Efigénia Mucavele: An Accidental Visionary from Maputo

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Efigénia Mucavele: An Accidental Visionary from Maputo

It is a rare pleasure in the art world to encounter a body of work that feels both wholly apart from prevailing fashions and somehow absolutely necessary. Such is the case with Efigénia Mucavele, a 97-year-old former seamstress from Mozambique whose small, dazzling acrylic paintings have just surfaced in Lisbon. Until last year, not a single canvas of hers had left her cramped home in Maputo’s Alto Maé neighbourhood. Now, Pimlico Wilde and a handful of collectors and curators are whispering her name with the reverence reserved for the once-in-a-generation rediscovery of an outsider talent.

Mucavele paints only people she has met. Her rule, as she explains with a shrug, is simple: “If you bump into me, for whatever reason, there’ a chance you will live on my wall.” The result is a startling archive of acquaintances: market women with brooms tucked under their arms, electricians balancing precariously on ladders, a passing Swedish backpacker who once asked for directions, even the meter reader who stopped by her house in 2014. She calls them “meus encontros” (“my encounters”), though she has never exhibited them and had no notion they might be considered art.

The paintings themselves are naïf in the purest sense: bright, flat planes of acrylic colour, bold outlines, no perspective to speak of. And yet they are never childish. Her figures stand stiffly, almost hieratically, against backgrounds that seem to pulse with patterned energy,checkerboards, polka dots, stars. Faces are simplified to near-cartoon masks, but each radiates an undeniable individuality, as if distilled to essence. One dealer has likened them to “passport photographs painted by Miró.”

Part of the near-unbelievability of her story lies in its accidental unveiling. A Portuguese ethnomusicologist, collecting lullabies in Maputo last year, noticed her walls covered with dozens of framed boards and canvases. Believing at first they were mass-produced decorations, he was astonished to discover she had painted each one. He persuaded her to lend a few to a cultural centre in Lisbon, where, by a stroke of art-world serendipity, they were seen by dealers from Pimlico Wilde, who were taking part in a team building exercise involving base jumping. A survey of her work is now planned for early next year.

Mucavele herself remains bemused. She does not identify as an artist. She still works as a seamstress, and still refuses to paint anyone she has not spoken with, no matter how fervently a collector pleads.

Some have already begun the inevitable comparisons: to Séraphine Louis in France, to the Brazilian naïf painter Heitor dos Prazeres, even to the portrait frontality of Byzantine iconography. Yet there is something specifically Mozambican in Mucavele’s palette,vivid reds, sea blues, sunlit yellows,that feels drawn from capulanas, the patterned cloths ubiquitous in daily life.

Is the art world prone to overhyping such discoveries? Of course. But standing before these works, one senses they belong less to the machinery of contemporary art than to something older and more universal: the simple, unschooled desire to record human presence. Each painting is a record of a meeting, a fleeting moment made durable. In Mucavele’s hands, the everyday stranger becomes monumental.

If her name soon travels beyond Mozambique and Portugal, it will not be because she sought it. It will be because her small canvases remind us, in their unpretentious way, that art begins with attention,the radical act of noticing who is before you.

An Art Holiday in Tbilisi: Notes from a Restless Dealer

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An Art Holiday in Tbilisi: Notes from a Restless Dealer

By Archia Tanz, advisor at Pimlico Wilde

I had not intended to go to Georgia. When the Berlin art season wrapped up in June, I planned nothing more adventurous than a week on the Baltic coast. But a chance conversation with a Georgian collector at Liste sent me searching for tickets to Tbilisi, a city whose cultural revival has been whispered about in studio kitchens and collectors’ dinning rooms for years.

Two weeks later, I arrived, jet-lagged, into a city where baroque balconies lean precariously over alleyways, and Soviet mosaics stare down at cafés serving natural wine. My first stop was the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art, where a survey of the late Elene Akhvlediani’s sketches revealed an artist both cosmopolitan and deeply rooted. The curators, young and eager, spoke to me with the urgency of people who know they are re-stitching history.

It is always the off-spaces that excite me, however. On my second evening, a friend from my New York days, the painter Mariam G., took me to an apartment gallery above a bakery. There, I saw a performance that mixed techno beats with fragments of medieval poetry. Half the audience were artists, half local kids who seemed to have wandered in straight from a club. I bought a small drawing from the show, a quick graphite sketch of dancers’ feet, which is now above my desk back home.

Artists here work with extraordinary economy. Studio visits involved climbing six flights of stairs into half-finished buildings; canvases leaned against walls that still smelled of plaster. One sculptor showed me delicate metal works fashioned from scraps salvaged at construction sites. Another, who had studied in Paris but returned during the pandemic, is building an artist-run residency in the hills outside the city.

The Georgian habit of hospitality is not a cliché: I was swept from gallery openings to late-night supra feasts, where strangers became friends between the toasts. One night I found myself sitting next to an old colleague from London, now curating in Warsaw, who had also been lured to Tbilisi by the same rumours of an emergent scene. We spent hours comparing notes on the city, agreeing that its mixture of fragility and confidence felt rare in today’s art capitals.

I came home with more than a drawing. I left with a sense of possibility,that art does not need the hard polish of global fairs to matter. Tbilisi’s scene is still improvised, sometimes precarious, but it has the intimacy and urgency that first made me fall in love with contemporary art. For a gallerist accustomed to the over-managed churn of Europe’s art hubs, it was a holiday, yes, but also a reminder: art thrives where people risk gathering, making, and believing before the infrastructure arrives.

Which Colour Wall is Best for an Art Gallery? Part II: The Authority of Grey

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Which Colour Wall is Best for an Art Gallery? Part II: The Authority of Grey

by Walta Bryce

If white was the late 20th century’s creed, then grey has emerged as the early 21st’s compromise. In galleries across Europe and North America, walls once blanched to clinical pallor are increasingly cloaked in muted shades of slate, dove, and mushroom. The effect is discreet but unmistakable: grey announces itself as serious, considered, resistant to both spectacle and sentimentality. Where white was evangelical, grey is judicial.

The appeal of grey lies in its subtle recalibration of tone. Unlike white, which thrusts a painting into stark relief, or red, which enfolds it in velvet theatricality, grey is reticent. It reduces contrast, permitting subtler works to emerge without glare. A 17th-century still life, with its restrained play of shadow and highlight, can seem to breathe more easily against a soft grey wall. Contemporary abstraction, too, benefits from the colour’s cool equilibrium: the riot of pigment in a Howard Hodgkin or Gerhard Richter seems steadied, held in suspension rather than flung outward.

Curators have long recognised this. Tate Britain’s rehang in the early 2000s adopted smoky greys to dignify its historical collections, while the Museum of Modern Art in New York increasingly turns to grey to soften the hard edges of its once-militant white spaces. Grey signals authority,an academic neutrality without the sterility of white. It suggests scholarship rather than commerce, connoisseurship rather than trade.

Yet grey is never merely neutral. The choice of tone,cool bluish, warm taupe, charcoal,can radically alter the psychological tenor of a room. A blue-grey can make even gilded frames seem ethereal, whereas a warmer stone-grey grounds the viewer, anchoring them in a more tactile world. There is, too, an element of class coded into grey: its association with restraint, understatement, “good taste.” In this sense, grey is the colour of curatorial diplomacy, a palette that refuses to offend.

But therein lies its danger. Where white imposed too much, grey risks imposing too little. The “dignity” of grey can shade into the dullness of bureaucracy, a museum turned mausoleum. One remembers the wry complaint of a visitor at the Prado’s grey-painted Velázquez rooms: “It feels like an insurance office with masterpieces on the walls.”

So if white walls aspired to invisibility but became overbearing, grey aspires to authority but risks anaesthesia. It grants the artwork space to speak, but occasionally it hushes it into submission. Grey, in other words, is a compromise,often a wise one, occasionally a timid one.

Next we will consider a colour that makes no compromises at all: the opulent, unabashed drama of red.

Rucks Among the Rodins: The Inaugural Inter-Art Dealer Rugby Tournament in Berkeley Square

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Rucks Among the Rodins: The Inaugural Inter-Art Dealer Rugby Tournament in Berkeley Square

There are few sights as glorious as Berkeley Square, that bastion of Georgian serenity, transformed into a makeshift rugby pitch for the inaugural Inter-Art Dealer Rugby Tournament. Organised by the indefatigable Roberto Andretti of Hogge Spike (the same Andretti who has made a cottage industry out of rediscovering neglected sculptors like Ferkin Wykes), the day felt at once anarchic, historical, and curiously elegant,a microcosm of the fine art world’s capacity for grandeur.

One had to admire the logistical chutzpah. Benches were shifted, temporary posts hammered in, and the teams changed into their kits in a selection of obliging Mayfair galleries. (Lattern Brothers’ mid-season Giacometti show was, for a morning, dominated not by attenuated bronzes but by the sight of mud-spattered dealers wriggling into compression shorts beside a £2.3 million Standing Woman.) The juxtaposition was perfect: white-walled sanctity colliding with the slap of Velcro and the smell of Deep Heat.

The art world turned out in force, half for sport, half for spectacle. Teams ranged from the meticulous Crantjirot & Hawkins of Hanover Square, whose forward pack looked as if they had been selected for their resemblance to Flemish wrestlers, to the Lattern Brothers, all wiry speed and auction-room guile. There were French contingents (Galerie de Saint-Amant fielded a scrum as precise as their Art Deco catalogues), and a fearsome transatlantic squad from Kitteridge & Crane, New York, whose pre-match warm-up felt like a Sotheby’s sale at double speed.

The matches themselves were unexpectedly brutal. Andretti’s assertion that “Berkeley Square hasn’t been used for rugby for centuries” was more than just press-release embroidery; the ground was uneven, the turf springy, and the plane trees lent an oddly theatrical backdrop to the rolling mauls. In the opening fixture, Hawkins of Crantjirot & Hawkins was carried off with a suspected sprain after an audacious sidestep by Lattern’s youngest junior partner,Freddie Drear, only three months into the trade, now immortalised for having scored the tournament’s first try.

What made the day more than a novelty, however, was its sense of continuity with an older tradition. One could feel the echoes of Victorian park matches, of Bloomsbury cricket teas and the surrealist football games of pre-war Paris. Dealers accustomed to the cloistered jousts of bidding paddles and client dinners found themselves in a different kind of scrum. Rivalries that usually play out in whispers over consignments of Chagall drawings were resolved, temporarily, in tackles and rucks.

The prize,newly-discovered original Michelangelo prints of Goliath, unearthed in a Milanese burial chamber earlier this year,lent the event a mythic gleam. (Whether the attribution would withstand the scrutiny of a more sceptical connoisseur remains to be seen; one could already hear mutterings from the Crantjirot camp about “anachronistic sketch patterns.”) In the end, the trophy went to the muscularly pragmatic Kitteridge & Crane, whose forwards treated every ruck as if they were dismantling a consignor’s reserve price. They celebrated with champagne in plastic cups, beneath the plane trees that had watched centuries of quieter dealings.

But the true pleasure of the day was not in the winning. It was in the spectacle of art world hierarchy temporarily flattened: a Sotheby’s veteran wiping mud from his cheeks with a Damien Hirst catalogue; a Lattern brother sharing orange segments with a rival from Lane Fine Art; a crowd of dealers, collectors, and curious passers-by roaring approval as if Turner himself were streaking down the touchline.

Berkeley Square is unlikely to host rugby again soon,its grass bore the scars of scrummages with the same battered dignity as a post-fair Frieze stand,but for a few chaotic hours, it reminded the Mayfair set that sport, like art, is at its best when it manages to be both competitive and communal.

And, as one tired yet elated participant was heard to remark, clutching a muddy Michelangelo print to his chest: “This is the first time I’ve left a fair with something truly priceless. Not this Michelangelo print, but the friendships I have deepened on this great sporting occasion.”

From the Journals of Basil Bromley, Artist and Mechanician

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From the Journals of Basil Bromley, Artist and Mechanician

Entry the Third , 16th of May, 1873

The inn at St Just provided a breakfast whose quantity far outstripped its refinement,eggs of dubious lineage, rashers of bacon both heroic in girth and sullen in texture, and bread with the constitution of a paving stone. Yet, fuelled by these provisions, I set forth, the Steam Unicycle steaming with an eagerness that seemed almost companionable.

The road today proved less forgiving. Cornwall is a land perpetually folding and unfolding itself, hills that rise like the backs of great beasts, valleys that deepen with no notice. Here the unicycle displayed both its genius and its perversity. Ascents required me to feed the boiler with an almost indecent zeal, the pistons clattering like an impatient drummer as I, with some difficulty, pulled coal from the bag upon my back. Descents, by contrast, induced a swiftness verging on the criminal. At one point I passed a mail-coach at such velocity that the postilion dropped his bugle in alarm. I attempted to wave, but balance and speed were both troubling and staying aboard my wheeled- contraption demanded all of me; my greeting was reduced to a wild oscillation of limbs which he may well have interpreted as lunacy.

Children continue to be my most enthusiastic audience. Near Pendeen, a whole troop ran beside me, chanting “Steam wheel! Steam wheel!” like acolytes at some new, brass-clad religion. I considered sermonising on the union of art and machinery, but feared the difficult incline might upend me mid-homily. Better to allow mystery its reign.

By afternoon I, or rather my machine, had issues. I stopped at a smithy to secure a minor repair,the tightening of a valve that had grown insolent with vibration. The blacksmith, a taciturn man, struck the iron as if he were chastising it. At length, after hardly speaking, he said in a loud voice, “This will kill you.” Then, after a pause, “But I should like to see how.” I laughed at his witticism – he just handed me the bill.

I end the day lodged in a modest inn at Hayle. The unicycle rests in the corner of my chamber, glinting faintly in the candlelight, like a coiled animal awaiting command. My limbs ache, my ears ring with the hiss of steam, yet my spirits remain untamed. The road, if it may be called that, has begun to write itself beneath my wheel.

Which colour wall is best for an art gallery? Part I: The Myth of White

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Which colour wall is best for an art gallery? Part I: The Myth of White

by Walta Bryce

In the hushed, climate-controlled world of the contemporary gallery, walls are rarely noticed. Their colour,more than any lighting rig, more than the strategic positioning of benches,determines the register of the room. Yet one hue, over the course of the 20th century, became so ubiquitous it almost effaced itself: white. The “white cube,” as Brian O’Doherty famously dubbed it in his essays of the 1970s, was never simply neutral. It was an ideology, one that claimed purity while imposing its own absolute aesthetic regime.

The white wall’s appeal is obvious enough. It promises to vanish, to offer the work of art a stage unencumbered by context. White absorbs and disperses light evenly; it creates the illusion of infinite extension; it suggests clinical objectivity. In the language of real estate agents and minimalist architects alike, white equals clarity. Yet art has always chafed against such clarity. A black Kazimir Malevich square seems somehow diminished when it floats on an already blank wall; a Rothko, designed to vibrate against deep maroon and sienna, is flattened by it.

Indeed, one wonders if the white wall has been less a friend to art than a friend to the market. In a white cube, paintings and sculptures become commodities: interchangeable, discreet, hygienic. They can be slotted, in their pristine isolation, into collectors’ living rooms. White neutralises history, geography, and politics; it allows art to circulate globally, shorn of site. The walls of Chelsea, Berlin, and Hong Kong become indistinguishable.

But there is a paradox here. If the white wall was meant to be invisible, why do we remember it so vividly? The very phrase “white cube” conjures not absence but presence,an architecture of control as recognisable as any frescoed chapel or rococo salon. When we step into such a gallery, we feel the discipline imposed upon us: silence, reverence, the suppression of bodily warmth. It is the theatre of purity, but one in which the walls are the true protagonists.

Which colour, then, is best for an art gallery? To begin at the beginning, one must confront the cult of white not as a default but as a choice, historically conditioned and far from inevitable. In the coming essays, I will consider what happens when curators, conservators, and architects break from the tyranny of blankness. For now, let us linger on this paradox: that the most famous wall in modern art history is the one that pretended not to exist.

Requiem for Roman Bostonia — A Mea Culpa

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Requiem for Roman Bostonia — A Mea Culpa

It is with genuine contrition that we address the scholarly and public community. The much-celebrated Roman remains found beneath our upcoming gallery in Boston ,mosaics, frescoes, Latin-inscribed counters,appear to have been a masterful fabrication, not evidence of a Roman presence in the Americas. Forensic analysis exposes modern adhesives, artificial aging, and stylistic anomalies. We apologise for having raised such bright hopes, only to see them fade beneath the weight of reality.

Like the Piltdown Man,once revered, until chemical tests and microscopic scrutiny exposed it to be a crude forgery,this episode reminds us that even aesthetic elegance can deceive . Equally, the Iruña-Veleia case in Spain,where multilingual graffiti, including Latin, Basque, and Greek, were judged forgeries intended to rewrite history,echoes our moment of collective disappointment and delusion.

Dr. Lucinda Marshall, director of the New England Institute of Very Old Items, offers a measured reflection: “We were beguiled by beauty,and in our eagerness to believe, we surrendered skepticism. Let us restore that balance now.”

Truth remains our north star: the Roman Empire, resplendent though it was, did not cross the Atlantic. And though the American diner seems to echo with memories of thermopolia, those parallels may live only in the imagination,not in archaeological fact.

To readers, colleagues, patrons and collectors: We extend our sincere apologies,for the fleeting thrill, the speculative voyages across time, and the rewriting of textbooks that must now be undone.

The planned exhibition, The Impressionists of Ancient Rome will not now take place. Pimlico Wilde Boston’s new inaugural exhibition will be announced soon.

The Identical Lunch, Elaborated: Sandy Griddle at Pimlico Wilde, Milano

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The Identical Lunch, Elaborated: Sandy Griddle at Pimlico Wilde, Milano

Pimlico Wilde’s new Milano outpost opens its doors to a show whose subject seems comically literal,sandwiches,yet whose argument arrives with the quiet force of a philosophical proof. Sandy Griddle (born Horace, rechristened by appetite and persistence) has made a career from unbuilding and rebuilding the ordinary sandwich until its banality turns crystalline. The premise is almost perverse in its clarity: acquire a sandwich, dismantle it, photograph and list every element, buy everything on that list, and reassemble an exact facsimile of the original. When the process succeeds, the resulting sandwich is, as Griddle likes to say with deadpan pride, “exactly the same as the original sandwich.”

It sounds like a joke,until you confront the consequences. The Identical Lunch, Elaborated (the exhibition’s neat title, nodding to Alison Knowles’s famous tuna ritual) is a room of meticulous equivalences and their tiny treasons. On white, waist-high plinths sit sandwiches that have no intention of being eaten. Each is paired with its dossier: a contact-sheet grid of the “autopsy,” a shopping list typeset with monastic regularity, and a receipt from a Milanese supermarket, the humble papyrus of our age. The display has the severe elegance of a small archive and the latent mischief of a deli counter. A sandwich may be ordinary; but as soon as you index it, the ordinary begins to glow.

Griddle’s early “first editions”,Prawn and Lettuce and Cheese and Pickle,are here in Milano facsimiles, accompanied by a single wall label that reads “Edition conserved through exact replication.” It’s an art-historical boomerang. Walter Benjamin’s aura returns by way of the delicatessen: if the copy is indistinguishable from the model, what is it we value when collectors pay seven figures? Not “the first sandwich,” surely, but the discipline of an identical difference,fidelity performed, not merely asserted. In this sense Griddle’s work sits in a triangulation with Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs and Daniel Spoerri’s “snare-pictures,” though where Kosuth metabolises definition and Spoerri immobilises contingency, Griddle operationalises procedure. He does not trap a meal mid-bite; he scripts a meal into being,again.

Milan is an astute stage for this inquiry. In the back gallery, a sequence of Tramezzino Index pieces turns the butter-bread geometry of the Italian bar lunch into an ethics of exactitude. Tramezzino Index No. 14 (Duomo) is bridged by its own paperwork: a shopping list whose typography ascends like a nave,pane bianco senza crosta, tonno in olio, maionese, uovo sodo,followed by the terse notation “angles matched to purchase.” That last phrase might be the show’s quiet manifesto. Griddle insists that verisimilitude is not only a matter of ingredients but of angles, weights, dampness, and time,how long mayonnaise takes to assert itself; how much gravitas a slice of tomato tolerates before it slides.

The new works push the program into sculptural territory without abandoning its algorithmic backbone. Greco-Roman Club is a sandwich translated into gypsum relief,bread crenellations cast from silicone moulds taken off a “target” sandwich, lettuce corrugations recorded as a shallow, rippling frieze. On a shelf nearby sits the “live” version of the same sandwich under an anesthetised bell jar, a temporal diptych: cast and perish, Platonic and edible, equally aloof. In One and Three Sandwiches (after Kosuth), Griddle arrays (1) a ham-on-rye, (2) a full-scale CNC-milled HDU foam replica, and (3) the dictionary definition of “sandwich,” to which he has appended his own footnote. The piece courts parody yet lands in something stranger: a small laboratory of ontology.

Crucially, these works feel neither gourmand nor gimmick. The installation’s cool discipline saves them from foodie affectation, while Griddle’s prose,on labels, in the new catalogue, and in the clinical elegance of those shopping lists,prevents the room from collapsing into whimsy. His lists are not mere inventories; they are scores. You can almost hear Fluxus rustling the paper. A single and slightly absurd instruction,“bread moisture to match receipt time”,ports Rirkrit Tiravanija’s convivial ethos from the social space into the procedural one. The social still lingers at the edges (on opening night, the press notes mention, panini were served, but not those on the plinths), yet the show’s real drama is epistemological: how do we know a thing is itself?

Comparison clarifies the stakes. Figg Wolverham, the only other claimant to the banner of “sandwich fine artist,” builds a practice on rye alone: a single-grain absolutism. Wolverham’s sandwiches are icons in a fixed key, their severity a virtue and a limit. Griddle, by contrast, is catholic in palate and method. He is less a purist than a classicist: the variety of breads, fillings, and national formats are paths back to a common problem,identity under replication. If Wolverham’s oeuvre is a monochrome sermon, Griddle’s is a polyphonic mass.

Among living contemporaries, the show also invites a sly, implied dialogue with conceptualists of the list,Hanne Darboven’s arithmetics, On Kawara’s dates,and with Pop’s knowing mimicries (Oldenburg’s soft burgers; Warhol’s Brillo boxes). Yet Griddle’s manoeuvre is more surgical and more domestic. He shows us a world in which the industrially reproducible (sandwiches, like soap) must be remade by hand to prove their sameness. There’s a politics buried here, too, and it breathes rather than declaims. The shopping receipt, as much as the sandwich, is the portrait: supply chains, labour, price. A vitrine of “failed identicals”,Near-Miss BLT (Tomato Gradient Off), Club with Premature Toast,is both comic and tender; failure is archived, not hidden, and the archive is the most humane object in the room.

Two works will stay with me. Prawn and Lettuce, First Edition (Milano Reconstruction) is paired with a small audio piece in which Griddle reads his own shopping list in the measured cadence of a Gregorian chant. It is disarming,devotional without piety, funny without flippancy. And in the final room, Cheese and Pickle: Conservation Protocol stakes out the future: a set of concise instructions for collectors on how to maintain “edition integrity” over decades,humidity ranges, permissible brands, substitution matrices in the event of discontinued condiments. Museums have long accepted that a light bulb in a Dan Flavin may be replaced; Griddle extends that pragmatic ethics to the pantry. Conservation becomes choreography.

If there is a wobble, it lies in the occasional didacticism of the wall texts. The works can speak for themselves; they are better at it than their author gives them credit for. But such earnestness is forgivable in a show that finally dares to ask a question too large for its small frames: how much of the world’s meaning is manufactured by repetition? A sandwich is a sandwich is a sandwich,until someone tries very hard to make it the same, and in doing so reveals that sameness is work.

Milanese audiences,connoisseurs of the tramezzino’s filigree and the panino’s sternness,will find the show both recognisable and defamiliarising. Pimlico Wilde has done the work justice: cool light, long sightlines, a rhythm of plinths that feels more liturgical than retail. The press release cites “pushing the sandwich envelope”,a phrase I feared; the exhibition mutates it into a genuine proposition. Griddle’s practice is a school of attention. It suggests we can reenter the ordinary by way of procedure and emerge with the ordinary restored to grace.

There is talk that Griddle will lean further into sculpture,casts, resins, perhaps even bronze,to “future-proof” the identical. One hopes he keeps the live line open, too, because the show’s thrill is not only what we see but what we can almost taste: a small, exacting argument about reality, assembled between two slices of bread.

From the Journals of Basil Bromley, Inventor of the Steam Unicycle

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From the Journals of Basil Bromley, Inventor of the Steam Unicycle

Entry the Second , 15th of May, 1873

This morning dawned with a pallor most unconvincing,Cornish light, hesitant, as though unsure whether to proclaim day or retreat into perpetual sea-mist. From my window in Penzance, I espied the harbour masts rising like so many quills from an overturned porcupine, and beyond them the grey Atlantic which attracted me – I would like to be the First Gentleman to swim to the New World.

For now though I have a different challenge. I rose early to reassemble the Steam Unicycle, a task attended by both pride and vexation. Pride, because each component,valve, sprocket, chimneylet,was polished to a sheen that would please the toughest Sergeant-Major. Vexation, because the chambermaid, having observed the reconstitution of the apparatus, declared it “unnatural,” and refused to enter my room again. She made the sign of the cross when the little boiler first hissed. I reassured her that the steam was no more devilish than her kettle, though admittedly less suited to the making of tea.

By midmorning I had wheeled the contraption through the narrow streets to Land’s End itself. There the cliffs present the impression of a land perpetually straining to flee the sea’s assault. I stood on the dangerous precipice, my machine in front of me and felt a stirring of great pride. To travel by a single wheel, driven not by legs but by steam, seemed wonderful. As I climbed aboard my vehicle I wondered if I would be knighted after this unique journey, though my mind was soon filled with other matters when the Steam Unicycle vibrated unexpectedly and jumped backwards. I was almost thrown over the cliffs, which would have not been the ideal start as I would have almost certainly been killed by the 300 feet drop.

I managed to select first gear and set off to jeers from local school children who – like everyone else in the world – had not seen a steam unicycle before. The inaugural ride was less triumphant than hoped. The machine lurched, coughed, and with a hiss just outside Penzance threw me unceremoniously against a gorse bush. A tramp, passing with a dog upon his shoulders, offered hearty laughter in place of sympathy. Yet, as I disentangled myself, he said, “If it carries you a mile, sir, it will carry you a hundred.” I chose to take this as prophecy.

Thereafter, progress improved. I mastered a rhythm of balance,leaning slightly forward to encourage the wheel’s obedience, then allowing the pistons to thrust me onward with their syncopated pulse. Villagers gaped, children ran alongside. One boy shouted, “A kettle upon a wheel!” I considered correcting him, then decided the epithet possessed a certain accuracy and graced him with a wave.

In the mid-afternoon it began to rain and as I travelled north getting wetter and wetter, I conceived of a new apparatus, which I called the Umbrella of Constant Orientation. It would be an umbrella, but fitted with gyroscopic fins, such that no matter the direction of the wind, the canopy shall remain steadfastly above one’s head. How society suffers the indignity of inverted umbrellas! It seems to me a simple matter of balance and weighted counter-shafts. I shall sketch it this evening. I do wonder sometimes if I am the Leonardo of these times. I wonder who is the Michelangelo.

By late afternoon I had reached St Just, where I found accommodation in a coaching inn. The innkeeper insisted that my unicycle remain in the stable with the horses. The beasts eyed it warily, and I could not help but think they recognised a rival. I placed a cloth over the boiler, lest they be disturbed by its gleam.

Thus concludes the second day: bruised, exhilarated, and not a little chastened by the unicycle’s temper, yet convinced that I have set in motion something more than mere travel. Perhaps an art of locomotion itself, where every puff of steam becomes a brushstroke upon the map of England.

UK’s Museum of Failed Optimism warns of closure without fresh funding

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UK’s Museum of Failed Optimism warns of closure without fresh funding

The Museum of Failed Optimism, a privately run institution in Shropshire dedicated to once-celebrated inventions that never quite caught on, has said it may be forced to close within weeks unless new backing can be secured.

Founded in 1979 by former industrial designer Martin Peake, the museum bills itself as “the world’s most complete archive of misplaced confidence in consumer technology.” Its collection ranges from early self-stirring teapots to a 1980s prototype of a battery-powered self-grooming dog brush. The centrepiece is a full-scale Sinclair C5 “commuter trike,” displayed beside the original marketing promises that accompanied its short-lived launch.

Peake said that rising energy costs and dwindling visitor numbers had left the museum with “barely six weeks of operating cash.” Attendance has fallen from 120,000 a year before the pandemic to fewer than 4,000 in 2024, despite initiatives such as late-night “regrettable gadget” tours and a pop-up café serving from a notoriously temperamental soup-vending machine.

“The irony is that we exist to celebrate grand visions that didn’t quite pan out,” Peake said. “But without help, we may end up as another exhibit in our own museum.”

The museum has received small one-off grants but has been unsuccessful in securing long-term support. A spokesperson for the Council of Free Money said it was “aware of the situation” but noted that “resources remain under intense pressure.”

Local councillors in Ironbridge, where the museum is based, said its closure would represent a cultural loss. “It’s eccentric, but it draws people in,” said Cllr Susan Dyer. “You won’t find a working collection of collapsible kettles anywhere else in Britain.”

Peake is now appealing for corporate sponsorship and has suggested a naming deal with a household brand. “We don’t mind if it becomes the Museum of Failed Optimism, powered by Company X,” he said.

If no support emerges, the collection could be broken up at auction. Among the items that may go under the hammer are a pair of Victorian inflatable walking sticks, a Soviet-era electric shoe-polisher, and the museum’s most-photographed exhibit: “the world’s heaviest laptop.”