Sweet, bright, chill Saturday

An away day.

The city unfolding, endless under tire of bus and foot of leg.

Mette and I head to see Dieter Roth's 'Reykjavik Slides (31,035) Every View of a City' at Hauser & Wirth in Mayfair. Dark space. . . click, whirring of multiple projectors filling the walls with slides of another, curiously, quietly different place. Away across the cold Northern seas.
. . . Past the building the Beatles played upon, putting out the sounds that awoke a decade one last time in another London of mini skirts and bowler hats. Through Soho streets so familiar they're hard-wired into my memory (days of storyboards and Soho House meetings, fresh pastas and Japanese supermarkets, New Piccadilly Cafe omelette and chips, looking out across night-time rooftops with Karen, then the same under the purple-peach light of an eclipse a few years after that). FOPP for cheap riches - in book and on film. Chris Morris' 'Four Lions' included. . .
East, through a chaos of sluggish traffic, roadworks and fellow weekend wanderers. Bump into Mette's old St. Martins pal Adam, but conversation feels forced and empty - no surprise this, given the sudden social collision of our two storylines, and none of us having seen a script for this sudden Pink Page in our day.
To The Museum of London, and 'London Street Photography'. Really very interesting indeed - even if only grazing the surface of the experience of living in this odd, maddening place that is at once all cities, but so very much its own peculiar distinctive self.
To love and to hate. . .
Back to N16; Mette finding knitting treasures for her niece that inevitably remind me of my own Auntie Jean, who I dreamed of again last night. . . and that old Church Street we have walked a thousand times. A gentle light brushes the upper floors of the buildings, hinting at a Spring which sort of really should be here already.
Then a much-needed repast at The Rose and Crown: beer-battered fish, chips and posh mushy peas. With Adnams Stout.

Talk and talk and talk – feeling hopeful, and a bit sad, too. But mostly hopeful.

And anyway, in the 2007 Doctor Who story 'Blink' (by writer Steven Moffat) Sally Sparrow (played by the luminous Carey Mulligan), said that sad was 'happy for deep people' and if you recognized the truth of that, well then we agree.

Two people - one thing - Saturday 19th March 2011.