I'm feeling sad this morning. Just learnt that the Adventure Playground in Battersea Park was demolished yesterday, despite all the campaigning, protesting and petitioning by local people, huge support from the wider community, and the recent brave occupation to try to prevent the council's bulldozers going in. The sun is shining, but the playground's been …
a brolly good read
I recently finished reading Umbrella by Will Self. A novel without chapters and hardly any paragraph breaks; a novel of shifting consciousnesses, where the narrative viewpoint often jumps mid-sentence; a novel unfurling along many different spokes, spanning a century, hopping back and forth between different decades; centred in London, her accents and voices, her many-layered …
magic, danger, fear
magic, danger, fear: the first words I jotted down last night, sitting in the hushed gallery space of the Parasol Unit, listening with intense concentration to Ian MacFadyen talking about the Third Mind. We were there for On beat, an event billed as exploring 'some of Beat culture's most evocative moments and its ongoing legacy …
Occupy Battersea!
This weekend, the Occupy movement came to my back yard. And they are very welcome. My back yard, since I live in a block of flats and have no garden, is Battersea Park. And the bit of my back yard that's currently occupied is the Adventure Playground, closed by Wandsworth Council in September, and due for …
how’s my navel?
Two excuses to indulge in a little navel-gazing: another year drawing to a close, and this being my one hundredth blog post. My navel was quite well travelled this year, accompanying me to Melbourne in late February, the Dordogne in July, and Paris in autumn. We hosted a small antipodean invasion, and my navel and …
not quite hibernating
It's dark by four and we're in the middle of a sustained cold snap, but a hardy, not to say hardened, culture-vulture will still be tempted out by a private view or two. Last week, it was the opening of NULL OBJECT: Gustav Metzger thinks about nothing at WORK. The exhibition is the culmination of …
and then there were two
My visitors have departed. The airbeds have been deflated. The flat suddenly seems remarkably spacious, and strangely quiet. There's a new mark on the back of the kitchen door, recording the current height of my niece. She's grown 34 centimetres since the last visit 5 years ago. 34 more centimetres and she'll have outgrown me. …
cinq nuits à Paris
Zut alors, we packed a lot in. Five nights, six days, in tourist-crammed Paris. Our visit coincided (unintentionally) with the English half-term holidays. Weather as changeable as Melbourne, or London. Downpours, and glorious autumn sunshine. Paris art overload: the Pompidou Centre, just after it opens, straight up to level 5 for early Dada and surrealism. …
full house
I have guests. Family from Australia, over for a few weeks. Which is fun, exciting, fantastic, and just a little stretching in terms of living space. Five adults and one lively seven and a half year old in a two bedroom flat. Finished reading Patrick White's The Aunt's Story while my niece played downstairs. And …
three nights out on the trot
Another busy week on the cultural front, beginning on Monday evening at the Southbank Centre's Purcell Room for Morton Feldman's For John Cage. The piece, for piano and violin, lasts about an hour and twenty minutes, requiring the intense concentration of both musicians and audience. Slow, often deathly quiet, the music creeps up on you, …
Hilaire 