Another Slice of Cake

A while ago I covered the wonders of cake making competitions in my home town's agricultural show. I think I forgot to mention at the time that a young woman, newly arrived in the nearby town of Yass, enquired about entering the sponge cake competition in that town's show. The comment she got in reply? "You're either very good or very brave".

Anyway, as I've never been brave or good  enough to enter such things, I have no idea whether Alice Thomas Ellis is right when she comments thus in her book Gallimaufry:

"Cake making held an inordinately important place in the cookery of the time [the writer's childhood] and there were competitions at local shows and garden parties for the finest Victoria Sponge or the lightest scone. There still are cake competitions at church bazaars, agricultural fairs, et cetera, but they have a faintly anachronistic air and I don't think passions run so high as they once did."

The intensity of imaginative effort, however misguided, displayed in the entries in Canberra Show's Gallipoli themed cakes competition suggests there may be more life left in the old dog than Ellis thought, even if is a very odd kind of life indeed:

Biedermeier Exhibition - National Gallery of Slovakia

Our guide book had promised that the gallery in Bratislava held a Caravaggio, plus examples of the work of one or two other big hitters of the gallery world. I didn't find them, but some sort of renovation is going on, which may have been the reason, (or my incompetence, equally likely).

Anyway, on an upper floor I did find an exhibition about the Biedermeier movement, which I've never really understood. Although I still don't really, despite going round the whole exhibition, I'd recommend going along yourself, should you happen to be in Bratislava with an hour or two to spare.

I think the thesis the curators are putting forward is that Biedermeier emerged at a time when the home became more important and the way it was furnished became a more important expression of individuality - and family and being comfortable all together in the house also became more important. 

I'm not convinced that I've got that quite right, but anyway they also seemed to be putting forward some kind of argument that all of this led to more portraiture. Unfortunately, the portraits weren't particularly interesting, except perhaps this one, but only because of the dog:

Painted by Josef Ziegler, it is a portrait of Elisabeth Erdody, who may be related to Count Erdody, of whom there is a terrific photograph in Zagreb. In it, he is doing his party trick, which is leaping over a park bench. I have a copy at home and I'll dig it out when I get home and put it into a post here, provided I remember.

I'm guessing that, if I've got the feeling-more-comfortable-at-home-and-becoming-more-cosy-as-families argument right, this painting of a family that is part of the exhibition shows them in the before rather than post Beidermeier stage:

It makes me think of Kantor's Dead Class, which I saw at the Adelaide Festival about a hundred years ago and is still one of the best things I've ever seen at the theatre.

I liked some of the pictures of town and street scenes, again sometimes partly on account of the dogs included:

 Sadly, Bratislava has lost the peaceful look of these scenes and the park from which the picture was painted is now overbuilt with hideous blocks of flats. The city has been sadly unlucky in its recent planners.

A couple of the pictures I liked because they were scenes that I know (the Stephansplatz and the Praterallee in Vienna), plus I thought my mother might be interested in the way the horses and carriages were put together, harness-wise, (and there were some dogs included as a bonus, at least in the one of the Stephansplatz):

The exhibition also provides tantalising glimpses of a couple of private sketchbooks, together with the rest of the images in the books being shown on an Ipad within the glass museum case, (the images are on a perpetual loop, and I think it would be extremely nice if the museum could put these images onto its website as well, as they are really wonderful, giving you a sense that you are seeing into the domestic lives of the families they belonged to):

I liked the rather naive, (both in style and name), "Gala Performance of the Police and Firemen of Banska Stiavnica and Banska Bela, 1846":

There was also a case of German 19th century greetings cards. They were actually described as a "Set of cards with congratulations, 1820-1840", but I'm not sure congratulations were exactly what they were all wishing. A lot of them were designed to move if you tugged at a little cardboard tab. It's remarkable they've survived in such good condition:

This one I find especially baffling

I cant make much sense of this one

The exhibition runs for several months at the National Gallery of Slovakia. I wouldn't have missed it. It is really well put together and enjoyable.

A Second Week of Wonders

This week the things I wondered about included:

1. Whether the slightly chubby T-shirted teenage boy walking down my local shopping street on Saturday afternoon was trying to impress his very pretty female companion when he leaned his head close to hers and burped very loudly in her ear. Or was it just nervous misplaced energy? My advice is that it is very unlikely to be a winning gambit, should any would-be swains happen to be reading this blog.

2. Whether I'm the only person in the world who much prefers this hawk wearer to this one:

who appeared in the hateful "How to Spend it" magazine, (objectionable on both moral grounds - don't spend it give it away; and financial ones - don't spend it, invest it, you loons).

3. Whether Maryon Stewart, who, as a result of her daughter dying after taking something called a 'legal high' , has campaigned for a blanket prohibition of all dangerous substances, understands that prohibition doesn't work.

'No-one should be allowed to sell substances that can harm mental wellbeing or rob people of their lives', she is quoted as saying, and she seems to have succeeded in persuading the British government she is right, (except when it comes to the substances that can have that effect that are already legal and creating employment and revenue for a number of people).

I think she is utterly misguided - and so is the prohibition of all substances, however harmful, (no, scratch that, I do draw the line at radioactive material, but I'm not sure that that is ever going to find a recreational use). The money and effort spent on trying to prevent people getting their hands on various substances should be spent instead on education - and more education and yet more education.

The aim - which is no-one abusing themselves with drugs or anything else - will never be reached. Humanity has a perverse desire - that is to say some members of humanity - to go to hell in a handcart, (in this context, I remember two little girls who visited my family in the country one afternoon; my stepfather looked on as they rushed to an electric fence time and again to touch it and get the horrid jolt it gave them; 'If they're like this now', he remarked, 'what sorts of thrills will they be needing by the time they're teenagers?') - and trying to prevent them will not work.

There are always going to be people who take pleasure in abusing themselves. There will also be some people who think it might be fun and harmless to experiment - and they are the ones who can be reached and prevented from endangering themselves with money redirected towards education. This has been demonstrated - at least in Australia - by the way in which smoking has been reduced so that now only a fraction of the population make the decision to keep puffing away.

Ultimately, mad though it seems to make the decision to keep smoking - or to do anything that endangers oneself - each of us has our own life and we must be allowed to take responsibility for making our own decisions. The one and only thing the government and the rest of us can and should do is ensure that our choices are made from a thoroughly informed position.

The alternative - prohibition and the criminalisation of people who make bad choices - damages society, creating opportunities for organised crime. Where there are crime syndicates, there is always corruption, and corruption is the root of all the world's problems. That is to say, if you look at any country that is not working well, that is in need of aid, that is provoking quantities of its citizens to seek refugee status elsewhere, I guarantee you will find that the country lacks good governance.

And, to go back to the frantic but misguided efforts of Maryon Stewart, a genuinely sad, grieving mother, for whom I have nothing but sympathy, her crusade shows no understanding of human behaviour and is therefore genuinely pointless. If I didn't believe that before, I became absolutely one hundred per cent convinced of it when I went to the Ikea in Bristol the other day.

This was not because a trip to Ikea is likely to make anyone end up thinking that almost any enterprise is hopeless - not at all; I'm rather fond of Ikea (mind you, I'm not the one in the family who does battle with the Allen keys and Delphic instructions). No, it was what I saw in the carpark as Iwewere leaving that made me realise that, no matter how much we try to take care of everyone, to save each individual from his or her self, there will always be ways that people will find to damage themselves and there will always be those who are hellbent on doing dangerous things.

It was while watching some young men on roller blades do the most terrifying stunts down the concrete stairs in the Bristol Ikea carpark, (stunts that made you wince and grimace with horror, so close did they come to breaking every bone in their bodies), that I came to this conclusion. They were having such fun and being so unbelievably reckless that it was actually unpleasant to watch. I was glad when we drove away, so that I didn't have to see the next crazy leap, the one that would probably end in a skull smashing, brain spilling disaster.

Unless we propose abolishing all concrete stairs, all rollerblades, anything on which anyone could possibly be reckless, the enterprise Mrs Stewart is advocating - the protection by government of all people from all forms of  devil -may-care, idiotic-behaviour-created harm - is doomed.

Shocked

Having read about the film Timbuktu at That's How the Light Gets In, I decided to see where it might be screening in Belgium.

I was really dismayed when I discovered that not only was I unlikely to see the film here, due to opposition from the new men of violence in our world, but an entire film festival appears to have been cancelled for the same reason. 

I thought we were free. I thought we didn't let people use threats of violence to dictate to us what we should and shouldn't see. I thought that was one of the elements of our way of life that we held most precious.

A Week of Wonders

This week I discovered Georgian polyphonic singing. A group of men - these are they - wearing black tunics with white trimmings, (some of which looked as if they were designed to hold spare gun cartridges), plus glossy black leather boots and metre-long curved swords tucked into their belts, (don't worry they were sheathed - in beautifully tooled scabbards), appeared at a Georgian party and started belting out strange, beautiful songs. Their voices were flawless, and the music, in that peculiar way that music can, managed to convey inarticulable, haunting things about huge swathes of empty countryside, steep bare slopes and icy gales.

Before making the acquaintance of this cultural wonder, I went on a long car journey, always a good way of provoking myself to engage in pointless speculation.

My first speculation was provoked by looking out the window during long intervals stuck in slowly moving traffic in various provincial towns. It was about skateboarding - I found myself wondering whether there is an age beyond which it becomes totally ludicrous to hurtle down pavements using your skateboard as a mode of transport. I didn't reach any firm conclusion on this, (possibly nought years old - unless you wear a baseball cap backwards, in which case maybe, at a squeeze, twelve and a half?)

My second speculation was a recurring one - I wondered yet again about why I didn't choose linguistics as a subject to study. It would make sense, since I am almost perpetually wondering, (not always in the foreground of my mind, but the questions burble away somewhere in the background rather a lot), why different languages express things in different ways.

For example, why, in Dutch, if you want to say that you are cold or hot, do you need to use a construction that states that you HAVE cold or warmth? Why in Hungarian do they have different forms of the verb to distinguish whether the sentence refers to something definite or indefinite? Why do most European languages have an intimate and a formal form of "you" when English only has the formal, (actually that one is easy according to French friends of mine - we are cold people [we do not merely have cold, please notice, we ARE cold] and thus we do not want an intimate form.)

I did actually reach a conclusion re my wondering about whether I should have taken a linguistics kind of path. I decided, as I think I may have done all those years ago, when I was choosing what I wanted to study, that these questions are fascinating but that they can never be answered.

Another question that can never be answered is whether we white Australians ought to have left Australia and its Indigenous people completely alone, establishing no settlement on that land mass, leaving them be, as sometimes happens now when a new people are discovered, (there is a tribe somewhere in the Amazonian rainforest that has been spotted from the air but a decision has been taken not to make contact with them, for the tribe's sake, which is another thing I often wonder about).

It is certainly true that many of the consequences of white settlement have been very bad for Aboriginal people - and, yes, I do know that not all of them have been intentional and that over many years the government has made huge efforts to try to put things right. I'm not assigning blame; I'm simply stating the facts.

Anyway, on Tuesday it was impossible not to wonder about the condition of Australian Aboriginals and what might or might not have been had history been different. On that day, I went to Harelbeke Cemetery, not far from Oudenaarde, in Flanders, to visit the grave of  Private Rufus Rigney.

Poor Rigney. He was terribly young, (only 17 when he died - presumably he lied about his age, and at that stage in the war, [1916], possibly the authorities were inclined to turn a blind eye to such things). Having got mumps on arrival at Plymouth, been deployed upon recovery and then wounded by shrapnel at Trones Wood, taken back to England to recover and then returned to the front and the first battle of Passchendale, where he was again wounded, he was captured and treated by the Germans, but died four days later, (on 16th October, 1917). He was buried in Iseghem, a German military cemetery. In 1924, his body was moved to Harelbeke, a British cemetery.

Who knows what inspired the boy to become part of the war in Europe. It may have been patriotism or the thought of adventure or the prospect of good pay. According to the Department of Veterans' Affairs in Australia, the army was one of the few places that Indigenous Australians were treated as equals at the time - and paid as equals. Whatever the reason for his decision, I felt very sad, standing in front of his gravestone on a cold, grey, windy day so far from where he was born.

Elsewhere

I thought I was getting too dull with some of my preoccupations here and so I've taken them away to another place - more precisely to Pinterest.

Thus, my interest in faces on buildings is now being indulged at this link

My compulsive desire to detail every painting I ever like in any gallery I ever go to is being dealt with here and here (the latter an outlet for my fondness for animals in the background of pictures).

Over there at Pinterest, I'm also gathering a collection of decorations on Belgian buildings and, my absolute favourite, a collection of Belgian chip signs Both perfectly useless but they give me pleasure - and I hope they may give someone else a bit of pleasure too.

(And, while on the subject of pointless, I have also removed all my rantings and ravings about how things should be edited and why commas change meaning to an instagram account called absentproof  It makes me feel much, much better - I think the scientific term is 'venting')

So from now on there may be fewer posts here, but they will at least be stone face, endless paintings and above all Belgian chip sign free. Which has to be a relief all round, surely.

Repetition

I apologise if I've mentioned this before, but I've been going through my notes and found an anecdote that amuses me - and I always think it'sworth passing on things that may, however fleetingly, brighten someone else's day.

I first discovered it when I was reading an introduction Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote for someone else's book. In the course of that piece he mentions that, when leaving Osbert Sitwell's house once, he encountered Edith Sitwell in the hall:

'I remember Edith [Sitwell] saying that it was a pity people had stopped having a china bowl left for visiting cards on the hall table. I asked why and she said, "Oh, I always used to pinch a handful and drop them on their worst enemies. It stirred things up."'

Mayhem - the stuff of a hundred Whitehall farces - must have ensued, I imagine.