Traditional Catholic Visualism. I've been spending far too much precious time lately lapping up the resplendent photographs on the excellent Hallowed Ground picture blog. Here is an inspired and carefully chosen celebration of the liturgical grandeur that was the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. It has taken many a year to recover from that cultural rupture which (indirectly) brought us a neo-Protestant mistrust of the visual in church worship. Other woeful Vatican II by-products in Catholic liturgy have been banal, folksy hymns and a mood of jamboree rather than awe at the sacred mysteries being represented.

For myself, hopes for the future and continuity with the past include going to Thursday evening Mass last week at Sacred Heart & English Martyrs Church, Co. Durham and witnessing Fr. Dickson process to the sanctuary wearing a black biretta on his head exactly like the above unknown circa World War I cleric.

Beano Summer Special Comics. I'm almost certain my Dad bought me copies of these Summer Specials (dated 1972, 1973 and 1975) during holidays in Wales, Yorkshire and the Lakes. In my early teens I remember reading mainly American Marvel and DC comics. But I also recall with a good deal of affection these DC Thomson goodies, printed in semi-gloss paper in tabloid size. There are many references here to venerable British Butlins style holidays in these jolly old pages. Steam Trains, Striped Blazers, Straw Boaters and School Teacher's Mortar Boards also crop up. Did we ever come across such delightful anachronisms in Captain America or The Avengers?

More signs from Lourdes. I wouldn't normally upload any pictures of vinyl (spit) signs but these examples from the grotto domain of Lourdes are certainly untypical. The above request for respectful silence is pleasingly naive and the schematic representation of a humble act of contrition between priest and penitent quite heartwarming. By the way, the confession hall at Lourdes was a little confusing - make one wrong turn and you could be faced with a confessor who could only speak Dutch or Spanish or Italian or German. O Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa!

Ghost Signs of Lourdes. Not long back from my (early) summer hols in Lourdes and Walsingham - a sort of two-centre pilgrimage jaunt which I enjoyed very much and will be reporting on in future posts. For now, and because its a disgracefully long time since I posted anything, here are 3 rather nice faded wall signs from the back streets of Lourdes. People complain about Lourdes being an over-commercialised Catholic shrine, but an alert eye can detect evidence of an earlier, more quiet era. I particularly like the middle auto sign, this long closed garage once must've been the place to take your Peugeot or Renault for a quick buff and polish.

Vintage Warm Weather Refreshment. Temperatures are suddenly on the rise and we're having a mini May heatwave. After a hard day on the lathe or coalface I'm sure we could all do with some refrigerated treats like those pictured above.

No Modernist Houses here. After morning Mass I spent my Bank Holiday Monday tootling around the local vicinity in search of sights which might run counter to our near total national submission to consumer lusts.

Near a Morrison's Supermarket which was full to the gunnels with sallow and obese drone youths taking advantage of the weekend's special offer on cases of Stella was this cluster of empty flat-roofed houses obviously ready for demolition. Walking around these silent reminders of faith in the square and the functional at Doxford Park near Sunderland I wondered what such nostalgically appealing International Style boxes might soon be replaced with. Nearby was a slick sign announcing "another exciting new development from (forgotten corporate name)". I should have known, more expensive and cramped houses to enslave mortgaged couples in atomised isolation, their only consolation being they are at last on the "property ladder"!

Rural hand-painted sign. I've driven past this very nice amateur sign nearly every day in the past few months and have grown to love its untutored gloss-paint brushiness. Pointers to its unprofessional charms are (a) closeness of lettering to border (b) confusion between upper and lower case letters, note the dotted 'i' and (c) random application of a serif on the letter U.

This formica beauty is located between Leamside and Great Lumley, Co. Durham.

Still Open For Business. These photos of severely decaying retail premises come from a visit I made yesterday to Stanley, Co. Durham. I was there for Saturday morning Confession at St. Joseph's, a magnificent 19th Century church with a beautifully decorated and dark Lady Chapel which is lit only by the small number of votive candles the elderly faithful choose to pay their 20p for. Parish Priest Father Joe Park is a kindly old priest with not many teeth and whose long winter clerical cloak shows under the velvet confessional curtain hem.

Despite these shops crumbling state they somehow remain open and stand for me as hopeful counter-cultural beacons amid the chain-store strangulation of our land. First pictured is an independent Estate Agent with nailed on plastic letters on its flaking fascia which must have come from a DIY store circa 1976. Please note the hand-written "Can't Get A Mortgage?" notice which you'd never see in a high-street Halifax branch. Next shop is Sandra's Ladies Hairdressers, a shop so unkempt I was certain it must be closed until I watched a head-scarved old lady walk inside and then saw a flourescent light flicker on through its exceedingly grubby net curtains. Last photo is of Beamish Street's garage with a unique weed-filled bathtub as it's welcoming feature.

Modernist Sunday School Art. Found these lovely vintage images on a Norwegian children's book illustration site. This style of popular religious artwork seems to have first appeared in the 60s and is "modernist" only in that it borrows the flat picture-plane, unmodulated bright colours and schematic black-outline representation from mid-20th Century painting. There are also echoes here of Hanna Barbera style cartoons. Being roughly 60 years old this generically modern graphic mode is now quite dated but has also acquired a luscious retro patina. Many parish churches still employ the style in their bulletins and decorations in a bid to communicate in a direct graphic manner. Even my own RC church uses liturgical wall-hangings in exactly the same simplified Matisse meets Derain manner.

New Testament subjects depicted above are the Annunciation, the Last Supper and the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles. I love the way the Angel Gabriel is represented as a strictly linear outline rather than the traditional flowing and feather-winged messenger of the Immaculate Conception.

Ladybird Book Art. One recent hardback volume which has been fascinating my reading specs since the beginning of this year has been Boys and Girls, A Ladybird Book of Childhood. This hefty collection of stunning images from the 60s and 70s heyday of Ladybird publishing rises high above the recent glut of UK nostalgia titles like the (admittedly likeable) Jackie, Eagle Comic and Look-In collections which were on every gift-title bookshop stack before the Nativity of Our Lord 2007.

Into late 40s Austerity Britain first appeared Ladybird Children's books, a series of inexpensive hardback volumes. Their small size was dictated by the paper shortage of post-wartime and the modestly sized printing presses of publishers Wills & Hepworth, Loughborough. Their format (virtually unchanged to this day) was a huge success and became most familiar and best-selling in every Woolworths and WH Smith during the 1960s and 1970s.

I've been a collector of classic Ladybirds from this period for about 5 years and willingly admit to pinching some of their iconic imagery for use in my comic and illustration work. Thanks to ebay all but the rarest titles are usually easy and cheap to locate (but I still can't find a decent copy of The Customs Officer!) Their beautiful and painstaking illustrations by artists like John Berry and Harry Wingfield provide an indispensable snapshot of an entirely lost British era and only now are these artists receiving belated recognition. Of course, predictable criticisms have been levelled against Ladybird books: they presented too cosy and middle-class a picture of Britain from that time and one recent Sunday Supplement reviewer of Boys & Girls said Ladybird books failed to illustrate the possible underlying tensions between parents in the happy family unit which is uniformly presented. But I ask you, what child would ever want to happily read about an impending divorce from their self-absorbed and irresponsible Mothers and Fathers?

Top photo shows a few choice Ladybird titles from my collection and the remainder are from the highly recommended Boys & Girls book.

Church Spire remnant. About five years ago, when I was having weekly driving lessons, my instructor Bill Berry used to make disparaging comments as I was steering cautiously through Bowburn, Co.Durham about the curious neo-modernist church situated in the town's main council estate. Concentrating on the road, I was unable to take too much notice of the eccentric building he was pointing out. What I did fleetingly take in was extraordinary - a bizarre metal and fibreglass 1970's edifice, the roof an Armadillo-like backbone of spiky red triangles with an equally eccentric spire which looked like an upturned shark's tail. A friend recently informed me the notorious metal church had been demolished due to it being declared an unsafe structure.

By chance, I returned to Bowburn this week and on a sharp, brightly-lit morning on the cusp between Winter and Spring, I was delighted to see the spire of the metal church is still in place, proudly pointing upwards amid a blank area of mud and rubble where the main body of the church once stood. I took a photograph which you can see above, but information about the original church remains elusive. All I can unearth is the building was a Church of England place of worship dedicated to Christ The King and local parishioners are still raising money to build a safer replacement. When their new church is eventually finished I predict much fewer double-takes from passing drivers.

Windy weather again. I've been waiting for a blustery opportunity to upload this fantastic Dudley D. Watkins panel from his 11th February 1951 Broons comic page. Last night the gales reached similar cat-hurtling violence but I certainly didn't expect an earthquake to add to the wintry excitement. Its tremor woke me from my slumbers just before 1am. Jings! Whatever next?

Rare Catholic Statues. Ever since I was a 21 year old wide-eyed visitor of Liverpool's (long gone) Catholic Truth Society shop I've loved plaster statues of Saints designed for home devotion. Sadly, even today's practicing left-footers seem to regard these inexpensive objects as incompatible with their precious property's laminated decor and who, in their right mind, would want to offend their neighbour's secular sensibilities with even the remotest display of belief in the non-material or self-sacrificial?

Happily, some of these once populist, mass-manufactured figurines are currently available for purchase on ebay. Even the ignorant should recognise the first figure as St.Sebastian, here without the details of his arrow-pierced martyrdom. The second is St.Expeditus, from Roman antiquity, and the third is the great St.John Vianney (aka Cure D'Ars), patron Saint of Priests.

Bagnall's Retreat has been on retreat!

For the last 3 days I've been living at Ushaw College a.k.a St.Cuthbert's Roman Catholic Seminary. Directed by Fr.Paul Grogan, the retreat centred around a 25 hour grand silence which was imposed on Friday evening and lifted at 9pm Saturday, when myself and the seven other male retreatants were able to re-join the rest of the community.

The first photo was taken from my room not long after arriving and the other two are from a brisk and nippy morning walk in the snowy grounds before I gathered with Anthony, David, John, Frank, Simon, Benjamin, Martin and Fr.Grogan to recite the Morning Office in St.Joseph's Chapel.

More Kenneth Rowntree Art. Astute and regular readers will have noticed that I am very keen on unearthing any printed items or original art of the pre-1970s work of my late art school Professor Kenneth Rowntree. I challenge you not to like this latest Rowntree (1949) book I have discovered via Ebay. Here are enough dull greys and sober design to last you a pleasurable rain drenched weekend.

Denture Repairs Comic Strip. This little piece of whimsey came about because I'd spotted a hand-painted sign in a Co.Durham semi-detached house window reading "Denture Repairs Here". Behind its net-curtains the sitting room looked dingy and old-fashioned, with a Seance on a Wet Afternoon ambience which certainly appealed to my imagination. I was planning to take a photo of this sign but when I returned to the terraced street the other week the sign had gone. I felt the vanished image needed to be commemorated in a strip.

More exotic packaging art. In response to my earlier post about Turkish confectionery packaging Harley Richardson has kindly captured these Asian graphic delights at a Tooting store and sent them to Bagnall's Retreat. What makes these designs superior to Tesco or Sainsbury's latest offerings? Apart from their visual unfamiliarity I think these boxes have an attractive bias in favour of arbitrary decoration (stars surely straight out of an old Letraset book) rather than boringly informing the anxious buyer what lurks inside the cardboard packaging. No sophisticated re-touched photographs appear here nor calorie or fat-content statistics. The uninitiated consumer must enter a mystery contract and £1.49 seems a very fair price to me for a product which promises to aid "prayer and pleasure".

A John Betjeman postage stamp. I unearthed this piece of Betjeman ephemera because the lovable old coot is once again prominent in my thoughts since reading A.N. Wilson's recent biography. It's a fine account for which I can forgive the author's 1993 heathen-biased life of Jesus. What strikes home is that the British architectural and cultural heritage Betj strove to save is virtually extinct but so is any trace of comparable humour or genuine eccentricity in today's cultural commentators.


Like my earlier blogged sighting of George Melly in a London street I remember vividly spotting John Betjeman ambling near Leeds Town Hall while I was about 19 years old and about to transfer onto a National Express bus to Liverpool. Betjeman's portly figure was unmistakeable, as was his battered charcoal suit and trilby. He seemed to be gazing upwards at the soot-encrusted provincial buildings, memorials of Victorian civic pride.

Turkish Confectionery Art. The necessary arrival of Polish foodstuffs in British shops has seen me optimistically searching for either appealingly dated or enticingly exotic Polish packaging. So far I've been disappointed, most Polish beer cans or orange cordial bottles look as brightly bland and contemporary as any other items of consumer enslavement on Tesco or Asda's shelves. The search for graphic novelty has had to continue elsewhere...

Ulker Cokokrem, now on sale in the UK, is a Turkish liquid chocolate confection packaged in toothpaste style tubes. Perhaps its sugar-saturated contents will be a hit with sweet-toothed children. The acidic green and red packaging is what locked my own adult eye in pleasurable wonderment. Garish candy-stripes and bulging typefaces are seldom used by Western European graphic communicators, but here they are working a treat, like a breath of unsophisticated Bosphorous air. Look how the Turkish designer revels in presenting the product smeared on a crust of bread in total un-natural, lava-like, rippled glory. See how the tube's goofy troglodyte cartoon character could be almost drawn by Ed Roth and how the red plastic cap works as the trog's headgear. Perfect!

I hope I'm feeling well enough by New Year to munch a little bit of Ulker Cokokrem. As they say in downtown Istanbul...mmm, Kremasi!

Sick-Note Bagnall. My sincere apologies to all my friends who I was unable to send Happy Christmas wishes to. I've been struck down with the worst streaming cold since I was a lad in short trousers. The timing couldn't have been worse. Pax Vobiscum to you all and I hope you'll keep reading and commenting in 2008 A.D.

Above photo is of St. Padre Pio revering the Christ Child during a 1960s Christmas at Pietrelcina, Italy.