Wednesday May 11th 2022

It's May 11th, the day we remember my late little-brother Steve, who sadly died in 2013 around the time of his 61st birthday. Today would have been his 70th birthday, so would have been quite a milestone for him.

Growing up he always stood out, firstly because of his shock of red hair, and, later, because of his sunny disposition, his playful and infectious sense of fun and his great love of sport, and later still because of his guitar-playing and his passion for the music of singers like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. 

On Steve's birthday, I always like to look at my collection of pictures of Steve growing up.

Steve with our mother in Steve's home city of Bradford, late 1953

Steve playing beach cricket in 1956, aged 3,

at Sandown, Isle of Wight

Steve, aged 16, in the garden of our grandfather's house

near Newport on the Isle of Wight, August 1968

Steve never married, and later in life became a recluse - but was this inevitable? In his 40's, working in one of the Oxford University libraries he formed a close attachment to a French co-worker, Anne-Marie, and in 1994, he had a holiday in France staying with Anne-Marie and her parents. Lois and I always felt that, if things had worked out between Steve and Anne-Marie, it might have saved Steve from his subsequent gradual descent into almost total reclusivity.

Steve with Anne-Marie (centre) and her mother (right)

at Amboise, France in 1994

(lyrics to Art Podell's "Take Care of My Brother")

Anyway it didn't work out between Steve and Anne-Marie in the end, for whatever reason. Would it have made a difference if it had? There's no way of knowing now, sadly.

Lois and I will never forget the day we were told about Steve's death in 2013, because we were on holiday in Denmark at the time, staying with our daughter Alison, her husband Ed, and their 3 children. Ed worked in Copenhagen for 6 years, from 2012 to 2018. 

Lois and I were just walking back through the suburban streets of north Copenhagen after a happy and enthralling morning visiting an art exhibition at the Ordrupgaard Art Museum, when I got a call on my mobile from a police officer in Oxford, telling me that Steve was dead. 

Lois and I emerge from a happy morning at an art exhibition

at Ordrupgaard Art Museum, about 15 minutes before we got 

a call from a police officer in Oxford, telling us that Steve was dead

Rest in peace, our Steve!

11:00 A frustrating day follows - oh dear!  I'm a member of Lynda's local U3A Middle English group, and the group are holding their monthly meeting this Friday. Our current project is a poem entitled "Sir Corneus", which we're promised is full of humour at the expense of "cuckolds", i.e men with unfaithful wives or mistresses, a subject that medieval poetry-readers were a bit obsessed with - to put it mildly! Still they didn't have as much entertainment as we have nowadays, so perhaps that explains the obsession - my god!

some of the standard studies of the medieval poem "Sir Corneus"

from Toronto University  and Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia

I'm itching to get started with reading the poem, but instead I have to spend a lot of time filling out a "Vendor's Information Form" for our estate agents - we're currently in the process of selling our house, and the form demands details of a lot of tedious information about the house, including date of various improvements we've made during the last ten of the 36 years we've been living here.

What madness !!!!!!

20:00 We spend some time online looking at possible houses to buy in Bishops Cleeve, Evesham and Stratford-on-Avon, before settling down on the couch to watch an interesting documentary on the life and works of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), the Norwegian painter, most famous for his painting "The Scream". 

I feel I've got to watch this, especially after learning a few days ago that my father was 4% Norwegian - who would have guessed it haha!

Although Munch is sometimes dismissed as a rather gloomy man - he was fond of saying that all his life he was being "followed by the angels of illness, madness and death" (my god!). But his life did have its brighter side, and after all he did live to the ripe old age of 80, which was nice.

He certainly liked to picture the big things in everybody's life - that's for sure: birth, love, death mainly, you know the sort of thing, you've probably had, or seen, some of them in your own life!

In Munch's "Frieze of Life" series, painted around 1900, we see the moment of his sexual awakening in his "Red and White" - a picture of two women, one in white, innocent and looking away, and the other in red, who represent passion and sexuality. This painting is followed by "The Kiss", where a couple's attraction begins to be consummated, which in turn is followed by "Madonna", where the woman is pictured having a climax, with "eyes half-closed and body arched in pleasure", totally in a world of her own.

Munch certainly had a thing about the power of women over men, which we see in his "Ashes" (1895), where the woman looks ecstatically happy and triumphant, while the man's looking really fed up!

Poor man !!!!!!!!

And we see this "power of women" angle again later in "Vampire" (also 1895) where some poor little man is being consoled by a red-haired beauty, but at the same time she's sort of "consuming" him in her embrace and in the tentacles of her hair - my god (again) !!!!

In Munch's famous painting "Dance of Life" (1899-1900), we see figures dancing under the sun of the long Nordic summer night, which is nice. 

And again we seem to see the various stages of all our lives depicted together in one painting. The central couple seem lost in their own embrace, with the woman again wearing red for desire. 

Personally I've always liked the couple a bit to the right: the slightly older man, who has got hold of a woman in a white dress He's actually grinning and seems to be really having a really good time - no doubt about that! 

Have you ever thought how unusual it is to see somebody smiling in a painting? Artists never seemed to think of telling their models and subjects to "Say Cheeeeeeese" - and why not? I think we should be told, and quickly!

Munch didn't have great success in his own life with women, when it came to serious relationships - he got involved in a "toxic" relationship with a wealthy Norwegian woman Tulla Larsen, but it ended badly with some sort of mysterious shooting incident at a country cottage, which left him injured. 

Poor Munch!!!!!

Edvard Munch, pictured here with Tulla Larsen, a wealthy

woman who became obsessed with Munch

Munch did have some more temporary adventures with women during a holiday in the German town of Warnemunde, where he went swimming by day but spent his nights in the local brothels. He depicts brothel life in some of his paintings, although the management's choice of wallpaper in the rooms has definitely attracted its share of criticism - "claustrophobic", one reviewer wrote: oh dear, that's not what you want in a brothel, surely?

What a life Munch had, eh. And it certainly gave him plenty to paint about!

His most famous painting "The Scream" (1893) was originally intended to "top off" his "Frieze of Life" series, and shows a screaming figure against a disturbing, febrile sky.

It's had such universal appeal - everybody can relate to it, because everybody feels like screaming at one time or another. And the central figure depicted is designed to be totally universal - you can't say whether it's a man or a woman, an adult or a child. It's like a formula, an iconographic sign for a human being. And we can all project on to the figure what our own little personal "scream" is. Yes, we've all got one - and I'm sure you have too !!!!

Let's hope the programme doesn't give Lois and me bad dreams tonight!

Will this do....? [Oh, just go to bed! - Ed]

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!!