Funny feller
Ah. This is where I went today. I went to see a Richard Dadd exhibition.
Do you know him? I think the picture above is the only one of him; it’s the only one I’ve ever seen, anyway.
He was born in 1817, the son of a chemist. He showed early promise in art, so he was sent off for a proper art education. It stressed him out. When he was 26, he was walking in the park with his father and, without much warning, turned on the old man and murdered him. Cut his throat.
Dadd spent the rest of his life in the loony bin, first in Bedlam, then in Broadmoor. He never really got better. He had lots and lots of time to paint.
Now, I don’t hold with worshipping artists just because they’re crazy. There are plenty of nutcakes of very indifferent talent. But Dadd really was a very good artist. Highly technically accomplished, though the crazy shines through, even in his early work.
By far his most famous painting is The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, which is, like, two feet by two feet and so crammed full of beautifully rendered crazy that it is almost always exhibited next to some kind of huge blowup (today, it was next to a slide show of extreme closeups).
I had seen some of his oils before, but this was the first time I’d ever seen his watercolors. Holy shit, they were uniquely beautiful but, well…bugfuck crazy. Made of tiny, tiny, tiny flecks of very pale color. Not at all like pointillism, though. Can’t describe it. Can’t find an example online.
Didn’t buy the show catalogue because it wasn’t a show catalogue, it was just a book about Dadd. Will have to search harder.
September 29, 2015 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 13
Don’t forget
For once, we have a clear sky. Next time we have an
eclipse plus supermoon, we shall be old, the lot of us.
September 27, 2015 — 11:26 pm
Comments: 6
Like the first morning…
After much rain, last weekend was supposed to be beautiful (spoiler: it was). We took ourselves to Alfriston, one of our favorite Sussex villages, inspiration for the hymn Morning is Broken.
I’ve posted about Alfriston before — a little town, but beautiful and much to see (if you want a better look a that mine, mash here; hard to believe it would have taken out the whole bidness).
There are an improbable number of ancient pubs for such a tiny place (perhaps because it was a market town). We settled on The Star. Legend has it the original name was the Bethlehem Star, when it was built in the 13th Century as a pilgrims’ hostel for the use of travelers between Chichester and Canterbury.
Others sniff that it’s only Fifteenth Century (do follow that link; lots of piccies of the carving out front).
If I were psychic, my lunch might have been oppressed by the weight of all the thousands of bodies who had sat just exactly where I was sitting to eat a meal. I am not psychic; I enjoyed my beer and pea soup very much.
Beer and pea soup. Better than it sounds.
More pictures later, but first: Xul has won dick (again) with Yogi Berra. Poor old bastard; I didn’t know he was still alive. You know what that means, of course: Dead Pool Round 77.
Be here Friday or forever hold your peace.
September 23, 2015 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 4
Can’t you hear the Kum Ba Ya?
From the last church flower festival we went to — possibly the last one of the year. We are down at the short end of the season now.
I feel a little cruel running with this one. These ladies were, after all, just making a joyful noise (and doing a respectable job of it, on the whole).
Only…aren’t they precious?
September 7, 2015 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 10
The tombstone whisperer
I spotted this pair of tombstones in a beautiful secluded churchyard at a flower festival over the weekend. This kind of skull-and-bones graveside iconography is very common in Puritan New England, but very uncommon indeed in an English boneyard.
I asked someone if they knew the story of the stones, and they directed me to — I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t catch or, anyway, don’t remember her name. She was in a tent selling books at the other end of the churchyard. She’s the local lady-who-knows-everything-about-the-stones.
As I walked up, she was complaining to another old dear that she was going to have to sell her motorcycle (a Honda 90) because ever since she turned eighty, the arthritis in her left leg prevented her propping up the bike at a stop. That’s such a shame, the other old lady said, you’ve been so mobile.
We fell to talking about the stones. Most of them are cut from granites and marbles and other stones that just melt away in the elements. Year on year, you can see the inscriptions fading.
She made a bit of kit — she described it as an old cider barrel, about 18″ across. It’s blackened inside, cut flush at one end and at a 45° at the other (I’m not entirely clear which end she looks down). She holds it against the stone in raking sunlight. She says it sometimes takes her hours of staring down the barrel, but sooner or later she’s able to decipher them all. At least, she hasn’t failed yet.
I was so engrossed, I forgot to ask about the two stones in the picture. Get this. This old dame bombs around the English countryside on a motorcycle visiting ancient country churches (oh my god, some of these places are so beautiful) to sit for hours staring at the stones. This is what she does.
I want to be this lady so bad.
Good weekend, all! This is our end-of-Summer long weekend, but I’m sure I’ll be around Monday as usual. Unless I buy that lady’s Honda and vanish down a country lane forever.
August 28, 2015 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 3
The most Zen place I have ever been
Celia Hammond was a supermodel in the Sixties. She modeled a lot of fur coats (among other things), until somebody took her to watch a baby seal clubbin’. Now she’s the supervillain mastermind behind C.H.A.T.
Um, the Celia Hammond Animal Trust. Mostly, they spay and rehome cats. Thousands and thousands of them. I get the impression she twists a lot of famous arms to fund this enterprise (she was Jeff Beck’s girlfriend for, like, thirty years).
Her main gig is trapping and neutering ferals in London (she trapped a lot of them with her own hands, using equipment she invented her own self, though I don’t know how much of that she does these days). But out in the country near us, she maintains a hundred acres of free-range pussoes. They had their second ever open day last Sunday, and we went.
Honestly, I think it’s the most peaceful place I’ve ever been. Inside the buildings are the ‘tame’ cats, suitable for rehoming, but the hopeless ferals are given a home for life, roaming free. Or coming inside, if they like. Or swanning around waving their wild tails and suiting their own damn selves.
There are about a hundred and fifty ferals in residence at the moment. The grounds are dotted with little hay-filled chalets and cabins, connected by ramps and stepped platforms, surrounded by woods and miles from the nearest busy road. Pictures here.
There were cats ev-er-y-where. They were all of them awfully friendly for unhomeable ferals, drifting around seeking treats and skritchies. It was terribly tranquil and hypnotic. I’m pretty sure that’s where I want to go when I die.
In the spirit of leaving something wholesome up for the weekend, there you go. Your weekend of Zen.
August 21, 2015 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 7
Last flight of the Vulcan
Well, not the last flight — there are several more on the calendar for 2015 — but this is the last in our range for the last operational year of the last airworthy Vulcan.
Or B.2 XH558, “The Spirit of Great Britain”, to give her proper name.
You want to talk airplane porn? Check out the picture (one of Uncle B’s). This was when she swooped overhead, turned her belly toward us and slowly opened the bomb bay. Hussy.
And we had a brief display of Red Arrows (there was a longer display on Sunday, but we couldn’t do both days) and a tribute to the Battle of Britain and acres of booths. Soldier of Fortune was there, and lots of people with the terribly mutilated antique guns that are legal for sale here.
The shop that impressed me most was full of rusty bits of junk from the Somme. Although they also had a whole bunch of rusty German helmets that had been found in a Danish lake in 2015, no explanation given.
The one that impressed me next most was the nice German couple selling real Nazi memorabilia. It’s illegal to sell that stuff in Germany, but I guess love finds a way.
I didn’t buy nothing. Not even a Nazi table setting.
August 18, 2015 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 13
Turns out I’m a lousy picker of weasels
This really is The Season ’round these parts. We managed to hit a village fete, a country show and an animal sanctuary open day this weekend. In the process, we had to drive by a church flower festival without stopping. The human body can only take so much.
I bet two quid on the weasel race at the country show and my ferret came in dead last both times. They race them down long sections of pipe, once down and once back again. My beastie got off to a promising start, but then sulked and refused to come out the end of the pipe.
So, to be fair to me and my weasel-picking skills, I did pick the weaselliest weasel both times.
August 10, 2015 — 9:04 pm
Comments: 1
This guy
It was an unexpectedly nice day today. I would like to digress a moment and tell you that weather reporting is utter shit here. They can’t help it — it’s a little island stuck out in the wild Atlantic — but they make predictions with such confidence and they are always, always, ALWAYS wrong. I miss being in New England, where you get to watch your weather come at you for five days.
Anyhoo! It was supposed to be cloudy, but nay it was sunny, so we decided, more or less randomly, to go to Bodiam Castle. Little did we know they were hosting a sort of Medieval Fair (Fayre, Faire, Faër, or Phære).
Most of the activities were for kids, and then there was this guy. He was hammering coins more or less in the manner of old. He put a disk of metal between two dies and bang, there you go. A man who did this for a living would be expected to make 2,000 in a day, he said.
He explained in some detail how he screwed with the mint marks on the back so no-one would think they were real old coins. As you might imagine, forging collectible coins is a thing, and collectors are mighty grumpy about it. But as all of this guy’s blanks were pewter, I doubt that would ever be an issue.
He also made jewelry and other bits. I bought a rather wicked-looking pewter torque bracelet, hammered and twisted (like moi). It didn’t fit, so he used brute force to pull it open and close it around my wrist. So…I guess I wear this permanently now.
Gotta show you this one large and in color, so you can see how cool his stuff is. My bracelet is just visible in the red case at the far left of the picture. Pictures courtesy Uncle B.
August 5, 2015 — 9:09 pm
Comments: 8
The English are so weird
I have posted about flower festivals before, where the members of a parish church fill the church with flower arrangements. Different people do different arrangements all around a single theme.
This sounds lovely, if you’ve never seen it. In practice, specific arrangements often include brain hurty items like plastic dinosaurs, old shoes or decapitated Barbie dolls.
I have no idea how this got started or what the point is, other than to spruce the place up and draw visitors. There’s usually a program (thank god for the program, or half the arrangements wouldn’t make any sense at all) and someone playing the organ and they sell you a cup of tea and a piece of cake. It is both civilized and grotesque.
We went to one this weekend that took it a step further and eliminated the flowers. The whole inside of the church was covered in…hats. Just hats. With labels.
Ladies’ hats, military helmets, Boy Scout berets, chainmail coifs, this here sombrero (there were two, actually).
I described this to a group of my neighbors and they were like, “oh, well yeah. That’s a little weird.” Then I told them that this same church last year featured wedding dresses of the parishioner and they were all, like, “oh, hey, our church did that!”
My life is a Monty Python sketch.
August 4, 2015 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 6