Waterlow Park...

Today’s lockdown walk saw Stuart and I venture up to Waterlow Park in Highgate. Lovely autumn colours.

Woodberry Wetlands...

Stuart and I had another lovely lockdown walk today. Round the local reservoir Woodberry Wetlands.

Alexandra Palace...

Stuart and I took a lovely long walk up to Alexandra Palace yesterday. The weather was great and lovely views.

Millennium Bridge (Lockdown Mix)...

London Skyline from Window Tate Modern...

Bruce Nauman @ Tate Modern...

Yesterday Stuart and I sneaked in one last trip to a museum before the new Covid-19 lockdown kicks in. We went to see the Bruce Nauman exhibition at the Tate Modern on London's glitzy South Bank.

Bruce Nauman is a very modern American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. His is very artist-based art. The experience of art from the creator perspective. His is often time-based art too - he often uses his body, often in video, and often conceptual.

Good fun.

Sacre Coeur...

Last minute dash to eat out before Lockdown 2.0 kicks in on Thursday.  After this it’s beans on toast!

Michael Clark Cosmic Dancer @ Barbican Art Gallery...

Last Saturday Stuart and I went to see the Michael Clark Cosmic Dancer exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London's glitzy Barbican Centre.

This, the first major exhibition of dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, explored Clark’s work as he became established as a radical presence in British cultural history. Much of the presentation consisted of a large archive of Michael Clark Company performance footage and interviews and the giant hanging screen displays had a strange memorial feel.

Michael Clark had a meteoric rise as a young choreographer in the 1980s. He left the Royal Ballet School in 1979 before his finals and danced his first solo in a Richard Alston piece for the Ballet Rambert just two years later. The exhibition presented not only film of his work since, but photography, and other material alongside his collaborations across visual arts, music, and fashion.

New works included Charles Atlas revisiting Hail the New Puritan (1986), which featured Leigh Bowery and The Fall, as an immersive film installation, along with work by Sarah Lucas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cerith Wyn Evans, Peter Doig, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Duncan Campbell.

Death of England: Delroy... @NationalTheatre Angry, funny, moving, meta - @Mikejbal has power and passion to spare. A great play for today.

Last Saturday night Stuart and I ventured back to the National Theatre on London's glitzy South Bank - for the first time in goodness knows how long - to see punkish state-of-the-nation address Death of England: Delroy.

Death of England: Delroy is a new one-person play by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams written as a response to their own acclaimed monologue Death of England (that starred Rafe Spall) we saw earlier in the year.

Death of England: Delroy is equally fearless - exploding identity, race and class in Britain. Set in London, 2020. His white-British partner needs him. Urgently. But Delroy gets arrested on his way to the hospital.

Filled with anger and grief, he recalls the moments and relationships that gave him hope before his life was irrevocably changed.

Michael Balogun plays Delroy with power and passion as he explores how a Black working class man searches for truth and confronts his relationship with Great Britain.

The whole piece is utterly gripping. But it brought me to tears when Delroy recalled his white-British best friend's words (first uttered in the previous play):

"You might act like us, you might sound like us, but you will never be one of us, and deep down you know it."

Angry, cruel, funny, moving, meta - it is a solo tour-de-force. Truly a play for today.

Running Time: 90 minutes (no interval). If you can, go see.

So my nemesis, we meet again. Let’s see who keels over first...

Spoiler alert: it was me. 

If I Could Turn Back Time....

The Titanic and Two Icebergs...

The ice in my (pink) gin and tonic is meant to be “the Titanic and two icebergs” I think they might want to rethink their marketing.

When all you have is a hammer...

 When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. 

Beverley Said It Best....

When you are having a really shit time at work. And your boyfriend leaves you a note as he knows how to cheer you up and make you laugh. That. 

“What brings you to these parts?”...

Watching a Kenneth Williams doc last night. On location the interviewer asked, “What brings you to these parts?” 

“I’ve got a lousy agent”

Oh, that was unexpected...

...broadsided out of the blue. More sleepless nights ahead.

First Xmas card arrived. #JesusHChrist

Mind the gap. Dinner is served...

Tasting menu. 6 courses. Mexican / South American menu. Amazing. Food was fab, the service great, and I would absolutely recommend it. https://supperclub.tube @supperclubtube

Talking Heads #4 : Nights in the Garden of Spain and Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet @ Bridge Theatre...

Last Saturday afternoon Stuart and I went to see the final brace of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues put on at the Bridge Theatre in London's glitzy London Bridge Quarter.

And a clever double bill this was. Both monologues featured fetishism in the suburbs; the first as perverse cruelty, and the second as ridiculous pleasure.

Nights in the Garden of Spain sees Tamsin Greig play a woman married to a controlling man. She is crippled by politeness though and suppresses everything but gently questioning. However, when she is suddenly confronted by darkness next door – dark hoods, dangling handcuffs, cigarette stubbing voyeurs, and a gunning down – she sees her own life in a new darker light. Her smile falls on her face like a shadow.

Our hearts break as Greig delivers the perfect bittersweet line, "I'm pinning my hopes on his prostate."

Marianne Elliott direction is great here; the sinister face of silence and the desperation of the long-married woman are perfectly displayed.

The piece finishes on a more upbeat tone however. The surprising and startling discovery of affection is genuinely tender. And funny.

Things become funnier still with the second monologue of the night. Maxine Peake plays it for laughs in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet.

A tremendous comic caper – with touches of Julie Walters's wry delivery - Peake's Miss Fozzard seems at first flattered at the attention her feet are getting and then rather knowing. For Miss Fozzard has a fan. A chiropodist with an easy eye and even easier wallet.

Sarah Frankcom direction sees pairs of shoes placed around the stage – stilettoes, flats, and some more comfy items. All ready for Miss F to slip on. "It gives me immense pleasure to have your feet in my hands", says our chiropodist.

At the start, she is the client and pays him. But then the roles are reversed, as is the payment, and the power dynamic. Before long she can walk all over him. Literally.