Forgotten Bristol - The Nails

Outside the old Corn Exchange in, of course, Corn Street, in the centre of town, the small area that managed, in part, to survive the attentions of the Luftwaffe, we find these curious objects. 

Four waist high bronze nails, all of different design and dates - one is Elizabethan, one Caroline. They were moved to their present location when the Corn Exchange was built in the early 1740s. Commercial wares may have been displayed, and deals were struck on them, payable in cash.

Bristol myth is that they are the source of the phrase 'paying on, or cash on, the nail,' but this seems to have arisen before the nails were set up in Bristol, and may even be Anglo-Norman in source from payer sur l'ungle. In any event Bristol isn't the only city to have nails - Liverpool and Limerick are others.

But nice quirk, and why spoil a good story. Just don't rest your fish and chips or pint on them. They are too splendid for that.

Forgotten Bristol - The Bristol L

I remember as a child a news report about the Bristol L, that particular use of an additional consonant at the end of certain words ending in a vowel, usually an 'a.' Thus if you ask, as the reporter did, a broad Bristolian to read out the following: Carla Rosa Opera Company, they will give you Caral, Rosal, Operal Company. 

You take photographs with your cameral, and an excellent plan is a good ideal. All very amusing to the outsider, but it is unconsciously done, as second nature to the Bristolian as aitch dropping is in Estuary English.

But it created a few problems for my mother trying to teach geography in explaining the difference between an area, as it plot of land, place, and an aerial photograph, as both words are pronounced the same as in 'an aerial photograph of a large areal of woodland.'

I had completely forgotten about the L until we moved back home recently and one of the first conversations I had with a passerby reminded me. It's charming and I've grown to love it again.

Launch of New Pamphlet Chalking the Pavement

Please join me for the launch of my new pamphlet, Chalking the Pavement, from Broken Sleep Books on Tuesday 30 April at 8pm. Tickets to the zoom room are available here. I look forward to seeing you all then!

Academic Honours

I am absolutely thrilled and delighted to do some serious showing off - today my PhD was confirmed. So, I can officially call myself Doctor Noakes.

It's been three years of hard work researching and writing about poetry and the breath. I have written a new book of poems called Sublime Lungs, which explores my asthma, and breath and breathing topics over a wide number of geographies and chronologies. Hopefully it will appear in print in the next couple of years. Publisher willing. Additionally, I have written a full academic thesis looking at the topic through the lens of health humanities and focusing on the work of Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, Elaine Feinstein, and Dannie Abse.

Many thanks are due to my splendid supervisor, Peter Robinson. I can thoroughly recommend Reading University as a great place to undertake a creative writing PhD.

Having started work during the Covid pandemic and spending lockdown days very firmly in front of the computer, I am glad to be able to now lift my head rather proudly into the air of new and exciting poetry things. Watch this space!

Busy times

Busy times mean little time for this website. I am sorry, dear readers, I've been neglecting you at lot this year. My excuse is that I've been travelling - a month in Denmark - plus house selling, house hunting, doing a great number of readings all over the country for Goldhawk Road,  and finishing my PhD. So consider this a pre-New Year's resolution to do some more writing and reviewing here.

Quick tips on some current art shows while I'm at it then:

Marina Abramovic at the RA - seriously not to be missed this one. And do make sure you interact with the doorway - it was a very weird feeling squeezing into the gallery between two naked people. I can't really describe it, except that it was oddly exhilarating. 

Pity the artist is unable to do much, if anything, herself due to ill health, so it's all other performers, but the video work etc. is great. Best to see some film of her explaining the work before you go to make the most of it. There are plenty on Youtube. That or read one of her books - I enjoyed the Art/File one.

Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain - I'd give this a miss, if I were you. Early student work from decades ago is looking rather jaded and frankly, boring. Plus it's only four rooms. However, if you're there don't miss the new painting by Chris Ofili of the staircase, which is a magnificent memorial to Grenfell amongst other things. We'll be enjoying this for the next decade, I'm sure.

Anselm Kiefer at White Cube, Bermondsey

Oh, this is an astonishing show. Kiefer has filled every inch of White Cube with paintings, installations and vitrines full of objects, hand written quotes and on and on, all in response to that most complex of James Joyce's oeuvre, Finnegan's Wake. It is a wonder of debris and dust provoking comparison to some decaying museum of curiosities and the heavy smell of oil paint fills the air. 

Here are metal sunflowers, panoramas of folk and characters from Joyce. Coincidences of post war Germany (Kiefer was born in 1945) and present day Ukraine abound, or is that just me? Kiefer says debris is hope. I'm not so sure.

Most amazing is the room containing the eleven paintings of the Liffey that Kiefer invented from his childhood memories of the upper Rhine. They are marvels of trees, reflections and gold in a perpetual and perfect sunset. I stared and stared. They are a joy. Joining them is a roomful of impossible books made of lead, illegible and their pages difficult to turn. 

An inspiring homage mixed with the contents of Kiefer's studio and referencing many of his earlier pieces. No need to have read the source. Get there soon, it ends on 20 August. You really won't be disappointed.

Midlands Explorer - Wightwick Manor

Here is all the fake Jacobean architecture you could want. It's a late-Victorian creation and it fooled me, a little bit. But if you don't come here for the house and lovely gardens, with some splendid specimen trees if you are in the market for those, then your reward is the astonishing collection of Pre-Raphelite works collected by a later generation of the family in the 1930s. 

The place is awash with Burne-Jones, Rosetti, Millais, and Evelyn and William De Morgan. It's hard to know where to look first. Be prepared to take a good long time going around the house and to put up with the usual over-enthusiasm from the volunteers. 

Why is it that if you show a longer than average interest in a picture or are actually discussing it with your companion, they take that as an invitation to tell you a whole load of things you already know, and practically run across the room to do so, not caring whether they are intruding into a conversation? Beats me. Annoys me. And it happens all the time. I do wish the National Trust would remind their helpers that they are not the centre of attention and that I don't appreciate someone's arm being thrust an inch from my face.

Bof! On with the art, some of which you have to strain your neck to look at, as it is hung in exactly the place the family had it and given the don't cross this line ropes, it is sometimes out of comfortable eye reach. There is too much to choose from, so I'll take just the one portrait by Millais of Effie Gray with foxgloves. It's easy to miss in a hallway, but it is the important painting that signals their love and her bravery to get away from the cruelty of Ruskin. Fabulous.