Going Up The Country:The Art Of Neill Fuller and 'Friends'.

Full disclosure. Neill Fuller is my friend. At least I hope I can call him that. I've known him for about twenty-five years, I've stayed at his house, we've visited countless exhibitions together and we've sunk more than a few pints together too. He's offered me sage advice when things haven't been going well in my life and he's helped me complete more than the odd crossword too.

So when he asked if I'd like to attend a private view of his at Gurrjohns on Pall Mall last night, of course I responded in the affirmative. It would be good to catch up with him (not seen him since last spring) and it would be good to see what art he's been making lately. I'd heard nothing but good things.

 

Neill Fuller - Going Up The Country (2017)

 

Neill Fuller - Syndicate (2017)

 

I wasn't to be disappointed. In a show that was not really an exhibition (more a sale, works went from £450 o £20,000, Neill's work being far closer to the more affordable end of that spectrum), Neill's work stood out as the best for me. Perhaps I'm biased. If I am, then in this one instance I don't care.

 

I like it when my friends are creative and successful and I like to celebrate that. Neill had five works on show (four I've included here, always good to retain at least some mystery) and all of them were small, figurative paintings of fairly unremarkable things. A slide, a stage (of sorts), a tree, some building blocks.

 

Where Neill excels is not in his choice of subject matter but in the way he colours and shades the work. His backgrounds show a love for abstract expressionism while his foregrounds transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. I hope he sold a couple of paintings. If he didn't, I hope he at least enjoyed the experience.

 

Neill Fuller -     Cut Out For This (2015)

Neill Fuller - Step Right Up (2015)

 

Angela Lizon - Album 100

 

I did - but in my role of amateur art reviewer (self-appointed) I couldn't resist a little look round the rest of the offerings (there was free wine and beer available but I'm not drinking at the moment so stuck to water - why does the free booze always come out when I'm off the pop?) and my favourite work, Neill's aside - of course, was Album 100 by Angela Lizon.

 

There was something of the Walter Sickert about it. Are that couple dancing or is he attacking her? The muted, muddy, colours of the walls and the man's clothes contrast with the lady's blue dress in quite a startling way and a way that seems to tell a story. It's echoed in the difference between the yellow rubber pig toy and the curious bird in Lizon's Album 54.

 

Angela Lizon - Album 54

 

Myma Quinonez - 20.9319579,-101.3004158 (2022)

 

Angela Lizon was definitely my second favourite artist on show but the rest weren't bad either. Myma Quimonez's works reminded me of something I'd seen, and forgotten, at the Hayward Gallery decades ago (it's bugging me I can't remember what), Tyga Helme's botanical looking (and sounding) 'A weed, singing' enticed, and Frea Buckler's abstracted, and geometrical, works proved satisfying to the eye.

 

Shout out too for David Abbot whose bleached landscapes managed to capture an appropriately wintry vibe for a January show - if intended or not. In fact the whole selection, spread out over two small - but very pleasant - rooms, fitted together very well. I came away feeling somewhat proud of my friend.

 

Tyga Helme - 'A weed, singing' (2024)

 

David Abbott - In The End (2024)

 

David Abbott - Find It In Your Heart (2024)

 

Myma Quinonez - Archive 1 (2024)

 

Thanks to Mark, Natalie, and Andrew for joining me at this private viewing, thanks to Gurrjohns for hosting, and thanks to Neill. Not just for his excellent art and not just for being a huge influence on my own art appreciation - but for being an old round top bloke. Puff up di chest!

 

Frea Buckler - Pitch 14 (series) (2024)

 

Frea Buckler - Pitch 16 (series) (2024)

Spies, Lies, and Satan's Demise:Aleister Crowley's Adventures In Espionage.

Heinrich Himmler, Fred West, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward VIII's sexual preferences, Jewish mysticism, Rudolf Steiner, Hippocrates, gnosticism, Paul Robeson, Augustus John, bestiality, antisemitism, and anthroposophy. These were subjects that cropped up in the Q&A after last night's London Fortean Society talk, Aleister Crowley:The Spy Who Loved The Occult, at The Bell in Whitechapel and they should give you some idea of just how large an area of scholarship the world of Crowley is and just how many different influences he took from, and how much influence he had.

The Bell's not a big venue - by any stretch - but the Crowley talk had sold it out weeks in advance (that doesn't happen very often) and that was only right and proper because Richard McNeff (who has been studying, and writing about, Crowley since I was at junior school) not only knows his stuff (and, in a nod to Crowley, adds a few ideas of his own creation into the mix) but communicates it ably and enthusiastically. I almost forgot my bum was sore from sitting on a hard wooden bench.

When Aleister Crowley died, in Hastings on 1st December 1947, not only was there a new face in hell (see what I did there?) but there was also a new face in the annals of British eccentricity. But his scandalous cremation, some called it a 'black mass', aside, he soon began to drift into obscurity and even those who kept his flame alive, like the novelist John Symonds, professed they couldn't actually stand the man.

Symonds, who had commissioned Crowley to write for him in the past - as well as helped him inject himself with heroin, ended up becoming Crowley's literary executor and, in 1951, wrote The Great Beast:The Life of Aleister Crowley about him. Symonds may not have liked the man but he knew he made for great copy. The 1951 tome was far from his last on Crowley. He wrote at least four more.

McNeff told us that he'd known Symonds personally and that Symonds was horrified with the Crowley revival which began, more or less, with the great beast's inclusion on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP. A decision made by John Lennon who also, apparently, wanted Adolf Hitler on the cover. Cover artist Peter Blake thought was pushing it a bit, twenty-two years after the end of World War II.

Some have claimed Crowley as the missing link between Adolf Hitler and Oscar Wilde (not a link I knew people had been looking for) and though Hitler's inclusion on the Beatles cover was nixed by Blake (though some claim the Fuhrer is still there, hidden behind Western actor Tom Mix's cowboy hat), Wilde still made the cut. What's more, and some people read too much into this, if you trace a line - on the cover - from Crowley to Lennon it cuts through Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas.

According to McNeff, 'Paul is Dead' conspiracy websites absolutely love this stuff but both Huxley and Thomas do reappear in this strange tale. It was Crowley, apocryphally - much in Crowley's life is apocryphal, who turned Huxley on to mescaline in Berlin in the 1930s (though, to be fair, Crowley gave a lot of people mescaline) and there are even regular suggestions that the Nazis themselves were using mescaline and flirting with the occult. Particularly Rudolf Hess who will crop up again later.

Crowley had become such a compelling, and intriguing, figure that he ended up featuring, under pseudonyms - which he fully encouraged, in books by Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, Anthony Powell, Dennis Wheatley. MR James, Christopher Isherwood, and Dylan Thomas. Thomas was, of course, primarily known as a poet but did release a couple of books of prose.

The minor poet Victor Neuburg, a devoted follower of Crowley who nevertheless had a love/hate relationship with him, was the first person to publish Dylan Thomas and, in McNeff's own fiction - not reality - and that line is a very blurred one it seems, also the one that let on that Crowley had been involved in a plot, in 1936, to avert Edward VIII's abdication. 

Maxwell Knight was a naturalist and broadcaster and also a spymaster (rumoured to be the inspiration for M in the James Bond stories) who ended up heading the MI5 department sourced with looking for homegrown traitors. Knight had, along with Dennis Wheatley, studied under Crowley.

So far, the evidence for Crowley being a spy was circumstantial at best and the American historian Richard B.Spence's 2008 book Secret Agent 666:Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (the cover showing the sinking of the Lusitania - its second EIAPOE mention in two days, the event that brought the US into World War I) offers even more far fetched ideas about Crowley's level of involvement in espionage. 

Spence believed, or at least wrote, that Crowley had been recruited at Cambridge and spied on the Golden Dawn in the 1890s - even though he was, it seems - along with W.B. Yeats, a member of the Golden Dawn. Double agent? Who knows?

What seems more plausible, though still up for debate, is that, during World War I, Crowley worked as a pro-German provocateur in the United States, posing as an extreme Irish Republican. Again it is suggested he was working as a double agent trying to flush out those in America who were sympathetic to the German side and this seems more plausible when you consider that after the war, despite the fact he had called on the destruction of Britain - specifically his auntie's house where he was sometimes living, he was not even arrested. Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, - the most famous British Nazi propagandist - was not so lucky. He was hanged in Wandsworth prison in 1946.

Philip Baker, another Crowley expert in the audience and the speaker at the LFS's excellent 2022 Aleister Crowley, City of the Beast The London of Aleister Crowley talk, felt this was because Crowley was less a spy and more of a 'grass' McNeff, who has written two books about Crowley's links to MI5 and MI6, chose to ice a different cake. Though they disagreed incredibly amicably.

So McNeff continued. Between 1930 and 1932 he had it that Crowley was in Berlin spying for the Special Branch, in 1941 Crowley is said to have written a letter to Naval Intelligence offering to interrogate Rudolf Hess who was being held prisoner of war in Scotland after flying there in a (failed) attempt to negotiate Britain's exit from World War II), and also during the war Crowley took to dressing like Winston Churchill.

As well as talking like Winston Churchill and even smoking the same tobacco as Winston Churchill. He even went so far as to claim (almost certainly untruthfully) he invented the V For Victory symbol. But then Crowley also claimed to have given the Nazis the idea of the swastika symbol. Which tells you something about the man. He led a fascinating, hugely unconventional, life. He was erudite, learned, and could be funny and kind but he could also be mean, he could (and would often) lie, and there was no story he would not appropriate for his own ends. His motto was "do what thou wilt" and, despite all the contradictions in his life story, he seems to have lived by it.

To go back to the start of this blog and to give you further idea of just how enormous his influences were, and his influence was, the talk also took in Stalin, Bob Dylan, Jay-Z, Paulo Coelho, Kenneth Anger, L.Ron Hubbard, Joan Baez, Timothy Leary, Jimmy Page, Nikola Tesla, Jack Parsons, John Dee, Ozzy Osbourne (of course), Kim Philby, Malcolm Lowry, The Rolling Stones, Fernando Pessoa, Jimmy Page, and the Graham Bond Organisation.

Graham Bond believed that Crowley was his absent father. David Bowie, of course, cropped up (the lyrics of Quicksand - my favourite Bowie song - includes the lines "I'm closer to the Golden Dawn immersed in Crowley's uniform") and so did Alexandr Dugin, known as 'Putin's Rasputin'. Dugin takes a heavy influence from 'chaos magic' and has claimed he will use it to create an all out war that causes "the end of times". Part of his plan has been to corrupt Western democracies with misinformation and to persuade Putin to invade Ukraine (though Dugin's personal preference is said to be the death of ALL Ukrainians) so either his chaos magic is working or something else very worrying is afoot.

I'm not blaming Crowley for Dugin or Putin, and I'm not crediting him for Bowie or for Black Sabbath, but he seems an endlessly fascinating man and I know, with a degree of certainty, that this won't be the last time the LFS tackle him. Thanks to the London Fortean Society and David V. Barrett for hosting, thanks to The Bell in Whitechapel (not least because I didn't buy a single drink and survived purely on a bag of Mini Eggs), and thanks to Dewi, Jade, Michael, Paula, Steve, and Jackie for keeping me company. Another great evening with the LFS and one that I was glad didn't end with being asked if I'd like to participate in a sex magick human sacrifice.

The Thames Path Part VIII:Bourne End to Henley-on-Thames (The Henley Regatta).

Henley-on-Thames is a place rich in memories for me. It's only twenty miles from Tadley where I grew up (though feels like a different world) and, during my late teenage years and my twenties, we used to go there - to the regatta if you can believe that.

 

We weren't competing in it - or even supporting a team. In fact, we had no interest in the rowing whatsoever. We went there because an older kid, Pat, who was in his mid-twenties when we were in our late teens, enjoyed it. It was an excuse (not that he needed one) to indulge in his favourite hobby of day time drinking and, in his imagination, it was a place where he could meet a rich attractive young woman.

The latter didn't happen. But we did have fun at the fair, jumped in the river, blagged our way on to a posh person's boat, and, one year, a posh regatta going young lady asked a very shy me if she could kiss me. I let her. On one occasion, Pat and myself had a bucket of water thrown over us after a couple of scrotes we were hanging round with threw chips over a newly washed car and another time those same scrotes earned themselves some money pretending to be car parking attendants.

I'd not been to Henley since March 2016 (in the second ever blogged TADS walk - another visit rich in memories, not least relating to Pat who had died the day before) so it had been a while and was looking forward to my return. First though we'd need to walk from Bourne End (where we finished last time) and before that I'd need to get to Bourne End!

 

It was easy enough - but it took some time. I'd left home at about 7am (and been up for at least two hours before that), walked to Honor Oak Park station and taken the Overground to Whitechapel. Contradicting the Internet, I hadn't had to get off and walk from Shadwell so I arrived in good time to leave the station and find myself a Guardian. Itself not an easy task but one that helped bump up the day's step count.

I still had about twenty minutes at Whitechapel station before I hopped on an Elizabeth Line train and Pam joined me at Farringdon. Both sporting new haircuts, we caught up with each other's news and then got stuck into the crosswords before changing at Maidenhead and taking the branch line out to Bourne End.

Adam joined us at Maidenhead and thought he'd start the day on an egg. Not in the way you might imagine but by posing us a quandary, from his game of Cards Against Humanity the night before, that involved both a boiled egg and an anus. It should have been enough to put me off my breakfast. It wasn't.

 

We'd chosen Bourne End's Moreganic Cafe as our designated brunch(ington) spot and we were discussing it on the train, with views to swapping to Wimpy - a bizarre feature on a high end high street like Bourne End's - when a friendly young lady sat opposite us piped up to tell us that the food, and even more so - the coffee, in Moreganic was really good.

Moreganic it was - and our friendly stranger on the train was not wrong. Adam, Pam, and myself had mushrooms, veggie sausages, eggs (sans anus, thankfully), a hash brown, beans, and toast and bloody tasty it was too. They had coffee and I had tea (doh!) and Shep and Laura soon joined us. The lady serving at Moreganic was super friendly, the service was quick, and we were back on the Thames Path proper by about 10.40am.

 

Good stuff. An alley way took us down to Bourne End's cute little marina, looking across river to the less cute sounding Cock Marsh, where we took in the boats. Many of them had appropriately twee names but it's uncertainty if the owners of Tugger are fully aware of the implications of that name. Seems apt it was moored near Cock Marsh though. The owners of Tuckers Luck, however, can be in no doubt as to what, and who, their vessel pays tribute to. As if to underline it the bow is emblazoned with the legend "FLIPPING HECK TUCKER".

Enough to make Todd Carty proud. We followed a sometimes muddy path along the river, Shep occasionally changing into his wellies, and soon crossed beneath the A404 and reached Marlow, some of the houses (on both banks) were, as has been a common theme on this 'odyssey', rather opulent looking.

 

 

 

 

 

Marlow was where we ended up on that TADS walk back in March 2016 but, that time, we didn't get to see much of it except for a pub (Clayton's), an Indian restaurant (Tiger Garden), and the train station. We certainly didn't get to see all of it on Saturday either but we saw a bit more. It's a nice looking little town. As with many places visited on our walks, I felt a desire to come back and explore in more depth.

Marlow developed due to its strategic location between Reading and High Wycombe and is now a "bustling commuter town", its railway link to Maidenhead (on a single track line) known, affectionately, as the Marlow Donkey. We'd been on the donkey but now we were in the town's picturesque snickets that brought us to Marlow's High Street (a market town straight out of central casting) with the spire of All Saints Church to one side and Higginson Park to the other.

 

Good place for a toilet stop even if Laura's failure of duty when keeping sentry outside of the cubicles meant Pam had an unsuspected visitor. It wasn't Dr William Battle (1703-1776), a nervous disease specialist, who used to live in a large mansion, Court Garden, in the park. Nor was it Sir George Higginson (1826-1927) for whom the park was named after. Also, death rules out Vice-Admiral James Nicol Morris (1763-1830) who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar and has 'lived' in Nelson's shadow ever since.

 

Other Marlow notables, red kites who may steal your food aside, Jerome K Jerome (who wrote parts of Three Men In A Boat in The Two Brewers pub), Heston Blumenthal (lived in Marlow until a few years back), Jonathan Ross's brother Paul (big deal), Jim Capaldi (the drummer of Traffic), cricketer Andrew Strauss, the chef Tom Kerridge, Shakin' Stevens, Chris Evans, and Ricky Gervais (who owns a property there) but most famously of all - the Shelleys.

Mary is believed to have completed Frankenstein while living in Marlow. Percy was making the tea, I guess. T.S.Eliot is another literary heavyweight with Marlow links, having lived there in the early 20th century. We crossed the Thames over William Tierney Clark's pretty 1832 suspension bridge (designed to look like both Hammersmith Bridge and a bridge over the Danube in Budapest) although I missed the statue of theatrical impresario Charles Frohman who went down with the RMS Lusitania in 1915. Sunk by a German U-boat off the South Coast of Ireland during World War I. Froham was one of 1,199 casualties.

 

 

The Thames Path normally follows the Thames along its northern banks from here but there was a diversion and the diversion took us through Bisham and Bisham Abbey. A Grade I listed manor house which was once home of Sport England a training centre for the English football team, though they've since upped sticks for St George's Park in Staffordshire.

Reading FC are still based there though under Dai Yongge's disastrous, immoral, and borderline criminal, ownership they may not be for much longer. They may not exist for much longer, sadly. A quiet country lane took us from Bisham to the hamlet of Temple and, from there, it was down a tunnel and under a bridge back to the Thames.

 

A pretty stretch this, we saw the Temple Footbridge we'd have crossed had it not been for the diversion and we crossed smaller bridges looking out to the coots, moorhens, mallards, and friends that were either cooling off in the water or relaxing on small islands. It's a duck's life.

 

We passed some holiday caravans, a place called Frogmill Spinney, and even a bit where the Thames Path broke into two. One bit, as Adam soon found out, too muddy to pass. There was a view across to the 'castellated mansion' known as Danesfield (built in 1900, now a hotel), a few FBs (footbridges), a couple of kissing-gates (always popular with the 'singletons'), before we came, slightly, off the river into a field full of deer and a somewhat bizarre architectural caprice that may have fitted better into a game of Jenga for giants than the Buckinghamshire countryside.

 

 

 

 

 

We also got a brief look at Lower Culham Farm and, from behind lots of trees, the 18c Culham Court. Laura went barefoot as is her thing. Something that is everyone's thing, at least after nine to ten miles, is a pub and we'd not stopped at Marlow (too soon) or taken a diversion into Hurley (too inconvenient) so The Flowerpot Inn in Aston looked, and was, very inviting.

Shep mentioned we may have been in there before on a TADpoleS walk (my Facebook memories confirmed to me we had - back in November 2018 when I described the pub as rustic). I must have been hungry (or, maybe, just plain gluttonous) as I couldn't leave the free nuts at the bar alone. I had a pint of lemonade, Pam took a more interesting Boon Doggle - but in the wrong pint pot, and we sat out in the garden - briefly.

We were warm enough moving but sat still we started to feel the cold so we grabbed a table indoors, near a very toasty radiator, and Laura tried to persuade me to enter the world of paid dog walking. Even though most people know I don't like dogs. To be clear, I do like SOME dogs. Just not all dogs. If you're reading this, I almost certainly don't like your dog! ;-)

 

Leaving the pub and embarking on our final stretch, whilst avoiding peacocks as surely as we'd avoided red kites earlier - though we did see one of the latter resting on a branch, we soon reached Hambleden Lock. A very satisfying area and one we strode out on to take photos and observe that the flow of the river viewed from the footbridge created an optical illusion not dissimilar to one you get when your train moves out of a station but you think the train opposite is doing so.

As the sun began to go down, it was a long straight yomp into Henley, via WH Smith's old home and the Fawley folly (more details on that  in the blog from 2016) and, as the gang stretched out, I got a call from Vicki (wanting to discuss Funboy Three badges) who was not far upstream in Cholsey preparing for her sister-in-law's birthday meal.

We timed it just right for our arrival in Henley. Unlike the Saturday before, it was not pitch black and the twilit river looked glorious, the street lights reflected dramatically in the water, and the houses and pubs along the front lit up gloriously. We soon repaired to old favourite The Angel and, despite a Burns Night party taking place in most of the pub, found a table near a roaring fire which was most satisfactory.

As Pam piled logs on the fire and waxed lyrical about Scrub Daddy ergonomic sponges, and Shep and Laura bickered about Costa customer cards, I drained another lemonade and an Erdinger alkoholfrei lager (pretty good). Laura had coffee, Adam was off the pop - like me, and even Shep had one alcohol free beer. It was almost too much for Pam. She calmed down by putting another log on the fire. That is, after all, her job.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From there it was on to Le Raj Indian restaurant (recommended by Carole, a Henley girl) where, after nearly falling through the door - sober as well, we were joined by Sharon, Jason, Carole, and Dylan. The poppadums and condiments were great, I assume the Cobra and Kingfisher was too - Shep genuinely thought they served Bangla so was mildluy disappointed, and my mango lassi (in a pint glass) was thick, cold, and tasty.

 

But the wait for the main course was too long by far. Luckily, nobody had to miss a train or miss their food so it wasn't as big an issue as it could have been but, as before, the prioritising of takeaway customers left seated customers feeling like second class citizens. My veg balti wasn't bad (I don't normally have a balti and it's not the best choice for me - I remembered too late) but the chick pea dishes looked best of all. I'll try and remember next time.

 

All done. Everyone except Pam and I drove, or were driven, home and we walked to Henley station where we took a train to Maidenhead and another to Paddington before saying goodbye. For me, it was a Bakerloo line tube to Elephant & Castle and a 63 bus home. I'd hoped, expected even, a 2024 step record but, despite the actual walk being longer, I'd fallen just short. 37,748 steps compared to last week's 37,828. Just EIGHTY steps. A couple of toilet visits would have had me over the line.

 

That was close. Far more importantly it was a great day. Great pubs, great sights, great deer, great mango lassi, great brunchington, great people, and, of course, great river. Thanks to Pam, Adam, Shep, Laura, Carole, Dylan, Sharon, and Jason for making it so (double thanks to Pam and Shep for photos included in this blog). We're back on the Thames over Easter (Henley to Reading) but, before that - next week, TADS kick off their 10th (TENTH) season with a little (or not so little - there are options) walk called To The Oldest Place from Theale to Thatcham. Let the games begin.