The Cave Colour Supplement

It was Anne the Gumrat, in Geneva, who drew my attention to the CityDailyPhoto site, and inspired by this I’ve set up a supplementary blog as a companion to this on, devoted to painting, through a daily photograph, a portrait of Barrow.

In honour of the esteemed local delicacy of meat and potato pie, mushy peas and gravy, it’s called Pie ‘n’ Mushies.

Enjoy!

Rambles with Rosie: Whinlatter Pass to Buttermere, the long way!

It wasn’t a very promising morning, chilly with a brisk wind eben in Barrow. Mind you, 8.30 was really 7.30, according to my body and that’s an obscene hour for a Sunday. So I was resigned to the C walk. Actually I’m getting to enjoy the company on C walks. Anyway today, if we didn’t do all that much vertical ascent we did do a significantly longer horizontal walk than the A and B teams, who started in the Portinscale/Braithwaite area and took direct if severe routes to Buttermere via high fells still bearing pockets of snow on their tops, and at 10.30 draped ominously in cloud.

We, on the other hand, started from the top of the Whinlatter Pass and made first for the Kirkstile Inn, in Loweswater village, via the Vale of Lorton, a tranquil and comparatively little-visited valley where the Lake District gently decays towards the old mining communities of West Cumberland and thence to the sea. Which I find unbearably sad because I don’t want the Lake District to peter out into pastoral greenery, however beautiful. I WANT THE WHOLE DAMNED COUNTRY TO BE LIKE IT!

That took us until lunchtime (a splendid opportunity for a snifter of Grasmoor Dark Ale, brewed on the premises). There’s something about walkers and climbers – you can’t get a decent draught beer in Barrow but the Lakes is swimming in the stuff, with a handy pub everywhere you look which is welcoming, old-fashioned and mercifully free of pool tables, wide-screen TV, and all the other tat that blights the twenty-first century pub. And many of them – this one, the Black Bull at Coniston, the Drunken Duck near Ambleside, the Wasdale Head Hotel and others brewing beer on the premises. Thirty years ago there were only three pubs doing that in the whole country.

Anyway, we hadn’t even started the walk proper, but now the weather had turned glorious. From Loweswater we climbed an old track skirting Mellbreak, a fearsomly steep climb on the south shore of Crummock Water, and round the back into Mosedale. The views were splendid, the ground boggy underfoot and the becks buoyant with the joys of spring. Spring – ha! There might have been some snow on the high tops but most of last week’s had melted and was filling the becks and sending them dancing friskily down the slopes and filling the boiggy bits making the becks hard to cross and the bogs very squelchy indeed. But at least it’s clean water. We passed the lonely holly tree in Mosedale – so isolated in this treeless wilderness that it’s even marked on the OS map – and so round the back of Mellbreak and down again to Crummock Water via Scale Beck. Yes, Crummock Water, the first real encounter with a lake in four outings with the Ramblers in the, er, Lake District. And get it right – local lad-made-good Willie Wordsworth rhymed ‘water’ with ‘matter’ and that’s how it should be. Mind you, Willie did write an awful lot of dross, IMHO! Give me S T Coleridge every time if we must have Lake Poets.

Where was I? Oh yes. More boggy ground above Crummock Water leads us to a sheep drove road leading into Buttermere village (which is on Crummock Water, not Buttermere, although one day they may be one lake again as they once were) to the Fish pub, which we eschew as being much too chichi for walking boots, to the Bridge Hotel, which serves a very palatable Buttermere Bitter, brewed not in-house but in the nearby (as the crow flies, not otherwise) village of Hawkshead. There we sat, awaiting the A and B teams who, unbeknown to us, were already on the bus waiting for us.

That felt like a real ramble, if not a true fellwalk, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Oh, and I had hoped to see a red squirrel or two, as this particular area is one of their last redoubts in England, but I didn’t. On the other hand, they do seem to be little buggers for tearing round the local twisty lanes…

Not many photos this week I’m afraid. I have them hear waiting but my Flickr account has lapsed, I can’t afford to renew it at the moment, and my bandwidge allowance for March has been used up.

Film Diary: Solaris (Солярис) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

This is a rum old thing: as big and sprawling and ramshackle as only a Russian film, and especially one from the days of communism, could be. Not that anything much shorter would have done justice to the big sprawling themes, or to the snse of brooding insanity haunting the survivors of the kind of Heath Robinson space station you might just expect the Soviet Union to put into orbit around a planet that seems to have a sentient intelligence all of its own, and is probing the minds of the cosmonauts to the point of dementure by sending them three-dimentional hallucinations drawn from their own memories.

Kris the psychologist is sent to the station, clad only in a grubby string vest, to find out what is going on, only to be drawn into the game himself when his ten-years-dead wife Hari appears in his bunk. Trying to blast her off into space doesn’t help, she just comes straight back. Just to make it worse, the apparition starts to get more and more human, and then things get seriously weird.

At nearly three hours, with not an awful lot going on, this might seem a bit of a grim prospect, but this is more psychological thriller than space opera and the tension is maintained very well. There’s nothing glamorous about it, which is refreshing in a way. The space station looks like my bedroom after a bad day and everybody looks so terribly Russian. In places it ought to be sexy and doubtless a Russian might find it so, bit like Anna Karenina it somehow manages to bypass sexiness whatever its merits.

An evening well filled then, but I have just one gripe about the DVD – or rather DVDs because it comes on two and I’ve had to wait for both to be here together. I did try to get it to play with original Russian dialogue with English subtitles, but somehow it’s all been bodged. Dialogue was mostly dubbed into English that sounded silly, but now and then it would lapse into Russian. I felt much more comfortable when it was in Russian – I’m not strong enough in the language to follow it wthout subtitles, but I hate dubbing and at least when the dialogue was Russian the actors looked and sounded a lot more natural.

Pies

On a sudden whim to be the Sweeney & Todd of the North West, I made a batch of pies today. Chicken, ginger and spring onion, which isn’t as far as I know, a Sweeney & Todd line. I made it up. I ate one for my tea and it was delicious. Even if they do look a bit lumpy and inelegant – well, they take after their maker!

A Priceless Radio Moment

BBC continuity announcer Charlotte Green is normally a consummate professional with an exceptionally mellifluous voice, but she has on occasions fallen over on the job. She did it again this morning. She does it so beautifully too.

Footnote: in North Carolina you can join the Charlotte Green Party, although I don’t think this has anything to do with the lady in question, somehow.

A Star is Born. Maybe.

My young friend Louisa, from Pennsylvania, wants to be a singer. She has a gorgeous voice. Well, I think so anyway, she reminds me a bit of the late Sandy Denny, and that can’t be bad, can it? See if you agree. For some reason (because I’ve never frequented such places much) I think she’d go down a storm on the UK folk club circuit.

Let’s hear a big round of applause for Louisa. She has heaps of talent in all kinds of spheres, but not anything like enough self-confidence. Tell her – you know you want to!

Reading List: Silence of the Grave (Grafarþögn) by Arnaldur Indriđason

Even in Iceland, where a man can set off into the wilderness and never return, and nobody asks too many questions, the past has a habit of coming back to haunt the present. And so, when new housing is being built to satisfy a booming and ravenous Reykjavik, a skeletal hand is uncovered, reaching out in desperation.

I found this slow going at first, but eventually the intertwined stories wrapped themselves around me and I was hooked. The central story was gripping, and even if the outcome was predictable there was some gratification to be found in a denouement as bleak and yet fiery at the country itself. It’s particularly satisfying to read about a country so very different from those generally found in English language fiction, and I’ll be looking for more of this author’s work.

This book won the CWA Gold Dagger. Talent not writing in English doesn’t get much exposure in British bookshops, which is shameful. Awards like the Gold Dagger play an important part in getting exposure for a wonderful writer who would otherwise go unnoticed. Or they did: this was the last such book to win the Gold Dagger before the sponsors decreed that the award was to be for work written originally in English. This kind of insularity is, frankly, a disgrace.

Meme time

From elhamisabel the meme queen. This looks more interesting than it looks, if that makes sense!

If I were a month I would be: April
If I were a day of the week I would be: Friday
If I were a time of day I would be: 3am
If I were a planet I would be: Saturn
If I were a animal I would be: a meerkat
If I were a direction I would be: West South West
If I were a piece of furniture I would be: a bookshelf
If I were a liquid I would be: hydrogen peroxide
If I were a tree I would be: a yew
If I were a flower/plant I would be: an oleander bush
If I were a kind of weather I would be: sunny with occasional squally showers
If I were a musical instrument I would be: a squeezebox
If I were an emotion I would be: frustration
If I were a color I would be: fuchsia
If I were a vegetable I would be: a globe artichoke
If I were a sound I would be: waves breaking on a rocky shore in a high wind
If I were an element I would be: vanadium
If I were a car I would be: an Austin Ascot, circa 1935
If I were a song I would be: something from a Frank Loesser musical
If I were a movie I would be directed by: Wim Wenders
If I were a book I would be written by: Muriel Spark
If I were a food I would be: Baked Alaska
If I were a place I would be: Tristan da Cunha
If I were a material I would be: rough silk
If I were a taste I would be: Marmite
If I were a scent I would be: seaweed mingled with sheep dung
If I were a word I would be: difficult to pronounce
If I were an object I would be: annoyed
If I were a body part I would be: index and middle fingers of the right hand
If I were a facial expression I would be: a wry grin
If I were a cartoon character I would be: one of the penguins in If…
If I were a shape I would be: one of those mathematical concepts with an finite area bounded by a line of infinite length.
If I were a number I would be: 1, of course.

Film Diary: The Cook,.The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)

What do you say about a film as compellingly repellent at this one?

There’s not much in the way of plot – this is a Greenaway film after all – and most of what there is can be gleaned from the title. Yes, there’s a lot of food loaded with symbolism, and naturally there’s Richard the Cook who cooks Significantly, and there’s a love triangle, although as with the Turners one might well ask what’s love got to do with it. On the one hand, Georgina’s relationship with her husband, Albert, a mouthy, uncouth and sadistic gangster who owns the Hollandaise restaurant, is about control and possession. On the other, Georgina’s relationship with Michael, a quiet bookseller who dines at the Hollandaise, is pure lust.

Given that the film opens in the most repulsive way imaginable, with Albert and his goons torturing Richard the Cook in the Hollandaise’s car park, smearing him with dog shit and forcing him to eat it, it’s not surprising that Richard connives at the liaison between Georgina and Michael, and at the terrible act of revenge at the very end.

There’s nothing comfortable about this bleak, Brechtian fable about greed and lust for power. 1989? It couldn’t have anything to do with ten years of life under Thatcher, could it? (Maybe it should go on general release now, as a warning about the spivs who are now in the political ascendance. but then it would probably be misunderstood). It’s not a film for a cosy night in. Roland Barthes drew a distinction between the texts of plaisir, which draw you in to a reassuring bubble and leave you feeling reassured afterwards, and the texts of jouissance, which are the kind of spiky white-knuckle ride that shakes you up and leaves you feeling uncomfortable and wanting to change things. This is definitely in the latter category.

And it all looks as scrumptious as Richard’s cooking. It is surreal and theatrical, moving between four sets which are states of mind. The dining room is a Hieronymous Bosch vision of Hell, where everything is red as blood. The toilets, bizarrely, are Heavenly white and spacious and where all the sex takes place – there’s not a lot of sex but what there is, is erotically explosive. Watch Georgina’s dress, even her cigarettes, change colour as she passes from dinner table to loo. All this set against a haunting Michael Nyman score which comes and goes, swells and fades away to nothing. Repulsive it may be, but it is both beautiful and absolutely rivetting. The ending, which I won’t dwell on here, is gratifying in a way that made me feel very worried about my inner nature.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, what do you say about it. One word: magnificent.

The Further Adventures of Phyllis Stein

I’ve just been listening to the Radio 4 featurette, “What’s the point of the Arts Council”. Amongst the pundits whining about public funds going to one-legged black lesbians, somebody was saying something about arts funding in, say, Bristol being down to old buffers who haven’t been to a theatre since <e.Arsenic and Old Lace

Er, not quite. When I was a member of Bristol City Council a while back, the brand of philistinism I was up against was that kind of inverted snobbery masquerading as populism. There was a very heated Labour Group meeting once where the matter of funding the Bristol Old Vic – a major national treasure – came up. Speaker after speaker condemned it as unworthy of funding. Why, it was the sort of place people from Redland went to, and people from Redland – students, teachers, academics, young professionals, mostly – were the lowest of the low. I came in for a lot of stick that evening – I was, after all, the councillor for Redland…