Rathbone's Ramblin'

[rathbone]

[Porty]

[bellybabe]

[rathbone]

[rathbone]

Having just become used to the soubriquet 'the spotted member', this week I was given a practical lesson in the principle that size isn't everything.

Mrs Rathbone and I set off for London with the firm intent of visiting the Picture of Britain exhibition at the Tate and instead went trawling along Oxford Street in search of 'plain winter boots' (don't ask).

Perhaps it was the transcendent state induced by hearing the mantra "do you have these in a seven" repeated several thousand times, but by the time we got to the Gallery I was in a particularly receptive frame of mind.

For those of you who watched the series but haven't been able to get to the exhibition, it's both a joy and an anticlimax. An anticlimax because many of the paintings featured in the series aren't here, but a joy because the painting have been supplemented by other works such as Wordsworth's notebooks (terrible handwriting) and Turner's sketchpads (these are sketches??)

However, my moment of revelation came not from the big famous Turners, Constables or Landseers, but in the form of a small watercolour of the Vale of the White Horse by Eric Ravilious. There was something about the quality of the thing which made me want to spend some time with it. Because the show closes next week it was the usual last minute packed throng and I had to push my way through to the front four times before I had intimidated enough people to get them to let me have enough space to even see it properly.



Beautifully done, with only three colours - yellow ochre, cerulean blue and paynes grey by the look of it. The skill is all in the cross hatching.
As usual, things get lost in reproduction, but in the original it really does look like it is raining and you feel you could walk along that ridge and up the path in the distance, beneath the white horse. Yet none of this is naturalistic (just look at how stylised the grass is). Quite a difference from the big, famous, photographic victorian landscapes around it, and all the better for being so small, humble and perfectly formed.

Now, if someone could only make humble winter boots in a size seven.

[rathbone]

I've been watching the repeats of Heimat on BBC4, and getting hung up on the logistics of developing the village into the town. The little details of the area around the war memorial change from episode to episode.. How did they do that? Start with the town as it was in the 1980s and work back in time, demolishing things, or start with a small set and keep adding?? Pity the DVD hasn't a "making of Heimat" featurette.

I suppose it would be possible to pull together a Porty Heimat. Virtual Memory.

To take one example, when I was small the area at the junction of Adelphi Place and the High Street was the tram depot. The trams used to go from there up to the Post Office at Waterloo Place. Then, when I was about nine, the trams were replaced by buses with signs on the back of the seats saying ' no spitting on the bus' and little metal plates for striking your matches on before you lit up your Craven A. Apart from a few memorial feet of track outside the Post Office, the tramlines were torn up, the depot was torn down and the flats were thrown up. Now I notice they've got nice little railings along the front and Mrs. Wright has put out her plant pots to add a bit of colour.

Then there were the shops in front of the villas in Bath Street, now all gone. Molly Hood's, where you had to take your sweetie coupons until rationing was lifted. The Barbers where you didn't need coupons to get something for the weekend. The Greengrocers, where the parsley actually tasted of parsley. And the chip shop which served real chips in real newspaper and is now the last to go.

Which brings me to Rathbone house from whence I came,



replaced long ago by nothing much. The garden went even earlier to accommodate some rather attractive public conveniences, subject of another thread on this forum, glimpsed in this early seventies photograph. The building behind the house, used to be an ice cream factory before it became a depot for caterpillar tractors. It went in the comprehensive Pipe Street redevelopment.

When I was in Porty in August, Bob Jefferson asked me what changes I'd noticed. Honestly, very little, I replied, It is like watching your children growing up -Apart from having to buy new shoes every five minutes you don't really notice the little changes until it's too late.

[ecm]

[Epykat]

[Porty]

[rathbone]

[Porty]

[wangi]

[Porty]

[Maria]

[Epykat]

[ecm]

[Epykat]

[Pal of Porty]

[foxy]

[Poppy]

[Lizzie]

Which brings me to Rathbone house from whence I came,



replaced long ago by nothing much. The garden went even earlier to accommodate some rather attractive public conveniences, subject of another thread on this forum, glimpsed in this early seventies photograph. The building behind the house, used to be an ice cream factory before it became a depot for caterpillar tractors. It went in the comprehensive Pipe Street redevelopment.

When I was in Porty in August, Bob Jefferson asked me what changes I'd noticed. Honestly, very little, I replied, It is like watching your children growing up -Apart from having to buy new shoes every five minutes you don't really notice the little changes until it's too late.[/quote]

Super photo of Rathbone House always wondered what it looked like, thanks for that Rathbone.
I live in Rathbone Place and if I've got my bearings right, my garden and part of my house stands on the very spot where Rathbone House used to be. I must post a photograph from the same spot this one was taken, when I can figure out how to do it

[rathbone]

I was in the kitchen contemplating how long the thunder would keep off and watching Zorro make his mark on my cabbages when this little card came through the letter box: We regret that we were unable to deliver your goods as no-one was at home when we called. To arrange collection from our depot conveniently located fifty miles away please call the following number...
... I was out the front door like a shot and managed to catch the little oik (he looked 13 but was probably 23) before he got back into his van. "What's the meaning of this?" I asked. "It means, mate, that you weren't in and I have to take your stuff back." "I'm obviously in otherwise I wouldn't be standing here." "But you didn't answer the door wen I knocked, so its too late." "You didn't knock, you just stuck the card through the letter box." "You calling me a liar?" "Far be it from me to impugn your integrity, but..." "And it's in the computer now, so I have to take the stuff back." "What do you mean it's in the computer" He waved his little palm device at me. "I've entered it in 'ere that there was no one in." "Well, delete it then." "More than my jobs wurf ,gov."

Fifteen minutes later he conceded that he could actually delete things on his computer without the wrath of multinationals descending on us both, opened the back of the van and dumped the boxes out on to the drive. "Wot's in these anway? They're fecking eavy." "Shelves", I replied.

This was the culmination of the ultimatum which the Rathbonettes and I had given Mrs. R at the beginning of the summer holidays. Is it really true that people in the teaching profession are obliged to keep cardboard boxes, containing every piece of work produced by every pupil they've ever encountered, in perpetuity? Mrs R seems to think so. (It's in her contract, she says). As a consequence, the only way that you can reach the computer this is being written on is to attach guy ropes to the loft hatch and abseil into the study. Television viewing requires the ascent of the east ridge of the living room and don't even contemplate using the dining room table without prior negotiation with the federal emergency management agency.

To give her her due, after the initial shock of the mutiny, she did settle down to a systematic sort-out of her clutter (sorry, essential archives) and I was forced into the other side of the bargain -- putting up shelves in the garage to store the results.

Once they had been de-oiked, the shelves were remarkably easy to put up. None of your old fashioned bolt together stuff. Oh no, this was easy, push together and twist-lock, heavy duty stuff designed for real garages, like the one Kevin Webster runs in Coronation Street. It only took two and a half hours.

By that time it was thundering merrily and Zorro had scarpered back to his hutch three gardens up. Needless to say, when she carried out the post construction inspection Mrs. R. homed right in on the dent where I had to give it a wee bash with a hammer before it would either push together or lock no matter how hard I twisted. Her ability to see the smallest blemish through the dullest gloom, aided only by a nanosecond of lightning flash, never ceases to amaze.

[foxy]

So glad you explained about Zorro towards the end...I was mystified

You must know by now Mr R that it's in the female job description to find fault with the work of our significant others

[Porty]

[Epykat]

[Maria]

[rathbone]

It was as if a big orange guy had come up to me, slapped my face and said:spladoosh - you've been tangoed.

There hadn't been much traffic and all the lights had been green, so I was early for my appointment at the Chiropractor's. Not that I minded because, unlike the dentist, Duncan the aussie chiro has a good selection of magazines.

Top of the pile there was an article on Gil Scott-Heron and in an instant I was right back into 1970, on my old pitch opposite Camden Town tube station, resplendent in my Red Mole t-shirt, peddling left wing propaganda to the masses. It was after one of those (usually unproductive) sessions that I had wandered up to Compendium and discovered Gil Scott-Heron, or rather his novel The Vulture. (As an aside, I notice that The Vulture has recently been reprinted by Canongate, of all people. It's about the life of a murder victim as retold by four men who knew him as a boy and really captures what it was like to be black and american in the 60s - perhaps I should add it to the Big Read list.)

I found that I could relate to the polemic in the book , honed as I was on those long dadaistic evening in the Meadow Bar during the late 60s, arguing socialism with the university anarchist society (now there was a contradiction in terms).

As time went on and Scott-Heron began to issue his work on records with titles such as Home Is Where The Hatred Is, he spoke a lot of sense to me about nuclear proliferation, apartheid, the links between race-poverty-big business, and the machinations of Nixon, Ford, Goldwater and Carter. The man was uncompromising, enraged and, above all, articulate.

As he said:

The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will not be televised.

In other words, Gil Scott-Heron was one of the formative forces on my personal political development.

So it came as a little bit of a shock when the article I was reading ended:
" Godfather of Rap in the 1990s, Gil Scott-Heron is now probably best known as the voice in the Tango Ads when he says - You know when you've been tangoed."

[Dadaist]

[Jackson Priest]

[ecm]

[rathbone]

[rathbone]

[mr magnolia]

[Epykat]

[foxy]

The vixenettes nagged and nagged about getting their ears pierced and I kept putting them off saying "not until you're 10". They're now 14 and 11 and its never mentioned...they'll probably wait and get everything done at once in a year or two