10 Mar
Out of the Mists of Time
One can never escape the mists of time, even if the details largely remain obscured.
1. Last night I watched John Hurt reprising his role as the gay icon Quentin Crisp in An Englishman in New York, a role he first portrayed in The Naked Civil Servant.
As a gauche 17 year old studying for my Art 'A' level, I attended Saturday 'life' classes at Goldsmiths College of Art. Before starting, I had assumed that I would be drawing still lifes, arrangements of flowers and vegetables.
I was very wrong!
That first session, seated behind my drawing board, I was astonished, embarrassed even, when a nubile young lady walked in, stepped onto the raised platform and in front of the assembled would-be artists took off here dressing gown and stood before us stark naked. I managed a very good likeness of her head as I peered over the top of my board, but drew nothing below her neck.
A couple of weeks later, just as I'd summoned up courage to explore her body further, she was replaced by a middle-aged woman who'd obviously led a full life of motherhood and unhealthy food, and I was able to capture the rolling mounds of flesh with my pencil.
One morning I noted that our model was quite skinny and had small not very developed breasts. And then I noted the g-string s/he was wearing. Some while later, s/he took a break and came round the group to look at our efforts.
And that was when I met Quentin. As well as being incredibly polite about my no doubt poor effort to capture his likeness, in words I have never forgotten, he also told me, "I must get a new g-string. I've nowhere else to keep my hankie."
2. Yesterday the Guardian carried an obituary of Roger Diski. The name was unfamiliar but he was lauded as a pioneer of ethical travelling, or eco-tourism as it is now known. I realised that Son No.1 had worked in his travel business.
On further reading, I realised that I probably met him in the early 70s when he was running a free school, Freightliners Free School, just behind Kings Cross station in London where some 200 of us were squatting about fifty otherwise derelict houses prior to their renovation by the then Greater London Council.
Those were exciting years; London, and various provincial cities, saw many community initiatives tried on a self-help basis, far removed from the current help yourself ethos of greed.
Roger's first wife Jenny has written a book, The Sixties in which she "convincingly argues that yes, the mid-Sixties to mid-Seventies, were special, mainly because there was an idealism among the young that has never been recaptured."
Yep, I agree, but I don't intend to recount this fulfilling and unconventional phase of my life iin this post.
What you may be interested to hear though is that Roger's daughter, Chloe, is to be our next (second) granddaughter's ‘god’ mother, or "semi-assigned ‘looker after’ in a non religious sense!"
It seems that there's no escaping one's past.
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