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In Which I Repeatedly Lose My Fu
This wasn't where I'd thought I'd be, but even in the run up we'd got to plan d or e, so spending a lump of money to avoid wasting a small about of money made sense, and it ticked something off the list.
I took a slightly later train into London than usual, as the Euston train was 2.15, and this gave me time to take photos of the Kapoor balls at the RAA and buy a white poppy (my remaining one having gone missing in transit on the way back from the last trip to London). There were slightly fewer people on Piccadilly who had forgotten how to walk than Monday, so speedily got to the courtyard in front of all the Royal Societies. Like an overenthusiastic Christmas tree decoration, a pile of steel balls rise into the air, reflecting the courtyard, the people, and each other. I'm snapping away for a good twenty minutes, although the light is not as good as it was on Monday.
Then back to the tube and on up to Euston, where I notice posters for A Bear Called Euston, Paddington's evil twin ("Move over, marmalade boy"). The Friends Meeting House is just across the concourse, bus station and road, and the bookshop has been done up since my last visit. I suspect I've ended up with five times as many poppies as I should, but I've paid double so there's a bit of an ethical balance. I elect to buy a sandwich here rather than n the station. I'm left with an hour for a coffee at Caffé Nerd, before the train ride to Milton Keynes.
Google maps claim that there is a Borders within 32 metres of Central Station - the precise directions are Turn right. You have arrived. Equally the address is given as The Portway, Elder Gate, which seems to be some distance away when I finally find it on the map. I do some wandering, and fail to find it, so head east parallel to Silbury Boulevard in search of my hotel. MK is arguably the most American of British towns, and the grid system is curiously anti-intuitive; there is no sense of where you are, and the wide avenues with strips of parking and trees make sight lines and landmarks minimal.
I cross a block south and spot the hotel, on the other side of Midsummer Boulevard. Success - but there's no obvious entrance. Ah, it's down the side of the building on a courtyard which has a Starbucks, Cafe Rogue, Strada and Gourmet Burgers, among other landmarks. Sainsbury's is also in sight. I check in, painlessly, and find a serviceable but soulless room which needs a plastic keycard to work. (Of course. I'm a mind reader.)
I head off in search of the cinema and coffee and quickly find the shopping centre. I see the ball and chain I recollect from last time, and ponder where the Waitrose was. When I came here with Abrinsky and Lamentables I think we drove between bits of car park - but there's a map with Waitrose clearly marked on it. Unfortunately, a) there is no clearly YOU ARE HERE arrow and b) it's not clear whether this is upstairs or beside the main building which I eventually establish I'm in. I wander into the unknown, and find the Odeon - I can see Up and Cirque du Freak tonight - and then head further into the darkness, where Waitrose is easily located.
It's too late to eat properly, so I return to the hotel via Sainsbury's and foolishly use the self checkout which I steadfastly avoid at Tesco. It goes okay, although I could do without it barking orders, and it takes a while to find where I insert the money. I'm also thrown by the automatic conveyor belt - almost as annoying as the automated book return in Albatross House - which appears to be stealing my shopping. I retrieve it, and go back to the hotel to read until 12.30.
The next days it is dry but murky, and I walk to the station, where I search again for Borders. No, it is clearly not there but two blocks north, and it aint going to happen. I'm on a train, and I'm heading for Manchester.
My initial idea - well, my tenth or eleventh idea - was to dovetail trains journeys so I moved from a Euston-MK ticket to a MK-Manchester one, but I didn’t fancy two nights in Manchester as I have family there, and I can't deal with the emotional fallout right now. I pondered one night in Manchester, but then I'd almost certainly be wandering around with a rucksack all of the time, and that's no fun. Two nights in Milton Keynes seemed the solution - working out cheaper than one in each - and in fact the journey time is hardly more than that from home to London. It's pricier though - £50 vs £12.
Having arrived I check the map on my Blackberry, but there's nothing to orientate me that I can spot. It looks like a trek to the Manchester Art Gallery, and I could do with a coffee at Caffé Nerd, but I feel like I risk heading off in the wrong direction. It's nearly ten years since I've been here, and misremembered is clearly worse than ignorance. There's a Caffé Nerd at the end of Station Approach - and I've already been in CEX and bought DVDs - so I sit and try and plot a route. Disturbingly what appears to be a crossroads on the map is a straight line on the ground. The territory is not the map.
I have directions for cars, which I ignore, cutting down a backstreet. Ah, Canal Street. I seem to recall wandering through here on the way back from the Eastercon in the 1990s. I'm headed in the wrong direction, according to the map, and whilst there are street signs, none of them point to an art gallery. A right turn to a main drag, and the first sign I'm on the right direction. I pass through what looks like a China town, and soon get stopped by two Chinese looking for Chinatown. I cautiously give directions. And then, almost before I realise it, I'm at the gallery.
I've come to see Angels of Anarchy, an exhibition of women surrealists. On the whole art, like most cultural endeavours, is presented as a boy's club. It's difficult for me to name women artists off the top of my head - Frida Kahlo and Beryl Cooke are about the only two that spring to mind, although Elizabeth Siddall and Catherine Blake had their moments. Tracey Emin. Barbara Hepworth. There were women artists included in the Futurist exhibition, and the Constructivist, but that feels rare – the landmark exhibitions are Picasso, Turner, Renoir, Waterhouse, Kapoor. Aside from the interest in it for itself, this also sneaks into the 1900-1950 period I appear to be mapping out for myself.
It takes a while to find the exhibition even within the gallery – they’ve clearly expanded into next door, and there is no second floor in the old building. I wander round the city collection – which confirms my suspicion that the great and the good have no taste or leave their crap paintings to their local council. There’s the indifferent portraits, the second rate pre-Raphs and the inexplicable giant canvas of a lion. Obscure classical scenes. Tick, tick, tick, and tick. But there are four Blakes I’d not seen before – his portraits of poets - and the twentieth century stuff is pretty good. It’s the nineteenth century crap that takes wading through.
To my pleasure, the exhibition is free to Arts Fund members, and I’m in a series of large rooms in subdued lighting. I confess my first thought is the Dr Johnson line; this art isn’t good simply because it’s by a woman, but of course there are all sorts of reasons why it’s more difficult to produce, er, masterpieces – lack of formal training, demands of family and so forth. But in fact, at the risk of praising with faint damns, a lot of it will stand alongside the male surrealists. It is noticeable how the attendees are 90% female.
The categories seem mostly ungendered – portraits, self portraits, landscapes, still lives, fantasy – but I don’t suppose there would be a domestic space for male artists in the same way. There is no section for the muse, I notice. The self-portraits are mistitled, as it includes portraits, mostly photographs. It’s a useful section for forging links between the artists, although I still feel a little at sea. Ah, she was associated with Man Ray, she with Max Ernst, ah, she’s still alive and in Mexico and might have known Kahlo. I confess to using Wikipedia on the Blackberry – yes, Eva Svankmayerova was a name that should have rung a bell.
The Kay Sage landscapes were impressive, and the Frida Kahlo stuff different from what I’d expected, and the Leonara Carrington have made me determined to get to her exhibition (with others) in Chichester next year. The revelation was the photographs of Lee Miller, a name that meant little to me by whose work I’d clearly seen, if only some of the fashion. I will need to do some digging – and check out the webpage.
There’s a fascinating bed, whose folded sheets I correctly spot as vaginal, and next to this another distinctly symbolic bed, although a pelvis is more obviously vaginal. The phallic symbols in these paintings are apparently ironic – I presume they are sincere in male paintings, but I’m not sure whether male depictions of vaginas then get to be ironic. In the lanscape section two rock towers become penises, but then, as the label points out, it’s also two legs, and it’s a view of the artist in the bath with her knees up. Clever.
I took a couple of hours going around, and didn’t do all the video stuff, but I’ve got the catalogue to peruse. There was a Caffé Nerd opposite the gallery, but I figured I’d better do the Shudehill bookshop first.
More navigation – the Arndale centre is entirely new – courtesy of the IRA – and I think the Royal Exchange has been reconfigured. There’s a big wheel almost in Selfridges. Again, the territory does not quite fit the map, and street signs with street names would be helpful. But I find Shudehill, and a bookshop that cares more about porn than books, a second one where I pick up a missing Tiptree collection and the rest of the Adlard Tcity trilogy (these have vanished from shelves since I decided to buy them) and then, finally, the Shudehill Bookshop itself, which again has gone over to dealing more in porn, More navigation and getting lost gets me to Oxfam – which is distinctly uninteresting. I realise I’m back on the road to the station, return to the Nerd from this morning, and catch the train back.
I decide en route that going to see a film is a bad idea – I’m going to sleep through it. Instead I can watch Have I Got More News For You and The Thick of It. I pop into M&S to buy fruit, but can’t justify those prices and cut across to Sainsbury’s.
Again I use the self checkout, and it asks me if I am using my own bags. SCAN BAGS NOW. How? Scan what. AN ASSISTANT WILL COME TO HELP YOU. I notice an assistant, but she is studiously not coming to help. I start cussing, and cancel the transaction. I start again. YOU HAVE SOMETHING ILLEGAL IN THE BAGGING AREA? Like what? There’s just my shopping. Then my mango slices won’t scan. TYPE IN CODE NUMBER. Which? There’s a product number and a bar code number. DO YOU HAVE A NECTAR CARD? No. Questions, nothing but questions, and by now, deeply into Tourette’s mode, and being frowned at by shoppers and their children. If an assistant were to appear now it would be to bar me from the whole chain, but I’m being given a wide berth. Can you gay bash a self-checkout? Apparently so – and its little dog also comes in for abuse, as does its mother. Malcolm Tucker, eat your heart out.
In the silence I hear an escalator telling someone they have reach the end and need to step off with their trolley. Because otherwise they’d fucking forget, wouldn’t they?
Back to the hotel. More fruit. More fruit juice. More Robert Adams Horseclans 3.
Sunday I’ve checked out, not before thinking that wet rooms are much better at the wet but than the room. If I need to not put the towels on the floor to save the environment, I could do with a rail to hang them from so they dry. The bath towel is still damp from the previous night, and lacks a certain something in the drying department. I check out, and they’ve got my rucksack. Across a damp and blustery square is the Starbucks where I’ve been for two hours, and I’ve got a Rewards Cards to use the wifi. I feel disloyal to the Nerd, but I’d have to pay for it there, and beside, there is not Nerd in MK, at least according to the map which failed to show at least two of the Manchester branches.
Soon I’d better go forth and investigate Sunday shopping, maybe even buy some lunch. The train is at 4.30. I have a work related email to seethe about. But I can’t deal with this until I’m home.
I took a slightly later train into London than usual, as the Euston train was 2.15, and this gave me time to take photos of the Kapoor balls at the RAA and buy a white poppy (my remaining one having gone missing in transit on the way back from the last trip to London). There were slightly fewer people on Piccadilly who had forgotten how to walk than Monday, so speedily got to the courtyard in front of all the Royal Societies. Like an overenthusiastic Christmas tree decoration, a pile of steel balls rise into the air, reflecting the courtyard, the people, and each other. I'm snapping away for a good twenty minutes, although the light is not as good as it was on Monday.
Then back to the tube and on up to Euston, where I notice posters for A Bear Called Euston, Paddington's evil twin ("Move over, marmalade boy"). The Friends Meeting House is just across the concourse, bus station and road, and the bookshop has been done up since my last visit. I suspect I've ended up with five times as many poppies as I should, but I've paid double so there's a bit of an ethical balance. I elect to buy a sandwich here rather than n the station. I'm left with an hour for a coffee at Caffé Nerd, before the train ride to Milton Keynes.
Google maps claim that there is a Borders within 32 metres of Central Station - the precise directions are Turn right. You have arrived. Equally the address is given as The Portway, Elder Gate, which seems to be some distance away when I finally find it on the map. I do some wandering, and fail to find it, so head east parallel to Silbury Boulevard in search of my hotel. MK is arguably the most American of British towns, and the grid system is curiously anti-intuitive; there is no sense of where you are, and the wide avenues with strips of parking and trees make sight lines and landmarks minimal.
I cross a block south and spot the hotel, on the other side of Midsummer Boulevard. Success - but there's no obvious entrance. Ah, it's down the side of the building on a courtyard which has a Starbucks, Cafe Rogue, Strada and Gourmet Burgers, among other landmarks. Sainsbury's is also in sight. I check in, painlessly, and find a serviceable but soulless room which needs a plastic keycard to work. (Of course. I'm a mind reader.)
I head off in search of the cinema and coffee and quickly find the shopping centre. I see the ball and chain I recollect from last time, and ponder where the Waitrose was. When I came here with Abrinsky and Lamentables I think we drove between bits of car park - but there's a map with Waitrose clearly marked on it. Unfortunately, a) there is no clearly YOU ARE HERE arrow and b) it's not clear whether this is upstairs or beside the main building which I eventually establish I'm in. I wander into the unknown, and find the Odeon - I can see Up and Cirque du Freak tonight - and then head further into the darkness, where Waitrose is easily located.
It's too late to eat properly, so I return to the hotel via Sainsbury's and foolishly use the self checkout which I steadfastly avoid at Tesco. It goes okay, although I could do without it barking orders, and it takes a while to find where I insert the money. I'm also thrown by the automatic conveyor belt - almost as annoying as the automated book return in Albatross House - which appears to be stealing my shopping. I retrieve it, and go back to the hotel to read until 12.30.
The next days it is dry but murky, and I walk to the station, where I search again for Borders. No, it is clearly not there but two blocks north, and it aint going to happen. I'm on a train, and I'm heading for Manchester.
My initial idea - well, my tenth or eleventh idea - was to dovetail trains journeys so I moved from a Euston-MK ticket to a MK-Manchester one, but I didn’t fancy two nights in Manchester as I have family there, and I can't deal with the emotional fallout right now. I pondered one night in Manchester, but then I'd almost certainly be wandering around with a rucksack all of the time, and that's no fun. Two nights in Milton Keynes seemed the solution - working out cheaper than one in each - and in fact the journey time is hardly more than that from home to London. It's pricier though - £50 vs £12.
Having arrived I check the map on my Blackberry, but there's nothing to orientate me that I can spot. It looks like a trek to the Manchester Art Gallery, and I could do with a coffee at Caffé Nerd, but I feel like I risk heading off in the wrong direction. It's nearly ten years since I've been here, and misremembered is clearly worse than ignorance. There's a Caffé Nerd at the end of Station Approach - and I've already been in CEX and bought DVDs - so I sit and try and plot a route. Disturbingly what appears to be a crossroads on the map is a straight line on the ground. The territory is not the map.
I have directions for cars, which I ignore, cutting down a backstreet. Ah, Canal Street. I seem to recall wandering through here on the way back from the Eastercon in the 1990s. I'm headed in the wrong direction, according to the map, and whilst there are street signs, none of them point to an art gallery. A right turn to a main drag, and the first sign I'm on the right direction. I pass through what looks like a China town, and soon get stopped by two Chinese looking for Chinatown. I cautiously give directions. And then, almost before I realise it, I'm at the gallery.
I've come to see Angels of Anarchy, an exhibition of women surrealists. On the whole art, like most cultural endeavours, is presented as a boy's club. It's difficult for me to name women artists off the top of my head - Frida Kahlo and Beryl Cooke are about the only two that spring to mind, although Elizabeth Siddall and Catherine Blake had their moments. Tracey Emin. Barbara Hepworth. There were women artists included in the Futurist exhibition, and the Constructivist, but that feels rare – the landmark exhibitions are Picasso, Turner, Renoir, Waterhouse, Kapoor. Aside from the interest in it for itself, this also sneaks into the 1900-1950 period I appear to be mapping out for myself.
It takes a while to find the exhibition even within the gallery – they’ve clearly expanded into next door, and there is no second floor in the old building. I wander round the city collection – which confirms my suspicion that the great and the good have no taste or leave their crap paintings to their local council. There’s the indifferent portraits, the second rate pre-Raphs and the inexplicable giant canvas of a lion. Obscure classical scenes. Tick, tick, tick, and tick. But there are four Blakes I’d not seen before – his portraits of poets - and the twentieth century stuff is pretty good. It’s the nineteenth century crap that takes wading through.
To my pleasure, the exhibition is free to Arts Fund members, and I’m in a series of large rooms in subdued lighting. I confess my first thought is the Dr Johnson line; this art isn’t good simply because it’s by a woman, but of course there are all sorts of reasons why it’s more difficult to produce, er, masterpieces – lack of formal training, demands of family and so forth. But in fact, at the risk of praising with faint damns, a lot of it will stand alongside the male surrealists. It is noticeable how the attendees are 90% female.
The categories seem mostly ungendered – portraits, self portraits, landscapes, still lives, fantasy – but I don’t suppose there would be a domestic space for male artists in the same way. There is no section for the muse, I notice. The self-portraits are mistitled, as it includes portraits, mostly photographs. It’s a useful section for forging links between the artists, although I still feel a little at sea. Ah, she was associated with Man Ray, she with Max Ernst, ah, she’s still alive and in Mexico and might have known Kahlo. I confess to using Wikipedia on the Blackberry – yes, Eva Svankmayerova was a name that should have rung a bell.
The Kay Sage landscapes were impressive, and the Frida Kahlo stuff different from what I’d expected, and the Leonara Carrington have made me determined to get to her exhibition (with others) in Chichester next year. The revelation was the photographs of Lee Miller, a name that meant little to me by whose work I’d clearly seen, if only some of the fashion. I will need to do some digging – and check out the webpage.
There’s a fascinating bed, whose folded sheets I correctly spot as vaginal, and next to this another distinctly symbolic bed, although a pelvis is more obviously vaginal. The phallic symbols in these paintings are apparently ironic – I presume they are sincere in male paintings, but I’m not sure whether male depictions of vaginas then get to be ironic. In the lanscape section two rock towers become penises, but then, as the label points out, it’s also two legs, and it’s a view of the artist in the bath with her knees up. Clever.
I took a couple of hours going around, and didn’t do all the video stuff, but I’ve got the catalogue to peruse. There was a Caffé Nerd opposite the gallery, but I figured I’d better do the Shudehill bookshop first.
More navigation – the Arndale centre is entirely new – courtesy of the IRA – and I think the Royal Exchange has been reconfigured. There’s a big wheel almost in Selfridges. Again, the territory does not quite fit the map, and street signs with street names would be helpful. But I find Shudehill, and a bookshop that cares more about porn than books, a second one where I pick up a missing Tiptree collection and the rest of the Adlard Tcity trilogy (these have vanished from shelves since I decided to buy them) and then, finally, the Shudehill Bookshop itself, which again has gone over to dealing more in porn, More navigation and getting lost gets me to Oxfam – which is distinctly uninteresting. I realise I’m back on the road to the station, return to the Nerd from this morning, and catch the train back.
I decide en route that going to see a film is a bad idea – I’m going to sleep through it. Instead I can watch Have I Got More News For You and The Thick of It. I pop into M&S to buy fruit, but can’t justify those prices and cut across to Sainsbury’s.
Again I use the self checkout, and it asks me if I am using my own bags. SCAN BAGS NOW. How? Scan what. AN ASSISTANT WILL COME TO HELP YOU. I notice an assistant, but she is studiously not coming to help. I start cussing, and cancel the transaction. I start again. YOU HAVE SOMETHING ILLEGAL IN THE BAGGING AREA? Like what? There’s just my shopping. Then my mango slices won’t scan. TYPE IN CODE NUMBER. Which? There’s a product number and a bar code number. DO YOU HAVE A NECTAR CARD? No. Questions, nothing but questions, and by now, deeply into Tourette’s mode, and being frowned at by shoppers and their children. If an assistant were to appear now it would be to bar me from the whole chain, but I’m being given a wide berth. Can you gay bash a self-checkout? Apparently so – and its little dog also comes in for abuse, as does its mother. Malcolm Tucker, eat your heart out.
In the silence I hear an escalator telling someone they have reach the end and need to step off with their trolley. Because otherwise they’d fucking forget, wouldn’t they?
Back to the hotel. More fruit. More fruit juice. More Robert Adams Horseclans 3.
Sunday I’ve checked out, not before thinking that wet rooms are much better at the wet but than the room. If I need to not put the towels on the floor to save the environment, I could do with a rail to hang them from so they dry. The bath towel is still damp from the previous night, and lacks a certain something in the drying department. I check out, and they’ve got my rucksack. Across a damp and blustery square is the Starbucks where I’ve been for two hours, and I’ve got a Rewards Cards to use the wifi. I feel disloyal to the Nerd, but I’d have to pay for it there, and beside, there is not Nerd in MK, at least according to the map which failed to show at least two of the Manchester branches.
Soon I’d better go forth and investigate Sunday shopping, maybe even buy some lunch. The train is at 4.30. I have a work related email to seethe about. But I can’t deal with this until I’m home.