Drawing Pandemonia

The paparazzi shots of Pandemonia don't prepare you for her breathtaking sweep into the room.

Flawless, kind to animals and sought-after for the front row - Pandemonia is a post-modern fairytale princess. I have been invited to her airy white central London penthouse, where the clear light bounces off her milky skin.

She shakes hands delicately. I feel gormless but Snowy is an ice-breaker. Pandemonia was enchanted to find him left on her doorstep one day. 'His bark is worse than his bite,' she purrs. 'At fashion shows you never get a squeak out of him. Even people who are terrified of dogs are not scared of Snowy. He is an ambassador for the canine world.'

Is it possible to make acquaintances in the front row? Pandemonia gently refers to Jake Chapman, Harry Blain, Margo Stilley, Agyness Deyn, Livia Firth... 'Brix Smith and I swapped dogs. She has a little black pug which got its grubby pawprints on me! I was glad to get Snowy back...' 


Pandemonia is a stranger to dishevelment. Her plumptious hair inspires envy. She has ambitions to create an eponymous scent when time allows: 'It will be an improvement on nature, more perfect than perfect can be.'

I ask how much Pandemonia owes to Hitchcock blondes.
'Of course, blonde hair shows up better on film. I've been offered a few roles but so far they haven't been quite right.'

She glances down from her penthouse window and sighs: 'I am a walking logo.'

'Look at that Burger King logo on the poster over there,' she adds alarmingly. 'Blue, yellow, red - you can see it right across the road.'

I admire the simplicity of her accessories and she points out: 'My blue handbag is a symbol of power.'

Does her disciplined chic owe something to an earlier icon? Pandemonia is reluctant to go down this road.

I am using the wrong materials to draw her. I think of Jane Eyre, when her self-esteem is at its worst, forcing herself to draw her glossy rival Blanche Ingram:

...draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully, without softening one defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.'

Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory...mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imagine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest lines...

Pandemonia surveys my lumpen drawing: 'Are you overcooking it?'

http://www.pandemonia99.com

On the pavement with the chewing gum man

Ben Wilson paints enamel miniatures on the flattened discs of gum defiling our pavements.

When he meets me in Notting Hill I'm in attention-seeking mood. I suggest setting up outside an embassy. 'I want a quiet life,' says Ben, so we compromise on Bayswater Road, near the Russian visa office. Two policemen approach.

Are we in for a rumble? No chance. One officer beams and hails Ben: 'Hello! I'm from Haringey!' He tells his colleague that Ben is well known for his street art there. Ben wants inspiration. 'Ah,' says the colleague, 'if it helps, we've just won our first gold medal. Ladies' rowing.'

Ben prepares his white enamel ground: as he sets it with a blowtorch it blisters like frying egg white. He builds up layers of colour fixed with a cigarette lighter and car lacquer. We don't know how many women are involved, so Ben paints six naked ladies. It turns out there are just two - Helen Glover, Heather Stanning.

'I'm trying to make sense of representative art in the twenty-first century,' says Ben. 'I thought about hiding a little Russian in the picture but I can't be arsed.'

We have fish and chips at Portobello Gold. The barman glances at Ben's Jackson Pollock trousers and asks: 'Did you manage to get any of it on the canvas, sir?'

Then we settle outside Themes and Variations, a furniture shop in Westbourne Grove downwind of the in-store fragrance pumped out by Ralph Lauren's air conditioning. A pair of tourists pounce on Ben: 'You're famous in Italy!' A uniformed Olympics volunteer from Lincoln bounds up: 'Wicked! I've seen your programme on BBC3!' A Dutch couple admire his work: 'Here's something for a cup of coffee,' says one.

He has notebooks filled with requests for street miniatures. The people asking range from teenage boys in graffiti gangs ('If I don't tag the pavement they tag me - I end up with tags all over my clothes') to the bereaved seeking to commemorate the dead.

'I get to know everyone,' he says. 'If I get on the bus I know all their stories.'

Ben paints on bricks as well. His next exhibition is at Julian Hartnoll, Duke Street St James's, in October.

Westbourne Grove

To the Supreme Court, then veering away

Lord Sumption 
from afar

Fry's Five Boys was a chocolate bar which offended me when I was a child. There was only one grimacing infant, photographed five times. Bar and wrapper said: Desperation, Pacification, Expectation, Acclamation, Realization - "It's Fry's". 

I learned from it that life was about some foolish grown-up imposing the wrong words in the wrong order. It was discontinued when the Sex Pistols arrived. There is nothing of the chocolate bar about the five law lords but I have an atavistic moment. 

Lord Hope

I'm sitting at the back, unable to see faces clearly, miles away across the tundra. 


British Airways plc v Williams and others is about pilots' holiday pay. QCs are hurling the kitchen sink at the issues. 'Habitats Directive'...'dredging rights'...'complicated Dutch competition case'... Three people notice that they are being sketched from afar. Each puts a hand up to his face. 

Lord Mance

At lunchtime I clean charcoal off my hands, face and shoulders. I eat a prawn sandwich and a Kit Kat in the basement cafe. The leading QC is asked, 'Still or sparkling?' He comments to his colleague that sparkling is a bad choice when you're on your feet. 


I meet a friend who has come from the volunteer Olympic drivers' Park Lane operations room. Things there are tense: it's the phoney war. Her Swatch Olympic watch, designed not to set off security alarms, sets off the Supreme Court security alarm. 

Lord Walker

Out in the sun we spot shiny Olympic BMWs being driven round Parliament Square en route to the stadium. Their Munich-controlled satnav has a left-leaning tendency. You can tell which drivers give the satnav credence: they are the ones who suddenly barge to the right (desperation) to avoid being swept up to Trafalgar Square and ignominy. 


I am off topic. But the volunteer Olympic drivers have each been issued with a time-killing 'game' (pacification) of such crassness that I reproduce the first page here:

Drawing at the Supreme Court

There was a big moth on the carpet when I looked in on the Equitable Life trial in the High Court, hoping to squeeze some entertainment value out of my ex-pension. A regular told me it stayed there for days, getting deader and deader.

Court usher

No dead moth would stand a chance in the Supreme Court: this is high-maintenance five-star accommodation, with oil paintings, stained glass and carved oak public benches upholstered in bottle-green imitation leather (or is it real? I didn't sniff it). Students, dazed tourists and self-conscious schoolchildren come and go. 

Knives aren't allowed so I forget about trying to sharpen charcoal pencils and end up smearing my face with burnt sticks as usual. You need telescopic sights for an adequate view of the law lords; I get engrossed in the backs of wigs instead. It would be appropriate, but frowned on, to draw with tacky, lanolin-scented, yellowing sheepswool dipped in a saucer of black ink. Or, failing that, a goose-feather quill.

Laura John,
Monckton Chambers

Your drawing materials must be silent: the High Court hubbub of multiple keyboards and fidgeting isn't present here. I keep rasping to a minimum - no extravagant sweeps across the paper, just polite little sketchy-sketchy movements. When you stand for the law lords to enter and depart, the silence is cosmic. You could be in the velvet depths of outer space. Or at prayer. As the leading QC possibly is.

The appeal, BCL Old Co Limited and others v BASF plc and others, is fiercely technical, about the timing of a dispute involving a vitamins-for-pigs cartel. The QC, on his feet all day before a firing-squad of five law lords, explores the accepted methods of contradiction. 'With respect, not, my lord,' is a good one. 

It's mesmerising. Lord Mance catches a famous courtroom echo when he says, 'One might comment that the tribunal would say that.' [Yoof please note: he's harking back to Mandy Rice-Davies. Now use a search engine as I'm tired of explaining things.]

Lord Phillips from a distance

I go to the bright white basement cafe for lunch. I eat a small plastic-packed cold pasta salad with olives, sun-dried tomatoes and basil, and a Wispa.

In the afternoon session, a law lord uses 'begs the question' to mean 'raises the question'. It used to mean 'avoids the question'.  Another distinction in the language flutters its wings feebly, like a dying moth. 

Lord Walker from a distance

On a housekeeping note, there is inadequate provision of lavatories for lawyers and public alike - what were the architects thinking? We need quantity, not fancy unisex cubicles with a Dyson hand drier inside - and adding a mirror is just asking for trouble.

Lord Wilson from a distance

Supreme Court carpet

Lord Mance from a distance when my
blood sugar is low

Drawing at the Leveson Inquiry

Court official

When grandees such as Tony Blair were on, people queued from 4am to get into the public gallery. Today there's no queue to speak of.

'Who's on?' I ask.
'Just journalists. And Jon Snow.'

'What was the best day at the inquiry?' I ask a cameraman.

'Max Mosley.'

There's chitchat among the tricoteuses in the public gallery:

'Rebekah Brooks...'
'If she's charged...'
'Can't stand that woman.'
'She came in and looked several people straight in the eye.'



Lord Justice Leveson

'Jay [Robert Jay QC, lead barrister to the Inquiry] has reputedly earned half a million pounds for this. He's worth it. It's public money. My money.'
'I wanted to say to Jay, why don't you really attack Blair?'
'Because Blair's got a legal background, that's why.'
'I need a small child to gnaw. I'm starving.'



Peter Riddell, formerly
of the FT and The Times

My optician says I'm top gun standard. And today I need it because I'm a long way from my targets across Courtroom 73.
I'm messing around with a portable, court-friendly but inadequate drawing kit and reduced to sharpening pencils into my pencil case.







'Will the court rise,' says the clerk, and a mouse's nest of pencil shavings falls on the floor. Sorry.

Court official

Now for a bit of glamour. The harsh fluorescent light bounces off Jon Snow's cheekbones. They are as defined as scimitars. No wonder he's on the telly.



Andrew Grice, The Independent

' "What is truth, said Pontius Pilate",' says Jon Snow, almost quoting Francis Bacon.

'Jesting,' growl two pedants in the public seats, one of them me.

We can hear a helicopter and seagulls.

Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday



Lord Justice Leveson

Philip Webster,
The Times

A glance back at the Occupy London camps

Me

A wraith from Occupy removes the ice-pick from its skull just long enough to rebuke the others for not rebuking me. My crime is to write about what I see, rather than what I am told I am seeing.

'Tell her that Occupy is a horizontal movement,' whispers the wraith. (Horizontal in this context means leaderless, with nobody aspiring to have power over others inside the organisation.)

Occupy is a horizontal movement. As am I.

While I was visiting the Occupy camps, I recorded what I saw but I left some things out because people worried about their mothers:
'You won't draw the cigarette, will you.'
'You're not going to write that you can smell dope, are you.'

At the Finsbury Square camp, Ella (see previous post) made a drawing on a scrap of newspaper for me.

Ella's drawing

Rupert drawn by me

After I drew Rupert at the St Paul's camp in December, he drew me. The fag was his idea. It tasted horrible. Despite the smoke in his drawing, it was unlit. 


But the tears of blood for Occupy are accurate.

Me drawn by Rupert

And Amy (8) drew me in the crypt of St Paul's. She called her drawing 'The Happy Artist.'

Mud and beauty: the last of Occupy London at Finsbury Square

E and Lee

In the High Court on Tuesday, bad-glamour-boy E tried to clamber into the judge’s empty seat and was ejected from the court.

I make a final visit to the camp. E has only ever been in a haze in my company, so he says we’re getting married. He asks me for a double portrait of him and Lee.

Double portraits are hell. You have to get both faces right. E giggles at the result: ‘I look like my dad.’ We go through an entire relationship in the few seconds it takes to hug goodbye.

Harjeet has her bright proselytising eyes on local communities: ‘What a great discussion to have, about how we want the world to be in the future.’

Harjeet

Roaring-boy blond-bombshell Johnny Teatent, aka Tom, dropped out of a philosophy course and won’t be going back. ‘Teatent’ in this context isn't about cucumber sandwiches: it’s the Occupy hangout for the homeless, the disaffected or the alienated.

Tom is wearing jeans decorated with scarlet spray-paint. He glares at his phone: ‘More emails. I want more emails.’

He’s built a barricade out of inner-city detritus, aspiring to a glorious last stand against the bailiffs. I think of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys without a Wendy. Two Portaloos, a bonfire in a brazier, a mains water pipe, adrenaline and testosterone are inside the barricade.

Tom feels sidelined by the Occupy cadre; he's impatient with members whose souls yearn for flip-charts and meetings about the names of meetings [sic]: ‘Occupy’s press strategy is completely xxxxed,’ he says. ‘Look at this fortress. Look over there at London’s big iconic buildings. It’s like Asterix. It’s like a World War Two outpost. It’s got to be on the news. They’re directing me to stop people lobbing bricks when the police come. Why the xxxx should I bother. The camp’s been co-opted by people who want it to be a talking shop. I don’t do that.’

Ella, Johnny Teatent and fortress

He’s also frustrated by the lack of wi-fi. ‘I tried to go to the library but I had holes in my shoes.’

He flops on a muddy sofa, strums a guitar, dries a saturated pair of trousers over the bonfire.  He takes the drawing: ‘I’ll use it for my propaganda.’

A man says, ‘He looks like James Dean in that picture.’

Ella is 18. By the bonfire, at dusk, she and Lynda, aka Dylan (17), make a heartbreakingly lovely tableau as Ella picks nits out of Lynda’s hair. Head lice like clean hair. ‘I’m good at this. They’ve eaten a lot of your blood,’ she says, throwing them on to the fire one by one. 

‘Finsbury Square is beautiful, a gorgeous little catalyst of love,’ says Ella. ‘It’s beautiful in its own way although some people say it’s a pikey apocalypse training camp. I feel incredibly safe here. It’s beautiful. It’s misunderstood.

Ella and Lynda

‘I find education doesn’t teach you anything any more. I did quite well in school but learned more outside St Paul’s in one day than I did in school. They give you a sentence structure and you can’t have a mind of your own. Education is just another tool for training camps. It teaches you to take orders. There’s a beautiful little established community here. Occupy is beautiful. It has become legend. All these communities coming under one name.

‘It’s not going to be the revolution – too many people are half-hearted. We need to be more organised. Finsbury Square isn’t going to promote that. It’s another big spark towards what will become the revolution. It’s nearly happened. It has to come in the next few years. It’s not necessary for people to come out on the streets now but as more people have less of a choice they’ll care more.’

Jan Molenaer: 'Woman at her toilet', 1633
(that's a nit comb)

Meanwhile, a desiccated faction within Occupy tussles for the right to have elections and grab power. 

The campers have turned a public lawn on Finsbury Square into contaminated mud; the camp looks hostile and irrelevant to passers-by; the cooking area is mesmerisingly filthy. This evening, occupiers are saying:

‘This is bad.’

‘We should have made this a sustainable eco-village. But we didn’t.’

‘This is a shit-hole. We could have won awards for this.’

‘Too much talk and not enough action.’

French sixteenth century
(nit comb left foreground)

Charlie

Charlie came to Finsbury Square after the St Paul’s camp was evicted. ‘I couldn’t handle it for the first couple of weeks. After that I quite liked it. But it was a smaller space with too many people.’

Charlie says he had an advertising business in South London: ‘I can start it again. But I like this life, the alternative way of living.’ He looks around. ‘This became a mess. Everything became too dirty. There was too much anti-social behaviour for our people. Mud is the problem. Cold is all right.’

It’s dark. Office buildings around the square are brightly lit. ‘People can play cards using the other people’s lights,’ says Charlie.

Washing my hands in The Master Gunner, the pub over the road, I turn to a young woman and ask: ‘What do you think about Occupy?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The camp in the square.’

‘I didn’t know that’s what it was called.’

Branding: fail.

‘They started to bring their signs in here,’ she says – I learn that she works behind the bar. ‘Then we heard about epidemics breaking out in the camp. We had to stop them coming in. We had to think about our customers. The campers were just coming in to use the facilities. They’re just people who trash things.’

Campaign to win hearts and minds: fail.

Occupy have been evicted from Finsbury Square. Now what?