On Saturday we went to the see the art fair at the London Design Centre in Islington. Its a sale kind of thing. Not the ‘affordable art fair’ which no-one can afford to go to, but another one. The same galleries showing the same stuff but no longer claiming affordability. Went there by tube because parking in Islington hasn’t been achieved since 1973. And we had free tickets, which is nice. Gives you more to spend on art. Though possibly not quite enough more to make it viable. Everything there seemed to start at 4 grand. Little photo of a dog; 4 grand. Watercolour 12” by 8”, looks like something Lila did at nursery (but NOTHING like as good), 4 grand. Piece of rock with a stripe of red paint on the side, 4 grand. And its not like I wanted any of them, but HOW MUCH???? We came away empty handed. But had a bag check going out. Like you’ve nicked a 6 foot square framed canvas squidged with beige paint. Oops; how’d that get in my wallet?

Last night we had the barmitzvah party. But a real party. Loud. Happy. Informal. Wonderful. Fab food. Sit where ya want. Eat standing up. Sit on the fucking floor. Issa party!!! And it was. But they had something unusual. Well, for me it was unusual. You might have a ‘silent disco’ in your house every night after dinner, but I don’t. So everyone was given headphones. Good ones. I nicked mine. Ok, I didn’t but in retrospect I should have. And there were 3 channels. Red, blue and green. On the blue channel was hip-hop, techno, garage and other total shit noise that has no place in my ears. On the green and red however, there were wonderful songs that you could ‘um’ along to. Proper songs. Old songs. Dancing songs. So in a completely silent room (other than the talking from the non-dancers) you had all the blues in one side, the greens on the other and the reds in the middle. Where you could kick them. And a few odd couples with a red dancing with a blue. At different tempos. Different songs. Its like they took the metaphor ‘dances to his own tune’ and industrialised it. At one point Mel was doing a waltz and I had ‘smells like teen spirit’ on me ‘phones. We looked like a calming nurse trying to attend a man having a seizure. But in a really cool, silent disco-y way.

Happy Monday

A xxxx