I Was a Boy Dalek

The Dalek Playsuit is an enduring memory and, given the plethora of Dr. Who-related merchandise that has resulted from the programme's phenomenal rebranding and re-invention, it seems that this particular item of early Dalek merchandise is one that tends to remain in the minds of those of us who are of a certain vintage, and for whom Saturday evenings were spent cowering behind the couch with delight and terror in equal measure. I was particularly struck to see this advertisement from an old Marshall Ward mail order catalogue, as doubtless, it was the very same one that caught my childhood eye and possessed my every waking hour all those many years ago, so much so that my beleaguered mother was driven to distraction by my constant badgering until it was sent away for (and at the outrageous cost of 66/6. it must have been intended to be a gift for several birthdays and Christmases combined). Let's face it, in the light perhaps of today's more finely-tuned aesthetic sensibilities, the Dalek Playsuit was, by anyone's standards, a superannuated bin bag, through which a sink plunger was thrust through one hole, a plastic potato-peeler through the other. It came down to just below the knees (despite the floor-length apparition we see in this somewhat overstated illustration) and lent the wearer the appearance of being clad in a futuristic mini-dress such as Courreges might have dreamt up for the catwalk. The head-piece was fashioned from stout cardboard, silvered on the outside, and with a series of die-cut slits through which one just about saw the direction of travel; the 'skirt' hung down from its base, whilst that dome was a sort of inverted saucer that sat on your head like a coolie-hat. The eye-piece was fixed, and was basically a large ping-pong ball on a stick. The colour of the skirt was red, and the trademark 'balls' on the Dalek's skirt were printed in white. I more or less lived in it (again, much to the frustration of my poor mother, who later decreed its fate) and when I decided to leave home, aged probably about eight or nine, it was my going-away outfit. I would like to imagine that to this day, there might be some soul who retains a glimmer of recollection that, whilst driving in Sussex in the sixties, they glimpsed the apparition of a Dalek wandering down the central reservation of the A22 like a revenant from a dream. Miraculously, I got as far as the pig-farm (the marmalade sandwiches having by then run out by then, thus posing something of a dilemma as regards supplies for any ongoing journey), whereupon I was duly returned on the back of the farmer's tractor (again, this must have been something of a sight to an unwitting onlooker). The days were numbered for the Dalek playsuit: my mother, at her wit's end, finally consigned it to the flames of our kitchen Raeburn on the very night of the Royal Variety Performance when the Beatles were blazing their own trail before the Queen of England. This act of iconoclasm on her part proved a step too far, as it set fire to the chimney at the exact moment the Fab Four took to the stage. A postscript. I am reliably informed that any Dalek playsuit that has survived (either flood or fire) commands huge prices on the vintage market; six to eight hundred of anyone's money, and that no one I know has ever seen one offered for sale, nor as a collector, possessed one in adulthood.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

As Christmas tails away for another year, here are two spreads and the cover from a charming little edition of 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' by Dylan Thomas. Printed by the Belmont Press, Northampton for J.M. Dent and Sons, the book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1968, an earlier edition being issued in the U.S. in 1954. It features beautiful woodcut vignettes by Ellen Raskin, which perfectly compliment Dylan's evocative account of a Welsh childhood Christmas. The image of the town with its cloud/constellation- the heavens above it and the sea beneath- is wonderful, as is the laterr vignette of toy soldiers standing guard by a towering glass epergne of sweets, and elswhere, a roaring fire with flaggons and mistletoe. This classic work for children ends with the following stanza:

'Looking through my bedroom window, out into
the moonlight and the unending smoke-coloured snow,
I could see the lights in the windows
of all the other homes on our hill and hear
the music rising from them up the long, steadily
falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and
holy darkness, and then I slept'

Pet Shop Puginesque

This Gothic psalm-board was made for me by Russell Thomas, and hangs in the stairwell of my house. The quotation is from 'West End Girls' by the Pet Shop Boys, and it is a line that has always intrigued me. My initial thought was to have it embroidered on a sampler in the Victorian style. I then considered a more oblique treatment, with aircraft carriers and spitfires on a cushion cover, the stanza perhaps picked out in Trajan a la Ian Hamilton Finlay. It was Russell who came up with the notion of a psalm-board such as would display hymn numbers to a congregation of church-goers. Fittingly, the frame is fashioned from an old pew-end, the gold-leaf lettering laid on a granite ground. The typeface is Sirona, which lends the piece its pleasing quality, particularly the kerning on the R and the K, as well as the caps on the A and N, and the G is as Gothic as it comes. I adore the enigma of this couplet, coming as it does at the end of this classic eighties electro ballad with its haunting 'How far have you been?' vocal rejoinder. I once glimpsed the Finland Station from the window of a coach bound for Leningrad, and to this day, wonder just what motivated Messrs. Tennant and Lowe to fashion such a wonderful lyric as this.

Saracinesco

Painted in 1961, Saracinesco is among a series of works made by the Cornish artist Peter Lanyon as a result of a trip he made to the hillside region of Italy situated some forty miles to the east of Rome. Lanyon, whose work is forever associated with the landscape of West Cornwall, had found himself increasingly at odds with certain elements of the St Ives school of the period; a small, fractious community which Lanyon perceived had been infiltrated by 'foreigners' who in no small measure had contributed to the battles for governance being played out between the Penwith Society and the St Ives Society of Artists. As a result, he published an essay The Face of Penwith in the Cornish Review, an article that owed, he claimed, much to the ethics of the artist and critic Adrian Stokes, whose concept of 'outwardness' chimed with Lanyon's own, very Cornish sensibilities. Having known Stokes since the late 1930s, he described himself in a letter to the editor of the Cornish Review as 'an artist whose debt to Stokes may never be paid', and quoted the following passage from Stokes's The Quattro Cento of 1932:

'The process of living is an externalisation, a turning outward into definite form or inner ferment. Hence the mirror to living which art is; hence the significance of art and especially as a crown to other and preliminary arts of the truly visual arts in which time is transposed into forms of space as something instant and revealed. Hence the positive significance to man (as opposed to use) of stone and stone building.'

In The Face of Penwith, Lanyon applied Stokes's ideas of revelation, particularly in terms of the landscape of West Penwith, and what, in his terms, he defined as being essentially Cornish. In mining, for instance (a subject which found a rich, continuing seam in Lanyon's work), as well as in in fishing and farming, the industry of Cornwall are construed as a commerce between the Cornishman and what lies beneath; ie, the tin, the fish and the nutrients. This process of delving and drawing to the surface is manifestly apparent in Lanyon's major works of the late 40s and 50's, particularly Botallack of 1952 and St. Just, his masterpiece of 1953. The continuous process of drawing these buried and occluded elements to the surface of the land and sea are aptly mirrored in the works of a painter who knew the form and nature of landscape as intimately, in Tacita Dean's words, as he knew 'his own skin'.

Shortly after the article in the Cornish Review was published, Lanyon and his wife travelled to Italy, where they spent a month visiting the places Stokes had mentioned in The Quattro Cento.'One must follow the Master' he said to Patrick Heron in relation to Stokes and Italy. Whether Lanyon recognised in these very particular landscapes, the process of externalisation that Stokes had identified in his writings is not known, but a series of paintings and drawings were produced by Lanyon as a consequence of his time spent in the hill villages outside Rome. At Anticoli, Lanyon saw an ancient settlement still steeped in a bucolic way of life, where animals and people co-existed side by side, and where the natural cycle of life, death and renewal was mediated by myth and tradition. This cycle was memorialised in Primavera, the largest of the group of paintings made at Anticoli. Painted as Spring came to this mountain region where the villages, and those living in nearby Saracinesco, celebrated its arrival with festivities, reflected by Lanyon in hot, bright colours that vibrate with an energy so consonant with the resurgence of the new season and its cycle.

Lanyon visited Italy for the last time in 1957, arriving in Rome at the end of February. He visited Lake Nemi and Albano, and returned to Anticoli and Saracinesco. Over the next year, he made pictures related to these specific places. In 1961, after an affair had ended, he returned to the subject of Saracinesco, and began work on the last and perhaps greatest of his Italian series, writing of it as:

'A celebration of a high place and beyond where not only fireworks but moon rockets search for things beyond the primitive proportion of an Italian hill town. The fiesta and the sacrifice are still a part of our behaviour...'

The Lost Domain of Alain-Fournier

in progress

Crossing the Snowline

'Crossing the Snowline' is the evocative poem from Pauline Stainer's same-titled anthology of 2008. Recreated here in Photoshop by me, it was an attempt to lend extra emphasis to the words by re-rendering them typographically. Stainer's reference to 'the Sculptors of Kilpeck' relates to the church of Saints Mary and David's in the village of the same name in Herefordshire. Built around 1190, the church is notable for its extraordinary corbel carvings of human faces, animals, fish and mythological creatures. Eighty five of the original ninety one corbels astonishingly survive, including a spectacular example of a sheela-na-gig. The visual impact of Stainer's stanza 'the jubilation of wolves spilling into the cloister' is equally spectacular, as is the notion of a statue of 'the sleeping Christ' 'chiseled from the living tree'. Stainer opined that the collection of poems was 'the record of [a] journey out of a long fallow following the death of [her] daughter'. In a contemporaneous review of the book, it is said that the poems 'cast a blue light, the light of mourning, and that the collection is 'poised between these insistent blues and the yellows of the sun prayers with which it closes, enacting the long journey from death to rebirth, grief to hope, out of the 'solstice on its hinge/of salt and fire' and back into the light'.

Broadstairs Gothick