I asked a friend who had been to Ukraine with his very expensive camera if he had any photographs of rivers in the country, which we needed for a fotoLibra client. This was his reply. Am I right in believing that the last sentence of this paragraph could only have been written by a master of the English language?

As to the rivers of the Ukraine – something of a problem here. One of the things that happened to us in Sebastopol is that Susan left the Canon on a bench and it had disappeared when we returned. She had been distracted by a post-Soviet nail in said bench which had penetrated her jeans and in disengaging herself forgot about the camera. It is not a subject we speak of very often.

Yes, it’s that time of year again.

Where else could you pick up a litter bin for £26,000, assuming you are not fortunate enough to be in charge of the Gwynedd Council Recycling Department?

That’s right — the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

This masterpiece of bronze and paint into which I’d unfortunately just dropped a snotty tissue was by Michael Landy RA, and was titled Self Portrait As Rubbish Bin. He was asking £26,000 for it.

I do realise I am hopelessly middle brow and hopelessly middle class, but in this instance I am totally out of my depth. I cannot understand — will never understand — why something like this should be seen as Art, or why Landy could command so much money for it. Would any private individual actually buy such an object? I doubt it. It is a tool designed to extract cash from institutions, probably publicly funded ones at that. I am torn between admiration for the (con?) artist and irritation with something that is patently not Art. And don’t throw Duchamp’s Fountain at me — that was a shocking statement a century ago, whereas this merely looks manipulative and silly.

Looking back over past reviews of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, I see that I was beginning to get restless with the same old same old. I’m delighted to report that this year it is actually different. The new coördinator is Tess Jaray, and full marks to her — she has done a great job, and it’s a wonderful, must-see show.

The most noticeable of Jaray’s innovations is to empty the Small Weston Room of all those fascinating little artworks by unknown artists and spray them in waves along the walls of the large galleries. If that means dropping a few gigantic, portentous works by major old farts, then so be it. It is much the better for it. Last year I expressed the wish to get Jaray down a dark alley some night. She curated the works in one gallery, and not only elbowed in four copies in different colours of her own identical work, but had the arrogance, snobbery and condescension to announce in print that her selection was “only for people who are sensitive, intelligent and thoughtful. No one else will enjoy it.”

This year I’ve evidently become sensitive, intelligent and thoughtful. Or else she’s grown up. The Small Weston Room was given over to the obligatory video installation, this time given over to a man attempting to destroy a cello, Trilogy: Kettle’s Yard by Jayne Parker. After 90 seconds of this my everloving wife whispered “Are we in here because you wanted to sit down?”

There were of course, some old familiar faces: Ken Howard’s immediately recognisable Venetian veduti, Michael Craig-Martin’s ruddy letters, David Mach’s fascinating coathanger sculptures and a playing card portrait of Snoopy, Tracey Emin and so on. A clerihew sprang to Mr & Mrs Headley’s minds:

I’m not taken in
By Tracey Emin
Her style is too fractured
To leave me enraptured.

What else caught the eye? We liked Holding Myself Together So Far And No Significant Bleeding by Effie Jessop, hand embroidered on linen and decorated with what appeared to be 4 point Letraset. Ann Winder-Boyle’s England A Century Of Change could have been subtitled “Five Go Looting”, an image of 1950s schoolgirls pillaging a local corner shop. A small wooden disc and a thin stick were credited to Roger Ackling and were offered for sale at £3,400 and £1,500 respectively. We didn’t feel this represented value. Likewise we didn’t care for Fiona Rae RA’s work, scattered throughout several galleries. Too reminiscent of the remainder bin at Clintons Cards.

I’m always seduced by the clever, detailed works, such as Larousse by Alexander Korzer-Robinson, and Fiction II from Phil Shaw, a bookshelf of spines of 1950s novels — or nearly: On The Bleach; The Son Also Rises; East of Eton; Lady Chatterley’s Hoover etc. Some work was simply breathtaking, technically, such as Colin Davidson’s masterly Portrait of Brian Kennedy.

Others served to annoy. Two works in red, black and white were innocently juxtaposed: Portrait of Sir Terry Frost by Neil Shawcross and Untitled No. 33 by Callum Innes, for which he was requesting sixty six thousand pounds. Disgraceful. The Shawcross was not for sale. North Road II by Patricia Burns was bleak and beautiful. I loved the hyperrealism of Lee Madgwick’s The Devoted Gardener, below, but then I have a soft spot for ruins.

My soft spot for ruins should be well known, after seven books on follies and grottoes, but much to many peoples’ amazement I am not is possession of a folly or grotto myself. However if I was, I would have no hesitation in snapping up Olu Shobuwale’s Chicken Chair, only £1,200 for a chair made entirely from bones. Perfect grotto material.

Kenny Hunter’s cute little Monument to A Mouse stopped us in our tracks. We’d seen it before, only much bigger. Then we remembered — it was this image by Arch White on fotoLibra. The big version of the Mouse Monument stands in Alloway, Scotland.

And finally to what you’ve all been waiting for yet again — the result of my annual Get Rid Of Lazy Thinking Among Artists campaign. This year’s tally is FORTY THREE — that’s right, 43 — out of 1,474 works exhibited were titled “UNTITLED”. How pathetic. Last year it was 18 out of 1,117. This is a distressing trend. I blame Cameron & Clegg. And the Olympics.

And probably Tess Jaray. Again.

Many years ago, aware that I had incredible difficulty remembering and associating names and faces, I coined the term ‘Nominal Dysphasia’ jokingly to excuse my predicament.

In 1994 a medical journal published an article on ‘Nominal Asphasia’. Exactly the same problem I had, but a slightly different name to the one I had made up for a laugh.

It turns out to be a real and general problem, not just me being thick or lazy. And at every conference and exhibition it’s always the same — people I have never seen before come up and greet me warmly, and until I see their badge or they give me a card, I have no idea who they are. Oddly enough it doesn’t happen with everyone. I saw an old friend at the London Book Fair last week whom I hadn’t seen since 1979, and I recognised him and remembered his name instantly.

Now here is a peculiar example which happened at fotoFringe, the picture buyers’ fair, yesterday. An attractive woman came up to the table and I greeted her warmly, “Hello! How are you?” (my all-purpose welcome and get-out). I had never seen her before in my life. We were offering blocks of Lindt chocolate in exchange for business cards, and as she didn’t have a card with her (why do so many people come to business trade fairs without cards nowadays? It makes no sense) she wrote down her name.

And as I glanced at her handwriting I immediately knew who she was. She worked for an educational publisher in the south Midlands, and I had met her at last year’s fotoFringe, and we’d had a good long chat. She was really nice.

I didn’t remember her at first sight, but I remembered her handwriting instantly. Is that odd? Or is that very odd? I could recognise and remember handwriting I’d seen for a brief moment twelve months ago, but not a face, a person or a name. It may explain my passion for typefaces and fonts, but it’s rather a lame excuse when you’re shaking the hand of your best man, frantically trying to recall where you’ve seen him before.

So apologies to all my friends, relations, colleagues et al when I sweep past you and cut you dead. It’s not intentional at all. It’s just me. I’m an extremely pleasant, warm and welcoming person, and if you write your name on a little piece of paper I will remember you straight away.

Promise!

I met him at the London Book Fair:

On Saturday a smirking, egotistical, attention-seeking Australian put an oar in the works of one of Britain’s favourite and most venerable annual pageants.

The Boat Race is contested between Oxford and Cambridge Universities along four plus miles of the Thames. This foreigner jumped into the river and impeded the racing boats to “protest” against — against what? Against “elitism in Britain”, of all things. This is not his country, mind you. I wouldn’t dream of going to Australia to protest against the stupidity of some Australians.

This prompted a voice of sadness and sanity from one of the competing rowers, an Oxford student named William Zeng. At his young age he is far more measured and controlled than I could ever hope to be, and all I can do is repeat his consecutive tweets in utter admiration:

“When I missed your head with my blade I knew only that you were a swimmer, and if you say you are a protestor then no matter what you say your cause may be, your action speaks too loudly for me to hear you. I know, with immediate emotion, exactly what you were protesting. You were protesting the right of seventeen young men and one woman to compete fairly and honorably to demonstrate their hard work and desire in a proud tradition. You were protesting their right to devote years of their lives, their friendships and their souls to the fair pursuit of the joys and the hardships of sport. You, who would make a mockery of their dedication and courage, are a mockery of a man.”

On December 15th last year I got an £80 parking ticket in Westminster. I thought it was massively unfair, because I had spent 12 minutes in the dark and drizzle attempting to pay for my parking by phone, and the system simply wouldn’t work.

I blogged about it in fury here. I wasn’t happy at all. I felt it was an unjust, unfair, and heavy-handed penalty, a cynical revenue-raising exercise. So I was determined to fight it.

27 letters and several emails later, I received this morning (Wednesday April 4) a letter from the Parking Appeals and Traffic Service telling me that the City of Westminster will not contest my appeal against the penalty charge notice (a.k.a. parking ticket). “You are not liable for any further charges and any amounts already paid will be refunded by the Enforcement Authority.”

I should think so too. The fact that I tried to pay for my parking, failed in my three attempts by phone, and then offered to pay by cheque has been ignored.

So I got to park for free. But at what a cost.

My celebration was muted when Yvonne told me that on the same day, December 15th:
1) finding we couldn’t turn right into Lisson Grove from Marylebone Road, I had turned left into Wyndham Street, right into York Street, right into Seymour Place and straight on into Lisson Grove. That took us into the Congestion Zone for 45 seconds. Fine: £80.
2) on the way home we paused outside our local Budgens for me to pop in for 2 litres of milk. Von was at the wheel, lights on, engine running; I was gone for three minutes max. Fine: £65.

An expensive hospital visit. Von didn’t tell me about these last two because I was so agitated about the parking fine. She just paid them.

I’m getting fed up with blogging and tweeting about how the fotoLibra site crashed last week and is nearly back up and running now, so I’ll take a quick break to laud a stunning photograph I saw in the paper on Saturday.

I wish I could show it to you here, but because of sensible copyright reasons I can only offer you a link to it: bit.ly/Hct01C

I urge, urge, urge you please to click on the link and look.

It is a portrait of a poor family in Accrington, Lancashire, and in composition, colour, lighting and the clear frank gaze of the sitters (what else can I call them?) it is a portrait worthy of a fine artist, a Dutch master, a Vermeer even. These are not handsome or pretty people. But MacPherson makes them beautiful.

Although I work as a picture librarian, I’m not a photographer and I don’t move in photographic circles, so I don’t know if Colin MacPherson is famous or not. I know from this one photograph that he deserves to be. I must have stared at this image for ten minutes on Saturday morning. It is luminous, and numinous. And somehow, it is much more compelling seen on cheap newsprint than on your top-of-the-range 28″ monitor.

And you know what the photograph really says to me? Look at those little girls. Look at their parents.

In the midst of despair there is always hope.

If you’ve been trying to find the fotoLibra website or the Heritage Ebooks website without any luck, it’s not your fault — it’s ours, we’re sorry to say. A server crashed on Wednesday afternoon and despite our best efforts we couldn’t resuscitate it. A replacement has been fitted and is being programmed as I write, if that’s what you do with servers.

We earnestly hope it will be up and running by this evening. Our fingers (and toes) are crossed. And we apologise. We are very, very sorry for any inconvenience caused. In the immortal words of the Rt. Hon Harriet Harman: “The lesson that has been learned is that lessons have been learned.”

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.