Tag Archives: London

October 5, 2012 · 10:25 am

Popping Cork Street’s Bubble

For those of you who are not particularly interested in the art world, the news that London’s Cork Street is about to undergo a major redevelopment may be of little interest.  Following on the heels of the eviction of the Gemäldegalerie collection of Old Master paintings in Berlin, which I wrote about last week, it now appears to be the turn of the modern and contemporary art world to feel the boot.  That being said, in the case of London, perhaps this will be a good wake-up call to the present art establishment in Britain that they do not have permanent control over the cultural narrative which they believe they hold by right.

Historically Cork Street in London’s Mayfair district has been the home of many of the city’s major sellers of modern and contemporary art since the previous century, probably due in part to the fact that the Royal Academy is very close by. Painters like Francis Bacon and Joan Miró first found their major British patrons here, as each gallery tried to compete to identify the next big thing in modern art, a process which continues to this day. Other streets around Cork Street itself have taken up some of the slack as well, since the amount of available space is limited, though for a certain well-heeled segment of the population, having a Cork Street address has remained the most prestigious thing you can hold as a modern/contemporary art dealer, rather like having your suits made on nearby Saville Row.

Personally, although I did go to Cork Street quite a bit when I lived in London, I spent most of my time on that particular stretch of pavement visiting friends who worked there, or patronizing fine drinking establishments bearing that address.  My “beat” was Old Master painting, which has its own stomping grounds on Bond Street and Albemarle Street in particular, not far away.  As it happens, from the point of charm or architecture there is little or nothing particularly attractive or even gracious about Cork Street itself to commend it to the visitor: it is simply another street in the West End, with lots of store fronts and a mixture of brick, Portland stone, and concrete buildings.

However even if you have little or no knowledge of modern and contemporary art, the name “Cork Street” itself has become practically synonymous with new ideas in art over the past century, and is often referenced or visited in literature or screenplays.  In John Galsworthy’s monumental “Forsyte Saga” for example, the respectably Edwardian Forsytes end up being dragged into the avant-garde world of the 20th century in part through the association of members of their family with Cork Street. In one sequence, Soames Forsyte unwittingly visits an art gallery owned by his Cousin June, whom he has not seen since a falling-out some time ago, and is perplexed by a contemporary painting on display entitled “The Future Town”:

“Soames!”

Soames turned his head a very little.

“How are you?” he said. “Haven’t seen you for twenty years.”

“No. Whatever made you come here?”

“My sins,” said Soames. “What stuff!”

“Stuff? Oh, yes–of course; it hasn’t arrived yet.

“It never will,” said Soames; “it must be making a dead loss.”

“Of course it is.”

“How d’you know?”

“It’s my Gallery.”

Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.

“Yours? What on earth makes you run a show like this?”

“I don’t treat Art as if it were grocery.”

Soames pointed to the Future Town. “Look at that! Who’s going to live in a town like that, or with it on his walls?”

June contemplated the picture for a moment.

“It’s a vision,” she said.

“The deuce!”

- John Galsworthy from “The Forsyte Saga Vol. III: To Let” (1921)

Now, as real estate prices in London continue to escalate, international property developers have decided to demolish two large buildings on the street, replacing them with luxury residences and mixed-use space. This will involve the eviction of eleven existing art galleries, seven of which have already been told to vacate their premises by June of this coming year, including the oldest continuously operating on Cork Street. Naturally the art community in London is rather upset, and protests have been lodged with appropriate authorities.

To now, the reaction from government has been that property owners are free to do what they wish with their own properties, and canceling a lease with advance notice is without question the right of the landlord over the tenant.  Moreover, it is not the role of the state to proscribe that commercial art galleries must be preserved on a particular site or street. Given how far into socialism Britain has fallen in recent decades, this rather common-sense approach is rather surprising, I must say.

While from a historical perspective no doubt many will be sad to see the end of this enclave and its affiliation with the art world, in truth such things are almost inevitable.  Cities change with the passage of centuries, and the center for the production and vending of a particular commodity shifts as well.  After all, it has been quite some time since lime was processed and sold on Lime Street in The City, the term for London’s financial district and historic center, and there hasn’t been a “May Fair” in Mayfair, from which the neighborhood’s name originally sprung, since 1764.  Cork Street in the 18th and 19th centuries had nothing to do with the art world, and over time the galleries presently located there will likely pop up somewhere else.

Although it is unfortunate when communities fall apart, perhaps this change can be viewed as a positive development.  By shaking things up and having to re-think their identities, the better galleries will survive in some new fashion, the weaker ones will fold, and new ones will take their place, in some other corner of the British capital.  Nothing we human beings make with our own hands lasts forever, which we must keep in mind in this life, but sometimes these experiences of shaking things up or loose is just what we need to change course and do something positive.  And no doubt many in the contemporary art world could use just such a good bursting of their balloon.

View of Cork Street, London

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September 19, 2012 · 10:24 am

Looking Back at London

If you have ever moved to another city, another country, or another continent for any extended period of time, gentle reader, then you know that the first few days you spend there are some of the most vivid memories you will take away from that place.  You may of course forget some of the later things that happened once you settled in, and began to see the place as your home.  However this is why I want to encourage those of my readers who are going to be living somewhere far from home for awhile, to make an effort to write down their experiences and observations now, in order to be able to draw upon them later.

Reading my updates on Facebook this morning I had a bit of a shock, realizing how quickly time seems to pass.  A good friend from here in the States had just arrived in London to begin a year of graduate school there, and I saw the news that he had safely arrived at Heathrow posted in my timeline.  It suddenly dawned on me that it was 15 years ago, in September of 1997, that I moved to London for the first time.  I could not help but sigh a little, as I thought about what my friend would be experiencing, as this was his first time ever in London.

To give you some context about what Britain was like at the time when I first went to live there, I arrived exactly one week after Princess Diana’s funeral on September 7, 1997.  The Labour MP Tony Blair had only been Prime Minister for four months, after decades of Tory government under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and the most popular British musical act at the time was The Spice Girls, who had only released their debut album in the U.S. earlier that year.  The Queen Mother was still going strong, mobile phones were seemingly all made by Nokia and about the size of a television remote control, and internet was exclusively of the dial-up variety (and very, very slow.)

As weird as it may sound, I can remember my entire first day in London on September 13, 1997, as if it were yesterday.  If you recall the expression of “having your wits about you,” I would say not only did I have all of mine about me, but they were firing on all cylinders.  Everything was new and interesting, and there was this strange sense of having landed on another planet.  For although the language was the same, many details of everyday life were handled completely differently.

For example, once my cab had dropped me off at my halls of residence on Regent’s Park – no Heathrow Express to Paddington in those days – I decided to see how long the walk was from there to where I would be studying, close to Piccadilly.  I remember looking at the words painted on the asphalt at intersections as I made my way through the car park and around the side of the building, which read, “Look Right” or “Look Left”.  I did not quite understand what they were for, until I started walking down Portland Place, and crossed an intersection without looking in the direction indicated.  As I did so a car came whizzing past honking its horn at me, and I had a near-miss with getting flattened within minutes of arriving in London.  From then on, I was quite careful to read what was on the ground before I stepped onto it.

Feeling a bit shaken and deciding I had better calm myself and call home, after a couple of blocks I spotted the BBC and All Souls Langham Place, both of which I knew from a lifetime of watching British television shows.  Across the street were three red telephone boxes in a row, standing at the side of a rather grandiose Victorian building, which I later came to learn was the Langham Hotel.  I chose one and made a telephone call to my parents, waking them up at about 5:00 a.m. Eastern to let them know that I was there and safe.

They were happy to hear from me, particularly my Father who is more the Anglophile of the two, and as I looked about from inside the phone box describing what I saw, I spotted a cafe across the road and down a little ways.  I told them I would head there to get some caffeine and try to call them again later, after I had done some exploring.  I could not have known it at the time, but later I ended up spending many, many hours in that Italian cafe/deli, using it as a place to study and write, and to meet up with friends, since it was centrally located but not a major tourist draw.

However rather than ordering their – excellent, as it later turned out – coffee, I must admit I bought a bottle of Snapple Iced Tea imported from the U.S.  It was warm, and the thought that I would be able to have American iced tea despite being far from home was rather encouraging.  As I continued down Regent Street sipping my beverage, I passed a news agent’s – which again, as time went on I would come to patronize regularly for magazines and for postcards – and noticed that they had that day’s New York Times for sale.  I realized that although I was in a different country and a different culture, there would still be plenty of things from home to keep me connected to the other side of the pond.

That was the beginning of a wonderful day, which included visiting my school and running into some of my classmates who were also figuring out the lay of the land; visiting what would come to be my parish in Mayfair for the first time; having my first gin and tonic in London at The Marlborough Head just north of Grosvenor Square; and coming back to my residence to find that a friend from high school was in town from Cambridge, and would be returning later that evening to meet up and go to dinner.  This is not a testament to any particularly astounding powers of memory on my part, mind you, but just an inkling of how much of an impact that first day in London had on my memory.  It is something I still treasure.

And if for some reason I should forget all of this, thank goodness I had the sense to keep a journal during both of my stints living in London.  It runs to many volumes, and though I must confess I have not sat down and cracked open these books in years, I do know they are there if I ever want to do so.  Perhaps with the realization of this anniversary, it might be a good time to revisit them, and recall some of the things I experienced, but have forgotten with the passage of time.

In the end that was the one piece advice I emailed to my friend today: that he makes sure to keep a journal for the year he will be living in Blighty.  No one knows what the future holds, and whether his experience will be as rewarding as mine, but having these memories to draw upon undoubtedly makes your life, and your understanding of the world in which you live, much richer.  Whether the city is London, Vienna, or Poughkeepsie, take the time now to write about what your impressions and thoughts are, so that you can relive those experiences later.


Phone boxes at the side of The Langham Hotel
Langham Place, London W1

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July 24, 2012 · 10:53 am

London’s New Orbit Tower: An Olympian Failure

While watching news coverage of the lead-up to the London Olympic Games over the past few days, I became aware of the existence of the Orbit Tower, more formally the “ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower”, which is without question one of the ugliest public monstrosities that Britain has built to date, at least since the “Cool Britania”-era Millenium Dome – now known as the O2 Dome –  was plopped down like a rusting metallic jellyfish impaled on a sea urchin made out of Tinkertoys along the south bank of The Thames in Greenwich.  The difference between the two, of course, is that we are told that the Orbit Tower is in fact a work of sculpture in the form of a building, whereas the Millenium Dome is simply a building.  This means that we can be force-fed different ways of looking at the issue by the press, by Olympic organizers, and by those whose goal is to advance their own social-climbing, as is the case here.

The line between sculpture and building can of course become blurred. The famous Statue of Liberty at the entrance to New York City’s harbor is both a sculpture and a building. Lady Liberty has stairs, rooms, and so on inside of her, but appears to be a giant sculpture from the outside, because she is clad in her iconic copper skin, gone verdigris from time and the elements.  The Eiffel Tower on the other hand, was not intended to be a sculpture but a building, designed to be an entrance gate to and an observation platform for the World’s Fair – or more properly, the Exposition Universelle – held in Paris for the centenary of the French Revolution. Over time, some critics have called it more akin to a work of sculpture since it serves no practical purpose, and has sculptural qualities.

In fact the Eiffel Tower is a good point of comparison for the Orbit Tower, for despite the fact that the former was considered a building and the latter considers itself a sculpture, both serve the same purpose, which is no real purpose at all. Neither tower was particularly popular at the time it was built, either. However what has changed in the century or so since the construction of the former has been the gradual deterioration of all sensible debate over the question of whether a work of art or architecture is actually any good.

Back in Eiffel’s day, a who’s-who of the French art and literary establishment tried to get his tower stopped, complaining that the construction of what would become, and still is, the tallest building in Paris would ruin the skyline. “To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.” Guy de Maupassant, quite possibly the greatest short story writer in France, supposedly ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant every day in protest, saying it was the one place in Paris where you could not see the Eiffel Tower. Nowadays, of course, most people (though not this writer) love the Eiffel Tower for its lacy symmetry, and cannot imagine Paris without it.

Will people one day say the same of the Orbit Tower? The answer is almost certainly no, though I am prepared to revisit this blog post in 20 years’ time and see whether public reaction to it has changed. It is an asymmetrical, twisted mess, demonstrating no talent or ability other than that of wasting other people’s money, and then daring anyone to question whether it is any good by bringing out the black turtleneck brigade to attempt to insult those with common sense.  It looks for all the world as though someone forgot to do their class art project until the night before it was due, and then rapidly scrunched together a bunch of odds and ends from around the house, and said, “Here: this is art.”  Art it may be, but bad art it certainly is.

In fact the designer of this structure, the untalented but inexplicably popular sculptor Anish Kapoor, has said that he was inspired by – brace yourself – the Tower of Babel. “There is a kind of medieval sense to it of reaching up to the sky, building the impossible. A procession, if you like. It’s a long winding spiral: a folly that aspires to go even above the clouds and has something mythic about it.” However the Tower of Babel, lest you forget your Genesis, was a story about human ego and pretension, hubris and failure: about how man sought to make himself equal to God, and how he failed miserably.

That whopper of a quote aside, quite possibly the most head-scratching statement I have read thus far on the Orbit Tower comes from Lakshmi Mittal, often listed as the richest man in Britain, and the man without whose deep pockets, bad taste, and need to climb the social ladder the project might never have come to be.  Mittal apparently told the Associated Press that people just need to get used to the building – er, sculpture.  ”People are still trying to criticize the Mona Lisa,” he says.  That is true, except there is one major difference: if you don’t like the Mona Lisa, you don’t actually have to go to The Louvre and look at it.  Londoners who live within sight of this utter waste of materials, manpower, and money are going to have to look at this doomed-to-demolition monstrosity every day for the next several decades, until a more sensible generation has the sense to knock it down.

So, enjoy your broken roller coaster wrapped around the Seattle Space Needle for as long as it stands, London. My guess is that about 24 hours after the games end, petitions for this tower to be demolished will begin finding their way to Boris Johnson’s office.


The Orbit Tower, London

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June 2, 2012 · 3:16 pm

Queen Elizabeth II: A Catholic Appreciation

This weekend world Anglophiles, such as yours truly, are enjoying the celebrations surrounding the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.  For those who wish to watch some of the events taking place this weekend in London, the BBC (including BBC America here in the U.S.) and the CBC are two of the best places to see live coverage of the numerous ceremonies.  I am particularly looking forward to seeing the Thames Pageant tomorrow morning before mass, in which over 1,000 vessels of all sorts will float down the Thames in London in honor of the Queen.

However as we discussed during the recording of the Catholic Weekend show today over at SQPN, one thing which is often overlooked with respect to the reign of the present Queen is the gracious effort she has made to reach out to Catholics.  She has done so in ways which some of her ancestors, such as Elizabeth I, would have found surprising, to say the least.  Anti-Catholicism has long been a problem in Britain, and it sill exists in some places. However in leading by example the Queen has shown what it means to be a true lady: someone who is welcoming, knows who she is, treats others with the respect they deserve and is deserving of respect in return.

The Queen is, of course, the head of the Church of England, which is something a bit hard for Americans to get their heads around, at times.  Imagine the President of the United States also being the head of your religion, and you get something of an idea.  The history of Catholicism in Britain since the split with Rome is one marked by a great deal of tragedy and centuries of legally-enshrined discrimination, which probably to the surprise of many of my readers still exists at the present time.

And yet despite this, it is worth pointing to the outreach that this Queen and the Popes have made to one another over the past several decades.  For example, she met with Pope Pius XII while she was still Princess Elizabeth; she also had a private visit with Blessed Pope John XXIII in 1962. In 1980 Elizabeth II made a state visit to meet with (now Blessed) Pope John Paul II, during the course of which she formally invited John Paul II to come on a pastoral visit to Britain.  Accordingly, Blessed John Paul II came to visit in 1982, an event which was considered an extraordinary success as well as an historic first, as the first sitting pope to visit the United Kingdom.

During the Church’s Jubilee year of 2000 the Queen came to visit Pope John Paul in the Vatican again, in commemoration of their first meeting twenty years earlier. By this time of course the Pope was already visibly suffering the long, painful decline in his health, but the Queen appeared as radiant and happy to see him as she had been twenty years earlier. At their meeting the Pope acknowledged the difficult past between the Vatican and Britain, but noted that “in recent years there has emerged between us a cordiality more in keeping with the harmony of earlier times and more genuinely expressive of our common spiritual roots.”  I daresay that part of that cordiality stemmed from the personality of the woman seated across from him as he gave his remarks.

When John Paul II died five years later, the Queen’s example was mirrored in the actions of her government and her son. Not only did the British Prime Minister attend the Pope’s funeral, which is something in and of itself, but many may not remember that Prince Charles actually postponed his wedding to Camilla Parker-Bowles so that he could attend the Pope’s funeral and represent the British Crown. The Queen herself issued a statement at his death offering her condolences, and noting the work that the Pope had done, trying to bring peace around the world. No doubt Henry VIII was spinning in his grave when he heard that.

Afterwards of course, came the historic state visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain in 2010, when he met with the Queen for the first time at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, and later made his exceptional address in Westminster Hall at the Houses of Parliament in London. When they met, in her welcoming speech the Queen acknowledged that the Pope would be beatifying Cardinal John Henry Newman, probably the most seminal figure in the rebirth of Catholicism in Britain, during his visit. “I know that reconciliation was a central theme in the life of Cardinal John Henry Newman,” she noted, “for whom you will be holding a Mass of Beatification on Sunday. A man who struggled with doubt and uncertainty, his contribution to the understanding of Christianity continues to influence many. I am pleased that your visit will also provide an opportunity to deepen the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the established Church of England and the Church of Scotland.”

As pointed out on the Catholic Weekend show this morning, symbolism matters. The fact that this elderly woman in her 80′s continues to hold the fascination of so many people around the world I think has less to do with glamour and glitz, and more with an appreciation that she, too, understands the power of symbolism. She does what her country needs her to do, and while we may think that work is easy, or extraordinarily well-paid, the sacrifices and personal losses she has had to bear as a result of not being able to relax, take it easy, and be just a normal granny like everyone else her age, are things I daresay none of us could reasonably be capable of fathoming.

In the case of the present monarch and her outreach to the Catholic Church, unimaginable to previous generations of Britons, I think she “gets” it. She appreciates that her visits to Rome, and the Pontiff’s visits to her realm; the warmth both sides have shown to each other during those visits in trying to make sure everything goes perfectly; and the interaction that the Queen has made with the Catholic hierarchy in the UK – going so far as to refer to the late Cardinal Hume as “MY cardinal” and attending Vespers at the Catholic cathedral in London – have gone a long way toward normalizing relations between her country and the Catholic Church, after so many years of unhappiness.

I for one will be raising my glass to Her Majesty this evening, to thank her for her efforts to reach out to Catholics in her country: your very good health, Ma’am.

Queen Elizabeth II meeting Blessed Pope John Paul II at The Vatican,
October 17, 1980

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April 9, 2012 · 10:43 am

When It’s Not Only A Game

The fact that it is now baseball season in the United States means little or nothing to me, however heretical that view is considered to be in this country.  To be fair, I do not worship at the altar of baseball any more than I do those of most other athletic endeavors. That being said, this is one of those rare occasions when you will be able to read a sports-related post from me, in response to a deplorable event which took place over the weekend.

I suspect most of my readers are unaware of the fact that the annual event known as “The Boat Race”, between students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, took place this past Saturday.  Every year two teams of rowers set out to race each other along the Thames, in a competition that has been held in London since 1856.  It was an event I attended when I lived on the other side of the pond, since I had a number of friends who had rowed for Oxford, though truth be told I was not particularly interested in it apart from the social aspect.

On Saturday I happened to catch the race on television, which I watched more out of nostalgia than anything else.  It was a very close race indeed, for much of the course, when probably about 2/3 of the way through the race suddenly came to a halt.  Someone was swimming in The Thames, and came very close to one of the boats.  Had it not been for the swift action of the teams, he could have been injured, or killed.

It turns out that this individual was – not surprisingly – a leftist protester, who was decrying the elitism of the event by employing the sort of anti-social behavior which of late we have come to expect, and for some inexplicable reason to tolerate.  It is also not surprising that, like most of these sorts of protesters, it turns out this individual is something of a joke, having attended the prestigious and pricey London School of Economics, and is moreover an active member of the Royal Society of Arts.  My friend Tim Stanley, a Cambridge alumnus with whom I was furiously texting about the event as it unfolded, shared some of his thoughts about the matter on his blog post for The Telegraph.

As a Yankee rather than a Brit, and as a non-athlete, I cannot speak with authority as to what took place, even though it was pretty obvious that even when the race resumed, this disruption ruined the event and it ended terribly. However as a human being, I can certainly share a thought or two, and particularly as someone who in general has little or no interest in athletic competition whatsoever, yet recognizes its value.  No doubt some of my readers will find what follows to be judgemental, and if you are one of them then I welcome you to leave comments saying as much, so that we can discuss the matter further.

Putting aside for the moment the very serious, physical danger that this person put both himself and the crews on the river in as a result of his actions, in which he and others could have been killed or injured, his stated intent is irrelevant, and I will not consider it herein. If you wish to read why he claims he did what he did, you are welcome to read it elsewhere, and then dismiss it for the utter rubbish it is.

The real reason he did this, whatever protestations one might lodge to the contrary, was that this person wanted to engage in the very same selfishness which he paradoxically claims to be protesting against. If he found the event, its sponsors, and participants, to be elitist, what has he made himself by becoming a media personality and drawing attention to himself? For surely he is no longer a humble man of the people – or at least, the people who hold degrees from LSE and are members of exclusive clubs.

The ones I could not help feeling sorry in all of this were the athletes.  They had trained for this event for months leading up to the competition. They sacrificed sleep, rest, food that one would actually like to eat, and suffered all sorts of physical injuries and mental and emotional stress, in order to get ready for the race.  As someone who is decidedly not an athlete in any way, I cannot even begin to imagine the disappointment of how what had been a well-matched, exciting competition that had started out with a bang, ended in a whimper.

The point of participating in a team sport, of course, is that it is an exercise in not only trying to get your body as healthy as possible, but also to learn how to work with others – indeed, sometimes individuals very different from you – in order to achieve a common goal.  It is no accident that the lessons athletes have the opportunity to learn in being part of a team are helpful in all aspects of life. This includes venues such as one’s profession, representative government, community activities, and the like.

The idea of tempering individualism through teamwork, helping to work toward a collective goal, directly leads to the creation of civilization and culture. The individual and the team have to work in balance with one another, or everything falls apart. Too much individualism, and you get anarchy; too little, and you get communism. Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals, or modern suspension bridges may have had a single designer behind them, but they were not built by that one man acting independently, any more than Mozart could have performed all of the instruments in one of his symphonies simultaneously, or Steinbeck could have written, printed, and distributed all of his novels by himself.

This is not to say that the lone protester cannot be a voice for change or a symbol of what is good, in the face of unrelenting evil. One need only look at people such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or St. Maximilian Kolbe to see that this is the case. Yet here, all that the protester in question has done is to ruin something that was perfectly good: an athletic competition between two schools. No one was forcing him to watch it, or to purchase anything in order to be able to watch it. He could have peacefully sat and viewed the race on the river bank, on television, or ignored it altogether, as he wished. There was nothing compulsory about this event.

Instead, this person chose to act out of selfishness, to ruin a once-in-a-lifetime event for groups of young people who had no quarrel with him, and who were not doing anything evil. By acting as he did, this man proved himself to be, in truth, nothing more than a child; he is no different from one who kicks over another’s sand castle at the beach, just for the sake of drawing attention to himself, while simultaneously intentionally seeking to hurt the other. He is, unfortunately, all too representative of the society that produced him, and which continues to believe that behaving like an arse is somehow going to change the world, when in fact all it does is make those of us who do not behave in this way the more resolute not to follow his example, nor listen to his views.

So in the end, albeit paradoxically, one has to say it: good for you, Thames swimmer. You have no doubt helped the cause of law and order, conservatism, and disdain for so-called “progressive” causes more than any letter to the editor which you might have published in The Guardian, or some similar birdcage liner publication. For that, at least, we can be grateful to you, even if it is no comfort to the student athletes at Oxford and Cambridge who suffered as a result of your selfishness and immaturity.


Poster for the 1923 Boat Race by Charles Paine
London Transport Museum

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