Only fools and mongeese.

Last week I was back with the London Fortean Society (and back at the Conway Hall). Their talk on Gef the Talking Mongoose had drawn an impressively large and appreciative crowd. The round of applause with which they/we greeted speakers Christopher Josiffe and Chris Hill was as warm as the beer I purchased from a trestle table set up at the back of the room.

It seemed right to be raising a bottle as the event was, at least partly, a celebration of Gef's 165th birthday. He'd claimed himself he'd been born on the 7th June 1852 near Delhi in India before travelling, via Egypt (stopping to admire the Sphinx, naturally) to, of all places, the Isle of Man where, during the 1930s, and already an octogenarian, he came into contact with the Irving family in their remote Manx farmhouse.

There he, in turns, haunted them, complained of various maladies, stalked their daughter, and stole things from their neighbours. At this point you're possibly raising your eyebrows incredulously and doubting the veracity of an 80 year old mongoose that could talk and travel the world and, of course, you'd be right. But the Fortean position is a different one to that of the Skeptics in the Pub, they celebrate the curious, the peculiar, and the downright strange, and don't seek to impose their own beliefs but simply listen, learn, and sometimes laugh.

 

Christopher and Chris began their story with a brief look at the life of James Irving. It was said that before moving out to the Isle of Man he'd run a successful business importing pianos from Canada to Liverpool. He lived in Wavertree, near Penny Lane. Not long after making the move to the Irish Sea, with his wife Margaret and daughter Voirrey, he heard scratching, rustling, and muffled speech from behind the wainscoting of their house. The house had no television, no wireless, and no electricity, and was lit solely by candles so it was a spooky enough place to begin with.

 

So when a weasel named Jack appeared and started talking things would've got even eerier. The boastful mammal claimed he was the eighth wonder of the world and that he was the fifth dimension. He also offered the Irvings a tip for the Grand National. A bad tip as it turned out as the horse did not win. He would cough, puke, gossip, moan, and, occasionally, even threaten the family. He did all this in a ludicrous high pitched whine that Christopher gamely, and amusingly, had a crack at.

 

After a while Jack the weasel decided he was actually Gef the mongoose. His spelling wasn't much better than his racing tips but let's not pick hairs. Estimates of Gef's size ranged from between 6 and 12 inches and mongeeses tend to be three to six times bigger than that so this seems like another example of Gef, or someone else (!), being economical with the truth.

 

In fact it seemed that what Gef actually was was up for quite regular debate. Was he a weasel? Was he a mongoose? Some said he might've been a stoat. Other opined that he was probably a cat. Out of the box thinkers suggested he was a shape shifter and could, therefore, be all of these things and more. Photographic evidence ranges from the vague to the virtually invisible. It's inconclusive to say the least.

 

Whatever he was he used to make a right pest of himself. A notorious sandwich theft from Peel bus garage was the least of his crimes. His obsession with Voirrey Irving bordered on the psychotic. When her bedroom was moved so he'd stop talking to her he said he'd find her wherever her parents hid her and flew into fits of rage.

 

He had a more mundane side too. His anecdotes were, quite frankly, utterly dull. He'd talk at length, over a saucer or two of milk, about finding a paintbrush in the fields or how he'd overheard a neighbour saying she was knitting a jumper for her husband.

 

He claimed to be fluent in Hindustani but experts considered his attempts at the Indo-Aryan language to be nothing short of gibberish. Gef was no doubt a bullshitter but were the Irvings? What of the handful of other people on the island who'd said they'd come into contact with Gef?



 





Gef was with the Irvings from 1931-1939 (it seems unclear what happened to him after that, perhaps the war took priority) but what was this peculiar story all about? Was it a hoax? If so, how many people were in on it? If it was a hoax nobody at all seemed to benefit financially, or in any other way, from it.

Was it a collective hallucination? Could Gef have been a poltergeist? If so, poltergeists don't normally eat sandwiches and drink saucers of milk. Fur and footprints were found and dismissed and Voirrey, speaking in later life after moving to the mainland, said she'd wish she'd never come into contact with Gef, that Gef had ruined her life and she'd been unable to form normal human relationships since her experiences with him. Voirrey also claimed that the Irving family had a sheepdog that hypnotised rabbits so either something very strange was happening on the Isle of Man in the 1930s or something very strange was happening in Voirrey's mind.

Either way this is the mystery that keeps giving. It's so different to other ghost stories or tales of talking animals. In places it's amusing, in places it's a little frightening, but, at all times, it is most definitely a tale for Forteans to ponder for many years to come. In that it was one of the best, and most appropriate, events that that I've yet had the pleasure to experience with the London Fortean Society. The way my fellow punters snapped up books about Gef suggested I wasn't alone in that.

The Wedding Present:It's What You Want That Matters.

"This is for you, you must know it's for you, what else can I think about?"

David Gedge has always run a pretty tight ship as leader, and sole original member, of The Wedding Present. He doesn't tolerate people shouting for songs, he gets aggrieved that Cinerama tunes aren't as well received as the earlier Wedding Present classics and he plays no encores. Ever.

So when he says that Saturday night's Roundhouse gig would be the last time the band would ever play the 1987 album George Best in its entirety it's probably best to take him at his word. I'd seen them at Reading's Sub 89 back in March and, great gig and great night though it was, I wasn't sure I needed to see them again quite so soon after.

The inclusion of Brix and the Extricated on the bill was very tempting, I'd seen them (and then written my most read blog so far) back in November at the Lexington and they were wonderful, but the final clincher was my very generous friend Gary getting me a free ticket. Hey, I'm not working. I ought to watch the pennies.

A pint in the sun with Shep and Pam in Chalk Farm's Enterprise set the scene nicely. A bit of faffing around at the door meant we arrived halfway through Brix and The Extricated's first song. They'd struggle to match the majesty of their Lexington gig in a, much shorter, support slot but they still pulled off a pretty impressive performance.

Brix, resplendent in leopard skin print, changing the lyrics to US 80s/90s to slag off Donald Trump and the damage he's doing to her home country, and her band didn't play as many Fall songs as last time. Only five with LA being the pick of the bunch, Steve Trafford providing the backing vocals originally sung by Brix in a neat piece of gender inversion.

Due to Brix's voice and her undoubted penchant for bubblegum pop some of their own material was very reminiscent of The Adult Net. Not least Moonrise Kingdom which substitutes the brooding menace of 1980s Fall with sixties influenced jangle. Pneumatic Violet and Damned for Eternity both introduce a harder pop-punk edge to their sound and they're both really rather wonderful.

David Gedge has clearly decided that if we're gonna be treated to a feast of nostalgia we're gonna have to earn it. The first half of The Wedding Present's set consists mainly of deep cuts and new material. There's nothing from their late 80s imperial phase and, in fact, the oldest thing they play is Crawl, essentially a b-side to 1990's Corduroy.

Opening with the slow, atmospheric, keyboard-led Scotland (from this year's Home Internationals EP), then changing up several gears to the grunge-lite Broken Bow before, eventually settling somewhere between those two extremes with tracks like the sad-eyed Model, Actress, Whatever, the moody Fifty-Six, and the Pixiesesque Love Slave.

It's all very good but most of the audience are waiting for them to get stuck into George Best which, after about half-an-hour, they do. Gedge, never one to hype something, explains how George Best is probably the third most personal Wedding Present album he's written while the crowd, considerably more enthused, create a moshpit that belies their age. As pints are lobbed in the air balding grey-haired men are escorted from the stage area by security guards who look like their granddaughters! These men may not get out so much these days but when they do they certainly make the most of it.

Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft, of course, and What Did Your Last Servant Die Of result in mass sing-alongs. The opening riff of the latter, and the camaraderie of the event, send a shiver down my spine. A sensation repeated during the heartbreaking refrain of My Favourite Dress.

Shep reminds me that when we were comparative nippers I'd accused The Wedding Present of basing a whole career on speeding up the guitar break from New Order's Love Vigilantes. If that seems reductive it's not entirely inaccurate and, so what, couple that with Gedge's conversational and heartfelt tales of love and lust and you've got a hugely winning formula. As Gedge shakes the pain out of his hands at the end of each song's guitar thrashing you feel his soul may need some exorcising too if he has to go over these tales of flawed romances too often.

Give My Love To Kevin is introduced with the information that Kevin was a real person that David Gedge knew from school. While it may seem strange to look back at friendships from more than three decades ago the awkward tale of first love that is A Million Miles and the borderline metal thrash of All This And More still sound as relevant as ever. These songs, this album, just has not dated.

Once George Best is over the band, clearly in a generous mood, finish off with the deathless indie disco classic Kennedy. The moshpit get to mosh some more and the crowd sing a long with more heart and gusto than anything else all night. The Wedding Present don't need to do encores because The Wedding Present provide the goods first time round.

Disgusting!

Richard Firth-Godbehere was at London Skeptics in the Pub to deliver his talk That's Disgusting! How Disgust Rules The World. As the second part of his double-barrelled surname, so he informed us, came from a Viking word meaning 'God of beer' a pub was the right place to be doing it. He'd even brought along a few insects to munch on while he spoke, though most of them ended up spilt on the pub carpet. Seeing the barmaid hoover them up once the talk was done was a bathetic sight - for her, me, and, not least, the insects.

Would you eat insects? Would you eat them if they were still wriggling around? Would you eat them if they'd been crunched up and put into an energy bar? I wouldn't - but that's because I'm a vegetarian - but I don't think the squeamish factor would stop me. It would a lot of people. We all have different thresholds as to what we find disgusting. In many parts of the world (Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, China) insects are consumed regularly and with no great fanfare. They're supposed to be pretty good for you and they're far better for the environment than raising cattle is.

So there are cultural reasons for what we find disgusting as well. But are there things that globally we all find disgusting? Most people would be uncomfortable with having shit smeared in their face or accidentally swallowing someone else's vomit. Some not only don't like the idea of ingesting such matter but are repulsed by it coming OUT of their bodies too. It was Firth-Godbehere's wife emetophobia that set him off on a six year long analysis and dissection of the history, philosophy, and psychology of disgust which culminated in a PhD in the English understanding of that feeling.

He'd extrapolated his findings into a belief that disgust actually rules the world! From refusing certain foods to relationships to political leanings and religious beliefs. It was here he lost me. I'm not arguing that feelings of disgust don't have huge impact on what we do, how we behave, or even what we believe but I'd say you could equally make the case for any number of emotions. Does angst rule the world? What about fear? Happiness? Desire? Lust? Shame? I'd wager that an infinitely complex mix of all these emotions are what drives us to do what we do, be who we are, and to narrow it down to just one is an over-simplification.

Firth-Godbehere came across as a likeable, jocular, chap who, perhaps down to feeling a bit nervous, tended to let his talk wander off into cul-de-sacs of digression and peppered it with too many poor jokes. It felt at times he was auditioning, unsuccessfully, for a place at a comedy festival and I felt that detracted from his highly interesting, if somewhat flawed, premise.

There was some stuff about neuroscience that he didn't really build on, some pictures of things that people might find disgusting (turds, puke, an ice cream with onions on it, rats, Donald Trump), and a very brief overview of the history of disgust which began with the Romans and moved through to the present day. One slide contained a painting of a couple having sex. As the woman was on top this was, apparently, considered disgusting in Roman times as men, as the dominant sex, should always be in the dominant position.

This showed, if nothing else, how our notion of what's disgusting changes over time. In recent years studies of disgust have shown that as recently as the 1980s a huge amount of people considered homosexuality to be repulsive and disgusting. Now, thankfully, it's a tiny amount. We can learn, we can teach, and we can be taught about disgust.

Children grow up without much of a concept of it. Some of them will happily play with their pooh. Some won't. Most adults don't. A member of the audience piped up to propose the theory, based on observing his own and other's children, that the smell of farts doesn't really bother humans until they reach about 4 or 5 years old.

We learn from those around but we also evolve. I'd have liked it if Richard had gone further back into evolutionary theories regarding disgust. It seems to me quite likely that this emotion (or reaction) must've developed for a good reason and I can't help thinking it would be a way of helping prevent us ingesting, or coming into contact with, things that are bad for us. Feces makes us feel nauseous - therefore we don't eat it.

Where the speaker did hit on something was by looking at the way politicians and propagandists use disgust. The Nazis regularly compared Jews to rats thus making their wider audience associate the two with each other (you think about Jews, you think about rats, you feel disgusted, therefore Jews = disgusting). Dehumanisation of an enemy and comparing them with disgusting things is a cowardly trick that goes back as far as history itself and, as witnessed in the recent spate of radical Islam inspired attacks, continues to this day.

Katie Hopkins' regular streams of vile filth that pour out over the pages of the Daily Mail calling migrants 'vermin' and 'cockroaches' is exactly the same technique used by the Nazis and ISIS but before us liberal minded lefties pat ourselves on the back for being better than her it's worth noting that the mere mention of her name, or that of Donald Trump, caused a huge repulsed sigh to break out across the room. Whilst the Conservatives remain the nasty party and, along with their buddies UKIP, use these slanderous and untrue techniques the most it's worth noting that some Corbynites are equally guilty of demonising the enemy. Theresa May, for all her many faults, does not barbecue and eat children as I read on my Facebook feed this morning. She disgusts me for sure - but that's because of her policies. Not because of how she looks or lies made up by those to dehumanise her.

I didn't eat the insects. I didn't believe the premise. I don't think Theresa May eats children. I don't think homosexuality is disgusting and I positively like the idea of a woman on top. According to Firth-Godbehere, in a leap of logic so wild it had me shaking my head, the reason I'm less disgusted than others is because I'm a left wing person brought up in a left-wing family. He clearly hasn't met my dad.

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.

I was at the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House. My National Art Pass saves me quite a lot of money visiting exhibition but the deal at Courtaulds is the best so far. I get into both the permanent collection and the temporary exhibitions for free. Saving me £7. Which would've been a lot of money to pay for their slight, and only intermittently interesting, Reading Drawings exhibition.

One medium sized room containing works from the 16th to the 20th century with seemingly little in common other than having some writing, some kind of inscription, on them. It seemed an unusual thing to base a show around. My curiosity was piqued.

The most common inscriptions to appear on drawings (or paintings) are, of course, signatures of the artists with maybe a date or a title. Notes on colour sometimes appear, as do comments highlighting changes to be made during the final composition, many of these drawings being preparatory sketches. Those considered already completed may include captions or explanations to help the viewer understand what the artist is trying to say.

Some have no relevance whatsoever. They've simply been used as handy scraps of paper for making notes about things unrelated to the work. Sometimes what's written is a lie. Fake authentication of a work, if not rumbled, makes it exponentially more expensive so owners often forged the signatures of masters in an attempt to accrue wealth. Bad people.

Finance is the dirty secret, an open dirty secret, that dominates the art world and has been for centuries. Juan de Juanes 1556 Study for his St Stephen Taken to his Martyrdom is scribbled over with (mostly) illegible calculations for the cost of the final painting. Another work of his contains, in both Latin and Valencian, a recipe for an adhesive used in gilding!

Artists from the studio of Raphael have written a shopping list on a sketch of theirs. It includes such delights as 'Sunday evening sausage bread and salad' and 'Monday morning bread'. It almost seems disrespectful to jot down such things over the expertly drawn body of Venus and leg of Mercury,

 

Italian School, Study of Antique Sculptures (1490-1515)

 

The 17c artist  Wibrant Jansen's signature is the only evidence we have of his existence. Canaletto, of course, is considerably more well known. He depicted the Piazza San Giacomo Di Rialto in Venice many times but this is the only version titled in his hand. It was probably a design for a print.

 

Canaletto, Piazza San Giacomo Di Rialto, Venice (1760s)

 

There's a Rodin forgery that was only uncovered because the chancer had got Auguste's moniker wrong. There are flying angels, there are statues from the Tuileries Gardens, there's a frontispiece design in the style of Guercino, and there are Roman donkey monuments designed by Pietro di Cortona. It's all a bit beige though - so the flash of colour provided by Paul Signac's Still Life with Watermelon comes as something as a relief.

 

Paul Signac, Still Life with Watermelon (1918)

 

Francesco Simonini, Howling Dog (1730-50)

 

Simonini's Howling Dog, too, has charm. I know I'm supposed to be hear to learn about inscriptions on art and what they signify but, fuck me, it's dry. I can't help focusing on the works themselves instead. They're more interesting. Well, some of them. The Howling Dog was a study for one of the cavalry scenes that the Parma born, Venice based, artist specialised in. It was attributed as a Simonini by a collector who became known under the fabulous nom de plume 'Reliable Venetian Hand' for his impressive authentication skills.

 

The rich in detail Stradanus drawing, below, was intended as an illustration for Odysseus. Flemish captions explain that Circe, the sorceress (one of the many historical figures George Romney painted Emma Hamilton as), is tempting Ulysses to drink a potion that will turn him into a beast. Previous victims, already transformed, occupy the right hand third of the work.

 

Stradanus, Circe and Ulysses (approx. 1596)

 

Thomas Rowlandson, Comparative Studies of Human and Animal Heads (approx. 1825)

 

Thomas Rowlandson was another who took an interest in such things too. The inscription below the English caricaturist's comparative chicken, goat, and human heads refers to the Pythagorean belief that human souls could be reincarnated in animal bodies. Not the reason I'm a vegetarian but a fairly compelling argument for why Pythagoras may've been one.

 

Elsewhere in the exhibition there are architectural plans for Rome's Palazzo Scapucci, a Rubens illustration of animals being 'created' (perhaps intended for bible illustration), and a sketch of some Austrians jousting. They're diverting enough but they don't exactly thrill and, more importantly, they don't hang together very will.

 

Edward Lear (yep, that one) give us another welcome splash of colour with his Villefranche-Sur-Mer from 1865, made six years before he wrote The Owl and The Pussycat. While sketching en plein air Lear would scribble 'phonetic' notes to himself to remind himself of colours etc; that needed to be worked up in watercolour later in the studio. Examples range from the rather obvious 'olives' to the peculiar 'grey fox + urbz' though, sadly, there's nothing about 'the land where the Bong-tree grows'!

 

Edward Lear, Villefranche-Sur-Mer (1865)

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Landscape Sketches (1859)

 

A distracting, if ultimately slightly disappointing, exhibition, concludes with a Corot sketch that doesn't look like very much at all - and probably isn't. Corot was a notoriously compulsive doodler and was probably just testing his pen. That's why his signature is in the middle of the daub. It's an odd thing to have in an art show but then it was an odd idea for an art show. In both its peculiarity and the negligible amount of interest the Corot sketch is likely to generate, however, it is absolutely quintessential to the remit and becomes almost emblematic of the entire experience.

 

With that I took advantage of the rest of the lovely, quiet (and did I mention free to me?) galleries. Nothing in this show could match their collection of Van Goghs, Cezannes, Seurats, Pissarros, and Gauguins but then that was never really the idea.

Broken Social Scene:It's all gonna break.

If you were to make a Venn diagram of Broken Social Scene fans and Ariana Grande fans it's probably fair to say the central intersection would not be particularly heavily populated. But any music fan knows that the gig going experience is pretty much the same across the board. It's just as much about meeting up with your friends, dressing up, and/or having a few drinks as it is about the music. The music acts as a conduit to bring like minded people together. Virtually all my friendships are predicated, in some way, around a love of music. The friendships are the most important part but sometimes the music does the heavy lifting.

Until events at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015 and Manchester this week the worst fears of gig-goers were overpriced drinks and missing the last train home. As Salman Abedi murdered more children in a matter of minutes than Ian Brady ever did in his lifetime that all changed. Now, like flying on a plane or taking a tube, people have been made to feel insecure in the environments they once felt most safe. Hatred will only fuel those bastards and reasoning will never work with such twisted ideologies. All we can do is carry on taking tubes to gigs and meeting up with our friends. In fact we should do it more. They want war, murder, and hatred. Let's not give it to them. Let's show them something they really can't stand:- love, kindness, dancing and music. Not to them. But to each other.

Broken Social Scene had been in Manchester the night before they arrived at Brixton Academy and it had clearly been a highly emotional night for all concerned. Kevin Drew was way more chatty than normal, as if he needed to talk. He only referred a couple of times directly to what had happened (including a dedication of the song Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl) but his incitement of the crowd to show love to each other clearly came down from Manchester with him.

It was a bold decision, and one that handsomely paid off, to kick off the set with Lover's Spit, possibly their best known, slowest, and, yes, most emotional song. It released a warm glow into the room that only occasionally let up during the next two hours. Broken Social Scene play long sets. There's a lot of them. At times there were four guitarists on stage.

 

On tracks like the jet propelled, almost motorik, 7/4 Shoreline and Fire Eye'd Boy those guitarists put in a shift. One of the things that make Broken Social Scene so endearing live, though, is that they always look like they're having fun, enjoying their work. Witness Brendan Canning, foot on the monitor, thrusting his guitar skywards as if to both mock, and celebrate, all those guitar heroes that went before him.

 

Sometimes the noise all four of them make adds up to one J Mascis (Cause=Time being a prime example), occasionally they drift into noodling but they always pull it back both quickly and deftly. Drew and Canning run a tight ship but allow other members of the band their moment in the limelight. Baseball capped Emily Haines and Julie Penner get to dominate sections of the gig, not least on the almost r&b flavoured Hug of Thunder, and stop it from getting too 'boys with their toys'.

 

New material like Protest Song and Skylines are decent, certainly a lot better than the tunes many returning bands serve up, and will probably soon grow into crowd favourites but the air of determined celebration of music in the aftermath of tragedy rendered old classics like Lover's Spit, Texico Bitches (from the school of slanted and enchanted leftfield rock), and set closer Almost Crimes the standouts of the evening. Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day) goes as far as to pay tribute to one of those leftfield rock influences and Backyards, with it's rippling keyboard flourishes, could almost serve as a tribute to Grandaddy's recently prematurely deceased Kevin Garcia.

 

I had a lovely evening out with my friends Darren and Ian, we ate great Brazilian food in Brixton before the gig, we had a couple of pints in the scorching sunlight, we spent an evening listening to wonderful music, and then I took the bus home safe and sound. Thanks to cunts like Salman Abedi a child one-sixth of my age never arrived, and never will arrive, back home from her concert this week.

A London walk on the theme of....Art Deco,

Having wandered around the streets of London for more than twenty years, often stopping to take in the architecture and then reading about it in the collection of books I'd amassed over the years, I considered that I'd accumulated enough trivia to be reasonably well informed on the subject and proposed, via Facebook, the idea of an architectural walk. The theme was Art Deco but it could've been Brutalism, Art Nouveau, Christopher Wren, or many other things.

Thankfully a good few friends got back to me saying they'd be interested and it was even suggested that, at some point in the future, there could be a potential business venture in it. For now, however, I just wanted a nice day out with friends, a good walk, and a couple of beers. Luckily that all came to pass.

In preparing a brief script about the walk I'd uncovered a few nuggets of information that I was looking forward to sharing with my friends. My main concerns were now about the weather (thunderstorms had loomed on the forecast all week) and a slight apprehension, bordering on stage fright, about having to curate the whole thing and keep it interesting and manageable for a reasonably disparate group of friends. I wouldn't say I was the consummate professional but I think I just about pulled it off.

We convened in Waterloo station, in Benugo on the mezzanine, by the big clock at mid-day. The concourse was teeming with stag and hen parties. I saw butchers, cows, Cleopatras, Pokemons, and a barbershop quartet. Our reasonably soberly attired (there were a couple of honourable exceptions and I'd expect nothing less) posse wandered out of the station and down to the south bank of the Thames.

At this point I realised that what with reading my 'scripts', trying to make sure people don't get lost, and focusing on the job in hand I wouldn't have much time for photos so I thank Colin Robertson for providing the photos on this blog (which later on got corrupted and have now been replaced by stock images but, you know, thanks anyway mate)!

First building up was the Oxo Tower, one of the few non-listed buildings on our route. Built in the late 19th century and then purchased in the 20s by the Liebig's Extract of Meat Company (founded in the UK by German chemist Justus von Liebig) and used as a cold store. A giant fridge basically. Liebig made Oxo stock cubes and when in 1928/29 all of the building, except the river facing façade was demolished Albert Moore rebuilt it and added its Art Deco tower. Moore wanted illuminated advertising signs but as skyline adverts were banned at the time he was refused permission. So he designed the famous O, X, and O shaped windows and if that happened to spell out the name of their most famous product well that was surely just a coincidence, eh? The tower spent a good part of the last century derelict and under threat of demolition but in the 90s the architectural firm Lifschutz Davidson refurbished it and, in 1997, it won an award for urban regeneration. It now has gallery space, shops, flats, a restaurant, and you can even get married in there.

Across the river you can see Shell Mex House (below), a Grade II listed, suave, almost New York in style, edifice. Originally the Cecil Hotel, when it opened in 1886 it was the largest in Europe with 800 bedrooms. The riverside façade, topped by the biggest clock in London, was remodelled in 1931 by Ernest Joseph and stands in comparison with Howard Robertson's lugubrious tower (also for Shell) on our side of the river.

We crossed over Blackfriars Bridge. The 3rd Thames crossing constructed in London and the 2nd oldest standing (after Westminster Bridge). Blackfriars Bridge is no longer a toll bridge and has quite a grisly story from recent years attached. In 1982 Roberto Calvi, God's banker, who had links to both the Vatican and the Mafia was found hanging from the bridge. In Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus Heath Ledger's character Tony is found, like Calvi, hanging from the bridge too.

On the north side of the bridge you'll find Unilever House. Like many of the tour a mish-mash of styles this one fuses Art Deco with Neoclassical elements, not least the huge Ionic columns, and even Baroque. Grade II listed with no ground floor windows to reduce traffic noise. On its corners there are statues of humans restraining horses. They're by William Dick and called Controlled Energy. There are mermen and mermaids by Gilbert Ledward and the lifts have been designed by renowned paedophile Eric Gill.

At Ludgate Circus we took a left into Fleet Street. Ludgate Circus was historically the main connection between the cities of Westminster and London and underneath it runs London's largest underground river, the Fleet (which starts on Hampstead Heath and seems to be crying out to be walked one day). Ludgate's name comes from the belief that once stood there was created by the pre-Roman king of Britain, Lud. London is said to mean Lud's Fortress. There's a branch of Leon there now where a pub called the King Lud once stood and you can see medallions of Lud himself over its doors.

On Fleet Street we stopped to take in the Daily Express Building (below, 1932, Ellis Clarke and Atkinson with Sir Owen Williams). In an unusually generous act for an architect the top three floors retreat behind the gantry to allow more sunshine to reach the people on street level. We couldn't go in but that didn't stop me telling my still not flagging  yet audience about the staircase being done out to resemble Cleopatra's tomb with twisted snakes as handrails. Private Eye refer to the building as the Black Lubyanska after a notorious Muscovite KGB prison.



Past the Royal Courts of Justice, St.Clement Danes, and St.Mary-le-Strand we reach the Savoy. The Thames facing side is not Art Deco at all but the stainless steel Strandside is. Built by Richard D'Oyly Carte with the profits of Gilbert & Sullivan musicals it opened in 1889. Grade II listed again here's a list of a few of the famous who've stayed there:- Edward VII, HG Wells, Monet, Whistler, GB Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, Nellie Melba. Al Jolson, Errol Flynn, Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Louis Armstrong, Humphrey Bogart, Liz Taylor, Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. Larry Olivier and Vivien Leigh met there and Bob Dylan filmed the video to Subterranean Homesick Blues (which I nervously renamed Suburban Homesick Blues) in a nearby alley and Richard Harris lived, and nearly died, there. Savoy Court is the only street in London where you're legally required to drive on the right!

Then, have a banana, we all went down the Strand. But not too far. The skies opened up. We retreated in a packed Coal Hole for a quick drink and by the time we'd supped up the rain had stopped and we had a brief stop outside the Adelphi Theatre. A building that received its Grade II listing in 1987. It was founded in 1806 as Sans Pareil and reopened in 1819 as the Adelphi going on to stage many Dickens adaptations. Renovated several times, once knocking down the nearby pub The Hampshire Hog (appropriate as the Strand is the old Roman Road to Silchester). In 1897 the actor William Terris was stabbed to death backstage by a rival thespian Richard Archer Prince and it's said that Terris' ghost now haunts the theatre. The present incarnation, by Ernest Schaufelberg, opened in 1930 and is currently owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Company.

In about 600AD there were houses on The Strand but people moved in to the city and it returned to fields until, in the Middle Ages, it became part of that London Westminster link. The Eleanor Cross, which stands outside Charing Cross, station is said to be where distances from London are measured. It's part of a series of ceremonial crosses marking overnight stays of the deceased queen of Edward I, Eleanor of Castile, who died in Lincoln and had her body returned to London for burial in Westminster Abbey. Crosses stood in Waltham, St.Albans, and Northampton but most are now fairly ruined. This one was demolished by parliament during the English Civil War in 1647 and reconstructed in 1865. 

Through Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, a quick jig with the Ugandan protestors outside Downing Street, round Parliament Square and on to 55 Broadway. We'd briefly passed Charles Holden's Zimbabwe House (with its decapitated statues by Jacob Epstein) on The Strand but this was Holden in his imperial phase. Now, predictably, being converted into luxury flats the grimy edifice won a RIBA medal when it was built in 1931 as an HQ for the London Underground. It was our first Grade I listed building on the walk and rightly so. Sculptures by Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, and Eric Gill adorn the building. The Epstein sculptures caused outcry at the time due to their nudity. Newspapers campaigned to have them removed but after Epstein chopped an inch and a half of the male model's penis the furore quietened down. I can't think why!

As much as Gill was the villain of our walk Holden to me was the hero. Born in Bolton his mum died and his dad went bankrupt during his childhood. He worked as a lab assistant and a railway clerk but  eventually found his way into architecture where he, quite obviously, flourished. He wasn't afraid of being pretentious and claimed his buildings were inspired by the likes of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. He built a ridiculous number of tube stations. Archway, Arnos Grove, Balham, Clapham Common, Green Park, Holborn, Highgate, Piccadilly Circus, Southgate, Westminster, and Tootings BEC and Broadway - they're all his.

From here we cut through St.James's Park, saw the pelicans, Egyptian geese, swans, and ducks, and rocked up at Simpson's of Piccadilly. Now a huge Waterstones it was once a huge menswear store, the biggest in the UK when it was built by Joseph Emberton (with the help of Hungarian artist and Bauhaus director Laszlo Moholy-Nagy) in the mid-30s. Another Grade I building in the 50s Jeremy Lloyd worked there as a junior assistant and used his experiences there (and the shop itself) as a basis for Are You Being Served?

From here we wandered through Leicester Square taking in the Prince of Wales Theatre (established 1884, rebuilt 1937, refurbished by Cameron Mackintosh in 2004) where Gracie Fields sang to the workmen as she laid the foundation stones. Designed by Robert Cromie and home to comedians like Bob Hope, Morecambe and Wise, Benny Hill, Peter Sellers, and Norman Wisdom.

Also in Leicester Square we took in the Odeon. Oscar Deutsch who formed the group actually came from Balsall Heath in Birmingham and was the son of a Hungarian Jewish scrap metal merchant, Leopold. He eventually passed his business on to J Arthur Rank, a man more famous for his role in rhyming slang these days. The Odeon was on the site of a former Turkish bath.

 

In Covent Garden the Cambridge Theatre was mostly under wraps so we couldn't appreciate the Wimperson, Simpson, and Guthrie built Grade II building or its interior, by Serge Chermayeff (the Russian born architect of the De Le Warr pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea) which famously housed both Jerry Springer the Opera and several 1964 performances by Bruce Forsyth.

I could talk about Seven Dials itself though. Once a slum of such repute that both Charles Dickens and WS Gilbert both passed comment on its 'lowliness' it did at least have a pub on each of its seven corners. Only one still stands. Even in the 1920s it was still a byword for urban poverty. That's all changed now as well-to-do types loiter around the sundial unveilved by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Freemason's Hall (below, 1927-33, Ashley and Newman) is the HQ of the United Grand Lodge of England and the Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch. Sounds like a load of old bollocks but its an impressive building nonetheless. Initially built as a memorial to the 3,225 masons who died in World War I. It's even appeared in a Westlife video!

 

Round the British Museum we come face to face with the megalithic Senate House. Charles Holden's work again. This one dates from 1932-37 and the plan, originally, was to make it even bigger but World War II put pay to that. During that war it was used as the Ministry of Information and inspired Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear, Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear (not sure who came up with that title first), and George Orwell's 1984. Orwell's wife had worked there. Some say the building's totalitarian or even Stalinist, Evelyn Waugh said the building insulted the sky, but many loved it. Not least Erich Mendelsohn (another who worked on the De La Warr pavilion as well as the Einstein Tower in Potsdam) who claimed London had no finer building. Unsubstantiated rumours say Adolf Hitler was also a fan and had earmarked it as his London base after the Nazi invasion.

 

I could see that some feet were aching, a few were midly flagging, people needed a wee, people definitely wanted a drink. So I thought on my feet and cut out Palladium/Ideal House (a scaled down version of the American Radiator building made famous by a Georgie O'Keeffe painting) and Claridge's (rumoured to have been ceded, for one day only, to Yugoslavia, so Crown Prince Alexander could be born on Yugoslav soil) and stop for a very refreshing drink in The Marlbrough Arms. I think it worked. People seemed happy with the decision anyway and, suitably refreshed, we headed off through Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia to see the Beeb!

Broadcasting House (above, 1931, Val Myers and Watson-Hart) also has sculptures from Eric Gill (not the only paedophile to enter the building, that's for sure). Serge Chermayeff provided interiors since removed by the BBC and in the radio theatre you can hear the rumble of Bakerloo trains passing by below. The cone on the roof of the building was unveiled by Ban Ki-Moon in 2008 and is a memorial to journalists killed in the lines of duty. It's called Breathing and it's by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa.

Broadcasting House (and the Langham Hotel) seem to rhyme with neaby All Soul's Church, built by John Nash in the Regency style in 1824 for George IV. Nash also did the less impressive Buckingham Palace and the wonderful and bonkers Brighton Pavilion.

Further up Portland Place you come to the RIBA HQ. They have great exhibitions and you can even take a shower in the Grade II listed George Grey Wornum building which stands resplendent in surprisingly clean Portland Stone. Wornum won a competition for the commission to build it that had 3,600 entries. His other work includes ocean liners and a girl's college in Alexandria. Probably a good job Gill wasn't called in on that job.

Up to Mornington Crescent and our final stop was the full Egyptian revival of the Carreras Cigarette Factory. Also called the Black Cat Factory, Arcadia Works, or Greater London House it goes by many names and one of our walkers, Linda, works there now for the British Heart Foundation (ASOS and Wonga are also in there these days). Built between 1926 and 1928 by the architects ME & OH Collins & AG Porri to house the growing Carreras cigarette makers ,after fags became more popular after WWI and they needed to move from City Road, it was designed not long after Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun which had made ancient Egypt so en pointe. It was made as a temple to the Egyptian god Bastet and was going to be called Bast House but they dropped that in case people nicknamed it Bastard House. It was the first building in the UK to use pre-stressed concrete and the first to have air conditioning. It was also a good place to end our walk and head to the pub.

We had a quick drink in The Edinboro' Castle (where Ian, Poppy, and Peter put in a brief appearance) and then a few of us went to Masala Zone for a curry. I had a fairly basic (but tasty) paneer dish but Colin and Valia, who both went for some banana and suran (?) thing, were braver and rewarded for their bravery in ordering. A dwindling band of us went for a couple more drinks before I headed home tired, satisfied with how it'd gone, and having learnt a few things about what worked and what didn't. I'm going to do another soon. It'll be Brutalist next time and the walk will probably be a bit shorter and hopefully in even better weather.

Thanks to Colin, Shep, Pam, Valia, Adam, Cheryl, Darren, Tommy (an absolute star who, at four years old, not only kept up with all the grown ups but at the 10 mile walk was still suggesting running races), Dena, Linda, and Sanda for joining me. I had a wonderful time and though the buildings, the beers, the walking, and the curry were all fun it was the company, as ever, that really made it. See you soon.

Justin Mortmer:It Is Here.

Whilst not as overtly political as recent shows by Gideon Mendel or Bouchra Khalili Parafin Gallery's 'It Is Here' by Justin Mortimer at least seeks to say something, even if that something is a little unclear, about the troubling times we now live in. It's certainly a change in subject matter, if less so in style, from his prior portraits of such establishment figures as Harold Pinter, Sir Steven Redgrave, David Bowie, and even the Queen.

While portraiture is his thing, he won the BP Portrait Award back in 1991 aged just 21, the figures in his new paintings are, for the most part, masked, and clad head to toe in hazmat suits looking like they're inspecting the site of an alien visitation or running a meth lab in Breaking Bad. Elsewhere they may be represented by just a pair of hands or even an entire naked torso with the face covered.

Perhaps he's saying something about how the new world order, even more so than the one it's replacing, is dehumanising, making mere ciphers, of those of us that live under its rule. It's hard to say because, despite the beauty of the often stark yellows and purples he employs, there's little actual political comment. Just a sense of over-riding dread.

 

Witness (2016)

 

Zona (2016)

 

That's fine. Art exists to question, not necessarily to answer, and these works definitely ask a lot of questions. Sometimes the titles give clues. Odessa must refer to the current conflict in Ukraine, but Witness, Zone, and the centrepiece It Is Here could all refer to a number of conflicts, refugee situations, or other crises currently affecting the world.

 

The A4 sheet of paper you can pick up at the desk on your way in suggests Mortimer is reflecting upon recent events in Syria, Afghanistan, Calais, West Africa, the US, and, yes, Ukraine but if you can ascertain which painting relates to which trouble spot then you're sharper than me.

 

I don't think that's really the point though. I think what Mortimer's trying to show is that bad times are bad times wherever you live, whoever you are. The reasons for these problems are manifold and confusing and the solutions unclear and sullied by the fact that in creating poverty and unsafety for huge numbers of people there's a small number of very powerful people who can get obscenely rich on the back of it. I attended a talk recently by a man who'd been living and working in Ukraine for some years and he said that, if they wanted, the war could've ended years ago but there's too many people making too much money out of it for that to happen either now or in the near future. That's how the military industrial complex works - and it works the same all over the world.

 

Monitor (2016-17)

 

It Is Here (2016)

 

Odessa (2016)

 

The palette Mortimer employs reminds me of Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold - the Falling Rocket (that's the one that saw eminent critic John Ruskin accuse Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face) . Its striations, splats of paint, and borderline abstractions bring that comparison further home but the lineage continues past Whistler and right back to Turner.

 

Mortimer is bold enough to do something new with this style though. Both in his rendering of the paint and in his addition of contemporary elements. The paintings downstairs (Widow, Slinter, The Lie) are populated with familiar items of everyday office furniture:- plastic chairs, ring binders, coffee cups etc; juxtaposed into a more unsettling environment. Taken in conjunction with the scenes of chemical warfare and poverty in the upper room they seem to hint at what Hannah Arendt called the 'banality of evil'. How decisions that affect, often destroy and end, people's lives are taken by bureaucrats in air conditioned offices far far away. They're just doing their job. Just getting on with life best they can.

 

Hoax I (2017)

 

Hoax II (2017)

 

Widow (2017)

 

Slinter (2017)

 

These are very beautiful paintings, and there is no doubt beauty to be had even in the darkest of times, but they depict a world that took a wrong turn somewhere along the line and rather than correct itself insists, as pig-headedly as a stubborn motorist, that they were right all along. The further downhill we continue to roll in the wrong direction the steeper the hill those remaining will one day have to climb. In Mortimer's Fugue a lone figure looks out at the mess in front of him as if a sudden realisation has fallen over him that he's been (at least partly) responsible for the mess he finds himself, and we find ourselves, in. The options in front of him don't look good. In fact they look utterly grim. Pray to a non-existent God, sling a noose around your neck, accept the status quo, or continue with the Sisyphean task of rolling that stone up that hill.

 

Justin Mortimer may've opened a window on a very bleak worldview indeed but he's done it so beautifully that if we let the fresh air in it may not be too late to change things for the better. Inhale while you can for it's gonna be a long, and painful, fight against the masters of hate and division who are now raising their heads above the parapet, bolder, and more emboldened, than any time since the end of the second World War.

 

Kult VIII (2016)

 

The Lie (2017)

 

Fugure (2016-17)