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For The Critic

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

After attending St Paul’s, Westminster School of Art and the Slade School – interspersed with stints in Italy and France, of course – he received high-profile commissions to redecorate the Borough Poly dining room, the First Class lounge of Cunard’s RMS Queen Mary (torn out as soon as the directors saw it), and the Russell Chantry of Lincoln Cathedral, where he calmly cast his lover in the role of Jesus.

As a conscientious objector during WWI, Grant took himself off to Suffolk for a spot of fruit-farming (not a euphemism). In WWII, the War Artists’ Advisory Committee hired him to paint St Paul’s Cathedral (small picture of).

Per Bloomsbury, almost anyone who wasn’t directly related to him was having sex with him. This included Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), a woman, with whom he fathered a child and lived, fairly consistently, for more than 40 years. Their progeny, Angelica, later married David Garnett – the former lover of both her father and Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell.

A maid once told Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) “that Mr Grant gets in everywhere.” This famously included the flagship of the Home Fleet, HMS Dreadnought, when Grant, the Stephens, Horace de Vere Cole (I know, I know) et al. dressed up as Abyssinian royalty and were given an escorted tour, complete with marching band.

I’d hoped Grant might have painted Leonard Woolf. But no. So this is his ‘Self Portrait’ (1920).

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House

— The Nelson Evening Mail, December 1 1906
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Coleraine Blackjack is the cheapest porter in the world.

Thomas Nelson was a quintuple agent, serving South Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Australia, and Canada.

You gotta peculate to accumulate.

Bruce Chatwin will release no further books.

In February, the London murder rate overtook New York’s.

In Roman times there was a set price for a slave’s loincloth (new).

Hyenas are the only mammals without vaginas.

Ben Affleck does not have a back tattoo.

The River Dart flows down and down until it meets the West Dart, sending pebbles rolling.

The Cuban flag hasn’t changed since 1902.

Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein invented the emoji.

To use Age of Empires, you need: multimedia PC with Pentium 90 or higher processor; Microsoft Windows® 95 operating system or Windows NT® Workstation operating system version 4.0 with Service Pack 3; 16 MB of RAM for Windows 95; 24 MB RAM for Windows NT; 80 MB of available hard-disk space; 50 MB of available hard-disk for swap file; double-speed CD-ROM drive for gameplay; quad-speed CD-ROM drive for cinematics; Local Bus Super VGA video display (with 1MB VRAM); Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device; sound board plus speakers or headphones to hear audio; 28.8 Kbps modem for head-to-head play. 

In Colombo you can buy healthcare gift-certificates.
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When it comes to the 6 Nations, in recent years the fixtures guys have done well making sure the final weekend sees the big deciders. Tomorrow’s England-Ireland show-down – on St Patrick’s Day! – should be no exception. The Irish have already won the Championship; but now they hope to win the Triple Crown, and claim the Grand Slam for just the third time since the tournament began.

The English will be out to stop that happening. Ireland thumped the champions last year in the final game, denying them the clean sweep (just as they had in 2001 and again in 2011), and this year England’s quest for a third consecutive 6 Nations championship was brought to an early and embarrassing halt – so a bit of reciprocal spoiling is to be expected. (It’s mutual. An Ulster friend sent round a chart two weeks ago, explaining how the English might yet come last.)

I have a little skin in the game. Or blood, at least. My great-grandfather, James ‘Jim’ Sealy (19 March 1876 – 4 February 1949), played this very fixture back in 1896, and scored a try – on debut.

Reporting on ‘A Splendid and Exciting Game’, the (English) Athletic News lamented how from the off the English ‘had a terribly warm time defending… and the wild, energetic rushes of the Irishmen were too much for the phlegmatic Englishmen.’ Penalties were missed, and Brian Moore would no-doubt be amused to know that ‘scrummaging of a loose and scrambling character was indulged in’. Before half-time, however, ‘the Fates smiled upon their [Irish] efforts… when Lee dashed along to the English line, and handing to Sealy at the right moment, gave that youth the opportunity of scoring a try near the posts.’ The English rallied in the second half, but somehow managed to run their only try into the dead-ball area. And so it was that Ireland won ‘a brilliant victory by the following score: Ireland 2 goals (10 points) – England 1 dropped goal (4 points)’. The ‘Critical Comments’ that followed might be fairly classed as poetry.

Pace yer man at the Athletic News, though, that year the Irish did not crack the Triple Crown. They drew with Scotland, 0-0, two weeks later.

A Dubliner born and bred, and captain of the Dublin University team (1898-99), my father’s granddad on his mother’s side played eight more times for Ireland from 1896 to 1900 (W5, L2, D2), during which time the Irish won outright two of three completed championships (there was some rum business about Welsh ‘professionalism’ in 1897 and ’98…).

As the ‘Grand Slam’ per se did not exist until the French joined, the Triple Crown – for beating all the other Home nations – was the equivalent achievement. Ireland won it, for the second time in five years, in 1899, James Sealy helping to defeat Wales in the last fixture, in front of an uncontrollable 40,000 crowd at Cardiff Arms Park. In the entire course of their tournament the Irish had conceded just a single penalty – the first time one had been awarded for tackling the man without the ball.

In his first year as an international, Sealy also joined the British Lions tour of South Africa (W3, L1), playing alongside eight of his fellow Irishmen, including the ‘psychopathic’ Tom Crean (not the Antarctic explorer) and Robert Johnston, both of whom then chose to remain in the country, as doctors, and both won VCs in the Second Boer War. (Sealy did not stay, but years later sent his daughter Brenda there, to marry my grandfather, Gerald Spence Smyth. And thus, eventually, to me.)

Evidently a man of more than passing sporting talent, aside from prowess on the rugby field (where he’s listed as a ‘forward’, in an era when perhaps they were shaped somewhat differently!), he represented Ireland at hockey, and played golf off a plus-3 handicap. In the summer of 1900 he also played in a 3-day game between Dublin University and ‘Marylebone Cricket Club in Ireland’. (Batting – or not – at No.9, he scored 9* and dnb; no bowling. I like to think he might have been the wicket-keeper.)

Presumably at some point Sealy also did a bit of studying. Hanging up his boots, he went on to be a well-regarded barrister, KC, and judge. In 1930 the London Times contained a nib to the effect that he’d been presented with a pair of white gloves, ‘symbols of the lack of crime in the county’ (or, more accurately, a lack of brutal sentencing). He seems also to have had the standard Irish sense of humour – telling an ex-Legionnaire who had been arrested for pulling a gun on a policeman, ‘I think the air here must be bad for you’ – although the records show at least one counsel ended up in contempt for calling the His (Protestant) Honour ‘the seed and breed of Cromwell’.

Yeats would come round to the family home for tea, as would the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde. When his first wife, Stella, died, Sealy – known throughout the family as ‘the Da’ – married Hyde’s daughter Una. All parties, sooner or later, had their portraits done by Sarah Purser, a middle-distant cousin.

In 1928 ‘Judge Sealy’ was elected President of the Irish Rugby Football Union. In the playroom where the young me watched 5 Nations matches while my father polished shoes, there is a framed touch-judge’s flag embroidered ‘France v Ireland’. A minor masterpiece of cockerels and shamrocks, we have one side of it, our surviving uncle has the other. My aunt in Perth, Australia, has the blackthorn stick that it was waved from.

James Sealy lived just long enough to see Ireland win their first Grand Slam, in 1948. As for his playing days, it is established family lore (passed on by one John Beckett, cousin of Samuel and Guinness underbrewer) that Sealy did not merely ‘score’ a run-in try against the English, but that he “crossed the line, festooned with Saxons!” This may well be apocryphal; but it reflects, I think, on a more eloquent time, when all players were not simply credited with having made ‘the hard yards’.

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For The Oldie, in a different edit

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 22 1907

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The Taliban now control more territory in Afghanistan than they did in 2001.

A castanet is a musical instrument that can be used for fishing.

The Yellow Pages was first printed in 1963.

Sri Lankan violinist and composer Lakshman Joseph de Saram is 36% Viking.

During the Terror of 1793-4, young French aristocrats danced jigs upon the scaffold to signify their contempt for revolutionary justice.

Theresa May gargles jobbies.

The first Playboy interview was a conversation about race between Alex Haley and Miles Davis.

The Icelandic word ‘nostaklígja’ denotes the gall-like taste you get in your mouth before you throw up.

­There are no woodpeckers in Ireland.

D-Day did not actually happen on D-Day.

Trends towards simpler language have been observed in US presidential speeches.

The Khmer king was crowned with a bowler hat decorated with ostrich feathers.

The ‘Musician’s Church’ has closed its doors to those who wish to hire it for concerts and rehearsal sessions.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, August 2 1906

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In 1943 a British pilot made an emergency landing on the Italian island of Lampedusa, only to have it surrender to him.

Kelo trees live for up to 3,500 years, and remain standing for another 700.

A ‘BLT’ is a sandwich containing bacon, lettuce and tomato.

Spinal Tap were originally called Lamé, but this soon changed after the named repeatedly appeared on posters without the accent.

24 sitting Labour MPs have died since the year 2000.

After Michael Jackson’s death ’emaciated’ was the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster dictionary homepage.

Gaius Plinius Secundus was the ‘Elder’ of the two famous Plinys.

The little black bits in kiwi fruit are spider cack.

José Mauricio Nunes Garcia’s Missa Dos Defuntos is a very obvious rip-off of Mozart’s Requiem.

Arthur C Clarke owned a Sinclair C6 electric vehicle.

The Fountain Café in Walliston, Surrey, dispenses the nastiest coffee south of Manchester.

Many C.19^th paintings are believed to have used pigment derived from pulverised Egyptian mummies.

You don’t need a sense of humour in paradise.

 
Arte Povera – affordable art
Brücke, die – German successors to the Fauvists (later disbanded amid accusations of Fauvoritism)
colour – the new ‘black’
deconstruction – critic’s hatchet-job
Edvard Munch – AaaaaaaaAAAAARRRGHH!!
Freud – act of ripping people off
Gauguin – one employed in knocking out Tahitian pearl necklaces
homage – plagiarism
installation – what curators do
Johns/Jaspers – suckers punters
kunst – art-dealers (those committing Freud)
Land Art – gardening
modernism – everything since 1872
Neo – ‘new’. As in Neo-Expressionism: expressing old ideas for new money
Objet Trouvé (‘found object’) – where there’s luck, there’s brass
Pompidou – the 19th President of la Republique Francaise. Not an artist
‘Qu’est-ce que le (freakin’) deuce?!’ – French expletive (cf. spazialismo.)
Ryman – retail stationer, Brit. Sells pens, paints, white canvasses, etc.
‘spazialismo!’ – most-frequently uttered put-down in contemporary art criticism (recent 12-month survey conducted by the University of Aesthetic Studies, Milan)
Tjapaltjarri – Aboriginal onomatopoeia indicating intellectual mortification
uglée – work of self-evident genius
video art – film
white –
 

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From the programme for Broken Leg Theatre Company’s sell-out production of Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art’, British Council, Colombo, July 1st-3rd.