James Hamilton on Culture, Technology and Art
Not for nothing are Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger the Garreteer film makers par excellence. Their battles against low budgets and wartime authorities should endear them to anyone who has had to deal with pennilessness and bureacracy at the same time, whilst their open propagandizing for less money-obsessed, equal, gentle societies puts them on the…
If you have any lingering notion that British art isn’t riven to the core with ideas of class, consider Alfred Wallis. Because Alfred Wallis, in his lifetime and in the seventy years since his death, has been the most patronised man in the country. Wallis was a Cornishman, a sailor by trade who, on…
These days, Ashington, a former mining town fifteen minutes’ drive from Newcastle, is best known for giving birth to the Charlton brothers Jack and Bobby, World Cup Winners with England in 1966. But before World War II, this place, lacking public library or art gallery, became famous for something quite different: its painters. The story…
It’s because drawing is like singing – something that, if you number yourself amongst those who can’t do it, you feel a bereavement. A bereavement that only self-deprecating humour can offset: you don’t want to hear me sing. Or, from a darker place, the oblique suggestion that the nice people, the likeable ones, can’t sing:…
Ira Glass, US radio personality and producer-host of the radio and television show This American Life perfectly sums up why so many new artists and writers give up. It’s not a perseverance problem, but something at the heart of why artists and writers enter the field in the first place: Nobody tells this to people…
A sermon from an eighteenth century might seem an off-putting place to find advice for leading the life of a Laughing Garreteer. I’ll admit the title is not the catchiest and starting off with a quote from Ecclesiastes – ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity’ – might make this seem like a…
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By James Hamilton In the end, I was in my twenties before two Italians taught me to cook, over a long Easter in a mansion flat high over Wimbledon Common. Little wonder really: as a boy, I’d never really been all that welcome in the kitchen. And an English Sunday dinner, with its roasts and…
Some cookery writers are sometimes a little bit snobbish about dried herbs and spices. Dried may mean less flavour but better that than no flavour at all. As a Garreteer, you may lack a space that is proper for growing your own. The kitchen at Laughing Garreteer Towers, for example, lacks a window and therefore…
Five Easy Ways to Cut Your Supermarket Bill This Week (Or Any Week) Go vegetarian for a week. The meats in your trolley might just be the most expensive things in your weekly shop. Check for special offers before you shop. Your favourite supermarket will almost certainly have a website. It will list special offers…
We chose the Baby Belling as our benchmark cooker because there’s a good chance that that, or something better, will be available to you. But what if you end up living for an extended period with no cooking facilities at all? How do you keep yourself alive and healthy in those circumstances? After all, it…
Although it might at first glance seem to be a guide about what not to do, the cult film Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1986) offers wise advice about positive steps that can be taken when one is strapped for cash. Our two eponymous heroes do not realise that a lack of funds is not…
