We Need Beauty and Positivity | UK Column Interviews

**Diane Rasmussen** (0:09)
Hello everyone, this is Diane Rasmussen with UK Column. I'm really happy to be joined today by Chris Dobson, who I'm really happy to say is going to be a new contributor to UK Column.
He's got some interesting things to talk about that he'll be covering over the next little while, both in written and in podcast form. But I think since he's here with me, I will just let him do his own introduction. So Chris, again, welcome to UK Column. What would you like to tell everyone about yourself?

**Chris Dobson** (0:38)
Hello, Diane.
Firstly, it's a great honor to be a contributor to UK Column now. I've been watching the Column for a few years since the COVID fiasco, and it's great to be working with you all.
So I suppose you want a little bit of a backstory for the audience?

**Diane Rasmussen** (0:54)
Yes, please.

**Chris Dobson** (0:55)
Okay. I originally come from the world of art and antiques restoration. I started in 1985 I established a studio to actually reconstruct and then later restore armor and edged weapons.
As time went on, I began doing more and more restoration. And my scholastic approach to the work was rewarded with me being granted the position of Master Armorer to the Royal Armories, at the Royal Armories Museum in Leeds. I did a stint there.
But I've been working in, around, and for museums for about 40 years now, in the field of initially of applied arts, working with arms and armor. And then I moved into graphic art, paintings, and then sculpture and even architecture. And that's what I'm going to be bringing to the UK Column. A little more of that in a moment. First of all, I think you wanted to know how I actually got here. And my story is the same as a lot of contributors to the column.
I effectively said no to the wrong person. And that got me canceled in a way I was never expecting.
I started off, as I said, working on Armour. So I said no to that particular person. And that was when my work in the antiques field came under attack very heavily. And as time went on, I lost more and more and more clients. And that pushed me into more writing.
And that came under attack as well. So in the end, publication after publication, not good. But I'd been looking at art since I started really, as a form of reference for my work on Arms and Armour. And paintings aren't photographs, but they are extremely useful for studying, that sort of thing. And I fell in love with the art itself.
I visited Florence for the first time in 1991 And for various reasons, I'd never really felt at home anywhere in the world before then. And that was when I thought, home, that's it. And I began really studying the art then. And then quickly back to how I came to you.
I began, since my publications had come under attack, I then began producing podcasts, which predictably came under attack from the same people. And so it just, it just pushed me more and more and more in that direction. And I was, when the COVID thing hit, I had originally foolishly been watching the BBC and other corporate media. And then I began looking at more alternative media online. And I came across the UK Column. I came across people like James Delingpole on Odyssey. And my reaction when I was looking at you guys was frankly, should I even be looking at this stuff? Should I even, am I safe doing it? Or am I going to wind up on a government list? Not realizing I already was, but not for any heinous crime, simply for saying no to the wrong person. So I wound up becoming a guest on various podcasts, as we've discussed previously. And that led to Jerm Warfare, now on the UK Column, James Delingpole. And this, this is it. Finally, I made a pitch to the Column about wanting to promote something which is about positivity, which is about natural, God-given human creativity. In this time where we're getting absolutely assaulted to drive everything online, to have our natural culture, our art, our history, driven from us. That's why I pitched the idea to the Column, and I'm honored to have been accepted by you.

**Diane Rasmussen** (5:07)
Well, it's really great to have you here because, as our audience will know for those who have been watching us for a while, with my background in library science and information science, and I went through similar stories as well, which people can try in other places. But ultimately, I really feel like one of the things that they're trying to do, as you will know from your area of the world as well, the museum, which is really not that far from libraries, actually, is that one of the things that we need to be doing and that we were trained to do is to preserve culture, preserve history, and even if history wasn't perfect in the past, which it never is, the idea is that if we don't preserve it, we can't learn from the past to make a better future. So I think that this can be potentially looked at as part of the agenda of when we talk about the issues of decolonization, which we won't get into in detail in here, but basically this idea that we're destroying the history of Western civilization and Western culture by attacking cultural institutions like libraries and museums.