Sunday Morning, London (still)

Mutterings continued.

I'm sitting in the bowels of the hotel, in a broom cupboard or what was possibly the servants' quarters. The room is just wide enough for a computer desk and a chair, which is all you need really.

Yesterday morning was rather warm - I got a touch of sun on the nose sitting on a bench near the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, eating a Cornish Pasty and trying to avoid some dodgy looking street performers. I don't know what act the chap in tacky face paint, with a stage made from a piece of plywood on two milk cartons had and didn't really want to find out. 8-)

There was a fabulous string quartet called Abraxas playing Holst in the market place; I bought one of their cds. Had a mooch through the ROH gift shop and visited Lush and a theatre toy shop.I finally found Carnaby Street - I asked the assistant in Lush where it was as I was looking for their offshoot 'Never be too busy to be beautiful', or B for short (thank god). It's a very classy, bohemian looking place with lots of black and gold and antique perfume bottles. Apparently Brittany Spears bought one of the bottles for £850. Or was it Kate Moss? It was all very gorgeous and out of my price range.

I treated myself to a cab back to the hotel. Cabs are a great way of seeing parts of the city you otherwise miss on the Underground, being under them. Whizzed round Hyde Park corner (not on a moped).

Art Philistine Alert:

In the afternoon I took myself back to the Tate Britain and had a better look at the displays. Some great (Pre-Raphaelites) and not so great (Tracey Emin (sp?)) pieces. Ms Emin has won several awards for 'art' that looks like, and is in fact, tat - bags of rubbish, an unmade bed, a tent, that sort of thing. One of the pieces in the gallery was a dedication to her grandmother and looked like a page from a scrapbook made by a 6 year old. You know when people look at art and say, "I could do better than that!", well in Ms Emin's case, they probably could. On a more positive note, when the fire destroyed the Saatchi warehouse a few months back, it took several of her works with it.

I may not know art, but I know what I hate.

I was hoping to see a piece by Pre Raphaelite Henry Wallis entitled The Room Where Shakespeare Was Born - I'd seen it as part of the travelling exhibition at the WA Art Gallery and was mesmerised by it. Apparently it's still travelling and is currently in Nashville. The lady on the Information desk was very helpful (I didn't know the name of the painting, except it included the words Shakespeare and room, or the artist). She did a search on their database and was blown away by the graphic of it. Sadly the shop didn't carry any posters or postcards of it.

Last night I watched a doco on one of my (tragic) heroes, Peter Cook.

A piece from The Guardian's The Northerner:"How about this for an attention-grabbing first paragraph? "The accentof Dales folk could be changed forever as the area has seen a steady migration of Kiwis.

"Quite why these strange birds are quitting the southern hemisphere for Skipton and district is not at first clear from a story in the CravenHerald, but the Northerner's research suggests that "kiwi calls are usually heard an hour before dawn and an hour after dusk, the calls being more frequent on dark moonless nights.

"Females give a lower hoarser cry compared with males but both birds, when alarmed or aggressive, growl, hiss and loudly snap their beaks together."As they wander through the forest at night, they are apt to make loud snuffling noises which is caused by the feeding kiwi forcing air outof its nostrils to clear the nasal passages of dirt as it probes the earth with its bill.

"The prospect of going into a pub in search of a pint of Thwaites and being aurally assaulted by a bar full of growling, hissing,beak-snapping and snuffling is deeply alarming. But there will be no such excitement in Skipton. The Herald is recording that 20 or so New Zealanders now live in the town, most of them working with the Skipton Building Society.

Mark Christensen, originally from Wellington, New Zealand told the paper: "I've been in Skipton for over two years and bought a house here, which was built in 1883. "I don't think I've ever been anywhere as old as that in New Zealand.The history here is amazing. We have difficulty with just comprehending the age of everything." "

From what I've seen, New Zealand is a very beautiful place; full of very nice people who have the misfortune not to be Australians.

Tee hee.