Ants

Ant art

I'm considering ants. There's an ant in the kitchen, ferreting around on the work surface, running in and out between some tomatoes and a mighty yellow melon. I haven't seen an ant for ages. Usually we get ladybirds here, 'the nicest of the pests', but today there's an ant.

It looks like it may be having quite a lovely time; rambling around on the smooth sideboard, skitting between vast objects and stopping to purloin the odd crumb... Let's be honest though; this ant is fucked. Even if I wasn't such a magnanimous and benevolent god, my equally omniscient house-fellows might descend from the mountains at any moment, and exhibit a far more frivolous attitude towards this trifling hexapod.

I also have a strong suspicion that our hero is lost. Where are the other ants? Ants are exactly like tourists. Successful in groups, but hopeless alone. Multitudinous pests in nests, or wretched solo wanderers. If a tourist becomes separated from their colony somewhere on the Strand, then how the hell are they going to make it back to Trafalgar Square before the bus leaves? They can't even walk in straight lines.     

Some uneven walking of my own led me to find myself at the wrong end of the Strand on the weekend. Still a god among ants and tourists, being firmly at home in the city of my birth, I gazed up at the astonishing semi-abandoned nest that is the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House. Only a few tourists had made the distance and it was quite empty. The courtyard was entirely unpopulated, as was the riverside terrace. The reason? Six pounds. Or maybe lack of jam.

Six pounds is how much you must charge in order to deflect tourists from one of the world's most astounding art collections. Along the road at the National Gallery, which is free, it's a genial hive of bustle and tussle. At the Courtauld, dropping the proverbial pin can deafen.

Rubens' room is nice. So is Cezanne's. Ah hang on, who's in here? Only Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso and Manet, each represented several times. There's an upstairs too, where Degas, Gauguin, Heron, Derain and Kandinsky are all having a pretty casual time together. They're just chilling out. Hardly anyone's there to see them. It's the weekend, and while the pictures in the National Gallery and the two Tates are all getting a jolly good seeing to, these guys are just hanging for the hell of it.

The outrageous six-pound entrance fee also covered the celebrated Mondrian and Ben Nicholson exhibition. I found I had wound my way up the handsome twisting staircases from the renaissance at the bottom, through impressionism, post-impressionism and expressionism, right up into abstraction and out onto the fascinating works of two of the proponents of the De-Stijl movement.

Abstract canvases don't kick me in the heart as consistently as figurative pieces tend to, but since receiving a print of Composition C (No III) with Red, Yellow and Blue from my mother as a child, I've maintained a soft spot for Mondrian. It turns out that one of his favourite films while living and working in London in the 1930s was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He sent postcards of the cartoon characters to his friends, and signed them 'Sleepy.'

Ants. There he goes. Off towards the bin. 

Surrealism in Liverpool

Magritte at the Tate Liverpool.

A man regards some art.

Approaching Liverpool, it began to piss down. Through the windscreen wipers the refracted shapes of derelict warehouses, abandoned factories and the day-glo uniforms of demolition teams streamed past. We trundled up the ramps of a multi-storey car park to find a space on the 7th floor, or, the "orange banana dog level", if you adhere to the car park's own terminology.

This was my first time in Liverpool, and the weather did its best to meet my pre-conceptions of the city. The Mersey emanated greyness, while wind and rain buffeted obese shoppers. Hooded figures moved silently around the wastelands of the docks, while children on stolen bicycles cycled through memorial fountains with notions of tattoos and spray paint glittering in their evil pygmy eyes. Then I trod in a dog shit.

"Magritte had better be on top of his game." I growled inwardly, while washing my boot in a puddle of probable tramp piss. 

At the Tate, we paid and climbed the stairs to the attic, where the exhibition began. The building was previously a warehouse, and many of the tiny windows remained - their grubbiness adding a spectral filter to the view of the grim estuary far below.

A slow starter, it was hard to tell the quantity of pieces on show, which caused a few crushes around the first wall of canvases. After the beginning though, the rooms became brighter and larger, with an increasing number of famous paintings on display.

Surrealism isn't always my thing. I find that bombastic eccentricity can creep in unnecessarily, to usurp what the movement does best, which is to question and attempt to answer our conceptions. Magritte's cool restraint ensures a clear view of what he is representing, without any gratuitous showing off or dicking around. Experiments with colour and form during his 'Renoir period' in the early forties showcase other talents, but he ultimately returned to the unaffected painting he is renowned for.

Vast canvases like The Glass Key's suspended boulder were thrilling in their sheer scale, while the famous This is Not a Pipe paintings, of which there were three, were surprisingly small. Towards the end it became a real greatest-hits show, with plenty of bowler hats, apples and bird silhouettes.

Hidden halfway along, through a curtained doorway, there was a small dark room full of drawings of surreal genitalia; winged scrotums and penis headed women were drawn out of pubic hair styled pen strokes. Apparently they were private drawings for a friend. Hilarious stuff, and I wish I'd seen it when I was younger, to inspire more imaginative graffiti in my enemies' exercise books.

This was a big and seriously impressive exhibition, worthy of any of the best art galleries in the world. Liverpool did well on this count. In truth, it was only really the weather and the canine ordure that let the city down, but on this reckoning, which cities hold up?

Cheltenham Festival

Simon Hoggart, Mathew Parris and Adam Boulton at the Cheltenham festival.

I like beer and books 

Cheltenham on Friday night was chilly and windy. It was also dark because night time had begun. Getting out of the car with my three associates, I wrapped my stolen suede jacket tightly around my shoulders and pulled hard at my badly made cigarette. "I am in Russia", I thought.

Inside the festival's food and booze tent, it was warm. Fragrant smoke rose from hot carcasses while hungry literature enthusiasts sat about gobbling quietly. I had already propelled a beautiful pie and potato dish down my greedy gullet, so moved directly to the bar and took a pint of reasonably priced lager. The evening crowd consisted mainly of antique specimens wafting about slowly in pairs, although I spotted one conspicuous child dressed in an overlarge Harris Tweed blazer and flat cap. He was either quite hilariously masquerading as an old man, or was the victim of his mother's misguided fashion sense.

Sitting near the back of the tent, we took our last sips of beer before the lights went down and Sky's Adam Boulton introduced the political sketch writers Simon Hoggart of the Guardian and fellow satirist Mathew Parris. The subject of the evening's debate was the apparent lack of characters in the coalition government who're worth making fun of. This certainly proved to be true amongst these three, who chiefly discussed their own glory days spent darting about through the corridors of Whitehall, taking the piss out of distinguished lords and ministers at a time when politicians (mostly) maintained an air of solemn dignity. Their only concession to modernity was to touch on the recent political party conferences in Manchester: "Cameron didn't say anything, but he said it very well," joked Hoggart. "And Miliband, oh dear. Mad staring eyes and covering up his mouth, like a panda that's been discovered in bed with another panda's wife."

This was as much a journalists' love-in as it was genuinely informative. It was, however, an amusing and entertaining evening; Mathew Parris declared that politicians "are in such general public disrespect that it's like kicking at a corpse," while Adam Boulton forgot who his employer was when talking about Rupert Murdoch: "It's like speaking to a person in an old-people's home," he announced.

  

The author of this very article felt compelled to ask a question from the audience along the lines of: "Do you think it's fear of being lampooned or ridiculed in the media that dissuades capable intellectuals from wishing to engage in public political life?" This question elicited a hearty response in the three journalists, with Simon Hoggart agreeing, Mathew Parris noting my 'irreproachable logic', but drawing some polite disagreement from Adam Boulton.

Back out in the night, Cheltenham was warming up for the weekend. The four of us groped our way through the darkness to the nearest pub, where we drank some properly cheap ale, before driving off into the night. Not drink driving though.    

Returning a Dog

Harry's Countryside Diary

The end of the summer 

As autumn has already begun to piss all over summer's shameful parade, there's nothing else to be done but forget the hot lusty dreams of shorts and suntans and embrace the bitter poetry of the wet and windy. For me, years of perpetual disappointment in the weather has bred a perverted distaste for pleasant conditions, and now I have come to adore the grimaces that rain streaked windows can etch into the dour faces of our depressed and insipid population.

The mendacity of the weather winds people up. Sometimes they start raving about what a shit the weather forecaster is, or how they finally now know that god can't exist because it's raining on a bank holiday. A sublime agony builds up in people's lives and you can watch them unravel as final straw after final straw grinds the metaphorical camel's vertebrae to powder until you find your own father weeping in front of a barbecue in the rain and telling you he's moving to the South of France. But frequently I find hot sunny weather and its accompanied jocularity quite vulgar. Like New Year celebrations, everyone is determined to 'have fun' all at once.

A tedious wind flounced about beneath the monotonous grey firmament in the Wye Valley today. Squalls buffeted the colourless trees and it threatened to rain, but eventually even that potentially interesting event didn't occur.

Carless, work-bound and left alone to complete my dissertation, the life of man here in the beautiful shit-end-of-nowhere truly is solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and bored.

Like some sort of distortion of atmosphere, akin perhaps to a dazzlingly coloured beach ball batted into the face of Audrey Hepburn as she chuffs her long fag in Breakfast at Tiffany's, or a bloody fist fight taking place in Waitrose, today I disturbed and improved the dreary scenery by skipping through the silent fields in the bleak wind proudly wearing a long and bright red tartan coat. The wind snapped and tugged at the flying tails of my coat, and angrily blew up gothic tresses of my mid-length hair. It was quite radical. Nay; profound.

I wittingly trod in shit and wantonly smeared it in the soft green grass of Gloucestershire. I shouted at owls mid-morning. It was all very political. I threw a stick at a fence (ironically) and ate a fistful of wild plums that hadn't yet reached maturity. The dog didn't mind at all. We were about to have an adventure.

I reached the gate at the top of the field, and there was another little dog there. A young and turbo-driven mongrel who began trying to copulate with my dog. This was perfect. Both of them were female. I'd hardly left the house and I was already being treated to some alfresco lesbian dog-on-dog dogging. Woof.

Quickly bored and as aroused as an ice cube, I put an abrupt end to the circus and inspected this wayward canine philanderer. It had no name written on its tag, just a phone number. After a bit of a glance about to check that no camouflaged or elderly owner was going to emerge from the undergrowth, I thought I should call the number, which I recognised as being fairly local.

"Hello, this is Harry Cockburn here. Have you by any chance lost your dog?" I said.

"No, I don't think so," came a confused man's voice from the other end.

"I see. It's just that I've found a dog with your number on its tag wandering about on its own."

"Ah, my wife is out walking the dog. It must have got free."

I established that he was a neighbour and lived fairly close, so attaching a red tartan dog lead I had in my red tartan pocket to the AWOL pup, I walked my brace of dogs down the road. I found the rotund neighbour, evidently compelled to leave his sofa and in his jogging trousers and slippers hurrying along the lane to meet me. He was very pleased to have the little creature returned. I introduced myself and he gave me a shake of the hand while eyeing my splendid coat with suspicion.

"Probably a queer," he may have thought. But that's ungenerous. But still, he might have thought it.

I handed his dog over, and he promised to return the tartan lead later.

"Looks like it might rain." He said at the sky.

And off I frisked, vaulting a fence and running off with my dog to complete the day's dog-walking under the leaden clouds and thinking about a story my Grandfather once related. It was from a book of moral stories he'd apparently memorised including one about Little Tommy Sucker-Thumb; a chap who happened to be a "Rain Maniac."

"The rain came down, and in a minute, Tom was in it!" Is how this insane little rhyme apparently goes. "It was highly improbable meteorologically." My Grandfather pondered.

When I returned, the red tartan dog lead had been returned and was hanging from the front door, banging aggressively against the glass in the perpetual heave-ho of the wind. 

Killing a Rabbit

Harry's Countryside Diary

I hope this image doesn't end up on the news.

This morning I woke up feeling well. The curtains were open and I could see the long tendrils of the willow tree in the garden suspended in the dawn mist. I felt invigorated from a good night's sleep, and felt I should get up and get going.

I am no longer in Brighton -- bedsit bound and living on tea, discount chips and Ginsters fare -- but am at my parents' house in the Wye Valley, where I am finishing my university work.

I got out of bed at about seven o clock, and decided I would take the dog on its walk (one of my daily duties) in the pale haze of the early morning. Despite evidence of warmth to come, it was still quite cold, so I put on a long overcoat for the march through the dewy fields, and a pair of chunky boots. I wanted to get the dog-walking over and done with so that I'd have as much time as possible to hit the textbooks. Well at least that's what I said to myself.

Taking an apple for sustenance, and with the dog jumping and wagging dementedly as I pocketed its lead, we left the house and took a steep route upwards towards a village called St. Briavels, which sits on the top of the English side of the Wye Valley and affords magnificent views over the Welsh side, the river a glistening wisp at the distant bottom.

It was a tranquil walk. The sun came out properly after about half an hour and throwing sticks for the inexhaustible cur warmed me up thoroughly. In total we walked about four or five miles, for just over an hour, before returning.

I'd also been asked to water the greenhouse, so in order to get some of the chores out of the way early, I walked round to the back of the house armed with the hose.

As I rounded the corner, I could see the dog looking inquisitively at something.  It was a shivering blind rabbit. Myxomatosis had engulfed and swollen its head covering its eyes and ears entirely. It did not take heed of the dog or me as I approached to inspect it.

I think the dog had some sort of sense of fair play and did not attack, but disregarded it, despite a life of (unsuccessful) rabbit chasing. For me it was not so easy. It's an appalling quandary to be in when there is a recognised duty to put the wretched creature out of its misery. I don't want to kill things, but days of starvation and the night's predatory beasts are not merciful executioners, so the right thing to do is to bash it on the head quickly and sling it over a hedge; something that I have done on a few previous occasions.

After returning from Brighton it felt like a countryside test I must pass for re-admittance, something highlighting the different environments. Perhaps a bit like warning off a drunken pimp with a blade, as everyone at some point must do when living in the city. It's not nice, but it's necessary.

Reluctantly I decided I must cave the rabbit's head in.

I put down the hose, and took the heaviest axe from the woodshed, which is, by all accounts very heavy. Outside, the rabbit was still in the same place, shivering next to the greenhouse. The dog was about six or seven yards away lying in the grass watching with interest. I didn't want to actually chop the rabbit's head off, as there'd be more mess to pick up, so I turned the axe round and aimed the blunt end at it.

With a quick whack I flattened its head onto the concrete next to the greenhouse. Both eyes popped out and thick gouts of pillar-box red blood glooped out. Its back legs kicked limply and it wriggled about horribly in the bright pool of blood. I whacked it again, and brains and bone were scattered about, it was dead, but convulsing horribly, streaking the ground with blood and fur. One more full body blow, under which I could hear ribs and shoulders crunching, stopped its movement entirely.  

The dog looked at me with distrust. I wiped the axe on the grass and went to the shed for a gardening glove. I put it on and picked the mangled rabbit up by the back legs and walked it up the garden to the far hedge, over which I threw it.

Returning to the scene of the execution, there was a lot of blood and brain lying about. Also, I hadn't noticed that blood had flicked up and sprayed the side of the greenhouse, and a low wall nearby. The grass too had bone chunks and other matter disseminated across it, so I used the hose to spray away the evidence before turning my attention to the tomatoes.

I had passed the test, but it wasn't very pleasant. I felt I'd done the right thing though, so I celebrated with a pot of tea and a bacon sandwich. Bacon's made out of dead pigs you know, and they're much bigger than rabbits.

Fairly standard state of affairs

It's not attractive to whinge about anything. Whingers are wankers. Particularly loathsome are people whining about being 'poor', when really they are just temporarily skint. Few people I spend time with happen to have much money, and if one person has a bit less, then that's just the way it is; everyone has a turn at having nothing. At the moment I have 35p left of my £2000 overdraft, so it's my turn. I might get paid next week for some freelance work I did ages ago, so it's just a brief irritation, but hunger has a rapid onset and is a condition with un-ignorable symptoms.

Headache is the current sensation I am feeling, owing to a double hangover from two nights of debauchery on the trot. And now here I am, ravenous and lazy, reclining on a sunny afternoon. "Hang on," you may interject, "moaning about no money, while nursing a hangover? Never have I heard such conceited piffle. How annoying you've become. Do fuck off."

The Good, The Bad And The Hairday

It's not that turds can be polished; it's just that it's not fair if you don't let them go for polishing too. 

A haircut taking place in the wild west circa 1966

  

  

Like the incomprehensible amounts of money involved in weddings, house buying and military budgets, the vast quantities some people part with to get bits of their hair cut off is absurd. Sometimes I can taste bile when I see people in swanky wanky hairdressers throwing their stupid money at their own head. My feet bleed in anger. But even the cheapest side street barbers charge an extraordinary sum. Anything less than fifteen pounds and people seem to think they've got a good deal. They haven't.

There's an old man in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean who eventually upped his 50p price a few years ago, and I believe even now he still only charges £2.50. I remember going there as a child, or rather, being taken there by my father. It was always dour grey men reading greasy copies of the Sun and the Mail awaiting their turn for a pruning, I never once saw another child in there.