Outward Bound

I am not sure if anyone's terribly interested, but I am off on holiday here till the beginning of September.  As the the old coastguard house, part of a row of seven (the big dark smudge on top of this Dorset cliff) has no electricity,  I shall be in radio silence.  Unable then, to answer any comments were you to be kind enough to think of making any.  There's a tempest and torrential rain forecast for tomorrow as we drive there across the fields ( who's going to open the damn gates? You guessed it) and unload food, water, foul weather gear, torch batteries, gas mantles and rather a lot of booze.
I think I might be getting too old for this game. I'll tell you later.

My son Will made a little film about the place . He introduces it like this "We shot this at one of my favorite places in the world, in Dorset. Exact location to remain a secret. Its an adaptation of a joke my dad used to tell; any excuse for a film.  And this was real micro- budget. 75 pounds for radio mics, and 25 for sandwiches and petrol!

Image © Rosie West 

The Generation Game: The Distaff Side

For the distaff side of my family, I  recently came across this crumpled photo of me with my daughter Olivia, as embellished by her.  I was presented with it by way of a birthday card a few years ago.  As  she has become a photographer herself (with her own blog) I hope she will now treat other people's work with more respect!  This  and the one below were taken by artist Peter Glover, an old friend of ours.

We looked rather more like this at the time.

My mother Mitzi with me. I remember that dress.  I wrote about her here.

My grandmother Ethel with my mother.  I could only find this image of her superimposed with a fragment of a sort of poem I wrote about her once.  Like my maternal grandfather I never knew her or very much about her but nothing ill was spoken of her.  She ended her life in London but had once run a club for gentlemen in Durban, South Africa or possibly in Laurenco Marques, now called Maputo in Mozambique. My mother said that this probably accounted for smart chaps in London's St. James tipping their hat to her. Funny the things you remember.   She was married to my raffish grandfather here.  


And finally, I have a granddaughter of my own.  

Arabella India Rose born in May this year with my daughter-in-law Joan (neé Gibbons)

The Scruffy Gene

  My paternal grandparents with the incredibly scruffy next generation. The Childs family. They would become two lawyers, two doctors and an almoner (social worker).  My father is on the far left.  I don't remember any of them being that threadbare and woolly but clearly it was in the family somewhere..

I think my great grandmother had a Beatrix Potter thing going on with her Benjamin Bunny 
tam o shanter and  Mr Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise's string bag. You will remember that he went to dinner with Mr Jeremy Fisher, taking his  own lettuce with him in one.  


The little girl, Joyce, was the younger sister of Grandfather's wife Mabel, standing next to him.  Joyce, unencumbered by the Childs aesthetic became a fashion illustrator in Paris! Alas, I never knew her because she died in childbirth.

THE GENERATION GAME: A Tale of Two Grandfathers

No wonder the Right and Left sides of my brain are constantly at war. I like to think they are personified by my two grandfathers.  My mother's father  Frank Gillam (above) was a dandy, gambler, a raffish character by all accounts.  He was a good artist too and I have some marvellous characatures he did of army officers in World War I.  Born in India, he spent most of his life in South Africa, doing what I have know idea, but he owned a Bugatti and was, my mama hastened to tell me, a 'gentleman' jockey.  He's reading 'Sporting Sketches' in this picture.  He survived the war but died young and I would love to have met him.  

By contrast, this is Philip Childs JP channelling Van Gogh.  He wasn't an artist, he was a provincial solicitor, magistrate and HM Coroner for Portsmouth and he was probably on holiday here. (I hope so!) His father was a pharmacist and his grandfather a 'tide-watcher' (port customs officer).  My grandmother, Mabel (not in the picture) would take her four sons and one daughter to the Isle of Wight and set up camp for the summer, hiring Pickfords removals to take all the canvas and kit by water and then horse and cart to Compton Bay.   Coming from a non-Conformist religious tradition, Grandfather was a teetotaller, but full of fun and occasional mischief. He was judicious and kind and never took himself too seriously.  The story goes that he was late back from the office for lunch one day.  Granny went out into the road and saw the coalman's cart approaching with her husband sitting up alongside the driver, a client of his.

I suppose another way I always sum up the difference between these two men is that in The English Civil War, Philip Childs would have been a Roundhead and Frank Gillam a Cavalier. Definitely. Meanwhile I permanently feel conflicted between these two opposing inherited strands of my character.  Creative tension, I guess.

When The Postman Knocked Twice

OK, it's not so bad but I had a dispiriting day.  My new all-singing all-adjusting ergonomic office chair finally arrived, in pieces with no instructions, which brought my other half out in hives.  " I hate these sodding things, they always effing say they're easy and they never effing are."  Followed by the IKEA flat-pack rant. The situation did look menacing but once we'd calmed down, it was easy. A piece of cake. So I sit on it, apply my tortoiseshell specs, smooth my skirt, thrust the bust and .. realise they've sent me the wrong flaming chair.  My work surface is draughtsman's height and I know I ordered the tall version. Instead of feeling like that secretary in Mad Men, I'm like an old lady driving a rather large motor car. When I press a lever, I'm a child driving a motor car.  That's crap isn't it?

But cheer is on its way because a parcel lands on the doormat.  I've waited a long time for it to arrive from The USA courtesy of a firm called Alibris via Amazon.  Recommended by Peak of Chic, it's 'Only the Best: a Celebration of Gift Giving in America'. . Except it's not.   It's just what I've always wanted:

I trust I can be justified in saying that's crap too.

Image top by Magda Archer for POLITE cards here

Great Colour Combos II : Red & Green China Style

Mao by Andy Warhol

From one of my all-time favourite fashion shoots Vogue in China October 1979.Why don't they still dress like this?  I know, but still..

The fibreglass version by Sui Jianguo  here

Conveniently dressed Beijing cyclists

Red lacquer and green leather does it for me

Red Lacquer and Nature not bad either

Me as Mao


Images 4,5& 6 from China Style Photos Reto Gunti  ed. Taschen

What a Pill

The artist Grayson Perry in his motorcycle leathers.


I can't say I'm not always pleased and flattered to get a comment on my blog.  The latest was in response to an old post entitled The Transvestite Artist and the Harley Salesman and  I read it with mounting pleasure:  'I liked this blog, is very interesting and wonderful.It catched my attention since the first time that i saw it,that because it´s very entertainment.I feel happy when i reache what i am looking for,like...


when i buy viagra the result is really great.' (Linked to a site selling the stuff)


Oh f*** off, do.  


Wondering if anyone else has received stealth merchandising like this?  I am constantly bombarded with offers of penis enhancement but they go straight into my, erm, spam.

PET

If I offend dog lovers by dressing pooches up in frocks, I am only using these sad little confections as a metaphor for what we tend to do with our human pets.

That Pinking Feeling

Pink is a delicious colour but little girls, particularly the ‘tween’ market, are bombarded with pink merchandising opportunities that dominate their wardrobes, their accessories, their worlds.  This seems to pose no other narrative, no other gender choice than a ‘girliness’ that is becoming commodified and toxic: contaminated with sentimentality, anxiety and a sophistication that only accelerates the loss of childhood innocence.

Most of these paintings were made for an exhibition at Southampton Solent University in 2008.  The horrible phenomenon of the beauty pageant was an insistent idea behind this somewhat uncomfortable project.  

Caged Bird

Candy Lamb

Are You Sure You Really Love Me?

 Bunny Cuddles

Play Time

All images © Rosie West

Pure Allure

Oh what a treat last night! We were invited to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden  for the Bolshoi Ballet’s ‘Spartacus’ with the music of Khachaturian.   Excited by the prospect the fabled Bolshoi,  I was unsure about the choice of Spartacus imagining it to be visually spare, ascetic and  just hard work, frankly. I was wrong and had to eat my uninformed hat: it was thrilling, beguiling and a magnificent spectacle.

The background to Spartacus’s rebellion of the slaves was the dissolute behaviour at the heart of the Roman Empire. With sly wit, choreographer Yuri Grigovich juxtaposed the military aggression with a bacchanal of the effete Roman elite, of satyrs and dancing girls; and later amongst half the followers of Spartacus who turned against their leader when seduced into lustful abandon by the Roman general’s courtesan Aegina.  Maria Allash in that role was  sexy and capricious, a real handful.  Her tiny toga was draped to expose a bare breast cleverly conceived by a little circle of red sequins on flesh-coloured net.  Her General (Alexander Volchkov) had the finest legs below his leather tunic that I’ve ever had the privilege to dwell upon and, boyishly glamorous, he evinced a camp kind of menace. (On a fashion note, here were the most fitting gladiator sandals of the season.)   

Dominating the production was  the overwhelmingly virile, saturnine presence of Ivan Vasiliev as Spartacus.  At only twenty-one, he is being hailed as a once-in-a-generation icon, the next Barishnikov?    Stocky, athletic and savage he seemed to demonstrate the limits of human strength and agility as well as the gift of flight. And yet he was most tenderly passionate towards his lover Phrygia (Nina Kaptsova) who bent and wavered and wafted like a willow in the breeze.

In the midst of my first attempt as ballet critic, a curious thought struck me.  I don't suppose the T*l*b*n would be too happy with this physicality, this intimacy, this state of undress.  I pondered the matter from a socio-religio-political angle on the way to the pub and suddenly heard myself asking my other half ‘By the way, did you find anything untoward happening in the trouser department tonight?’  Choking on his Guinness the answer was an emphatic NO.  ‘Okay, okay, just checking out the corrupting power of dance on the average British male.’

Great Colour Combinations: Red & Pink

One of the most depressing aspects of the landscape of bringing up children  is the cacophony of crude colours or sickly pastels.  (Luckily my small grandson prefers a more muted palette: any kind of hose pipe, mobile phones, tools, car steering wheels..  )  I  turn to Hollywood musical ensembles or ballet on You Tube to find the World's unsung colourist heroes - costume designers.  The gift of creating a moving tableau that is gorgeous but subtle, I always find miraculous.  


Well here, the bold juxtaposition of pink and red, or pink and vermillion is not exactly subtle but they really pull it off in these two films.  As a child with red hair, my mother would never let me wear pink. As much as I loved her,  I never forgave her then and still don't. 


Here is Rosemary Clooney in Red Garters (1954) directed by George Marshall.  Costumes by Edith Head.  (No surprise there for genius.)





And Dorothy Jeakins created these shockingly wonderful petticoats in The Music Man (1962) dir. Morton DaCosta.

Scenes From The Mess In My House

Uh oh, I'm panicking again because I need to do another post in a hurry.  Here is a selection of my artwork interspersed with my mess.  That's it, really.

Toot Toot!  Back Soon

That Time of Year

The Stars and Stripes on the River Thames at Henley Royal Regatta 

For all my lovely American friends
on the Fourth of July

Mallards settle on Brian Flattery's slipper launch moored outside his fine house which overlooks the Regatta's finishing line.  He has lived there for over ten years. Mr Flattery, a former state energy official in North Carolina, looked unmistakably American when we met him on Friday in his blue and white striped seersucker suit and preppy rounded collar with pink braces (suspenders, I think you call them.)  His blue tie bore the emblem of the famous Leander Rowing Club, pink hippos.  Pink is the colour at Henley: it is Leander. 

 Famously hospitable, whenever possible he hosts an Independence Day party, inviting American crews to participate. “We read the Declaration of Independence and throw tea into the Thames at 1:30 p.m. on July 4th…. it’s all done in good sport. We always have an Englishman read the Declaration so we have the proper accent” he laughs. [quoted from The Henley Standard July 2008]  

River Legends

Two members of the Cossey Family : lightermen on The Thames by George Owen Cossey who died this year.

On the hottest day of an English summer (so not that hot then) what better than to wrestle with a 20 ft oar or ‘sweep’ and help power a very heavy steel barge seven miles up the River Thames.  The tide is with you but it’s still a Herculean task over a couple of hours.

Racing barges today.  Two men run up a small ramp and take less than a dozen strokes before handing over to the other pair. The fifth man steers with a sweep.

Yesterday’s Annual Barge Driving race from  Greenwich to The Palace of Westminster that I watched from The Port of London Authority’s beautiful launch ‘The Royal Nore’, celebrates the strength and adroit handling of all kinds of river craft for which The Company of Watermen and Lightermen are famous. Well, in my opinion not famous enough.    

The Race starts at Greenwich Naval Hospital, designed by Christopher Wren completed in 1712.

 One of the 'diamond geezers' at the prize-giving.  The Freemen and Apprentices of the Company of Watermen & Lightermen are a tough breed.

A few years ago I worked for Alan Lee Williams who had completed his seven year apprenticeship as a waterman and lighterman before becoming a Member of Parliament and going on to other great things. The watermen are concerned with passenger transport and the lightermen with the carriage of goods but whichever way you work the river, it seems to get into the bloodstream. There are several redoubtable London families who have been involved with The Thames over generations.

Alan L W couldn’t get it out of his blood either and would annually renew his towing licence. I jumped at the opportunity to accompany him and asked naively ‘So what will be towing?’ The answer came ‘Well, rubbish of course.’  Oh well, I thought, it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it and that means me.  Apparently there’s very little waterborne trade left these days.

The stuff Londoners would rather not think about in yellow containers

The next bolter was that I had to get up at 4am to drive down to Gravesend and catch the tide on the Cory tug ‘Retainer’. I wouldn’t get up at such a daft hour for anything else; and this, it emerged, was to be my finest hour.

You can call me Tugboat Rosie now.  I took the helm as a string of several barges slewed round a river bend behind me and then I was jumping between them like a gazelle. Actually I lie about that bit.  I was shaking with horizontal vertigo as I gingerly unclipped the bindings on one container and took slow motion steps along the concrete gunnels. I felt sick as the skipper brilliantly judged the fast ebbing tide in the process of berthing alongside the depot at Mucking Flats. What seemed like two minutes later, an evil expanse of mud appeared which always gives me the most ghastly feeling of claustrophobia.

Lucky  bargee.  Feeling proprietorial about the rubbish in my lifejacket with Alan looking on.  If I told you I have this picture in a silver frame...

You see, I am not talking about my heroics (I had all the bravado of a whelk) but those of the lightermen who do this work in all weathers and in in the dark. On an icy morning, the ropes have to be bashed into life with a length of two-by-four. I watched in awe as the men deftly juggled their juggernaut barges into changing formations. And I appreciated their rough charm and patience towards the honorary apprentice. (Little did they know I already had a degree in lower-deck language.)  And what was great was our fat boys’ breakfast and a rest on the bunk waiting for the tide. There are bursts of activity and then everyone can settle down to do the crossword. We disembarked at 9 pm – a pretty long day. Meanwhile London was completely unaware that all its landfill was being quietly and efficiently disposed of. (Don’t ask me about the recycling implications, this was about ten years ago..)

 Reunited yesterday with Jack Faram MBE, my fellow crew member on that voyage.  A former much respected trade unionist, he spends much of his retirement taking the disabled and disadvantaged on narrowboat excursions on the River Lea. He also works with Alan Lee Williams on Transport on Water, an organisation which aims to reinvigorate the river's working culture.  

Many thanks to The Company of Watermen & Lightermen, The Port of London Authority and Transport on Water for fabulous hospitality in The Royal Nore yesterday.

 Top two images from the Barge Driving Race Official Programme; Greenwich Naval Hospital courtesy Wikipedia

The Triumph of Hope over Experience II

Germany 4 : England 1


And the man who painted the front of his cottage in Bray white with a red cross over it will be opening a new tin of Farrow & Ball tomorrow.


The South African sun sets over England's World Cup hopes.


We was horribly robbed of our second goal.  But we shouldn't have played 4 - 4 -2 .  But what does that mean?


"We  have to go back to factory settings."


 Oh dearie dear, as the commentator on my radio kept saying. "We might as well bring David Beckham on in his suit." There's apoplexy breaking out in every pub in the land.  I feel the pain of our supporters but truth to tell I can't really care.

In Berkeley Square...

A nightingale sang...

And in Moscow.  I always wondered how a nightingale really sang.  Wait for its sublime little voice to
develop..

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

FREE with Tatler July issue!!!!   Never buy the July or August edition of anything.  Half the staff are on holiday, it'll be thin and disappointing. No wonder you get the tacky gift. When will I learn to resist?

You know you're old when you absolutely hate shoes like this  :

Shoe crimes perpetrated by Giuseppe Zanotti and Gina (no. 3)
Photos courtesy of Tatler