Art – EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

An Excuse, A Blue Square and a Story

Art Stories at Reading Museum has been, after an admittedly bumpy start, a roaring success. A collaboration between that big red-brick building facing off against Queen Victoria on Market Place, artists like Cornelia Parker and Gerald Scarfe and local creative types, the exhibition has shown how visual and literary disciplines can interact, inform and enhance each other. The public have thoroughly embraced the experience, writing their own responses to the paintings, sculpture, textiles and photography on display.

Time, Shepherd’s Pie and more excuses.

This week I’m going to be a bit looser, a bit more personal in my approach to the newsletter. For one thing, I’ve been attempting a social life, so not had much time to trawl for links. For another–well, it’s good to mix things up sometimes. Grab a cuppa and a slice of cake and let me tell you about my week.

Twenty Good Things About The ‘Ding

Over the August Bank Holiday in 2004, TLC and I packed up everything we’d somehow squeezed into a little end-terrace Victorian two-bed house in East London, and lit out for the sticks. The decision to move was partly to do with work—C’s job was relocating out of London and we needed to find a place within shooting distance of the Oxfordshire science zone near Harwell.

The main reason? We were done with the Big Smoke. Too crowded, too noisy, too dirty too—much. We needed a reset. It was time to go west, where the air is clean. We needed to breathe again.

So we looked at a map, drew some lines and circles, figured out the perfect midpoint between where C and I needed to be for work.

Slough.

We reconfigured.

A bit more research and we settled on a big town with a big heart twenty miles west of Betjemen’s bete noire, straddling a river and a canal. A couple of visits and one very fortuitous twist of real-estate fate led, six months after we started looking, to a bulging-at-the-seams Nissan Micra pulling away from Woodville Road in Walthamstow for the very last time, as R.E.M’s Leaving New York synchronistically rolled up on the car radio.

That was twenty years ago, and we’ve never looked back. Reading is our home now, in a way London somehow never was. We have built a life for ourselves here, and although it doesn’t have all the facilities that a big city can offer, Dingtown has a big double handful of gems which give it a bit of a hometown advantage. In honour of two decades in a town called Ding, here are twenty reasons we like it so much.

Dig in. Here we go.

A Week in the Weird

The two handles either side of the great upturned ale-jug of our island nation, Wales and East Anglia, are places which wear key elements of our character loudly and proudly—an obsession and familiarity with magic, the afterlife and demonic entities, permeable borders (including those between the living and the dead) and an intense dislike of authority. In this TED talk I will focus on the eastern lobe of our big-eared country. It’s familiar territory for me as an Essex boy who regularly holidayed up here as a boy, More helpfully, TLC and I’ve just spent a week in Suffolk, in a deconsecrated chapel a short drive from the coast.

In Here Life Is Beautiful

‘Come and have a dance.’

Your response to that demand (and it is a demand, not a question or request) depends entirely on who says it. From your beloved? No option but to comply. It’s likely one of Your Songs has hit the decks. You need to throw shapes with them, right now.

If a drunken relative puts out a hand, you have more swerve room. It’s within your rights to fake the flare-up of an old sports injury or the development of a new twinge—say from the strenuous shape-pulling you’ve just thrown with your beloved—as an excuse to cry off. It’s also a good cue to make for the bar and grab a glass of something to ease the imaginary pain.

Exceptions to the rule? If your mum or gran make the demand, get over yourself and get back on deck. It’s the least you can do after what you put them through as a child.

If a large sweaty bloke in pancake makeup and a corset who you’ve never met before invites you up, well, what do you do? More specifically, what did I do when it happened to me last week?

Up On Irish Row

The track up the valley is not for the faint-hearted—or if you have a fancy car. It’s a set of inclines which quickly hike in gradient, a loose gravelly surface riddled with potholes and larger rocks. As you progress steep, fern-cloaked limestone walls give way to steep drops with rushing waterfalls seething twenty feet below. Your tentative progress will be watched and judged by Herdwick sheep, unblinking and endlessly curious. Wheel-spin is inevitable. You will almost certainly have to slow to a crawl at some point for walkers.

Just at the point when the terrain starts to level, and a clear path comes into view, you realise the map is pointing you uphill again, to an even narrower and rockier track. ‘This can’t be right,’ you say. ‘We must have gone wrong.’ Visions of the car stuck in a ditch and the prospect of a night in the wilds dance through your head. But you find the nerve and the lowest gear you have, grip the steering wheel a little tighter and take the right.

Readi To Go: Notes On Readipop 2022

After two years away for some reason, Readipop returned to Christchurch Meadows for three days of art, love and music. It was delightful and strange to be back. Can we remember how to festival?

The Story Of Sentience

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. There’s this guy who works with computers, a software developer. As part of his duties, he has to interrogate the equipment, a quality control pass to make sure the program is working within normal parameters. He discovers, or realises, or believes, his particular piece of software is not only over-performing—it has developed a soul.

The Cut Season 2 Episode 22

Sumer is ycumin in, according to the old song. Really? We see little evidence of the change in sessions as yet. If anything, things seem to be going backwards. Still, all this rain is good for the garden, if not for our mood. We hold out hope for a sunny long weekend cos boy howdy do we need to get some mowing done.

This week, impractical devices, violent deaths and a card trick that still stumps all the experts.

Now is the bank holiday. The garden is the place. This is The Cut.

The Cut Season 2 Episode 21

It fell to Liam Gallagher to sum up the mood of the British public in one succinct tweet.

PUB
— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) May 17, 2021

Exactly. Have you been in-out yet (as opposed to out-out—frankly we find it hard to enjoy a beer while shivering under canvas)? How was it? A bit odd and creepy or a shining, joyous moment pointing the way to a new and brighter future? At the time of writing we have yet to indulge, although a lunchtime session is in the mix. It could well get emotional.

This week, we get a bit noir-y, take a look at a very literal Cold War and ponder the mechanics and logistics behind a one-shot movie.

Pub is the place. Opening time it is. This is The Cut.