The Radio 2 traffic news this morning said that the A1 was closed in three places due to flooding, and looking at the BBC website I see that a car park in Morpeth where we tried and failed to find a parking space last week is under three feet of water, and that the road to Rothbury from the east that we used several times during our garden visits is shut. Trains on the east coast main line are disrupted by rain as well. We turn out to have enjoyed our lovely holiday just in time, leaving Northumberland as if we were on the last flight out of Saigon. I feel terribly sorry for the residents of Morpeth, which is a delightful town, and for the bagpipe museum, which must be flooded by now, though at least the bagpipes are kept upstairs.
I went up to London today to see the Munch exhibition at Tate Modern before it closes on 14th October. As I ran up the platform at Colchester for the 10.30am intercity from Norwich the guard opened a door for me, and as I gasped my thanks and collapsed into a seat in the quiet coach I thought that maybe travelling by train was quite civilised after all, buoyed by my recent lux experience on the Edinburgh train. This feeling of satisfaction lasted all the way to just outside Liverpool Street, where the guard announced that travellers on off-peak saver tickets could not return between 4.30pm and 7.00pm, and anyone travelling then with a saver ticket would be liable to pay a full single fare.
When Greater Anglia took over the franchise this year they upped the cost of an off-peak day return from £24.80 to £28.50, an inflation-busting increase of fifteen per cent, and as a compensation trumpeted the fact that the evening restrictions on homeward travel no longer applied. I hadn't seen any notices at Colchester warning me that they'd come on again, so I asked at the information desk at Liverpool Street whether this was indeed the case. The man on the desk said that if they had nobody had informed him, but declined to offer any reassurance that they hadn't, instead suggesting I go and ask in the ticket office. There was an extremely long queue for tickets, which I didn't really fancy joining, so I asked one of the platform staff standing by a ticket barrier. She didn't know, but went away to ask and returned saying that she'd asked a ticket inspector, and there were still no restrictions on return travel with an off-peak day return.
As it happens, I was all done and dusted in time to leap on to the 3.30pm Norwich train to go home. Out of interest, I asked the ticket inspector when she came by whether I would be able to return home with my ticket between 4.30pm and 7.00pm. Without blinking, she replied confidently that I would not. I expressed my surprise that restrictions had been reintroduced with no publicity to passengers, and she spent a long time interrogating the list of restrictions on the ticket machine around her neck, before telling me that she was wrong, I could get any return train with the off-peak, just not with the super-saver, but she never worked the later trains so wasn't familiar with the restrictions.
At Colchester I thought I'd have a look and see if there was a notice at the ticket desk giving permitted times of trains. There wasn't, that I could see, but since there was no queue either I found myself facing the man behind the window, who asked what I wanted. I presented my used return ticket and asked, for the umpteenth time today, whether I could use it on any train, and he said that I could. I explained about the announcement on the morning train and he said that would be referring to super-savers. At this point a ticket inspector who was leaning against the desk joined in, asking amiably which train I'd been on this morning. When I said it was the Norwich train he said ah, the problem was that there were different restrictions applying to passengers travelling from Ipswich as compared to Colchester, and that the Ipswich passengers couldn't travel during peak evening hours. The man behind the window then observed that when he had caught a Norwich train home recently he had seen inspectors pulling over Colchester passengers with off-peak returns. I asked if there was somebody I could write to about this plethora of inaccurate passenger information, and the man behind the desk gave me a Customer Comments leaflet, while the smiling inspector told me the names of the two relevant managers in Norwich. I rather gathered that their sense of solidarity with passengers from Colchester was greater than it was with the management in Norwich.
I am going to write and complain. It will be have to be a letter, since the space in the Customer Comments leaflet isn't large enough to fit the whole story in. I am a seasoned, travel-hardened ex-commuter. Equipped with a Kindle and enough money for a lot of cups of tea plus no further commitments this evening I can afford to take a relaxed view and spend a couple of hours finishing off volume 2 of Proust at Liverpool Street, if that's what it comes to. On Friday I am due to take my father to see the Bronze exhibition at the RA. He is in his eighties, not so fit as he was, likes to know travel plans well in advance, and worries about rules and authority far more than I do. I can just imagine his state of mind if he had spent the whole day worrying about the validity of our return tickets and fretting about what time we needed to leave the RA to be sure of getting back to Liverpool Street in time.
Returning to the purpose of the day's outing, which was not actually to engage with our marvellous privatised railway network, the Edvard Munch exhibition was interesting, I'm glad I saw it, it's worth catching if you're in the area of Tate Modern in the next couple of weeks, but it isn't one to beat yourself up over periodically for the next five years if you miss it. I always think of Norway as a deeply civilised country, but Munch's Norway seems to have been a troubling place. His mother and sister died of TB, he had a nervous breakdown exacerbated by alcoholism, he almost lost his sight at one point, and his paintings mostly portray angst. I suppose I should have guessed that from The Scream, no version of which is in this show, but the rest of his output isn't much jollier. A girl stands at the foreground of a painting, so close we can only see her head. Behind her on the road another group of girls are huddled together. Are they talking about her? What is in the red house covered in Virginia creeper to make the man whose head we can likewise see in the very foreground look so worried? Two women sit by a table, drinking success to the young girl, so the picture's title tells us. They look as glum as ditch water. Munch fights somebody who impugns his patriotism, then turns a rifle on him (presumably with non-fatal results), then worries about it for years, working through it in his paintings.
Some of them I thought touched greatness. A late self-portrait, Munch prowling around the house late at night, peering warily and wearily at us, combined psychological insight with skillful paint handling (I thought, but I'm not a painter), and I liked an almost abstract, very lively picture of children walking down a street, the presence of a young girl indicated by a splash of white dress and black leg. On the other hand, the set of weary standing nudes (woman crying, we were told), head bowed to indicate sorrow (and obviate the need to paint her face), legs and torso unmodelled, top of (sometimes outsize) head unrealistically close to the ceiling (to indicate her oppressed state?) didn't entirely convince me. They didn't quite pass the park railings test*.
Then I went to see Everything was moving at the Barbican art gallery, an exhibition of photographs from the 1960s and 1970s. This was really gripping, though I managed to tour the lower floor of it the wrong way round due to the total absence of signs at the entrance indicating which way you should go, the rooms being un-numbered, and the intended flow of traffic apparently being contravention of my inbuilt belief that circulation should go clockwise. This meant that I viewed most of the sets of photos before getting to the blurb on the walls about the photographer, or the context in which the pictures were taken, but at least it meant I got to view the images with something approaching an innocent eye. A black South African (who subsequently had to emigrate) documented the daily lives of black people under apartheid in miraculously composed black and white, shot some of the time from a camera concealed in a paper bag under his arm. A second generation Lithuanian Jewish South African also photographed his country, though he was able to work with the Africaaners as well, while a white American portrayed the struggles of blacks in the deep south during segregation. Another American photographer took the most extraordinary small town images in almost psychedelic colour, inconsequential details of diners and traffic signs adding up to a very unsettling vision. The show continued upstairs, but for me the meat of it was the first five artists (reporters?).
I found it a fascinating exhibition, and spent well over an hour there, until my brain wouldn't absorb any more ideas or images. I know that Obama has been a disappointment when it comes to the economy (though would anybody have done a great deal better?) but if you want to remind yourself of why it is so significant that America elected a black man as President, go and see this show. A black child in deepest Alabama stands in front of a chalkboard in a wooden shack. It is a shed. It is the child's school. The photograph is dated 1965. That was education for poor blacks in the deep south, in the lifetime of the black man who is now President. In another picture a bullet riddled car stands empty, that was being driven by a white mother of four taking a young black man home after a civil rights march, when they were run off the road and shot dead by white supremacists. Let us not all assume that we'd have stood up on the side of justice, if we'd been there.
Addendum On the BBC news just now the bagpipe museum still seemed to be above water despite being so close to the river. It's in a very old building, so I suppose the highest land got built on first.
*If an artwork were removed from the gallery, and shown to you instead in the middle of an amateur art exhibition, a sixth form student show, or offered for sale on the railings of Hyde park at the Bayswater end of Oxford Street, would you instantly recognise that it was of a totally different calibre to anything else there?
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