I’ve never seen the Royal Academy more crowded — and this was just the press view. Unfortunately this meant the Dear Leader had to be left behind, so your intrepid reporter had to brave the crowds alone to see what the fuss was about.

Our Greatest Living Yorkshireman is the antithesis of what most Yorkshiremen dream of being — he’s a gay artist instead of a macho sportsman. Yet this exhibition alone will do more for Yorkshire than any number of Fred Truemans, Geoff Boycotts or Darren Goughs.  This is a Yorkshire staggering in its intensity and colour. One example will speak for many: mounting nine video cameras and dollying slowly forward through space and the seasons has produced a stunning, a mesmerising effect which silenced the assembled hacks. This is one of the few installations for which the use of the word awesome could be justified.

Because Hockney is no longer as spry as in his Californian days, he finds difficulties in reaching the top of his sometimes enormous paintings. But artists can solve problems as well as pose questions, and his ingenious solution is to produce the artwork on a number of squares with one missing, just like an 8- or 9-puzzle, so that the top squares can slide down to the bottom — oh, I guess you have to see it to understand it.

His Grand Canyon of 1998 is a vast panorama of 12 x 5 A2 panels.

Hockney sold his first painting in 1954 when he was still a student. He was influenced by landscape masters Lorrain and Monet, but his biggest influence was Picasso.

Room 3, 1997 work: Yorkshire landscapes — first ones based on travels, journey, memories. Live painting, but making use of all memories of times seen place before. Salts Mill, Saltaire — permanent display of work.

Room 4 has one wall of 36 framed watercolours, one wall of 30 oils, 2′ x3′ each. They were painted in 2005; in a more photographic style; lovely.

Room 5. Tunnel – track with trees on either side shown through all seasons. 1 grid painting; 6 blocks

6. Woldgate Woods, again through the seasons, all 6 blocks; 9 in series, 7 in RA. The colours are remarkably vivid, huge slashes of magenta and viridian.

7. Hawthorn Blossom – move from naturalistic to more surreal — very imaginative & exuberant. ‘May blossom on the Roman Road’, wild shapes; huge. 2009.

8. Timber and Totems. Charcoal drawings — v. fine;  2008. Woldgate Woods again.1 stump + horizontal logs. Winter colours can be just as bright other seasons; just got to look for them. Vast painting on end wall.

Room 9 is a HUGE space — The Arrival of Spring 2011, Woldgate. Hockney created this when asked to fill the vast end wall for this exhibition. It consists of 95 iPad pics of the road through Woldgate Woods from Jan to June. 51 prints of images made on iPads are displayed in the room. The large painting is the combination of smaller prints.

Hockney suggested hanging it high as he knew the show would be popular and wanted every visitor to have a good view. “If in doubt, go higher.”

Hockney’s Sermon on the Mount was based on Claude Lorrain’s painting. The original was damaged by fire, and has been digitally cleaned. It is surrounded by multiple variations, like Picasso did. This is Hockney first religious subject. Christ preaches — and so does Hockney!

The new works came as a direct result of the exhibition.  He was first asked to do it in 2007.

Room 11 shows his video work – 9 cameras

1). contrast late spring / summer / winter moving slowly along lane. Mesmerising.
2). Side view — hedgerow / bank of lane using all 18 screens; same scene rolling through. Also a dance sequence.

The Small Weston Room has sketchbooks and six iPads showing finished works which were then blown up into huge prints.

Room 13. Yosemite — the paintings were late comers after Hockney’s trip to US. The RA had to find more space. There are 5 huge paintings in a small space, made from iPad drawings printed on huge sheets of paper then mounted.Room 14 holds his recent works — still woods, but focusing on ground growth and flowers

The whole display is just so impressive. This must be the killer exhibition of 2012.

I needed to buy a length of clear plastic siphoning tubing to attempt to either suck or blow clear a blocked oil line.

Jewsons in Penrhyndeudraeth: “Sorry, no idea where you can get such a thing. Try a car accessories shop.”

Peirce, Ironmonger, Penrhyndeudraeth: “We only have thick plastic tubing. Try a pet shop. Or Wilkinsons.”

Wilkinsons, Porthmadog: “No idea. Try a car accessories shop.”

Car accessories shop, Porthmadog: closed.

Ffrindiau Bach, pet shop, Porthmadog: “No idea. Try Eric Owen, ironmongers.”

Eric Owen, ironmongers, Porthmadog: “No idea. Try a car accessories shop. Or a pet shop.”

Quaeck, soft furnishings, Porthmadog: (I was getting desperate) “Of course we don’t stock anything like that, but have you tried the chandlery on the harbour?”

Robert Owen, Marine Engineering, Porthmadog: “You mean like a fuel line? EU regulations mean we can only sell toughened and steel-reinforced black rubber fuel lines. And Sea-Doos at £16,995. Wait a moment —” and he popped over the road and came back with a metre of clear plastic siphoning tubing. “That’s EXACTLY what I want,” I cried, “How much?” “No, nothing,” he said. “Take it.”

I needed mounting holes drilled in two slate nameplates I had ordered and paid for in September, and which were delivered without screw holes in late December after much chasing, threatening and Trading Standards Officer intervention. Graham our handyman couldn’t do it, and said he’d asked various people but they were too busy — the recession bites ever harder.

I rang Madog Memorials in Porthmadog. “Yes, we can do that, bring them in.”  While I waited, he drilled two holes in each thick piece of slate, then countersunk a larger hole on the face. He then gave me a plug of slate. “Just slice off the depths you need with a knife,” he said. “It will shear cleanly and easily.” It does. The plugs will cover and conceal the screw heads. The slate dust from the drilling is as fine as talcum powder.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked. “Oh, there’s no charge, it didn’t take me long, did it?”

What a great place. What kind people.

So for your next Sea-Doo, may I strongly recommend Robert Owen Marine, Oakley Wharf, Porthmadog, Gwynedd LL49 9AY. 01766 513435.

http://www.robertowenmarine.co.uk

And for your next gravestone, I can also strongly recommend Madog Memorials, Stryd Madog Gorllewin, Porthmadog, Gwynedd LL49 9DU. 01766 515206.

Although I’d rather have a Sea-Doo than a gravestone.

 The clear plastic siphoning tubing, the nameplates with the drilled screwholes, and the slate plug with the first slice taken from it.

An epublishing newsletter, eBOOKNEWSER, has announced that the publisher HarperCollins UK had 100,000 ebooks downloaded from its website on Christmas Day. This figure excluded US sales but included sales from the UK, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Forgive me, but I do find this hard to believe. I know Rupert Murdoch runs a large organisation that has in the past been accused of being somewhat cavalier with the actualité, but I believed HarperCollins was relatively insulated from the rot creeping through its parent company News International.

I’m surprised buyers chose to go to the HarperCollins website to make their ebook purchases rather than trying an online bookseller such as Foyles, Waterstones or the Hive, or even that one named after some big river. I assume the buyers knew they only wanted ebooks published by HarperCollins, and not from any other publishing house.

Full marks to HarperCollins for getting media coverage for this statement. I would have binned the press release, or at the very least questioned its veracity. You might spot that I’m a bit sceptical about the claim, and with some reason.

Our publishing division Heritage Ebooks had a huge double page spread in the Daily Telegraph over Christmas, and another double page spread the following day in the Daily Express. As a result, we sold a few ebooks through our site heritage.co.uk.

Of course I was disappointed — what’s the point of publicity, after all? So I checked our sales on the Amazon.co.uk website. Amazon UK has sold eleven times as many Heritage Ebooks as our own site has over the same period of time. It’s a shame, because we and our photographers make far more money when the ebooks are sold through heritage.co.uk, but at least they’re sales.

Is HarperCollins UK really telling the truth about 100,000 ebook sales EXCLUDING the USA on one day?

Come on!

Oh, and a Happy New Year to you all!

I went to visit a friend in hospital yesterday afternoon.

Night was falling with the drizzle when we arrived in Bell Street, in a dingy part of Westminster. But there was a parking space, so we parked and I went to find the meter.

There wasn’t one. Instead we were invited to pay for parking by phone. A sign on a post gave a text messaging number, a website address and a telephone number. I tried all three, and attempted to follow the instructions.

I’m not particularly stupid. I reckon I’m above average intelligence. I’m even mildly computer literate. But I found this process extraordinarily difficult. I have to say that standing in a cold dark side street in a rough area of London at night in the drizzle, trying to comprehend new instructions, holding up a new iPhone 4S and a credit card and squinting to read the numbers off the card from a distant street lamp while inputting a succession of codes is not conducive to a warm feeling of safety and security. If I was a young villain instead of a pensioner I would fancy my chances in a situation like this.

When I came back to the car, there was an £80 parking ticket slapped on the windscreen.

I got home, found the Westminster Council’s Challenge Your Parking Ticket section which was cleverly concealed on their web site, and protested the charge.

After I’d logged the protest, my iPhone suddenly came alive with a succession of eight separate text messages as follows:

15 Dec 2011 16:18

Sorry, parking failed as text in wrong format. Send LOCATION DURATION CVV eg 7002 10 123. Add number plate to change car eg 7002 10 123 AB05CDE. Thank you

You can also manage your account, download apps, or pay for parking all from www.paybyphone.co.uk – Thanks for using Pay by Phone Parking

Welcome to Pay by Phone Parking. Try our new mobile website the next time you park http://m.paybyphone.co.uk

Welcome to Pay by Phone Parking. Try our new mobile website the next time you park http://m.paybyphone.co.uk

You can also manage your account, download apps, or pay for parking all from www.paybyphone.co.uk – Thanks for using Pay by Phone Parking

15 Dec 2011 17:17

Welcome to Pay by Phone Parking. Try our new mobile website the next time you park http://m.paybyphone.co.uk

You can also manage your account, download apps, or pay for parking all from www.paybyphone.co.uk – Thanks for using Pay by Phone Parking

Your parking has not started as you did not confirm the transaction. If you wish to park now please call back and ensure you confirm the transaction. Thank you.

These messages arrived on my smartphone at 19:49, long after the Westminster traffic warden had issued the parking ticket. And what can “Send LOCATION DURATION CVV eg 7002 10 123″ possibly mean to a human intelligence? And why should I want to park, then change my car’s numberplate?

I spoke to “Michelle”, working  at Westminster’s parking bureau at 17:19, and expressed my dissatisfaction and confusion at the complexity of the system. She solved the problem by putting me through to an automated voicemail system.The parking payment system Westminster has installed is Byzantine in its complexity; far too intricate to operate reliably. By not getting their text messages until two hours after I had left the parking bay, I had no idea that any problem could have arisen.

I made every attempt to pay for my parking. It took me over 15 minutes standing by the car in the cold and wet to try and make the payment. The Westminster system made it so difficult that it was able to issue a £80 parking fine promptly after I had left the scene.

But then I guess that’s probably the whole point of it.

I went into hospital yesterday for a minor procedure under general anaesthetic. I came out yesterday afternoon feeling woozy so thought it better that I didn’t go into work.

As a result this morning I’m dealing with accumulated emails,  tender documents (and tender bits of me), and picture sales when suddenly I notice that two of the image sales made so far this morning are photographs taken by me!

Now I may run a picture library, but I am not a photographer. I am a man with a camera, and not a great camera at that. My photos are adequate, but I am fully aware I don’t have the photographer’s eye. It’s like music or sport — you have it or you don’t. If you don’t, you can work on it and improve, but you’ll never be a Linda Wright, Lang Lang or Shane Williams. They started good and worked hard on getting even better. All I could do was make my photographs correctly exposed and straight and level. Then the answer is to photograph things people want to buy.

So two sales made before 11:30. Who know what the rest of the day may bring?

Or maybe they’d heard about my op and were taking pity on me?

Imagine you are standing beside a tall wall. It encloses a kitchen garden, eight acres of kitchen garden, the sort of self-sufficiency that would satisfy a Sainsbury. On the other side of the dirt road is a scrubby wood, derelict, ramshackle and overgrown. In the wood is a strangely formless holly tree. You duck under the branches; it has a hollow centre. In the middle of the encircling holly tree, like something out of a Rupert Bear story, is a door. There is nothing else above ground, just the tree and a door. You go through the door and find yourself walking down a ramp, a spiral going down into the earth. There is very little light. What little there is illuminates, on your right, an empty, circular room lit from above by glass pavement lights let into the floor of the wood. Windows roughly cut into the wall allow you to look into the room as you walk down the ramp. Eventually there is a door from the ramp into the room. The room is cold and damp, faintly repellent. The ramp continues down. It gets darker. The sloping floor gives way to steps. The steps carry on down. There is now no light at all. You have a torch. You need a torch. You can pick out the shape of another room beneath the round one. You are now about 40 feet down inside the earth. It is musty. Make your way through another doorway and suddenly the torch is shining into emptiness; you are in a room so large that the beam will not touch the other side. Walk carefully across the rough floor. Don’t look in the niches; nothing pleasant lives in them. Walk over to the other end of the chamber, where you can see a pinprick of light. There are more steps, steps down to a boat — yes, a boat, moored in this flooded tunnel 50 feet below ground level. Embark. Cast off. Walk the boat down the tunnel to the point of light a mile? a hundred yards? away. It gets brighter.

You come out on to a lake, a warm, comfortable, capable sort of a lake. In the middle of the water is an oblong island, small with a low wall surrounding it. There is a statue in the water just offshore. Row across to the island. It lies about 50 yards from the lakeside and is big enough to take a dance band, if only there were somewhere to dance.

There is somewhere to dance. There is an underwater ballroom domed, and built of iron and glass so you can watch the fish dance around you as you dance. Climb down the stairs to a room directly below the floor of the island; light and airy, nothing to worry about. Down some more steps, through a short tunnel, and you’re in the glass ballroom. It isn’t very big, but it’s big enough and it is completely underwater. You can dance underwater by yourself not even the Joneses could keep up with this. A lances arched submarine tunnel leads 100 feet back to dry land and reality.

All this is true. This fantastical place exists — not in crazy California or in sensual Samarkand but in stolid, suburban Surrey It was built at the turn of the twentieth century by Whitaker Wright, a financier and self-made millionaire who spent one and a quarter million pounds — who can guess what that would be worth today? — to improve his estate southwest of Godalming. He built four lakes, moved a couple of inconvenient hills, planted a forest or two, imported treasures from all over the world including the head of a dolphin in bronze so big that when they were hauling it up to the estate from Southampton it got stuck under a bridge and they had to lower the road, and then erected a very ordinary, undistinguished house, now demolished, to overlook the lake with the underwater ballroom.

Wright’s demise was as sensational as his follies. Sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for fraud, he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide before he could be taken from the Old Bailey, and his folly park is now a private estate.

This is an extract from Follies of Surrey, one of the Follies of England series by Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp, published by Heritage Ebooks at www.heritage.co.uk.

Photo © Gwyn Headley / fotoLibra

St. Paul’s Cathedral in Wellington, New Zealand is displaying a portrait of Jesus as an All Black.

I don’t know which Jesus they’re referring to — probably some Mexican gardener — but the world knows that out of preference The Great Redeemer wears the No. 10 shirt for Wales.

SATURDAY 2^nd JULY Posted 3 weeks later.

London

Hey — we’re still on holiday. But now at home. Time here to give credit to our 10 year old diesel Citroën, which effortlessly covered 2,790 miles (4,490 km) without missing a beat, in comfort, coolness (thanks to the recently recharged digital air conditioning) and reasonable economy — 43 mpg. Its current value according to Parkers Price Guide is £1,000.

Buy one. It’s well worth it.

Waiting to board the ferry at Calais

FRIDAY 1^st JULY Posted 3 weeks later.

Saonnet – Bayeux – Caen – Dozulé – Pont-l’Evêque – Beuzeville – Pont de Tancarville – Bolbec – Yvetot – Tôtes – St Saëns – Neufchâtel-en-Bray – Blangy-sur-Bresle – Abbeville – Autoroute A28 to Calais – Seafrance ferry to Dover – London. 516 km / 320 miles.

A warm, still, cloudless morning, the sort of day that the month of July would pay a fee to market itself. We breakfast in the garden in the sunshine. Nick doesn’t care to drive six miles to pick up four croissants and I hope I manage to conceal my disappointment. We go to say goodbye to the donkeys, who seem very amused by Milo.

Off through country roads more like Dorset than our image of France, until you see the architecture. Of course, like every country in western Europe, the modern domestic architecture stinks. It’s ugly and out of place, and the corners that have been cut are readily apparent. Most of the beautifully restored houses are foreign-owned; the French share with the Americans a distaste for living in the past.

A really hideous and huge concrete building disfigures the skyline on the north périphérique of Caen. I suspect it might be a university or a hospital. Abandon hope all ye who enter there.

As we approached Pont-l’Evêque (Bishopsbridge) there was another sudden architectural change — timber framed houses appeared, with reddened rather than blackened timber as in the U.K. “Look out for cheese promotions,” I warned Von, but there were none. Was this also Flaubert’s Pont-l’Eveque as in Un Coeur Simple, where I was stymied by the French word ‘genuflexion’, so I looked it up to discover it meant ‘genuflection’ — which I then had to look up in an English dictionary? There was no sign of it. I later resort to Wikipedia: it was both places. Yet the local tourist board evidently had no idea there were two reasons this one tourist knew for visiting Pont-l’Evêque.

A 2pm we stop at Neufchâtel-en-Bray for The Last Lunch, traditionally our end-of-holiday blow-out, but this time we are driving and a little pressed for time. So we take the business menu — the Menu Affaires — at a pleasant little restaurant called Les Airelles. As well as using a 1987 Michelin map for getting around France we are using a 2002 Red Guide. Egon Ronay used to warn against using out of date Ronay guides because they might ‘promote indigestion’, but we have a delicious lunch of mousseline d’avocat, foie de veau, gazpacho and rumsteack followed by a plateau de fromages with — you guessed it — Neufchâtel and Pont-l’Evêque.

The old N roads are lovely, with each town boasting its attractions:

Bienvenue à
ROMORANTIN-LE-PARKING
Ville fleurie
Sa circulation bouchée
Ses camions énormes
Ses piètons ivrognes

We have to rush to get to Calais because Von is anxious about the time spent getting the dog through his homecoming check and leaving enough time to fill the car with products from Majestic. We sail at 18:30 and I repeatedly assure her that they are now so efficient at loading that you can turn up 10 or even 5 minutes before departure and drive straight on, as we did at Dover. But she is rightly cautious, and wants to allow for the full half-hour, plus time for the dog. In the event the dog check takes 3 minutes and is done by Gwyn who has to hold the microchip reader over Milo’s chip for the man in the passport cabin, who won’t get out. Fortunately the dog appears to have the same chip he had when he came out. So we get into line 35 minutes before the 18:30 departure time. Then we discover the departure time is actually 18:40. Ah well. 18:40 comes and goes. The boat finally sails nearly an hour later, at 19:35. No reason is given for the delay. I ask at the info desk on board.

“Zaire was a technical problem wiz de 2 o’clock sailing.”
“Was it this boat?”
“Yes, sair.”
“Are we going to sink?”
“No, sair.”

So I go away, mollified but not satisfied. The boat is packed with six busloads of screaming schoolchildren, running around and crashing into each other and us. One is shouting particularly loudly, and even seems to be yelling “Yvonne! Yvonne!” She turns, and it’s Chris Engelmann and his wife Birgit from Hilden near Düsseldorf, on their way to the Goodwood Festival of Speed in their souped-up Porsche 911. We go to the bar, and I tell Chris “I only have a €10 note.”

“Thank you,” he says, “I’ll have a beer and Birgit will have a prosecco.” Luckily I also have some loose change and they don’t have prosecco at the bar. Also they have no draft beer. Two small cans of beer and two small glasses of white wine come to €16. Not great value.

Chris and Birgit were staying in Portsmouth but didn’t want to drive along the coast, so they followed us to the M25 before turning off to find the A3. We got home, flaked out and exhausted, at 9.30, to find the lights on and a Frenchman in the house. Damien had been looking after the cats and Timothy the Tortoise while we were away, and had forgotten to go home. No problem; we were grateful to him for doing it. I was less pleased when we collapsed onto the sofa and I discovered he’d drunk all my beer — AND my whisky! Growl. Not happy. He sat there apologising. I was too tired to get annoyed, and simply asked him to replace it. I had some Spanish hooch instead, which I was too exhausted to finish anyway, so Damien went home and Von cooked a delicious spaghetti vongole — first decent meal I’d had for two weeks — and so to bed.

THURSDAY 30^th JUNE Posted 3 weeks later.

Saonnet

Von spends the night kicking me so I wake feeling even grumpier than usual. Splendid croissants and lots of freshly squeezed OJ make a real difference.

We go shopping for fish at the market in Le Molay Littré, and Milo gets spooked by something. He is very anxious on the lead all through the market. Padi never acted like this. There’s a new Mini parked in the market; we are all surprised by its ugliness, it looks like a small Hummer. It is considerably larger than the old Peugeot 406 family saloon parked behind it.

Nick, Susan, Von & Milo at Le Croix, Saonnet

Back to La Croix to put the fish in the fridge for tonight’s dinner, then off through drowsy summer lanes to Port-en-Bessin where we have lunch en plein air. I have to ask for the awning to be pulled down to protect my fragile little head from the blistering heat of a Normandy summer sun.

We tour the lanes admiring the chateaux from a respectful distance while Nick and Sue regale us with anecdotes about their friend Jean-Luc, who turns out to be a holder of the Legion d’Honneur and the general who led the French attack on Iraq. He wears new socks every day, emblazoned with cartoon characters. Mentioning that we’re looking for an espagnolette for our french window in London, we get to visit a brocante and then an amazing place called a Dépôt Vente, which I had never encountered before. Apparently they exist throughout France. People lug their unwanted goods there and set a price. Then Brits go there and buy them, although one can negotiate. The stock largely consists of giant armoires big enough to hold the clothes of an entire family, but hidden in a corner I discovered an ancient pair of espagnolets, as they are called in France. The only source of espagnolettes (English spelling) in London is the locksmith Franchis, where the one they offer retails at £430 + VAT. These two are for sale for €8. Not many second thoughts, then. We buy them, even though they need a bit of work.

Milo goes to the vet in Bayeux for his pre-ferry check. A pretty little French vet is delighted to be able to practice her English, and murmurs all the right compliments about him. Throughout the trip everyone has remarked on how Clean he is. €55 to get the requisite stamps in his passport. We pass on the Bayeux Tapestry as we saw it in 1976, and don’t need to see it again. Been there, done that.

We tour the Kennedy estate. They have a terrific gîte with four bedrooms which they’re not too bothered about letting, which seems a shame as it’s really peaceful and is bathed in setting sunlight. There is also a wonderful dilapidated dépendance, ripe for restoration but needing €70,000 to carry it out, always a hurdle. All in good time. In a field at the back they have three lovely donkeys, Qiqi, Tisane and Emma, named after opera characters. I have to take this on trust, since I don’t know my Parsifal from my Melba.

Von & Milo meet Qiqi, Tisane & Emma

Susan, Von and Gwyn shell peas in the evening while Nick cooks sea bass. Getting back up to speed (we haven’t seen them for over a decade) Nick tells us of his lecture tours on cruise ships in the Black Sea, the correct pronounciation of Sebastopol (SevvaStopple, a Tertius Paeon not the Anglicised Secundus Paeon) and the wimpishness of British book publishers (Susan is an editor). Susan describes being prescribed morphine by a doctor who could. She said that coming down she itched frantically for two days. Wisely, we pass on the Arquebuse for tonight and Gwyn & Nick doze in front of BBC satellite telly instead.