Pjätteryd

I will leave it to you to work out how you want to pronounce it. Mis-pronouncing Swedish words and names is extremely hard for me. Guessing which way to get it wrong (i.e. the official Ikea mangling by English speakers) generally causes no end of difficulties for me.

But our family are very fond of Pjätteryd.

It’s a place name. Somewhere fairly insignificant in the county of Småland. Many years ago we were driving through Småland, on our way back from a visit to Ikea HQ in Älmhult. Every road sign – or so it seemed – promised to take us to Pjätteryd. The more we said it, the funnier it got. But we never arrived in this Pjätteryd, so I suspect it was all an elaborate hoax.

Over the years, whenever we needed to giggle about something, the Resident IT Consultant would bring Pjätteryd up. We’d laugh, and then forget about it until the next time.

That’s when Ikea brought in products bearing the wonderful name of the village that seems not to exist. It’s mainly arty stuff that’s been given the name of Pjätteryd. To the best of my knowledge we haven’t yet bought any.

Or maybe we have?

The Lost Thing

A 15-minute film wouldn’t normally be on my wishlist for DVDs to watch. But The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan is not your normal film snippet.

I read the book last year after Shaun won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and instantly loved it. The Lost Thing is a picture book, and you don’t always get successful films based on something as short as that.

The more I learned about Shaun and his books and his art, the keener I grew, and knew I had to try and get hold of the film.

This Christmas Daughter and I sat down together to watch, and we both loved it. Daughter now ‘must’ have her own ‘Thing’ to look after. ‘It’s so cute!’ she wailed. And it was. Very. But it’s also so large that it’d be hard to house, which is what the boy in The Lost Thing finds as well.

Narrated by Tim Minchin, it’s so laid-back in tone that it sounds exactly like Shaun himself. You could be fooled into thinking the boy doesn’t care about his new-found Lost Thing, but if he didn’t, he wouldn’t spend all that energy on finding the best solution for Thing.

It may be CGI, but to me it looked exactly like the book, only moving around. Perfect!

The 2011 Christmas Card

My rather nice card comes from the children at Charnwood. This is a Stockport nursery/playgroup with a difference. ‘Normal’ children can be found there, nicely mixed with children with special needs of varying type and severity. Both Offsprings attended Charnwood, and both received much needed skills and support from the fantastic staff. The place looked such fun that it was all I could do not to kick off my shoes and jump into the indoor sandpit, not to mention the ballpools.

Definitely the Inn Crowd.

As with the place in Bethlehem, places are at a premium. But it was well worth persevering.

Guest art

We’re sleeping in the New Librarian’s old room. It’s now an ‘artist’s studio’, so on the shelves there are no longer the New Librarian’s books, but art. Always nice to look at, when ‘sleeping’.

Sometimes I even sit and blog at the paint stained desk in there.

As for the bed, it’s the most comfortable I’ve known. It’s damned hard stealing a bed unobtrusively. I would if could.

Frisk-ier than ever

When Daughter saw the prices asked for Thomas Frisk’s art today, she came to the conclusion that ‘she could do that too’. I was less surprised, because Thomas is good, and he has to have money to live. Unfortunately, so do we, so no buying.

We needed to entertain GP Cousin and Swiss Lady, which is why I suggested the new Thomas Frisk exhibition in Halmstad, at Galleri Art-On. I’m only ever a ‘little girl’ to GP Cousin, so he might well have had his doubts about my suggestion, but I think he was won over. It’s an excellent exhibition, and I’d struggle to pick a single piece I wouldn’t want to own.

There were ones that I absolutely loved, but all were good.

Between us, Daughter and I and Swiss Lady, as well as the other visitor there, fell for the same picture. Despite Swiss Lady claiming to have a wall waiting for something large, she too loved the washbasin picture, which also happened to be a more ‘normal’ size.

Ever the sexist, GP Cousin explained away our fondness for it by saying its colours were girly. Hah. OK, there was pink and purple, but mostly not. Mostly it’s the same grey and monochrome industrial grunginess as usual with Thomas. In other words, perfectly wonderful.

I have blogged previously about Thomas, and I feel the washbasin would complement my earlier toilet print very nicely. But I’m not fussy. Any of the other paintings would be quite acceptable. However, some of them would need to come with a new wall to hang them on. The wayward shopping trolley was good.

So were the ceramic industrial ‘details’ Thomas had made, to match what’s at the exhibition venue. All I can say is that before my electrician removed them for something modern and bland and white, I too had light switches like Thomas’s. I could have killed him. The electrician, I mean.

I’m going to need to send Daughter to study for Thomas, and then she can – maybe – produce industrial grunge directly for me. Free of charge. She did study with Thomas once before, because he’s a very kind man, and at about age 10 she angled for lessons when we met him. She was too young. Now she’d be more than ready for some knowhow on ceramic light switches, and how to best portray a WC.

The birth of British rock

This was right up Daughter’s street, and I don’t mean that in the geological sense. We managed to find just enough spare time before the show at the Lowry the other day, to take in the exhibition of Harry Hammond’s photos of early rock stars.

Sometimes exhibitions like these sound good and turn out to be somewhat disappointing, mainly due to far fewer exhibits to look at than you’d expected. This one was almost the opposite, with far more photos than we could have hoped for. All of them good and interesting to see.

I’m obviously too young (yes, really) to remember most of these stars from back when. The Beatles, yeah, yeah. My Cliff Richard is a little older than the one in the many photos. It almost seemed like a ‘Cliff with a touch of Beatle’ exhibition, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

The others were many of the obvious ones, but I especially remember Adam Faith. You know how you often think when you hear that someone has died, that you didn’t realise they were still alive? It wasn’t until I saw the dates given for Adam that I remembered that he died in 2003.

As for Shirley Bassey she looks younger now than then. Almost. There’s something about the hairstyles and dresses from the 1950s.

Well worth going to see, especially if you’re ‘old’. Some of the theatre-goers for Goodnight Mister Tom who were taken round the photos by granny looked less than enthusiastic. Perhaps they’ve not been brought up on old songs on the iPod?

Cramped can be best

I would love more and bigger toilets. It’d be convenient not to have to queue for a table in the bar when you want to eat. The stairs to cinema screens 2 and 3 are a little awkward. And I love several other new and large cultural halls/theatres, whatever you want to call them.

So I’m not too much of a stick-in-the-mud I hope, and change can be beautiful.

But – and I hope the but could be felt a long way off – hands off Cornerhouse as it stands!

When I received the email telling me of the changes planned for the new and ‘better’ Cornerhouse I didn’t think too many dark, negative thoughts. But as I realised that the so-called city centre location is over by Deansgate station, plus a bit, I really don’t see that it’s going to be convenient in the way Cornerhouse is now. And its location is much of its charm.

The fact that it is cramped is what makes it what it is. If it could suddenly house many more people, while also sharing facilities with the Library Theatre Company, the Cornerhouse-ness may well disappear. You sort of know what kind of people you are going to meet at Cornerhouse. That’s a lot of its appeal.

As for travelling, you can’t be more convenient than next to Oxford Road station. It does have fewer trains off peak, but the fact that it’s a short walk to Piccadilly means you’re not stuck, even when it’s late and dark and possibly cold. The Deansgate area isn’t that much further off, but it’s that extra distance which will make getting back to suburbia less streamlined.

I haven’t yet heard a user of Cornerhouse say what a good idea they think the new plans are. Sometimes it is better to stay put and not believe that bigger and newer must mean better.

Being a recent Cornerhouse fan I suppose I have less ‘right’ to moan, but I’m already mourning.

Save the Assembly Rooms

You can’t possibly have too many shops, can you?

Yes you can. We have far more of them in most places than anyone could ever want. Now the Assembly Rooms – of Edinburgh Festival Fringe fame – are about to close for ‘upgrading’.

That might be good, were it not for plans to turn it into shops at the front and a posh restaurant at the back. As if Edinburgh needs either!

Please sign the petition to stop these ridiculous plans.

Living art

Can someone please tell me what’s wrong with saying ‘I know what I like’? As it refers to art, anyway. To me it’s perfectly logical. I do know what I like, and also what I don’t. A piece of art becomes no more pleasant to look at because it’s reckoned by experts to be ‘good’. Likewise, I can enjoy a ‘poor’ amateur painting.

I recently came across the idea that one should buy art by living artists, and I can sort of see the argument in that. Though I have to admit to having my walls covered in paintings by the amateur, and now sadly dead, Mother-of-witch. I love her paintings because they mean something to me.

Other paintings on our walls are favourites inherited from relatives. It feels good to be surrounded by stuff I always used to like. Again, most of it is not especially valuable.

One ‘proper’ artist whose pictures I love is Thomas Frisk. He is still working and even his name suggests good health. Visiting his studio can be dangerous to the bank balance however, and I have succumbed several times.

Around 35 years ago I saw a large oil painting of his at an art gallery near where I lived, and I still remember it. It was a painting of a toilet. I mentioned this to Thomas more recently at another exhibition, and he told me how his mother had made some less complimentary comment about having a son who thought toilets were art. Then he hunted out what he thought was the offending article, except his fondness for toilets appears to mean he has painted lots of them. It wasn’t the same, but I liked this one too. So I bought it.

Most of Thomas’s paintings are so large that they could never enter our house. It’s not because our walls are full. (They are though.) It’s because Thomas often does oils so large that they won’t fit on a domestic wall. Doesn’t stop me from wanting them, however. And the day I find myself living in a palace I will know where to go for pictures.

This little grey number is quite small, and I’m not sure why I like it. But I do. It’s a picture of a desk, which hangs close to our desks. Desks hanging together, so to speak.

The blue picture is an unusual mix of oil and ceramics. It was the first one I noticed when entering Thomas’s studio, and the one I kept coming back to after looking at everything else. Love at first sight?

(Sorry about the leaf!)

Picturing Murdo

I could really have done without Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the nude. But other than that I quite enjoyed the exhibition of Murdo Macleod’s photos at the Guardian.

I wouldn’t ordinarily go out of my way to look at this type of exhibition, but after a couple of Augusts at Charlotte Square in Edinburgh ‘in the company of’ Murdo and his colleagues, I almost feel I know him. He doesn’t know me, of course, and probably doesn’t want to. I’m the Fat Controller of the Bookwitch photographer, and no matter how good her (photographic) equipment is, theirs is always bigger and better. And they are all boys together.

After seeing the article in the Guardian a few weeks ago, I thought I’d pop along to their offices if I happened to be in London at the right time. Luckily the Philippine ambassador saw fit to invite me round, so I did end up in London after all.

But, I would have welcomed more than the foyer of the Guardian. OK, so it has walls. Walls with exhibits on them. It has stairs to the offices. It has a security guard. After my trek all the way there I would have loved somewhere to sit. Many galleries have seats. You can rest, and you can think about what you’re looking at. Here I was in and out in minutes, or so it felt. I had also hoped there would be many more photos not already known to me from the paper.

The photos are good. No question about it. But then if you have access to famous people, especially in unusual settings, then half the battle has been won. Experience in how to get the famous people to pose will help, and I’m sure the superior long lenses do their job. But an amateur could take pictures like these, too. Murdo has a lot of interesting umbrellas, and I’m certain they assist him with the job in hand.

So, just get a politician to stand in front of a derelict cottage, or someone rich to sit down in an untidy room and you’re halfway there.

Or am I being unfair?

Murdo is the one in red. Philip Pullman asked what gave him the right to ‘give the orders’, and I believe the answer was his red fleece. This photo was taken by someone who is not aspiring to professional photography, using an ordinary small camera, which incidentally was bought after our first encounter with Philip, when we were so camera-less that we had to borrow one. But that’s another story.