Another mark of age is the discovery that an event that you think of as quite recent actually occurred thirty-five years ago. This happened to me on Saturday when I visited the current Stubbs exhibition, "George Stubbs: all done from nature", which announced itself as the first major show of the artist's works for thirty-five years. "Surely not," I said, "I went to the last one, at the Tate, and the catalogue is in the sitting room. It wasn't that long ago." So I checked from the catalogue when we got home; the last Stubbs show was indeed at the Tate in 1984 and in Yale in 1985. You may not have noticed the current show, because it is at MK Gallery, the municipal art gallery in Milton Keynes, but make no mistake about it, this is a serious show, put on in collaboration with the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it moves in a month's time. Sadly, the MK Gallery doesn't seem to have a publicity budget, so the gallery was virtually empty when we went, for a show that in London would be attracting thousands. It's ridiculous, it's only half an hour from Euston on the train (and admittedly a stiff walk up Midsummer Boulevard once you get there) and it's a brilliant show. Go while you can! They've even got the skeleton of Eclipse, the first great racehorse, which I think used to be in the horseracing museum in Newmarket, and which belongs to the Royal Veterinary College. Stubbs painted Eclipse at least twice and as they are showing a lot of the material from his "The Anatomy of the Horse" it is particularly appropriate to have the skeleton in the show. I still remember the impression that the Tate show made on me all those years ago, a great sense of wellbeing flowing from those serene embodiments of Whig Britain, and this show did much the same on Saturday. Stubbs is still a really top-notch artist, persistently undervalued because he painted so many dogs and horses, but he's so exciting with his bold plain backgrounds and radical compositions. Those are classical friezes there. And how on earth does he get aerial perspective while painting in enamels, for goodness' sake? His people are usually convincing portraits, too, but I suspect he found animals rather better company than the Whig landowners he was working for. In the end, a lot of those pictures are just absolutely ravishing, and it will enhance your life to spend a couple of hours looking at them.
Milton Keynes, on the other hand, is not so life-enhancing. It's a demonstration of how far we have come that this place, which seemed so progressive and futuristic in the 1980s now seems like a dinosaur. I remember passing through it by various different routes in the years when I used to take the bus from Oxford to Cambridge (and vice-versa); the bus company seemed not to have settled on the best route, and so you saw different bits of Beds and Bucks each time, but I remember pausing outside Milton Keynes Central more than once. Now the whole place seems hopelessly dated and very uncongenial, totally lacking a human scale, and devoted entirely to the motor car. I would have supposed that it would be a good place for cycling, being flat and spacious, but there was no evidence of that when we were there.
"Rembrandt's Light" at Dulwich was the other recent show. Another excellent piece of work, brilliant curatorship, making something quite special out of quite a small show. The highlight is the Queen's "Christ and Mary Magdalene", which is shown on its own under changing light conditions. The picture of course depicts dawn, and so they bring the lights up to replicate dawn. You see a tremendous amount that way, not least because the lights end up being brighter than you would normally have in a gallery, and so you see things you wouldn't otherwise notice. It's one of my favourite pictures anyway, but I loved that. My friend John painted an "hommage" to it, in the style of Van Gogh, which now hangs in our Sacristy at Mary Mags, as his thank you to us for giving him a show.
Our other Christmas treat was "La Traviata" at Covent Garden, beautiful. Simon Keenlyside on good voice as Germont, and two young Armenians as Alfredo and Violetta. Terrific music, beautifully played, and a great staging (by Richard Eyre, twenty-five years old). I reminisced about seeing the Zeffirelli film, with Placido Domingo as Alfredo, but I knew that was back in the eighties, 1982, as it turns out. We treated ourselves to dinner in the opera house restaurant, and I was amused to see that the menu is ten pounds more for the opera than it is for the ballet. Of course they will be able to justify it, but I rather suppose it's just more expensive because everything connected with opera is routinely more expensive.
Monday 30 December 2019
Friday 27 December 2019
I GROW OLD...
Obviously, one of the signs of getting older is that people stand up to give you a seat on the tube, but I am still very surprised when a young woman offers me her seat. Just possibly wearing the collar may have something to do with it as well, but that doesn't seem very likely in contemporary London.
More alarming though, is to discover that your contemporaries are now occupying great offices in the land which are positions of eminence and seniority. This is very concerning when you have always believed, as I have done, that these are positions for grown-ups, who are a distinct species, quite different from you. So, as you can imagine, it was a bit disconcerting to discover that Bishop Stephen Cottrell (the current Bishop of Chelmsford) has been chosen to be the next Archbishop of York, because I knew Stephen very well when we trained together at St Stephen's House. He is two or three years older than me, and was in his final year when I started at Staggers, and he was my group leader. Groups were a feature of institutions in the 1980s; we were all organised into groups across the years, with a tutor vaguely supervising us, and we were expected to socialise and support each other. Mostly, though, it was a way of ensuring that certain domestic tasks got carried out (like serving dinner). You got to know your group pretty well. Your group leader could make your life less than pleasant. Stephen was my bishop for a while in Reading, having been appointed to the post instead of the unfortunate Fr Jeffrey John, when the irony was that their views and theological approach were virtually the same, but Stephen was judged acceptable because he is married with children, while Jeffrey was not because he is a gay man in a (celibate) relationship. From Reading Stephen was advanced to the diocese of Chelmsford, which is his (and my) home diocese, for he grew up in Southend, or rather Anglo-Catholic Leigh-on-Sea (which is posher than Southend). I am slightly surprised that Stephen should be put in charge of the Northern Province, as he has spent almost the whole of his working life in the south-east of England, and has always been rather the professional Londoner, speaking a sort of Estuary English that comes very naturally to him. To be fair, he was diocesan missioner in Wakefield for a while (a diocese which no longer exists), but that's his only contact with the north. I have no doubt that he has been an effective Bishop of Chelmsford, and clearly the Archbishop of Canterbury sees him as a suitable collaborator for York, but you would have expected someone with more experience of the north (especially after Archbishop Sentamu, who is also pretty un-northern). It is amusingly ironic that a life-long Socialist like Stephen should be sent to York at exactly the time that vast swathes of the north turn Tory.
For me, the Archbishop of York should be someone older than me, whom I can respect. Still more does this apply to the Governor of the Bank of England, and I exclaimed with surprise on the tube the other day when I realised from the report in the standard that the Andrew Bailey who has been appointed the next Governor was the same Andrew Bailey whom I knew at university. I remember he was jolly bright, and he was certainly the sort of person who would have gone to work there, but it still came as a jolting surprise, mainly in realising how ancient I must have become. I remember bumping into Andrew in Florence in the summer of 1981, when we were both doing the cultural thing, thanks to cheap student rail fares, but we weren't ever particularly close. We both read History; he was at Queen's, I was at Emma, and he was in the Labour Club while I was in CUCA, but we moved in similar political circles. As I recall, we had common enemies, a coterie of "moderates" in both organisations who hung around together and shared backgrounds of similar wealth and privilege (among them, amusingly, Sir Bernard Jenkin, who is now my brother's MP). We provincial grammar school products gravitated together.
More alarming though, is to discover that your contemporaries are now occupying great offices in the land which are positions of eminence and seniority. This is very concerning when you have always believed, as I have done, that these are positions for grown-ups, who are a distinct species, quite different from you. So, as you can imagine, it was a bit disconcerting to discover that Bishop Stephen Cottrell (the current Bishop of Chelmsford) has been chosen to be the next Archbishop of York, because I knew Stephen very well when we trained together at St Stephen's House. He is two or three years older than me, and was in his final year when I started at Staggers, and he was my group leader. Groups were a feature of institutions in the 1980s; we were all organised into groups across the years, with a tutor vaguely supervising us, and we were expected to socialise and support each other. Mostly, though, it was a way of ensuring that certain domestic tasks got carried out (like serving dinner). You got to know your group pretty well. Your group leader could make your life less than pleasant. Stephen was my bishop for a while in Reading, having been appointed to the post instead of the unfortunate Fr Jeffrey John, when the irony was that their views and theological approach were virtually the same, but Stephen was judged acceptable because he is married with children, while Jeffrey was not because he is a gay man in a (celibate) relationship. From Reading Stephen was advanced to the diocese of Chelmsford, which is his (and my) home diocese, for he grew up in Southend, or rather Anglo-Catholic Leigh-on-Sea (which is posher than Southend). I am slightly surprised that Stephen should be put in charge of the Northern Province, as he has spent almost the whole of his working life in the south-east of England, and has always been rather the professional Londoner, speaking a sort of Estuary English that comes very naturally to him. To be fair, he was diocesan missioner in Wakefield for a while (a diocese which no longer exists), but that's his only contact with the north. I have no doubt that he has been an effective Bishop of Chelmsford, and clearly the Archbishop of Canterbury sees him as a suitable collaborator for York, but you would have expected someone with more experience of the north (especially after Archbishop Sentamu, who is also pretty un-northern). It is amusingly ironic that a life-long Socialist like Stephen should be sent to York at exactly the time that vast swathes of the north turn Tory.
For me, the Archbishop of York should be someone older than me, whom I can respect. Still more does this apply to the Governor of the Bank of England, and I exclaimed with surprise on the tube the other day when I realised from the report in the standard that the Andrew Bailey who has been appointed the next Governor was the same Andrew Bailey whom I knew at university. I remember he was jolly bright, and he was certainly the sort of person who would have gone to work there, but it still came as a jolting surprise, mainly in realising how ancient I must have become. I remember bumping into Andrew in Florence in the summer of 1981, when we were both doing the cultural thing, thanks to cheap student rail fares, but we weren't ever particularly close. We both read History; he was at Queen's, I was at Emma, and he was in the Labour Club while I was in CUCA, but we moved in similar political circles. As I recall, we had common enemies, a coterie of "moderates" in both organisations who hung around together and shared backgrounds of similar wealth and privilege (among them, amusingly, Sir Bernard Jenkin, who is now my brother's MP). We provincial grammar school products gravitated together.
Thursday 12 December 2019
GUNS AND HOUSES
It was horrible to learn of a shooting on Walterton Road last week, on the edge of the parish. A young man remains in hospital, critically injured, after being shot in the neck by someone passing, apparently on a moped at 8.30 in the evening. Details remain sketchy, and contradictory, as some people thought a car was involved, and either two shots, or seven were mentioned. A member of the congregation who lives on the street had heard and seen nothing unusual. The previous evening we had been told by the local police that our silly youths on the Estate have decided that they want to have their own gang, instead of being disputed territory between the Harrow Road Boys, the Lisson Green Men, and whatever they are called on the Mozart Estate (the virtuosi perhaps?) and so they have taken to taunting other postcode dwellers on social media. The result of these taunts apparently was that ten of the Lisson Green "Men" turned up at the youth club on the Amberley Estate with machetes. We really do not need this. Of course we can reassure people that you are unlikely to have any problem if you are not a young black male, but young black men are actually human beings too, and part of the community.
Bizarrely the line that the Evening Standard chose to take on the shooting was that this was a nice street in prosperous Maida Vale, where "Regency townhouses sell for £3 million". This is laughably misleading. First they need a history lesson; nothing on Walterton Road dates back to the Regency (1811-1820). This area was developed after 1870. And when I looked on Zoopla, the average price of a house was £1.3 million, but that was only an estimate because so few houses are actually sold; almost all the houses are divided into flats, and almost all the property is social housing. Most of the property belongs to our local housing association, WECH (Walterton & Elgin Community Homes, the clue is in the acronym) which is a remarkable thing, a well-run housing association, run for the benefit of the residents. Many of those in Walterton Road are Bangladeshi families, as the older Caribbean families are gradually moving out, but the street is pretty diverse; it was one of the great centres of squatting back in the 1970s, and several of The Clash lived there before they achieved success.
WECH was set up in the wake of the "Homes for Votes" scandal, the notorious episode of gerrymandering by Dame Shirley (later Lady) Porter, when as Leader of Westminster City Council in the 1980s, she moved council tenants out of marginal wards and sold off those properties. Many of those moved out were transferred into the Harrow Road and Westbourne Wards, which were regarded as hopeless, and some homeless people were even housed in two semi-derelict blocks of flats on Elgin Avenue which were full of crumbling asbestos (a fact well-known to council officers). The Thatcher government had created mechanisms to encourage housing associations, and tenant buyouts, but Lady Porter was much discomfited when the council tenants in Elgin Avenue and Walterton Road (and streets round about) organised themselves to acquire the property. So WECH was born, and it has remained tenant-controlled and has worked hard to improve housing conditions (the asbestos-riddled flats were demolished). Lady Porter was found to have acted illegally and ordered to pay a surcharge of over £42 million, but the council later accepted a settlement of £12 million, on the basis that legal action would not be cost-effective. She fled to Israel.
In my experience most housing associations are pretty unresponsive to their tenants' problems, and are in fact more difficult to put pressure on than council housing departments (which at least respond to complaints from councillors) as they are not actually accountable to anyone. They pose as community-focussed organisations, but are in fact raising money by mortgaging their properties and playing the US property market. Anyone involved with community issues in this part of London will tell you horror stories about Genesis and Notting Hill, which have now merged (into an organisation whose two computer systems are incompatible). but they seem to be typical. Sadly, Genesis began life as the Paddington Churches' Housing Association, but the churches gradually lost interest, and the management manipulated the rules to take control from them, with the result that an organisation that had been set up on Christian principles (in the wake of Rachman) turned into an entirely secular and indeed entirely godless company, which asset-stripped former Church property. Both St Peter's and Emmanuel churches are built into blocks of Genesis flats, which gives us endless troubles, as witness the spectacular damp here in St Peter's House, which Notting Hill/Genesis are doing nothing about, as our cupboards fill with mould, and the paint drops off the corridor walls. I'm just glad I don't have to live there, as some of my predecessors did.
Bizarrely the line that the Evening Standard chose to take on the shooting was that this was a nice street in prosperous Maida Vale, where "Regency townhouses sell for £3 million". This is laughably misleading. First they need a history lesson; nothing on Walterton Road dates back to the Regency (1811-1820). This area was developed after 1870. And when I looked on Zoopla, the average price of a house was £1.3 million, but that was only an estimate because so few houses are actually sold; almost all the houses are divided into flats, and almost all the property is social housing. Most of the property belongs to our local housing association, WECH (Walterton & Elgin Community Homes, the clue is in the acronym) which is a remarkable thing, a well-run housing association, run for the benefit of the residents. Many of those in Walterton Road are Bangladeshi families, as the older Caribbean families are gradually moving out, but the street is pretty diverse; it was one of the great centres of squatting back in the 1970s, and several of The Clash lived there before they achieved success.
WECH was set up in the wake of the "Homes for Votes" scandal, the notorious episode of gerrymandering by Dame Shirley (later Lady) Porter, when as Leader of Westminster City Council in the 1980s, she moved council tenants out of marginal wards and sold off those properties. Many of those moved out were transferred into the Harrow Road and Westbourne Wards, which were regarded as hopeless, and some homeless people were even housed in two semi-derelict blocks of flats on Elgin Avenue which were full of crumbling asbestos (a fact well-known to council officers). The Thatcher government had created mechanisms to encourage housing associations, and tenant buyouts, but Lady Porter was much discomfited when the council tenants in Elgin Avenue and Walterton Road (and streets round about) organised themselves to acquire the property. So WECH was born, and it has remained tenant-controlled and has worked hard to improve housing conditions (the asbestos-riddled flats were demolished). Lady Porter was found to have acted illegally and ordered to pay a surcharge of over £42 million, but the council later accepted a settlement of £12 million, on the basis that legal action would not be cost-effective. She fled to Israel.
In my experience most housing associations are pretty unresponsive to their tenants' problems, and are in fact more difficult to put pressure on than council housing departments (which at least respond to complaints from councillors) as they are not actually accountable to anyone. They pose as community-focussed organisations, but are in fact raising money by mortgaging their properties and playing the US property market. Anyone involved with community issues in this part of London will tell you horror stories about Genesis and Notting Hill, which have now merged (into an organisation whose two computer systems are incompatible). but they seem to be typical. Sadly, Genesis began life as the Paddington Churches' Housing Association, but the churches gradually lost interest, and the management manipulated the rules to take control from them, with the result that an organisation that had been set up on Christian principles (in the wake of Rachman) turned into an entirely secular and indeed entirely godless company, which asset-stripped former Church property. Both St Peter's and Emmanuel churches are built into blocks of Genesis flats, which gives us endless troubles, as witness the spectacular damp here in St Peter's House, which Notting Hill/Genesis are doing nothing about, as our cupboards fill with mould, and the paint drops off the corridor walls. I'm just glad I don't have to live there, as some of my predecessors did.
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