The wife and I managed to sync up our diaries and take a whole day off together. The plan was to walk into town along the river Thames (a four hour walk of ten or so miles), stopping off for lunch along the way and then popping into the Tate gallery in Pimlico, before having dinner in the heart of the city. This was the kind of "holiday in London" shit we meant to do in September, but it was a very welcome tonic for November and we were lucky that the autumn sun was shining for most of the jaunt.
I love the Thames: it's full of surprises, but mainly it's full of rubbish. But the rubbish of centuries of human habitation. The river was quite low and I was able to look down into the mudbanks and see the shopping trolleys that some drunken louts had chucked into the river. I thought of the alien archaeologists of the future discovering this stuff and trying to work out why such wheeled chariots were required by the river and why their owners were so careless with them. But if you dug down through the muck and debris you'd find the discarded junk from people who were drunk a thousand years ago. It almost made me want to throw something in myself, but my wife wasn't keen on being thrown over the railings for some reason. As tempting as it was to be this close to a large body of water for this long.
We move through London as such a pace usually so it's good to go more slowly occasionally. And more importantly if you've just walked for three hours you can have a massive lunch and if you don't have any work to do you can have a bottle of wine as well. It felt very decadent, though I suppose most people take more than one day off a month. We ended up in a Bistro in Sloane Square doing a very reasonable deal for a three course lunch.
I largely enjoyed
the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition at the Tate, though we also popped into see the Turner Prize nominees which left me a bit cold. It seems to me there's a fine line between being an artist and being obsessively insane, but I think the same about comedy. I wonder if I can enter a year's worth of Me1 vs Me2 snooker as a contender for next year's prize. I don't really see why it wouldn't be in with a shot. I don't know who decides what is art and what is comedy and what is madness and even in the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition it seemed to me that success and failure was quite arbitrary. Some of it looked like the kind of thing you'd get on a Christmas chocolate box or the work of
Jack Vettriano. I am sure there is some reason why early Rosseti is better or more worthy than Vettriano, but I wasn't entirely sure why. I think Me1 v Me 2 snooker will probably never be displayed in the Tate (but if it is it should be played in a totally dark room and people have to agree to listen to the whole thing), but if the exact same thing was presented by the right person then I am sure it would be. My favourite thing in the Turner prize exhibition was the slightly dimly lit corridors that connected each room. If that had been one of the contendors it would have been my winner.
But as with any comedy, annoyance is almost as good a reaction as enjoyment. The fact that I noticed the corridors is probably testament to the way the rest of the art had opened up my perceptions. A dingy corridor was suddenly interesting after loads of photos of church pews.
We passed through Westminster and had coffee in a book shop on Trafalgar Square and then headed up to a dim sum restaurant near Oxford Circus. The direct route into town is only a 90 minute walk and I was tempted to complete the day by walking back to Shepherd's Bush, but wisely we got the tube. I was inspired to see a bit more of London and do more walking in this brilliant city and bought a couple of books with interesting routes to take. Whether we'll make this a regular thing remains to be seen.
