Holland Park Spring – the Acers

As I am sure you know, Holland Park is London’s finest green space and there is no better time to enjoy it than spring. I love spring, for after months of dark evenings and cold nights, when no self-respecting plant would grow, the riot of growth and colour and frivolous vibrance in the gardens and in the parks drags me out of my own winter torpor.

Holland Park has a fantastic collection of Acers which I love. The leaves of Acers are just so precise, their shapes are so architectural; I find them fascinating and calming. Best of all is their emergence in spring, as the pink buds swell, and the drooping fingers of the new leaves curl out and spread into their full form. I’ve been working far too hard these last few weeks, but it has been a pleasure to walk through the Park most mornings, down the Acer Walk from the pond where Lord Holland sits, and watch the daily change in the leaves.

FCUK poster girl with huge balloon penis.

The title somewhat speaks for itself. I just took this photo outside FCUK on the King’s Road. It is hard to believe this is an accident, if it is some advertising executive is getting the chop.

What do you think of French Connection’s latest controversial ad? Amusing animal balloon double entendre or a foray into poor taste?

Why Brian Sewell is wrong about Hockney

Brian Sewell has never been one to understate his opinions, and was damning in his criticism of David Hockney’s Royal Academy exhibition, A Bigger Picture. His Evening Standard review starts with questions about the exhibition: : “Why is so much of it so big, so towering, so vast, so overblown and corpulent? Why is it so repetitive? Why is everything so unreally bright, so garish, discordant, raw and Romany? Why is the brushwork so careless, crude and coarse?”.  He lambasts him for his “vile greens and viler purples“, and condemns the temerity of Hockney’s monolithic canvasses. There is no doubt about what Brian Sewell thinks of Hockney’s latest work.

Now I understand that a critic must criticise, and must not shy away from challenging orthodoxy when it strays into mediocrity. But I fear that Sewell’s criticism stems not from Hockney’s inadequacy, but from Sewell’s lack of understanding of the true nature of the subject.

Hockney’s recent work is huge in scope and scale. Not that he has shied away from size before, his work ‘A closer Grand Canyon’ (1998), which Sewell applauds as “his last brief fling with quality”, adorns the wall in the second room, a huge expanse of interlocking canvases depicting in vivid, almost visceral, technicolour the enormity of rock. It is a truly immersive canvas, the heat from the red rock radiates from the canvas as the view fills your vision. There is an evocative quality to the work, an elegance of execution, and I agree with Sewell about the standard of his work then.

His rediscovery of the Yorkshire countryside is brilliantly displayed in this exhibition, and it his journey exploring the topic that is most interesting. The earlier works, particularly the montage of 24 oil canvasses on one wall from 2005, are classic, pastoralist paintings of the English countryside. He captures the feathery wild grasses on the edge of a field, the chocolate-brown of freshly tilled earth, the golden field of corn stubble filled with pert, round bales of straw.

Whilst I enjoyed these paintings, his massive wall of watercolours in the same room leave me cold. Each picture has the same confident brush strokes, the same picturesque framing of its subject, but they are rendered insipid without the bold colours of oil.

But the colours return, and as we follow him into the later parts of last decade, the colours brighten again, and his palette changes. Whites and lime green and red-brown mark the winter scenes, and bright summer is enlivened by orange-pink and beige and greys and purples which reminded me of Van Gogh. The colours are vivid, are supernatural, and clearly Sewell finds this vivid interpretation jars with the sobriety of the English countryside. But these colours work. These are colours painted from the heart, from a memory of a country walk or a spring picnic where the greens of your memory are greener than any green should ever attempt to be.

Indeed, I find this excess of colour works better for the scenes of English fields than it does for the wilds of Yosemite or the Grad Canyon. We know that those vistas are vibrant, the sheer size and scale is overwhelming in reality, and perhaps, like in writing, then the action is strongest that is when it needs the most delicate touch. In contrast, the gentle, and genteel, rolling hills of England flash real in the mind’s eye with the application of vibrant colour: a visual metaphor.

He triumphs in his exploration of the seasons, particularly in ‘Thixendale Trees‘ and ‘Woldgate Woods‘. I adore beech woodland, and in these works he paints the same view again and again, in different seasons and lights and moods, and brings alive my memories of beech trees near home. He finds the iridescent line green of spring beech leaves, the lustrous shade of the mature leaves in high summer, the burnished copper of sunny autumn evenings, the supple khaki of bare beech boughs in winter. As my sister said as we stared into the woodland, “it makes you want to go for a walk right now”.

Not that he always gets it quite right; the Hawthorn blossoms seem just too exuberant, in his quest to capture the vitality of the spring bloom he strays into caricature, the blooms become candy floss in a Willy Wonka scene. And the less said about his exploration of the Sermon on the Mount the better; bright, almost kitsch, it lacks spiritual meaning, so much so that he is forced to write ‘LOVE’ in the sky in one painting, in case the painting cannot speak for itself.

But the key theme returns again, and we see Hockney’s latest and most exciting work in the room of trees and totems. Here man’s effect on the countryside is most evident; there are coppices and pollarded stumps and cut trunks, the yellow of cut wood jars against purple bark and blue-green foliage. Yet this is not some Eco-rant about man’s destruction of nature, rather a recording of the annual cycle of man as part of nature, man as cultivator and sculptor, rather than intruder and destroyer.

For the English countryside is not ‘natural’ not in the same way as the Grand Canyon, untouched and colossal. This is a managed landscape, man working nature, harvesting, planting, sowing. It is a celebration of Britain’s agrarian history. His paintings celebrate muddy purple tractor tracks as much as the trees in ‘Winter Timber‘ 2009. In his springtime works of 2011 we see further complexity added to his earlier pastoral scenes, with woods and fields intertwined with roads and cars and signs and walls and telephone poles. This is our countryside, nature melding around man. These pictures were painted on iPad, and his use of an $8 app to paint does not compromise his vision.

I found the exhibition was both fascinating and moving. To see Hockney’s own exploration and development from typical scenes of pastoral bliss, to an exploration of the seasons, and finally to a deep understanding of man’s shaping of the countryside was interesting intellectually, to explore my own emotions and memories of nature and countryside was a deeper challenge. It leaves me with little doubt that Brian Sewell has truly missed out. Perhaps he lacks the experience and understanding of what the countryside is, perhaps a lifetime in cities has taken him too far away from the joys that nature brings. Either way, he is wrong. The exhibition has its faults no doubt, but Hockney has brought something both vivid and nuanced to the art of landscape.

 

Why zoology rocks

I did my first degree in Zoology, and although I moved onto medicine, there are some things I still really miss about zoological research. Medical research is by its very nature rather worthy, its hard not to be when your aim is to understand and cure disease, and to save lives, but there is something wonderfully fun and frivolous about some zoological research, like this study reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, and then on the BBC.

These scientists decided to look into whether a Zebra’s stripes helped reduce bites by Horseflies. They studied Horseflies’ response to polarised light, and the differences in polarisation between dark and light coloured horses, finding the light coloured ones were bitten less. Even more interestingly they found that ones with Zebra stripes attracted even less than the white horses, the bands somehow interfering with the Horsefly’s attraction to polarised light. This research involved, amongst other things, building model horses with different coloured coats, with a sticky glue on the surface to trap Horseflies that landed, and then watching them in a mountain field. Awesome stuff.

I miss the creativeness of Zoology sometimes, along with the lack of funding and the ‘Blue Peter’ style of building experimental apparatus out of whatever you have lying around. You can try to answer questions like ‘what benefits do Zebras get from their stripes?’. What other branch of science can you muck about in a field with some model horses and get published in major scientific journals? Zoology rocks.

Beef Wellington

Beef Wellington is one of my favourite dishes. Ever. Rare fillet steak, foie gras, mushrooms, crisp puff pastry; it just works.

After making it at New Year (and nailing it, if I must say so myself) I am now the Beef Wellington chef for evermore amongst my in-laws. The New Year’s version was the first time I had cooked it, and the meat was spot-on, although the pastry was a bit dodge, and it leaked a little in one corner.

My second attempt was a bit tricky due to a slightly lopsided bit of meat which I undercooked a little, but the pastry looked awesome, and the foie gras and mushrooms were pretty good too. It was not a problem for me, I like my fillet on the rare side of mooing, but I did make a Frenchman microwave part of the meat, so I must have undercooked it a bit!

Here’s the recipe I developed from a couple I found on the net, I can’t remember where.

Ingredients (for 5-6):

• 1kg fillet, whole
• Thyme
• 4 tbsp Olive Oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• 300g of wild mushrooms
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 100g of foie gras
• Puff pastry (shop bought, unless you are crazy)
• 1 egg

First brown the meat. Heat a frying pan up nice and hot with a tbsp of olive oil. Season the meat with a touch of salt, and put in the pan. You want to get a nice deep brown on the meat, so leave it a couple of minutes on each side, and on each end. You also want to almost cook the meat inside, it won’t cook much more later on. Once it is done (you want it pretty rare, it is fillet after all) take it out and leave it to cool.

Now make the mushroom duxelle. Finely chop the mushrooms and garlic. Place in the hot frying pan with the rest of the oil, some pepper and salt, and some thyme. Cook on a medium heat until it is lightly browned, and all the liquid has come out of the mushrooms. Now add the foie gras to taste with the pan off the heat, it will melt into the mushrooms a little. Check the flavour, it should be balanced between garlic, woody thyme-flavoured mushrooms and foie gras. Leave aside to cool.

An hour before you want to serve, it is time to assemble. Preheat the oven to 200c. Put a thin sheet of puff pastry on a baking tray with some parchment paper underneath. The puff pastry needs to be about 3-4cm bigger than the piece of beef on each side. Put a thin layer of the duxelle you made on the pastry in the shape of the piece of meat. Place the meat on the duxelle, then spread the duxelle all over the meat, it should stick to it with the foie gras in the mixture.

Lightly beat the egg, and egg wash the 3-4cm of pastry around the sides of the meat. Now put a second piece of pastry over the top, which needs to be considerably bigger than the first bit. Tuck it around the meat and press it down on the bottom pastry with a fork to make a neat pattern. Trim the pastry, and egg wash the top layer. You can make decorations with the offcuts of pastry.

Pop into the oven for 25-30 minutes, until deep golden brown. Take out, and leave to rest for ten minutes to make sure it is warmed through, then carve across so each person gets a slice of fillet, surrounded my rich duxelle and crispy pastry. We served it with garlic potatoes, spinach and a marsala gravy. Goes well with a nice Bordeaux.

As they say, here’s one I made (and ate) earlier:

Laura Dekker – 21st century inspiration or abused child?

In January, Laura Dekker completed her solo circumnavigation of the world in a 38ft yacht called Guppy. Circumnavigating the globe is an enormous achievement of skill and endurance for anyone, and the group who have successfully completed the journey is small indeed. What makes Laura’s achievement all the more incredible is that she is 16 years old.

There is something truly inspiring (and a little depressing) about the stellar achievements of young adults. Such incredible feats motivate and deflate me at the same time; it reminds me what anyone can achieve given time and dedication, and what I have not managed myself. Tom Lehrer put it well when he said “It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for 2 years.” I certainly empathise with Lehrer’s sentiment; at 16 my achievement was passing my GCSEs.

And yet much of Laura’s and her family’s efforts have been spent trying to satisfy the Dutch social care system. First her proposed attempt was stopped on the grounds of safety and that it would impair her education. Her parents had to fight the decision in the courts, and eventually she won the right to start her journey before she was 16, albeit with significant restrictions placed upon her, such as completing distance learning schoolwork whilst on her journey. Even during the journey she was not free of the Dutch authorities, her father was issued with a summons for her ‘truancy’ when she could not submit her schoolwork in time because storms prevented her working and internet access was erratic. I think this case brings to light several important issues about the autonomy of children and the interaction between the family and the state.

When I read about young people like Laura, it reminds me just how artificial our notion of childhood is. The start of adulthood is an artificial construct, but one every society marks. In the UK you are not granted the full rights and responsibilities of an adult until you are 18, in America it is 21. In most earlier societies and in many religions adulthood starts much younger, around 12 or so, with children joining the British Army and Navy at 11 or 12 as drummer boys or powder monkeys just a couple of hundred years ago.

One of the rights of adulthood is autonomy, the right to decide what you do, and what happens to you. I’m a doctor, and autonomy is something we talk about a lot, it is one of Beauchamp and Childress‘ pillars of biomedical ethics. Put simply, if a patient has capacity to make a decision then we should respect it, even if we do not think their action is one we agree with. A patient can refuse a life saving operation even if that decision will lead to their death. Autonomy trumps all (except in certain special situations; everything has a caveat in medicine!).

Except for children. Children do not have autonomy under medical law and ethical principle, instead their parents decide for them, or the state in their place, until they reach adulthood. So if Laura at 16 would not be able to consent to an operation, should she be able to make the decision to circumnavigate the globe?

Well, medicine in the UK has come up with an answer to this. Children under 16 can consent to medical interventions themselves if they meet certain criteria, if they do then they have what is called ‘Gillick competence’ a term which refers to a case where a Health Authority won the right to give contraception to under 16s without parental consent if the child met certain criteria. I won’t go into the details here, but what this ruling means is that doctors can judge whether someone has the ability to make adult decisions, it recognises what we all know, that different children develop at different speeds, and some reach ‘adulthood’ faster than others.

In most other spheres of life, the cut-off between childhood and adulthood is fixed, no ‘Gillick competence’ exists for driving, or marriage, or joining the army. But in cases like Laura Dekker’s, I think we need to introduce this flexibility. This clearly intelligent, motivated girl may well have the faculties to balance up the risks to her safety and her schoolwork versus the benefits that such a voyage would bring. As she has the support of her family also, should the state try to stop this?

There is no simple answer. Just as in medicine, such decisions need to be taken on a case by case basis, applying law with intelligence and empathy. I think it is probably right that authorities were aware of her case, and insisted that she continue her studies in some way, but the idea of rebuking her for truancy when she was battling oceanic storms is laughable. Solo sailors often have to stay awake for days at a time when weather is bad, so homework deadlines are not exactly a priority. When she did have time to write, she was doing so, and her blog makes fascinating reading, a well written and often moving account of her journey (written in English, a foreign language) which is an amazing achievement in itself. Surely she gets some school credits for that!?!

The Dutch authorities insistence on certain safety measures on her yacht seems reasonable, but such activities are inherently unsafe, as are others such as climbing, or go-karting or crossing the road to school. Life is risky, and understanding this is part of the transition to adulthood, which is fundamentally the objective of childhood. By ‘safe-guarding’ children we may be preventing their development into adults.

Now I am not anti-authoritarian, indeed work as a doctor opens your eyes to all the dreadful things that happen where a state has a moral obligation to intervene. When you see children who are physically abused by parents or guardians, or who are harmed through neglectful parents, or whose minds are broken by emotional abuse, you can’t fail to support any system that tries to help those children. In the UK there are children who need social care, and I am sure there are in Holland too. So it begs the question, where should the state’s resources go? Should we be micromanaging the parenting skills of clearly loving and supportive parents of an ambitious and talented youngster like Laura Dekker, or could those resources be used better elsewhere? I can’t believe there are no children worse off than Laura in Holland.

Laura Dekker’s record for circumnavigation of the globe is an inspiration to anyone, particularly young people, and she is a credit to her family. Her record is unrecognised though, the Guinness Book of Records state that they ‘aim to encourage responsible record breaking that does not jeopardise the claimant’. This is an organisation that recognises a record for ‘Heaviest weight lifted by nipples’ – responsible record breaking indeed (In case you were wondering, 31.9kg by Sage Werbock aka “The Great Nippulini”).

Laura’s case reminded me of a book I read many years ago, Danziger’s Travels, where Nick Danziger travelled to post-war Afghanistan in the early 90s. With so many men dead, much of the economy was run by children. I remember his description of a 11 or 12 year-old boy who had the enterprise to set up a tyre repair business, and had several employees working for him, all younger even than him. Not only does it make you realise how tame ‘Young Apprentice‘ is, but also shows just how much children can achieve when given the chance. Laura Dekker did something amazing, not just motivated by need, but driven by some colossal internal desire to succeed, to conquer, to explore. That spark within her is not unique, many children have it, and as a society we must encourage youngsters like her to let that spark burn bright, and to succeed in ways most of us find unbelievable. To do this we all need to allow children autonomy as they develop, and not constrain them with rules rigidly imposed by schools and authorities and parents. Well done Laura.

I’m back

Rather embarassingly it has been 3 months since I last posted, as events rather took over of late. November brought with it NaNoWriMo, which quite amazingly I managed to complete. December heralded the end of the internet in our house, thanks to the incredible incompetence and terrible service of TalkTalk (quite simply the most awful ISP ever, don’t give them a penny). By the time the internet was reconnected in January work was crazy busy, and that brings us up to the present.

Anyway, I am back, and ready to write, after too long away from the keyboard.