Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Fact of the Day...



Tits-out model, entrepreneur and feminist icon to gullible teens Katie Price (or Jordan as she used to be known) is currently promoting her 42nd book. 

I find that astonishing because a crueler person may suggest it is 41 more books than she's actually read and 42 more books than she's actually written. The latter, of course, may well be true.

Is it more depressing that:
a) She has achieved this? or b) There is clearly a market for this?

I don't know. Should I weep over this or secretly admire her chutzpah?

Monday, October 27, 2014

Holiday: Part III…


St Ives had some great stuff and the highlights for me were:
i) The Leach Pottery, which housed the original workshops where the father of the British pottery movement, Bernard Leach, produced work and essentially founded a movement linking British arts and crafts to the millennia-old Japanese pottery industry.
ii) The Hepworth Museum and Studio (above), where the Wakefield-born sculptor worked in St Ives, and the attached and quite intimate gardens, which displayed quite a lot of her work.
iii) The beaches, the scenery and the coastal walks. Quite lovely.
iv) The Tate, which was much less impressive than either of its London counterparts but still quite inspiring in a much more small-scale and provincial way.
V) A seal. I saw one of these quite close up swimming among the rocks. It was totally unexpected and really wonderful. This one small but amazing thing was probably my highlight of the entire holiday.

We also ventured into Penzance to visit Penlee House, which is another art gallery with an attached museum and gardens. The exhibition on here featured a painter called Leonard Fuller, who was one of the fathers of the St Ives art community. He was a portrait painter trained at the Royal Academy, who saw action in World War One, then came to St Ives and set up an art school with his wife and a former Army colleague.

Hugely influential in the local area, he then broke away from the more traditional school he set up to form a school more allied with modernisn, which included Barbara Hepworth among its members. Fuller lived into the 1970s and continued to contribute to both schools and was awarded a major award for his contribution to the arts alongside Hepworth.

Penzance itself was a bit grim, although most holiday places probably look a bit shit out of season and in the rain. The exhibition at the Penlee, though, was well worth the visit.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Holiday: Part II…


Me and the Missus are in St Ives for a few days. As per usual when travelling with the Missus via Reading, we have experienced a two-hour delay and a six-hour journey is now taking eight hours.

On the plus side, as we travel through Cornwall, it is kicking-out time at school and lots of quite posh children are getting on and off the train with musical instruments.

I turn to the Missus and comment: ‘We’re surrounded by musical youth and we are passing the Duchy on the left-hand side. If only we had a song to remember the occasion…’

She sighs and gives me a look that is part-pity and part-despair. 

I feel guilty and immediately apologise.
‘I’m sorry. You could have married a funnier or a cleverer one. You must feel cheated…’

She smiles, before replying: ‘I’m not worried about funny or clever. I would have liked richer, though.’ Ouch!

Monday, October 20, 2014

Holiday: Part I...


Me and the Missus haven't had a proper holiday all year so we're taking a few days off and heading to St Ives for some chilling-out-innit time. 

And I've adapted a famous nursery rhyme especially for the occasion:
'As I was going to St Ives,
I met a man with seven wives:
He was a polygamist.'

I never said it was sophisticated.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

UKIP...

UKIP have their first proper MP. This means British politics is in quite a bad state, even though I can only assume it's a protest vote.

But protest vote or not, it genuinely worries me that a majority of voters can genuinely think that a little Englander from a party of racists and homophobes is a candidate worthy of support.

At times, people and their stupidity makes me despair.