Photography: new Dimensions.

The kids are tech crazy, grubby fingers reach constantly for every screen within range. Tablets get dropped on wooden floors, smartphones fall into baths and toilets, jam is smeared over touchscreen monitors. The only way to stop em is to give em their own tech, wire the fiends into the matrix in their own right, so I can skip parenting for long enough to watch another video of a skateboarding walrus.
I got Ksenia a camera: I had to in order to get my phone back. It's a cheap tiny digital camera and she has taken 5000 photos in a month, most of them are of her feet or of stretches of skirting board.
Still just as a stopped watch is right twice a day, and a million monkeys will write the De Vinci Code in less than three hours, so she gets lucky.
 These are her best: her first gallery opening, so raise your glasses ladies and gentlemen and give your warmest applause to Ksooooooosha.

Her early work was an exploration of the lived reality of walls and cooking implements. Clearly it had promise, but the critical reception was harsh and undermined her fledgling confidence, which led to a series of self portraits, very much as it did with Rembrandt.

Occasionally she would explore other models, but only if they were very close to her own self genetically, and were distracted by pizza.

Faces so seldom reveal the depth of a persons true character: the radical artist will look elsewhere

"Nu, Zaitz, Nu Pogadi!"

 Her brief foray into examinations of popular Russian culture promised an exciting new departure.

Before the faces came back.

Her approach to abstract expressionism and her deconstructions of colour were considered naive by many critics.

But that she would employ these new tools in a shocking and revelatory reassessment of the possibilities of the self portrait took even the most forward looking of them by surprise. 

 Her re-imagined and bold return to explorations of the very concept of the self seemed to offer untold possibilities.

Then she put a dog in a box

and again.

The extent of the photoshopping was cropping and contrast adjustment, the rest seems to be built in filters on the camera itself.

Archive of a completed experiment.

Life is...

I think, as I get old and impatient that without defining terms you can't really discuss anything of importance. You can talk to another person for sure, and feel it's going somewhere, but mostly it's juggling abstract concepts, and that's no way to get at anything concrete.
Look at this for example.

'What is Life?
(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)
(3) Mrs Woolf: ‘...a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’
(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.
(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].
Which?'
Isaiah Berlin.

We talk about "life" all the time, and imagine we are talking about the same thing, but never define it.
And we could think of another five definitions before breakfast.

Observations on monkey behaviour.

 Zhenya, who is 11 now, has started a new school and it’s just across the courtyard from me. He gets free every day at around three, the old school kept em chained up till five or later.

I liked that.

So he comes over, about an hour before my working day begins in the late afternoons, and it’s good, we feel all grown up and stuff, almost as though we were normal.

  But now, increasingly,  he brings his mates too, up to four or five of them, and they sit in the kid room and fight and giggle and build mountains out of mattresses and pillows to jump onto each others’ heads and, sometimes, they miss and slam into the wall or the door screaming in agony. Whoever breaks the least bones gets to play KILLZONE on the play station at ear-splitting volumes. At least I’m guessing that’s how it works; I’m too scared to go in there while it’s actually its happening and, so I am forced to see what I can deduce from the wreckage after they have left to pursue their unshakeable quest to destroy God’s creation elsewhere.

 Other times their feral brains might stumble by chance on the notion of food and they will flood outwards in search of prey. Any loaf of bread or pound of cheese left to fend for itself in the kitchen will be taken mercilessly and carried aloft in their shrieking midst back into their lair. A sane man had best not ask what happens to it in there.

  Or again, they swarm into my room demanding that I play the guitar. And when they say guitar they mean Rammstein not Renbourne. So I find myself at 3:17 on a Tuesday afternoon playing an impromptu gig to a gang of ex-soviet 11 year olds. They are only about half them Russian most days, the other half being dark skinned Caucasian lads, Georgian or one of Dagestan’s myriad tribes maybe,  or else central Asian kids, Tajik or Kazaks or even Chinese: they all babble in strange kid Russian.

 It’s very disconcerting at times, and asking what Jesus would do hardly helps anymore.

I wrote a poem, as you can if you're not careful.

Ode on a member of the British Conservative Party

Should you wish to see a Tory
Behold him here in all his glory
Schooled by Cambridge, after Eton,
Well suppressed and soundly beaten
But not soundly enough.

The Cinderella profession

  Given time, and a modicum of thought, teaching turns into the best job in the world. John Fowles called it the Cinderella profession, in that everyone in teaching is waiting for a real career to start and. in the world of TEFL , it’s absolutely the case. Everyone seems to be a writer or a journalist or an actor or a director and the average lifespan of the English teacher abroad is about 2 or 3 years. Then they go back home and become tele-sales people or work in a corporation.

 The result of this is that it doesn't take very many years to become a veteran, and if you also learn the language of wherever you are and devote some of yourself to the job, rather than to your self, you turn into a very rare and desirable critter.

  As a member of an endangered species you find, increasingly, that you have your pick of what work is out there. So you escape the class rooms full of bored teenagers and enter the worlds of business, media, or academia, where the clever people live. What’s more you escape the low level learners who need to be coddled through the basics and start to spend your time working with people whose English is already very good and who want nothing more than a conversational partner and the occasional explanation of some abstruse point of grammar or semantics.

  16 years in I still meet ex pats at parties or bars who smile with a tinge of pity when they hear I am a teacher. They are working 60 hours a week for less than I get from 15 hours, and they are working, like real work and stuff. I don’t tell them any more: life is fleeting.

  I go somewhere or I sit at home and meet someone who is generally at the top of his or her profession and I ask them to tell me what they do and how it works and why it matters and then they teach me all about the world, give me 100 dollars and go home feeling happy. Sometimes they are busy so we have to meet in a restaurant so I get a free dinner too.

I often end up thinking I ought to be paying them; it’s a preposterous way to earn a living, and I am deeply ashamed as I put the money in my wallet.

Coming soon to a reality you can't escape

Increasingly age and aging is the subtext to these visits to England. Old friends met after many years are changed in ways I am not and unchanged in ways I am profoundly different. They seem to offer a glimpse of what I might have been had I stayed here, a glimpse that veers between relief and regret, and occasionally veers off into existential horror.

And the parents, my own and those of friends, are now moving into frailty and weakness, this is what's coming then, and here it is, up close. Meanwhile death haunts with more conviction the more people you have seen lost.

And kids grow and become real people with real consequences to their actions. Getting ready to grasp that you are an old, useless fucker.

All of it is obvious, and obvious should mean, boring or unimportant or unworthy of mention. But it's precisely what the Russians were trying to understand when they had Tzars and huge beards and geniuses wandering the birch forests pondering 1000 page novels. And they thought that it is the only story worth telling, what happenes in families under the pressure of time and suffering.

I sit hours with my mother and talk of those who are gone now, my father, her parents, friends, and we see what sense there is to be found in it. And of course as we age we find greater understanding of what was happening to these who were the centre of life when we were last living togethger. I find myself wondering what is amiss in anyone who isn't thinking of these things. Is it fear of death, that old bug bear, that keeps them from ever acknowledging emotionally who has gone? And it is some deep buried regret that keeps them, us even, from looking to youth and where it went wrong? And sometimes you suspect that, if so, then they might know what they're doing.

The street where I grew up is full of old people and health visitors and nurses and, I suppose, fear.

Still, they continue to be Nice.

 The Mosley folk festival was nice, though why they named it after a 1930 fascist leader, is beyond my ken. Oh yes, the folk festival was nice.The people were safe and good  and kind and I feared their smiles for it was as though the national trust had invaded and taken over glastonbury. this was no rave, I smelt one other person smoking blow and saw no one who looked out of it. I seem to be the stonedest man wherever I am here.
 Or it was as though the kids field at Glastonbury in 92 had a long lain and secret plan for world domination and one night had broken forth and taken over the whole festival: the whole world.
The music may have been good, I couldn't say: I watched the ducks on the lake mostly.
Harper came out and did that Harper thing half heartedly, the usual mix of bumbling incompetence and flashes of breathtaking beauty. He was the same in 85.
The following evening passed in kirton village hall, further north, nice young white English people pretending to be from tennessee, but only as they sang, between songs they were earnest, chatty, and very, very English: it is americana sanitised by the women’s institute. The girl, who to give her credit has a beautiful voice, and wishes to be Bob Dylan in 1964, chunters on between songs about aunties in chip shops and a whole host of friends, all of whom are wonderful singers or players or songwriters and it is nice and it is right and it is the village of the damned in which I have found myself.

So I am back in the old place, where my head is full of the whirring clanking machinery of Moscow reality while the world around me is nice,
When we used to go to the dales with friends we always needed to listen to the lark ascending to find the consciousness that fit the world we had entered: here I try The National, but that is all about Moscow,

"If you walk away now, you're gonna start a war. "

Far bleaker and more beautiful than anything they were playing up there to that audience of rich and comfortable people. the folk of lincolnshire spending their sunday evenings listening to nice, nice young people from Bridlington or the home counties singing about Nashville. 
None of this is wrong, but I am angered by their failure to be me, I feel like Rutger Hauer at the end of blade runner: “I have seen things” 
But it makes no sense, to try and speak, and listening is even more painful. Overheard snatches of conversation I catch return again and again to a mutual reassertion of some banal fact of life.
“aye it’s not what is was
No, whatever you say you can’t say it’s what it was
you’d be a fool to say that,
aye. not at all what it was”
And I could join in and trouble them deeply because I know them I have known them all my life, they are who my family could have been were we able to hold the madness off. They were the people in the garden centers and motorway service stations of the first half of my life.
They dress for colder climes than the one they inhabit, there is an abundance of gortex, of complex fabrics and boots that could survive a brutal arctic winter war, worn by people who drive sensible cars down sensible streets in sensible towns to visit sensible entertainment venues and it is good and it is right and something in me wants to scream. And yes I know it’s me, I’m just wrong here where everything is right.

I used to look at them, Tories, Republicans, putinists, whatever form they take, and think they’re rich and they’re old and they’re scared, and what’s more. they are angry because it’s starting to look like the losers had it right, that you can’t take it with you, that all the time and love you gave up simply to be this rich and this old and this scared was the best of it, and the weaklings, the ones you climbed over to get here, they had it all.

That stupid mechanic who ended up with Colleen from school and gave her three kids in a council house by the bottom of the hill, who fixed cars on the front lawn and slept with whores after a Saturday on the piss, he was nothing, but he got Colleen. they didn't: they got ambitious sweet women, whose stupidity was masked for a year or so by a lithe body, a body that got scrawny, while they got fat

Now I sometimes think...

What if none of it really matters if you haven’t done something of stature? What if the achievers are right, in their good suits and German cars? What if there was some kind of purpose? What then?

This is the form my moments of fear take, if I bake too much, then this is what the visitors from planet anxiety, ask me, none too politely

But if you phrase it in the old way, skip the biz speak, and speak of having made something, perhaps even having made something beautiful then the flippancy grows less easy to sustain

Watching the Low Anthem sing Charlie Darwin on later with Jools Holland, and I think that if you met them you could tell them honestly that they had done that and, whatever happened from now on they had already made one thing of profound beauty, and though it might never happen again they had done that. Just as I always felt with Bowie that he could be as crap as he chose in the 80s because he’d given us more than any of us were ever gonna give back to him, we owed him: he had won.

Activities for the elderly

My mother, Jennifer is a woman of impeccable reputation: not in the manner of a Duchess of course, but as a born member of the respectable working class. I am half that still, as are the Brays, (you know...the Brays, the ones with the sharpened hammers) but I don't know how many of that species still exists. It seems to have been driven out of its natural habitat by reality television and the machinations of the credit pushing industry.
 Nevertheless she is one of that old breed, liked and trusted by almost everyone who knows her, first a good daughter to her parents, a good mother to us, later a Nurse, and then a pensioner.
 White haired now, modestly dressed and with a face that seems to draw others to confide, financially comfortable in the safe English way, and the leader of a modest and sedentary life.
She is in short the ideal criminal.
When she skypes me, we cook up schemes, involving cricket bats and random attacks on people we are not overly fond of.
This can be done because she has the crow gene in her: that same demon that possesses my daughter and I has its roots in Mother. It's that old knowing that nothing is actually sacred, that anything can be laughed about with those you love, and the madder the better.
 We plan drives out into the country where she visits people in caravan parks or cottages, uses her infalliably decent manner to lull them into defenceless positions and then reveals the cricket bat and does the deed.
These are not murders, rather nose breakings and Tom and Jerry style clunks on the head. In the shock and confusing arising out of being attacked purposelessly by a polite old lady, she would make good her escape and drive home in her little silver car.
If the police should arrive, she could simply act as though she were bewildered by the very thought that a woman such as her might do such a thing, and the Police would see at once the absurdity of the accusation.
Of course with the number of such crimes the risk of punishment would become more real, but that bridge can be crossed when we reach it.
The only task now is to persuade her that it could be more than a ridiculous skype fantasy.
So much more...

Oh to be in England now that September's there

England again: the hassle of sorting shit out in preparation, Ksuka playing drama queen about being unable to live without me, the companies asking if I can teach extra classes and getting confused when I send them the Scunthorpe address they will need to be at 9 am on Wednesday, even though I told em I’m going 5 times already.

  I used to look forward to England with bated breath then tire of it after a week: now I sort of dread it and then love it when I’m there: this might mean I have become Russian.

The time before last the snow came and it was breathtakingly beautiful,: we walked in white, ghostly forests and felt all that druid shit kicking in. Then last time it was high summer and a dear friend got married and my sister lives in a house that must have been built by an architect who was channelling Vaughan Williams through landscape and brick.

Besides the kids came so that added magic.

  It used to irritate me that life there is so sweet and most people just grumble all the time, or keep saying “Hiya” to me in voices drenched with cheery, cheery, chintziness: half dead and half alive. I don’t get that anymore, people here bitch a lot too and do nothing about it: learned helplessness maybe, but they don’t have the green ink principle of democracy yet: angry letters to bewildered councillors about paving stones and dog shit that actually make stuff happen.

And anyway the internet means it means nothing where you are, if I want BBC or premiership games  it’s 24/7 available, films, books, music: they’re all here on tap constantly, it’s trickier to live without a flood of news regarding Geordie Shore or Beckhams hairstyle, but one struggles on bravely.

I will see Roy Harper, older now than Stonehenge I understand, then I will go north where they sharpen the hammers and walk in the forest watching the leaves turn red.
And maybe I won't want to come back...