The Soundtrack Of Our Lives:Mix Tape.

"You can take the road that takes you to the stars now. I'll take the road that sees me through" - Road, Nick Drake

"I'm going down to the place tonight to see if I can get a taste tonight. A taste of something warm and sweet that shivers your bones and rises to your heat" - Some Candy Talking, The Jesus And Mary Chain

I should have liked it so much more than I actually did. It's full of the music I grew up with (The Fall, The Stone Roses, The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, New Order, The Velvet Underground), it's set around the sort of house parties and pubs I used to go to, and it's a romantic story of star-crossed young lovers and I'm nothing if not a romantic at heart.

Yet for some reason Mix Tape (BBC2/iPlayer, directed by Lucy Gaffy, and based on a story by Jane Sanderson) didn't hit with quite the same emotional force of other dramas in the same mould. I'm thinking One Day, Normal People, Us. or Mayflies. I sometimes had the feeling I'd seen it before. Sticking with the theme of music, it felt like a cover version. Maybe even a tribute act.

Mix Tape is, ultimately, a very sweet tale and it captures the awkwardness of young love terrifically well in places (except perhaps an instance of couple dancing at a house party, not on my watch), and in some places it is excellent and enjoyable. But it's all a bit uneven. There's a real sense of people acting. Characters are either very good or very bad. There are few of the grey areas that you get in real, complicated, life. In places it feels like a simulacrum of reality rather than reality itself.

Which, as a television show, it is. It's not entirely unbelievable but it's not entirely believable either. We begin in Sheffield, 1989 (cue a television showing Margaret Thatcher, of course) when Daniel (Rory Walton-Smith) and Alison (Florence Hunt) meet as young students. He makes her a mixtape (the first of many, tracks by Primal Scream, Cabaret Voltaire, Bowie, Joy Division, and Edith Piaf - nice touch) and carriers her bag for her. She's into The Shop Assistants and Fuzzbox (preternaturally cool?) and they have their first kiss to The Mary Chain's Some Candy Talking.

Whilst Daniel's dad, pigeon fancier Bill (Mark O'Halloran), is supportive of his son's relationship, mother Marian (Helen Behan) is more circumspect. How come Alison always comes round to their place and yet Daniel has never been to her house or even been allowed to walk her home? Because, unknown to Daniel, Alison's home is not a happy one. Mother Catherine (Siobhan O'Kelly) drinks, creates a scene in the chippy, and has an absolutely awful on/off boyfriend in the egregious Martin Baxter (Jonathan Harden).

Two decades later, Daniel (now played by Jim Sturgess) is still in Sheffield. A music journalist who has worked for the NME and possibly Rolling Stone and appears to be inspired by Alexis Petridis (though also reminds me, looks wise, of Johnny Marr). Alison (Teresa Palmer) is a hugely successful novelist living in Sydney. Both are married with kids. 

Daniel's wife Katja (Sara Soulie has either been lumbered with a somewhat two dimensional character or else fails to bring it to life, the jury's out) wants to go on a road trip now they're empty nesters but Daniel wants to write a book about some obscure, and presumably made up, long lost musician. This, inevitably, causes tension in their relationship.

Alison, meanwhile, is married to the condescending and controlling surgeon Michael (Ben Lawson) and daughter Stella (Julie Savage), one of two, still lives at home with them. When we first meet her she seems to be a typically rebellious teenager but we soon find out she's pregnant and won't say who the father is. Alison and Michael disagree on what course of action Stella should take. This, inevitably, causes tension in their relationship.

At times, Mix Tape is more like a portrait of two middle aged marital breakdowns than it is a story of young love and that's not to its detriment either. They are both suffering what Daniel's friend Duncan (Alexis Rodney) accurately calls "the very definition of a midlife crisis" but is that because they both married the wrong person all those years ago?

It's 2009 so Daniel uses Facebook to stalk, sorry - get in touch with, Alison but what's he hoping to achieve by doing that? You don't need to be Nostradamus to see where this is all going. Yet when Daniel and Alison finally meet up they appear to be at slightly crossed purposes. Luckily their cookie cutter spouses, sent direct from central casting, contrive to change that and soon they're either tying up their many loose ends or tangling them up further.

To Mix Tape's credit it's not until very near the end you're sure exactly how it will all pan out. There's a couple of other supplementary story lines (Alison's brother Peter (Conor Sanchez) is mercilessly bullied for being gay, there are some big themes (rape, suicide), there are lots of phones and texting, there's more than a few pints downed, and there's a fantastic soundtrack - of course. Arctic Monkeys, Richard Hawley, even Frente! and The Comsat Angels. The Cure's Lovesong and New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle work particularly well although it feels like some of the Australian music on offer is part of some contractual obligation. As Mental As Anything's Live It Up was definitely not an indie disco staple of the late 80s/early 90s and I'd never even heard of the band 1927 before and I bought the NME, Melody Maker. and Sounds every week for way longer than I should have done.

Yet in some places it felt the music, and the act of being a music lover, was fetishised. When a needle drops on to a vinyl record in a room full of posters (even The Jack Rubies appear at one point) I was reminded of the kind of middle aged guy who bores on about 'real music' and gets angry when youngsters use the word 'vinyls'. And those people are almost always pricks which is something that, in Mix Tape, Daniel never is.

He's almost too good to be true - although maybe that's me remembering some of my own terrible behaviour at that age. But Mix Tape does too often go for the low hanging fruit. Sheffield is council estates, chip shops, homing pigeons, Full Montyesque views across its rolling hills, and The Leadmill and Sydney is Bondi Beach, Sydney Harbour Bridge, chic cafes, and green fields and Alison's friend Sheila (Jacqueline McKenzie) is more a trope than a fully realised character. A wise old lesbian who spends her days in an old colonial house on the outskirts of Sydney, drinking wine, and dishing out sweary homespun wisdom.

Mix Tape, enjoyable though it was, leans too heavily on tropes like this for viewers (or this viewer at least) to get fully immersed, to really care about what happens to Daniel and Alison. It's always interesting to think about, and to make art - or content - about, the lives we could have had but didn't compared to the lives we actually do have. Of course, our imaginary parallel lives are always remarkably unblemished and nothing really bad ever happens in them. In reality, we know it's quite different. I'm not sure Mix Tape did quite a good enough job in conveying this. But, hey, I sang along to Hit The North. Who wouldn't?

Nevermore, Forever More:Kiefer &Van Gogh @ RA.

Anselm Kiefer and Vincent Van Gogh are not necessarily two artists I would put together in a show. Sure, it's easy to imagine that Kiefer was a fan of Van Gogh (most people, except in the artist's lifetime, have been) but I've been to see Kiefer's art before (a few times) and I didn't come away thinking about Van Gogh.

 Kiefer - Hortus Conclusus (2007-14)

Then again, I'd not seen (or even been aware of) Kiefer's sunflowers before. That's an obvious link and one the Royal Academy would have been daft not to make. But the curators of the double header show (more a Kiefer show with supplementary Van Gogh really) do a good job of finding plenty of other connections. Kiefer helps them.

This isn't some cash in on Van Gogh's name. Though the fact his shows are always so popular can't have hurt the RA's box office takings, eh? Van Gogh died in 1890 and Kiefer was born over half a decade later in 1945 but Kiefer claims the Dutch artist as his first inspiration and even followed in his footsteps. From his (Kiefer's) home in Germany to the Netherlands, Belgium, and not just France but Arles in Provence.

Kiefer claimed he wasn't interested in "the emotional aspect" of Van Gogh's work but the "rational structure" behind his paintings and how confidently they were constructed considering Van Gogh's life was increasingly out of control while he was making them. Perhaps the theme that bonds the two artists closer together is nature. Van Gogh painted nature and Kiefer incorporates nature into his work. In the form of straw, seeds, and lead. Sometimes he even scorches the surface of his works with fire. The light in some of Van Gogh's paintings is so incredibly bright it's almost like a small fire.

Van Gogh once opined that books and reality and art are all the same to him (he was a particular admirer of Emile Zola) and Kiefer, too, incorporates mythological, philosophical, and literate ideas into his art. Sometimes confusingly so. There's a lot of interpretation required to understand Kiefer's art but not to enjoy it. With Van Gogh, at over a century's remove, simply looking is enough.

 

Kiefer -  Walther von der Vogelweide:Under the Lime Tree on Heather (2014)

 

Kiefer - Nevermore (2014)

2014's Nevermore refers to Edgar Allen Poe's 1845 poem The Raven. A poem in which a grieving man is driven mad by a raven repeating the word "nevermore". He's also riffed on James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegan's Wake as well as the composer Richard Wagner. When it comes to the sunflower, Kiefer sees it, as Van Gogh did, as a symbol of life. First it is connected to the stars because it moves its head against the sun. Then in the night it is closed. The moment they explode they are yellow and fantastic but also the decline has began. 

Just like us poor mortal humans. As soon as reach our peak - intellectual, creative, sexual - we also start our decline and the long journey towards our inevitable death. Worse, we know it. With this in mind, a work named The Crows hung nearby seemed apt. They'll be among the first to pick away at our bones. Especially if we die in a world that looks anything like some of the imaginary hellscapes conjured up by Anselm Kiefer.

 

Kiefer - The Crows (2019)

 

Van Gogh - Piles of French Novels (1887)

When in Arles, in 1963, Kiefer (still a teenager at the time) sought out the landscapes that had inspired Van Gogh and the RA has got a few drawings that Kiefer did at that time which certainly presented to me a side of Kiefer I had been previously been unaware of.

It's not hard to see Van Gogh's influence in these smaller works and it helped me understand the link between Kiefer's enormous canvases as well. Kiefer saw Van Gogh as an artist who didn't so much paint nature but paint from nature. He imbued natural scenes with his own temperament and his own memory and Kiefer has made a career of doing the same. I've not read W.G.Sebald (I think I probably should) but I couldn't help think of him while perusing this section of the exhibition.

 

Kiefer - Edith Causse, 12 Years Old Arles (1963)

 

Van Gogh - L'Arlesienne (1890)

 

 

Van Gogh - Snow-covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet) (1890)

 

Mme Ginoux, the owner of the Cafe de la Gare in Arles, was painted from a drawing by Paul Gauguin (note, again, books on the table - here Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens) and in that Van Gogh's portraiture is not dissimilar to his landscape work. It is an image of something, or someone, that was once there. Refracted through the memory of the artist and, when we look at it - over a century later, our own perception of how the world was and how the world is.

 

Art isn't static. It changes as we do. It changes to reflect the times. The painting itself remains more or less the same but what we see in it is different as we age, as we change, as we come to see life differently. I don't get bored looking at the same things because they're never really the same. I think that is something best captured in the art of Paul Cezanne but Van Gogh and Kiefer understand it deeply also.

 

Van Gogh - Sunflowers Gone to Seed (1887)

 

Van Gogh - Field with Irises near Ales (1888)

 

Inspired, variously, by elder French artists like Jean-Francois Millet and Japanese art, Van Gogh could see nature as beautiful (full of colours like his field of irises) or sad and bleak. His snow covered field looks almost like the aftermath of a battle. Its muted greyish palate conjuring thoughts of desolation and despondency. In the nicest way. 

Both La Crau and his Avenue of Poplars seems to stretch out into infinity. As if Van Gogh wished to go beyond the horizon. Both in life, in nature, and in art. There's a yearning to his work, a sense of not being fully satisfied (which would be understandable, all things considered) even when confronted with the best, and worst, nature has to offer. Almost as if the change of seasons was like a parting or even a death. Something gone that can never return. Something that can only be held for a while but never fully grasped. A potentially romantic encounter that was never fulfilled.

 

Van Gogh - La Crau Seen from Montmajour (1888)

 

Van Gogh - Avenue of Poplars (1884)

 

Van Gogh - Country Road (1882)

We could be that solitary figure walking the long straight country road but we could also be the lone bird hovering in the sky. We are, after all, alone in this world. Nobody ever really knows us. Not in our entirety. Not in our deepest, darkest - or even lightest - thoughts. As the alienation inherent with us will live within us forever we should embrace it while at the same time making the most of the moments of communality, be they with family, friends, or strangers, and even intimacy we find ourselves fortunate enough to experience.

Little of this, of course, says much about the paintings but it does say what the paintings made me think about, what they made me feel. I like to learn dates, locations, stats essentially when I visit galleries but I also want to feel stuff. Van Gogh makes me feel stuff. In the past, I'm not sure Kiefer really has. But seeing him alongside Van Gogh made more sense to me. That's good curation. Curation that changes how one feels about an artist.

 

Kiefer - Untitled (1963)

 

Kiefer - Untitled (1963)

 

Van Gogh - Poppy Field (1890)

 

Kiefer believes that landscapes are silent witnesses of human history and it's hardly a surprise that he finds so much to confirm that in the work of Van Gogh. You don't just see what has been painted but you find yourself imagining how Van Gogh saw, and understood, that view. The landscapes are, in a way, portraits as surely as his 1886 painting of a pair of worn shoes (I'd call them boots) is. The owner may no longer be wearing these shoes (may not even own them anymore) but a memory of the owner lives with them. If you've ever lost somebody close to you and then found something that once belonged to them you'll understand. 

It's probably just our human desire for connection, and an equally profound need to negate a painful loss, but we find ourselves imbuing inanimate objects with the spirits of those we have loved and lost. Van Gogh's art speaks profoundly of that.

The Royal Academy show ends with Kiefer's 'cover version' of Van Gogh's classic Starry Night. It's much bigger, rawer even, than the original. It's not better but it's probably just as good. It's the same view but of a different place. Seen by a different person. At a different time. Van Gogh and Kiefer would have have had similarities in their approach to a starry night but they wouldn't see it, or depict it, the same. It's true also of us when we look at the work. We all see it different because we're all different. We change, art changes, life changes. It is for the artist to grab a slice of it while they can. It is for us to grab a slice of it while we can.

 

Van Gogh - Shoes (1886)

Kiefer - The Starry Night (2019)

Is Anybody There?:Elvis And The Celebrity Seance Cult.

"I am the resurrection and I am the life" - I Am The Resurrection, The Stone Roses.

Over two thousand years ago, the leader of a violent death cult called Christianity, a Mr Jesus Christ, was said to have come back to life after being crucified in Golgotha. How was this possible? And if Jesus Christ can return from the dead then why can't other people? For example, Elvis Presley, Princess Diana, William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, or, more topically, even Norman Tebbit?

I was at The Duke of Greenwich, Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, to hear the engaging, well informed, and very funny Dr Kate Cherrell (or, as OK magazine has her, the goth from Grimsby) talk about just that subject in her lecture (a word that makes it sound far more po-faced than it actually was) Has Elvis Really Left the Building? A Short History of Celebrity Seances. The talk began, as you might have guessed by its title, with the King of Rock'n'Roll himself.

It's long been held that the only place that the living Elvis stepped foot on in Britain was Prestwick Airport near Ayr when a US Air Force plane carrying him home from West Germany in 1960 stopped to refuel there. But dead Elvis? That's a different question. He turned up, just two years after his death, in Watford. And not at Vicarage Road to cheer on Graham Taylor's Hornets.

Dr Cherrell confessed to having two main interests. (1) Spiritualism and (2) tat. Which has led to her having a house like Lovejoy's antique shop - if he lived in a council house. This had led her to take an interest in celebrity seances and to understand that people simply love celebrities. Be they alive or dead. Parasocial relationships are something we've heard a lot about in recent years. One sided irrational relationships where members of the public, often lonely people, invest a lot into a relationship with a famous person who, quite frankly, has no idea they even exist.

It can lead to stalking (stans!) and, oddly, the parasocial relationship doesn't have to end when the celebrity dies. Certainly not in the case of Elvis. Some, of course, say he isn't dead but some of those who accept he is dead do it with the caveat that he can still communicate with the living and where better for him to do that in Hertfordshire's largest town.

On 24th July 1979, about two years after his death, Elvis 'appeared' in a spiritualist church in Watford. He was chatting to a Carmen Rogers who had form when it came to seances. Rogers had previously spoken to Jack the Ripper from beyond the grave and it turned out Jack's real name was Charlie and he was a fish gutter.

Dead Elvis's revelations were, sadly, even less interesting. The most notable thing was that he complained of people exploiting his name following his death (imagine!) and at one point it seems Rogers got a bit irked with Elvis for getting too emotional. The seance was recorded and released on an album called The Elvis Presley Seance. Check out the cover!

Elvis was just joining a long list of those who had spoken to us from beyond the grave. At the height of the Spiritualist movement in the late 19th century many long dead people came forward to speak. Jesus, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Aristotle, and Shakespeare among them. All of them, surprise surprise, said they were big believes in Spiritualism.

George Washington, described by Dr Cherrell as a "chatty chap", kept popping up but so did Buddha, military leaders, and poets like Dryden and Pope. Industrial and print developments helped spread these stories and somebody, or several people, got very rich on the back of them.

A case in hand comes in the form of the 'Essays from the Unseen' book printed in 1885. It featured accounts of interviews conducted via seance with many noted dead celebrities and the book was credited to the barrister Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson and his collaborator and personal medium Willliam Lawton. Who, as it happened, was also a convicted fraudster.

Often the revelations delivered from the beyond were less than fascinating. Shakespeare didn't like "busybodies" and was very keen to point out he was not, as many have said, of 'low lineage'. He also claimed he didn't write his own plays and was merely a conduit for a ghostly spirit who wrote through him. Shakespeare's spirit was evoked so often that by the time of 2011's Twitter seance (an actual real thing that happened) he was too tired to even type.

The Irish spiritualist Hester Travis Smith got in contact with Oscar Wilde after he died and Wilde had it that he was in purgatory (he'd had it in life that he didn't want to go to heaven, none of his friends were there), he thought James Joyce's Ulysses was utter filth, and that he was absolutely definitely not gay. Not all.

Oh, and he was also a big fan of mediumship. Natch. Rosemary Brown (1906-2001) was an interesting case. She claimed she'd been visited by the ghost of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and during his visit found that she could play piano, and compose, like a pro. Her hands controlled by Liszt as if he'd put on a pair of ghoulish gloves.

Later she was visited by more composers. Among them Bach, Mozart, and Debussy. She gave notes on their characters. Rachmaninov was reserved, Berlioz explosive, Beethoven had been cured of his deafness, Grieg was a friendly ghost, and Chopin was something of an irritant who warned Rosemary Brown that her bath was overflowing.

She claimed she once visited Tesco with the spirit of Frans Liszt and he complained about the price of bananas. Celebrities of a more recent era have also been in touch. Comedian (I'm told) Freddie Starr has written material from beyond the grave and is now touring the afterlife with Bobby Ball in support. Tommy Cannon is still alive so when he finally goes it'll be interesting to see if Ball sticks with Starr or reunites with the Oldham bruiser.

In the US, the Viewers Channel have done remarkably well - financially - out of pay per view seances. Princess Diana being particularly popular. The psychics who claimed they could speak to her tactfully chose to do this, among other places, in the Parisian tunnel in which she died and also used Diana's own tenuous yet well intended links to mumbo-jumbo to justify their own 'investigations'.

She had, it is claimed, once foreseen the heart attack of one of then Prince Charles's favourite horses. Diana now hangs out with Mother Teresa in the afterlife. I wonder if she's still with Dodi? The man behind the Diana seance, Paul Sharratt, did alright out of it so he turned his attention to the spirit of John Lennon (with a guest appearance from the dead George Harrison) who even revealed an exclusive new song to Sharratt and his audience. Like most of the dead celebrity via seance creative output, it's almost impossible to distinguish from the sort of AI slop that clogs up all our social media feeds these days.

Next up was Michael Jackson. On Sky. A live seance. Just six months after The King of Pop had died. Presented by June Sarpong (who got a nice new kitchen out of it), it was voted the worst television programme of the year. The seance itself was overseen by Derek Acorah (the Skeptics audience let out a collective groan at the mention of Acorah's name) and although Jackson didn't offer up much (though Acorah did claim that Jackson spoke once but, unfortunately, it was during the adverts) the event left some hardcore fans in attendance traumatised,.

 

Their trauma was then packaged as entertainment in its own right. And that, sadly, appears to be what these celebrity seances are all about. Entertainment of the lowest kind. A mean spirited grift to part lonely and often damaged people with their money. Often while causing great harm to the families and friends of the departed, Interestingly, Derek Acorah himself has never spoken from beyond the grave and other mediums say he should be left alone as it would be disrespectful to bother him. If only they'd shown that level of respect to the people whose memories they have besmirched and to those they have ripped off with false hope.

Another great night at Greenwich Skeptics. Thanks to Jade, David, Paula, and Andy and the rest of the crowd (plus three dogs) for joining me, thanks to the staff at the Duke of Greenwich, thanks to Goddards Pie & Mash for feeding me beforehand (and for playing some good tunes while I ate:- Band Of Gold, You're So Vain, We've Only Just Begun), thanks to host Professor Chris French, and thanks most of all to Dr Kate Cherrell for her time and knowledge.

A Q&A took in the Witch of Endor, Helen Duncan, Norse mythology, Orientalism, demonology, Pythagoras, James Randi, Houdini, Lee Harvey Oswald, necromancy, post-Christianity, Norman Tebbit's mischievous spirit, John the Baptist, the ghost of a masturbating monkey, and a sad snake who wanted to have a television in his room because his best friend had died. If that sounds like the sort of brilliant nonsense you'd enjoy then you should join us at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub. You never know what might happen and it's better than talking to a pretend dead Elvis. Who has now, I must report, finally left the building.

TADS #71:Chichester to Bognor Regis (or Pagham Harbour).

71!* The numbers are starting to look silly now. But I'm not getting bored of TADS and, in fact, last Saturday's stroll from Chichester to Bognor Regis via Pagham Harbour was as much fun as any walk. A lot more than some of them. When I looked at Adam's map the next day it looked like we'd actually walked almost exactly the route I'd planned as well. Wonders will never cease. 

As so often, I''d made a nice early start. Train from Honor Oak Park to West Croydon (a little bit spruced up compared to recent visits I noticed), and walked to East Croydon where I bought a new Network Card and almost immediately lost it. I left it at the counter (I was sure I'd put it in my pocket, I guess that's what we can class as a 'senior moment') but thankfully the friendly staff had hung on to it.

Wouldn't have been good if they hadn't. I met Pam on the platform and we hopped on the Sussex snaker down through Gatwick Airport, past the lovely views of Arundel, and in to Chichester where we somehow managed to avoid popping in to Saigon Boozebox. Shep and I visited Vietnam (Saigon even) back in 2008 and either one of us, on that holiday, could well have earned the nickname Saigon Boozebox.

There was a Saigon Munchbox too but let's not go there. Shep and Adam were waiting for Pam and I in the Dolphin & Anchor (a Spoons I'd chosen as I'd not been able to identify any suitable greasy spoons, even though being there it became apparent Chichester was not short of them) and it wasn't long before Roxanne and Clive joined us too. Roxanne and Clive had muffins, Pam and I had veggie breakfasts, and Shep, famed now for his solitary sausage in Guildford, managed five and half veggie sausages.

Impressive! With that it was time to start the walk proper. I've written about Chichester (and Bognor Regis) before in previous blogs (see hyperlinks attached) so I won't go into much spiel here but it was lovely to see Chichester's large and splendid cathedral again (even if nobody wanted to go and have a look at the Arundel Tomb inside) and to stop and consider the Chichester Cross.

Built between 1477 & 1503, it served as both a meeting place and a covered market and still looks very impressive now, over five hundred years later. We headed back past the train station, and Saigon Boozebox, and near The Richmond pub turned in to the Chichester Canal Basin and picked up the Chichester Canal itself. An only partly navigable ship canal that flows for just 3.8 miles into the Chichester Channel.

There's some nice butterfly sculptures there and moored in the basin were the four boats that travel up and down the canal:- Richmond, Frisky, Egremont, and Kingfisher. Later on one of them would pass us and we'd wave at the people on board. Of course we'd wave. We're not barbarians.

The canal, of course, was a flat and easy section and it was a flat walk even if it was to have a few minor challenges en route. Shep and I myself strode out at the front. Felt like ages since I'd seen him so it was nice to catch up but by the time we came off the canal at Poyntz Bridge I'd dropped to the back with Pam and it was just the two of us who enjoyed, and appreciated, the view back to the cathedral that no less an artist than JMW Turner had painted in 1828. The painting is impressive and so is the view.

 

Leaving the canal, we passed through the small village of Hunston (Wikipedia claims a population of 1,257 but not sure how they keep that up to date what with the fact that people keep dying and being born) and made our way down Church Lane to the church of St Leodegar which is named for a martyred Burgundian bishop and was home to several tombs with porcine decoration. One can only assume it relates to pig farmers and their families from the area.

We took a ziggety-zaggety path (Pam providing a soundtrack of Captain Beefheart's excellent Zig Zag Wanderer) through a few fields, some kind of dingly dell, and, of course - this is TADS, a golf course. We saw an abandoned boat and we nearly went into a field of cows before deciding better of it and chatting to a local about directions before continuing on the route that I had planned, despite the fact that at times the signs suggested we were entering private property.

The signs were vague. They specified no through road for vehicles but walkers didn't warrant a mention. I feared a telling off from a toff or one of their lackeys but, fortunately, that never happened and the most challenging obstacle came negotiating a field full of barley. We all made it thought but alas Pam's rather lovely green cardigan was lost for ever. I like to think some shall child in the wilds of West Sussex found it and now wears it as part of their Sunday best.

After a fashion, we emerged at the edge of the mostly silted up Pagham Harbour and the tiny hamlet of Little Welbourne and its Salt House. We had already walked on multiple terrains and there were a few more left for us to try yet. Which I liked and I think the others did too. Changes of scenery on walks tends to make them more interesting.

Even if at one point we seemed to be heading straight for an impassable bush! The 1,550 acre (629 hectare) Pagham Harbour is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and all of that and the RSPB are among its many owners. It is said you can see such birds as wood sandpipers, avocets, pied wagtails, shelducks, little ringed plovers, black tailed godwits, and red necked phalaropes here on the few remaining parts of the Sussex coast yet to fall prey to the developers but pretty much all we saw were cuttlefish bones and the skeletons of crabs - and lots of them too.

 

 

As we passed between the mostly dried up Pagham Harbour and the much deeper, and more waterfowl friendly, Pagham Lagoon on what was almost a boardwalk we emerged to sea views, sea cabbages, and the outskirts of Pagham itself. What people were most excited about was, after nearly three and a half hours without a stop, was the prospect of a pub.

But the pub turned out not to be a pub. Pagham Beach Cafe was a cafe with pub style tables out front that comes up as a bar/pub when you look it up on the Internet. Even though they served bottled beer Shep was most disappointed and suggested we head to a pub instead. The problem being that would have added nearly an hour on to the walk.

He seemed happier as he, Pam, and myself sucked on a brace of 330ml San Miguels (overpriced but cold) and Adam, Roxanne, and Clive took more respectable refreshment. He did however point out that if they hadn't spent money on Wayne Rooney's football boot (and, one assumes, Sugar Ray Leonard's boxing glove) they might have been able to afford to sort out some draught beer in their establishment.

 

It was an odd place but in TADS we like to visit odd places and we've definitely seen odder. We didn't get to see Pagham's Grade I listed church (St Thomas a Becket) but we did see an Elvis Presley that looked more like Frankenstein's Monster and a road with the amusing name of Pinball Alley.

 

Pagham is famous for its annual pram race (the world's oldest) that takes place every Boxing Day. You have to cover three miles with your pram but you also have to drink three pints of beer while doing so (that'll set you back if you stop at the Pagham Beach Cafe). Pagham's other claim to fame is that Joe Biden's paternal fourth great-grandfather James Byden was christened in the church in 1767. The village was also home to two former F1 drivers in John Watson and Derek Bell. It's not on record how they fared, or even if they ever competed, in the pram race.

We headed off on the home stretch, sometimes on the beach, sometimes on a coastal path (of sorts), and sometimes on roads. At one point through a rather fancy gated community and later through the village of Aldwick. Shep and I again moved ahead of the crowd. That's normally Adam's job but this time he seemed content to hang back with the others.

Clive talked a bit about his forthcoming impressive bike ride to Dunwich in Suffolk and back (about 250 miles in total and one he's done before) and I mentioned that it was folk singer Shirley Collins' 90th birthday and as a proud Sussex gal I felt it was highly appropriate we were in her home county for the occasion. Even if we would be ending up in the resort that Which magazine had recently voted Britain's worst.

That seemed a bit harsh (many of us have had good times in Bognor before) but the centre of Bognor Regis did look a bit Brexit. Boarded up pubs and hotels and the pier had virtually nothing on it. Either attractions or people. Imagine the piers of Brighton or Southend on a Saturday in July being that quiet! Even on an overcast day. 

Bognor Regis' motto, once quite simply 'action', is "to excel" (Chichester has gone for "firm in faith) and it'd be a very partial judge who could honestly say Bognor excels at much. Yet all we needed was a pub, a curry house, a train station, and maybe somewhere to buy some train booze and Bognor had all four.

 

The Waverley pub was cheerful and comfy and we enjoyed a couple of pints there before heading on to Cafe Punjab which did some delicious tarka daal and cheese naan that, sadly, I was too bloated on lager to even get close to finishing it. They even had beer on tap (including a pale ale, Bombay Bicycle) and all (except Roxanne and Clive who had headed back after the pub) agreed it was a decent Indian meal and all also seemed to agree it had been a good walk and a fun day. 

I certainly thought so. Adam and Shep headed back to the car and I picked up some train booze before Pam and I headed back to London, changing at East Croydon. I'm not sure my account of the day totally does justice to how much I enjoyed it but I did and unlike The Salt Path you can be assured that my account is entirely truthful. You might not get the most dramatic walks with TADS, but you do at least get honest ones.

Thanks to Pam, Shep, Adam, Roxanne, and Clive for joining me, thanks to Adam for the map included in this blog, and to Pam, Clive, and Shep for the snaps too. You can probably guess which one Shep took. No TADS now until Bank Holiday weekend in August and that's the two dayer. This year we're going to Weston-super-Mare. Some TADS do. Some TADS don't.

 

*and that doesn't include all the LbF/Thames Path/London LOOP/Capital Rang/unaffiliated walks or even the few TADS walk that took place before this blogging malarkey kicked off. Let alone my solo perambulations.