WEDS 2 JULY BRYAN ADAMS’S PICNIC
Bryan Adams’s picnic to raise money to support veterans’ charities and War Child. Venue: the Chelsea Hospital with operatic concert in the church. This Wren building is immaculate – the golden mean – a harmony between aspiration and restraint. Bryan sang a little at the beginning. He has an incredible voice. No wonder he loves singing: he still does one gig a month worldwide and this gives him the time to do other things he’s interested in – his photography and time spent with his family. He’s a good cook: vegetarian. We talked to Eva Herzigova and her husband Gregorio.
THURS 3 JULY TRACEY EMIN’S BIRTHDAY
Tracey Emin’s birthday at Mark’s Club. Too many people for Tracey to be able to talk to us. Haven’t seen her for ages. She says the answer is that she will come and visit us – just her – and stay 24 hours. Her agent is Jay Jopling of White Cube. His father is so proud of Jay. He was saying, ‘Do you know my son?’ The look I gave him caused Jay to rush in and tell him – Vivienne doesn’t like modern art.
I was so pleased to find Eva and Gregorio there again and talk to them some more. They are such kind sincere people; he adores her and always wants to hear her opinion. She has three small boys; hard work. Eva remains a supermodel, so strong and powerful – a force to be reckoned with. She looks bigger than she is but size 8 or 10 fits her perfectly, still.
Happy Birthday, Tracey.
FRI 4 JULY OZZY OSBOURNE IN HYDE PARK
Sharon Osbourne invited us to come and see Ozzy perform in Hyde Park. I thought it was nice of her to think of us, though she and daughter Kelly do wear our clothes from time to time. I’ve never listened to Black Sabbath or any of the others but I do recognise heavy metal and if I ever hear a bit of it I like it. I know their daughter Kelly a little from the way she supports good causes and victims of injustice and I found the family friends interesting to talk to; they had a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the world. Sharon’s tough: she banished one regular gatecrasher, no messing.
Anyway, I still haven’t heard Black Sabbath. We were at the back in the wings where you only hear noise and feel the beat. Ozzy just ran to one side then back to the other side waving his arms and the whole audience copied him, waving like a sea of corn. It’s a shame my son Ben wasn’t with us. He once split himself laughing describing how funny Ozzy can be. We left just as they were finishing so as not to get caught in the exodus. We could have rushed over to Jerry Hall’s party in Richmond – we love her but we have too much to do to rave.
THURS 10 JULY VANESSA REDGRAVE
Shami Chakrabarti is a friend of Vanessa Redgrave and suggested that we should meet. Tizer and I biked over after work to a restaurant in Hammersmith where we were excited to meet Vanessa, but Shami warned us that she would have to leave early (ten-ish) to appear on TV to comment on the sneaky activity of the government (with Labour acceptance) in driving us further down the road to surveillance. Vanessa is dead clear against it. My opinion of governments is pragmatic. They don’t care who their victims are so long as they look ‘tough on crime’ (Theresa May). They’ll be making mistakes all over the place, getting the wrong people as victims of their paranoia, not supplying reasons for kidnapping people beyond the claim that they have secret information.
But this goes a lot further – right up to Orwell’s world of 1984. We’re all potential victims and at the same time most of us think the secret information exists and accept that governments have a right to get it and act upon it. The system picks out arbitrary victims (especially today, if you happen to be Muslim – think of what happened to Shaker Aamer). People have been blacklisted and never got a job since they were involved in union activity, or other opposition to government policy.
My copy of 1984. In Orwell’s story, people self-censor. Big Brother is watching you. But Big Brother doesn’t exist.
It makes people self-centred. Shami said that an American friend of hers who had recently visited was a bag of nerves, thinking that because of who Shami is she would be under surveillance and that she, herself, would be marked as a dangerous threat. A week later, when Pamela came over and made an appointment to go to see Julian Assange, her son feared that she would not be allowed to return to California. Julian and Edward Snowden are America’s most wanted men – because they defy the con.
WEDS 16 JULY EVERYTHING KEN CLARKE JUST SAID IS WRONG
After our tour against fracking – to which the pro-frackers had not come – Joe, myself and our team wondered what to do next. The pro-frackers had evaded our challenges; there didn’t seem much point in continuing to invite them. Nevertheless, though we hadn’t had our skirmish in the battle, we had alerted the media throughout the country to the fact of the battle.
Now the BBC had invited me to take part in the midday news programme. They showed the video we had pre-recorded (this bit is called ‘Soapbox’) and then I and the politicians on the panel – Ken Clarke and Liz Kendall (Labour) – were interviewed. I got one point across: it is not true that fracking in America was a success. Now that it has peaked, the frackers have lost money and are going bankrupt.
Ken Clarke waffled on, reassuringly. When I had a chance to reply, I didn’t play the game of polite reply. I just said, ‘Everything Ken Clarke just said is completely wrong!’, then demolished his main claim. Liz Kendall was just as bad; speaking for Labour she said she was pro-fracking so long as safeguards were ensured. If she had ever applied one decibel of brainpower to the problem she would know that safeguards are impossible.
Listening to them, I put my head in my hands. Having done so, I kept them there a second so the camera could catch it. This, and that I took care to look good, were the most important weapons I had in such a short time to discuss the most important fight the Brits will ever face. It’s most important because we have to win every battle in order to stop climate change.
There is a trick I must consider next time (if ever) I speak on TV: whatever the question, answer with one main thing you want to say. I would have chosen to say, ‘These wells, which take up the space of Trafalgar Square, will be all over the country. Your house price will drop by 25 per cent and because of this the whole economy will collapse for ten to fifteen years. Because we’ll be waiting this long before they can get enough gas.’
SAT 19 JULY LATITUDE FESTIVAL
Train to the Latitude Festival with film-maker Lorna Tucker, her cameraman and Tizer, who brings a picnic we eat on the train. Duffy’s twin sister, Katy (not identical), meets us off the train as she works for Greenpeace. John Sauven will interview me and Frank Hewetson (Arctic 30) on stage for Greenpeace. Tent packed. John tries to find common factors in our lives. He talked about our childhoods – what made us rebels.
I admire the art of Keith Haring. He created a significant visual language. I met him in New York – a dear man – and he gave me some art work to use in my collection, Witches (1983). He was thrilled. This is my drawing, using his visual language, drawing like him. My margin dog in this book (signifying fracking) is also based on Keith’s visuals.
I said that my life was ideal. My parents loved their children, I lived in the country, that I became self-aware when experience pressed upon the rebellious nerve: why must things be this way and not that? And particularly regarding injustice and suffering: why should I be so lucky? When I look back, I think this is what shaped my life. Frank said how he looked up to his wonderful father. He mentioned that in World War II his father was told to shoot a prisoner. He took him round the back of the hut, he wouldn’t do it, and told him to run. That must have been scary for the prisoner; it’s a well-known way of killing somebody – to tell them to run and then shoot them in the back.
I seized the opportunity to talk about how we can stop climate change if only enough of us act now. Urgent! The only way out of this is:
This, of course, would change the world completely because a green economy is a world without war. Wars, since history began, have been waged to secure a monopoly on land for ra
w materials and exploitation of its people for cheap labour. We could say therefore it’s inevitable and that by combating climate change – transferring from a world of finite resources to a sustainable world of peace – we will get the world we want – eventually. The only thing is that ‘eventually’ is too long.
Frank told of his time in jail in Russia. Cold … bad, bad, bad. There for sixty-seven days. Didn’t know if he would be there for months, years, or forever. Each day, he made string out of bits of whatever. At night, he tied a note on the end with the name of who he wished to receive it. At night, the prisoners hung these out of the window and, swinging them so that they caught in each other’s strings, they passed them along. After about four hours you received a reply – there were many cells on different floors and it took time. The only person who ever opened the note was the recipient. Frank is a solid fighter for Greenpeace. He won’t give up.
We got on the train home while it was still light. It stopped at every stop; we had to change and they held the train for us while we ran over the bridge. Then we stopped again at every stop and got into Liverpool Street at midnight. The best part of the day for me was the last couple of stops when groups of youngsters got on (ravers). They would have been between eighteen and twenty years old. A black boy sat down in the seat beside us; he had a medium-sized Afro with a rolled handkerchief tied round. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, he was so good to look at; he was talking all the time to some friends behind us. His friend was good-looking too, he looked a mix between African and Indian, proud features, big. When we got off I saw that their friends were three white boys, not one more handsome than the other. They were so lovely together. In the streets lots of clubbers were around, girls in high heels with platforms (difficult to dance in?). They looked really glamorous, they were dressed like film-stars. I didn’t know it was like that, really happening! But what the hell music do they dance to nowadays? Surely if there was anything good, we would get to know.
MON 21 JULY THE GENIUS OF WIKILEAKS
Went to see Julian Assange. We were happy to see each other. It’s been a long time, we’re both so busy. As in 1984, governments misrepresent the truth and give out false history; but what makes our world different is that there is also a true record of facts called WikiLeaks! – a whole library which denies the official view, an archive accessible to all. So simple, so clever: anyone who wants to do so can publish the facts and the powers that be can do nothing. Any journalist can preface a fact with ‘WikiLeaks says’ and they can’t be accused of libel.
THURS 24 JULY THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO IN MUNICH
In summer each year we go to Andreas’s family in the Tyrol. Munich is the nearest airport and we are staying there two nights, first. We arrive mid-afternoon and in the evening we go to the opera to see The Marriage of Figaro. Love Mozart. I was pleased that the costumes were eighteenth-century. It’s safer to do it from the costumes of the time; you have to be clever to make modern dress work. The set was minimal – the stage was filled with a box of three white walls. They were super-white and lit with backlight. Token pieces of furniture were placed inside and changed in each scene; the best effect was in the scene where everyone was getting lost and mistaking each other in the garden at night – the floor was totally covered in a white sheet and when people wanted to hide behind a bush they got underneath it or picked up a separate square of white cloth and got underneath it. Nevertheless the effect was a bit thin. You were conscious of the figures looking precious against the white – kind of like porcelain figurines. You thought of them as figures rather than people.
FRI 25 JULY BECKMANN, DIX AND ORFEO
My friend Patricia who lives just outside Munich came to see me in the hotel, bringing her youngest child, Augustino, eight months; already standing, he should be an early walker. I taught her as a student in Berlin and she worked with us in London for a time as a design assistant. I enjoyed having her with me and her laugh is happiness itself. Then Andreas and I went to an art exhibition which was devastating yet uplifting. It was a double bill: Max Beckman and Otto Dix, who both served in World War I, and the exhibition was arranged according to the similarity of subject matter.
Both artists had drawn, etched and painted what they saw in the war and its results; Dix emphasised the message and arrested your attention. You had to bear witness to the horror, you had to look or immediately turn away. Beckman allowed you to look longer before the realisation hit you. I was shocked to know that Dix’s shocking images were the truth; it was that bad. And we know this because Beckman painted the same thing, his war victims were the same. There were scenes of torture and scenes of horrific injuries and this cold end to soldiers’ lives left my stomach heavy and drained of emotion. I had to turn myself away.
Before we went to the opera that night to see L’Orfeo by Monteverdi, I read the synopsis in English on Andreas’s computer. Orpheus the shepherd played such beautiful music on his lyre that the birds and beasts came to listen. His beloved, Eurydice, dies from a snake bite. He went to Hell and Pluto gave him permission to take her back to life on condition that he did not look back at her as she followed him. As he got to the opening he turned to look and she faded back into the Shades. We were joined by Andreas’s friend of many years, Bertram, and his sister, Silke. They met in their teens when Andreas worked evenings as an usher in the theatre and Bertram was a set designer. Bertram: well-cut features and a beautiful-shaped head, elegant, smoking.
The idea for the set and the costumes was very good. It was set in the 1970s and began with the hippy wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice. There were no scene changes. The costumes were hippy and intermixed with historical garments, which was true to the hippy period (remember Hendrix wearing a theatrical nineteenth-century soldier’s jacket with gold braid) and went back to the time of Monteverdi. But everything was greyish or white; the floor of the stage was covered in a grey plastic sheet. Orpheus’s suit was rubbish; it was in beige crumpled linen. Many theatre designers today think that without colour – and, therefore, neutral – you leave more room for the imagination. But I wish they would drop this boring convention.
The wigs were great and, in particular, the long dark wig of Charon – the ferryman who takes you over the River Styx and into Hell – suited so well the man who sang this role; his features were riveting, he had a sharp strong nose, eyes that flashed sapphire, and amazing white teeth. Pluto, the god of the underworld, was big and beautiful – really a god of a man – and he had a long silky, medium brown wig; he was wearing a vest and they had covered his arms and chest with matching hairs, long and floating and real-looking. I would love to have seen him riding his chariot – or a Harley. His queen, Proserpine, had a great dress, a long black gown filled with stars (little electric lights). She was the audience’s favourite and they went crazy at the curtain. The performers rose to the highest aspiration of the sublime music.
Afterwards, we walked across the park with our friends to a restaurant bar where we ate traditional mash with fried egg.
SAT 26 JULY OFF TO THE MOUNTAIN
Before we left for the mountain we paid a visit to the Frauenkirche, the brick cathedral near to our hotel. It was incredibly beautiful inside, a high gothic nave with its two side aisles; tall pillars and arches all in white stone; a large simple crucifixion.
On the train to Jenbach we sat opposite a fat man whose belly spread into his lap. He was dressed casually and elegantly and his body language was delicate and refined as he talked to his daughter of around twenty. His son was reading. When we got off, Andreas told me that he had expressed himself at the highest level of the most beautiful German with a rich vocabulary.
I am going to start learning German during this holiday. I don’t know why after all this time – I taught for thirteen years in Berlin (going seven or eight times a year for about four days each time), our pattern cutters are always German (they are the best), and I’ve been married to Andreas for more than twenty years. One reason is because I’m inspire
d by German painters and by Bach and Handel. And of course Mozart spoke German. Then there’s Brecht … But I don’t pick up a language by ear, I need a book. I speak French and Italian. I will then learn Chinese so I can read the characters. I think the characters each have their own story and that when you put the characters together they keep their story as well as contributing to the whole new story – and that this keeps the newly created story alive to deeper meanings.
Gregor, Andreas’s nephew, collects us from the station and we drive to the mountain. We stop for a week’s groceries then drive to the chalet, which is lower down the mountain to say hello to Martin, Andreas’s brother and Gregor’s dad, then drive on to the higher chalet. There are two chalets and Martin the farmer switches between them because the cows alternate between pastures. It is peaceful here; we will read and walk. We light the fire in the stove. The chalet has everything we need: cool cellar (no need for a fridge), solar electric light, pure water, milk, stars. The region we are in is the Inner Alpbachtal.
SUN 27 JULY THE BIRTH OF A CALF
We are invited to lunch with Martin and it is his birthday. Julia, Martin’s wife, has a hairdressing salon in the village of Fugen at the bottom of the mountain. She has three children; she doesn’t seem to get a day off and every Sunday she comes up to see Martin and to cook. There are other guests, too, including Andreas’s father, Franz, and Auntie Herma.
I go with Martin to the barn where one of the cows is giving birth. The two front feet are out but we go back into the house because everything is okay; the cow is lying in a good position and Martin isn’t needed yet. When we go back, the calf’s nose is out. Martin puts his hand in and moves the calf’s head forward a bit but it is still inside; you can see the shape of the calf’s head covered by the distended fur-covered flesh of the mother. The feet and nose are white, a bluish white and I can’t see any sign of life, except the calf’s tongue, which is hanging out, moves. Martin ties a rope to its feet and does some serious pulling, sitting with his feet wedged against the mother’s backside, and he moves his other hand round the head inside her, easing it forward. The calf’s eyes are shut and all of a sudden the whole head is out. The mother stands up as the total calf sloshes out in the broken waters and lands on her hip. She is brown and white and her wide eyes are fringed with white lashes. I was shaking with emotion. I wanted to cry.
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