True Love Will Find You In The End:The Pursuit Of Love.

"True love will find you in the end. You'll find out just who was your friend" - Daniel Johnson

Alconleigh, a posh stately home in rural Oxfordshire, was not, in the 1920s, a very happy place. The man of the house, Uncle Matthew (Dominic West) dished out beatings as regularly as he killed foxes. He hated Germans and he hated Americans. In fact, he hated all foreigners and all foreign lands which, in his world view, was one horrific amorphous blob dismissed as "abroad".

Even more than foreigners, he hated children. Especially female children. Especially intelligent female children. Especially headstrong and intelligent female children and ones that dare to use such fancy words as "notepaper" or "mantelpiece". Which was unfortunate because Alconleigh was home to two of them. At least during the holiday season when Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham) came to stay with Uncle Matthew and his family.

Her best friend, and permanent resident, is her cousin Linda (Lily James), the second of Matthew Radlett's daughters, and in Alconleigh, starved of both culture and contact with the outside world they create their own inner sanctum. A place of fantasty, of safety, and of peace. Linda and Fanny are cousins and, at times, they're close to kissing cousins. For all their talk of men they seem, on occasion, very close to getting it on with each other.

The Pursuit of Love (BBC1/iPlayer, written and directed by Emily Mortimer and adapted from a 1945 novel by Nancy Mitford) tells the story of Linda and Fanny's coming of age between the wars and as the story flits from Oxfordshire to Surrey to Chelsea and even abroad to France and Spain we see the relationship between the two cousins wax and wane as their lives begin to take very different paths.

Paths, it seems, that have been predetermined by their characters. Linda is fur coats and high heels, she's wild, she's full of passion, she falls in love easily and deeply - even with a photo of The Prince of Wales, and she's often in tears. She wants to dress up and go to the cinema and she wants a man to sweep her off her feet - even if the men in her life, for the most part, are underwhelming.

She wants, essentially, to be adored. Fanny is the ice to Linda's fire. Practical, sensibly attired, anxious, and educated. She shares with Linda a love for the novels of Virginia Woolf and she shares with her, also, a desire for love. But how that love is defined, and how they each go about searching for it (Fanny works at it, Linda believes it arrives on a magic carpet), is the heart of this compelling, if initially too jaunty for its own good, drama.

Some of the whimsical touches (the captions when new characters appear, reading such things as "Boring Don's wife", "important person", and "the chatters" for example) fall a bit flat and the voice overs, provided by Fanny, reminded me of last year's Anna Kendrick vehicle Love Life. But, as the story played out, I found myself becoming increasingly emotionally involved and that's not something I thought would happen in a world of coming out balls, ponies, follies, tea and toast in pristine landscaped gardens, and people who never fancy a drink but always "desperately" need one.

That's not to say upper class people's lives can't be interesting but more to say that the comedy of manners has never said much to me about my life. I didn't grow up with and nor have I ever moved in circles with dandies like Lord Merlin (Andrew Scott). An obscenely wealthy man for no apparent reason who introduces Fanny, and Linda especially, in to a world of Dada, jazz poetry, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Proust, Cezanne, Watteau, and Josephine Baker.

Uncle Matthew, of course, loathes this swell, this unapologetic boulevardier, but Linda is besotted. Like a magpie, she is attracted to that which shines. Merlin's exciting and sophisticated lifestyle has a magnetic force that Linda cannot, and will not, resist. Merlin, initially, appears to be a potential suitor of Linda's and yet neither his true feelings, nor his sexual preferences, are ever divulged.

In this, the makers of The Pursuit of Love have wisely steered clear of the hackneyed gay best friend trope and, in lieu of that, choose to present Merlin as some kind of Blitz club/glam rock precursor. With Merlin's platonic credentials established, Linda is presented with a triumvirate of widely different love interests, all of which Merlin holds a strong, and often unforgiving, opinion on.

Tony Kroesig (Freddie Fox) is a pompous, blond haired Bullingdon boy with a staggering air of entitlement whose confidence greatly outweighs his ability. It's hard not to make comparisons with our current Prime Minister when in the presence of Kroesig and when he becomes a Tory MP you wonder if the show's creators have gone a bit too far with the lampooning comparisons. When he lies back on the green leather banquette seating of the House it owes to everything to another of Britain's most loather Etonians, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

While Kroesig's family are sympathetic to Hitler, one even proudly boasts of having been taken for a spin in Heinrich Himmler's Mercedes-Benz, Tony Kroesig's first love rival, the young communist Christian Talbot (James Frecheville), could not be more different. In an era long before the invention of the word mansplaining, Talbot turns Linda on to Marx, Trotsky, and Orwell and she even opens up a "red" bookshop and surprises everyone by making a success of it.

Completing this motley troika of swains is the suave and confident French Duke Fabrice de Sauveterre (Assaad Bouab) and a smoother mover you could not imagine, witness him shower Linda with affection, elegant French decor, and an ugly bulldog. Both Linda and Fanny marry and they both 'fall' pregnant but whereas Linda takes little or no interest in her child Moira (Abbiegail Mills), Fanny becomes a devoted mother and husband to Alfred.

We meet Alfred Wincham (Shazad Latif) as a young don at Oxford and his kind, scholarly nature (in mien, he has echoes of William Butler Years) never deserts him. Nor, less happily, does his fastidious manner. He frets over coffee rings on tables, he abides to societal norms unquestioningly, and, even in the height of passion, he neatly folds his trousers and places them over the back of a chair.

All of the leading actors put in first class performances and in this they are abetted by an impressive supporting cast (credit due to Kitty Archer as the studious Lavender Davis, Dolly Wells as Aunt Sadie, John Hefferman as the valetudinarian Davey, Beattie Edmondson as Louisa Radlett, and Emma Mortimer herself as Fanny's mostly absent mother The Bolter). The soundtrack is anything but diegetic and transposes music from the future on to characters, and mores, from the past.

Never mind the authenticity, feel the quality. New Order, T.Rex, John Cale, Nina Simone, Karen Dalton, Marianne Faithful, Cat Power, The Meters, Sleater-Kinney, Le Tigre, Bryan Ferry, Blossom Dearie, and Joan Armatrading is not a score to be sniffed at and the judicious use of these artist's songs succeed in eking out emotion in a story that, at least for the first half of The Pursuit of Love, was played out somewhat dryly.

I was gently entertained but not, to begin with, moved or invested in the characters. As the story developed, however - and not least when the action was interspersed with black and white archive footage and stills to invoke the coming storm of World War II, it crept up on me and I became, quite quickly but also profoundly, involved in the events.

Like love itself, perhaps, something that started off as a piece of fun became imbued with an unknowable and transformative power. True love, it seems, WILL find you in the end. Sometimes it was there already.

 

Kakistocracy XVIII:The Perfidy Of Albion.

As the sun, finally, shines down all over the UK and lockdown measures are eased this weekend saw people smiling, drinking in parks and pub gardens, and I even witnessed dancing. Socially distanced dancing - but dancing all the same. Stoke Newington was buzzing. Dalston was buzzing. The South Bank was buzzing. Covent Garden was buzzing.

It's not back to 'normal' yet (whatever that even is) but with the vaccines seemingly resilient against even the new 'Indian' variant (so far) there is hope that we may, slowly, finally, be starting to put this nightmare behind us. So it's not a time, surely, to criticise the government? Certainly many think so. Boris Johnson's Tory party are enjoying a huge lead in the polls and even though the UK still has the fifth highest death toll in the world, one that was clearly and easily avoidable, many are giving the man and his court a free pass and many others simply want to move on.

But I don't think we should. Not completely anyway. Maybe Covid will never again wreak as much danger as it did over spring of 2020 and the winter of 2020/2021 but those responsible for mishandling, negligently and, I would contend, criminally, the pandemic need to be held responsible. Other challenges will come our way. If these failures remain in charge they will fail us again. 

There are 127,782 reasons the government should be held to account, held to scrutiny, for their actions. If people can get their knickers in their twist, as Piers Morgan - of course - has done, about Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka refusing to do press at the French Open tournament you'd think they'd be in equal uproar when elected politicians refuse to submit to questions about something that, I dunno, just feels a bit more important than a game of tennis. 

But who is the person who appears in front of a select committee to make the case for both a public inquiry and the sacking, multiple times, of Health Secretary Matt Hancock. None other than Dominic 'Barnard Castle eye test' Cummings - the person who did more to put Johnson and Hancock in power in the first place than anyone and a person, despite this time clearly speaking a version of the truth rather than an outright lie - even if it was only because the truth now suits his personal agenda, who the country lost all faith in over a year ago.

You would have thought the country would have lost all faith in Hancock and his boss, Johnson, too. But Johnson, particularly, seems to find a new trick to distract the British people whenever it looks like they're starting to see through him. How about a quick marriage to Carrie Symonds in Westminster Cathedral (a Catholic cathedral, for his third wedding, nice touch) which also means she is now unable to be called to testify against him if need be?

How about an offer to bring back British Rail but this time with the name needlessly changed to Great British Railways? How about Matt Hancock claiming he's "saving lives" and taking credit away from the hard working NHS staff and volunteers who actually are. How about instead of trying to bring the country together, making strenuous efforts to divide it further so that those who aren't with Johnson become not just the opposition but enemies and, in many cases, deemed unworthy British citizens.

None of these tricks were beneath Johnson and his cronies before the pandemic and they are certainly not now. Take a walk in this divided nation, as I so often do, and see the evidence pile up in front of your eyes. In the shires the gardens are adorned with Union Jack flags and St George crosses and in London and other large cities the windows are adorned with BLM posters (thankfully, the NHS rainbows are something we can all still agree on - even as many of us vote to get rid of the NHS). 

It seems to me like London, the big cities, and the university cities (Oxford & Cambridge) now see a very different future for the UK, or England, than the towns and villages do. A future in which we try to improve the country for everyone. A flag says "no thanks, we're alright as we are". What sort of country waves flags around? 

Not, generally, liberal democracies. North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Jordan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, the United States all feature heavily in the list of nations keenest on waving flags around. They are not the nations I would hope the UK would aspire to be like. Flags outside municipal buildings and at sports events - I get it - and people are free to fly whatever flag they like in their own garden but these flags don't scream EXCELLENCE or DOMINANCE. They impotently yell INSECURITY and DECLINE.

It's one of the main reasons that much of Scotland now wants to leave the UK. They want to live in a country that is determined to improve the lives of its people - not one that shouts loudly at how lucky the people are to live there. The UK government, English government really, is like an abusive husband constantly telling its wife, the rest of the UK and most of us who live here, we're actually lucky to have them and, amazingly, we defend them for doing so. Almost out of shame for having made the decision to vote them in/marry them in the first place.

In the middle of May, in Glasgow, hundreds of people surrounded a UK Immigration Enforcement van and, telling the Home Office - "you messed with the wrong city", eventually succeeded in stopping the detention of two men. It was proof of how Scotland is now going in an almost completely different direction to England. 

Scotland now sees Scottishness as an inclusive concept - you can become Scottish if you want to. In England, Englishness is something you are born into and for many, still, only then if you are white. The England that Johnson presides over is eternally suspicious of outsiders, of those who look different, of those who speak differently, and, most of all, of those who think and act differently.

In Northern Ireland, undone by trusting Johnson's lies about the border down the Irish Sea, Arlene Foster stood down. Arlene Foster was neither admirable as a person nor a politician but Edwin Poots, who has been voted in to replace her, could prove to be even worse. As witnessed by an almost comically irate performance on Newsnight by his backer Ian Paisley Jr, Poots looks to be trying to move Northern Ireland back to more sectarian, and God fearing, ways.

Voters, one hopes, will desert the DUP - and Sinn Fein - in droves for the Green and Alliance parties. Closer relations with Boris Johnson and his party will lead to clearer, and louder, calls for Northern Ireland to become part of a Republic of Ireland and Johnson's negligence, untrustworthiness, lying, and incompetence will mean that the Green and Alliance parties will be able to back this just as easily as Sinn Fein. Already they are no more against it than they are for it. 

That's the thing with liars, of which Johnson is the UK's most infamous in my entire lifetime. Eventually everybody sees through them. Take Jenny McGee, the nurse who kept vigil over Johnson while he was in intensive care with Covid at St Thomas' hospital last year. Last month she handed in her resignation as a nurse as she was sick of the "lack of respect" shown by the government for NHS and other health care workers before going on to explain how upset she, and her colleagues, were with the government's indecisive and ineffective handling of the pandemic.

The woman who helped nurse the Prime Minister when he was genuinely close to death has been rewarded, in her own words, with a "kick in the teeth" from him and his government and yet this is the person we, as a nation, are trusting to bring us out of a pandemic. I have full faith that the British people will pull themselves out of this mess but that will be despite of, rather than because of, the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, and Matt Hancock.

My faith that things will improve comes not from the Houses of Parliament or the vast majority of the British press that act as Johnson's courtiers, rather than interrogating his many indiscretions and failings, but in simpler things. That people - both in the UK and around the world - are, on the whole kind and want to help each other. Even many of those who have been conned into voting for those that are not.

My anger with this distrustful and shambolic government is as complete as it ever has been but my own personal mood is, right now, very good. That's because I've done lots of things that make me feel good and I've surrounded myself with people that make me feel good. 

Alongside my usual walks in, and through, Brenchley Gardens and Peckham Rye I have visited Basingstoke. Ostensibly for work but I did manage a few pints and a curry in Spicy Tadka with Shep, Adam, Teresa, and Cheryl. Ian and Arlow joined us for drinks but skipped the curry as Arlow's not really got into Indian food yet.

I took my third walk in my solo Permabulations on the Perimeter series, this time around the edge of SE4, and, on Saturday, finally, returned to the Capital Ring with a hugely enjoyable walk in glorious sunshine from Hendon to Stoke Newington with Shep, Pam, and Ian. Kathy and Mike joining us at Highgate. We visited a couple of pubs en route and we all ended up in Rasa N16 for more veggie Indian food and the day was probably the most fun one I've had in 2021 so far.

It was certainly the one in which I walked the most steps. On Monday I met Sanda for the first time this year, sun still out, for coffee and cake in Oree in Covent Garden. I've chatted on the phone to Mum, Dad, Adam, Michelle, and Simon, somehow won Dylan's Eurovision quiz, came joint second in my first quiz at my new work - as part of a team, set another 'godfather' quiz for Evie (which she did brilliantly at - she's getting so bright now it's hard to keep up when setting questions), and I joined a Eurovision watch party with Sanda, Sharon, Carole, Dylan, Kathy, and Ian.

Not sure that's one I'd do again but was an experience. More enjoyably - for me if not them, I've attended art exhibitions at the PACE Gallery (Robert Mangold) and Tate Britain (the excellent Lynette Yiadom-Boakye) and online talks from Skeptics in the Pub about the not very jolly, but certainly interesting, subjects of suicide and healthcare outcomes in middle to lower income countries.

I've finished watching Line of Duty (series five and six), boshed out the third series of Motherland - never as funny as it should be, and been enchanted by Caroline Catz' Delia Derbyshire film and I've finished reading William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and started on Cosey Fanni Tutti's Art Music Sex.

Oh, and I had my second jab. This time followed by a pint, as I promised myself, in the East Dulwich Tavern and a read of that above mentioned book. It feels good to be double vaccinated, it feels good to be working in reasonably secure employment with nice people, it feels good that the sun is out, and it feels good to have so many people in my life that make me feel valued. It feels really good to know that on Saturday, finally, TADS will get together for the first time since October to walk from Rye to Camber Sands. But what would make me feel really good is if Boris Johnson and his band of crooks and cronies would fuck off once and for all. There's little chance of that in the short term so I shall continue to enjoy the things that do make me feel good - and continue to hold this stinking government up to the criticism they have so thoroughly earned.

Geranium Love Sonnet and the Hard Wet Epic:Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain.

"My relationship to time is that of perhaps anyone who's never felt particularly fixed anywhere" - Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

"I write about the things I can't paint and paint the things I can't write about" - Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

No Such Luxury (2012)

I first encountered the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Serpentine Gallery about six years ago and, then again, back in July 2016 when she was featured in a show, Making and Unmaking, curated by the Nigerian fashion designer Doru Olowu at the Camden Arts Centre alongside artists as disparate as Dorothea Tanning, Alighiero Boetti, Claude Cahun, and Yinka Shonibare.

That was the first time I wrote, briefly, about her. Describing myself as 'entranced' by her work. But it was when I discovered her work in museums in both Seattle and San Francisco during an American holiday later that year that I realised she was far from being my own little secret, my own personal discovery.

In 2018 I attended All Too Human:Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain and she held her own not just with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud but with Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, Paula Rego, Walter Sickert, and Stanley Spencer too so I was delighted that my first post-lockdown proper paying exhibition at a major gallery was Yiadom-Boakye's Fly In League With The Night at Tate Britain.

Black Allegiance To The Cunning (2018)

Any Number Of Preoccupations (2010)

It didn't disappoint. Even if, because of Yiadom-Boakye's relatively young age (still in her forties) and the lack of discernible narrative in her work over the years, it felt far more loose than a typical Tate retrospective. You don't look at her early work, her middle work, and then her later work and see how she changed and developed as an artist. You just get eight or so rooms each containing a selection of her rather wonderful paintings.

I say "lack of discernible narrative" because any narrative the viewer brings to the work is their own. The art of Yiadom-Boakye, it seems to me, demands that of us. In 2012's captivating No Such Luxury, a lady with brown hair and a brown top on looks back at us over a cup of tea. Her expression neither intense nor vacant. She is lost in a moment and we have no idea what that moment can possibly be.

A penny for her thoughts? Animals, too, feature alongside Yiadom-Boakye's imaginary sitters. You'll see foxes, dogs, and birds in this account alone. Animals are friends that never judge us and Yiadom-Boakye chooses not to judge her sitters either. They just exist - if only in hers and our minds. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in pairs. Sometimes in groups. Sometimes sat upright but often in relaxed poses. The double portrait Pale For The Rapture features two sitters who could either be tired, resigned, or simply kicking back.

Pale For The Rapture (2016)

Daydreaming Of Devils (2016)

To Improvise A Moutain (2018)

Some subjects assert their personality, the camply glamorous hero of Daydreaming Of Devils stands proud in front of an abstract background as if to dare us to pass comment. To Improvise A Mountain, one of the works that to my mind is most influenced by Rego, tells a less certain story. The lady on the floor is paying full attention to the person stood in front of her but is that attention earned or has it been demanded?

Yiadom-Boakye, you will have noticed, makes portraits of black people. There are no white faces on show at all in this exhibition and, of course, there is nothing wrong with that. She is not obliged to make portraits of anyone except those she chooses to. But I did notice it. Revisiting my account of a visit to a Lucian Freud exhibition at the Royal Academy last year, I note that the lack of black or Asian faces was not something I felt compelled to remark upon.

For Yiadom-Boakye there is a simple explanation:- "it isn't so much about placing black people in the canon as it is about saying we've always been here, we've always existed, self-sufficient, outside of nightmares and imaginations, pre and post "discovery" and in no way defined or limited by who sees us".

Six Birds In The Bush (2015)

11pm Tuesday (2010)

6pm Madeira (2011)

Her images are of people who are not real but are informed by real experiences. She omits almost anything that may place an image in a specific era or locale. Backgrounds are often fuzzy and unclear, abstracted, clothes are of classic or at least basic design, and shoes are mostly avoided. 

Animals and musical instruments change much less with time so they are more often permitted to make the journey from imagination to canvas. When Yiadom-Boakye, the daughter of NHS nurses who emigrated to Britain from Ghana, attended Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London, the city of her birth, she didn't enjoy it. So she moved to Falmouth College of Art and there, in more remote Cornwall, she felt liberated and freer to express herself in a way that was true to her heart.

Which was to invent people that, to my mind, could, in their uncertain expressions, represent any one of us. Their thoughts and conversations are closed to us, as surely as the things they may be looking at - either directly or, in one case, through binoculars, but it is our human nature to try and interpret them.  A lesser artist would nudge us in an obvious direction but Yiadom-Boakye leaves room for multiple readings.

Accompanied To The Kindness (2012)

The High-Mind And Disrepute (2020)

The paintings are, on the surface, deceptively simple - yet the passion and thought that underpins them are deep. Yiadom-Boakye aims to express universal feelings, to show both the surface and, in the eyes or the expression, what is beneath that surface. In Accompanied To The Kindess, the parrot's owner looks sad but defiant, The High-Mind and Disrepute, which reminds a little of Chris Ofili, depicts two friends enjoying music together, one of the finest bonding experiences two people can share.

These are, of course, my interpretations. I can't attend a show of art that asks for interpretation and not at least interpret some of it. The Counter has a sense of the sublime, of awe, it could come from a rich tradition harking back to JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich while also reminding me of the paintings of Yiadom-Boakye's American contemporary Kehinde Wiley.

Amaranthine (2018)

The Counter (2010)

Hard Wet Epic (2010)

Hard Wet Epic has a classicist feel, its cast could be walking across a beach but they could, equally, be walking on the surface of Mars (even though they're clearly not dressed for it). A Bounty Left Unpaid looks like a still from a gritty movie, something by Cassavetes, and the russet coloured geometric blurs in the background of that painting could stand for an industrial part of a city or they could, just as easily, be a figment of our protagonist's imagination, a reflection of his mental state.

A Bounty Left Unpaid (2011)

No Need Of Speech (2018)

Few Reasons Left To Like You (2020)

The Woman That Watches (2015)

Geranium Love Sonnet (2010)

In Geranium Love Sonnet, a confident red haired lady in jeans and a pink vest top tilts her head to one side and looks out to us from between a table and a red wall. She could be having a friendly chat, she could be about to give someone a dressing down, or she could, for all we can tell, be waiting for someone to serve her a drink.

Songs In The Head shows two gentlemen chinking champagne flutes. Is it a business meeting, a wedding, or even a funeral? Similar questions could be asked of the group portrait Diplomacy I in which a group of men, women, and children stand suited and booted in an ill-defined landscape. Confusion is only added by the inclusion of someone in very different attire whose back is turned to the viewer.

Songs In The Head (2012)

Diplomacy I (2009)

All Manner Of Comforts (2016)

Complication (2013)

It's hard to work out what the 'complication' in Complication is (unless it's the fact that one guy's gone and wore white pants on black pants day) and it's even more difficult to read a more recent, and seemingly darker in intent, work from last year called The Stygian Styx in which a young man with his hounds meets our gaze via a cracked and distorted image that borders on the uncanny.

It's a painting that shows that Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's work can, and surely will, branch off in new directions as she continues her career but it is also one that asserts that Yiadom-Boakye is already, now, fully developed as a major British artist. As such this exhibition was timely and compelling and, for me, a great return to visiting London's major art galleries after way too long an absence.

The Stygian Silk (2020)