Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley St

'Your life sounds like a film at the moment.' a friend says. 'Yes.' I say . But I feel slightly detached as if writing my life separates me from myself. That sometimes I don't have time to experience what is happening to me, for I am always worrying about the next bit, what other people think, about the neighbours, about money, about what to make for tea. Also, I boasted about time having expanded but it just isn't true. I am swimming upstream, slightly harried, flailing against whatever is oncoming. Though occasionally the fast currents form warm deep pools and briefly I kick out my legs and tread water.

The night I started writing this blog I could not sleep for I knew somehow this was my adventure. Though I had no idea what I would write and when the words first tumbled out I held my breath as if they were escaping. The adventure turned out to be to tell my truth and my ambition became to make it as honest and real as possible. Though the stories have gathered unexpected momentum as if into a plot. But reality seems a difficult story to write. It becomes invasive and perhaps questionable for different realities are owned by different people.

Today at the doctor's I heard an older receptionist talking to a young pretty colleague. With great kindness and concern she was talking about her alcoholic partner. The pretty girl seemed to have experience of alcoholic behaviour too and asked deftly 'Does he take it out on you, does he get nasty towards you, are his outbursts directed at you?' 'Oh yes. Of course.' said the kindly and chatty woman. I was only eavesdropping but I realised she was oblivious of what she had said. Why? 'Of course? ' Why? 'Oh yes? ' Though I understood.

My pride meant I did not tell people what was happening to me as our family life gathered speed to the point where h was really really dh. I felt I peered out of a 'hide', a camouflaged place - observing normality from a smiley face. I thought it was all my fault. I thought others would think that too. I thought I have children now and I better make it work for all. Some of the tales I have told or events that have happened have been so truly painful and what a funny word - embarrassing - how did I get here - how did I let these things happen - how did I become so trapped - that writing the words, telling the truth freed me from that hidden, isolated observation post of pride and shame. Recently I went to see the twin babies of a couple I know and really like and in the midst of all the love and beauty and wow how lovely I am holding a baby, ooh now I am holding another one, and how do you ever get time to do anything ever again, one of the women said oh I read your recent blog this afternoon and she said it so matter of factly and warmly I felt like crying. Everything I once screened and desperately hid was just accepted in a nice calm room.

Years ago I worked with a picture editor - an honourable but difficult and demanding man who was brilliant and determined about what he did. He helped discover the artist Richard Billingham and in a junior position I spent a lot of time within office hours helping colour photocopy ( remember it was a while ago ) Richard Billingham's brilliant pictures from the snap shots originally taken for the work to be edited into a book. RB was a young art student who wanted to be a painter. His Dad Ray was a chronic alcoholic. His Mum Liz obese, with a love of colour and decoration and pets. They lived in a council flat in Dudley. RB had taken hundreds of pictures of his family life. His Dad slumped by a bed, his mum in a big dress raising a fist to his Dad infront of a gaudy carnival of colourful knick knacks and a dog and a cat eating dropped peas and carrots off the dirty floor. Richard had intended to make paintings from them. Understandable for the colour in his pictures has the verve of brushstrokes. But his tutors, this man I worked for and some others I didn't know, found them - greedily understanding their painful and beautiful honesty. At the time there was almost a blood lust for 'reality' in photography and a hunting mentality about obtaining it. As publication of the book loomed - letters come from a german art gallery that advised them all to leave the young man alone. This gallery had worked with a very young german female artist on a reality project and built her up and she had not been able to cope and killed herself.

But the book 'Ray's a laugh' is a masterpiece. And Richard Billingham is still an artist. I get it down from the shelf to look at it to write this. They are better even than I remembered. Very shocking but very very beautiful. Despite and including the violence and dirt they feel to me to be about love. And I remember there is a quote from Richard that when he came home the first thing he always did was check Ray was breathing, check he was still alive, and the photographs started with this.

I didn't write about these because they are about an alcoholic I just wanted to think about the ethics of portraying 'reality'. Of describing other people's lives involved in your own. I always think of the 'authorship' of Richard's pictures. That when the scratched and badly cared for negatives were lovingly hand printed to exhibition quality there was more to the pictures than the lazily cropped snaps printed on a machine at the chemists had shown. In these unseen edges there was more compositional balance, even more of an exact idea of a whole picture. Richard 'constructed' the pictures from the real events that occured infront of his eyes. He 'told' these lives. His skill makes them real. Not just them being in them. Though when the book was first published it felt like a boundary of reality was crossed. That there was no longer any privacy. Not even within the family.

Oh it is tricky.

In Mayfair I try to obain access to the grand fronted Christian Scientist reading room but only a bookshop is open. The man who appears from a back room says the 'church' ( is that what it is called - I am not sure?) is only open for services. There is a slight smell of wee and unwashed clothes. I take a BB from right outside and weave again up through the beautiful streets tucked between Park Lane and Berkeley Square. I don't have much time, I have an appointment with the bank which I am dreading and later exh wants to talk to me. Belatedly he has been reading the blog.
These streets are where I walked just after christmas trying to decide whether UOL ( unexpected old love) could or would become UL. It felt like a journey that day into a beautiful and unknown place, the church I eventually found a surprise, like one of those precious beautiful eggs that open to reveal intricate treasure.

Today though the church I had hoped to go into on that day is open and fortunately there is a BB locking station alongside. It is a relief because I am running out of time. Grosvenor Chapel. I don't know why it looks Dutch to me or maybe just American. Simple and charming with painted doors and a white portico. A clock and a steeple. I slip in through the door and there are buckets of flowers in the hallway. I am not sure if these are being stored for the flower stall at the side or if the church is about to be decorated. There is no one around. Inside it is plain and spacious with a wooden gallery and a simple shallow marble font on a slim stem.

At the altar there are pillars and fences and railings as if to keep the eye moving inwards, as if somewhere in the centre of these arrangements something is hidden. I read afterwards that the simple georgian church was built in 1730. On a peppercorn rent for 99 years given by Sir Grosvenor to developers including Benjamin Timbrell who designed it almost from a 'pattern book' of recently built churches like St Martin's in the Field and St George's of Hanover Square without having to bother with an architect. It's simple emphasis on the pulpit and the spoken word was changed by John Ninian Compern in 1912 'to a prayerful church in which attention is directed to the mystery of the altar.'

'In the body of the church Comper brought the iron Georgian communion rails forward to enclose a new sanctuary within which the High Altar stands against the screen. It is flanked by two Corinthian columns intended to carry a canopy which was never completed, and the giant Ionic columns at each side set the scale for colonnades which were to run the whole length of the building, replacing the gallery columns. They carry a beam on which stands the rood with the crucified Christ, attended by his Virgin Mother and the beloved disciple John, triumphing over the dragons of evil. Two angels kneel below with chalices to gather the sacred blood. The three delicate stained glass windows in the south wall are also by Comper two of which contain his trademark strawberry motif.'

I find also photographs of a beautiful installation on the internet by Claire Morgan in 2005 made on the stairs up to the church galleries of the Grosvenor Chapel where she made an arch of real strawberries hung on nylon thread
http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/page18.htm

I am so worried about what is about to come - the bank/exh- my reality - that I leave quickly. Back onto the bike in cold sunshine.

Since Richard Billingham's pictures were published technology has increased the pursuit of 'reality' I think. Like a mass produced invasion. Digital cameras, home computers. How we process what we see has changed. For example I read that the advent of computer-based non-linear editing systems for video in 1989 made it easy to quickly edit hours of video footage into a usable form, something that had been very difficult to do before. (Film, which was easy to edit, was too expensive to shoot enough hours of footage with on a regular basis.) This became reality TV. But it is a strange reality - Big Brother, Jade Goody, Katie Price, The Only Way is Essex, even some programme I saw mentioned recently 'The Batchlorette' where a man chose a bride from a group of girls - leaving the spurned girl from the final two with a kiss, sobbing, heartbroken.
Big personalities acting out what being a human being is under the eye of a camera.

Finally I want to mention Nigel Shafran who is another photographer whose work I love. He takes beautiful pictures of rather unnoticed parts of life - the washing up on the draining board, his girlfriend, gentle ordinary domestic scenes. A very early picture shows the mark left by a sock on his girlfriend's leg, just the imprint on her skin. Time, love, a whisper of something noticed. Observation rather than entertainment from reality. 'An acceptance of the way things are.' he says.

The bank manager consolidates my debts. Exh says he won't babysit anymore.


Amen