Chris Sutcliff

At last, after many an uncertain and lonely midnight typing frenzy, these words have a home and you are actually reading them. Rob (who is a computer whisperer and who has The Power! and who would be feared were it not for his woolly perm), commanded the site be alive three days ago and it heeded his mighty trumpeting. I have to say I’m absolutely chuffed to bits with it. So, as I have a new reason to be cheerful, and you’re probably not all THAT cheery about the fact that I have a new website, I thought I’d give you some different reasons to be cheerful as well.

Summer is finally threatening to devour Spring and defecate sunnier weather on all of us. This means all the beautiful people that seem to hibernate all Winter will now be sprouting forth in not much clothing and playing Frisbee on all available civic surfaces so that the rest of us can stare at them and marvel at how their toned young bodies don’t wobble or buckle as they leap and bound. They’ll also be wearing those new sunglasses that cost the same as a Politicians second mortgage expenses – these will be broken or lost by Autumn as though the credit crunch had never happened tra la la. The days will stretch on forever. So will the sunburn. Awesome. Unless you have hay-fever. In which case get ready for three months of Nature going to war against your face. Rubbish.

If that isn’t cheery enough, then be cheery that you live in a world where you can refuse to buy a burger on the grounds that it funds and promotes a capitalist ideal that steals the life from our rural farming communities, uses fake Americana to despoil fragile third world community identity, causes life threatening reactions in our own bodies and makes our high street as bland and litter strewn as every other town in the world. Then go out and get drunk and buy three of them.

If that doesn’t do it for you then just think of how amazing you are – from your chromosomes to your pheromones and your toe nails to your secret bald patch. The likelihood of your birth defies mathematics and the likelihood of your lasting long enough to read this, let alone understand it, defies science. From all our majestic accomplishments to every time you have ever seen and ever will see a poor unfortunate person in a highly crowded environment trip up over something, but not fully fall over, transforming the near fall into a bit of a run instead – like they did it all on purpose. Unless the poor unfortunate person happens to be you, this is the funniest thing you will ever see in your life.

Yup. That’s the cheeriness right there.

Acrylic, pencil, photography, photo-shop

2009

Just when it seemed I would be a deceiver for life, I fed my computer to the Cat. I will never sin again.

Acrylic, pencil, photography, photo-shop

2009

The second background. The same filthy lie.

Acrylic, pencil, photography, photo-shop

2009

The first of the three backgrounds I did for the website. One of the very few times in my work where I have used the help of a computer to get the final effect. Make no mistake – this is cheating. I am so very sorry. Please don’t tell anyone.

The Universe is constantly speaking to us. It does this in a surprisingly direct way and its purpose in speaking to us is to help us realise and then actualise our place within it. The problem is that sometimes we’re a bit rubbish at listening to it. It may say “It’s OK to read about Peter and Jordan in trashy magazines, their plight is the struggle of all relationships in the modern age”. Or it may say “Go on, eat some KFC, it’s probably chicken”. Or it may say “The square root of 729 is 27”. And you may think ‘well, that last one wasn’t very helpful’. Then, a week later, you’ll be in a pub quiz and THAT will be the last question, and then you’ll be like ‘if only I’d listened to the Universe, it was trying to help me win a free pint’. Sometimes these messages are spoken to us through devices. Maybe you’ve already experienced this, for example, if you’ve ever been upset at the end of a relationship and the lyrics of a random song on the stereo go “You broke up with your lady / but that’s OK ‘cos maybe / she shouldn’t have been kissing Greg at Steve’s party / well cheer up ‘cos you’ve still got her DVD box set of Prison Break”. And then you’re like ‘Yeah! Screw that bitch! She shouldn’t have been getting it on with Greg’. Or maybe you watch a movie and there’s a detective and he goes “So I was able to deduce that the killer was Simon the Postman, he had befriended old man Smith’s dog and also had a key to the back door, if he hadn’t put all that money in his cash incentive ISA on the same day we’d never have known”. And you think ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking about what to do with MY cash and whether or not to kill the old guy with the dog, now I know what to do about all of that’. Sometimes the Universe just says “I’m raining today, go visit your Grandma.”

One of my best friends is Dominic; whose real name is Hippy Boy because he has long hair. He doesn’t find this half as funny as I do. Hippy Boy plays guitar and so we often talk about creative artistic type stuff. He was recently asked a question in regard to his creativity by the very wise lady that helps him with his head, and last week he asked the same question of me – a question I have been thinking about ever since and is beginning to have a profound effect on me. Like all great questions it is unnervingly simple, can be asked at any time and will probably bug you until your dying day. Think about whatever it is you love to do, in my case the painting and in Hippy Boy’s case the guitar, and ask yourself how often you really WORK at it? If you’re anything like me your immediate response is to ridicule such an idiotic question because you WORK at such things all the time – how do you not WORK at something that you are working on? However, you should note the difference between merely doing something and WORKING at it, and then ask yourself the question again.

I have come to understand that I DO a lot of painting, but I do not WORK at it. This is a disarming realisation, because now I have to re-evaluate how I do what I do and re-engage with it in a different way if I am to experience any success through it at all. I believe I have stayed at a comfortable level of application, probably for years, for fear that if I WORK at it, I might actually become GOOD at it and will therefore have to realise my dreams instead of just dreaming them. It’s terrifying. I believe that the wise old lady needed that question at some point in her life and the Universe asked it of her, then she saw Hippy Boy needed it and she asked it of him, he asked it of me and now I am asking it of you. Like a cosmic pass-the-parcel.

It doesn’t end there though, because when the Universe wants you to pay attention it can really shout. Hippy Boy leant me a book, Paulo Coelho’s ‘The Pilgrimage’. If you’ve ever read any of his books then you already know where I’m at with this. Apart from the fact that every line of every page is imbued with spiritual advice, one of the threads of this story is that enthusiasm is the joy of the soul, and without it you become bitter and dead inside. So the next question is – How enthusiastic are you feeling right now? Nothing dispels my enthusiasm quicker than having to spend precious hours working in an office instead of nourishing my creativity just so that I have enough money to pay bills and then not have a lot left. This month, my entire wage had gone on bills and bank charges in THREE days. What am I going to eat for the next 27 days? Probably just my words. I sat in the office yesterday and I was thinking about all this. I began to lose focus on what I was doing. I became irritable and vague, I had a terrible urge to flee and by not doing so I was nauseous and agitated. I have had some pretty crap days at work before now but I have never experienced anything quite like that. I became emotional and felt like I couldn’t remember what I was doing. I was frustrated and worried and spun out by the rapidity of the change. My heart raced. I was so fearful in fact that it registered plainly on my face and people starting asking me what was wrong and I had to pretend I was OK. The attack lasted nearly two hours. I think I was having my first taste of what for most people becomes stress related illness. It really got to me and I was still deeply disconcerted about it long after it had subsided. I honestly thought I was better at keeping my head in check than that, but it would appear I’m as susceptible to stress as anyone is.

I’ve one last piece of advice to bring this to a coherent whole, because good lessons always come in three’s. This one is from Hippy Boy’s Mum (a very wise family indeed), and again it is simple and always applicable – ‘The wheels won’t fall off’. The upshot of all of this is that I’ve been so wrapped up in trying to make it as an artist that I’ve stopped enjoying the journey, becoming deeply embittered by anything that I perceive to be distracting me from that goal, like my job which is totally necessary because it pays my bills and allows me to live. This frustration has robbed me of my enthusiasm which in turn has had me churning out Art that I have not WORKED at and has wounded the only soul I will ever have. It has been this way for so long that by the time something has started to go right, like this website, I have slipped so far from the track that it took an intergalactic telephone call and a panic attack at work to wake me up. As close as it came though, the wheels didn’t fall off. Now I have to do something about it. This Blog entry is for all those people who have worked so hard for something for so long that it has become difficult to remember what it was all for. You WILL get there. Never, ever, EVER quit. Just pay attention when you’re being spoken to, it might be the Universe and you don’t want to piss it off.

My Dad is a walking history book. More specifically – after 12 years in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces – my Dad is a walking naval history TALKING book. If you don’t run away from him fast enough, he will put knowledge in you, whether you want him to or not. Depending on whom you are and which party you are at, he’s either the man you most want to sit next to or the man you need to pretend not to have seen before leaving discreetly via the fire exit. As I am his son and his house has no fire exit, I am the man who receives ALL his topical updates in return for being fed or borrowing his money. Thanks to him, I not only exist but I can also talk for some time on major naval victories like Trafalgar, major naval growling matches like The Cold War and major naval drinking holes in Plymouth.

I visited him the other day to waste all his black printer ink by printing giant fonts that I later found to be quite useless. He cornered me when I made him a cup of tea and I least expected it. Amazingly, he only needs three conversational jumps before you find yourself in a seminar. It goes like this – “Hi Son, how are you today? The weather is awful isn’t it? Have you seen how low the ceilings were on the gun-deck of HMS Victory? The men slept eighty to a bunk in a room the size of your eye and had one radish between them to nourish them for four years.” – Or any one of a million other random facts that are centred on intense bravery through intense hardship a really, really long time ago. On this particular visit I got two stories that I was surprised and pleased to find absolutely ace, not only were they pretty interesting and inspiring but they were also totally in tune with the themes I want to talk about in this blog. So here they are:

In World War 2 the British had these nifty little four-man submarines called XE-Craft that were actually just water-tight Dustbins with two tons of Amatol explosives strapped to each side. The four crewmen were signed up because they weren’t claustrophobic, flammable or sane. One of the crewmen was a diver who had in his possession a further six or so 20-pound limpet mines. The craft would slip under an enemy ship whilst it was moored, drop the two side charges on the sea bed and then the diver would pop out of a tiny hatch and attach the limpet mines by hand to the hull of the ship then get back in the XE and make a hasty exit before the timed charges all went off. You ideally needed to be at home in your slippers by the time that happened. How anybody volunteered for these missions is completely beyond me.

In August 1945, the craft XE-3 was tasked with mining the Japanese cruiser ‘Takao’ in Singapore harbour. It took 11 hours to steer the craft through fortified harbour defences and get under the target. The diver, one James Joseph Magennis, then swum out of the hatch to lay the limpets. In the cold and the dark he had to chip away at barnacles for thirty minutes before he could clear enough space to lay the mines, without being seen by guards with rifles, in a diving suit that was faulty and leaking oxygen the entire time. When he returned to the craft, panting slightly, his Lieutenant found that one of the side charges had not dropped, so Magennis went straight back out to sort it, commenting only “I’ll be right as soon as I’ve got my wind, Sir”. He sat on a two ton bomb for seven minutes and freed it with a heavy spanner allowing it to drop to the sea floor. During all this time the tide had gone out and the ship had dropped in the harbour, obstructing their exit. So, with a Japanese cruiser sat directly on top of them and with all their own bombs sat just feet away and ticking merrily towards obliteration, the crew of XE-3 just sort of sat about for a bit, sweating in silence and waiting for the tide to lift the ship sufficiently out of the way so they could bugger off in one piece. This they did. The ‘Takao’ was damaged enough to never sail again and Magennis got the Victoria Cross for bravery.

In February 2008, in the city of Basra in Iraq, Major Phil Packer found himself on the wrong side of a rocket attack and suffered ‘catastrophic’ injuries, resulting in the loss of use of both his legs. Doctors said he would never walk again. I can’t say for sure, but that sounds like the point where I would have accepted defeat and got ready for a life where most of the planet is completely inaccessible, including most of your home. Major Phil Packer had entirely different ideas. Twelve months after the accident, almost to the day, Phil and a chap called Al Humphreys rowed a boat 30 miles across the English Channel, in freezing temperatures and rough seas, in fifteen and a half hours. Two months after that, on the 26^th April 2009, Phil set off with all the other runners on the Flora London Marathon. It took him 13 days, 2 hours and 50 minutes to walk the route, 2 miles a day, on crutches. “I’ve walked 52,400 steps and somebody has walked with me every step of the way, be it a dinner lady or a London taxi driver,” said the Royal Military Police Officer. “I’ve had time to talk to people and they have really opened up about their feelings about the Armed Services. It has been humbling”. Naturally, he doesn’t stop there. Next he will climb, actually pull himself up, El Capitan – 3000 feet of vertical rock in Yosemite National Park – in 3 days. After that he wants to work to bring hope and inspiration to disabled teenagers and injured servicemen through the charity Help for Heroes. What an absolute legend.

My sincere apologies here as I drag these two great stories into making a rudimentary point about my cushy little life. Leading Seaman Magennis proves that when you have a job to do you have an opportunity to do it to the best of your ability (listen up my call-centre brethren) whilst biding your time so you can eventually get the hell out and go about your life with pride. Major Packer proves that you can do whatever you set your mind to, despite what everyone else thinks are impossible obstacles, and achieve greatness in the face of all adversity. Finally, and most oddly of all, my Dad has proved that as long as you tell someone enough stories, some of it will eventually be of some use and you may accidentally inspire someone to go off and be better than they would have been had you paid any attention to how obviously disinterested they were when you started talking to them.

Acrylic, spray paint, Bible pages on canvas

47 x 31 inches

2008

Acrylic on canvas

47 x 31 inches

2008

I quit smoking at New Year. So I started going to the Greengrocer’s round the corner from work during my morning break instead of having a fag in the car park. I figured now that I’d remembered my body is a temple it was worth having at least two of my recommended five-a-day fruit and veg, where previously I was on none-a-day. This is because I’m scared to death of dying and quitting cigarettes and eating five-a-day makes you live forever. It’s Science.

The Greengrocer’s smells funny and still sells little cartons of assorted flowers which old ladies buy in the same quantities as kids buy sweets. The guy who runs it is either pretty old but looking good for his age or quite young but has had the hardest life in the top ten tales of Greengrocer woe. It’s impossible to determine. Either way he is always in an infectiously jolly mood and his cheeks are always ruddy so I’m guessing he has a distillery out back to turn unsold potatoes into get-you-through-your-day juice. On the wall at the back of the till are two posters, one with a gorilla’s face on and one with a polar bear’s face on. The caption on each poster reads ‘Try telling HER that fruit and veg aren’t cool’. Each animal is surrounded by photos of carrots and broccoli and bananas and oranges, all of which have faded to a soft blue so that you actually have to work out what some of them are from their shape. They had the same posters in my Primary School dining hall, making them way over twenty years old. They’re probably keeping the wall up.

The guy tells me where every item is from as I buy it. My orange is from South Africa, my banana is from British Columbia and my apple is French (he checks I’m not prejudiced before he accepts my money for the French apple). My eight pence change, he tells me, is from the London Mint. It’s brilliant. It’s like around the world in eighty seconds. We do this routine every day. He has different banter for everyone he serves. He’s probably known them as customers for years. Somehow it feels like I’m in the club.

Sometimes for lunch I have to go to the Supermarket and what a different beast that is. Apart from the obvious horror of shopping in a characterless warehouse it is the employees that mark the separation of these two different stores. Before I generalise wildly I must tell you that I worked at a Supermarket for four and a half years and escaped with a certificate in fire prevention and minor brain trauma. Supermarket staff can have an eerily empty preoccupation about them. They tend to be either bored and embittered because they’ve worked there too long or vacant and uninterested because they’re students and one day they’ll be doing anything that isn’t this. They hope. On some occasions, (and this MUST have happened to you) I’ve gone through the checkouts when the operatives are gossiping to each other and have only been addressed when it came to the cash, on at least one occasion I paid and left without a single word being said to me. I didn’t care and neither did they. This from an Industry that actively monitors and grades the Customer Service it expects from its staff.

The explanation for all this is simple. The Supermarket sells everything and never shuts. Even if the staff all lined up and slapped you about the face every time you tried to leave with your trolley, there’d still be something there that you’d need. Sooner or later we’ll all go back. The Greengrocer doesn’t have that luxury, he does however have the luxury of meeting every single one of his customers and therefore to personalise the service to all. He wants you to go back and he’d notice if you didn’t.

That isn’t my point though. If you put the Supermarket Employee in the Greengrocers they would soon act as the old man does – they haven’t been lobotomised or anything – they’re PEOPLE. I think that something about the size of an organisation can be dizzying to us as a race; it promotes a weird false sense of separation that is helplessly alienating to all involved. When it gets too big, it affects your perception of your individual worth and you lose your inspiration to contribute. Like your town. Like your country. It’s enough to make you start smoking.

Why is your Greengrocer better than your Supermarket? Because he’s in a position whereby as long as he remembers to give a shit then it benefits everyone he meets.