THIS AND THAT
IMAGES
TEXTS
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In “This and That” I try to make sense of the various impulses that add up to some of Chris Newell. They all relate to my childhood or formative years or to the years since my cancer diagnosis. I think of these years as volatile whereas the years of happiness I have had with my wife and children pursuing at first a career in opera, then as an unsuccessful digital entrepreneur and finally as an academic were, for the main part, happy and calm. Consequently they don’t feature here (not enough drama) although they are undoubtedly the most significant contributors to who I am. This section is one of many web resources I have written to collate the various bits of me. It is the most personal and tries to avoid repetition by leaving my working life and creative life to other sections or web sites linked on the right.
I grew up in suburbia.
I grew up in suburbia but Eynsford felt more like a village. It was 50 minutes from London by train and was the first truly rural stop on the main line going south east. The mix of an increasing number of commuters and a decreasing number of farmers created a slightly unbalanced atmosphere partly bucolic and partly suburban.
I am nostalgic
Hopefully not in a sentimental way but I feel a connection with my past that has inspired a lot of my work. I am told that nostalgia is an unhealthy emotion but I think this is only the case if its a longing for things to be as they were rather than an affection for aspects of the past.
I hear voices
The last 20 years and the previous 25 years have been dominated by voices. It began with a career in opera and ended with research into computer generated speech. I wish we had some recordings of my mother speaking but people prioritise images over sounds. Maybe that will change with the ubiquity of mobile recording devices.
I remember Eynsford.
The photographs I have assembled are from an Eynsford I never knew, however they evoke the feeling of the village and its environs better than the more contemporary photos in my collection. I maintain a great affection for the village as well as curiosity concerning its less idealized underbelly.
I commuted.
My Dad commuted to London into the City Square Mile all his working life. I did the same when I first left school to work in a record shop in Oxford Street. The process, which I didn’t dislike at the time, gave me material that I would subsequently exploit in many poems and stories. I find memories of the damp smokey smell and the sound of the slam door carriages very evocative.
I relish chaos.
My imagination was engaged when I became familiar with the trend in the 1960’s to welcome chance and serendipity in music. Particularly in the work of John Cage. Of course its a lazy way of making art but it can be liberating if its integrated into the creative process without necessarily contributing directly to the final artefact..
The forest attracts me.
The wood across the road from where I lived was my childhood and teenage playground. Curiously I have no photos of it but it appears in lots of my writing. The Station Woods the Bluebell Wood and another nameless wood on the way to Maplescombe were the scene of many a sordid scene in my teens.
I am a collector…
…not the unhealthy ‘complete the set’ type. Just a lover of ‘things.’ A delightfully unfashionable trait to confess to. Over the years I have had several collecting outbreaks. toy cars, old cameras, cigarette and tea cards, coins, old radios, kitsch, old telephones, old cigarette lighters. I still own many of my childhood collecions. Curiously all bar one of my collection begin with letter C or a C sound.