A Shooting on Broadway

Last Saturday I went up to London with my bike on the train to see my dad and go to Victoria park's firework spectacle. Arriving into London I spied my dad hiding from me just outside the barriers at the end of platform 18. We pushed our bikes through the station and came out onto Wilton Road and cycled up towards the river. After a swift half facing into the autumnal sun outside the Morpeth Arms – one of my dad's favourite pubs – we walked up to the Tate, locked our bikes out front and joined the throng of people shuffling through the J.M.W Turner exhibition.

I didn't realise Turner was such a huge ego. It seems he made his name by imitating the great masters and trying to show he could do what they did - only better. It was amazing to see Turner alongside Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Constable. On one occasion, at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1832, Turner returned to the gallery a day ahead of the opening on 'varnishing day' to spy Constable's painting entitled The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. On seeing his contribution, Turner took a brush and added a dash of red paint to his own painting. In comparison Constable's painting now looked over the top and gaudy and he was none too pleased. What a sneek he was – that Turner! He really knew how to get and keep the public's attention.

Next, we swung through the Turner prize and I was most drawn to the work of Lucy Skaer. Her blurb says she makes drawings, sculptures and films which often take found photographic sources as their starting point. One piece called Black Alphabet – which consists of 26 dust coal sculptures I found stunning; stark, bold and very striking.

That evening crushed tightly against other revellers inside Victoria Park, with my brother and some of his friends - we watched some fantastic fireworks. It wasn't quite cold enough to capture my heart but I definately had one or two sparkly moments. However, no sooner had it started it was over and I was queuing to get out. Ordinarily in this situation - crammed into a vast crowd inching painfully slowly towards a narrow opening I start hyper-ventilating and imagining worse case scenarios. Too many people pushing forward, no where for those in front to go - with fearful mayhem ensuing. I kept focussing on the fact that it was still early and the crowds were full of mums, dads and children. Sensible, safe people. Nothing untoward was going to happen right now. I escaped the throng and took refuge outside an Italian café and considered ordering pizza and wine for a treat for me and my brother whom I had lost somehow in my failed attempt at beating a hasty retreat ahead of the rest.

Soon after wolfing down pizza my bro and I were unlocking our bikes in the rain. He was going to cycle me back to Bethnal Green before going on to a party. We had to get off and push our bikes when we hit the crowds on Broadway Market – it was nearly 10p.m. The streets were busy and full of trendy types hanging out despite the fact it had been raining on and off and was starting to feel really cold. At one point as the crowd thickened we had to be really careful not to run our bikes into the ankles of the people in front. Those coming towards us had to swerve to avoid our handlebars. It was at this moment that we heard a loud bang and turned to see a guy standing still, pointing a gun down a side street we had just passed - smoke was coming out of its end. Nothing happened. No one reacted. There was no noise. It was weird. A moment frozen in time. Two men ran round the corner and disappeared into the night – the guy with the gun and and another. The one with the gun had, moments earlier pushed past us in the crowd.

Me and my brother stood in the kerb looking back and wondering what the hell just happened. Had we witnessed a murder? or a failed attempt? I was in shock and thinking about how we nearly got in his way and how we might have paid for making him late for his target. My brother was quite rightly more worried about whether or not there was someone lying injured or worse - dead. Still, nothing much was happening. We wondered if it was even a real gun? Maybe it was a stunt?

I felt bad. There couldn't have been a body – the shooter must have missed – cos still no-one was reacting. In the meantime some git in a car went ape shit at us for getting in his way and beeped his horn at us angrily, swearing and shaking his fists out of the window. This side show really unnerved us. His aggression was directed right at us in close proximity. He was horrible. Nothing was happening and so we got back on our bikes and now pretty shaken from this road rage we carried on up to Hackney Road.

What just happened? Why didn't anyone react? I didn't get it. My bro took me back to my dad's front door which was the right thing to do considering. It must have been gone 10p.m. by now and a few minutes later I got a text from my brother. On his way back past the scene, he saw that the area had been cordoned off with two police vans. He reckoned there was no body. The police had been called at least - thank goodness for someone having the right reaction.

I googled 'shooting on Broadway Market' when I got back to Brighton and for several days thereafter and I found nothing. Is that because shootings are so common on the streets of London that they just aren't reported or is it that no body means no story? Should I have gone to the police even tho there were hundred's of other witnesses - plenty closer to the scene than us? And even though the guy with the gun practically had to push us out of his way to get to where he was headed, my brother and I couldn't even agree on what he was wearing. I still don't know what to make of this. At once such a familiar scene from films and TV but certainly close up it just felt wierd and maybe that's why no-one reacted - we didn't know what we were looking at nor how to react to it?

Halloween pumpkin fest

On Halloween this year I found myself with 3 children; thirteen, eight and nearly two. The youngest is mine and the older two are my partners – all girls. I am not quite sure how, but I have managed to stay fairly ignorant of Halloween activities until this year. It must be down to my age bracket and 'status'. Before, as a mid thirties somebody I guess I must have been too old to be invited to hip Halloween parties. Now, a mum and parent type of person to my partners girls (which means we get to do Halloween every other year (!)) I am going to have to start engaging with child centred festivities with a renewed enthusiasm.

So, this year in an attempt to fulfill young desires and parental type obligations – after a day out on Southwold beach and pier - we found ourselves driving to Bungay on the recommendations of an artist lady my mum knows who works in Craft Co. It was a bit of a treck but it was well worth it – in more ways than one.

By 6p.m. the whole of Bungay was alive with witches, ghosts and gruesome nasties. The centre of town, by the Buttercross, surrounded by food stalls; cakes, mulled wine and a whole pig sliced up from head to tail - past which we hurried to save our vegetarian sensitivities. Bridge Street was harangued with hundreds of children, mums and dads dressed so very scarily, trick or treating buckets a go go (mainly orange and from tesco's I since discovered!). This was the town's annual pumpkin night. Outside all the houses down Bridge Street sat the hugest pumpkins you ever did see. If I squinted down the street – with the mist and the light and the smoke off the fires rising into the damp night air I could almost have been in the middle of a medieval street festival. It was quite magical and definately worth a visit.

On the way back to the van we went into St.Mary's graveyard to scare ourselves a little more and check out the claw marks left by the ghostly hound Black Shuck - but we got the wrong church! On August 4th 1577 during a raging thunderstorm it is said that during a service at St. Mary's, the 'The Black Dog of Bungay' killed two and left another injured before tearing off to Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh where the creature charged down the aisle, before fleeing through the North door of the church leaving large black scorched gouges which can still be seen on the door.

The mist on the way out of town was almost impenetrable I had to drive back at 30 miles an hour. If I put my full beams on I was blinded by the whiteness. After a while it felt like the bluriness was actually on the surface of my eyeball. It was well scary and the drive was made more eery still by taking turns to continue a scary story about severed arms and wobbly eyeballs.

When we got back we took our pumpkin and candles in jars up to the graveyard behind my mum's house, to see what Halloween had done to the old souls up there. My brother managed to swing round ahead of us to flicker on and off the mock victorian lantern that lights up the pathway and to give a few screeches. Meanwhile over the other side of the field my mum was whining like a dying cat. It did the trick. I took the eight and two year old back to the warmth and safety of the sitting room fire and left the braver folk to explore the graveyard close up.

A fork makes the perfect comb

We arrived at Snape Maltings for the the Buddhist chanting proms earlyish - given that we were already in Aldeburgh and there seemed little point driving back home cos mum would have to come pretty much straight out again. Our main problem was that mum felt she couldn't possibly go out looking the way she did after a day hanging about on the beach. I had another cardigan I could lend her although it was a bit screwed up, and she already had another pair of shoes kicking about the van left from the day we went to Norwich to see probably the worst ever exhibition at the Art School. The top was a problem tho' - earlier in the day one of the straps had pinged off and with no needle or safety pins mum had just tied it to her bra strap which had done the job of keeping the top up. There was also the cleavage – this was a problem for mum due to her perception of it in conjunction with her age. It was one thing wearing a scanty top at home but quite something else to be showing the Buddhists her cleavage at the proms. All was made right quite simply by placing my purple scarf over the cleavage and the wayward beach hair was tamed by using a fork from the salad we'd made on the beach earlier as a makeshift comb. All happy, we went off to find Ute and her two sisters down by the Henry Moore sculpture in the reeds.

Coastal Erosion

We went to Walberswick the other day for a swim and a mooch about. We used to camp there every year when we were kids, pitching the tent at the beginning of the summer and leaving it up until the end. Family could come and go and whoever wanted it had a tent set up with everything they needed. These visits to Walberswick started before we moved to Suffolk – which was when I was about ten - so it's probably around 30 years ago now that it became our family camping heaven. Needless to say it has changed an awful lot particularly in the last few years.

I was driving the van carefully down a lane so as not to draw attention to ourselves searching for somewhere to park (there is absolutely nowhere to park although Walberswick has become one great big car park). It was queue in and queue out which is why we sloped off down the lane to try and avoid facing that suffocating feeling that we are yet another, one among hundreds, messing up Walberswick for the day. Sad but true. Florence, my cousin, was with us. Now nearly seven months pregnant, she had her 21st birthday party in the village hall about 7 years ago and has camped at Walberswick with her mates and when we were all younger for years since she was a little girl. We'd had the run of the campsite back then. Kids, dogs, cats, goats - all were welcome when Margaret was in charge. The campsite now has limited delineated plots and is only open for the 6 week school holidays. Apparently it is booked up months in advance and Lady Bloyce who owns the land and sets the rules for the campsite is even rumoured to run the campsite as an invite only affair. It pisses me off the way everything has become packaged and sold back to us as a quintessential experience. Walberswick really is the perfect place but sharing it with that many people just doesn't feel alright. I just read an article in Red magazine about Esther Freud's love of her annual walk from Aldeburgh to Walberswick, and a week later I heard on Radio 4 about the annual crabbing competition – for goodness sake – what is going on? I know it has always been a retreat for middle class Radio 4 types but they seem to have told everyone else in the world too! How can this level of people driving in and out of Walberswick be sustained? The old curiosity shop is a contrived version of its earlier self when it truly was old and curious and Mary's tea shop has shut down but then as kids we never went there as cream teas were out of our price range and not enough fun quite frankly.

More fun was to take our bikes over on the ferry for 5p and cycle up to the bakery in Southwold to get as many buttered buns as you were allowed (I think each person could have 4 because they baked limited amounts and only on certain days so I guess they were trying to be fair) and then arrive back on the campsite to share with all the kids who quickly gathered as the bikes arrived over Piddle Bridge. The fête was an annual event and as fêtes go it wasn't bad. All the ladies of the village emptied their cupboards and you could be sure to find something interesting or tasty. The best part of the fête though was at the end when all the leftovers that didn't sell were abandoned up at the bins by the toilets for us campers to claim. Nice.

We stopped at the Tuck Shop on the way in to Walberswick the other day to get a bottle of water. Florence remembered how she would get her post sent to the post office so that when she was camping she could keep in touch with her friends elsewhere. If she went away from the campsite she sent postcards to the post office to keep in touch with friends on the campsite! I asked her if she thought she would recognise anyone down on the campsite now. Florence thought not, it had been too long. How come in all those years camping at Walberswick, no-one I knew then or now owns one of those bloody beach huts. Surely at some point they must have been affordable, and surely it might have been possible that my family got to hear about one being up for sale. How come I don't have a stake in Walberswick? Is it cos I isn't posh enough? Florence thought that most of the beach huts had been replaced over time and many had been burnt down. I don't really know but I have been day dreaming about finding out what goes on behind the scenes at Walberswick - what makes it tick? Who all these people are that team here every summer, and how did they get their beachuts? I want to write a witty and acerbic article about Walberswick in the good old days when a few noisy, wayward hippy families had the run of the campsite all summer long. Apart from the August bank holiday of course, when a load of Hell's Angels descended on the place and made it their playground. But even then our mothers gave them a run for their money. One year my mum remembers it lashing down with rain and her and Trisha crept round the bikers' tents tipping all their helmets right side up so that in the morning they were full to the brim with rain water. It was a way of getting their own back on these swearing raucous ruffians.

My mum leaned out of the van window and said hi to two women and a child walking their dog down the lane. Mum recognised one of the women from working at the Pupil Referral Unit in Ipswich. We shared our reminiscences about Walberswick and how much it has changed. Mum said to the women that when we were all kids we thought she was the Julie Christie of the campsite, with her dog walking along looking all brown and lovely – and we all wondered who she was. This made her laugh she said she wished she had been Julie Christie. We camped where we liked then - there was none of this plot business, no booking, no behaving yourself, no perfectly bleached white tents. It was much more rough and ready. One recurring childhood image is of looking down at my sandy brown legs in blue clogs, my jean skirt and my blond, curly, tangled, salty hair and a warm glowing feeling of complete freedom and abandonment running along Walberswick beach with my brothers and cousins. When we were there the other day, I overheard three young girls about 10 years old or so at the swings on the green discussing the details of baby P's injuries and death which they had been following closely in the news.

My connection to this place is invisible – it's in my head – it's just a memory. I don't know what to do with the feelings I have for the place I spent so much of my childhood in and which I feel so alienated from now. I return several times every year because my mum lives up the road and I feel like an on-looker. I wonder who the locals are or if there are any left? I wonder who the people are that camp on the campsite where there is now a standpipe – whereas in our day the water was a 10 minute treck up to the toilet block. It makes me smile that no matter what day of the year you go it will always be busy, it will always be windy and even at the height of summer when the sea is warm it is an imposing grey mass and no matter how bright the sun the sea doesn't sparkle. I didn't really notice this until someone I met on the street in Halesworth pointed it out after a visit to Brighton where the sea is blue and twinkly. Sizewell power station sits on the horizon looking more or less gleaming, domed and cathedral like. I remember my granny asking me, “what's a size whale?” when I was trying to explain to her about nuclear power and ban the bomb and how the sea at Walberswick was always warm because of Sizewell.

I wonder, as I queue for nearly 40 minutes to pay 80p to the ferryman, whether or not we had the best of it and that now it's over. I am calculating the amount of money the ferryman makes an hour – if he can take 10 people in his boat and cross the river in about 8 minutes each time. I don't want to be thinking like this – but I am trying to drown out the noise of the other 40 people waiting behind and in front of me. How can this be a pleasurable experience?

It's a beautiful place, but like everywhere else it is inundated with people and cars as far as the eye can see – and I feel like I have been forced to standby and watch the erosion of my childhood coastline.

It has been a while

It has been a while – but with Jo Whiley on Women's Hour distracting me in the background and the Babs down for a sleep, I have coffee and maybe a free hour – and it is time to make another installment.

We are week two of our Open Studio in Suffolk. Mum and I spoke well before Xmas about registering her rather dilapidated old barn as part of Suffolk Open Studio taking place over weekends in June and the possibilities of being inspired by having a project, a deadline and by doing something together as a family with brothers, cousins, girlfriends and friends – and whoever else wants to get involved. So, at Xmas I raised it – are we going to go for it or not? No-one was particularly interested and everyone felt they were too busy to get very excited about this project. In the end, on the day of the deadline in February mum and I wrote a bit of blurb to describe us and what we do and emailed it back and forth to everyone to check in the hope of drumming up their interest and commitment. The name we agreed on was Leyline Studio…

Leyline Open Studio, Saxtead
Painting, Drawing, Illustration, Photography, Textiles, Urban Art, Antique restoration
This group of artists come together at Leyline Studio in Saxtead to motivate and support each other. They are occupied in creating their own individual work in various places and come home to draw inspiration from the places they grew up in. The house and workshop provide space for making interesting and dynamic work ranging from drawing, painting and illustration to urban art, photography, textiles and furniture artworks.

This blurb, I sent off to Suffolk Open Studio’s person in charge with a cheque for 100 pounds. Now it is true to say I was rather chuffed with getting this together so it came as a real shock when a couple of months later when we, alongside all other participating artists are preparing work to take to a Showcase Exhibition in Rougham to discover that I have somehow mistakenly registered us as a ‘Gallery’. This has major ramifications that only become apparent over time. It means, first and foremost that we aren’t on the map in the Open Studio Handbook, we aren’t entitled to publicity materials to put up outside the barn to entice people in, and at the Showcase Exhibition that we have to label all the work (by 10 different artists) with one name so it gives the impression that it was all done by one person! And we are not allowed to mention anything about a Leyline Studio.

I have to say I was gutted. The art work from brothers, cousins and friends had been arriving in Suffolk via the postman from London and Bristol. I drove up from Brighton with Babs in the back of the van a day ahead of the Showcase Exhibition to sort out the work and frame it all up. It was great to see a load of interesting packages containing their art work and I spent all day with the Babs running around the barn unpacking, framing, and phoning artists to check titles and prices. I was also getting my work out and making decisions about which of my bits I wanted to show. It was a buzz getting it all done. The next day I drove the van to Rougham to meet mum after she finished work in Ipswich. All was going to plan. We carefully carried our artwork into the Rougham Barn to find our allocated space. We spent two and a half hours hanging and re-hanging the work – knocking nails into oak beams which just bounced back at us and trying to hang frames at the same level on completely uneven walls. Babs was brilliant and sat quietly watching people or eating crackers and hummus. It felt uncomfortable there, like people were talking about us. Am I paranoid?

That night I had dreams about all the works falling off their insecure nails and smashing their cheap Ikea frames and glass on the concrete floor. I had horrors of being called by the person in charge to come and clear it all up. When I did then get a voice message from the very same person my blood ran cold. He said politely that we had not labeled and priced all the work, and that even though he had asked us not to we had left Leyline Studio flyers around the place. I decided to deal with it and phoned straight back. He said that without all the work labeled, we would not be eligible for the competition that was being judged at 3p.m. later that day. I said that I didn’t think that we would have been included in the competition anyway – ‘for obvious reasons’! Surely to goodness it was clear to anyone that one artist did not do all that work; textile, graffiti, oil painting, monoprint, wire drawing, illustration and so on. I said I could get there later before the exhibition was opened to the public at 6p.m. and sort out the labels.

We arrived on mass, me mum, the Babs and three other women - one of whom works at the Royal Academy. I was telling them the story thus far and that even though 4 of our group had exhibited the week before at the Crimes of Passion exhibition in Bristol at the RA West of England and that one of our group was a well know local painter - they were all now called; ‘D.Neary’. It is true to say that the work in our corner was different. Two illustrations screen printed onto skateboards by one of my brothers was priced high to ensure they didn’t get sold. They looked great. But, it was a bit of a mishmash and difficult to tell whether our work was strong or not because of the context. The woman from the RA advised me that I had underpriced one of my bothers prints so when no-one was looking I added a new card!

That was then and this is now. Week two of our open studio weekend and with a huge graffitied Open Studio sign out on the road, several wooden boards at strategic cross roads a mile away, and flyering to Southwold and back again we are hopeful. We might even get a visit from Sarah Lucas who lives nearby and is bound to be driving pass at some point. Surely? The work looks really good and if one of my brothers is done helping Banksy put together his new exhibition at Bristol Museum maybe he’ll have time to drive up with some more of his work. And if my cousin’s exhibition at the Rarekind Gallery in Bethnal Green finishes this Friday and he hasn’t sold everything hopefully he’ll send the rest up to Leyline Studio.

Come and have a look. 11 - 5p.m. weekends or by appointment.