On the Brink

June 10, 2015June 10, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Twenty-one in a few hours. Blimey, did that come around quick! Rolling out the monster-drawing on the table in front of me, it feels like I only started it yesterday. In actual fact, I first put pen to paper just over a year ago – a year which has, what with a summer job, rehearsals almost every night and the trip of a lifetime to Morocco and back, come and gone before you can say Tinariwen. It’s set to be a boiler, too – a whopping twenty degrees, even high up here in the frozen north. Pity it isn’t predicted to go that one degree higher, to tally up with the twenty-one guests at my birthday party and the twenty-one hours I intend to be awake. Almost twenty-one and I’m still ridiculous about fateful minutiae like that. Something to work on over the next few years.

This year I’ve decided not to find myself another year older in Klute in the early hours of the morning. I did that last year. To be precise, I seem to remember not only spending the early hours of the 11th in Klute, but the final hours of the day in the same establishment. Hardly the grandest of venues for a birthday party – but it is Klute, and it’s kind of a local treasure zealously guarded by the student body on a Friday night, so I didn’t exactly see it that way at the time. This year I intend to turn twenty-one in the comfort of my own room. I’ll probably be working on the picture when the clock turns and the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban audiobook I’m listening to will be nearing its conclusion. I predict the beginning of the time-turner escapade when the clock strikes midnight. How appropriate. I’ll try to get an earlyish night, I suppose. Lord knows I could do with one, after all these recent two o’clock finishes. It’s not the portraits that take so long, it’s the sitting, thinking and planning that occurs whenever I’ve finished one detail. That’s where all the lost hours have gone, I reckon.

So, since it’ll be another busy day tomorrow, I’d better make my plans tonight. And to kick them off, how’s about twenty-one things to do over the next few years?

Learn to drive
Learn to play bass guitar
Teach yourself ki-Swahili
Teach yourself German
Visit every Spanish communidad autonoma
Go to a music festival
Finish that picture
Find a palatable alcoholic drink
Get into a new genre of music
Get a girlfriend
Decide on a new adventure
Cut chocolate from the diet
Find a new hobby
Learn a martial art
Go for a real all-nighter in Spain
Set foot in the Sahara
Give an animal-related job a try
Set foot in the Americas
Be more like my younger brother
Learn to be happy with who and what I am
Rewrite the book ONE LAST TIME and take it to a publisher’s

I think that’s a nice little set of tasks. Not exactly Herculean, but there’s a few worthy challenges in there. These last twenty-one years have been amazing, but for Pete’s sake, I’ll be spending most of the coming year in Spain. It could hardly get any better than that. Here’s to another spectacular, adventure-filled twenty-one years. I should be so lucky! BB x

Clear the Runway

May 29, 2015May 29, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

That’s it! No more exams this year! And none for another two years, come to think of it. How’s that for a load off the mind? I guess only time will tell how they went – three weeks’ time, to be precise, by which time I’ll be home. Blimey, but this year has drawn to a close quickly… I’m really not expecting an awesome turnover as far as the language exams are concerned. These last few weeks more than ever I’ve heard people liken language to Maths – the beauty, apparently, being that there’s a logic, and there’s a right and a wrong. Great news if you’ve got the kind of brain that can crunch logic like a harvester, but devastating if your mathematical competence is on par with a freshly-picked beetroot. The highest I ever achieved in a regular Maths paper at school was a paltry 28%. How I got this far – to Durham, of all places – with such a pitiful weakness for numbers is nothing short of a miracle. For me, there’s nothing better than a good, old-fashioned essay, so this last week has been an absolute breeze in comparison with the previous three weeks of grammar-busting. There’s no denying the importance of grammar – it’s the bedrock of any and every language – but it doesn’t exactly make for entertaining reading. Especially when you have to tread the line between what is right and what is wrong. Thank goodness for Arts, where it becomes one big grey area. A difficult place to excel, but a far better environment for the mathematically inept, like me.

Away with the musing. The Morocco/Jordan debate came to a sudden and decisive end yesterday with the booking of return flights from Amman at the end of June. Done! Expensive, but that’s the price you have to pay for visiting wealthy countries. It’s not as though I had much of a choice with my department either, the way things have gone of late. We’re banding together as a year to prevent the following years being plagued by the same problems we faced. Hopefully they don’t have to go through with all that chaos. But that’s that! So I’m going to Jordan. I’ll be there for just over two months before zipping back for a short stop at home before jetting straight back out to Spain, by which point I’ll have much more of an idea as to where it is they’re sending me. Exciting stuff. Now all I’ve left to do is to wait a couple of days for my monstrous portrait to arrive and I can get straight back to work on that, and let’s not forget all the gigs and rehearsals set to swamp me over the coming weeks. And paperwork. Christ, the paperwork. Will it never end?

If you’re after an alternative point of view over the next two months in Jordan, give my friends over at Langlesby travels a browse (https://langlesbytravels.wordpress.com/). It’s highly entertaining reading and a great deal less greenie-pontificating than me! I’m working on that… BB x

Summer's here and the lane is as dark as night again

Freedom!

Back to the Drawing Board

May 19, 2015May 19, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The waiting game continues. The last language exam is around the corner and then it’s two essay-based exams and then I’m done on the academic front – for the time being – and it’s headlong into three weeks straight of rehearsals, gigs and parties. Isn’t that what summer’s for? As I explained earlier, there’s quite a bit of admin to get through, and I’ve already set out on that, but I can’t tackle the two most pressing until I have a vague idea exactly where it is I’ll be spending the bulk of my year abroad. So roll on Friday! I’m kind of past caring where the British Council send me now, I’m sure it’ll be an enriching experience wherever it is. How’s that for prefabricated merchandising?

So today, tired of revising Arabic grammar, I shut al-Kitaab for the first time in days, shoved it down the side of the sofa and turned my attention back to La Celestina, one of the texts I’m supposed to be writing about in next week’s exam. I’d quite forgotten how good it is. More than that; by academic standards, it’s praiseworthy to say the least, but even as regular books go, it’s really quite amusing. A lot of the gags and stitch-ups are as true-to-life today as they were then. The birth of satire, or something like that. If I can spin a yarn like that in the exam I should be alright. We’ll see. Long ways to go, really – we’re talking next Friday. When that’s over, I’ll be finished, so it ought to be at the bottom of my priorities. But it’s a heck-of-a-lot easier to revise texts because it means I can doodle and muse to my heart’s content and still call it revision. Brilliant. So I thought I’d share with you one of my revision doodles. Featured are Areusa and Elicia, two subsidiary characters from the tale. Yes, they’re quite clearly based on Margaret from the latest Poldark series. So judge me. I’m hooked. It’s a bloody good job the series ended the weekend before my exams began, or I’d really have been doomed. Small mercies! x

Bruegel under the Microscope

May 17, 2015June 19, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Ever looked closely at Bruegel the Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents? I wouldn’t blame you if you haven’t. It’s a pretty famous painting, but it’s not the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. You might have seen it on a Christmas card, along with the more common Hunters in the Snow, another painting by Bruegel. And why not? It’s a snowy scene with plenty of animals. Perfect for Christmas. Until you look closer. On first inspection it looks like a raid – sundries strewn in the snow, soldiers carrying off sacks, livestock taken for slaughter. A far cry from Christmas. But look a little closer and you’ll see the signs that there’s something far more sinister at work. Hidden away in various corners of the painting are the ghostly remains of figures now painted over. You don’t have to look too closely to surmise that there’s something amiss; a lot of the animals depicted look messier than the figures surrounding them, as do the clothes and sacks. Look closer still and you’ll see shadowy feet beneath one of the sacks. Or a little hand reaching out from the huddle of poultry gathered before the mounted soldiers in the centre of the image. What you’re looking at is far more than just a raid. It’s a Biblical scene brought to life in the snowy Spanish Netherlands; that of Herod and the Hebrew children. It’s a genuine massacre of the innocents.

How did I stumble upon this? Good question. Revision is a tiresome thing and I found Bruegel’s painting on one of my desperate ‘productive procrastination’ sprees. I still can’t remember how. But it was one of those images that I just couldn’t stop staring at, and the more I looked, the more I wanted to know. Why the children? Why were they painted over? And why, when the painting was restored, were they not returned? It chilled me to the bone when I first saw one of the few uncensored images floating around, but I think it’s more poignant than the one we’re left with now, shocking though it may be. What would Goya have thought if the men of El Tres de Mayo had been painted over with cattle? Or is there a line that cannot be crossed, as far as children are concerned? Goya obviously didn’t think so. See Saturn devouring his Son. But what do I know? I’m just musing as usual.

What I think matters most of all is one of the few details that wasn’t amended. In the background, behind the Spanish soldiers, is a man crossing the frozen river with an infant in his arms. He has a sword at his belt but his stance, in tandem with that of the woman standing behind him, imply that his actions are protective, rather than nefarious. It’s the one detail that really sticks in my mind. Is he the father of the child, or a friend, trying to smuggle the child to safety? Did he succeed? Perhaps most poignant of all, is it something Bruegel saw? Tough questions. I wish I’d had more trips to art galleries when I was at school. You can lose yourself for hours in a painting like this. The more you look, the more you see.

Apologies for the heavy content of today’s musing. I’m thinking of writing a novella based on the painting, so I thought I’d share the image with you in case you’re interested. It sure piqued my interest! x