Saturday, 27 October 2007
stolen objects
ive been burgled and am now in a phase of considering lost objects - specifically my large maglite torch in metalillic, limited edition, green. But you know whats ironic? they used a cow stick to break the security light, the first act in the burglary. Yet again a stick features as a fundamental object. Funny because only this week i was accused of fetishising a stick , which steve, in supportive mode, said to take as a completement as thats quite a difficult thing to do i.e fetishise a stick. So the cow stick has a new narrative layer, and im going to add it to my collection.
Sunday, 21 October 2007
My dads breakfast story
I like my dads story it is my equivalent of a wheelbarrow. It makes me think that the idea of sending trainee enginners to work with the men who will later entrust their lives to them was a good thing and probably reduced the number of switching errors. It a made me think of the relationship we have to the land and how because we can manipulate it so much with machinary we think we are more incharge than we are - like the floods in Sheffield in this day and age. it makes 1958 seem like a long time ago. I wish I was good with an axe I'd like to be good with an axe and able to draw so if I ever got the opportunity to do these activities in front of other people who could do them they would say "Boy that bloke is good with an axe" or "He has a good hand look at the way he holds a pencil he is clearly very good at drawing" alas I will never be very good with a pencil or an axe I will just have to become good at living with this fact.
The breakfast
It must have been in late October or early November 1958, I was a student apprentice working for Yorkshire Electricity based at Goole. The student apprenticeship trained its candidates to be electrical engineers for the power industry. They believed that, for an overall knowledge, the apprentice had to work in each discipline within the company.
I had already worked with the electricians on housing and industrial wiring and on appliance repairs. I had also spent the summer working at Ferrybridge power station, (the old little one on the river edge).
So it was me for the overhead line section. The staff had a cowboy attitude; ‘the mail has to get through’ spirit. They were tough no-nonsense men. They constantly bantered with anyone who in their eyes didn’t come up to scratch. As a new boy I had to absorb some of this. I mixed in with the best of them and won respect because I would do anything they had to do and was better than anyone with an axe. This was due to me being a lumberjack for nine months prior to working at YEB.
I loved the work - it was extremely variable; marking out routes, erecting poles, fixing steelwork and pulling out conductors and erecting them. It is strange that all this activity took place without mechanical aids but by manpower. By the time I became an engineer all this was replaced with JCBs, Land Rovers and Simon lifts - now only 4 linesmen are needed in a gang.
So back to the old days: a gang had a ‘Ganger’ who was in overall control and a driver, who did nothing but drive a big lorry that transported men sitting on planks across the lorry and all materials to site. The lorry had a lift-off canvas cover which, when off the wagon, was called ‘a Bivvy’. There were four linesmen who did the climbing and two mates who assisted in the climbing, with three labourers lifting, carrying and digging post holes and stay holes. The oldest labourer was in charge of the Bivvy and the fire and messing facilities.
So, on the first day we drove to site and lifted off the Bivvy to the Ganger’s instructions. He was a man of about 58 years at this time called Raith Penistone and it’s his breakfast. ‘Right lads’, he said, ‘Let’s get to it. Les, get the fire going well - we’re gonna supp’ at 1000 –ish’. Everyone set off to perform different tasks over a three to four hundred yard area of open fields. Les Asp was in charge of the fire. This was known as a ‘Fire Devil’ - it was the size of a five gallon oil drum with holes in it to let in the air. Les chopped firewood from scrap poles and lit it in the Fire Devil. We were supplied with coke which was then put in and the whole devil glowed with raw heat until we left site at 1500. Raith blew a whistle at 1000, ‘Get yer arses here’, he shouted, ‘We’ve only got fifteen minutes’.
Raith, being head man, was first to the fire. He carried a shovel which they all used called a ‘Grafter’, designed originally for draining. All the shovels were bright from use. He went into his snap box and took out a large parcel then looked at me grinned and said, ‘This’ll do, they belly good but tha int havin any’. He wiped his shovel on his coat-sleeve, removing most of the mud but not all. ‘What’s tha looking at lad?’ he said to me, ‘It’ll be sterilized in a minute’. He put the shovel on top of the fire. Steam came off after a couple of minutes, the blade was very hot. He opened his snap box, took out a large lump of ham and tossed it onto the plate. He then removed an egg and smashed it, shell and all, onto the ham. It sizzled away merrily. He removed two large slices of white thick bread, placed the ham and egg with shell between the slices and began eating. ‘He’s a real gourmet cook is our Raith, an no mistake’, one of the men said.
After about fifteen to twenty minutes Raith stood up shouted back to work, ‘You lazy buggers’, and peed onto the fire. A cloud of fumes was emitted and everyone dived for the outside. ‘Was that for my benefit?’, I asked someone. ‘It’s for no bugger’s benefit’, was the reply, ‘The daft bugger does it every day’. And he did. He was still doing it in 1965 when I, by then an engineer, shook his hand as he retired. He said to me then, ‘You want ser bad lad but we’ve had some shite doing yer job’.
Gordon Pool
October 2007
The breakfast
It must have been in late October or early November 1958, I was a student apprentice working for Yorkshire Electricity based at Goole. The student apprenticeship trained its candidates to be electrical engineers for the power industry. They believed that, for an overall knowledge, the apprentice had to work in each discipline within the company.
I had already worked with the electricians on housing and industrial wiring and on appliance repairs. I had also spent the summer working at Ferrybridge power station, (the old little one on the river edge).
So it was me for the overhead line section. The staff had a cowboy attitude; ‘the mail has to get through’ spirit. They were tough no-nonsense men. They constantly bantered with anyone who in their eyes didn’t come up to scratch. As a new boy I had to absorb some of this. I mixed in with the best of them and won respect because I would do anything they had to do and was better than anyone with an axe. This was due to me being a lumberjack for nine months prior to working at YEB.
I loved the work - it was extremely variable; marking out routes, erecting poles, fixing steelwork and pulling out conductors and erecting them. It is strange that all this activity took place without mechanical aids but by manpower. By the time I became an engineer all this was replaced with JCBs, Land Rovers and Simon lifts - now only 4 linesmen are needed in a gang.
So back to the old days: a gang had a ‘Ganger’ who was in overall control and a driver, who did nothing but drive a big lorry that transported men sitting on planks across the lorry and all materials to site. The lorry had a lift-off canvas cover which, when off the wagon, was called ‘a Bivvy’. There were four linesmen who did the climbing and two mates who assisted in the climbing, with three labourers lifting, carrying and digging post holes and stay holes. The oldest labourer was in charge of the Bivvy and the fire and messing facilities.
So, on the first day we drove to site and lifted off the Bivvy to the Ganger’s instructions. He was a man of about 58 years at this time called Raith Penistone and it’s his breakfast. ‘Right lads’, he said, ‘Let’s get to it. Les, get the fire going well - we’re gonna supp’ at 1000 –ish’. Everyone set off to perform different tasks over a three to four hundred yard area of open fields. Les Asp was in charge of the fire. This was known as a ‘Fire Devil’ - it was the size of a five gallon oil drum with holes in it to let in the air. Les chopped firewood from scrap poles and lit it in the Fire Devil. We were supplied with coke which was then put in and the whole devil glowed with raw heat until we left site at 1500. Raith blew a whistle at 1000, ‘Get yer arses here’, he shouted, ‘We’ve only got fifteen minutes’.
Raith, being head man, was first to the fire. He carried a shovel which they all used called a ‘Grafter’, designed originally for draining. All the shovels were bright from use. He went into his snap box and took out a large parcel then looked at me grinned and said, ‘This’ll do, they belly good but tha int havin any’. He wiped his shovel on his coat-sleeve, removing most of the mud but not all. ‘What’s tha looking at lad?’ he said to me, ‘It’ll be sterilized in a minute’. He put the shovel on top of the fire. Steam came off after a couple of minutes, the blade was very hot. He opened his snap box, took out a large lump of ham and tossed it onto the plate. He then removed an egg and smashed it, shell and all, onto the ham. It sizzled away merrily. He removed two large slices of white thick bread, placed the ham and egg with shell between the slices and began eating. ‘He’s a real gourmet cook is our Raith, an no mistake’, one of the men said.
After about fifteen to twenty minutes Raith stood up shouted back to work, ‘You lazy buggers’, and peed onto the fire. A cloud of fumes was emitted and everyone dived for the outside. ‘Was that for my benefit?’, I asked someone. ‘It’s for no bugger’s benefit’, was the reply, ‘The daft bugger does it every day’. And he did. He was still doing it in 1965 when I, by then an engineer, shook his hand as he retired. He said to me then, ‘You want ser bad lad but we’ve had some shite doing yer job’.
Gordon Pool
October 2007
i ate it and now i feel a bit sick
Here you are steve, photo really a bit duff but you get the idea, the top one is from memory/ imagination, i deliberately didnt cook one first to inform my visual memory, so its proper true. The bottom one is as i ate, outlines of food and plate as it changed - the activity recorded, no rubbing out, just line overlay. Hope you like them or at least it does what you want .
Just want to say i dont eat fry ups, well hardly ever and so i feel a but sick, also though this is my perfect fry up combination, crispy bacon, fried egg no runny bits, on fried bread and beans. The beans i eat first as their my least fav and then i combine the bacon egg and bread, which is odd for me because i normally eat in order of least fav to best so obviously cant decide between the bacon, egg and bread.
oh my god i can feel im slipping into this......................
Friday, 19 October 2007
Becoming Sausage
Not put off by fear of OCD I post a becoming sausage. But you must take this with a pinch of salt. So Kate - engagement - if we define something or even bring it into existence by measuring it does your idea of the body as scale represent a sort of soft measurement system? If this is the case is this an exploration of space and our personal relationship to it through scale. Is there a connection between the personal relationship to a site and the a bit of what you fancy methodological approach to creating or perhaps defining a library of measures. On a higher level is the project saying something about the personal and the external and giving back control of measurment to it's funtion rather than an external established set of rules.
Thursday, 18 October 2007
An imagined breakfast
I. Imagining the full English breakfast
Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.
Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.
But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.
Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.
Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.
But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.
I. Imagining the full English breakfast
Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.
Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.
But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.
Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.
Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.
But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.
Monday, 15 October 2007
la la la la America
Well paper got excepted for Boston so we have to do something now - I'm concerned about my Carbon footprint if we end up flying. I think they will like the English breakfast thing in notions of the other. Spent today carving a breakfast - it's made from Geleton a grainless wood traditionally used to cut patterns for sandcasting - felt more like prop making than carving but I like it and it made me look closer. It's good to have Tim making comments he clearly thinks about it - or perhaps he just needs some egg and bacon round at our house rather than all them french croissants.
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