Today’s Nap: Stoke to beat Arsenal at the Emirates 11/1.

Ludicrous price: Arsenal = those that aren’t injured are fairies; Stoke = big, horrible. set-piece specialists.

School of Saatchi on Tuesday nights on BBC 2 has become my new favourite programme. It’s X-Factor for modern art; you can catch up with it here on watch again.

Matthew Collings – who has presented the televised Turner Prize in the past, and done a good job of it, I think, taking a sceptical yet on the-side-of-it sort of line – is both a judge, and principal presenter of, this show. This week the ‘contestants’ were went out into the seaside world of Hastings where they were required to create installations. Collings, in commenting on the difficulties the ‘contestants’ would face in substituting ‘the emptiness that was in the space before the artists came along, said the following:

‘The nonsense that goes on in the heads of those poor students whose minds have been corrupted by decades of garbage in Art Schools is going to be manifested there out in the street for the public to see.’

I don’t know about that. I went to Norwich Art School (NSAD – Norwich School of Art and Design) in one of these past decades (94-97). If I recollect the experience correctly, though you could really do whatever you wanted – which would be the point (if there’s no freedom of expression, there’s no art school) – whatever you wanted included the opportunity to develop craft skills in the life room, the print room, the computer room and so on. Even in those years the works of Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread et al were on the syllabus – there were monographs, slides and videos in the library and there were on short loan, too: we were already studying our contemporaries, who, in some cases, doubled up as our heroes and inspirations. It was a free-spirited time. There were some students, perhaps, who were going to make the unhappy discovery that they weren’t artists, but as far as I was concerned there was no garbage in the experience at all. Perhaps it was different elsewhere.

It’s certainly different at Norwich Art School (NUCA – Norwich University College of the Arts) now. The anti-poetry of the new name (chosen by committee to exhibit the fact that the school is now allowed to accredit its own degrees) tells you all you need to know about how, in the past decade, such garbage as there is has come down from the top. The place has been dryly sanitised by the steady drip drip drip of a stagnant, ‘transparent’ New Labour form-filing Health and Safety ‘Human Resources’-led brand of uptight dronery. Now that all the bean counting has been done, and all the old ‘artist teachers’ have been squeezed out, the Mandelsonian task is complete. All that remains is a turgid structure of suffocation and the dread hand of beaurocracy. If I enrolled there today I don’t think I’d last six months before the weight of rules and the stifling atmosphere of authority killed me. Now that is garbage.

Emma Biggs/Matthew Collings : Primitive Methodist, 2008

the proposal for The Portrait of a Nation has gone off leaving me free to twiddle my thumbs. Russell Grant does the horoscopes in our local paper. He was advising yesterday that I should ‘put my generosity and creative and organisational talents to the fore by, for instance, promoting the services and products of others, on my blog, if I have one.’ (I am not making this up). I did not have time for it yesterday, but now I can catch up. (Today I should be starting a long distance romance. I’ll have to get round to that tomorrow.)

So dear blogees, what services and products have you got? Don’t hang around, you could become a millionaire here.

A dog in a manger, no crib for a bed… Better make do with a sofa, then. You’d think I’d set that up, wouldn’t you, but no, this is how he was found. That ‘Dalmatian’ is the first animal he’s really warmed to since Ollie. He’s not even chewed his head off. Yet.

Which window will it be behind today, children? The round, the square, or the arched?

Having watched the Masters tennis from the O2 on Sky all last week I have plans in the near future to write a ‘test tennis’ piece about the astonishing standard in the mens game right now, and about the absurdity, particularly in the BBC, that surrounds Andrew Murray when Wimbledon comes around – he is just one of many very good players on the tour, but he is about to fall between two waves of greats, I think (how can I write about that happy prospect in a way that seems fair and unbeastly?). I also want to do something intelligent and unsentimental on National Hunt racing. Denman’s Hennessy Gold Cup at the weekend was an extraordinary accomplishment (too many superlatives already, ed). But I can only concentrate on one thing at a time and am busy trying to put together a book proposal so here is a picture of the legendary Milla. He is a softy, really. (Those who have read Walking Ollie will know of him, for others a previous post here says something about his ways.)

I went to photograph a dog and owner yesterday for the pitch for the forthcoming, ‘A Nation of Dog Lovers- the purebred, the allsorts, the rescued and the saved.’ (Possible subtitle). We already know Blue (below) from his early days when he had many a skirmish or two with Ollie and (as sanctioned by Ollie), Dylan. He is about Dylan’s age. I have a great photograph of him with his owner, but for now that is under wraps. He’s a Labradoodle of enormous vim, vigour, charm and exuberance (he only knocked me over twice). Funnily enough, regular blog contributor makemeadiva (who also has a great picture and story in for the pitch) has blogged a compelling piece about another animal called Blue today here.

All Time Goal Celebrations

1. The Tango Tribute

Took place at Eastlands today when cheeky Cockney chappy Jimmy Bullard, having scored a late penalty to level the scores at 1-1, collected his team mates and re-created the infamous moment from a year ago when manager Phil ‘Tango’ Brown sat his side down in the penalty box when they were 4-0 down at half-time and ticked them off. It was a joy to behold, and you could not have had a better actor to play the part of Tango than artful dodger Bullard who did an excellent job of pointing at people.

This pushes the previous number One (from obscure Book of Lists: Football) to second:

2. The Dying Swan

Jürgen Klinsmann joined Tottenham Hotspur in 1994 following performances in successive World Cup tournaments – Italia ’90 and USA ’94 – during which his fame as the Diver’s Diver reached global proportions, nowhere more so than in England where supporters are on permanent red alert for skulduggery from Ze Germans. Klinsmann scored his first goal for Spurs away at Sheffield Wednesday; in an inspired choreographed gesture, which won over a significant amount of the non-partisan, he celebrated by running to the touchline and performing a self-mocking cartoon bellyflop, just ahead of his teammates, who piled in behind following suit.

Come to the Norwich Theatre Royal most years and tonight was the night. The Rambert Dance Company (proper title) are the best things on legs and we are most uplifted. (This post is intended to provoke a certain amount of outrage from OS regarding roots betrayal and the depravity of middle-class gayness to which I have sunken.)

is the title of one of my favourite poetry collections, by James Fenton. It’s a substantial combination of personal politics and of the other kind of politics, the writing has a very clean, clear, hard and simple Auden-like beat. Fenton has spent time in south-east Asia, Cambodia, covering war and its fallout for the Independent newspaper. This is the title poem, which I can almost recite:

Out of Danger

Heart be kind and sign the release
As the trees their loss approve.
Learn as leaves must learn to fall
Out of danger, out of love.

What belongs to frost and thaw
Sullen winter will not harm.
What belongs to wind and rain
Is out of danger from the storm.

Jealous passion, cruel need
Betray the heart they feed upon.
But what belongs to earth and death
Is out of danger from the sun.

I was cruel, I was wrong -
Hard to say and hard to know.
You do not belong to me.
You are out of danger now -

Out of danger from the wind,
Out of danger from the wave,
Out of danger from the heart
Falling, falling out of love.

(1993)