I spend a day among free wine, thirteen rooms of balloons and a skyscraper plan, all of them mostly air.
LONDON, England – I have been given one rule for the day by Marjorie, my editor, which is that I must leave the flat before noon and come back with a piece of culture, preferably one I can describe as “bracing”.
Stall Row, Early
I start at the market, where my friend Tilda runs a stall called Marla’s Pickles, named after a grandmother who, as far as I can establish, did not exist. Tilda sells jars of things in brine at prices that make you wonder what the brine has been through. A small jar of pickled onions costs the same as a pint, and the pint has a better story.
“Everyone wants a bargain,” says Tilda, “and nobody wants the thing that comes with a bargain, which is a cheaper onion.”
I buy a jar and carry it like a hostage. It is the most expensive thing I will own for the next two hours.
The Opening, Midday
At noon I go to the preview of an exhibition at a small gallery called the Thimble Rooms, down an alley in Hackney that I find only because the alley has a queue. The show is called Beige, and it is a retrospective, I am told, of twenty years of beige.
There is free wine, warm, in plastic cups, and a man in an enormous scarf telling a woman in an even bigger scarf that the third canvas is “an argument with absence”. It is a rectangle of oatmeal. I stand in front of it for several minutes and feel the absence arguing back.
While I wait in the line for the wine, I read the morning’s news on my phone. It is the sort of news that wears slip-on shoes. The Balloon Museum has opened next to the ExCeL centre, and it has thirteen rooms of artworks built from balloons and other bouncy things, which will run until the end of August next year.
The details are lovely. There is a glass box of giant blue balloons, a mirror room with spinning balloons, a ball pit and a bouncy castle. ianVisits describes it as more of a bouncy playground for families than a traditional museum, and offers one piece of advice: wear slip-on shoes, since you have to take them off for some rooms.
I compare this with the room I am standing in. Here, the art asks you to contemplate emptiness. There, the art asks you to take your shoes off and fall into a ball pit. I know which of these I would send my own family to, and I also know which one the man in the scarf would call “unserious”, and these are the same one.
A Short Walk With a Jar
I take the train towards the City, because Marjorie said bracing and the City has the wind for it. On the way, my friend Dev sends a message to the group chat that says only “have u seen the ai thing”. I have not, and I never have. Dev explains that his estate agent now has an AI that will value a flat in seconds. I tell him this is a perfect match for a farm site’s story about an AI that knows everything except tractor prices, because it will be confident, fast and cheerfully wrong about the one number that matters.
Dev replies with a shrug in picture form, which in our group chat counts as a full written statement.
Looking Up
I reach the Gherkin and stand at the foot of it with my jar, looking up at the sky where the neighbours are about to arrive. ianVisits has just reported that more details have been revealed for a new super-tall tower next to the Gherkin, replacing a 1990s office building called Exchequer Court on a long, narrow site.
The developer, AmTrust Financial Services, wants it to be almost as high as is permitted in London under aircraft restrictions. It has over 100,000 square metres of office space, public uses on the first seven floors and a free double-height garden on the seventh. The plans are only at the pre-consultation stage, with a formal planning application expected early next year, and the company hopes to finish by 2033.
2033! By then, Gideon will still be saying he is about to move out. The tower will have a garden in the sky, and I will have the same jar of pickled onions, still unopened because I will not be able to find a bit of the flat that is not already full of something.
I like that it is “taller but narrower”. That is also how I would describe most of the plans I have made for my own life.
Home, Evening
Back at the flat I set the jar in the fridge, where it joins the capers and Brenda the sourdough starter in what I think of as the committee. Honor asks how the day went. I tell her it was a day of balloons, beige and ambition, and she says that sounds like a normal week at any news desk.
If you want more of this kind of thing, my daily notes at The London Prat are there to be read. Anyone curious about the business of making jokes about the news for a living can look at the site that explains how we do it, or at the page of British news for people with a sense of humour.
I never did get the third canvas out of my head. I think it was an argument with a pickled onion. I think the onion won.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/