Tate Modern and St. Paul's

Today's focus for me was further down the Thames. We split up for the morning, with Margo and Sarah tubing off to Buckingham Palace to visit the Royal Mews, where the ... uh ... horses and carriages are. For the Royals. Perhaps Margo will grace us with a detailed description in the near future.

I, on the other hand, had a different agenda. My first Tube stop was the London Bridge station. I immediately found its namesake and began crossing it. Here is a view looking east toward the Tower Bridge (which we plan to visit tomorrow):



[I have to jump to the present for a moment. I'm writing this on Margo's laptop on bed ... and what are Margo and Sarah doing? Watching the telly. What's on? Or, what did they choose? It's Pimp My Ride UK. Really. Margo keeps laughing. It's distracting. I'm trying to write while some bloke is complaining about the difficulty in finding an appropriate hearse to pimp out.]

So. I hiked around the north bank of the Thames for a while until I found the Millennium Bridge. And nearby I was able to take this picture, of the Tate Modern museum and the Millennium Bridge, together. That's two more items off my to-do list then.



So. The Tate Modern. Well, again, it's a modern art museum, so there are those head-scratching exhibits that make you wonder, why are they committing valuable gallery space to this? Here are my favourites in this category:

- An actual gallery (albeit very tiny) named "The Wrong Gallery" which consists of a CD player, amplifier, and speaker. Playing a recording. Of a guy blowing raspberries.

- "Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp. It's just a urinal bowl. Really. That's it.

- "Grey" by Gerhard Richter. It's a large canvas, painted ... one single shade ... of grey. No colours, you see. But reading the note, it turns out he made three in the series, and found he liked one more than the others, so that's its importance. Do you get it now? Do you?

Okay, that easy target being thoroughly splintered, I did immensely enjoy the wing containing Surrealism. It's what I look for first in modern art museums, and this has a great collection. Why Surrealism? I love the imagination. And as I visit more and read and learn more, I see it's an attempt to channel the "uncensored creative impulses of the subconscious". It's no coincidence Freud's analysis of dreams immediately presaged the movement. I also like the grounding in reality, in that many of the images can be photo-realistic, showcasing genuine talent, yet completely unreal.

So there were many examples you'd expect by the likes of Dali, Miro, Magritte, Picasso and others. (I was also chuffed to see Dali's 'Metamorphosis of Narcissus', which graced the cover of a coffee-table book on Dali I got years ago.) But I was also introduced to several artists I enjoyed: Yves Tanguy, Ithell Colquhoum, Max Ernst, Pierre Roy, and David Gascone.

Then I had a cider in the top-floor lounge, enjoying a great view of the Thames and St. Paul's Cathedral across the way, while phoning Margo and planning our next adventure: St. Paul's.



We met on the steps and entered. It's amazing inside. Incredible heights. But we couldn't take pictures, so follow that link I added earlier. Margo wanted to look at the monuments in the tombs, and Sarah and I went to climb to the upper galleries.

We started in the Whispering Gallery (30m), which is so acoustically perfectly round that you can supposedly hear a whispered conversation on the opposite side of the dome. Sarah and I couldn't. Which is just as well because she was just calling me a spanking head anyway.

Then we climbed up to the Stone Gallery (53m) on the outside of the dome. But Sarah didn't want to stop to enjoy the view: we went onward toward the Golden Gallery (85m). Now, seeing this small rictus near the top of the dome from below, I knew I'd be freaked out to actually be there, and have this huge gaping void underneath me. But Sarah wanted to go on, so up we went ... until Sarah got freaked out, because at this point, the stairs were not inside a tight stone column, but instead on steel spirals in a fairly large space, so that once you got up five or six stories and saw so much beneath you, it was pretty chilly. So we went back down to the Stone Gallery, where I got this photo:



And Sarah played hide-and-seek with me from column to column. Here's where I found her:



So we made our way down and met Margo in the crypts. I have to say, the name Nelson carries a bit of weight around here. One wing of the crypt was named as we are, and in the centre were the remains (supposedly underneath an exquisite sculpture) of Nelson himself. Nearby were Churchill, Florence Nightingale, and the Duke of Wellington.

So we went to the nearby cafe for a spot of lunch, then back to the B & B for a nap, then dinner at a nearby pub. And that, Dear Reader, was our Wednesday.