Edinburgh 2012

Before I file away all my ephemera, I'll just list the shows I managed to see at this year's Edinburgh festival - you could hardly call it a review! It was just a week: Saturday 11 - Saturday 18 August, with a stop-off at Bury on the way back for my sister's birthday and a spot of trainspotting.

No shows Saturday and Sunday, just lazy days hanging out in various bars, including George Square Gardens and the new venue Summerhall, a former vet school and hospital - The Royal Dick - and it's huge (we came back on the Friday for a proper look round). They make their own beer there - Barney's - and I had a couple of pints of the Red Rye on Sunday in the courtyard.



Monday 13 August: took in some art shows, including Dieter Roth: Diaries at the Fruitmarket, an underwhelming  collection of rubbish, flattened and put in folders for a year! Much more interesting were Harry Hill's paintings, upstairs at White Stuff, including some pop stars painted on coconuts. Saw the ever entertaining Robin Ince at The Jam House, a free gig, but I put a fiver in the bucket, and popped along to the book festival to meet up with Sam and his friends.



 Tuesday 14 August: got a bus to the Mound (my bus pass doesn't work in Scotland so it was a £3.50 day ticket) to check out the Symbolist Landscape exhibition. It was better that expected; but the subtitle Van Gogh to Kandinsky let it down. There was so much more, including Whistler, GF Watts, Lord Leighton, James Ensor and Monet, plus lots of German and Scandanavian painters such as Franz von Stuck and Villhelm Hammershoi and Akseli Gallen-Kallela - and a couple of dreadfuls by Munch. What was fascinating was that so many of the conventional paintings were contemporary with the more avant-garde pictures, such as by Mondrian, collected together towards the end of the exhibition. Thanks to The Scotsman I got a half-price ticket to Formby, a play written and performed by Ewan Wardop, and smashing it was too - he can really play the banjolele, and we had a good old sing song at the end of the two songs audiences never let George leave the stage before he did - can you guess them? I met up with Sam to go see Paul Foot (not the politician) at the Underbelly and funny he was too, without ever finishing a joke - don't sit on the front row though! It was another late night as well, to see Humphrey Kerr as Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher. It was the sort of tall tale that your grandad might tell you about his role in the downfall of Hitler, and hugely entertaining. It was the last night of the run and the props dept had put some extra bang in the explosion, making the actor jump out of his skin (and the audience too).



Wednesday 15 August: to the Stand for another Edinburgh stalwart, Simon Munnery, who conducted the whole show - Fylm Makker - from the middle of the audience as a video link. It was a virtuoso performance involving half-silvered mirrors, foot pedals and cardboard animations, and of course Venn diagrams. After a pint across the road we were in the other Stand for Gavin Webster, an old-skool geordie comic, who was nevertheless extremely likeable and shook everyone's hand on the way out. After a Yo! Sushi meal at the top of Harvey Nick's I baled out and let the youngsters go oot on the toon.



Thursday 16 August: I had a mission, to discover Sally Kennedy's singing ancestor's plaque at the bottom of Calton Hill steps. I was also looking for the Ingleby Gallery, so I got off the bus at the top of the High Street and walked down the Royal Mile through all the buskers and flyerers , checked out the golden pillar box on Hunter Square, looked in at the Collective gallery and made for the Trainspotting steps. Lo and behold! there was the gallery: two floors of lovely Ian Hamilton Finlay stuff, including a film of aircraft taking off from an ironing board and a set of wooden models of Japanese warship chimneys. Back up to Waterloo Place and across a bridge over where I'd just been (Edinburgh is like that) and it was onward to the steps. Found the plaque just past the steps and decided to do something I'd never done before: go up to the top of Calton Hill! It wasn't that bad and ate my sandwiches overlooking a stunning view of Leith. Walked down to the Mound and got the Art Bus (yes, it's back, as a luxury coach) to the modern art gallery for the Picasso and Modern British Art exhibition. Now I've never been too fond of Pablo, but the Wyndham Lewis paintings downstairs and the Hockney room upstairs were worth the admission price on their own. There is some local interest too, with photos by Lee Miller and collages by Roland Penrose. Didn't bother with the Munch at the former Dean gallery, now Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 2. Back to the old Assembly for Stewart Lee (who flyered me on the way in!) and his very-post-modern show Carpet Remnant World. Then another late-night show - John Shuttleworth at the Ace Dome. It was quite a rushed performance, with only an abbreviated I can't go back to savoury now as an encore. I look forward to a good two hours at the Theatre Royal in November.



Friday 17 August: spent most of the day at Summerhall looking at the many art exhibitions on show. It's like a college degree show with so many rooms to explore and only a badly photocopied map to guide you. Liked the Demarco Foundation rooms, with more Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the Phenotype Genotype ephemera. Then it was a walk to the Pleasance Courtyard, thence to the Brewdog Bar in Cowgate, and a farewell meal at Absolute Thai.



On Saturday it was down the west coast on Virgin to Manchester and the tram to Bury, and on Sunday I made use of one of my free member's tickets on the East Lancs Railway, where steam locos 80080 (made in Brighton) and Jinty 47324 pulled me to Heywood and Rawtenstall and back. Stopped off at Ramsbottom for some black peas, but the stall had gone, its pitch taken over by a Tesco carpark!

Bauhaus at the Barbican

Can someone explain to me how you can buy a Travelcard (from Brighton) online? As it happened, the ticket office at London Road beat the online best, coming in at £13.80 (with senior railcard), but it meant I missed a train! Also, on the Barbican website, I could have saved a quid by booking online, but I'd have to specify a time! Ah well, swings and roundabouts.

I was off to see the Bauhaus: Art as Life exhibition at the Barbican, not a venue I relish, so it's London Road > Brighton > East Croydon > Farringdon (spanky new station) > Barbican tube, then follow the yellow line to the Art. it's £8 to get in and it starts upstairs on the balcony. Now I love the Bauhaus, I've been to the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin and have fond memories of the Modernism exhibition at the V&A back in 2006, but I'd heard it's not that good - a Torygraph writer was particularly disappointed, so, I treated it as work (I have a book to write on graphic design) and dived in.

From the outset, however,  I was impressed, and over the edge of the bacony got a preview of the treasures to come, downstairs. It's just so good to see real artwork - the holes where Kandinsky put his compass to draw less-than-perfect circles, the postcards they loved sending each other, the home-made diplomas. They must have had so much fun - they were just so MODERN, doing the 60s in the 1920s, with their jazz bands, miniskirts and geometric hairstyles. And I'm delighted by the odd anachronism that crept in, like on Peter Keler's design for Moholy-Nagy's studio: just a bare room painted in three shades of grey with a one-legged table in the corner holding a slim record player, but with the curved trumpet form of a gramophone arm upsetting the perfect rectilinearity of it all. I couldn't find an image of it, but here's another from the same series.

There was no photography allowed and of course that particular gouache was neither in the £32.95 catalogue nor available as a £1 postcard (the postcards were from the Bauhaus-archiv) so you'll have to take my word for it. There was lots lots more to love: all the famous chairs (and you can even see them in a catalogue where you could actually order and buy a Mies van de Rohe tubular steel job, brand new), the lamps, the teapots, the textiles. Then there were the toys, the very weird puppets, sculpture, woodcuts, typography, colour wheels and exercises, Petshop Boys-style dance costumes, experimental photography, adverts for Nivea creme... but most of all it's the personal stuff, the questionnaires, the letters, the photos of teachers and students having a wild time before the killjoy Nazis put a stop to it. It's not really about the artists, though, but there are enough Paul Klees, Kandinskys, van Doesburgs, Feiningers on show to satisfy anyone. If you ever went to art school, you owe them all a huge debt; if you didn't, like me, you'll wish you were around between the wars when there was everything to live for. It's on until 12 August.

Sea shanties in Hastings

I love a sing song, and sea shanties make the best sing-along songs - with simple melodies and repetitive choruses to go with the kind of nautical heave-ho work they accompanied. So, when I heard there was a Sea Shanty Festival in nearby Hastings, I got my bike up to London Road station (taking my folder as it's lighter, knowing there'd be steps to negotiate) and headed east. At Lewes, I changed for the fast Ashford diesel, which is only two carriages so it was a bit of a squash, what with all the pushchairs. I'd arranged to meet Erica Smith, so I got off at St Leonards Warrior Square (and yes, there was a footbridge with steps) and we cycled along the seafront to Rock-a-Nore.

 

First, we popped into the new Jerwood Gallery, tucked in amongst the black fishermen's huts. Erica had a magic ticket, so I got in free. The latest exhibition was the painter Gary Hume. I do like his stuff, and own a print and drawing of his. He paints on aluminium sheets using household gloss paint. But why? You'd think it was to get a perfectly flat finish, like on his sculptures, but no you can see the hand of the artist, and things not clear in reproduction, like toes, that transform what looks like an abstract into a figurative painting.

 

The permanent collection is pretty impressive too, mainly smallish paintings from between the wars and after. There's a nice LS Lowry of a bridge and chimney, a Ruskin Spear (Roger's dad), William Roberts, Frank Brangwyn, Dod and Ernest Proctor, John Piper - everyone except Ravilious and Bawden... plus several winners of the Jerwood Painting Prize such as Craigie Aitchison and Maggi Hambling. It's also got a cafe with balcony, and great unisex toilets. The windows are spectacular too, going right down to floor level so you imagine you might fall onto the shingle outside.

 

Dodging the miniature railway, we collected our bikes and trudged over the pebbles to the sea shanty 'stage' - a fishing boat, where we caught the end of a Polish group of unaccompanied singers. There then followed Graeme Knights, who did a solo set, and then The Hastings Shanty Singers, who after a rousing sing-along of 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor' were joined by the ensemble cast for the final couple of songs. The event was to be repeated on a proper stage, that evening. And Sunday was going to be Pirate day!

 

I grabbed a Fishermen's roll from Tush and Pat's stall - two fillets of fried plaice on a bun, fresh and straight from the sea, for £2.50. Heading back to Brighton, the train was packed to the gills, but had thinned out by Eastbourne. It was home to watch history being made at the Tour de France final time trial, as Wiggo and Froome came in one and two, like Le Tour itself, and then it was out to see Anal Beard at the Albert to round off the perfect day.

 

SEO: how to get into Google's good books

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the art of getting Google to like you and approve of your website. I learnt all about it on a day course at Silicon Beach Training in Brighton by the personable Pat Kelly that I won in a competition. I thought I'd won some Top Trumps cards (and I did) but also won a course of my choice, so I chose SEO, something I knew little about except perhaps for the myths everyone knows, such as it's all down to the number of other sites linking to yours that will put you on the desirable page one of the search engine's results.

Before the course, I would have started this blog with something like 'Can you teach an old dog new tricks?' But one of the secrets I learnt was to put your primary keyword (in this case SEO) first both in your postings title and in the first paragraph of your body text - and preferably in your URL, file name of any image and its alt text too. But don't overdo it! Too many mentions of a keyword will alert Google's penguin and you'll be penalised if not blacklisted for daring to use cheating 'black hat' techniques. The idea is that you become not only popular but also authoritative. I won't give away any more secrets!

It's all common sense really. You need a well stuctured, W3-validating site, with compelling content! Publicise it on your Google+ page so it'll get indexed sharpish and Bob's your Uncle. One thing I need to sort out is that because I use masked web forwarding from my domains to my free hosting service, the tools Pat showed us how to use don't go directly to my sites. Not such an urgent problem in that they're so specialised I've never really had to think about SEO before, but that's a job for the future, as well as keeping my Google+ profile up-to-date. This blog covers all kinds of topics, so choosing the primary keyword is always going to be difficult.

I did get my compo Top Trumps cards in the end, and countless cups of tea, and whilst dreading going back to school at my age - and initially forgetting to bring my reading glasses - I thoroughly enjoyed it, as did I think the other seven participants. The last time I was in those offices on Gloucester Road, by the way, it was Joti's DTP bureau, where you could use a cutting-edge Mac SE to type up your CV and get it printed out pristinely by a laser printer - no internet back then, just expensive computers for hire. Seems so long ago!

My Brighton Festival so far

2 May: Cheeky Walks book launch at the Blind Tiger Club, with added quiz
6 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
Lucky Jim at the Battle of Trafalgar
7 May: Kissing the gunner's daughter outside the Fishing Museum, rainy day, not the best for peering through small holes in bathing machines
8 May: Hangover Square installation at the art school, inc 20 minute reading, go alone!
9 May: 17 Clyde Road PV with Mark Little and Monty Oxy-Moron, the best PV of the festival, always!
10 May In/visible city: multicultural ride on a Big Lemon bus to Falmer and back. http://in-visible-city.com/o_eng.html
12 May: invigilating at 99 Clyde Road Open House
Open day at Brighton National Spiritualist Church, with a talk and 'dem' - always wanted to see what it was like on the inside.
http://www.brightonnationalspiritualistchurch.com/SPIRITFRINGE.html 
13 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
The Return of Adam Acidophilus the Fable Man at the Rock
14 May: Jeremy Deller, Playing Silly Buggers - The Life and Times of Bruce Lacey at the Dome, film followed by a useless Q&A enlivened by Bruce Lacey himself having a go at Deller for cutting things out
15 May: Spymonkey, Oedipussy at the Theatre Royal, post-modern pantomime by a quartet of extremely fit actors, best in show so far
www.spymonkey.co.uk/oedipussy/index.htm
17 May: And No Birds Sing at the Booth Museum, eerie promenade night at the stuffed birds museum with poems and zombie women, based on the life of Lizzie Siddal
18 May: Bootworks (Andy Roberts, no not the Andy Roberts (see below)) Predator at the Basement, the Arnie scifi film re-enacted using toys and members of the audience with great gusto, 2nd best in show so far
19 May: Phoenix Gallery Open Studios
20 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
Trumpton comes Alive at the Latest, delightful concert of Trumpton music played by Glen Richardson (vocals), Adrian Oxaal and Stephen Wrigley (guitars) and Tom Arnold (percussion). Some videos wot I made:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFLPFJjXvU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWZE3dXZGA

Plus a few other Open Houses, documented here:
http://artistsopenhouses.tumblr.com/post/23032616783/a-few-half-way-highlights

Still to come:

23 May: Wellsbourne Society at Bom-Banes
24 May: The sound of the wind in the trees at the Nightingale, with live music, starring me (on film)!
27 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
Three Bonzos and a Piano at the Komedia, with the one and only Andy Roberts

Should Brighton and Hove City Council sell off its assets? (From The Argus)

Should Brighton and Hove City Council sell off its assets? (From The Argus) - I get a name check in this, from my letter to the Argus in March.

Pensioners love compos

I recently entered a competition on Twitter to name an exhibition I might have, based on Jeremy Deller's Joy in People. The prize was a load of Deller / David Shrigley goodies from the Hayward Gallery shop.

My spur-of-the-moment entry was:

@southbankcentre No interventions or paradigm shifts here, mate, just my paintings #fantasticfridays

To my surprise I won, and in due course a Jeremy Deller 'Bless this Acid House' poster arrived in a tube, followed by the box of goodies shown above: a catalogue of each exhibition, a set of 25 Shrigley postcards, a Deller mug 'My Booze Hell', and a couple of badges, worth around £70 the lot! Wow! Well worth entering. Now I've heard I've won another Twitter compo, from Silicon Beach Training, for writing this sycophantic blog entry on my Tumblr site.

Pensioners love compos. Not only do they pass the time, but you may win stuff. I'm not as fanatical as some internet compers, but I used to enter quite a few back in the 70s, mainly from the Sun newspaper (don't ask!). My best prize was a gold-plated Levis belt which I still have (any offers?). I also won a signed Roger Daltrey LP, the one with the centaur on the front (long gone!) and many other albums, including John Lennon's Sometime in New York City. If I see one that's easy to enter and I can be bothered, I'll have a go. You never know!

Bristol steam

I wasn't expecting to see any steam on our Clarion Cycling Club weekend in Bath (full report here), as I knew there was a diesel event on at the Avon Valley Railway. We did however spot the diesel, pulling some coaches that included Angela, which amused at least one of our riders, and I did spot a couple of cold steam locos in the shed at Bitton. Imagine my surprise therefore when we arrived at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol for lunch, to see a plume of smoke coming from across the harbour. Last time I was in Bristol, it wasn't running, but today my luck was in. After a great lunch of pea soup and a glass of Bristol Exhibition ale, Jim and I wandered over the bridge just as the train was leaving. In the 20 minutes or so it took to return, we chatted to one of the volunteers who was from Bolton and recognised my Clarion badge. Henbury returned and we got into the guard's van (which had a fire going).

 

Jim was going to see SS Great Britain so he and I bought return tickets (£2). I discovered however that the route to Create was longer and more interesting, so upgraded (another £2), and on the next run by the river was joined by Angela and Anne who'd been strolling along the docks.

 

Henbury never actually faced forward on any part of the journey, because there were no turning loops and it was paramount to have good visibility because of tourists wandering across the line. The other loco was away for repairs.

 

London Road is finished and will be an eyesore for years (From The Argus)

London Road is finished and will be an eyesore for years (From The Argus) Selma Montford replies to my letter (never published on the Argus website) suggesting the council sells King's House and relocates to the old Co-op building. It ran along the lines:

Does the Council really need to be in such a desirable prime location as King's House on Hove seafront? Why not sell it off for luxury apartments and move the offices to somewhere like the old Co-op building on London Road, with its imposing Neo-Classical facade, and help regenerate the area? Kill two birds with one stone: make money to offset our council tax rises and bring badly needed jobs to the 'gateway to Brighton'.

Today's letter answers Selma Montford's objections to my idea.
http://www.theargus.co.uk/yourargus/letters/9646506.Develop_King_s_House_as_flats/

Norfolk steam gala at Sheringham

Spent a very enjoyable weekend in Sheringham for the North Norfolk Railway Steam Gala. The journey up on Saturday was long but interesting. The computer told me to take the Jubilee Line from London Bridge to Stratford, which meant I saw some of the Olympics construction, including Anish Kapoor's tower, but also meant a half-hour wait on a platform with no buffet. The two-hour journey went through Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich and crossed a few estuaries. At Norwich I changed onto the Bittern Line train for an hour's trip to Sheringham, via Cromer and an enormous field full of photovoltaic panels near North Walsham.



The line ends at Sheringham, but the other side of the road it continues as the Poppy Line, and I could see steam. Closer inspection (I didn't need a platform ticket) revealed a double header of the mighty 92203, named Black Prince by its owner David Shepherd, and a Micky (Black 5) from ELR Bury: No. 45337! What a noise when they set off for Holt! Magnificent. Also in the station was LNER J15 7564 and 4936 Kinlet Hall. I must confess it's a bit odd to see a GWR engine so far east! After a cappuccino, I set off for my digs, Camberley House, up Cliff Road. The name of the street was a bit of a give-away... yes, it was a bit of a schlep up one of Norfolk's only hills. Bags dumped, I walked down to the prom and along to the harbour and a pint of Woodforde's Nog at the Camra Best Pub in Norfolk, the Windham Arms (on Wyndham Street!). The Robin Hood, up the road had a more limited selection of ales (I had a pint of Abbot) but the three-bean chilli was surprisingly good, with the accompanying veg cooked perfectly.



After a great veggie beakfast (including the best poached egg in North Norfolk) on a glorious Sunday morning, I breezed down to the station and caught the 9.46 to Holt, pulled by the J15 7564, built in 1912 at Stratford. On the way back, being pulled by Kinlet Hall, I alighted at Weybourne and waited for the beautifully restored B12 8572, hauling the 1924 LNER Quad-Art set that once carried commuters from King's Cross to the suburbs. Quad-Art? It's a four-carriage set with each carriage sharing a bogey with the next, making the whole train much lighter. I took the Black Prince train back to Holt, where it was left and we came back with Kinlet Hall. At Holt is a 2-10-0 Dub-Dee 90775, out of service. After a cappuccino and toasted teacake break, I caught Black Prince again back to Holt and returned to Sheringham with the 5MT 45337. Also on duty was a GWR tank 5619, which I kept missing. The bummer of the day was the on-off switch of my Flip Ultra II breaking, so no videos!



On the way back to the B&B I called in to the Lobster for a pint of Woodforde's Wherry, thence to the Windham Arms for some Elmtree Dark Horse stout. Monday morning, after another great breakfast, headed back the way I came, except to Liverpool Street (at Norwich you can get a train to either Liverpool Lime Street or Liverpool Street London, which could be confusing to a foreign visitor!), tube to the being refurbished Farrington and back over the river to bonny Brighton.

More photos on Flickr.

Things they don't tell you about getting old

You may not know, but I'm a terrible hypochondriac. Anything remotely worrying or out of the ordinary in the health department sends my anxiety levels sky high, resulting in tense neck and shoulders and then headaches, making me feel a whole lot worse. Yes, we all know that as we get older, we're more likely to get ill, and then eventually die. But I'm not ready for that yet. After spending most of my youth in hospitals, I've managed to avoid them in my adulthood. I think in a way I fear any cures more than the ailments itself. So, it was with trepidation that I visited my doc on Tuesday - the first appointment I could get after experiencing a surprise big black floater in my right eye, followed by flashing lights on the very edge of my vision, especially in dim light, the previous Friday afternoon.

Of course, I did a Google search, but as with almost any symptoms, the bottom line is always get checked out by your doctor! Could be anything. What I didn't want it to be was a detached retina. A friend, Stephen R, had told me on the trip back from Holyhead last year of his brother who got that and had to have emergency treatment in Liverpool, involving lasers and needles in the eye. Not nice! When I told the doc my symptoms, he immediately wrote me a note for the eye hospital A&E - yes, they have their own. So after charging up the mobile and packing some dark glasses (I knew they would dilate my pupil) I set off on the bus. He recommended getting there around 2pm.

Brighton's eye hospital is an Art Deco building (the foundation stone says 1933) and the ED is down some stairs. I showed the triage nurse my note and she directed me to sit down in a transit waiting area. Eventually I was summoned by another desk person to give some details, next of kin etc and then directed to another area of seating. After a while I was called by a rather laconic and brusk male nurse who put three lots of drops in my eyes and told me to save my story for the doctor. After another wait, me and an elderly lady from Newick with ingrowing eyelashes were led to a bench in a corrider opposite a rack of leaflets from the RNIB. She went in to see the doc and I waited again, later joined by another couple of women. Apparently there was an emergency involving a young lad, who needed a brain scan.

So I got to see the doc who took a good look in my eye and said (not in so many words) that it was posterior vitreous detachment. He could see that big black floater fluttering round like a moth, but said that it would either sink or my brain would get used to it eventually. Although the symptoms do incude the flashing lights as the vitreous tugs on the retina, he seemed to think it was an ocular migraine. Hmm, not so sure, I've been getting them for a week now, but as I said only in dim light, when I get up in the morning and in the evening.

Anyhow, the good news is that it wasn't retinal detachment, so no lasers and needles. But... I now have to live with this black moth fluttering around inside my eye... and being short-sighted, I was always going to be more prone to it. We are lucky in Brighton to have an eye hospital and yes, I know the dear old NHS is stretched but I can't help feeing the whole visit could have been made more pleasant and reassuring (I'm a big fan of Holby City and Casualty, y'know). Not being aware of the modus operandi and procedure does make you feel a little bit you are wasting their time and cluttering up their department (although there was a wall chart aimed at kids which went some way to explaining the sequence of events). And it was an eye opener to see people worse off than you (the lady from Newick had already had several operations and only had one good eye). Here's to life's little surprises, and let's hope it'll be a while before I have to enter a hospital again.

Here's a bit of weirdness: the other morning I was having a shave and when I reached for the towel a moth flew out. I thought it had come from my eye, but it was a real one and the floater is still there buzzing around.

If you've read this far, thanks for indulging me. I find writing about these things quite therapeutic. Got a train-spotting weekend in store in Sheringham, so come back and read my write-up.

Why are Open Houses on in May?

Delving about in my ephemera, for my last post about the Two Fringes, I came across a couple of brochures of alternative Open House events. Around the time of the split from the Festival and then the Fringe, some AOHers, notably from the Fiveways trail, proposed moving the Open Houses Festival away from the 'umbrella' of the May Festival to other parts of the year.

This was trialed by a Council-backed (City of Culture/Where Else Campaign) initiative called Manifest, which took place in October 2002, for three weekends. Various talks/workshops/exhibitions/open houses took place, from Portslade to Rottingdean. But it never happened again.

Then, of course, came the Christmas Open Houses, still going strong. In its first year, 2003, there were just 16 venues; last year there were 65. The brochures are designed by AOH's Chris Lord, with woodcut illustrations on the cover by Judy Stevens, always on the theme of The Twelve days of Christmas. We look forward to its 13th year to see how she will illustrate that one!

In 2006, 11 Open Houses had a July opening for two weekends, as part of the Celebrating Age festival, featuring more mature artists, i.e. those over 50! The participating venues (I was in Jackie Jones' house at 51 Upper Lewes Road) were not impressed by the level of publicity it got, attendances were poor and it was never repeated. The consensus is that May is best!

Incidentally, almost all these events had websites, now gone to the great digital graveyard in the sky...

When Brighton had two Fringes

A recent Twitter exchange with the new Fringe Director @JulianCaddy, who by all accounts is a breath of fresh air, jogged my memory about the origins of the Fringe. Unlike Edinburgh's Fringe, which started the same time as the International Festival in 1947 and has since grown bigger than its posher rival, the current Brighton Fringe was created by Festival Director at the time Nick Dodds. Under Gavin Henderson, the Festival embraced all of May's cultural events, including also the Artists' Open Houses. Henderson was also responsible for using Brighton artists and makers to design the covers of the brochures. Under his successor, Christopher Barron, the miscellaneous events and artists houses were grouped at the back of the festival brochure under the heading of Umbrella. My collection only goes back to 1997, so earlier than that I don't know.

Dodds, however, wanted to split off the 'non-programmed' events (i.e. not taking place in the Dome complex) into an Edinburgh-like fringe. There were lots of heated meetings about it, main opposition coming from the AOHers. As a compromise, the 2002 festival brochure (the one with the jelly bean cover) included a bound-in supplement called Brighton Festival Open.

But also in 2002, some bright sparks - Helen Medland and Jeff Hemmings - started up the Brighton Fringe! This was described in their intro as the fifth ever Fringe 'after an enforced sabbatical last year'. This is where my memory fails me. I do remember seeing Fringe brochures from the 1960s in a small exhibition at North Star Studios once, but I think they related to the Open Studios that preceded the Open Houses.

In 2003 there was another Brighton Fringe ('the sixth real Brighton Fringe Festival'). But 2003 also saw the publication of a brochure by the new Brighton Festival Fringe, with the first 13 pages devoted to the Open Houses!

So for one year only, Brighton had two Fringes! What happened to Brighton Fringe you may ask? I don't know, but I believe pressure was put on them by the official festival. There was also the question of funding. The first 'official' Fringe was funded by the main festival, who were in turn funded by the Arts Council and Brighton Council. AOH stayed with the Fringe for a few years, before deciding to break off and produce a brochure of their own in 2005, but that's another story. And that's a cue for me to sort out my ephemera collection.

Edward Burra in Chichester

I really am still in two minds about Edward Burra. There's a Burra in Bury art gallery called 'News of the World', I have fond memories of seeing it as I was growing up, but I always assumed he was American, what with the unusual name and his best known pictures being of jazz-age Harlem. What I also didn't realise was that he worked almost excusively in watercolour.

So I set off to Pallant House in Chichester on half-price tuesday to see more. As ever they put on a fine exhibition, and I loved the first room of art deco sailors and showgirls from French ports, and in the corridor before you even get in is a fabulous and rare oil painting, and all in that flattened perspective with vibrant Léger-style shading of arms and legs. How did he achieve that depth of colour with watercolour? I squinted close up and all I could deduce was that he was using very dry paint, perhaps pounced like Maxfield Parrish. When I got home I googled about his technique - more later!

Anyway, after that first room with its smallish pictures, plus his photo album of tiny contact prints, we get to the Spanish war and some huge paintings that I thought were horrible. And I was pretty much disappointed from then in - everything he did I could think of someone who'd done it better. The early inter-war stuff you could compare with George Grosz and William Roberts (also featured in a Pallant House exhibition, 2007). The spanish paintings remind you of Dali, and put Burra in that sad category of English Surrealist. His Sussex paintings are not even in the same league as Ravilious. I find his pictures on the cusp of ugliness, with those big lumbering forms looming up in the foreground and the hideous lips on everyone. But I still can't help being fascinated.

The technique to achieve this intense tempera-type finish, I found out from a Guardian review, was as follows:

He came to prefer watercolour to oil, partly because it was physically easier to handle for a man who, perforce, painted sitting down [he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, as well as other ailments]. Though he seems to have had a good idea of where he was going from the start, he did not make preliminary sketches. He started at the bottom right-hand corner, and in his 20s and 30s, drew a compartment, or section, in light pencil (he later dispensed with this). Then, using a rather small brush laden with paint lightly moistened with spit, he completed the entire section before moving on to the next, achieving a suave, velvety surface of intensely saturated colour.

Do go and see it, though. It's on until 19 February.

How authors go mad

I was planning a Moan on this subject, but someone beat me to it: How authors go mad

Fred through the ages

With my 65th birthday looming I thought I'd compile a slideshow of photos of me through the ages!

Daily Moan #19: Upgrading the computer

Another New year and it's back to having a good old moan! Now I must preface this moan with the statement that I love Apple and Apple products, and believe that Jony Ive should be knighted. I bought my first ever Mac Plus back in June 1989 and even before that, way back in the early 80s, I got my company - IPC Science and Technology Press - to buy an Apple ][e with a bank of four floppy drives, just to put conference delegate lists into alphabetical order. But...

BUT...

I hate upgrading. I dread it. I avoid it like the plague until I get dragged into doing it for the sake of a new gadget. It happened when I got my first iPod. I brought it home all excited and unpacked it, only to find my OS wasn't up-to-date enough. So I upgraded, and of course nothing worked - it took days to get the internet, printers and everything back working again. Stressful!

The same thing happened when I got the iPad 2. I was perfectly happy with OS 10.4 but it insisted I needed 10.5. So I borrowed a copy (the only alternative was to buy an expensive box set) and again it was traumatic, mainly because a program I'd been using for years, Adobe Streamline, which was working fine in 'classic' mode, was no longer happening. Ah well, I thought, I am almost retired and should I need to trace line drawings, I could learn Freehand's built-in trace tools. But then, just before Christmas, my trusty iMac died!

OK, I'd had seven years productive use from it (bought May 2005). It was the last of the PowerPC iMacs, the white one before they stuck a camera in. I'd woken it from sleep and everything was frozen. I restarted it from the power button, it chimed but never got past the blue screen. Hmm, what to do. I had the iPad so I was on Facebook and Gmail, but I couldn't work. I'd rigged up an old 12in Powerbook G4 (bought to handle Channel 4's dreadful content-management system, for which my iMac was too up to date) as a distraction-free writing machine for NaNoWriMo, so I could use that. I'd been thinking of buying a new iMac for a while, so I took the plunge and ordered one from the Apple Store, where I get an NUJ discount. The old iMac went to the menders. I was hoping it could be repaired so I could get at Filemaker Pro and my invoices etc.

When the new iMac arrived, I transferred all my life from an external hard drive (using Time Machine). My neighbours had already been caught out with the new Firewire 800 plug so I borrowed their £20+ cable to transfer everything from the hard drive into the new computer. So far so good, but I'd been reading up and was aware that Lion didn't support PowerPC apps. My plan was to get the old one mended and strip it down as a work computer, but as it worked out the logic board was gone and it was an uneconomic repair. Luckily Mick Swabey had an old iMac like mine but with smaller screen on sale for £85! So he swopped the internal hard drives for me and I was back in business, but with two computers on the go.

Now I've been using Freehand since the beginning, but that was no longer supported on the new computer. I had archives going back years and my new giclee prints had all been created using Freehand. I'm too old to learn Illustrator! Luckily, Photoshop CS3 still worked, but I didn't even attempt to connect my old scanner to it. All my records - invoices, addresses, etc were on FileMaker Pro - I could have bought an upgrade, but why should I when it was working fine on the old computer? Upgrading is not only stressful, it can be expensive too. So to do my Xmas cards I began transferring my contact info to Address Book - I didn't try printing labels, I still have that bridge to cross.

I'd also bought a Time Capsule, which I thought was just a glorified hard drive, but it is also a router. I couldn't get it to work as just a hard drive, so took my Netgear router out of the loop and everything was sweet as a nut, just like Apple products usually are - all working straight out of the box. I noticed it had a USB port to attach a printer, but after trying to get the old HP 990c printer to work on the network, discovered it too was no longer supported! Ah well.

Anyway, on New Year's Eve I went up to the 100 Club in London to see my favourite band David Devant and his Spirit Wife, and as usual I took my Flip video recorder to document the event. Back home, I put a couple of videos on YouTube and set about compiling the DVD. My trusty copy of iMovie HD was working and I started importing the Flip files and typing in the song titles. When it was all done, I clicked Share to power up iDVD then discovered my iDVD wouldn't work. OK, so I'd download an upgrade, only there isn't one! What! Yes, that's right, iDVD is no longer supported by Apple. So how the blazes can I make a DVD? The only solution was to start again on the old computer, transferring the Flip files by USB memory stick (the iMovie project file is 17 gigs, I could have used my old external drive to transfer it over but I don't have the right Firewire cable!). There may well be way of doing it via Time Capsule, but it's done now... or rather it's in the process of doing it!

Of course my PC friends will be killing themselves laughing at all this. I thought Macs never broke, they'll taunt. The upshot is that I have a beautiful, fast, state-of-the-art iMac with a crisp high-res screen, but it does little more than my iPad already does. My workhorse is an old 17in G5 iMac running all my favourite programs on Leopard. If only my iMac had died earlier when they were still sending out Macs with Snow Leopard, I would have been OK (for a year or two). Guess which computer I'm writing this on? The old one of course.

Up North again

Doing the NaNoWriMo in November made me a bit behind with my blog, but I did it! 50,000 words in less than 30 days! What I discovered about fiction, as opposed to non-fiction is that you can make things up! According to Julia Crouch I'll have to wait until January before I look at it again.

Just before November I made another trip to Bury for my Brother-in-Law's 60th birthday celebrations, and to take in the East Lancs Railway Autumn Steam Gala. I travelled up on the Saturday, so only had Sunday to enjoy the trains. The big disappointment was that 71000 Duke of Gloucester was stuck somewhere and wouldn't be on (but he'd be back the following weekend, hoorah!).



The ELR seems to be running out of locos so it was a pretty humdrum selection, the star of which was 49395 - the so-called Super-D. The only other big loco on was a Mickey, 45231 The Sherwood Forester. The rest were industrial tanks: Peckett and Sons 1370 May in Yates Duxbury paper mill livery, Manchester Ship Canal 32 Gothenburg in the guise of Thomas the Tank Engine, and WD132 Sapper.



On the Tuesday I took the tram to Manchester to see the Ford Madox Brown exhibition at the Manchester (City) Art Gallery. As you may know I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphs and as Brown was a honorary member, and Rossetti's teacher, it was a must. Although I've seen all his major works before : Work, Manfred on the Jungfrau, and The last of England - there were lots of studies and sketches to see, including the drawings for his Manchester Town Hall murals. His faces always worry me though, they look so sinister some of them. If the later ones look a bit unfinished its because he suffered a stroke and had to finish them using his left hand!

On Wednesday my niece took me out to Bolton, where we stopped by at Fred Dibnah's house, now a heritage centre - there are tours but you have to book in advance. After fish and chips at Russells we looked at the magnificent Victorian market hall, now a shopping mall, and other architectural gems.



On Thursday I chose the day with the worst weather to take the Cumbrian Round Robin rail journey: train from Bolton to Carlisle, then back down the coast through Workington, Whitehaven, Sellafield, Barrow-in-Furness and Carnforth. Unfortunately the train north I was on caught fire (engine under central carriage) near Shap summit and I missed my connection, so it was dark as I reached Morecambe Bay. If I did it again, I'd only go up as far as Barrow, or maybe Sellafield if you like weird places. Whitehaven looked reasonably nice; but Workington was a wasteland. Ulverston, between Barrow and Carnforth, had a very impressive station with clock tower.



Friday was spent on Bury market buying Northern food, including black peas and black puddings. Saturday I took my Bruv-in-law on the steam trains while my sister's gaff was being decked out ready for the party. We drove to Ramsbottom and did a round trip, pulled by 45231 The Sherwood Forester. At Heywood we observed a party of VIPs, including the Mayor of Rochdale, inspect the train. On Sunday, the Duke was back in action, so I spent the day in a comfy carriage behind that most magnificent loco.

NaNoWriMo and my Hon Degree

In case you've been wondering where I've been, I've had my head down writing a 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo and you'll be glad to know that I'm just over half-way through. It's all Julia Crouch's fault - she did it three years ago and the result was her published novel Cuckoo, with another two on the way. I'm not sure there's a publishable novel in me, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and easier than growing a moustache.

After my trip Up North, the second this year, which I have yet to blog, I travelled up to Guildford, along with thousands of others, to receive an honorary degree. No it wasn't for my outstanding contribution to social media, it was a B Univ given to all and sundry who spent time at Battersea, before the college became an University and moved to Guildford. It would have made more sense if they'd given it to those who just got an external London degree, but I did get a Surrey degree, and now I have two!

I met Chris Chelu (who took the photo), Tina, Groovy Rob Thomasson, and Wal - who missed the boat on a ticket for the ceremony so came as my guest - long with Maurice Valoir, Chris Taper, Phil Garel-Jones, Pete Baylis - and Sir David Varney! Plus many others. I shook hands with HRH the Duke of Kent and we had a slap-up reception with canapes and wine after.

Book Review: How to Design Websites by Alan Pipes | HOW Interactive Design

Book Review: How to Design Websites by Alan Pipes | HOW Interactive Design: first review of my latest book - only 3 stars though.