April, 2025 - How would you know...

A to Z 2025 Challenge – Business, Books and Barbara…

April 2, 2025April 2, 2025humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. There is now a term for this type of image – “Knolling” or “Flatlay” and you can find the fascinating origin of this nomenclature here. The memory of this Exhibition (or Exhibit if you are American) has never left me and in addition, the BBC produced a series of programmes (now available as a podcast) A History of the World in 100 Objects, or in book form if you are not able to download from the BBC.

This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Boredom Box

I have a love of miniature worlds and also of gadgets (more of that under G) and I put this tiny box together to carry in my jacket pocket so that I might never be found at a loose end… It contains a Codewords puzzle, a Sudoku set from a Christmas Cracker, some wool and a miniature crochet hook so that I might practise or demonstrate Tunisian crochet, an IKEA pencil, plus the tools from a cheap Swiss Army card whose cheapness was revealed when the casing broke – consisting of a pen, a nail file, tweezers, a toothpick and a pair of scissors. I have never had to use the boredom box in anger but it is as well to be porepared

Business

I realise that this is not strictly an object apart from the fact that every picture exists as a print, a slide or just a digital collection of 1’s and 0’s… This is the factory where I work 2.5 days a week (semi-retired)… Myself (centre) with some of the staff of the bakery in the factory in Bradford, England. We make Gelato, Puddings and Gateaux for our own Restaurants and also Wholesale. The thing that stood out (pardon the pun) for me in this picture, was how much taller I am ( at 6′ 2″) than my colleagues apart from Adam who is from Sudan – a country noted for tall thin people!

Let me say at the outset – I am not a good businessman – at least when pursuing business on my own account…
You may have gleaned from the A for Art and Architecture, that I had some difficulty deciding what course to pursue in life although I prefer not to think of this as indecision but rather as having too many options to choose from. For many years, if asked what I did, I would say “Designer”, and that covered a lot of activities – Signwriter, Draughtsman, Architectural dabbler and these are all creative roles though within the confines of a brief or practical application. There has also been another quite different string to my bow – working in business, which I came to enjoy – and although I frequently got to employ my design skills in the service of those businesses I worked for or set up, I would say that there has never been a perfect balance between creativity and business skills – except perhaps my restaurant, but that will come under R…

A 1970’s bottle of Liquid Gumption from the time I worked at the factory
producing it. This bottle feature in a website called “Rubbish Walks” which
collects and displays a museum of rubbish…

Actually, the first business I worked in was a factory making Liquid Gumption (cream cleanser), Woodwards Gripe Water, and Wrights Coal Tar Soap and they were made by Sanitas located quite near to where I was living in London at the time. I had just left my first job after University, working for The Greater London Council under “Red” Ken Livingston where I had spent a year as a Trainee Administrator (learned how to write reports) and a year in the Print and Design Section (learned how to produce artwork for print by paste-up) but since these roles had either not suited or proved dead-ends, I needed a job to pay the rent and went to a work agency. After a week digging out huge tanks full of dried silica slurry, and having proved myself as a hard worker, the company took me on to work on Liquid Gumption kitchen and bathroom cream cleanser which was swapping silica(hazardous to the worker’s health) for chalk as the “scouring” agent.

A bottle of Woodwards Gripe Water similar to the one
produced in the 70’s but probably lacking that
alcohol used to extract the ginger flavouring…

The department making this very old soap, had the
worst smell I have ever smelled during the manufacture
– we had to go through this department to reach the canteen and you took a deep breath and tried to make
it through to the other end without taking another…

The factory also made Wrights Coal Tar Soap and Woodwards Gripe Water which in those days, in addition to the active ingredient, Bicarbonate of Soda (to make the babies burp) and Dillseed oil (flavouring and slight anaesthetic), it also contained an extract of Ginger made by steeping dried kibbled (raked apart) ginger in pure alcohol. The finished product thus contained an appreciable amount of alcohol which no doubt helped to soothe the babies but was later deemed a health hazard and removed… We used to obtain sample bottles of the concentrated ginger tincture that had been kept by the lab for sufficient time and dilute them with water and sugar to make ginger wine/liqueur!

The Sanitas factory in Brockwell, also housed some regional offices of the company and from the factory floor you could see people moving around behind frosted glass that delivered “borrowed” light into the factory and yet we had nothing to do with those office workers. The only individual who moved between the world of management and the shopfloor was the Factory Manager, whose name I have long forgotten, but who wore a white coat – little did I think that I would one day also wear a white coat and occupy that very same role… It says something about the industrial relations of the 1970’s that such stratification existed and I like to think that it is a little better today…

The next business I worked for was called The Good Food Shop and was in Lamb’s Conduit Street in London and was run by one, Tony Page who sadly I have lost touch with. It was here that I blagged my way into cooking at weekends to take a little pressure off the chef. I was a reasonable though enthusiastic cook but here I learned to make 6 buckets of salad each morning, six quiches, ratatouille, chilli-con-carne, beef-in-beer, and other staple dishes of the time which stood me in good stead when I eventually opened my own restaurant. I later went to work full-time for Tony when he acquired the shop next door and wanted to open a Wholefood Shop about which I knew a little more than him. After The Good Food Shop closed due to losing half it’s lunchtime trade when the newspaper industry moved from Fleet Street to Wapping, I worked in several businesses with Tony. I will forever be indebted to Tony for introducing me to the spreadsheet which in those pre-PC days, he produced on graph paper, in pencil with lots of rubbing out. Excel spreadsheets form a large part of my work today – chiefly monitoring prices and profitability of products in the factory where I work.

What I am forced to admit, is that whilst I have not succeeded in my own businesses, I have been “a useful engine” in other people’s businesses (more of that later). Creativity exercises one part of my brain and business skills another – I have never found a position or activity in which the balance is quite right…

Books

Unlike my partner Barbara, who grew up with no books in the house, I have always been surrounded by books, my father’s collection of post-war economy cover Penguins and Pelicans sat outside his bedroom door in their now iconic orange (fiction), azure (non-fiction) with other colours for biography and crime. My parents bought the complete Encyclopedia Britannica which was for us what the internet is today. Other bookshops contained all of Dickens unabridged, wrist-wearying hardbacks – and then there was the local library. At four books each a week, my youngest sister, Helen, would choose the Enid Blyton books she had not yet read and immediately begin reading in the corner of the library, carry on in the car going home and by tea-time she was finished the first of her four picks – the result – she became a speed-reader which was confirmed when her school in Australia (more of that later) tested all the pupils to determine their reading level.

This bookcase, the one beside the desk where I am writing from, represents about two-ninths of the books in the house. These particular ones contain reference books, but also poetry, plays, design, art, music to play and some novels. Elsewhere there are cookery books, therapy and a lot more novels and at least a third of all the shelves are double stacked…

I read once, that everyone, by the time they become an adult, has picked a character from a book they’ve read, on which to model themselves. I wonder if that means that in an age where children read fewer books, characters from film and tv are now role models – Elon Musk certainly seems to have imagined himself as some kind of super-hero though sadly appears to have become a super-villain… After reading this theory, I searched my soul for clues as to who I might have picked and came to the conclusion that it might have been “Doc” in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. He was a real-life Marine Biologist who lived in Cannery Row and as well as being a close friend of Steinbeck, Doc seems to have been able to mix with everyone in Cannery Row from the “bums” in the Palace Flophouse to the girls in the whorehouse (though he was not a client). Doc was known to entertain “high-class dames” when he would fire up classical music on his gramophone. Doc and Steinbeck wrote up a marine biology expedition which Doc invited Steinbeck along on and the result was The Log from the Sea of Cortez. My mother was proud to say that she raised us to be able to speak with anyone from a tramp to the queen so it is perhaps not surprising that I should have identified with and modelled myself on such an egalitarian and kind polymath…

I am addicted to books and goodness knows what my children will do with them all if we are not forced to downsize before departing this mortal coil – then all the special books that have associations none but I or Barbara know, will stand on a level playing field and if they are not chosen to be kept, will suffer the indignity of the market place or worse – the charity shop – perhaps I need to think about that…

Barbara

I am not going to say too much about my partner and love of my life Barbara, partly for her privacy and because this is not her story but there were many times when I counted on her support just as she receives from me. We have been together, with a couple of brief hiatus’ for 42+ years. The picture above featured in a poetry post I made called One Day which will tell you all you need to know…

A to Z 2025 Challenge – Art and Architecture

April 1, 2025April 1, 2025humanist55

Brushes +, Top left, a handy brush roll, once my mother’s; top right, plastic palettes, and below them a selection of palette knives and a glass container for water; bottom left, large brushes for watercolour, centre my watercolour brushes and to their right, sponge brushes for large-scale calligraphy and bottom right, one of many sketchbooks – this particular one is paper made from elephant dung which has proved to be quite absorbent making it good for quick outdoor sketches.
Not all the pictures in this A to Z will be “knolling style” and I am not sure whether the original Parker Knoll technician who invented the form would find this example nearly neat enough…

If a Writer is a person who writes then I may consider myself to be a writer but if the same stricture were applied to being an Artist, then I could not claim that title, at least not on a regular basis. Of course, writing is an art form, but there was a time when I did seriously consider the possibility of becoming a “Fine Artist” and for that matter, I briefly considered studying to be an Architect. I decided against being a painter because I saw even at 16, how the art world works – you find a gallery that likes your work and they promote you until you want to do something different in style and then they say “No! Do more of what sells!!!” (Unless you achieve the stature of say, David Hockney and then you can do whatever the hell you like!) So you must submit or starve in a garret… A slight simplification, but enough to put me off going down that road. As for Architecture, I took out a book from the library whose first chapter simply said “So you want to become an Architect?” and the next chapter, with even greater brevity, said, “Don’t!” It then went on to outline the seven-year process of qualifying as an Architect before you really enter the workforce and have to find your own path. The same logic caused me to reject joining the Royal Air Force at 16 because even though paying your way through University and attaining a pilot licence were tempting, there was no guarantee that you would be fit to become a fighter pilot at 21 and who knows what else you might end up doing – perhaps not even flying at all – uh-uh!

A box of fish photographed (much to my partner’s puzzlement) on Naxos and painted some years later in Ireland.

This multimedia piece was made in the studio I set up for both signwriting and art when I first moved to Sligo in 1995.

But having spent the first paragraph of a sort of memoir saying what I didn’t choose to do, I did continue to be an artist on and off and I have worked in Architecture to an extent, and so this first post of the 2025 A to Z Challenge celebrates these two areas of endeavour by me. How did I even get into Art? Well in 1968, my father took a sabbatical year from his post as a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Oxford and spent two terms as an exchange lecturer at the University of New South Wales. In 1968 it was cheaper for a family of five, plus my Granny, to go by ship than to fly to Australia, and so we had a world cruise thrown in. Four weeks around the Cape of Good Hope, because the Suez Canal was closed due to the Six-Day War, then six weeks across the Pacific and via the Panama Canal back to England. Needless to say, this was a mind-expanding experience for a fourteen-year-old on many levels, but one thing that happened had far-reaching consequences. We disembarked the ship in Perth, Western Australia and spent two weeks with some relations on a farm near Bunbury. Growing there we encountered Paper-bark Gum Trees that like all gum trees, shed their leaves continuously all year round and so are in effect, evergreen but they also shed their bark and as the name implies, the Paper-bark comes away in wads of multi-layered tissue-thin, varicoloured bark ranging from red, through browns to white and even black if bush fires have blown past the tree. Later in Sydney, we visited a gallery where some artist had collaged paper-bark along with oil-painted sky and lake. My mother criticised this combination and felt hat with the palette offered by the paperbark, oil paint was unnecessary. My father challenged her and said that if that was the case then she should demonstrate it for herself. So our relatives in Bunbury duly sent a parcel of bark and together with dried seeds, leaves, moss and suchlike, she collaged landscapes which were well received back in Oxford. She next set about organising weekend exhibitions on the University Park railings and for several summers we children had to spend every weekend sitting at the exhibition. Eventually, I decided to have a go myself and produced and even sold a few there. You could saunter up behind people and earwig on their comments and I came to learn a universal truth about art – Even if You the Artist Do Not Like a Piece – There May Be Someone Out There Who Thinks It’s the Bees’s Knees!

One of my mother’s Australian Paper-bark collage pictures.

Later, I found it necessary to stay on an extra year at school and not having a full timetable, decided to add Art and Geology to the Geography A-Level I was re-taking. Yet still I had only 11 hours of timetabled lessons and so I was allowed out of school to visit some of the great museums and art galleries of Oxford. I discovered the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum (a kind of mini British Museum) and if they weren’t too busy, the staff would sit me down with – wait for it – boxes of Turner watercolours (5) or a box of Thomas Girtin’s work (a friend of Turner). I doubt whether they would allow such things today, but these boxes of old masters’ work had a direct influence on my own efforts for which I am eternally grateful and I can still visualise the luminous paintings of Venice by Turner, to this day… However, for the reasons already given, I decided not to pursue Fine Art and yet I have, from time to time, got my paints, or other mediums out ,and made an artworl or two, so here are some of those pieces…

A street in Valetta, Malta – watercolour 1980.

A screen print based on a tiny photograph in a national newspaper of the annual Thames Barge and Smack Race – a wonderful punning name that conveys the jostling that can characterise a sailing race. I have used the overlapping transparent layers to try and convey how the skipper of a boat in a race must focus on everything from the adjacent boat to what is going on in the distance…

This was a wedding present to my late sister and her husband and is a base relief carved in 22mm MDF from a drawing by Eric Gill, artist and
the typographer who gave us Gill Sans and Gill Transport (London Underground).

The Haiku at the bottom of this piece is the source of the title of this blog – multimedia 1995

A work in progress after a holiday in Morocco, the largest canvas I’ve tried at about 5.5 feet 4.3 feet, Acrylic.

And what of Architecture? I had studied Technical Drawing at school and I occasionally produced some illustrations for my father’s work and although I was heavily influenced him in many ways, I was not strong enough at maths to follow him into engineering and despite his disdain for architects generally, he admired Frank Lloyd Wright who made his students go out into the desert and build their own buildings. And so, briefly, I considered Architecture until I read “that book” Instead, I eventually worked as a jobbing signwriter for many years – an applied art, where you get to develop your own style and inject a modicum of creativity into every job – more of that in later posts. However, in a life-changing moment, I broke my hip in a car crash, spent a year on crutches and could no longer work up ladders so a change of direction beckoned. A friend of mine in Ireland, where I was living at the time, got me a job part-time, teaching Modelmaking to Interior Architecture students in the Engineering Department of Sligo Technical College (now a university I believe). Nothing fancy like finished building models but rather, how to think in 3D – so lots of cereal packets and Sellotape! Whilst doing this, I had the chance to first learn, and then teach AutoCad which is the computer version of the Technical Drawing I had learnt at school. Eventually, we moved back to England to see more of our growing grandchildren and AutoCad enabled me to get a job as a professional draughtsman starting at the ripe old age of 50! A few years later I worked in an architect’s office for a year or so – the oldest one there and yet the office junior. Along the way, I designed a house in Ireland which got built and designed the converted stables which is now our house and I have been the draughtsman for a Mosque in Bradford for the last eight years (mosque building is an incremental affair as funds are raised).

A house that one of my AutoCAD evening class students asked me to design for a lovely site he had bought. He subsequently sold the site and the design (which I had got through planning) to somebody else, who dropped some of the features and built it. This is a common story for architects, the clients making changes – anyway, I visited the house when the outside was complete and they were just finishing decorating inside – so that’s another one off the bucket list – a house designed and built…

Our house before and after – a “stable-conversion” which had been used as a workshop fo decades and which I redesigned as a house….

So despite the non-choices I made when contemplating what to do with my life, I have, amongst many other things, worked in an Engineering Department like my father, painted a body of pictures and dabbled in Architecture after all…

How would you know…

Month: April 2025

A to Z 2025 Challenge – Business, Books and Barbara…

A to Z 2025 Challenge – Art and Architecture