Life is like a Banana

Culled from 237 journals Tony Wilson has kept since 1989, this is a brightly illustrated diary/commonplace book

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Foreword

In February, 2023, I received an email from a lady named Grace Pilkington. She had found my details online and was approaching me, she said, with an 'unusual request'. An elderly author called Tony Wilson was looking for an editor to curate some diaries he had been writing since the 1980s. They were, she said, 'rather amazing - philosophical musings and beautiful watercolour illustrations'. Grace had worked with Tony on a previous book, but as she lived in Hastings and he was in Wiltshire, she felt he needed to find someone local to curate the diaries. 'Are you available and would you be interested?' she asked. 'There are rather a lot of them.'
Intrigued by this description, I agreed to meet with Tony in his home in the lovely old village of Turleigh near Bradford-on-Avon. I found a gentle, funny and extremely intelligent, but very frail man who seemed to be surrounded by a lot of warmth and care. As well as the constancy of those he lives with - his grandson, Oliver, and Jack Russell, Rufus* - he is visited regularly by friends, cleaners, gardeners, and his devoted carer, Vanessa.
After an introductory chat, Tony sent me up to his office. I pulled out a small number of the carefully indexed diaries and immediately saw what Grace meant. The sketches and watercolours were striking in their simplicity and brevity, as was Tony's ability to reflect a mood or moment with just a few well-struck lines. I was also taken by his bold and often experimental use of colour and tone. In addition to the sketches and watercolours there were many writings - most were occupied with Tony's life with his wife Pat and their large family and group of friends, but others concerned his observations on life, reflections on historical events and - his favourite subject - what makes society function. It is this latter preoccupation that provided the subject matter for his previous two books - The Universe on a Bicycle (Elliot and Thompson 2007) and The Wheels of Society (Quartet 2021), which received glowing reviews in the Daily Mail and the Times Literary Supplement respectively.
Anthony Wilson did not initially seem destined to become an artist or philosopher. He was born in Ireland in 1931 and studied economics at Trinity College, Dublin, qualifying as a chartered accountant before becoming a financial controller. In his career, he worked for Price Waterhouse, the Avon Rubber Company, GKN and British Oxygen. In 1989, Tony moved to Turleigh with Pat. They had three children, Philippa, Mark and Luke, and five grandchildren - Oliver, Oscar, Freya, Freddie and Theo. Family members and the residents of Turleigh (who like to get together each year to make cider) are featured in the diaries along with Tony's beloved dogs, a bearded collie called Tilley, and Rufus.
It is clear from the diaries that Tony does not like to sit still for very long. His life has packed with interests and hobbies, including rowing (he was President of Bradford-on-Avon Rowing Club), sport, politics, writing, philosophy, sculpture and painting. His house is full of his sculptures and painting and as we chatted he pointed out that even the coffee table next to me had been carved by his own hand. Tony has had six solo painting exhibitions and his work was shown in the RA Summer exhibition in 1987.
Tony also loves to travel. When Pat was alive, they spent 10 weeks of every year in the tiny village of Simena in southern Turkey. There he sketched and painted the various local people and places he came to know and love. Despite suffering a disabling fall in November 2022, Tony has since returned to spend time in Turkey.
Tony has requested that the pictures and writings should appear chrono logically (which at times may give them a random feel) and 'warts and all', with no embellishment or erasing of mistakes or other writings that have leaked into the image boundary. As AI creeps into our world, he believes there will be a strong drive towards 'authenticity' and would like this book to be part of the latter.
Getting to know Tony and curating this book for him has been one of the most rewarding jobs I have ever had and I only hope that I have done his talents justice. The selections I have made attempt to capture his rich inner life as well as the one he lived outwardly. They include deeply personal (often painful) thoughts about bereavement, aging and death, comic observations about the world and other people around him (Tony loves to people watch) and his concerns about the political state of the world. The artworks brilliantly capture village people as they go about their ordinary business, and the changing seasons and how they affect the landscape. Most of all, I hope the work demonstrates (as reflected in the TLS quote on the cover) how constant application and practice can lead to mastery of a craft even at a very late age. Tony Wilson is an inspiration to us all.
Finally, the selections covered in this book begin in 1998, but Tony actually started keeping diaries back in 1989. One wonders what other treasures might be found inside those pages!

Sorrel Pitts, June 2023

*Sadly Rufus died during my time curating the diaries. He is still mourned by Tony, Oliver, Vanessa and the residents of Turleigh, who preferred to call him 'Poofus' due to the random toilet donations he liked to leave around the village.