Staring Fifty Feet Up Into Your Own Eyes

Well, I had an interesting day in London yesterday. More fiddling with supercomputers, and more importantly, the interesting and colourful pictures I had got them to produce.

Just don't talk to me about fluid mechanics, okay? Not that you were going to.

I finished kind of early, but not so early that it was possible to make it back to my own office by the end of the working day, so I decided to have a bit of a walkabout. Starting off near the Barbican, I wandered down to St. Paul's Cathedral in a light but refreshing drizzle, across the Millennium Bridge and into the Tate Modern.

Now, I appreciate that you might not have been to the Tate Modern, so let me give you a brief desciption. It is housed inside an old power station on the South Bank, and from the outside it is an enormous brown brick box with a cloud-reaching chimney. Inside, half of the building is your traditional museum/art gallery setup - labyrinthine galleries and staircases combined with symbolic signs that point everywhere and go nowhere, but the other half is just...space. A huge cavernous hall with epic concrete piled walls and the original lifting gear - this used to be the Turbine Hall, the name it retains. This huge space is used for one-off exhibits, unique pieces of art.

I could tell you how big I think the place is, but the numbers would be meaningless. The strange thing is, because of the majesty and general impressiveness of the place, whatever the artists do to it always makes me laugh.

The exhibits are clever and sometimes ingenious, brilliantly affecting the space itself, but it goes beyond that. They are imagination and fantasy writ large, and two facts get to me - one that someone somewhere had to pitch them..."Well I want loads of money to build a fuck-off massive red trumpetty thing, three hundred metres long, with a longboaty bit in the middle and a kinda crocussy bit at this end...", and two; that after the artist has changed the space, warped it, made it art or unreal or whatever you think it is, chlidren are always very at home there. It's as though they are comfortable because this kind of thing is what goes on in their heads all the time...

The piece that is in there at the moment stretches the size of the hall even further. Three quarters of the way up to ceiling is a false ceiling made of mirrors, increasing the sense of space by half as much again, with the added wierdness that you can see yourself wandering around up there. At one end of the hall is a large semicircle of orange light...it just does something to the space.

This picture was taken with my phone from the bridge in the middle of the hall. The marks on the ceiling are the reflections of people lying down and generally basking in the place.

I went down and joined them, sitting with my back to a girder, lost in my own thoughts, dipping in and out of my book, not really concentrating. Some bugger started taking pictures of me.

Leaving and walking along the South Bank I bumped into someone I met through RAG at Warwick, which was cool...I love it when you get one of those 'Hey, that person looks familiar...' moments...and it is them.

After ploughing through the disappointing selection of 2nd hand books under the bridges, I nipped across the Golden Jubilee Bridge, and started stomping up towards North London. Greenhamster called just before I hit Euston, we met at Picadilly, where we barricaded ourselves in a pub and didn't come out until...well, until we got hungry, really.

It was good to link together places and things I've seen only as small areas that I know surround certain Tube stops...a sort of joining up the dots. From actively disliking the place a couple of years back, I am now keen to live in London.