Wipers

It's Remembrance Day in Britain (but not in the rest of the world more or less) and here's a beer from Ypres celebrating how they used to throw cats out of belfries - no wonder really that war exists.

REMEMBRANCE DAY IN WHITEHALL

This is the funniest day of the year.

Old soldiers shall pass by like gentle sheep
While that old ram, the State, speaks
In staged silence.

I don't think it matters much
That most marching past will be agèd white men,
Or that we take red poppies as easy ciphers
For something too bloody for words,
Or that we say, 'Charlie died in the desert, you know!'
As if we can bask in the heat of his final sigh,
Or that we put it all back in a box for next year
Like the Proms and the Ashes and Miss World and Lent.

I'm honoured to be here,
Pressed up against Chelsea lads in waxed shooting coats
And blue-faced chavs half-sullen half-mad
And an army of toddlers shoved through to the front.

It'll be over by one
And the tarmac shall bear wet petals and the smack of old shoes,
And the crowd in Saint Stephen's Tavern
Will chew on a hotpot lunch
Served up by forgetful youths.

Bodega!

This isn't in Spain: it's in Sheffield in the cellar of someone's house - and as you can see they've converted it rather nicely into a Spanish bar.

I was going to show you other pictures of the house but for some reason I've only got shots of people watching dodgy satellite channels like Essex Girls.

What do you Frink of this?

Another thing from last week - this is Dame Elisabeth Frink's Walking Madonna (it doesn't though) in front of Salisbury Cathedral.

This is the only female figure she sculpted and she used her own face as a model. Some (=I've just looked it up on the Net) say she is striding purposefully away from the Cathedral out into the world: others that she is careworn and therefore emblematic of maternal suffering.

Modern art - and I would contend much art - is not really about subject-matter but form and so I've done the photo as a kind of play between different spaces and substances. If I were the sculptor here, I'd have a bright blue crystal pyramid complementing rather than opposing the spire, which - at least on a summer's evening - looms like a Saturn V over the silent green spaces surrounding it.

Love the stinger but hate the sting

Over in OUSA, we've been talking about whether there is a distinction between sexual orientation (not sinful) and sexual acts (some of which are sinful).

As ever, only England knows the answer to this. This is a National Trust Garden last week. Here they show that they recognise apian orientation, but feel the need to warn against apian activity.