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I think I’m right in saying we’ve never had a speaker go
missing before. Not when he was only supposed to be parking
the car!
September’s guest, Ian Constantinides, Building Conservator of
St Blaise Ltd, motto: Experience, Experience
and……Experience……, enjoys a beer when giving a talk, and had
brought a glass to be filled at a local pub, but when the
landlord saw him apparently ‘stealing’ the tumbler, he
followed him outside and flagged down a passing police car
(what are the odds on that?). The police wanted to breathalyse
our speaker, who had by then taken a swig, which meant a wait
of twenty minutes….
Later, Mr C. proved to be a gem, a character that would be
quite at home in a Wodehouse novel. His two-projector slide
show had incongruous inclusions such as a
shot of zebras, and one slide that was whipped away as
‘too rude’. In between, we learnt that building conservators
and restorers hate each other, and that conservators ‘bang on
about ethics, but have no ethics at all’.
The theatrical streak that makes Mr C so entertaining is also
what makes him an outstanding conservator, for although he
obviously has a great knowledge and understanding of building
materials and methods, he’s not averse to faking a repair for
an `authentic looking’ result. For instance, rather than chip
out a block of crumbling hamstone and replace it with a sharp
and pristine new one as restores would do, Mr C will fill the
stone with lime mortar mixed with iron filings (it’s iron that
gives hamstone its gold colour), and ‘age’ the repair with
fake lichen, so that from the start it matches its
surroundings – and often takes much less time and is cheaper
than restoration.
 Ranting
passionately about, amongst other things, inappropriate
‘modern miracle materials’, ‘SSSR – silly, silly stone
replacement’, and restorers who bankrupt their clients by
spending thousands on scaffolding (he’ll happily shin up a
chimney with just a few ropes), Mr C. then stunned us by
showing slides of what he used to do and is ‘now ashamed of –
with the inexperience and arrogance of youth I ruined the
house’. He has learnt that the lightest touch and an eye for
subtle colour changes are what matter, and his sumptuous
slides of St Blaise’s many prestigious commissions – including
the British Museum - prove his success. In my view he was
certainly worth the wait.
Fran Pitt |
