only a northern town

The Systems Administrator and I went up to London together today.  That doesn't happen as often as you might expect.  The SA's appetite for traipsing around art galleries is less than mine, while I find that an annual trip to Lords satisfies my desire for cricket, and being forced to listen to live chamber music at lunchtime would come close to cruel and unnatural punishment in the SA's book. We had a nice time at the theatre back in August, but that was north London, not London central, and I'm pretty sure our only other joint trip to the capital this year has been passing through Liverpool Street and Blackfriars on our way to a party in Bromley.  I think I offended one friend by declining the opportunity to join a coach trip to a charity concert at the Albert Hall, on the grounds that spending an hour or two trapped on a coach with complete strangers, after driving an hour to catch the coach, then sitting through an evening of excerpts from the classics, before repeating the travelling experience in reverse, was close to the SA's idea of hell on earth (see yesterday's blog on the perils of invitations).

However, today we went to see the Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, joined in a genuine shared love of his work.  I really like Lowry.  I always have, since childhood.  My school, although academically pushy, was not very good at arts education, and a lot of what we were taught seemed to be about ranking artists between the top tier, the acceptable middle, and the not quite Art, so that we should not let ourselves down by bracketing Mendelsshon with Mozart, or Butterworth with Beethoven.  Lowry was deemed a lesser artist, not to be taken seriously, not really a proper artist at all.  However, I reserve my right to like and respect Laurence Stephen Lowry, artist, aesthete and Salford rent collector.  Not as much as I love and revere Rembrandt van Rijn, a great deal more than I regard Damien Hirst.

Lowry painted what he knew.  He observed and commented on the English social scene in a particular part of the industrial north at a specific time.  His paintings are highly individual, stylistically innovative, and faintly disconcerting, his people so often disconnected from each other even as they teem in ant like masses across the canvas.  I like them, and if that marks me down as a stuck-in-the-mud middlebrow then never mind, I probably am one.  I read Trollope and have a weakness for Brahms as well, so there.

As usual, I was cutting it fine with this exhibition, which closes in ten days, but last week I was already going to town to do something else, and the week before that the SA was, and we were trying to pace ourselves.  It was crowded, but not so much that you couldn't see the pictures properly if you waited for people to move.  If I lived in London I'd go again, or have been already. Tate Britain will be nicer when its building works are finished.  They are due to be completed in November, at which point there will be a new Members' Room, but at the moment there is not enough cafe capacity.

Then we trotted down to the Imperial War Museum, which is largely closed until August of next year for renovation, but which I was fairly sure had rehung some of its war art.  It has, and the experience of walking through boarded off areas of museum to the sound of distant banging to find it probably adds to the experience of looking at it.  The exhibition on Britain's secret services was slightly disappointing, a bit cluttered, and I don't like museums to play me multiple overlapping sound tracks at the same time as expecting me to read things.  I don't have a good feeling about the way the IWM is going, after the Manchester experience and now today.  The small exhibition about logistics in Afghanistan was good.

We caught a Thames Clipper from the London Eye back to Tower Pier.  I never went on one before, and was delighted with the view from the Thames, as we whizzed past familiar landmarks which normally I view at a pedestrian's pace.  The route from the Tower to Liverpool Street lies on the Systems Administrator's old stamping ground from City days, and I was taken on a walking tour at great speed through tiny alleys and cut-throughs, pausing only to admire a 1930s office block, now listed, in the shadow of the Gherkin.  As we closed in on Liverpool Street I began to know the streets better, but the SA was in charge, and it is remarkable how everyone has their own streetscape.  It never occurred to me to use the underground entrance to Liverpool Street from the east side of Bishopsgate.  I have always, but always, crossed the road and then taken the steps down into the main concourse.