If, at night, you drive east from Swansea (Wales’ second city), round Swansea Bay, with the Bristol Channel on your right hand, in just a few miles you will catch your first glimpse of what could almost be mistaken for fairy lights shimmering in the distance. As you get closer, you realise they are, rather more mundanely, the lights of the Port Talbot steelworks. Port Talbot is home to some 37,000 people, and has, since the 1920s, been producing high-grade steel. From its peak in the 1960s, when it employed 18,000 people, the steelworks has scaled back its workforce, but still employs 4,000, and is one of the largest steelworks in Europe, producing over 3.5 million tonnes of steel annually, and capable of producing almost 5 million. However, the current owners are threatening to close the works. What that will mean for the town is unimaginable.

Apart from steel, I can think of only two things for which Port Talbot is noteworthy. One is the Baked Bean Museum of Excellence (a classic celebration of British eccentricity). The second is the number of prominent people who have emerged from this South Wales industrial town. Let me pick out two politicians. The first is Geoffrey Howe, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister and, arguably, the man who triggered (possibly unwittingly) Thatcher’s stepping down from the leadership election after her leadership was challenged following Howe’s resignation from the Government.

The second is George Thomas, a Labour politician who became a government minister and later won even greater national prominence as the Speaker of the House of Commons when the proceedings of the house were first broadcast on radio. His call for “Order! Order!” delivered in his distinctive South Wales accent was instantly recognizable.

It is in fact three other Port Talbot boys with distinctive voices that I particularly want to focus on this week: Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen. Only one of them (Hopkins) was actually born in Port Talbot, but the other two were educated and grew up there, and I do believe that education, in the area I am focusing on, matters more than accident of birthplace. Interestingly, Hopkins, the one who was born there, was educated elsewhere in South Wales.

If you are a South Wales actor with a glorious voice, then, at some stage in your career, you are going to take on the biggest role in Welsh theatre: a role known, prosaically, only as First Voice. It is the senior of the two narrators in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. For those of you who don’t know it, Under Milk Wood is an evocation, through glimpsed scenes from the lives of its inhabitants, of the vibrant life of Llareggub, an imagined small South Wales rural fishing and farming town.

Conceived as a radio play, it has, in the 69 years since its BBC premiere, been adapted for the cinema twice. The 1972 production was very prestigious, starred Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole, and is a classic illustration of a particular kind of cultural tone-deafness.

Dylan Thomas had a poet’s eye for the telling detail and a poet’s ear for the words to capture that detail. Here are the opening lines of Under Milk Wood, as spoken by Voice One. You may want to listen to Dylan Thomas himself speaking these lines in a live performance. (The audio quality is pretty poor, so reading along is advised. This speech is from 0:00 to 2:06.)

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

Word pictures tumble one after another out of these lines. Thomas has sufficient confidence in the power of his words to ease up, and let them speak for themselves. Now take a deep breath and see how the cloth-eared makers of the 1972 film sought to ‘enhance’ these pictures with their own, and I hope you will agree with me that not only are these pictures superfluous; they are also inaccurate and distracting, and they actually weaken the impact of the language. Here is the opening scene of the 1972 film. (2:45-4:38).

Turning to the work as a whole, there is a tendency, I suspect, to play up the humour of the piece. Many of the characters certainly have a comic side to them. The piece is built in such a way that disparate characters appear fleetingly and the narrators offer the only obvious over-arching structure. This makes it easy for the cast to play up the characters’ idiosyncrasies, and go for easy laughs; it also makes it easier for the audience to treat the characters as objects of amusement.

And yet…

If you have ever lived in South Wales, then you will know that none of these characters is as much of a caricature as they might appear to outsiders. There is something about life in the small towns and villages of the South Wales valleys that breeds larger-than-life characters, each with her own distinctive voice, each determined to live his life according to his convictions and passions.

The South Wales valleys were, traditionally, coal-mining valleys, and every town had its own male voice choir and rugby team, and many had their own brass band. If you spend upwards of 55 hours a week underground breathing coaldust, and working some shifts in a Welsh winter you go a week without ever seeing the sun, then you want to run free on the rugby field or fill your lungs and let your voice ring out when you do emerge from the pit. If your working week is spent risking your life in an environment fraught with danger, then you want to be sure to live to the full what precious time you get above ground.

In Under Milk Wood, I would suggest, Thomas is seeking to capture a world that was already disappearing, a world that celebrated life with such gusto. He relished the memories of his own childhood, and, particularly on his last, fatal tour of America, he must have felt very much severed from his roots. The humour in the piece must not, I feel, overwhelm the feeling that these are people whose lives have value, that they represent a world that is fading and that we should strive to keep alive. I have read that learning about Hiroshima and Auschwitz made Thomas acutely aware of the fragility of local culture and drove his desire to immortalise the Wales in which he had grown up.

Bernice and I saw a stage production in London, decades ago, that was very enjoyable, but that did not really acknowledge that side of the piece, and, indeed, many productions do miss that. In fairness, both the original Burton radio production, and a production released on CD starring Anthony Hopkins, largely avoid this trap.

The reason why I am writing about the play now is because last week Bernice and I watched, on our National Theatre at Home subscription, Michael Sheen as First and Second Voice in an innovative production which reopened the Olivier Theatre after Covid as a theatre in the round. This was really an adaptation, adding a framing story to the play. While critics were unanimous in praising Sheen’s performance, opinions were divided about the framing device. I, for one, think it was a brilliant concept and superbly executed.

The production is set in an old age home; one inmate, who is suffering from dementia, receives an unscheduled visit from his estranged son (Sheen), who is, we learn, a writer with, it appears, drink and anger management problems. (There is no great leap of imagination needed to identify the son with Dylan Thomas himself.) Desperate to connect and reconcile with his father, and unable to get any response from the old man, the son eventually tries painting, for his father, the picture of the town that features in his father’s old photo album, from the father’s own childhood as the son of the town preacher. At this point, the son launches into the opening lines of Under Milk Wood, only speaking them with a passion and intensity that reflect his need to get some reaction from his father. At this point, the other inmates and the staff of the home assume the characters of the inhabitants of the imagined/remembered town, and the play continues to its conclusion.

This framing device seems to me a magnificent metaphor for Thomas’s desperate attempt to preserve/revive the South Wales of his (imagined) memory. It also invests the characters with a great dignity. Ultimately, their vivid creation has the power to restore the father to an awareness that makes it possible for him to fleetingly remember his past and, momentarily, even recognize and  embrace his son, before slipping again into oblivion, making it possible for the son to leave, at least partly comforted.

Excellent ensemble playing includes Sian Philips, now 88, improbably but utterly convincingly playing the young promiscuous unmarried mother Polly Garter, who declares:

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where’s their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You’re looking up at me now. I know what you’re thinking, you poor little milky creature. You’re thinking, you’re no better than you should be, Polly, and that’s good enough for me. Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?

However, this production is, more than anything, a celebration of the incredible power of Sheen’s performance. Here he is delivering, again, those opening lines, and not holding back!

Sheen’s evocation of an entire world not only brings the father back from oblivion for a short time, but also holds the audience spellbound for 90 minutes that feel like half that time.

If, after reading this blog, you would like the full experience of Under Milk Wood, then you could do worse than take out a subscription to ntathome. Failing that, I strongly recommend the 90-minute 1954 BBC radio production with Burton: a straight performance that celebrates the pure power of Thomas’s prose-poetry.

Meanwhile (you knew that was coming), Tao is designing his own tractor, and Raphael is working on perfecting his facial expressions. There’s no such thing as down time!

We begin with a medical bulletin. Thanks to the wonders of antibiotics (see last week’s post) and her inner strength, Bernice bounced back from her bout of strep throat in good time to pull her weight in last week’s preparations for Pesach. (Just as well: I would have felt bad leaving her at home with a packet of matza and a flask of tea while I went to a hotel for chag.)

Instead, we turned down numerous invitations from family and friends. With Micha’el and family celebrating with other Israelis in Portugal and Esther and family (I rather like the sound of that) celebrating with Maayan’s parents and siblings, Bernice and I held a seder-à-deux (thereby turning the enforced format of 2020 into a voluntary tradition in 2022).

No arguments about who was going to sit next to who; nobody fell asleep at the table; Bernice recited Mah Nishtanah faultlessly, found the afikomon very quickly, and was not unreasonable in her ransom demand; there were very few arguments about whether we fill the third cup now or later, and at what point we sing what. All in all, a very satisfying evening, and we even both managed to find the time on Friday afternoon to prepare new insights to bring to the table.

(My insights, incidentally, were gleaned from the amazing Lamm Heritage Archives, of which I was, to my shame, completely unaware until last week. This is a collection of PDFs of Rabbi Norman Lamm’s original typewritten sermons and addresses, complete with his pencilled emendations, spanning over 50 years from the middle of the last century. As a pulpit rabbi, and as the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Lamm brought a fierce intelligence, immense scholarship, and an insightful awareness of the significance of current events to his sermons. If there is anyone out there who is unaware of this amazing resource, as I was, and who might be interested, I cannot recommend it too highly.)

Looking back again to last week’s post, allow me to brag about the fact that I achieved a very significant milestone last week. I believe I became a social media influencer (even though I’m not at all sure what that is). It came about in the following way.

You may remember (but probably don’t) that I made a passing reference to the Waddington board game Buccaneer in last week’s post. A dear friend posted a comment saying; ‘My favorite game ever. ! played for many wonderful hours…. I often wish I still had it to play with the grandchildren.‘

Reading that, I went back to eBay, where I had found the illustration I used in my post, and sent her a link to one of the several boxed sets available for sale. I of course selected one of 1958 vintage, which I knew would be the set she remembered, as it was for me. The same day she WhatsApped me to say: Awesome idea !!!!! Brilliant! We‘ll get on it !’ and, a little later: ‘Done !’ She was even thinking of buying another one to send to her cousin as a birthday present.

This all left me a little dazed, not least because I had only sent her the link as a joke. I now begin to feel a terrible weight descending slowly but inexorably onto my shoulders. Am I going to have to start weighing my words now, and considering what effect my careless trifles might have on impressionable readers? Am I acting irresponsibly when, every Sunday morning, I just sit down at the keyboard and just allow myself to be led wherever the fancy takes it? Do I need to consider more responsibly my target readers and my relationship to them?

To which, after due consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the only answer is: Not bloody likely!

(Far-from-brief editorial aside: I am allowing myself to sully my post with this expletive, since it is a quote from one of the classics of English theatre – George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’. Eliza, in her first public attempt to pass herself off as a lady, responds to an enquiry as to whether she plans to walk home across the park: ‘Not bloody likely! I’m going in a taxi.’

In 1914, when the play was first staged, theatre censorship was a legal requirement, and all plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for pre-performance approval. The office’s report included the following:

The Play is entirely without offence, except perhaps to the opinions of old-fashioned people who must be accustomed to having their opinions offended in modern dialogue. [Ed. Note: There really is nothing new under the sun.] I notice, however, one detail. On Page 46, the word “bloody” slips out of the as yet only partially educated Liza and on the next page a silly young woman uses it under the impression that it is part of the new “small talk”. The word is not used in anger, of course, and the incident is merely funny. I think it would be a mistake to be particular about it, but since the word has been forbidden in other plays– in a different sort of connection, however– I mention it.
Recommended for license.

Although the word stayed in, and no less an actress than the great Mrs Patrick Cambell, playing Eliza, uttered it on stage in London and, later, New York, the usage gave rise to a delightful euphemism. For some time after the premiere, Londoners, in print if not in speech, favoured the expression: ‘Not Pygmalion likely!’)

While I was trying to decide who my target audience is, a phrase came into my head that I have not heard for some time: the man on the Clapham omnibus.

[Editor’s notes:

‘Omnibus’ is the correct word for which ‘bus’ is merely an abbreviation. It is Latin and means ‘to or for, by, with or from everybody’, which is, as Michael Flanders pointed out, a very good description.

Clapham is an area of London which, when the phrase ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ was first used in a court of law, was a lower-middle-class commuter suburb with reasonable access to the financial and legal district of the City of London. We can picture the nominal ‘man’, therefore, as an office clerk. (These days, to be able to afford to live in Clapham you are far more likely to be a lawyer, accountant or stockbroker than a mere clerk.]

Possibly the first use of the phrase as we know it was in 1903, when Lord Bowen, hearing a case of negligence, said: ‘We must ask ourselves what the man on the Clapham omnibus would think.’ In other words, what a reasonable layman of reasonable intelligence would think. The phrase is often used when arguing how to interpret a less than clearly written text, for example.

Incidentally, the Clapham omnibus itself features in a much earlier reference. I don’t know how much of a comfort this will be to any of you reading my blog while stuck in London traffic, but here is a quote from 1857: ‘So thoroughly has the tedious traffic of the streets become ground into the true Londoner’s nature, that … your dog-collar’d occupant of the knife-board of a Clapham omnibus, will stick on London Bridge for half-an-hour with scarcely a murmur’. [Ed. Note: There really, really is nothing new under the sun.]

Since his first appearance, the Clapham commuter has travelled around the world, putting in appearances (so Google tells me) in Australia – as the man on the Bondi tram (Sydney) or the man on the Bourke Street tram (Melbourne), or the man on the Prospector (a rural passenger train) to Kalgoorlie (Perth) – and even in Hong Kong, as the man on the Shaukiwam tram.

One final diversion, if I may. Apparently, ‘a moron in a hurry’ has recently emerged as the obverse of the man on the Clapham omnibus, in cases where intellectual property rights may have been infringed. If I try to flog really bad copies of Nike shoes, for example, and Nike take me to court, the judge may dismiss the case, claiming that only a moron in a hurry could possibly confuse my ‘knock-offs’ for the real thing.

Of course, my dark secret – as I am sure all of you realise – is that I am not writing for the man, or the woman, on the Clapham omnibus or, for that matter, John or Jane Doe or Fred Bloggs. I’m writing for David Brownstein. If John, or Jane, or Fred, or, indeed, you, want to eavesdrop, then you’re all more than welcome.

Meanwhile, in Zichron, Raphael is taking an increasing interest in the world around him, and, in Penamacor, Tao shared one of his new books with us last week during our video call.

In the dark days, and the long, dark evenings, before the internet, folk used to gather round the encampment fire as the chill evening closed in, and either play board games or hold philosophical discussions. Board games probably gave you a better insight into human nature: Warren Buffet, so they say, played, and won at, Monopoly as if his life depended on it, relishing every opponent he bankrupted, while Alexander the Great was more of a Risk man himself. Personally, I enjoyed Buccaneer, with its miniature pirate ships laden with gold bars, rum barrels, rubies and pearls.  Whether that had more to do with the accumulation of riches or the harsh chafe of leather jerkin against bare chest is for me to know and you to guess…

And, as the evening wore on, and the conversation started to droop a little, someone could always be relied on to ask: ‘So, tell us. What/Who do you think is the greatest….’ Depending on the particular slice of the population gathered round the fire, that might be greatest England forward line, or non-German-speaking composer, or Cadbury’s item of confectionery, or whatever.

For our present purposes, dear reader (in case you were wondering where I was going with this) the question is ‘What is (or, as I suddenly realise we now need to say, ‘What was) the greatest human invention or discovery?’ Interestingly, Google seems largely incapable of distinguishing between inventions and discoveries. Many of its lists of the greatest inventions include discoveries.

The Atlantic magazine, in a 2013 article, wrote about the greatest ‘technical breakthroughs’ since the invention of the wheel: ‘technical breakthroughs’ seems to me a neat bracket term for inventions/discoveries. The article is a very interesting read; this is partly because it discusses in detail the methodology used by the magazine to arrive at a top 50, and the variety of ways in which the experts canvassed interpreted the guidelines they were given. It also explores, in interesting ways, some individual breakthroughs that performed better, or worse, than you might have expected.

For instance: “Considering how often the modern era has been called the “television age” and how much time people now spend before a variety of screens, it is notable that television comes in only at No. 45. Many years from now, perhaps people will regard the second half of the 20th century as the brief moment when broadcast TV could seem a dominant technology. With its obvious-in-retrospect limitations, like one-way information flow rather than interactivity, and dependence on heavy hardware for best display, maybe TV was bound to be a transition to some other system more tailored to individual tastes.”

Optical lenses, on the other hand, made it to #5 on the list. I must admit they would not have been something I considered, probably because there is a sense in which they do not seem very dramatic, especially these days. However, the author argues that “the adoption of corrective lenses amounted to the largest one-time IQ boost in human history, by expanding the pool of potentially literate people”. That seems an argument that is hard to dismiss, even if John Milton managed to cope with late-onset blindness by dictating Paradise Lost to his daughter without writing any of it down himself. There are people the inside of whose heads is a land impossible to imagine.

One more interesting aside from this list (since my spyware tells me that hardly any of you click on my links). Having only fairly recently wielded a wheelbarrow in Portugal, I can attest to both its almost-elegant simplicity of design and its tremendous labour-saving potential. Why, then, was it invented only thousands of years after the wheel?

Turning to the pointed end of the list, my attention is drawn to #3. Since I’m sure you’re dying to know, #1 is the printing press – although I suspect that future digital generations may find it as limited and transient as the television. #2 is electricity.

And #3? Bernice reminded me this week that the answer is probably the one always given by our dear friend and family doctor in Wales, Louis Saville z”l. Louis grew up in the Glasgow of the 1920s, studied medicine, and practised as a family doctor for many decades, spanning the introduction into general medicine of what he always claimed was the single greatest discovery of the 20^th Century – penicillin. It was certainly not easy to argue with someone who had wrestled with the daily stark reality of family medicine before antibiotics, and lived to see their routine adoption as a first line of defence against infection, turning deadly diseases into minor unpleasantnesses.

When Bernice took herself to bed last Tuesday with a very sore throat and flu symptoms, we knew this was serious. Bernice, let me explain, is one of the world’s worst patients, since she has had so little practice at it. A veritable fusion of Edith Cavell and Florence Nightingale whenever anybody else takes ill (with, as she pointed out to me when she previewed this post, more than a dash of Matron Hattie Jacques, or possibly even Nurse Ratchet thrown in), she is incapable of judging the severity of her own symptoms. When her gall stones triggered a life-threatening infection a couple of years ago, it took me a day to drag her screaming to the emergency clinic, and even after she had been admitted to hospital and started on medication as a precursor to surgery, she was still protesting that she was over it now and could she please go home.

Having languished in bed for a day and a half, barely able to swab her own nostrils for the rapid flow tests that all came out glowingly negative, she finally agreed to allow me to make an appointment to see our family doctor, and a second appointment for a PCR test (since we all know that the rapid flow test is not worth the mucus it is written in). We saw the doctor that same afternoon. He was able to confirm that she had strep throat, and to start her on antibiotics – although he was very impressed that her own immune system was already doing a valiant job of fighting the infection.

Back home, Bernice started the course of tablets and cancelled her PCR. By the following morning, the sore throat was gone, and she felt well enough for a full story-time and conversation with Tao.

It is unfortunate for many of the most significant of human breakthroughs that, not long after they are achieved, they go almost unnoticed. Antibiotics are such a part of everyday life now that it is very difficult for those of us who do not remember life before them, in other words anybody under 90 years old, to appreciate how dramatic was the change they made. We can read about medicine before antibiotics, and understand intellectually their contribution to human well-being, but very few are still alive who can argue as passionately as Louis always did that they represented, unequivocally, the greatest human achievement of the 20^th Century.

Before I close, some other personal reflections on the list in The Atlantic. Weighing in at #11 is nitrogen fixation. Well, I don’t know about you, but to the best of my knowledge I have never heard of that one. It is, apparently, the heart of the ammonia-synthesis process, which was used to create a new class of fertilizers central to the green revolution. #37 is cement, the literal foundation of civilisation. Anaesthesia only made it to #46; as the author of the article pointed out, having had dental work before the NHS authorised the use of novocaine, he would swap his personal computer (#16) for anaesthesia in the blink of an eye.

Finally, and appropriately for my last post before Pesach, I started this week with sliced bread (since which all of the above were claimed to be the greatest thing). So let me finish with the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, who had neither wheelbarrows nor wheels (the Egyptians having not yet discovered them). Instead, they almost certainly relied heavily on #48 in The Atlantic‘s list, the lever.

Of course, no human achievement can come close to the everyday achievements of human life: a child’s smile, for example (even if (see right) wind-induced).

At this stage of the week, I’m usually desperately poking around the deepest crevices of my mind with a cerebral toothpick, hunting for crumbs of ideas to winkle out (You can tell we’ve started cleaning for Pesach, can’t you?) and serve up as my latest post. On a good week, I come up with one idea. On a stellar week, I start off thinking that one idea might turn out to be a good idea, rather than simply coming to the conclusion that I don’t know of a better ‘ole.

This week, uncharacteristically, I feel spoilt for choice. It seems that, everywhere I look, there is the kernel of an idea that seems worth teasing out. How did a film musical that Bernice and I found it difficult to get into manage to win us over and sweep us along for two hours (Tick, Tick…Boom!)? Exactly why did we find the Hebrew stage adaptation of a film we both loved so leadenly disappointing (Hooked Up to Life – adapted from the French film The Intouchables)? What lessons can we draw from the fact that, of the 11 people murdered in Israel this week by terrorists acting against the Jewish state, one was a Druse border policeman, one was a Christian Arab policeman and two were foreign workers from Ukraine?

And then, of course, there’s the extraordinary story of the slap heard around the world. 1500 words? That story must have 15,000 words in it!

But in the end, I’ve decided to opt for a small story that caught my eye online today, and another story that that one led me to, about two people who, six years apart, raised all sorts of interesting questions about the nature of art. Both were, coincidentally, women (always assuming I know what that word means – there’s another subject for a post right there) and both were described, in the news reports I read, as pensioners (although I’m not sure of the relevance of that fact).

Our story begins, however, with that infinite group of monkeys, eternally and uncomprehendingly pounding on an infinite number of typewriters – or, I suppose, these days, keyboards. Eventually, so I was always led to believe, one of their number would randomly type out the text of Hamlet, or, I suppose, another, as yet unwritten, masterpiece of the theatre. My question is: Would that manuscript be a work of art? Let me ask the more generic question: Must a work of art necessarily be the result of a conscious act of creation? You may be inclined to dismiss the question as trivial, since it arises from a completely unrealistic situation. (Where are you going to house this infinite number of monkeys? How will you persuade them to keep typing away? How are you going to afford to buy all the bananas you’ll need?) However, let me give you a far more plausible example.

You can occasionally find, on certain seashores, a washed up, twisted piece of driftwood that is aesthetically very pleasing. Imagine taking such a piece home and placing it on display. A friend walks in and admires what she calls your ‘new artwork’. Is she mistaken? Or do you feel that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – in other words, if it has beauty, is interesting to look at, can stir the observer’s emotions, stimulates reflections on the transience of form or the ceaseless passage of time – then it is indeed a work of art (or, perhaps, a duck)? 

And so to our first pensioner, a retired dentist who, in 2016, visited a Nuremberg museum and stopped in front of an art exhibit in the form of a crossword puzzle with clues in English, which was captioned “Insert words” and “so it suits”. Since this 91-year-old knew English, she started filling in the answers, as she believed she had been invited to. She even used a ballpoint pen! She was then accused of damaging property – the 1977 artwork was valued at £68,000, and was on loan to the museum from a private collector.

When questioned, the woman pointed out that, if the museum did not want people to follow the artist’s instructions, they should have placed a warning notice alongside it.

Her lawyer later produced a seven-page rebuttal, arguing that, rather than harming the work, her actions had increased its value by bringing it to public attention, and, furthermore, her “invigorating reworking” of the exhibit meant that she now held the copyright of the co-created artwork, and perhaps the collector should sue the museum for destroying the co-creation by erasing the ballpoint pen additions.

You may find the lawyer’s rebuttal too clever by half, but is it any more so than the original work?

And then, in the Picasso Museum in Paris this week, a 72-year-old noticed a blue overall hanging on a wall. Assuming it had been forgotten, she took it, tried it on, found it was too big, and asked her tailor to shorten it. When she revisited the museum a few days later, she was arrested for art theft. The overall was, in fact, Old Masters, an example of the artist Vilanova’s “critical yet lively reflection on issues such as the role of images in transmitting culture and cultural values”, according to another gallery.

The pockets of the overall were full of the postcards that Vilanova collects in flea markets and which are a major theme of his work. The garment was intended to be unhooked and handled, and the postcards studied.

Prosecutors accepted the pensioner’s explanation that she had no idea she was stealing an artwork, although she confessed to the theft. She was let off with a warning. The museum is now left with an artwork 20cm shorter than originally. Is it still a work of art? Is its value reduced by the alteration? Was the alteration an act of vandalism, unintentional damage, or, indeed, artistic collaboration?

The side of the argument that I instinctively find myself on will not, I suspect, surprise many of my readers. Art, I would argue, requires artifice. That is a word that usually carries a negative connotation. Merriam-Webster notes:

‘Artifice’ stresses creative skill or intelligence, but it also implies a sense of falseness and trickery. Art generally rises above such falseness, suggesting instead an unanalyzable creative force.

As a counter-argument, I would cite Picasso’s comment that:

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth – at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

There are, I believe, two points to be made here. One is that art is always the result of a conscious act of creation as creation. For me, driftwood can be beautiful, but it cannot be art. Even the tailor’s handicraft is not part of the overall as a work of art; it is conscious, and indeed skillful, but it was not intended as art; it was not carried out to enhance the truth contained in the piece of art.

The second, not unconnected, point, is that art has to be cooked, not raw. Of course, just how much preparation is required to constitute ‘cookedness’ is a moot point. I was recently at a meal where one of the guests was very sceptical whether steak tartare could be called a food dish. (This scepticism meant, I am pleased to say, all the more for me!)

In a similar way, I am not sure whether an overall hung on a hook requires sufficient, and sufficiently skilled, preparation to ‘earn’ the status of art. There is a continuum: at one end (for me, at least) is a late Rembrandt self-portrait; at the other is an entirely blank, untreated canvas, hung in a gallery. Somewhere along the continuum a line needs to be drawn, dividing art from non-art. I don’t really feel qualified to decide where the line should be drawn, although I know that if I were forced to draw it, my line would be much closer to the Rembrandt than modern art experts argue. I am certainly out of kilter with the times; fortunately, galleries have not discarded their genuine old masters to make room for such work as Old Masters. There is still plenty for me to see when I visit a gallery.

Speaking of beautiful pictures (I keep doing it!), here’s two more. Tao clearly found this week’s stories more amusing than last week’s, and Raphael continues to thrive under tender, loving care.