No he is not a cop.

Ny nephew Charles Arrowsmith took this festive pic in the New York Subway. I think its an award winner.

Seriously!

Captions please?

Now that the poxy meaningless ritual called Christmas has past it is time to address the next poxy meaningless ritual called my 60th birthday. Hitherto this is traditionally scheduled for January 16 but my delight in marking the day 365 sleeps from the day I was born in 1957, lost its potency in 1958 when I woke up in my cot already bored with cooing parents relatives, cake, cards, pressies and similar crap so so soon after my first mice pie. THUS MY BIRTHDAY IS RESCHEDULED TO AUGUST 1st. Anyone who has the presumption to acknowledge the 16th will have their legs broken and any cards presents or goodwill will be shredded – so SO DON’T? THIS IS IN EARNEST and PERMANENT!

Yes I have done it by deed pole.

RULES for my birthday on AUGUST 1st

1. Decent gifts are encouraged. These should be of an appropriate price and quality- I would suggest a minimum spend of £50 but this is negotiable. Strictly no charitable donations- you may form small groups to spend the £50.00 Check with Chris whether this is OK.
2. Cards on paper with first class stamps are OK but only this once, thereafter they are banned for the duration of my life.
3. Any other form of ‘card’ will be liquidated unread.
4. Witticisms on my age will amount to insults and will reflect badly on the senders capacity to write or to think 
5. NO eating things, drinking things, flower things, soft things from Marks, funny things or anything I don’t like.
6. I like Mamod stationary engines, lighters pre 1960, phones pre 1950, murano glass, lucite items, gold eg sovereign rings, well chosen books, music of any kind, vintage photographs, well designed gadgets (care with this one) a Landrover from the 60’s any kind of American car pre 1970, clocks, almost anything that isn’t new and needs fixing, speech sythesisers for the 1980’s or earlier, dogs.
7. You will all attend my birthday on August 1st which will be a barbecue in our garden. You will bring tents and stay the night. You may also bring drones and kites or hot air balloons, RC aircarft. Children are allowed but must be silent in my two hour poetry reading and accompanying contemporary dance performance.
8. Pets are actively encouraged as they are so much more fun than human relatives and friends. They should NOT be kept on leads but roam free in the equisite anarchy I call my birthday bash ‘ total freedom for Chris and everybody else in chains.’
I am still hellish dizzy but otherwise very well indeed. Every time I stand and up or move I have to lean on something solid. This creates an impression of someone about to throw up, clamouring for attention or auditioning for Richard III.

We had a superb day yesterday during which time I actually talked myself hoarse on my favourite subject – Other people’s creative projects that I can interfere in. Lisa is exquisitely patient with my excessive enthusiasm to meddle in her creative life – I am so excited!!! I had the most thoughtful gifts from our four children and our friends ( yes we have four children now) I believe I have ever received, everything was brilliant and so so generous. You wait till you see me wearing them.

That’s its for now. I do actually love you all xxx

 have done it!

I started the telephone box project about 18 months ago and since then I have been avoiding a fairly fundamental technical constraint. You see – the sound going in and out of the telephone was not really available to me, well it was, but the way it was, was shoddy and incompetent to say the least. Imagine a conversation with an IPhone, that on a part of its journey gets relayed with a tin and string telephone, before transferring back to another IPhone – that was more or less what was happening. I had always hoped that I would be able to capture both the sound input and output and manipulate them, before returning them along with my real and synthesised voice, in ways to ‘surprise and enchant.’ (still struggling with that bit). Techniques for doing so existed, but none were designed for the ‘ancient and modern’ of my set up. I was sad and frustrated but remained strong and perky.

On and off for the last 18 months I have been trying different solutions – mainly archaic hacks using solutions designed for completely different purposes. Rather like trying to design a washing machine using a cheese grater and a copy of the radio times. YESTERDAY I HAD A BREAK THROUGH. The sound, hitherto trapped somewhere down the phone line, was digitally tapped and fell into my lap or rather emerged on a screen as a stream of incomprehensible code that I recognized as instructions to other software make noise. A few moments later sounds emerged from the telephone line that obeyed the instructions on the screen – HURRAHHH! To celebrate I took photos of my notes and my screen at that precise moment and here they are.

On Thursday Maria and I are off to the Royal Free so that I can run up and down the corridor – the bit I dread most, as my macho desire to impress often exceeds the capabilities of my wheezy form to progress at any thing approaching a non embarrassing speed. The enthusiastic words of encouragement the nurse provides unwittingly transports me to a cheering Mrs Hewlett at sports day, whose kindness did not allay my sense of crushing despair as I came second to last to my best friends excusable asthma, wooden leg, weight issue, rampant unsportiness. Pretending not to be out of breath afterwards is an additional challenge met in my case with lies, lies and more lies. Do you exercise regularly? – no! – note this is a lie because the true answer is neither regularly or irregularly as any exercise makes me feel sick, dizzy, depressed and a looser. In fact I despise exercise, the imperative to do it, the people who do it, the people who talk about it, the clothes they wear, the shops they shop in, the desperate Darwinian fight for survival they adhere to, the word, the concept and whatever is bigger than concept. This time I wont lie, as my green face at the top of the two flights of university stairs is beginning to cause alarm amongst the students who are reasonably convinced nee hopeful that I will die mid seminar anyway and who by the way have taken it upon themselves to assume my nut brown barnet is a cancer wig – cheeky sods – my crowning glory has probably retained its conkerness due to years of not being cut, the product of embarrassment about my flappers (don’t get me started) that kept me out of the hairdressers chair for 45 years. Oh how shallow I am, was, still am, less so than I was.

A confession. I consider this blog and my poetry blog to be quite important. Not to anyone other than me of course but I think I can say honestly that the two together constitute consummate ‘Chrisness.’ Should anyone in the future want to grow a new Chris then these outpourings together with the products of my loins should just about do the job. I have been troubled by the digital impermanence of these items – they are after all nowt but ones and zeros in sequences that happened to make sense today but in time will probably make no sense or worst will be reconstituted as some new digital Angel Delight. Low I was sent a vision and that vision was to turn both my blogs into printable books. 15 minutes later it was done by a wonderful free bit of software, sponsored by libraries and archivists across the world and thus were two weighty problems solved – my legacy in 15 volumes and your Christmas presents – Hark the Herald Angels sing!!! Seal up your letter-boxes, lest My Life in Art by Christopher Newell should fall mightily on the mat in advance of the twenty fifth day of this month.

I am joking but sadly not about the legacy bit I really did not want these rambles to evaporate – I consider this to show some not inconsiderable hubris. At last I have been able to write that word – been waiting years. Like Epiphany – it’s a word I have heard but have never had the courage to use.

Family life is quiet at the moment. George and Avani’s wedding plans are afoot – big time and I mean BIG – so exciting. Arthur and Lisa pretended to have a baby – a jolly jape none of us fell for but I must admit it made me broody. The three cats – yes its officially three – still fight and wee a bit. I have concluded the Mitch the original ginger one personifies something that Wittgenstein said about a Lion’s speech – that even if we could decode it we would not understand it – it’s world view would be profoundly incomprehensible to us.

https://wittgensteinforum.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/wittgenstein-if-a-lion-could-speak-we-could-not-understand-him-pi-p223/

I believe that Mitch believes Vincent (another ginger cat) to be Mitch. Not another mitch a doppelmitch or a twin mitch just Mitch. As a consequence he accepts him because in effect he is him. I have yet to prove this theory but his placid disregard and lack of interest in his rival points to something metacatical I am sure.

Boy am I annoyed – bile alert!

 We have been living in a ‘post-truth’ media environment for millennia. To imply it is all the fault of Facebook is dumb dumb dumb. Ever since someone scratched ‘beware of the sabre toothed tiger’ on their cave door when all they had to subdue a club-wielding burglar Flintstone, was ‘tiddles the cave lap cat,’ the media, and we that feed the media, have lied, lied and lied. What greater lie is there than the nonsense contained in the Bible, Quran, Tora, The Daily Mail and all the other esteemed titles that have sought to profit from misleading the masses by spreading bigotry and lies. Trump is by comparison a mere pixie pinocchio. At least we can see him, touch him, blame him and hopefully one day someone will punch him. God is comparatively a slippery, hidey sort of fella. Never daring to appear in public, never daring to step in when things go bad, never daring to do bugger all – just standing on the side lines watching the world, he apparently created go into meltdown. What a nasty, vicious individual. If ever there was evidence for the non-existence, or if you prefer, meanness of god, Mr. Orange is it.

Love Chris xx

Ps Today I acquired my first musical lighter – yes it lights your ciggy and plays a tune while you die.

Avani our lovely, lovely future daughter-in-law (that will annoy her –tee hee) got her distinction in the MA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at the University of East Anglia confirmed this week. This is a massive achievement as UEA is world famous for this particular course – just google ‘creative writing alumni UEA’ https://www.uea.ac.uk/literature/creative-writing/alumni – Ain’t she clever!

So much going on I temporarily abandoned blogging for the emotional fray of real life.

Yet more pride and gush – My beautiful children are doing beautiful things.

George and Avani are engaged to be married!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We are so, so happy and excited and really, really looking forward to the wedding party. The whole engagement event in front of family members and friends was a rom com masterclass the details of which I will leave for them to reveal.

Arthur and Lisa had a fantastic gig at the Jazz Café in London that was packed out and totally brilliant. The Time-Out guy hosting the event was really complimentary. Nonna’s toilet mat made a star appearance and there were plenty of loyal Bovinos, Arrowsmiths and Newells in cheery attendance.

All in all a fantastic few weeks of total joy that had no impact on the goodwill extended from one of our cosy cat family toward our immigrant cat Vince. Much despised by Bobby he now hisses at everything including us when we feed him.

Psycho cat yes but we love him nonetheless.

Families eh!

I wrote Avani and George a song

I looked back over my old posts and now recognize a direct correlation between illness and posting frequency. So I am happy to report a diminishing need to post. As cancer was really the main story, and as that is at the boring stage then I don’t have a lot to say. There is also a disproportionate animal content in my posts that probably point to that thing you do when you play games with small children – look around the room for inspiration – ‘I know lets play Eye (I) Spy. I Spy something beginning with H, yes that right, Hen.’ I will write about the Hens again – except they are bizarrely clean, quiet, polite, not eaten and in their pen. So instead –

MELTDOWN 1

Donald Trump is a smelly poo – That’s it for political commentary – framed in the language appropriate to his intellectual capacities which really do appear to be those of a spoilt, cantankerous three year old.

What a shame it’s not funny. If ever there was an argument that no government is better than bad government, he makes it.

This picture would actually make an amazing Caravaggio or alternatively a Francis Bacon. What would you call it? – ‘Trump thanks god for Trump and a bunch of hypocritical arseholes agree’

I am actually revolted by this picture. It is pornography of the worst kind – God, power, corruption, greed and hypocrisy – and we worry about exposure to willys and bosoms. Really!

MELTDOWN 2

Well as you may know I have been having a technology meltdown. It was not really my fault, well I suppose it was because I allowed some already dodgy software to update itself, the result was the dodgy software became crazy software, that went on to enthusiastically contact all my subscribers, many times over to let them know of this and that and not much. I think it was software led spite aimed at my over confidence.

I have been teaching more technological subjects and was getting to rather enjoy it. All my students now have web server space that they can manage themselves and I can manage that space from home, helping them out remotely if required. I have had lots of help from more knowledgeable staff and IT at Hull but it was going so well I thought it was time to tinker with my own servers – so there you go – I broke them! and for a while it was rather like a runaway train – except I did not have the sense to stop stoking the fire – the more I stoked the more emails poured from the smoke stack, landing hilariously in the lap of my old PhD supervisor, Alistair who taught me everything I know about computing – ohh the shame!

Cancer wise, nowt to report. I continue to slowly deteriorate but intervention is there none yet, I am glad to say. I feel well and happy, so a slow rotting is nothing but the fate of us all – tee hee – so you might as well get used to it folks. The wonderful media correspondent Steve Hewlett – thanked me for praising his brilliant interviews on PM about his cancer – Definitely worth a listen – he says all the things I would like to say but as an experienced journalist he says it so well. Google him/cancer/R4

RT @steve_hewlett: @gravityisahat glad you appreciated the #bbcpm pieces…and the very best of luck to you! S

My boys and girls are doing fabulously well creatively if not financially – but who cares about that. Any hopes of sponging off them in our old age diminish in accord with their delightfully diminishing desire to do anything to earn money. One wants a camper van to hit the festivals and the other seems to be weighing up a career writing novels and looking after other people’s dogs in Spain. I do hope none of them disappoint by becoming sensible or worst rich.

Vincent the (not so stray anymore) cat is becoming choosy about the food we offer – no cheap tinned crap. I guess that means he is OK. He is still terrified of us but comes in at night to sleep and sometime sneaks in behind us to eat from the other cats bowls while we are preoccupied with a box set. Bobby is quite literally having hissy fits (is that where the term comes from) Mitch gives him a casual slap, (like a Mafioso style boss, impatient but caring with the new impetuous recruit, his nephew, Salvatore) but is largely indifferent. I predict by the New Year Vince will be in the house more than out, but I don’t think he will ever become a cuddly cat. His genes are screaming street and substance abuse and twocking. He has as a tick in his ear, which must drive him mad, but the chance of me doing my St Francis and ‘drawing it from out his ear hence,’ is zilch, as St Francis Newell would end up shredded or dumped in the river with concrete slippers. You can tell it’s like kitty Palermo in our garden at the moment.

MELTDOWN 3

Oh dear I have lost it – in a bid to seriously jeopardise my job this week I have started another ranting place. Contribute if you dare.

www.universitylecturer.net

I am probably taking a few risks with this but the alternative is to bore all my colleagues with my constant anarchic ramblings about removing hierarchies and returning powers to the grass roots. Instead I have started to vent online and not over a latte. I know its childish, I know its ill informed and unfair but I am sorry I just cannot stop myself. Yes I am 14 again!!!!!!! and I love it.

The gig is being advertised here

https://thejazzcafelondon.com/event/time-out-presents-lisa-marini-debut-album-launch-party-08-11-16

Maria and I have booked a table with dinner here using Ticket Master

Section: TAB7, Row GA0,  Seats 1,2

Please join us.

We are so looking forward.

https://youtu.be/9nWqomRm_ms

This is Lisa Marini, Arthur Newell and Jack Tustin captured Live at StudiOwz. The album is launched in London on November 8th.

Maria and I have heard it in its rough state and we think it is exceptional. Amazing songs, singing and playing, some really innovative sounds and best of all the sort of album you really look forward to hearing again.

As soon as the album is released I will provide a link, but in the meantime forgive this gush of pride and love.

‘Peace by Piece’ written by Lisa Marini, taken from her debut album ‘Summoned By a Foolish Magpie’.

Lots of niggly listy things done this week so thought I would drift away for a moment for a think.

RELIEF – No more medical interventions for three months save for a quick rubber snake down the throat maybe – so hurrah for that!!

FRUSTRATION – I am wrapped in a straight jacket of teaching procedures at the moment. Of course we “academics” (pah) have it easy, compared to the primary, secondary and FE folk. There is still an absence of the ultimate sanction in most universities and so we can get-away-with-it by ignoring some of the nonsense poured down like wet cement upon or heads by the dept of higher education or whatever they are called.

MOAN – I know its oft said and even ofter moaned about, but there really is an infectious management culture thing that spreads through advanced economies like the flu. Among educationalists it’s more like the plague – fatal to morale, creativity and to good teaching. Please could someone ask them all to go away and leave us beautiful creative folk alone. Any of you folk unfamiliar with A.S Neil might want a gander at this https://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/asneill.php

Summerhill looks like it could be a nightmare to be part of (eg teach, be a pupil, live near, pay for) and it has a checkered history, nearly closing in the 1980’s cos of some OFFSTEDy type scathing report. I have heard that some children in later life have scorned it vociferously and it does have something of the hippy cult exclusivity aura around it – school for the Glastonbury Poppies and Sams. Like so much that is out of the ordinary it is probably as flawed as the ordinary but at least it is trying to be different, and that has to be a good thing when so much education policy these days is about reproducing the schooling whatever the minister is in charge happened to have. Grammar schools (Blah, blah blah) are in because Teresa May went to one. And look at what she has achieved!

RANT – Our blind acceptance of the status quo annoys me a lot. Everything should be questioned, scrutinised and criticised at all times. What we are doing to children in schools is certainly worth chucking away right now. In mainstream schools we seem to have turned punishing our children into a cultural ‘must do.’ Thankfully we don’t whack them anymore but we substituted that punishment for “achieving”. That means working hard, striving lots, doing things, lots of things…. What has happened to lying on your book pulling the fluff out of your belly button? Maybe I should run a module in that discipline.

RANT CONT….When I was a teenager I used to have an orange bobbly bed cover on my bed, upon which I lay, kicking a plastic spider that hung down by a string from the light above. This activity has held me in excellent stead for those moments when only thinking about something really is all that is needed (like now). I do not need to fact check, read anything, ask anyone, complete a worksheet, pass an exam —- just bluuuuuur and out it comes all runny and delicious and maybe largely wrong (if such a notion existed). The capacity to think for yourself is at the antithesis of what eduction achieves. It cannot do so when we teach teachers the craft of not thinking for themselves. We do that by ensuring that rigidly stick to a pre(o)scribed process and that to step out of line will result in all their pupils failing the this-that-or-the-other-test-crap-nonsense.  I deplore the state of mind that uncritically thinks that education always has value and that educators should respected. Teachers are all crap I should know I am one. Education does have value sometimes for some people (mainly goody goodies and I have no time for them) and some educators are good, like some dogs are well behaved but some are not, so steer clear they may bite you or drag you under a bus. And it also ‘messes up your head man.’ Especially if you are a teenager who has been told repeatedly through her school career that GCSE’s or A levels are the end of lifes journey to hope, and if you mess them up the only way left is the Hell that is failure – OOOOOOOOhh. Apparently failures have consequences, like falling off your bike and knocking your teeth out. What nobody tells you is a/ – you may come to prefer your toothless grin to your toothed b/ – if you are that upset just go to the dentist and get a crown. Just don’t cry, despair or listen for a moment to old people cos they are all wrong! Education is really cool, when you are ready for it and if you want it. A.S Neil made it optional, he made it fun and he made it creative. We have made it compulsory, dull and regurgative of the supposed wiser ones who claim to be entitled to teach, but know nowt. Myself included.

LAUGH – Here is my favourite picture ever.

Kinda dull but I am pootling along just nicely. Same old same old.

My writing muse appears to have retired to a bungalow in Eastbourne with two poodles and a husband who collects home insulation manuals hence the long gap since my last post. Seriously for a moment – there really is a “telephone pole appreciation society” – https://www.telegraphpoleappreciationsociety.org I just wonder if they would be excited by the above item that I happen to own:

It is a ceramic insulator from a telephone pole. – but hold on -!-!-!- believe or double not, there is a collectors club for telephone pole insulators https://www.insulators.info – and yes they will soon be holding their AGM. There are many different types of insulators, some made of blue glass are rather beautiful and a few rare really sort-after ones which, strangely, look exactly like all the others. So the fictitious hobby I referred to in my opening sentence may really exist – oh to be a fly-on-the wall at the pole insulators AGM – material for a poem at the very least.

It is so easy to assume that collectors of weird stuff are themselves weird – its true of course. Everyone in the Telecom Heritage Group, of which I am a member, come across as courteous, intelligent, articulate and nice but on closer examination they turn out to be weird. It is the online conversations that generate so much heat around issues of so little consequence that betray the weirdness. Currently disagreements over validity, with regard to one members paper, on the number and placement of GPO man-hole covers in the 1950’s threaten to engulf the group in a controversy more vicious than ‘Trump’s wall.”

Speaking of shed heads – my word for men of a certain age who have brains like sheds . We have a new shed. Strictly speaking it is Maria’s but so far I have metaphorically ‘sprayed’ like Vincent our feral furry friend. It is now full of quite a bit of my ex Nonna’s garage stuff and thus has rekindled my interest in bikes, of which we have many –not riding them of course – but reviving them. There is very little as satisfying as oiling a seized up hub, freeing some rusted brake cables or best of all aligning gear sets when you are feeling blue which I am not (I hasten to add.)

Jeez I am boring myself with this old man domestic cosiness, it feels like an episode of ‘last of the summer wine’– (yes I met a man at the car-boot bearing a ferret – cutest thing ever – lives in the house, fully house trained – nice to children and dogs, highly intelligent but a little bit pungent) but the grim fact is I have nothing to share but stories of sheds, real and virtual and their residents. There is a lot of family news but I am keeping that quiet – all very exciting though – we hope.

Oh yes – I was in arms reach of the fabulous Jeremy Corbyn at a rally in York. Having sung my socialist credentials loud and strong, me, the boys, the boys friends and the girl went to ‘Bettys’ a famously overpriced tea shop in York where your cream jug is solid silver (not plate) and the jug of coffee would probably have paid for the rest of Jeremy’s leadership campaign. Highlights were the PA system, which looked like it was last used by Lenin and necessitated a good number of polythene bags thrown over it to protect it from the rain, as well as some Heath Robinson wooden scaffolding to stop it falling over and potentially eliminating some well meaning supporters and the man himself. He is not suave, cool or particularly articulate, not charismatic or slick just – true – and that will do for me and the loads of people who came out in York to cheer his somewhat muddled sentences ( a bit of a Prescott in that respect) most of whom were very young. He was charmingly preceded by a highly articulate Romanian young woman student who announced herself as ‘I am Romanian. I am one of the people who according to the Daily Mail, you should be frightened of.’ This was actually the best moment of the night. Some of the other socialist twaddle delivered by socialist priests was exactly that, twaddle. The food and the coffee in Betty’s was ‘divine darling’ – how we chuckled ironically as we tucked into £75.00 worth of posh Nescafe and listened to Cole Porter on the white grand. Left a big tip for the workers though – ra ra to red me.

Aha another bit of news – This Saturday the reformed family band is performing on the green outside our house. This promises to be a fun disaster as we have barely rehearsed – George and Arthur not at all – the rest of us old geezers are as utterly useless as ever- memory chasms, sausage fingers and nerves will no doubt litter the green like empty fag packets did on the Swanley School playing field after an afternoon of brutal humiliation and pretend smoking (no inhaling it makes you sick and cough stuff up in French).

Speaking of fags I occasionally fantasize about having one as a prop in those social situations where people ask me how I am, with a (plain speaking but deeply compassionate MacMillan nurse supporting the middle aged bloke staring out of a rainy hospital window in Sheffied advert) tone or when I just want to look cool – projecting something like the ‘who the gives a damn about cancer’, artist type – Leonard Cohen (alive –still smoking I think) springs to mind or Lou Reed (dead?). Maybe its time to refresh the image – a makeover perhaps – I admit to being weary of me – that slightly belly bloated, ill chap who has shrunk three inches in three years – I need to look creatively existential even when I am singularly failing to be so.

My teaching schedule next semester is very full and quite ‘challenging’ (which means teaching lots of stuff I know sod all about and thus will have to engage in significant study starting now!) but the new department is doing very well with lots of new students and a jolly staff team – it would be great fun if I did not continue to see myself as outside looking in. That won’t change so I best adapt to voyeurism.

I await the results of some non-invasive tests. Been down the tube yet again. Its beginning to feel like a second home. They should put inspiring poems and bra adverts on the walls like the real tube. Get the impression there is nothing much up just the usual super cautiousness. Once you are as ill as me they investigate every little change in your body – so a slightly extended nose hair can trigger alarm bells that result in yet another tube ride. Ahh me. The nurse who was slightly deaf was also deeply reassuring. She asked me what was wrong with me. I explained, she did not understand or possibly did not hear, anyway she asked if I was getting medicine, I said yes, she asked is it working, I said yes, she said well that’s all that matters isn’t it smiled and carried on with her paperwork – I felt a buzz of simple joy.

Talking of simple joy. Two of Maria’s friends came over and one was particularly and genuinely enamoured with the phone box installation – she really got it in a way that nearly everyone doesn’t. Suddenly the last year seemed like a good one. I have a fan. This is what she liked.