My Spotify algorithm often serves up the version of Smile sung by Judy Garland (partly because of this) and Morecambe and Wise’s Positive Thinking.

I have long assumed that the latter was riffing on the former, but when I’ve looked into it, I’ve been unable to find any evidence to substantiate that. Superficially, the lyrics of both are about projecting and sharing happiness in a vaguely mindless way. Yet, the minor key underscores the melancholy of life. The combination of the two, along with clever word choices, highlights the desperation and necessity of maintaining a positive outlook at the worst of times. They are songs which are desperately bleak yet necessarily uplifting, a combination that’s common to the work of Charlie Chaplain and Morecambe and Wise. These layered emotions are no less common in the modern world than they have been in the past, but they’re less visible in the modern world.

The emotion the songs portray isn’t quite melancholy: it’s something a bit more cutting and urgent. Nevertheless, given my long-standing theory about the under-appreciation of melancholy, hearing these songs often leads me to reflect on the emotional infantalisation of society. Human emotion is as complex as ever, yet it seems to be that we’re increasingly encouraged to express it in marketable primary colours: Christmas is ‘brilliant’, riots are ‘terrible’, and politicians are ‘useless’. Nuance is discouraged.

Wendy and I were reflecting on this while watching the Olympics: there is undoubtedly a profound sadness to winning a gold medal. That’s not hard to understand: heck, it’s the combination of emotions portrayed in Disney’s The Jungle Book, in the song I Wan’na Be Like You: ‘I’ve reached the top and had to stop and that’s what’s botherin’ me’. In 1967, the Sherman brothers could communicate that complex and layered motivation to young children: in 2024, we rarely entertain the idea that a gold medal win is anything other than a happy occasion. Medalists may only perform that single emotion. They face the wrath of the press if they don’t comply.

Yet, if we all lived with primary-coloured emotions, there would be no good novels and certainly no opera. Jukebox musicals might be okay, tabloid newspapers would thrive, and there’d be no visible change to Loose Women or Good Morning Britain, but wither art and poetry.

It strikes me that the world would be a better, more understanding place if we acknowledged that we are all bundles of strange and conflicting emotions. To pretend that we experience only one thing at a time misses the essence of what it is to be human.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I walk past these lovely gates outside Charlotte’s Butchery fairly often, and every time, I’m reminded of this video which I first posted eighteen years ago (with the image quality you’d expect):

It’s twelve years since I last visited the transporter bridge: the longest extant transporter bridge in the world. It remains an astonishing sight, although in one crucial respect, it has changed beyond recognition.

For five years now, the Transporter has been out of service, becoming a monument more to modern underinvestment in infrastructure than early 20th century engineering. It looks like it might take investment of £30m to press it back into service.

Waiting for me dad, a sculpture by Mackenzie Thorpe, commemorates families waiting for the return of the workers across the bridge at the end of their shifts on the industrial sites beyond. As events transpired, it was unveiled about twelve weeks before the bridge ‘temporarily’ closed, which lends it a melancholic air to expectation it depicts: the figures will be waiting for far longer than they expected for anyone to return over the Tees.

The wall text at the start of this exhibition reads, in part;

Belonging takes different forms. Humans can share an affinity for a specific place, familial bonds and friendship, or spiritual connections based on religion or stories. Geography can also underpin local, national, and international connections. Hobbies and traditions in both real and imagined space can inspire a sense of camaraderie.

I’ve previously mentioned Wendy’s propensity to respond to wall texts by saying ‘I don’t have the bandwidth for that’. On this occasion, it was me perhaps imperceptibly rolling my eyes. Belonging does take different forms, but it’s hard to see how you can successfully curate a coherent exhibition around a feeling you’re choosing to define so expansively.

And, to be honest, I didn’t get it. But there were some nice pictures.

Here’s Mary Cantrill’s 1941 watercolour of a local landmark, Leazes Park Lake in the Snow of 1941. The label said that the park ‘offers tranquil escape in the bustling city’, which is probably true, but my overriding association with Leazes Park is of being asked to find patients who had absconded there from the RVI, which is just over the road.

This is JW Carmichael’s 1839 lithograph of The Ouse Burn Viaduct, looking like it is crossing an impossibly rural setting. It’s only a few weeks since I featured a photograph of the viaduct on this very blog.

This is Beryl Davies’s 1940s watercolour of The Haymarket, a part of Newcastle that has changed surprisingly little despite huge changes outside of the frame. This was painted as part of a project run the The Laing. After the council approved major redevelopment work in the city centre, the gallery’s committee sent forth artists to document the city as it existed before the work started, which feels somehow inspired and a little eccentric at the same time.

There’s something about the lighting in this picture which, along with all of the arches, that sort of feels like the kind of art that AI generators often spit out. It is, in fact, an 1813 painting by Thomas Miles Richardson, show a View of the Ruins of Tynemouth Monastery. For some reason, I had always thought that the the monastery had been damaged in the war, so to find out that it was in fact already a ruin over two centuries ago was a bit of a surprise!

And lastly, here’s that other local home of brilliant art, the Baltic, captured in watercolour here by an unknown artist at some point when it was clearly still a flour mill rather than a centre for contemporary art.

Belonging continues at The Laing until 30 November.

I mention it far too much, but it did look especially pretty on this walk!

First published in 1954, this is a story of the end of a marriage. Evelyn, a distinguished barrister, has a beautiful wife 15 years his junior called Imogen. She is submissive and passive to the point that she almost has no character of her own, and becomes more so the longer the novel goes on.

Their plain neighbour, Blanche, is two years older than Evelyn. She’s presented as unremarkable in every respect, but becomes an object of fascination for Evelyn, and also an 11-year-old boy, in a weird narrative choice. The fascination is attributable to the fact that she actually has a character of her own, some opinions, and can converse reasonably.

Evelyn and Blanche start an affair; it takes forever for Imogen to realise what’s going on, and she just sort of subserviently leaves.

I did not enjoy this. The characters are all thoroughly unlikable, and are living in unthinkable social straitjackets. Almost everything they did or said made me want to fling the book across the room—though I didn’t because it was a rather lovely original from the London Library.

But mostly, this book is slow. It’s not slow in the sense of contemplative and reflective, it’s just stuffed with loquacious description and scene-setting.

This was absolutely not for me.

I recently visited MIMA for the first time: I came perilously close to visiting more than a decade ago but didn’t quite make it through the door.

The exhibition I popped in to see was ‘Working Lives’, which brings together works from the Middlesbrough Collection with newer pieces by contemporary artists in the Cleveland Art Society.

The curation didn’t do much for me—it seemed a bit random—but I think that’s probably because this was a pretty speedy visit without time to consider and reflect the choices that the curator, Alan Morley, had made. I perhaps didn’t give him a chance.

But two works did catch my eye.

At the top of this post is Sandhaven , a 1983 work by Ken Cozens, the late and much-celebrated local artist who contributed much to the local art scene by working for the local museum service, including as Fine Arts Officer at Middlesbrough Art Gallery. My photo is rubbish, but I was absorbed by the drama of the image, and also liked the colour scheme.

Below is the 2020 work Fractured Land 5 by Derek English, a much-loved local artist and art teacher. I liked the abstraction in this one, and found the lines and shapes intriguing.

The two paintings were exhibited beside one another, and I reflected that, if I’d had to guess, I’d have dated them the other way around—though I can’t really explain why!

Working Lives continues at MIMA until 29 September.

You know how on QVC, there’s never a gadget that performs only one function? Everything has to be multi-purpose, even if some of those purposes are a little bit questionable? William Bell (1844-1919) was once Chief Architect of the North Eastern railway, and I reckon he’d have loved QVC.

By Middlesbrough Dock, there was a need for a simple accumulator tower: a big tower containing water to provide hydraulic pressure to operate things like lock gates. William Bell’s team were on it in 1903. They decided not only to make an accumulator tower, but also to whack a clock tower on top. Why not?

Well, because the local ironworks didn’t want workers clock-watching, that’s why not. But Bell’s team weren’t to be defeated: they simply installed three clock faces, and left the fourth face—in the direction of the ironworks—blank.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way…

In celebration of its bicentennial, the National Gallery has deigned to send some of its works out of London and out to visit the nation that owns them. Newcastle has been ‘loaned’ The Fighting Temeraire, Turner’s 1893 masterpiece which Radio 4 listeners once voted ‘the greatest painting in Britain’. If I’m totally honest, I’m so ignorant about art that I’d probably not have recognised it.

I wrote recently about the grief of aging, and it was that feeling that came to mind as I contemplated this painting: the outmoded sailing ship being pulled along to its final destruction by new-fangled Tyneside-built tug boats. The exhibition, though, made me note the brightness of the sunset, which perhaps represents hope for the future. The grief of aging is often paired with the joy of a new generation taking over.

This being the Laing, they haven’t just stuck The Fighting Termeraire on the wall and left it at that: they’ve built an ambitious and absorbing exhibition around it, featuring dozens of Turner paintings alongside other works. They even—and here’s a bit of lateral thinking—have displayed a piece of wood from the actual Temeraire.

I particularly liked how the exhibition unpicked Turner’s technique, featuring colour studies and sketches that would go on to inform his future work. I’ve never really thought about the artistic process of watercolour painting before, nor really of the way an artist would want to plan out both the colours and the objects in this way.

There was some interesting discussion on Turner’s view on the ethics of the sea battles he painted: was he a patriotic supporter, or more interested in the abhorrent loss of life? I find it difficult to look at his paintings and see anything but the latter—they all feel tinged by sad reflections on humanity. But for this to be a point of academic disagreement, there must be another way of seeing them, and I must just be projecting my views.

The exhibition also made the point that steamships are now as old-fashioned as sailing ships were in Turner’s time. That made me think about whether there is any art being made now, chronicling the ‘industrial revolution’ we are going through in terms of artificial intelligence putting people out of work. Are the Turners of today making brilliant works about that revolution which will be revered in centuries to come? We can only hope.

Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia continues at The Laing until 7 September.