At home, I always start Saturday with an early morning Pilates reformer class. Here, to stretch me out and get my body prepared for the long journey home, I signed up for another mat class at the studio up the hill from where I'm staying. This class was taught by a tall, lean German woman who was very serious and scared me a bit. I struggle with mat class because of my scoliosis and the exercises being different to the ones I do on the reformer or other apparatus. In my Saturday class at home, there's always chatter and laughing and here I couldn't help myself trying to crack jokes. I did get a couple of chuckles out of the other participants and even one from the German.
Wonder of wonders, it was not raining on Saturday morning. As I walked out of Pilates, I decided to head over to Parliament Hill for a last visit to the farmers' market. Be still my heart! I saw a sign at the entry that Sire Hill Bakery was there this week. They are the makers of my second favourite savory pie, made of sweet potato, red onion and goat's cheese. I reckoned one of these pies would make the perfect last meal in London, and I got a small cobbler as a gift to my hosts as well.
After dropping my tasty treats back at my gaff, I headed over to Chelsea for the Moniker Art Fair. Roger and I have been going to Moniker for many years, back to (I think) the second one when it was in the Village Underground space in Holywell Lane. After a few years, the fair outgrew that space and moved into the Old Truman Brewery. This year is the first that they've been in the old sorting office in Chelsea. Moniker is comprised of various galleries who represent young, up-and-coming artists as well as some more established ones. Many of the artists started out doing street art and have now begun making works on paper or canvas to sell.
Most of what was on offer was way out of my price range, but I yielded to temptation and bought a small print. It's of Tony Blair and George Bush with Special Relationship painted over their images, by Alex Bucklee.
Then it was an evening of organizing and packing. I just got up, before the sun, and am putting the finishing touches on that. I'll be out the door in an hour. It's pouring, of course.
Stats:
£10 to top up me Oyster card
£15 Pilates
£9.65 Moniker entry fee
£££ for art
£7 farmers' market purchases
16,522 steps
7.26 miles
Getting back into London from Arundel around noon on Friday gave me an opportunity to cram in a few more things that I'd been meaning to do, two of which fell nicely on the tube/overground route I was taking back to Tufnell Park. Janie dropped me off at the station in Sydenham, with a very nice packed lunch, and I got on the overground, disembarking four stations later in New Cross Gate to walk the short distance to the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Goldsmiths is the art college of the University of London. They recently converted the boiler house and laundry rooms of a Grade II listed Victorian bath house into their gallery and performance space, retaining a lot of the industrial elements of the building in the same way that Tate Modern and Mass MoCA do. The exhibition I saw was videos by Tony Cokes, an American artist mounting his first exhibition in the UK. I usually don't have a lot of patience for video art, but I sat through three of the five(?): one about Morrisey (of the Smiths) and the dichotomy between his often poetic lyrics and his racist personal views, one about Aretha Franklin, her music, her support of Angela Davis and of the black community (I thought this was really powerful), and a very heavy one about US and UK use of the five techniques of torture, particularly that of incredibly loud heavy metal music. I then found the empty caff in the building, which turned out to be a perfect place for a sit down to eat my packed lunch of tuna and sweet corn sandwich.
Back on the train, I alighted at Southwark and walked up to Tate Modern. I'd already been there to see a couple of exhibitions, but I had been too early to see Kara Walker's installation Fons Americanus in the Turbine Hall, which opened on 2 October. This is a difficult work to look at, particularly as a white American, and is both frivolous and incredibly serious at the same time. It was hard for me to see all the children and adults sitting on the side of the fountain, sticking their hands in the water, and lounging around with their backs to the main piece, seemingly not seeing it or taking it in other than as being something for their relaxation and enjoyment. I admit that I, too, sat on the edge of the fountain when my camera told me I needed to change batteries, but I quickly got back up.
After I dumped my stuff back at my gaff, I saw that there were no rain clouds in the sky and decided to get in a visit to the East End. It had been two years since I'd last roamed around Shoreditch and Spitalfields. It always delights me to see the things that haven't changed and to visit old friends, like Thierry Noir's faces in Holywell Lane and Mighty Mo looking down on the car park in Sclater Street.
So many new buildings have sprung up and the area has become much more commercial in the 15 years I've roamed around here. I was utterly confused around the Old Street roundabout and had to consult my map many times when I found myself surrounded by tower blocks I didn't recognize. But I found some new street art along the way.
I'm not sure if this statement is apocryphal or if it's already come to pass.
Stats:
£7.85 for food and wine at the Sainsbury's in Tufnell Park
20,261 steps
8.58 miles
My friends David and Janie took me down to Arundel to their family's cozy cottage for two days and it was marvelous. We drove from their home in Syndenham through Sussex to another part of England where I'd never been. Arundel is a market town, perched on the side of a steep hill, with a ginormous castle and a Catholic cathedral stuck on the top. The Dukes of Norfolk have owned everything for miles around for hundreds of years, despite being Catholic and at least one of them having his head cut off.
We stopped on the way down at the Cass Sculpture Foundation, a fantastic wooded sculpture park with about 40 or so excellent pieces of sculpture tucked in amongst the trees. A couple of the sculptors were known to me, including Robert Montgomery (whose gallery show I'd just been to in Mayfair) and these Gormley bollards.
But mostly I was seeing these sculptors for the first time. The walk through the well-maintained woodland property, with lots of ivy on the ground and growing up the trees, was totally enjoyable, as was our packed lunch that my hosts brought along. Though the temps were a bit brisk, the skies were blue, the sun was out and we occasionally saw expansive views across fields of sheep and down to the sea through breaks in the trees.
From there, we made one more stop before Arundel — Slindon Pumpkins, where we saw the annual pumpkin mural made of numerous pumpkins and squashes from the farm. This year's mural is called Octopus's Garden to honor of the 50th anniversary of the Abbey Road album and to call attention to marine conservation. The Upton family has been creating these annual murals since 1968, originally overseen by Mr. Upton the Elder and now by the Younger, who himself is getting up in years. That's him in the white Panama hat in the second photo below.
We ended the day with a walk around the Arundel town centre, full of charming shops and Grade II listed buildings. The town was pretty quiet on this mid-week afternoon, but is bustling at the weekend and during the summer months with visitors and seasonal residents.
The next day started with a long, brisk walk along paths and across fields on the Norfolk Estate, where we saw a folly, used in the filming of The Madness of King George, built by one of the Dukes.
We passed fields of sheep, a hillside where the dukes and their mates go pheasant hunting, and a picturesque lake filled with ducks, swans, coots and other water fowl chasing, snapping and honking at each other. The walk brought us back into town at the entrance to Arundel Castle and the gardens.
Needing stamina for visiting the castle, we fortified ourselves with another tasty packed lunch in the amazing gardens, containing various formal garden "rooms" with fountains, as well as a glass house for tender plants, an impressive kitchen garden that grows food used on the estate in the cafe, and beds of dahlias still in bloom. I forgot to take photos of the gardens with my phone, so you'll just have to wait until I get them up on ipernity to see them.
The original castle dates to medieval times, but it was largely re-built in the 18th and 19th centuries. The tickets are priced on a tier basis, with each tier giving access to additional parts of the complex. I opted for the gold level ticket, which enabled me to see the garden, chapel, keep and main castle rooms. The highest level gives access to the bedrooms. The castle is just full to the brim with impressive stuff — paintings, silver, furniture, you name it. Though narrow passages and up steep, winding stairs, I managed to make it almost to the top of the keep, but the top bit looked just too scary. I'm sure the views are grand from up there, but I was content to look through arrow slits and pretty windows.
We ended the day with a fantastic tapas meal at a charming little restaurant in the town. On Friday morning we headed back to London. Huge thanks to David and Janie for their hospitality and for showing me this wonderful part of Britain.
Stats for Wednesday:
£6.25 for Cass Sculpture Foundation (half off the concession price with Art Pass)
17,442 steps
7.44 miles
Stats for Thursday:
£17.50 gold ticket (concession) to the castle and gardens
21,693 steps
8.92
Sorry to keep whinging about the weather, but it's really been dreadful. I've never seen it like this in all the time I've been coming here this time of year. And Tuesday was the worst of the worst — several absolutely torrential downpours of Biblical proportions, flooding streets and pavement. I waited out one stonking shower inside the Tufnell Park station, but didn't get the brunt of it. My host, however, did and came home soaked to the skin.
It was a pretty low-key day for me, after all the adventures of my two day trips. I took the tube to South Ken and walked up to the V&A, which is my usual go-to place when the weather looks foul. I saw a large exhibition called FOOD: Bigger than the Plate, all about where our food comes from, who produces it and how it's produced, food waste, human waste, as well as innovative products that are being made with waste. I learned a lot and am never, ever going back to eating meat.
Not knowing what my next destination would be or what the weather had in store for me, I ate lunch in the bright, cheery caff by the new entrance on Exhibition Road.
Sandwich consumed and still no rain, so I took the tube to Green Park, still not certain if I was going to the Royal Academy for the Gormley exhibition or if I'd potter around a bit. I consulted the Art Rabbit app and saw that there were two interesting gallery exhibitions in easy walking distance: Shiny Colourful Amusements for the Walls of the Bourgeoisie (Robert Montgomery, at the JD Malat gallery in Davies Street) and Super Rich Interior Decoration (new works by Grayson Perry at the Victoria Miro Mayfair in St George's Street). I enjoyed both a lot. This was the third time I'd seen an exhibition of Grayson Perry (the huge retrospective at the British Museum several years ago and his 2017 show at the Serpentine Gallery). I must say that the Mayfair crowd was a humourless lot — not much talking amongst the punters about the work, few smiles and no chuckles. Perhaps they realized how much the work was poking fun at them, their greed, conspicuous consumption and Tory politics and they were not amused. But I certainly was.
Back home mid-afternoon to Tufnell Park to start packing for my trip to Arundel. In the evening, I dodged the puddles, caught the 390 bus and headed to the British Library to meet up with Judy for an evening about Asylum: Fact, Fiction, Truth, curated by Juliet Stevenson and featuring four women who incorporate stories of asylum and refugee experiences in their fiction, poetry and music. The panel was a bit uneven, with the women who spoke from their own experiences the most interesting and compelling. I'd like to read Dina Nayeri's book, The Ungrateful Refugee.
I'll be down in Arundel with friends David and Janie from Wednesday to Friday morning, so no blog post until I return. It looks like there's no rain in the forecast.
Stats:
£5 to top up Oyster for my upcoming journey into zone 3
£8.50 Food exhibition at the V&A (half price with my Art Pass)
£6.25 for lunch
£14 for Asylum at the British Library
£2.58 yogurt and ginger nuts from the convenience store in Tufnell Park
16,803 steps
7.14 miles
On Monday I took another day trip, this time to the seaside town of Margate in Kent. I'd bought a cheap return ticket out of Victoria, which turned out to be the milk run. (There are faster, more expensive trains from St Pancras). The train took me through places known and unknown. As we rumbled along, I peeked into windows of flats and offices in towers around Battersea, looked down into back gardens and allotments in Brixton, crossed the River Medway and saw Rochester Castle and Cathedral (Roger and I had visited there a few years ago), got the first glimpse of the sea as we came into Whitstable, and saw the silhouette of the ruined church at Reculver above Herne Bay (Judy, Helen and I had done a day trip to Whitstable and Reculver even more years ago). From that point, it was all new to me.
The sun was shining as I got off the train in Margate, so I headed straight toward the beach. The town is a fascinating combination of seaside tacky (arcades and casinos), Victorian iron and wood shelters for sitting and looking out across the water, boarded up shops (some closed for the season and some permanently out of business), twisting lanes, lovely flint cottages, and a ton of photo ops.
I joined a bloke in looking out at the sea.
Passed a twisted letter box.
Ate my packed lunch at the colourful closed-for-the-season Sea Shed.
Walked across the golden sand.
Wandered in the streets and lanes of the Old Town.
Arrived at the Turner Contemporary around 2 pm and looked at the installations by the four artists who have been shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize.
All four works were challenging and dealt with contemporary political and social issues, involving multiple media. This wasn't a "paint a nice picture and stick it on the wall" type of exhibition. I enjoyed aspects of three of the four, but the bubblegum pink feminist utopian city did nothing for me. The other three involved issues of immigration and isolation, women's activism in Northern Ireland, and how sound shapes memory among survivors of a brutal prison in Syria. Here's the review in the Guardian (which I've not yet read).
When I left the gallery at around 4:30 pm, it was getting cooler, windier and darker, but I was still able to mooch around before making my way back to the train station. I looked for the Gormley sculpture and spotted his head bobbing above the waves. The tide was slowly going out, so I hung around long enough to see his shoulders.
I made it back to the station in plenty of time for the 6 pm train back to Victoria. The rain started about half way to London.
So, mates, for a great day out from London, choose Margate!
Stats:
$26.38 for train ticket (that's about 20 quid)
£1.75 for pastel de nata for the ride down
£3.30 for wine for the ride back
16,094 steps
6.71 miles
