I love the
way that chocolate remains inert until you put it into your mouth and it gradually
reaches body temperature, dissolving into goo and working its eagerly
anticipated magic on the taste buds. If you like the stuff you would have been
delighted to come across, as we did by chance, thirty or more market stalls
displaying the produce of chocolatiers from far and wide. It was a spectacular
demonstration of the diversity and excellence of their skills but, unfortunately,
it was outdoors and, with a sub-zero temperature and a Siberian wind whipping
the canvas, customers were reluctant to linger. Although I admired the
confections, I didn't buy: it was too cold to take my gloves off and fumble
with banknotes and, in any case, I had begun to doubt if my own body
temperature would ever return to the requisite level.
We were on
London’s South Bank, en route to catch the exhibition called Light Show (a
phrase I still associate with early Pink Floyd concerts). It’s a pot pourri of electric-light
art installations made during the last 50 years and it’s very popular (advance
booking required) but, while some of the pieces are certainly intriguing, its
classification as art is debatable: the attraction seems to consist mainly in
the spectacle of coloured lights. Back up North we are quite familiar with this
phenomenon: the annual Blackpool Illuminations (no booking required) are a
hundred times more spectacular and have been drawing millions of viewers every
year since 1879. However, the one thing the Light Show did demonstrate is that
advances in technology do not necessarily equate with imaginative leaps forward:
those psychedelic slide projections of the 60s still shine brightly in my
consciousness - although that may have something to do with the circumstances
of the time.
Our next
stop was the National Theatre where we watched a gritty Northern drama played
out in front of an effete Southern audience. Despite the authenticity of the
dialogue and the accents (I lived 20 years in the place it was set) the
audience needed no explanatory sur-titles because Northern TV dramas have long
since prepared the ground. Although the actors deserved the enthusiastic
applause at the curtain, to my mind the production contained more grit than
drama and scarcely justified our journey from the real-life setting to the
staging.
The next day
we set out for a stroll around central London but, with the wind so cold that
it hurt our faces, shelter soon became a priority and we found it in Boca di
Lupo, an Italian restaurant in Soho. The excellence of this place must be in
part a consequence of the fierce competition in the area. Customers here are
too sophisticated to be palmed off with pale imitations of stock dishes,
pantomime Italian waiters and special offers. Consequently a breed of
establishments has evolved, like this, so stylishly Italian it almost hurts. As
we ate, our journey South no longer seemed so futile.
After lunch
it was the strikingly handsome face of a North American Indian, rather than the
promise of shelter, which attracted us into the National Portrait Gallery. His
face stares down from posters and is one of a series of portraits, painted in
the 1830s by George Catlin, who made several expeditions into the western
United States to document all the tribes and their traditions. His work is not
only an invaluable pre-photographic record but also evidence of his personal empathy
with a people that, in his own words, “had been invaded, their morals
corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed and, therefore,
lost to the world”.
He
subsequently made his living touring the paintings, along with an entourage of
Indians - and their tepees - around America and Europe. While not considered to
be an A-list painter, audiences nevertheless flocked to his shows and, whilst we
can’t be sure that they shared his sympathies, we can be sure that people then loved
a spectacle - just as they do nowadays.
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