COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: From my sketchbook, by JD

The first of the two horses below was copied from Leonardo da Vinci but his is better than mine, of course. The other horse is copied from a Rennaisance guide to drawing, the idea being that a figure can be built up with a series of small squares and rectangles approximating to the shape/outline of the figure. That second horse sketch was further developed into a painting to show something similar to the white horses etched into the English landscape.

The second picture of a lady at the bus stop came out of my head; the bus stop sign is of the old Tyne & Wear transport logo before they were all privatised.

The gentleman sitting at the table was one of a series of quick sketches from life during one of my art classes.

THE WEEKENDER: Decorating the money pit... by Wiggia

... or, The Colour Of Money:

The gap between house moves often shows up changes in taste, layout etc., that have occurred during that period. Till now the worst aspect of the recent move was the process about which I gave vent earlier; the physical aspect of the house you move into is not always apparent till a bit later, however much you delve, and the content of the surveyor's notes are found to be largely padding, I honestly believe that going round a prospective home with a builder you can trust is a better option, at least you are there and can direct him to items that may or may not be faulty and more importantly relevant.

So much of a surveyor's notes are protected by the words 'could not,' as in see under the carpet, behind whatever or was inaccessible; and virtually nothing relates to the grounds or boundaries unless you specify that he look at them.

If you need a mortgage you have no choice other than to employ a surveyor but otherwise I would take the other route now. In my last home the surveyor noted the shed, a large one, was leaking at one corner badly; fine, but it was a nothing job to put right; but the insect damage in the garage roof went unnoticed. I noticed it months later when the little piles of dust started to arrive on the car bonnet; luckily despite its being widespread a spray of insect and wood rot treatment did the job, so no harm done, for a surveyor - though I'd have thought the bore holes would have been hard to miss!

I think this decorator has been on an inclusivity and diversity course; where to start?

                                               

But back to the present. Again, in our last house the whole place needed redecorating, a big job and a lot of paint and elbow grease needed. We decided as there was an offer on Dulux trade to get all the rooms sorted as to colours straight away and purchased all the paint in two visits to B&Q, spending in the region of £650+ for the lot. The 5 litre cans of Dulux trade, priced at something in the order of £33 each, came in for the 'three cans for the price of two' offer, so cost around £22 a can; and we used it all, plus a little bit more from a couple of other producers - it was a big house and a big job. That was seven years ago. Luckily this place is smaller, a bungalow and only a couple of rooms need painting at the moment and the outside front which was painted in a trendy battleship grey - only they don’t call it that, Wishing Well? said the half empty can left in the garage; still battleship grey; so our paint outlay for the time being is modest.

Nonetheless, off we go to the usual suspects to get what we need, firstly to the Dulux Decorator Centre, which only sells Dulux and affiliated paints; very helpful got exactly what I wanted and then came the bill... 'Is that right?' I queried, as I realised the price per 2½ litres was a 5 litre can cost seven years ago, and then some!

We then went to B&Q to get something completely different but I was intrigued with the paint thing so had a stroll round. They no longer stock Dulux Trade but have replaced it with Valspar: never used it, so no knowledge, but it was a bit cheaper. Then onto the Farrow and Ball section; I have used Farrow and Ball in the past with very mixed results, the high pigment content paints are dry before you get them on and drag terribly and one in particular faded badly in a couple of years in what was a dark room in a barn conversion; so not happy with them, but there they were in all their trendy colours with the top price £73 for a 2½ litre can - that is bonkers.

Can anyone explain the huge rises in paint prices? Even Dulux have jumped on the bandwagon with their own trendy paint range Heritage which matches F&Bs standard prices, yet before now you could  - and still - can get any colour you want with Trade. Yet it appears off-the-shelf trendy colours are big business and big profit; I find it difficult to believe that adding colour to the basic trade quality white at a fraction of the price justifies these sky-high prices.

Looking through one of the wife's ‘lifestyle’ magazines (I know, I know) there were the latest paint hues - everything black, dark blue, dark green, dark red, truffle! And others making everything look like the local funeral parlour unless you have a big room and a lot of light coming in, but there was even more madness: small specialist paint firms with Chelsea type names (it’s never Smith and Co.) actually had trendy coloured emulsion in 1 litre cans for £68! That’s getting into Dom Perignon territory and I know what I would rather spend the money on.

The same can be said of Crittall-style windows. No home is complete without them these days, despite anyone who had any contact with them in those days before when they were popular knowing how they became rust traps; of course, with modern materials that no longer applies but the memory lingers.

Or the obligatory rear extension with bi-fold doors, most of which look like U Boat pens such is the lack of design in adding them. A neighbour from the old house is having one built against the backdrop of an old Edwardian village shop (it was the grocer's); it is so out of scale with the house it is obscene, the height is such the the upstairs bedroom window above it is having to be rotated to landscape view so as not to be covered by the height of the extension. Still again, it's their money, and they talk about the house having integrity; they are both doctors - is that an excuse?

On the serious side, it is worth doing a little research into what is the best paint for the job. As in so many areas we are spoilt for choice, the different types of paint, the make up of them and their suitability is simply mind boggling. One thing I have found that is really an advance for all those filling and making good jobs is Easyfill, by Gyproc: I used the 60-minute setting version in 1kg bags so as not to waste too much but there is a ready mix version called Lite which is apparently even better for the DIY-er - but only the Lite version, the other one is not so good.

I also took the advice of a decorator's forum for ceiling emulsion and purchased Johnson's Covaplus Vinyl Matt; it is very good, better than the Dulux trade equivalent that I first used which gives a good finish but cannot be touched up (‘ooh matron!’) so if anything's been missed you have to do the whole ceiling again.

So there you have it, free DIY tips from an erstwhile Barry Bucknell.

Though it appears that most of us should leave well alone:

https://www.paintinganddecoratingnews.co.uk/decorating-industry/brits-confess-their-diy-disasters/

That didn’t stop hundreds invading the local enormous timber yard after the first lockdown ended; the place, really a trade outlet, had to stop private buyers clogging up the place to buy one fence post. They sold out of decking and most fencing products which meant the price went up due to demand, but nowhere near as much as paint!

Nice, if you are a Morlock...

That doesn’t mean that dark colours cannot be successful in the right place, but this current fad is creating a land where people will have to have lights on all day, and we all know that won't continue; or live in another room.

Naturally I was assailed by Number One when I started groaning that nothing ever goes down: 'you live in the dark ages, want everything for nothing' and on and on; true, but unless I am missing something, the price rises in that period are extortionate. Is there a rational explanation as to why paint has risen by over 125% in seven years and no discounts of substance to ameliorate the pain?

On the other hand 'Nut Nuts' (aka Carrie Symonds) is putting up gold wallpaper at over £200 a roll, but of course that is allegedly not her money; if it is, more fool her or Boris.

Still, Lulu ‘banquettes to the stars’ Lytle (Chelsea) will be pleased. Out of curiosity I had a look at her website Soane: how on earth designs that look like poor knock-offs of Louis X1V sell is beyond me. If the Sun King could see this stuff he would wince and order them to the Bastille. Needless to say no prices are given, if you have to ask you can’t afford it. Everyone to their own; Boris of course has no taste so he wouldn’t know he was being ripped off until the bill landed.

Now with Louis of course it was a different matter: no Lulu Lytle for him!

Back to reality...

He’s got to go! He refuses to move or get a job, and I refuse to paint round him;
and now he says the sofa doesn’t match the curtains! Ingrate.

                                                                                                                                                          

FRIDAY MUSIC: Northern Soul, by JD

 What is Northern Soul?

The Wiki page explains its origins, ironically enough, in London:

The term "Northern Soul" emanated from the record shop Soul City in Covent Garden, London, which was run by famous soul music collector Dave Godin.[3] It was first publicly used in Godin's weekly column in Blues & Soul magazine in June 1970.[4] In a 2002 interview with Chris Hunt of Mojo magazine, Godin said he had first come up with the term in 1968, to help employees at Soul City differentiate the more modern funkier sounds from the smoother. Godin referred to the latter's requests as "Northern Soul":

"I had started to notice that northern football fans who were in London to follow their team were coming into the store to buy records, but they weren't interested in the latest developments in the black American chart. I devised the name as a shorthand sales term. It was just to say "if you've got customers from the north, don't waste time playing them records currently in the U.S. black chart, just play them what they like – 'Northern Soul'".

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_soul

Voting Day

In my constituency we have to vote for a Police and Crime Commissioner and Mayor. I did have a look at all the candidates' statements for both roles.

It seems all the PCC candidates are agin crime; no-one is running on a platform of releasing all prisoners and sacking all the police. How to choose?

The Mayoral incumbent had a top role in business but I've heard nothing I can remember about what he's done since donning the gold chain four years ago.

I don't know what others have done. I excluded LibDems who as far as I can see are all things to all people; and an axe-grinder or two. Other than that, I clutched at straws: this one is ex-military; one in each race wears the Reform rosette (formerly Brexit Party) - good or bad? - certainly we need political reform, nationally.

Oh dear.

At least the system is using an Alternative Vote in both contests - first and second preference.

I suppose I'll just have to take a mild interest in the result.

"Build Back Better" - really? by JD

I'm sure you will all be familiar with this phrase, the latest in a never-ending river of political slogans. It has become very popular among our political leaders in the western world.

https://vermontindependent.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/46221.jpg

The local (un)Conservative Mayoral candidate has included the phrase in his 'manifesto' and when I saw it I stopped reading and groaned inwardly. He obviously has no thoughts of his own and thinks the electorate will accept a second-hand and meaningless slogan and think him wise. The evidence of the past year is that a large percentage of the electorate is gullible enough to believe it. I shall refrain from naming the candidate to spare his embarrassment, not that politicians are ever embarrassed!

But we have been here before; Alan Hull of Lindisfarne wrote this song about T Dan Smith, 'Mr Newcastle' who wanted to 'build back better' by demolishing half of the City of Newcastle and rebuilding it as 'the Brasilia of the North'. Oscar Niemayer's plans for Brasilia didn't turn out too well either.

The results of Dan's 'plan' were the uglification of the city centre. Just one example of this was the elegant Royal Arcade, designed by John Dobson, which was demolished to make way for a huge roundabout serving the new central motorway. The Arcade was carefully 'unbuilt' and the stones were numbered and stored to be rebuilt in another location at a later date. Under the supervision of the usual crop of 'wise' civic leaders, the stones were numbered in chalk which quickly disappeared in the rain. Dan Smith subsequently ended up in jail after his involvement with John Poulson and a huge financial scandal which led to the resignation of Reginald Maudling who was Home Secretary at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Dan_Smith

Smith was not the only political 'visionary' who thought he could improve our lives with grand civic projects and brand new housing, which at that time meant flattening terraced housing and replacing them with 'streets in the sky' tower blocks which were universally hated by everyone except architects and planners. I have previously posted on the subject here https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2019/06/home-economics-by-wiggiaatlarge.html

It is possibly unfair to single out Dan Smith but his story is the one with which I am most familiar. However I know that planning disasters including the hated tower blocks were widespread in the 60s and 70s. I have also known and worked with many architects and every single one I have known was enthusiastic, almost evangelical about the ideas of the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and all of the other modernist vandals. Nobody bothered to ask the people who were rehoused in those tower blocks. It is no coincidence that most of these blocks have been demolished.

So the current claim that this latest slogan of 'build back better' will give us a bright shiny new future is just more of the same; in other words it is a lie because we know that politicians are not capable of building anything.

And then there will be the unintended consequences of the latest 'build back better' fad just as there were the unintended consequences of the earlier utopian plans to create cities of the future with their skyscrapers (have you noticed it is always skyscrapers?)

In the following video clip, Roger Scruton is in conversation with Hamza Yusuf about the impact of modern ugly architecture on Islamic culture and why beauty matters. He describes the modern city as looking like a mouth full of broken teeth. One of the many people who hated the destruction of human scale cities was an architectural student named Mohammed Atta who had been an architecture student in Hamburg and he hated the inhumanity of high rise buildings of the type his parents were moved into in Cairo. Scruton implies that when Atta flew an aeroplane into the World Trade Centre in New York, it was for him not only a political/religious act against the USA/unbelievers but also a symbolic blow against soulless, oppressive architecture.

Scruton talks about Mohammed Atta flying into the Twin Towers at 1:30 onwards:

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Fencing By The Book Of Arithmetic, by JD

Romeo and Juliet | Act III, Scene I:

Mercutio and Tybalt engage in a sword fight which results in the death of the former. As is the way in drama, he has to make a little speech before he dies and he addresses Romeo thus:

"No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’ both your houses.

"Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm."

That is a very curious phrase “fights by the book of arithmetic”

What can it mean? Tybalt is a minor character (a cousin of Juliet) in the play and it looks like one of Shakespeare’s throwaway lines but closer examination reveals a whole story.

According to a book by Adolph L. Soens “Tybalt fights by a Spanish book of fence.”

Tybalt seems to be an anglicised version of the name Thibault and the character could be based on Gérard Thibault who was a Dutch fencing master.

Around 1605 Thibault was living in Sevilla and studied the style of swordsmanship of Jerónimo Sánchez de Carranza and Luis Pacheco de Narváez, two renowned masters of the art. Returning to the Netherlands, Thibault built on what he had learned in Spain and developed a new system, possibly after studying mathematics at Leiden university.

The result was the publication of his only book 'Academie de l’Espée' which was lavishly illustrated to show the style and system.

The book was published in 1630 after his death and also after the death of Shakespeare. Somehow the man from Stratford knew about Thibault’s style of fencing. At that time there would have been news pamphlets and manuscripts in circulation possibly with information on new ideas from around Europe. And it appears that Shakespeare understood Thibault’s style, or system.

Soens also suggests that there is enough information in the text to indicate how the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt should be staged. This probably had a great dramatic effect on the Elizabethan audience as they watched two contrasting styles in action with the unfamiliar one being the winner.

One wonders if Romeo also adopted Tybalt’s new style in their subsequent meeting, turning it to his advantage.

Four hundred years on and the Bard and his works continue to be a source of endless fascination.

Further thoughts on Tybalt/Thibault and his invention/adaptation of a new style of fencing can be found here and also here  - the entries at this latter link are in Spanish but it included this video which shows what appears to be a very slow and leisurely style of fencing: 

We are used to seeing in 'action' films frantic and fast moving sword fights so one wonders if the real thing four hundred years ago really was as dramatic as the film industry would like us to believe or it was as depicted in the video.

You will notice on the back wall the name Luis Pacheco de Narváez, one of the fencing masters referred to by Thibault in his book.

-------

* An earlier version of this post originally appeared at Nourishing Obscurity on 18/11/2010; that original post has been lost in NO's technical problems.

THE WEEKENDER: Sweet Charity... For Whom? by Wiggia

If there is a reset in the offing, let it be charities !

Advancing years mean different things to different people; items like wills need making or need re-writing according to circumstances.

Like many I would guess, I put off the inevitable because it brings home the prospect of the Grim Reaper hovering somewhere ever nearer. For most couples the family figures highest on the list of recipients of any wordly goods that might be left on departure, it makes a will relatively easy to configure; for us with no children it is a very different matter.

Ideally we would depart with nothing left in the kitty, a scenario that would give us much pleasure and deny the taxman and others grabbing what is left, but while simple on paper that is not as easy as it first appears; not knowing when the call will come makes that route nigh on impossible to plan, though one can have a good shot at it.

So apart from more distant relatives, nieces and nephews, all of whom seem well catered for by their own parents and therefore don’t need our help, and whom I don’t feel inclined to include anyway, to whom or what do we leave the remnants of our time on earth?

By coincidence the Times recently (26 April) had a very good article on the subject in which it explained how the richer parents keep their children at a higher level and those naturally further down the food chain get less by degrees from their parents, which keeps inequality as is or worse depending on earnings which for most have plateaued for the last 12 years. The winners are poor children with rich parents.

On the other hand those who make their own destiny stay the same. In our case we had only minimal bequests from both sets of parents for a variety of reasons, i.e. they had bugger-all to leave in real terms and we have made all we have on our own backs; that is not a virtuous boast, just a fact of life, but it does make you appreciate what you have and also more suspicious of where you intend to donate what you have left.

As Machiavelli said, 'A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair,' which judging from the words I have heard from family members is not far from the truth.

- and anything else I can get my hands on...

Those items that you have no intention of gracing the spaces of the Sally Army furniture emporium with can be left to people who will appreciate them: art works, designer pieces etc, jewellery of any value can be turned into cash and spent; but after that it becomes more difficult.

The reason this matter has surfaced is because since we have just moved, some items have become surplus to requirements and it has made us review our wills as they too have come to light in going through all the paperwork we have transferred with everything else to the new abode and needs to be sorted and filed away.

The last will was decent enough in where and what we wanted to leave the bulk of possessions and property, but not any more, and this is where things have started to get bogged down. After much searching the last time we found some local charities, in particular a local hospice that did sterling work outside the usual business model of so many others, a genuine charity in a much-needed sector.

But - that word again - upon looking at their site recently and reading the FAQs it appears that within the last few years they have succumbed to the acceptance of government through council monies and now have a CEO  on an enhanced salary, so joining the bulk of charities where a business model and jobs in the revolving door public/private sector have become the norm. So, sadly, they will not be getting anything from me as through taxes I/we are already supporting the place and its enhanced salaries.

Obviously after we have gone any changes that a recipient makes is no longer any concern; all we want to do is to try and make sure any decisions are the right ones at this moment in time.

It is very difficult not to be a cynic when one is bombarded with television requests for £3 a month for everything from clean water to medicines to saving an endangered species. Sponsoring a snow leopard has to be one of the biggest cons in charity advertising, what with so few of them left, though at the moment I feel we are the endangered species; and all these requests come from international charities with huge reserves and CEOs on six figure salaries. I don’t need to go into the minutiae of how they operate and spend money; it has all been revealed many times in recent years and it paints a portrait of greed not charity.

Charities that work on the assumption that every pound given means they keep 90p to run the thing and pay employees are not charities, except for those that work for them.

The same outfits now regularly beseech one to include a legacy in a will and have employees trawling through estates to find legacies they have not been informed about. Have no doubt that they will find anything left to them and will often come knocking long before the estate is settled, as we experienced in a recent family legacy; as with certain family members, they have profiles matching vultures.

None of this helps us. We can’t even take advantage of the tax inheritance laws as we have no heirs; all we can do is try to make sure we spend as much as we can and leave the rest to carefully-vetted charities, local if possible; at least if you spread the residue over several charities, presuming you can find any, you at least have a fair chance of it doing some good.

It is sad it has come to this. Even some of the charities we took for granted as doing worthy things have become woke shadows of their former selves as they all make a beeline for the high salary business model. That old Victorian philanthropy has long gone, as with politics the 'putting back into society something for the general good’ and doing it for free has disappeared, along with most of the goodwill.

Of course current events - our government and the massive debt we have been put in - might well save me the trouble of where to put my money, it must just disappear to save the world.

Something will come up I am sure, but I never thought it would be so difficult to give away money, well in the way we want to, that is.

____________________________________________________________________

Sackerson adds: this article from 2015 underscores the problem...

One in five of the UK's biggest charities are 'spending less than half of their income on good causes' (and some spend as little as ONE PER CENT on charitable work)