Posts Tagged ‘george henry’
at the mansion of the halloween lolitas
This photograph shows Adam Smith’s bust in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. I took it on Friday. It shows Smith and his ghost looking at one another. I wondered if perhaps it could stand as a metaphorical comment on our current economic woes.
I went to Glasgow a couple of days ago, mixing business and pleasure. I went via the A69 to Carlisle and then up the M74 to Glasgow. The soft slow blaze of autumn smouldered up the Tyne Valley and over into Cumbria and all the way over the Galloway hills. It is Samhain, the time of the end and beginning of the Celtic year, the time of the festival of the dead and bone-fires, the time of apples, nuts, egg-whites and crows. The time of the final harvest and the beginning of the dark half of the year.
Kelvingrove is a beautiful place, the most impressive and enthralling gallery and museum I have ever been in. It contains and somehow or in some way integrates many diverse aspects of the cultural and natural worlds (although I might want to argue that once something enters a museum it can only be culture, and not nature, and not only for the obvious reason that there are no stuffed animals in nature!). Because of the design of this huge old mansion – all stone staircases and long balconies which look over its large lower spaces – it is a place which throws at the visitor an astonishing succession of quite unforeseen and often surely quite accidental combinations of items. These idiosyncratic juxtapositions, depending as they do very much on the eye and interest of the individual observer, make the experience open-ended and potentially unique for each visitor. Kelvingrove offers the imagination an endless feast, a chance to make chaos out of order and a new order out of chaos. It’s a magnificent junkyard rather than a marvellous jigsaw. Hugo would love it. Go there. You won’t see what I’ve seen, but what you do see might amuse you.
Kelvingrove is a metaphor for the city itself in the way it brings together disparate objects and experiences. Kelvingrove is also a metaphor for the attractive but ultimately misleading façade offered to us in the self-(mis)representation of modern cities by their marketing and PR people. Don’t get me wrong, Kelvingrove is a fantastic, enchanting place and I’d happily spend a whole week there; but it doesn’t show the whole of life and it doesn’t show the whole of Glasgow life. Glasgow has higher child poverty levels than anywhere else in Britain. In some parts of the city forty-nine out of every fifty children are living on or below the poverty line. In Kelvingrove poverty simply vanishes up the sleeve of social history. Kelvingrove does its job incredibly well, but it’s just not its job to tell the whole truth.
I went to Kelvingrove on Friday to look again at the paintings of the Glasgow Boys, which I’d previously looked at while they were temporarily housed in the McLellan Gallery on Sauchiehall Street while Kelvingrove was being restored. In Kelvingrove the paintings are exhibited in the ‘Scottish Art’ room, along with paintings by the Scottish Colourists, whose work I also like a great deal. I used to like Fergusson the most, but looking on Friday on Friday at the Kelvingrove selection – which I think is relatively weak in terms of Fergusson stuff – I began the think that in some ways Peploe and Cadell were at least his equal and in some ways his superior. On the strength of the Kelvingrove, Fergusson’s work looks less original than theirs and his handling of paint far less subtle and skillful. I’ve never yet been much impressed by Leslie Hunter’s stuff and Friday didn’t change my mind much on that question.
The Glasgow Boys’ paintings astonished me, as they always do, in their perception of light and their rendering of this in paint. On Friday I especially noticed George Henry’s paintings. His A Galloway Landscape is in the far corner of the Scottish Art room. I had mistakenly thought it was in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh when I last saw it, but clearly it must have been in the McLellan gallery at the time. I love this painting, but always wonder how it looked when it was first painted. I wonder if the obscurity of the cattle isn’t the result of the whites becoming dirty and dull – although this hasn’t happened to the clouds – and whether Henry really wanted them to be so murky, although of course the murkiness may well be one of the reasons for the painting’s success now in engaging some viewers. Things sometimes mean more to us when we’ve got to decide for ourselves what they are.
I had intended to go and see the ‘Impressionism and Scotland’ exhibition, which had just opened that day. But I spent too long in the other parts of the gallery it was late afternoon before I got there. I decided to leave it till another day. I bought three postcards instead – one of Henry’s Galloway Landscape, and another of Cadell’s Interior – the orange blind. The third is James Guthrie’s strangely haunting portrait Old Willie – the village worthy.
It was already dusk as I walked back up to Kelvinhall subway station and caught the underground back into the city centre. I wandered through the crowds of shoppers on Buchanan Street and back down to my hotel. Later I came back out and went looking for an Italian restaurant that might serve a good vegetarian meal.
Glasgow is a big city and seems to throng at all times of the day and night. By comparison, Newcastle looks hardly more than a small town. On Halloween Glasgow was full of weird and wonderful characters of all kinds. Of course, we all know that until recently Halloween was a humble folky sort of date on the calendar, but that like many other minor annual occasions it has been hijacked by business looking to make money wherever it can. The colours of this enterprise are orange and black, its sacred vegetable is the pumpkin.
On Friday night in Glasgow there was many a ghoul and ghoostie, some fine Draculas and Frankensteins, many a witch and crone. There were zombies and the undead, droves of unquiet corpses wandering the city with blackened eyes and theatrical blood on their anaemic chops. This is no more than you might expect.
But was there something else going on that night?
Maybe it was just me, but on Halloween in Glasgow it began to seem that nobody was who they seemed to be. The city seemed to be virtually inhabited by people in fancy dress, and I really don’t know yet if this was to do with Halloween or about something else entirely. What I do know, of course, is that on this occasion it was nothing to do with Flinty.
As I was crossing the huge space of the Central Station I noticed there were lots of young girls dressed as bumblebees and angels and fairies. Batman then passed me, arm in arm with Catwoman. When I got outside there was a whole queue of strange characters at the bus stop opposite. Interspersed with the usual vampires and ghouls I spotted Minnie Mouse and Scooby Doo, nurses, French maids, police women, Eskimos, Red Indian braves, Superman, The Grim Reaper, and, to my amusement, an Arab. It was beginning to feel like home.
Around the next corner I encountered my second batman, this time accompanied by a very short and tubby female Robin. Next up was Wonderwoman, and then a male superhero who was clad completely in a banana yellow skinsuit except for black trunks. I lack the knowledge to identify him for you with certainty. I called him Banana Man. He shook my hand firmly and reassured me that the city tonight was safe in his hands. He had a heavy Glaswegian accent. I then encountered Rob Roy, Snow White, a tramp, a Roman centurion, and two ghosts in kilts playing the bagpipes. It was as this point I realised I could now no longer differentiate with any confidence between the real and the make-believe.
On Nelson Mandela Place I came across the three wise men talking to a female Dominatrix and my third Batman of the night. Inexplicably, Mandela himself wasn’t around, but of course the night was still young.
At the restaurant I played safe. I had garlic bread followed by the special for that night, pumpkin ravioli in tomato sauce. I had vanilla ice cream for dessert. Later, when I stepped back outside, I encountered a character who I think was Tintin’s dog, Snowy, who appeared to have had a little too much to drink. He was trying to catch up with a rather lean but stylish scarecrow, inspired, I felt, by the one in Wizard of Oz. As I headed back towards the river I met Robocop, Cinderella, and a black cat, along with the regular tribe of ghosts and hags and girls in leopard skin boots and bikinis.
I made my way back down past the Station towards my hotel. Outside the Solid Rock Café at the bottom of Hope Street there were a lively crowd of truly strange characters, some of them in fancy dress and some of them characters I hadn’t yet seen that night. There was a cool-looking gunslinger dressed all in black and – a particularly rare find, I thought – a Super Mario! In my head I was already working on my “I-Spy Weird People in Glasgow at Halloween” book. Super Mario will score you 25 points. Snowy and Nelson Mandela will each score 15. A normal ghoul or hag will score 2 points, a man in a kilt 5 points, 6 if he’s playing bagpipes.
I crossed the road to the hotel and made for my room. The Scots will know better than I do what to expect of Samhain. But what I’d just experienced seemed to me to be taking guising to a whole other level. If Tristan had been there he’d no doubt have explained the whole things in terms of commodity fetishism, or some such aberration. I put the kettle on. I wondered if I should drink my instant cappuccino by candlelight.
The next day I had a look around the shops and listened to the street entertainers and buskers on Buchanan Street. The world had regained its previous shape. I went to the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art and looked at the show of Jo Spence’s photographs, some of which were those she took of herself while she was dying of breast cancer. It’s a harrowing and somewhat dark exhibition, although ultimately her bravery and creative courage can only be seen as uplifting.
After nightfall I was out again, and for while at about eight or so, stood near Pizza Hut on the corner of Jamaica Street and Argyle Street. I was exploring my thesis that at nights Glasgow is always full of weirdoes and that what I’d seen the previous night wasn’t really a grotesque late Capitalist version of an ancient Pagan festival at all. I quickly spotted Scooby Do and two guys who were dressed a bit like turkeys. Then Batman crossed the road at the traffic lights. This was reassuring.
And then I noticed a stream of young teenage girls trickling out of the Cathouse, which I took to be a nightclub and which is situated below the Station. There were dozens of them, all aged between about twelve – and in some cases less – up to about fifteen, dressed as what I took to be fairies or angels or characters from children’s stories. They teetered from the Cathouse in high heels and stumbled over the road to KFC, often taking their shoes off half way across and walking on in their stocking feet. They wore socks that were knee high or just above the knee, often striped, sometimes white, sometimes with bows at the top. They were all wearing very short skirts, which were often bright pink and full and frilly and looked like tutus. The girls all had bare thighs. Some of them wore tiaras or antennae or red devil’s horns. Quite a few wore white or pink angels wings. It was obvious that their dress encoded a blatant combination of childish innocence and precocious sexuality. They were Alice in Wonderland crossed with Fifi the French Maid. The street was awash with Glaswegian Lolitas of some kind.
Did there bloody mothers know they were all out like this, I wondered. Where the hell were their dads? Was this a one-off dispensation for Halloween, which in Glasgow goes on for several days? As I waited I watched the gauche, self-conscious young girls stumbling in twos and threes across the road and along the path and on past Poundland and Subway towards the east end of the city. Occasionally a stretch Limo would pass and sometimes toot at them. The police passed in a Panda, but they didn’t give them a second look.
I later researched these Halloween Lolitas on Google. It seems that Gothic-Lolita is quite a hot style for young teenage girls at present, and that the style owes some of its popularity to the Japanese harajuka girls and a look promoted by Gwen Stefani. These Glasgow girls display many of the key features of the style. In fact all that was really missing were the parasols. So it isn’t just a Halloween thing. And nor is it just a Glasgow thing. It seems pretty clear that girls like this will be appearing on a street corner near you any day now. It struck me that some of the girls we deal with at the office probably dress this way when they go out. I wondered if this was something we should care about.
When I got back home this afternoon, the house was filled with the sweet smell of onions and pastry. In the hall there were several large boxes of slippers. Christmas is on its way. I went into the kitchen. There were five onion pies on the bench cooling. De Kooning came scampering in to see me. He rubbed his head against my shin.
‘Hey, I didn’t see you in Glasgow the other night, did I?’ I said.
I picked him up and ruffled his fur. He began to purr.
‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘You can help me unpack. I’ve got some new postcards to show you. The Glasgow boys and girls are something else. You just won’t believe the wonders I’ve seen this time.’
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of frogs and flip flops and moral panic
The Widow Middlemiss has an intermittent plague of frogs. On two occasions since the latest flood she has found one in her utility room. She fears there are many more there and sometimes she lies awake at night thinking she’s heard croaking in her house. According to Margaret our elderly neighbour is a ‘quaking wreck’ and fears her house will be overrun by ‘slimy creatures’. Margaret says it’s a disgrace that this can happen to a woman of the Widow’s age in a modern society. Although she left the question open, I don’t think that in saying this she intends to imply that it would be acceptable for younger women or for men to have to endure such a plague, or even that in a bygone age this would have been a reasonable fate. Last week she wrote letters on the Widow’s behalf to the council and Griff asking who would take responsibility for this “sudden, unpleasant and alarming infestation of amphibians”. She hasn’t yet had a reply. I did notice last Sunday, however, that Maureen and the Whelp knocked at the Widow’s door and that she invited them in. God knows now what she’ll make of this manifestation of frogs. Margaret may well have wasted her time writing the letters.
Margaret has been somewhat downcast in recent days. It seems that the sales of slippers haven’t been going as well as they’d hoped.
‘Brenda wonders if we shouldn’t be more up-market,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Or maybe the product’s fine but you’re trying to sell them at the wrong time of the year. Slippers are like mittens, I think – you won’t sell many in the summer but they fly off the shelves when the frost comes. Perhaps you should have a summer product to cover the slipper off-season.’
‘That’s a good point,’ she said. ‘Oddly sensible for you. What should our complementary line be?’
‘What about sandals and beach shoes? You could rebrand yourselves as Slip Slops and Flip Flops.’
‘Sandals, eh?’
‘Or what about swimming gear. You could become Slippers and Flippers. Brenda would be the flippers, of course.’
Margaret gave me a raised eyebrows look. ‘This is a serious business to us,’ she said. ‘Not everything in life is a joke, you know.’
I nodded. She is probably right. But I wonder if there is anything in life that doesn’t have the potential to be a joke. I suspected this wasn’t a debate Margaret was up for.
‘How are your teeth?’ I asked.
‘They’re fine. Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondering,’ I said.
Both Captain Hook and The Man With No Name made a return appearance this week, a week marked by the absence of any new characters. The Arab was seen on a handful of occasions, notably with Elephant Carmichael in the white Mercedes at Coulson Park filling station. They put in thirty pounds of unleaded and bought two packets of Walkers ready salted, a pack of Tic Tacs and a copy of the Daily Star. From there they drove up Alexandra Road and into the estate. Later in the week the Arab was seen alone parked at the Queen Elizabeth Park feeding the swans.
We have had several phone calls this week complaining about children in pillow cases terrorising people and launching paper aircraft at their windows. One woman complained that her house had been “besieged by a horde of rampaging Flinties”, as they’re now known. Another caller said her daughter was afraid to leave the house because of them. It seems Flinties have been spotted further afield too, in places like Ellington and Stakeford.
While there is no doubt that there is a loosely constituted flock of Flinties around Mandy’s estate and a bit of a summer craze going on down there, there is a consensus in the team that the sightings elsewhere are probably largely apocryphal at present. But they are generating an urban myth. The population have heard about them and imagine they are prowling beneath every window. They aren’t, of course, and they probably never will be. But it makes you a part of a community to see the same devil that others see.
On Thursday night I drove along to my dad’s to give him a book about early British jazz that I’d ordered for him from Amazon. We sat for a while talking and he showed me a video tape of some clips from Fred Astaire films. I drove the long way home, up the Avenue through Seaton Delaval. I turned on the radio and flicked through the stations. I came across Alan Robson’s Night Owls phone-in programme on Metro Radio just as he was beginning to talk to Hettie from Bomarsund.
‘On the line now we have Hettie from Bomarsund,’ he said. ‘ Good evening, Hettie. What do you want to tell us about tonight?’
‘Hello, Alan, it’s Hettie from Bomarsund. I’m ringing you about the Flinties, Alan. Have you heard of them?’
‘No, Hettie, I haven’t. What are they, a new fashion item?’
‘No, Alan, they’re not. What they are is these kids who wear white pillow cases and you can’t see their faces and they go around in gangs and throw paper aeroplanes at old people’s windows. They’re scary, Alan. They’re mini-delinquents.’
‘It sounds very worrying, Hettie. Has this happened to you?’
‘It happened to my sister in law, Alan. On Tuesday morning when she got up she found all these white paper aeroplanes beneath her kitchen window. She said they were like crumpled pterodactyls. She said the Flinties could just as easily have murdered her in her bed that night.’
‘So have they actually harmed anyone yet, Hettie?’
‘I don’t think so, Alan, no. Not that I know of. But they do scare people. I think they should all be put on those Asbo’s, don’t you?’
‘Well, it’s a difficult one, isn’t it, Hettie? I mean, are you sure they’re not just kids having a lark? Have you reported them to the police?’
‘No, I haven’t. What’s the point, they wouldn’t do anything.’
‘Listen, thanks for ringing, Hettie. I wonder if anyone else out there has experience of these Flinties. If you have we’d love to hear from you. I’ll be back in just a bit, after this.’
Mama Mia by Abba came on, followed by an advertisement for Blockbuster Videos. Alan Robson returned and said that the next caller on the line was John from Westerhope. John turned out to be something of a hawk on this issue.
‘I’m ringing about these so-called Flinties, Alan,’ he said. ‘With all due respect, Alan, I think it would be dangerously complacent to assume that they were nothing more than kids messing around in pillow cases. That might be exactly what they want us to believe!’
‘Good point, John. So what do you think might be going on out there?’
‘I’d like to see their faces, Alan, wouldn’t you? You can’t trust people who won’t show you their faces. Who are these people, Alan? Do they have an ideology or a manifesto? What are their motives, Alan, that’s what I’d like to know.’
‘So you don’t think they’re just local children inside those pillow cases, John?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Alan. None of us know. That’s the point. That’s what makes it so scary. You’ve got to admit there’s something sick about throwing paper aeroplanes at people’s windows. Who’s controlling these Flinties, Alan? That’s what I’d like to know, who’s the mastermind behind all this? Don’t you think we should know that, Alan?’
‘So, John, have they been to your house too?’
‘No, Alan, not yet. But I’ve heard about them and they sound very sinister to me.’
‘Well, night owls, what do you think? Is John from Westerhope right, are the Flinties the sign of a sick society or an enemy that has infiltrated us? Or is Hettie from Bomarsund right and are they just gangs of bored kids making mischief during the summer holidays? Would a good dose of Asbo’s sort them out? And what about their parents in all this – don’t they have any responsibility for their children’s behaviour? Give us a ring and tell us what you think.’
Radio Gaga by Queen came on. Alan Robson appears to have a bit of a liking for corny, synthetic soft rock from the eighties. I swung around the roundabout at Laverock Hall Farm and headed down the hill through the corridor of orange lights towards the town. The record ended as I was entering Newsham.
‘Right now on line two we’ve got one of our regulars, Cheryl from Ashington,’ Alan said. ‘Good evening, Cheryl. Nice to hear from you again. What is it you want to talk to us about tonight?’
‘I’ve seen the Flinties, Alan, and I think John is right, there is something strange going on in our society. The Arabs are taking over. And that’s not all, Alan. I’ve seen Robin Hood around here three times and I’ve reported it to the authorities and they simply aren’t interested. Doesn’t that seem very strange to you, Alan, that the authorities aren’t interested in it?’
‘Robin Hood in Ashington – well, that does sound a bit strange, Cheryl, I agree with you there. You’re sure it was him, are you?’
‘Quite sure, Alan. I was no more than twenty feet away from him. I’d know him anywhere. It was definitely Robin Hood, Alan, I’d swear on me mother’s life it was.’
Cheryl sounded more than a little drunk. I turned off the radio and drove home in silence. I went into the house and picked up De Kooning.
‘Do you think we should revise our opinion of Bukowski?’ I asked him.
He began to purr and rubbed his head against my cheek.
‘No?’ I said. ‘Or we need to think about it? Yes, you’re probably right. What about Queen, then?’
He began to squirm. I carried him to the kitchen and put him down. I gave him a plate of fresh prawns and sat down in the conservatory with my book on Scottish art. For a while I gazed at the reproduction of George Henry’s important 1889 painting A Galloway Landscape. I’ve seen it in the flesh in Glasgow and it’s stunning, so alive and so completely tangible. Margaret was already in bed. I noticed there was a large unopened cardboard box in the hall. It was yet another consignment of slippers. De Kooning finished his prawns and came and jumped up beside me.
‘You really need to see this painting,’ I said to him. ‘It’s so beautiful.’
Yesterday it rained on and off for most of the day. I drove up to Simonside and walked up through the forest, over to Bob Pyle’s Studdie and up on to the crag. I followed the newly slabbed path across to Old Stell Crag and on over it, east to Dove Crag. The heather is blooming now like a vast purple ocean, its scent so heady and wild. I wandered across the top almost alone thinking how much I’d missed the sense of space and freedom you get in places like this. I began to think about Scotland. I’m going there for a week soon to walk the mountains again. I was thinking how much I love that.
After I descended to the trees I followed one of the old hollow ways down hill through the forest and eventually picked up a narrow, overgrown trail through the bracken – which is now almost as tall as me – and the nettles. My legs inevitably got stung in several places. When I got to the car I ate a few wild raspberries from the bushes nearby. They were soft and sweet.
This morning Maureen and the Whelp called at the Widow’s again. She invited them in. God works in mysterious ways, and on this occasion it appears that his secret agents were slimy creatures that croak. Margaret was getting ready to go off to Brenda’s for what she called a pow-wow, which is the highest level meeting that can be convened in the Slipper Shop partnership and indicative of the scale of the crisis they are now facing. I imagine that Gordon too is having his own equivalent of pow-wows, even though he strolls around Suffolk apparently without a care in the world.
I went for a walk through the town, pondering the street names. In Cowpen Quay there are a whole raft of dead politicians commemorated by street names: Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, Balfour, Goschen. How many of the people who live in these houses have any idea of who these people were or what they stood for? I had to google Goschen to find out that he was a nineteenth century Liberal who became a Conservative. Balfour was a mystery to me too. We don’t have a Thatcher Street or a Blair Road in town, and we’re not likely to get one. Nowadays it’s more fashionable to choose safe marketing bets which have connotations of status or rural affluence or reassuring associations with nature. I walked through South Beach and found sweetbriars and brambles there, pastures and aspens, Balmoral and Sandringham, and a whole flock of seabirds and waders. If things keep going the way they are it may not be long before we have to google those things too, of course.
When I got home I noticed some old fence panels had joined the three tyres in Hugo’s front garden. De Kooning and I went out into the back garden. We noticed Hugo’s platform clock has stopped. It now permanently reads five to twelve. I will suggest to him that he consults Brenda about the suitability of this particular configuration. The moose, heron and three ducks have been joined by a large red owl and, as far as I can tell, the fish are all alive and well.
I glanced at the Citadel and took De Kooning back inside. There was a large pan of chopped onions on the cooker. I lifted it to one side and turned the oven on. I made myself a tomato and garlic pizza and sat in the conservatory reading The Observer and listening to Hugo banging steadily on the Alligator’s tail. I wondered if in Southwold Gordon too was having a quiet evening reading the Sunday papers. For a moment I saw him there with a chalk in his hand scratching a word across the curved surface of his beloved time bomb. And in an instant I saw the word that he was writing and I saw that the word was ‘Miliband’.
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yammering 