Grenville Allen's blog: designed to give more exposure to www.grenvilleallen.com, and to demonstrate by the by how Grenville paints poppies, cats, ducks, cottages and landscapes.
A nice reminder of a sunny August Bank Holiday, 2013.
Mud, sweat and debauchery! Well, mud and sweat, anyway.
An excellent time was had by one and all despite the snow. All thanks to Anne Marriner's organisational skills. |
| RCA Crafts for Christmas, 2012 |
 |
| Hazel (on right) making final adjustments |
Steps as seen from backyard...
My trusty spade
An artist in every sense. Now fulfilling a lifelong ambition to go topless in the Telegraph.
26 Comments
Link to this: http://disqus.com/Grenville_Allen/
on Andy Gray and Richard Keys: the changing face of office banter 4 days ago
This was the London advertising scene in the eighties. I've written about it in my unpublished novel 'Albert's Little Vice'. From what I've heard those days are long gone. Currently everyone it seems is just grateful to keep a job, any job, in the ad world.
on Andy Gray and Richard Keys: the changing face of office banter 4 days ago
"Office banter" often leads to "office goosing" through to "office groping" onto full-scale "office orgies" aka "office Christmas parties". All well and good between consenting individuals but not so good when one of said individuals has bad breath, flaky skin or is just downright plug-ugly. From my humble experience. But then — beneath the veneer — we are all simply creatures roaming about on a harsh unforgiving planet.
During the eighties, my wife would come home from her office duties, many a time complaining about the sly sneaky groping and goosing she'd received. My hackles would go up at this and I'd offer to give the groper "a good hiding" only to be told not to intervene. According to her, it would only make matters worse.
An office associate of mine told of similar woes and one night sat in wait in his car for the offending person to leave the office. Revving the engine wildly and mounting the pavement, headlights full beam, he drove straight at the groper. Think he broke the groper's ankles but even if he didn't he'd have at least given him something to think about. I dunno. The trials and tribulations of office life: a bit of banter to broken ankles.
on Why don't we truly value poetry? last week
[Beginning of my epic poem. To be read in a long slow sorrowful manner with many excited blips and pregnant pauses and rising in a powerful crescendo....]
Calmly reposing on a saphire pebble
I survey the meadow
Yawning before me
Bathed in life.
Out on the fresh grass they they lie
The two earthworms I have searched for
All my life.
I am ready to meet their copulatory functions with extreme zeal.
Steadily I crouch down
And put my face next to their cold, soiled bodies.
And feel myself tugged
Gently at first
But afterwards more and more violently
Down and down
Into the slick ageless worm's mystical hollow.
All I can see is the pink shadowy insides of my eyelids.
All I can feel is the moist soft loam
And the tubulous roots of the trees against my body.
I am blinded.
A helpless victim to the amorous advances of an earthworm,
Dragged along labrynthian corridors
To be pitilessly
Raped and tortured
Is love so sweet!
Once inside the belly of the earth
I am immediately arrested
By an ever-mounting number of worms
Who wriggle triumphantly
In and out of my anal passage
Up my nasal cavities,
Preparing my body for a peculiar sacrifice.
My brain is liquid
My tongue crawls away to safety
Back to the surface of the globe
And sunlight.
I am masturbated from within
And celestial heaven cannot be far away now
As the worms turn and everything is black
Immovable
Monumental.
"Help me dear God," I cry. "This delirious pleasure is but an aberration.
Give me something solid!"
Grenville Allen 1977
(The above work is juvenilia par excellence. I spent many a happy hour reciting this during my student years!)
on Why don't we truly value poetry? last week
See above....
on Why don't we truly value poetry? last week
Stanza from my epic poem....
And in that wood the eyes no longer see
But only feel the blind, poking darkness
Of the wood's searching, groping, anxious need to clasp me
To its damp and heaving breast
Where now it holds me like its rooted trees
Grenville Allen 1977
on Why don't we truly value poetry? last week
The constant wit can be cloying
The constant fool annoying
I prefer the dead, the silent
The one who keeps away from me
Now and always
Constantly.
Grenville Allen 1977
on The art exhibition where the pieces really do grow on you last week
Here's something I prepared earlier: http://www.craftsforum.co.uk/a...
Talk about suffering for one's art. I think I'll call this piece "Bubble 'n' Squeal".
on Wikipedia at 10: 'It's what the web is for' 2 weeks ago
'Course there are ways round the vanity/self-promotion issue. Me old mucker Beattie is a master at this. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W....
I was simply out to increase my SEO and tried using Wikipedia as one element of this. But this was before I'd discovered there's as much subterfuge involved as in my old advertising days. Here btw is my own FREE offer that no-one was in the slightest bit interested in: http://www.wmhleisure.com/foru...
Which just goes to show you.
on Wikipedia at 10: 'It's what the web is for' 2 weeks ago
I've corrected many a celeb's biographical details, using the 'sandbox' etc. For instance, Tommy Boyd, the radio presenter, listed as studying at Brighton University. Wrong. He went to my university: Sussex. (His political persuasion is diametrically opposed to mine though.)
Now, what gets me about this supposedly democratic encyclopedia is that when I entered my own enthralling life details: acting in my early teens on the RSC stage alongside Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and her brother Jeff, Ian Richardson, Brenda Bruce, Liz Spriggs — to name but a few illustrious fellow luvvies — short story on BBC Radio at eleven yrs of age, violinist with the Warwickshire Youth Orchestra, a spell in the advertising world in the eighties as an award-winning copywriter with the likes of Trevor Beattie in my twenties, and now here doing my utmost as a painter. No joy. All the above scrubbed out by some interfering nomark geek. The only reason he could give for my rejection: vanity. Tch!
on Tesco sales miss estimates as out-of-town stores hit by snow 3 weeks ago
For Tesco, history began when Jack Cohen returned from the First World War and invested £30 on a surplus food stall in London's East End. Cohen consolidated his initial small-scale success by joining forces with T.E. Stockwell, and the name Tesco was born. The first shop with "Tesco" emblazoned above the window was opened in 1929.
But even Tesco's so-called 'Finest' range is barely edible. Which is why we shop at Waitrose. And always have done.