As If

So that time is approaching again. The full list of my 2008 New Year resolutions (working title Things I Will Definitely Do This Year, Honest) has yet to be finalised. But I thought I'd set down the latest draft. In the hope of at least remembering a few of them after January 5th.

1. Get Fat. Obesity is now more reviled than glue sniffing and alcoholism, and is fast approaching paedophilia and heroin abuse. Therefore, fatties are rebels. Fatties are cool. Not quite sure how to manage this, however, given that the things which make you obese (watching TV, eating) are duller than the things keeping me thin (walking, chain smoking). How do they all do it?

2. Talk to more people at work so they don't think I'm a weirdo / dullard / sociopath / all of the above. I may have left this slightly too late.

3. Get addicted to at least one reality TV show. Rather necessary to fulfil Resolution 2, given that they're the only topic of conversation at work. Still trying to decide which one, however. Strictly GCSE Woodwork? Celebrity Big Brother with David Irving and Nick Griffin? How Clean Is Your Car Glove Compartment? It's a tough choice.

4. Spend more time on the things I cite as my hobbies and less on those I cover up. Which translates as: read history books instead of playing online games aimed at 10 year olds. This one tends to feature each year.

5. Stop crow-barring my epilepsy into conversations and then being so stoical that it's impossible to have a discussion about it. Though I've yet to decide whether to shut up about it entirely or turn myself into a martyr. Right now I'm leaning towards the "Woe is me" option.

6. Warn the people about Noel Edmunds. He hasn't changed, you know. He may have tried reinventing himself as a weird numbers freak on Deal Or No Deal. But I saw him on a Sky show over Christmas and he was as bad as ever. The same monstrous ego. The same smug cackle at his own joke. And obviously, the same beard. Stop him now before his terrifying resurrection is complete.

7. Do at least one blog entry a week. My fan base – two people in Sheffield and my mum – deserve no less.

8. Stop doing the same tired old joke about my blog fan base. Besides, I think the Sheffield crew have abandoned me.

9. Finally find out what the bloody hell this 'emo' is. So I can claim to still be 'down' with 'the kids.' Though I'll probably conduct three months of intense online investigations just to reach the same answer as the question about the blues. If you have to ask, you'll never know. And it'll have gone out of fashion by then anyway.

10. Get out and meet people. Yeah. That'll happen.

11. Smoke less, worship God, spend less, work harder, be nicer, greet each day with a smile on my face yah-di-yah-di-yah. See the footnote to Resolution 10.

Oh No They Aren't

Perhaps this isn't the right time of year to be doing a piece on arrogance. But I think I've said everything I've got to say about Christmas over the past 34 years. Meanwhile a couple of remarks in today's Guardian caught my attention.

One was uttered by everyone's favourite history bore, David Starkey. Starkey has made a decent career out of sucking up to British monarchs, so it's surprising that he's started laying into our current one. The Queen is a poorly educated philistine, he claims. In a late challenge to the most tasteless insult of the year, he compares her attitude towards culture to that held by Goebbels. By way of evidence, he cites an occasion when he was showing her around an exhibition he had curated. Practically her only comment was to say she needed a drink. (Or at least, to complain her gin and Dubonnet was late arriving, but this is the Queen). Frankly I think it very likely that the Queen is a philistine. It's telling, however, that Starkey doesn't even consider the alternative. That his exhibition was shite and she was trying to avoid saying so. Appreciating culture, apparently, is synonymous with appreciating David Starkey.

The other comment came in a wonderful piece about Santa Claus impersonators. Most were struggling actors, of course, and not happy with what they are reduced to. One moaned "Father Christmas is only one step up from panto." Which surprised me because I though it was quite a few steps down from that. In fact, it's possibly on an entirely different staircase. Pantomimes don't have the greatest scripts but they offer lines a bit more demanding than "Ho ho ho, what's your name, little boy?" Former celebrities banished from television tend to end up in panto; your Bonnie Langfords, your Ronnie Corbetts, your Les Dennis' (or should that be Les Denni?) None, to my knowledge, have been reduced to putting on a beard and getting groped by children in BHS.

Personally, I don't knock those in pantomime. I've been in one myself, while in the Sixth Form. It wasn't easy. There was the experience of playing at Bootham Mental Hospital in front of an audience barely able to feed themselves, let alone know when to chant "He's behind you!" There was the morning after the Christmas party when a severe hangover left me barely able to stutter a single line. There was the performance when hi-larious backstage pranksters replaced the cardboard beanstalk with a giant penis. And they were just the gigs themselves. Getting the thing onto the stage involved daily battles between the fundamentalist Christian directors who objected to every single irreverent joke inserted by the atheist writers. A struggle which turned into an all-out religious war, culminating in the Great Death Song Controversy. It was a tough time.

So if every performance of Mother Goose or Cinderella is half as rocky, respect is due to all those involved. I understand the Father Christmas' looking down on somebody. We all need to sneer at those below us. And this lot need more comfort than most, with work experiences varying from being propositioned by amorous mothers to watching your Little Helpers get drunk and fall in the lake. But they've chosen the wrong targets here. There are still street mimes, after all. There are Sealed Knot Society foot soldiers. There are people who dress up as Romans and give out leaflets. Don't pick on the man in the wig and the 44D bra.

A Clue, My Dear Watson

So on Friday morning, I returned to my desk to find I had written 'Grey Owl' on a post-it note. Frowning, I studied the words carefully. The script was definitely mine; and there was nothing else on the note. Given that:

a) We have no suppliers, clients, employees, contacts or enemies whose name fully or partially contains these words;

b) It is extremely unlikely that on Thursday I had heard, saw, thought of, talked about, eaten or copulated with a grey owl;

and c) There isn't technically, or even descriptively, anything such as a grey owl to be found anywhere near where I work;

Well, given all that, the message perplexed me a little.

I threw the note away eventually. And I regret this now. Just in case I am found slumped lifeless over my keyboard early one morning. Then a Poirot-type detective might have found the note and spent weeks trying to tie the words back to my killer. Until he finally reached the conclusion that I did. It is a clue simply of a mind going slowly but inexorably insane.

Not Shaken Or Stirred

Watched The Spy Who Came In From The Cold yesterday. Not for the first time and hopefully not for the last. John le Carré novels always worked well on film, where his fine plots and characters aren't held back by his rather mediocre prose. It also helped that they featured some especially brilliant actors. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold starred Richard Burton, a man whose whisky-soaked charisma practically staggers out of the screen.. Later Alec Guinness would make spymaster George Smiley his own and infuse the role with his wonderful brand of sinister melancholy.

However, I also couldn't help thinking that le Carré must be in despair nowadays. His books seemed to be a concentrated attack on the glamorising of spies during the Cold War. A tendency epitomised by James Bond, of course, smirking around in his tux like an aristocrat, shooting or shagging everyone in sight. Le Carré created shabby, melancholic little men; and they knew the truth about their fellow operatives. "Drunks… hen-pecked husbands… civil servants playing Cowboys and Indians to brighten up their drab lives," Burton's character spits. He also sums up the level of morality involved: "Yesterday I wanted to kill Mundt because he was evil and my enemy," he says of a Communist double agent. "Today he's evil, and my friend." Le Carré's approach became popular for a while. Even a writer as mediocre as Len Deighton could put some balance and intelligence into his Cold War yarns.

And now? Spies are superheroes again and every bit as banal. James Bond is seemingly indestructible, each new film as inevitable and over-publicised as Christmas. In Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy somehow created a character even worst; morally impeccable, utterly lifeless. On TV, meanwhile, Spooks and 24 seem locked in a bitter contest to see who can be the most absurd. Cops, doctors and even, for that matter, superheroes, can be deeply flawed and barely functioning sociopaths. Spies have to be two dimensional.

It's unfortunate because a more balanced portrayal is needed right now. One of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold's central themes was that your methods cannot afford to be less wicked than your enemy's. Morality only plays a part in your ultimate goals. And this had grim consequences when the West was just fighting totalitarian regimes who shot individuals they suspected were guilty. How about now, when the enemy blows up groups without caring who is innocent? Have our tactics become more brutal to match? It would seem so, from the accounts which have seeped out from Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. But you'll be lucky to see any acknowledgement on screen.

'The Virgin of the Rocks'

In his impressive recent program 'This Is Civilisation,' Matthew Collins explored the different impacts the Greek and Christian religions had on art. The ancient Greeks were obsessed with physical perfection. Their gods and goddesses were supermodels; essentially like us but much more beautiful. This civilisation found both aesthetic and spiritual bliss in a well-proportioned statue of a naked boy. A notion which vanished when Christianity conquered Europe, Collins argued. Not only were statues of the gods condemned as idolatry, the human form itself became problematic. The body was seen as transient, it was the source of sin. So much so that the central image of Christianity became a body pierced and broken so that the spirit could live forever.

I knew which picture Collins would show to illustrate art's dramatic change of direction. There have been thousands of Jesus dying on the cross, but one still stands out. Grünewald, of course. His ghastly Crucifixion which is slapped across the Isenheim Altar. Jesus is twisted unnaturally on the cross, head slumped. His outstretched arms are as thin as twigs, his pierced skin already the colour of rotting flesh. Grünewald embraced the cruellest side of Christianity and became immortal as a result. His altarpiece is frequently used to show the gloom of the Middle Ages, just as Texas Chainsaw Massacre epitomises the 'video nasty' boom of the 1980's; though Crucifixion is more horrific than any of Leatherface's antics.

The gruesome Grünewald is only one part of Christian art, however. And the crucifixion is only one pole of the Jesus story. More artists clustered around the other, the one we are preparing to commemorate: his birth. Here we get not a hatred of the human form but a celebration of it. And with this comes a joyous representation of humanity itself. This happened most vividly in the Renaissance paintings. The Renaissance, of course, was a rediscovery of classical methods and ideals. And the body became beautiful again. More importantly it became living and three dimensional, after the flat mannequins of the Middle Ages. This was partly because of the development of scientific techniques and observation, a tendency which Leonardo da Vinci perhaps took to excess. It was also because of the notion that humans and human relations were worthy subjects of art.

Classical themes also became fashionable again. Such paintings were always a subsection of the Renaissance, though, and often a farcical one. They often feel like the old legends being used as an excuse to create images which would otherwise get the painter excommunicated. Want to show an orgy? Just call it a Feast of Bacchus. Violent pornography or bestiality more your fancy? Then resurrect the Rape of the Sabine Women or Jupiter getting his end off. Titian alone got away with this sort of thing and he only occasionally. The bulk of the Renaissance, and certainly the majority of its masterpieces, were Christian. Partly this was because of the piper's paymasters. Many pieces were commissioned by either Popes or Italian dukes wanting to suck up to Popes. But many artists were deeply religious too, sometimes – especially in Michelangelo's case – taking their devotion to the point of insanity.

So crucifixions dominate, and nativities and pietas and ascensions. There was also another popular theme. Christ as a toddler or a young boy with his mother. This is surprising because of its apparent irrelevance to Church dogma. Jesus rather drops out of the Bible in between his escape from Herod and his reappearance as a smart alec teen showing off in the Temple. Yet many Renaissance artists tried to fill in these lost years. The sheer variety of their images gives us a clue why. Michelangelo shows a muscular Mary leading The Holy Family, reaching up to grab her son. Caravaggio's Virgin and Child With St Anne has Christ helping his mother tramp on a serpent – the symbolic resisting of temptation turned into a nursery game. Raphael's Madonna of the Chair is all protective love, arms wrapped around her rather chubby son as she glares at us suspiciously. Again, the titles of some of these works seem to be a cloak. The images are simply the painters' statements about motherhood, maybe based on memories of their own childhood or observations of their wives. It is worth mentioning that the pictures are filled with love and devotion. The religious settings were probably useful here as well; such emotions are rarely fashionable in art otherwise.

Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks is from this tradition. It has a more mysterious feel than many. The golden light which illuminates his characters and the subtlety of his shadows give it a touch of the divine. The darkness of much of the background, contrasting with a bright glow peeking through the rocks in the distance, hint of a grotto cut off from the rest of the world. Otherwise it is a realistic, if slightly stylised, representation of a family at rest.

One puzzling element, distancing it from many Virgin-and-child pictures, is that there are in fact two children. There is no obvious explanation why or even which one is Jesus. Conceivably the other could belong to the girl on the right. She has the look of a servant or a nanny, however. Da Vinci's careful arrangement of figures leaves her on the fringes; and states that the Virgin is the mother of both children. Her arm rests on the shoulders of the praying infant. Her gaze is directed towards the other while a cautioning hand sneaks towards him. This Madonna is much less protective than Raphael's. Leaning against a rock, her expression is as serene as the sunlight. Yet she emanates a calm authority over both children and seems capable of bundling them both up in an instant.

The actions of the children supply the only overtly religious details. One is down on one knee to pray. The other, placed by the water's edge, lifts a hand to bless him. Perhaps the latter is John, rehearsing the moment in later life when he will baptise his cousin. Their relationship is also suggested by Jesus' slightly higher vantage point, a sign of superiority. If so, however, it feels like an unconscious forecast. The children simply seem to be playing, mimicking the actions of adults. They also have the clumsiness of infants. Both appear to be in danger of unbalancing, the prayer not entirely secure on his rock and the blesser leaning rather too far over the water. You can understand why their mother is keeping a close eye on them both.

And the gaze keeps returning to her. She is placed almost dead centre of the canvas. And she rears over the other figures, her head the apex of one of da Vinci's triangular compositions. Not in the way Parmigianino's ridiculous Madonna of the Long Neck does, but in an arrangement which looks both natural and inevitable. This is another common feature of Virgin-and-child pictures. Mary's authority is total. Jesus may be the son of God but, at this stage, he is totally dependent on his mother. Meanwhile poor, divinely cuckolded Joseph barely features. Michelangelo puts him in the background and turns him into an old greybeard to emphasise his weakness. Da Vinci simply excludes him, replacing him with a servant girl.

The Virgin of the Rocks is so powerful because it works on two levels. The lighting and setting give it a mythical aura whilst the details are entirely realistic. In this it follows one a strand of Christianity especially strong in fifteenth century Italy – the cult of the Madonna. An ordinary woman worshipped because of her status as a mother. This was effectively an updating of the ancient tradition of the Mother Goddess – a figure somewhat terrifying but also benevolent and loving. The urge has survived because of our memories of the time when our own mothers seemed to be all-powerful beings who could guard us from anything.

Matthew Collins was partly right. When the Christian artists showed naked flesh, at least outside the classical legends, they tended to punish it. The blinded Samson blundering around the temple, a saint stretched out on a rack, Jesus dying on his cross. Only babies could do full-frontal nudity and survive. The Mother Goddess lost her multiple breasts and gained a healthy set of clothes. The Divine Conception reflects the new squeamishness towards sex – while also continuing the tradition of Jupiter's dubious 'seductions' – particularly when practiced by our own mothers and fathers. But this doesn't mean the human form itself was condemned. The opposite actually happened. The divine became humanised. Jesus was turned into a chubby, clumsy toddler dependent on his mother's protection. And religious art became a study of personal relations, rather than just the search for a perfect set of pecs.

A New Icon

I see my home, York, has won another Best City In Britain award. We get a lot of these accolades. Never the Best City To Live In, though. Just the Best City To Visit; and then escape from before you start getting depressed by the lack of, well, anything to do. My joy this time was also tempered by the fact that the award was voted by Daily Telegraph readers. To translate for non-Brits: you've heard of the phrase "just to the right of Genghis Khan"? Here we also say, "just to the right of the Daily Telegraph." Our supporters are elderly colonels who probably like York because it's "not full of all those black chappies."

Anyway, I was mildly interested by the photo accompanying the 'story' in the local free rag. It featured the Minster, of course. You still cannot have a general story about York without showing the Minster. There are laws. The cathedral was relegated to the background, however. Pride of place was given to the York Eye. A city with a history stretching back to the Romans is now epitomised by a damn great ferris wheel.

The York Eye, admittedly, is impressive. Erected a few years ago beside the National Railway Museum, it has been extremely popular with tourists. I gather that it gives remarkable views over what is still a low, flat city. It is also lit up by an ethereal light when darkness descends. You can see part of it over the Bar Walls from my office window. It is a nice spectacle to gaze upon as I work late into the evening and wonder what's happened to my life. Still, the York Eye is only a damn great ferris wheel. Moreover, it looks like all the other damn great ferris wheel which have sprung up across Britain recently; many of which, notably London's, are even damn greater.

What makes a building a symbol of a place? So much so that this one structure can always be used as a shorthand image of the whole city? Size, fame and bombast are sometimes seen as the only criteria. But I think the most important quality is originality. This building has to mean that place because nothing like it is found anywhere else. The Golden Gate doesn't work because, frankly, it's just a damn great suspension bridge. But the Guggenheim has to mean Bilbao, the Statue of Liberty New York and the Reichstag – at least since Norman Foster's deranged dome was added – Berlin.

So the Eye doesn't work as an icon of York. Nor did the Minster, however. Except for connoisseurs, it is indistinguishable from any other gothic cathedral. Or most cathedrals of any age, really – I only know it's gothic because enough books have told me so. It's just the biggest thing we have got. York has never been about size, however. If it was, it would have bothered growing into an actual city, rather than just a town which got a leg-up in status because it has a cathedral. What it does specialise in is quirkiness. There are plenty of structures here possessed by no other city, mainly because they can't imagine why they would want them. Any one would make a fine new symbol of York. As a starter, also giving a neat tie-in to my web site, I nominate A House Called House, the Rock Church or the Hand of Monkgate. And if they are less striking than a ferris wheel, if York becomes less popular and attracts a few less Daily Telegraph readers…. well, we'll just have to cope.