NGC 63, Friday the 13th, 2020

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Oh no, another Friday the 13th and there’s still one more to come this year in November. This happens every eleven years, so I’ll be sixty-three the next time we get another triple whammy.

I wonder what I’ll be doing when I’m sixty-three?

There is a galaxy in the constellation of Pisces, a spiral galaxy, NGC 63 - maybe I’ll go there the next time we have three thirteenths in the same year. That is if they have Friday the thirteenths. Maybe they won’t have time at all - no years, or months, or weeks, or days, or hours, or minutes, or seconds.

No time at all – timelessness, what a comforting idea, no reason to rush.

I wonder what the planet I’m on in NGC 63 will look like?

I’d like it to look like a surrealist landscape. I like surrealist art, I find the artists as interesting as the work. The really big surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. There were lots of other artists trying it though, most artists of the time tried surrealism at some point and they either liked it and stuck with it like Dali, or didn’t and moved on like Picasso.

I like Dorothea Tanning. She was married to Max Ernst, one of the biggies. Tanning is so incredibly sexy. I think she’s still alive - living in New York, in her eighties, so maybe I should say that she used to be so sexy.

It’d be great if when I arrived on this planet in NGC 63 it was populated by surrealist painters – particularly the young Dorothea Tanning. There’s a photo of her with Max Ernst, taken in 1946 in the desert in Arizona. It’s by Lee Miller, the surrealist photographer. It looks like a photograph of a dream, a dream photo. In it Ernst is a giant of a man with his trouser leg rolled up and Dorothea is a minute sylphlike dark haired girl in a flared skirt. She’s so tiny; she looks about two feet tall compared to Ernst, a weird photo – a dream, the sort of thing you may come across in a galaxy as remote as NGC 63.

If you ever get to Philadelphia check out the museum of art. There’s a painting by Tanning called ‘Birthday’. It’s fantastic in every sense of the word, a self-portrait and she is gorgeous in it. It shows her in another surrealist dream, and it looks like a bad one. A woman stands on a slanted hardwood floor in an open doorway. She’s standing stiffly, not smiling. The background is doorways, door after door as far as the eye can see, and her purple dress is flung open above the waist. It looks like satin, you can see her naked breasts. Tree roots, tendrils and tiny naked women cover her skirt. It is very erotic – she is very erotic.

There’s a small furry creature with round, piercing eyes and extended bird’s wings at the woman’s feet -her pet perhaps? I don’t know. The woman’s gaze is locked on a point somewhere far over your right shoulder, but she’s looking way beyond you - she knows that you are there but you’re simply not important. I wonder what she is seeing?

I think that she about to start a journey. Where is she going? I don’t know, but wherever it is I don’t think it’s anywhere good. Perhaps she’s off to Hell, or Mars, maybe even back in time to the start of it all. I can’t know, and she’s not telling, but I bet that when she gets there whatever or whoever she finds there isn’t very lucky for her.

I wonder if it’s Friday the thirteenth in that picture? I wonder if she’s going to NGC 63 and it is Friday the thirteenth?

I wonder if she’s coming to see the sixty-three year old me that is desperately waiting for her.

Is she going to tell me her secret? I hope so.

Skullduggery

I heard a word used today that I'd all but forgotten about and the hearing of it made me remember what a fantastic word it is. It's the kind of word that when I was young was regularly used in newspapers, in general conversation, and even on 'Blue Peter' - particularly around Guy Fawkes night.

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It is such a great word.

Skullduggery

Yes, I know it should be spelt with a single - but how much darker is it with that other 'l'?

It conjours up visions of grave robbers at midnight digging deep to remove the bodies of the dead as they lie wrapped in their shrouds. The worms wriggling... well... you can fill in the rest, I'll leave it to your imagination.

Or maybe it's about pirate treasure? Was it a pirate law to place the 'Jolly Roger' on top of the booty ready for the finders? Maybe it was some sort of pirate curse and they would be blinded at the sight, or choke on their own tongues?

Or perhaps it has something to do with poets and philosophers? You know, the ones that used to keep a skull on their desks to remind them of their own mortality as they wrote their odes to long lost consumptive lovers - wasn't that called a 'momento mori'?

Skulduggery - what a magnificent word. Today it means 'underhand practices', but what of its origins?

Nobody really knows where it came from but it is probably an American word first coined in America to describe political intrigue - how disappointing.

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Some experts think that it is probably a Scottish word, most likely from 'sculduddery' which meant fornication, adultery, unchaste - a little more intriguing perhaps.

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Despite me wanting it, it isn't cockney rhyming slang - which is a real pity because I can only think of one other word that it rhymes with.

Skulduggery, skulduggery, skulduggery, skulduggery, skulduggery.

Skulduggery - I'm going to start using it whenever I can because there are so many situations in these dark days that it applies to.

SKULDUGGERY...go on make up your own definition.

The real world?

For a long time my father told me that I should ‘start living in the real world’ - he still does sometimes and I’ve never really understood why. What is so great about the real world? It seems pretty dull to me and always has. From an early age I’ve preferred the ‘not real’ world and when, at the age of nine, I broke my arm after not vaulting a vaulting horse, my interest in the unreal became even stronger.

My broken arm - caused by me not vaulting the horse - was in part due to the teacher who was meant to stop me from coming to any harm as I vaulted. It was her job to stand by the ‘too high’ horse and steady me if I got into trouble. Unfortunately she’d been distracted for a moment and I fell to the floor breaking my arm at a more or less ninety degree angle just below the elbow.

That evening poor Miss Mathews came to my house with a brand new paperback book – Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. As soon as she’d left I carried it to my room and escaped the real world for the very unreal world of Narnia.

For the next couple of years I moved from one unreal world to another dependent on what book I was reading at the time. Soon I’d expanded into paintings and music as I started to realise that it was better to live in an unreal world of my own making - or at least one that I’d borrowed from Breugel, Cole Porter, Ray Bradbury, or even David Bowie– than live in the mundane real world all of the time.

So here I am today still jumping between worlds. Most of the time I slip away from reality through losing myself in a book, dipping into the landscape of a painting, disappearing into a radio play. I hardly ever manage to travel by television, although films are no problem at all – perhaps television is too real or maybe it’s just me - and of course there is my blog.

But it isn't as simple as that - the unreal can co-exist with the real, and I’ve found that there are some places in the real world that aren’t quite as real as others and where reality isn’t as real as it should be. I think that most of us have been to places where we’ve felt that they, or we, or both, aren’t quite ‘here’. Places that are a little disjointed - outside of our full reality. I call them ‘flux places’. I’m going to tell you about a real ‘flux place’ that I’ve been to, so that you can go there if you ever have the chance…or the need.

Sometimes I drive right down to the western tip of the Llyn and stand on a small mountain looking out towards, Ynys Enlli, ‘The Island of the Tides’ - Bardsey Island - as it rises from the sea like some half submerged sea monster.

You could easily drown in the tides that swirl around it - sometimes I almost do; losing myself in the whirlpools and swells of the sound. It is said that the Vikings gave the island its English name – the Bard’s island – and even from the distant mainland you can hear the poetry and taste the magic. Others say it’s the Isle of Avalon and that Arthur was brought here after his final battle to heal in Merlin’s magical castle made from glass, they say that they are both buried on the island – and as I look and imagine, I believe them.

I went there once, by boat from Porth Meudwy, rubber dinghy then fishing boat, alighting on the dock to the welcome of barking seals and the whistle of the wind across a near treeless landscape. I spent time on tiny beaches calling to the seals and trying to understand their replies as I walked to the lighthouse at the far end of the island, tasting the salt blowing in from the Irish Sea.

Saint Cadfan built a monastery here and thousands of pilgrims made the long, hard trek to Bardsey along the Northern pilgrim’s path from Clynnog Fawr. A long ago Pope decreed that three pilgrimages to Bardsey were equivalent to one pilgrimage to Rome. Some choose to stay and die here and they say that twenty thousand saints are buried on this tiny fragment of dream. If you look carefully you can almost see them.

In the 19th century over a hundred fishermen and farmers along with their families lived on the island, it was a hard and remote life. Lord Newborough (the island’s English owner) decided to make the oldest male on the island ‘Brenin Enlli’ – king - to settle disputes and keep order. The king wore a tall, ornate crown made from tin, painted gold that looked like King Neptune’s crown. This tradition continued until the death of the last king in 1927, his name was Love Pritchard. I know a direct descendent of his – have talked with him about kings and crowns.

Sometimes as I stand on the mountain, looking out to Avalon, I imagine King Arthur, Merlin, Saints and Pilgrims, pirates and kings, tin crowns and dreams - and I slip away from the real world to another place.

Of course you realise that what I've written here could all be imaginings - I wouldn't know -and you can never really know where reality ends and the unreality begins can you?
Perhaps that is what the real world is all about?

Taking the Myth...

Today is my birthday. I was born in 1957. It was, as days go, a fairly unremarkable day - a slow news day. I was born on 10th March, the same day as - Shannon Tweed the Canadian model and actress, some American actor called Matt Knudsen, an American folksinger called Jim White and…oh yes, Osama bin Laden.

1957 was the year that the BBC fooled the nation into believing that Spaghetti grew on trees. Thing was, back in 1957 most spaghetti came in cans with tomato sauce, so I can see how people were fooled. I was probably in my mid teens before I saw a packet of spaghetti in a shop, and maybe twenty before I ate freshly made spaghetti in an Italian restaurant in Wolverhampton.

Way back in 1974, seventeen year old me bought a copy of ‘Kimono my House’ by Sparks. There was a track on it called ‘Equator’ and the opening verse went ‘I always felt that I had quite a gift as a judge of human character - This is the day and the time and the place - And I wonder, wonder where you are - Surely, we set it for 3pm - Surely, we said it was March the 10th (Equator, Equator) - You said you'd meet me there - You must be just around the bend.’

I’d read somewhere that the antichrist would be born on March 10th, so I wondered if the lyric of the song was a message to him. The message wasn’t for me though – I’d checked and I was 666 clear – so perhaps it was a message for Osama.

Anyway – let’s say it was and spread it all over the Internet…

- in 1974 Sparks sent a message to Osama bin Laden through the lyrics of track 10, (the final song), of side B on ‘Kimono my House, informing him that he must be around the bend and that as good judges of human character they knew him to be the antichrist. This view (or so it is claimed) is shared by Shannon Tweed, Matt Knudsen and Jim ‘the preacher’ White - whose 1997 album ‘Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus’ is also believed to be a reference to Osama. Prior to this many believed Richard Dimbleby to be the antichrist who, as perpetrator of the BBC’s ‘Swiss spaghetti harvest’ hoax, is claimed to have damaged the minds of thousands of members of the British working classes in 1957 -

So there you have it.

Off you go…crank up the handle of that urban myth hurdy-gurdy and get it out there.

Fourteen

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God it must be great to be fourteen.

At fourteen you have your whole life to come and so many choices.

When I was fourteen I was convinced I was ugly. I wasn't - that came later. At fourteen my hair had colour and my skin was smooth. I was shaving, but only just - it wasn't something I did every day, I didn't have white stubble to worry about, and how I wished that I could grow a moustache.

At fourteen I could play rugby four times a week and not ache at all. I could run up three flights of stairs and not get out of breath, and get up and down from the sofa without making that involuntary 'Uh!' sound.

At fourteen I laughed a lot - even at things that are no longer funny, and probably never were - 'Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam'.

At fourteen I won the school art prize and chose 'Monty Python's Big Red Bok'. Not a good choice as it turned out; Lord Longford was presenting at prize day that year and was deeply into campaigning against pornography at the time (Myrah Hindley came later).

Our headmaster 'Stosh Goodall' was appalled by my choice of book and removed the typographical dust jacket so that Lord Logford couldn't easily see what he was presenting - after all Monty Python was very subversive back then. Unfortunately the hard cover beneath showed a photograph depicting a group of very entangled, very buxom, and very naked young ladies.

Stosh frantically flicked through the book, his face becoming redder and redder with each turning page. He almost exploded when he got to the page showing a soft focus, but naked, Graham Chapman obviously pleasuring himself.

I tried to argue that it was art in the tradition of Dada and the Surrealists (I was in the school debating society, and no...we didn't do it on mass), and that the image was a satirical and slightly avante-garde statement rather than an image to be taken literally - but Stosh wasn't having any of it - particularly from a fourteen year old boy who had only recently started shaving.

So, Lord Longford came and went without presenting me with my prize, and I got a reputation around the boarding boys for being a little wild - which was pleasing, but untrue.

Ironically, a few years later Stosh's son, Howard, went on to write music for the 'new wave' of comedians that followed 'Monty Python' - 'The Young Ones', 'Black Adder' even 'The Vicar of Dibley'. He's a radio four presenter now with his own classical music show on Radio Two, and I heard his 'Desert Island Discs' last December. I never even got a mention.

Yes, fourteen was good. At the time it seemed hard; exams, double maths, the six mile run, spots, trying to get into the pub...girls - it wasn't though.

At fourteen I was going to, to...

Anyway - that's my fourteen year old daughter on the beach in Wales at the weekend. Pretty isn't she.

Twig

Twig,
Look at you
Freshly green,
Budded and leafed,
And blossomed soon.
Still new.
A delight to see.
Stay this way
Always,
Do.

The third of May 1808

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Do you like Goya?

The fog and mist lifted just long enough on Saturday for me to get an hour on Hell's Mouth beach. It was pretty cold and very windy but I wanted to go and make my first beach sculpture of 2009.

I knew what I wanted to do - a self portrait - so here I am on the seventh of March 2009 facing the camera, in the wind, ready to meet my fate.

I wanted to do a funny piece, something to make people laugh. I look pretty funny don't I with that head that looks like a dunces cap, my coloured guts spilling out of my middle? Look, the blue touch paper is waiting to be lit and my arms are open in a gesture of surrender. I'm not expecting any mercy though - so fire away.

I'm trying to look quite normal but its hard when your mouth is full of blue and you know you have the 'L' brand imprinted on your forhead. Look at the top of my pointy head - my radar's gone all wonky - and if I'm not careful I'm going to trip myself up with my two left feet. Its only a matter of time.

What a laugh.

Collections

Are you a collector? I am. I’ve been a collector all my life.

My first collection was snail shells. I was four or five and we lived in Oxfordshire. I remember that the garden was full of snails. Large brown snails, small yellow snails, red, black, brown striped – all colours, all sizes. I used to catch the snails and, with a darning needle, scoop out the creature from within. After two weeks soaking in vinegar and a good wash in soapy water, the snail shells were ready to go on exhibition on my wide windowsill in my bedroom, above the porch of our semi-detached in King’s Close.

Once, I went to the Chinnor Hills and found dozens of ancient calcified snails. I wasn’t sure if they were snails or fossils but they were included in my collection – white and powdered - creatures from another time.

The old molluscs piqued my interest and soon my collection of snail shells was joined by some fossils that I dug up in our back garden – ammonites and belemnites - belemnites mainly. Soon I was looking for fossils wherever I went - and the space on my windowsill grew smaller and smaller. I found fossilised mollusc shells on the beach on holiday, and a fragment of trilobite in a field nor far from where I lived. Pride of place went to a fossilised fish, all bones and an eye, which I saved up and bought mail order.

For a while I collected bits of clay pipe also excavated from our back garden. Some had ornate stems and bowls with faces moulded into them. Once I found a whole pipe, with only a slight crack in the base of the bowl.

In those days comics were full of advertisements for stamps, and the local newsagent, ‘Castles’, sold stamp books. For my eighth birthday my uncle Charlie gave me a stamp collector’s book, a small packet of transparent stamp hinges, and ‘fifty assorted stamps from around the world’. I was soon a keen collector and had stamps from Togo, Italia, Nordsk, Quatar, Great Britain (of course) and just about everywhere else in the Commonwealth and beyond. I even had a facsimile of a penny black and a real (heavily franked) two penny red.

I used to spend hours carefully folding and licking the far too thin mounting hinges, attaching them carefully to the back of my stamps, and gingerly mounting them in the pre-printed dotted lined squares in my stamp collecting book. I lusted after the ‘approval books’ that stamp companies advertised in my comics so badly that it made me feel sick, all you had to do was send them a stamped address envelope and they’d send you back a long, thin book (about the size of a pound note) with complete sets of stamps on every page for you to purchase.

I'd to dream of sending for one, and one day I couldn’t contain my lust any longer – so I forged my mum’s signature on the application slip. You had to have your parent’s permission to apply and I knew my dad would never agree - they were too expensive - and if saw the stamps - I’d want them - and I knew we couldn’t afford it. Two weeks later the book of stamps (total purchase cost ten pounds) arrived. I was excited and appalled. I’d got away with it! They’d sent me the approval book and all the stamps it contained!

I told my Mum that I’d won a stamp competition and that this was my prize - and she believed me!

I looked through the ten pages of carefully mounted stamps - it was almost a religious experience…a trio of triangular stamps from Mauritius – red, green, mauve, for five shillings…five rectangular air mail stamps from the Ivory Coast depicting bi-planes, tri-planes, and propeller driven beauties flying above elephant and crocodile filled jungles for six shillings and sixpence…and (most coveted of all ) a collection of fifteen stamps from Iceland all showing the same exploding geyser, but in such a range of colours and hues - all for an incredibly expensive ten shillings!

The stamps were mine ‘on approval’ for two weeks.

Three weeks later I still had them. Four weeks ran into five, then six, eight, and ten – I couldn’t send them back – and I certainly couldn’t afford the ten pounds to buy them. With every envelope pushed through the letterbox (by Cyril the postman) I expected a ‘demand’ letter. Every rap at the door was the representative from the ‘World Stamp Trading Company’ coming to ask for payment, or even worse, the local police. It was awful. I was in terror.

I hid the approval book in one of my ‘Arthur Mee’ encyclopaedias (volume seven out of ten I think –I only had nine) and pushed it far against the back wall under my bed. At night I lay awake certain that I’d soon be caught as the thief and liar that I was.

Two years later I stopped worrying, dragged the encyclopaedia out from under my bed, and nonchalantly stuck the stamps in my stamp book – by this time I’d moved onto coin collecting anyway.

My uncle Len had a milk round and at weekends and through the holidays I’d help him to deliver milk to the small villages around the market town where we lived. Some people used to leave the milk money by the side of the empties, and one old lady seemed to always pay with Victorian coins. I took to carrying the money Uncle Len paid me in my pocket and swapping the Victorian coins with my wages. Soon I had a large collection of ‘bun’ pennies and dozens of the older Victorian pennies, all dark and weathered with use. I had sixpences, shillings, florins, half crowns – even a silver three-penny piece mistakenly left out for a sixpence.

I bought a coin collectors book and began to look out for rarities – I found ‘H’ pennies, Georgian sixpences, Edwardian copper thrupenny bits, even a George V florin with Britannia standing up and not sitting.

I collected coins for years, eventually diversifying into collecting foreign coins. I bought five Churchill crowns and a Mexico Olympics commemorative coin. Then one day I just gave up. I think it was around the time that I started to collect girls. Bad mistake that, it turned out to be very expensive.

Over the years I’ve collected enamel metal signs, cigarette cards, beer mats, wooden cigarette dispenser boxes, antique glass bottles, screen printed cover children’s books, black and white woodcut book illustrations, old sweetie tins, ceramic cats (over a hundred) snow globes (over two hundred), and most recently pebbles (thousands).

Most of my collections are long gone. I remember coming home from school one day to find my collection of over a hundred and thirty-two blown bird eggs (including a huge Swan’s egg, only slightly cracked, that I’d picked up from the side of a river where it’d been dumped) mysteriously removed from the cotton wool lined chest of drawers, that stood in the shed, where I carefully kept them. They’d been replaced by a collection of rusty screwdrivers, hammers, spanners and rasps – I have no idea where my beautiful eggs went, but I often think of them and the fun that I had collecting them - and I only took the cold ones.

I still collect, but these days my collections are more random, less driven. A few of the old things still gather dust around the house, but I hardly notice them. These day my collections are more cerebral and less tangible. These days my collections are mainly memories. I find them, polish them, and put them out on display.

And you’ve just read one of my collections - my recollections – thanks.