Dartington

Here's an entry from Sam Leith's blog at the recent Ways with Words festival down at Dartington, in Devon, which mentions the talk I gave there.

Carla Bruni loves British eccentrics

According to a recent interview..

Shropshire's finest

Hew Kennedy, builder of the trebuchet, in the Shropshire Star..

Hoaxers

One of the most interesting reactions to the book has been to do with crop-circles. Geoff Ward, of the West Country Western Daily Press, is interested in these mysterious formations. I think he has been for some time judging by the circle he has printed on the banner at the top of his column. Having read In Search of the English Eccentric he turned detective, beginning his weekly newsletter with the following:

SOMEWHERE in Wiltshire, in a wheatfield under a brilliant full moon, author Henry Hemming found himself helping to make a crop circle. Silhouetted against the crop, seven men with stomping boards and measuring tapes went about their business in earnest. Several hours later, the job was done, and the group could relax and speculate on how the crop-circle community would react when daylight came. Henry, researching his book In Search of the English Eccentric, just out, had encountered Britain ’s leading crop-circle maker John Lundberg, who allowed the writer to join his party on condition that he never revealed the location of the formation created that night. Lundberg never reveals the locations of any crop circles he makes, which undermines his claims somewhat.

Now, the universe may be infinite, but my Mysterious West page in the Western Daily Press unfortunately is not. So I am including in this new sletter a little piece of detective work which I have carried out - I believe I can identify the Hemming/Lundberg crop formation. In his book, Hemming describes a visit by himself and Lundberg to the Crop Circle Connector get-together in the Coronation Hall at Alton Barnes on August 1 last year. Henry tells his readers that he helped to make the crop circle some weeks before - under that full moon, which he describes as being so bright it was "like a floodlight". Now, in this case, the only relevant full moons were on June 1 and June 30 - a “blue moon” month, having two full moons in it. The full moon on July 30 was obviously too close to the Crop Circle Connector event. I rule out June 30 as no crop circles appeared in Wiltshire immediately after the date. But, referring to Steve and Karen Alexander’s Crop Circle Year Book for 2007, I see that a formation did appear on June 3 in the famous East Field at Alton Barnes. This was a three-armed propeller-like pattern with five circles on each arm. As crop circles go, it was not a particularly elaborate design. The Hemming/Lundberg team could therefore have created this formation overnight on June 1 or June 2, when the full moon was at its peak. I rest my case.

Ward's rationale was sound, but as one of the few conditions for joining Lundberg that night was to keep the location a secret. So to either confirm or dispel this hypothesis would of course fly in the face of that. I wrote back to Geoff explaining this. Several days later he published the following:

ON THE TRAIL OF THE HOAXERS
27 June 2008

Reading between the lines, it seems I was right about the location of the crop circle created a year ago by author Henry Hemming and John Lundberg, who is regarded as Britain's leading crop-circle creator.

From unwitting clues in Henry's new book, In Search of the English Eccentric, featured on this page last week, I deduced that the formation was the one found in the East Field, Alton Barnes, on June 3 last year.

I was interested to pursue this because Lundberg never reveals the locations of any crop circles he makes, apart from those done purely for commercial concerns.

My piece of sleuthing went out on my Mysterious West email newsletter to regular readers last week.

Henry's response was: "That was very interesting what you put together. It's extremely frustrating not being able to say yes or no to your hypothesis, but I'm fascinated by what you've put together."

Enough said.

In researching his book, Henry was allowed to join Lundberg's party on condition he never revealed the location of the formation he helped to create.

And I never will. But all is not as it seems in the mysterious west. Nor the mysterious east. When writing Misdaventure in the Middle East time and again I was compelled to change not just the identity of a man or woman who had said something politically subversive, but also parts of their physical appearance, or the location of where we met. It's rarely enough to omit details. Often it's necessary to alter certain descriptive elements in order to create an effective mask.

Latest

Apologies for the month-long hiatus. It's been a busy few weeks, but a happy few weeks as well, in the sense that it's a huge relief to have the book out and be able to watch it make its way in the world, even if there are few stumbles along the way.

Most of the people I've spoken to over the last month will, at some point, ask how the book's going, to which I don't always know what to say. The publishers don't really give you a daily update on sales as they don't have one themselves - though you can check your amazon sales ranking. Obsessively. This can only end in tears. No matter how high you soar there comes a point, even if your first initials are J. K. and you have a thing about wizards, that your rating begins to drop, and the unbearable helplessness of knowing there's sweet fa you can do to try and turn the tide, short of buying the book yourself, makes Amazon sales-ranking-checking a Bad Thing To Get Hooked On. And yes, I've been there.

There have been a handful of reviews so far, including one by Tina Jackson in Metro, and the nicest one yet in the TLS, by Josh Raymond. Sadly I can't find it online. The pull-out quote was: 'an intelligent and encouraging piece of writing.' Thelondonpaper did a Q and A, Gay Times liked it, so did Vogue, Tatler, Traveller Magazine and the Western Daily Press. However, Harry Mount in the Literary Review did not. More on that and how some (often more conservative) reviewers can turn against it later.

Articles I've done concerning the book - there's one about hermits, most of all Sue Woodcock and Tom Leppard that appeared yesterday in the Independent on Sunday. Several to follow in the coming weeks.

People in the book - Chris Eubank has just put his kids up for adoption. King Arthur started a protest outside Stone Henge, after performing a ceremony to make sure there was no rain during Glastonbury (which seems to have worked). Vivienne Westwood walked out of the Sex and the City premiere, saying there was nothing remotely memorable or interesting about what she saw. I love her for that. The film is apparently one long product placement for a number of different labels, including hers. Sebastian Horsley's book Dandy in the Underworld got an excellent and sympathetic review in the Guardian which, as he has since explained, means his life is essentially over. 'It's now one long descent into respectability.' We're doing our talk together at Camp Bestival at 8.40, Friday 18 July. In the Comedy Tent. Help.

More later in the week I think



Also here's a snap of Pete Doherty I took last year. He played a great set at Glastonbury, apparently. Even the Sun liked it..

Dead Eccentric No. 2

Geoffrey Pyke 1893-1948

Is one of my all-time favourite English eccentrics. As well as being a journalist, spy and investor, Pyke was a military inventor of fantastic ability and imagination. According to his biographer, David Lampe, ‘any single one of his major projects could be expanded to fill a large book. His aphorisms, his vital ideas about ideas, would fill still more books.’

In 1939, with war against Germany imminent, Pyke hatched a plan – to avert conflict by showing Hitler an opinion poll suggesting that most Germans were against the idea of war. Pyke recruited a team of students, dressed them up as golfers, and packed them off to Germany to conduct the survey. As he guessed, what they gathered showed that most Germans were indeed against the war, but before the students could finish their survey and present it to the Fuhrer Hitler invaded Poland.

Soon after, in trademark straggly beard, shabby suit with a bootlace for a tie, no socks and instead brightly coloured spats (as he put it spats obviated the need for socks), he volunteered his services to Lord Mountbatten, informing the general, ‘Lord Mountbatten, you need me on your staff because I’m a man who thinks. But my services will not come cheap.’

Mountbatten later described him as, ‘the most unusual and provocative man I have ever met.’ Lord Zuckerman, on the staff of Lord Mountbatten at the time, described him as ‘not a scientist, but a man of a vivid and uncontrollable imagination, and a totally uninhibited tongue’.

I like the fact that he was taken on and later defended by Mountbatten and his staff. It seems indicative of a hard-won toleration of eccentricity at this time (in contrast to the attitudes of English generals during the First World War, or indeed the US Military in the Second World War who were so disgusted by the sight of Pyke that his idea for a motorised sled, for example, was ignored until Allied military operations had moved on from snowy climes).

Pyke’s motorised attack-sleds, never realised, were designed to carry torpedoes and leave a trail of insect-eggs as they motored along. The eggs would hatch later, so obscuring the trail. As they were to be used in German-occupied Scandinavia Pyke decided that the sleds should be hidden in sheds marked (in German) ‘Officer’s Latrine. For Colonels Only.’

His most impressive design was an aircraft carrier made from ice reinforced with wood shavings, a composite he called ‘pykrete’. Brilliantly, Pyke had realised that the molecular structure of ice was similar to that of concrete yet ice had a lower tensile strength. Pykrete was indestructible compared to more conventional shipbuilding materials: during trials it was bombed, torpedoed, shot at, set fire to but nothing could make a real impression.

Lord Mountbatten, then Chief of Combined Operations, was so excited about it that he went to see Churchill and, so the story goes, dropped a lump of it into Churchill’s bath (with Churchill in it) to demonstrate that it did not melt. Churchill repeated this trick more or less on President Roosevelt by placing lumps of the stuff in near-boiling water. Again, it retained its shape and did not melt.

Pyke named his putative aircraft carrier Habbakuk – it was meant to be Habakkuk, in honour of a Hebrew prophet from the Old Testament who prophesied about the eventual coming of, ‘a work which you will not believe though it be told to you.’ An Admiralty clerk mis-spelt it. Battleship Habbakuk would have been 2000 feet long and weighed 2.2 million tons, however the Normandy landings removed the need for a ship of this size and the plans were shelved.

To destroy Romanian oil fields, he suggested sending in teams of carefully drilled St. Bernard’s dogs, each with a mini-barrel of brandy round their neck. The German guards would see the dogs, want to give them a cuddle, at which point they’d notice the brandy and get drunk leaving the British commandos free to attack. Or, they could send in scantily clad women to distract the guards. Failing that Pyke suggested dressing British commandos up as Romanian firefighters and getting them to rush in immediately after British bombers had set fire to the oilwells.

Prior to all this, Pyke had a brief and for some time successful career as a financial investor. At one point he controlled a third of the global supply of tin.

A non-practising Jew, he also founded his own school. It contained Britain’s first ‘jungle gym’ and was designed to be the exact antithesis of Wellington School, where he was miserable as a child. In Pyke’s school pupils were never reprimanded nor forced to learn any particular subjects. Instead, in true eccentric fashion, they were encouraged to find out things for themselves. Unfortunately in 1928 his investments went awry and the school was forced to close.

In the winter of 1948 his depression defeated him. Sitting in bed – he often worked from bed so as not to waste time getting up and dressing and was known to hold conferences with military chiefs from his bed – and writing non-stop – Pyke is said to have suffered from hypergraphia – he took an overdose of sleeping pills. As they kicked in he continued to write. On the last page he would write the words stream, with each line becoming less legible, until at last they trail off.

On his death, The Times described him as, ‘One of the most original, if unrecognized, figures of the present [20th] century.’ The Guardian wrote, ‘Britain has lost one of the greatest and certainly the most unrecognized geniuses of all time.’

At his request no gravestone was erected.

King Arthur was NEVER a Hell's Angel

It's annoying to have to admit you're wrong - in an argument that is. More annoying is realising you've made a basic factual error, based on a series of different sources which I thought, at the time, represented journalistic triangulation, and then to have that mistake printed however many thousand times the first print run of In Search of the English Eccentric has gone to.

This is where I find myself. There are a handful of websites that describe Arthur Uther Pendragon, star of my book, as a former Hell's Angel. He is no such thing. I repeat, Arthur Uther Pendragon, formerly John Rothwell, was a biker, yes, but never a Hell's Angel. (Above is a picture of a Hell's Angel).

Sorry Arthur. It will be corrected in all future editions of the book.

good news

For the first time in what seems like ages Pete Doherty, one of the stars of In Search of the English Eccentric, was in the tabloids without being portrayed as the drug-addled unwashed Son of Sam that some red tops like to make him out as. The story was about the fact that he had to bury one of his cats before going onstage.

Gin the dog

This made me happy when I read it. it's from a longer piece in praise of 'Britain's Got Talent' by Kira Cochrane, and is in fact the first time I've read or heard someone else say point out what I seemed to find throughout researching In Search of the English Eccentric:

'In Britain, it is usually only upper-class eccentricity that is celebrated and recognised, but Britain's Got Talent shows that eccentricity lurks in all corners of the land, and that it is entertaining, shameless, and often hilarious. While it might seem strange that a 74-year-old cleaner would want to dress up in a leotard and lie on a bed of nails, for instance, Joan Gallagher seemed to enjoy every minute in the spotlight. The programme offers up the weirdest acts - people who dance with illuminated hula hoops, in superhero costumes; who perform the Star Wars theme tune on a keyboard - re-arranged to make it more "spacey"; who whistle Nessun Dorma; who bring ferrets on stage to dance, and then have to hurry them off when they start trying to mate. Most respond well to the adversity of the judges; when Simon Cowell dubbed 20-year-old student Donald Bell-Gam "the worst singer we have had on Britain's Got Talent - completely and utterly horrific", Bell-Gam simply paused before responding with a screeching version of I Will Always Love You. If he was fazed, it didn't show.'

And following hard on her heels, here's Melanie Reid in the Times:

'Britain's Got Talent is a model for a competitive, compassionate, cohesive, colour-blind society that the politicians haven't quite managed to deliver. Telly got there before them. The show taps straight into some wellspring of happy ordinariness. It is endearing because it's an snapshot of British life: unpredictable; inspiring; sentimental; humorous: a celebration of national eccentricity. '

More eccentric summer games

If you liked the Cheese-rolling at Cooper's Hill, near Gloucester, then you'll want to know about the nearby Olimpick Games, a little to the west in Chipping Camden. They took place this weekend.

Here's a report of this year's games, but much better is this clip from last year's games showing the highlight of the Cotswold Olimpicks, shin-kicking..

Dead Eccentric no. 1

I thought I'd start with an eccentric who's in the news right now. Even if he never existed. He's an imaginary eccentric Victorian inventor - constructed by artist Paul St George as part of his Telectroscope installation that opened recently on the banks of the Thames.

The fact that he never was makes him doubly interesting for me, as he becomes an amalgam of the different things we want an English eccentric to be.

Alexander Stanhope St George 1848-1917

...was a little-known eccentric Victorian engineer. The first of seven children (it's interesting how eccentrics are almost always the first of their siblings) he was born to a British father and a Sierra Leonian mother. Aged nine, he went to see the attempted launch of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Eastern steamship. This is where this photograph was taken. Although he was cropped out of the image we routinely associate with this great inventor, St George never forgot this moment and would claim Brunel as his greatest inspiration.

After university St George went to work with some of the great engineers of the time, including Joseph Bazalgette (Chelsea Embankment), John Wolfe-Barry (man behind the the District Line) and Sir John Hawkshaw (Severn Tunnel).

In 1884 he went to New York to see the newly completed Brooklyn Bridge. Again, he was wowed. On his way back there was an unscheduled stop at a mid-Atlantic island. This would go on to provide the inspiration for his greatest invention: the telectroscope. It was to be a transatlantic tunnel in which you could travel without moving. His contraption would be a “device for the suppression of absence”: an optical machine which allowed you to see from one end of the tunnel to the other.

So he returned to the mid-Atlantic island and had a shaft sunk. Teams of men dug in opposite directions, one lot heading to London, the rest to New York.

But the project was bedeviled with delays and accidents. Meanwhile St George began to lose his mind.

Four years after it began his workforce mutinied and forced St George to take them back to England.

He never recovered from the sense of disappointment that followed. His mental health continued to deteriorate and in 1917, resident in a Bethnal Green asylum, he died. His family tried to suppress his papers and pretend that he didn’t exist until recently when his great-grandson, Paul St. George, found them.

Where? In an attic of course.

Here’s the Brooklyn end of the telectroscope he was able to build having got his hands on Alexander Stanhope St George’s designs.



I really wish he had existed. He feels at least half-real.

Vivienne Westwood show

There's a show that opens today in Sheffield, at the Millennium Gallery, dedicated to the work of Dame Vivienne Westwood: it's a retrospective of her clothes, a monument to her status as grand dame of British fashion.

Typical of most of the Vivienne references I found while researching the chapter on her in In Search of the English Eccentric is this: "She is one of the most original voices in 20th century fashion," says Claire Wilcox. "She never swam with the tide. In 100 years' time I still think her work will be strong and will speak for itself."

I agree. Although it's a shame that the show doesn't seem to focus on Vivienne herself, and what she stands for. For more, see her manifesto.

Bankesy

Here's an interesting piece from the Jerusalem Post all about the ruins of Qasr al-Abd, west of Amman, capital of Jordan, brought to the attention of the world by 'an eccentric English aristocrat', William Bankes. Orientalist, Egyptologist, collector and mate of Lord Byron, Bankes recognised these ruins as being those of Tyros, described by the 1st century AD Jewish historian Josephus, when he came across them along with two British naval officers midway through a grand tour of the world.

Although he was mostly responsible for redesigning Kingston Lacy and leaving it in the shape it is in today, Bankes barely got to live in or enjoy his creation. He was forced to flee the country and live more or less in exile after he was caught in flagrante with a guard in Green Park. Sodomy, at the time, remained a capital offence.

Throughout his life he sent back to Kingston Lacy numerous artefacts or curiosities that he picked up on his travels, and is said to have returned home in secret to glimpse this collection just before he died.

Without doubt England's most eccentric sporting fixture

I have no idea why, but this makes me extremely happy. Yesterday the legendary cheese-chasing event took place at Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire. I wish I'd been there. Instead, here's a video of it, something I could watch (and have watched) again and again...

birth

At last I've got my hands on one. It's just as exciting as it looks on films or when you read about it. Although the book feels different to how I imagined it - the paper's better and it smells unlike my last book. In a good way.

I once met someone who could tell what country a book had been printed in just by smelling it.

As of late last week these little bundles of joy have begun to make their way around the country and parts of Europe in order to be stacked up in large warehouses or hidden under other books on literary editors desks.

I've decided that the month of June is going to be a month of dead eccentrics on this here blog. It needs a bit of structure I think. I'll post 15. One every other day, with each as a slightly fuller biog of a dead English eccentric.

Ruskin

Over the last few days - in Paris, interviewing the last of the Saudi artists - I’ve been re-reading bits of This is Civilisation by Matthew Collings, the tie-in for his recent tv series. I like it more and more. I like the way he writes, the sweep of the book, and the change of pace that happens every time he switches from his light-coloured look-at-me-Mum-I’m-blogging chatty font to the slightly fatter one for Meaty Serious Stuff.

The best parts, though, are when he writes about John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, visionary and eccentric, someone Collings clearly likes. He's the one on the left in this picture. I guess part of the reason I like these passages is they flesh out one of the main themes of In Search of… - that of how Victorian writers and readers began to pine after their recent, vanished past and would by turns idolise or laugh at its apparent bawdiness and closeness to nature. Without them doing this, it’s unlikely that we’d be able to talk today with such familiarity about an ‘English eccentric’. This figure is part of the national furniture only because of the extent to which Victorians wanted to read about him.

In Collings’ book Ruskin becomes the guide to art in the second half of the 19th century. He explains Ruskin’s love of organic-looking Gothic design over the more regimented and classically pleasing symmetry of the Renaissance because you could see the hand of individual craftsmen in the former. For him, irregularity and inconsistency stood for humility, individuality, participation within the natural world; and this belief in the purity of Nature and the importance of being connected to it in some way was symptomatic of his age – a time of mass-urbanisation and mass-industrialisation. It’s also exactly what fuelled the Victorian fascination with English eccentrics.

As well as embodying something of why eccentrics were so popular during the Victorian era, Ruskin was an eccentric himself, both as someone who had visions and as a visionary. I didn't really take this in first time I read the book.

Collings: ‘He resisted the soul-destroying effects of industrialism with cranky concepts like free schools, free libraries, town planning, smokeless zones and green belts, all of which we now take for granted.’

Towards the end of his life he became ‘what we would nowadays call bipolar. He saw devils and had hallucinations and had to be constantly nursed, and finally spent the last twelve years of his life in silence, utterly withdrawn from public life, spending his days nodding and smiling in his house in the Lake District.'

Here he is nodding mode:

gnomes

an excellent gnome montage from the Chelsea Flower Show. Ann Atkin would be proud.

Robert Lenkiewicz

A few days ago in The Independent there was a profile of Robert Lenkiewicz, painter, showman, artistic musketeer, lothario (see above), and eccentric, who died six years ago leaving a mountain of unsettled debts. There were 240 claimants to his estate. Most of these claims have been met by selling off his paintings and his collection of rare books, but it's the record prices for his paintings that sparked the article.

They're newsworthy because he was not, and is not, seen as a cutting-edge contemporary artist. Instead his work was shunned by what you could call 'the contemporary art world' yet embraced by 'the public', in the way that Jack Vettriano's work is. Though their work is quite different - even if Tom Lubbock more or less lumps the two together at the end of this piece (along with Beryl Cook). More on this further down.

Robert Lenkiewicz is someone I was planning to write about in the chapter on eccentric artists (towards the end of In Search of the English Eccentric). I went for Sebastian Horsley instead, and then wrote in a general sense about how the modern artist has been perceived over the last 500 years. All of a sudden I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do.

Lenkiewicz would have been fun to write about, mainly because he falls outside the accepted caricature of the aristocratic, anachronistic eccentric toff who lives in cheery isolation somewhere in the English countryside, also because there are some great stories associated with him. But, if I'm entirely honest, and after starting a sentence like that I kind of have to be, I didn't want to write about him because I used to work for his son at his gallery. He's called Wolfe. I know one of his daughters too, and I guess the idea of writing about their father with any kind of authority felt unnatural. I couldn't see a way of describing him that would allow both of them to recognise him. But that's an aside. Again. At times this entire blog feels like an aside. Much more interesting is Wolfe talking about what it was to be a teenager growing up around his dad.

He told me once about a tramp called Andy Lynch who had been taken in by his father. One night Andy drank a titanic quantity of meths, climbed to the top of the building where they lived and began to piss onto the street below. Mid-piss he set fire to the stream of urine issuing forth before jumping, ablaze, to his death. Wolfe was about 16 at the time. His father wanted him to know death, to understand something of its smell and what it looked like so he took him and his brother Ruben to the morgue. There they found Andy's corpse. He told his sons to sit with it for fifteen minutes. Wolfe went to feel the texture of the charred flesh but pushed too hard and broke the blackened surface. From the way Wolfe described it, it had the consistency of a crème brûlé pudding. On the way out, with a rare kind of forcefulness, Robert insisted that they look into the other cubicles in the morgue. He wanted to show them more bodies and more death. So they did, like negatives exposed to the non-light that was, here, death.

Wolfe's an artist now. Here's a low-lit image of one of the three big pieces from his last exhibition, at Dickinson's on Jermyn Street.








There's one more thing to say about the way Robert Lenkiewicz was described in this article, and it's to do with how we configure art and artists.

Although he is lumped together with artists who produce kitsch and unchallenging work, Lenkiewicz's output is different to that of Jack Vettriano or Beryl Cook. Because of its inconsistency. That and its ambition. There are occasions when he achieves the clarity and quality of mark, intent, visual impact and the kind of compositional harmony that he undoubtedly aspired to. Yet there are thousands of times when he does not - the works he did in a hurry, to pay a bill, get out of there, pass the time, or just feed the part of him that needed to be prolific. Towards the end of his life he rarely struggled to push each painting as far as it could possibly go, more often leaving the paint thin and light.

When talking about art, a lot of the time you end up talking about movements or artists - though more often it's artists. When talking about artists you end up referring to the work they have produced. Their character, eccentric or not, with time becomes less important than the works that have survived them. And it's at this point, for the sake of concision, when describing an artistic oeuvre in your mind you flatten the images that you can associate easily with the artist, until they form a single generic image. Your response to that image controls your reaction to that artist. The artist becomes a discrete productive entity: a kind of machine there to produce 'arts'. It makes it easier to say yes or no to, say, Klee art, Kippenberger art, Kosuth art. So when Lubbock sets out a mini-hierarchy of figurative painters (a bit like a school sports day with coloured rosettes, trophies and plaques) he's cementing that.

I suppose the thing that interests me here is that (as with someone like Giorgione) the artist-machine is rarely judged according to how many 'arts' it produces. Our minds can't easily concertina a thousand images into one.

But don't bother telling this to a freakishly prolific artist. The drive to create on this scale doesn't stem from a reasoned intellectual decision; it comes from somewhere lower down.

ECCENTRICITY, the band

There's a band called ECCENTRICITY. They're Indian. I'm not sure if they've broken into the Indian pop mainstream, yet, but they've got a good look: as far as I can make out it involves cricket whites set off by denim jackets. The cricket whites might just be school uniform, it's hard to tell. And their sound? I'm not sure how to describe it, it's heartfelt, or heartbroken, with quite an 80s ballad feel to it. Here's a video of one of their first concerts on youtube.

If anyone knows of other eccentric bands, or bands called eccentric, please please let me know. I want to stockpile as much trivia to do with the word eccentric as possible, particularly things to do with the way the word is used today.

satin worship

Here's me and Ayman, the Palestinian living in Jeddah who prints film posters onto tissue boxes - the first guy I described as an eccentric Saudi artist. We're in his studio, with the air conditioning monster towards the top right of the shot.

The day before leaving Saudi Arabia Stephen - brilliant exhibition curator and all round good guy - and I went to see Ayman's new exhibition. It was about touch. Some of the canvases squeaked when you pushed them. Others felt scummy, or adipose in the way they were a little damp. Over towards the far corner of the gallery was a series of hellish, black paintings covered by a shiny vinyl texture that he'd arranged in swirling patterns. Each looked like an inferno of crude oil. In between two of them was a sheet of white paper with one word in large printed letters:

s a t a n

Hands on chins, Stephen and I agreed with each other that this was pretty bold for Saudi Arabian contemporary art. In fact, it was about the most shocking thing we'd seen since getting here. By some distance. Hamza, who was with us, was stunned as well. After another minute of staring at it and telling each other in a spiral of admiration, fear and by the end of it, bewilderment, that Ayman had gone too far, Hamza gave him a call. Stephen and I watched as an inaudible Ayman explained the piece to Hamza's right ear. It registered little. He hung up.

'It's a typo,' said Hamza, putting his phone away. 'It's meant to say 'satin'.'

The gallery phone rang. About twenty seconds later the guy looking after the exhibition went up to the offending piece of paper, pulled it down, folded it, and took it over to the main desk where he hid it amongst some old files.

more saudi artists

some pictures from the last few days:
























Above, Sameer Al Daham, one of pillars of Saudi art, who works now at the Ministry of Culture and Information.

And Mehdi Al Jeraibi, from Mecca. He collects pilgrims' hair when it gets shaved off at the end of haj (because he's got a friend who works in one of the barber shops that specialises in this). He sets these clumps of hair in resin, and suspends that around a wooden frame. They become giant negatives, as well as emblems of the rebirth that follows the end of haj when most men get their hair shaved off.

He also makes work using the inside of Meccan schooldesks that he's collected over the years. Each one is a rich, mucky palimpsest of graffiti, either scribbled or scratched - names, football teams, crushes, hearts, names in hearts, birds, and more names. here's a slightly fuzzy image of one:

and lastly here's m. ali farea.

the policeman and the doctor - two of the youngest artists in the show - to follow soon..

found one!

Ayman Yossri is my favourite artist from yesterday. And the day before. Though originally Palestinian (with a Jordanian passport), he's lived in Jeddah most of his life - Jeddah being cosmopolitan compared to other Saudi Arabian cities. Ever since pilgrims began to gravitate towards nearby Mecca there's been a greater racial, cultural and ethnic mix in Jeddah and thereabouts, which is some kind of a backdrop to Ayman's life and status as someone, in his words, who lacks identity.

Ayman is pronounced 'A-man'.

His studio was a concrete-walled sauna. Jammed into a rough-hewn hole above his bed was an air conditioning unit the size of an oven, and about as useful when it came to cooling us down. I went to visit him towards the end of the day - he usually sleeps till four or five in the afternoon and spends most of his waking hours watching old films and crying; sometimes he prints miniature versions of the posters from these films onto tissue boxes. He also collects IKEA gnomes and arranges them on boards.

More than any other artist I've met in Saudi he has a following. At times it feels cultish. Young film-makers and artists look up to him and see him as a mystic, genius, man-child, joker, or just inspired baby with extraordinary ideas and a balding pate. He has has a more situationist take on making art than other Saudi artists in the sense that he doesn't believe so much in the creation of finished artistic products that can last beyond him and be photographed, packaged and sent to London for an exhibition. He'll do all that. I guess. If you force him. But it's unlikely he'll send exactly what you've agreed. At the beginning of our evening he announced that he would recreate his studio in the London gallery and man it throughout the show, shopkeeping an 'Identity Shop'. He wants to buy identities, you see, and offer some of his in exchange. By the end of the evening he had decided to send 3-metre wide blow-ups of film stills with subtitles in Arabic frozen onto the screen. Dialogue or voice-over which when translated would read as: 'I know who did it'; or 'Then there was silence'; 'Later he died', and others.

Is he an eccentric artist?

Am I not allowed into Mecca.

That doesn't quite work, sorry.

Yes is the answer.

Here's a slightly less eccentric Saudi artist I also met yesterday:

The Kingdom

If England is famous for its eccentrics, Saudi Arabia ain't. That's where I am right now by the way. In Jeddah, high in a hotel that looks out to sea. From my window you can see oil tankers planing north towards Aqaba and Eilat, or Suez; and one heading south, high in the water, empty. Could there be a less eccentric country? By that I mean a land where eccentricity is encouraged or in some sense championed less. I don't know.

Above is a picture of me and Al Braithwaite in the Saudi Gazette from the last time I was here in 2003.

This time I'm in the birthplace of Islam to meet and write about fourteen different Saudi artists. Their work will appear in an exhibition taking place in London, this autumn, and I've been asked to provide the text for the book accompanying the show. Up until about eight minutes ago there were eight Saudi artists I had to meet and write about, but the other person writing the profiles has just got in touch to say that she will have to drop out.

Still, I'm excited. I want to find out whether any of these artists think of themselves as typically marginal, eccentric outsiders by virtue of being artists, calling themselves artists, or having other people call them that. Do fellow Saudis imagine that you need to see the world differently in order to be an artist? Or, as I found when I was here last - five years ago, disguised in a Pakistani dish-dasher, sleeping rough in the desert or on a stony beach with the invasion of Iraq rumbling towards its inception, in the company of Al not Stephen - is the artist imagined to be a pillar of zen-like calm, cleanliness and craft?

The first meetings are later today.

We have a driver.

Women still can't drive in Saudi Arabia.

Aisha, wife of the Prophet Muhammad, oversaw a battle from the vantage-point of a camel. The battle was even called The Battle of the Camel because of this. Camel-riding in the 7th century feels equivalent to car-driving in the 21st.

In the words of Sebastian Horsley, 'that's an aside.'

Below is a piece by Abdulnasser Gharem, a Saudi policeman. It's from his recent 'Path' series (2006) and shows the words Al Siraat - meaning the path, the way, the course you take in life, the decisions you make - spraypainted repeatedly onto an abandoned road that falls away into a ravine.

I'm an eccentric!

It's not that often you hear someone describe themselves as 'eccentric'. Publicly at least. While researching my book I found that only the die-hard exhibitionists went out of their way to do this.

Which makes the president of the Formula 1 governing body Max Mosley's description of his private life as 'eccentric' quite interesting. For me at least, as I'm more or less obsessed with the word. It's interesting because it reinforces the idea that for a person or lifestyle to be eccentric it must be within the bounds of common sympathy. It's not taboo.

What I also came to realise is that anyone who actively calls themselves eccentric is almost certainly not, which is why this headline stuck out.

Here's what he looks like,

Videotape, Youtube, Moral Turpitude

I've found Arthur's video- or rather someone else found it and passed it on to me. This is a relief. The tape was in a box at a film production company's office and looked set to see out its days in there until the box was opened accidentally, which means I can, in theory, look him in the eye again.

With the kind of symmetry that I like, only hours after getting my hands on his compilation tape of former tv appearances I was able to upload a brand new piece about Arthur. It's the pick of the footage shot by me and Hels (lover) over the last four months. I do the camerawork. She does the sound. We both ask questions and nod politely. I think the section at the end of this clip is really moving.

In other news In Search of the English Eccentric, I've edited my chat with Sebastian Horsley about Moral Turpitude and being eccentric into this; the nation's favourite jailbird has been moved into a secure unit after prison staff learnt of a plot to do him in; and Vivienne Westwood has just launched a new line of shoes in collaboration with Melissa (who is not a person but one of the leading lights in Brazilian footwear, I'm told).

I had dinner with someone called Sebastian Mary this week. Sebastian Mary blogs a lot. She has more blogs than pairs of shoes. She said that when it came to writing blogs the key was to keep it to three paragraphs, or less, and always include a picture... So. If I can't do three paragraphs, I can at least put up a picture. Here are Dame Vivienne's new shoes. The silver one is best if you ask me. And I think we need one of Arthur,

And another

Review of Tree of Rivers, this time in the Sunday Times; including the best part of a paragraph about one of my favourite English eccentrics, someone who gets a few pages in In Search of the English Eccentric, the naturalist Charles Waterton:

We meet Charles Waterton, “the first Englishman to write in praise of tropical forests”. In his later years he turned his Yorkshire estate “into a wildlife sanctuary full of artificial burrows and nests...liked to dress as a scarecrow and sit in trees”, and “launched the world's first successful legal action over environmental pollution, against the owner of a nearby soap-works whose chimneys released noxious chemicals”.

Tree of Rivers

This doesn't have much to do with English eccentrics, but, here are two great reviews in this weekend's Telegraph of my Dad's latest book. It's called Tree of Rivers, published by Thames and Hudson, and is a single-volume history of the Amazon; obviously I'm biased in saying this but I think it's great, so have a look if you get the chance.

In the beginning there was Pete

Here is the first of twelve etchings that I've been working on over the last four months. It's of Pete Doherty, based on a photo I took backstage moments before Babyshambles played a gig in Birmingham at the National Indoor Arena. 'You pick your moments, don't you,' were the words that had just left his lips when the shutter opened.

I've etched him into copper, before inking him up and printing him onto some 19th century hand-made laid paper.

But why? - why bother going to all that trouble instead of just using a photo? Because I wanted to imitate/emulate Sydney Parkinson, one of the principle artists to accompany Captain Cook on his voyage to the south seas in the late 18th century. This moment in history was also when the word 'eccentric' first appeared in the English literary and cultural landscape. In writing In Search of... I've tried to use a late 18th century understanding of the word and apply it to a 21st century setting. So with this etching, similarly, a late 18th century lens is used to present a contemporary icon. Also I wanted to emulate this man's work because of the way he depicted his subjects. Most were Pacific islanders, men or women who had never seen white Western Europeans before, avatars of the unknown for an English public who would later see the prints, so for Parkinson there'd have been a temptation to show them as exotically wierd, alien, unusual, Other. He doesn't. See below. Instead he renders them familiar. There's something entirely unthreatening about the expression of this guy- 'a Chief of New Zealand, the face curiously tatowd, or mark'd, according to their manner'. I guess in an identical sense, having met them, I didn't want to portray the people I had interviewed as odd or in some way alien, and I think there's a temptation of sorts to do this when writing a book about English eccentrics.

where to begin

This really is not the beginning. That won't be for a month or so, for now I just want to see how it works, and what the words look like on the screen.

That said, while I'm here, I may as well run through what some of the people who appear in In Search of the English Eccentric are up to - after all that's what I've just said I'd do in filling out the bit at the top that asks you what your blog is about. No more than 500 words. So. How are they? Arthur's doing very well, he's just written a book, and although a bit broke, is in good spirits and looking forward to Gordon Brown calling a General Election so he can start his campaign for Salisbury. I am right behind him. He's also about to start a picket at Stone Henge in the next few weeks. I had lunch with him yesterday in a pub in Kennington because I'm trying to make a film about him. Though this might be in jeopardy- there's a slim chance that one of his videos went missing while it was in my care. It's a compilation tape that he lent me a few months ago. This makes me feel really bad. Not only do I hate losing things that belong to other people but Arthur is someone I don't want to piss off - probably a combination of fear and liking him a lot.

Sebastian Horsley, the Dandy, was deported from America a few weeks ago on account of, as he told me this afternoon, lips curling themselves around the words as if they were female and getting undressed, 'moral turpitude'. What he said will go up on my website fairly soon as I had a camera on my lap.

There are plenty of other things to say about the people in my book, since the book has gone to the printers, but I will leave the rest until later and close with the beginning of the letter that arrived today. It came in a dinky cream-coloured envelope, second-class post. On the back the following words had been stamped: THE ONLY GOOD GERMAN IS A DEAD ONE. Because a stamp had been used, rather than one of those gold stickers people with stationery disorders used in the 90s, it looked for a moment like a Royal Mail frank. Perhaps they were trying to promote a new line of first edition stamps I thought for a moment. Or it was a new advertising space - what a great place to advertise. But I knew by then who it was from, and that I'd interviewed him a year ago.

'Dear Henry', it began, 'Thank you for your letter warning me that your book is actually going to happen. This is going to cause me much embarrassment, so I will have to hope the work proves a miserable failure. In any case I shall arrange to live abroad for a couple of years.'

The rest can wait for a little bit.