millionreasons | Went out with my friends

Saturday

Trip sunnily down Upper St for the first iced coffee of the season. Hello trees! Hello birds! Hello glorious hot sun! We go around the corner to the Crafts Council which has on an eco-clothing exhibition which is interesting, if a little worthy. I’m tempted to write in the guestbook: “I only buy clothes made with the blood of 3^rd world children”, but fear that they may be able to trace handwriting and anyway, all my current summery clothes are charity shopped or clothes swapped. Afterwards, we head to the Nobody Inn to watch the Liverpool/Chelsea match with Heike (birthday girl), Jo, DanJ, Alan, Heike’s parents and later, Alice and Steve and Tanya. After 6 hours or so, we get bored and move onto Suruchi which I remember as being a nice place to eat, but severe indigestion makes me think otherwise, afterwards.

Sunday

Because it’s St George’s Day, we go and have a full English fry-up (veg version) in the Worker’s Café in Islington. Because this is Upper St, the caff is run by Turks and peopled by non-workers. Well, non-proletariat workers anyway. We meander down to the farmers’ market and then onto the Estorick Gallery, starting to wonder if we’re in a Time Out Sunday in North London article.

The problem with art galleries is that they’re always full of couples with kids in pushchairs being warned to be quiet because this is an art gallery and old people in fleeces standing in front of the pictures. Anyway, we wander around the Morandi exhibition which fortunately also contains artists whom the curator considered influenced by him; Morandi himself favoured beige portraits of bottles, which gets a little yawnsome after a while. Rothko can get away with one theme, a hundred variations, Mr M can’t. I prefer the Futurist exhibition upstairs - big bright canvases of specious political meaning. There’s a photograph of the gang of five about to go off to the First World War. Dave asks if they had rayguns instead of rifles. I notice, delightedl,y that was one of them was called Balla. A mystery solved by a Sunday afternoon art trip. Smashing.