evident malaise

My dear friend Emma's musings on prison toilet bowls being the main actor which deters her from a life of crime have inevitably turned my own thoughts to the art world. Not as you might think because of Marcel Duchamp , but because of my own husband’s occasionally intimated wish to be a master criminal à la Steve McQueen in the Thomas Crown affair. I think I can be reasonably sure he's not going to act on this desire, mainly because he really only wants to be chased by Faye Dunaway (he does like strong women, sigh) but also because if he broke into the Tate Gallery (The proper one, not the TonyBankside or whatever it's called) he would do much more to impress our friends by stealing the coffee shop’s expresso machine for our kitchen wall rather than a pictue of some old castle. Anyway, what’s the point of going to an art gallery in the middle of the night wearing a balaclava? Who’s going to see you there? Surely better to give the old masters a miss and pinch a ‘I’m so rich and cultured I do my clothes shopping in an art gallery’ t-shirt or two from the gallery shop, which is I'm fairly sure more expensive than an original Turner anyway

Actually we did go down on the big blue train recently because my husband’s aforementioned fascination with slighty dangerous redheds led him to drag us both down to Millbank to catch the last weekend of a show of pictures of Lizzie Siddal demonstrating the various stages of consumption. It was lovely to forget The North for a day, although this relief didn’t last long as my husband insisted on dropping into the Morpeth Arms on the way from the tube. Is there no escape, sigh? It was a very interesting exhibition, the painter chap in question having been a bit of an enfant terrible, the Damien Hurst of his day perhaps, well, Damien Hurst with sideburns, artistic talent but a perhaps overly predictable tendency never to be found very far from a wet corset. It was all the more exciting because many of the paintings had travelled from as far as two or three rooms away, obviously not worth going to see when they’re free lest people should think one is a care in the community case or even, god forbid, a student or just plain poor but well worth ten of anyone’s husband’s pounds to go and stand shoulder to shoulder with talking guidebooks squeaking away in a dozen languages. Some of the models did have a look which was rather less pre-raphael than pre-menstrual but it was all a jolly nice day out. The only disappointment was when we found the gallery café had run out of sugar. No sugar? In the Tate? It’s not the same London I left behind. I miss London so much and it was very clear that day that they're not coping very well without me either...