Bristol's Biggest Bike Ride

Sunday was Bristol's Biggest Bike Ride, and it's become something of a tradition for Katie and me; we've been doing it ever since she was riding behind me on a trailer bike. So we joined in yet again, riding the Avon Loop, which goes down the Portway, the main road down the Avon Gorge, closed to other traffic for the day so that it is unusually peaceful- just the ticking of bicycle gears and the occasional tinkling of bells; then over the Avonmouth motorway bridge, and back up the cycle path along the bank of the Avon, and so to the city centre again.


As you can see from this picture of a bottleneck at Pill, a small port on the Somerset bank, there were thousands of people. There was also a pub open next to this patch of green, and our friends Mal and Adrian. So we stopped for lunch. The Sally Army came along and started playing, so Mal and I joined in with the singing. I was fortunate, though I didn't think so at the time, in that my school had dumped their old A&M style hymn book and replaced them with a 'happy clappy' one in 1971; we were very 'with it' in the Valleys; and so I knew the words to Give me joy in my heart, make me happy, though in my head I still hear it in a Valleys accent.... sing 'osannah, sing 'osannah, sing 'osannah to the king of kings....

Katie looked as though she wished that the ground would swallow her up...



Well, it was good being part of a little 'world turned upside down' event, especially seeing an apoplectic motorist in a Big Car trying to force his way against the flow of thousands of bicycles, presumably to prove a point, while shaking his head in theatrical disbelief- "I'm a motorist, so I take precedence". Duh. But I'm not entirely sure that cycling is as morally-improving as I might have hoped; there was some quite selfish riding (stupid overtaking and cutting-in) going on. It wasn't supposed to be a race, dumbfucks.

Home again, achy and tired. I think it was the constant stopping and starting and dodging other people that was the tiring part. We don't usually do group things. Not sure I want to again. I'm pining for the mountains...

one midsummer morning

Out and about bright and early, to see how the summer is getting along. The wild cherries are getting perfectly ripe now, and, unusually, there were lots of deep red ones hanging there for the picking when Katie and I went out the evening before; usually the birds get there first. As we were happily picking and eating, a man walked by with his dog. He looked quizzically at us.

"Wild cherries," I explained, and presented him with one.

He stared mistrustfully at it and slowly handed it back.

On this early morning sortie, though, the tree was busy with blackbirds, all tucking in.




Here are the damsons, some of which I shall be steeping in vodka later in the season. Last year's damson vodka was really extremely good...



...and so down to the side of the gorge. I passed the avenue of trees which stretches from Sneyd Park (Bristol's poshest suburb) to Ladies Mile, and along which the Sneyd Park dog walkers promenade. Several dogs hurtled towards each other and started fighting.

"Heah! I said HEAH!!" called a woman in a voice accustomed to command, if not to be obeyed.

(This reminded me of the occasion when I was walking in these parts with my lurcher, long ago. A Range Rover stopped not far off; the driver, accoutred in flat cap, corduroy trousers, Barbour Jacket and Hunter wellies, opened the back door and a couple of labradors came bounding across to say hello, ignoring his fruity and progressively louder admonishment: "Purdey! PURRRDEH!!" (Purdey, if you didn't know, is a posh make of shotgun, and of course the name of the character played by Joanna Lumley in The New Avengers...))

...through the wildlife meadow, with the sound of squabbling dogs and foghorning Sneyd Park matrons receding astern. And I hear a chiffchaff singing, though it is fighting for airspace with the massively amplified music drifting across the gorge from Leigh Woods, where an illicit all-night party is still under way.

At Peregrine Point I meet Mandy Leivers, the Education Officer from Bristol Zoo, setting out leaflets in readiness for a family walk around the Downs.

A heron flies over, high up.

I head for the cafe.

Happy solstice!

wild things

I get up early and gaze out of the front window to see what's going on in the world. I'd usually expect to see our local fox doing its rounds, but I've not seen it for a week or so now. Perhaps the mange has got it. Or any of the other unpleasant things that can happen to foxes, thus ensuring that their lives are possibly nasty and brutish, but almost always short.

Yuki and Pookie were peering intently at me, so I took a picture of them. Note: A canary in a cage puts all heaven in a rage. But rats are OK.

There's been lots of moths flitting around the flat lately. Small dusty grey looking things, I captured one in a jam jar last night and had as good a look as possible, and concluded that my fears had been realised and it is a clothes moth. So I squirted fly spray into the jar and quickly put the lid on. A nasty way to murder a moth; it is somehow better to splat them with a rolled-up newspaper. I'd been hoping to pin it out after it had died, to get a good picture of it with my camera. But it got mired in a little puddle of fly spray and by the time I'd got it onto a piece of paper it was in a sorry old state.


Katie's first thought was for her stuffed toys, particularly Llygoden, whose (possibly organic Welsh) woollen complexion would be a tasty treat for any passing moth. So she put them in a bag with a gallon of lavender oil, to keep them safe. "A few drops would do", I said, but it was too late by then.

The stuffed toys at least will sleep soundly.

I must find a friendly garden where I can pick some herbs for strewing.

Irish Independent

There was a nice write-up in the Irish Independent, following the Dublin reading that Richard and I did. Without Richard, of course. Because of the chicken pox. But Andrea Smith pieced out our imperfections with her thoughts. And they used my fave 'group' photo from the walk, at Strumble Head in Pembs. And I've got killer cheekbones. It was worth it for that alone! Thanks, Andrea!

Following a friend on the difficult road across gender

Richard Beard had a long way to go when he first saw the man with a pearl earring, writes Andrea Smith

Sunday June 14 2009

Drusilla Marland was born the second of four brothers.

She is on good terms with both of her ex-wives.

She was thrilled to become a dad.

Thus author Richard Beard describes the breakdown of grammatical orthodoxy that is an occasional side effect of describing the circumstances of his close friend, Drusilla Philippa Marland, known as Dru.

When Richard first got to know Dru, she was then called Drew -- a motorcycling male engineer in his 30s with whom he went on camping and walking holidays. These trips were a back-to-nature quest for Richard, reminding him of what it meant to be truly alive and what it meant to be a man.

Then, after 10 years of thinking he knew everything about the friend he shared a two-person tent with, came the call that threw him into confusion. The following day, Richard went to Dru's flat in Bristol, and tried not to react when he saw his friend in pearl earrings. He noted the shaved forearms too, as he listened to his friend's request to think of him as a woman from then on.

By his own admission, Richard didn't cover himself in glory with his initial reaction, as he describes the thoughts that initially ran through his mind.

"You are a 43-year-old man whose wife has just left you for another bloke, taking your daughter with her. You have a dismantled crankshaft on the table in your front room. You drink lunchtime pints of Smiles Old Tosser and you work in the engine room of a 7,000-ton passenger ship. You are not a woman."

After this, Richard went home, read books on the subject and did his best to understand what had just been presented to him. Still seeking answers, he suggested writing Dru's story, and by his own admission, he was partly trying to catch his friend out.

"If Drusilla is not true, then in her place sits a fizzing combination of modern afflictions," he says in the book. "She's probably psychotic, possibly sexually deviant, certainly attention-seeking, and conceivably a secret special agent of the patriarchy. No wonder candidates for surgery have to see so many psychiatrists."

In person, Dru is a softly spoken woman with killer cheekbones and eccentric dress sense. At her book reading in the Winding Stair bookshop, she is by turns coquettish, amusing, gentle and hesitant. Telling the story of her difficult and often painful journey to womanhood requires bravery, not least because she has not been universally accepted.

Indeed, she was awarded £64,862 (€76,276) compensation in 2006, after a tribunal found she was forced to endure "an atmosphere of intimidation and hostility" while she was undergoing gender reassignment while working for P&O Ferries.

The Southampton tribunal found that she was constructively dismissed through having to endure "constant gender-based ribaldry" relating to the gender reassignment, and offensive remarks from other staff members.

It is no wonder, then, that her intelligent eyes glisten with sensitivity, framed by "spinster" glasses.

As the passages describing Richard's experience are read, it becomes clear that the author has also gone on his own complicated journey to acceptance and understanding of Drusilla's situation.

"I want to say I'm sorry," he says. "It must be horrible and tiresome having people look all the time, having me look all the time. Christ, I wouldn't like it, to be looked over so closely by someone like me."

Becoming Drusilla is a remarkable story of friendship, courage and humanity. Achingly funny, bruisingly heart-rending and deeply honest and personal, the story is gracefully and humbly told and free of mawkish sentimentality.

Both Richard and Dru struggle with the new and fragile world they find themselves in. The journey is traced from Dru's early days, through realising that she was born in the wrong body and her subsequent journey to full womanhood.

They still go camping together, notwithstanding prejudice from equipment store owners who insist on calling Dru, "Sir." And Richard worries about what the future will hold for his friend Dru, who is in an intensely complicated and vulnerable position, due to spending the first 43 years of her life as a man.

"I do sometimes worry that Dru will lose her way," he says. "I mean really lose her way. That she'll drop into a life of special-interest groups and Oxfam scavenging, and the occasional indignant letter to the Daily Mail. Or end up a bag lady on a permanent shuttle between ... the Gloucester Road charity shops, too old to jump into skips, her day made or broken by whether there's bottled beer in the house come five past six."

Then again, he concludes, he worries about everyone he loves, and in brighter moments, he sees Dru as an eccentric lady driving around Bristol in her Morris Minor, getting mistaken by people of a certain age for the district nurse.

"The lucky children in her street will know her as the mystery woman with many bangles who will mend a puncture before Mum comes home," he says. "And solve any problems with a bully."

Becoming Drusilla: One Life, Two Friends, Three Genders by Richard Beard (Vintage UK, Random House, €10.40)

- Andrea Smith

my pink half of the drainpipe

thank you, Gaping Void!

Nothing can my peace disturb. Well, apart from the chavs down the road who wake up at about eleven in the morning and put crap music on too loud. Which is probably no more noisy than the sit-upon lawnmower that the aspirational neighbours fire up to mow their five square yards of tired urban grass. But is certainly more annoying.

Some people try, though. I found a hand-delivered letter on the mat yesterday, from someone at the City Council. As it had been correctly addressed to me, I inferred that one of my neighbours had complained about me to the Council.

I note that your boat/trailer has been placed on the carriageway of the public highway at the above-mentioned location for some weeeks. The boat/trailer displays no reflectors or license plate and faces the wrong direction to traffic, therefore I must instruct you to remove the boat/trailer and not replace it on the highway in future. Sections 143/149 of the Highways Act 1980 empower the Council to remove from the highway any structures/items causing danger/obstruction and recover the expenses of so doing from the person having control or possession of the structure/item.

So I turned the boat around and put a towing board on it with a number plate and reflectors. And I called up the chap who signed the letter and explained that the boat is only going to be here until I've finished repairing it; and that there is never any shortage of parking in my road anyway. He was fine about it, and commented that he at least had nice neighbours. "So do I," I said, "...mostly".



I didn't bother adding that there'd be even more parking if people weren't so fiercely protective of the space in front of their houses, especially those people who jealously assert the presumed privileges of dropped kerbs, which, even long after their original purpose (access to basement garages long converted into flats) has ceased to be, demand the right to park their cars across this space on the road....

Suburban pettinesses.

Here are some choice examples of local parking from my collection, by the way. They aren't parked in these odd places because there are no better places available; they are parked like this because their owners don't want to walk more than a few paces to their front doors.



One of them recently had a polite notice from the police stuck under its windscreen wiper, suggesting that they may have action taken against them. A week later the car and the notice were still there. Then one day the car was gone and the notice was in the gutter. Hopefully the owner had read the notice before discarding it, and taken note that 'antisocial' parking is actually acceptable behaviour.

on specs

I am much too casual with my specs, given that they are such an important part of my life... I was reminded of this yet again last night as I was staring at a six-pack of baked beans in Tesco, wondering how much of a bargain they were, and Katie said, "Why are you looking at dog food?"

Driving home, we saw a great turmoil of dramatic clouds over in the direction of Wales, so as soon as we were inside, I scrambled up onto the roof to get a better look. There's been a lot of weather around lately, some of it involving cumulonimbus clouds, which are always nice to watch... from a distance.

And there, on the roof, were my missing specs, which I'd just resigned myself to having lost irrevocably. I must have put them down on the parapet while photographing balloons on Saturday morning.

It is very happy making, being reunited. It puts things into focus. Here is a haiku I wrote when I once got some new spectacles.

How finely woven
This spider's web by my head.
Thank you, nice new specs!

Here are some shots I took yesterday, spec-less obviously, for publicity stuff for a reading that Richard and I are doing later in the year. If you would like to express a preference for either or neither, I should be glad to hear your opinion...

hegemony, hegemony, they've all got it hegemony

I think there's some art over here

The Arnolfini gallery (or 'Anal phoney' for short) has been doing its stuff in Bristol since 1975. It had my favouritest ever exhibition back in the 80s, with the Ruralists; lots of Peter Blake and David Inshaw. My kind of art. I usually call in when I'm passing; and I once sort-of-participated in an event called New Barbarians. It closed for a couple of years not long ago, and transformed into a much posher place than it used to be. Gone was the cheery cafe with the informal refectory seating, to be replaced by little tables, uniformed staff, and gloomy and oppressive 'designer' decor by Bruce Oldfield. Oh, and lots more gallery space.


At the moment, that gallery space is host to something called 'Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie'. I wandered around it the other day; it was easy to see, because I was the only visitor on that particular afternoon, and it was just me and the invigilators. So I didn't take pictures of the installations, as they get sniffy about that sort of thing. But I took a picture of the mission statement, because I thought it was the most interesting piece there.

If you don't like squinting at my photo, here it is

To what extent does class play a role in the production and dissemination of contemporary art? Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie investigates the latent issue of class underlying the field of contemporary visual art. The project is an open question, an invitation to a discussion long overdue, and does not offer foregone conclusions or rigid hypotheses other than the relevance of the conversation itself.

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie will present a collaborative project with a number of practitioners that scrutinise their own positions, bias and gaze within the hierarchy of cultural production. It will seek to identify the impact class has in the field - from artists, through to curators, institutions, audiences and decision makers in mainstream art. The exhibition will contain work in various media, including photography, texts, performance, video and sculpture.

See how the people whose stuff is hanging on the wall here describe themselves as practitioners, and I am apparently an audience. So visual art is performative, apparently. I find this notion a little alien, though, thinking about it, I suppose that it's what Richard Long does. Though I 'get' Richard Long, while I found the stuff in the Arnie incomprehensible. As a general rule, I realised long ago that you're on a hiding to nothing if you find yourself in company with someone who uses words like 'hegemony'. I recall first encountering it in my early student days, when I shared a flat with Jon Charnley, leading light of the new wave band that changed its name for every gig before settling on Beam Me Up Scottie and having a single (Coffee Table Cheese Plant Anglepoise Lamp, a sort-of-love-song for Julia Platt, our other flatmate), that John Peel played for a while. In Jon's room, late at night, people (well, some people) would say things like 'hegemony' and 'Gramsci'. It was heady stuff for a post-teenager in the 80s.

The description of themselves as lapdogs of the bourgeoisie seems to indicate a dissatisfaction with the status accorded them. And describing the targeted consumer of their product as 'bourgeois' seems a little ungrateful, even if it is true. People, perhaps especially bourgeois people, do like something a bit 'edgy' to hang over their mantelpiece, as long as there is a consensus about its edginess and artiness... There is, though, a species of hegemony going on (just had to look that word up again to remind me of what it actually means. This is a sure way of knowing whether or not I should really be using a word...). And that is the hegemony of the Real Artist.

I had a neighbour (she's moved now) who is a Real Artist. I have illustrated books, though I describe myself, if pushed, as an illustrator, or as someone who draws pictures. Slobodana would purse her lips in a dismissively Balkan way when she looked at my pictures. She was too polite to say outright that they were not art. But I knew that's what she meant. I can live with that.

Bristol is very excited at the moment because it woke up on Friday to find that the City Museum, which had been closed for two days, had been transformed into a Banksy exhibition.
A couple of art critics on BBC Radio 4 talk about it here . My favourite bit is Rachel Johnson, art critic for the Times, saying "there's absolutely nothing wrong with this show". It's that Slobodana sneer again...

I haven't visited the exhibition yet, not least because it's too bloody crowded. Look, here was the queue yesterday.


The city council is quite pleased at this evidence of their hipness.

Just down the hill in Stokes Croft there is a boarded-up shop. Until three weeks ago it had a rather good bit of painting by local graf artists Cheo and 3dom. But I can't show you a picture of it now because, although the painting was done with the permission of the owners, the council painted over it. Just over the road is one of Banksy's earlier pieces, Mild Mild West, which was recently restored after someone splashed red paint over it. Authority? Establishment? Iconoclast? Artist? Who?