With no ‘Dorset Art Weeks’ this year, artists around the Bridport area are gearing up for ‘Bridport Open Studios’ at the end of August. There is no shortage of talent in the area and many have learnt their trade at Art College. Probably the most prestigious of these, London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), has been running their degree show since May. Although not always associated with ground-breaking technological advances, RCA design students have much to their credit. This year graduating students have designed and developed life saving equipment and medical apparatus that could potentially save thousands of lives each year. One innovation, however, has brought more than a few wry smiles. It is a urinal system that can help young men test themselves for Sexually Transmitted Diseases. The stigma of going to a STD clinic still persists and the increase of STDs in young people is rising. This urinal could be installed in pubs or clubs and is a confidential and private way of getting tested. The man would swipe his mobile phone along a scanner next to the urinal, this would register the phone’s number. The urine is passed into a chamber where a sample is collected and identified with the mobile phone number. Once the chamber is full, the samples are taken away by a laboratory to be tested – the person is then notified by a text message to say whether they are all clear or if they should seek medical advice. Be wary of anyone borrowing your phone in the pub.
Sue Macpherson
Sue Macpherson was born in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and lived in a number of different parts of Africa. Sue said, “When I was nine years old and living in Sierra Leone, I was attending a school which had a dilapidated hall with no roof and a swimming pool which frequently contained snakes and frogs. My parents decided at that point that some continuity and stability in my education was going to be necessary and I was sent to boarding school in Taunton, Somerset.
On my fourteenth birthday I was given my first camera which quickly led to a desire to learn more about photography. It was thanks to an interested member of staff at Taunton School that I was introduced to the mysteries of dark room work. This inspired a lifelong love of black and white photography.”
Sue studied at Harrow College of Art and then, after marriage, at Gloucester College, qualifying for a British Institute of Professional Photography Diploma.
“In the years when my three children were small I worked as a freelance photographer and at the same time qualified as a Design Technology teacher. My teaching commitments, though, grew to the point where for a number of years I had to give up photography. Three years ago I moved to Dorset and I now teach photography part-time at Bryanston School.”
The majority of Sue’s work has been black and white portraiture. Over the years she has photographed children and families and has had commissions from magazines such as Oxford Today and The New Scientist. Sue has exhibited her portraits on two occasions. Once privately at Beechwood Park in Hertfordshire which led to an invitation to exhibit her work alongside celebrated photographers such as Patrick Lichfield and Koo Stark, at the inaugural exhibition of the Collyer Bristow Gallery in London.
Sue added, “Now that my children have grown up and with my move to Dorset, I have time to work towards the Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society, which has been a lifelong ambition.”
Up Front 06/05
A £10million promotional campaign to encourage people in England to recycle ‘more stuff, more often’ gets a bit more publicity on June 27th, with a week of promotional events, press articles, television and radio exposure. While various recycling efforts are made by local councils, one area of waste that seems to become ever more frightening is electronic waste. According to one article last month, the British throw away at least one million tons of electrical equipment a year. It suggested that, based on present turnover rates, in an average lifetime each of us will get through 12 washing machines, ten fridges, eight cookers, three dishwashers and 185 other bits and pieces, which includes items such as televisions and vacuum cleaners. Total that up at today’s prices and it comes to around £20,000. Multiply that figure by a population of 60 million and even the calculator suggests you’ve made an error. If these figures are dreadfully wrong, lets say even by up to 50%, that’s still an awful lot of hard to recycle waste. A ‘Congressional E-Waste Working Group’ was formed last week in America to work on standardising national laws for the recycling and disposal of electronic waste, while a new EU directive, due to be enforced this August, aims to make manufacturers and retailers responsible for collecting and recycling their products. Presumably it would be far too damaging to industry to make products that last longer than their warranty period.
Nathan Glover
Nathan was born in Exeter and grew up in East Devon where he developed a love of the vast diversity of landscape and wildlife in this area. After leaving school he attended Bicton College of Agriculture where he studied and qualified in countryside management and conservation.
“I have always been interested in nature photography and after leaving college I bought a second hand SLR camera to pursue my interest. I soon realised, however, that I wanted photography to be more than just a hobby so I enrolled on a course run by a local photographer to improve my photographic skills. I found it most inspirational and was keen to go on advancing. I then went on to study photography at Dillington House where I achieved a distinction with the Royal Photographic Society in applied and professional photography.
I have contributed to the Marshwood Vale magazine and the most memorable photograph I have had published and the one with which I was most pleased was the cover shot of Michael Walton. I am very glad that I come from a mutually supportive family which has always supported my ambition to become a photographer.”
Nathan’s photographs have been shown in a number of exhibitions and some of his work will be on display at the Town Mill Gallery, Lyme Regis in 2006. His photographic style is original and personal; he is quietly self-confident and this is manifest in his photographs. He has a strong artistic flair and has always been highly creative. These are qualities which he expresses not only through his photography but also through music. He is the lead singer in a local rock band called In4red which plays in the Honiton area and beyond. Much of their material is original work written by Nathan and the other band members. As part of his musical image he grew his Mohican hair style as above which has now gone.
Up Front 05/05
It started with radio, then it was television, and now the Internet and mobile phones have joined the arsenal of weapons used by politicians to reach out for our votes. Although we still see them turning up on our doorsteps or doing a ‘walkabout’ down our high streets, we’ve grown to accept that technology is playing an increasingly important role in helping them get their message across. There are already half a dozen websites with interactive questionnaires available to anyone unsure about what party to vote for. Not surprisingly most of them have a statement saying they are neither funded by, nor support any political party – not all of them are being completely honest here, but that’s no surprise either. Since a Mori poll suggests that up to 14% of voters don’t actually make up their minds on which way to vote until the last week of an election campaign – indeed 7% don’t decide until 24 hours before voting – the day to day results from questionnaires like these make interesting reading. Two of the popular voter websites are whatdoivotefor.co.uk and how2vote.co.uk. However the latest method of communicating political messages – by mobile phone text message – took an interesting turn last week. A report from a University of London psychologist suggested that too much texting could lower a user’s IQ by up to 10%. Perhaps this means that Party text alerts become even more popular because the recipients will be dumb enough to believe everything they promise.
Ray Smith
My life as a butcher started on a bicycle with a big basket on the front, cycling around Golders Green and Swiss Cottage as a delivery boy for a kosher butcher. There were lots of independent butchers at that time and in that particular area many were kosher. Kosher butchery is a totally different way of cutting meat, very similar to the continental way and it teaches you well – anatomically.
It wasn’t long after the war and all cuts of meat were used, nothing at all was wasted. My mum, a traditional cook, served up neck of lamb stew every Saturday after preparing it on Friday and cutting all the fat off. I used to help in the kitchen even then.
I went on to work at a Kosher grocers, all strictly regulated by the local rabbi!
I left butchery for a while after finishing school lured by more money but always kept my interest in food and cooking.
I married Mary in 1966, we bought a house with a GLC 100% loan, a maisonette in Stanmore for £3,500! We had kids and moved to Harrow and in 1972 decided that the rise in house prices was our ticket out of London. We put a pin in the map and travelled out of London at the weekends to see potential properties! We settled on Dorchester and found a shop with a flat above. I sat outside the shop for a whole day to look at the custom. It was a risk and a challenge and we wanted to build the business. Our first week we took £50! We used to roll out of bed at 4am and down to the shop and we built the business tremendously. We carried on until 1984 and then decided to sell when planning permission was approved for Waitrose. There were 13 butchers and 2 abattoirs in Dorchester at that time and there is only one butcher in the whole town now – that’s telling.
We shut the shop, Mary retrained as a medical secretary and I worked in the garden growing vegetables and kept some animals. I used to butcher for farming friends before all the regulations came in and it was at one of these farms that I met Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. We hit it off, both having the same philosophy about food, and a passion for cooking.
I now work at River Cottage HQ with Hugh I have come full circle really. For me it is paradise; I am not butchering for profit, people are keen and learning. We are using whole animals, not just the usual cuts and it’s great to share that knowledge.
One evening recently at about 11pm, after a whole day teaching, sore throat and shattered, three ladies cornered me and wanted me to show them again how to pluck a pheasant so they could do it at home. That to me is really rewarding, that’s what makes my job worthwhile.
Being in Dorset is great for me, my job is unique and every day is like a holiday.
Up Front 04/05
The argument that modern food is just a shadow of what it was 50 years ago, because of the way it is produced, is one of many points made by those that will have their daily vitamins banned by the European Food Supplements Directive, which comes into force at midnight on July 31. After that date, your local health food shop will not be allowed to sell tablets containing selenium yeast, boron, chromium picolinate and a further 300 nutrients that thousands of people find helps them lead a healthier life. This is a European Union directive that our government has agreed to. It has created a ‘Positive List’, a list of vitamins and food supplements determined to be safe to sell to the public. Nutrients not listed can continue to be used until 2009 – provided safety dossiers are submitted to the European Food Standards Agency by July 2005. However the cost of compiling these dossiers is estimated to be in the region of £250,000 per substance. An estimated 5,000 supplements have been excluded from the ‘Positive List’ because they have not been assessed by the EU, even though under the UK Food Safety Act they are considered safe products. At around £250K to get on the ‘Positive List’ it’s not rocket science to figure out what size companies can benefit. Perhaps we should run a sweepstake on how many parliamentary hours might be needed to debate laws to prevent the next crime wave – vitamin and supplement smuggling.
Jon Lee Anderson
Jon Lee Anderson talks to Fergus Byrne
Despite launching a newspaper at the age of ten, whilst living in Taiwan, Jon Lee Anderson never really harboured ambitions to become a journalist. More likely, given the right set of circumstances, he may well have become a naturalist – fighting for the rights of animals in the wild and in captivity. At thirteen, he ran away from home, planning to live in the natural history museum in Washington, D.C., where he had spent time as a volunteer taxidermist. “I was not even interested in politics until I was 25” he says. “I was only interested in jungles and tribes, rivers, mountains and animals, that was all I cared about. I always thought I would be a naturalist. In fact, when I was living here in England at the age of fifteen I met Gerald Durrell. I wanted to work with him, in Jersey. That was my goal. It’s funny how it turned out.”
Jon Lee’s latest book The Fall of Baghdad may well be one of the most significant contributions to the memory of what is undoubtedly the most important political event of our time. Though he was based in Baghdad before, during and after the allied invasion, he was not an ‘embedded journalist’, and this book is by no means ‘war reporting’. It is a story that works on many levels, not only giving the reader a fascinating insight into the workings of a regime, both under threat and under attack, but it also sets an emotional and historical context for the reader through the lives of many of the characters the author meets and befriends during his time there. “I would hope that the book serves, on one level, as a kind of story of about human nature” says Jon Lee. “But it’s also a story about the fall of one of the world’s oldest cities, and its history, and how that history continues to transmute and evolve, and about the collision between the west, the United States, and that culture – the coming together of two cultures – with a lot of mutual incomprehension. And I felt almost like a mediating personality – because I was there, it was my countrymen invading and I had a great deal of empathy for the Iraqis. At the same time, I was continuing to explore their reality and trying to discover why it was all happening, and there was a precognitive quality to it. The Iraqis I talked to were steeped in their own history – telling me well before the events what was going to happen, and then it did happen. So, on the one hand, the book is a document of an extraordinary period, a dramatic event which affects all of us, but also, I hope, a book that offers an insight into human nature.”
Apart from the insight into human nature under extreme conditions, a subject that Jon Lee is uniquely qualified to investigate, having spent most of his writing life in volatile situations with heightened human emotions, The Fall of Baghdad has a keen sense of reality. From the opening chapter, in late 2002, when Saddam Hussein frees the inmates of Abu Ghraib prison, the reader becomes aware of the danger that mutual incomprehension and fear can bring. The fact that when all other journalists were warned to evacuate Iraq, Jon Lee Anderson stayed, is a testament to his need to report the reality of the situation. It is also a sign of his respect for those that befriended and gradually trusted him – giving him insights into the workings of their lives under the Saddam regime. “Essentially, Iraq is a secret world” he says. “It is as I told it. People revealed themselves gradually, the little moments, chinks of light. Ala Bashir, someone admired and trusted by Saddam, summons me to an art gallery to tell me what he really thinks about Saddam – what an extraordinary moment. When Sabah, my driver – who was a cipher to me, I never knew exactly where he stood – breaks down and weeps in a private moment and tells me he has a brother who has disappeared. When Salaar, the minder, makes a dry quip about Saddam having won 120% of the referendum he held in 2002 to extend his rule for another seven years, with just a twinkle, not a wink – this was how I began to learn about what was really in people’s hearts. The fascinating thing was it continued to be a voyage of discovery because you never really know. And people, to survive, will do anything. So were all of these admissions ways of pulling me in? They saw me as a lifeline. At some level, this was an element in each of their cases, but that didn’t make it any less authentic. They are people, you cannot view them in black and white terms, they are complex and they react in unpredictable ways.”
The future of Iraq, the Middle East and the western world are now inextricably linked. During his most recent visit to Baghdad, Jon Lee had to travel in camouflage, sometimes with armed guards. This is something familiar from his childhood in Colombia where he would be taken to kindergarten by armed guards. His unique perspective and knowledge of conflict stems from a need to understand the psyche behind the change from victim to revolutionary. Prior to writing what is considered the definitive biography of Che Guevara, he wrote Guerrillas, an on-the-ground account of five insurgent movements around the world. He probably has a better understanding of what is fuelling the current insurgent movement against allied forces than most military analysts. He says, “I spent a lot of time around revolutionaries and guerrillas and I can often empathise with them. I understand the idealism that leads people to leave a safe and comfortable existence and go off into the hills and fight what they see as a tyrannical or an evil regime. But that same idealism can turn. Once blood begins to be shed, the blood becomes a combustive element of its own. It can create a world of martyrs and heroes, and it becomes its own justification. Vengeance is dressed up – usually by a spiritual realm. Idealism can turn to its own form of tyranny.”
Jon Lee agrees with the commonly held belief that the lack of preplanning for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq has led to the needless loss of life on both sides. However, he is uniquely placed to offer intelligent observation on what is happening in the hearts and minds of those that the average western citizen fears most, those prepared to give their lives for their beliefs. “Look at the motivation behind the guerrillas,” he says, drawing on knowledge gained from previous conflicts and groups. “These were people, who in some cases had a great deal of animosity toward the outside world. The world looks at them as dangerous – beyond the pale beings – but they’re all over the world, they come from every society. So, therefore, who are they? What unites them? How different are they to us? That was the seed in my exploration of that world. It appears in every society, and if any society becomes polarised to the point where a significant minority feels disenfranchised from having a civic voice – for economic, social, racial or political reasons – you are already on the slippery slope to pushing them or allowing them, to leave the fold. Such a group will almost inevitably break apart and use violence, which is a time tested course of action and somehow a legitimate part of our human development. Because most societies were formed in blood.”
It is his ability to draw on personal experience and hard-earned wisdom that has allowed Jon Lee Anderson to bring the reality of the Iraq conflict, its history, and the current insurgency into context. The Fall of Baghdad not only brilliantly documents an event that, on some levels, may have been inevitable, but it also offers an authentic and non-judgemental observation of some of the people and elements that could pave the future for that country.
John Bullock
My school careers advisor suggested I became a farmer. This was a shock because the nearest I got to agriculture was the greengrocers. Perhaps he was using the ‘Mr. Drip the Plumber’s Employment Guide’. Young Bullock must become… a farmer!
So imagine my surprise to be living here in Dorset. Not a farmer, but living on a farm, with waxed jacket and thermal wellies. It took a few decades to get here, via London (a reasonably-sized town east of Wessex). I carved out a career as one of the UK’s leading lighting design consultants, working on contracts throughout the UK. When I say ‘carved’, it was more of a bas-relief than a statue – urban living being a two-dimensional business, where the opening gambit of ‘and what do you do?’ determines whether you spend the rest of the evening talking to yourself.
An inevitable siren call brought us west, where it’s more a question of ‘who am I?’ I’ve heard Dorset described as ‘the graveyard of ambition’, but I think that’s just bad medicine from urbanites frightened of too much green.
Lighting design feeds and clothes us, but I have re-found my singing self. I’d always sung, usually alone in a locked room. These days I’m enjoying working within the English roots tradition (folk songs to you), recently releasing a portfolio of songs and photographs from West Dorset, called ‘Soundscape’. A tour of village halls is anticipated later this year.
Did I mention the labyrinths? I’ve always been fascinated by ‘earth mysteries’ and there’s no better place for that than Wessex. I design and build labyrinths – not those mazy things, but pilgrim paths used for meditation and contemplation. There’s one at Godmanstone, another planned at Monkton Wyld Court, and occasional temporary structures here at Townhill Farm.
Up Front5 03/05
The argument that we should try, as much as possible, to eat food supplied by local producers, has been in the news again recently, after a new food scare caused a product recall on a massive scale. Although product recalls are not uncommon, this one could cost the food industry an estimated £100 million. All the major supermarket chains, along with fast food companies such as McDonalds and Pizza Hut, were forced to withdraw food items that may have been contaminated with a dye known as Sudan 1 – the dye had been found in a batch of chilli powder. Sudan 1’s dark red properties make it ideal for colouring petrol, oils, waxes and shoe polish. Its use in food, however, was banned after tests revealed it has caused leukaemia in laboratory mice. The Sudan 1 scare has resulted in more than 400 products being recalled, and it comes on the back of two other food scares this month in America as well as one in Northern Ireland. Although the original source of the latest problem has been blamed on unscrupulous suppliers, the complexity of the supply chain highlights the need for complete traceability in our food. While the industry claims that it is that very traceability that has allowed it to track the products affected by the latest scare, the chilli powder containing Sudan 1 passed through at least four different companies before arriving at the retail outlets. The original supplier has not yet been named and legal wrangling will likely rumble on for some time, but we must be thankful that the powder wasn’t laced with something even more sinister.
