Myspace blog post - Interesting objects

I intended to focus on finishing a half-finished painting today but when the sun came out properly I stopped pretending and went into the garden to do some summer pruning.

The painting I was going to continue is a study of the chapel that was designed and built by the wife of the celebrated English Victorian artist, George Watts. (You can find information about George watts at http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp04730&role=art.) Mary Watts was also an artist and designer but as often happened in those days (the end of the 19th century) she was overshadowed by the reputation of her famous husband. George did large melodramatic mythological subject paintings and sculptures, but Mary was into Art Nouveau design. They lived and worked in a picturesque rambling house not far from where I live, which has now been turned into a gallery and memorial to George Watts' work.

More interesting to me than the heavy symbolism of the George Watts collection is a little memorial chapel in the cemetery down the road, in the grounds of the house. This chapel was a project that Mary took on, which her husband seems to have regarded as a little hobby to keep Mary from getting too bored. She organised its design and building from first foundation stone to final decorated tile.



It's Italianate in many ways, but it is absolutely Art Nouveau in its character, tall and narrow, and highly decorated in a combination of Italian, Celtic and Romanesque styles. Mary used local craftsman throughout. Compton is a tiny village, and she mobilised most of the work force, including women, to help with the building project.. The bricks and carvings, mouldings and tiles, were locally made. The interior, in particular, is a dreamlike creation, which some people I've spoken to find "creepy", spooky, and claustrophobic.

I began a painting of the exterior last summer but I got rained off, so now I'm going to finish it from the photos. Yesterday I went back to Compton to take some.

Not today, though. I got into cleaning mode. I began polishing up my ship's lamp. This dented copper object stands in the corner of my garden. It's not been converted at all - it's still a paraffin lamp, with a very battered inscription on it: STARBOARD. It also shows the place where it was made - HULL (that's in the northeast of England) and a date, which has lost one of its figures but from the marks left behind is either 1751 or 1731.



I bought this lamp in a breaker's yard in Bangaladesh, in 1984. I wanted a brass one, but that day the only one that the scavengers had left was this copper one, in terrible condition. The setting where I bought it was incredibly sad - a forlorn mudflat, the horizon studded with broken shps of all ages. Wiry thin muddy men at work among the scrap, dismantling the ships that had been brought there to die, haggling over the prices they wanted from the expats who had come to pick over the remains. I felt even more out of place than usual on that beach.

We brought it all the way home to England in 1985 when we were posted back here. Then it sat in our loft for 20 years, still in its crate, because we never did move to the palatial house where it might have been converted to electricity, a chic curiosity to show off to visitors.

When I set up house on my own, I unwrapped my old lamp and cleaned it up. I’ve kept it as a paraffin lamp - it shines with a green starboard glow if you keep the filter inside it and light the wick. As I cleaned it this morning ( my avoidance activity for the morning's painting) I thought about the places it must have been to, the men who must have cleaned it before me, and the storms it had been through.



It needed a lot of work to clean it this morning. I'd neglected it all winter. I ran out of Brasso and remembered what I learned from my bearer in Bangladesh, Ashok. He cleaned all the brass and copper with citrus juice. I had some fresh limes in the fridge so I cut them in half and rubbed them over the surface, left the juice there for a while and then scrubbed and polished. I remembered Ashok's smiling face, his intelligence and his infectious laugh. I remembered his fierce quarrels with the old cook, who was a veteran of the Raj and cooked better Yorkshire puddings than I've tasted anywhere including in England.

Some objects are so valuable for their associations that they really are priceless. I wonder if any of my friends have an object that is valuable for its interest - forget its monetary value. I thought of tagging some of my friends to challenge them to show the most interesting object they own, and explaining why.

I'm choosing five people to tag - I hope they'll write a little blog about their most interesting possession - interesting, remember, not expensive! – and pass the tag on. I’ll look forward to reading them.

New Year's Eve in the Pub (31st December 2007)

New Year's Eve and I was spending it with a new friend, whom I'd only just met. Dinner went well. I cooked it at home because we hadn't booked anywhere - this was a last minute arrangement. Then we had time to kill before midnight - staying in didn't seem to be an option. Television was solid repeats of shows and documentaries shown in the last few days. We didn't know each other well enough to go to bed and occupy each other in more interesting ways. I didn't have any cheerful DVD's to put us in a good mood for midnight. We didn't want to drink and drive so the party that I been invited to was not a good choice. So, he said, I don't go to pubs much, but where's your local?

I didn't think I had a local. Though I live within walking distance of the town centre, all the pubs there look alien and uninviting to me. My "local" was a five-mile drive away.

"There's a pub about five minutes' walk away," I said doubtfully. "I've never been inside and it has boards outside about Quiz Nights and Karaoke." We shuddered in unison. This man and I could make music together, I thought, observing the distaste on his face for such plebeian pursuits.

"OK, we could just take a walk down there and if it looks too bad at least we'll have had some air," he suggested.

It was a fine night, not cold. The decorous streets where I live were deserted. No sign of revelry, no parties. We turned into the street where the pub lurked on the corner. An Edwardian dive, probably a riotous gin palace in its heyday, I thought prissily, as we began to pick up the strains of loud music. When we arrived outside the opaque glazed doors we could see over the wall a small outdoor smoking area, packed with cheerful people laughing and shouting to each other. The smoke from their cigarettes drifted over to us.

Neither of us are smokers. We exchanged disapproving glances but soldiered bravely on. The first entrance we tried was locked.

Probably a private party, we agreed, but went round the corner and gingerly pushed the door. It was stiff to open, perhaps because of the crush of revellers inside, I thought.

The door gave and I stumbled in. And did a double-take. The place was almost empty! Two miserable looking elderly ladies were sipping port at the bar, on high stools. An even more miserable looking man sat a couple of stools down from them. He was clearly on his own and regretting it. In the corner was a group of four twenty-somethings and a dog. One of the girls was rather hopelessly trying to get the men to dance to the music that now assaulted us full blast.

My friend was hovering on the threshold. The music was deafening and he still had the impression that he would have to shoulder his way to the bar, through wildly inebriated revellers, and was summoning up his strength.

"It's OK," I said. "Look."

Even the decor was a surprise. The warm old brick outside led me to expect flock wallpaper, chipped cream dados of Edwardian lincrusta, bentwood kitchen chairs. I hadn't remembered that now we are in the twenty-first century all that is reserved for really chic places in the centre of London. Here, they'd swept it all away and replaced it with whitewashed naked brick walls, exposed steel beams also painted white, black chandeliers, They'd kept (or more likely bought new) small round marble-topped tables. The seating was a combination of white wicker armchairs and leather ones. Very tasteful. I had to admit, it was nice.

We paid a small fortune for a small glass of house red and a cider, and found a seat near the exit to the smoking area. This was still obviously where the action was. When the door opened, we experienced a powerful episode of secondary smoking and made sure it was shut again. Round the corner, in the almost deserted bar area, a large TV was showing Graham Norton's antics leading up to the midnight countdown.

In the same way that your eyes become accustomed to the dark and you begin to see again, our ears gradually began to make sense of the conversation we were trying to have, over the huge decibels of the seventies music that was pounding out. We began to relax. We pointed out the chic details of the decor to each other. We speculated on the possible need of the landlord for some more paintings for the walls (the black-and-white theme made this unlikely, I thought). We exchanged reminiscences about past New Years. We began to enjoy ourselves. We agreed that I did have a local, even though I didn't know anyone in it.

When the countdown to midnight began we were surprised how fast the time had slipped by. Everyone - even the smokers - crowded into the bar in front of the TV screen. We still didn't make a big crowd but there was a big crowd with us on the screen, all packed into Trafalgar Square. The cameras picked out some tiny children, some elderly faces, all colours, all races, all looking up, as we were.

The fireworks on the screen were wonderful. I thought I'd love to have the job that the men in lit up overalls did, cruising back and forth on the river in front of the London Eye, activating the cascades and waterfalls of fireworks, fluid walls of coloured light, painting on the sky on a vast scale so that the Eye became a gigantic catherine wheel, the river a stream of flashing, flowing colours. It went on and on.

The little crowd in the pub around us had suddenly come to life. We were seized and hugged and kissed by girls and men, and seized them in our turn, wishing Happy New Year! Happy New Year! over and over again. It was a night to remember, after all.

I'd forgotten to bring my camera or my mobile phone. Everyone around us was texting and receiving messages. My friend was doing the same and complaining that the network was jammed as usual and he wasn't sure what he'd sent to whom. I didn't mind not having my camera. My mind's eye was enough.

And now I know that I do have a local.