Of medieval dance, and my experiences thereof.

When I finished last, I was off to interview someone - everything getting there seemed to take forteen times as long as it should - realising I needed to print a consent form sending me scurrying through files, needing to get a blank cassette for the interview, trying to buy 'fast' food etc created a tedious montage of chore. The interview was a really good one though, someone I hadn't expected to meet, so a bonus to my time in London. She ran a gallery in London in the 1960s on the Kings Road: it would be harder to be cooler than that, without, I don't know, knowing John Lennon, but hang on, she did.

Friday I was tired. Not for any particular reason, just tired, and generally grumpy. There was some pouting, and some stern looks directed in various quarters. I went to the National Gallery, where they have opened what is effectively a 'greatest hits' selection of works from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries collection. They have moved them into the Sainsbury Wing because of the upcoming Velasquez exhibition and renamed them the 'Manet to Picasso Exhibition' (ie the stuff we can't take off the walls without crushing expectations with abandon). So for me it was another chance to get up close and canvassy with things I've known for a long time. And confirm, once again, that I really do not like Renoir. I really don't. The guy paints the most insipid, wuss-bag, bleary gimps known to canvas. (Well okay, it seems unlikely that they were actually gimps, but I think you probably understand I'm venting right now). Take, for instance, The Umbrellas, now, I think that the painting on the main figure's dress, and the umbrellas, but especially the dress, is stunning, the modulation in the colours is beautiful, and if I could that bit out and keep it, I'd be very happy indeed. Sacrilegious, and in prison, but happy. But the faces are so SO irritating. Possibly I've just read a little too much about theories of the flaneur and apparently how to look at this work is to put ourselves in the position of the gentleman of the street, checking out the ladies and about to be found out as the gentlman accompanying the young lady is bound BOUND! to follow the girl's gaze and SPROING! find us out for checkin' out da laydees. The kind of tension and drama that only a pre-filmic generation could appreciate. Even watching, say, Shakespeare, for example, and, in, say, Antony and Cleopatra, if there was to be a say, gunshot sound, and you weren't quite expecting it but, for example, happened to be drinking a glass of red wine, an amount of it could then be slopped down one's front. Just as a hypothetical example of what could happen as a response to true narrative tension. I can't imagine anyone at the original Impressionist Salon reacting, beverages akimbo, Mon dieu! Le vin rougue est sur mon shirt! Le tension! J'ai regarde la laydee, et le monsieur! He is about to look AT ME!' So startling you would naturally forget how to speak french and start speaking fluent English! Anyway, most of Renoir's women seem to have the same head, and him going down on the record as a misogynist was never going to endear the man to me.

Anyway. Finally! Saw Van Gogh's Sunflowers, which I think have so much press that seeing them is I think in the same category as the Mona Lisa (althought I'll get back to on that... ): it is so mediated by previous imagery that it is hard to actually see it. But the background is a lot lighter than I expected, and that creates the radiance of the image, rather than the actual sunflowers, which are mangier than I expected them to be. I prefer Van Gogh's Chair though, as the colours in that aren't captured in reproductions, and are a lot more subtle.

The Degas were mixed, as ever with Degas I think - if I was to see a whole room of these I think the tetchy flag would be flying along the lines of Enough with naked bathing chicks already! Leave the house! But they are incredible drawings, and the colours in them are remarkable. Also this, which I've also loved, probably because I tend to see several different shades of red with a touch of black as enough of a palette for anyone, and I love how it teeters on abstraction but still reconciles the form. I had always thought of it as being quite a relaxing picture, but looking at it the other day noticed how much pain the combed girl seems to be experiencing.

Unfortunately the Cezannes are going to be in an exhibition 'Cezanne in Britain' opening two days after I leave London, so I won't see them this time around (but I'm going to have to make time to see the Velasquez as I traverse Engerland, so all is not lost). I'll spare you any further discussion of everything else I saw there.

I left the gallery, and wandered about, pouting, because I had done my looking for the day. Found myself to Borders, found an armchair, and read a book for some hours. I do love the modern corporate bookstore: they are enormous so they have great stuff and their staff don't care if you sit there for hours. And being a massive global chain you know that you will be buying many more books from them, so don't feel too bad for reading their merchandise. But no-one by me Bill Bryson's latest for Christmas okay? It's a lovely light read, but it only takes three hours, so I'm done. Is a good book, a memoir of his early years in 1950s Iowa and the times as they were, parts of which reprise a little too much of his earlier books, and there is a little bit too much of the nostalgia shiny-happy-fifties-glow, but there is also a tale of how his mother once sent him to school wearing his sister's capri pants, and Iowa may have been a simple place in the 1950s, but they recognised when a small child is wearing his sister's pants.

After that I wandered up Edgeware Rd and had dinner at one of the many Lebanese restaurants, which are delicious, the Kebabs in aus will never be the same again, and then I wandered home, playing Fruit Lotto along the way - which is when you buy a piece of fruit you are not familiar with in the hope that it will be your New Fruit Sensation, and eat it to find out if it is. The one I chose is not my new Fruit Sensation, and has left me with a question mark about whether everyone else on that street was thinking 'wow, I've never seen anyone eat one of those raw and/or unpeeled before' because it was a strange fruit.

This morning was a day of some excitement, as I have been seeing quite a few pamphlets advertising 'Open Rehearsal' - which is a weekend in which many of the major music and theatre groups open up their doors for the public to witness their rehearsal. Being a philistine when it comes to classical music - I'm not that eager to go and see a symphony play, let alone rehearse, unless you can guarantee me that the conducter will take a step back off the podium and sprawl inelegantly onto the stage - I, of course, headed for the Globe, where I thought *thought* that I would witness actors preparing a play. I probably should have considered the fact that they are two thirds of the way through the current season, so unlikely to be rehearsing, what with performing at least once a day. So perhaps should have expected to be participating in a workshop. But the description made it sound like a discussion on the theme of Love in Shakespeare, by describing as 'a discussion on the theme of Love in Shakespeare'. Rather than workshops on voice (good, if lacking any sense of direction) followed by one learning a medieval circle dance. Some of you have seen me attempt to perform Nutbush City Limits and watched me reliably go in the opposite direction Every.Single.Time so you can imagine the aptitude I displayed. But it was fun, and I can now crap on about when I danced at the Globe...

Then I went and saw 'In Extremis' - a contemporary play about Abelard and Heloise, which has completely erased the unfortunate telling of that tale using puppets in 'Being John Malkovich' and replaced it with a much better version - hooray! Although I suspect that when the first Globe was there, there was a lot less distraction caused by the flight path.