Cambridge Folk Festival

For some reason the organisers thought it would be a good idea to assign one day (yesterday) to female performers. It was so annoying. All the voices were high and harmonising. We were quite disappointed with the line up. We enjoyed the day anyway. When I go to the Cambridge Folk Fest I think - "Here are my people". They are getting to be rather elderly - were they always?  those who look quite relaxed and into the liberal arts. People who like camping and reading and music. Men in shorts and T-shirts and leather hats.

I saw someone I used to know, who now has a little boy, a lovely bright-looking little boy. How strange to see someone when you never expected to! and feel ashamed and embarrassed, and what a sad business to have that history that makes you feel ashamed of yourself, like me. But it is all in the past now. And on the top deck of the bus, too, there he was. How very strange. It was always like that, with he and I.

Sandham Memorial Chapel: paintings by Stanley Spencer

Sandham Memorial Chapel. Although I am a big Stanley Spencer fan I haven’t seen this before. It is a long way to drive and quite small but the pictures are full of love. They must have been Spencer’s way of coping with his memories of WWI. Although it is ostensibly a memorial to a chap called Sandham who died of disease after fighting in the Macedonian campaign, it doesn't show Sandham's experiences as Spencer could really show only his own memories: he had been a medical orderly in the UK (in Beaufort hospital near Bristol) and then? in Macedonia.

In this picture the orderlies are washing the wooden lockers (open shelves) in the baths and Spencer shows himself finding a moment of peace and calm between the baths, which were magenta in colour, and he liked them.

 He shows views of orderlies making beds, fetching tea urns, sorting the laundry, tending to frostbitten feet – and he shows the soldiers resting on the ground, getting water from a stream and filling their bottles, putting up tents, shaving under mosquito nets. And this being Spencer, there’s also a big picture of the Resurrection of the Soldiers. The soldiers get up and see their plain white crosses and some of them hand them back to Jesus, some just heap them up, the mules (that did all the heavy work) come back to life too, and the soldiers start to roll up their puttees (canvas bandages around their lower legs). For some people, the Great War destroyed their faith (how could a good God allow it to happen?) and for Spencer it was the other way (God must have more in store for us than this mess!)

The pictures of his hospital orderly experiences seem the most calming and organized. He had tried to see his menial daily tasks as a devotion to God and his faith was such that he remembered the time as very spiritual, mentioning “the progress of my soul” in these surroundings. It was very hard work and the shifts were long, between 10 and 14 hours, and he was at the hospital (in Bristol) for three years and was not able to paint in all that time. Obviously, he was unhappy, frustrated and lonely, but he was helped by his religious desire to please God by performing these menial tasks with love.  With Spencer the compositions are very complicated. Individual figures are simplified into curves and straight lines, but the design as a whole is difficult to see, with the eye being led all about the picture.

Stanley Spencer: Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there was no war, the feeling of that corridor, the sergeant-major and his dog - anything so long as it gave me the feeling and the circumstance gave me! If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn't know there is a war on, I could do it. I envied him the mental agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in the corridor now. And I will paint it, with all the conviction I feel now, in a belief in peace being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that whether war is on or not is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul.

This picture is called Ablutions. It shows the patients washing themselves and in the middle there's an orderly (prob a self-portrait), with an apron that ties up at the back, painting a man's wounds with iodine. It looks a little like a scene from Christ's life in renaissance painting - the man with the towel could be wearing a toga. The man at the back is pulling up his braces - something most men today have never done. 

In his Beaufort days Stanley had not yet formulated his ideas on the meaning of what he came to know as love, nor were the inspiring mental transformations he later experienced possible in his circumstances then. His current inability to master the significance of the atmospheres he was meeting or to discern the connections in them so vital to his creativity not only alarmed him but turned eventually into a source of desperation for him.
He was so disconnected that he became convinced in later life that the war had damaged beyond repair the cherished pre-war Cookham-feelings which had sourced the pristine glory of his early work. 

the above quotation is from a well-researched website with plenty of interesting thoughts about Stanley Spencer.

In this picture Spencer is on the right front, scraping dead skin off the feet of the man who is suffering from frostbitten feet. Another orderly has round slop pails over his shoulders making him look a little like an angel. There are eggs in nests all over the wallpaper, and this is probably something Spencer remembered as he liked to be precise about details.It is unlikely to be a conscious allusion to sex as this was something Spencer tried not to think about. There is a rare female presence in this picture: the sister right at the back through the doorway.

Stanley Spencer: I would like to explain what was at the back of my mind when I began to want to do these pictures. Well, when I first enlisted I began to feel I was dying of starvation, spiritual starvation, and this feeling intensified my desire for spiritual life, and then suddenly I began to see and catch hold of little particles of this life in the scrubbing of a floor or the making of a bed; and so everything I did meant a spiritual revelation to me. Everything at the hospital became a key to my conception of spiritual life, and so it came about at last that tea urns, bathrooms, beds etc all became symbols of my spiritual thoughts, things sacred to me by association.

when I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.

Stan's collection, Adaptation, Gran Torino

My son collects films - DVDs and Blu-ray. He knows that he doesn't need to do this; he knows that soon nobody will need a hard copy because they can just stream them, but he wants to own the artifacts that he likes the most, and these things are films.

Adaptation is a study in absurdity in that it stops being an examination of how hard it is to create art and becomes a study in how easy it is to undermine a high purpose by adopting a formula, and it is very funny. Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep play their roles brilliantly, and as for Chris Cooper, you don't know he's acting. I think it should have won a screenwriting Oscar for being original and clever, but having said that, having the writer (Charlie Kaufman) up there talking to himself is not new. Alan Bennett has also done it. He wrote about writing about a tricky subject in "The Lady in the Van", and dramatised his arguments with himself, presumably he had the joy of casting someone who could imitate himself. In this film you have a writer who's writing about another writer's account of her interactions and feelings with a rough diamond orchid stealer. It sounds crazy and in the end it is. But when the writer has got stuck in a hole, his twin brother Donald (who doesn't exist) is there with his worldly advice and by using all the non -respectable schlocky writing tricks in the book, he pulls it all together.

I can't tell you how not interested I am in cars. I had no idea that a Gran Torino is a car. But I gave ten minutes to a film of that name and then I had to watch the whole thing. It's great - a beautifully constructed film with a strong story. The car has practically nothing to do with it - it's a film about poverty of opportunity in the immigrant community, gang culture, and an angry old boy who doesn't give a shit, and then learns to give a shit. It says on the box it's a must-see, and I do agree, for a change. Clint Eastwood; what a guy.

Postscript: The Donald Kaufman character says something wonderful about love. He loved a girl and she laughed at him behind his back. He said he knew she laughed but he loved her and she couldn't take that away from him. Charlie says "but she thought you were pathetic." Donald says "That was her business. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago."

That's for all of us who loved in vain, someone who laughed at us.

The L-shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks

Published in 1960. But really, it's a classic. The writing is strong and tough and pulls you in to the grimy, parochial post-war world that is always being beautifully televised now - The Hour comes to mind.

The protagonist is a pregnant, confused, 27-year-old, who goes on an emotional and physical adventure that's just as exciting as taking a camel to Timbuktu, but it all happens in the backstreets of Fulham. She starts out as a prejudiced and narrow suburban girl who doesn't realise how much she's engaged in fighting with Daddy, and she finds her feet and becomes someone else... She learns she's not so great and that those people she feels superior to are the best people to know when you're in a mess. It's an every day miracle, like a bulb coming up and producing a tulip, studied carefully. It's a book to save a life. I shall press it upon my daughter.

...and I went and waited in the hall [of the hospital] , which was ablaze with the Matisse colours of Christmas decorations. Two enormous red paper bells hung from the centre of the ceiling, and from these radiated countless paper-chain ellipses dripping with silver icicles. It was all overdone, like the decorations in the ward, but even while I was having a superior little mental scoff, they were making me feel obscurely uneasy and near to tears....Why, of all times of the year, did it have to be Christmas? It wasn't just a thing you could ignore, and being alone at it was to combine the worst elements of being alone at any other time...

London fogs; writers used to get a lot of mileage out of these: they don't happen any more.

the fog seemed to close in and the bus was forced to nose its way cautiously along in first gear. The journey went on and on - before long we were travelling at a walking pace, and I and the few other passengers were anxiously clearing the condensation from the windows and peering into the murk in an effort to see where we were. Passing a street-light came to seem quite an event; one watched their brave little sulphurous smudges receding with a feeling akin to despair, as if we might never find another.

Marriage is a bag which can be stretched in many ways without breaking

One thing that was very admirable about the Bloomsbury group was their determination to cast aside Victorian hypocrisy and be open about their relationships, rather than covert. Perhaps the bravest was Vanessa Bell. She loved Duncan Grant, who was homosexual, so she left her husband and went to live with him and managed to have a child with him; over the years making space for the more passionate relationships he had with a succession of men. She wanted to love honestly and passionately and knew there was no room for a locked-in, watertight commitment. It wasn't an easy or self-indulgent way of life because sharing is hard and demanding, but love survived even though lovers came and went.

I know a woman who was in a very long-standing relationship with a married man and had his child, and he visited and provided for the child. Now there was a wife, and she knew about this, but the marriage survived.  I knew another woman who made the same choice, to have a child with a man she loved, although he stayed with his wife and visited his number 2 family only occasionally. If you read any family story there is very often some instance of illegitimate children and the father having two families. Very interesting. So the advice columns tell you what a healthy relationship in a healthy marriage is, but there are plenty that survive infidelity and, really, polygamy, without collapsing, and in a way, isn't that worth celebrating too?

Women sometimes have 2 partners at once, although this is more hidden, to save the feelings of one of the men. 

One film that made an impression on me is called Pleasantville, with Toby Maguire. It’s a film about an American telly programme where the citizens of 1950s Pleasantville live idealised lives in black and white. Everything is perfect in Pleasantville, orderly and neighbourly, but grey. But when passion comes along the citizens change into pink-coloured people. The mother of the perfect TV family is deeply ashamed that she has turned coloured because of her secret passion for the artistic man who owns the town Diner . Her son (Toby Maguire) helps her to cover her face in grey make up until she looks “normal” again. But the Diner man shows her a painting that makes her cry, and because of the tears he sees that her face is pink under the make-up, and she turns her face away in shame. But he says “That’s beautiful” and he helps her to take all the make up off again. He celebrates her by painting her in lovely bright pinks and blues and making love, and of course he turns coloured himself.

Many aspects of life change in Pleasantville; there is violence because the people are afraid of the fact that people can change. And the message of the film seems to be that life is not nice or tidy and it’s certainly not perfect, but it is dangerous and difficult and beautiful, and we have to deal with that.

In the film the 'mum' character leaves her dull husband because she loves the other man. But the husband  is heart-broken, because he loves her very much in his own way, and she too loves him in a way. So the three of them sit down together and try to work something out. Maybe they can find a way to share the perfect wife. After all, laws and traditions only work as far as they work. Sometimes we need to find a more imaginative solution, and what is really interesting is that people seem to have done so, perhaps always, in their underhand, ad hoc way, although I really know back as far as Edwardian England, and what went on then was truly revolutionary.

post script: Vanessa Bell did not tell her daughter that her father was Duncan Grant, allowing her to believe that she was Clive Bell's child until she was 18, which was, of course, a mistake. Honesty has to go all the way, and must start with the children.