prisons minister, when interviewed on BBC Radio 4s Toady programme, managed to not answer any questions about withholding literature, banning pants and penalising small children squarely.  In this, it's fair to say, he was ably assisted by the presenter who missed the most obvious question, the question the listening nation was shouting in a collective cloud of teadrops, toast crumbs and marmite fumes, which was 'what the actual fuck?'.
Apparently, the news from the Home Office is that searching packages going into prisons takes resource.  Yes, yes it does.  But that's why you have people in prisons who aren't prisoners.
I don't, thank goodness, know much about prisons.  But I do know that you have to check stuff.  Cakes, they have to be X-rayed to ensure that there are no files in them.  Outgoing laundry trucks have to be searched or, if time is precious, randomly stabbed with a pitchfork.  Vaulting horses have to be looked under in exercise yards.  You even have to check the attic from time to time for evidence of glider.
All these are sensible measures, but banning children's cards to their parent is just cruel.  What the fuck is the danger, are they afraid the con is going to sniff the glue securing the glitter?
The underwear thing is ridiculous too.  Unless the state is going to provide fresh undies for everyone.  One Bleat from a woman was making the point that if you stop gifts of underwear, you have to rely on the state for scanties.  Municipal pants sound about as grim as it gets, but not as grim as having to rely on municipal bras.  As we have seen, anyone relying on this administration for support of any kind if fucked.
The book ban is even more sinister than it is ignorant, and that's going some.  Apparently inmates can buy 'approved' books from a 'catalogue'.
I am so appalled by the idea I can barely type.
But...
What the fuck!  Who is choosing what people can and cannot read?  Possibly the only fucking benefit to society of incarcerating somebody other than getting wrong-un's off the streets and seeing justice done is to have somebody come out of prison a better person than they went in, and I don't see a restricted reading list helping that?  And what's in the catalogue?  Government approved books.  Is this fucking North Korea?
I'm no fan of this government, but this really is the lowest sort of unjustifiable, petty, vindictive and short-sighted unmitigated bollocks.

Culture Corner

Throughout 2013, Gentleman & Player has never been short of an (unpublished) opinion, informed or not, about the cultural landmarks of the year (such as asking ‘is the Costa or the Orange the one for lezzas?’ before not dashing off 700 words on modern literary prizes).  In an outstanding year for the arts, here were some of the highlights.

Television

Reviews and articles about the final season of ‘Breaking Bad’ continued a trend started by coverage of ‘The Wire’ which implied that the audience is somehow intellectual simply because they were watching the thing.

Strictly Come Dancing continued to amaze, Sir Bruce is a testament to either the wonders of animatronics, or the existence of necromancy.

‘Day of the Doctor’ was best enjoyed in a cinema.  Not just because sitting in the dark gave fans a chance to touch a girl, but because the 3D was perfectly realised and there was, appropriately, yet another dimension to the experience by sharing it with others.

BBC ALBA was a revelation.  You can see premiership football and rugby on the BBC.  OK, it’s Scottish premiership football and rugby, and the football is mostly Partick Thistle, but it’s excellent for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, in the world of Scottish sectarian football, Partick Thistle are like a DMZ, wearing a Jags scarf is guarantee of safe passage in Glasgow.  Interesting to see if this continues if they continue to be quite good.  Second major bonus is that all the commentary is a Gaelic, so nobody can understand a word.  But it all sounds poetic and wonderfully passionate.  Blissful.

Art

Manet at the RA was a masterclass in how to do a lot with not very much at all.  Manet was rich enough not to be arsed to finish most of his paintings.  Still, the new audio guides are good, including a little screen where you can see a picture of the picture obscured by the crowd in front of you.  This was a blockbuster and with London so handy for the Eurostar judging by the accents, and the manners, quite a lot of French had made the trip to see the exhibition.

The RA Summer Exhibition 2013 – surprisingly un-shit this year.

Doig at the Scottish National Gallery – confronted by enormous, colourful canvasses of tropical landscapes, the indigenous population didn’t know what to make of them.  Is a blue sky modernist or surrealist?

Theatre

The exceptional performances in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ underlined the casual cruelty of the fairy folk.  Sheridan Smith deserves special credit for being able to divert attention from David Walliams, who appeared to be possessed by the ghost of Frankie Howerd.  Smith’s legs are even better than her acting talent, which is exceptional.

Jude Law’s stellar performance as Henry V confirmed that it’s always a great idea to put a film star on the boards.  In a spellbound audience, you could hear the collective raising of hairs standing up on end during the ‘breach’ and ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speeches.  The tears in my eyes were due to an excess of dry ice used as smoke for the battle scenes.

Postcard from Edinburgh - Views and Tattoos

The delight of the festival has been the book festival. The pop-up book shop is fantastic (to clarify, a pop-up book shop is a large marquee housing a temporary book shop, not a book shop that exclusively sells pop-up books, although wouldn't it be great if you had a pop-up pop-up book shop?). I could really have done some damage in here but thankfully had to consider the weight limit on luggage for the flight home and so confined myself to purchasing a paperback, and a hardback roughly the size and weight of a house brick about the history of the British Post Office (how could anyone resist a book that reproduces notice that gives instructions to postmen about keeping their firearms clean and ready at all times?). What was pleasing was that as well as the best sellers, thee was a whole aisle devoted to Scottish authors and Scottish publishers. Here was a wealth of Scottish literature, not all of it about smack.

From one cultural event to another with a trip to Hollyrood Palace to visit the Queen's Gallery, showing a small selection of the Queen's Collection. It's rather hard, looking at the collection, to gauge the tastes of the present Queen, as her acquisitions are based on complementing the pieces acquired by her predecessors.



Hence, there is a lot of stuff from the Victorian era, when even the most modest candle holder from Balmoral had to look at home in a room with tartan on the floor and stags' heads on the walls, so was six foot tall and marble.

There was a lot of stuff from India, where 'gift of' sounds so much better than 'looted by', and where the decorative taste appears to be: cover everything in precious stones, even the swords, although, in fairness, just the pommels, the blades were originally Persian and looked as though they had just been given a perfunctory wipe after last being extracted from somebody.

There was also, and let's be fair - some tat. Royal tat, but tat none the less in the form of Faberge eggs. One in particular was a platinum frame encrusted with diamonds held there only by their perfect cut. Inside was a broach. It must have cost a fortune, looked tacky as hell and was a long way from a 'Kinder'. The royal family have the largest collection of Faberge in the world, most of it acquired from the Bolsheviks after it was in turn pillaged from the murdered Russian royal family. No doubt acquired because it was too good to remain in the hands of murderers. Fair enough.

One stand out piece was a painting by Canaletto of the grand canal in Venice. Light seemed to flood from the painting and barges bobbed on the water. The whole thing was awash not just with canal water but with symbolism and hidden meaning. Like a Dan Brown book. But good.


Perhaps the most striking piece there was a crown. From Ecuador and about 1,000 years old it was a broad band of gold with a fan like the rising sun at the back. Simple and primal, there was no doubt that whoever wore this was top dog. Presented to Queen Victoria just because it was wise to keep a mighty monarch on side.


Out in the fresh air, just time for a scone roughly the size of a small car and then to the Plesance to see Tim Vine. Tim good, venue shite. It's one thing to crowd people into a small room with total disregard for dignity or fire safety laws, quite another to sell more tickets than you actually have unobstructed view.

No such problems that evening at the Tattoo, which was exceptional. The bloke in front was getting a bit over-excited and sprang up and down from his seat to photograph the action. I can sort of understand, as if you have not seen the Tattoo before, you must be thinking 'the folks at home will never believe this!'. The Tattoo is so good that it remains the only show in town that you don't have to be a little bit drunk to get maximum enjoyment out of. Pipes, drums, huge aggressive men in kilts. This is Scotland, especially when they project the St Andrew's cross onto Edinburgh Castle.


By the time the fireworks go off the crowd are in such a state that they are not sure if the pyrotechnics mark the end of the show or the opening salvo in the battle for independence but if the latter, they are for Scotland, and freedom!

An early night tonight - home before midnight, meaning time enough for a trip to the bar and a scotch to aid restful sleep.

The eyes do follow you round the room...

Much like an STD, paranoia takes a little effort to acquire but, once you have done so, it's an absolute bugger to shift and it will affect the way you interact with others. Having been a regular visitor to the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition over the last few years, I had a pretty reasonable set of expectations of how I would feel when I finished wandering round this year's; uplifted, slightly testy at the inclusion of some sub-art club daubs, possibly a bit pissed due to frequent visits to the champagne bar and resolving that I really should enter something for next year, because if Tracy Emin can get that crap on the walls, then a doodle on a post it note should get me inclusion, a red dot and everlasting fame no bother.

I did not expect to leave the place unsettled and more in need of a drink than when I went in.

It all started out so well. There was an expected theme, the Olympics that overtly or otherwise penetrated a lot of the display. In the architecture room for instance there were models and photographs of the Olympic village, the stadium and of course the velodrome and quite right too, as they are remarkable buildings. There was also a larger than usual number of cartography based paintings, drawings and collages on display, reproducing either real maps or maps of imagined places, or of real places reimagined.

This world askew view contributed to a growing sense of unease that had been kicked off with a black and white lithograph titled 'the gamble', a picture of the entrance to an underpass. Anyone who has ever used one instantly recognised the scene and the significance of the title, you could almost smell that distinctive underpass odour of damp, piss and cider.

Thereafter, I wondered if either the entire exhibition had been curated with a sinister theme, or I was just noticing the sinister paintings more than most, or indeed if I was quietly having some sort of episode and imbuing quite innocent paintings with a sinister quality. In fairness, the did seem to be more than a normal number of paintings featuring deserted houses and so on, although even innocent pastorals took on a sinister tone, a green thick hedge might be lovely, but also provides ideal cover for a waiting pervert, or homicidal maniac - flasher or slasher, I'm not sure which was the most intimidating. Suppose it depends on the length of the weapon.

Then I wandered into the gallery with the chair made out of chicken bones, which stank, and the question was settled, and settled beyond question when I caught sight of a large painting of a fish shop front with the proprietor's name - 'Dagon' displayed in large red letters above the shop. The theme was now officially sinister or I was being paranoid, the paranoia being brought on by the sinister theme. Time for more champagne while I pondered why everyone was looking at me, might be the paranoia, might be the 'meep' noises of distress I was making.

In the sculpture rooms, the was a welcome return to normality. What a load of absolute tat. The place looked like a cross between a house clearance of a deceased hoarder who had perished beneath a pile of yellowing leaflets for his local curry house and a charity shop for one of those charities that normal people are reluctant to donate to, like the cats' protection league or the society to provide broadband to peados or something. There was a bright yellow litter bin in the room which was obviously an exhibit but provided both a neat statement on the rest of the junk on display and a powerful temptation to make use of it.

As poor as the sculpture was, it did at least have the virtue of not being a video installation, the last resort of anyone who aspires to be an artist, but can't draw, sculpt or even take a decent photograph and so fakes a career out of producing a grainy three hour film of what looks like a colonoscopy, calls it 'turmoil IV' and prepares to be misunderstood and unappreciated.

Postcard from Norfolk - Art and commerce

'Morston Reflections' by Trevor Woods

In all my years visiting Norfolk I’ve never been in Big Blue Sky, the distinctive shop that sits on the edge of Wells-next-the-Sea on the road to Cromer. The exterior is distinctive because it’s painted duck-egg blue and because it obviously used to be a petrol station. Petrol stations converted for other use are something of a feature in Wells, which has no petrol station itself (the nearest one is in Burnham market) but two converted ones, one being Big Blue Sky, the other being a funeral directors. Egg shell blue looks better than sombre black as a colour scheme, in case you were wondering.

The shop itself is, as you would expect, full of lovely things and I didn’t manage to get out without buying a tee shirt listing all the wind conditions on the Beaufort Scale. Stylish and practical.

Next to Big Blue Sky is gallery Plus, and sticking my head through the door was something of a revelation. Prints and paintings of London and of Norfiolk filled the walls, all done in a distinctive style, all desirable and all well out of my price range but, wait a moment…postcards!

The chap behind the desk, Trevor Woods, turned out to be the artist who had painted the fabulous pictures and, obviously mistaking me for somebody with money, showed me his latest project, a large canvas of the London skyline. Even at this stage, pencilled but yet to be painted, it looked fabulous, with familiar landmarks emerging from the crowded cityscape. Good job he works fast, as he’s almost able to keep up with the pace of construction on the Shard.

Postcard from Norfolk - Yarn Bombing is a sunny Hunny delight

Hunstantion is getting posher. It still maintains its kiss-me-quick sensibility, but that co-exists very happily alongside skinny lattes. It is also presently the home to an event known as ‘yarn bombing’.

This essentially consists of tree cosies, that is, finding a suitable spinny, knitting like a fiend and then draping the knitted product round the trees and branches. The effect was enchanting. There were scarfs, waistcoats, bunting and even dolls (one of which is of the type from the label of a popular jam!).


But it doesn’t stop there, in the town the parking signs and various poles of officialdom that conspire to tell us what to do, where and when had also been yarn bombed. Somehow a ‘no stopping’ sign seems much more reasonable when the pole supporting it is covered in a purple knitted wrapper.


It’s quite a sight to see something so indoorsy and fragile, and obviously made with so much care, placed in an open air environment against rough nature or a rougher town centre. Maybe it’s this contrast that provides the charm, but I suspect that the charm is more the love and care in every stich of something made for the public to enjoy.

And The Ship at Brancaster fully redeemed itself after the whole tricky ‘not serving dinner yet’ episode earlier in the week. Overhearing an ill-informed but as usually fully opinionated discussion at our dinner table about just what constituted a ‘flat white’ coffee (latte we know is mostly milk and froth and a bit of coffee, cappuccino is the same, but with the froth mostly on top and added chocolate, but what the hell is a flat white?) our waiter turned up with a flat white and the girl who had made to explain how she makes it. It was sampled and proclaimed very delicious and on concluding her explanation, the waiter remarked to his colleague that ‘that’s not what it says on the instructions in the kitchen’. ‘I know, but that’s how I make it for the owner’ was all the reply needed.

So, if you are in the ship at Brancaster and Sara is available, get her to make you a flat white – it’s delicious.

Postcard from Yorkshire: On the road

A day out exploring the area, essentially going up hill and down dale via whatever attractive looking coffee shops appear to be open and serving cake. As the dry stone walls run like veins across the fields, so the narrow country lanes that appear to pass for B roads in Yorkshire wind like arteries, connecting villages, usually following the flow of some river or other.

The villages themselves are usually arranged around a triangular green or square and the houses and shops sit huddled together, as if for warmth in a landscape that can be as cold and hostile as the locals are warm and friendly. But these are not abandoned villages only inhabited by tourists at weekends, they are busy and occasionally surprising places, like the place we passed with a racehorse stable on the edge of it, and returning to the stable was one frisky looking horse and rider and one positively manic looking four hoofed menace being led by the stable lad while the diminutive jockey walked alongside, clutching crop and saddle, rubbing an evidently sore arse and looking for all the world like he was not at all pleased with new rules on whipping meaning he could no longer legitimately thrash the beast who had unseated him on the training run.

This makes driving a bit of a challenge, as the scenery is spectacular and, after a good deal of rainfall, dynamic as rivers tumble in waterfalls and cascades, all very diverting which is not a good idea as you try to negotiate a tricky turning which will, in all probability, have something interesting coming the other way.

This could be a local driving at nutter speed in their landie. Or it could be a tractor, or it could be a tractor pulling a trailer piled dangerously high with some sort of root vegetable that could really put a crimp in your day and a dent in your lap if it were to make a guest appearance through your sunroof. These twisty turny uppy downy roads are also home to the lorries that zoom from farm to farm and village to village.

Tiny villages and enormous lorries abound, the latter squeezing through the former sometimes one suspects because sat nab is no respecter of road width but also because this is where the road goes and the lorries have to go on the road. This was certainly the case of the lorry hauling sheep that looked if anything considerably more relaxed than the pedestrians trying to get out of the way in the village of Hawes, as it squeezed down the high street. One often wonders what goes through the minds of sheep at the best of time, but god alone knows what they think when being transported, presumably they are under the impression that are going on some sort of trip, possibly to Alton Towers. This is almost never the case.

As well as lorries and deluded sheep Hawes is home to a rather nice cafe and art gallery, which sells the work of local artist Peter Brook.




It also sells a rather nice print of 'The Butcher's Dog'.



This is a painting of a Westie looking out of the upstairs window of the local butcher's shop. Looking up from my latte, I saw a butcher's shop with a Westie looking out of the upstairs window, life imitating art imitating life.

Degas at the ballet at the Royal Academy

The first thing you notice when you strap on your audio tour at the Royal Academy's blockbuster autumn exhibition 'Degas at the ballet' is that you have been mispronouncing 'Degas' for years as day-gah. Apparently, if you are qualified enough to record an audio tour for the RA then you are qualified enough to risk pronouncing it 'Digger'. Little did I know that this master of capturing movement and Parisian dancers is apparently the most famous Australian painter since Rolf Harris.

I love audio tours, and in this case, with the subject so often the ballet, the audio tour really lends to the sense of occasion. You have the ballet dancers on the canvas, ballet music in your ears and, by the time you reach the final gallery, every little girl in the place is attempting ballet poses, inspired by the images and dreaming of being the next Darcy Bussell or Angelina Ballerina, depending on cultural reference points or age.

Back on the walls, I was coming to the conclusion that Digger certainly had some chops. His paintings include devices to lead your eye around the picture, with figures and structures vanishing out of frame. My personal favourite was a painting of a night at a ballet about, this being France, naughty nuns. In the foreground of the picture the great and the; good bearded ballet goers sit and chat or watch the nuns whirling, their movements blurred in an uncanny anticipation of trying to capture fast motion on film. One of the patrons is in profile, holding a pair of opera glasses and directing his gaze not to the stage but sideways, out of frame to, one supposes, his mistress's box.

With its capturing of a moment in time, of society, of movement and music, it's a stunning piece of art, but if you had commissioned a painting of a famous ballet that included erotic nuns, and were presented with portraits of a bunch of old blokes, one might feel a little ripped off.

Digger's painting career was taking off at the same time as the development of photography, both still and moving, and the science of photography was just turning into an art. The exhibit was as much about photography as it was about girls in tutus and in terms of informing context, was excellent. What was also clear was the beauty of the cameras back in the early days, little mahogany cameras that were more furniture than something to snap your holiday photographs.

One of the things that most impressed was the 360 degree portrait. Surrounded by cameras, the subject was photographed from all angles simultaneously. It's a pity that they had to wait another hundred years before the technology would exist to animate these and project them as a film, as I reckon the Matrix movies would have been greatly improved if Neo was a portly gentleman wearing a top hat and a beard the size of a cumulus cloud.

The paintings were, though, magnificent. This was the greatest painter of the dancing figure painting at a time where the world of capturing movement was changing forever. Even more wonderful than the paintings were the sculptures, originally created as wax figurines for reference and private contemplation, cast in bronze they were simply stunning.

One could not help but wonder about Digger's sexuality. Luckily, for somebody who spent so much of his time painting young ballet dancers, he appears to have been a confirmed fan of musical theatre. At least I could see no reference to a marriage, then again, if I was famous, and with a flick of a brush make a ballet dancer famous too, why get married? Private in his habits, most of the pictures of him are from his own experiments with photography, showing him and his friends either sitting stiffly for portraits, or clowning around for the camera. The catalogue also has a photograph of him emerging from a gent's loo, the significance of this is not clear and parallels with former Wham! front man George Michael end there as, as far as I am aware, Digger never got out of his skull on weed and decided to drive his horse and carriage at speed into a photo booth or whatever it was.

My one complaint - it was not French enough (there were French people there, enjoying themselves, who had no doubt come by Eurostar to see how a really good exhibit is curated), although the final film, a ten second loop of Digger being papped on his doorstep, was good, the street was full of French people and signs for little bakeries and coffee shops, and it was so Parisian you could almost smell the dog shit, but the Van Gough exhibition was the equivalent of gargling with red wine and rubbing onions underneath your armpits, it was that French.

A right Royal show

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is a fixture of the summer cultural calendar in London, a fixture of the cultural output of the BBC Arts Unit (if you can call a handful of commentators lolling on sofas in the courtyard of the RA and bickering about whether a particular piece is worthy of inclusion or even saving from the recycling ‘output’) and a fixture for the many amateur artists who send their efforts to the RA in the hope of having them included in the largest exhibition of public works anywhere. In essence, it’s not unlike an exhibition of the local art club’s works at a village fete, except it is lent credibility by being housed in a large building and anyone in a village art club can draw better than Tracey Emin (though credit where credit is due, her oversized post-it note with the provocative script on it bubbles up unbidden in my thoughts since seeing it).


Courtyard

This year was a very, very good show though. On previous years, the approach seemed to be to have as many works as possible crowding the walls of the galleries, effective tiling the place. I’m not sure if the curators love art, but they obviously hated white emulsion.


Raphael Revisited
Tom Phillips RA

It may be because I was late in seeing the show this year, in the final weeks in fact, but the gallery was less crowded and so, it appeared at least, were the walls. This was particularly true of the smallest gallery, where in previous years the crush of bodies resulted in the sort of close proximity and temperature that normally results in somebody bolting from the room to roll in the snow. What’s more, you could even see the art.


China Dog, 2010
Humphrey Ocean RA

On the whole, the standard was very good this year. The chaps had got the Pimm’s to lemonade ratio right and the champagne was chilled and not overpriced. As usual, the bar remained the best installation in the place and confirmed my suspicion that one should never see art sober. Certainly, most artists produce the stiff either pissed, stoned, out of their heads on thinners or a combination of all of the above and surely the best way to appreciate it is with a glass of something refreshing firmly clenched.


Four Vases, 1984
Lisa Milroy RA

As well as ‘professional’ artists being well represented, the RA affords and opportunity for members of the public to submit their works also. These are them casually glanced at by a collection of judges, most, but not all, wearing unnecessary scarves. The artist is then either sent a letter telling them they are crap (work didn’t get through first round of judging), they nearly made it (we need the entry fees from the continually hopeful and reckon that this letter is worth you entering for at least the next three years) or you’ve made it. The only thing that approaches this sort of middle-class uncertainty is the result of applying for planning permission for a new conservatory.


Abergwoun (Fishguard)
David Humphreys

While the exhibition seemed less hectic, more relaxed (certainly by my third Pimm’s it was), what it clearly evidenced was that there are, in sheds and garages, back rooms and spare rooms, an awful lot of genuinely talented artists out there who will never outrage the Daily Mail, maybe never get their own exhibition but have created something wonderful and, for one summer at least, had their work exhibited in one of the greatest galleries in the world and were glorious.

Graffiti

Back in the 1980’s there was a baffling popular series of books by, I think, Nigel Rees, about graffiti. This was not some collection of academic tomes explaining why people feel the urge to daub their thoughts, names or marks on the public landscape, like dogs marking their territory, but rather a collection of amusing thoughts or phrases that had been left on the world in marker pen and spray pen.

So they avoided the sort of low-rent low-brow stuff you might see in urban areas, such as ‘(insert minority group here)s out’ and instead recorded things like ‘beware the dreaded limbo dancer’. The graffiti was shown in a series of cartoons and illustrations, the phrase in question being recorded at the bottom of a toilet door in a gent’s toilet (for those unfamiliar with public loos, in certain styles of toilet the door does not fit flush to the floor, rather a gap of a few inches is left. This is either designed to prevent dossers spending the night curled up on the floor of a cosy cubical or facilitate the easy passage of toilet roll from one stall to another should need press, I never quite worked out which).

With the benefit of hindsight, one can speculate if the entire contents of the book was indeed the result of painstaking research, with Mr Rees wandering the toilets of the land with pad and pen in hand. My recollection of graffiti in public toilets in the 80’s is rather less ‘don’t throw cigarette butts in the urinal, it makes them soggy and difficult to light’ and rather more ‘young cock wanted, be here at three o’clock next Tuesday’.

Graffiti has changed for sure. What used to be a simple message, showing dedication to a football team or fascist cause became a colourful expression of territory with the advent of tagging, and then the use of stencils as vandals restyled (resprayed?) themselves as artists.

At its heart though, graffiti is still about defacing something, changing it and leaving a message. That’s why the endless repetitive tags are so boring, why the self regarding social comment of a tosser with a stencil and a spray can is so bland and why something like this, a speed sign near a school defaced with a stencilled grenade at least genuinely begs the question – why did whoever did this do this and do they know that behaviour like this resulted in paperback books about graffiti moving out of the ‘humour’ section of bookshops and becoming coffee table tomes sitting shrink wrapped in the ‘art’ area?

The Glasgow Boys audio tour

The Royal Academy is really doing a good audio tour these days and this one was no exception, making much use of Scottish artist Barbara Rae, essentially ensuring one Scottish voice at least to disquiet the London gallery goers. What really sets a good audio tour apart is the use of music and sound effects. Music, I think, would be a particularly good way to make that other reason to visit galleries - cruising for potential new boyfriend/girlfriend material - a lot easier, if one were to key in the appropriate number for the painting and then dance to the music that precedes the commentary. Like birds or badgers, nothing gives a signal about the suitability of a mate more than how you throw some shapes.

As good as music is, sound effects are the new must have for audio tours, to make it a completely immersive experience. The tennis paintings was glorious opportunity to exploit this. It could really have benefited not from the grunts and whooshes that one associates with the modern day game but with the 'pock', 'pock' of a genteel rally and the gurgle gurgle of Pimms splashing into a glass full of ice and hedgerow, not to mention the swish of crinoline and crease of linen

There should, though, be something on the audio tour for every painting, although I realise that this might result in a long tour. It would be good if the owners of the paintings on loan from a private collection had sixty seconds to explain why they bought the painting in question. With luck it would be a little more interesting than 'an investment' or 'the shade of blue really goes with an armchair I have'.

These small deficiencies, especially the idea of composing a score to visit the gallery to, or even something I experienced in the Whitney in New York City, where a composer had produced a 'sound response' to a painting, makes me wonder if it is not time that the audio guide market was opened up. With the ubiquity of the iPod and iTunes podcasts, might it not be simple enough for early visitors to the exhibition to go, get the catalog and put together a podcast, each chapter either an explanation of the painting (resisting the temptation to just make everything up and also resisting the temptation to pretend to be the owner of a piece on private loan who explains that he bought the piece because he likes to 'self pollute' when looking at it, not just when at home but especially when he visits it on public display and he sees somebody listening to a bootleg audio tour on their iPod turning round with a growing sense of suspicion and alarm) or, better yet, a soundtrack to the thing. Oh, and some banging tunes to groove to.