Author Archives: Peter Scott

Gone Fishing

23rd April 2013

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for. (The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway)

I do not fish. I have fished, I have been fishing, but I am not a fisherman, though I’d like to be. I’ve caught fish, several times. I’ve caught mackerel from a pier and trout at a farm. I once caught piranha in the Amazon jungle, baiting hooks with steak and lowering them into the water, then flishing them out, quick-smart, as soon as there was activity below. The piranha, eager for blood, leapt out of the water after the steak and I hit them hard with a makeshift cosh. We ate some and used the rest as bait for catfish. We caught a couple of those too, enormous and tasty over an open fire. (more…)

On the Buses

I’m standing at the bus stop. Waiting. For the number 29. I look about me but unseeingly, eyes glazed in post-meetinged, post-memoed, post-spreadshat vacancy. I stand and enjoy the still. Still, I travel into my thoughts. I notice the cold, but I’m not bothered, wrapped in my mother’s old sheepskin coat, yet another hand-me-down from the 1970s. Is it weird that I’m still wearing my mother’s clothes from the 1970s? I wonder what times they have seen in their two lives.  I think of those clothes I felt I couldn’t share –  a hand-made dress so unfeasibly short, my mum-made matching pants. I smile: at my mum; at the word ‘pants’.  (more…)

Five Poems

Autunno

After Cy Twombly

The sadness breaks tonight it breaks at seven
it cheats all tender efforts to get even
it remembers what I did not we were Autumn
and the way it falls away and gives to auburn
where the slackening of trees felt our knot tauten
and it bunts me with the harvest of old caution
and it dances its rapt pupils to abandon -
because it knows the days weigh more now as they shorten. (more…)

La Vida Animosa

As a child, I had three answers to the perennial question of what I wanted to do when I grew up. The fact that at the age of 32 I am yet to entirely dismiss two of these ideas probably means the growing up hasn’t quite happened yet - a realisation I make with mutually cancelling measures of relief and concern. Strangely, without having really tried, without having to take it seriously, the third one I have already ‘done’. The story reminds me of the following exchange:

Boy:               ‘Mum. When I grow up, I want to play for England.’

Mother:          ‘You’ll have to choose, darling. You can’t do both.’   (more…)

Mistaken Identities

There’s a moment in Arnold Bennett’s 1923 novel Riceyman Steps when the scullery maid Elsie, having secretly taken in her sick lover, discovers that besides being a down-and-out ex-convict, Joe has none of the documents that an interwar Englishman might rely on to raise him up again. Elsie is rightly shocked. ‘The absence of the sacred “papers” disturbed her. Every man in her world could, when it came to the point, produce papers of some sort from somewhere – army-discharge, pension documents, testimonials, birth certificate, etc., etc. Even the tramps … had their papers to which they rightly attached the greatest importance.’ The reason for Joe’s paperlessness, it turns out, is no more than the simple bodily exigency of hunger. ‘I sold ’em yesterday morning,’ he tells Elsie, ‘to a man as came to meet a man as came out of Pentonville same time as me … he gave me four-and-six, and then we went and had a meal after all that skilly and cocoa and dry bread.’ (more…)

Thames 3D

Reality is hard to fake. While it is relatively easy to create a visual simulation of a static object, it is almost impossible to reconstruct convincing environmental phenomena and atmospheric effects. Creating the illusion of water in motion requires an extensive repertoire of artistic skills: the ability to observe and represent the shifting geometries of line, surface, and volume, while rendering the surface reflections of light, transparency and fluidity. From Chinese landscape painters to contemporary digital animators, these demands have made the virtual representation of rivers a true test of visual craftsmanship. According to classical Greek aesthetics, mimesis – the imitation of the physical world – stands for beauty and truth. Yet this does not take into account the relentless evolution of visual language: from drawing to printing, moving image to Internet mapping. Rivers – both real and virtual – allow us to record the accelerating rate of technological change; as Heraclitus says, nobody steps in the same river twice. 

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Can Not Hallow

The President Abraham Lincoln 12" poseable action figure in period attire and equipped with a display stand, available for near-on $30 at the Gettysburg National Military Park Visitor Centre, is saying something. Staring out beyond the transparent acrylic, painted black eyes focussed to a point somewhere just beyond your left shoulder, his face is moulded to exhibit the same patient stoicism with which he looked into Mathew Brady’s camera in the dark days of 1864, and with which, we would like to imagine, he signed the 13th Amendment. While this particular model does not contain the standard Read Only Memory voice box from which the Gettysburg Address may be transmitted at the customer’s will, the face is reassuring, the expression looks authentic. Those lines of fatigue carved by four bloody years are etched very nicely here: they’re just like the daguerreotype, just like the five dollar bill, just like the original man. Who wouldn’t want to take an Abraham Lincoln home from Gettysburg? Who wouldn’t want to collect another likeness from the very place those furrows in his brow got deeper, the very site on which he charged the American nation with a curious kind of living commemoration? 

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Death and the Canal

A few months ago I watched a swan brain itself against the Cat and Mutton Bridge near Broadway Market in Hackney. I was walking on the towpath; it was flying along above the water, following the curve of the canal from Limehouse Basin westwards. Swans navigate by waterway, following the dark ribbons of rivers and streams over land. They’re too big, too ungainly, to land on anything but water, and are sometimes found with broken legs on motorways, having mistaken the silvery sheen of tarmac for the surface of a river.

My swan sharked implacably and inevitably into the bridge, never noticing it was there. The contrast between the grace of its flight and the heavy inevitability of its fall was brutal. A sudden blow, a heavy, almost metallic crack, a great thrashing on the water, and then the great wings beat themselves still. Its neck, so long and straight in flight, bore a grotesque protrusion like a canker on an oak tree. It drifted under the bushes on the opposite bank and was still.

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