9 April 2007
Hamster wheel comes to grief in grey area
The tricky line between art and an April Fool’s joke is one that few people can locate with any confidence.
Many locals will define art as anything containing a view of the Norfolk coast and feel fairly content. Others plump for Old Masters, or Colin Self. Last week a French girl gave us some guidance in the grey area.
As a student at the Norwich School of Art and Design, she created an arts project that involved building a giant hamster wheel and piloting it herself (in the absence of giant hamsters) from Norwich to Happisburgh – which she said “looked like the end of the earth”.
She didn’t say which end. She was right, however, in envisaging a tortuous journey, because most of the hamster wheel came apart in Magdalen Street, at a point where the distance from her starting point would be measured in yards rather than miles. I’m not sure if this disqualified it as a work of art, but it does seem as if the technical aspects were somewhat lacking – assuming that traffic calming was not a factor.
However, I understand that very little modern art is built to last ¬– an artist friend tells me that few people even understand how to prepare a canvas properly nowadays.
Nevertheless, we were reassured by the enthusiastic student that her hamster wheel was a “metaphor for the human condition”, perhaps because it started off as a wheel, became a hoop, turned a into a square, then a coffin shape, and ended up as sea defence when it was tipped off the end of the world.
This pretty much describes most people’s life, I suppose, but then so does waiting for a bus that never arrives – and I wouldn’t call that a work of art.
Come to think of it, the hamster wheel, for all its failings, may be a more reliable mode of transport.
Song thrushes do well out of climate change
Here is a worrying quotation from a serious national newspaper: “The varying birds visiting our gardens is one example of the impact climate change is having on the natural world.”
I don’t mean the grammar, though that is worrying enough. I would also like the birds to be more consistent in their character, but that is a minor point.
What really worries me is the emptyheadedness. “The varying number of birds visiting our gardens” could be replaced in that sentence by so many other phrases – “number of blue skies last year”; behaviour of great crested newts in relation to major roads”; choice of holiday destinations for stockbrokers”; “movement of sub- atomic particles in second homes” without any loss of integrity or meaning.
There is more to worry about when we discover who said it: the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ head of climate change policy. This means that not only does the RSPB have a climate change policy, but it has a department dealing with it, of which someone is head.
I have no idea what such a policy could be – perhaps to persuade birds to emit less carbon dioxide – but the policy head’s next observation is that song thrushes are doing rather well in the countryside, though “as changes to our climate become more extreme, many birds will struggle to cope with the altered weather patterns”.
That’s birds other than thrushes, presumably. The words “non” and “sequitur” come to mind, but so do the words “goodbye RSPB”.
You can't take the adder away from me
Following my recent mention of adders, I discovered that someone was trying to track down sightings of the poisonous snakes to compile a record of where they used to be found.
It so happens that I have only seen one adder, but you can’t take that away from me. It was at Hemsby, in the late 1950s, which I have to admit is a long time ago.
When I was a child we often had holidays at Hemsby – in a community of bungalows called The Marrams, which I am delighted to see has largely survived the despoliation of the rest of the road to the beach.
It was a pretty magical place in those days. All right, I did visit the first very innocent amusement arcade, where they played the latest pop songs – I remember fondly repeated plays of Diana and Last Train to San Fernando, but I don’t talk about it.
I watched the Norwich bus arrive and turn round, I devised extraordinary games in the dunes, and I played football and cricket on the short, sheltered grass of The Valley, which stretched up to Winterton – not that we ever went there.
We were warned about adders in the Valley but I never saw one. Mine was in the hedge outside the bungalow we were staying in – and to my relief, it made a quick exit.
Interestingly, the Old English for adder is naeddre, which could be part of the derivation of Saxlingham Nethergate. Snakes in such an exclusive spot? Surely not.
Volunteer surgeons may be next on list
I see that the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital has been reduced to using volunteers to man its outpatient reception desks.
These volunteers used to walk the corridors, offering assistance in a relaxed way to visitors confused by the mysterious medical signage. Now they are tied to one spot, where they enjoy the enormous benefit of unrewarded responsibilities and the opportunity to be abused by tense visitors without the correct change for the car park.
Two questions: how soon will they run out of volunteer receptionists, and when will they start recruiting volunteer surgeons?
High risk of traffic calming in distortion spot
Most traffic calming has been described by a road safety campaigner as “a form of appalling vandalism”. To introduce it in the Autonomous Republic of Hingham, as is proposed by the local Traffic Action Group – a title to make the heart plummet rather than simply sink – adds a new element of danger.
Time and space distortion in the Hingham area is well documented. Expert Professor V A R Scheinlich said last night: “We are on a knife-edge. Introducing humps, ramps and chicanes would be not only pointless but extremely disturbing.
“People could die, or at least disappear into another dimension.”