Ramsgate is well known to be the new Monte Carlo, at least if you happen to have a house down there (Ramsgate I mean). I have made the quip myself when describing the joys of Thanet in various newspapers. Now I've actually been invited to Monte Carlo so I'll find out if the comparison measures up. Naturally I don't want to get overexcited: could be a disappointment, though the Casino may offer the only way of paying the school fees.
Meanwhile, thought you might enjoy this picture of Ramsgate. Unfortunately, it's Ramsgate in KwaZulu-Natal.
I went to the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain over the weekend and thought I should publish a photo of him. No, I jest. This Henry Moore is from the 47th New York Infantry during the American Civil War. Our Henry Moore came from Yorkshire. His sculptures, Recling Figures and Mothers and Child, with small heads and unexpected holes, were everywhere when I was growing up; his great period coincided with the creation of new public spaces around Le Corbusian buildings which needed something to cheer them up -- not that Moore's work was desperately cheering, but it was undeniably Art. My parents' generation loved them. Naturally they were something for the younger me to rebel against, but I've come round to them since visiting hist studio in Hertfordshire a couple of years ago, and seeing the knobbly flints and seaworn shells that inspired him. Thirty years after everyone else I've got the point.
My 14 year old son likes him; his 9-year-old brother tugged me round the exhibition, saying they are all the same. He's got a point, I suppose.
I realise that my last picture was so gloomy that I should efface the effect with something more cheerful. Well not much more cheerful but here is a photo of a giant chimney in a car park of Lidl at Swalwell, Co.Durham. There it is, splendid, marooned. Swalwell scrabbles up the hill to keep out of the way of Gateshead which threatens to eat it up (though it could find it indigestible.) Somebody grew a giant cabbage at Swalwell in the 19th century. Life's full of variety, you have to admit.
I'm still recovering from Northumberland. Why recover? It's a lovely place, and en route I stayed at Piercebridge, in County Durham, where there is a beautiful 18th-century bridge and a Roman fort. The Romans had a bridge there, built out of stone - which was pretty good for them, because even the Roman London bridge was wooden. I went to Bowes and looked at the gravestone of a boy, George Taylor, who had died while under the care of the school master William Shaw. 'Young reader, thou must die. But after this, the judgement.' Shaw was a monster; he offered to 'educate' boys with the special inducement of there being no holidays - they were boys that their parents did not want to see back. Dickens based the character of Squeers of Dotheboys Hall on him. He saw the gravestone in the snow, as I did, and it inspired him to imagine another character, the forlorn and bullied Smike.
What else? Well, I ended up in Blanchland, a village made out of a monastery. By then it was dark, but oh what a drive back to Pimlico. Thought I would stop around Newark and drove off the M1. Once off, it is strangely difficult to get back on again. It is not a place for bijou country pubs. Perhaps appropriately, I came to a rest at somewhere called Clowne, eating fish and chips. I haven't been quite the same since.
Meanwhile, the electricity had gone off at home, a genuine old-fashioned power cut of the kind we had in the early 1970s. I wrote a piece about energy security a few years ago, predicting power cuts - and then got terribly worried about having overdone it. Well, I was right. It wasn't too bad: neighbours came round like Wee Willie Winkie, carrying candles, and except for the fact that everyone froze without heating, the Blitz spirit got wife and sons through. It was a bit much of EDF, the power company, to say that, should Naomi be out when the engineer called, they would charge her for the visit. It was their wretched power cut in the first place. I also noticed, up North, that the wind turbines, on that intensely cold but still day, were as stationary as statues; not a blade turned. Fat lot of good that form of alternative energy is in a crisis.
It's my birthday soon and if anyone is wondering what to get me, can I drop a hint? I did like the Van Gogh doll which I noticed in the National Gallery yesterday; one of the ears is attached by Velco and so can be taken off if the little mannequin is suffering a fit of paranoid rage. But wow, £ 18 -- that would buy a lot of sunflowers.
Have just been washing the mud of Cumbria off the car, though it is perhaps unfair to categorise it as just Cumbrian; I've also been to Oxfordshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire, on an epic tour of villages, undertaken at a cracking pace. I've been doing quite a lot of these tours recently for a book I've been writing for Bloomsbury. I've set myself the task of visting all the ones I mention and there are 500 of them. It's pleasurable but brisk.
Cumbria is one of the most beautiful of counties because it doesn't have much industry beyond farming. But like so much of the countryside, it used to. I ended my odyssey at Nent Head, established by lead-mining Quakers in the 17th century. It still seems a lonely sort of place, heaps of frozen snow still on the ground, smoke from a few chimneys being the only visible sign of life, except for a woman walking a dog. She said that people can still remember the days when it would be cut off from the nearest little town, and people would have to dig through ten foot snowdrifts to get bread. A tough place.
Troutbeck in the bright morning light was a contrast: all National Trust loveliness. Here's a picture of it. I blush for the inadequacy of the photo, Troubeck being a muched photographed place. I can least say that I have captured a unique moment. There was nobody else about when I was there, except for a lad on a quadbike and he didn't seem to have a camera.
I've been reading William Morris... you know, the tousle-headed socialist who was big on the crafts. News from Nowhere, published in 1890, was pretty hopeless at imagining life in the 21st century.Of course, Morris was being utopian: he didn't think of it as a prediction. So he dreams up a world without money, where men and women work for the love of it, making beautiful garments and tobacco pouches which they are pleased to give away, and working co-operatively at building and haymaking for the fun of it.Food is dispensed in communal halls, and all for free.TheHouses of Parliament have become redundant, because decisions are taken locally, by working people, and serve as a dung store.
Quite a lot of things have not gone right, according to Morris's prescription, since his day. He would have gone mental to see the way suburbia has sprawled around London. But actually, some aspects of modern life are just as Morris would have liked. He imagined everyone looking much younger than in the Victorian period -- and they do. The Thames is clean.Westminster Abbey used to be black with smoke: not now. Morris once said he thought electricity would be a good option to replace steam trains -- and look there are electric cars plugged into their charge points on West End streets. If that isn't a smidgeon of utopia, what is?
Meanwhile, thought you might enjoy this picture of Ramsgate. Unfortunately, it's Ramsgate in KwaZulu-Natal.
