The Artist, the Apple and Ada.

Aside

As we were in Porlock I decide to call in at the excellent Visitor Centre to collect the certificate for completing the Coleridge Way. It was closed but there was a notice saying the artist in residence was working in the garden. There we found a tall man under a tree eating an apple. Perhaps he was a performance artist but no, he explained in excellent English (he was German) he was eating the apple as it had fallen from the tree. What he was really doing was painting numbers on the apples.

Naturally – being nosey – I asked him why - and he kindly gave me an explanation which became more and more complicated and just when my eyes were beginning to glaze over he mentioned Byron’s daughter when I literally pricked up my ears. Probably most of you, when he mentioned Sadie Plant, ‘Zeros and Ones’, and Babbage would have thought ‘Ah yes – of course!’ I had to resort to Google.

Byron’s daughter was Ada Lovelace (yes I know you have all heard of Linda but it’s a different family)

‘She was buried next to the father she never knew at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham. Over one hundred years after her death, in 1953, Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished after being forgotten. The engine has now been recognized as an early model for a computer and Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software.^[14]

The computer language Ada, created by the U.S. Defense Department, was named after Lovelace.'

Sadie Plant has something to do with the Apple but this is where I get a bit lost although I believe she championed Ada. Below is what she said in an interview with Rosie X

‘The word cyberfeminism I started using quite independently of any other use I'd come across. I'd never seen the word used before. This is one of the reasons I was delighted when I came across the work of VNS Matrix here in Australia. Cyberfeminism to me implies an alliance is being developed between women/machinery and the new technology that women are using. It seemed to me a lot of women really love this type of technology and because of the "toys for boys" complex it was curious that they did. I thought women should be encouraged to go with their desire. To start with I simply used the word "cyberfeminism" to indicate an alliance. A connection. Then I started research on the history of feminism and the history of technology. It occurred to me a long standing relationship was evident between information technology and women's liberation. You can almost map them onto each other in the whole history of modernity. Just as machines get more intelligent so do women get more liberated. (link to history of this particular lie industrial revolution, witchcraft, loss of "women's knowledge")

So there you have it. I love that Byron’s daughter wrote the first computer programme. Sadly I lost the bit of paper with the artist’s name but he is on the left of the photo below.

Keeping up with the Joneses

Story contd

With two small boys and a large house to look after I was kept pretty busy and the milk dried up at six months. Son# 1 was active as ever and we decided to send him to a little nursery school for a few hours in the morning to prevent him killing himself or his brother. It was run by a vibrant mother of three boys who was determined that her children would be privately educated. This involved sending them to a nearby private school until they were old enough to go to prep school from whence she expected them to go to a famous public school. I believe these names mean different things in the States; suffice it to say that this was going to cost an enormous amount of money and meant a degree of privation for the family.

She and I became friendly and she almost convinced me this was the way to go. I even bought a small red blazer as part of the private school uniform. William and I had long discussions about it and he pointed out that we would have to sacrifice family holidays in order to afford it. I remembered my childhood – Blackpool when we were tots, cycling holidays, youth hostelling and the unforgettable camping holidays in the Lake District. I couldn’t deprive my boys of that sort of childhood. We were both agreed about this so I started to investigate the local state schools.

Cynthia, the nursery school owner was quite a social creature and we were invited to one of her Sunday morning sherry parties. The house was even bigger than ours and twice as draughty and to compensate I drank rather more sherry than was good for me. It seemed to me that all the people there were on a different plane with different aspirations. They knew of my brief moment of fame so I was welcomed but I didn’t feel comfortable and I resolved I wasn’t going to become what I can only describe as a snob. In spite of the drink we got home safely but I hated the feeling of the ground coming up to meet me and decided fortified wines were not for me.

The money I earned modelling had disappeared, mainly on buying things for the house and I was now financially dependant on William. I didn’t enjoy this at all and matters came to a head when I asked for money to buy a new bathing costume for our holiday and - after quite a lengthy campaign - he said no. I remember going out into the garden, staring up at the sky – choked with tears and vowing I would never go hungry again. No of course that was Scarlett O’Hara - I was hardly hungry but I made myself a pledge that somehow how I would become independent again.

Married women then, had a duty to look after their husbands, children, house and garden. That was women’s work; so we cooked and cleaned, bottled and preserved, laundered and ironed, knitted and darned and made do and mended. Hubby would be greeted in the evening with a fresh, pretty little wifey and after a restorative snifter he would kiss the children goodnight and sit down to a delicious home-cooked meal prepared by the lady of the house. It didn’t always work out quite like that. There was a feeling of unrest in the air. We were into the sixties and about to have Women’s Lib make waves and change our lives for ever.

I had a lovely home, a good husband and two delightful little boys and I was unhappy. Maddie and her husband used to come over most week-ends – first shopping in Tunbridge Wells and then dropping in to play with the children and share our supper. They usually brought little gifts for the boys and a bottle of wine and I looked forward to their visits. One evening Maddie and I were washing up after eating a nourishing goulash; she asked me what was wrong and I started to weep. I got a ‘no nonsense ‘ pep talk from her and she suggested I should take a part- time job, have driving lessons, join a theatre club and take a lover. I remember feeling quite shocked. Within a month I had done as she suggested. As she said later

‘I didn’t mean all at once.’

And I didn’t quite do everything she suggested. Naturally.