British Design 1948 - 2012 at the V&A

John Piper's Coventry

The Exhibition of British Design 1948 - 2012 at the V&A is fascinating as it covers approximately my lifetime and includes some particularly potent images from the 1960s including my first car -  a Mini - reminding one forcefully how terribly small they were. There were also a number of striking pieces from the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, including the only maquette of John Piper's Baptistry Window and some stunning cartoons by Graham Sutherland from the creation of his famous tapestry, 'Christ In Glory in the Tetramorph' .

Graham Sutherland "The Eagle" (An image depicting St John)

I was also lucky enough to attend a lecture introducing the exhibition by Ghislaine Wood, the curator, as well as Louise Campbell of Warwick University on Sir Basil Spence and the building of the new Cathedral and Jonathan Foyle of the World Monuments Fund on the Fund's plans to improve the Coventry Cathedral quarter of the City as well as restore and display the beautiful C15th stained glass from the old Cathedral. Work on this part of the project has already started at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. 

Favourite Places - The Bishops' Palace, Winchester

Favourite Views - Chilcomb in Spring

Oilseed rape in flower covers the fields around Chilcomb

Marta Becket - To Dance On Sands

Marta Becket - 'Sunflower Alley'

Say that upon the altar of her beauty
You sacrificed your tears, your sighs, yours heart:
Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears
Moist it again, and frame some feeling line
That may discover such integrity.


For Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews,
Whose golden touch would soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.


Proteus: Two Gentlemen of Verona
Act Three, Scene Two

The Song of Solomon

My beloved spake, and said unto me,

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

Arise my love, my fair one and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenenace is comly.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes.

My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

So perfect for April

Favourite Views - The Hog's Back

View towards Godalming from the Hog's Back

For more views, click here 

Food Shopping in Winchester

Ross Brimfield at The Veg Shed

Shopping for food in the otherwise lovely cathedral city of Winchester is sorry experience. Three big supermarkets - Waitrose, Sainbury's and Tesco crouch on the extremities of the city like leeches sucking shoppers into their vast car parks - and forcing smaller specialist food shops to close. Incredibly, there are no butchers and no fishmongers left in this ancient city of 200,000, once the capital of England (well, Wessex) due mainly to our own weak-minded shopping habits, compounded by the cunning of the supermarkets who offer seemingly irresistible prices on everyday goods like lavatory paper and pet food. And for those trinkets we ignore the high prices we pay for imported vegetables and fruit and the factory-farmed chicken.

Not only do the supermarkets squeeze the last drop of profit out of all but the largest and best capitalised agribusinesses, but their profits are siphoned out of the area and contribute little or nothing to the wellbeing of city and its citizens, unlike small family-owned shops. And of course they avoiding paying as much tax as they can through transfer pricing, captive insurance companies, group relief and offshore trusts and make billions - while in a once charming and friendly city like Winchester (where as a schoolboy I used to be greeted personally by the bank manager), one is left talking to bored check-out staff rather than being known by name by knowledgeable shopkeepers who's defining advantage is service, not price.

There are signs of life however, outside the massive car-parks and ugly approach roads of the supermarkets. The Farmer's Market every fourth Sunday is hugely popular and carries interesting stock from small producers. And The Good Life, in Headbourne Worthy is a brave attempt at a farm shop, though it carries no fish. And, best of all, The Veg Shed run almost singlehandedly by Ross Brimfield, sells high quality and cheap vegetable, fruit and eggs from a wooden shack in two pub car parks three days a week and makes deliveries on the others. And he knows all his customers by name.  

Spitalfields Life Book Launch

Christ Church, Spitalfields

The launch of the book of Spitalfields Life was a magical evening; unique in publishing terms and probably the largest gathering of notable locals and far-flung well-wishers ever assembled in Spitalfields for any purpose.

We were bound together by the vision of the unnamed Gentle Author who has penned his daily stories of a place and its people in the most sensitive and yet enlivening way, and which, through the power of the internet, have instantly reached people across the world.

The book itself is a triumph of design and deserves to be the godfather of many other collections of blog pieces that one hopes could sometimes be opened on one's knee.

Some photos from the event can be found here 

The Gentle Author's own piece about the event and many more photos can be seen here 

Tichbourne Water Meadows in Winter

Click here for some more photos

The Road to Bangalore

Favourite Writings - Desiderata

Desiderarta

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

The Orangery Garden in Snow

An Astronomer's Paradise

An Astronomer's Paradise from Babak Tafreshi on Vimeo.

Favourite Places - Mottisfont Abbey

Mottisfont Abbey in winter

Thoughts on SOPA and PIPA

As a newcomer to this discussion, I have been looking at some of the il-tempered arguments that are raging around the proposed SOPA and PIPA Bills currently being considered by the US Congress and Senate.

The essence of the problem is that the internet has made the sharing of spoken, written, sung and photographed material incredibly easy, and the bodies that exist to protect such material from being shared without payment to the copyright holder, like the Motion Picture Association of America, are being rendered obsolete - and in their death-throes are thrashing around without regard to the underlying issues and what should be done about them.

It's interesting to start from the fundamentals; and the thought that sharing itself not a zero-sum game. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."


The same is true of physical works. While physical property rights are usually 'rivalrous', intellectual property rights are non-rivalrous. If you make a copy of something, the enjoyment of the copy does not does not prevent enjoyment of the original.

But the Motion Picture Association and others lined up alongside them use intemperate language that clearly shows that they believe intellectual property rights are akin to real property rights and illustrate  this confusion by frequent use of terms like 'criminal', 'piracy' and 'copyright theft'. The unauthorised use of copyright material is not a criminal but a civil matter, and the criminal law should not be used to deal with it except in the most egregious cases - such as those involving serious fraud. 

The problem is that the concepts are dominated by money and big business trying to protect the 'rents' that they derive from their patent and copyright monopolies. Although patent law is somewhat outside the scope of this debate and is far more defensible, most people scorn the pharmaceutical companies for concentrating on creating patents for 'first-world' drugs and at the same time refusing to release from patent drugs that could then be made much more cheaply. And the worrying notion that certain useful gene sequences can be patented has made big pharma's position even less acceptable.

These perceptions add to the righteous indignation of those who think that the whole concept of unilaterally setting high fees for unselected chunks of copyright material is inequitable. This has been shown dramatically true by the success of iTunes, where users are quite happy to pay for legitimate downloads since a reasonable sum is charged for the individual songs that the users actually want. 

The same is true of films and DVDs. As soon as DVDs come down in price to something reasonable, people buy them in handfuls. If the film companies don't want to sell them for those prices because their films cost too much to make, they should make cheaper, better films and pay the 'talent' much less. There is no universal law which says that Hollywood stars have to be paid $20m a picture, and the idea that we made much better films now than we used to when they cost so much less to make, is laughable.

Of course, Google and other aggregators of content have created a world in which most material is actually free to read and view, even if is originally copyright - as are millions of YouTube videos of professional performances. It's not impossible that one day we will have to pay for access to YouTube - and would probably willingly do so if the fee was reasonable. Similarly some newspapers have successfully found ways to charge small amounts for access, while others have built up sufficient advertising revenue to continue to offer their content for free.  

The general public will not now accept an agenda that both excessively criminalises copyright infringement and at the same time walls off of the internet just to protect the high profits of big business. Instead they want the major producers and publishers of content to amend their business models to allow the production of content at a cost that the public is willing to pay.

Click here for an Infographic as to how the bills were supposed to work

Favourite Views - the Gold Coast

The Beach at Burleigh Heads looking towards Surfers Paradise, after a cyclone

Why We Spend Such a Lot of Time at Our Desks

I am sometimes gently chided for spending a lot of time at my desk. It's certainly true, but whereas the implication is that I should be doing something more worthwhile or undertaking some more social activity, the truth is that so much takes place on one's computer these days that it's very difficult to avoid being on it a great deal.

Take ordinary correspondence, for instance. That has almost entirely migrated to the computer, either on e-mail or as typed out letters or printing one's photographs to send as postcards. And it's easy to forget the amount of time our parents devoted to handwritten correspondence; their accumulated letters attest to this, and most of it was written at a writing desk. And of course, those letters required time to stamp and post as well, and a visit to the post office would count as a social activity.

Almost everything that once took time at post office and bank counters can now be done on one's computer. Our parents paid bills by writing cheques and posting them off. There were no standing orders or direct debits so they had to write a cheque for each bill. Of course they bought their tax discs at the counter and collected their pensions there too. All were potentially social activities - as I discovered when collecting my father's pension; the woman behind the counter clearly loved his visits! Now all are done on line and that social interaction is lost, as it certainly doesn't occur at one's desk!

Many hobbies too have moved to the computer. All desk-based hobbies certainly, except perhaps jigsaw puzzles (though even they can be replicated there). Of course tinkering with motorcycle engines in the garage or collecting stamps will always be un-computerised, but they were hardly social activities either. And for some people computer games have become a completely new and absorbing hobby. In fact, computer games are often quite social as they can be played against someone else. And some people play bridge and chess on line with others across the world with great enjoyment.

My hobby of photography, which I have pursued since the early 70s, used to result in many trips to Boots to get films developed, and much time spent pasting the better photographs into albums and writing captions. And both were at least partly a social activity as the choice of photos to be preserved was probably something to be discussed on the sofa, rather than alone in one's study looking at a computer screen while simultaneously editing the photos and uploading them to Flickr.

Keeping up with family and friends too, which once involved postcards, letters and expensive phone calls is now the preserve of Skype and Facebook.

Dealing with banking, insurance and investments is also now a largely on-line occupation, but they were usual solitary actives anyway. Catching up with the news and listening to music are also less social than they used to be with the TV and hi-fi, though the totally new pastime of watching videos on YouTube is often a shared activity.

So much of what we used to do that once involved at least some social interaction has moved onto one's desktop, and new ways of keeping in touch have developed to such an extent that the use of letters, postcards and the telephone have declined dramatically.

And one could probably say that social interaction at home has diminished, but by much less than is commonly thought given the number of activities that were always solitary. But we would do well to mind the chiding, nevertheless!