I'm Late, I'm Late...

What do you do when you don't have time to complete your planned blog about the Turner Prize?

You dig out some old book reviews you wrote about Alice In Wonderland related books and post them instead.

Alice In Blunderland (John Kendrick Bangs)

Alice In Washington (Richard Pray Bonine)

What is it about Alice that, more than any other book, it draws people with all sorts of motives to write pastiches? There are enough books and articles in the style of Alice to fill a decent sized library. From explanations of quantum mechanics to treatises on saving the rain forest to books of mathematical puzzles it seems there is no end to it. I even won a T-shirt myself once with a letter of the month to a magazine in the style of Alice’s conversation with Humpty Dumpty. But I digress. Beyond all those things it draws political satirists like raths to a sundial. Whenever someone wants to point out the absurdities of any political landscape the first metaphor out of the bag is always Wonderland. I’d assumed this to be a modern phenomenon but I find I was mistaken.
Two recent additions to my collection have been Alice In Washington by Richard Pray Bonine and Alice In Blunderland: An Iridescent Dream by John Kendrick Bangs. The latter was published in 1907 so a new thing this most definitely isn’t.
Satire by its very nature has a short shelf life. Targets that are well known and in the public eye today could well be largely forgotten tomorrow. Today’s satire can all too easily become tomorrow’s incomprehensible gibberish.
So how does the 1907 book fare? Surprisingly well, is the answer. Bangs chose to satirise concepts – specifically the concept of state ownership as opposed to private enterprise. He also managed to do it in such a way that while not understanding the point would remove some of the pleasure from the book it would nonetheless remain quite amusing for the absurdities used as illustration - the train that completely encircles the city and doesn’t actually move (you get on at your stop and walk along the train until you reach the stop where you want to get off) for example or the attempt to run cars on a mixture of cologne and hot air which is very logically and reasonably explained.
It’s a brief but moderately entertaining read and by targeting ideas and concepts remains at least partially relevant today.
Alice in Washington is another thing altogether. Published in 1999 it’s already past its sell by date. It chooses to satirise the life of Bill Clinton. It’s with a little shamefaced nod of self-deprecation that I admit to giving up halfway through it. Put bluntly to an Englishman not familiar with all the ins and outs of the Clinton Governorship and Presidency it is the aforementioned incomprehensible gibberish. It probably is to most Americans too unless they can name all the major players in the Whitewater affair or list in alphabetical order the members of the Clinton administration. I found the book pretty much unreadable and am, now that I think about it, astonished that I managed to get as far as I did. The cover blurb describes it as “a gentle satire full of puns and poems and galloping alliterations”. Well, perhaps it is but a less accessible book I have yet to see.
Perhaps someone who is American can read the thing and enlighten me. Is it just my British perspective or am I being over generous in thinking I’d like it better if I came from Baltimore instead of Birmingham?

Alice’s Journey Beyond The Moon (R.J. Carter. Ill. Lucy Wright)

Sequels by other hands are often tricky beasts and never more so than when, as here, presented with the central conceit that they are a “lost manuscript” by the original author. This, like other pretenders, is of course no such thing. It is a new story. The problem with it is that the pretence that it is a lost Carroll manuscript extends to a series of long footnotes explaining how the various jokes and whimsies fit into the lives and events surrounding both Dodgson and Alice Liddell. These footnotes are done in the style of “The Annotated Alice” side by side with the text. For example the footnotes to one of the poems (giving the recipe for a rather unusual pie) explain that the ingredient “wet collodian” was a photographic chemical with which Dodgson would have been familiar and the nonsense word “queechy” refers to a novel by Elizabeth Wetherell that he gave to his sister Henrietta on her twelfth birthday. The depth of research into Dodgson’s life is impressive but as a literary device it all rapidly becomes rather tiresome and it’s a good idea to read the book through and ignore the footnotes altogether until you have finished.
What, then, of the story itself? At ninety pages it’s quite a thin tale but pastiches the style of Carroll quite well. Some of the puns and jokes are good and there are quite a lot of amusing touches. The artwork while not in the Tenniel style complements the story nicely and I suspect that there are many references and subtleties that a single reading has failed to reveal to me. The main problem is that at times it tries rather too hard to be clever. References to Descartes and an exposition of Zeno’s paradox are deftly handled but seem a little out of place. The insistence on explaining some of them in those annoying Gardneresque footnotes doesn’t help. As soon as you need to explain a joke it ceases to be funny.
The story has Alice journeying to the moon through the eyepiece of a telescope and while there having the kind of adventures that she had in Wonderland and through the looking glass. The style doesn’t quite hit the mark but comes much closer than Jeff Noon’s Automated Alice (though not as close as Gilbert Adair’s Alice Through The Needle’s Eye ). This is “explained” by suggesting that the work was written some years after the original stories, again an explanation that is necessary only because the author insists on maintaining the fiction that this is a lost story.
What of the poems and songs? Once again they are in the correct style and character and with a nice whimsy but they lack the surety of Dodgson’s metre and caused me to stumble in trying to get the rhythms right.

Final verdict? A slight but diverting dreamlike tale which would have been all the better if more attention had been given to crafting a longer story and less to the learned and mock-erudite footnotes.

Bad Alice (Jean Ure)

It’s impossible to review this book adequately without giving away the major plot points so if you are likely to read it -- and in spite of it being a very disturbing read I recommend that you do -- and don’t want to know in advance what it’s about then skip to the end of the review now.

Still here? Then let’s get on with it.

Bad Alice concerns the friendship between two children one summer. Duffy is a teenage boy with mild Tourette’s syndrome and Alice is the girl next door. Alice is a child that is universally agreed to be a bad sort – universally that is except for Duffy who strikes up an immediate friendship with her.
As the plot unfolds the disturbing nature of Alice’s family set up is revealed and the abusive relationship with her father is readily apparent to adult eyes reading the book if not to the adult characters. Duffy’s gradual realisation that his friend’s obsession with Alice in Wonderland masks very deep and real problems is poignant and painful to us because we have seen coming what we know he must eventually realise. Alice’s problems become most apparent through the version of Alice in Wonderland which she is secretly writing and allowing him to read. These sections are at times a little too knowing and articulate for a thirteen year old to have written but that is the only slight flaw in an otherwise brilliant but deeply disturbing book. This should be on recommended reading lists for all teenagers as the handling of one of the worst problems that exists in society is sensitive and intelligent and raising the awareness within teenagers that such problems don’t have to be simply endured must be a good thing.
Come to that raising the awareness of the problem among adults is also not a bad idea. Maybe, if enough people had their awareness raised then we could eradicate this kind of thing altogether and books like this would become unnecessary.

Final verdict. A sensitive, disturbing and above all necessary read.

Brightly-Coloured Blobs

There is a kind of fixed template nowadays for those who wish to make TV programs for very young children. They need a handful of blobby near-human looking characters, usually furry and always brightly-coloured. These characters wander around a landscape that is not just brightly-coloured but almost exclusively primary-coloured. They make a variety of pre-linguistic sounds that are apparently meant to mimic the noises children typically make before they learn to speak but which in fact resemble the noises you get if you try to speak through a kazoo.

There is usually some kind of narration, often by a "famous voice" – a down-on-his-luck actor or a pop-star-turned-thespian will do nicely.

And not being a child psychologist I have absolutely no idea whether this is a good thing or a bad thing and hence no comment to make.

What is the point of this post then?

Well, flipping around the channels this morning I happened upon something called "In The Night Garden" in which a light blue blob and a brown blob in dungarees were running around a large bush that was a shade of green unknown in nature. They were looking for each other but as they kept running in the same direction were always on opposite sides. All the time they were making a kind of squeaking-grunting noise. Eventually they did find each other, at which point the narrator (apparently Derek Jacobi) chipped in with the comment that stopped my hand on the way to the channel switch

"Igglypiggly and Upsy Daisy have found each other. Isn't that a pip?"

"Isn't that a pip?"

I haven't seen language like that since I last read a Famous Five book and that was more than forty years ago. Enid Blyton, who wrote them, died in 1968.

So why, I wondered, did the narrator use such an oddly dated turn of phrase? Is it perhaps making a comeback? Can we look forward to similar 1950s middle-class expressions being revived? Will it be a jolly good show? Will everything be absolutely ripping? Or perhaps topping? Will there be lashings of ginger beer when mater and pater get home? Are you a good egg? Or maybe a brick?

Maybe not. Maybe it's just "pip". Maybe it's part of the current street argot of the average three-year-old. Of course as I don't have an average three-year-old handy I may never know.

When all is said and done it's probably just an idiosyncrasy of the writer. Who knows?

And with that I must be away. It just remains to say "Toodle pip, old chap. Toodle pip."

Yellow Dust Jackets

At the top of this blog it says "travel, language, poetry, teaching and anything else that occurs to me" so let's get away from travel for five minutes. Let's talk instead about libraries. (And I can think of at least one reader who just cheered.)

Nowadays, apart from looking for text books, I don't go to libraries. If I want a book, I buy it. It accounts for a substantial percentage of my salary but what can I say. I like owning books better than I like borrowing them.

Part of the problem is that I don't have a convenient local library and the selection of books available at the less convenient ones (the ones that are an hour or more each way to get to) don't coincide with my requirements.

But it wasn't always this way.

I've lived in the same house (give or take periods working away or travelling or living at the University Halls of Residence) for forty-five years – I was six when we moved here. Back then there was a library and I had read a lot fewer books. It was, even for a six year old, a five-minute walk away. It has long since disappeared, demolished for no very good reason. The land to this day remains derelict although they did put a fence round it and dig a hole a couple of years ago.

But that's something else that wasn't always this way.

I remember the library so well I could draw you a map and with a bit of effort label up the shelves with Dewey classifications. I remember it as I remember little else of my childhood. It's a bone-deep visceral memory.

At first I used the children's library. (In through the front door. First door on the right. Librarian's desk on the left, immediately inside. Young children's books at the back left. Older children's books at the front.)

I remember taking my books to the librarian and the pink cards being taken and put into little card envelopes and filed in a wooden drawer.

I also remember the day when I couldn't find anything I hadn't already read and was allowed into the adult library. (In through the front door. Through the door straight ahead. Librarian's desk to the right – connecting to the children's desk via an arch). Fiction on the left. Non-fiction on the right.)

In the next few years I probably read ninety percent of the fiction in there. (It would have been a hundred percent but inexplicably the library also had books suitable for girls.)

I'm getting all nostalgic for the colour yellow now – not any old yellow, the yellow of the spines of the books published by Victor Gollancz. They were always the ones that I looked for first. They had all the best science fiction. Of course at this remove it's difficult to identify specifically which authors were in the Gollancz stable but among the science fiction authors that I discovered at the time were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Keith Laumer, Andre Norton, Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, John Sladek, E.E. Doc Smith, John Wyndham and Robert Zelazny.

Ah. Those were the days.

But don't get me wrong. I didn't just read Science Fiction. I also read Ian Fleming's James Bond books Adam Diment's less well-known spy books The Bang Bang Birds, Dolly Dolly Spy and The Great Spy Race. I read Russel Thorndike's Doctor Syn books which I remember fondly and Kenneth Royce's XYY Man series. I read Sherlock Holmes. I read anything and everything. These are just the ones that jump immediately to mind. I'm sure I could come up with many more if I put my mind to it.

And now I don't go to the library. Instead I browse in bookshops. I treat bookshops as libraries with the inconvenience of having to pay but without the inconvenience of having to take the books back.

And even that is changing. Quite often now I browse on line. And that's what I'm off to do now, to browse on line. I have a sudden fancy to read a Doctor Syn novel, or maybe one of the Adam Diment ones. If I can find them cheap enough I'll buy some. And as I read them I'll think about the old library.

Another Point of View

It's often nice to get a different viewpoint on something, to see something familiar through other eyes. Paul Merton's TV series on China could scarcely be more familiar. Although he's getting to meet lots of people arranged specifically for him, and staying in decent hotels rather than the tents and downmarket dives that I managed, he's visiting all the same places that I went to last time I visited China and that's giving me the chance to compare my observations with his. Of course there are some differences – I paid for my trip whereas he's was paid for his – then again he's a famous (and very funny) comedian and I'm a bloke from Bilston who has a blog. So how do things stack up?

A few general observations first. He was absolutely spot on target when he talked about the ever-present noise that forms a soundtrack to the Chinese experience – the sound of someone hacking up a mouthful of phlegm and gobbing it into the gutter. On my first trip – way back in 1992 – I wrote down my first impressions and they included this

"the other thing you can't help noticing (is) the amount of coughing and spitting that goes on among the Chinese. To a westerner it is very disconcerting to see everyone from teenage girls to little old men coughing up a mouthful of phlegm and expectorating with gusto into the gutter."

He seems (though I missed an episode, so I could be wrong) to have missed another particular favourite in which someone will lean forward at an improbable angle, place a finger firmly against the nose to close one nostril and empty the other onto the ground by blowing very hard.

Something else that I have to agree with him about is Chinese Opera. After I saw it in Beijing, my local guide commented sadly that it was killing Chinese culture in the eyes of foreign tourists because once they had seen that nothing he could do would persuade them to see anything else "cultural". A group of us who had been to see it struggled for appropriate descriptions and eventually came up with

"It sounds like someone strangling cats in an alley full of dustbins and looks like Max Wall performing Aladdin."

When we saw it, it was enlivened by a faulty computer generated translation of the words which seemed to be omitting all the nouns and thus providing such eccentric possibilities as "I will overcome my and build a mound of their."

Another point of almost complete concord between his experience and mine was his boat trip down the River Li from Guilin. He went on one of the small boats which seem to always be full of backpacking Australians. The scenery is magnificent, far more so than you can possibly appreciate from a television program. It was such a highlight of my trip in '92 that when I returned nine years later I made a point of ensuring it was in my itinerary again.

Although both Guilin and Yangshou had changed greatly in the intervening time, the river had not. It was every bit as lovely as I remembered it. The sun was high in the sky, the water was calm enough to be a mirror reflecting back those remarkable conical mountains that rise from the plain like giant molehills. Here and there, there were groups of children playing at the water's edge and sometimes a long low boat with a fisherman. We floated downstream, watching the birds wheeling overhead and the buffalo cooling off in the shallows. It was idyllic… and just as with Paul Merton's trip every now and then the peaceful tranquillity was completely shattered by the noise from a flotilla of huge boats steaming up-river full of Chinese tourists all sitting inside, eating dinner and ignoring the wonders around them.

I have to differ with him on some things though – specifically on his opinions of Yangshou and Guangshou. In both cases it would be harder to find a more complete disagreement. Oh, the facts of the cities are indisputable but it's the interpretation that you put on them. Paul Merton wasn't to put it mildly, very keen on Yangshou which he thought was too touristy and too commercial and too much like every other touristy and commercial place in the world. I, on the other hand, loved it. I checked myself into a very odd hotel that reminded me of a condemned flat I once occupied in Nottingham. Not only did I have the room to myself, I had the whole building… an annex to the main hotel. Why should somewhere quite so deadbeat have appealed to me? It's hard to say. I wrote several versions of a description while I was there. The best of them was this.

There was something very Chinese about the room: not the Chinese of pagodas and palaces, or rice fields and straw hats but the Chinese of the cultural revolution. As I looked at the streaked and stained whitewash on the walls and the bare floorboards with just the faintest remaining traces of ancient varnish; as I looked at the beds with their thin mattresses and single sheets, I could picture myself as one of the proletarian masses living my life in what was only technically a two roomed apartment. I paced out the larger area – almost eighteen feet square and about the same height. The other "room" connected via a hole in the wall without a door. It contained a tiny cold shower, a cracked and plugless sink and a squat toilet. It was about four feet by three.
I lay down on one of the beds and stared up at the green metal fan, which, even on its highest setting, moved barely fast enough to disturb the humid air. It didn't matter. I hadn't put it on for the comfort but to help dry my washing – underwear, towels, T-shirts – which were strung out across the room on a wire fastened there by some previous occupant. It was a losing battle. The day was so humid they would never dry adequately.
I mentally inventoried the furnishings. It didn't take long. Two beds with mosquito nets. Two armchairs far too dilapidated to be called threadbare. One table with a wobbly leg. A broken television set. An apparently homemade cupboard.
As I lay there trying to relax, I could smell the mustiness of the place. The whole building reeked of it. The room was a perfect match to the building, which was a seedy run-down thing away from the main block of the Xiling Hotel where those on higher budgets were staying. I didn't mind. I actually felt comfortable there. It was – after a fashion – en suite and I did have a room, indeed a whole building, to myself.
Forty yuan per night? For a whole building?
A bargain.

Anyway, back to why I like Yangshou. After months of travelling we were stationary for a few days and I couldn't think of anywhere I had been that I'd rather be stationary in. It's a backpacker town and anyone who has ever been backpacking around the world will need no further description. It's a place that seems to have no reason to its existence beyond the travellers on its streets. It has two main streets joined by various alleys and they are crowded with a fifty-fifty mix of tourist shops and bars. They all have either jokey or mock-classical names : Minnie Mao's, The No-Name café; The Golden Lotus; The Shining Mountain. The shops sell nothing but souvenirs (T-shirts, carvings, lanterns, jewellery) or pirated copies of rock CDs.

I found it all very relaxing and friendly and for three of the four days there I did absolutely nothing except hang around in bars chatting to random strangers – Chinese and otherwise – and generally relaxing more than I had done in the previous five months of travel. It was great. I was very tempted to answer one of the many advertisements around the place for English teachers and stay there.

Guangshou, by comparison, Paul Merton liked, seeing it as the authentic face of modern China. And he's not wrong there. Unfortunately the authentic face of modern China looked to me very much like a grim and dull industrial city with little to recommend it other than the facts that a) my stay was very brief and b) it was a convenient place to get the ferry to Hong Kong. It's the kind of place that is vastly improved by leaving it. The restaurants and hotels were too expensive for someone on a tight budget and all in all, especially coming a mere day after Yangshou, I'd have to say that I found the place thoroughly depressing. This wasn't helped by the fact that I could find absolutely nowhere to eat that wasn't well beyond the money I had to spare and ended up sitting in a hotel room (I'd persuaded a couple of Danish backpackers that what they needed was to rent me six foot of floor space in their room, without mentioning it to the hotel management), drinking a couple of bottles of beer, eating a packet of biscuits and watching a documentary – in Chinese – about tuna fish. It was a new low.

Next week Paul Merton is in Shanghai. I shall make a point of watching to see if we agree or disagree. Either way, it's good to get a second perspective.

Ten 100-word annecdotes involving food

I don't do lists. They are too trivial and pointless. Waste of space. So this isn't a list of ten one-hundred-word anecdotes involving food.

Definitely not.

1.Kyisimoss Dinner

Panchase Ridge, Nepal, Christmas Day 1993

The locals were preparing Christmas dinner for us. One of them accidentally kicked over the basket that the chickens were under and spent an hilarious fifteen minutes chasing them across the hillside before returning them to their prison to await dismemberment.
I looked away again, to stare at that view across the valley – at the twin peaks of Machapuchare.
I looked back. They were killing a goat for the curry.
And away. And back. They were baking a cake in a round iron pot in a hole in the ground.
They "iced" words onto it with jam.
"Happy Kyismoss 25thDac1393"

2.It's What Flavour?

Beijing, China, 1992

A hint for those travelling in China – don't eat the ice lollies.
Why not? What can possibly be wrong with an ice lolly?
At the delightful Yonghegong temple, I found out. After queuing for tickets in the blazing hot sun, I decided to buy one and cool off. From the selection, I chose one with a green wrapper, expecting it to be apple or kiwi fruit flavour. It wasn't. It was chopped green beans frozen in sugar water. It tasted disgusting. I gave it to a passing ten-year-old, who evidently didn't agree with my assessment, and went into the temple.

3.Just For The Tourists

Somewhere on the Amazon, Ecuador, 1999

Look! Absolutely no one really does this, right? It's like the sheeps' eyes thing. Made up to gross out the tourists. So here we are, a day out in the Amazon Jungle. See, there's our guide, over there, breaking a branch off that tree.
Urgh. It's covered in ants. He wants us to do what? No way! Wait. Dave's taken the stick. He's licking them off.
Why did he have to do that? No we all have to do it or look like wimps. I like fresh food but this is ridiculous.
No, I don't think they taste of lemons.

4.I've Had This Before

Austria, 1989

The morning, billed as a strenuous hike, was in reality a gentle, albeit uphill, stroll. Nevertheless we were ready for lunch and grateful to find such a delightful Alpine bistro. Now Donald was studying the menu. Most of us played safe with the easy translations. He declared loudly
"Ah, I think I've had this before." and ordered something unrecognisable before starting lecturing us on haut cuisine.
Fifteen minutes later a plate containing several pounds of almost raw, quivering white fat was placed before him.
"Oh," he said "That's not at all what I was expecting."
Everyone tried not to laugh.

5.A Smell Of Water Bug

Vientiane, Laos, 14 February 1998

Translated menus should be approached carefully. Things are not always as they seem. We sat in the restaurant. We ordered. The waitress brought food. My beef and peanut curry was bright red, astoundingly hot and very tasty. David's sticky rice was rice. It was sticky. Warren, more adventurous, ordered "Chilli with smell of water bug". A translation problem, he assured us. It was a plate of vegetables with little unidentifiable black things. One of them turned over, grew legs and escaped over the side of the plate. Translated menus should be approached carefully. Things are sometimes exactly as they seem.

6.Frankendeer

Inari, Finland, 1995

I hadn't fancied the boat trip and that left me at a loose end in an especially uninteresting town. After a little desultory exploration I decided on a whim to try reindeer for lunch. It came as shapeless lumps of unappealing grey meat served with about two kilos of mashed potato. It was deeply unimpressive.
Afterwards I explored the shops which seemed to contain every conceivable reindeer part fashioned into every conceivable souvenir. If I'd bought them all I could have probably reassembled a complete animal.
Later, back at camp, Herman had prepared a treat. Reindeer stew. With mashed potato.

7.Hotpot?

Chengdu, China, 3 August 2001

Misled, perhaps, by having already found a café that did bacon sandwiches, I felt optimistic about dinner. Hotpot. It conjured images of steaming potato-topped stew.
It was an upmarket restaurant but I was puzzled by the polo-mint-shaped tables. We were quickly seated and gas burners, built into the table, lit. A put was suspended over it, divided into two sections. One contained bubbling red lava, the other bubbling green slime. We were given plates of unidentifiable shredded meat.
"Drop them in," said my guide," "Then take them out with the chopsticks and eat. Be careful. The red one is hot."

8.A short treatise on literal-mindedness

Barcelona, Spain, 2004

Catalonian restaurateurs must be trained in literal-mindedness. Menus deliver precisely what is written on them in black and white. In a chic restaurant I ordered duck with orange, expecting perhaps duck in an orange flavoured sauce and a few accompanying vegetables. What I got was half a duck. And an orange. Whole and unpeeled. Others ordered peas and ham, which was a large bowl of peas and a slice of boiled ham. I was sorriest for the man who ordered the spinach. Two kilos of boiled spinach, unsullied by contact with other foodstuffs, would be more than Popeye could manage.

9.Keep Your Hands Off My Sausages

Various locations, South America, 1999

There are two main varieties of vegetarian – moral and practical. The practical ones don't eat meat because they don't like it, the moral ones because they prefer a more ethical treatment of animals. I don't understand either of them but I respect their views. The trouble is the third kind – the part-time vegetarians. When you are cooking at the campfire and you've prepared, at their request, a separate meatless option, it's annoying to have them nick your sausages because they "look nice". I'm sorry but vegetarians are like virgins. You is or you ain't. And keep away from my sausages.

10.As Sure As Eggs Ain't Eggs

San Jose, Philippines 22^nd December 1995

There is something important that you need to be told,
So listen, listen well now, I beg.
Though it may look like one on the menu
"Balut" simply doesn't mean egg.
Oh, it's true it's an egg in most senses.
It came from a hen, can't deny it,
But you need to delve closer and deeper
If you think, "That looks great! Think I'll try it."
For a "balut", though an egg is quite fertile
And if it's closer to hatching that's more tasty.
It's a "boil in the shell" baby chicken,
So when choosing your lunch, be less hasty.

Art For Art's Sake Part II

I have a colleague who, while always striking me as a little odd, has recently astounded me by admitting to a conceptual art project of staggering strangeness. (To me anyway.)
Before I talk about that though let me remind you of my definition of art – "It's art if the person who makes it says it's art." In the case of conceptual art you may have to substitute "does" for "makes".

I invented my own conceptual art form once. Like all of my best inventions it came to me in a flash of genius while drunk. (Let me help you out on interpreting that sentence. Something that is "genius while drunk" doesn't mean that I was drunk and came up with something that was genius, it means that I came up with something that was only genius because I was drunk.)

I found myself walking along the road from the bus stop to my house composing poems in my head. For me this is as inevitable as the drinking that preceded it. When drunk, I always compose poems in my head. When sober again I always have an incredible sense of regret that I can't remember anything about them other than the fact that they were sublimely beautiful and intensely profound.

And then it struck me. Why not do that deliberately? Compose poems entirely in my head. Polish the words until they gleam. Set the lines together like jewels in a Fabergé egg. And then, without ever having written them down, without a single other human soul ever having seen them, forget them completely. I called it "transient poetry". Boy, if only you could see some of those poems. They make the best of my written-down work pale by comparison. At least I think they do. Kind of hard to say as I have, by definition, forgotten them entirely. And the only person who has ever seen such wonders is me.
You'll take my word for it, of course.

Anyway, while I do still mock and deride a lot of conceptual art and art installations, I never do so from the standpoint of claiming that it isn't art. I only ever claim that it's bad art. Even then, I find myself with a sneaking admiration for the sheer bravado of those standing in front of the critics and saying "Hey, what do you think of that, then?"
And of course much of it I find fascinating. Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North I can take or leave but his Event Horizon was one of the spookiest things I've ever seen, all those silent unmoving figures on the rooftops. He probably wouldn't thank me for the comparison but it reminded me of the Cybermen marching up the steps in London in an early Doctor Who, or perhaps the scene from the beginning of 28 Days Later when the hero is walking around a completely deserted London.
Even things like Martin Creed's "Lights Go On… Lights Go Off", in which an empty art gallery is alternately lit up and then plunged into darkness over and over (winner of the Turner Prize in 2001), amuse rather than irritate me, especially for the bemused look the artist had when interviewed later on the news. Along similar lines was the piece by 2007 winner, Mark Wallinger, who – dressed in a bear suit – filmed himself walking around an empty art gallery.

For me these things, though they may well be risible, are nevertheless art. Other people don't even find them risible. Some people think they are terrific – and who am I to say they are wrong? You must make up your own minds about the quality but to refuse them the label "art" is just to show that you think your taste is superior, to give yourself the label "supercilious".

And my friend's conceptual art? (You knew I'd get back to it in the end.) Well you can see it for yourself at sneezecount. He is writing down the time, location and brief description of all of his sneezes. He puts them on a blog. Why? Buggered if I know. Is it an ironic comment on the trivial nature of blogs and blogging? Quite possibly. Is it, perhaps, a comment on our modern predilection to reveal intimate details of ourselves and our lives to complete strangers? I expect so. Is it something that started as a brief in-joke (like the OEDILF) and has taken on a strange and unlikely life of its own? Seems perfectly plausible. Maybe he just likes counting stuff.

Above all, is it art?

And there, I am sure, is where we may have to agree to disagree. If it gets nominated for a Turner Prize, it has my vote.

And now to my poetry bit. It's so tempting to sit here and write a poem in my head. Then forget it. Then tell you that I've finished and invite comment.

But I won't. I'll post a couple of ones that you can actually read.

First of all there is my limerick from the OEDILF, on "abstract art". This, of course, does not actually represent my view. It's in the voice of those critics who think only representational art is art.

abstract art by BobHale

A painting of nothing's not the done thing.
Ev'ry painting should represent something,
But too often, in fact,
That's the one thing that's lacked,
Which is why abstract art's such a rum thing.

Then there is this piece that was written after visiting the Saatchi Gallery. This isn't meant to be critical, simply descriptive. The question posed at the end is for the reader's contemplation. The writer has already made up his mind.

Oil filled rooms,
towers of mice,
victims of
the slice and dice
approach to art.
Schoolgirl smut,
unmade beds,
elephant dung
and bloody heads
and candy hearts.

Spiral spots,
a butcher's blade,
the dismemberments
of death displayed
in separate parts.
Cows, pigs, sheep,
a sense of balance,
raw egos that
outstrip raw talents –
they call this art?

And, on the same theme, a variation in the form of a double dactyl

Artistry-Butchery
Hirst D. and Emin T.
Cut up dead animals
Mess up a bed
Charles Saatchi, a man whose
Money seems limitless,
Unparsimoniously
Parts with the bread.

Art for Art's Sake

I've had more conversations than I care to count on the vexatious question of "what is art?" and most have them have been conducted over on wordcraft. My view, which I admit has developed over time, is simple - if the person who made it says it's art, then that's what it is. I think that any other definition is conflating the question with the entirely different question of "what is good art?" So to those who say that Tracy Emin's work isn't art – that their beds are just as messy and untidy and they aren't art so neither is hers – I say that I think that "My Bed" is as ludicrous as they do but that it is most definitely art, just not necessarily very good art. To suggest otherwise is to reduce art to an even sillier definition – "if I say it's art, then it's art" and that's no definition at all – it's simple "I have better taste than you do" arrogance.

Anyway there are many great artists who have been reviled by their critics as much as they have been hailed by their fans – probably every artist in the history of the world, in fact. I have no problem with that – only with the converse of that last definition – "if I don't like it, then it isn't art."

Probably my most consistently artistic trip was a visit to Barcelona. It took in Picasso, Dali and, of course, the eccentric (some would say raving mad) Anton Gaudi, an architectural genius whose buildings are scattered around the city. Gaudi was by any standard an unusual figure. Born in 1852, as a child he suffered ill health which prevented much of his schooling and he became interested in observing the natural shapes of plants and animals and stones. As he grew he became a good mathematician and keen student but by no means a genius. He also developed a religious streak that bordered on obsession.
As an adult much of his work was commissioned by Eusabio Guell who was his friend and patron for many years. He died, run over by a tram, in 1926 after a life in which his fame as an eccentric but uniquely talented architect had spread around the world.
So much for the extremely potted biography. The important thing isn’t the man but his work which is what many people travel to Barcelona to see. This especially true of the Japanese who flock there in droves. There are two common theories for this. One is that they have an understanding of nature and natural forms that enables them to better appreciate the baroque nature of his work. The other is that the Palau Guell, one of his most famous buildings, featured in an advertisement for a popular brand of Whisky in Japan.
I started my cultural meanderings with a visit to one of his most impressive, though unfinished, buildings, Sagrada Familia. This is a cathedral that was started (although not under the auspices of Gaudi initially) in 1882. Gaudi became construction manager two years later. By the time of his death in 1926 only a small fraction of the Cathedral had been completed and construction - to his plans - goes on today. They are planning to finish in another twenty years or so but looking at it, it seems doubtful to me that this will be achieved.

There are plenty of guide book descriptions of it and I won’t attempt to emulate them here in detail. Suffice it to say that the exterior of it is bizarre. At one end there is an extremely elaborate and naturalistic set of biblical sculptures including a huge tree on which doves are perched. Towers rise up topped in coloured balls and crosses and patterns. If ever a cathedral were required in hell this would do just nicely. At the opposite end a more cubist approach has been taken with biblical scenes rendered in a stylised and formal way by a succeeding architect based on Gaudi’s ideas.
I took the audio tour but soon discovered that inside the scaffolding and structures make it look disappointingly like a building site. Nevertheless when I looked, up the tree like branching structures of the columns were like nothing I had seen elsewhere. Their peculiar elegance of form belies a strength of structure that came from a true stroke of genius. To calculate the best load-bearing shapes Gaudi built an upside down model in string with lead shot weights. The tension stresses in the string exactly mirror the compression stresses in the right way up model so that the shapes of these columns and arches are exactly optimised for the loads they must bear.

When I had finished with the cathedral I met up as arranged with some fellow travellers - Jo, Karen and Donna, for a trip to the Picasso Museum. While the Gaudi architecture is top of most people’s lists in Barcelona, the Picasso was my number one must see attraction. We took the metro and quickly located an entrance to the museum. It was unfortunately a back entrance and we searched around for the box office. Here we found the front of the queue. We followed it back, out of the box office, through the building, across the courtyard, out through the gate and three hundred yards along the road.
There was good news though to make up for the forty five minute wait. We were there at a time when there was an extra exhibition - a further 450 caricatures spanning Picasso’s life. Had we come a week later we would have paid two Euros less but missed this splendid addition.The gallery - both the special exhibition and the regular gallery - was superb and I spent several hours wandering around it. Picasso is a “love him or hate him” figure but when you see his works in context, see how his style developed from art school experimentation to the cubism for which he is famous it all makes much more sense than when his “bloke with two eyes on one side of his green nose” (as critics sometimes put it) is viewed in isolation.

I looked at my watch and discovered that it was only a few minutes to three O’clock when we had agreed to meet up and go for a drink.

The four of us met up again and I discovered that everyone was a satisfied with the day as I had been. A couple of beers and a plate of snacks in a Tapas bar that we had spotted set us up for the next part of our tour - a trip to photograph some of those Gaudi buildings we had seen last night. Two stand out in particular. Casa Batllo has window balconies that look like eyes in alien faces and a general appearance that would fit smoothly into Rivendell. You half expect to see hobbits and elves waving down at you. Looking upwards reveals a roof of twisting fungoid chimneys and shining fish scaled ridges. Further along the road is “La Pedrera” or Casa Mila which has the same organic fairy tale appearance but seems somehow more sinister. From the ground you can just see the baroque chimneys towering above the edges of the building. Not every building in Barcelona is as interesting, much of it is an ordinary and unlovely place but a couple of hours wandering with a guide book and a camera is a very rewarding experience, even if Las Ramblas is plagued with "human statues" making money by standing very, very still. They are every few yards and, as I slalomed round them on my walk, the question of whether they were doing was art never entered my head, though I'll bet I know a few people with strong opinions on the subject.

When I had chosen this trip there were two things on the itinerary that I knew I simply couldn’t miss. One I had now seen - the Picasso Museum. The other was a visit to Dali’s house at Figueras. My four favourite artists are Picasso, Escher, Magritte and Dali. Dali above all. When I was a teenager I had one wall of my bedroom completely covered with an extraordinarily large poster of Dali’s Last Supper - and me an atheist ! Nowadays I have it more tastefully decorated with a series of smaller prints of his illustrations for Alice In Wonderland. So after a couple of days in Barcelona I moved on to the quaint and lovely town of Girona and from there I planned my trip to Figueras.
Salvador Dali was, like Anton Gaudi, either a true artistic genius or a complete raving madman. I know too little about Gaudi to have an opinion but in Dali’s case I’m firmly convinced that he was both. He was a fierce Catalonian nationalist and lived for most of his life in Figueras and examination of his paintings often reveals detail taken from the Catalonian landscape or portions of the local coastline. (As well as the nigh on universally present figure of Gala - his wife and muse.)

I took an early train, and was outside the museum at 10:15. It opened at 10:30. I was glad that I was early because there were already people ahead of me and in the quarter of an hour that remained to wait quite a long queue built up behind. The galleries occupy four flours of the building - although the third floor is devoted not to Dali but to his friend and fellow surrealist, Pitxot.
Inside, to avoid the crowds as much as possible, I adopted a simple but effective stratagem. I ignored the ground floor and went straight up to the first floor. As I had expected the majority of the people there stayed on the ground floor. There was a lot to see. There were many works that I’m familiar with from books but many others that I had never seen before. The bedroom, the first room I entered, had Dali murals on the walls and a gold coloured skeleton of an ape in the corner. The corridors were filled with smaller works (which in many ways I prefer) and the side rooms with larger ones. By the time I had was completing the left hand fork of this floor the parties of school children (some of whom had Wolverhampton accents) were already catching up to me. A number of pieces caught my eye, painted stereoscopes, a hologram of Alice Cooper, a large cross which at the touch of a button slowly unfolded into an intricate painting, superb paintings large and small. I continued on upward.

The Pitxot floor was largely deserted but this was the loss of those ignoring it rather than mine. Pitxot had a strange style. What he painted were piles of rocks but in such a fashion that when viewed from a distance they became figures - men, women, children, groups - in a variety of poses. It was clear that - Pitxot aside - the gallery was now pretty crowded so I went downstairs to the ground floor and examined the works there, including a recreation of the famous portrait of May West. The whole building is arranged in a crescent around a courtyard and the geodesic dome that tops the hall that stands between the points of the crescent lets in an astonishing amount of light to illuminate the huge Dali paintings on the walls. I was glad that I had decided to spend the whole day there rather than just the morning and it was almost three when I decided to leave and get the train back to Girona.

Back in Girona I sat in my hotels grassy courtyard and drank a couple of beers and wrote the poem that is reproduced below. What's it about? I couldn't really say. It was inspired by my Dali experience and has I hope caught a little of the spirit of it.

But is it art? (Or for that matter, poetry - we have somewhat differing views on that, too.)

Strange Empire

There are no fixed points here
In this Empire of the mind,
No guides to lead us from
The country of the blind.
The heavens hold no patterned truth.
Their mystery is a peddler's lie.
No greater world stands out of view
Hidden beyond the speckled sky.

Everything is a lie.
The words upon the page - a lie.
The ink that stains then fades - a lie.
The hand that neatly writes - a lie.
That mind that tries to guide - a lie.
There is no mind,
No hand, no pen, no ink
No words
No matter what we think.
Everything is a lie.

There are no fixed points here
In this Empire of the stranger,
No gimballed compass set in brass
To lead us out of danger.
The turned boards, the swirling leaves,
The crystal ball, the bones that fall
Are lies that act as reason’s thieves
Wise men distrust them all.

Everything is a lie.
The stars seen through the glass - a lie.
The days and hours that pass - a lie.
The masquerades of life - a lie.
The freedom of the knife - a lie.
There is no knife,
No life, no time, no stars
No matter who we are.
Everything is a lie.