Frostier And Frostier

The mornings get frostier and frostier. This morning when I went out to feed the birds pigeons the grass crunched under foot and I left tracks- just like good King Wenceslas.

You know who Wenceslas was, don't you? Of course you do. He was the warrior king who defeated his enemies (the Huns or the Mongols, my memory is getting a little hazy) at the battle of the White Mountain- and has a statue in the big central square in Prague- where the Czechs hold all their demonstrations. Heaven only knows how he found his way into a jolly English carol...

Mary has strep "A"- the throat infection that is wild-firing its way through our schools so I don't expect her mother to be bringing her over this morning. Strep "A" claimed a number of lives, but the authorities aren't for letting parents keep their kids at home. The authorities are heartless.

Talking about authorities, Nadhim Zadhawi- the dodgy businessman who currently holds one of the great offices of state- has said that the nurses are "playing into Putin's hands" by going on strike. This could be the most insultingly stupid thing I've ever heard a government minister say- and I've been listening to the fuckers for over half a century. Not only stupid, of course, but heartbreakingly cynical.

Horror Show

I've been visiting London all my life (literally- I was born in the Westminster Children's Hospital) but I'd never- that I remember- set foot in Somerset House. For much of my lifetime it's where government kept its records of births, deaths and marriages. Now it's a Wonder House.

The magic began with us sourcing a disabled parking space on the Victoria Embankment, right outside the entrance to the exhibition where Alice and Niki had their stall. We went down a random corridor and found a classy Indian restaurant off to one side. We ate vegetable Biryani and paid no more for it than we would have done in Eastbourne. There's a skating rink set up in the big courtyard- with an enormous Christmas tree alongside- and the sun was coating the upper strata of the building's imperial architecture with brandy butter. The Courtauld Institute keeps its offices and its Manets and Van Goghs on the north side facing the Strand- but there wasn't time even to peek.

(You have to watch the spell checker; it just rendered my Manets as magnets- which they are but it's not really the most important thing about them. The Bar at the Folies Bergere's is one of them. Ah me, another time, another time! The Bar at the Folies Begeres is arguably the greatest painting in England...)

We'd come to see the Horror Show. Its publicity- which lazily I'm going to quote instead of working up my own description- calls it "a landmark exhibition that invites visitors to journey to the underbelly of Britain’s cultural psyche and look beyond horror as a genre, instead taking it as a reaction to our most troubling times." It features films by Derek Jarman, memorabilia from movies like the Wicker Man, Mrs Thatcher's Spitting Image puppet, artwork from David Bowie's albums, Monster Chetwynd's life-size sculpture of a "Hybrid Creature Bat" and, most horrifying of all, a photograph behind bubble glass of Tony Blair with that grin on him. Alice and Niki had a table set up in front of the exhibition shop. Their zoomorphic Tarot people fitted right in- as the exhibition's curators knew they would. Coming out I felt I'd had a quick tour through the history of our times- from the seventies until now- and a demonstration of how what will survive of us is our imaginings. Spooky and grotesque as everything was, I've been left feeling all fired up, wonderfully cheerful- and looking forward to all the great things that are still to be accomplished on Albion's ancient, rocky, druid, shore...

Horror Show 2

The artists represented here are, from the top, Monster Chetwynd, David Shrigley and Paul Heartfield. If I'm breaking copyright by posting these images let me know and I'll take them down.