Between Lockdown and Lockdown

Personal and Impersonal Training

 Personal and Impersonal Training

 

I’m standing in a steady drizzle, on a surface of uneven and cracked tarmac. At least I am not wearing singlet and shorts but a fleece and cycling leggings. I am being told to do various physical movements, most of which I find difficult, if not painful. This has got to go on for an hour, unless the rain worsens. What age am I? Seven, or nearly seventy? In my head at this very moment not much separates the two.

On the Eve of Lockdown

 On the Eve of the Second Lockdown

 

Lord Byron wrote a long, quasi-autobiographical poem in the early C19 – Child Harold. It made him famous, and gave us that staple of the Romantic imagination – the Byronic Hero, a melancholy, rootless, but noble and passionate figure.

 

Child Harold was written in four Cantos, or books, with a break in between the first and later two. In that gap occurred the final spasm of the Napoleonic Wars: the battle of Waterloo in June 1815.

The Contingency of Truth

 The Contingency of Truth

 

 

Truth, at present, seems to be very elusive. That is, important truth, sincerely sought. There are, clearly and depressingly, many people disregarding or twisting truth for partisan ends. Enough is being written on that. I refer, to begin with, to the mostly honest debates about science and policy in dealing with the pandemic. The premisses of the debates are: medical and epidemiological facts (hard truths, if you like); and political and moral priorities (for crude example, economic survival versus survival of the vulnerable), which have to do, not so much with hard facts, but rather hard ethical choices. However, if the former cannot be nailed, the latter may be disastrously misinformed.

In Notting Hill; Memories of Roy Jenkins

 In Notting Hill; Memories of Roy Jenkins

 

 

 

I don’t really know the Notting Hill area of London. Until recently, I’ve only remembered having visited the Eastern periphery, over towards Queensway and Paddington. The heart of the district, Portobello Road and the terraces set round private gardens off Ladbroke Grove, were pretty much foreign territory.

Re-opening the Royal Academy - Just a Little

 What if We Reopened the Gallery and Nobody Came?

At this time of year (August/September) the Royal Academy of Arts is usually bustling, if not bursting, with visitors to the Summer Exhibition of all-comers’ art, of all qualities and none. It’s not just an exhibition to be viewed- with reverence, excitement or raised eyebrows; it’s also a fair. The art is mostly for sale. Little red “sold” dots  grow like pondweed under many of the works (especially the prints).

Walking Near Combe, West Berkshire

 Walking Near Combe, West  Berkshire

 

 

The highest point in Southern England (an area of fluid definition) is at, or vey near, Walbury Hill in West Berkshire, on the edge of that region of the Downs facing the Kennet Valley (in modern parlance, the M4 valley).

Being a Zoom Student

Being a Zoom Student Many months ago, I signed up to a summer art history course at the Courtauld Institute: a week’s intensive study of Manet and Cezanne. The course would include guided time looking at works by these artists in the Courtauld’s gem of an art gallery in Somerset House. Alas, the suffocating blanket of Lockdown fell on us all. The Summer School was in jeopardy. The Courtauld decided to move some of the courses online, including mine, discounting for the lack of the real art. So it was, in mid-July, that some 20 students filed into a virtual lecture hall via their “devices” (the preferred, rather old fashioned, word for all our phones, tablets, lap and desktops).

The Covid Trolley Problem

The Covid Trolley Problem

 

 

Every student of modern Anglophone philosophy is familiar with the “Trolley Problem”, a thought experiment designed to tease out our moral intuitions when confronted with life-and-death dilemmas. 

Hobbes's Leviathan in the time of Coronavirus

 Hobbes’s Leviathan in the Time of Coronavirus

Thomas Hobbes’s famous treatise on political philosophy, Leviathan (published 1651) has been the subject of a couple of recent articles (May 2020). In The Guardian the political philosopher David Runciman writes that the imposition of national lockdown displays the raw power of governments over their subject citizens, in ways that Hobbes would have recognised and indeed advocated.

Spanish Walk Before The Lockdown

Before the Lockdown – a Last Hike in Spain

Long ago – you must forgive my faltering memory; age and distance make things so blurred, and ancient events hold on by their fingertips, and then drop away. It must have been March 2020 (can you remember then?).

Well, in those times, I went walking in the sierra behind Nerja, guided with friendship and expertise by professional guide, John Keo.

Cars in the Lockdown

Cars as Garden Sheds and Other Uses

In these days of sparse traffic, even if volumes are slowly increasing, I’ve come to note certain features of the vehicle use that still persists.

I leave to one side the obvious – the great numbers of delivery vans chasing after their time slots, and the ghostly empty (at most times of the day) buses.

Lockdown and Boarding school

Lockdown and Boarding School

The tiresome cliché is that prison holds no terrors for anyone who has been to a British boarding school, at least of the type prevalent up to the late C20. It would be trite to adapt the cliché for the current lockdown, but I’d like to stand it on its head. Certain aspects of the lockdown, far from being immunised by a boarding school experience, insidiously recall some of the traumas of that experience.

Lockdown - cinematic echoes

Lockdown – Cinematic Echoes

Sean of The Dead is a comedy zombie film set in North London, using locations near to my place of lockdown. One of the conceits it indulges in is the notion that it is not easy to tell a zombie apart from the ordinarily decrepit, or from an exhausted bus passenger gurning in semi-oblivion. 

ignorance about Portugal

Ignorance about Portugal

What do I know about Portugal? Trying to answer that question in advance of a short trip to the Algarve in January, the reply I had to give myself was “very little”. This was to be my first visit to the country, apart from a weekend break in Lisbon some years ago. I chiefly remembered Lisbon as a city where it was possible to walk to most places where a weekend visitor might want to go, so long as one didn’t mind labouring up a lot of very steep hills.

Caminito del Rey (and Cliffs of Moher)

Caminito del Rey (and the Cliffs of Moher)

El Caminito del Rey is a lengthy walkway cantilevered along one side of two sheer gorges near the village of Chorro, northwest of Malaga. It is billed, in some quarters, as the “scariest walk in the world”, but this bit of hyberbole connects to truth only in the way of fairground rides making the same sort of claim. In years past the description had foundation: the original walkway, constructed in the first years of the C20, had, as it approached its centenary, deteriorated so much that it had become lethal. Several walkers fell, and died.

Nerja Museum, Museo de Nerja

Nerja Museum: Some Things I Didn’t Know; Some Things They Didn’t Tell Me

The town of Nerja on Spain’s Costa del Sol has a modern, well thought out museum. It stands fairly inconspicuously in, and partly under, one corner of the vast Plaza de Espana, a forlorn development of mainly empty buildings set round a paved open space that is largely deserted except for fairs at fiesta time.

Artists' personalities: Freud, Lorca, Falla

Artists’ personalities: Thoughts on Freud, Lorca and Falla

One of the most notorious images of the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign is that of Donald Trump looming with menace over the back of Hillary Clinton in a televised debate. It projects a nasty archetype: woman as potential prey to a brutal man.