VICTORY!

Not Being Choaked

The big news is the success of the Royal Oak campaign. I was preparing a letter to Sadiq Khan when we heard that he had decreed that TfL would not locate the coach station here. It quite took the wind out of our sails, as we had been gearing up for a long and bitter struggle. Both Tory and Labour councillors, and the local MP, Karen Buck, were all part of the campaign, not to mention impressive Bayswater ladies, and we knew the proposal was ridiculous, but still it was a very pleasant surprise to succeed, and so quickly. Sadly I missed the victory drinks.


In the Home Straight

The windows are beginning to go into our new building, so it is starting to actually look like a building. This is positive, but less positive is the news that the lift doors were manufactured wrongly, and so have to be changed. The length of time that it takes to install a lift is extraordinary, so this may apparently delay us. Virtually all the equipment for the new building is now on site, and swarms of people are working very hard putting it in. The faience looks splendid, and is currently being grouted (or masticked, to be accurate). We are due to interview potential cafe operators next week, so everything is coming together and starting to feel real. There's still a significant repair to be done in church, but we're on track to be able to celebrate soon!


No Home

A story that I don't feel like celebrating has been playing out recently. There was a person who had been homeless, but was living in a flat near St Peter's, and came to our Lunch Club and Breakfast Club. Gradually, over many months, they started coming to church as well, and it seemed that they had sorted out their life; they were talking to me about faith, and I was happy that they found the church supportive. Then we saw them less frequently, and then suddenly, a few weeks ago, they appeared sleeping on a pavement, under some scaffolding. When we tried to engage we were told they couldn't talk, which was certainly partly shame, and so there was not much we could do. Fortunately the place they were sleeping was very public, and attracted a lot of attention, so they have now got some support. Disappointing. We ask ourselves how we failed them. In truth we were wrong to have been congratulating ourselves, because the situation was always more precarious than it appeared, and there was a very complicated back story.


Dog's Home

Meanwhile Angry Woman with Dog has loomed large again. Her housing provider sent her notice of eviction proceedings last August, and so I hurriedly helped her get a solicitor. Proceedings have still not started, but the housing association won't say that they are not going to.  Seven months it has been hanging over her. It is clearly being used as a threat, a device to try to get her to behave better. This seems to me to be cruel, and is deeply unreasonable for the solicitor, who won't get paid by Legal Aid if there are no actual proceedings. The trouble is that the main complaint against her is that she has a noisy dog, which is true. I have bought harnesses to try to make the dog  more controllable, and devices to try to stop it barking, even some sort of tranquilisers for it (for which I am confident there is no resale market, unlike horse tranquilisers). It's really not a suitable dog for her (too big for the flat, too strong for her) but she won't hear of getting rid of it, as although she shouts and curses at it, she really loves it. In a chaotic and dysfunctional life a companion animal is a lot more reliable than the humans around.  


Colour Wash

Last Saturday we went to the Bonnard show at Tate Modern, which caused us to discuss how modern is "modern", because Bonnard was a post-Impressionist who did his most characteristic work around the First World War and died in 1947. Of course it's the old Tate Gallery thing, that the Tate in the old days was the repository for British art, and international twentieth-century art, as the National Gallery basically turned its back on anything from after 1900. The other (more popular) show on at the moment is of the Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, and I guess she would seem more "modern", despite being practically Bonnard's contemporary, because Surrealism is recognisably "modern" because of its debt to Freudian ideas. Bonnard remained working in a way that didn't move on very far from Pissarro or Cezanne and so feels much more part of the great tradition. Still, he really wasn't very good. I am struck by the reverential hush that prevails in art galleries, and I fear I broke the hush with some critical comments. At one point I was giving my view when a young American woman next to me asked me a question, fortunately one which I was able to answer (I wasn't just talking out of my backside on this occasion). I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment, but I think dialogue and discussion are an appropriate part of the gallery experience, and so I don't think one should be ashamed of having an opinion.

My opinion is that Bonnard is a second-rank artist who painted a handful of very nice pictures and an awful lot of dull ones, and a number of real shockers. The Tate curators wanted to emphasise his use of colour,and that's why I went, but even that's not really very special; he's a great one for yellow and purple, but a lot of it just feels straight from the tube with no thought. My point which caught the attention of the American was that in his garden pictures he is too fond of viridian, a striking pigment which is not the colour of any plant in nature, but which he uses raw. He uses colour as a substitute for drawing, and the few drawings in the show reveal his draughtsmanship to have been strikingly weak. It's notable that his most convincing human figures have their faces obscured, because he really is very bad at faces, but sometimes his anatomy is rubbish as well. The curious thing about the show was that it was chronological, but only started in the artist's forties, when he had settled on his final style, and so there is no artistic development at all, though there are some very weak pictures from his last years which speak of declining powers. The trouble was that he thought he was Monet, and he wasn't.

I hadn't realised that he lived very near Monet in Normandy. Bonnard's house at Vernonnet (one of three homes, he was not a starving artist) is only a few miles from Monet's at Giverny; you'd get off the train at Vernon for both. Ian and I came very close to them on the cycle ride last summer, and perhaps I might do that one day in the future, but I'm not sure that Bonnard would detain me for long.