Excremental Jeremy Hunt

The Bristol Stool Chart (BSC) is a medical aid designed to classify the form of human feces into seven categories. It was developed by Dr. Stephen Lewis and Dr. Ken Heaton at the University of Bristol and was first published in the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology in 1997. 

Here's the list in full (and you can search online for illustrated versions but (as the Daily Mail webesite would say) WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT. The agreeably un-technical type descriptors are those devised by Lewis and Heaton:

• Type 1: Separate hard lumps, like nuts (hard to pass)
• Type 2: Sausage-shaped, but lumpy
• Type 3: Like a sausage but with cracks on its surface
• Type 4: Like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft
• Type 5: Soft blobs with clear cut edges (passed easily)
• Type 6: Fluffy pieces with ragged edges, a mushy stool
• Type 7: Watery, no solid pieces, entirely liquid

The remarkable thing is not only that there are as many types of excrement as there are types of ambiguity (according to Empson), but that each of these seven categories can be applied with great accuracy to the public pronouncements of Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health and the Tory Member of Parliament for South West Surrey. 

Before reading this blog, which is JUST FOR FUN, you might take a look at Dr Rachel Clarke, a highly intelligent and calmly furious junior doctor, calling Hunt 'a liar and a manipulator' during a television interview. She makes an eloquent case against this horrible mendacious man.

I lack Dr Clarke's authority and experience and alll I can do as a writer is compare the Health Secretary to different types of excreta.

Everything this awful man says is shit, of course - there can be no question of that. But what type of shitty nonsense does he evacuate at any given time? Let's consider some examples, JUST FOR FUN, with thanks to the extensive Wikipedia entry on Hunt:

Type 1: Separate hard lumps, like nuts (hard to pass)

In an interview with The Times in October 2012, Hunt said that he was in favour of reducing the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 12 weeks. This is a point of view (although it barely passes muster as a thought) that can instantly be categorised as BSC Type 1: hard lumps, like nuts. Hard to pass and, one might add, hard to swallow.

Type 2: Sausage-shaped, but lumpy.

In July 2015, Hunt broke patient confidentiality by tweeting a publicity photo with patient details visible on a board behind him. That seems to me a sausage shaped and lumpy kind of gaffe - inelegant, witless, and porcine.

Type 3: Like a sausage but with cracks on its surface.

The cracks began to show on 30 January this year when Hunt seriously suggested that parents should go online to look at photos of rashes if worried that their child might have meningitis.  "if you're worried about a rash your child has, an online alternative – where you look at photographs and say “my child’s rash looks like this one” – may be a quicker way of getting to the bottom of whether this is serious or not".  

The charity Meningitis Now said his advice was "potentially fatal". I suffered from, and was nearly killed by, a dose of meningitis when I was five years old. Doctors and nurses at our local NHS hospital (now closed) saved my life. Hunt understands medicine las much as a sausage understands an abattoir.

Tyoe 4: Like a sausage or snake, smooth but soft.

In June 2013 Hunt announced plans to charge foreign nationals for using the NHS, claiming that the cost was up to £200 million though official figures put it at £33 million.^[However, £21 million of that £33 million was already recovered, putting the actual cost at £7 million - less than Hunt's crackdown could cost.  Smooth but soft.

Type 5: Soft blobs with clear cut edges (passed easily)

In 2009, Hunt was investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.The commissioner found: "Mr Hunt was in breach of the rules in not reducing his claims on the Additional Costs Allowance in that period to take full account of his agent's living costs. As a result, public funds provided a benefit to the constituency agent." Hunt’s offer to repay half the money (£9,558.50) was accepted - the clear cut edges of legality and probity were easily passed Hunt repaid £1,996 for claiming the expenses of his Farnham home while claiming the mortgage of his Hammersmith home.

Type 6: Fluffy pieces with ragged edges, a mushy stool

In June 2010, Hunt attracted controversy for suggesting that football hooliganism played a part in the death of 96 football fans in the Hillsborough disaster; when it has been suggested that a lack of police control and the presence of terraces and perimeter fences were established as the causes of the tragedy. He later apologised saying "I know that fan unrest played no part in the terrible events of April 1989 and I apologise to Liverpool fans and the families of those killed and injured in the Hillsborough disaster if my comments caused any offence. Note that heartless, evasive and self-exculpating "if".Jeffrey Hunt is a mushy stool.

Type 7: Watery, no solid pieces, entirely liquid

As Culture Secretary, Hunt was the government Minister responsible for the London Olympics and Paralympics. He took the decision to double the budget for the widely acclaimed opening ceremony, which came to £27,000,000 for four hours of telly.

Well  now that's done and I'm glad it's over. I haven't had time to consider Hunt's absolutely disgraceful treatment of junior doctors in the National Health Service - that would involve an additional category on the Bristol Stool Scale. Type 8: explosive flatulence with excrement streaking the walls and ceiling. 

Hunt will be best remembered (though not fondly) for the moment James Naughtie inadvertently called him a cunt on the Radio 4 Today programme, before suffering 'a coughing fit'. Listen here

On Ann Quin (eventually)

On 20th June 2013 I posted a short blog which appears  in full below. It may well be the first blog reference to a newly-published novel that would later take the world by storm and is now established as that paradoxical thing, 'a modern classic'. I had no idea at the time that I would go on to write a book about the book I so much admired, but that has come to pass. About a Girl  (subtitled 'A Reader's guide to Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing') will be published on March 17th by CB editions. 

My TLS review of her debut  novel had appeared a couple of weeks before I posted the blog. At that time no other reviews had yet appeared and the book's phenomenal success was still in the future. But within a few months word had spread and the first of many literary awards  - the Goldsmiths - came as belated recognition that a novel of outstanding brilliance and originality, written almost a decade before by an author who bore comparison with Joyce and Beckett and other major modernists, had at last found its place in the world. Eimear McBride is a leading literary figure and her second book The Lesser Bohemians is the most keenly-anticipated novel of 2016. 

The paragraph deleted from my TLS review forms the basis in About a Girl for refections on the paucity of women writers in the modernist movement. The usual names come up in any such discussion - Virginia Woolf inevitably leading the field - although in my view the English critical perspective tends to overlook even those avant-garde writers across the Channel in any consideration of the subject. I realise belatedly that my placing of McBride in the category of female modernists may appear condescending - she's a great writer full stop - but I like to think my intentions were noble. The tiny community of modernist experimental writers contains an even tinier female cohort, and they deserve and repay our close attention as readers. If you haven't read any of Ann Quin's four novels Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), please make a point of doing so as a belated resolution for 2016. Start with Berg - it's a piece of work.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Salvēte! 20th June 2013

Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a superb first novel that I've been raving about to anyone within earshot since I read an advance copy a month ago. You can read my Times Literary Supplement review here.

The TLS quite rightly cut my first paragraph (too much of the Village Explainer), in which I said:

There are not many experimental novelists, and very few of them are female. Leading the field are Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson (whose Pointed Roofsdeveloped a stream of consciousness technique seven years before the publication of Ulysses). More recently Christine Brooke-Rose, Marguerite Duras, Eva Figes, Ann Quin, Nathalie Sarraute and a handful of others have explored and expanded the novel's formal potential. Eimear McBride is of their number and, on the strength of this brilliantly accomplished first book, equal to the best of them. 

Her book is by turns very funny, intensely sad and utterly astonishing. I've never read anything like it.

Who wrote this?

Who wrote this, and to whom?

Your bodysnatch story is ghastly, but so are all bodysnatch stories. My grandfather was a surgeon, a fellow student of Keats', and once conveyed a body through Plymouth at the risk of his own.

You'll have to scroll down to reveal the (surprising) author of this passage (and the picture below is a clue):

This eerie paragraph comes at the end of a letter dated May 13th 1878 from the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins to his fellow poet Robert Bridges.

Hopkins was one among many eminent (and many more non-eminent) Victorians who visited the town of Barmouth on the beautiful Mawddach estuary in what is now called Gwynedd, in Wales; Darwin and Ruskin were among other visitors, attracted by the sublime scenery. I've been there several times for holidays and love the place for its vast empty beaches, mountain walks, the wonderful sunbleached wooden railway bridge that spans the estuary and is open to walkers. It's a place with a Post Office where you can buy paper flags to decorate short-lived sand castles, a place where you can go netting for crabs and shrimps or ride a donkey wearing a straw hat (the donkey, I mean); a place where you can gaze contentedly for hours at the waves and the clouds. Barmouth has some interesting buidlings (a colossally out-of-scale church, and a tiny cottage rented by Ruskin). It's also a bit run down, with (the last time I was there) a fascinatingly dingy amusement park and some decommissioned chapels selling cheap garden furniture. The railway station is a passing point on the Cambrian Coast line, which snakes through the town via a series of tunnels and bridges before emerging onto the great bridge that crosses the mouth of the estuary to the village of Fairbourne, a place of bungalows and prefabs built on a sand spit in constant danger of inundation from the sea. It was founded as a seaside resort by Arthur McDougall (of self-raising flour fame.) and is home to a  delightful miniature railway.

This is Wales so there's little chance of a decent meal but otherwise it's a good place to spend a few days. It's no longer possible to take a ferry boat up the Afon Mawddach to Penamenpool, a place Hopkins visited and commemorated in a lovely piece of occasional verse. I blogged about the place and the poem here some years ago, and a ghastly disaster that has now been all but forgotten

I've been reading Hopkins again, prompted by the disturbing news that Fairbourne is to be 'decommissioned' by cash-strapped Gwynedd council, who have no plans to invest in coastal defences but will allow the place to be taken over by the sea, probably within the next fifty years. This the council describe as 'a managed retreat'. One of Hopkins' greatest poems 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'  is about death by drowning. What would he make of a village under the waves? 

Minding the Gap

A reluctant commuter, I use Embankment underground station regularly.. The northbound platform on the Northern Line is built on a tight curve and this potential hazard to travellers prompts the recorded message "Mind the Gap" every time a train arrives and the carriage doors slide open. The message is delivered in a brisk patrician voice recorded for London Underground (as it then was0 by the actor Oswald Lawrence in 1969 "MAIND THE GEP" (pause) "MAIND THE `GEP". More of this chap in a moment.

The phrase is surprisingly recent in origin, despite the pre-war enunciation. It was apparently introduced as a pre-recorded announcement circa 1968, the terse phrase was also painted where appropriate on platform edges. 

I was mildly surprised to learn that the clipped voicewe hear at Embankment is not standard throughout the system. Piccadilly line stations, for instance, use announcements pre-recorded by by Tim Bentinck, the actor best known for his role as David Archer in The Archers. His Wikipedia entry tells me that Timothy Charles Robert Noel Bentinck (to give him his full name) is 12th Earl of Portland, 8th Count Bentinck. He is also Viscount Woodstock, Baron Cirencester and "a mediatised Count of the Holy Roman Empire". Strewth.

At Paddington station we can hear the voice of one Keith Wilson, who was in 1990 industrial manager of PA Communications Ltd of Milton Keynes. It strikes me that we might consider having bespoke announcements recorded by different people at every one of our stations, perhaps based on local associations - Graeme Garden (Mornington Crescent), Suggs McPherson (Camden Town), Hugh Grant (Notting Hill), Sid James (anywhere else).

In March 2013 it was reported that the version recorded by Oswald Laurence would be restored to Embankment station so that his widow could hear his voice. This is the one I hear each day. You can find the full story  here. 

Incidentally the French version "Attention à la marche en descendant du train" ("Watch your step while getting off the train") is a perfect alexandrine.

Developing poetry

Back in the 1930s, the editor Geoffrey Grigson described the particular thrill of receiving a handwritten manuscript from the young poet W. H. Auden and typing up the lines before sending the new poem off to the printers. He compared this now obsolete procedure to the development of a photographic negative (a process now equally obsolete), and liked to see that moment as the point at which a new poem entered the culture.

But when does a poem actually become part of the culture? When it's first written? When it's accepted for publication? When it first appears in a little magazine or anthology? When it has a broader public exposure by - for example - being recited in public or on the radio or quoted in a film? Or is it when (to personalise the matter) one reads it for the first time? When a line, or lines, become fixed in the memory? When it's quoted elsewhere, or borrowed by another writer?

Fiction is not like poetry because novels are not like poems, and novels are not (yet) as remote from the cultural mainstream as poetry. Of course a similar if more technology-driven route is taken from manuscript to publication, but poems are slighter, lighter, less emphatic productions, less commodified. This is not to question their power or value or vestigial prestige, only their presence. 

So - to reformulate the question - when does a novel become part of literature? Answers on a postcard, as we no longer say.

On J. O Morgan

Today sees the publication (by Jonathan Cape) of Interference Pattern by the poet J. O. Morgan. This has been admiringly reviewed by Kate Kellaway in the Guardian so in this blog I'd like to look back to the earlier work of a contemporary poet I have come to admire above any other.

Morgan has previously published four book-length poems. The first two - Natural Mechanical (2009) and Long Cuts (2011) - were based on episodes in the life of his friend and fellow Hebridean, Iain Seoras Rockliffe ('Rocky'), a self-taught naturalist and gifted mechanic, equally at home foraging among the island's flora and fauna and mending a broken motor mower. Morgan adroitly fused a third person biographical narrative with Rocky's laddish perspective, and the result is a luminous, utterly beguiling study of an adolescent innocent negotiating the foothills of experience.. As the TLS reviewer put it, the results are at times 'a pleasing cross between the Beano comic and The Prelude' .The teenage Rocky's heart is set on owning a motor cycle. He visits a showroom where he sees:

Pristine machines, hard-angled skeletons

stretching their frames low between thin black wheels,

the small silver lumps of engine, flat-ribbed hives,

floated in the central gap, pipes leading down and back.

Has any other poet since Thom Gunn hymned the motor-cycle so eloquently? 'Flat-ribbed hives' might not be the words that young Rocky would use to describe a motorbike engine, but they chime with his sensibility as a nature-lover and are wonderfully evocative (not least in their suggestion of potential noise).

Long Cuts, subtitled 'further wanderings in the life of Iain Seoras Rockliffe', follows Rocky into adult life as he becomes an apprentice engineer and then travels the world as a merchant seaman. There is a brief scene in which the adult Rocky teaches a Filipino sailor the rudiments of his language:

Oakaedeno

Ouk ai dan

Orc hai tonoh

Och aye the noo

The lines are untypical of his poetry but the technique is unmistakably Morganesque. The words appear to develop on the page, slowly coming into sharp focus like a photographic print. He constructs scenes and episodes through allusion and nuance, leaving the reader to explore and understand what may at first be a baffling, or at least ambiguous, situation. This is not merely a ludic approach - Morgan has a deep understanding of the inconstancies and contingencies of language, the subjectivity of perception. He doesn't want to frustrate his readers, but beguile them.

His third volume At Maldon (2013) was a departure: an epic re-working of the thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon fragmentt recounting the bloody skirmish between Vikings and locals on the Blackwater estuary in Essex, in which Morgan did to Anglo-Saxon verse what Christopher Logue did to Homeric Greek, with equally impressive effect. At last year's Edinburgh Book Festival I joined a spellbound audience to hear the poet recite all 60 pages from memory, and flawlessly. I struggled then, and struggle now, to muster adequate superlatives to describe his delivery -  you simply had to be there. His polyphonic reading, interrupted by strategic sips of water, was an immersive experience for his listeners and offered  a direct link back to the aural poetic tradition of the Saxon period. I shan't forget his weary delivery, close to the end, of two blunt lines::

So one man hits another

and the other hits him back.

There's a history of human conflict in that. Late in the day a Saxon named Wistan (who features fleetingly in the original poem) appears on the battle field and is described thus:

         his graceful step, his mastery;

the fearlessness worn lightly on his face;

his body-buzz, his aura's lucid edge.

Morgan's writing has that lucid edge, and I like to think that the lines are a nod to the homophonous Wystan Auden. Although he tells me he hasn't read the poet, Morgan can at times be strikingly if casually Audenesque:

At the hottest part of the year there are no fish.

The calm lens of the sea collects the sun;

the skin of its surface boiling downward

to where the fish doze

in cool black hollows of rock.

This comes from Morgan's third book In Casting Off, published in 2015 by Edinburgh's HappenStance Press.  (See their website here). The publisher describes it as a 'poem-novella' and 'among other things, a love story.' The 24 linked poems are set in a remote fishing community on an unnamed island, somewhere in northern Europe. The main protagonists are a brother and sister and a young 'foreign' woman (apparently anglophone), a student of anthropology who arrives by ferry to undertake some unspecified research. The village has a fish factory, a jetty, a church and little else. Not even, it seems, a pub. 

Set over a few summer months the poems should be read consecutively but are, thanks to some deft temporal shifts by the author, remembered in a different order, part of a more general destabilising effect on the reader who is left in a state of increasing uncertainty as the narrative elements shift subtly to reveal deeper meanings. Which of the female protagonists works in the fish factory? Who is the girl with 'coffee-coloured skin'? What do the unnerving contents of the 'thin wooden case' signify? Who, at the end of the final poem, is knocking at the door? (I thought of the conclusion to W. W. Jacob's celebrated ghost story The Monkey's Paw, which subtly informs other parts of the narrative.)

There is a mythical undertow. The opening poem 'A New Suit' includes a startling and disturbing image of a young woman easing her greased body into the pelt of a freshly-gutted seal, perhaps a reference to the Scottish selkie legend. Selkies are seal-like creatures that shed their skin to assume a human identity. Traditionally male selkies seek out unhappy women (such as wives waiting for their fishermen husbands to return from the sea). Female selkies may lure human men, but yearn to return to the sea. Myth aside, there is an unsettling whiff of incest and zoophilia.

Morgan's evocation of the Isle of Skye in the first two volumes confirmed his acute powers of observation and description and his preference for clear and simple language:

When strong sunlight

strikes clear water

it penetrates in parallel columns

that blink out

and re-form

as the surface shifts,

altering the angle at which

the sun cuts through.

This is the opening to 'Staying Afloat', combining an intense realisation of the natural world with Morgan's horde of private references (in this case to columns, eyes, light and water). 'Blink' is a word that appears here and many times elsewhere, with a slightly different sense each time; 'cross-hatching' is a phrase that refers both to the impression left by fishing lines on sealskin and the appearance of rippling bathwater. Late in the collection a woman ill-advisedly swims out to commune with a group of seals, unaware of the danger:

Those long grey bodies, hung as columns,

slanted in plant-like stillness,

their lines converging

towards her.

Such internal parallels and adroit visual reconfigurings make Morgan's poems rewardingly complex and satisfyingly approachable. He has an optical virtuosity and, in each book to date, creates and inhabits a fully-realised world, whether in the past or the present. He has a formidable gift for judging the weight and pace and length of every line; you hear these poems as you read them to yourself.  

Morgan is the most epidermal of poets - he  sees the skin above the skull. There are multiple references to skin: a girl has 'coffee-coloured skin', as does a woman (presumably the same girl in her later years); in the fish factory  salmon are efficiently filleted and their grey skins removed; freshly-applied paint becomes "the tacky elastic of this semi-solid skin'. There is sealskin, sharkskin, bearskin - even the sea and a mountain lake have 'skins' of their own, permeable surfaces that both reflect and conceal. At one point a woman marvels at the pale pink baby-like flesh of her weatherbeaten fisherman husband:

as skin beneath a sticking plaster wrinkles

and whitens as it heals.

His images are all the more effective for being rooted in the domestic - they are hauntingly strange because they are familiar. Other motifs are borders, rims, edges, nets and meshes, eyes and a bestiary featuring not only seals but also bears, salmon and birds of all kinds. On occasion some rather quaint 'poetic' words creep in ('whereat', 'lest', 'whilst' which may have a greater currency in Scotland,), but Morgan is always confidently modern in his technique and sensibility, if not exactly modernist. In Casting Off  reminded me of W. S. Graham's masterpiece 'The Nightfishing' (1955), one of the best long poems of the 20th century. 

Graham and Morgan are both Scottish poets although the former lived much of his life in Cornwall, the latter lives on a small border farm. Both are, among many other things, great poets of the sea. While Graham increasingly tended towards abstraction (to the point that much of his writing was writing about writing). Morgan has a particular gift for evoking the movement of water, sunlight, heat and clouds.

The artist and writer David Henningham is a great admirer of Morgan's poetry and observed to me that the more ambitious the poetry becomes, the simpler the language. (This certainly seems to be the case the case, as Interference Pattern confirms - a very sophisticated polyphonic performance that (it seems to me) is a 21st century equivalent to The Waste Land..) There are a very few moments in his fourth book where his reach appears to exceed his grasp: a description of a camera doesn't quite come off, for instance, as too many ingenious images vie for his - and our - attention; elsewhere the action of a bear peeling back the roof of a car to abduct a child is compared with folding paper flowers (which I found resistible at first but am gradually coming around to what is, at least, a very memorable image). But these are rare lapses from a writer who brilliantly manipulates language and situations to a fresh aesthetic end. At his best J. O. Morgan has no contemporary equal.

J. O. Morgan's first three books are published by CB editions: 

Natural Mechanical http://www.cbeditions.com/morgan1.html

Long Cuts http://www.cbeditions.com/morgan2.html

At Maldon: http://www.cbeditions.com/morgan3.html (CB editions have also issued a recording of the author reading the poem)

In Casting Off is published by Happenstance Press: 

http://www.happenstancepress.org/index.php/shop/product/47738-in-casting-off-j-o-morgan

Interference Pattern is published by Jonathan Cape:

http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/j-o-morgan/interference-pattern-9781910702024.aspx

Kate Hopkins - a solo show

To the Browse and Darby gallery in Cork Street last night, for the opening of a solo show by the artist Kate Hopkins. I last wrote about her work on this blog in August 2013 and may have said then that while I think I know a lot about art, I don't know what I like. 

I do know, though, that I like Kate Hopkins' paintings very much. You can see some of her recent work in the online catalogue here. twenty five images, each perfectly lovely: a glazed pot-bellied earthenware water jug, musty grapes, some of which are rotting quietly; cut flowers in a podgy orange vase and - wow! - a madly extravagant architectural  confection (Chinese cake, oil on board, 30cm x 30cm - see below). My first reaction to this was that of a pop-eyed schoolboy presented with his first knickerbocker glory. I smiled, almost laughed. I can't think of many contemporary images that are so immediately and delightfully pleasing. We look down, as imminent consumers, at this side-lit marvel: nine layers of fluffy sponge - mint green, bright custard yellow and raspberry pink alternating with creamy cloud-white seams and topped off with jelly hearts, smarties, what looks like a sugar mouse, chocolate flake logs - a muffled explosion of form and colour. It looks good enough to eat but is, at the same time, doubly artificial, being an artistic representation of a man-made object - and an extraordinarily elaborate one at that. Having sourced the cake in a Charing Cross Road Chinese bakery (now closed) it took her two months to paint.

I'm reminded of some lines by Auden in 'The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning'. He's writing about poetry, but might as well be thinking about pictorial art:

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

This Chinese cake is certainly 'subtle, various, ornamental, clever' - it's fantasy patisserie, a literally fabulous confection and one can almost hear it subside under the gentle pressure of an approaching fork - it has mass, but little weight or substance. Compositionally off-centre, it casts an improbable shadow (part of a complex rhythmic arrangement of counterpointed curves and lines) and rests lightly on a thin circle of silvered card, all set against a subtle background of multiple shades of icy blue and green - as alluring as it is unnutritious. Has anyone ever looked so closely and carefully at a cake?  Has any cake, Chinese or otherwise, made such a claim on our attention? This one looks as if it should have a label attached saying 'Eat Me' - in that mildly sinister Lewis Carroll way.

As I said in my earlier blog:

In a rowdy market-place Kate Hopkins' paintings create their own space. Here are two more pictures - of grapes (below) and cherries (below the grapes). She must have looked very closely and for a long time at these two modest clusters of fruit, and has captured perfectly, and permanently, the mustiness of the grapes and the enamelled glamour of the cherries. They are small images but have monumental presence. These pictures have something of temps mort about them - something essential salvaged from the wreck of time. They are not loud or pushy or overbearing or sentimental or gauchely confessional - they're the sound of the wind in the trees. 

I'm reminded of the (presumably fictitious) Braque still life (brilliantly described by Gabriel Josipovici in his novel Only Joking) that the artist painted food when he (and the population of occupied Paris) were hungry. And then I'm reminded of Hemingway's observation that one should look at Gauguin paintings on an empty stomach because the artist was hungry when he painted them - not because he was poor but simply because, wholly absorbed in the act of painting, he forgot to eat. 

Kate Hopkins' scrutiny is cool and cerebral. It's a Chinese cake - the kind of thing one picks up in Soho, perhaps on the way home after a few drinks. It hasn't the finesse of its French equivalent - it's rough and ready, elaborate yet unsophisticated and uncommodified (as it would be if made and sold in a branch of Patisserie Valerie, say). It's also cheaper than its French equivalent, and its appeal is more to the eye than the palate. (My own experience is that Chinese cakes taste of nothing much, not even monosodium glutamate) Is the artist making a cultural point here, about Eastern and Western tastes and values? About luxury and self-indulgence? Is being a painter today (as opposed to a conceptual artist) as incongruous as a Chinese cake in an era of high-protein diets and locally-sourced Hipster-friendly groceries? But I'm rambling.

There's what you might call a confident tentativeness in the painting, in the application of small decisive brushstrokes. Extraordinary effects are achieved in that covetable image of grapes, for instance: get up close and the colours and shapes are wildly improbable; step back and everything works - the illusion is complete. I could look at and enjoy any one of her pictures every day for a year (and on a purely literal level that represents astonishingly good value, as the cost of buying such a cake or bunch of grapes daily would very soon outstrip the investment in a picture). Five of the paintings were snapped up on the night - including the Chinese cake, a wonderful blue Wedgewoody pitcher and some flowers in a squat jug that looks like the kind of thing a child would bring home from a school pottery class. The bunch of grapes - my favourite - remained inexplicably unsold when I left (but  I had to leave early).

Walking home northwards along Cork Street (much of which has been demolished as part of the continuing predatory destruction of the capital) I reflected, as one does, on mutability - the way painters (more than any other artists) salvage something from the wreck of time. These tough little images remain while whole streets are reduced to rubble.

Click here for details of the show, which runs until 26th February.


Images © Kate Hoplins