Keeping up with the Joneses

To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel — to see Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ at Turner Contemporary. The exhibition has been organised by a group of local residents, who selected the exhibits, designed the layout, and wrote the exhibition texts. In ‘The Waste Land’, some of it written in the Nayland Rock seafront shelter, Eliot writes: ‘On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ The local research group have connected Eliot’s text with everything — some duds, some successes.

For example, in ‘The Fire Sermon’, a gossipy, gripping, ungrammatical female voice says: ‘It’s them pills I took, to bring it off’. So we have three Paula Rego pictures, ‘Abortion Sketches’ (1998). One in a hospital (the bed leg has a castor); another clearly illegal, showing a schoolgirl, with a tie and gathered green skirt pleats, squatting over a plastic bucket.