The Aardvark Blog

A trip to London to meet old friends
23/11/2024

This week the ordinary flow of the Aardvark week was disrupted by a rapid trip to London to pick up books and meet up with old friends. As Kenny Rogers once sang you can't make old friends, they come about by a natural process of accretion. Over the years many have dropped by the wayside - usually by applying for a card at the great library in the sky - sometimes by geography or getting tired of my pontificating.

There is no getting away from the old shoe comfort you get from holding conversational hands with a friend who has known you in good times and bad. On this occasion the pleasure was increased by my seeing my godson for the first time in nearly two years. He was fresh from an epic sporting victory - a 17-nil thrashing of a local school at football. He greeted my suggestion that they should have let the other side score at least once, with the kind of disdain I would have shown at his age. Perhaps it takes a lifetime to develop a taste for faux generosity.

After a generous supper and a comfortable bed for the night we set off to pick up the books I had  arranged to buy. Here, after an horrendous journey (I can see why my hosts have given up owning a car in London), we eventually made it to the publisher's offices. And there I met up with another kind of old friend - books from a publisher I have known and loved for many decades. Each publisher is different, although they all have a tendency to copy their rivals' successes. But not withstanding the temptation to synchronism, a publishing house just cannot help being who they are. And there is such pleasure in seeing the newborns from these old and well-loved houses. The books that carry on a story that you remember first becoming acquainted with some decades ago. A publishing house like a bookshop, can itself be a work of art. And why not? How are the careful placement of books and authors less than the latest faddiest installation piece?

On my return from London I read in the Art Newspaper about the latest sale of Maurizio Cattelan's 'Comedian' - a banana duct taped to the wall - for $6M. It is a poor kind of joke, but nonetheless a funny one. If only Duchamp had found a sympathetic judge to allow him to copyright this kind of jeu d'esprit!  - how he would have laughed at the thought, yet when it came to it, such musings would have diverted him from playing and talking about chess for barely a second.Now, there was a man who knew the value of old friends.