Mixed up confusion

Sweet Thames Run Softly

It started well.  The day dawned fine, and Grosvenor Square was tranquil, though the strangely wrapped figure of Dwight David Eisenhower outside the Qatari remake of the US Embassy seemed an ominous portent:

Anyway, in one of the Halcyon Galleries on Bond Street I get a glimpse of early Hockney, where the women come and go:

And across the way Bob Dylan exposes his inner Marlborough Man with a little less finesse than Bradford Davey:

And then I work my way through the streets of Soho, past traces of earlier communications, now repositories of today's excess:

I note that Pink seems to be the in colour today, whether on your rickshaw:

Or with a casual glass of wine while trading al fresco:

Or as part of your biker gear:

Or if you are Queen for the day:

Then, where Kipling once lodged, I pass one of my favourite haunts, though now it's hard to get a seat:

With my special dragon bike I take a pedal up the river to Richmond and beyond, where the sun is out:

And a heron fishes, the cycle of life:

And where, in the 18th century, George II lodged Henrietta Howard, his mistress, in Palladian splendour, another cycle of life.

It is hot now, but the Sweet Thames runs softly, 

So I took her sailing on the river (Flow sweet river, flow),

From Putney Bridge to Nine Elms Reach
We cheek to cheek were dancing
Her necklace made of London Bridge
Her beauty was enhancing

Ewan MacColl

But this is where things start to go wrong.  The heat. The after effects of gothic strawberries, the press and confusion of London Town; even if it is French:

We dine upstairs, the food, the drink, the company, the wine, the digestifs.....

It may be my daughter's birthday, but the confusion is beginning to set in, my pulse beat racing, 

Well, there’s too many people

And they’re all too hard to please

Well, my head’s full of questions

My temperature’s rising fast

Well, I’m looking for some answers

But I don’t know who to ask

Bob Dylan

Mixed-Up Confusion

And so it goes......

But then, despite the gentle musings of Ewan MacColl, and the ebb and flow of Old Father Thames (without which, London would not be) I sink into oblivion, exhausted by the heat and confusion of the city. I long to be back in the calm of Norfolk, even though this yearning is a two-edged blade. I trip from MacColl to Edmund Spenser, and look to Prothalamion for solace, those sixteenth century lines like a cool gauze across my brow:

CALM was the day, and through the trembling air 

Sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play, 

A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay 

Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair;

And at dawn it is quiet now.  Oxford Street so near a desert:

Tottenham Court Road a pedestrian dream:

And all the fowl which in his flood did dwell 

Gan flock about these twain, that did excel 

The rest so far as Cynthia doth shend 

The lesser stars. So they, enranged well, 

Did on those two attend, 

And their best service lend, 

Against their wedding day, which was not long: 

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

Edmund Spenser

Prothalamion

And, waking, as if from a confused state, I walk through Gordon Square, and hear a voice:

Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.

Rabindranath Tagore

But I’m walking and wondering

And my poor feet don’t ever stop

Seeing my reflection

I’m hung over, hung down, hung up!

Bob Dylan

Mixed-Up Confusion

*****

The nymphs are departed.

T S Eliot

The Waste Land

*****

To unwind, please see Christy Moore, with 

Sinéad O'Connor and Neill MacColl, singing Ewan MacColl's Sweet Thames Flow Softly....

https://youtu.be/Tgwtl-s0CNI

Journeys with 'The Waste Land'

On Margate sands....

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Journeys with The Waste Land is the title of an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, though by the time you read this it will probably have closed.

On Margate Sands.

I can connect 

Nothing with nothing.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Journeys with 'The Waste Land' is a major exhibition exploring the significance of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land through the visual arts.

In 1921, T.S. Eliot spent a few weeks in Margate at a crucial moment in his career. He arrived in a fragile state, physically and mentally, and worked on The Waste Land sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter....

 on Margate Sands. 

The poem was published the following year, and proved to be a pivotal and influential modernist work, reflecting on the fractured world in the aftermath of the First World War as well as Eliot’s own personal crisis.

I have come to Margate to see this exhibition, and to explore the town, as, despite many personal crises and several wars, I have never been......

The little I knew of Margate was that J M W Turner (Timothy Spall) spent some time here, with Mrs Sophia Booth, a particularly accommodating landlady; the ashes of Jack Dodds (Michael Caine) are scattered off the end of the breakwater here at the end of Graham Swift's Last Orders; Tracey Emin was brung up here (sic); and Thanet (the area) is one of the most deprived in the UK (though there is no connection between this fact and the previous one: Mad Tracey from Margate.  Everyone's been there - an appliqué blanket, fabric from clothing provided by friends, 267 x 216 cms, executed in 1997 -  fetched £722,500 at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 16 October 2014).....

I don't know whether T S Eliot liked seafood, but I enjoy cockles with the camera-shy potential next Mayor of Margate, who tells me that the Japanese tourists (Margate is in the Japanese guide books) like their oysters.....

Inside Turner Contemporary I get to know some of the locals - in this case John Davies's My Ghosts.... (a collage of images significant to me - people loved and lost, those wronged, those missed....)

Before becoming involved in the artworks and objects chosen by The Waste Land Research Group.  It is a fascinating and rewarding collection, especially (for me) where illustrations link clearly with either the period of The Waste Land or they pick up on one of the themes, a good example being Edward Hopper's Night Windows, 1928....

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.....

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles and stays.

Or William Lionel Wyllie's The Goodwin Sands, 1874....

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers.  As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Or Paul Nash's The Shore, 1923, 

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street,

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishermen lounge at noon.....

Your man himself is present, too, in this case painted by Edgar Holloway in 1934, when the artist himself was only 20.....

Though without the maestro's mandoline.....

It's a shame you may not see this exhibition, though I believe it will be re-staged somewhere else later this year....

But there's more to Margate than the shed by the shore....  The people, for instance.....

Scott, for example, is as friendly as can be at The Fez, and he rings down to The Lantern Cafe to make sure that Liz will be able to feed us.....

And indeed she is.  Her Bubble and Squeak, with egg and bacon, is a rare treat, especially as, with Carol's permission, she brings it in to us next door at The Harbour Arms......

Outside, in the rain, there's just time for a look round.  Pink seems to be the predominant colour:

Even the trees by the remarkable Tudor House are pink.....

And, despite it's patina of age, the 4.6 million shells in the Shell Grotto have a pink tinge.  No one knows how old this extraordinary place is (it was 'found' in 1835) but my guess is that it was the burial chamber of an Etruscan Pearly King.....

The Theatre Royal is the second oldest theatre in the country, which may be why Gerry and the Pacemakers performed here last year....

But all is not old, nor,

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying.....

There is Yasmin.....

Who smiles, and chatters; who grew up here and loves the place and is just the best antidote to a Waste Land......

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings....

Thank you Margate!

Waste Land?  What Waste Land?