Badaude

Port Eliot on Sunday

 ...following on from the incident I described yesterday, I have to explain it might have been slightly karmic/inevitable as I'd just badmouthed camping's tendency to bring out the miltaristic to Matthew De Abaitua after his talk on the subject on the Fivedials stage. 

Tent moved* - and impulse to sabotage the bunting while the guilty families were asleep restrained -  on Sunday I carried on drawing life-sized festival portraits.

The portraits hung in the FiveDials tent over the weekend, next to...

the FiveDials patchwork quilt, a backdrop to events by Hari Kunzru, Joe Dunthorne, Katie Kitamura, Dovegreyreader, Craig Taylor and many others...

...

I also did the lobster thing with rural variations for the Idler Academy.

After spending Sunday evening drinking cider in a mosquito-infested swamp (camping expert, Matthew, passed round a bottle of something labelled 'Skin-so-soft' which is apparently used by the British Army to repel mosquitos and, presumably, casual sexual encounters**) with luminaries from the Idler Academy and the Catalyst Club I left by moolight, only pausing to slam-dunk the frame of the Tudor stone arch that leads through to the walled garden. Touch for luck, touch for coming back. Port Eliot is magic. See you again next year...

...

*Camping left me so sleep-deprived that on Monday, as I got off my train to change at Didcot Parkway, I realised I'd left my tent on my previous connection, the train from St Germans to Swindon. I burst helplessly into a spontaneous bout of out-loud cursing. I think the people on the station thought I was trying to fend off a wasp.

** The miltary are right: it worked but not on my legs - those tough Port Eliot mosquitos can get through jeans. Plus the smell and the fine plasticized layer it left on my face were so replusive that it might well have been less disgusting to cover myself all over with regular mosquito repellant.

Tent City!

The Port Eliot Festival has come round again. As soon as I arrived on Friday it seemed I'd never left the big party that must have been frozen in time last July only to have been defrosted, like Sleeping Beauty's palace, to party on this summer...

...or is that what I said last year?

I'd been asked to draw for Fivedials magazine (life-sized portraits of festivalgoers) and speak, for The Idler Academy, about walking in the city and the country.

Here are a few of the portraits, done in Posca pen on brown parcel paper (if you were there and have better photos of my pics than these ones I took on my phone, please send):

Louis...

Freya-Rose of the Half Sisters...

...and Herbert. 

As for the Idler, apart from the usual lobster-racing event I wanted to talk about how Humphrey Repton, Port Eliot's early 19th century 'landscape gardener' (he's said to have invented the term) planned an enviroment around the house that's deceptively, artificially rural - and how on top of this, festival-goers have created their own temporary ideal city, reinventing boulevards, avenues and twisty alleys, in a utopian space ripe for quasi-urban exploration...

...or so I thought. When I got back to he camping area, I found my tiny pop-up tent had been surrounded by five other much larger tents, linked by passive-agressive floral bunting, like a single sardine herded by a school of decorative whales. I didn't realise the village fete flags marked a boundary until, stepping over them, a hip-ly beardy guy in a flat cap popped his head out of one of the tents to warn me that he and five other families would be cooking breakfast over a fire tomorrow morning, on the approximate location of my tent. He didn't actually ask me to leave but...

"We do all have young children" (him)

"Do they get up early?" (me)

"Oh no they sleep through the night - they only wake for 10 minutes at 3am. Then they sleep all way through 'til five."

At this moment I forgot all the stuff I'd been saying about utopias, struck my tent and moved it a good number of yards away from the charmed circle. 

More Port Eliot photos tomorrow.

 

 

Seaside Special...

 The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there. (Edouard Manet)

After last weekend's Latitude Festival, due to a chain of unforseeable events, I was forced to spend 24 hours in a small town on the East Coast of England.  

I won't tell you how we got there (there were two of us) which is a story in itself, but we spent all Monday waiting for a ride out: someone who'd voluteered to take us all the way to Oxford but couldn't get to us until the evening. The ride would come at 3pm, 5pm, perhaps 7pm. We would make the best of it. We would have a day at the seaside. We might even enjoy ourselves.

The town, which has an amber museum and a sailors' reading room, is the closest point to the Netherlands on the British coast and - reborn as a holiday resort - has been re-designed for enjoyment. While my companion was asleep I read the guidebooks in the flat we had found ourselves renting. Inside the books children played on the sunny beach. Outside the books - outside our window, which said, DO NOT OPEN - elderly Londoners in expensive maritime anoraks carefully transported newspapers up and down the main street through a fine drizzle.

Don't get me wrong: this place was heaven compared to the day before but...

After WG Sebald travelled through East Anglia,  Stuart Jeffries retraced his steps for The Guardian, finding a "kind of narrative unreliability that makes you wonder if Sebald's stories can be trusted at all. At a hilariously dismal-sounding Lowestoft hotel, did he really bend his fork on a battered fish "that had doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years"? And can it really be true that the narrow-gauge railway near here once carried a train originally built in China to convey the emperor?

Like Sebald, we found that our town provided two types of excitement: the natural...

and the specially invented.

The town was fully aware of this. We were slightly sad to find that the pier's slot machines had been converted into a selection of atemporal/Steampunk objects which were just a bit bossy about the way you might enjoy them.

There's no joke so bad as one that explains itself, especially on a dull day (or maybe we were just in no mood for it).

We were delighted to find a genuinely atemporal cafe in a dark basement complete with cress garnishes, salad cream in sachets, and waitresses who were both rude and slow.

There is nothing good to be had in the country, or, if there be, they will not let you have it. (William Hazlitt)

We especially liked the cake Tardis whose unecessarily brightly-lit, coconut-frosted contents were spun with a slight whirr at unexpected speed.

By the end of the day we found we had visited neither the Amber Museum nor the Sailors' Reading Room. We did not go onto the beach which, even in July, was a violence of waves and gravel. Having saved the excitement of the chuch with its pre-Reformation painted wood screen and roof until the end of the day, we found it had closed at 4pm. 

We had visited various cafes, shops and the boutique - where my friend bought an on-sale Barbour jacket - three, or perhaps four, times, once to look for a pair of sunglasses she had mislaid. 

The hours between 5 and 7pm were long. I did a lot of pacing on the cream carpet inside the flat in front of the window that said, DO NOT OPEN. My companion said, I hope you're you not still wearing your outdoor shoes!

I'll be talking about walking in the city and the country this weekend at the Port Eliot Festival: 3pm in Dovegreyreader's tent on Saturday and 4pm at the Idler Academy on Sunday.

Foyles/Idler Booklaunch Photos!

(re: yesterday's post)I was sent some photos! It's pure vanity but... here's the launch in the relaxed atmosphere of The Idler Academy last wednesday

Nice chair, Tom:

(yes I do move fast: sometimes too fast for the shutter speed)

And this is outside Foyles last saturday: 

(You in the b/g just stop checking your messages, ok?)

And some unlucky person had to wear this:

(actually that's Anna, Tate Publishing's wonderful Publicity and Marketing officer. No one else would wear it so she had to - she has a book to sell!)

No more of this self-glorifying rubbish, I promise. Although I might post some of the drawings I do on glass at the Tate Modern this Saturday. If you're in the area on the day, please drop by and say hello.

Late addition: Rachel just sent me this door from the Saturday Foyles event.

“What strange phenomena,” said Charles Baudelaire, “we find in great cities. All we have to do is to stroll about with our eyes open.“

Monday Morning - a Series of Unfortunate Events

(for the beginning of this unfortunate series, click here. For the second bit, click here).

I wake up, sharply, to the alarm clock the fat guy gave me. It's 8.20am. The night before I booked a taxi for 8.40am. I have to dress fast. And I do. Almost as fast as I did at 2 that morning.

I get to reception in time. I feel good. Then bad. My American Friend isn't there. S/he will miss the taxi. Is that good - or bad? I'm not sure. I do feel a little contrite. Well not too contrite. Who knows how long or how loudly MAF  would have gone on talking in his/her sleep? Maybe s/he should miss the taxi...

I have spent so long thinking about it that it's now 8.45am.

Is the taxi here yet? I ask the (new, female) receptionist.

You booked it for 8.40?

Yes

But it's only 7.40.

I look at the lobby clock. She's right.

I look at the alarm clock the fat guy lent me. It's one of the ones with minimal hands. You can tell where six and nine are, but seven and eight are unmarked and could be one and the same. Who set the alarm last night? Who set it wrong? I decide it must have been the fat guy.

Outside the Premier Inn the grass is grey and wet. I begin to feel a little more contrite.

I decide that the best amends to MAF would be to wait for him/her and to pay for the taxi so that we can both go back to Saint Germans station together. Trouble is, I have no cash and I know s/he hasn't either.

I return to the hotel reception to try to address the cash problem.I ask the (new, female) receptionist.

Is there a cashpoint here?

It's in the "tavern".

I find the "tavern" which smells of tomato ketchup and something fried. I find the cashpoint. It doesn't work. I return to reception.

I think there's one in Morrisson's.

I walk down the long wet Premier carpark to the nearest thing South Cornwall has to a motorway. I dodge early traffic across two roundabouts, past the Homebase shed-island to the Morrisson's shed-island. There are no pavements, only grass verge covered with morning dew.

I do a circuit of Morrisons. Nothing.

Do you have a cashpoint? I ask a man holding a dustpan, with careful politeness.

Yes, says the man

But it's inside, says the other man, who is holding a brush.

And we don't open 'til 9, says the third man, who is holding nothing and seems to be supervising the operation. 

I follow an early employee, who is travelling on a golf buggy, into the shop through the doors marked EXIT and say to her, trying to sound neither criminal nor lunatic, I'm staying at the Premier Inn and their cashpoint's broken and I have to get to Saint Germans by nine-twenty two to get a train and our taxi leaves at eight-forty.

She reverses the golf buggy and looks at me for a long time.

...

Too painful to go on with this right now. More tomorrow. Instead here are some photos of the Port Eliot Flower show.

Entitled to the priviledges of the  performers' bathroom, I found myself queuing behind Flower Show judge, Grayson Perry. Last month at the Shakespeare and Company festival it was Jeanette Winterson. Oh the glamour.

Mr Perry presented the prizes dressed as a 1950s toddler (he arrived on a pink motorbike with a backseat shrine to his teddybear). Here are a few photos of the exhibits. This one's the 'Patrick Suskind's Perfume' entry in the Novel category:

 

...and this is literary luminary, Simon Prosser's 'The Tin Drum'.

 
He gained a 'highly commended' rosette as well as an offer of round-the-clock misting from several members of the WI.

Day Zero

...sounds so much more impressive than day one, doesn't it?

I also sounded like I was pretty organised yesterday. The truth was I was tired, hungover (put it down to stress) and not entirely sure what I was going to find when I got to Port Eliot.

Happily I've never had so much help in getting an exhibition off the ground including the help of four production/security guys who were surely packing an unecessary amount of muscle to hang such little pictures.

My tent popped-up fine and didn't leak despite the rain (can you tell how much relief I'm exuding here on so many levels?).

And now I'm actually sending this direct from the Production Tent at the festival where they have every facility to get my drawings online (as well as a nice bowl of fruit.Hey, someone just delivered some Prosecco. Is that for us too? Sadly, no).

So this is what happened last night...

Tomorrow I'll be live-desigining book covers at the Fashion Tent as well as listening to the Book Club Boutique Band and attending the School of Life Sunday Sermon...

More on Sunday...

Port Eliot Again...

It's that time of year again.

   

(Photo by Cath and Math)

I first went three years ago, through disaster-level floods into brilliant sunshine, meeting friends by chance and making new ones (not to mention sharing a taxi with Pearl and Daisy Lowe). Truly a charmed weekend.

Three years later, I'm exhibiting there: A selection of my Brit-oriented pieces for this most English of Festivals.

Who am I going to see? Mates John Mitchinson, Ben Moor, Maitresse, The Idle Academy, Gavin Pretor-Pinney...Am I name-dropping? Why, of course!

I'll also be worshipping at the altars of Helen Simpson and Barbara Hulanicki;  meeting up with 5 x 15 again (who were at the Shakespeare and Company Festival last month) and The School of Life; and listening to Jarvis, Louis and Wurlitza.

I'd like to learn to tie a Hermes scarf (mine's from APC but who'll notice the difference?)

Maybe I'll Wild Swim but maybe, given the weather, I'll be too wet already.

And, of course, as artist in residence, I'll be drawing all weekend. 

I'll try to put pics up as I draw them but have no idea how the technology will hold up.

See you there?

What Happened Next?

Any more information - add it below...

Roads to Utopia

You can still get there right now, if you're prepared to travel:

Once upon a time in Ruskinland

a group of "quiet but earnest" men and women had a go at the good life...