Compromise is the answer

Someone was defending the behaviour of Kanye West today on the grounds he is an 'artist'. Artists can do or say what they like, apparently. Only wealthy ones, I suspect.

Someone else was saying that if the train drivers cannot live on £65,000 a year, then how do they expect pensioners to live on £10,600? This person recently claimed that he could easily live on £6 per day, as could everyone else. Hmm.

Today it is too cold for me to go to my workshop, even though yesterday was colder. The other day it was too wet and windy. Being in my workshop is almost exactly the same as being outside. The door stays open and there is no heating. It does have a roof though, albeit a leaky one. I just have to accept that it is Winter and I am in the winter of my life. Once you come to terms with that you feel better about poor productivity.

It used to be that when the going got tough, the Arts was the first area to face cuts in funding. Now it is basic services. Ordinary painters, sculptors, poets and musicians have always been expected to live on £6 a day or less. They are not seen as contributing to society in any palpable way. Internal and external adornments to new buildings were traditionally an afterthought - if there was any money left at the end of the project. 

Conservators and archeologists are about as popular with general builders as the crested newt, but - or because - they have influence in civil society which is set in law and hard fought for. It wasn't until so much damage and destruction had been wreaked  in the 1960s that everyone woke up and realised that the quality of their civic life does not depend on shopping centres alone. Remember The Sack of Bath.

Bath is back-sliding so badly now that the city is running the risk of losing its World Heritage status. Speculators want to develop the site of the old 'gasometers' at the Southern end of town. Basically, Bristol and Bath are slowly merging down the line of the river as it flows out to the docks and the sea. Years ago I began to suspect that this was a long-term plan when they installed six-foot diameter sewage pipes through untouched countryside, when the area just did not need them.

A friend of mine - now dead - was a key figure in stopping the demolition of good 18th century buildings here by developers in the 1960s, and in later life turned his attention to the gasometers on the Bristol road. I always found these huge metal cylinders rising up on the outskirts an industrial eyesore, but he saw beauty and social history in them. He was a teacher at the local art school before becoming a successful property developer. He also began making brand new Morris 1000s in Sri Lanka with his friend and business partner. He had the remaining one (of three) of the gasometers painted in gay colours and then tried - and failed - to get it listed. Charlie Ware was his name. He threw good parties in the 1970s at his house in the Royal Crescent.

The listing of industrial buildings and structures is always going to be contentious - take brutalist Nazi architecture, for instance - but you cannot let speculators change your living environment for the sake of profit alone. You build bigger roads and cars will fill them. As for HS2...