Your review of Martin Gayford’s book How Painting Happens (Life & Arts, October 5) quoted Howard Hodgkin saying: “Having to go through the horrors of painting a picture is not something I look forward to, ever.”
In “The Secret of Artistic Creation”, Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer, describes the processes through which great composers and artists create their immortal works.
For Mozart, it was easy: “There were no sketches and all we possess are the finished articles, the definitive texts, jotted down in one go in that light, effortless, winged hand.”
With Beethoven it was hard labour. There were countless drafts, each an agony of creation.
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“With such fury does he score and strike at the paper, that the whole page is torn apart — and one sees here the enraged man at his labours, the man who stamps, groans, curses because the ideal musical form cannot be expressed from where it originates in his head.”
Zweig sums it up well: “Mozart plays with art as the wind with leaves; Beethoven struggles with himself like Hercules with the 1,000-headed Hydra.”
Kim Kardashian, it seems, is a fan of the FT (“Under her Skims: inside Kim Kardashian’s $4bn apparel empire”, HTSI, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, October 5).
In the accompanying photograph, I count a good 20 sections scattered on and around her sofa.
This suggests she follows the markets, the environment and the Olympics, but what she clearly loves is a crossword: three on the cover photo and four inside.
But she never fills in an answer and, even more strangely, she has multiple copies of the same puzzle — front left on the sofa and far right at her feet — from, presumably, multiple copies of the same edition of the paper. The article tells us, “she is one of one,” but one copy of the FT is clearly not enough for her.
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I do hope she carefully bundles up and recycles all those sections she has flung around, after she skims them.
Every week as I tuck into Tim Hayward’s column, I think to myself, he can’t be witty and insightful every time. This week as I read his article (“The cult of St John”, FT Globetrotter, September 28), with all the details of the two people (restaurateur Trevor Gulliver and chef Fergus Henderson) behind the St John restaurant in London’s Smithfield district, I thought this is an interesting and informative piece. But that was it — until the very last sentence, where Hayward told of the two old friends holding hands across the tablecloth, and there it was. Your restaurant critic had got me again . . . every time.
AS the leaves begin to turn and a chill creeps into the air, the country is transforming into a playground of eerie delights.
From pumpkin patches to haunted castles, this year’s Halloween attractions promise thrills and chills for all ages.
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Jacob Lewis reveals the best bewitching Halloween events across the countryCredit: Supplied
Whether you are seeking family-friendly fun or scream-your-lungs-out scares, Jacob Lewis has found the best bewitching Halloween events across the country.
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Budget-friendly boos
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In Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, history meets mystery with the Ghostly And Macabre guided walking tourCredit: Supplied
FOR those watching their wallets, Pembrokeshire’s Milford Water-front offers a free Halloween trail from October 28 to November 3.
To make it a full getaway, Hotel Ty Milford Waterfront is offering a “kids stay free” deal when sharing a family room, with prices from £116 per night.
Major Scots tourist event returns – and this year it has an ultra spooky theme with 10 new features
Grownup goose bumps
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Are you brave enough for Norfolk’s ROARR! experience?Credit: Supplied
EXTREME scare experience PrimEvil at ROARR! in Norfolk is not for the faint of heart.
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Running between October 17 and November 2, the fully immersive event features five terrifying haunts, including Werehouse 51: Toxic Mutation, and roaming street actors.
Other attrac-tions include high ropes courses and zombie archery. Tickets from £28 at primevil-scare.com.
Ghost hunters will find their perfect Halloween treat at Hever Castle in Kent.
This year, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn invites brave souls on an after-dark tour, delving into the castle’s most unfortunate owners and their gruesome fates.
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The experience begins with a glass of prosecco (or a non-alcoholic alter-native) at the Moat Cafe, setting the stage for a truly haunting night.
Or check out Millets Farm Centre in Oxfordshire, which secured third spot, thanks to its low £2 entry fee and annual Halloween Spook-tacular that includes pumpkin-picking, a Halloween circus and a spooky disco.
In Blackburn, Scare Kingdom Scream Park is pushing the boundaries of fear.
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Running on select nights to November 9, it boasts 80 scare actors across 130 themed spaces around five scare mazes promising pulse-pounding adventures.
Minimum age of 13 (accompanied by an adult).
With tickets starting at £27.79, this one is an intense experience that’s not for the faint-hearted.
The Halloween in the City festival returns to Manchester on October 26 and 27, when the city centre will be overrun by giant inflatable monsters, including eight-metre-long Leech.
As darkness falls, buildings across the city will glow an eerie green, while thousands of pumpkin lanterns line the streets.
Moors Valley Country Park in Dorset is debuting a Halloween illuminated trailCredit: Supplied
FOR those who prefer their scares with a side of natural beauty, Moors Valley Country Park in Dorset is debuting a Halloween illuminated trail.
Running from October 25 to November 3, the after-dark adventure winds through the forest, revealing hidden surprises including a secret cemetery, ghostly undertakers and tree demons.
With thunderstorms, wicked witches and giant spiders along the way, it is a multi-sensory experience that blends the beauty of nature with Halloween theatrics.
Just outside Port Talbot, Margam Country Park is launching Fright Nights – a spine-tingling experience that draws on the location’s haunted history.
The trail begins in the ruins of the gardens where visitors encounter 7ft Cistercian monks before venturing into a forest rumoured to be home to the ghost of a murdered gamekeeper.
The journey continues into the 19th-century castle, considered one of the UK’s most haunted places.
With two scare levels available – one for younger visitors and a more intense version for those 15 and up – it’s a customisable fright fest for those with different terror thresholds.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Tokyo will become the first part of Japan to ban customer harassment of service workers amid a perceived worsening of consumer behaviour that some analysts say is linked to the return of inflation.
Officials in the Japanese capital are drawing up guidelines to accompany the new ordinance, which was passed by the metropolitan assembly last week to tackle customer nastiness known by the abbreviation “kasu-hara”.
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The regulation, which will take effect in April next year, declares a blanket ban on customer harassment and calls on society as a whole to join in the effort to prevent abuse.
In doing so, it strikes a hefty blow at the mantra of corporate Japan that “the customer is God”.
Economists say companies’ reluctance to upset customers by raising prices was one of the reasons the Japanese economy had spent so long mired in deflation. Now that sustained inflation has returned, senior executives in the restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors say customers are unhappy.
Jesper Koll, a veteran Japan economist and director of the securities group Monex, said worsening customer behaviour was an unintended consequence of Japan’s switch from its long battle with falling or stagnant prices to the current inflationary environment.
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“During the decades of deflation, customer satisfaction and happiness was built in. Now that prices are going up — and going up not just once but more or less consistently — Japanese feel cheated. Under deflation, the customer was always king. Under inflation, they are taken for a fool,” said Koll.
Over the past few years, a rising drumbeat of media reports of incidents of staff suffering everything from screamed rebukes to menacing online abuse has made the customer seem less like God and more of a spoiled child.
Surveys of workers in the service sector give the impression that the highly demanding but once generally polite Japanese consumer has become more cantankerous, plaintive and liable to erupt in rage.
The UA Zensen, a labour union that represents workers across multiple sectors of the economy, in June released a report based on responses from over 33,000 members that found 46.8 per cent had experienced some form of kasu-hara in the past two years.
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The private sector has been hastily enacting measures to prevent abuse of staff — a critical challenge for businesses as the country confronts a shrinking workforce and ever more acute labour shortages.
Transport and utility companies have strengthened mechanisms for reporting kasu-hara incidents and some taxi firms have introduced emergency kasu-hara buttons that allow the driver to start video-recording difficult passengers.
Earlier this year, the major convenience store chain Lawson stopped insisting staff display their full names on uniform badges to prevent them being targets for online abuse, while rival chain FamilyMart began allowing workers to use pseudonyms.
The practical force of Tokyo’s ordinance has yet to become clear: there is no punishment for those who break the ban and it appears chiefly intended to promote greater awareness of the problem.
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Even more critically, it does not yet come with a comprehensive definition of what counts as kasu-hara. Guidelines drawing the boundaries between abuse and legitimate complaint will not be revealed until December.
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