More wildlife in the flat woes. Think I made a tactical error in choosing this place: what appealed to me was the hobbit-hole-like nature of it: buried away in the corner surrounded by bushes and greenery. Unfortunately the bushes seem to be a breeding ground for wildlife of all kinds, and my borders are just too porous to keep them out.
This time it's a plague of huge black flies in the bathroom. Have no idea which of the many cavities they're coming from: I keep the windows shut and the extractor fan on. Walked in to discover about twenty of them buzzing around: they seem dopy and possibly stoned. Killed those (took a while) but a few hours later there were half a dozen more. Killed those, but there are yet more there this morning.
What creeps me out is that I'm going away today, back Sunday: will probably find the whole bathroom a seething mass of thousands of them...
Museums
Went to see the Turner Prize candidates at Tate Britain.
They seemed pretty crap this year:
last year
they had some interesting
stuff like Osama bin Laden's house and the mannequin on the trapeze recreating
a famous painting.
High-concept but dull to look at seemed to be the theme. One guy has a wooden shack that was apparently turned into a boat and moved before being turned back into a shack: still just looks like a shack though. He also has an electric bicycle. There's a painter who paints some bottoms, and black-on-black forest paintings looking like plain black to the casual glance. Also a video installation of one video of his grandmother looking vacant and nostalic at another video of close-up dancing at a place she danced at as a girl. Another guy had some plastic models daubed with paint and things stuck on them.
Maybe all the good artists are on sabbatical. Or more likely, last year's was a fluke. They got a lot of flak for nominees that were too based on issues and reality, so maybe this time they decided to go for hardcore just-the-concept conceptualism.
Recommendation: give it a miss, come back next year.
Me 2
Wedding Blessing Trip: Travelling way too heavy for an overnight stay. Don't fully trust these new, unworn shoes and clothes not to crap out on me, so carrying spare trainers <USian>sneakers</USian>, T-shirt and sweatpants. Annoying since there will be a certain amount of walking to get there.
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