Skegness and me.

 When I was small, cameras were only just becoming quite commonplace amongst working class families. The one we had was basically a black plastic cube, with a little silver lever on the front, just below the lens, and a square silver viewfinder on top, which you could spring up and look through when lining up your shot. Not that it helped my mother much, who missed the heads off everyone she ever photographed. The film looked like a roll of yellow paper, and had to be kept out of the light or be ruined. So my father had to wait ‘til evening time or find a dark place under the stairs, when loading it into the camera. It all seemed so secretively mystical and magical to me.

Twelve photographs per film was the maximum, which then had to be taken to the nearby town’s chemist to be developed. The final photographs came back as tiny “contact prints”. In other words, the same size as the film’s negatives. So, if you have any tiny photos amongst your family’s treasured keepsakes, now you know why. If you wanted good, better sized photos for a wedding, a christening, or maybe a baby’s first birthday, you would hire a professional. Most likely the guy at the chemist, making good pocket money on the side. Come the holiday season, trade could be especially lucrative.

Walk along any UK seaside resort’s promenade in the 1930s, 40s, or 50s (the war years being an exception), and it wouldn’t be long before a man with a bigger professional camera leapt out in front of you, snapped your photo, pushed a ticket stub into your hand with details of where and when to collect, and be off. And you didn’t mind one bit. In fact you were most appreciative of the souvenir.

This photo, capturing one such moment, I’m guessing comes from 1933 / 34. It shows my English grandparents, and a little girl who would go on to become my Auntie Beryl. I must have looked at it a hundred times, before only recently realising where it was taken. My favourite go-to place for a day-trip’s sketching. Skegness. The clue being the roof of the Tower Cinema behind. That is to say, the roof before it was bombed in the war. The building as it stands today, has cropped up in my art more than once during the 2010s. Who’d have thought?

All text copyright ian gordon craig 

X / Twitter blocked.

I seem to be one of thousands who have been blocked with no reason given. This is what happens when you rely on AI to monitor humans. The old bird wasn't looking too good anymore anyway.

So, as a social media fan, just somewhere to catch a non-BBC version of the news, and post my sketches, I’ve gone to Reddit.

Lockdown, Four Years on.

 

Summer 2019. I was on a roll. I had just exhibited and sold one of my artworks in the somewhat prestigious Harley Gallery. Sunshine was plentiful. British sunshine. The kind you want sunshine to be like. The kind that frames all your childhood memories. The kind that my “straw” trilby hat and shades could easily cope with, as I sat in the gallery courtyard sipping my latte, being careful not to disturb its frothy top. Life was good, and would continue to be so through the cool winter months ahead. Until the unexpected happened.

Early 2020. An allegedly life-threatening disease came in, allegedly, from the East. Allegedly. Something to do with bats and test tubes. Rumours and conspiracy theories were rife. And that was when, over the horizon came the first of a trilogy of lockdowns, broadcasting their soon to be legalised directions: “Stay indoors! Cover your face! No physical contact! No touching!” The lockdowns didn’t really bother me. As long as I have a sketchbook and laptop, I swear I could easily do solitary. What bothered me, and does so to this day, is what happened next.

On July 19th 2022, we all stepped outside. It was a bit like one of those sci-fi movies, when they take off their space helmets on an unfamiliar planet, to see if it’s okay to breathe the air. The Lockdown Tripods had gone. It was okay to breathe. But was everything else okay? I felt like the character in “28 Days Later”, or “Day of the Triffids”, who woke up one morning to discover the world was no longer how he had known it. 

I took a drive out to my usual sketchbook haunts, only to find that several places where I used to stop in the past for a drink or a meal, were gone. They hadn’t survived the pandemic. I took a drive in the opposite direction and immediately incurred penalty charges for entering what had previously been a much used familiar lane, but was now restricted for buses only. When did that happen? And what about all the new buildings along the skyline? Some people must have had a very busy lockdown. I must have not got the e-mail.

The last four years have gone by fast. After the lockdowns a high percentage of people did not return to their workplace, choosing instead to continue working from the seclusion of home, like they’d gotten used to it. A notable percentage, though capable, chose to not work at all and let others pay the taxes. We got four Prime Ministers in four years. More blades in city streets than the cutlery drawers of Buckingham Palace. A country that once took down the Luftwaffe, now no match for a rubber dinghy. Everything seems broken. Remember that song about walking along city streets where there’s “Always something left to remind me”? Well, there isn’t. Or if there is, it’s fading fast.

All text & art copyright ian gordon craig.

About Football.

 

I am not, and have never been, a football fan. When I was a grammar school boy, the last thing Physical Education ever involved was Education. So I never understood the attraction. But I do like to watch the women’s game. The Lionesses, and Arsenal. Why? Because they don’t cheat. Well, hardly ever.

Imagine if in snooker, the all-time great Ronnie O’Sullivan’s black ball is just about to reach its winning pocket, when his opponent sticks his que out to block it. Or if World Darts Champion Luke Littler’s last dart is thrown off course by his opponent nudging his wrist at the moment of release. Never going to happen. Never going to be allowed.

In men’s football, it’s different. If your opposing team looks likely to score a goal you are apparently expected to inflict life-changing injuries on that player to prevent him doing so. It’s called a “professional foul”. What makes it “professional”? Are there such things as “amateur fouls”? Perhaps the “professional” ones are the debilitating kicks to the shin, “amateur” ones a sharp tug on the opponent’s shirt. I have no idea. I admit, I don’t understand it, even though I can quote the off-side rule with pretty much the same accuracy as the Lord’s Prayer. I do, however, have an opinion about the way men’s football is presented on TV nowadays.

I was thankfully raised through childhood by women. A mother and a big sister. I am a huge advocate of women’s rights. But… Can we please remove these blonde haired, blue eyed, long legged girlie commentators from the commentator’s chair during the men’s game? Let the boys have their space. Let them jest and jostle their macho opinions free of all regard of ladies being present. Let them shift and shuffle in their chairs, talking over each other’s voices with conflicting opinions about management failures and referee’s mistakes. Let them scratch at their balls, adjust themselves in their seats, and reminisce about games gone by, when they themselves were perhaps out there on the pitch, competing for those hallowed cups and trophies. Let the boys have their space.


(PS: The car in the photo? It’s my neighbours).

About Disclaimers.

 

You probably never read that bit at the beginning of a book. That blank page before the chapters start. The bit that says “all people, events and places in the book are fictitious, and any similarity to the living or dead is coincidental”. It is of course put there to fend off legal complications. It’s not really true.

You can’t write about something that bears no resemblance to things you’ve experienced, places you’ve been, people you’ve known. Same with actors, developing the roles they play by thinking back on character traits, accents, physical habits, of persons they met. Same with painters. Even Picasso. Especially Picasso. He could paint the other side of an imaginative cubist still-life because he’d looked at it. He wasn’t making it up. Picasso could paint a bull in two or three strokes of the brush, and it be perfect. Because he’d watched them. Many times.

When your small children, anyone’s children, started drawing, it’s usually of mum, with a huge round head. The head is what they got to know first. Scribble-hair usually comes next. Arms and legs come last, as simple sticks, because they haven’t yet figured out what’s beyond the close, cuddled face.

When you see ancient drawings by Native Indians, Aborigines, Inuits, of beings in “space suits, you can be sure they’ve seen them first. There is no other possibility. They didn’t get it from Spielberg movies. Try it. Try to imagine something you’ve never ever seen, which looks like nothing else at all.

So that’s how I’ve spent my 30+ degrees heatwave. Sheltering, plenty of fluids (make mine apple juice), trying to push myself through an already difficult chapter, whilst assuring myself that “all people, events and places in the book are fictitious, and any similarity to the living or dead is coincidental”. Yeh, right.

All text and photographs copyright ian gordon craig.