Pots of Liquid Flesh

It was a Friday evening. Mike and Bill were playing chess and I was surfing the internet searching for images of Lucian Freud’s paintings. Suddenly I stumbled across a painting by Jenny Saville, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Excitedly I encouraged my companions to leave their chessboard for a moment and share in my discovery…

Jenny Saville grew up in Cambridge. She studied painting and drawing at Glasgow School of Art from 1989, catching the end of eleven years of Thatcherism. Unemployment was officially nearly 3 million, the unpopularity of the new poll tax charge had led to riots in London and as far as Thatcher was concerned, there was no such thing as society. On April 10th 1992, the year of Saville’s graduation, John Major led the Conservatives into power for a fourth term in office contrary to expectations.

Thatcher’s legacy was powerful, pervasive and left a significant impression on the young artists in the late 80’s and early 90’s. She had successfully appealed to the lowest common denominator and relieved us of any social conscience. The resulting mediocre, banal, mass consumer culture was accompanied by a raw, edgy selfishness and a widening gap between the have’s and have not’s. The yuppy - me first society was born, with a mindless pursuit of wealth and a tremendous growth in the art market.

The generation of artists emerging from the art schools in the late 1980’s (as Saville was just beginning) were known as Young British Artists (YBAs). Government funding cuts had left art schools struggling to survive. Students and teachers were making work that reflected their experiences of what was happening in Britain and their reactions to Thatcherism. Goldsmith’s College was at the forefront of major changes in art schools across the country. Abolishing the traditional divisions between the painting, sculpture and photography departments, lecturers inculcated a belief in their students that from day one they were artists.

The students from Goldsmiths – who became the YBA’s - were self confident, worked together to promote themselves and challenged what they saw as the complacency of the establishment. They used found objects, quotations and deconstruction to make art that represented themselves and their relationship to society. They also aimed to actively engage the spectator in the experience of looking as Saville would do later in her own work.

In 1997, Saville took part in the controversial Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, alongside fellow YBA’s; Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Chris Ofili. The press had a field day with the, “raw humour, nastiness, inventiveness, obscenity, aggression, beauty, insouciance and failures of the work.” The Daily Mail rechristened the museum “The Royal Academy of Porn”.

“Not since the 60’s, when David Hockney bleached his hair, donned a gold lame jacket and became a painter-celebrity, has the London art scene generated so much interest,” wrote a journalist in 1999 describing Sensation as “the defining contemporary art collection of a nation”. With the YBAs, London became a centre of the international art world, a source of export to the New York art scene and a magnet for New York gallery owners.

I went to the Sensation Exhibition in 1997 and can remember the shark in formaldehyde, Mueck’s 'Dead Dad', and 'Myra' by Marcus Harvey, but I don’t remember Saville which, perhaps, says something about the hype at the time. While Saville was one of the YBA’s, albeit two or three year’s younger than Damian Hirst et al. her work seems to be less well known probably because it was less controversial and possibly because she is a painter and her subject the female nude.

Saville grew up looking at Freud, Bacon and Auberach. She was drawn to artists that depict the body like Velasquez and Courbet. De Kooning she describes as her ‘main man’ whose work she feels, pushes the medium of paint.8 She has often been compared to Freud but is closer to Bacon and de Kooning in her own opinion. Pondering her comparison to Freud, Linda Nochlin argues that Saville is at heart a conceptual artist, whereas Freud is a traditional painter trying to look as though he has a concept.

At Glasgow, Saville found only one female painting tutor but she followed in the footsteps of Scottish painters like Stephan Campbell, Ken Currie, and Peter Howson, all of whom had the same tutor - Sandy Moffat.9 She learnt about feminism and its influences on art practice and was influenced by work of French feminists Luce Irigary and Julia Kristeva and the artist Cindy Sherman.

Feminist critiques of representation at the time were arguing that the image of ‘women’ was constructed by men through a male dominated media and shaped the way women saw themselves and how they experienced being a women.10 These ideas were reflected by female artists. Even as a child looking through art books, Saville realised there were no women artists and she started to wonder why not.

"Could I make a painting of a nude in my own voice?” she asked, “It's such a male-laden art, so historically weighted. The way women were depicted didn't feel like mine, too cute. I wasn't interested in admired or idealised beauty."

Saville uses masses of photographs to create her ‘monumental nudes’. Often they are photographs of herself or bits of her friend’s bodies. They are not self portraits as Saville has said herself in the Monograph interview with David Sylvester, “I use me all the time because it’s really reliable, you’re there all the time”. She also likes the idea of using herself because “it takes you into the work”. She talks about how women have so often been the subject-object and this has an important implication for her not wanting to be just the person ‘looking and examining’. Females, as she says, are used to being looked at and she wants to be able to do both; looking and being looked at.

She also works from photographs of bruises and other injuries from medical textbooks. All are used as reference. Finding out what causes a stretch mark from a medical book, for example, helps her understand how to paint them. She’s aware of the ‘snobbery’ against using photos when painting from life - but doesn’t care. Using photographs of fragments of the body is a pragmatic approach particularly given the sheer size of her paintings and her subject. She doesn’t paint while looking at the figure. Instead she will have a model for a day and take rolls of film of close ups. Then, climbing up and down scaffolding with the use of a grid and mirrors she embarks on her paintings.

She is really interested in painting areas of flesh rather than the female body as such. “It’s as if the paint tends to become the body… When I put the paint on in layers, it’s like adding layers of flesh. There are areas of thick flesh, where the paint becomes more dense”. She mixes up large quantities of different colours in maybe three hundred pots rather than working from a palette. She tries to paint in a sculptural way.

Nochlin, who famously asked first in 1970 and again in 1980, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?” is impressed with Saville’s ‘painterliness’ and thinks she is one of the most interesting and exciting painters of our time. She writes about her work, “although the surface and the grid both play an important role in Saville's formal language, both are melted down and sharpened up by the virtuoso yet oddly repulsive brushwork that marks her style”.

In what may be her most current interview in May 2005 Simon Shama asked Jenny Saville about the types of bodies she paints. Her answer to this question and her analysis seem more sophisticated than earlier interviews.

“I try to find bodies that manifest in their flesh something of our contemporary age…I don’t paint portraits in a traditional sense at all. If they are portraits, they are portraits of an idea or a sensation”.

While living in New York, Saville observed the work of a plastic surgeon, Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub. She took photos of the operations and became interested in the ‘manipulations’ that could be made to the body. Importantly for her work she also gained insight into the psychological factors behind these changes to the body.

I stumbled across Jenny Saville’s work by accident. I was looking at images of Lucian Freud’s paintings, which I have been drawn to since I first saw them as a teenager, and found some images of Saville’s figures which really excited me. I was drawn to the images, without realising that the canvases were so huge. I find the fact she’s a female painter - inspiring. I read about her working from photographs which was a bit of a shock but also a relief. I had been trying to paint from the nude (using myself in the mirror) and felt I now had permission to explore working from photographs. This gave me something new to explore in my own work which felt liberating.

When I look at ‘Branded’, ‘Prop’, or ‘Propped’, all painted in 1992 or ‘Plan’ which is 9x7ft painted in 1993 and I mark out with a tape measure on my sitting room wall the dimensions and imagine sitting in front of the painting looking up at those images - I ask myself what these paintings are about. My head is full of the critiques I have read - some almost impossible to comprehend and a little intimidating. I see images that are strong and bold and by which I am humbled. I wonder if Saville gives us a female body – a nude – which makes us work. My eye darts across the paintings and I flick between the full paintings and the close up photographs to try and understand how the paint is applied to create these fleshy bodies. They are not easy on the eye and that is not their intention.

‘Plan’ draws me in, holds me transfixed and I crave to be able to stand in front of the real thing. These are unfamiliar images of the female body. Those available for public consumption (in newspapers, magazines and even in art) tend to be idealised images of a beautiful, thin female body. Saville’s bodies are ordinarily covered up or left indoors. Big breasts may be desirable but Saville’s breasts are huge colossal mammaries that are intimidating, hardly sexually alluring. These bodies do not lend themselves to voyeurism.

The naked body in ‘Plan’ is brave and bold. The towering figure looks down and demands your attention in a way that other common images of female bodies do not. I wonder whether these nudes are attractive to the male gaze and I think probably not. If her work critiques the young, alluring female body which has long belonged to the male painter/artist – I wonder if Saville’s naked bodies intend to confront or even repulse the average male viewer. They certainly don’t facilitate the normal consumption of the female form which, it could be argued, has been legitimated by a male aesthetic approach to figurative art. In this sense ‘Plan’ liberates the viewer and the figure depicted is liberated too.

One day a week

It's 1 degree outside and not that much warmer in. This morning I carried my daughter (2 stone and a ¼ pound) through a silent winter wonderland. Snow falling lightly on our faces. All quiet apart from the odd one or two people going about their business – mainly women walking their dogs. Her first full day at nursery. I dropped her at 10 to 10 not too early, not too late – just in time for snacks. I walked back through the park my arms still singing with the weight of her little body. I was alone. I kicked through the snow down to the café and got a coffee. Listless, I sent a few texts, wrote a couple of 'to do's' on a green 'post it' which lives in the bottom of my bag and stared out the window at the falling flakes. I had forgotten to drop off cat at the nursery.

Cat or Cattie is number one friend and has been ever since he came into our lives. My dad found Cattie abandoned on the pavement outside the Barbican one cold, wintry day last year. Poor Cattie was soaking wet, filthy dirty and very lost. After a ride in the washing machine back at home he was as white as the snow and happy again and so was Winifred with her new friend. They have hung out together ever since and even vacationed together in Morocco at the end of last year. Well, Cattie had to be delivered to the nursery toute de suite just in case he was needed at some point during the day. As I was leaving the café on route to take cat back a women I recognise from the neighbourhood said 'hello' and 'where's your little one?'. How nice that a stranger, known well enough by face to nod at in the street, noticed I was without my normal attachment. By asking, she gave me the opportunity to share a unique moment in time. I shook her hand and asked her name. We both wished each other a good day.

After the drop off, I slipped back along the snowy paths through the park and down to the beach. I pushed my hands into my pockets and I pulled out little icy snow lumps which must have fallen off the trees when I took a short cut earlier through the bushes to get to nursery. This made me smile. When I got to the sea front I turned right not left which meant inevitably that I would end up in town. Not really desirable but the truth is I wasn't sure what to do or where to go. Much of the snow was gone and the roads were slushy by the time I walked up and away from the beach towards town. I wiggled my way round for about half an hour picking up a back light for Mike's bike and then I had a thought... if I could find a way of earning £40 today – i.e. the cost of a day at the nursery (!) I could somehow justify my existence.

This was enough of an incentive to get me homeward bound and trying to work out as I walked what I could put on ebay or in the Friday-Ad, or how quickly I could paint a couple of pictures and who I could try and flog them to. If I set myself the challenge of earning £40 on a Wednesday - that really would be something. Since then, I have been at home cleaning and clearing. Sorting out baby clothes in piles for different friends who are having babies as I write. For the record, I also hung out by the van down the bottom of the road with some jump leads in my cold hands waiting in the hope that someone might pull up and I could ask them for a jump start. Whoever drove the van last left the internal light on and now the battery is dead - fortunately that was not me! A guy did try and help, but like the bloke I asked yesterday - he couldn't find the battery in his transit van either. How can I have managed to find two men who don't know where their battery is?

I did dig out some canvases and piled them up thinking, I can do something with these one day – but right now I don't want to get the bloody paints out. I just want to put the coffee on the stove, I want to check my emails and I want to sit here and marvel at this new beginning - one day every week! Can this be true? I keep thinking I hear a little voice saying 'mum' from the other end of the flat - but then I remember she's not here and I am alone.

I have used up my time now by writing this and it's nearly time to go and pick her up. I'll work out how to make £40 with my one day - this time next week!

An hour or two ALONE

Having a moment – an hour or two - ALONE. What to do with that time..? Walk briskly through a cold, blizzardy snow on the pebbles of the beach close to the water edge? Thrilling and a sanity restorer. Raid your own CD collection, with speed and not too much thought, dig out a few privately perfect tunes and play them as loud as is possible. Change them mid track, turn 'em up, turn 'em down, play one tune over and over – who cares. It's up to you!

This is what I played. First off Jewel; Who Will Save your Soul followed by Pieces of You. Next, Disc 1 The Chill Out; Gorillaz Clint Eastwood, I listened to half of it. Coldplay, Trouble - for old times sake. A big breaking up album and I sort of love the morose feelings it allows me to indulge myself in for all of 3 minutes. Turn it up! Jump on to Moloko, Sing it Back (original album version). S'nice! Tried to play Soul Rabbi Session, Enlace Funk Collection (burnt by cousin JohnJoe) but it wouldn't read. O well. The Best of Van volume 2 and my very favourite track which always brings a genuine tear to my eye; Coney Island. I love Van, but he is a grumpy git. I know that because I once saw him in concert on my birthday in Brighton. He came on stage, he said nothing, he didn't smile. He just played his set and left. I was appalled. How lame. I went off him instantly after a life times commitment. So shallow.

K'Naan, The Dusty Foot Philosopher. Now this is an album that only means something to me and I have tried to get others into it without much luck. Maybe it's a 'you had to be there' type a thing. And I was... there. Right down the front at the Radio 3 stage at Womad when this young Somalian jumped on stage and sang his heart out for a magical couple of hours. As with all moments in life that transport you – I will remember it for ever. My whole being was gob smacked. I got the album off Amazon and joined his fan club as soon as I could. My lovely darling Mike however was none to keen and the disk coincidentally disappeared never to be found again leaving an empty case knocking about for ever after – but luckily not before I had got it onto the i-pod. Phew! I listened to the whole album with maximum volume, and this took up most of the rest of my couple of hours.

If I had more time to listen to the rest, they would have played thus... Joan Armatrading; Dry Land and Travel so Far. Have always loved Joan and played her to death growing up. Even though, ever since I found out she's a Tory it just doesn't feel right – I still have to give her a listen now and again. Pete Seeger's Abiyoyo. I hunted far and wide to get a copy of this album. Another one to grown up to. I reckon if I played this track to my brothers it would have us all welling up? Maybe not. The Smiths; What Difference Does it Make and of course Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. Actually, the whole of Hatful of Hollow - it's the soundtrack to my coming of age.

Elvis Presley cos he would have been 75 yesterday and cos I remember the day he died like it was yesterday. Me and Warrell Andrews sitting in St. Agatha's Primary School. Miss Woodward's class. Her favourite class. Warrell and I often had competitions to see who could draw Elvis the best – in particular his quiff and I have to say it was a close call. The day he died we both cried, Warrell at his desk behind mine. I don't think anyone else in the class even knew who he was. August 16th 1977 and we weren't yet nine years old! That's all Right, I don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine and I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone for good measure.

Then, for pudding I got Fiona Apple; When the Pawn, track 5 Paper Bag - a very angry young women – and good for a vent. Dear Science, TV on the Radio probably a quick flick through because I don't know this album very well. I caught them on Jools Holland one night and fell in love with the lead singer immediately, and so I bought the album! Why not? And just before the finale and for that comfortably full feeling one Dr Hook, When You're in Love with a Beautiful Women. And for the last call, cos I'd definitely be well over my 2 hours of alone time - I'd throw on old Elgar's Enigma Variations to calm... everything... right... back... down and prepare to re-engage with reality.

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.