One of the great things about living abroad for so long is the opportunity to blend cultures. Sometimes the mix is, well, excuse the pun, but sometimes the mix is SMASHING!
In August of 2012, while the older two were away at a Scottish outdoor adventure camp, I took the younger two to Mull, an island off the west coast of Scotland, better known to most of us as Balamory. Yes, those colourful houses on the water do exist, in fact it is a beautiful place, rugged and hilly with lots of art everywhere, but I digress. While on Balamory, a summer fete in honour of the RNLI (Lifeboats) 
took place and one of the restaurants on the water was getting rid of their old place settings. They set the stuff up on wooden shelves and for few coins you could hurl cricket balls at the plates and bowls….and well, is there anything quite so satisfying as the sound of breaking crockery. I knew instantly that this would be the perfect THE PERFECT stall for me to run at the annual Northcote Lodge Summer Fair, the gorgeous English prep school both my boys attended, at the time. And run it I did…for 5 consecutive Fairs.
On a serious note, a very good friend of mine, a Vicar who also runs an organization to help adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, told me recently that they often set up a crockery smashing pit at their retreats. When asked if participants would like to donate money or just bring crockery to break they inevitably choose the latter. There is just something so satisfying, cathartic even, about it.
But where, I hear you saying, is the American twist. Aaahh….do you remember my post three back, when I told the tale of London baseball. At my plate smashing stall we don’t use cricket balls. I drag the enormous canvas sack of old baseballs and softballs out of the basement. The kids are fascinated. Yes, they have seen them in the movies, but to hold an actual one in their hands is a novelty. They are especially taken with the softballs. I don’t bother to explain the difference, size is all that matters at this age. Remember also in that same post how I explained that all 4 of my children have played up at Wormwood Scrubs, year after year after year. What I may have left out is that for many years, they often played on two teams, each, simulataneously. The junior team in the morning and the seniors in the afternoon. Now take a moment and do the maths. How many team jerseys (of various sizes) and caps do you think I have had in my house. Oh, yeah, and my husband often coached all these teams and had swag as well. What a perfect way to recycle all this stuff, as prizes. Prizes just for participating. How American is that! I can’t lie. There is something so privately pleasing about looking round at the end of the Fair and seeing boy after boy after boy wearing an American baseball team jersey or cap.
3 years ago someone donated a Frozen mug. The boys went crazy trying to break it. Suddenly there was target above all the others. It took a while, but someone finally did get it, to the cheers of all his schoolmates. Last year it was a One Direction mug that caused the frenzy, and because there is justice in my little corner of America that is the plate smashing stall, a very quiet and shy boy won the honour. Hero for the evening.
This year I outdid myself. As a joke, I promise as a joke, someone at the office gave Craig a Trump 2016 coffee cup. It was enormous. Of course it was. Craig gave
it to our older son Joseph, who posted photos of it on social media and got the insane response from his friends he hoped for. But that was back in February, so I convinced him that the joke was long over and it was now my turn to have a little fun. And destroy it. The reaction was incredible. You could have been excused for thinking you were at a Make America Great Again rally for all the chanting of Trump, Trump, Trump as each youngster stepped up, baseballs at the ready, hoping to be the one to give it the final blow. I must admit, it took a long, long time. Ole golden Donny T proved to be rather indestructible as ball after ball, tumble afte
r tumble, left it unscathed. But finally it happened, and again justice was meted out, as it wasn’t one of the older, stronger boys, one of those who had been baying for its blood, but a young one, named Finn. He was thrilled, beyond thrilled. He asked for the pieces which I put carefully into a plastic bag to take home. What he parents thought of it all I have no idea. Nor do I care. My game, my rules. And I love it.
Speaking of the parents, the school wisely keeps my stall in the cricket nets (covered in tarpaulin) in the lower playground. The Bar (of course there is alcohol at the school fair, this is England, parents wouldn’t come otherwise) in the upper playground. Therefore, there is obviously no need for them to ever wander down and see the potentially dangerous (those shards fly!) activity their precious son is engaged in. And I am happy to report that in the 5 years I am the only one to ever be injured. I always manage to cut myself on something, but a small price to pay. Occasionally a Dad will come along, bolstered by rose in the sun, and ask to play. I always warn them they will only embarrass themselves. A cricket bowl doesn’t do much when trying to break stuff on a shelf, as the ball goes down rather than straight, and while the boys can manage to adjust, the Dads can’t. Usually they just miss entirely. This year, a father managed to hit a teacher who was foolishly poking his head round the side. I was totally unsympathetic. I told you so, I said to them both
. They sheepishly returned to the bar, where they belonged.
This past Friday night was my last time as the Northcote Plate Smashing Queen because Stephen is moving on to secondary school. But I certainly went out with a bang. How I managed to get away with it, there isn’t anything health and safety about it, I don’t know. But boy did the boys love it. Boy did I love it. And for two short hours that nagging existential question: Why am I here? was answered. My epithet may read “she let boys smash things,” and that would be very good indeed.
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I keep a pretty, fabric covered file box in which I collect all the pages ripped from magazines and newspapers of things I desperately wish to see. The write-up about the House of Dreams from Time Out is so old it is crumpled and the edges have ripped away. This incredible homage to life is tucked quietly away in East Dulwich and only open a few times a year, and never when I could make it. Until yesterday. Was it worth the wait? Oh yes. Was it what I expected? No. No, not at all. It was crazy and colourful and wild. It was also emotional, a house that has experienced grief, but ultimately it is a validation that life and love are worth celebrating.
otherwise nondescript south London street, is an art installation. It is the brain child of Stephen Wright, a successful fashion and textile designer who, in 1998, began creating a safe, magical space away from the overwhelmingness of London, with his then partner Donald Jones. Gaudi-esque mosaics inside and out, collages and assemblages using souvenirs, toys, relics of daily living. An Aladdin’s cave of things most of us throw away, but only after we have kept them preciously.
10 years ago, Stephen met his current partner, Michael Vaughan. Michael doesn’t contribute directly to the installation, but provides endless emotional and intellectual support, though, it might be fair to say that his thoughts on the project are sometimes different from Stephen’s. In a lovely 14 minute video about the house, there is a wonderful scene where Stephen brings home some old curlers from a car boot sale and Michael suggests they go straight into a strong solution of bleach. No, no Stephen insists, he wants them to retain the strands of hair, evidence of the person who has used them, proof of the life they touched. And that is what the house has become, evidence of being, of having been. People he has known, and recently, more often, strangers. Isn’t that what we all want at the end of the day, for someone else out there in the world to say: you lived and you mattered and I will miss you forever.
utterly, utterly, utterly charming, like men of a certain age often are. Welcoming and kind, they are a couple you could easily spend hours and hours with, sitting in their lush back garden, enjoying soft cheese and crisp wine and laughing, laughing and laughing while solving all world problems. The property has already been promised to the National Trust, and while it will no doubt preserve the House beautifully, the absence of these divine hosts will be noticeable.
and one of the best two lines I have ever read. In fact, if I were a mantra kind of girl this would be it:
Dreams, and of the artist himself. Wright can’t walk through his days without seeing something irresistible, extraordinary, dreamlike, sentimental in things we otherwise might no longer notice. Baby dolls, ceramic tiles, reading glasses, glass beads, old shoes, his father’s false teeth, and I swear, as you walk round you can hear them whispering…look at us, look at us, look at us. WE REMAIN.
Oh how I love Borough Market. How my husband loves Borough Market. In fact, it may be the single thing in London he really, really likes, as he finds my beloved city loud, crowded, dirty, inconvenient and ridiculously expensive. All of which is true. But I love it still. And Borough Market is certainly top of the list. I would never consider myself a foodie, far from actually, but there is something about the quality and the beauty of the market that makes it irresistible. It lulls you into believing you can cook anything, turn every meal into a feast, excite every taste possible. I have 
struggled home with bulging sacks filled with fruit and vegetables, not the boring kinds but the good stuff: artichokes, figs, pomegrantes, mushrooms. Once I decided that I had to have a dozen blood oranges too. Certianly appreciated by my family, but bloody heavy to carry home. Cheeses, saucisson with hazelnuts, Spanish ham, olives, bread, fish, exotic meats, cake, licorice, everything that looks good, and it all looks good. Why I haven’t written about it before, I don’t know. But now is certainly the time. Sadly, sadly now is the time. Following the devastating terror attack, the market was closed for 11 days. But it has reopened, and I was there.
There has been a market, in one form or another, at London Bridge, for at least 1,000 years. Over the centuries, and more recently, the decades, the market’s size and success has waxed and wained, and by the 1970’s the growth of the supermarket made the market obsolete. But nothing this good could be gone forever. In the 1990s the interest in local and artisan foods began to grow. A collection of traders met once a month, then once a week and now the Market is open Monday-Saturday and has stalls from all over
the UK and Europe. A quick glance down the current trader list includes Spanish cheese, vegetarian pasties made with Balkan recipes, French pastries, olives from Greece, Turkish condiments, Oysters from Essex and charcuterie from south Wales…you get the idea. It is a destination for anyone interested in food of any kind. It is also a popular spot for after work drinks and dinner. A gorgeous place to spend a warm Saturday night. Hence the horror that took place there only two weeks ago. And why I had to go back as quickly as I could.
This time I wanted to be a little more organized than usual, not just roam round and grab anything and everthing that appealed. I wanted to prepare something exclusively sourced. Given how hot the weather has been, I decided on a salad, a gorgeous, colourful summer salad. A Borough Market salad. I chatted with vendors, all of whom were so happy to be back at work. “Everyone is coming with so much love,” the adorable olive seller told me. The market was crowded, but less so than I have seen before. Everyone was taking pictures. Not just the hideous selfie versions, or artistically arranged piles of peppers, but of the market itself, as if people wanted to prove that life was continuing on. I shared my idea of the salad and got great suggestions. In the end, I made something really rather beautiful. And delicious. Rocket, bibs of many colours, tomatoes in all their many, many shades of sunset, black olives and violets. A treat for the eye and the stomach. Made with so much love, food for the soul.
Baseball. If you build it they will come. A field in Iowa. Or a west London prison. Build it and bats will sing out. Every year I dread the start of the London baseball season (it’s inconvenient, time consuming and cold,) but by the end, find a grudging affection, if not respect and love, for what these crazy Americans manage to put together year after year after year. On the playing fields of Wormword Scrubs, a category B facility. And a hideously run down Athletics complex. It boasts its own weather system, different to whatever else may be taking place in London. Usually cloudy, often damp, though actual pouring rain is rare. Cold, regardless of the sunshine. And the wind. Oh the wind. Frenzied, relentless wind. All the time. Which makes it very easy, on those treasured days of full sun, to get 
badly burned. Ones core remains swaddled in trousers and jackets and blankets, but feet and noses and arms exposed to the piercing rays. It happens to me every year. And every year I am shocked. But then, baseball at the Scrubs (what the cool kids call it) does have an element of Groundhog Day.
Back in those early days everyone and I mean everyone was at the American School of London and lived in St. John’s Wood. They were here for one, two years tops. Their experience was exclusively of the insulated ex-pat variety. Except us, or so it seemed. We were the freaks who lived south of the river and sent their kids to be educated with the English. But times have changed. More and more of the families live all over London, some even further south than us! The children go to English schools and play English sports and have English accents, for lots of reasons, including the slashing of perks by American companies, and the number of families who are long-term residents. And many more mixed nationalities, with the American parent (of either sex) being the driving force for joining the baseball. And 
sometimes not even that. One of the most involved families at the moment is German/Italian. Why? No clue. But boy can their boys play! And the particularly beautiful thing about this is that now it really is LONDON baseball. Kids chat about football and cricket. They mix sports terminology. They recognized each other from other things. It is American, with international flavouring.
and animal has suddenly appeared between first and second base. I always wonder what the locals make of this highly organized but totally alien activity taking over such a large section of the Scrubs. Sometimes they stop and watch. Mostly they ignore it and carry on along. They are Londoners after all. The Scrubs is remote, or as remote as one can get in a major city. Set well behind the prison and a collection of hospitals, it is a long walk from the main road. Yet one morning, last year, we arrived to find a man sleeping one off just behind what was going to be the home run fence for my younger daughter’s softball
game. We just left him there. He did finally come to, in about the 4th inning, and just shuffled away. Must have been quite the night! And to wake to find oneself in the middle of a ball game, well that is a tale for the lads. A few years ago two burnt out cars were on the fields, police all round. This meant that games had to be moved over to one side, but no one complained. Kids (and adults) were fascinated by the scene. Speculation and rumour was rampant. So exciting.
coach with his suitcase in tow. The taxi came to get him to his flight to Australia (business, not pleasure) before the last out. And he isn’t the only one. Plenty have shown up straight off a flight from Frankfurt, NYC, Singapore, Tokyo, LA or any other place important men happen to go. Bleary-eyed but willing. Their dedication is extraordinary. Humbling, even. They are fathers at their absolute best. Well most of them anyway. A few of these important men are pretty awful. Their behavior in front of their, and other people’s children, inexcusable. Their need to win (correction, their need for their 11 year old to win) beggars belief. But there aren’t many of those. And, of course, they provide hours of gossip for the rest of us.
Its a Dads thing. We are just the cheering section. Thankfully. Because I am hopeless. I can’t throw or catch or hit. The idea of someone hurling a hard ball at me, at my request, is absurd. My understanding of the rules is basic. My attention wanders. I am always cold. ALWAYS. But, once I get there, I do love watching.
It is a full compliment of experience and my husband and children have done it all. Starting with T-ball, moving up to coaches pitch, then the junior softball and baseball and now, finally the seniors. But that T-ball. It requires a patience most of these men didn
‘t know they had. But have they do. These diddy little things, jerseys all down to their knees. No clue how to throw or catch or if either of those actions are really necessary. Lots of tears (actually, the tears last, for both the boys and girls, right up to the end). Kids lie down, they wander off, they chat. They run the wrong way. Or not at all. But outs remain uncounted and every game ends in a tie. A game of endurance over skill. Yet these men do it (my own husband did it for years), with enthusiasm.
Over time, attention focuses, skills are honed, games are played, plays are made, fly balls caught, strike outs, stolen bases, home runs. Proper competition. Sadly, it ends at age 13. After that, it becomes another organization and it gets serious. Or rather, the Dads get
serious. Really, really serious. And the promise of a trip to Poland for a place in the Little League World Series gets adult hearts pumping. And grown men fighting, sometimes literally. But that is for the true-believers, like mine, but not me. I am happy to stay at the Scrubs.
On Tuesday night I was supposed to join Secret London Runs (the cleverest and most fun running company out there) to find the hidden noses of Soho followed by some pub conviviality. But it was r
aining. Hard. It was cold. I was tired. And I am a terrible map reader (no wonder I only guide inside), I can’t even follow google map instructions properly. Getting lost in a cold hard rain while running isn’t fun. So I made my (pathetic) excuses and stayed home. But the lure of the noses had me. And getting lost while strolling on a sunny, warm Saturday morning is bliss. Not least because I absolutely LOVE the morning after the night before in big cities. When the streets are devoid of people but the detritus of nighttime fun is everywhere, Show me your filthy doorways and your littered alleys. Hastily bagged rubbish and appallingly parked cars. Mysterious liquids running down pavement cracks. Dried vomit and pungent wee. Shuttered windows and
metal encased entrance ways. The silence. The stillness. The emptiness. I love it. You can walk in the middle of the road. Snap photos of street art without anyone tutting. Notice things you would otherwise never spot. A chance to look up and around. The perfect time to find a few noses.
Ears? They seem to be casts of the artist Tim Fishlock’s own ear. Why? When? What for? I haven’t a clue. Both on Floral Street. One attached to a Ted Baker shop, the other the Tintin shop. If there is a political or social message being made here, I missed it. Or else I am too worn out by the last election to care. But they are rather magnificent ears. Gorgeous helix of the auditory system. Certainly something worth smiling about. And smile I did. As I wondered about. In the early morning sunshine. Backtracking, diverting, enjoying a city stretching itself awake and taking on the day.
And all with a tremendous sense irony. Because I was hunting for what could be symbols of anti-big brother behavior in a city experiencing a heightened state of surveillance. Police, barriers, road blocks everywhere. The St. Anne’s church in Soho, which boasts a gay congregation, had security out front when I walked by. I have no doubt that computers and cameras are working night and day to track people with terrible intent. And, one week on from the London Bridge/Borough Market attacks, that is exactly how we want it. Need it. 
This is the world we now live in. As I walked up Haymarket I noticed the London Welcome Everyone banners hanging from above, in a variety of languages. London: multicultural, international, the best city in the world, and site of yet another extremist attack. Freedom, of the monitored variety, the plurality of modern living.
But let’s get back to the noses themselves. Found the first one on the Admiralty Arch. It took a while to find it, but once spotted I couldn’t believe I had ever passed under the arch, currently impossible, without seeing it. Another nose on Great Windmill Street and then into Soho. Oh what a rich past this area has. The oversized protuberance on Meard (one thought to have been added later) can’t quite compete with the history of this very short street of still existing and stunning original 18cth Georgian townhouses, including
the one with the famous sign This is not a Brothel. Then on to D’Arblay Street where I worried the crowd outside the inexplictably popular Breakfast Club that I was trying to queue barge (as if!) to find what (to be honest) looked more like a bent screw than a nose. Peeked through an olive tree on Dean Street, loitered outside the Milkbar on Bateman and found the last nose on what was an otherwise totally uninspiring printshop store front on Endell Street. Equally fun were all the Invader pieces I found. A French street artist who creates 1980s video game creatures out of tiles and mounts them high up.
I have loved Hamlet for a long time. Correction. I have loved a passage from Hamlet for a long time. Though I had no idea it was Hamlet. Because I thought it was a song. From the Hair soundtrack. Boy oh boy did I love that soundtrack. I discovered it in my parents collection when I was about 10. I played it constantly. I knew all the words to all the songs, especially that one that is just a list of naughty things. I could probably sing the album today. It is skill I share with my best friend from university, Abby. She too spent hours of childhood entranced by Hair. Fast forward many decades. Imagine my surprise when I heard “what a piece of work is man, how noble in reason…” spoken, not sung, by Hamlet. Well no wonder it is a song I remember, it is lyrical, pure poetry. Words that stick on your soul. Hamlet itself is a little harder to love.
So here we are again. Another election with vitriol, scare mongering and yap yap yap from all sides. Another shocking, horrific and desperately sad terror attack. And more rain. This seems to be an unbreakable pattern. But it does explain how I came to be standing in an impossibly long queue, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, on election night, only days after the London Bridge/Borough Market attacks, in the rain. Waiting to get into the preview of the Grayson Perry show: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! Well if nothing else in the world seemed certain, that did! As we stood and stood and waited and waited. “But I am on the guest list,” I spluttered when I arrived on the dot of 7 to find myself at the end of something I couldn’t see the beginning of. “I think all of London is on this guest list,” the man in front explained. The already overwhelmed security men just shrugged and gestured for me to take my place behind the others. So I did. It began to rain. And strangers began chatting. Soon it was all rather jolly, especially when waiters with trays of wine and fistfuls of beers began to appear. The attacks were mentioned only obliquely, as in “so glad so many people came out” and the election in passing, “so glad it will be over,” (ha ha, wishful thinking, as it turns out). We inched along (the gallery was working on a one-out-one-in policy) we talked about the weather (of course) and books (never a dull subject) and Harry Potter (so much to discuss) and art. Then a frisson in the crowd. The great man himself was approaching. Wearing fabulous shiny shoes and an impossibly short pink frock, his cyclist legs on full display. We were giddy. Camera phones clicking. He stopped by my group and surveyed the length of the queue and the patience with which we were all waiting. “You have made all my dreams come true,” he told us before he breezing on. Grayson Perry. A National Treasure. But to call him that seems too trivial, too patronizing, like patting the hand of an elderly relative. Because I believe, at this moment, in this crazy world we live in, Grayson Perry is a voice of reason and sense. And the size of the crowd trying to get into the Serpentine Gallery proves I am not alone in this belief. He is known primarily as a ceramicist who likes to wear women’s clothes, whose work reflects the times we live in. Not a reinterpreted, through the lens of high culture, reflection, but the way it actually is. 
Which is why he is so popular, with the masses, if less so the elite. And he is funny, pointedly funny, with a fantastic laugh. In this new show he pokes fun at high brow culture with “luxury brands for social justice,” a large pot covered in drawings and pithy statements like: “I’m off to buy a serious piece of political art,” “I’ve read all the academic literature on empathy,” and my personal favourite “super expensive knick-knacks against fascism.” There were plenty of chuckles (and many winces) round that piece. His two pots on Brexit had been highly anticipated. Using suggestions via social media from people on either side of the debate as to what Britain means to them, he created a Leave pot and a Remain one. And the joke on us all is that it takes time to figure out which is which….to quote Jo Cox, the MP murdered last year, “far more unites us than divides us.” A concept we seem neither able to embrace nor reject, but instead turn it over and around and back again as we make our way through these times. Because, as Perry suggests, there is a gap between how we feel and how we think. And when faced with decisions, we often go with feeling over thought, no matter the evidence that should make us choose otherwise. Sometimes, for that reason, bad things happen. But sometimes not.
mostly post it notes, on which people have written messages. Messages of hope, of love, of sorrow. From all over the world, as were the victims: France, Spain, Canada, Australia. From places that are all too familiar with horror: sympathy from Lebanese journalists, love from Ukraine, hope from 
Iran. And some messages that should never have to be written. “I miss you so much Sara love from Mum xxxxxx” People stood and read, took photos and cried, a few added their own messages. But mostly people just stood and read. In silence. The immediate area was eerily quiet. Somber and still. While the bustle that is London Bridge, station and streets carried on in the background. It was moving, overwhelming.
The police were very patient, simply disentangled themselves and encouraged the gentlemen to stagger along. Oh, some things never change. And that is what Londoners keep saying to themselves post-terror. That London won’t fear, won’t give in, won’t divide. At times I worry that this attitude isn’t defiance so much as a form of passivity, that in saying we carry on, we normalize the events, make them seem simply one more part of the urban fabric. Which is unacceptable. Because these attacks are unacceptable. And to treat them as 
anything but abhorrent is unacceptable. But the solutions are complicated. And in the meantime this is perhaps the best we can do. Feel more than think. Share thoughts on colourful squares of paper, stand in long queues to see art, have a laugh with strangers, let the politicians bray on and know that sometimes the wisest man out there is wearing a very short pink dress.
We are in the midst of a heatwave, here in London. “In other countries they just have the summertime. We have to talk about heat waves. It’s dreary,” so complains shrewish Nan in Iris Murdoch’s divine The Sandcastle. But she is wrong. Heat waves aren’t dreary. They are wonderful and hot. And it is hot right now. Hot, hot, hot. Desperate for a little relief, yesterday afternoon, I went to Trafalgar Square and put my feet in the fountain. For a long time. Yes, I did take a little break for some art in both the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, but I was back. Feet in the water. Sitting on the stone rim. Thinking about the world. About Monday night in Manchester. I do have many thoughts about the atrocities, but I am not sure I have the words to express them properly without sounding glib or superficial, such was the horror. So instead they remain a feeling that twists and turns, sharp and hard and present. But unutterable.
it is possible for me to just sit and be. Looking out at London. A city I love so so much. The place I love the most. For all its flaws, I would not want to be anywhere else during a heat wave. Feet in that dirty ole fountain. Music and traffic and people all round. In the blazing sunshine. I must be the luckiest woman in the world.
I first discovered the verb “to pop,” many years ago, when I heard it in, what else?, Absolutely Fabulous. Eddie and Patsy are forever popping into Harvey Nichols on the way “to work.” Saffy has to pop out for some milk when she cancels the Harrods food delivery, in her brief attempt at austerity. Gran loves to pop by, causing Eddie to instantly regress to a sulky teenager. It is a great word for a fantastic action. And London is the ideal place to pop. So many places, so many people, and with the world moving ever faster a quick pop is all we may be able to manage. It is a rediscovery of the small moments. The tiny breaks in reality that can not only provide rest, but perhaps, a whole new mood. A quick look at something beautiful. A short time under the sun in a secret garden. A few minutes with a friend. Not scheduled. Not planned. Not written in the diary. Just popping by. Because that is when the laughter is sudden and real. So it is what I plan to do over the next few months. And to what will I be popping? Art obviously.
London is the perfect city for this. Not only is there so much art, everywhere, all the time, as far as my new hot pink suede boots can walk me, it is, for the most part, free. FREE!!!! Not too much free around these days, so I plan to take advantage. So, 2 days ago after visiting a friend and realizing I was only one stop away from, I popped into the V&A. To see just one thing. Or 4, things as it turned out. Or 4 things plus the things around. And for a few minutes I was utterly transfixed. Rachel Kneebone’s new installations at the V&A. Ceramic bodies, sometimes just legs, in fantastic collections, at times entwined, with vines and leaves, as though emerging from the large eggs nestled in the background. So tactile and visceral and gorgeous. Displayed next to Rodin sculpture, works that also beg to be touched (though that is forbidden), the twisting bodies beautiful and mesmerizing. The longer 
you look, the more you see. And, at the front of the museum, Kneebone’s stunning tower, 399 Days, a Tower of Babel perhaps, or a series of physical vignettes, again in silky white porcelain. While 16th century statues of antiquity greats stand near, gazing at, reaching toward, engaging with her work. It is masterstroke of curatorial genius. The outside world just melted away as I stared and studied 
and sighed with pleasure. For a just a little while.
Yesterday I popped into the RA, again to see just one thing. Andrew Green’s stunning and heartwarming installation The Life and Death of Miss Dupont. A beautiful homage to his mother and her loving second marriage to lobster salesman, Stan, They only had 15 years together before Stan died, but Andrew believes they were the happiest of her life. Widowhood didn’t suit her nearly so well. In the center she stands, not quite life sized, but wearing the actual fur coat Stan gave Madeleine during their marriage. I know attitudes have changed, but there was a time when being given a fur coat was the highest expression of devotion possible. I remember well the Christmas when my father gave one to my mother, the pleasure and 
excitement was infectious. This effigy of Madeleine stands at a jaunty angle surround by touches of their home together, Peter the Poodle having a prominent role, and includes an acknowledgement that they greatly enjoyed the physical side of their relationship, not something most children are gracious or understanding enough to do (without retching anyway). The rest of the room is filled with other tributes, including the congratulatory telegram sent by her family to the restaurant where they dined after the ceremony . What looks like a large hat box topped with an elegant cut glass jar stands on one side. Two empty chairs are painted on the base. Immediately one is reminded of the heartbreaking song “Empty Tables and Empty Chairs” from Les Mis. And indeed the connection is correct, as this is the container the artist imagine his mother’s ashes should 
be held in, rather than the plain, metal urn he was given. Even in death, his mother is elegant and beautiful and very, very loved. Much of the story was brought to life for me by the excellent guard in the room, Harsal, who generously and enthusiastically shared the joy of this piece, in all its gorgeous detail. Thinking back, it feels like I spent hours with Miss Dupoint. But I was there less than 15 minutes. I popped out to pop in and what a bit of magic I got.
for the large sculptures in this collection. But always love the mirror work. So spent most of the few minutes I was in the gallery playing around with them. Managed what I think is a fun photo of my hands. And then got on with the rest of my day. With an extra warmth in my heart.
Several days ago I went along to my friend Alice’s house to watch a bio pic of Peggy Guggenheim. I was very much looking forward to seeing what I thought might be a peek into my fantasy future….world famous art collector of the avant garde filling her stunning Venetian palace with treasures on the artistic and human variety. Parties, laughter, love. An enviable force for cultural advancement. Yikes was I wrong. Her life was horrible. Her family, her friends, herself….horrible, horrible, horrible. And so so very sad. I think I am still reeling. (Her sister Hazel throwing her babies off the roof….) With this still fresh in my mind, I met my marvelous friend Samuel at Two Temple Place. An incredible home on the Victoria Embankment built by William Waldorf Astor, in the 1890s. A rare case of limitless money and taste coming together perfectly. It is one of my favourite buildings in London. I fantasize that someday I am going to buy it and live in it with artistic and literary splendor. Astor only used it for twenty five years. It is currently owned by the Bulldog Trust charity, but I could make it my own very quickly. The oak-paneled staircase alone sets my heart racing. Astor was a newspaper man who loved 
literature, The Three Musketeers most of all. Characters from Dumas’ novel stand proudly on the newel posts, joined by other favourites like Hester Prynne (another strong woman), the last Mohican, Uncas and scout Hawkeye. The Great Room on the 1st floor offers reliefs and statuettes of more famous women, some real, some not, including Anne Boleyn, the Lady of Shalott and Maid Marion. The main door is covered in reliefs of the women of the Arthurian tales. There is no particular agenda to the choices, rather a collection of fictional and historical characters who appealed to Astor. Voltaire is there as are greats of the Renaissance, including Dante, Michelangelo and Raphael, the scientist Galileo and the explorers Columbus, Marco Polo and Captain Cook. Eclectic taste, yes, but excellent, eclectic taste. The ceiling is a jaw 
dropping open timber hammer-beam mahogany roof and at either end of the Hall are stunning stained glass windows, Sunset and Sunrise. Rich in colour, they are enormous, idealized landscapes. It is the kind of room that takes your breath away at first glance. And then you start to look and the more you look, the more you see. It is pure pleasure.
would immediately join me under the spell. I arrived early and popped up to the gift shop to buy a ticket for a talk later in the week, but before I did I told the lovely volunteer that I was waiting for a friend. “Tell him I will be right down. His name is Samuel and he is fabulous. He will be wearing a cape.” She smiled appreciatively. And when I returned, there they were together. “I recognized fabulous Samuel straight away,” she told me. See, we belong here. And he loved the house, I knew he would. It is the kind of house that Mame would have loved too. We are both Auntie Mame devotees. We both understand completely when she despairs “life is a banquet, but most poor bastards are starving to death.” But not us. Samuel and I are greedy gluttons for life. And here, at Two Temple Place, we overindulge, yet again, in beauty. And some bleakness too. Because the current exhibition isn’t some worthy Egyptian pots, but a retrospective of Sussex Modernism. People who, over decades, lived together in Sussex, not as a single group, but as distinct collections of artists and writers and emigres and free-lovers and political thinkers, who found a degree of freedom in the English countryside. Freedom from war and oppression and institutionalized mindsets and society and prying eyes. On the surface, these looked like little Edens and the names attached are known the world over. But they weren’t. With all this creative energy came great sadness and pain. Eric Gill was criminally repulsive. Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and walked into the river Ouse. Relationships and children were abandoned carelessly. And Lee Miller, suffering from what we would now call PTSD from her experiences as a WWII combat photographer (she was one of the first to the camps,) tried to drink herself to death at her Sussex home, Farley Farm. Oh what a woman Lee Miller was. Like Peggy Guggenheim, on the surface everything a powerful, fabulous woman could be. But her life, like that of Peggy, was filled with terrible family secrets and tremendous unhappiness. The Imperial War Museum had a terrific exhibition of her work, a few years ago. What an eye for the beautiful, the simple and the evil. She went from photographing movie stars and fashionably dressed women in wartime to corpses in concentration camps, corpses she treated with the same individual respect she had the socialites, making the pictures all the more horrifying. Like the parties at Peggy’s palace, those at Farley Farm, where Roland Penrose, the great English surrealist and founder of the ICA and American Vogue model turned photographer, Lee Miller lived, hosted Picasso and Max Ernest and other great game changers. Oh if only walls could talk. Or maybe not.
It was with these two very strong women in mind that I went to see the Lady Emma Hamilton exhibition at the Maritime Museum. Again, a tremendous life. From abject poverty of the coal-mining variety to the most famous woman of her time. She is, of course, best known for being the mistress of Lord Nelson. But she was so much more. A superb performer, a consummate hostess and, when war broke out with France, a skilled diplomat. A great beauty, yes. But a powerful and ever inquisitive brain, as well. And a really sad life. Is there a theme here? Oh, I hope not. And in the case of these three, one could easily argue that the sadness came first and their success was, if not a solution to at least a catalyst for their success. So not wax wings melting so much as the necessary supports missing, or in the case of Emma, the cruel fickleness of societal norms. In the funny twist of history, we might love them, adore them, honour them far more now than they were in their own lifetimes. Their sadness doesn’t diminish their accomplishments, quite the opposite actually. And anyway, who wants an unlived life?
So that is the great trick isn’t it, to find the right level between skin scorching brilliance and obscure pointlessness. Maybe to acknowledge both, but stay a generous distance from the bottom and at least a sensible distance from the top end…a gentle warm glow without the flames. Be discreetly wealthy enough to own Two Temple Place and fill it with art and books, and Edward James’ Mae West Lips couch (designed with Salvador Dali), trust me, it looks perfect here, and of course interesting, way outside the box kinds of people, but never, ever, ever trend on Twitter. Yes, that seems a good plan. A very good plan indeed.
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