Just another Saturday in London…….

………having spent all our money last week at Hamleys (the LARGEST toy store in the world), we decided to go to London yesterday just to hang out and check out some ‘free’ culture. We went to Oxford and Regent Street for a while, checked out Trafalgar Square and then wandered along the Thames. The buskers were wonderful, everything from a string quartet to a couple of guys playing amazing rhythms on a wooden box and a few inverted plastic buckets. The chaps on the banks of the Thames were going hard out to beat the tide with their sand sculpting. We eventually got a bit cold so dropped into the Tate Modern and were confronted by the most astonishing ‘piece’ – “Shibboleth” by Doris Salcedo….a long snaking crack across the vast length of the gallery, fracturing the concrete floor. For the artist, the crack reveals a ‘colonial and imperial history that has been disregarded, marginalized or simply obliterated’ she reminds us by gouging open the very ground that we walk on, that these wounds cannot be simply consigned to the past, that we must confront uncomfortable truths about our world and about ourselves without self-deception….phew!!!....it was amazing to be in a place that would allow such an installation to take place. It was challenging on many levels, not least being the expense involved in creating something so ‘permanent’ yet with a transitory existence like rangoli.
Emerging several hours later it was dark and so we wandered on and ended up in a lovely pub on the banks of the Thames for a pint. It was cosy under the radiators so we ordered fish and chips (okay Ian & Janet we are up to 2009!!!). We scoffed these, convinced we were having supper, glanced at our watch and it was only 10 past 4!!!! Puleeze!….too late for lunch…way too early for supper…afternoon tea???? Not only has our direction in this part of the world gone to pieces, but also our body clocks have become completely dysfunctional……make it dark and we’re ready to snuggle down for the duration…. don’t know how we are going to get on in Tromso, more about that later…………miss you and love hearing from you xxxx