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Tag Archives: attack
22 December 2021 by Changyu Dong 0
Understanding and Hardening Blockchain Systems Security under DoS Attacks
Ethereum is the largest smart-contract platform and second-largest cryptocurrency only after Bitcoin. Under the hood, Ethereum is a peer-to-peer network where miner nodes come to a consensus and decide what transactions to include in the blockchain. In practice, Ethereum's P2P network receives transactions sent from millions of web clients and propagates them to the tens of thousands of miner nodes. While the blockchain-to-client communication channel is a part of the system's critical path, its security is understudied in the existing research literature. This talk presents our recent research examining Ethereum systems security under the denial-of-service attack vectors (CCS'21, NDSS'21, and IMC'21). The security vulnerabilities discovered in these works have been confirmed and then fixed by the Ethereum developer community.
attack blockchain security
On the (in)security of ElGamal in OpenPGP
Do you think you know ElGamal encryption? Think twice.
We uncover vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP ecosystem stemming from confusion about the definition of ElGamal encryption (and the lack of an unequivocable standard). The first vulnerability leads to practical plaintext recovery in a limited number of cases. The second one, combined with side-channel leakage we found in some popular OpenPGP libraries, leads to feasible key recovery, in relatively rare cases.
We hope that these attacks, that we dub "cross-configuration", serve as a cautionary tale for standards designers. Cryptographic algorithms, even when they may appear very simple, hide a great deal of complexity in the choices of parameters and data representation. While an instantiation may appear to be safe in isolation, the interaction of two incompatible instantiations may lead to a security disaster, which can only be avoided by a carefully written standard.
Joint work with Bertram Poettering and Alessandro Sorniotti.
attack Cryptography
27 August 2021 by Changyu Dong 0
Polynomial Representation Is Tricky: Maliciously Secure Private Set Intersection Revisited
Private Set Intersection protocols (PSIs) allow parties to compute the intersection of their private sets, such that nothing about the sets' elements beyond the intersection is revealed. PSIs have a variety of applications, primarily in efficiently supporting data sharing in a privacy-preserving manner. At Eurocrypt 2019, Ghosh and Nilges proposed three efficient PSIs based on the polynomial representation of sets and proved their security against active adversaries. In this talk, I will discuss that these three PSIs are susceptible to several serious attacks. The attacks let an adversary (1) learn the correct intersection while making its victim believe that the intersection is empty, (2) learn a certain element of its victim's set beyond the intersection, and (3) delete multiple elements of its victim's input set. I will explain why the proofs did not identify these attacks and discuss how the issues can be rectified.
This is a joint work with Steven Murdoch (UCL) and Thomas Zacharias (University of Edinburgh)
attack Cryptography privacy Private Set Intersection


We noted before how the 2019 Royal Rumble winner Seth Rollins has been dealing with a back injury due to which he has been kept out of action recently.
While it was reported that his announced WrestleMania match is not in jeopardy, it appears that WWE is being cautious about his health so they won't have to cancel the bout.
The company's official website has removed the Architect from all the Live Events until the April 1st episode of Raw, which will be the WrestleMania go home episode of the show.
It's always possible that the company can add him back to the events if he is cleared by doctors but it would make more sense for them to try and protect his match at the upcoming PPV.
Seth Rollins is currently scheduled to face the Beast Brock Lesnar for his Universal Championship at the upcoming WrestleMania 35 events in one of the show's two main events.


The Housing (Scotland) Act 2014 introduced changes to help social landlords, like Melville, make the best use of their housing stock in the interests of existing and future tenants.
Some parts of the Act needed additional legislation to be agreed or further guidance from the Scottish Government and because of this a timetable for the changes has only recently been set.
One of the biggest changes, which has been well publicised, was the scrapping of the Right to Buy. This came into effect on 1 August 2016. The other changes will be introduced from May 2019 onwards.
1. What are the main changes to my tenancy agreement?
2. What do these changes mean for me?
The most significant change is the importance of letting us know who is living in your household. This includes letting us know about anyone who has previously moved in with you who you have not already told us about. You should also notify us when anyone moves in or out of your home in the future.
This is important because any decision about subletting, assignation, joint tenancy or succession will be based on whether we have a record of you and/or the applicant living in the property for a minimum of 12 months.
This means that we can end a Scottish secure tenancy if someone living in or visiting the home is convicted of a serious offence in the area of the house. It also allows us to end the tenancy where behaviour has had a serious impact on neighbours or others in the community.
A serious offence is one that the offender could have been imprisoned for, whether or not they were actually sentenced to imprisonment.
Before ending a Scottish secure tenancy in this way, we would first serve you with a notice advising that we intend to repossess the property. That would be done within 12 months of the conviction or, if it was appealed unsuccessfully, of when the appeal ended.
3. How can I update who is in my household?
You can let us know who is in your household by contacting your Housing Officer. You can do this by telephone, by email or in writing. You can also visit our office at the Dalkeith Corn Exchange to let us know about any changes.
4. What is assignation and what are the changes?
An assignation is a formal request from a tenant to assign (pass the tenancy) to another person.
The Act states that you must have lived at your property for at least 12 months before applying for permission to pass the tenancy to someone else. There was previously no qualifying period. Also, the person you wish to pass the home to must have lived at the property as their main home for at least 12 months prior to the application. The previous qualifying period was 6 months. Importantly, we cannot consider the 12 month period to have started unless we have been formally advised that the person you wish to pass the property is part of your household.
5. What is subletting and what are the changes?
Subletting is when you rent out all or part of your house to someone else on a temporary basis.
The new Act says that you must have been the tenant of the house for the 12 months immediately before you apply for written permission to sublet your home. There was previously no qualifying period. Also, the person you wish to sublet the property to must have been living at the property during those 12 months and you must have notified us at the time they moved in.
6. What are the changes when applying for a joint tenancy?
Single tenants who wish to add another person to their tenancy must first request permission from Melville.
7. What is succession and what are the changes?
Succession is when another person is entitled to take over a Scottish secure tenancy on the death of the tenant.
Unmarried partners. In order to take over the tenancy the Act says that the house must have been the unmarried partners only home for a minimum of 12 months prior to the tenant's death and they must have been registered as part of the household. The previous qualifying period was 6 months.
Family members. In order to take over the tenancy the Act says that the house must have been the family member's only home for a minimum of 12 months prior to the tenant's death. Previously there was no qualifying period, the person simply had to be living there at the time of death.
Carers. In order to take over the tenancy the Act says that the house must have been the carer's only home for a minimum of 12 months prior to the tenant's death. Previously there was no qualifying period, the person simply had to be living there at the time of the tenant's death and have given up a previous home to provide care.
These changes come into effect from 1 November 2019.
If you have already told us about changes to your household then you don't have to tell us again but it's always worth checking that your household details are up-to-date.
8. What about the changes to ending tenancies?
9. What about ending tenancies where the property has been adapted?
The Act allows any social landlord to request a Court order to end the tenancy of an adapted property where the adaptation/s is no longer needed by a member of the household. This only applies where the landlord needs the property for someone who does need the adaptations. If this situation arises, we would first give notice before applying to the sheriff and would offer suitable alternative accommodation. The tenant has the right to challenge both the request and the suitability of any alternative accommodation offered.
This change comes into effect from 1 May 2019.
10. What are the changes in converting a tenancy to a short Scottish secure tenancy?
The new Act extends the circumstances by which we could change your Scottish secure tenancy (SST) to a short Scottish secure tenancy (SSST). A tenant with an SSST has fewer rights and less protection from eviction than with an SST. An SSST also has a fixed duration, unless we agree to extend it or convert it back to an SST.
The circumstances now include any situation where a tenant or someone living with the tenant has acted in an antisocial manner or pursued a course of conduct amounting to harassment of another person. This conduct must have been in or around the house occupied by the tenant and it must also have happened in the three years before the notice is served.


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The Texas Heritage Museum
The Texas Heritage Museum serves an active and successful role in the educational and service missions of Hill College and brings increasing national and international prestige to Hill College. The Texas Heritage Museum is comprised of three divisions: the Galleries & Collection, the Historical Research Center, and the Hill College Press. Furthermore, on the front of the museum grounds is the Home of the Official Texas State Medal of Honor Memorial to Native-Born Texans.
The Texas Heritage Museum - Mission Statement The Texas Heritage Museum - Join & Give
Galleries and Collection
The first division of the Texas Heritage Museum is the Galleries and Collection. Historical artifacts are exhibited from the Texas Republic through the Vietnam War within the museum galleries and collections that serve as tangible evidence of historical events. Considerable thought and research goes into the galleries before they are displayed, and exhibits will continue to change to present fresh topics and perspectives.
Read more about Learn more
Historical Research Center
The second division of the Texas Heritage Museum is the Historical Research Center that aspires to be widely acknowledged by scholars world-wide as one of the nation's finest collection repositories, bringing international distinction to Hill College by advancing scholarly research and education at the college and beyond. Included in the Historical Research Center is an extensive collection of maps, photographic collections, microfilm, and an archival depository that contains numerous files of soldiers' letters, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts from all wars. Also featured in the Historical Research Center are original art works, art prints and sculptures depicting the War Between the States, and personal items belonging to Hill College graduate Bob Bullock during his term as Lieutenant Governor of Texas.
Hill College Press
The third division of the Texas Heritage Museum is the Hill College Press, the only academic press at a community college in Texas. Hill College Press publishes works of original and interpretative history that compliment both the mission of the Texas Heritage Museum and the geographical setting of central and north Texas. To date, the press has published 49 books, several of which have won literary and historical awards.
Official Texas State Medal of Honor Memorial to Native-Born Texans
This memorial highlights Audie Murphy from Kingston, TX. as the most decorated soldier of WWII, and Samuel Dealey from Dallas, Tex., as the most decorated sailor of WWII as well as many more native-born Texans of singular courage and character.
Learn more about Official Texas State Medal of Honor Memorial to Native-Born Texans
Academic and Education Support
Hill College, with the support of the Texas Heritage Museum, has become the "Community College for the Study of Texas History." Hill College faculty generally have emphasized the importance of being outside the traditional learning classroom, and many of the faculty utilize the Texas Heritage Museum as a more comprehensive learning environment for their students. All the divisions of the museum work to enrich and enhance the academic environment and educational experiences of Hill College students.
Read more about Contact Us
Read more about Become a Friend of the Museum
Read more about Gift Shop
Read more about Media

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Hitting the Italian slopes in a ski-in, ski-out resort
Italian powder: Club Med Pragelato gets its fair share.
Club Med's future is looking less bleak, more chic, at Club Med Pragelato Vialattea. Words by Georgia Rickard.
Thinking of trying out a Club Med resort? We may just have the one to take a chance on, if you like luxury – and more than a little skiing – that is…
I confess: Club Med has never really captured my imagination. Not in the way it's meant to. It's the place my mother had a wild affair with a Tahitian in the '70s – apparently he showed her some very inventive ways to explore an island. She's never forgotten him, which is all well and good, but I've never forgotten him either, which is not good. So, it's always been a hotel brand I've felt best avoided.
If last year's closure of the chain's three-star Lindeman Island resort says anything, the majority of Australians aren't so sure about Club Med either.
Focus is what's outside rather than what's inside your room.
The brand may have once been a thriving chain selling the promise of luxury and adventure for the young and the single, but a couple of misturns in the early noughties – including a foray into fitness centres, and the launch of some questionable 'budget resort' accommodation – left the French company's offerings floundering somewhere in the wastelands of bad buffet food and floral bedspreads. Particularly here in Australia, with Club Med's then-Australian general manager Quentin Briard admitting, after Lindeman's closure, that their product just wasn't what the market wanted anymore.
Now Club Med is back and better than ever – or so they claim. To prove it, they've invited International Traveller to their global relaunch, set to take place in the pretty north-western corner of Italy. Over 300 journalists are being flown in for this event; television presenters, radio reporters and journalists from around the world. French Vogue will make an appearance. Italian Harper's Bazaar is a confirmed guest. International Traveller is the only Australian magazine there.
Our destination for the night is Pragelato, Italy a 45-minute drive west of Turin airport and the home of Club Med's latest venture – a ski-in, ski-out resort 'fashioned in the style of the local village'. If a ski resort seems a strange location from which to relaunch a beach resort chain, think again. Post-apocalypse Club Med, as we're about to learn, is all about 'embracing your surrounds', not just parking yourself by the pool (or, ahem, in your room).
The company has downsized significantly in the past few years; ditching the entire bottom third of their portfolio in favour of a new, more discerning benchmark and, from here in, they say the only way is four stars and up. Their next venture in Guilin, China, will be set amongst UNESCO World Heritage listed sugarloaf mountains and rice terraces.
Ski in, ski out at Club Med Pragelato, Italy.
Unfortunately, even business class on an Emirates A380 (Couches! Canapes! Cake! I confess, I spent most of my time in the bar area) isn't enough to remove the sting of three flights, 28 hours and too many time zones, though it helped. A lot. But the picture-book roadside makes the final 45-minute leg a little easier to bear.
This part of the Italian Alps has been dabbed, rather than totally covered, by the turistica brush, and so the area retains a pleasantly decent air of authenticity – where Starbucks has not yet entered the local mélange of French and Italian dialect. The resort too is surprisingly unobtrusive; all sloping roofs and low-rise chalets – part of the new company policy to incorporate the local surrounds into each resort as much as possible.
Pragelato, meaning 'icy meadow'
And these local surrounds were a canny choice. Pragelato – meaning 'icy meadow', thanks to its particularly cold climate and the resulting icy grounds – might be a tiny town but it has some big history, having hosted multiple events during the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. It's also something of the quiet achiever of European snow; part of the second largest ski domain in Europe with 440 kilometres of slopes, more lifts than you can count and consistently good-quality powder. I'm raring to head straight to Club Med's on-site gondola, but alas – cameras are lighting up and Prosecco is being downed. The dawning of Club Med's next era is beginning.
Like the resort itself, the launch is surprisingly tasteful. Held in the vast main bar area, we are treated to the usual press conference stuff: new beginnings, big ideas, grand plans, etc. etc., but it's the bar area itself that really speaks volumes. Oversized chandeliers fashioned from antlers hang from white ceilings, an assortment of lounges congregate around the several fireplaces; snow buckets down in powdery clouds outside… It's not Philippe Starck sophisticated but it's modern, well-styled and thoroughly comfortable: a solid four-star product. As the music begins and drinks are refilled, general consensus amongst media is good: Club Med has done well.
All-inclusive skiing at Club Med Pragelato, Italy.
The proof is in the powder
But the real proof is in the powder, and happily, it is here that Club Med Pragelato shines. The snowfields are vast and the skiing is excellent – non-negotiables for any ski holiday, to be fair – but there's another major advantage of staying with Club Med: its trademark all-inclusive packages. Snow holidays are notoriously full of hidden costs, as anyone who's ever bought an on-slope sambo can tell you.
But a family skiing getaway here has everyone suited, booted and trailing behind a ski instructor for five days without shelling out anything on top of the initial tariff. Even on-slope lunch is covered at Club Med restaurant Chalet Mollino – a genuinely lovely, two-story chalet with sloping glass windows, a huge fireplace and the best hot chocolate in the area.
Of course, if you're an intrepid traveller after cultural immersion then Club Med is not for you (and never has been).
Give it a miss if you're not 'ski mad'
This particular resort is also not the place to come if you're not ski-mad; like so much ski accommodation, the focus is more about what's outside your room, not in it. Lodgings are essentially modern and include all the additional comforts required by today's traveller (in-room espresso machine, wi-fi, flatscreen…) but they're just not the kind of rooms you never want to leave. Unless you manage to find yourself a Tahitian, of course.
But you probably won't find one here. Like most of Club Med's products these days, the Pragelato resort is family-oriented, complete with hassle-free buffet restaurant and a well-equipped Kids' Club. But if that's what you're after, then you'd be hard stretched to find another option that's as enjoyable, easy, and easy on the wallet as this.
Overall, it's an excellent example of what this brand does very well: hassle-free, genuinely easy holidays, run by friendly, eager-to-please staff. The new Club Med, in other words, is essentially the best bits of old Club Med, this time around with nicer rooms and a better-looking buffet. Now, to find a memory-erasing service…
Club Med Pragelato Vialattea, Via Rohbach, 10060 Frazione Plan, Italy +39 0122 741301 – clubmed.com
Emirates flies from Australia to Rome via Dubai daily, from approximately $2287 return. Alitalia flies from Rome to Turin several times per day, from approximately $80 return (emirates.com; alitalia.com).
Luggage can be checked all the way through if all flights are booked together through Emirates. Pragelato is a 45-minute drive west of Turin, with cars for hire at the airport complete with snow tyres and ski racks if required (europcar.com; avis.co.uk). Transfers can also be arranged as part of your accommodation package with Club Med.
Ski season in the Turin region runs from mid December to early April. The first two weeks of January are generally the busiest time of year to visit due to the number of Italians on annual leave.
A six-night tariff at Club Med includes accommodation, breakfast, lunch and dinner at a choice of three restaurants with wine, beer and soft drinks included at lunch and dinner, lift passes, ski hire, five days of ski school and kids' club facilities. Rates from $1905 per adult and $1476 per child (for bookings until end of September).
You can't leave without
Heading to Chalet Raggio di Sole ('Ray of Sun'), a tiny on-slope bar in the valley of Sestriere Borgata (the next mountain over from Pragelato). Aside from looking like something straight out of a European fairytale, the gluhwein – or 'vin brule', as it's referred to here – is sweet relief after a hard day's thigh-burning. chaletraggiodisole.com
Eating the pizza at Club Med restaurant La Trattoria. Made in the local style (wafer thin) by local chefs (not wafer thin), it's easily some of the best pizza we've ever tasted.
Checking out the Club Med Wellness Centre. It actually includes a PAYOT spa with a Turkish bath and Finnish steam room, but you don't have to shell out for treatments to feel 'well' – the indoor heated pool and spacious gym are both free, and offer floor-to-ceiling views of the snow-capped mountains.
The best thing about Pragelato
The absolute ease with which you can get on, off and around the slopes. Having a dedicated on-site gondola is a nice touch, but the connecting mountains and lifts are also clearly signposted and make for a cruisy traverse.
The worst thing about Pragelato
The cold is proper cold. Snow falls heavily and consistently (although often at night), so you really do need your thermals. Avalanches are also a very real threat – it had been just two weeks since the last fatality when we visited. Unless you're an extremely competent skier, stick to the assigned areas.
It's too cold here for very small kids (under four years of age) to ski – winter temperatures average about minus 10 degrees celcius. However, there is a dedicated section of the kids' club for children of this age. If you are keen for some separate time, they can also head to the kids' club after 'shower hour' (6-7pm), allowing them to play and eat dinner under supervision while you eat separately.
Don't come here for the nightlife – Pragelato is a friendly village, but it's very small and not for ragers. If it's partying you're after, consider investigating nearby villages Sestriere and Sauze d'Oulx.
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Tag: The Last of Us
Posted in SyFy
Critcally acclaimed videogame, The Last of Us, to get a sequel
Carol Pinchefsky December 5, 2016
The Last of Us 2 will be "a story about hate."
The Girl with All the Gifts Trailer is a Child's-Eye View of the Zombie Apocalypse
Carol Pinchefsky July 1, 2016
There are two reasons people like zombie movies: 1) They're an excellent metaphor for the inevitable decay of civilization, and 2) Viewers get to see someone chomped to death. Fans will likely get plenty of both in the upcoming movie The Girl With All the Gifts. We have the trailer for you, above. The Girl […]
Who Arya should kill on Game of Thrones and more from Maisie Williams' AMA
Carol Pinchefsky February 2, 2015
Maisie Williams tells Reddit her likes and dislikes about playing Arya Stark in Game of Thrones.
Director reveals The Last of Us' alternate ending
Carol Pinchefsky July 29, 2014
The Last of Us original postscript, removed from the game's final cut, was revealed at a recent theatrical event.
Someone gets the jump on Ellie in The Last of Us: Left Behind trailer
Carol Pinchefsky January 13, 2014
Ellie isn't nearly as paranoid as she should be in The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC.
The Real Reason 'The Last of Us' Deserves An 8 Out Of 10 (Spoilers)
Carol Pinchefsky June 17, 2013
Warning: This articles describes parts of the end of The Last Of Us, including one of the climactic scenes. If you plan to play the game, you have been warned.
Review: 'The Last of Us'
Carol Pinchefsky June 5, 2013
I crouch down and listen carefully. There are six of them, moving slowly around the abandoned office space I've entered, trying to find a way through to the center of the city. Four of the enemies are Clickers. They're blind, so if I move very quietly, they won't spot me with their echolocation. But then there are two Runners. Still in the first stages of infection, they can see me coming. Using a gun is out of the question: That will bring every single one of them all down on me immediately. Not only that…I don't have enough bullets.
A Hands-On Demo Of 'The Last Of Us'
Carol Pinchefsky May 28, 2013
The Last of Us is the upcoming PS3 game by Naughty Dog, makers of one of my favorite game series of all time, Uncharted. Uncharted is the light-hearted adventure of Indiana Jones-esque Nathan Drake and his globetrotting pals, and it takes us from one dazzling destination to the next. The Last of Us' mood and mechanics have almost nothing in common with the award-winning Uncharted, but from the hour I spent with it, it looks like a worthy successor.
The Last of Us: 3 Minutes of Spine-Tingling Gameplay
With their Uncharted series, Naughty Dog proved they could do Indiana Jones-style adventures right. After watching these particular three minutes of gameplay of The Last of Us, which will be released on May 7, 2013, it doesn't take long to see that the game company will be conquering the zombie apocalypse genre too.
10 Videogames to Play in 2013
Carol Pinchefsky January 2, 2013
It's 2013. Do you know where your list of videogames for the coming year is? Wikipedia has one, and PC Gamer has a good one too, and they're chock full o' so many goodies, I have no idea how I'm going to play them all and have time to eat/bathe/dress/exercise/write/call my mother and father and let them know I'm still alive.
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Montreal borough hopes new 3D crosswalks will improve road safety
CTVNews.ca Staff
Published Tuesday, July 10, 2018 6:06PM EDT
Last Updated Wednesday, July 11, 2018 8:14AM EDT
A Montreal borough is trying out three-dimensional crosswalks in the hope that the eye-catching optical illusion will make the streets safer for pedestrians.
Outremont repainted a crosswalk at Bernard Avenue and Champagneur Avenue on Tuesday with boxes that appear to be rising above the road. A second crosswalk will also be repainted as part of the pilot project.
Outremont borough councilor Mindy Pollak told CTV Montreal she believes the markings will make drivers pause and think, "Oh, let me slow down a second, what is this new marking?"
"The goal of this is to increase pedestrian safety, decrease the number of accidents, increase visibility of crosswalks, slow down drivers," she said.
It's not clear whether the new design actually works. In fact, one study by a master's student at Western Michigan University found 3D crossings do not significantly improve safety.
Still, the idea has been spreading from India to China to Iceland, and residents of Outremont seemed to feel it was worth a try.
"It's a dangerous corner," one woman said.
With a report from CTV Montreal's Matt Grillo
3D crosswalks aim to slow down traffic and improve pedestrian safety 🚸
A pedestrian walks a crosswalk painted in a three-dimensional style for a pilot project, in the Montreal borough of Outremont on Tuesday, July 10, 2018. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz)


Bob and Pat Smiley were both awarded the 2015-2016 National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Community Service Award at the DAR Flag House Chapter's Tri-annual luncheon on May 21st.
The award comes from the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Flag House Chapter was founded by 13 descendants of Betsy Ross in 1903 in Frankford.
The luncheon also saw the swearing in of the chapter's officers who will serve three year terms.
DAR members come from a variety of backgrounds and interests, but all share a common bond of having an ancestor who helped contribute to securing the independence of the United States of America. Any woman 18 years or older, regardless of race, religion or ethnic background, who can prove lineal descent from a patriot of the American Revolution is eligible to join.


To be qualified, candidates must possess minimum first degree in engineering, estate management or any other building related field, and preferably be a member of a relevant professional institute.
Minimum 8 years' experience in similar roles is required.
To be qualified, candidates must possess a degree in Engineering, or Quantity Surveying.
Minimum 5 years' experience in similar roles with a construction company is a must have.
Qualified applicants should forward their CVs to zidmaresourcing@yahoo.co.uk.


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THE NATIONAL INVESTIGATION AGENCY (AMENDMENT) ACT, 2019 NO. 16 OF 2019
[24th July, 2019.]
An Act to amend the National Investigation Agency Act, 2008.
BE it enacted by Parliament in the Seventieth Year of the Republic of India as follows:-
1. (1) This Act may be called the National Investigation Agency (Amendment) Act, 2019.
(2) It shall come into force on such date as the Central Government may, by notification in the Official Gazette, appoint
Amendment of section 1
2. In the National Investigation Agency Act, 2008 (hereinafter referred to as the principal Act), in section 1, in sub-section (2),-
(i) in clause (b), the word "and" occurring at the end, shall be omitted;
(ii) in clause (c), after the words "may be", the word "and" shall be inserted;
(iii) after clause (c), the following clause shall be inserted, namely:-
"(d) to persons who commit a Scheduled Offence beyond India against the Indian citizens or affecting the interest of India.".
3. In section 2 of the principal Act, in sub-section (1), in clause (h), for the words "a Special Court constituted", the words "a Court of Session designated as Special Court" shall be substituted.
4. In section 3 of the principal Act, in sub-section (2), after the word "India", the words "and, subject to any international treaty or domestic law of the concerned country, outside India," shall be inserted.
be inserted, namely:- "(8) Where the Central Government is of the opinion that a Scheduled Offence has been committed at any place outside India to which this Act extends, it may direct the Agency to register the case and take up investigation as if such offence has been committed in India. (9) For the purposes of sub-section (8), the Special Court at New Delhi shall have the jurisdiction.".
Amendment of section 11
6. In section 11 of the principal Act,-
(i) in the marginal heading, for the word "constitute", the words "designate Court of Session as" shall be substituted;
(ii) in sub-section (1),-
"(a) for the portion beginning with the words "The Central Government", and ending with the words "Special Courts", the words "The Central Government shall, in consultation with the Chief Justice of the High Court, by notification in the Official Gazette, for the trial of Scheduled Offences, designate one or more Courts of Session as Special Court" shall be substituted;
(b) the following Explanation shall be inserted, namely:-
'Explanation.-For the purposes of this sub-section, the expression "High Court" means the High Court of the State in which a Court of Session to be designated as Special Court is functioning.';
(iii) sub-sections (3), (4), (5), (6) and (7) shall be omitted;
(iv) in sub-section (8),-
(a) for the words "by a person appointed as a Judge or an additional Judge of a Special Court", the words, brackets and figure "by the Sessions Judge of the Court of Session referred to in sub-section (1)" shall be substituted;
(b) for the words "such judge or additional judge and the Central Government", the words "judge of the Special Court and the appointing authority in consultation with the Central Government" shall be substituted;
(c) for the words "as may be specified in that order" occurring at the end, the words ",whichever is earlier" shall be substituted;
(v) for sub-section (9), the following sub-section shall be substituted, namely:-
"(9) When more than one Special Court is designated for an area or areas, the senior-most Judge shall distribute the business among them.".
(ii) in sub-section (1), for the words "constitute one or more", the words "designate one or more Courts of Session as" shall be substituted;
(iii) in sub-sections (2), (3) and (4), for the word "constituted" wherever it occurs, the word "designated" shall be substituted.
Amendment of Schedule
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text:
Paul Waplington
Paul Waplington, artist
The Vivid World of Paul Waplington
I've just come from spending a few days with Paul Waplington at his home in northern Portugal. 'Homestead' might actually be a better description. It's an old word which means a small house in the country, a bit bigger than a cottage but nothing fancy, surrounded by a patch of land not ample enough to sustain a fami1y, but useful for growing vegetables and fruit, keeping chickens and perhaps a few sheep and a cow. Paul also has a couple of noisy and nosey geese which roam the arc of terraced slopes that spread out westwards from his old, low granite house. You don't find many homesteads nowadays, not even in this out-of-the-way part of Portugal. There are still numerous small working farms, but most of the older properties with a little land have been smartened up as holiday homes, with terracotta doves perched on the pantiles and swimming pools sunk into the vegetable plots. Paul's place resists all this. It's a bastion against prettiness, a hymn in praise of use, a bit ramshackle but totally functional. The rickety fences and gates might not look smart, but they keep the foxes out and the chickens in quite effectively. In a large cage under a lean-to near the house, dapper collared doves fill the air with their soothing calls. In summer the oaks and fruit trees, many of them planted by Paul and his wife, Fatima, surround them and their livestock in a barricade of green, and it seems as though mankind and nature can still live here together in unsentimental harmony. But it was late winter when I visited. The trees were bare, and through their branches you could see the renovated houses creeping up the hillside and across the valley, and the new road on the other side of the river taking lorries past the village.
I was there to catch up with Paul's latest paintings and take notes about his life for this article. Our four days together were packed with pictures, stories and memories. His brilliant rumbling, grumbling conversation – always tinged with irony – would sometimes well up with sudden anger, then just as quickly subside into calm. He often broke into song or poetry, which he can remember by the ream – everything from elegies to raunchy limericks, always telling, usually pointed, often hilarious. It was as if the presence of someone from Britain had turned on a tap in his mind, letting gush a rich seam of experiences. Painting is a lonely pursuit, all the more so in a country not your own, although Paul now speaks Portuguese. The range and quality of his reminiscences and condemnatory running commentaries on everything under the sun – from urban street lighting to the failure of the Left, or the pernicious spread of eucalyptus trees – are the abiding memories of anyone lucky enough to spend any time with him. Switch him on and he starts his rundown of all the problems human beings are bringing on the world, in every direction and in every dimension: he's a curmudgeon, but one of the most entertaining and omnivorous ones around.
What image of him do I take away with me? Most typically, I see him leaning against the door of his cowshed. He has one cow, named Boni, a beautiful young Barrosã (the breed he so often paints) with golden flanks, a square, blunt head, large dark eyes and wonderful curving horns. She was born seven years ago, in that shed. Every morning he goes to let her out, his last treat after he has opened all the chicken pens. He has several breeds of hen, including the large, bizarre-looking Brahmas, which seem to be wearing pyjamas, and the attractive but aggressive Copper Marrans. First, he opens the top half of Boni's door. The cow looks out, and they gaze into each other's eyes with a strong, warm, mutual concern. It's not an eye contact an outsider can share. Paul swears the cow is intelligent and knows what he's thinking. Then he has to tie down the latch on the lower door, because she's taught herself how to open it – as he says, when it's raining, she's got nothing else to do all day but stand there, peer down and work it out. After their greeting, Paul likes to lean on the door with his back to her, blocking her view, amiably chatting on about how beautiful the day is. I caught him doing this once, and he laughed. ''It really annoys her' he said. 'See, she's trying to shove me out of the way to get a look'. At breakfast the next morning, he came in with the year's first tiny newborn chick tucked into his fist. It poked its beak out. His wife, Fatima, was thrilled. As he opened his palm he said, 'You can see why a chick is a symbol of new life,' and his eyes shone.
Several images of his paintings stay with me. I'll describe many later, but one in particular remains as a self-contained classic. Viuva de Panque – Sra. Torres is a portrait of a widow who is herself self-contained. The painting is not large, about a yard wide and half a person high, with the whole of her figure filling the frame. I'd seen an illustration of the painting before, but its physical presence added a new dimension. The technique is Paul's own, a rougher version of Rembrandt's. He lays the paint on thickly, as if carving within chunky silhouettes. Then when it's dry, he covers the corrugated surface with thinner translucent glazes which allow the substructure to show through. So, the substance of the picture is sustained – the massive forms of the old woman's body, her waistcoat barely stretching over it, her great hands that have done so much work, her spreading knees and heavy feet which have carried her so far and now bear her weight so slowly, all as massively solid as the stone bench on which she sits and the brightly painted granite houses in the background. All this faces out at you, as if the wall had been moulded into a living form. But then you see the woman' s face, her sad, quivering, strong, knowing smile – how can one shaded line say so much? – her nose, flushed with age and wine and, higher up, her tiny eyes, one unseeing, sunken, sliding sideways like a faded sunset, the other as sharp, dark and searching as a pin. A whole life's experience is there, carved in flesh. Paul told me he had great difficulty with the face and erased it again and again, leaving an empty oval in the picture. He only got it right after the old lady had died, working from memory as he mostly does. The painting is her monument, and a monument to all those people, fewer by the year, who have wrought a living out of the tough granite hillsides of northern Portugal.
Another painting keeps coming to mind – a large, unfinished white rectangle on the easel in his studio. Tucked at the edge of his plot as far as possible from the house, this glass-walled haunt is littered with piles of drawings, old battered folders, faded brown posters, a broken stool. It looks abandoned, but it isn't. Paul has no patience for tidiness unless it's purposeful. Unkempt corners harbour growth. And there it is on the easel, the beginnings of a magnificent magnolia tree, branches bending over, laden with heavy-bosomed purple blooms. A half-sketched woman lifts a branch while above her a man is coppicing a nearby oak, both of them framed by twigs which give the blossoming magnolia a sudden depth and glorious, close-up presence. And below this, worked over and scrubbed out many times, rise the curving necks of complaining geese, like pale grey shadows of the dark branches bending over above them. A picture is beginning to dance. Seeing it at this incomplete stage was like watching a play in rehearsal. This is what Paul Waplington is about, in his painting and his conversation, his singing, jokes and teasing, and his jibes at shady politicians, wide-boy business men and chancers in general. This is what he chucks at them all: the corporeal, down- to-earth business of being, human and animal in a continuum, forming in the act of painting, the only fresh start in the universe, glorious. unblushing, no-holds-barred act of praise. Where did this joyous painting come from? Why this subject -matter – and why Portugal?
Art is an unpredictable business: it pops up in the most unlikely places, like mushrooms in manure, the mix that feeds its magic buried deep in the mycelia of life. Paul Waplington had, what many would think, an inauspicious start in life, especially for an artist. His paternal grandfather Walter, a handsome upright fellow who sported a magnificent military moustache, became a goldsmith in London, but then returned to Nottingham to manage the City Creamery on Friar Lane. (Cattle have had a continual presence in Paul's life). In those days the dairy was still producing 'beastlings', very rich milk streaked with blood, pulled from the cow's udders just after calving and extremely good for puddings. It wouldn't be allowed today, now that the strictures of Euro-cleansing have taken hold. Walter Waplington married and settled with a family, but then had an affair with his beautiful secretary. The son from this relationship, also called Walter, was farmed out to peasants and brought up in the country. But when he was twelve his father's wife died. And so, his father married his mother and the young Walter was suddenly plucked out of a loving home, which he remembered fondly, and taken to live in a large house in the centre of Nottingham with his half-brothers and sisters. Then, within months, his mother died, and the young Walter withdrew into his shell. Walter Waplington proved to be a most unfortunate name for a shy boy who stuttered and stammered. He worked at the dairy, then during the war became a fitter, and later a later a storeman. He married the daughter of miner, and they rented rooms in Bulwell where their son Paul was born in 1938, later moving to a council house on the Broxtowe estate on the north – western edge of Nottingham.
Broxtowe was a rough housing scheme, typical or those times, packed with families cleared from slums like the notorious Broad Marsh area. Paul was once hospitalised after being kicked in the head by a boy wearing the wooden clogs that were still common then. Football and boxing were the main masculine pursuits. There was virtually no art in this environment, nor was there any at home. One day a schoolmaster, who was fond of reciting The Fighting Temeraire, turned to Paul and asked, 'Waplington. are you fond of fighting?' 'No sir'. said Paul. ' Why not?' the teacher enquired. Paul explained. 'Because I always lose sir.' Cue for general laughter. But that didn't stop the master from putting him in the ring to fight a hulking gorilla of a lad whose head was always shaved because of lice infestation. The match was declared a draw when a blow from Paul caused a nose bleed in his opponent. He was big and strong, but he got picked on because the others sensed he was different. And they were right.
One of Paul's earliest memories is of watching a Punch and Judy show, sitting cross-legged on the grass, riveted. He was irritated by the other children shrieking, 'Behind you!' and giggling as Mr. Punch squeaked, 'That' s the way to do it!'. They were all enthralled by the story. But Paul wasn't interested in who killed the baby, or whether Punch would or would not put his head in the hangman's noose. What fascinated him was the imagery, the carving and the strong colours. He'd never seen anything like it, but it spoke to him as if he'd always known it. Though he'd never seen a hunchback, he was fascinated by the curve of Punch's back, and his nose and chin almost meeting at a point – like cattle horns, he said, as he remembered. He began to make his own puppets and was determined to put on shows on the back lawn. He put up posters in the street, but his first attempt at public entertainment ended when the booth, made with the help of his dad, collapsed on to the kids in the front row. Paul now says that if he had his time over again, he would be a puppeteer, without a doubt.
When he was seven, he suffered some sort of nervous breakdown, and was sent to convalesce with his maternal grandparents in Warsop, a colliery village in North Nottinghamshire. The streets and houses were still gas-lit, and he remembers being rudely awoken the first morning by a pole tapping on the bedroom window. It was the 'knocker-up', doing the rounds to wake up the colliers whose shift it was. The village was still rural, and his uncle taught him how to set 'snickers', snares for catching rabbits. His grandfather was an Irish immigrant miner and, like most of the other ' pit yokcrs', grew his own vegetables, and reared and killed his own pigs. This rural life had a deep attraction to Paul's imagination, and remained much on his mind when he went back to live on the council scheme in Broxtowe. Because of the war, building work was on a hold, and the planned extension to the estate was in abeyance. The result was that the countryside started at the end of Paul's road.
A mile away, tucked in a fold in the hills, was the feudal village of Strelley, a fossil from the past with a blacksmith's shop, a farm and a manor house. The ancient Miss Edge ruled the village with a rod of iron, hobbling around her terrain with a stick. She hated boys from the housing estate, and one day tried to chase off Paul, who was always hanging about watching the animals. He backed away bit by bit, fixing her with his eye, waiting for her to catch up, then backing away again just out of reach. After playing this game for a while, Miss Edge smiled. Paul had won. Visiting Strelley again recently, Paul, not normally prone to sentiment, was in tears, seeing how it had been smashed apart by a slip-road to the M1, with only the dilapidated remains of an old tithe barn and a few scattered vestiges of field and hedge patterns visible.
When he was ten, Paul contracted scarlet fever. He had to spend five weeks in hospital, and after missing crucial classes, failed his eleven-plus. In those days of selective education in Britain this exam sealed the fate of children at the age of eleven. The ones who passed went to grammar school. The failures had to cope with the stigma of going to a secondary modern, where academic achievement was not the order of the day. Paul still remembers with pain his father telling him, 'You're on the scrapheap now. What am I going to tell my mates? The best you can do is be a delivery boy for Marsdens (a quality grocer) – if you keep your nose clean you might get a job in the shop'. Paul was convinced that was going to be his fate. One teacher, however, did try to encourage him. Jeff Bowley taught English and made the class read Macbeth out loud, line by line, explaining every meaning as they went along. He produced the school plays and made papier-mâché masks. He tried to encourage Paul, telling him always to 'be a doer, not a looker", but to little effect at the time. His condemnation still rings in his unresponsive pupil's ears. 'Waplington! Am I ever going to be able to knock some sense into that block of rather unseasoned oak you laughingly call a head?' Paul left school at fifteen. He didn't want to go down the pit. With his mother 's encouragement, and through the contacts of her fellow cleaners at the technical college, he got a place as a trainee lace curtain draughtsman. Soon afterwards he was taken on as an apprentice by Lace Textile Designers, a trade shop producing patterns for the industry for the weekly wage of two shillings and sixpence (twelve and a half pence in decimal money).
Nottingham has surfaced twice in history. In the Middle Ages, with its castle perched high on a rock, surrounded by Sherwood Forest, its wealthy citizens were fair game for Robin Hood, the legendary outlaw who stole from the rich to give to the poor. During the Industrial Revolution, rich seams of coal were found in the surrounding hills, and Nottingham became a great manufacturing centre. Lace, along with bicycles (Raleigh), cigarettes (Players) and pharmaceuticals (Boots), was one of Nottingham's major products. Fortunes were made there: the lives of the rich and the bourgeoisie contrasted vividly with the traditional cultures of the poor working classes. The friction between the two is celebrated and dissected in the great novels of D.H. Lawrence (1855 – 1930), the son of a Nottinghamshire miner. In Paul's youth social classes were still rigidly set, and with them traditional dress codes – his boss at Lace Textiles wore spats when it was raining, and stiff starched detachable collars were de rigueur. Like most peripheral housing scheme, Paul's was notoriously poor and deprived, and though things had begun to look up after the war, there was still a lot of violence there.
Paul rapidly became politically engaged. He began to read voraciously, and joined the Young Communist League, though not, in the end, the Communist Party. He felt more attracted to the Labour Movement; his socialism was instinctively home-grown, springing from exemplars like William Morris. the Levellers and John Ball, the itinerant priest who was one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt in 138I. He rejected anarchism because he thought people needed structures. And there was indeed a side to him that his young fellow Comrades didn't like. He was a Scout Master, wearing a uniform and taking troops of kids off at weekends to camp in the countryside. He loved every minute of it, and can still sing the rousing songs: 'We're riding along on the crest of a wave / And the sun is in the sky…'
Music and song are never far from Paul's thought or lips. He often pouts in a quirky way, pursing his lips as if ready to play the cornet, or to blow something between a raspberry and a mocking kiss. This he does with a twinkle in his eye, as if to say 'come on, don't take it too seriously, you know it might never happen' – the game, whatever it is goes on. At any turn his conversation is likely to swing into a snatch of song, aptly remembered, and if his accordion is to hand, he'll regale you for hours with folk songs and scurrilous ditties lodged, often to his own surprise, in the recesses of his mind. One of his finest paintings, Basford Hall Silver Prize Band (1975), is a group portrait of the colliery band he used to play in. So gloriously is the composition orchestrated, in a forward, lurching, flowering curve, that you'd swear you can hear the music's blast echoing off the factory walls. Paul has a host of hilarious tales of their escapades, such as when they managed to lose the rest of the marchers in a solemn parade for Remembrance Day that they were leading through the village of Warsop. The parade turned left but their band in front, gloriously oblivious, went marching straight on into the open countryside.
It came as a surprise to Paul that he loved draughting lace. He discovered that he had a natural talent and could work out the extremely complex reverse-repeat patterns that were required to produce lace of the highest quality and intricacy. He soon found his talents were appreciated. He also loved the machines, the huge elaborate, cast-iron looms which needed such fine-tuned adjustment to make them work. Later, when he first became an artist, some of the best drawings he made were of their workings. He understood their gears, shifts and eccentric cams and earned wide respect for being able to fix them when they played up. For the first time in his life he was in demand. But his earnings didn't reflect his skills. He realised that the designs he was getting twenty pounds for were being sold by the firm for ten times as much. Then the company began to 'modernise'. The antiquated hierarchies went out and a Manager of Personnel appeared on the scene. He recommended that Paul's job should be axed, apparently not realising that lace actually had to be designed by human beings. A new Sales Manager arrived. The first question he asked Paul when they met wasn't 'What job d' you do?' or even 'What team d' you support?' but ' What car you got?' A recession was beginning to bite; the old machines that Paul had mastered were being scrapped. In 1959, at 21, he found himself redundant. Realising that the lace business held no future for him, he began to look beyond it.
Paul began to wonder if he could make a career in art – not that he knew anything about that world in those days. Art was a chimera, luscious and rosy, beyond the horizon. His success as a draughtsman had made him realise he was good with his hands and could create things that pleased the eye and attracted attention, and his ability with machines showed that he had a clear grasp of form and understood how things worked. He'd been given his first lessons in aesthetic judgement by older designers in the factory. Arthur Cooper had told him, 'If a line gets too long it gets boring,' and Harry Rhodes had taught him to avoid even numbers of flowers – three or five always looked better than two or four. But he knew that what he was doing was two-dimensional, essentially mechanical and decorative. It was emotionally thin, lacking humanity and the fullness of the human form. Above all, it was in monochrome -and Paul wanted colour.
The visual world had always fascinated him. His earliest memory is of a wooden object, a blue, red and white shape. He can't see its form clearly now, still less make out what it was, but he knows that he used to think it was the most beautiful thing in the world. Then, when a very young child, he fell in love with a hand-painted wavy-edged wooden dagger decorated with flowers, a piece of folk art which the parents of the boy next door had somehow acquired. After days of yearning, and cajoling, he persuaded the lad to exchange it for a vicious bayonet blade that Paul's father had acquired during the war. The magic talisman was his for a night before the neighbours banged angrily on the door. The only painting he knew, from a reproduction in the doctor's waiting room, was Constable's Flatford Mill. He loved it because he wanted to be that boy under the trees. It never occurred to him then to paint.
He was inspired by the work of Edward Seago, the son of a Norwich coal merchant who became an immensely successful painter of landscapes – a sort of high-keyed Impressionist Constable and a dab hand at brushwork. Paul learnt from him that paint could represent a physical thing like stubble, and still be paint. He began to sense that he had a feeling for the medium. He took a canvas and some paints up to Strelley and painted the ducks on the pond, with ripples. It sold for three pounds. He had begun.
One sunny Sunday afternoon, sitting outside a pub with his mate Dave Bullers, Paul was watching a group of women he had known as schoolgirls, pushing prams and surrounded by their kids. Suddenly he saw his life stretching out before him, living in a council house, tied to a wife and family, and he turned to his mate and said, 'Let's pack up and make off'. They hitched down the A1, crossed the Channel and started walking through France, sleeping in fields and drinking pond water. Eventually, after Paul had suffered a bout of delirious illness, they got to Brussels. Sitting in the railway station, down to his last penny and wondering what to do next, Paul noticed a man walking up and down reading a book. When he wandered off, Paul decided to see where he was going and followed him down little side streets to a café Paul went in and ordered a beer with the last of his money. There were paintings on the wall and some musical instruments stacked in a corner. He was about to leave when a tall American invited him over and bought him a drink. 'Hungry?' he asked. Paul explained his situation. The American, who turned out to be a well-known folk singer called Derroll Adams, ordered him some food. A lean man sitting nearby asked, 'You broke?'. Paul nodded. The man emptied all the contents of his pockets on to the table. He separated the folded notes and coins from the detritus and heaped them into a small pile. 'That's all the money I have in the world,' he said. Dividing it in two, he pushed one half of the pile over to Paul. 'Half for you and half for me.' 'Don't you want to count it – for when I pay you back?' Paul asked. 'You don't pay me back.' said the man and got up and left. This turned out to be Herman Minner, an established Belgian painter, mainly of nudes.
Paul had found his way by chance to the Welkom Café, a haunt of radical lefties, artists and musicians. It was a centre for Belgian nationalism and Algerian resistance to France. Years later he discovered that the police compiled a dossier on him at that time; they photographed all the habitués of the Café. He stayed for the rest of the summer and returned for the following two summers, earning money as a pavement artist. One day, while Paul drawing a Last Supper on the pavement near the cathedral, Herman Minner came and sat next to him and asked if he could help him for half the takings. He did, took his cut and disappeared. That was typical of Minner. When he got any money, he was liable to go on a drinking binge for days. On one occasion a man appeared in the Café and gave Minner a bundle of notes in exchange for a painting. A couple of hours later, taxis arrived to take all the Café regulars to an extremely expensive restaurant outside the city, where they feasted all night with Minner as host.
One day when they were all sitting in the Cafe. Paul's mate brought in a painting that Paul had been working on – a Constablesque landscape. ·'Now this is real art', he announced. ' Thank you very much,' Paul muttered under his breath, deeply embarrassed. Minner looked at it. 'Very good,' he said, and gave Paul some advice. ' If you want to be a painter, throw away your watch, eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, and have sex whenever you can- otherwise you're one of 'them'. Until he got to know Minner, Paul had never met any 'real' artists in the flesh. At that time Minner, living in a dirty flat where naked women posed for him, was Paul's ideal – and he wore clogs. But Paul couldn't go down that path and abandon everything to lead a totally free and irresponsible imaginative life. That wasn't him. He'd always had one foot in wildness, but the other he kept planted firmly in reality.
So, a new rhythm of life began for him, working as a freelance designing lace and spending the summers painting and drawing in the countryside. He married, moved into a terraced house in the Nottingham suburbs, and soon had a young family. As ever, he kept chickens in the garden. Once a neighbour, a massive lorry driver, who had painted his section of the brick terrace white, complained about the cock crowing in the morning and took Paul to court to make him have it put down. Paul fought back and drummed up local support. One of his witnesses said he liked hearing the cock crow, but when he had to ask the magistrate if he would mind speaking up, it became obvious he was deaf. Nevertheless, Paul won the case. with costs charged to the police. He briefly became a national celebrity, as a champion of a way of living that was to be the subject of his art in Portugal.
Summers were spent along the southern English coast, because Paul had heard that that was where artists went to live and work. He spent the first summer in a Devon fishing village, at a time when there were still real villages with fishermen, and Devon was a real place with its own accent and traditions. A bit later, when he was thinking of going down there to live, he came across a village where the houses were much cheaper than usual. 'Oh, I wouldn't advise buying there,' the estate agent warned. 'That's a dirty village. 'What do you mean by dirty?' asked Paul. 'They're still farming,' the agent replied. Dirty working villages are what Paul now celebrates in his art.
One summer he settled in Ilfracombe and painted cliffs and the sea and did portraits of visitors in charcoal for ten shillings a time. He got to know Bob Lynn, a painter from Peterhead in Scotland. and together they set up the Combe Studios in an old pub to sell their work. He also made the acquaintance of two large families who regularly holidayed there together. One day when he was drawing all their portraits, he said to the youngest boy, 'I know who your dad is. I can tell from the eyes.' He had unwittingly identified the right father, but from the wrong family. The families disintegrated before his gaze. Bob Lynn encouraged Paul's painting, and introduced him to the vigorous brushwork of Scots artists like Peploe, Cadell and Fergusson. In acts of purist bravado, Paul disciplined himself to paint what he could see in front of him, straight on to the canvas with the minimum of strokes, without changing anything afterwards. He aimed for what he called 'a straight slab of reality' and learnt how to make waves appear to have weight, and to recede. Around the local marina he earned a name for himself doing 'portraits' of expensive yachts.
Fishing boats were of course more up his street. Paul's early sketches of them show his interest in rendering how things worked. The engines, lifting gear, nets and boxes are strongly articulated, as is their big-bellied shape. But he was dissatisfied with his painting of human figures. He couldn't get them to sit or stand in the picture space; they were a bit like tourists, floating through. He wanted his figures to be tied to their environment, to live in it. It was a hunger he felt more broadly in his own way of life, with the ecological politics that he was beginning to formulate. Bob Lynn told him again and again that he'd never get anywhere unless he learnt to draw the figure. So back in Nottingham, in the winter, he joined a weekly life-drawing class run by the Nottingham Society of Artists. That was where he really began to draw, with uncompromising vigour and directness. He was gaining in confidence and mastering the skills. But he had yet to find his subject matter.
It came to him very simply that he wasn't painting what he was living: he wasn't painting his own life. And that life, as he looked at it became more vivid. He started to see the terraced streets around him and the factories where he worked as if for the first time. He'd been trying to get out of what he cheerily called 'this horrible place' all his life, but might it not after all be a subject for painting? Why was it that, though people spent most of their time at work, there were hardly any pictures of people working? Reality was, he felt, being papered over with pretty landscapes and bright holiday images. He had sat in the countryside and painted trees. He'd been to the seaside and painted the sea. He'd become competent at it and had got all he wanted to get out of it. He was, quite simply. bored with it all. Moreover, he was bored with the dropout life, and had come increasingly to think of it as cowardly and unrewarding even in its own tenets. There was, of course, a political aspect to his thinking. He remembers with embarrassment how he once tried to paint a political satire. He called it 'The Decay of Capitalism'. It writhed with snakes, men with girders on their backs, rotten teeth and crosses spewing out of arses. He sold it one night for a fiver and didn't repeat the experiment. He knew about Social Realism, the art advocated by communist regimes in the Soviet bloc and China, but it didn't interest him. These paintings were full of gestures aimed at things outside the picture, which for Paul flawed them immediately, because they made him want to look away. They were works of propaganda, not painting. He never regarded himself as a 'Socialist Realist': he was just a socialist trying to paint from his own working-class experience. Painting was a job like any other, and the paintings themselves had to work.
Paul's paintings of working-class Nottingham didn't serve a political agenda, but flowered within a political view of life. They contain no hint of triumphalism. None of his figures are treated as heroes of the working classes raising themselves up by their own labour. Once, a middle-class left-wing acquaintance of Paul's was talking to an old right-wing friend of his from the council estate. ' You must be proud to be working class, Seth,' he said. Seth looked at him in disbelief, ' You' re bloody joking!' Paul has no rosy view of the life he depicts. He neither looks down on nor up to the working classes, but just looks at them, all around him. That's why he twists perspective in the way he does, he wants to take you right into the scene, so you're surrounded by it, feel what it's like to be in, and know how it works. He sees the wholeness of it, and the painting has to be contained within its boundaries. That is the challenge. Paul wants his life and his art to be bound up in one reality – he's always pursued integrity. Painting is a way of contemplating that; that's why he finds it so intriguing.
Pride isn't part of Paul's make up, but belief in humanity is, as he let slip in our conversation. 'I can live without God. I can live without money – well, without much. But I can't live without hope. And since I don't believe in that any more, I don't like to think about it.' Paul's early paintings blaze with hope, but not of a political kind. His sympathies were socialist, but he had long had a suspicion of the left, thanks to the wartime experience of his father, who was ostracized by the union for painting tanks when not a qualified painter. The result was that the vehicles weren't ready in time to be shipped to the Soviet Union, an incident which could have cost many men their lives. Paul used to encourage others to start painting by telling them that not only could they buy the materials for the price of a couple of pints, but there was no union that could stop them – art wasn't a closed shop. He could, of course, rally to support a cause. He designed badges for the miners' strike of 1984-5 .as well as a fine banner for them to march behind. A Davy lamp, given to him by the miner's union in gratitude for his support, hangs today above his fireplace. But if his primary motivation had been political, he would have become a politician. In fact, he's come to despise the breed. 'Hasn't everything been great since the Wall came down?', he muses wryly. Paul's early paintings glow, not with hope for political change, but rather with the warmth of humanity.
This warm glow was hard won. He taught himself to draw what he could see around him. His approach was methodical, almost ritualistic. For eighteen months in 1967 -8, he left the house first thing every morning with his conté crayons and sheets of cheap paper clipped to a board. He would walk a hundred yards, alternating directions, then stop and draw whatever happened to be in front of him – a mother pushing a pram, a car on a street corner, a distant view across the valley. The important thing was to have the decision about what to draw made for him. By this method he taught himself not only how to draw anything very quickly, but also how to see freshly. He found more and more of interest in his immediate environment, and at the same time developed the skills to convey it. Turning the crayon on to its long side, he could rapidly block in walls, roofs and windows to give an overall impression of massed buildings in rows catching the light. Pivoting the crayon on its corner or point enabled him to define contours and edges of people in movement. He became an Impressionist of the urban streets, his touch as versatile and skilful as Manet's draughtsmanship.
What caught his interest more and more was not just the light but the space. He began to paint at home, blocking in the composition as he'd done in his drawings, but now using brushes loaded thickly with colour. He was recreating the feelings he'd had outside. What he wanted to communicate, as he still does, was the sensation of being in the space he was painting, standing looking at the buildings rising around him, the streetlamps looming overhead, a valley of rooftops opening at his feet. And he didn't convey just the sight of these surroundings, but also the sense that the viewer could walk through them. His landscapes roll around you, just as moving through the real world makes it appear to move. He paints you into the picture. What's even more remarkable is that the space in these paintings changes direction and stretches as it would if you were looking around them in reality. In Alfreton Road (1979), you get a sensation of vertigo leaning over the balcony looking down to the ground below, then as you lift your head the townscape rises with you, in a great, sweeping arc up towards and finally over the horizon. There are few skies in Paul's work. He's always been more interested in what's going on down below.
In the life classes he became fully familiar with the workings of the human figure, and could soon sketch with great facility people walking, running, skipping, playing, hanging about and just living in their environment. The thousands of drawings he has produced are liberally sprinkled with lightning portraits, mostly of kids who've stopped for a moment to watch him at work. His streetscapes are rollicking, and a bit drunken at times – Paul enjoys a pint. Few artists have ever created a townscape so vividly lived-in. Paul was still regularly attending classes when, rather to his surprise, he was invited to teach life drawing at the Nottingham College of Art. This was a natural home for him, for it had originally been established by the lace trade to encourage good design. But by then trendiness had hit the college and the tutors were happy to leave life classes to an entertaining, self-taught local lad with a talent for representation, while they scaled the lofty reaches of abstraction and conceptualism. Fred Bazler, hot from a background folk- singing in America, championed Albers-like pop abstractions in sweet mint pastel shades, while Sheffield-born Victor Burgin had returned from teaching in the U.S. advocating making posters with political slogans, like 'What Does Possession Mean To You?' slapped across an image of an embracing couple. Paul had had an earful of middle-class political theories, and didn't see what it had to do with art. As for formalism, he'd had enough of that in lace design. It was cold and thin. Art, for him, had to be much richer and multilayered, with emotional depth and, above all, humanity. When he first saw Mondrian, he couldn't conceive what all the fuss was about. He'd seen the results of Modernism in the lace business, when Victor Pasmore was commissioned to produce some designs. They were a failure: sloppy, lopsided spirals which had Paul's fellow craftsmen in hoots of laughter and were withdrawn when they didn't sell.
What interested Paul was human content. He taught his life-class students not just to draw the body as an object, but to try to capture the feelings of the sitter. The people in his paintings had to have real personalities, no matter how summarily they were sketched. You can sense that every kid hanging on the frame in his great triptych, View Over Sneinton Dale (1983) has a home. This painting is a masterpiece. It isn't just the extraordinary articulation of shifting perspectives, the whole landscape dizzy with the children swinging high above the streets, parked cars, slate roofs and backyards. It also evokes, poignantly, the foreboding atmosphere of that time of rising unemployment. The horizon is too high for these kids: none of them can see over it, no matter how high they climb. Without laboring the point, the painting asks what future they have during the rapid decline of this once rich industrial city.
Paul's pictures soon began to attract attention. In 1970 his painting Boys on the Locks -a powerfully blocked image of industrial locks and lads slumped over them – won the Holbrook Trust Prize; he took pride in the fact that a previous winner, in 1930, had been D.H. Lawrence. Around this time, he got to know the Liverpool poet and artist Adrian Henri, jamming with him in boozy pub jazz sessions. With Henri's support, in 1975 Paul applied for and was awarded an Arts Council bursary, to paint images of the lace trade. Looking again at a life he had loved and intimately understood, a fabulous series of paintings and drawings poured out of him. Lace Draughting Room (1977) is the most direct celebration of his own work. He's tipped the picture up so that you can see exactly what the men are doing and get a real feeling for both the skill and the tedium involved, as well as the magnificence of their production. The plates of paint are explosive oases of freedom in this expanse of finicky precision. The era is set by the young man's sideburns and kipper tie, which give an inkling of his life outside work. An older worker warms his hands by the stove to ease his fingers: those factory floors were cold. Past other palette plates perched on the sill, a vertiginous view through the window reveals rows of women sewing, segregated in a lower floor across the way. You know exactly what it was like to work there.
A local artists' collective, the Midland Group. ran a gallery in the centre of town. Its director, Linda Morris, was a left-wing curator who put on challenging exhibitions and organised symposia about the state of British art when the Group weren't showing their own work. Leading left-wing critics like John Berger visited the city. Paul, who greatly admired Berger's book Permanent Red (though he was never quite sure what it had to do with art), showed him his View from the Lace Market over Cliff Road. Berger exclaimed, 'That's a marvelous painting!' but he never wrote about Paul's work. However, the critic Peter Fuller, who also became interested in his work, interviewed him for his first one-man show at the Midland Group in 1978, and wrote an article in New Society which claimed optimistically that 'many art world eyes are now turning towards the powerful paintings that Waplington has been producing. He saw Lace Draughting Room as 'a metaphor for the professional Fine Art tradition where many artists have recently tried to awaken from the sterile slumber of flat abstraction and to relate their images to experience again.'Waplington himself had no such grand ambitions. What he did was much more direct, practical and natural. Jackson Pollock' s paintings didn't interest him in any way, but those of Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Carel Weight and John Bratby did. He was uninterested in theory but obsessed by the business of painting what was real.
Nevertheless, Paul was briefly lauded as a hero by the leftist art intelligentsia: not only was he genuinely working class, he was highly intelligent and entertaining to boot. He was invited to sit on the panel at a conference on the future of British art at the ICA in London. The combined effects of the interminable discussion, the heat of the room and a couple of lunchtime pints sent him off into a doze on the platform. He only woke up when he was addressed by his name and invited to respond to what had just been said. His contribution was understandably brief, but it is faithfully recorded in Studio International (2/1978). He said he'd escaped the boring formalism of designing lace in order to paint and draw people in their environment because he found that much more interesting. He noted that some delegates had said that the TUC and the Labour Party might do something for art, but added, 'I wouldn't expect too much to come out of these people.' Then he shut up. His career as an art pundit was over.
In 1979 the art critic Richard Cork included Paul in the British Council exhibition Uncertain Art Anglais in the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris. His main recollection is of Kevin Atherton doing a performance piece which involved him removing single pieces of clothing from bystanders as he took off an item of his own, until he was left standing naked in the crowd. By the third evening, he'd attracted most of the gays in Gay Paree and didn't want to go on. 'You have to -for art's sake! ' said Paul. Paul' s own paintings drew no critical comment, nor any sales or invitations to exhibit. His international career seemed to have petered out before it had even begun.
More problematically, his inspiration was beginning to dry up. He had explored the strcctscapes and lace factories of Nottingham and said much of what he wanted to say about them. He'd also produced a few paintings of miners, not as heroes emerging from the underground but, as in Snibston Mine, Coalville (1978), dog-tired, streaked with dirt and rubbing their eyes. I was then director of Art Galleries in Sheffield, and I commissioned him to do a series of paintings of the Don Valley steelworks. He produced some powerful drawings and a handful of paintings, but the subject -matter didn't inspire the magnificent, expansive images I had perhaps hoped for. The machines weren't the ones he'd worked on and knew intimately. He felt closer to the people. His greatest achievement in Sheffield was his four storey-high portrait of Ron Mason, a steelworker, which I commissioned for a site in the city centre in 1979. I'd had the idea for large murals made out of coloured bricks – these had been used to make decorative walls before, but seldom with any real aesthetic ambition. Knowing his expertise as a lace designer, building up images with minute blocks, I thought that Paul would be able to manage this medium brilliantly. It proved, however, to be much more of a technical challenge than I'd anticipated. Since the coloured bricks varied in size and strength. making the wall structurally sound was problematic, but Paul mastered all the complexities. For example, he was only allowed to use four bricks which were pure white: more would have weakened the structure. He used them for highlights in the eyes. The wall has maintained its immense popularity because it's not a portentous image of a generalised worker, but a portrait of a real individual who took pride in his work. The difference is subtle but crucial. This image is truly monumental without being at all rhetorical.
The Nottingham lace trade was dying. Paul was still supporting himself and his family financially by working as a freelance lace designer, but more and more his work was destined for Spain and Italy. He began to wonder what he was doing living in a semi-detached house in the suburb of a cold, grim, northern European town. The factories that had inspired so much of his work were closing and his painting, too, seemed to be running out of steam. He had met and come under the influence of John Seymour, the pioneer ecologist, farmer and writer, staying the odd time on his farm in Pembrokeshire. For years Seymour had been warning of the dangerous effects of industrialised agriculture in causing soil degradation and air and water pollution. These and related topics are of course now very much in the public arena, but thirty years ago they were mostly regarded as the bleating of cranks. Paul's first idea was to move to the country, but it proved financially impossible, as the wealthy were already snapping up houses at inflated prices for weekend homes. He carried on allotment gardening, and hiking and camping at weekends. mostly in the nearby, glorious Peak District of Derbyshire. Then in 1988 he finally sold up and moved to Portugal, buying a ruinous farmstead with a plot of terraced land, where he still lives. He spent the first years making good the property, rearing chickens, planting vines, learning the language and slowly immersing himself in the culture of the place. He made a living by doing lace designs but didn't paint or draw at all.
He discovered he was a stranger in an ancient land. European Community grants had not yet penetrated the valley where he lived, though modernisation was soon to eat into its spirit. The roads were cobbled, the buildings ancient, and many people still believed in witchcraft. One day, on his doorstep, he found a toad with its mouth sewn up, an unspecified curse, put there by someone who'd taken umbrage at something he had or hadn't done. Myths and superstitions lingered in the air. Local people still shot owls because they were believed to be harbingers of death and took fright at salamanders for the same reason. Within a few years Paul was drinking his own wine, enjoying the warmth of his own logs burning in his own grate, with his dog Sweep at his side. Fortune had favoured him, despite the toad. He met and married Fatima, a divorced physics teacher, the daughter of a port-wine barrel cooper. She encouraged him to paint, paying for a studio to be built for him at the end of their plot. At first all he could do in it was sleep. But gradually Portugal, the countryside and its people got under his skin. He began to feel at home, and finally abandoned any desire to return to Britain. Then the paintings and drawings began to flow, in what was for Paul a new medium -watercolour. It gave him a luscious extension of his vocabulary, fluid and rich, fit for capturing the landscape of his adopted country. Triggered perhaps by memories of his father's dairy and the beasts of Strelley. He began with cattle – the handsome long-horned, golden Barrosã breed used everywhere on the steeply-terraced hill farms. Their great dark eyes looked at him from the far distant past. He felt in touch with a continuum he'd been seeking all his life – an atavistic warmth he wanted to express that linked him to the most ancient art. He couldn't have painted this magnificent bull, Bos da Parradella (?1998 ), in the way he did without knowing, from book illustrations, the Neolithic cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux. In Paul's deceptively simple, rapid, glowing rendition, the earliest art of modern man seems to breathe again.
He's painted oxen singly and in pairs, knowing their muscles, bones and odour. He's painted them pulling wooden carts, beautiful, curved boat-shapes between great wheels, heaped with manure, logs or maize according to the season. In our journey round his artistic hunting ground, we watched two being hitched to a yoke by an old farmer acquaintance of Paul's. It was early spring, and the cart was piled high with the rich, dark muck that the old man had raked out of the room beneath his house where the oxen had wintered, keeping themselves and his household warm. His wife brought them up the lane, her black clothes and traditional short black apron showing that someone in the family had recently died. The old man yoked them in a pair – a delicate operation. Then they jerked into action, pulling the cart up a narrow cobbled street, past a half-built new house, owned by someone sending money home from Spain, to a field over the brow of the hill. The cart wobbled and shook, and a few spatters of muck fell out. The old woman picked them up – no point in wasting it. We followed behind. Paul regaling me with a limerick: 'A careless young farmer called Burke pulled up his cart with a jerk / His load of manure /Was too insecure / And he was up to his eyes in his work.'
The embracing expansiveness together with an intricate, inner complexity – such features of Paul's sweeping views of the hilly suburbs of Nottingham -have found their equivalents in his depiction of the steep farmed hill sides of northern Portugal. From row upon row of red brick, slate-roofed houses and backyards, he has turned to painting rank upon rank of granite-walled green pastures and vines: from one kind of terrace to another. And as in Nottingham he painted his neighbours at work in the factories and at play, celebrating marching through the streets with brightly coloured banners and bracing bands, so in Portugal his subject-matter is the lives of ordinary people. He portrays peasants working in the fields, muck-spreading, ploughing and pruning, getting on with ordinary everyday tasks. Then there are the seasonal, communal activities, like treading the grapes in the Douro Valley, and the markets and feast days when farmers proudly bring their best beasts to show, decked with elaborate lattice-punctured yokes, as delicately designed as lace and decorated with flowers and ribbons of yellow, red and blue – like the bright colours of that indeterminate object which haunts Paul's childhood memory. His handling of the space in these pictures is mesmerizing – the way the legs of the cattle and those of their owners are rendered in the cramped space between them is a miracle of two -dimensional spatial articulation. But these animals and people are never simply juxtaposed, as they would be in a pattern. They aren't reduced to shapes or outlines, but are all fully realised beings with lives of their own.
The cattle are all up to something, looking round, peering out, raising their heads and lowing, each one an individual with its own personality. And the people are all busy too, weaving a bouquet, restraining a wandering animal, or resting, arms folded but ready for action. Even in the background people are active – a girl peers into a hole in a tent, a boy kicks his heels as he sit s high on a wall. Paul can't paint a person who isn't doing something. This is why his work is so alive: it celebrates life in action, and the overall effect is a glorious eyeful. Paul showed one of these pictures, Festival in Mixoes da Serra (date nk), to an old neighbour of his who'd probably never seen an original painting before. His reaction (unlike John Berger's) was not 'That's a marvellous painting!' but 'Look at that herd!' That' s quite a tribute to an artist who began life on the streets of a Nottingham housing estate.
Paul has come a long way, but the interests in his life have remained constant, as has the inspiration for his art. His remarkable achievement has been to wring from his experience a distinctive and versatile personal visual language which, in its exuberance and richness, has enabled him to express what excites him about life, without ever, for a second, losing touch with reality. As he revelled in the lace manufacturing and working-class culture of Nottingham before they disappeared, so he is celebrating the traditional peasant life of Portugal before it, too, vanishes forever. He is the only artist to have done so, and through his work, his celebrations of lives will go on breathing life into our own.
Julian Spalding (2010)


After listening to the Morning Skate Podcast and having a few conversations with some friends, it is clear that the only place for PK Subban next year is New York City. Not only that, but he needs to be the Captain. The guy is a natural born leader and deserves to be in a huge market in the biggest city in the world. He is developing a reputation that he is "too big" of a personality, which is what the New York Rangers need. Here are the logistics of what I think needs to happen.
PK Subban, 29, (9 million cap hit until 21-22 season) will come at a price. How much? Rangers should send the Predators Brady Skjei and a second round pick. In return the Rangers will get Subban and have the Preds retain a portion of his contract or maybe a conditional pick. If anyone thinks this is crazy here is my rationale.
This guy was made for New York!
First, Brady Skjei, 24, (RFA) is a great player and will be for years to come. But, he isn't a New York Ranger. I love the kid, but his Minnesota personality doesn't fit New York City. He is a cheap player right now, with a ton of talent, and will open up enough room for Nashville to make moves for a free agent….Tavares maybe???? Brady will probably make around $4.25 million over the next 5 seasons. 4 goals and 25 points doesn't exactly tell of his actual value. The Rangers had a terrible year and were big time sellers at the deadline. I think that will eventually be a bargain price for a player like Skjei. Also, if you think this isn't enough for PK, you're crazy. Nashville wants out of this contract so bad because they know they, can/need to, bring in more talent up front with all the depth they have on defense. Offense wins championships. Your defense and goaltending are your supporting cast. Nashville needed some more juice up front and their window will eventually close if they don't make some moves right away.
Don't be sad Brady. You'll probably get a cup in Nashville.
Second, PK would be a great guy to build a team around in NY given the current climate. The third NHL black captain in the biggest city in the world would help create a positive image and will help promote the game. Hockey is such a unique sport and the league doesn't do enough to promote it. PK was born for New York City and the New York Rangers. He can lead all this young talent that will be coming in over the next four seasons. The guy is a work horse. He is the face of a franchise and is exactly what the Rangers have been lacking since Avery was kicked out of town. (I'm not saying PK is Sean Avery, just that New York fans crave big personalities and both of these guys have it in their own unique way). Getting PK Subban also makes the Rangers a much better team. A power play with Shatt Dueces and PK would be deadly. I also think this move would allow the Rangers to go forward heavy in this years draft. Hopefully they can draft some young guys to build with and maybe be ready for a cup in 3 or 4 years.
I think both teams help each other out in this situation. Obviously this is all hypothetical and just an opinion, but it's hard to argue that PK shouldn't come to NY. Skjei is obviously a sign and trade type of deal, but I could 100% see this getting done. Predators already have a great foundation and is a desirable market for players. Also, Nashville already made it clear that they want out of the contract. With that being said, Rangers could certainly afford him and could really benefit with an emotional, motivated, and talented leader like PK Subban.


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→ News → Somewhere beyond La Mer
Somewhere beyond La Mer
Royal Northern Sinfonia, resident orchestra at Sage Gateshead, are currently on tour in Nantes, France with Music Director Lars Vogt. Across three days they will perform five concerts of Beethoven's symphonies and piano concertos.
Flying to Nantes on Wednesday 29 January, the orchestra left Britain as members and citizens of the European Union. When they disembark from their flight home on Saturday 1 February, they return to a Britain that is no longer an EU member state.
Meanwhile, the Orchestre National de Lille (ONL) are at the same time on a concert tour of the UK. The ONL arrived in the UK for their first concert in Birmingham on Tuesday 28 January and will return to France on Sunday 2 February. Their tour includes performances at Symphony Hall, Cadogan Hall, Sage Gateshead, Sheffield City Hall and Leeds Town Hall.
Here's what our friends at the ONL have said about touring the UK during this historic political period:
"It seems more important than ever to strengthen Franco-British relations. Whatever the outcome of the negotiations between the UK and the EU, the Orchestre National de Lille firmly intends to work towards maintaining ties between the two territories.
"In January 2020 this intention will take the form of a cross-Channel tour, during which the orchestra will represent the cultural standing of its region, mirroring the economic standing of northern businesses."
Thorben Dittes, Director of Royal Northern Sinfonia and Classical Programme at Sage Gateshead, said: "We are delighted to be welcoming the ONL here and to have our orchestra performing at Cites de Congre in Nantes at the same time. The timing of these two tours is significant in demonstrating our joint will to maintain cultural and musical connections nationally and internationally.
"We are an international orchestra and plan to continue taking our music around Europe and the rest of the world, building relationships with great international artists and ensembles and presenting them at Sage Gateshead."
Hear the Orchestre National de Lille in concert at Sage Gateshead on Thursday 30 January. Under its inspirational young Music Director Alexandre Bloch, the ONL brings a programme of French music at its most sumptuously colourful, as well as a chance to hear 2018 Leeds Piano Competition winner Eric Lu in Beethoven's most poetic and personal concerto. They will be performing Debussy's evocative masterpiece La mer, inspired by the English Channel.