Steppin' Out

"They're still very white," said Patsy123 last night. She was referring to my new trainers.

The planta fasciitis continues to give me trouble and I desperately needed something I could wear on holiday that would give my foot support. Especially if we decide to do the Samaria Gorge while we're on Crete.

So I found myself in John Lewis's trying on running shoes. The talk all round was of the forthcoming Great North Run and how exciting it was to attempt it. I thought how exciting it will be to attempt the Samaria Gorge with a bad foot, but said nowt.

Designers of trainers must be on acid most of the time. They seem to come up with the most ghastly confections of multicoloured cross webbing imaginable and have now taken to introducing springs in the heels. Most of them I wouldn't be seen dead in.

I finally settled on a pair of Adidas Rush running shoes in relatively tasteful black, white and grey. They were made in Indonesia where people must have small feet because although I take size 8, these are 9s and not at all excessively roomy.

I've been wearing them ever since to break them in, but have failed to find something to wear that will make the shoes look anything other than brilliant white. (The white bits, that is. Clearly the black and grey bits are not in any sense brilliant.)

I'm beginning to feel like the old gadgies who get on the late night bus at the Bluebell on the High Street. Always in their best grey suits, they nevertheless fail the sartorial test by wearing trainers which glare from under their trouser cuffs.

I did see an advert recently for prestressed trainers, complete with scuffed suede trim, but you have to pay for all that prestressing and it only helps them to fall apart quicker.

No, what we need is a can of instant scuff-and-shabby to spray on new trainers. It's amazing I wasn't offered one at the shop. Last time I bought a pair of shoes I was asked if I also wanted to buy a can of protector and a pair of socks!

Overweening Ambition

George & the Dragon (oil on canvas, 16 x 20 ins)

Things have gone well today. The new 3 x 4 painting has moved along remarkably well, thanks in part to a return to Spectragel, the fast-drying impasto additive. Inevitably, of course, the figure - undoubtedly the most successful part of the painting so far - has turned out to be too small. I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet, wipe her out and redo her. Bollocks.

Mo came round today with her digital camera and took a photograph of what will probably be my image on the publicity. I'm happy enough with it. That's it above.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is shaping up to be a total loss as far as painting is concerned. I managed to get an appointment with a doctor of uncertain pedigree at 9.10 tomorrow morning.

That'll be a laugh. Me getting up in time to make an appointment at 9.10!

Then I simply gotta see my mum. She'll be running out of ciggies.

And to round the day off, a much-postponed visit to the dentist for at least two fillings. Oh joy.

I can see I'm unlikely to get all the paintings done I'd hoped to, unless I really knock myself out. Ambition will be the death of me yet.

Stretching Credibility

A long tiring day assembling stretchers.

This consists of creeping about on the floor screwing the bits of stretcher together. Then fixing spacer strips to the edges and cursing as I run out of panel pins.

Creeping about on the floor measuring up the canvas and cutting from the roll comes next. Then stretching the canvas on the stretchers and cursing as I run out of staples for the staple gun.

Finally, priming the canvas and cursing as I run out of acrylic gesso.

It's so good to work in a well-stocked studio.

This is the tedious part. Tomorrow I can get on with laying out the pictures, several at a time. I like that bit.

But today was just grind, brightened only by the news that the trial of Slobodan Milosevic has been postponed indefinitely due to his failing health.

Surely they know that all they have to do is send him home and he'll be well again. Worked wonders for Thatcher's friend, poor old General Pinochet, the only man in history to recover from Alzheimer's.

Would that my own cure might be as easily attained.

I phoned the surgery today and asked for Doc Pop. Apparently he was expecting my call, because he went on two weeks holiday today.

"Well, I don't know who to see, then," I said. "I don't even know who else is in the practice now."

"I might as well tell you now," offered the receptionist, "that we have no appointments left today. If you phone tomorrow after 8.30, you can ask for an appointment for that day. We're now an Open Access practice, and that's how it works now."

Why does this sound ominously like first come, first served, and if you don't get an appointment on one day, you have to go through the same rigmarole the next day? At this rate, Doc Pop will be back from his hols before I get an appointment. And what guarantee is there that I'll get to see him, anyway?

Bugger.

RAgbag

I got into London on Monday with enough time to take in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, though humping my bag through hot and sweaty London streets, given my current limp, was not a lot of fun.

I can't say the Exhibition was a lot of fun, either, though it had its moments. The usual ragbag really, but the Academicians seem to be taking over the place. Considering the show was set up to allow open submissions from the country, it pisses me off when the RAs decide to load it with their own works and invite "Honorary" RAs from abroad to show too.

There were the expected delights in the Small Weston Room, where very small pictures by your average Joe are skied alongside better-known names like Craigie Aitchison and Jane Corsellis.

The Large Weston Room was also good, being given over to prints as usual. It always fascinates me to see which subjects are given the long line of red dots treatment. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see more red dots on an etching of a cute grey seal than on a colossal woodcut of Zeppelins attacking London.

In Gallery V David Mach had found a good use for hundreds of postcards of the Clotheshorse Princess. He'd cut up lots of Diana postcards, as well as others depicting fruit, grapes etc, and collaged them all together to form a reclining nude called "Princess."

Tom Phillips presented a typically idiosyncratic arrangement of 40 sheets of Minutes from RA meetings on which he'd doodled quite exquisitely.

Drawing seems to be making a comeback. Gallery VI was stuffed with them, many very good indeed. I don't include in this the two Tracey Emin monoprints of quite extraordinary ineptitude. I begin to think she may be dyslexic. But as Patsy123 puts it, while dyslexia should not be a barrier, it should also not be an excuse for lack of ability. Anyone unknown presenting such dross would have no chance of having it accepted.

Emin's crap was more than made up for by a beautiful Dennis Creffield charcoal drawing of Skenfrith Castle, Alessa Avelino's New York Drawing 1, Mary Fedden's two unfashionably precise pencil drawings, and On the Moors, a lovely poetic semi-abstract landscape in pencil, acrylic, oil stick and chalk by Victoria Petterson-Turner.

Too much to go into in any more depth. There was a huge polychrome sculpture of an owl in one gallery. Must have been 15 feet high. "No dear," said one deaf old lady in a loud voice to her equally deaf old friend, "it wouldn't go in my sitting room."

Anthony Whishaw, whose work I've always looked forward to, disappointed me by producing pictures in what I took to be simply black and white acrylic. Then Patsy123 pointed out how he'd painted over a heavily textured red underlayer which gave a fascinating effect apparently Not to my red/green defective vision, unfortunately.

There was some kind of function on that night, so we were thrown out at 5.30.

Time to shuffle and drag ourselves through the crowds outside to a pub with no beer, where we'd arranged to meet the Big Dave, True Rat, Buddy K and Suzie Sue. The Expected Welshman wasn't able to make it. Then on to an excellent meal at a Turkish restaurant. Lamb shanks all round, despite True Rat's suggestion that it might be Cockney rhyming slang for something offensive.

All the Fun of the Fair

Untitled - detail (Oil on board)

Maybe walking for two hours on a sore foot wasn't a good idea, but, hey, the Hoppings are in town!

The largest travelling funfair in Europe, the Hoppings comes to Newcastle's Town Moor for a week at the end of June every year. As a child, it was always something I looked forward to with huge anticipation and the visits there, especially at night, were filled with excitement and wonder.

I still remember the time my parents steered me clear of any stall where I might have won a goldfish. Our last goldfish had recently died and they didn't want another. He'd lived on for years after killing off all other competitors in the tank and I think they were glad to see the back of him. Anyway, just as we were leaving the Moor, their attention was diverted just long enough for a lovely couple to come up to me and say, "Here, sonny, would you like this goldfish?" That one lived even longer than the previous one.

The days of giving away goldfish are gone, of course, and it's clear that most of the tat given away now comes from pretty much the same warehouse. Most of it made in China, I should imagine.

I met the Frootbat beside the bandstand in the Exhibition Park at about 3.30 and we set off up to the Moor. There's always a sense of bewilderment, I find, when I get to the Hoppings. A sort of "Where do I start?" This is compounded by the fact that the Hoppings now grows appreciably year by year. For years it consisted of two long rows but these have increased to four.

The answer to where to start is actually the same every year. Walk up the first row to the top, walk down the next, up the next and so on. And despite the increased entertainment, it's always laid out more or less the same every year.

First of all, there are the fortune tellers - the innumerable daughters of the one and only, the original Gypsy Rose Lee and the occasional Gypsy Rose Higginbotham. They were always an attraction to young women and I guess it's still the same now. Why is it young men never want to know how their lives will turn out, I wonder?

During the afternoon, of course, there's not a lot of activity, and the lady clairvoyants, evidently unable to tell when their next punter will turn up, sit about in the sunshine outside their caravans, trying to catch an eye.

Sunshine! There's an innovation of recent years. For some reason (connected perhaps with the Fair's origins in the Temperance movement) the week of the Hoppings always coincided with the most torrential downpours imaginable. Wellies were always de rigeur when I was a kid, and at least one visit was a complete washout.

But global warming seems to have brought about a change in the fortunes of the showmen. OK, so it rained once or twice this week, but the ground was still firm and only the occasional slough of bark-covered water lay here and there to trap the unwary. But then if you're daft enough to not watch where you're going, you're just as likely to walk into a mess of discarded noodles, a heap of fallen chips or a slippery ice cream cornet. All part of the fun.

After the fortune tellers, there are rows of hoopla stalls, hook-a-duck stalls, penny arcades, darts stalls and shooting galleries and even a few of the old lucky number stalls (where you pick a straw and push out the ticket from inside).

Rounding the top of the Moor, you start to come down the row of sideshows. In my youth there were real sideshows - boxing booths, ghastly old women doing "artistic tableaux" to the strains of "The Swan" by Saint-Saens, dwarfs and three legged sheep and halls of mirrors.

The crooked mirrors still survive as part of the Houses of Fun - those places where the floor shakes back and forth and blasts of air blow up girls' skirts. Some things never change, though the number of girls in skirts has, I suppose.

Many of the sideshows now are developments of two basic entertainments. The Ghost Train in various forms still seems to pack 'em in and people still come out looking slightly breathless and rearranging their clothing. The Rotor seems to have made a big comeback, although the original, which was doing no business the last few times I saw it there, has gone. But there are lots of new ones declaring their "sticky walls." The Rotor, in case you don't know it, is the ride where you go into a room which slowly spins, then picks up speed until you're stuck to the wall....and then the floor drops away.

Down the middle of the ground are the big rides. Waltzers, dodgems, helter-skelters and one or two old fashioned merry-go-rounds with properly painted horses. I even saw a set of shuggy boats for the kids. But mostly the really big bits of technology have taken centre stage here. There's a colossal Big Wheel, the biggest I can remember at the Hoppings. How the hell do they transport such a thing? There are a surprising number of people prepared to pay big money to get strapped into a metal ball and then get flung heavenward by two massive bungy-ropes.

So how many of these potentially suicidal rides do you suppose the Frootbat and I went on? Absolutely correct. None. We went to see the fun, not take part in it. I guess the showmen could tell that, because with one exception, none of them tried to rope us in. The exception was a guy who was either very desperate or simply the world's worst judge of character.

"Come on lads," he yelled," kick a football through the goal!"

The Frootbat! And me! Kick a football!!!