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My Blogiversary

A year ago, on August 24, 2006, after much soul- and mind-searching and researching into the possible ups-and-downs of blogging, I took my online life in my hands and started Notebooks. I have long decided that it would be a kind of online version of my real-life paper notebooks I’ve been carrying around with me since about 1995. I could write about anything, although literature would presumably be the main subject.

The choice for the blog name that seemed so obvious immediately presented me with a challenge: I had to create a decently looking and sounding name for the blog’s URL. From what I remember, “notebooks.blogspot.com” and “notebook.blogspot.com” have already been taken, so I was offered to use “juliasnotebooks” or “notebooksofjulia”. It was a warm early morning in August, and I sat in a totally dark room because I sometimes like sitting and writing in a totally dark room. The room, however, grew darker as my spirits sank lower because I couldn’t bear having any of those cumbersome names for my blog. It had to be good, it had to be something I liked.

Somehow I remembered about The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, which is the English translation of Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto. As I didn’t (and still don’t) know any Iberian language, I did some more research, to make sure that Los Cuadernos de Julia would be grammatically correct. Once I realised that it was, that very important part of the URL was created. Naturally, I had no competition whatsoever.

Turned out, not only did I take my online life in my hands, I did exactly the same thing with my life in general. Through the blog I’ve met different people, I’ve been interviewed, Notebooks have been added to the BBC Manchester Blog, and sometimes I receive personal emails from my readers who, for whatever reason, choose to express their opinion in private. This opinion is positive, but I respect the readers’ privacy, not least because there is already quite a few comments on the blog that sufficiently satiate my vanity. And I must be honest with myself, I didn’t expect any of this to happen.

One thing I was adamant that I wouldn’t be doing was the accommodation of the immediate interest. Which is the reason why this blog isn’t about fashion, or current affairs, or entertainment, or TV, or, indeed, sex. It doesn’t mean I haven’t written or am not going to write on any of these subjects. It simply means that I wanted to create the audience by publishing primarily my thoughts, my interests, and after months of experimenting with various tracking solutions and receiving comments and emails, I know I’ve succeeded.

It’s a bit cheeky on the part of any blogger to announce the anniversary of their blog because it comes across like asking for congratulations, etc. Well, I obviously won’t mind any such (big bashful smile). But I do believe that whatever artists do, they do it for people: readers, listeners, spectators. As one such artist would sing, “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world”. So, I think on this first blogiversary it’s really should be me who says a huge “thank-you” to everyone out there who lands on Notebooks via a search engine, reads the feed, or types the URL in the browser. I write a lot about loneliness and in loneliness, but you’ve given me a wonderful gift of communication, understanding, and expressing the interest and support. What more could I ask for?

Exercises in Loneliness – VI

Let’s imagine you live in a flat. It’s nice, warm and cosy, you’ve got a toilet and a refrigerator, a warm bed (even a hot-water bottle, perhaps), and, as it should be, thy home is thy castle. You should be very happy, but deep inside you feel a strange unease. Then one day, under some inexplicable urge, you decide to cross the Atlantic on your own. It’s inexplicable, but it’s not unusual: people have been crisscrossing the Atlantic for ages.


Your urge to leave your flat is so strong that you cannot care to save some money to build yourself a decent ship and to take your domestic paradise on board. Therefore, you’ll only have one small boat. There’ll be no fridge. Definitely, no toilet. You will battered by the weather, and your boat will never be as cosy as your flat. At times you’ll be cold (or, adversely, very hot), and, most importantly, you will be all alone. There’ll be no beloved, no parents, no best friend who lives next door. Who knows, maybe your network will not support the signal? Or, if worst comes to worst, you’ll drop your phone into the water? No pets. Your radio signal will be interrupted, there’ll be no TV, and a book or two you take with you will not entertain you. Your boat will turn into a deserted island.

But you will see. Before, your world has always had its boundaries. How often do you look up to the sky? On your journey, there will be nowhere to hide from this enormous space that seems to originate directly from the ocean’s depths. And what about the water, indeed? Unless you take frequent vacations, the only water that you use regularly is for washing hands and taking a bath. And on your boat you will be surrounded by the vast territory of water, underneath which there is a totally different, unknown world.

This journey will make you re-evaluate things. For once, you will have but one thing in your possession: your life. Your boat may be crushed by storm, you may drop your tangible possessions in the water, or they may be blown by the wind. The only thing that remains truly yours will be your life, and for this possession you will fight till the end. But what is it – your life?

It is often believed there are two most important things that deserve thinking about – the meaning of life and the meaning of death, and no doubt you will have thought about these before you leave your homeland. Now, sailing between two enormities, celestial and oceanic, you will constantly have these thoughts on your mind. You will understand that finding a definition to a word comes through experiencing it. On this journey you-in-the-flat will die for good, but you-at-sea will be born. The two exist in one person, and this person is you, and, as far as your physical existence goes, you’re still alive. Can you be alive, if one part of you has died? Have the new you entered the next plain of being? Is this what life and death are about – going from one level of existence to another? Or are they not?

See, how many big questions you’ll have to ask yourself on that journey, before you get to the other side of the ocean and stand on the shore. This ground may not be native, or stable, or the one you expected to land upon. But under your soils there will be some solid ground, and to know where we stand is something we always seek to establish. You’ll hide your boat from the view, so nobody recognises you as a foreigner, and will start a new life in a new place, until you begin to feel it’s time to leave your hut and to set your sail again.
Jan 19 – Aug 23, 2007

There are certain thoughts that get written or even jotted down and are then forgotten, which is what happened to this text, as I literally forgot about it and have only just found. This is but an allegory. The flat represents both “the idols of the cave” and “the idols of the market place”, to use Baconian terminology. It is a set of beliefs imposed on us by the environment in which we were born, brought up and educated, where we continue to live and work, and which language we use. The journey on a boat is a metaphor for extreme and ultimate break of ties with the “flat”, but this is obviously a metaphysical journey. The contemplative nature of “being-at-sea” may suggest one can jump on the “boat” while still living in the “flat”. One thing I am wholeheartedly for is learning about foreign cultures by interacting with people of those cultures in their native language. But one doesn’t have to cross the Atlantic, and there is no “right” direction, in which to cross it. Gauguin went to Madagascar from France; H. Miller left America for Europe. The Atlantic Ocean is only there to highlight the difficulty and length of the journey, which continues even after one has reached the destination.

Elton John: “Remember No Two Ovens Are the Same”

I’ve only been a fan of Sir Elton John since the 1990s (due to my age, of course), and, like with many other great artists, I have missed a lot of really impressive performances. Some of these are still being shown on TV, like his duet with George Michael in Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me. But some, like the one below, are only remembered by those who’d seen them or been told about them.

“An Audience with Elton John” was aired on ITV in 1997, and the audience was packed with celebrities, including Boris Becker, Claudia Schiffer, David Copperfield, Ozzy Osbourne, and others. The documented scene originated from two rumours: that Elton John can write songs very quickly, and that he can write music to absolutely any text. Both rumours are said to have had a precedent in the 1970s, when he wrote a song to the text from a phonebook. He repeated the trick a few times afterwards, composing music on the spot to various texts.

This time Richard E. Grant handed him a leaflet to one of the kitchen appliances. The mastery of the composer is so stupendous that it does feel unbelievable, which registered in certain comments on YouTube. The problem, of course, is not in a simple fact of us living in the age of staged-up TV shows. The problem is in the sheer absense of anything similar. Now and again we hear about musical artists locking themselves up in a studio to conceive of a new album, which usually takes anything from six months to several years. Obviously, the time needed to conceive of an idea and to find the way to present it varies greatly from artist to artist, and there is no minimum timescale to be used as a limit.

And yet, in this video Elton John demonstrates something more than just his talents of a song-writer and performer. In a matter of seconds he chooses the style of music which makes the entire song a perfect parody on consumerist advertising. As I’m listening to it, I can vividly picture a TV advert, with mannerist ladies in purple skirt suits, with perms and fucsia lipstick, singing in the kitchen: “get to know all there is to know about your new oven before you begin preparing your own mouthwatering meals”.

Over to you now! And if you’ve seen this programme and have other fond memories to share, leave us a comment.

Every Inch Royal: Mail Post Box

There are many things you can find in Manchester that strike an unusual cord with you. For instance, I used to adore this wall painting in Northern Quarter, in Hare St. It requires no further musing, and I always thought it was very witty, given the name of the street.


Alas, this was painted over with some bright children-friendly images, and my heart still aches when I think of what a loss it was.

Another site which may soon be driven to extinction is located not far from Deansgate. I first noticed it in spring, but the weather was never good enough to snap it. The site is this:


I know they say that royalty and nobility both have got blue blood, so it is perhaps only logical that this “blueness” extends on to their possessions. Including one post box in red-brick Manchester.

Manchester International Festival Feedback

The first Manchester International Festival may have ended, but not our talking about it. As the festival is planning to become Manchester’s own arts biennale, the organisers are waiting to receive feedback on their efforts. If you were there and would like to participate, just follow the link below:

Manchester International Festival Survey

There is a small incentive: “one lucky person can win £100”. So, you can test your luck, too, by completing the survey.

I completed it last week, trying to be as honest as I could. I do think that Manchester: Peripheral could’ve been presented better. The survey is said to take 10 mins: not quite so, when you’ve got questions like “Please name any SPONSORS, if you can”. Certainly, if you can’t, then you don’t have to, but it’s nice to be able to, nonetheless.

The concerns for nature and economy weren’t ignored, whereby there is a section of questions that should help “to estimate the total economic impact and carbon emissions the festival has generated in Manchester”. In particular, they ask “how many miles did you travel in total to get to and from Central Manchester to ALL the Manchester International Festival events you attended?”

This is a very tricky question to someone like me, who doesn’t have a car and thus cannot count miles.

Water lilies in Warrington and Blogging at Cornerhouse

As you might notice, some changes have occurred in the sidebar on Notebooks, thanks to Craig McGinty. Craig has given a helpful hand and advice to many a blogger out there, and I didn’t escape his touch of gold either. Not that I mind, especially as the sidebar now looks neater and makes more sense even to me. Much encouraged by a late evening discussion I may tweak things further, but the top of the page is unlikely to change any more, so feel free to make use of the readily available archive of posts. Many thanks to Craig, who can always be contacted via his personal blog at Words, Writing and Web.

We met at Cornerhouse. This fantastic place, in addition to all gems of cinema and contemporary art, now also offers the wi-fi connection, which makes it a perfect venue for any purpose. We sat just a table away from where I wrote Exercises in Loneliness – IV, and admittedly the place today was quite busy. I’ve even met another friend of mine there and saw a fiancee of my colleague. This just confirms how small the world really is.

Long before then I had a short afternoon walk around the pond in Centre Park in Warrington where I work these days. I noticed that many provincial cities are often slagged off without a reason, and I find it truly disappointing because this is how an opinion is being formed. As a result, many people may just never visit a certain town because it is described as poor, or bad, or sad, and apparently people like Charles Dickens or Jean Genet are too rare these days, so no-one wants to enter the dens of life. What can be lost is well illustrated by this slide show of pictures I took today in Centre Park. I don’t think it will generate a flood of visitors to our business den, but hopefully it will somewhat have changed the perception of Warrington.

http://www.slideflickr.com/slide/JG6Z9zOS

Warrington Centre Park on Flickr. Other photos from Warrington.

Exercises in Loneliness – V: Thoughts on the Train

The moments of tranquility and loneliness are likely to happen on a half-empty evening train, but a morning train can be an equally inspiring environment. A lot of people who take the 8.10 train from Manchester to Liverpool I already know by face. A large group of Asian men and women alight at Birchwood. So do two girls, whose nationality I cannot make out because I know neither Spanish nor Portuguese. But they definitely speak either Spanish or Portuguese. A well-dressed man who on my memory always wears sunglasses, jeans and a jacket, often with a white shirt, goes to Warrington. Once in a while one of my colleagues catches the train, usually when his car is broken or when he lent it to his girlfriend. I owe to my former colleague the tip on finding a place to sit – at the opposite end from the first class. And it is in this multitude of people that I sometimes reach for my notebook, to collect the impressions du matin ou du soir (morning or evening impressions).

Morning

Trains are awfully democratic. You finally come to realise this when your head is catastrophically close to the conductor’s postérieur.

I suppose what really concerns me is that any group (however large) that fights for acceptance through positioning itself vis-à-vis other groups ends up being less tolerant and more narrow-minded than its once “oppressors”.

I really like travelling by train. It must be the motion that I enjoy so much. It relaxes me. At the same time, there’s always enough people around to remind you by their presence that in you hermitage you’re yet not alone.

Evening

A guy who sits next to me across the aisle (later on it turns out he is Greek) is wearing, apart from the actual clothes, a baseball cap and earphones. The music in his earphones is loud enough for me to hear those “zdub-zdub-zdub” beats. He moves his head ecstatically a few times to the music’s rhythm before picking up the phone, exchanging a few phrases with someone, then getting up and going away. By the time he comes back (although I thought he’d left), another guy has taken his place. The Greek is undeterred, sits right next to the guy and rests his feet on the opposite seat. Then he begins to talk to me. He lives in Liverpool and wants to know which is Manchester’s main train station. When the train stops and I’m getting up to leave I receive a friendly, if somewhat masculine in gesture as in strength, pat on the back, between my shoulder blades.

At Birchwood, a guy sits on the bench in the pose of Copenhagen’s Mermaid.

We arrive at Manchester via Castlefield. Every time the train goes past the houses, I wonder what it’s like to live in such house. Anyone on the train can see directly into some of the flats. I know I wouldn’t care in the slightest and certainly wouldn’t keep my curtains shut at all times, but it still puzzles me. I always think of the scene in Les Triplettes de Belleville, when a train stops opposite the house, and the dog looks inquisitively out of the window at the dull passengers before exploding into hysterical barking, as the train moves on. Of course, of course, we’re not supposed to look into private flats and thus into private lives, but this is what we’re always doing in one way or another, aren’t we? And in the city that is constantly growing and expanding, you can’t walk starring at the ground. Tall buildings are there for us to raise our heads and stretch our necks, and while doing so you may, by pure chance, end up looking into someone’s flat, as it happened to me a few times in Northern Quarter.

Off the topic

Speaking about Les Triplettes, this is one of the most original animated films on my memory. As its director, Sylvain Chomet explains in his BBC interview, he’s always liked the circular motion of cycling and thus chose the Tour de France as the film’s subject. If you’re a fan of French language and music, you can enjoy both the film and any of its musical themes. As for me, I really like Attila Marcel composed by Sylvain Chomet and performed by Béatrice Bonifassi. Many thanks to the Imeem user for sharing their love for Les Triplettes with all of us.

http://media.imeem.com/m/uoZdN69JOb/aus=false/

Memento Ossis (Remember the Bones)

As many a blog reader will agree, you never know what you find in blogosphere. Just like in any sphere, really. Blogosphere is your web Cosmos, and the last thing I read about our galaxy was that, unfortunately, Uranus was no diamond quarry. Neither is Neptune.

Thankfully, in our Blogalaxy there are some sparkling stones, and on this occasion I’m speaking of a post in Jezblog. Jez, as he says about himself on Flickr, is a “good freelance translator” and a “bad photographer”. I can’t doubt the former, but I do think he’s slightly too modest about his camera skills. At least, when he visited the Sedlec Ossuary in Czech Republic, he’d taken some stunning photos.

Ossuaries date back to the time before our era, but the examples of this somewhat morbid art that we see today across Europe have come into existence since the Middle Ages. Sedlec Ossuary that Jez has documented for his blog and Flickr photoset was created in 1870 by František Rint at the request of the Schwarzenberg family. One of the compositions that Rint had made was the family’s coat-of-arms. Below, on the left, is Jez’s photo of it; and right next to it is the original coat-of-arms. Rint’s interpretation lacks neither wit, nor creativity. Other examples of his artistic vision come from Jez (left) and the ossuary’s official site, http://www.kostnice.cz/.

Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora is not the only European site of this kind. The most famous is, perhaps, the Portuguese Capela dos Ossos in Evora. Built in the 16th c. by a Franciscan monk, the chapel has the following inscription above its entrance: “We bones that are here, for you bones we wait” (“Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos”).

I notice that the mendicant brothers were particularly apt at spreading the word about life’s being transitory in this peculiar “bony language”. Another ossuary was created by the Capuchin monks in Rome, in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini. The Order of Friars Minor of Capuchin, a deviation of the Franciscan Order, was established in the 16th c. in Italy. The church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini has also got the website, with a special section highlighting The Crypt.

The most recent ossuary is the Douaumont Ossuary in Verdun, which commemmorates the unthinkable cruelty and catastrophic human losses during the battle of Verdun in the First World War. Inaugurated in 1932, the ossuary (on the right) is the resting place for the staggering number of unidentified French and German soldiers.

Links:

Jez’s Kostnice Ossuary set on Flickr

Pictures of Capela dos Ossos at Sacred-Destinations.com

Exercises in Loneliness – IV

I’m sitting at Cornerhouse in Manchester, on the first floor. There aren’t many people there yet, and I am fortunate to find myself by the window in the farthest corner. People are eating, or drinking, and chatting, and at the next table to mine sit two Spanish girls, in similar clothes, with laptops.

It’s almost seven o’clock. Going to work in the morning happens pretty quickly, or so it seems, perhaps because I’m in a hurry. But in the evening homecoming takes ages. In truth, it takes probably just a little bit longer than in the morning – about 20 minutes longer – but somehow I’m conscious of this difference.

And so, I’m sitting here, writing this, and the tea in a delicate glass cup is still fairly hot, but will get colder by the time I finish writing.

What is it that I wanted to say? I came here with the intent to carry on with my musings on self-identification and categorisation. I spent the most fulfilling half an hour on the train spilling the words out on the lined pages of a reporter’s notebook, where I’m now continuing with this. Henry Miller – and with him many a writer – would call this “dictation”. It’s this wonderful state of things when you feel as a tool in someone’s hands who, somewhere afar, is whispering these words into the tip of the tool, and they pass at the speed of light to land in your head to be heard and discovered.

I don’t enjoy being lonely. I don’t want to be lonely. But rather often than not I want to be alone to capture moments like this. When this moment is gone, I will probably feel empty, not being certain about anything, whether future, past, or present. But how should I feel otherwise, if on the train I have suddenly and plainly realised that I don’t belong to anything but this huge multitude of human bodies that we call mankind, and that I was happy to realise this?

This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to friend or to bond, or that I don’t ever belong to any group. It simply means that I want to friend and to bond by essence, and not by category. And our only essence is deeply, painfully, undeniably human. It’s not our religion, or political views, or nationality, or sexuality, or social class. It is all that remains after these “identities” are stripped away – a human figure, forever insecure, forever seeking for acceptance, which is why it wants to identify itself somehow, sometimes for the mere sake of it.

My tea is now warm, and it’s quarter past seven. At the crossroads of Oxford Rd and Whitworth St there aren’t many cars, and even less people. The Spanish girls are joined by other Spanish girls, and Cornerhouse now sounds like a multilingual beehive. They already took away a chair from my table, and, God knows, I may be compelled to move to another place. But while I’m here – isn’t it peculiar that I’m writing this at Cornerhouse, of all places?! Am I truly at some kind of corner? And what is there around it?

I don’t know, and I won’t know. Only when you observe one’s life from a distance it may look like a effortless soaring or a roller-coaster. While you’re in the process of living it, you’re always on the road, and you can never know where it takes you. Is it good? Probably not, if you end up at the dead end. But it’s the most fascinating journey if you arrive to San Salvador instead of India.

The Spanish girls have gone, as did a lot of other people. I know that once I finish this I’ll go to an internet café in St Ann’s Sq and type this text in Los Cuadernos. I’ve just thought that all I wrote has originated in the moment, and that later tonight or tomorrow or later in life I might change my mind. But how, and will I?

The truth is that even when we – when I – speak in favour of loneliness, there are different meanings to this. Which makes me question the nature of a union (of any kind). Can there be such thing as complete acceptance of the other? Or does acceptance imply insincerity for the sake of a union?

I know – and so do you – that everything complete, ideal, perfect only exists in theory. To ask ‘is complete acceptance possible?’ is to paraphrase the question from Jacques Derrida: ‘is absolute forgiveness possible?’ To accept is to forgive another person for not being what you want or expect them to be; to forgive is to accept that the other person will never become what you’d like them to be; to forgive and to accept is to forget – not to cast into oblivion, but to draw the line between the other’s essence and the cloak of their “identity” and your expectations that conceals the essence.

Forgiveness, acceptance, forgetting can only be absolute and mutual. It isn’t enough for someone to look past the others’ “identities” – others have to recognise that identities, like paradigms and art movements, are fleeting. They come and go in order to shed the light on that part of the essence that has yet remained undiscovered. In the words of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, ‘everything flows and nothing stands still‘ (panta rei), and if there is any true lesson of history, it is the lesson in change. Life is that very perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion), and so is everyone as a particle of it, if only we recognise that our human essence is the only constant thing for as long as the mankind lives. It is possible to change views, religion, or gender; it is possible to be inhumanly cruel; but it is not possible to regress to become a monkey. It is probably possible to never start thinking, but once you’ve started, it is impossible to stop. And as we’re being told, this capability of coherent and creative thinking is exactly what makes a human being.

I enjoy being human. Even my mistakes and those severe moments of self-doubt – would I be happier without them? Is it not those moments that produce the hours that I spend at Cornerhouse, as if in a café in Montparnasse? Is it not in these hours that I understand why, of all novels and stories, Maugham’s Theatre is the one to which I most closely relate, though far from identifying myself with the protagonist?

Like Julia Lambert at the Berkeley, so I at Cornerhouse think that all we, people, are trying to do is to find a role to stick to, and it’s only art, by touching the deepest layers of one’s being, can lift the curtain off this stage, to show that the only true, inimitable, constant thing about us is our human individuality, unique by definition. It is to this individuality one really belongs, and any change that occurs serves the purpose of staying true to this essence, to the feelings and thoughts that lay hidden beneath the stage persona.

You know, it’s strange how people differ. Mrs Siddons was a rare one for chops; I’m not a bit like her in that; I’m a rare one for steaks‘.

Indeed, I am a rare one for salmon.

Notes:

I left Cornerhouse around 8.30pm. I did go to St Ann’s Sq, and I did log in, but the keyboard proved to be the worst I’ve ever used: the space bar didn’t work unless I stumbled upon it, and if I didn’t, then words were joined together. I went home, which is where I have now finished typing the text at 11.10pm.

The Story of Discobolus

Imagine this: you’ve been waiting to take a picture of something. You found a perfect angle, even conjured a title for your photo, but your precious sight is an object of adoration for too many people, mainly tourists. They keep coming up to it, their figures exuding admiration, and their eyes lit with fever of connoisseurship. They don’t notice you. Worse still, they sometimes appear in front of your camera at the exact moment of your pressing the button.

Let’s not be dismayed by tourists – for all I know, I may be just as inconsiderate. Occasionally, though, this inconsideration becomes a blessing in disguise, as I found out when I visited London this April.
I went to the British Museum, and I couldn’t resist taking a picture of Discobolus. I saw this statue in the books before, and I had previously visited the British Museum and taken a picture of it. But for me, it is a historic statue in more than one sense.

When I was in my first year at the University in 1997, we had a course in Art History and had to pass an exam. The task was to list all (or as many) monuments (sculptures, edifices, paintings) from a particular period in Art History within 40 min. After 40 min. the (now late) examiner collected our papers, checked them immediately and told us, whether we passed or not. I sat next to a girl who had a question about Ancient Greek art and knew it very poorly. This is when Discobolus appears. This statue was made by Myron during the classical period of Greek art (in the 5th cc. BC). The lecturer also touched on Homer whose lifetime – between 8th-7th cc. BC – is seen to have initiated the entire Classical Antiquity.

I vividly remember the girl asking me, if Discobolus was made by Myron or by Homer. I confidently whispered ‘Myron’. Nonetheless, the girl ended up writing that Discobolus was sculptured by Homer during the Myronian period. This true story became one of the best-loved anecdotes of the Faculty of History at the Moscow State University.

This time in London, when I first tried to take a picture of Discobolus, a group of visitors with children was around the statue. The parents did move, but a child, being a child, couldn’t stand still, and eventually I wasn’t satisfied with my first attempt. I decided to wait, but the visitors kept walking up and down the staircase, not even intending to disappear. I decided to wait out and took this picture – I thought it sent an interesting message (right).

Just as the staircase emptied, a couple appeared out of the blue. The woman struck a pose beside Discobolus, the man took a photo of her, and then the woman walked to the man, and they froze at the top of the stairs looking at the pictures they’ve taken. I stood several steps below, clutching my mobile phone and wondering, if they would possibly move elsewhere, so I could have a clear view. The speciality of the moment was in that there were only us three on the staircase, so providing they’d moved I could take a decent shot of Discobolus.

But no, they didn’t move. They were totally oblivious to the fact that the British Museum is one of London’s principal attractions and is visited by thousands of people each day, who may fancy taking a picture of Discobolus. I put it down to the special feelings they shared. Me, I was alone, and my despair was beyond imagination.

I was released from despair by my own roguish spirit. To paraphrase the well-known saying, if Discobolus couldn’t show its unspoilt angle to me, I was going to find an unspoilt angle of Discobolus. I suddenly realised that the majority of pictures of the statue were taken from the staircase. But what about the actual frontal view? Well, here was one.


What a sense of liberation that was! Nothing could stop me now. Another staircase was behind me, which was decorated with a vase. There was something intriguing about a composition involving Discobolus and the vase (left). And then I went as far as to almost lie on the stairs, to take the picture on the right.

So, waiting and not getting to snap Discobolus from a conventional point of view was entirely worth the trouble. Even for me, for whom Discobolus was anything but unknown, to see this sculpture in so many different compositions was a great way to enjoy it again. I know for a fact that next time I’m at the museum, I’ll be looking for something unusual in the objects I might photograph. And so should you – who knows what story you may be able to tell?

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