What better way to spend a crisply cold Sunday afternoon than tracking down ethereal sound installations in obscure alleys and corners of the City of London? These temporarily deserted streets are the site for Surround Me - A Song Cycle for the City of London by Susan Philipsz. We start in Change Alley, where three …
Category: London
Triptych Poets – London launch
After much angsting (what should I wear? will anyone come along? will I sell any books?), the London launch of Triptych Poets turned out to be a very enjoyable event. In a dimly-lit below-stairs bar, round the corner from the Friday night madness of Leicester Square, a good group of friends and acquaintances gathered to …
lushness, sublimity and more
Summer is coming to an end. So are the Proms. Last night, we sat high up in the circle at the Royal Albert Hall to watch and listen to the Berliner Philharmoniker perform some sublime music. First up, Wagner's Prelude to Act 1 of Parsifal - love those lush strings. Then, the extraordinary soaring, immensely …
Lydia Davis at the London Review Bookshop
To the London Review Bookshop on Tuesday evening to hear Lydia Davis read and discuss her work with Kasia Boddy. My interest was piqued by a recent enthusiastic review in the LRB of Davis's Collected Stories. The collection runs to over 700 pages, yet I'd not come across her work before. Many of the stories …
autumnal leanings
It's only the second week of August, yet there's a definite sense that we're on the cusp of autumn. There's a nip to the air in the mornings. The sun is lower in the sky, the shadows are longer, more angled, and by 9 p.m the last light is draining from the sky. Most of …
the week that was
was rather high on stress and somewhat low on culture. The stress arose from a little spate of domestic/technological crises (yes, they do seem to come in threes), and the mundane but wearying frustrations of earning a wage. Still, I did manage an early-ish morning swim at the lido on Thursday, twenty lengths, beneath a …
dawn chorus
How long did it take me to adjust to the level of noise in London? I can't remember now. I think about this as I lie trying to sleep on another warm, muggy night, the windows open for the bit of breeze which shimmies through the plane trees outside. For about five hours, overnight, there's …
soho sunshine
Thursday afternoon we headed into town to catch the Tacita Dean film Craneway Event at the Frith Street Gallery before it closed this weekend. A warm, rather drowsy afternoon, London teeming with tourists, and just about every pub bedecked with national flags and World Cup 2010 posters. From Piccadilly, we wandered up to Golden Square, …
come, been and gone
Cultural highlight of the weekend: seeing Michael Clark Company at the Barbican performing come, been and gone. The phrase 'jolie laide' (pretty-ugly) came to mind when I was trying to pinpoint why his work appeals to me so much. The punk aesthetic is still firmly there, in the bizarre costumes, the poking of fun at …
first swim of the summer
8:00 a.m., Tooting Bec Lido. It couldn't be a better morning. A ridiculously blue sky, the sun already warm, the trees surrounding the lido in full resplendent leaf. No dipping my toes this morning, I'm straight down the steps and into the water. It's cold, but not that gasping-takes-your-breath-away cold. I push off and begin …
Hilaire 