Olivia Plender in Kibbo Kift attire (1930's camping uniform)

Train horror as ever, who designed these trains? 4 empty 1st class carriages and 5 packed others stinking like a sewage pipe on wheels filled with impossible luggage that doesn’t fit in the store (clearly the designers didn’t imagine people would want to carry heavy suitcases onto a train and quite right they were too, I am sure they don’t, but they do), the toilet alarm being pressed every 5 minutes - still after 3 years of these ‘new’ trains that problem hasn’t been ironed out. And of course the staff who might as well wear a uniform emblazoned with slogans, like 'it’s got nothing to do with me, I didn’t design it, I don’t work for Virgin, I hate you, there’s nothing I can do about it, die passenger scum' and my favorite Cumbrian catchphrase ‘I ve got absolutely no idea’ and of course the perennial torturous, mean and vindictive ‘is everything alright?’ a question which one never answeres in anything but the affirmative - it's all part of the pain and the zen of acceptance.

Alistair Huson (deputy director Grizedale, Fiona Boundy (director of the A Foundation) and myself spend the 2 days explaining and rexplaining what the TV project we are planning is all about. By the end of it we have refined a much clearer idea of what we are doing and provoked several arguments amongst ourselves - so that’s useful. We also have a long chat with YES the graphics company that Fiona wants to work with. They are arch minimalists, concerned with paper weights (not that kind) and qualities and unusually for graphic designers very upfront about their own critical process with material they don’t personally like. I had suspected as much as they did a fantastic and clever job of destroying a series of 4 pages we did for the A Foundation newspaper in 2006 – I had wondered if it was accidental but clearly not, quite impressive, they made us look like idiots. It’s going to be a challenge working with them but they are nice, perverse and sharp people so whatever, it’ll be engaging.
Giles Deacon (designer for uniforms) is busy but we say hello and meet briefly also with Jeremy Deller (he is working with Alistair on replacing the Greasy Pole - a folk event that requires the climbing of the aforementioned). He - Jeremy - is his usual slightly abstract self, off to look at a colony of greater Horseshoe bats in Devon (they of the nose shaped like a horseshoe), he’s making a bat house! The man doesn’t knowingly go with the money projects.
The interviews for a project manager (TV project) are interesting of course. It's always interesting to hear what people are up to, one interviewee has a particularly remarkable job developing online discussion space for voluntary sector and local government groups, fora for cross fertilization – government funded! We all get really interested in this but sadly we can’t really employ her as she has little experience of working with artists and their ilk and the project has a long and difficult list. We end up in the usual horns of dilemma trying to decide between two people with very different but excellent experience and all that.

On this visit I am particularly shocked by the price of things in London and actually how bad they are. One bar we are in charges 32 pounds for a jug of margarita, a jug entirely filled with ice and charmingly served in a lightly worn/milky plastic jug. The poisonous hotel run by understandably suicidal Poles offers a motorway service station styled breakfast at 17.50, a coffee and a warm flannel of a croissant comes in at a very reasonable fiver. All this after paying 200 for a room in a cardboard warren with a broken TV. Maybe I just don’t get it and this is all an ultrastyle statement reclaiming the 70’s dog eared chic of my youth (Crossroads, The Brothers etc).
The way the UK economy seems to work is that everything is massively ramped up cost wise to provide everyone with huge surpluses of money to buy endless houses around the world. The cost to us being the lowest quality of life in the known world (if you include how vile we all are to each other).

The train return revisits the horror – 2 hours standing on a platform waiting for the delayed train and then having to sit opposite my least favorite thing, a couple who’ve just met (on the platform) and are trying to get to first base by talking incessantly about the minutia of their lives, portraying themselves as the worlds most reasonable, observant and caring people, Jesus 10 minutes into this and if I was them I would be considering a joint suicide pact. ‘The thing with me is I really like old people, call me weird but I just think they’ve got so much to offer, I mean you know they really have experience of life’ and this moments after they had refused to give up a seat to an elderly woman who seemed a little lost. It’s strange conversation, kind of intentionally super dumb so as not to threaten/scare off one another, mating morons.

Fiona tells me Virgin Trains are sponsoring the project.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 13/04/07 at 16:00 : 0 Comments