Fresh from Oz

A number of weeks ago, I had an unexpected mail from Karen. She was coming to Europe for a conference about museums…actually, the conference is in Istanbul but she’s coming to Europe as well. She had to firm up dates but wondered whether we’d want to get together at all. Seriously?

Well, she firmed her plans up, booked her flight and some accommodation and she arrived in London yesterday afternoon. Today we’d planned to have lunch so, at midday we met outside the main entrance of the Science Museum.

While in London, Karen has booked to see a lot of exhibitions and plays, one of which is called Decision by Belgian artist Carsten Höller. This is an exhibition I’ve wanted to see ever since I read about it, mainly because it features a big slide as the exit. Anyway, I was in charge of booking the tickets so we planned to go after work.

In the meanwhilst, we decided to try the creperie at the start of Exhibition Road. It was very French and the crepes were delicious. The only downside was the fact that they only sold Evian water which, of course, is very salty and slimy so we made do with tap water instead.

After a lovely catch up lunch, I said goodbye and headed back to work while Karen popped down to Harrods.

Decision is on at the Haywood Gallery (rapidly becoming a bit of a favourite gallery of mine) and the outside of the building has been redecorated a bit to accommodate the slide.

And it was brilliant. Talk about a fantastic end to an exhibition. As soon as I emerged from the tube I just wanted to go back up and do it again…but of course, you can’t. That is not the point. But that does get a bit ahead of the whole thing. Let’s go back to the beginning.

The first Decision one has to make is which entrance to use. In our case, it was the closest to the lockers. Also we hadn’t realised there were two and we just went for the obvious one. And it wasn’t far inside before we were plunged into darkness.

We were in a length of very tall duct work with no lights and many bends (and one curve which I missed completely). For anyone with claustrophobia or darkophobia, this would have been horrifying. It was an interesting way to start an exhibition. It was also remarkably long and twisty. It went up and down and, by the time we emerged, we had no idea where or how far we’d walked. There was a second tunnel that ran alongside, over, under and around the one we walked through. This must have been the tunnel through the other entrance.

The rest of the exhibition was the sort of thing that Bob would call Nothing Like Art. We thought it was a lot of fun. Sadly I didn’t go on the ride that flew in circles from one of the terraces because the wait was over an hour.

Sadly I didn’t miss out on the Upsidedown Goggles. Karen was very fortunate she couldn’t fit the goggles over her bun. These things sit on your head and turn everything upside down. They have to be one of the most diabolical things I’ve ever tried. I will NEVER do it again. The experience was made even worse by the fact that little kids wearing them are quite happy to run around. Apparently they adapt very quickly. They made me feel like swatting them.

There were so many great pieces (the Roaming Beds were another favourite) but I’ll stop there.

Having slid down the slide, we wandered around the South Bank market before, finally, settling down at Ping Pong for cocktails and dinner.

A lovely day in lovely company.