Little Rock – ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA

DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ IN THE PRESS…

February 28, 2024February 28, 2024 by adamhalevi, posted in Arkansas, British Army of India, Covent Garden, Dido Nicholson, Edinburgh, Glasgow Evening Times, Guy's Hospital, Little Rock, Loretto School, Murrey, Nicholas Millington, Pitlochry, Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, Saltcoats, Scottish Ancestry, The Mount School, UAMS, VAH Little Rock

especially when the truth is more newsworthy

This must have happened to most people reading this post. You mislay a possession somewhere in your home, and while turning out various drawers, cupboards and shelves searching for it, you discover something else, long-forgotten, and often more precious than the original object.

Last week I was rummaging through a wooden chest we use for storing bits and pieces, looking for a lost drawing when instead, I turned up a small bundle, packed with old photos of my wife Dido from her time as a ballerina and a model. My curiosity at finding dozens of images that I had never seen before was heightened, when among the pictures I also found a yellowed, newspaper article from the Saturday edition of the Glasgow Evening Times, featuring Dido and another Sadlers Wells dancer, Nick Millington.

Although the article was for a Glasgow newspaper, the shoot was done in London, before a Scottish tour. The reporter, Rosemary Long, writes an entertaining piece, but she gets a couple of things slightly wrong; Dido’s *“huge – doe-like” eyes are blue-grey, not “brown”, and the other issues I deal with below.*

However, while I of course enjoyed the article, and got the whole forthcoming Scottish tour – Scottish interest thing, there were several details, probably due to a desire to accentuate a direct Scots connection, the journalist got slightly wrong. And, as is often the case, the more complicated truth, is also much more interesting.

While Dido’s parents regarded themselves as proud Scots, they were both born continents and oceans distant from Saltcoats and Edinburgh respectively.

Ann’s very Scottish father (who was from Saltcoats) was a high ranking doctor in the British Army of India, where she was born in Murree (now Kashmiri Pakistan). Following the war, Ann was educated at the famous Quaker private school, The Mount in York where she met Judy Dench, a fellow pupil. So, while some of Ann’s family did indeed hail from Saltcoats (others also hailed from Pitlochry), she herself, was not a native.

*Ann’s family lived on a houseboat during her childhood in Murree, probably similar to this, from the 1930’s*

Dido’s father, David, was born in Long Island (New York) during the journey to the UK from Chile where the family had interests in copper mines. He was later educated in Scotland where he attended Loretto School outside Edinburgh (Scotland’s oldest boarding school)) before leaving Scotland for London, where he studied medicine at Guy’s (teaching) Hospital (NOT “Edinburgh University”). David eventually became a general practitioner, later specialising in pulmonary medicine.

*David’s family moved from Chile to the slightly less exotic west London suburb of Northolt, where he spent his childhood.*

David met Ann in London where she was an opera student at LAMDA (London school of Music and Dramatic Art) and working as an usherette at Covent Garden. Soon after they married, they immigrated to Canada in the early 1960’s, and then on to Dallas (Texas). Together with their two children, Dido and her older brother Niall, they then moved around the United States according to David’s latest medical posting, including spells in Kentucky and Ohio before finally settling in Little Rock (Arkansas). There, David worked at the UAMS (University of Arkansas Medical School) and the VA (Veterans’) Hospital as professor of pulmonary medicine until his retirement, while Ann became something of an Arkansas celebrity, broadcasting a weekly culture “magazine” show (“Arts Scene“) for the state university radio station (KLRE-KUAR). In all that time, they never took up US citizenship – preferring the status of resident aliens, and “proud Scots”.

Thus, as I said, while Saltcoats and Edinburgh did feature in Dido’s immediate ancestry, it wasn’t in quite the way the journalist reported it. As for her “attractive Stateside drawl…”, these days it’s still attractive, but more mid-Atlantic.

*Dido, with her parents, David and Ann, in Dallas.*

WALKING AWAY – or the ephemeral nature of being

February 14, 2017September 18, 2024 by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Art, Art Photography, Digital Art, Edgware, Ein Kerem, Hampstead, Hampstead Heath, Israel, Little Rock, Oxford, Tel Hai

The image of someone walking away into the distance has stirred my artistic sensibilities since early adulthood. I’ve returned to the subject photographically and in paint pretty regularly since about 1979, from when the first picture presented here dates (Astrud at Tel Hai).

Several of these pictures are of loved ones, past and current, walking into a variety of landscapes, urban and open, and I guess that with them in particular, powerful feelings of vulnerability, both as partners and individuals are aroused.

Two of the photos here have special poignancy: The one of my mother Hannah with my grandfather Harry was taken on a stroll in my home town of Edgware in the early 80’s when they both still had many years to live. I took the photo on my old Canonette camera by accident. I was meaning to line up a shot of the lake we were passing when I must have clicked the shutter too early. It was only when the film came back from the developers that I saw the photo, and even then I instantly realised that it was a happy accident in that it had somehow captured the essence of them and their relationship in a way that no face-on portrait ever could have matched. The fact they are both now dead has made this image increasingly precious to me as the years have passed. The picture of my wife Dido walking her old and frail father into his house in Little Rock is even more poignant in that it represents the last photo of them ever taken together. About an hour later we returned to the airport, never to see him again.

All the pictures here, even those of total strangers, like the chap on Hampstead Heath, have a quiet melancholia about them in that they share a sense of our human transience.

UNTROUBLED WATERS

May 27, 2015 by adamhalevi, posted in bridges, Cork, Ghent, Little Rock, London, Melbourne, Rome, travel, Verona

I’ve long been fascinated by bridges and the way they frame and colour the waters which flow beneath them. Perhaps it’s that they are a natural metaphor for hope and unity, or perhaps it’s just I’ve always hated getting my feet wet. But whatever the reason, they and their host rivers, streams, inlets and lakes are indisputably photogenic. Presented here are images sourced from over four decades of photography.