Chris Sutcliff

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.

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.

I’m like the rubbish version of Batman. By day I’m a nobody office worker, peddling car insurance to the masses. By night I’m a nobody artist, painting out a dream that one day this will be all I do and who I am. Only that’s not how it goes at all. In reality, office work is mentally tiring and the days are long. At home at night you have to cook and eat and clean up and then claw back a little bit of life that is not about ‘productivity’ or ‘targets’. It seems I’ve got the tiniest proportion of time in which I can try to develop my hobby into something that pays gas bills and keeps the fridge full, but I’m too knackered when it comes. And I’m not alone. Most people you talk to have got some sort of brilliant skill or passion that they attempt to squeeze in around a job that does nothing to encourage their growth and a life that is full of distractions. I show people in my office my sketchbook and they go “Dude, you should totally be doing this for a living” (because people in Burnley talk like Californian surfers) and I think – how can I tell this person that I’ve been hearing this for the last ten years and done nothing about it but moan and feel cheated? Sound familiar? Then what the hell do we do?

My mate Rob built this site for me and during our planning sessions he suggested that I put more content into it than just the paintings; that I have something to hold the attention of the visitors and give them a reason to come back again. So I thought about this and I decided that as well as the usual stuff that appears in blogs, I wanted to have a specific aim, a continuous thread, something that people would find useful. And because I’m Batman I came up with two ideas.

When I was a Student and learning how to paint, I found that good advice and instructions were a bit thin on the ground. Like Magicians, Artists are a bit hesitant to tell you exactly how they do what they do, as with magic you have to look at the end product a lot and then work it out for yourself – mostly with depressing results. And if you’ve ever picked up a self-help book such as ‘How to draw animals pretty crappily’ or ‘How to paint portraits that will insult your models’, you’ll already know that these are a rubbish and boring alternative. They’ll give you the basics but following the steps will not make you Andy Warhol. Being Andy Warhol makes you Andy Warhol. But there’s my point, even Warhol took his inspiration from sources that were readily accessible to everyone, developed them in structured ways that could easily be taught and exhibited them via a bunch of connected people that he had been fortunate enough to meet, and people meet people all the time. (DISCLAIMER – becoming rich is another matter altogether, you cannot teach your audience to like your work. Rob a bank instead, the pay off is quicker and the critics are less harsh). So occasionally, for the studious and the curious alike, I’m going to drop the veil and tell you exactly how to do what I do from infantile sketch to finished canvas – warts and all. I promise it will be less boring and more valuable than ‘How to paint oxygen with watercolours’.

I don’t like peddling car insurance to the masses five days a week. I don’t even think the masses are that happy about me doing it. I also don’t like the fact that I have to fight to make time for my one real interest in life. I want to get out. So I’ve got a bit of a plan and it’s ready to roll and I’m going to document every single step of it here. That way if I make it, then I will have left behind a step by step guide to turning your hobby into your living. And if I don’t make it, then I will have shown you all the pitfalls, wrong turns and dead ends so you can avoid them and make better decisions than I did. I read about ordinary people realising their dreams and improving their lives all the time, mostly in trashy magazines in our staff canteen. So if it can be done then let’s get on with it. How hard can it be?

Interesting times. I would have quit watching the news ages ago if it hadn’t become such a strangely hypnotic mantra coloured by yet another Big Business Fat Cat going bust and resigning in shame, yet another member of the British Parliament abusing their expenses, yet another terrorist attack in spite of the wars we fund and then fight and then die in to curtail them. It’s a hypnotic mantra on panic. It seems that the media has been successful in at least one of its apparent agendas – to prepare the State for a hysterical reaction, to the point that we are now actively re-shaping our lives around these dramas instead of just vicariously watching them. Uncertainty is sinking in. More and more these days my friends and relatives talk about the global recession or the North Korean nuclear programme or some other doomsday construct. I find it steadily harder to remember what we used to talk about but I’m sure it was more comforting than that. If you can no longer switch off the TV to stem the tide of information, and the information in question is taxing the smile off your face, you’d be forgiven for feeling a little bit, well, impotent right now. We are all screaming into a hurricane, after all.

It was a few years ago when somebody first suggested to me that I put my art on a website. The problem with that brilliant idea is that I am technologically challenged in a way that I’m sure one day an expert will prove to be a disease. So at the suggestion of running a website I probably nodded approvingly, did that thing with my eyebrow that makes me look serious and then went straight to work hiding in a hole and pretending it wasn’t happening. I do that a lot. It may seem stupendously bad timing that just as I finally launch my site, I do so in a nerve-shredded world of collapsing financial markets, war, famine and a multitude of other venomous beasties. Who in their right mind right now is going to care about one little nobody standing on a chair and waving his arms just because he paints a bit? Now that I’ve written that, I don’t either.

Okay, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that Art probably won’t save the world. Unless you actually think it will, in which case good luck. Also I’m not Picasso, so my art probably won’t get seen by World Leaders or Bruce Willis and provoke them into saving the world for me. But being a ‘nobody’ does not mean you’re ineffective and not being big isn’t an incentive to stay small; in fact it can be a great strength. Whenever I show a new drawing to a friend, I hope first of all to get any kind of reaction, even better if they like it; I do have an ego to feed the same as you do. I also hope to temporarily lift them out of this world of implied futility, if only for a few seconds, to a state of being that has no cash value and that no agency can control, while they decide if they love it or hate it or if they get it or whatever. It’s a tiny offering with a big payback – precious few interesting seconds for someone so the end of the world can stop affecting them. Where they have space to react to a benevolent stimulus and enjoy a nice, free human response like wonder or imagination or pointing in my face and laughing. I’m not denying there’s some escapism here but this isn’t a mere distraction; it’s a reminder that not everything important has to terrify you. So I reckon it’s alright to do more drawings and show more people – a bit like taking on the world but just the tiny chunk that I am able to affect and without really getting off the settee. I’m one of four and a half billion little ‘nobodies’ all doing this little valid thing that will restore more seconds of humanity to a world that experts insist will explode at any moment.

Something like that anyway. I’m tired of screaming into the Hurricane and I’m pretty sure you are too. People repeatedly assure me that this site is a safe place. So you’re welcome here whenever you want.