Notting Hill Carnival romance

Hippy crack canisters. I can see
blue sea, golden sand, palm tree

This year's Notting Hill Carnival is ending. I clamber out over the front garden railings as the gate is wired shut in order to stop complete strangers using the front basement area as a latrine. (Someone uses the gate itself as a bottle opener.)

I sit on a nearby low wall which, like the pavement, is covered in detritus. A large sausage bitten at one end lies near me on the wall. A young white man picks it up and walks off eating it.

I go for a wander. A barefoot girl manages to keep her hat on while vomiting.

It's impossible to keep drawing - people want to chat.

Then I'm joined by my friend who has spent the last two days dancing and helping to manage a float.

An observer

While she goes off to dance some more I am a staring point of stillness on the corner.

A tall neatly-dressed young red-headed man rounds the corner, stops, tilts his head, raises an eyebrow and offers me his arm. In a different dream I go with him.

On Beach Blanket Babylon's territory

My friend returns. We become joyful mudlarks pouncing on Caribbean flags and glittery treasure in the gutter.


Uses for the Financial Times, part 4

Protecting the kitchen table from stuff we found in the gutter after the Notting Hill Carnival.

I handled it with latex gloves and laundered the washable items, don't worry.

Uses for the Financial Times, part 3

To denote gravitas.

Nicola Streeten (who wrote the award-winning graphic novel Billy, Me and You and co-founded Laydeez do Comics with Sarah Lightman) used the FT as a symbol of high seriousness on which to rest her speech notes at the Graphic Medicine conference at Sussex University in July.

 

 

Being drawn from an uncomfortable position: the artist as model, part 2

Artists' models are like public lavatories, engaged or vacant. 

I'm at the Newlyn School of Art, working at being the kind of model I want in front of me when I'm drawing.

There's a lot to think about. Hair, jewellery, lipstick; fabric to make pools of colour. I grab a bright yellow book from the shelves for a stab of citrus. Eek - there's a snail on it. 

The star of the day turns out to be my Indian cotton sequinned loose trousers from a market in Cannes, very Matisse. It feels very daring to put clothes on.

Sunblock. The morning sunlight streams through the high schoolroom windows.

Stillness. A quarter-inch shift in my position is seismic. I can't turn to look at my hand but thumb and forefinger feel about three miles apart.



At the start of a long pose the body is light. Then it sinks and solidifies. To counter that, you imagine it filled it with swansdown, whipped egg white.

Sometimes the statue speaks. 'Degas,' I say helpfully as I go into the pose of his 14-year-old ballet dancer, arms down straight behind me. 

'Don't tread in that!' I yell as someone is about to put his foot on a splat of blue acrylic paint.

I wonder if I'll wake up and realise that I am naked in front of all these people.




I rearrange my snowdrift self. I plan two poses ahead. Short dynamic fanciful poses, long supposedly tranquil poses. You can subtly shift your centre of gravity without people noticing. You learn to pass the pain from one part of your body to another. Even so it is going to take my back three days to recover.

The teacher is Rose Hilton. Rose is revered by her students. It's fun. Time races.

I think of a short poem (brace, brace) I wrote long ago called Galatea which I thought was about some guy but turns out to be about the trippy and intense experience of modelling:

Although you've kicked away the pedestal
I will not fail or falter now
For here, raised disproportionately tall
To see, longer, further, the altered horizon,
I float,
Although marble.

I got a nice email from one of the students afterwards. She said I was a fantastic model. 'Mind you, we had this trapeze artist once...'

All pictures here are by the students.

Sitting for Rose Hilton: the artist as model

Brushmarks on glass in Rose's studio

I am in Rose Hilton's conservatory in Cornwall.

She rootles through her pastels. 'Ooh, where are my whites? I'm going to run out,' she coos, surveying my glistening alabaster, my Antarctic shelves.








 
Rose and her beau settle down to sketch me. A vine with darkening grapes shades the worst of the sun and I re-apply factor 30 during short breaks. Rose is slender and elegant in a chartreuse linen dress.

My left leg goes numb. I stand on it with all my weight. The leg returns. 

Next day I sit for Rose in her Victorian schoolroom studio in Newlyn.

Rose is abstractly figurative. Her effects this morning are gauzy, dreamy and luscious.

We chat. 'You've got pepper and salt in you,' says Rose. 'Do you wear stockings?'

An artist's studio has its own codes. A factory preserving a mystery. It's dangerous to interrupt the collusion between artist and model, but Rose is expecting visitors. A young friend of hers has asked if he may drop in. He's bringing a hearty cricket-playing Australian.

A tap on the door. 'Come in,' trills Rose.

I am wearing coral leather driving gloves, a freshwater pearl necklace and lipstick. I am sitting on a velvet chaise longue. The weather is hot, the studio pleasantly airy.

I am motionless and silent but appear to be emanating a force field which roots the visitors to the doorway. I think of cartoon characters spatchcocked against a wall.

'I'm afraid I don't know much about cricket,' says Rose as she carries on painting. Dab dab pink dab white.

I say that I used to live next door to Phil Edmonds. It doesn't lead anywhere.

I try to be helpful: 'Slow left arm spin bowler.'

Dab dab dab.

Of course, this is just the view from the chaise longue. I can't tell if horror and pity are somewhere in the reaction. The artist's model is patinated with the victimhood of centuries. 

The situation eases. Chitchat ensues. The model falls silent.

'Right,' says Rose, 'I've finished for the day.

'Are you sure?' I ask, flexing my right hand (pins and needles).

'Yes.'

I peel off my gloves and get dressed.

We all leave the studio. Our visitors walk towards the sea.

It's no big deal.

The Maenads would have torn them apart with bloody hands.

Supreme Court Art: the Privy Council and being prepared

I'd been avoiding the Privy Council.

The Thing sometimes lurks there. People from overseas jurisdictions arguing for the right to carry out a sentence of capital punishment.

But here I am in Court 3, where the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council sits. Behind me is a picture frame that looks like a giant rib cage after the heart within it exploded. 

 On my journey in, a bus driver traps a frail elderly woman's arm as he closes the doors impatiently, and hurts her. The conductress (it's a new-style Routemaster) freezes and stares in the opposite direction. I harangue the driver. The woman's companion harangues the driver. He is silent and avoids eye contact. I assume he's been trained not to apologise for fear of admitting liability. It's very hot. The woman doesn't wish to make a formal complaint. Where does our duty to other people begin and end?

Are you prepared to catch me if I fall?

That is the first line of a poem written by a prisoner  in the latest copy of Allies, the  newsletter of the charity Prisoners Abroad - 'caring for Britons held overseas and their families'. (Not normally death row cases.)

Lord Neuberger hosted a reception for this charity at the Royal Courts of Justice back in January. And now he is rather disconcertingly sitting beneath a portrait of William Mainwaring (1735-1821), MP for Middlesex, whose electoral opponent sought an inquiry into prison abuses. Mainwaring made sure there was no inquiry.

The Thing isn't here today. In Cukurova Finance International Limited and another v Alfa Telecom Turkey Limited, the latter lent the former $1.352 billion; it went wrong and the finance company claims that it was stitched up in the New York courts. I've been programmed to feel sick every time I hear the words 'Deutsche Bank' so I'm not having a great time.





When I leave, the sound of the celebratory peal of bells from the Abbey smashes against the hard surfaces of Westminster and bounces off again. A birth. Funny old world. Still got people in it like Clive Stafford Smith and all the other death row campaigners with perpetually exploding hearts.

Supreme Court art: what is a terrorist?

I arrive early but they've already started - what's happening? It's Lord Hope's valediction: he is retiring today. Grandchildren and a teddy bear are in the front row.

A speaker points out that, for counsel, appearing in the Supreme Court can be 'among the most alarming and potentially intimidating' of experiences (and later today the judges do make counsel's ears go pink).

Lord Hope does not look in urgent need of retirement. He ruminates: 'Ten minutes from time you're extracted from the maul by the referee and shown the red card...I do regret this is all over.'

After amiable speeches, the crowd departs and the continuing echo of 9/11 is analysed in legal abstraction. In R v Gul, does the Terrorism Act 2000 catch military attacks by a non-state armed group on state or inter-governmental organisation armed forces in a non-international armed conflict? Be careful what you upload on YouTube.

Lady Hale enquires into the logic of the argument. 'So why can the Prime Minister not be stopped and searched by the police?'

Had any activists been in court, there would have been a rafter-rending cheer. I think of the armed police outside Tony Blair's house in Connaught Square. And who parked the red sports car with the number plate 1 RAQ there?

Rootling quietly in my art bag, I disturb the kitchen timer with which I time life-class poses. The movement makes it start ticking rapidly, like the heart of a shrew. I can't turn it off. The only thing about my person with adequate sound insulating properties is my person. I sit on the timer, feeling like the crocodile in Peter Pan.

In the café, counsel snap up souvenirs at the till with their snacks. One buys two pens, a china mug and a Christmas tree bauble (the cashier gently takes it out of its box and inspects it in her palm, as my mother would examine each egg in a box before buying it).

Perched by the window outside Court 1, where you used to be able to watch the late Brian Haw protesting from his Parliament Square complex, I speed-draw Westminster Abbey.

An aeroplane crosses the view. I should have drawn it, to commemorate the queasy shock of seeing one in the sky after the temporary flight ban was lifted in 2001.

A generality of soft human beings is wafting around. How can you protect people from people?

More pictures if you scroll down.