There’s quite a good joke here — it must be an old one but I’ve not come across it before — in this week’s Spectator by Robin Oakley. It goes:
Asked why he had sent a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt, a friend at the funeral of the man who had drowned replied, “It’s what he would have wanted.”
There must be an infinite number of variants on this. What’s yours?
There’s an exhibition on at Compton Verney, 13 November til 12 December, entitled Kurt Tong: In Case it Rains in Heaven. It’s a photographic celebration of the Chinese custom of burning paper consumer goods of all sorts — clothes, cars, iPods — in order to provide for the dead person in the afterlife. It’s a custom that probably makes little intuitive sense to anyone not brought up in the tradition, by which I only mean that it makes little intuitive sense to me.
As well as being a lovely place with a very good restaurant and a tradition of excellent exhibitions, Compton Verney is home to the largest single piece of stone ever taken from the Isle of Portland. It’s a boulder 5 metres high and weighs 100 tonnes. Its installation was the inspiration of artist John Frankland. They had a heck of a job getting it off the island, I remember it well, and having got it to its destination the best name Mr Frankland could find for it was ‘Untitled’, which sounds a bit like artspeak for ‘Er…”
I digress. If you’d like a foretaste of Tong’s snaps, have a look here.