Culture

George Rowlett’s new paintings have wonderfully tousled, wind-rucked surfaces, the paint stirred and whipped up in moving emulation of the effects of the elements on water and landscape — his principal subjects. He paints the Thames and the seashore of east Kent; he also records the passage of the seasons on the landscape around Deal where he has a studio. In his latest solo exhibition, the groundfloor gallery of Art Space is dominated by a large and splendid painting called ‘Ramsgate from the Tidal Flats, Pegwell Bay, January’.

The most affecting programme of the week was Lost in La Mancha, a film shown as part of the Storyville series on BBC 2 (Sunday). It was about Terry Gilliam, who used to do the cartoons for Monty Python and who now has a reputation for being a ‘maverick’ director. This means that sometimes he works outside the Hollywood system successfully (Brazil) and sometimes disastrously (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). He often refers to the catastrophe of Munchausen. We all have events that define our sense of ourselves; how awful it must be when the central incident in your life was a devastating failure. But Gilliam can never do anything the easy way. He wanted to make a film of Don Quixote but he couldn’t let even this huge story speak for itself.

Throughout a newly affluent Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and under the spur of a technological revolution, people — country people, in particular — began to throw out their artefacts of wood and metal and natural fabric in favour of the exciting new plastic that never wore out and rarely needed cleaning. Newly-weds could have furnished their homes for a pittance from what, in Britain, were known as ‘junk shops’ — if they could face the embarrassment of living with somebody else’s grandmother’s chaise-longue or somebody else’s grandfather’s armchair. Horse and cart gave way to the internal-combustion engine. Children’s table games gathered dust as the family clustered round the television screen.

Conwy in north Wales is among the most enchanting of our small towns. It’s like a toy fort, its encircling walls surviving intact until Thomas Telford had to breach them for his bridge. He did it elegantly, even delicately, creating a suspension bridge that actually enhanced the little town. It was for our brutal, automanic age to bulldoze through a road bridge in an act of architectural rape. But that apart, the town is a gem. Within the encircling walls there is a medley of little twisting lanes that give the impression of being in a far larger town, for the visitor is never quite certain where the lanes are leading. One of these is Crown Lane. Rather steep. Very narrow.

When you are so addicted to writers’ works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator Diary column. Zen is the Italian policeman who is sent to different parts of Italy to solve crimes sensitive in nature; he’s a louche, corner-cutting cop with a hopeless domestic life. When I’d read the last novel, I wondered listlessly what I’d do until the next Zen book, which I surmised would be in two years’ time. And so it is: another is promised for August. Bit of a sad case, you might think; yes, probably, and I’m not, as a rule, even a particular fan of the genre.

The television broadcasts of the late Pope’s funeral and the marriage of Prince Charles, coming as they did on consecutive days, gave the opportunity to compare two different styles of choral singing at their most typical. Of course I am going to go on to say that the British version, as represented on that occasion by the choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, represented everything that is best, indeed just about everything that is humanly possible, in liturgical singing, while the choirs gathered in Rome managed to fulfil every gloomy expectation of those who care about these things. It has been many decades since the Sistine Chapel Choir was first recorded, bringing tears of something to many people’s eyes, and it sure hasn’t got any better.