A La Recherche..

Getting on for twenty years ago a small French restaurant opened beside Camberwell Green, and disappeared not long after. Helen and I ate there once or twice, when going out for dinner was one of those rare treats. I can't remember the name, or the food, but I have ever since had a piece of music running through my head which was playing on our first visit. I found out recently that it was by Georges Brassens, and called "Putain De Toi", loosely translated as "You Whore". Well worth a listen.

James Robertson Justice

James Robertson Justice was an actor known for playing formidably gruff characters, possibly the best-known of which was Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor film series. He was educated at Marlborough College, where my father had also gone to school. So when we were on holiday in Dornoch in 1964 and my father saw Robertson Justice walking into the local post office, he left us in the car, saying "I'll just go and say hello". He arrived back a few moments later looking somewhat crestfallen. What happened, Dad? "Well, I walked up and stood next to him and said 'Floreat Marlburia'. And without looking round he said 'I detested the place'. And that was that." And that was that.

Hockney - The Artist's Eye

The theme of David Hockney's Artist's Eye exhibition in 1981 was in large part to do with how our perception of any image and its value is altered by the stages of reproduction through which it passes. So a postcard of an Old Master is perceived differently from the original (for Hockney with just as much integrity and intrinsic worth) because of the change in material and scale, and because of the knowledge that it is anything but unique and inaccessible to us - we can own it, hold it in our hand, throw it away. He was exploring how modifications like photocopying and photography allowed new layers of perception to be overlaid on an original work and create new forms.

The poster for the exhibition, therefore, contained much of this multi-layered perspective. The image is a photographed re-staging of an original Hockney painting Looking At Pictures On A Screen, in which Hockney himself replaces the original figure of Henry Geldzahler. The posters of the original paintings from the National Gallery - which then appeared in the exhibition - hang on the screen, and close-ups of Hockney's original painted versions of them run along the bottom of the poster. And of course the whole thing was then produced as a four-colour litho print run. Of which I have a copy inscribed and signed by Hockney, which changes the value yet again.

It is one of life's great pleasures to work with someone with this sort of mind.

Things that have come up to expectation - 1. Virgin Atlantic

While at the V&A I had what in retrospect seems like an amazing hit-rate in blagging upgrades from airlines for overseas trips. The absolute best of these was for a trip to the USA with Tracy, the V&A press officer, when I managed to persuade Virgin Atlantic to upgrade us both to Upper Class. This was without exception the best transatlantic flight I have ever experienced. Virgin Upper Class was extremely stylish, comfortable, and - with the option of a neck-and-shoulder massage - pampered and relaxed its passengers in just the right way. Nothing in-flight since then has come close to matching that flight, and I look at Virgin with immense fondness for proving that air travel can indeed be magical.

Robert Crumb

The cartoons and characters of Robert Crumb helped to define an age for me. Fritz the Cat, Mr Natural, Big Brother's Cheap Thrills LP cover, all became part of the crazy visual language of the late 60s and early 70s.

St Mary's Street

In 1970 I moved into a small and insanitary flat at the bottom of St Mary's Steet, Edinburgh, with friends Simon and Janie. I seem to remember that on arrival between us we had four LPs, all Simon's. They were The Yes Album, Layla, It's A Beautiful Day, and Messaien's Turangalila Suite.

Janie, who moved out to live with her future husband shortly afterwards, had the only real bedroom. I had a room with a small window out onto the common stair (which as it was regularly used as overnight living quarters by rejects from the Salvation Army hostel opposite smelt strongly of many unpleasant things) while Simon basically slept in a cupboard.

In a search for stylish living I acquired a small white spherical television, which I suspended on a long chain from the living room ceiling. And which never quite stopped revolving thereafter, meaning that a lot of shifting was required to watch a programme all the way through. However, as the reception was terrible anyway, the sacrifice was not too great.

At an early stage Simon taught me to make chilli con carne, a valuable skill.

Not telling stories

I had a much-loved aunt, to whom it was almost impossible to tell a story, particularly a funny story, because of her habit of asking literal questions. "So, there was this man in a pub..." someone would begin. "Why was he there?" she would ask, intent to know the answer. "Well, he'd just gone in to have a drink or something. It doesn't really matter, you know. He was just in the pub. Anyway, another man walks in with an alligator under one arm..." "Good Heavens, would that be safe? Are alligators allowed in pubs? Was it a live one?" "Yes, it was a live alligator. And he puts it down on the bar..." "Didn't the barman object to that? I'm sure an alligator on the bar wouldn't be very hygienic." "He was a very tolerant barman apparently. So, the man puts down the alligator..." "And he wasn't worried about it falling off?" "No, it was a very sensible alligator" "... and turns to the crowd in the pub..." "So there were lots of people in there, then?" "Yes, a lot of people. And he unzips his fly..." "Good heavens! Did he really?" "Yes, he really did, and then he..."

And so the story would lurch on, from one interjection to the next, often coming to a complete stop before the end as the complexity of explaining the logic became too much. I loved it and miss her greatly.

Scrambled eggs

The secret to really good scrambled eggs, as told me by my dear father, is to cook them really slowly. It takes time, of course, and attention, but the main aim is to avoid the eggs cooking too fast at the base of the pan and creating the dried-out bubbled eggs layer which you have to scrape out. So turn the heat down to the absolute lowest and be prepared to stir carefully at regular intervals for some time. Then drop a hefty knob of butter into the pan; if it bubbles on contact you still have too much heat under there. Break in the eggs and stir them together. Add some salt and pepper to taste, and a tiny amount of milk. Too much milk and the eggs are ruined. Then stir, or rather occasionally scrape the base of the pan. The point when you need to pay attention is when the eggs start to solidify and you can feel the mixture gradually, gradually starting to turn. At that point you need to ensure that nothing sticks to the base of the pan for too long - you want to keep the heat working through the whole mix evenly. But at the same time you don't want to create a paste with no texture, so just keep scraping the thicker stuff up and letting the more liquid stuff take its place until you have just the right consistency - not too wet and sloppy, but not too dry and solid either.

Then serve onto the buttered toast you have prepared with your other two hands. It may all seem an effort, but it's completely worth it. Variations on this theme are Marmite or Gentlemen's Relish on the toast (not everyone's taste) or smoked salmon pieces mixed into the eggs as they cook. I prefer this to the more traditional way of serving scrambled eggs on sliced smoked salmon, not least because it's possible to buy smoked salmon offcuts much more cheaply than slices.

Conways

I think it would have been in 1969 or 1970 that I was driving in Edinburgh's New Town during the Festival and saw an elderly couple looking stranded beside an obviously damaged car on Queen Street. So I pulled over and asked if I could help. It turned out they were American tourists, passing through Edinburgh en route to somewhere further north when they had been involved in a traffic accident in their hired car. Their car was being taken away for repair but they had not planned to be in Edinburgh that night and so had made no arrangements for somewhere to stay. And as it was Festival time, there wasn't a spare room to be had. So I invited them to stay at the family's home where I was still living. My parents were away on holiday, so there was plenty of room. It must have been a bit strange for this couple to trust a complete stranger but eventually we all drove back home and they stayed the night and all went charmingly.

Their name was Conway, and I'm sorry to say that I never kept in touch with them afterwards. I would love to have found out what they really thought was going on - were they worried about being kidnapped, or ending up in a drug den, or what? I guess now I will never know.

Taste of Italy

When I worked as Head of Design at the National Gallery in London in the 1980s we staged a small exhibition comparing two works by Canaletto and Guardi, both views of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. As usual I arranged for large sign-written boards to be produced to promote this exhibition, which were made up in sections and then mounted on the front facade of the gallery. On the day of the exhibition itself I was called out to see the boards being put in place, only to realise that the signwriters had missed out a crucial "A" between two sections, and the National Gallery was now proudly advertising the PIZZA San Marco to the tourists in Trafalgar Square. Ah, what memories...

One act, one scene

At school there was a tradition that the junior boys performed, during the winter term, one-act plays, usually supposed to be comedy, for the school. And so, aged about 13, I found myself involved in a humorous play called In The Dentist's Waiting Room. My part was not large or central; it involved appearing on two occasions, in the first and last scenes, speaking a few lines which moved the plot forward in some fashion, and then exiting again.

Unfortunately, the occasion overcame me. I made my first entrance, in the first scene, and spoke my lines clearly. They were, however, my lines for the final scene. The rest of the cast, rehearsed to a Pavlovian level of response, followed on from my lines and completed the final scene. The curtains closed to a surprised silence from the audience. The play, which was supposed to last fifteen minutes, had taken four. And it had had no discernible plot. And it was not remotely funny.

Noone said anything afterwards. My excuse is that the two lines were very similar - I swear.

Orienteering

In 1973, I guess, I was working at the Edinburgh Film Festival for the summer, and one of the films launched there was The Wicker Man. This was a fairly weird movie by any standards, and has since become a cult, valued in retrospect much more than its lukewam reviews and limited box-office at the time would have suggested. There was a press screening one day, attended by one of the actors in the film, Lindsay Kemp, who had a 'character' part as a Scottish innkeeper (if I remember). Lindsay was one of the features of the Edinburgh cultural scene, leading a mime troupe that I had first seen perform at the Richard Demarco Gallery in 1968.

After the screening several of the EIFF team went out to a nearby pub for a drink with Lindsay, together with Jack Birkett (Orlando) and others of Lindsay's group. In the chat, someone asked Lindsay, who was about as camp as they come, how he knew he was gay. 'Well', replied Lindsay, 'it's very simple. Women don't give me erections.' Now, I'm sure there are all sorts of experts in sexual orientation who would say it's a lot more complicated than that, but to me that was about as useful a test of which way one was swinging as any deeper psychological study. On this simple premise, I was able back then and since to confirm that I was in a different -er - camp from Lindsay.

Dowsing in St James'

In 1971, I visited London with my friend and flatmate Simon. This was still in the "far out, man" days, and London was still a place with w-i-l-d fashion sense. I remember buying a pair of remarkable vivid lime-green crushed velvet trousers in the King's Road, which never looked quite as marvellous when I got them back to Edinburgh. However...

In our quest for cosmic consciousness we decided - no, it just seemed like a good idea at the time - to go dowsing in St James' Park. We each appropriated a forked twig, and with eyes closed wandered around the park chanting mantras and searching for oneness with nature. Simon almost immediately had things happen with his twig; it started twitching and bending, and drawing him around behind it, just like the books said, in fact.

My own experience was a bit different. No twitching, but I started to feel a tingling in my hands which got me excited. Until I opened my eyes to see that my palms were turning bright red, and my fingers were starting to swell to an enormous size. Instead of divining the earth's mysterious forces, I was suffering from an allergic reaction to the twig I had chosen. Bummer.

That was the moment I realised that Joni Mitchell wasn't going to sing a song about me. Stardust I was not.

In praise of a poor memory

I have always had a poor memory - or perhaps more accurately a poorly-disciplined and untrained memory. And for most of my life I have bemoaned this as a real disadvantage, while continuing to do nothing to try and improve the situation. I forget names, routes, facts, almost anything but especially jokes.

Lately, however, I have been wondering whether this can at times be an advantage, not just in the sense of being able to revisit books and films for the fifth time with almost as much pleasure as the first, but in the world of business. My thought is that a poor memory acts against the forming of strong preconceptions, formulaic solutions, or mental comfort zones. I realise that, by not having a vast memory bank of reference points to draw on, I tend to approach situations relatively openly. As I obtain facts, I'm not usually mapping them against an existing model, because I've forgotten what those models were. So if there is an advantage to a bad memory, it might be that any new case is judged on its specific merits, not against a history of similar but perhaps entirely misleading cases. The downside is that this potentially makes for a longer, less efficient process. The upside is that any solution offered is as unclouded and fit for purpose as I can make it.

Of course I would say that, wouldn't I?

Taste where?

About 25 years ago I guess, there was a hilarious ad on television for Brooke Bond Red Mountain instant coffee. The theme was rugged outdoors Americana with a throaty male voice extolling the virtues of the coffee in song. One line has stuck with me over the years which began: "You need a bigger taste..." and then "...right in your coffee cup". It's the word "right" that always got me going. Not just in your coffee, but "right" in your coffee cup. Somehow it evoked an image of aimed accuracy ("right in the bullseye"), and of other coffees getting the whole thing wrong and ending up with their bigger taste somewhere else, maybe the sugar bowl, or over the table cloth. I know it's just a lyric, and lines have to scan, but still. Where do you want that bigger taste, sir? Right in my coffee cup, waiter, if you'd be so kind.

Early classical music

We were not a musical family in particular. The record player was kept upstairs, and we certainly had some records of performers like Victor Borge, but listening to music wasn't a habit of any sort. I have no memories of the radio beyond the news and The Archers. But at some stage, when I was about ten, my parents bought a Readers' Digest boxed set of classical music, a sort of potted history of classical music in ten albums. A greatest hits selection. I came across this by accident shortly afterwards and started working my way through the collection.

The composers that really interested me were the more modern ones, and in particular Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring was included in the set and which I played over and over again. I found this to be some of the most exciting music I had ever heard. It opened up completely new perspectives on what music could be, and probably fixed me for ever in preferring 20th Century composers to most others. I then discovered Delius (On First Hearing..), Walton (Facade) and Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet) through my mother, for whom these were favourite pieces. And when I bought my own first record out of my pocket money, it was an EP of Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting Mars and Venus from Holst's Planets Suite.

Cars - the Healey 100/6

For my 21st birthday (just before in fact) I was given an Austin-Healey 100/6 by my parents, which cost £200. I had chosen this machine myself, and in my glee had failed to discern that its bodywork was largely made up of chicken-wire, newspaper and fibreglass filler. The engine, however, was simply superb and it went like the clappers. I took it out onto the newly constructed motorway north of the Forth Road Bridge and topped 100mph, which was something in those days. It had electric overdrive on 3rd and 4th gears, and there was nothing sweeter than flicking overdrive on and hearing the engine note drop a tone as you surged onwards. It was heavier than my father's big Vauxhall estate, and almost impossible as a result to push, let alone push start, so during the winter months it was essential to find a hill to park it on, just in case. I had the most marvellous eight months with it.

Its demise was tragic. I was taking a friend down to Harrogate en route to a summer job north of London, which was going to fund my driving the car to Greece to meet my then girlfriend who had had a job out there. The friend had brought along a whole box of books which went in the boot. It was pouring with rain. I had just fitted a brand new set of Michelin XASs. Just south of Newtown St Boswells on the A68 I lost the rear end completely on a bend, the car careered through a wire fence and into a field of barley. We were fine, thank goodness, but the car was in shreds. It was only insured for third party damage, and repairing it cost more than I could afford, so off it went to a new home.

As we were sitting in this field in the car in the rain, some people ran over from a house nearby and said. "you know, you're the second car that's done that this week". The corner has now gone, smoothed away, so I suspect we weren't the last car to do that particular trick either. I took the train to Greece.

Mortification

A recent conversation about children and gifts brought back to me an experience from when I must have been about six. I went to the birthday party of a friend of mine, at the conclusion of which presents were given to all. I watched other children unwrapping exciting toys and games and then my present was handed to me. I eagerly tore off the paper to find - a wooden clothes hanger, painted pink, with a little picture of a robin on it. This was about as big a let-down as it was possible to have at that age. Even today I cannot imagine who thought that a six-year-old boy would be glad to get a clothes hanger (I mean, hanging up clothes at all was a completely alien concept to me), let alone one that was pink. The scars remain to this day.

My first golf pro-am

My first golf pro-am in the mid-Eighties traumatised me so badly I didn’t play golf for ten years afterwards. Okay, the arrival of my baby daughter Kate focussed me on family matters and consumed all available cash, but the scars from that pro-am ran deep.

I was at BT at the time and had just helped to stage a very successful company golf day with a number of older British Ryder Cup stalwarts, Brian Huggett, Brian Barnes and others, helping to create an informal, chatty competition for our clients. So when I was rung up later and invited in return to a pro-am “at Fulford, up in Yorkshire”, I thought it would be another of the same. No worries. I was very much an occasional hacker, no handicap, so I wouldn’t be invited to anything serious, would I?

It wasn’t until we were driving to the course in the morning that the penny began to drop, and keep on dropping. It was indeed serious, very serious. The large yellow banners with B&H on them were a small clue. I asked the question. Oh yes, this was the pro-am the day before the Benson & Hedges International. Hadn’t I realised? So the informal group I would be playing with were? Jose Rivero, then a current European Ryder Cup star; the captain of Fulford golf club; and an important local businessman. No pressure there then. Butterflies began tap-dancing behind my navel.

They broke into a full can-can when we arrived at the club and the full horror of what I was exposing myself to became clear. This was warm-up day for everyone. Television cameras were all over the place, practising their angles, there were crowds of spectators lining the course. There were caddies touting for business, and it was clear that you didn’t carry your own clubs for this round. There were – and this was nice – huge goodie bags of B&H golf stuff. Photographs were taken for posterity of our foursome. The practice ground was full of people sending eight-iron shots 200 yards and landing them on a pocket handkerchief. It was truly terrifying.

As I swung on the first tee – clickclickclickclick - a fast-frame camera was firing away. I was so startled that I sent my drive straight down the fairway. Along the ground all the way, but straight. That was, I think, the only half-good shot I managed all day, and I hit a good few. It started to rain, RAF jets howled low overhead, and Jose Rivero strode along in grim silence, disgusted by his group's performance. Eighteen holes of pure unredeemed misery, ineptly hacking around in full view of the crowded galleries, a memory which even now causes me to break out into cold sweats. At the end I over-tipped my thoroughly disgusted caddie and slunk away.

James Lee Byars piece

James Lee Byars, an American conceptual installation and performance artist, visited the National Gallery in my time there, quite what for I can't remember. He presented Alistair Smith, one of the curators, with a piece of his art, and Alistair promptly handed it on to me. The work was (is) unsigned, and consisted of a large sheet of black tissue paper folded several times down to around A5 size. I think it was a "sketch" for a larger installation. Its title, or perhaps the event for which the actual work was planned, is Four Continent Documenta (maybe done for the Documenta VII in Kassel in 1982). For the last twenty years it's been sitting in an envelope in a file at home. To frame the thing somehow seems all wrong; I know it's there, which is about all a piece of conceptual art really needs.