UFO Info Week-End

All of which was mere grist to the Geordie mill

All of which was mere grist to the Geordie mill.They were even able to take a principled stand in marginalising Tim Stimpson, the England and Lions full-back who, in many eyes, was the highest-flying Falcon in the nest. Stimpson’s contractual contretemps restricted him to 11 senior appearances, two of them as a replacement, and yesterday’s confirmation of his move to Leicester will not have caused a flicker of an eyelid on Tyneside. The startling emergence of Stuart Legg as a wing- heeled offensive runner is consolation enough.Newcastle went about their business with a single-minded sobriety that made a mockery of Cotton’s more apocalyptic suspicions; if Andrew, Dean Ryan, Steve Bates and the rest of the senior Falconry are indeed the enemy within, they have pursued their seditious ambitions in very peculiar fashion. The revanchist wing of the rugby establishment will never admit it in public, or perhaps to themselves, but the new champions have built their house on the foundations of model professionalism.There will be a different look to them next season; Alan Tait, such a ship-steadying influence in midfield, may soon decide to knock it on the head – “I think I’ve done my bit,” he said on Sunday night – and recent performances suggest that Nick Popplewell and Va’aiga Tuigamala are descending the far side of the mountain.

They’re in awe of the new power but they’re worried what the implications are and that this whole thing might blow up in their faces.”For James Hamilton, 1837 – when the Royal Academy left Somerset House – symbolises the beginning of the end of this special age. And the point is made, whether the artist is capturing the vitality of an industrial furnace (as Turner often did), or painting a Roman ruin.Daniels says, “You’re still dealing with an age which took religion and myth seriously. He says, of both the artists and the scientists of the period, “There’s always this millenarian undercurrent – that progress would overreach itself, maybe things aren’t going to reach upwards and onwards for ever.” Our own civilisation – gloriously technological and imperial – might collapse like all others before it. Hamilton says that Turner’s steam ships used to be taken as symbols of despair at modern man’s hubris “They aren’t The ships survive, they’re getting through, they’re coping But it’s not triumphalist, either”. Other things in the show make the point: Turner liked life-saving devices – lighthouses, improved rescue kit – but didn’t ever understate the force of the natural world in which they were useful.It was Stephen Daniels, a brilliant cultural geographer at Nottingham University, who first really put this sort of feeling on the map, in his book Fields of Vision. Take Snow Storm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water and Going by the Lead, that most Turnerish of images, with the ship etched in a scene that is otherwise a mass of swirling sea and sky. The horrors and the glories of war conducted under wind power are replaced by the brilliant but functional new arts of peace.The good thing about the new insights is that they allow a thoroughly nuanced view of this almost unbelievably vigorous and exciting period in our cultural history.

In Rain, Steam and Speed a hare is seen, well, “haring” to escape the onrushing unnatural monster. Figures in a timeless pastoral scene are dimly seen mourning or admiring the new iron age. In The Fighting Temeraire (in which a steam tug tows a sailing ship to the scrapyard) we can admire either vessel, at will and alternately. This makes a second exhibition, Italy in the Age of Turner, at the Dulwich Art Gallery, doubly interesting. It shows wave after wave of painters trekking south in the relatively new comfort of mass tourism. But the images we have from their sorties – the classical ruins, the picturesque in Italy’s modern life – are only superficially about order or gaiety The new tourists acquired sombre baggage, too.

The classical world had crumbled, its “project” (as moderns would say) vitiated. Its ruins were now inhabited by a superficially charming but in fact beggarly and squalid people. That was part of the excitement of the Tour, Grand or otherwise: Venice, for instance, was a disturbingly over-sexed repository of high civilisation’s relics. Modern scholarship (the Yale University Press catalogue is a particularly rich seam) shows us how high culture and low life were twin draws to travel, and that the “sublime” included an almost deliberately fevered – almost neurotic – response.Right from the start the importance of Turner is that his work contains so turbulent a range of responses which nonetheless never seem close to toppling over into the grotesque. Justine Hopkins, of the University of Bristol, told the seminar how John “Mad” Martin (well and permanently represented at the Tate) painted an imagined world that was informed but also hugely revved-up by science.But those early-19th-century visions were powerful because they were dark as well as fiery Davy himself is a fine example. While still young he was ill, and perhaps prey to the heightened awareness of those who face death.

He produced intense poetic writing: hallucinatory, Hamilton calls it. The rise and fall of civilisations was one of his great themes. Many of Turner’s paintings were accompanied by bits of his “The Fallacies of Hope”, which turned gloomily on the transience of human enterprises.So beyond the intensity of feeling common to scientists and artists of the period (and so unlike the frosty formality we wrongly attribute to our forebears), there is the very reverse of triumphalism. “This will cause the demise of English rugby.” Oh yeah? From where would Steve Ravenscroft, George Chuter, Danny Grewcock and Ben Sturnham emerged, if not from Saracens? Would Jonny Wilkinson have matured so rapidly outside Newcastle’s profoundly professional dressing-room culture? Who brought Spencer Brown and Dominic Chapman to the notice of the England selectors, if not Richmond?Consult experienced Welsh internationals like Scott Quinnell and Adrian Davies and they will tell you the principality is awash with front-line players desperate for a move across the Severn Bridge. This is that both sets of people shared intense romantic feelings about the understandings that were emerging. Turner’s friend, the populariser of science Mary Somerville, is typical in having a vision of the world that is giddy, almost unhinged, like an acid-head’s or an adolescent’s. In her “On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences”, Chaos Theory is presaged and classical wisdom lurks: “In it [astronomy] we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with everything which exists on heaven or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motions of animate and inanimate beings, and is as sensible in the descent of a raindrop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the moon.”David Knight, of the University of Durham, the other day told a seminar at the Royal Institution, “Humphry Davy’s vision was that forces, power and spirit matter more than matter itself”.