Searching For Gravitas In An Emerging Social Milieu

We were at this Royal Medical Benevolent Society "do" the other evening and we were ushered into the room which appeared to have been reserved for the oldies. Everybody there seemed to have retired and there was much chatter about the ways in which those precious retirement years were being filled to the very brim with good works and useful endeavor. Some people were doing degrees in Egyptology whilst others were cultivating new species of hybrid tea roses. I developed an unhealthy interest in the accumulated fluff in my trouser turn-ups in order to avoid the dreaded question : "and how do you occupy your time?". Walking the dog, enjoying a decent pint, and a little harmless blogging doesn't sit well amongst all that service to local charities and research into the etymology of modern Sanskrit.

I was still turning this over in my mind the following morning when I was getting Amy ready for her walk and downloading the latest Guardian Football podcast to my MP3 Player. And there on the iTunes site I saw something called iTunesU. It is a kind of University of the Modern Age where instead of doing boring things like turning up at lectures you can download them to your iPod and learn whilst you are lying in bed ... or in my case whilst you are walking the dog. Participating institutions include respectable institution like Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and Cornell. It's free, it's easy and it is an instant way to acquire some post-retirement gravitas.

I eventually chose a series of lectures delivered by a certain Dr Beat Kumin (I kid you not) of the University Of Warwick on the role of the 18th century European public house as dynamic multi-functional spacial environments. I downloaded the first episode and set off merrily on my way. By the time I had got to the top of the road my mind was wandering: by the time I got to Bradly Roundabout I was practically asleep. It was like being transported back forty years to one of those pointless, pseudo-academic, jargon-rich exercises in self-abuse that used to pass for university lectures. My search for gravitas had come to an end. I clicked the MP3 Player forward and listened to the Archers instead.

Later I went for a pint at the Sportsman in Huddersfield and wrote the visit up for my Great Yorkshire Pubs Blog. I suppose I could have written about how the pub was no longer fulfilling its central role as an inter-cultural communications space within the emerging social milieu. But I didn't. I wrote about curved mirrors and bitter beer instead. What the hell, if anyone asked what I do with all my retirement time I will simply say "I enjoy it".

Surreal Sunday 3 : Drawing

In an experiment to determine whether or not surreal art can be produced by someone without any artistic merit or skill, I am currently featuring six works of art. Five of the works featured recently in the British Surrealism in Context Exhibition . The sixth work of art will have been produced by someone without any artistic ability or experience (me) on my kitchen table in less than an hour. Your task is to spot the surreal fraud. You can comment as we progress through the six works or wait until the end to give your verdict.

Entitled simply "Drawing", this piece displays "delicate colour harmonies and a keen sense of the post-cubist importance of flatness and hard edge".

Facing Up To Things

Today I was supposed to post the last of my Family Six Pack mini series. But I never got round to it and it is all the fault of those people at Google. The subject of the last in the family history series was my Auntie Miriam and I knew I had a photograph of her somewhere. I had scanned it many years ago and it was somewhere amongst the two and a half thousand images that are tucked away in files on my hard-drive. I would like to be the kind of person who labels and tags each image when it is added to the collection, but I have never been that organised. The only way to find my errant Aunt was to search through each folder manually and even using the multi-image display format on Picasa, this is still a lengthy undertaking.

As I opened Picasa I noticed that there was a new version now available Picasa 3.5 and I downloaded it to see if there were any major improvements. To my surprise I discovered that there had been a significant development - facial recognition had been added to the programme. This is a magnificent gizmo : you simply identify a face by giving it a name tag and the programme will then search through all your image files and using facial recognition software - doing clever things like measuring the critical distances between eyes, nose and mouth - it will present you with a list of all other images containing the same face. Most it can spot without much doubt but where there is a doubt it will give you the option of either accepting the match or rejecting it.

What is really very clever about the system is its ability to recognise faces over considerable periods of time. Once I identified the GLW in a recent picture of her it managed to rightly match this up with images of her when she was just 17 and 18 years old. It is not a particularly fast system : it has taken about six or seven hours to work its way through my collection of images, but it is quite fascinating to watch it as it works its way through. Occasionally it will do sweet things like matching father with son or mother with daughter which can bring a lump to the throat. And at the end of the day you are presented with a stack of images which - as in the example above - can be a bit overwhelming.

I have spent the day fascinated watching it trawl through my life sorting people out into neat piles. All thoughts of the piece on Auntie Miriam have had to be put off until next week. But when I do get around to writing it up, I will not be short of images to illustrate it with.

If you haven't already got Picasa you can download the programme - free of charge - from the Google website.

Theme Thursday - Wild

Haiku 78 : Wild

Wild as a crazed dog

The wind cleaves down from the tops

Stripping my sorrow.

To see the work of other Theme Thursday participants, follow this LINK.

Yorkssshhhire

I clipped the following out of the Guardian twelve years ago. I am probably infringing a dozen copyright laws by reprinting it here, but what the hell. I love the poem and I adore the drawing and together they seem to sum up my native county better than anything else I have ever seen.

Tony Harrison and David Hockney, arguably England's greatest poet and painter, were born ten miles apart in Yorkshire 60 years ago. They have been friends for the past 20 years, but it was only last summer in Bridlington that they finally worked together. Hockney produced this picture of Harrison who wrote the following poem.

Yorkssshhhire

by Tony Harrison

Him drawing those lines, me composing these,

our breathing inside louder than the sea's

Yorkssshhhire .... ssshhh, Yorkssshhhire .... ssshhh they say

the whispering waves on this last day of May.

Pebbles skimmed by two school-skiving kids

bounce on bulky waves that dawdle into Brid's

bare beaches where a man shouts, "Stay!"

to his disobedient dog who runs away,

the studio clock with its metallic tick

the craftblade scratching on the charcoal stick,

the gulls' cries and the crows' dry caws,

as I compose, stock-still, and David draws,

and Brid's grey ocean, lisping and then lush

shuffles into one long silent ssshhh!

Bridlington

May 31 1996

Archive Of The Week : British Pathé

Once you hear that cock crow, hear that rising sweep of orchestral music, hear those clipped tones of the announcer - who sounds like a condescending bank manager - you are immediately transported back fifty years. You are sat in a dark and cavernous cinema. The B film has run its low budget course. The projectionist is spooling up the main feature while the usherettes serve tasteless ice-cream bars. On the screen is the newsreel from British Pathé.

I should thank Gerald Gee and his splendid Blog for a recent link which reminded me of the existence of the British Pathé film archive which is my Archive of the Week this week. British Pathé was one of four or five major providers of newsreels for British cinema audiences during much of the twentieth century (amongst the others were Gaumont British News and British Movietone News). Pathé started providing news footage for cinemas in the 1890s and continued right through until the 1970s. Their film archives - over 3,500 hours of film footage - eventually came under the supervision of the television company ITN and they have re-scanned all the original 35mm film and made it available via an on-line archive. If you are putting together a documentary and want full quality copies of the material you, quite rightly, need to pay. But if you want to view the material on-line, in what is called preview mode, access is free and there is an excellent search feature which allows you to find the material you are looking for in a variety of ways.

But like all good archives, the real joy is just to browse and to skip from one subject to another. Here is Ramsey Macdonald visiting America in the early 1930s, there is news of the Titanic disaster being received in London, and over there are the Beatles returning from one of their overseas visits. The archive is a joy to behold and well worth a visit. I have just calculated that if I limit myself to just watching an hour a day, five days a week, I can keep going through the archives for the next thirteen years without seeing the same piece of film twice.

Must go now, here comes the lady with my Choc-Ice.

Congratulations Fatty

I am pleased to announce that I am now officially overweight. Although it has been my ambition to be overweight for some time now - I first wrote about this almost two years ago - I did not start taking real steps towards my goal until after our recent holiday when a tripartite agreement to lose two stone each was sealed over post-dinner cocktails and beers one balmy night whilst we were sailing across - what my friend Mark calls - the Bay Of Biscuits.

In case anyone imagines that my struggle has been with anorexia I should point out that my journey towards my overweight status has been from the position the medical textbooks classify as either "extremely overweight" or "obese". But I have now lost sufficient pounds for my Body Mass Index to fall below the critical dividing line which is why this particular overweight person is walking around with a spring in his step and a smile on his face.

So will I be marching on towards ever-greater feats of weight loss? Much as I would love to I am slightly constrained by the research I quoted in my last post on this subject which indicated that the mortality rates for the overweight were lower than those for both the "normal" and "underweight" categories. The study in question found that although "overweight" people had a higher chance of dying from cardio-vascular disease than people of normal weight, the situation was more than reversed when diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, infections and lung diseases were taken into account.

I cannot abandon my diet just yet however : I have still some way to go before my two stone target is achieved. And before I get too carried away with medical statistics, perhaps I ought to remember the story of Tom Castle, the young lad who appears in the postcard at the top of this post. He worked for the local Sugden's Brighouse Flour Mill and featured in many of their advertising posters in the early years of the twentieth century. "Age 15 years, Weight 15 stone .... the result of eating Sugden's Flour" the postcard proclaims. Sadly, by the time he was 30, Tom was dead : uncomforted by any mortality statistics. Perhaps I will give the celebratory chocolate biscuit a miss.

Surreal Sunday 2 : Sluice Gates Of The Mind

In an experiment to determine whether or not surreal art can be produced by someone without any artistic merit or skill, I am currently featuring six works of art. Five of the works featured recently in the British Surrealism in Context Exhibition . The sixth work of art will have been produced by someone without any artistic ability or experience (me) on my kitchen table in less than an hour. Your task is to spot the surreal fraud. You can comment as we progress through the six works or wait until the end to give your verdict.

In this piece the artist goes in search of the unconscious mind and attempts to bring traumatic memories to the surface.

A Family Six Pack : Part 5 - Albert Burnett

Albert Burnett 1911 - 2002

I suppose I have been putting this off. The fifth member of the family group I have been writing about for the last few weeks is the youngest of the group - Albert Burnett : my father. It is now seven years since he died and although he had a long and happy life I still miss him. I miss his quiet assurance and I miss the way that he could interact with life with the minimum of friction. He was an amiable man, a pleasant man, a good man. He was a nice man. He could be annoying - he could worry for England and he would insist on getting places at least three hours early. My brother and I once created an international unit of waiting time called "The Albert" which was flexible and depended upon the event being undertaken but the basic law said that you always had to be where you were going 2 Alberts before you were due there. When I do something to mildly annoy my family like worry if they are five minutes late or fuss to make sure they have got their keys and phones they will say "You get more like your father every day". I argue and complain, but secretly I take this as a tremendous compliment.

Albert was born on the 25th June 1911 and therefore he was just six years old when the family photograph was taken. He must have had some artistic talent when he was young because my grandfather managed to get him taken on as an apprentice to a sign-writer. But this was 1925 and the new Education Act was being rigorously enforced and a School Inspector came and took him out of work and sent him back to school for the final three weeks until his 14th birthday. By the time his birthday came around the sign-writers job had gone so Albert was taken on as an apprentice fitter and spent his entire working life as a maker and mender of machines. For the last thirty years of his working life he maintained and repaired the machines that wrapped Mackintosh's Quality Street sweets in their coloured cellophane wrappers. The photograph shows Albert proudly sitting in front of a splendid machine that looks as though it could have flown to the moon but in fact could merely wrap a chocolate toffee finger in its gold wrapper.

Albert met Gladys, my mother, on a day-trip to Cleethorpes in the late 1920s. They discovered that they were both from the same part of Bradford so when they returned home they started seeing each other. This was the age of long courtships, an age where you had to try and save a bit of money before you thought of getting married and so it was 1936 before they finally got married. They were together for 66 years : a marriage which was happier than most and which eventually brought them two children - my brother Roger in 1943 and me in 1948.

I suppose the family became the centre of their lives - I cannot remember many friends who were not part of the wider family. They rarely went out in the evening and their lives centred around their house, their television, and trips out into the countryside in a whole succession of vehicles. When they first married they would go off every weekend on their tandem, exploring the countryside around Bradford where they lived. Later the graduated to motorbikes and their territory expanded to the entire country. By the early 1960s my father had got his first car and I can remember endless holidays touring from campsite to campsite in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Even towards the end of his life my father managed to get hold of a "mobility scooter" and would go for tours around the little estate they lived on. According to my records, I took the final photograph in 2001 when my father was 90. I can still remember the day as though it was yesterday. By then he couldn't walk very well at all and I had to help him out of his flat and onto his scooter. It was a cold day and I was worried that he might catch a chill or that he would get stuck and not be able to get home. I was determined to run behind him and make sure he was OK. By the time I had locked the flat door and turned around I spotted him in the distance. Still travelling on. Still doing things his own way with a minimum of fuss. Still wanting to get wherever he was going 2 Alberts early.

For the previous posts in this mini-series see :

Me And My Family On Tenterhooks

A Family Six Pack Part 1 : Auntie Annie

A Family Six Pack Part 2 : Enoch Burnett

A Family Six Pack Part 3 : Harriet Ellen Maxfield

A Family Six Pack Part 4 : John Arthur Burnett

That Bill Brandt Must Have Been A Tall Chap

The first part of yesterday was spent taking the Lad back to University in Sheffield. The rest of the day was spent in bringing the Lad back to collect the things he had forgotten and taking him back to Sheffield again. From now until Christmas, the house will be that little bit quieter, that little bit tidier and that little bit lonelier. I will miss him dreadfully and I will have to think of endless excuses to drive over to Sheffield so I can take him out for a pint.

On Tuesday, as a final treat, we went for a nostalgic walk around Halifax. I was anxious to go back to the site of perhaps one of the most famous images of the twentieth century : Bill Brandt's majestic "Snicket in Halifax". Brandt was a photojournalist and one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century and the Halifax pictures were taken in 1937 when he was undertaking a commission for Lilliput Magazine. From previous expeditions I knew where the site of the snicket photo was but I was keen to return as I wanted to try and track down the exact angle Brandt had used to get his famous image. As this meant that I needed someone to hold a copy of the original Brandt image why I scrambled up walls and hung from vegetation I needed an assistant : hence the need for the Lad to come with me. If you have a matchbox-full of insight you will have already guessed that this was simply an excuse for getting a day out with the Lad before he returned to Uni.

After a fair amount of messing about I think I found almost the right spot, the spot where Brandt must have stood 72 years ago. The famous hand-rail is wobbly now (aren't we all?) but the mill is still there (although some idiot has cleaned it) and the cobbles are just about intact. However hard I tried I could not get the exact angle : that Bill Brandt must have been a tall chap. But it didn't matter, it was all an excuse.

Archive Of The Week : Sail Away

You know what it is like when you are certain that you are going to hate something just as soon as someone first suggests it. I was like that with cruising. The idea of being shut away with a couple of thousand stuffed shirts aimlessly drifting over leaden-grey waves and eating your way through enough food to build an edible battleship just did not appeal. But this was twelve or so years ago, it was our 25th anniversary and the GLW (Good Lady Wife) quite fancied the idea and so off we went aboard the old P&O Arcadia around the Mediterranean. You know how some times you can be wrong. I was wrong. I fell in love with a type of holiday that allowed me to laze in the sun working my way through a mini-library of books whilst having endless cold beers delivered to my reclining deck chair. I fell in love with the pace-less days and the stress-less nights. And in consequence, I now find it difficult to survive much more than six or eight months without jumping on a ship and sailing off somewhere warm.

It is still four months until our next cruise but we had the first meeting of the little party who will be holidaying together over the weekend and we discussed things like anti-malaria pills, mosquito repellent and available supplies of tropical shirts. And with the anticipatory taste of salty sea-spray still caressing my lips I went in search of my Archive of the Week. And I found a little gem.

The Gjenvick-Gjønvik Archives are one of the largest private archives of historical steamship and ocean liner documents, photographs, and passenger lists. Even if your tastes are more inclined to family history rather than family holidays the site is still worth a visit as they maintain many passenger lists from the days of the great trans-Atlantic liners and these are freely available. As well as passenger lists there are collections of steamship tickets and illustrated brochures. There are menus and recipes and guidance on what to wear for the fashion-conscious travelling of 100 years ago. You can happily browse for hours and pretend that you are far from land on the high seas.

I will provide you with just one little sample here and that is the breakfast menu from the Cunard Line R.M.S. Berengaria from Friday, 9 August 1927 on an Eastbound Voyage from New York to Southampton. Enjoy!

FRUITS

Grape Fruit

Oranges

Apples

California Figs in Syrup

Compote of Prunes

Baked Apples with Cream

CEREALS

Oatmeal Porridge -- Cream of Wheat -- Fresh Milk

Force Whole Wheat (Flakes)

Puffed Rice

Breakfast Bran

Post Toasties

Corn Flakes

Post's Bran Flakes

Grape Nuts

Shredded Wheat

FISH

Boneless Codfish—Cream Sauce

Fried Lemon Sole

Kippered Herring

EGGS AND OMELETTES

Eggs Fried, Turned and Boiled

Poached Eggs on Toast

Shirred Eggs—Portugaise

Scrambled Eggs on Toast

Omelettes Various

ENTREES

Calf's Liver - Piquante Sauce

Chicken Hash

Smoked Beef in Cream

GRILL

American and Wiltshire Smoked and Pale Bacon

Cumberland Ham

Cambridge Sausage

Mutton Chops

Devilled Beef Bones

Potatoes— Mashed, French Fried, Steamed Jacket

Cold Meats Assorted

Spring Onions

Tomatoes Cucumber Radishes

CAKES

Griddle and Buckwheat Cakes—Maple Syrup

Waffles

VARIOUS BREADS

White and Graham Rolls

Toast

Hovis Bread

French Toast

Cottage Loaves

Vienna Bread

Pulled Bread

Toasted Muffins

Scotch Oat Cake

Corn Bread

Currant Buns

Sally Lunns

Swedish Bread

Triscuit

Parkerhouse Rolls

Soda Scones

French Crescents

Marmalade

Preserves

Tea—Ceylon, China and Blended

Coffee

Cocoa

Horlick's

Malted Milk

Buttermilk