Weekend the Fifth: Rain and more rain (and a little art)

This will be a short post as there's really not much to report. It alternately drizzled, gently rained and downright poured throughout the weekend. I was too knackered from my day trip to Cambridge on Friday to think of indoor places to go in town where I could get out of the rain and amuse myself, so instead I found a couple of destinations close to home. And between the short dashes out, I did laundry, tidied up and wrote my previous long blog post. The weekend wasn't a total washout, in other words. 

When I got up on Saturday morning, the predicted rain had not yet started. I walked up to the farmers' market on Parliament Hill, bought a few things that didn't weigh me down too much, and walked all the way back. Not knowing if that would be my only walk for the day, I reckoned it would be good to get in as many steps as possible while it was dry. 

In the afternoon, after several hours of rain, there seemed to be a break in the weather. I headed out to walk over to the Camden Art Centre near the Finchley Road. I meandered uphill and westward, along streets I hadn't walked before, until I reached Frognal, which I knew would take me down to Finchley. I walked past what had been the Langorf Hotel B&B. Molly and I stayed there when we visited Roger in 2004, the first academic year he worked in London. We had a self-catering unit with a small kitchen and a washer that leaked water all over the floor due to a ripped gasket. It wasn't fancy, but it was clean, safe and it met our needs. There is now no signage whatsoever to indicate that any of the three adjacent terrace houses are still a hotel. I peeked at one of the entries and saw six doorbells, so I reckon it's been turned into flats. 

This was my first visit to the Camden Art Centre and I was impressed with the facility (and it's free). They do all kinds of arty things under their roof -- exhibitions, classes, talks -- and the cafe looks wonderful (I looked but did not buy). I saw two exhibitions, each in very different spaces, both edgy, weird and by Americans. 

From what I gather, Forrest Bess was something of an outsider, though he was represented by the same gallery as Rothko. He lived in obscurity in Texas, working as a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico. His paintings are abstract and symbolic, derived from his dreams and visions. The walls of the gallery are painted black, as this is how he had wanted his work to be displayed. Some of the small paintings I liked, others I didn't, and the symbolism of all of them was lost on me.

The second exhibition was of the collaborative work of Dani and Sheilah ReStack, a lesbian couple who draw inspiration from Forrest Bess for their drawings, paintings and videos. A couple of the paintings were interesting, but the use of animal pelts in them was a bit off-putting. I watched about 30 seconds of the video, so I can't really tell you anything about it other than I didn't understand it at all. 

The rain held off, so I took a few snaps along my way to and from the Centre to give you a feel of the area, though I had to stop when the showers started up again. Note the hills. Hampstead is perched on many, many hills and the houses cling to all of them. Some of the houses have a mews behind them where the horses were originally stabled. Now they are very expensive residences. Nearly every street in NW3 (Belsize Park and Hampstead) has fantastic tiled street signs, each letter or character on an individual tile, set either on low brick walls or up high on the side of buildings. 

It was still raining on Sunday morning, so I used the time to do laundry and a Pilates class. When it finally stopped (not for long, alas), I decided to trek 25 minutes up, up, up through Hampstead to Burgh House, another place (free) that I'd never been. Their cafe appears to be a popular Sunday brunch destination, judging from the number of people seated inside and out. But there was hardly anyone in the house itself -- a former residence that dates to the early 1700s and was the home to many families before being acquired and preserved by the local council in the 1970s. It's now used for all sorts of cultural activities, including concerts and exhibitions, and is rented out for private events. The gardens are supposed to be lovely, but it was just too wet for me to look at them this weekend. The docents tell you to feel free to enter any room with an open door. The current exhibition is of the work of Those Remarkable Carlines, a Hampstead family of three generations of artists, whose paintings and drawings capture local residents, visitors and scenes. The rest of the open rooms contained artwork by other residents of Hampstead, local landscapes and portraits across three centuries, as well as objects associated with the area. Apparently their collection contains thousands of such works and objects, so only a tiny fraction is on display at any one time. So, I must plan to revisit Burgh House in the future to see the gardens and whatever else they've brought out of storage and hung on the walls. It really is a charming place. 

I spent another hour puttering around in two different antiques and collectibles markets before the rain started chucking down again and I made a mad dash all the way back to my gaff. Before it got too bad, I managed two snaps:

Stats:

Saturday, Nov 5

£14 farmers' market purchases

18,393 steps

7.83 miles

Sunday, Nov 6

I spent no money!

12,593 steps

5.24 miles