The Broomway

An ill defined path leads out across a flat, tidal beach, with pools of water, into a distant band of muddy sea. The sky, taking up fully two thirds of the picture, is blue, with the tatty indifferent cotton of low level nimbus clouds just above the horizon.

Sometimes a change in life comes at the speed and force of a motorbike crashing out of control, bouncing off one car and crashing into another, while its rider slides along the road.

The Broomway links Foulness Island to the mainland and is sometimes called the UK’s most dangerous right of way. Most of the time it sits under estuarine water. From the island, looking out at the grey horizon beyond, the crumbling on-ramp down into the water looks like a path to the Land of the Dead. It is so-known because its route was marked by tufts of broom to guide your steps. Along with the fast and deceptive tides there is quicksand, sand craters and unexploded ordnance. You need a guide, and should start your journey as the tide starts its ebb, to give you as much time as possible to pick your way along it.

Last Sunday (1st June 2025), I visited Foulness Island with my friends Dave and Hannah and looked across the Broomway, and even walked a little down it.

On getting home, tired after a long day, I got a call from my brother’s wife to say that he’d had a serious motorcycle accident and was being airlifted to hospital – St George’s in Tooting, where he was born. I said I’d be there straight away and got a cab. On the way, I get the details from his wife. Severe head injuries, severe chest injuries, multiple fractures to the spine. I phone our mum, on holiday in Crete. Police meet me at A&E, with practiced professionalism despite pitying, almost fearful eyes, and say they will go and get my mum, with emergency lights on in both directions. I explain. His wife is in a private, locked room to the side, and I go in and we hug.

It’s clear from people’s expressions, from the willingness of the police to fetch our mum, even from the spartan, lockable room with its offensively neutral wall art and board of information, that it is very possible that he might die.

A consultant comes in, explains the situation and confirms what has been evident in all this hurly-burly of things hadn’t even existed an hour ago: “right now, the priority is to save his life.” And so you sit, and wait, in the unforgiving halogen light, with similarly shellshocked, tired people outside. You don’t panic, you can’t do anything except feel tired, and coaliesce into a sort of frozen, passive acknowledgement that you are in the middle of something bad happening. And you must sit in a room and wait for information.

At some point the consultant from resus comes in and tells us he’s stabilised but in a medically induced coma. He has a clot on his brain and severe chest injuries, mostly on his right side. Good news: his abdomen is intact; liver, spleen, kidneys etc. They let me in to see him. Pale, deep in coma, but recognisably my brother. His body underneath the cover is smashed up, but his face is intact somehow, despite the cranial fractures and head trauma. He doesn’t look dead. But he does look suspended, very far away.

Police go and get my other brother, J’s twin. They are going to move him up to Neuro ICU. This must be about 2:30am. The three of us agree that we will wait until he’s settled in and then go home. There’s nothing we can do of course, but you need to be there, a logic that has governed this last week.

It takes two and a bit hours to set him up in ICU. My brother and I are asked to look at his biking leathers. The air ambulance crew cut him out of them, and there are bloodstains on the inside. There’s nothing to find other than a tenner and his house keys. The police have taken his phone and helmet for analysis. We ask them to dispose of the leathers.

Eventually, we are let in to see him, his smashed body held together by countless cannulas, drains, blocks, wires and tubes. Six or so monitors are dense with information, ready to bleep at the slightest irregularity.

When we leave it is getting light, and I go home and sleep for a couple of hours, while my brother crashes on the sofa. He’s gone when I get up, and I must start thinking about how to inform his work.

Sometimes a change in life comes at the speed and force of a motorbike crashing out of control, bouncing off one car and crashing into another, while its rider slides along the road along his right side. That impact, mangling a human body and a life, sends out ripples, or as my other brother later says, a blast radius. That blast radius communicates not just the fact of the crash, but the violence of it as well, to the people in immediate relation to the rider, in the front line. The mess of a life is also suddenly frozen at a moment like this, as if someone in authority has suddenly shouted ‘STOP’ in a game, and we must pick up and manage the pieces of an imperfect set of relationships and histories, like my brother, now held uncertainly in suspension.

Later in the week someone says ‘it must be exhausting just coming to terms with it all’ And I realise that it isn’t possible to come to terms with anything. There isn’t anything to come to terms with. It’s all uncertainty, and reined in speculation, and not thinking, just waiting, and holding feelings, again all in suspension.

I now write this three surgeries later – spine, arm and scapula, chest and ribs – all successful in their own terms. J himself, has been unresponding, eyes partially open from time to time, looking at you without comprehension, unable to follow nurse instructions, leaving us all completely uncertain still about where he will be, what he will be. That is apart from one miraculous day last Saturday where his eyes were open and he was – impossible to believe – smiling at jokes and trying to speak, despite the tubes going down through his mouth into his stomach and airways. There he is, I thought, there’s J.

He was given an alphabet board to see if it would help him communicate, but he couldn’t spell words and became distressed.

Since then he has submerged back beneath sedation, fever and delirium – a common feature of ICU apparently. There was a day when his breathing equipment came out, but his breathing was too ragged and weak, and they had to put it back in.

Although at one stage he was writhing in bed with pain, temperature, and the itchy skin that can apparently come with morphine, it is unclear whether his right side will regain any mobility.

It goes without saying that the medical staff at St George’s have already delivered a miracle. And it is absolutely clear that the air ambulance team saved his life.

Beyond that?

Foulness Island is MoD land, and like MoD land generally, there is a tension. Underpopulated, as if in the moments or years after some cataclysm, plague, or rules and regs, firing ranges, red flags, barriers, readied against some crisis or disaster.

The Broomway’s path onto and off the island is confusing and uncertain. It is easy, apparently, to overshoot and end up in the sea, and of course then there is the quicksand, sand craters and unexploded ordnance. The incoming tide and its deceptive eddies and runs. Despite how it appeared that day, last Sunday, it is not a path to the Land of the Dead, but danger and uncertainty surrounds it, overwhelms it. When you are on its path it does not look like you are anywhere at all. As my brother makes his slow, painful way back from the moment his motorcycle smashed into a car, from the threshold he was at on that Sunday night in resus, what is the mainland on which he will set foot? What island?

Why am I figuring such a direct emotional experience in this way? Because the overriding sensation in the week after was of being a sort of block of dense nothing. A sort of emotional constipation and fatigue – a draining continuation of that coalescing feeling in the emergency room on the first night. It is inarticulate, and the most natural answer to anyone who asks me how I am feeling is ‘I don’t know. Tired.’ When I sit with him and hold his hand, I just gaze at his face and watch him breathing, and speak to him if he opens his eyes slightly, though if they’re shut I prefer to let him rest. I call this ‘collecting my thoughts’ and although that’s not quite right, it is almost tranquil, just being able to hold that moment, because the radius of moments out from just sitting there with him and waiting for him to get better is meaningless and anchoring emotions in that sand exhausting.

Oh, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!

il generalissimo comes to visit again

Siena: 1300-1350, The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

The National Gallery was waaaaay too busy. Pretty stuffy down in the bowels as well. That said it was gilded, splendid, and moving – full of creative energy bursting out of its form, finding previously unknown things to show. Seeing moments when something new is being discovered, a new way of understanding being expressed, new ways of portraying – I always find it powerful. It makes you want to look around you – where are these things today? Should a new set of wonderful artists appear in some part of the world, almost certainly not this one, out of what things around us would they find their art?

Duccio’s Christ plays with the Madonna’s veil and so symbolises the birth of Renaissance humanism – so it seemed to me anyway – finding living behaviour in a formalised Byzantine icon. I almost said ‘breaking free’ but I think that would probably be a disservice to Byzantine art. This Christ is also a child, and children do this.

Watching bodies take shape in three dimensions – Giotto’s great innovation – solidifying out of the symbolic into the more naturalistic, yes, more playful, more observed, suddenly you get the sense that these are people in the world.

I was struck by the idea of Simone’s paintings of Mary and four saints being in the Siena government offices. To be conducting administration of a city dedicated to Mary, underneath those vivid, extraordinary pictures, which must have seemed very new and astonishing at the time, must have created an equally vivid sense of piety.

Was one effect of the portrayal of the newly human saints, looking very much like the men (and women?) with whom you might transact, to make sainthood itself feel more tangible, to create a typology between being a saint and being a political person? The reverse is also true – it made the portrayal of saints and others political.

Textiles from Turkey, Iran, Cordoba, Mongolia, which provide the distinctive tessellations and intricacies of cloth so distinctive of Sienese painting – fragile scraps of cloth that have somehow made their way across seven centuries – were a reminder, always slightly thrilling, of the commerce between diverse cultures, religions and places throughout history, and how important such transactions are for artistic creativity, the ability to make something new and exciting, fresh.

A Surprising Encounter

On the way to the National Gallery bumped into John, a senior manager for a major competitor, who I last saw in Las Vegas, on Regent Street. Doubly wild because he normally lives in the States. He and his colleagues have all been laid off. A strange start to the day. As always you think ‘what if I’d taken my normal route instead of going a different way and then deciding actually you couldn’t be bothered?’ I suppose the negative side of it is all those serendipitous moments you missed out on by not taking a right you were thinking of taking…

Sinners

Was very good. Having a glorious day, where the community is brought together and lives and revels in itself, in a diptych with a night when it is destroyed by evil, produced a really nice balance – warmest feeling vampire film I’ve ever seen anyway. And not one but two grace notes – one an Inglorious Basterds style revenge on the KKK, the other a rapprochement between the old bluesman and the vampires. I think the whole thing only makes sense with that scene at the end, otherwise the view of religion is too confused. I saw a review say that the characters were one note. Yeah, sure, it’s a vampire flick- it gets a lot into its run time.

Couldn’t believe Washington Phillips’ What Are They Doing In Heaven Today? didn’t roll over the end credits though.

The Skin

Curzio Malaparte’s portrait of Naples at the end of la deuxième guerre mondiale. Very powerful, in that cynical Céline sort of way, which makes it seem like a Bosch painting, or at the very least a Breughel picture.

As well as a sort of monde à l’envers satirical force, i like the dark, mystical power this seems to generate in the corners.

All around us was a glint of eyes in the green shadow, a muted laughter, a flashing of teeth, and a silent gesticulation which clove the rays of light that filter into the alleys of Naples at sunset, a light the color of dirty water at sunset, the ghostly light of the aquarium.

and of the effect of the sirocco:

Even voices sound thick and lazy, and words have an unwonted meaning, a mysterious significance, as though they belonged to a forbidden jargon.

Although I’ve got a strong stomach, even a liking for this sort of stuff, by which I mean like Céline etc, his vignette on ‘the languid hosts of homosexuals’ who ‘descended’ on Naples from over Europe is unpleasant. It may be just that I had finished Alan Hollinghurst’s survey of queer life in London, in the 20th century, whose tropes of disgust and pederasty are matched beat for beat in Malaparte’s depiction. Is it worse than his portrayal of blacks? More importantly, is it worse than his portrayal of anyone?

Generally I would say the purpose, the meaning of satire, is to spare nothing and no one (this slightly deviating from a more traditional punish vice and reward virtue – never really actually what it did… or wanted to do.. anway). And generally Malaparte manages the tone to do so, brutally sympathetic, mocking laughter and caustic pity.

He quotes Theseus at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when, calling on the new moon to rise, he cries, ‘Oh, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!’ It seems like such a great phrase for the breakdown of the politics of the liberal world order through (so Tim Garton-Ash in the FT), amongst other things, the complete breakdown and infection of the information space.

Watching it lose its grip on everything – senescent fingers attempting to hold fast onto something slipping from its grasp – makes you want to sing out with Theseus in anticipation of the new moon.

Music

has been really about Florence Adooni’s wondrous Ghanaian highlife album – fresh, gay, joyous even, cynicism withers  in the face of it, any heavy-hearted dolor evaporates.

also yesterday and today, listening to Melody Maker by Horace Andy, and the Big Youth version, Can You Keep A Secret? Melody Maker is great, but Big Youth transforms anything he’s on. Here, his traditional forceful delivery is also jittery and paranoid – the pieces of paper everwhere seem to evoke dangerous mental disorder or administrative collapse. ‘Can you keep a secret? Can you keep it in your mind?’ In one sense well yes, where else do you keep secrets? But in the sense of this track, it opens up an internal space, your mind as a place to be guarded, hidden from the outside world. All this in front of the haunting wailing of Melody Maker and the eerie  background of Row Fisherman, Row by the Congos.

risotto milanese

i had the best risotto milanese in Milan, perhaps surprisingly enough. the worst was in a carluccio’s in chiswick and was the closest thing to vomit i’ve ever been served anywhere.

this was excellent. a good stock, finely chopped guanciale (rather than bone marrow but nm), and cooked to exactly the texture i like – rice with a slightly hard kernel, suspended neither firmly nor loosely in the butter, saffron, parmesan and starch of the stock in which it’s been cooked. best thing i’ve cooked so far this year (not so far in itself particularly resplendent with glories tbh)

new year, old favorite

Courgette sauce with basil and beaten egg yolk, from Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

An old favourite this. The flavour of the courgette is right at the front, as although it tastes creamy, it hasn’t got any cream in it.

The trick is to ensure the flour and milk binding doesn’t split in the butter, which means it really is a matter of turning the heat right down under the butter and pouring it in bit by bit and stirring constantly.

The Wreck of the Sierra Madre

There is something particularly piquant about the mixture of elements in this story:

Biden to warn Beijing against meddling in South China Sea

A rusting wreck called the Sierra Madre in the South China Sea, with Philippine marines stationed on it, at the centre of a diplomatic flashpoint.

I was mentally tagging this as #futureaesthetic, or “the future’s here today”. Or is it like a projection from the past about what the future would look like? Or is it just that many of the elements here – the wreck, the film name resonating around it all, the name The Second Thomas Shoal, the set up for a new film, about marines on the edge of a global conflict on a rusting hulk, the geopolitical heft focused on this point of fragility – an accidental artefact of geopolitics – feel like they’re of the past, not new, the newness being provided only by the conflict, and even that of course, well established…

Gleanings

It wasn’t the best picture in the exhibition. The Impressionists on Paper was in part curated around capturing the tempo of the early modernist world, the City – the City being Paris mainly – and sketches that caught moments “imbued with our surroundings, our sentiments, the things of our age” (Edmond Duranty). Degas’ ballet dancers, joking with each other at the barre or behind stage. Toulouse Lautrec’s sketched intimacies among the women at the brothel. Others, like Jean-Louis Forain’s Dance Card, conveying nicely a woman practically assessing her options at the dance, expressive of a light, wry humour – the dance card being the perfect example of a ’thing of our age’, an apparently transitory object that nevertheless connects with sex, society, and the night. Moments behind the manners of the age, behind the stage – many of the pictures were of people dressing or undressing, lacing and unlacing, before going out or just coming back, of thrown comments to a passer by, or blurs of faces caught through the windows of cabs (Giuseppe de Nittis’ wonderful In the Cab). Motion and sentiment, little rapidly sketched dance cards, the moments around the performance, the things of our age.

It was a vivid charcoal silhouette by Seurat caught my eye though. It was static and seemed timeless rather than of the moment, and symbolic rather than anecdotal; from a distance across the room at first I thought it an image of Death. The Gleaner. Someone who scratches at the ground of a field that’s been harvested to glean what they can.

So, not Death, what happens after Death has visited. 

Also, forcibly, to me, at this moment, an image of mental decay. What it feels like to be scratching around your mind for information, thoughts, words, that will not come. A sudden, vivid expression of how I’ve been feeling as I experience what seems to be a decay in my mental and intellectual faculties as rapid as the sudden decay of my eyesight.

That dark underlayer of ground the region of information: intractable, obscure, barren and cognate with synapses/nerves tangled, plaqued and sclerotic. Any fruit or grain already reaped and carelessly squandered.

Also maybe what it’s like also to engage in psychotherapy, gleaning from roots and chaff and scattered seeds. 

Seurat's picture The Gleaner, the dark charcoal silhouette of a hatted peasant bending down to scratch at a field for gleanings

Maybe I’m just tired.

Bodies and Faces/Passages and Rubens

Passages is a v good fuck-about-and-find-out 3-hander. Was it Agnes Varda who said that film is all about faces? If it was she said it better, but ever since I heard it I notice it, both in film and as a qualifying aspect of television. It’s not just about size of screen, or rather the size of screen is clearly a cause of the historical importance of the face in cinema so that it is an intrinsic aspect of film, film as method, film as perception, film as definably different from television.

Continue reading “Bodies and Faces/Passages and Rubens”