Respite Relaxation
8 August

The week at work ended with more upset.

Those six people who are being asked to leave have now been told specifically who they are. However, they are being asked to work their thirteen weeks notice. As one designer put it, I've been told I'm not required and yet I'm working flat out on three projects. It just feels wrong. And it also feel like a very high risk strategy. The gamble is that, if people find jobs within that period, then Connect won't have to pay them redundancy money. The other gamble is that they won't take information with them, create a poor impression with prospective customers or further lower the workplace morale for the rest of us.

So, it was with great glee that I woke up on Friday morning and prepared to head off to London for a solo jaunt and a bit of respite relaxation.

Round about breakfast time, however, I finished off Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland. There were two precedents for wanting to read this book. Firstly I had rated the movie based on the novel very highly. Secondly, I had enjoyed Ladysmith by the same author, earlier this year.

Books and films often don't mix. If you've liked one version then the other doesn't suit. This as a rare exception. The basic narrative is the same but the purpose is different. The film's aesthetic is that of an adventure story - how will the hero escape? The book is a longer, slower meditation on the nature of evil and how easy it is to be complicit.

There's a lot more in the book about the main character's early days in Uganda setting out how ordinary life was and there's a passage at the end about dealing with his life once he got back to Britain. Neither of these episodes is covered in the film. So, the book is a fuller experience and one that is exceedingly well written. Definitely worth three and a half stars.

The Virgin Pendolino delivered a smooth two hour journey. I did some typing as we travelled and thought it a bit bumpy compared with German railways but then we were travelling at over 100mph rather than nearer 50mph. I booked into the George Hotel, my cheap and cheerful near Euston and then headed off into town.

First stop was Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery's free exhibition entitled Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries about the science of authenticating the provenance of paintings from yesteryear. It covered out and out fakes, works which had been touched up and altered, works which had been changed as a part of the creative process and complete misattributions. I can't say that I found it any more than mildly interesting however.

From there I walked down to Piccadilly for the Royal Academy. I've been to a number of excellent exhibitions there over the years including the amazing Aztecs exhibition of 2003. Currently on offer was Sargent and the Sea. Like the artist's work, the exhibition was small and attempting to be perfectly formed. It spoke of the leisured and cultivated worlds of those existing on existing money. It spoke of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

I liked the works showing the play of light on the Atlantic ocean, I liked the series of works committed to canvas at Cancale in Brittany and in particular the studies leading up to En Route pour la pêche. I was very taken with the quality of heat and light in A Boat in the Waters off Capri. But you'd have to say that it is all very minor stuff no matter how skilled it is. So, enjoyable but hardly earth-shattering.

I filled in time.

I went for a coffee at Prêt à Manger. I read my book (Black Swan Green by David Mitchell which I first read in 2007). I discovered that they didn't have any toilets for patrons on the premises. I asked if that was legal given that people were sat down eating and drinking. I was told that it was kind of weird. I replied that I hadn't asked if it was weird; I had asked if it was legal. Anyhow, I grabbed a bus up Oxford Street, sought out John Lewis and found relief there. I checked out HMV a little further down, classical section is still extensive if half the size it once was. I bought nothing however. Then a tube to Notting Hill. I ate at a not very wonderful Italian bistro called Sugo. A quick bus up the road and I was at Holland Park.

I was there to see Verdi's La forza del destino, a work I've not seen in nearly twenty years. It was a splendid, rip-roaring success, modest in its budget and scope compared with a big company production but far more attuned to the spirit of the work.

I'd heard Gweneth-Ann Jeffers two years ago in La Gioconda. Peter Auty was a revelation in the tenor rôle of Don Alvaro. A few years ago, as he was starting a major career, he was thought of as having a bright but small voice. Well, he and his voice have certainly grown in stature. There was a real ping to his sound and a real line to the style of his singing.

Mark Stone matched him all the way as the vengeful Don Carlo. There strong contributions in the minor rôles from Donald Maxwell as Fra Melitone, Carole Wilson as Preziosilla and, particularly, Aled Hall as Trabuco - a rôle which felt very like the chancer Thénardier in Hugo's Les Misérables.

The conductor Stuart Stratford allowed the work to flow, ebb, peak, trough. Director Martin Duncan kept the narrative moving and Alison Chitty's designs allowed for swift, cinematic cross-fading between scenes. All of which is essential in a piece whose narrative sprawls across time and geography and which gives an act's rest to each of the three major principals. Nevertheless, there are wonderful moments of vigorous ensemble, stirring duets and achingly beautiful solo moments. The chorale La Vergine degli angeli which ends act two is one of my favourite moments in all Verdi.

But I can't honestly say that it's one of my favourite Verdi works though this production made one of the best cases for its depiction of a society crumbling through savage war whilst its protagonists inexorably move towards their fate through the force of destiny. There are two versions of this work. The first was premiered in 1862 in St Petersburg. This is the one which gets a mention in the programme on sale at Holland Park. At the end, all three principals are dead with Don Alvaro committing suicide by throwing himself off a cliff.

Up until now this is the version that I have seen each time I've attended the work - and each company, Welsh National Opera in 1982, Scottish Opera in 1990 and English National Opera in 1992, has told me that I'm getting a rare chance to see this version. What Holland Park Opera gave me, quite unannounced, was the later version premiered in Milan in 1869 in which Don Alvaro lives on, crushed by remorse but seeking some sort of peace through atonement. And somehow that ending made much better psychological sense to me rather than the earlier blood and thunder, let's slaughter the lot of them.

A good night's sleep followed by a typical George Hotel English breakfast and then I made my way down to Millbank.

My prime reason for wanting to visit Tate Britain was to see the Rude Britannia: British Comic Art exhibition. This, I suppose, follows on from the James Gillray exhibition that I saw here nearly ten years ago. It was a fun way to spend 45 minutes or so, though I really only laughed out loud once and that was at a specially designed room sized mock-up of Viz and, in particular, at the cod letters page (so, come to think of it, I was laughing at a verbal rather than a visual joke which maybe says something about me).

I had a coffee and a sit down in the Members Room followed by a mooch around. In the Entrance Hall, were two sculptures by Fiona Banner using life sized military aircraft, a jaguar and a harrier - one was suspended nose-down from the ceiling; the other had been flipped over onto it back. And yes you could see the beauty of their lines more easily when they were taken out of context but they were still military aircraft.

I also hunted out an exhibition highlighted on the Tate's website entitled Art and the Sublime but this turned out just to be a particular room hanging within the classic British collection - hardly an exhibition; more a thematic re-grouping following a re-hanging in the Clore Gallery.

Bus, tube, walk, getting around London can take some doing. I ate at a chain eatery called EAT: The real food company on Bankside and, yes, the goat's cheese and sweet potato pie was very nice if a little difficult to cut up with a plastic knife and fork.

On to Tate Modern for an exhibition of project work by Francis Alÿs. I'd first encountered this artist's name by chance in a small exhibition called Portraits of Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery last year. I found a whole exhibition of his work more problematic. I think that I would rather encounter it project by project rather than as a complete retrospective.

So, for example, I was totally captivated by the film of the sheep being herded in a circle round a column. I loved the film of a car being driven up a dusty hill to the soundtrack of a brass band's rehearsal Rehearsal I Tijuana 1999–2001. I was gobsmacked by the footage of the artist dashing into the heart of duststorms and small tornadoes in order to find the still quiet space in the centre. I was very taken with the film of 100 students walking over a large sand dune outside of Lima digging as they go so as to move the whole dune When Faith Moves Mountains Lima 2002. There was a whimsical futility to the video of the artists pushing a block of ice around Mexico City whilst it melted Paradox of the Praxis 1 Sometimes doing something leads to nothing Mexico City 1997.

I like the simplicity of these large scale activities. I think they have a poetry of their own. But I don't think that seeing them in one lump helps any of them. And, of course, you are not seeing the artwork itself - simply a video memory of it all. In that respect, it was a bit like the Land Art exhibition of work by Richard Long which I saw here a couple of years back. So, for me this was good but problematic.

Even though, it was still quite early in the afternoon, I did not fancy any more input. I'd considered going to a matinée performance at the National Theatre. But no, I needed downtime.

So, I went back to the hotel, wrote for a bit, listened to some music, lay down, fell asleep for an hour, woke up, showered, went and had something to eat at Prezzo on Euston Road and then got the tube out to Holland Park for my second opera of this visit.

This one was the real rarity - Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini, first performed in February 1914. Let's be honest, everyone did their best by the work but it really is an odd mixture. The critics all went on about Wagner. I heard Debussy, Respighi and, late on in the evening, Delius. But really, I should have just been experiencing the work for itself.

Cheryl Barker as Francesca and Julian Gavin as Paulo gave of their best. However, the structure of the work places them at the sidelines rather than in the centre of things. I liked newcomer Kirstin Sharpin in the thankless rôle of the maid, Samaritana. Jeffrey Black was a bit gruff as the Gianciotto and Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts was crazily evil as Malatestino (he was Peter Grimes for Opera North). Phillip Thomas was a reasonably effective conductor and Martin Lloyd-Evans direction wasn't exactly inspired but wasn't deadly either. Jamie Vartan's completed the reasonable experience.

On this showing, however, I couldn't see myself seeking out this work for a second viewing.

Next year, Opera Holland Park offer up Mascagni's L'amico Fritz and Catalani's La Wally. I should love to go to at least one of those. However, I've just done a complete schedule of costs for this trip. Once you've added in travel, hotel, subsistence, gallery entrance and catalogues, opera tickets, programme books, etc, then the total comes to the best part of £500.

I could have trimmed my travel and subsistence a little and not have bought exhibition catalogues (nearly £80 there) and brought that total down to near £350. But still. It makes you think in these straightened times.

Once home, I completed Black Swan Green. I enjoyed it very much. It's a very easy read - less complicated than the other novels by David Mitchell which I've been reading this year. The idea of multiple perspectives is still there but subsumed into a narrative structure which is a sort of diary of the year 1982 and the thirteenth year of the narrator.

The states of transition are caught well. The narrator knows and understand more by the end of the book than at the start. However, I still stand by my starred verdict of 2007; that this is a three star novel and no more.

I've got a couple of days for a bit more relaxation now before I'm due back in work on Thursday.