Well, I'm a bit behind on some of these blog entries due to In The City and various other bits and pieces that have been going on, so I've got alot to tell you!

First up, my recent trip to London! I was supposed to be going down for meetings and whatnot, but due to a combination of sickness, last moment changes and getting the dates mixed up, all my appointments were cancelled! And I'd got the 5.13am train! Oh no...

What's a boy to do when he's down south with a blank agenda? Why, soak up as much culture as possible of course!  

I struggled out of Euston station with the morning communters and plonked myself on a tube train down to Embankment.

A morning walk down by the Thames - a mucky, drab affair, full of litter and knackered boats, rain, and bored looking people (l liked it!) - followed by a coffee and a full English, and a plan had been formulated!

I'd been wanting to pay a visit to the British museum for some time, especially having enjoyed my morning in the Louvre in June. So I got myself down there and low and behold they had a rather fantastic exhibition on about the Aztecs which focused on their final 20 years prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Here's a fact - we shouldn't call them Aztecs, we should call them the Mexica (pronounced Me - shee - ca). And their final ruler, Moctezuma II, who has enjoyed a rather mixed reputation as the man who capitulated to the Spanish, was the focus of the exhibition and at one stage apparently had 150 Mexica women pregnant! Great scott, I thought!!

Blood thirsty lot, these Mexica, and no exhibition surrounding them is complete without mentioning human sacrifice, which played an important role in their culture. Cutting out a few thousand human hearts seemed to be the answer to everything in those days. Ah religion - both the cause and the solution to all humanities problems....

Anyway, I managed about two hours in the British museum and it was splendid, and I'll be making a return visit I'm sure. Its just full of countless, priceless treasure, it really is. I urge you to go.

Midday, and due to the early start it already felt like evening, and I made my way over to Camden. What a load of old crap, really it is. Its like a theme park, all gloss and no quality. The market is worth a look round, but would you actually buy anything from there? There's lots of shops, but again, not much worth actually buying. I guess its good for venues. The Proud Gallery is a great space, I hope we get to play there. The tourists seem to like it, though.

I got myself out of there pretty quickly, in case I got sucked in never to be free again, and made my way down to the Tate Modern. I love the Tate Modern, especially the Turbine Hall stuff - for those of you that don't know, that's the big empty space in the middle of the building, where they generally have some sort of installation. On this occassion, its Miroslaw Balka's "How It Is".

Its a giant grey steel structure holding a vast dark chamber, which in its construction reflects the surrounding architecture of Tate Modern - almost as if the interior space of the Turbine Hall has been turned inside out. Hovering somewhere between sculpture and architecture, it sits on two-metre stilts and stands thirteen metres high and thirty metres long. Visitors can walk underneath it, listening to the echoing sound of footsteps on steel above, or enter via a ramp into its pitch-black interior.

So I did!

And it was dark. Very dark.

Apart from all the tourists taking pictures of....what exactly...? The dark?? The wall? Who knows! But there were a lot of flashes. That was annoying.

I must admit it was rather marvellous actually, and worth a visit. You need to see it. Its hard to describe the power of the piece in words. I guess its the excitement of being in a very big, very dark place with lots of strangers, bit like the inside of a gay club. The fear of walking into somebody. The fear of the dark. The fear of the unknown.

We are not supposed to be in places where there is no light - human beings like light. I mean, the Mexica liked light so much that they made the sun a God and cut out human hearts to make sure it stayed in the sky!

And after all that, I still had the evening. Well, when it gets past 4pm and you've been up since 4am, I can't handle anymore culture so its time to drink booze - and where better than Soho! I found a rather marvellous bar called Ku Bar and parked myself on a stool for two hours and enjoyed watching the world go by. Well, what a honey pot of talent! Its amazing how engrossing bar work can be when its carried out by rather amazing, good looking people. I felt like I needed a cold shower when it was time to go. I certainly needed to sober up! The trip back to Euston was a stagger rather than a walk.

Fortunately, I'd brought a travel pillow and slept all the way home.

What a nice day.... and that's it really. Stories and rumours that might have been circulated by a certain irish dog groomer have been wildly exaggerated.

.... next up, the full report from this year's IN THE CITY....

Ben

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