Street Sadness

   I entered the ravishingly sumptuous but, let's face it, preposterously eccentric Moorish entrance hall of Frederick Lord Leighton's house in Holland Park. The beautiful wall tiles were as I remembered them from my previous visits, as was the shallow pool, with its gently tinkling, central waterspout. Incongruously, the lovely floor tiles had been muffled, here and there, by four cheap-looking Turkish-style mats, which would never have graced the room in Leighton's day: I wondered what possible logic lay behind this intervention, but could think of no answer. It was as if the management of the house had decided that the sumptuous beauty of the room - with its peacock-blue vases and its peacock-green dishes, and its Moorish tiles and its gorgeous filtered light was not sufficiently Victorian and so they had upped the ante by troweling on even more of the decorative kitsch, Disney-style. It was superfluous, but the public - at least the dozen or so pensioners who were shuff...

I was very excited to go this morning to hear the great German artist Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy talk about his work. I had seen this wonderful exhibition four times already, so I was really looking forward to hearing about the ideas and processes behind it. The morning ended sourly, however, due to the staff’s very poor management of the event and one other major problem - the sound system. We all crowded into the foyer of the beautiful building to register at the front desk with our tickets. We then joined the end of a long queue which stretched into the far side of the foyer. People were chatting happily and there was an air of good-natured camaraderie in the group. We continued to wait in line as more and more people arrived. These new arrivals apparently did not care to join the queue. Instead, they hung around at the foot of the stairs in front of us in an untidy, chattering rabble. There were no helpful ropes set up to cordon people into a manageable line...

I have read a great deal about the Nazi period and I have seen a lot of documentary film footage about this evil. But I was completely shocked and surprised by my emotional reaction to the exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum about the Holocaust. The exhibition is staged across eight or nine rooms on the fourth floor of the building. It is, appropriately, dimly lit. It consists of photographs, film footage, objects and audio recordings of survivors. In the first room there are films of happy, prosperous Jews in Germany in the years before the war: here they are in parks, at functions, in family groups. They are laughing and touching and kissing and hugging and eating and drinking and having the time of their lives. All this was to change. Very quickly.   In the next room we see images of the pathetic Austrian, the failed artist, just released from prison for plotting to overthrow the government. His time had now arrived. His day had dawned. He spoke well. The ...

An American mother and daughter sit next to me in Tate Britain cafe. The daughter is telling her mother about a course she has just been on.    "So the whole point of the course was to teach the stoodent how to discuss things in a group and how to listen and it's really cool because you all sit around a big table so the teacher is on the same level as the stoodents and then we learn how to speak to the other stoodents and how to bring other stoodents into the conversation and how to not talk for too long and how to keep to the topic and it was really cool but then when I went to the Oxford classes the whole thing was completely different and the classes are like lectures with the teacher at the front of the class and all the stoodents sitting in rows in front of him and so it's like a two hour lecture and it was just listening to the teacher for two hours and I think it should be toadally different and maybe the teacher talks for one hour and then you have a one hour ...

Tonight, Chrissie, Ivan and I are at this moment sitting in their apartment in Hackney with the front lights turned off in the hope that the over-privileged children who are now parading up and down the street dressed as pumpkins and witches, with their mothers, trick or treating, don't come to the door. In case any of the more intrepid ones do take the chance, we have water boiling on the stove and big syringes which can send steaming jets through the letterbox into their eager, upturned, ghostly faces. It will be 'Straw Dogs' all over again.