Old England

His clothes are dirty shade of blue 
And his ancient shoes worn through 
He steals from me and he lies to you 
Old England is dying

Today our unelected Prime Minister got the Queen to suspend Parliament, in order to push through Brexit.

RIP British Democracy. The end of our civilisation is just that one step closer.

Vasily Vereshchagin

[Click on pics for full size]

Caravan of Yaks loaded with Salt

Last week I turned in edits for a short fantasy story that was set in "Russian Turkestan" - imperial Central Asia in the 19th century. It was inspired by my Silk Road travels of course, but in the course of my research I came across Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904) and thought I'd share some of his pictures here because he's quite brilliant, was extremely controversial in his lifetime, and deserves to be better known.
 
He painted some places I've been myself! (Only with more severed heads)

Triumph, Registan Square, Samarkand

He's known primarily as a war artist, and he traveled extensively with Russian troops during the Russo-Turkish and Russo-Japanese wars, being both wounded and decorated for his courage (and in fact he eventually died when his ship hit a mine).

At the Fortress Wall

But his emphasis was very much on the horrors of war and he was banned and derided all across Europe for his uncompromising portrayals of just how shitty the military life was...

All Is Quiet - tryptych

Night Halt of the Great Army

... sometimes literally:

Russian Camp in Turkestan

He painted aftermaths of battles, POW corpses, wounded soldiers being abandoned to the crows, and soldiers dying in hospital.

After the Attack

Defeated: Memorial Service

This is his most notorious painting, The Apotheosis of War, which he dedicated "to all conquerors, past, present and to come":

War-paintings aside though,Vereshchagin was an extraordinary recorder of his travels across Asia. He visited India, the Himalayas, Tibet, Siberia,  China, Japan, Cuba, the Phillippines, Palestine and Syria.  He loved painting the landscapes:

Glacier on the road from Kashmir to Ladakh

Mount Kazbek

the people:

Residents of Western Tibet

Chorus of Dervishes, Tashkent

Parsee Priest, Bombay

the ruins;

The Gur-Emir Mausoleum, Samarkand

Ruins in Chuguchak

the temples

Entrance to the Temple of Niko

and OMG the costumes:

Buddiskogo Lama

Warrior of Jaipur

A Rich Kyrgyz Hunter with a Falcon

 If you want to look through (many) more of his paintings there's a good gallery HERE

Hard As

Empress Dowager Cixi, and her 6-inch fingernails, for you history buffs

Well, I was booked in this week for a photoshoot and the instructions we received urged long, shiny fingernails.  My natural fingernails, even when I've not been nibbling them, are short and stumpy like my fingers and usually ingrained with garden dirt, so I decided to get false ones for the first time in my life..

HOLY FUCKING SHIT that was not a good move.

First of all, you've got to understand that this was WAY outside my comfort zone. It's an artform that belongs to younger working class women, predominantly, so I'm clueless both as to the terminology (gels? acrylics? infills?) and the appeal. But it's an Experience for sure. I entered this Thai production line in the nail-bar, and only embarrassment stopped me succumbing to a panic attack and bolting out the door.

The  process is sort of fascinating actually. They grind the surface of your natural nail to provide a key. Then they glue these plastic tips onto the ends of your nails and cut these down to size. Then they use this MAGIC POWDER that turns into a plastic slime when it comes into contact with the MAGIC PURPLE LIQUID*, and they slap it onto your extended nails and shape and buff it with EXTREME VIGOUR. I don't know what the glue they use is but it puts superglue to shame - it's instant and as far as I can tell permanent.

Here's the results:

They actually looked okay from that angle but when I walked out I discovered the true horror. They are 10 tiny levers of pain that connect to your nail beds. Doing anything that requires normal fingertip pressure (opening the car boot for example) is AGONY. Accidentally catching them against a hard surface is AGONY.

And I can't clean my ears when I wash my hair. Or pick up small objects from the floor. Or use a smartphone. Or, ahem, do any of the things I might normally do with my genital area...

Here are the evil buggers from the side:

Thick, aren't they?

I'm stuck with them, literally and figuratively. I have no clue whether they grow out naturally. Here's how the internet says you get them off:

1. Clip the acrylic nails as short as possible.
2. Pry the edges with the pointy end of the tweezer.
3. Now, pour acetone free nail polish remover in a bowl.
4. Soak the nails in the nail polish remover for at least 30-40 minutes.
5. Once you feel the nail loosened, pull it out gently with tweezers.

OKAY STOP RIGHT THERE. I am NOT gouging my nails out with tweezers!!!  😱😱😱

So basically I've clipped them short with tin-snips and filed them and now I'm going to ignore them until my fingers fall off.

At least I can, with some care, pick my nose again. 😠

---

(*poly methyl methacrylate acrylic (PMMA) mixed with "liquid monomer", usually ethyl methacrylate.)

1933

Frank Turner puts my reaction to the last few years into verse 😨😭😣

The first time it was a tragedy,
The second time it's a farce.
Outside it's 1933, so I'm hitting the bar.
But I don't know what's going on anymore -
The world outside is burning with a brand new light,
But it isn't one that makes me feel warm;
Don't go mistaking your house burning down for the dawn.

Armistice Centenary

Gassed, by John Singer Sargent

Wilfred Owen 1893-1918

Stan 2: Kazakhstan

One of the nicer bits.
To be fair, most of the country looks like this.

Kazakhstan, second country on our Silk Road holiday, was ... an experience. By which I
mean DON'T EVER GO THERE.

I REALLY MEAN THAT. I'm on a one-woman mission to collapse their miserable, surly excuse for a tourist industry.

Honestly, it's the first country I've ever been to that I concluded was not worth the bother. And there was quite a lot of bother on our way out in particular, as the border guards took one look at our group and decided it was time to pick on someone and extract a hefty bribe. Seven of us made it through to the safety of Kyrgyzstan (and did we hell as like know what was going to happen next or what we should do), while one (along with our extremely noble guide) was held for 7 shitty hours under interrogation until he coughed up £100.

Fuck Kazakhstan and its corrupt police.

So I'm not even going to post any interesting pictures, just in case I give you the mistaken impression that travelling there might be worth the risk. All the ancient historic monuments stop at the Uzbek border anyway - and anything good Kazakhstan has, Kyrgyzstan has more and better.

😡😡😡

Today I'm marching

Because I feel like the world is sliding into a nightmare from which we may never wake up.

Because I like to believe that if I'd been alive in the 1930s, I would have protested against the Fascists.

Because I read Eichmann in Jerusalem. According to Arendt, under Nazi occupation the numbers of Jews deported to the camps varied enormously from country to country in Europe. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews died under Nazi occupation. Yet not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported - and the difference was down to public compliance.

Because silence is not neutrality, it is siding with evil. Doing nothing is not a moral option.

Haunted land

This week I discovered this place, ten minutes from my house.

It's a huge community woodland. The paths go on and on for miles of fabulous walking...

The thing is, this is post-industrial landscape. This entire site used to be a colliery and those hills were its slag-heaps. Like so many of the pits in this country it was, despite huge opposition, mothballed. I'm old enough to remember the year-long Miners' Strike in 1984-5, with the incredible deprivation it caused and the pitched battles between police and protesters. The strikers were eventually starved back to work, the coal industry was privatised and one by one the pits were closed - this one in 1994. It must have torn the heart out of the community.



I think the place is beautiful, but I imagine many local people have very different feelings.

There's a brilliant article here about the long (and currently resurgent) British tradition of ghost stories rooted in the specific eerieness of the countryside: so-called Folk Horror. And it persuasively ascribes this feeling of unease to landscapes of social conflict, class oppression, and capitalist exploitation.

If that's true, then this park must be haunted as fuck.

No wonder there's a sign at the gate telling you:

Caspian: October 2003 - March 2018

My aged greyhound Caspian was put to sleep yesterday morning. He was 14, and had lived a full and mostly happy life, at least in later years.

An Irish track dog, he had a thoroughly mediocre racing career as "Rosedale Ricky," in which he earned a grand total of 80 Euros prize money ... then was found in 2008 dumped on the streets of Northern England, riddled with worms and mange:

We had him nearly ten years, thanks to Tia Greyhound Rescue! And he was an utter rogue in his younger days, stealing food (he learned to unzip rucksacks) and chasing anything small and furry. The first or second day we had him, I looked out of the kitchen window to see him standing on the lawn with a pigeon-wing sticking out sideways from either side of his jaws. By the time I got out there the bird had been swallowed whole!

He got shot by teenagers and taught me an interesting lesson about gun-control.

He was a pinup dog, appearing in not one but two calendars:

In January 2017 he went into congestive heart failure, but with the help of enough daily pills to make him rattle, he lived happily, if much more quietly, for another year and more, fulfilling his life-mission of making terrible stinky farts and gallons of pee.

October 2017

It's a relief to be able to sleep with the back door shut for a change, but he will be sorely missed.

💔💔💔

Wood acid

Until we bought our wood I had no idea that rural life is one long low-level battle against the forces of crime and anarchy. Country people are dodgy as f*ck, frankly. There's the fly-tipping, of course - I was expecting that:

But not just by individuals, oh no. The bloody public services are just as happy to leave their old crap in my wood:

In fact some bugger decided to trench through my land and lay a utility pipe without asking permission:

I'm constantly worried that I have badger diggers - though it's possible this poor chap died of natural causes;  certainly the sett still seems to be active.

And this week I found a seriously suspicious-looking CONTAINER OF HYDROCHLORIC ACID left inside my gate.

I reported it to the police, because acid-attacks are a Thing now in the UK. They called in the fire brigade to dispose of it, but it's too hazardous so the fire brigade aren't allowed to (and nor am I) so they've called the local council.

Guess who gets to foot the bill?

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Victorian art lovers were always up for a good bit of slut-shaming:

Augustus Egg: Past and Present no.1: Misfortune (1858)

In the very famous painting above, the wife's adulterous letter has been intercepted by her husband and she's about to reap the whirlwind. In fact the other two painting in the tryptich go on to show the children abandoned in a garret years later, and the destitute adultress dying under a bridge near the Thames.

But hey! Since you - as an upright Victorian - don't approve of women being naughty, you get to enjoy pictures of them being shamed for it! In fact there is a loooooong artistic history of depiction of Christ and the Woman Caught in Adultery (John 8), in which she can be seen looking suitably disheveled, frightened and penitent.

Giuseppe Sciuti. The Adulteress (1906)

Here's an obscure Arthurian legend illustrated by, you'll note, a female artist:

Isobel Gloag: The Magic Mantle (1898)

In the story, a boy comes to court with three magic items; a mantle that conceals nothing if the woman wearing it has ever been unfaithful, and a knife and a drinking horn that can only be used by a man who is not a cuckold. Queen Guinevere tries on the dress with disastrous results and has to flee in shame from the court.

In fact, you didn't even have to have been shagging about to be publicly stripped and leered at. Here's Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester in a historical incident in which she has to do the Walk of Shame for consulting with a witch-woman about the possible future date of the King's death:

Edwin Austin Abbey: The Penance of Eleanor (1900)

She addresses her husband in the crowd thus, according to Shakespeare:

Methinks I should not thus be led along,
 Mail'd up in shame, with papers on my back,
 And followed with a rabble that rejoice
 To see my tears and hear my deep-fet groans.
 The ruthless flint doth cut my tender feet,
 And when I start, the envious people laugh
 And bid me be advised how I tread.
 Ah, Humphrey, can I bear this shameful yoke?

 (Henry VI, Part 2)

But don't fret; occasionally the guy gets equal artistic treatment too:

Jules Arsène Garnier: The Punishment of the Adulterers (1876)

Altogether now: "Shame!"

Shame!

There are several reasons you should watch this video RIGHT NOW:

1. If you are a Game of Thrones fan, it is extremely funny. Yes, that is the same Septa.
2. It's an advert for Sodastream, but the message is right on point.
3. The Advertising Standards Authority/Facebook/Youtube banned it for use of the word "fuck," so it keeps being removed from t'Internet.
4. The International Bottled Water Association is taking Sodastream to court to stop them saying that plastic bottle waste is bad for the environment. Fuck them.

Nevertheless, she persisted

For the year to come: