Journal

Glencot school photo, early 1960s

Was sent this photo today by Sam Hunt, who lives in Somerset, showing the denizens of Glencot preparatory school, near Wookey Hole, sometime early in the 1960s.  He is third from right, third row; my brother Gray, who would eventually become Head Boy, eightth from the left, front row; and I am seventh from right in the back row.

The school teetered between periods of intense learning (which I badly needed after weak schooling in Ireland and Cyprus) and, alternately, Harry Potter, Gormenghast and Lord of the Flies.

The headmaster, shown here with the adults, the Anthony Eden face and pocket handkerchief, was eventually committed to an asylum – which would have come as no great surprise to those of us who he routinely subjected to canings that wouldn’t have been out of place in a prisoner of war camp. But he also taught me a huge amount in key subjects, so I feel a considerable debt of gratitude to him, too. Complex.

Slum with a view – of how the elite lives Amanda and Amy Gate of India (detail) Equine illuminations  

Flew in to Mumbai today with Amy (Birchall) on flight 0199, bringing to mind the Beatles and Back in the USSR, though this was BOAC’s successor, the embattled BA. And Russia’s influence on India is way less these days than it was the Sixties. We are staying at the swish Renaissance Mumbai Conference Centre Hotel – where the view from my room, when I swish back the curtains, and fittingly perhaps, turns out to be of satellite dishes, skyscrapers and a somewhat cheek-by-jowl slum.

Delightful meeting with Rajni Bakshi, a long-standing friend, and then Amy and I head south by taxi to the Gate of India area, to see Amanda (Feldman), recently an intern with Volans – who also arrived this morning to start on internship with Tata. The Gate was the first landing point for many who came to India from Britain, but I found myself recalling the last British troops – the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry – passing through the Gate from the landward side in 1948, the year before I was born. Despite the fact that I was born post Imperial India, I have always felt both a profound connection to – and responsibility for the state of – the country.

Indeed it does: hoarding Jaguar 1 Jaguar 2 Jaguar 3 Harrier, with feathering pattern on wings Feathering on Assyrian beast from Nimrud Nereids, I think Taking flight: Doug Miller 1 Taking flight: Doug Miller 2 Incoming: Kecia and Alex

Weird concatenation as I write this: our new neighbour is laughing her woefully irritating laugh and, at exactly the same time, a magpie is making its grating sound at the bottom of the garden. The two have a great deal in common, though on balance I infinitely prefer the magpie.

A fairly fractured week, ahead of flying to India this evening, involving a mixed bag of meetings and events, plus finishing off a range of writing tasks. Yesterday, though, I got to the end of a series of tasks and found I had nothing immediate, so Sam and I took off for the Tate Britain, to see the Henry Moore exhibition. Loved some of Moore’s notebook pages – and adored the final selection of four great reclining figures carved from elm.

On the way in to the Tate, we were very taken with the Harrier jump-jet suspended from the roof – and the Jaguar fighter burnished to a shine and up-ended on the floor. Astonishing sculptural effects achieved by the artist, Fiona Banner. Initially thought the patterning on the Harrier’s wings was the result of vortices in flight, but then seemed much more likely that they were painted on. Today, I was looking again at the giant Assyrian human-headed winged lion statues in the British Museum – and was struck by the similarity with their feathering.

This evening, Elaine and I took Alex and Kecia Barkawi at the Court Restaurant in the British Museum. Lovely evening, with choral concert under way alongside the Elgin Marbles. An opportunity to show Alex, who is half-Egyptian, the extraordinary Rosetta Stone. Found myself comparing the survival of what those long-ago Egyptian hieroglyphic carvers had achieved with the unintelligible scrawls that the Harrier and Jaguar would have left in the skies during their flying days.

Earlier in the day, I had headed across to SustainAbility, for a meeting with Geoff, Gary and Doug Miller of GlobeScan, to discuss various possible co-ventures. It has also been a very busy week at Volans, with a steady stream of visitors passing through, the sofas occupied much of the time. And an interesting moment more or less mid-week when the various elements of the work we are doing suddenly jumped to a different level in the collective brain. Pregnancy pressing in on two fronts at the moment, but considerable progress being made.

But have been reading the extraordinary book Poseidon’s Steed: The Story of Seahorses, by Helen Scales, as I have beetled around the city by Tube – with my cycle in for a major service these past two weeks. (The nereids I photographed in the British Museum were mythologically linked to Poseidon.) And the scale of the damage Helen Scales reports to the ecology of our oceans and seas has left me quite depressed about the prospects for anything like sustainability beneath the waves – with the appetite for marine life growing furiously and much of that demand in parts of the world where the broader environmental agenda has yet to strike root.

I remember my sister Caroline being given a dried and glazed seahorse mounted on a rock in Eilat in 1959, the only time I have visited Israel. At the time I was excited to see the creature; now it’s hard not to feel that the impending extinction of so many seahorse species is an ecological form of the writing on the walls at Belshazzar’s feast, foretelling the fall of the Babylonian Empire.

Hare at Royal Academy Cork Street Mews graffito Face tatoo in Bond Street Chinese dancing at British Museum 1 Chinese dancing 2

A day spent prowling shops for light-weight clothes for an impending trip to India – and took back a Panama hat that I have not had long, but which has developed a crack in the crown. Bates replaced it instantly, no questions asked. Marvellous. Then we took in Jieying’s counter-current embroidery for framing at Railing’s in New Cavendish Street. Then on to the British Museum to meet Will Rosenzweig, ahead of supper at the Court Restaurant there. Many things going on at the BM these evening, including an exhibition of Chinese dancing and operatic singing.  Interesting, but hard on the ears. Will gave me a wonderful little kaleidoscope for my birthday, to promote even more colourful visions. Am contemplating having it implanted as a third eye.

Counter-current 1 Counter-current 2 Counter-current 3 Counter-current 4

Last night, in Soseki restaurant, I opened a most extraordinary gift from Zheng Jieying, one of or two Chinese interns at Volans who left us recently to work in New Zealand. She had commissioned a silk embroidery based on my ‘counter-current’ motto, titled ‘Against the Tide’. The artist, based at the Su Embroidery Art Studio in Suzhou, China, was Wang Ling. Astounding.

Jieying explained some of the background in an email this morning: 

The embroidered characters are “counter current”, in Chinese Zhuan calligraphic style.  I did not ask the artist to translate it back to English; but apparently he did, and to a different version. [‘Against the Tide’]

Traditional Chinese embroidery has four styles; one happened to come from my home province Sichuan.  However, I talked to a few artists and could not find what I really liked — until I saw the work of this one based in Suzhou city, close to Shanghai. 

Su embroidery is usually more colourful, but this piece is a little different, although it still took 14 colours (I think, and with threads as thin as 1/16 of the normal) to create the shades around the fish flock.