Britain votes for its next government tomorrow. It is definitely the end of an era. The polls (haha) tell us the present Conservative government is heading for a crushing defeat – maybe the worst in its nearly two hundred year history. If so, a depressing era in British politics will come to its well-deserved end. After the feeble premiership of Rishi Sunak and, before him, the failures that were David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, please let us find deliverance from that terrible day when we learnt that all the lies of the BREXIT referendum had led us, almost literally, to walk off a cliff, like The New Yorker’s brilliant cover from 4th July 2016.

I had always been a bit of a politics addict, but I got depressed in 2010, when David Cameron redefined what we understand to be leadership – it’s not leading, it’s cynically and weakly following populist headlines – and my political mood got worse with BREXIT and has stayed low ever since.

Today, the day before tomorrow, I am feeling optimistic, but still a bit worried. Yes, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, and probable next Prime Minister, is a good man, a clever man, outstanding in almost every way apart from his self-marketing skills. I want to believe that he can and will succeed in bringing Britain back from the edge and help make the country a modern, fair and tolerant nation. I was going to say “a fair and tolerant nation again”, but I’m not sure, like the USA, it has ever been the great modern liberal nation that it should be. All the seeds are there, if only our politicians could lead the way.

Things can only get better as the slogan went, not fully aware of the hidden irony. They can and will, I am sure, I want us to return to the EU, but, I want more than that. We all deserve much more than that. I want us to start along that path of being a tolerant, egalitarian, nation of grown-ups. We need put away childish things, like The House of Lords, the aristocracy of elites, the fear of not being like our grandparents’ parents, they weren’t always right and they certainly weren’t free. We should give up those dreams of fictitious golden eras, and then maybe we could see the pride that can be won by citizenship in a community of equals, not subjects of our masters, equal citizens, no matter what race, class or nationality. You know, the stuff we could have got right a very long time ago but didn’t. Can we start tomorrow with the new government, I hope so.

But, no matter who becomes the British Prime Minister tomorrow, there’s still the problem of this man……but at least the era of Britain’s terrible prime ministers seems likely to end.

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A Greek tragedy in British English – Noun

(ɡriːk ˈtrædʒədɪ  )

(in ancient Greek theatre) a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstandingpersonal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal

Collins English Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers

Don’t let Donald Trump become America’s tragedy too.

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Ladies is an old-fashioned word in 2024, we say women, or even other less gender-specific terms, but, in the 1880s and 1890s, in Europe and the US, it was lady if you were a lady, and woman if you were female, but not a lady in the class-conscious world that the painter, and famous American, but European-based portrait artist, John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) inhabited. I suppose in those days he would have been Mr John Singer Sargent, and, if he had married, which he didn’t, his wife would have been known as Mrs John Singer Sargent. He was even, if he didn’t say so in public, what we call today, queer. I was thinking about this yesterday, when I went to see the spectacular and extremely well documented exhibition, Sargent and Fashion, at London’s Tate Britain art gallery (until 7th July). The show has a large collection of his portraits of the fashionable elite of Paris and London at the end of the 19th century. Here the portraits of married women, er, I mean ladies, were named for their husbands. The Tate helpfully gave us these women’s maiden names in brackets and in the catalogue notes, reminded us, or surprised us by how cultured, intelligent, creative and progressive a lot of these, er, ladies were. It was also interesting and a little surprising too that many of them were or became friends of the artist.

He had a number of female friends, many of them were what was known as progressive in those days, when it would have been considered unladylike. The times though were a’changing, not least in gender politics. I say this here because I want to share some of Sargent’s fabulous fashion portraits and to refute the common accusation that Sargent was nothing more than a brilliant technician with a superficial attitude to art and society. This exhibition is about art and fashion, so it’s about art, and therefore some art critics assume the show must be superficial, a kind of arty Eurovision.

The ladies in this portraits are mostly dressed in the high end of haut couture in the formative years of the very idea of fashion houses and fashion shows, and they appear to be loving their clothes – in these pictures, I think, we should love them too, as well as the superb demonstration of Sargent’ s virtuosity with a paintbrush. Here clothes, dresses and the materials they are made from, are truly beautiful, but we are not just seeing lovely dresses, these pictures are character studies, and these women, it is obvious, interest the artist as individuals as much as they should interest us.

The women and men, I mean, ladies and gentlemen, in these portraits are exposed, in the best sense of that word, as real people and most of them appear to be comfortable to avoid, as did Sargent himself, gender stereotyping. When some of them were first unveiled, the pictures caused more than just a ripple of outrage, some of the sitters suffered not just sniggers, but ostracisation for, what was seen as their revelling in their questionable propriety. Many more though clamoured to be Sargent’s next portrait.

Sargent was a great colourist, and I apologise if I am ignoring many of the magnificently colourful paintings in this exhibition, but my first and long lingering final impression of this exhibition is that Sargent was the master of black and white. Ladies, er, women, by the end of the 19th century, were allowed to wear black without being in mourning, and to wear white even if they were no longer virgins. There is already a kind of freedom there. Sargent helps them in this and allows them to be, not ladies, but human persons, each with their unique characters – and very much not just black and white.

I have cheated a bit and, because I couldn’t help it, I let his wonderfully vivid reds into the show and, I have also included the portrait of the scruffy bohemian writer Édouard Pailleron, wearing black, I know, but with his shirt hanging out and trying, veryr hard, not to look elegant. I have also allowed you to see the very masculine-looking Henry Lee Higginson wearing brown, albeit with his black cloak, robe-like, spread out in glory over nearly half of his body. He was an American Civil War veteran, successful banker, and founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but I was wondering if I should call him Mr Olympe Frederika Agassiz, after his wife. I put them in because just I love them, but this is blog primarily about black and white.

Sargent wanted to mix up the genders, so I’ll close with his wonderfully informal, Group with Parasols, where men and women lie in a happy jumble on the grass. It was painted towards the end of his career, after he had stopped painting society portraits. Sadly, the delightful innocence of this picture reminds me of the work as a war artist that he began in 1914. John Singer Sargent wasn’t superficial, after-all. He was a serious observer of humanity in all its shades of grey.

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I was thinking about nostalgia today – you know the things ain’t what the used to be feeling. Well, I’m not really someone who dwells in the past, or so I think. I like the present, my day today, and I’m quite keen on the future too. I’ve found recently that more than a few of my friends talk about the past much more than they used to do in the old days – you know when pubs were real pubs, when cigarettes were supposed to be good for you, and no one wore seatbelts in cars. Well, I don’t drink as much alcohol as I did in my so-called good old days; I gave up smoking decades ago, and I used to have nightmares of being thrown forward through shattering windscreens. I regret some things about the present – Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, obviously….also the last ten years, at least, of British politics…. climate change is really happening as opposed to being a fear of the distant future as it was once for my generation. The good old days were full of anxieties, the present is too, chaps. I had many nightmares in my youth – not just crashing through windscreens – nuclear war, murderers climbing through my bedroom window in the middle of the night; when I was very little I was also frightened of ghosts. Then there was the real nightmares of school playgrounds, compulsory rugby, and, maybe worst of all, teenage parties. So, I’m ok with the here and now – we can at least have a go at changing things.

I can still enjoy looking at old photographs, reading history books, walking in bluebell woods in April and May, summer trips to the seaside, but also going to the cinema most weeks over the last year and seeing so many great films. If I get a little nostalgic at times, it is for the lost pleasures of the iPod (why can’t they come back?), my Chicago 88 converse trainers (they pinch my toes these days), and, I suppose, if I regret something, it is the careless and ignorant freedom of lighting a cigarette.

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I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since 2015, when I went on two trips, to Italy https://wolfiewolfgang.com/it-was-all-mistake-my-three-inspiring/ and to Portugal https://wolfiewolfgang.com/my-time-in-lisbon-portugal-was-pure/

During my travels, I usually take my camera and, when armed with that, I am unstoppable. Looking through my photographs recently, I was worried that soon it would be too late to remember the details and, reluctantly, I would have to abandon ideas of writing about my experiences abroad.

So, to make it up with all those photographs lying dormant and ignored in my crazily crowded computer files, I decided a few weeks ago to do a blog-marathon and write these 17 blogs about my European travels over the the last 7 years – 7 years of real change in all our lives, here in the UK, and around the world.

Four failed UK prime ministers – plus another one soon.

There was Covid and Trump

Putin

Netanyahu

The world definitely changed and some of those changes were made only too apparent on my various journeys around Europe. I’m hoping that although things have got so bad, they can’t get much worse before, who knows, the bad guys are forced out, and the rest of the world will be pressured by the rest of humanity to make a real change for the better.

With apologies to all you disenfranchised UK citizens, and on a totally selfish note, there was at least some good news for me since 2017. I got my Irish citizenship and retained my EU passport.

If you want to look up my latest set of travel blogs, the links are below:

Amalfi Coast, Italy (2017): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-amalfi-coast/

Naples and Sorrento, Italy (2017) : https://wolfiewolfgang.com/category/travel/page/2/

Puglia: Polignano a mare, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-puglia-polignano-a-mare/

Puglia: Lecce, Bari and Trani, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/some-other-towns-my-journey-through-puglia-in-southern-italy/

Puglia: Alberobello to Matera, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-road-from-polignano-to-matera-via-alberobello/

Milan, Italy (2019): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/milan-city-of-fashion-music-and-art-even-in-the-rain/

Naples, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-in-naples-weeks-before-covid-soon-we-were-all-told-to-stay-home/

Pompeii, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/in-2020-i-went-to-pompeii-and-then-to-troy/

Tropea, Calabria, Italy (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/tropea-taking-it-easy-in-calabria/

Lahti, Finland (2022):https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/

Helsinki, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Ainola, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Tallinn, Estonia (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/day-trip-to-tallinn-in-estonia/

Leipzig, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/an-easter-meeting-in-leipzig-with-js-bach-300-years-on/

Berlin, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/im-a-berliner-now/

Sysmä, Finland: (2023) https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/

Lahti, Finland, (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-to-lahti-in-september-2023/

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Tony, a French friend, recently sent me an illustrated French novel by a novelist that I was embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894 – 1961). I googled him, as you do, and discovered that he is not only regarded as one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th Century, but also the most reviled. I was plunged, yet again, into that dangerous territory where I had to decide how to regard a great artist, like Ezra Pound or Richard Wagner, who held unacceptable and shocking anti-semitic opinions, even if, in Céline’s case, they are not expressed in this, his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the end of the night), published in 1931. I am pleased that I have read it.

Later he wrote two anti-semitic polemics which I will never read but which, I am told are very different to his first novel which is a truly revolutionary work of fiction where, in scenes of dark cartoonish horror and humour, the author writes in vivid working class French, almost dialect, about life in and after the 1914 – 1918 war, as well as about the degrading living conditions of the poor in society, in France, Africa and the USA. Conditions he witnessed first hand as a soldier and later as a doctor. The story is told in the liveliest of language by the narrator, the much put-upon and unfortunate Ferdinand Bardamu, a semi-autobiographical caricature of Céline himself. This great novel must not be ignored even if that is not the case for Céline’s later work.

Bardamu, with his sinister and ultimately tragic friend, or even enemy, Robinson, experiences a series of picaresque adventures at war in Flanders, where human life has no value for the generals, and in peacetime, where life is still harsh and unfair. In French colonial Africa native Africans endure hardships every bit as harsh as those in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and French colonial officials live abandoned lives of poverty and disease.

Bardamu and Robinson meet up again in New York where rampant capitalism has gone wild in a frenzy of sex and materialism and when or if, inhumane industrial conditions allow for any remission, poor workers like Bardamu find their only comfort in flea-pit cinemas and in the arms of affordable sex-workers.

Back in Paris, Bardamu sees the same harsh realities of life where money is everything and most people never have enough. There is no hope in this world, wherever Bardamu and Robinson go, life is only a preparation for death, which will be as good as your courage allows. That is the journey to the end of the night.

My absorption in this extraordinary novel (reading in French but with a parallel English translation on my Kindle), was made all the more gripping by the wonderful and appropriately cartoonish illustrations by the great French artist, Jacques Tardi. Those haunted faces and lives will stay with me forever.

So many of the issues of inhumanity and existentialist uncertainty tackled so powerfully in this novel remain with us today that it is a double tragedy that someone of Céline’s genius should, like Ezra Pound, poison their profundity of thought with the unforgivable and still threatening evils of anti-semitism. It will also be a tragedy if this book’s insights are missed by anyone put off reading it by the author’s reputation.

Many thanks, again, to my friend Tony for giving me this magnificent and thought-provoking book.

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I bought my first laptop last year as a luxurious add-on to the desktop computer that sits in the office room where I spend most of my writing days here at home in Lewes, UK. I suppose I should confess that I have been envious of all those lucky people that I’ve seen over the years who have these marvellous portable machines and who manage to work with them wherever they go. I went to Scotland for a long weekend last autumn and took my lovely new computer with me in a rucksack on my back – it was my first time away from home with my very own portable machine and, because it lives inside there too, the new novel, my fifth, that I am working on these days. Forgive my naive enthusiasm, but I still can’t believe how wonderful it felt to be working on my book on a train speeding up from London to Glasgow. I was amazed how much work I got done. And, yes, while my novel is in my laptop, my laptop is now a character in my novel.

My laptop has travelled with me around town too when I wanted a change of scene or even when fancied a cup of coffee in the coffeeshop across the road, so I am still excited by my new found mobility when I need to be working. Well, I have recently had a bout of the current ‘flu and I have been confined indoors in the warm and out of the winter rain. It’s an ill-wind, as they say , that blows nobody any good, so, looking on the bright side of my imprisonment, I have discovered the joys of moving around the house with my laptop. How cosy and tranquil to be away from my desk, to stay in my pyjamas all day, to keep the flu symptoms down with paracetamol, but feeling too ill to concentrate much on writing, I am free to play frivolously on the web, to listen to music and watch movies or just to surf the internet. It actually feels like a holiday.

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I am thinking about the women and girls of Afghanistan. Was this really the best the world could have done for them? These twenty years of corrupt and ineffectual Afghan governments seemed better than the terrible Taliban regime that proceeded them, and there was some hope that international assistance, not just guns and soldiers, could have led to a new system of government that looked after all of its people, men, women and children from all tribes and traditions without turning the assistance into a personal enrichment scheme for its leaders. The corruption may have been endemic in Afghanistan, but the ineffectuality was shared by the governments of the nations who were trying to help but allowed the corruption to continue. The pullout of American troops was, I’m sure inevitable and, maybe, sensible, but, I don’t believe that after the deaths of so many young soldiers and the suffering of so many Afghanis, that the best the world can do now is to leave these little girls to their fate under a regime that is saying it has changed. No-one should believe them.

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In July this year, while the UK was still locked down, I was challenged by a friend on Facebook to do the 25 Day Pushup Challenge and, because I can’t resist challenges, I did it.

The idea was to do 25 pushups every day for 25 days, to film the process and to post it on Facebook in a campaign to help raise awareness about the growing cases of people, often young, and mostly male, who are suffering from depression, anxiety and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). A condition which contributes to, again, mostly young male, suicides in this country.

I am no athlete but after leaving the hell that was my compulsory school sports experiences behind me, I have always tried to stay fit and, yes, to challenge myself by doing what has never come naturally to me. Like going to the gym or even roller-blading along the promenade at Brighton or in Hyde Park, London, where people, wisely, dodged out of my way.

I thought if I took part in the pushup challenge, I could be more encouraging as an example to others than elite sportsmen and women who can inspire by their skills but also, maybe, put the rest of us off with their unachievable brilliance and those rows of medals, silver cups and champagne showers that we will never win. Very nice to watch, of course, and great for them, but they can leave the rest of us feeling like, well, also-rans.

Talking about these issues is good, of course, but also, there is just a chance that regular exercise, no matter how athletic or not you are, can raise your endorphin levels and significantly effect, to use a modern catch-phrase, your mental well-being.

There have been difficult times in my life (as with many people) and I can talk first-hand about the effects of fitness-training when life gets tough.

I was lucky with some of my physical challenges when I was definitely old enough to know better. I found Kungfu, and an excellent instructor, the world-class martial artist, Neil Johnson. http://www.whitecranefightingarts.com/

Neil is also a brilliant and patient teacher who challenged my lack of co-ordination and lack of natural talent, into doing things that I would never have believed possible. Like training with kungfu masters in China, for example. Amazing!

I got fitter than I had ever been and even learnt how to win, at least a few times, in combat. The feeling was unbelievably exhilarating.

I trained hard and saw and felt the results of working the body to its limits. It was really good fun. I did kungfu weapons-training too….the seven and a half foot staff…

and the straight sword. Martial patterns I could practice wherever I was on holiday, like this rooftop in Santorini, Greece where an old broom handle made a good weapon.

Even the smallest spaces – like home – have space for martial arts training and, of course, for push-ups. So no excuse not to practise.

In the last ten years I had two life-threatening illnesses which challenged not just my life and my fitness but also, yes, that phrase again, my mental well-being. Doctors told me that I probably survived from the brain haemorrhage because I was very fit.

So I have continued in my efforts to stay that way, with a lot of help from my kungfu instructor, Neil, even though I was told I would have to give up full-contact kungfu sparring.

I also owe my gradual return to fitness to two personal trainers too. First, Ritxar Magee Atxukarro, whom I trained with on my doctor’s referral – UK prime minister Gordon Brown’s initiative which died with the change of government. Ritxar got me back into the gym here in Lewes and gave me the confidence to push back against illness and to get me going again.

For the last two years I have had a new trainer, Gyles Abbott, at Soulfit, http://wearesoulfit who has taken me back to fitness a second time after my recovery from a second illness, pulmonary embolism, when even walking up a hill was a struggle…now I can run up that hill.

My fitness has returned, or is returning, thanks to these three gentlemen and, yes, by a lot of personal effort. I have often felt down about health problems but I found that pushing back really helps. Exercise really does make you feel good about yourself.

Most of us usually discover pushups as a kind of school punishment, but, hey, they are a great form of exercise. You don’t need any equipment, just your body and a bit of will-power. I can vouch for the fact that doing them on a regular basis, why not every day, will really make you feel better. Honestly, if I can do them, so can you. Good luck!

Here’s the short movie I edited to show you how I did it.

I didn’t stop at 25 days – this morning, day 41, I am still going strong and hope to keep it going with new variations.

One last thing, if you don’t believe I did all 25 pushups on those 25 days, the full film is available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-hFwwf5QDc

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