Brighton rocks

The old man spotted this and it seems to sum up a soggy Bank Holiday Weekend in Brighton.
Harry is still celebrating his GCSE results, Bill is happy living with his 'professional ladies' in London
and Polly is enjoying the heat in Gibraltar. And currently there's quite a bit of heat.
We were talking to her on Skype and I was distracted by a fundamental thought; how on earth does Skype work? And for free!
I don't even understand how planes fly or a homing pigeon knows where home is, so let's just not go any further.



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Let's go fly a kite

To be honest, this photo wasn't taken by me, or this one,


But since it was such a lovely windy sunny day we took a walk along the seafront and watched all the aerial acrobatics that a giant quaver can produce.


And it was exhilarating watching them all flying around, just missing the surfers. So of course seeing all that exercise made us hungry so


we made a visit to the Brunswick Festival to see Gordon and Elena, who make the best paellas and curries. Business must be good because instead of one enormous pan they had three, plus loads of helpers, chopping, slicing and stirring. In between all their hard work, they gave us a tremendous welcome.

There were also more cupcake stalls than is healthy.


And when did charity shop stuff all become 'vintage'? there was a lot of toot but I grabbed this for £1.60 cos that was all I had.


Then the old man, who has never understood the concept of the thrill of finding a bargain said to the girl on the stall 'oh hang on, I've got some more change'...

Anyway, if you want to buy some gorgeous cakes, for more reasons than just your tummy, come to the coffee morning we are having for Macmillan at the end of September. Don't worry, I will remind you, regularly!

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Summer in the city

The old man and I took our lovely nieces and nephews onto the pier this week.



Although we couldn't get any of them to go on the ghost train (poor Harry) or helter skelter, at least Ella got a tattoo. I feel it is an Aunties duty to cause chaos where ever she goes. We all had ice creams from Maroccos which were delicious and finished the day watching Ferris Bueller's day off.


The ice creams have been arriving fast at our house since the old man bought an ice cream maker. The diet's on hold until we have tried them all. The rhubarb and custard is under construction currently.





Yesterday we tested the raspberry and cream on my sister, she said it was yummy.

The gooseberry ice cream could have been a bit more interesting maybe mixed with some elderflower.

The lemon ice cream was OK.









Grannie's blackcurrants were put to good use.












But the favourite so far is good old strawberries and cream.









They say 'never work with children or animals' but I caught this in Arundel on Pirates Day.

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The men in my life

The Marx Brothers would be on my desert island just to make me laugh.

And the island would be the land of Homer, Ithaca.

Bruce would sing to me. And Captain Scarlett would do Cary Grant impersonations, but not at the same time. A couple of Sporty boys would keep me fit and Sean would remind me of the old man. 

Jonas Kauffman would also sing, I like a sing song.

Pilates Matt

In my quest to 'get better' I go twice a week to the Dolphins for Physiotherapy and swimming. Then I go to Pilates with more physiotherapists who tell me where I'm going wrong. I see my dentist every three months to try and control the wobbly bits. I'm trying, honestly.

Then I realised, its all in the name,

my dentist is Mr Fillery,

my GP is Dr Cramp,

and now my new Physio is Pilates Matt.

What's the likelyhood of that happening, eh?





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Brilliant Emerald or Ruddy Darter?

It was so fast, darting from one neighbours overflowing Greek urn to another neighbours koi carp pond. The dragonfly knew there was absolutely no point stopping at my 'water feature', the dried up river bed which used to trickle away, making anyone in the garden desperate for the loo.

Having given up on the huge variety of pond plants which I watched turn yellow and die in quick succession, Eric mountain is now a home to all the ericaceous plants which I can't grow on chalk. Why do we beat ourselves up trying to grow plants which hate chalk? Anyway on Eric mountain I grow pieris, magnolia stellata and camellia. All of which are no use at all to a dragonfly. They love water but I couldn't even offer the poor thing a muddy puddle.

Another mystery is the lily beetle. Do they laze around underground just waiting for you to come home with some bulbs which they can nibble away so there's nothing to see and you blame yourself for overwatering /underwatering it or forgetting where you planted it or even that you ever had one.

Or you bring the plant home, leave it outside to plant later and the next time you see it, the leaves look like they have been turned into doilies as every one has a series of circles all over it. There are various ways of eradicating them. These include;

Digging up the plant, removing all the soil, washing each flower, every leaf and all the bulbs and replanting in fresh, new sterilised compost. Like that idea? no, I didn't either.

You could go to a plant nursery, if you can find one and buy an evil smelling powder which will probably kill you faster than the lily beetle.

Then there's the nematodes, which you buy online and just hope the beetles are still there (and the lily bulbs by the time they arrive).

The vine weevil has to be treated the same way, but because it's so ugly, you don't mind 'culling' it. By the way these weevils don't just eat vines, vine weevil is a beetle that attacks a wide range of plants, both indoors and outdoors, but especially plants grown in containers. 

It is one of the most common and devastating garden pests. The adult weevils eat plant leaves during spring and summer, but it is the grubs that cause the most damage over autumn and winter when they feed on plant roots, causing wilting, and often plant death. Plants growing in pots or other containers, outdoors or under cover, can be severely damaged by vine weevil grubs. Plants growing in the open ground are less susceptible, although the grubs can kill strawberries, primulas, polyanthus, Sedum,Heuchera and young yew plants. The adult beetles feed on the foliage of many herbaceous plants and shrubs, especially Rhododendron, evergreen Euonymus, Hydrangea, Epimedium,Bergenia, Primula and strawberry.

So, by this stage you are either covered in a nasty smelling powder or there are loads of nematodes buzzing around and you've just sat through Die Hard for the umpteenth time so what's a little more death and destruction? This is the cheapest, most satisfying solution: grab hold of the little beasts and squish them.

The Mayor, the son-in-law and a royal ape

What could they all have in common?

 Katy and Bill were under such pressure from all the families about names for the baby. So they rang and we chatted about names they actually liked and as anticipated they went with my Grandad's name.

Then with a nod to the newly-weds,the second name chosen was Alex. And finally, to prove they want to keep the little prince working those lungs, they plumped for a royal character from the Jungle Book.



George Brocklehurst, Mayor of High Wycombe
Alex Lavarello, son-in-law
King Louie, the Jungle Book


And Katy, I know which George you are really thinking about...




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Place your bets

The Duchess carried the baby in her arms as she and William emerged from St Mary's Hospital at 7.11pm, briefly holding her son one handed as she waved to the gathered crowds, and bouncing him in her arm to keep him calm in the hullabaloo.

The old man obviously wants the first name but I reckon it'll be my Grandad's name, George, but 'Something Else' could be a Bohemian option?

James

Henry

George

Philip

Alexander

Richard

Louis

Arthur

Charles

John / Jonathan

Edward

David

Spencer

Andrew

Albert

Stephen

Oliver

William

Michael

Something else





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Spot the fake

Cameron's newest / old rehashed idea to stop teenagers looking at porn on the internet is yet another plan which only made me shout loudly at my poor, innocent radio. My teenager already knows more about the internet and probably porn than I ever will.

But this headlline is actually from todays Guardian and features an article about the work of my mate Susie who I first met at Chelsea Art College and I'm still very proud of her:

"There's a problem with the copy I'm making of Édouard Manet's Asparagus, one of the most insouciant of his still lifes. The great Frenchman painted a single stalk lying coquettishly on a table. Mine looks more like a fish that's flopped out of a toxic sea to commit suicide. Or, if you look at it from a different angle, a penis at rest after a busy afternoon. It's certainly more animal than it should be.

"Not bad," says Susie Ray as we examine the results at her studio in Padstow, Cornwall. An upbeat sort of person, Ray is a copyist artist, meaning she has spent 25 years meticulously copying Manets, Monets, Renoirs, Modiglianis, Sisleys, Van Goghs and other artists who have been dead for more than 70 years (that's when their work comes out of copyright). She sells the results for £600 (for a sketch) to £9,000 (for the most laborious copy). Her pricing structure is based not on the original's market value, but the time it takes her to paint the copy. Who buys them? Celebrities and politicians apparently, as well as Russian millionaires keen to fill the wall-space on their yachts. "I'll also get commissioned by collectors who have a hole in their collection that can't be filled because the original isn't for sale," she says.

Ray, 55, has just opened what she claims to be the world's first copyist art gallery, Susie Ray Originals, in Padstow, and has agreed to give me a lesson, to give an insight into her craft. The gallery will teem this summer, no doubt, with the kind of posher holidaymakers who, after lunching at one of Rick Stein's many joints, might be tempted to spend £3,900 (including  VAT) on her copy of Renoir's Onions. Buy it and you could astound your friends by passing it off as original (best tell your contents insurer the truth, though). Her surfer dude partner Ollie May tells me that wives are forever dragging their husbands into the gallery, saying: "They're selling Monets for £8,000!"

Across the street, a woman who does paintings of cartoon cows seems to have cornered the sizable seaside novelty market. She's not, one suspects, courting the same demographic as Ray.

Susie Ray with her copies of Monet’s Storm on Belle-Ile and Modigliani’s Jeune Femme à la Collerette. Photograph: Mark Passmore/Apex

While she won't name many of her clients, Ray does reveal that DJ Bruno Brookes and chef Marco Pierre White rank among them. She was once commissioned to do a copy of Van Gogh's Vase with Gladioli for Dame Edna Everage. Gladioli-accessorising miserabilist Morrissey would probably like a copy of that, too, but he's out of luck: Ray doesn't do duplicates, as a matter of principle.

But isn't this forgery? Isn't Ray's whole oeuvre that of a cynical charlatan? "I'm not a forger," she says, arguing that she's different from, say, the notorious cockney forger Tom Keating, who avoided jail even after admitting to painting 2,000 fakes of old masters. On the back of each copy, Ray signs her name. Real forgers don't do that. That said, she tells me some of her clients have passed off her copies as the real thing, if not to make money then to show off to dinner guests. One household name (whose identity I can't reveal) loves to boast about his Claude Monet – when it's really his Susie Ray. But isn't Ray facilitating such grubby behaviour? "A lot of famous people pass off my copies as original," she says. "That's up to them."

You could have been a lot richer, I add, had you followed Keating's path. "In jail more likely," she retorts. "Tom Keating wasn't a very good forger. The only reason he got away with it is that he was copying in an era when the reproductions weren't very good. People didn't know how unlike the originals his versions were. I don't have that luxury."

I've spent two hours trying to replicate Manet's Asparagus, the simplest impressionist masterpiece Ray could find for me to copy. The original, in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, is a cute art-world joke: in 1880, Manet sold collector Charles Ephrussi A Bunch of Asparagus for 800 francs. Ephrussi sent him 1,000 francs, so Manet painted this extra stalk and sent it off with a note: "There was one missing from your bunch."

My shambles contrasts sharply with the technical mastery of the canvas hanging on the wall behind me: Ray's copy of a painting from Monet's series Cabane des douaniers, effet d'après-midi. "The title sounds better in French," she says. "Customs shack in the afternoon doesn't have quite the same ring." I wonder how much a Monet copy would shift for, but this customs shack's not for sale.

I'm working from three coloured prints Ray has sourced, each one tonally very different from the other, with one cropping out the asparagus altogether. Ray has done a rough sketch and helps me mix some paints. I've never painted in oils before and am on a steep learning curve, but what I'm mostly acquiring is a profound appreciation of Manet. Just look at the illusion of solidity he creates at one end of the spear with just two brushstrokes. Damn him. My version is hopeless. It's starting to look like a seagull.

Asparagus, 1880, by Édouard Manet. Photograph: De Agostini/Getty Images

"It would have taken Manet about four hours to paint, I suspect," says Ray. A copy could take her up to five weeks, what with drying times, overpainting and adding some mysterious goo from a jam jar to make it look as if it were painted in 1880 Paris rather than 2013 Padstow. Ray specialises in impressionist art, partly because she loves that era, and partly because copies are easy to sell. They are not easy to do, though, but the challenge adds to their allure. "It's more painstaking for me to replicate an impressionist painting than an old master. I know someone who does Vermeers and Rembrandts. That's fairly straightforward. You can correct where you've gone wrong more easily. They're time-consuming, painstakingly built up, but they're not beyond me technically. With impressionist works, you have to copy what they did quickly and freely, while still being meticulous. Very difficult." Anybody you can't copy? "Pollock. The drips aren't going to be the same." Rothko is also tricky. "The scumbling is incredibly difficult to copy, the different colours peeping through the layers – nightmare. But everybody thinks their kid could do Rothko. They haven't really looked hard enough."

Ray made her career from looking hard and painstakingly copying what she saw. Even though she's of the right generation to be a YBA, she isn't of that temper. She despises Hirst and Emin. She's never heard of artists doing similar work, such as photographer Louise Lawler and Mike Bidlo, whose copies of and portraits of other artist's work serve to problematise the notions of authenticity, originality, genius and art-world commodification. Ray's art doesn't roll that way.

Intriguingly, though, Bidlo copied what banjaxed Ray. He made some Pollock drip paintings and, in a 1982 show called Jack the Dripper at Peg's Place, re-enacted Pollock urinating into Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace. Naughty boy.

Born on the Lizard peninsula, Ray was educated at convent school and then trained at Chelsea College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic, graduating with a first-class degree in scientific illustration.

In the early 1980s, she worked for a pittance as a botanical illustrator at Kew Gardens. "I got £70 a painting, which would take 10 days to produce." It was a good grounding. "I was painting in watercolours and you can't correct a mistake easily so there was a premium on getting it right first time." She also illustrated seashore guidebooks for Collins Gem, channelling not just her scientific illustrator skills but her Cornish beachcombing past.

By the late 1980s, while her contemporaries at Goldsmiths were fomenting a Britart revolution, Ray had established herself at a gallery in Drury Lane doing copies of Renoir, Monet, Caravaggio, Stubbs, Gauguin and Modigliani. She became the artist in residence for the British Museum's 1990 show Fake?: The Art of Deception.

Today Ray denies her business is fakery. Her true precursors, she says, are the 1880s artists who worked copying paintings in the Louvre. "I do work in some grey areas, though," she concedes. She has been commissioned to copy Bacons and Picassos so that collectors, whom she declines to name, can store the originals in vaults. "By replacing it with my copy the work can still be enjoyed while the original is safely locked away."

Asparagus, 2013, by Stuart Jeffries. Yours for £20. Photograph: Mark Passmore/Apex

Don't you feel creatively thwarted? Isn't art about using your talents to express yourself rather than slavishly copying another's genius? "I've tried my own paintings but they're no good. I'm very critical of everything I do. I'm an illustrator not a fine artist.

"People think I make a lot of money from what I do. I don't really, I do it because I love it."

I take a final glance around Ray's gallery. On an easel is a Samuel Peploefloral still life. Ray recently started copying the Scottish post-impressionist painter's works because, as he died in 1935, his oeuvre has been out of copyright since 2005. I look in awe at her copy of Manet's A Bunch of Asparagus, the painting for which critic-collector Ephrussi overpaid 200 francs. The original is in Cologne's Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. If you wanted your own copy, you could order an oil painting from an online supplier for $214.20. I couldn't vouch for its quality. Or you could have the copy hanging in Ray's gallery in a rather lovely frame for £3,900.

Here's a better idea. Wait a couple of weeks until my copy of Manet's Asparagus has dried. The critics (well, my partner) are already calling it a masterpiece. Actual quote? "It's a masterpiece – if it's meant to be a dead whale." Look a treat in your loo. Twenty quid plus p&p? Don't tell me you're not tempted."

Glorious Glyndebourne

Hippolyte et Aricie was Rameau’s first work for the stage, written when he was nearly 50. It is also Glyndebourne’s first opera by Rameau and does still, as it did in Paris in 1733, have a richness of invention.

So there's hope for us fifty somethings?

"The lighter moments do bring the best out of Paul Brown's fabulously inventive and glowingly colourful designs. The prologue is set inside a domestic refrigerator, a very obviously French one, to judge from the tins of escargots and cassoulet on its shelves, while the underworld that Theseus visits in the second act is the grimy area behind it; the costumes cheerfully mix the 18th and 21st centuries, as well as camp get-up for a dance troupe of matelots (don't ask) that belongs in neither."

The ladies in the Glyndebourne 'ladies' just didn't get this, at all, but maybe they were more desperate for a pee than any operatic analysis.

However, The Guardian continues; "Fun as much of this is, the action commutes awkwardly between the humour and the real emotions and in an opera that already provides plenty of scope for dancing, choreographer Ashley Page adds even more during some of the arias. With William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, though, the music couldn't be better presented; Christie's ability to conjure up ceremonial grandeur, tender intimacy and rhythmic variety may be sleight of hand from the greatest Rameau interpreter of our time, but it's totally compelling. So too is much of the cast, especially Ed Lyon's Hippolytus, Christiane Karg's Aricia, and Stéphane Degout's Theseus; as Phaedra, Sarah Connolly plays the stepmother from hell to the manner born."

This was one of the better reviews. The Telegraph hated the opera, but then they were pushed into their uncomfortable zone and probably felt too challenged cos they had to think independently and weren't wearing their comfortable beige slip-ons.




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