Beach holidays then and now

For a fair chunk of my childhood living in Portugal, summer holidays were spent in a small house in the fishing village of Armacão de Pera in the Algarve.

Amongst the images imprinted in my memory are whitewashed houses with red tiled roofs and chimneys, dry brown landscapes, donkeys, wizened and bent old ladies dressed in mourning black from head to toe, miles and miles of sandy beaches, giant rocks, colourful fishing boats, seagulls, and of course the sea - in fact, the cold blue Atlantic  - from which you could imagine seeing North Africa in one direction, or North America very far in the other. 

Today Armacão de Pera is almost unrecognisable - it's a full-on tourist development, from posh resorts to sea-fronting apartment blocks. But the beach is much the same, still dotted with fishing boats and a good mix of locals and tourists.

This friendly 'captain' gave me a double thumbs up as I took this photo, but was disappointed when I declined the offer of a trip to the coves and grottos ...

Instead we hired a couple of colourful cabanas with loungers facing the sea ...

Curiously, almost all the life-guards and beach vendors I chatted to (including the one below) were Brazilian, not Portuguese ...

Tractors are still used to haul fishing boats into and out of the sea, a spectacle people gather round to watch ...

My one disappointment was that the beach vendors no longer sell farturas - fried choux pastry, a kind of light-as-air doughnut in a thin spiral shape, coated in cinnamon and sugar. An older man told me that a few summers ago he'd seen the last seller of home-made farturas, still warm, in a straw basket hoisted over his shoulder.

Taking a long walk down the beach later on (this is one of the longest stretches of beach in the Algarve) we saw young Ronaldos in the making, practising their moves ...

... and even younger ones ...

These kids were chasing each other with spades in a dispute over a sand castle ...

But here's something you'd never have seen back in the day - at a trendy beach bar, you could plop down on bright beanbags dotted on the sand under woven umbrellas, for a chilled caipirinha perhaps ...

treat yourself to a massage in a custom-made tent ...

or even - how cool is this - get comfy on a four-poster bed while watching the sunset ...

I guess progress has its compensations ...

Where am I?

Can you guess from the Moorish style rooftop of the house?

This view of olive groves beyond my toes?

Daughter no. 2 is coming up from the pool ... too hot ...

and Daughter no. 1 is multi-tasking in the hammock - texting and reading ...

Relaxing and reading were in fact the only things on today's agenda

in this lovely house in the south of Portugal ...

where nobody felt inclined to move far from here ...

until sunset, when hunger overtook inertia and the Weber had to be fired up ...

Around 9 pm the sun was setting ...

Would you blame us for not stirring from this spot tomorrow? Hmm, well, on the other hand there are soft sandy beaches to explore ... 

and watermelon girl is hatching a plan to swim with dolphins ...

A weekend of art

A brief window of nice summer weather and lots of interesting exhibitions on, as London's tourist season gets into full swing, made a spot of gallery trawling seem the thing to do last weekend.

First stop was the National Portrait Gallery, in St Martin's Place, where the 2011 BP Portrait Awards are showing - an annual competition open to anyone over 18, from any country, working in portraiture - seemingly not as popular an art form as it once was ...

I posted about last year's show here. Both years I've found the judges' choices surprising - you can see the four prize-winning portraits here - and apparently I'm not alone in this. Visitors are also given the opportunity to vote for their own favourites and it's interesting to see how different the popular choice is!

These were some of the portraits I liked or found interesting (the images below from the NPG's website) ...

One of my favourites was Latoya by Alan Coulson - I liked the contrast between her vibrant, colourful clothes and her face which is so composed and quiet ...

I also loved the feel of Barbara Skingle's portrait of her daughter with pet canary, Katherine (and Millie) ...

In very different vein, Edward Sutcliffe's oil painting of the actress Glenda Jackson (more recently Labour MP for many years) was photographic in quality, the skin texture astonishing in minutely exact detail, and shows her as stern, rather humourless and quite fearsome ... 

Somewhat prettier was the romantic subject R.H. by Isobel Peachy ...

I liked the strong colour and life in this portrait of Boy George by Layla Lyons ...

and I was really taken by Manuel Ferrer Perea's tender portrait of his daughter waking from sleep, titled Despertar (Awakening) ...

Ohh! by Cayetano de Arquer Buigas was chocolate-box kitsch but made me laugh out loud ...

The most interesting of all for me was Wendy Elia's I could have been a contender, a huge canvas (unfortunately I can't find a decent quality image of it on the web). We see her painting herself in a full-size mirror, with two of her children in the room (note the son's appalled reaction on seeing his mother nude! and the daughter gazing at herself in the mirror), her grandchildren present in photographs in the room, and yet another view to the outside through a window, from which a CCTV camera points inside the room. I liked the fact that there is a story to this picture, as well as her honest take on herself as a woman, artist and mother. (Her feet are extraordinarily well painted and seem to have a story of their own). 

After the exhibition we headed upstairs for lunch at the Portrait Restaurant on the roof, where glass walls give fantastic views of the city, across Trafalgar Square to the London Eye and Big Ben. It took a friend visiting from Cape Town to introduce this hidden-away London gem to me - thank you, Cathy! - and it's my newest favourite lunch spot ...

After lunch, Younger Daughter steered me off in the direction of another new spot a little further north - the German Gymnasium, a recently-converted gallery space in Kings Cross ...

... where she'd heard of an exhibition by a recently discovered photographer whose work has sparked great interest in New York and now London ...

Vivian Maier, self-portrait  www.vivianmaier.com

...  Vivian Maier, born in New York in 1926 of French and Austrian parentage. She spent most of her life working on and off as a nanny and all her free time walking the streets of Chicago and New York, photographing street life over more than three decades, from the early 1950s onwards. 


In character she seems to have been as interesting as her photographs - she's described as an eccentric loner, intellectual and opinionated, obsessed with her personal artistic life but uninterested in sharing it. She died in poverty in 2009 and her work would have remained forever unknown if a curious real estate agent had not discovered an astonishing stash of over 100 000 negatives packed away in storage lockers amongst her few possessions after her death!

Street photographs, Vivian Maier. Photo credits www.vivianmaier.com

These are just a few samples of some of her earlier photographs. They reminded me of some of the great photos of this era from Life magazine, and perhaps will become classics in their own right.

And from here we intrepid art viewers summoned the stamina to head towards Picadilly, to check out the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition - an annual event for which members of the public - amateurs and professionals - are invited to submit art work. And submit they do - this year they had over 12 000 entries from 27 different countries! 

Not all are exhibited, fortunately, but it does almost seem that way as you trek from one giant exhibition hall to the next, gawking as much at the sheer quantity of pictures as at the pictures themselves, all of which are also up for sale.

And were they worth the visit? The few I wouldn't mind owning were way beyond my means, and the rest, well, they ranged in quality from quite interesting to downright mediocre, so I'll rather sign off with a pretty pic of Londoners enjoying the sunshine in the pretty courtyard of the Royal Academy ...

Canada comes to Trafalgar Square

On Friday this week, these were the unusual scenes in Trafalgar Square ...

... as patriotic Canadians poured into London along with thousands of curious locals and tourists, to celebrate Canada Day.

For the past six years this event has been staged here, outside Canada House, and last year drew 50 000 people, making it the biggest celebration of the day outside of Canada. This year it coincided with a royal visit to Canada by Wills and Kate (for some alternative views see here and here). 

The Mounties were there of course, in their snappy red uniforms, smiling politely for endless photographs with people wanting to be seen with them for posterity ...

There were as many creative ways as you could think of to show that you loved Canada.

Street hockey matches were being played on  a makeshift pitch ...

... while way up on his plinth Nelson haughtily turned his back on all this colonial nonsense ...

'Traditional' Canadian food was available to those who queued - Tim Hortons' coffee and doughnuts, bison burgers or sticky buffalo wings? The bloke in the hat seemed a bit dazed and confused by the options ...

and the traditional English ice-cream van was evidently a less popular choice ...

Familiar scenes around the square ... the fountains (above) in front of George IV on his horse, and below the dome of the National Gallery, spire of St Martin in the Fields, and embassies - Canada House (bottom left) and South Africa House (bottom right) ...

On a huge stage, a Saskatchewan dancer, member of the Great Plains Dance Company, twirled like a colourful whirling dervish to an insistent beat ...

This couple looked fully in the spirit of things ...

... but not everyone was there in supporting roles. A few principled young women from PETA were making their own colourful stand against Canada's tolerance of seal-clubbing.

It may have been London, but this was unmistakably a Canadian affair