two exhibitions and some lunch

I went to London today, for my rescheduled exhibition and lunch with a former colleague.  We hadn't seen each other since a team reunion which I think must have been not even in February of last year, but the one before, and I was pleased when in her Christmas card she suggested meeting for an exhibition or show, and then followed up on it when I replied in the affirmative.  We go back a while.  Looking at us now you would take us for what we are, a pair of retired and semi-retired ladies of a certain age, but back then the two of us spent two solid days in a room checking and rechecking every last line of a vast Excel spreadsheet of two hundred and fifty million pounds' worth of UK equity holdings spread over a large number of clients, that we were going to sell in a programme trade, as part of our then employer's reorganisation of its assorted asset management businesses.  In some cases they represented several per cent of the issued share capital of the companies concerned, while the market in others was pretty illiquid, and selling more than we actually held of anything would have been a deeply embarrassing and expensive error.

My former colleague was brilliant at that sort of thing.  I had learned to be extremely competent, because I knew that I was not naturally organised, and between us we got there, and there were no errors.  But it means I can tell you from personal experience how it feels to sell a quarter of a billion pounds' worth of anything, and the answer is, nerve wracking.

We met at the British Library, where we were going to see their exhibition Georgians Revealed. I've been to some good exhibitions at the British Library, but they never seem to get the publicity of the British Museum or V&A.  Georgians Revealed skims elegantly over a hundred and sixteen years of social and economic history (accession of George I, 1714, death of George IV, 1830), touching on tea drinking, wallpaper, canal building, sporting pursuits, pleasure gardens, Josiah Wedgewood, dancing, Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital, architecture, Adam brothers furniture, landscape gardening, home music making, shops, attitudes to animal welfare, theatre, Jane Austen's writing slope and spectacles, and other topics that don't immediately spring to mind.  Nothing can be covered in any depth, so Wedgewood is represented by two or three pieces of pottery and a letter, whereas we happily spent three hours last autumn at the Wedgewood Museum, but the overall effect is highly effective at giving the flavour of how society was developing, and what sort of things people were concerned with and getting up to.

After an hour and a half we agreed that our brains were full and our tummies empty, and went in search of lunch, unkindly passing by the eager young researcher with his tablet who would have liked us to take ten minutes to complete a questionnaire about our visit.  My friend had promised we would go to a trendy cafe, as they are springing up all around Kings Cross, and so we had lunch in a cavernous converted warehouse next to the Central Saint Martins college of art.  I could have had pizza if I'd wanted to, but we agreed that it would have been a wasted opportunity, with the rest of the menu offering dishes like bulgur wheat, spinach and manouri pastille, green olive yogurt, and deep fried duck egg, babaganoush, chorizo oil, cumin.  As she said, you probably don't get that out in the sticks.  Since I have no food allergies that I know of, I will attempt to eat almost anything once, though I tend to stick to vegetarian unless I know the meat has been ethically sourced.  The main thing is not to absent mindedly order risotto, since each time I do I remember when it arrives that I don't like it.

We parted company after lunch, and I just managed to squeeze in a visit to the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait competition at the National Portrait Gallery, which ends very soon.  It receives over five thousand entries, and the pictures that make it through the exhibition are always worth a look.  Thematically, socially disadvantaged subjects are in this year, as are refugees and victims of war, while celebrities are out, and there were three sets of twins.  Black and white is hanging on in there, but colour photography predominates.  I bought the Systems Administrator a postcard of the winning entry, a tired and exasperated Katie Walsh captured after a hard day's racing.  Portrait photography is a fine art, and I look forward to getting along to see Bailey's Stardust in due course.