Friday was an interesting day. At work, everything was quiet again on the ‘real’ support front, but we did get no less than three ‘personal’ calls, of the ilk: “I’ve just bought a new computer and I want to do [this] with it.” We try to be as helpful as possible without actually volunteering to do any of the work ourselves…
There was also a bit of an explosion of Chorus politics at one point, where I was being accused of all sorts of wicked deeds. By the end of the day though I was receiving profuse apologies from my accuser talking about pressures of work and being caught at a bad moment. So we had a happy ending and peace was restored.
Friday night we went to see Sideways, which was a watchable enough movie. Can’t say I was overwhelmed by it, but it was an intelligent and subtle story and I was curious to see it, having read about it in one of the blogs I read.
Saturday, Brett was off to the inaugural rehearsal for the Chorus’ new Small Group. (One of the topics he was hoping they would discuss is a more interesting name!) While he was doing that I headed off into town to see the Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy.
The morning started off beautifully. We had a lie in and a lazy breakfast. The weather wasn’t unpleasant as I walked to the station and caught the train. When I changed at Waterloo for the Underground I had a rather surreal moment: I was listening to the opening [sample from here] of Vivaldi’s Gloria in D on my iRiver as I walked onto the main concourse and it felt so like the opening moments of a film: the titles have just faded away leaving the music still playing over a crowd scene. Any moment now, the camera will home in on the star and the story will be underway.
As it happened I didn’t go off on any adventures with the movie star of your choice, I just got on the Bakerloo line with the words ‘Soundtrack to your life’ ringing in my head, alongside Vivaldi. (That would have been such a marketing coup for whoever invented that slogan – if only I could actually remember the product it was used to advertise…)
Now you would think that the Royal Academy of Art would be pretty experienced at staging exhibitions. That’s what I had thought until I got there. In the courtyard there was the tail of a long queue and a girl wearing a
Shortly after I arrived she disappeared and I realised the queue was very slow moving for people who were just collecting tickets. Unfortunately there was no signage, no-one around to ask and I was loathe to leave the queue as a group of about fifteen people had joined behind me. So I stuck with it. For half an hour. I was mildly relieved, once I made it into the building, not to see any signs saying ‘pre-booked tickets here’ and so I waited patiently to get to the desk. When I finally did, the attendant was most apologetic and directed me over to the Information desk which, on closer inspection, did have a (very small!) sign about collecting tickets.
I did look for the girl with the Friends leaflets so I could have words, but she wasn’t to be seen.
To cut a long story short, at the Information desk I enquired after my Internet-booked ticket but, in the words of Little Britain: “Computer says No.” It took them another twenty minutes of incompetence to find it (Safely printed out and in an envelope behind the desk!) by which point I was ready to commit GBH on anyone else who got in my way and I was more than an hour later than I had expected to be.
I went and found a quiet bench to sit down and unwind a bit before heading into the exhibition.
The artefacts and the information about them were excellent. I would recommend the show, even if you’ve only ever heard of Ottoman sofas and never of the Empire, I think you’ll enjoy it. The artistry and craftsmanship displayed, particularly in the later pieces, was stunning in its beauty and intricacy.
An good example would be an Imperial Monogram of one of the Ottoman Emperors on display. It was a large piece of paper (about twice the size of most movie posters) on which was inscribed the massive monogram (more like a logo, actually) of the Emperor, done in perfectly wrought lines of gold and aquamarine. The beauty though, was that in between the wide strokes of the monogram itself were hundreds of tiny flowers, branches, leaves and geometric designs, mostly no more than 5mm in diameter; each one, hand painted and perfect. It was awe-inspiring to contemplate how many hours must have gone into it and how carefully it had been done. The smallest slip of the hand could have ruined hundreds of hours of work.
The exhibits were rather poorly lit though – the overhead nature of almost all the illumination meant that it wasn’t hard to throw a shadow over an object if you tried to examine it at close range. The exhibition was also very crowded (Saturday afternoon. What did I expect?) – but I got around that by using the booklets they had by the door of each gallery which contained all the artefact information in large print. So long as you could glimpse the number of the object, you could look it up in the booklet and examine it from the back of the case, away from the press of the crowd.
It took me three hours to get through with the exhibition, by which time it was time to go and meet Brett after his rehearsal. We went out for a drink afterwards with the group and Charlie, our Musical Director. We pretty much took over the top floor of the pub. After a pint and a lot of chat, four of us headed off to Norbury to attend John and Nick’s housewarming party.
I’d been a little bit wary of going to the party following yesterday’s conflagration, but in the end it was a good thing as there were lots of hugs, kisses and apologies – and the peace was reaffirmed.
It was a good party too. Amongst other highlights, Paul A and I reminisced about our various experiences in
I think it must have been the pint at the Black Cap beforehand that did me in, but by 9:30 I’d only had another four glasses of wine and was quite happily drunk. We made our excuses around 10:30 and were home an hour later. What a pair of lightweights!
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