15 September
Time Off

It's been a while since we last had a good laugh together.

So, to take us into the autumn season, here's a photograph sent to me by Roland which purports to emanate from Disneyworld.

This actor amply demonstrates the efficacy of wearing an athletic support under your tights. I'd place a healthy bet that his impersonation of Dumbo was the talk of the staff Christmas party.

I should have been down in London this week but the training I was to have been delivering has been postponed until October. Instead, I've taken the time as annual leave and have been doing things in and around the house. And I've been avoiding the commemoration programmes for 11 September. I don't see any reason to be so sentimental given the monstrous nature of current American foreign policy.

The decorating in the kitchen does not continue apace but does continue. It's painful stealth is the product of my lack of ability. I rely very much on Ross's judgement but it doesn't feel as though he sticks around very much whilst I am working at present. Still I'm sticking at the filling and sanding and burning the paint off the kitchen cupboard.

The gardening continues. We took a trip to Lady Green Nursery and ended up buying some rather nice garden furniture.

Our rather cutsie neighbour, Jamie, was rather scornful of us buying this at the back end of summer. However, it will be around next year and the year after.

Jamie occasionally provides us with a living peep show when he takes a shower in the late afternoon. The angle of the sun hitting his bathroom window removes the opacity fully revealing a rather splendid upper torso. Ross claims that the effect is even better in the dark of nighttime with the lights on indoors inside the bathroom. One of these nights he will freeze to death in the back garden waiting for the lights to go on.

The highlight of the few days, however, was our trip to the opening of the Liverpool Biennial at Tate Liverpool in the Albert Dock complex. Ross is a Tate member so we got a free invite to the private view with an assisted tour of some of the main installations.

Here's some impressions...

• Fred Tomaselli's patterned compositions comprising pills, leaves, etc trapped between layers of transparent resin were initially arresting but ultimately bland, showy, superficial fayre;
• Nikki S Lee's photographs of herself in a variety of different identities which she plays out were intriguing but somehow failed to move me;
• Clare Langan's video work was just astonishing, poetic, beautiful, disturbing, mesmeric, holy;
• Juan Fernando Herrán's lead rocks surmounted by tiny figures produced a set of moving micro worlds which became all the more thought-provoking when we learnt that all the scenes depicted there were inspired by actual events in the ongoing struggle with the drugs trade in his native Columbia;
• Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi's monumental posters based on Hollywood iconography were initially arresting and supremely artfully crafted but really only held their power for a moment before their total secret was released - art for the marketing led generation;
• Guillermo Gómez-Pena's work was extreme and self-advertising - art for those who like to be shocked but little else and
• Francesco Vezzoli's video based on Cocteau's La Voix Humaine and starring Bianca Jagger was totally absorbing.

Notably, all the things I liked were trashed by the art critics in the press as being old hat and derivative whilst the work I hated was cheered to the rafters. So, I must be on the right track. We will certainly have to return to the Tate and go and see all the other stuff around the city.

And we finished the night off with an excellent meal in the Tate restaurant. The two of us could do with many more shared nights like that. In former years we would have rounded the whole pleasant experience off with abundant and arousing whoopee. Sadly, no longer.