A tour bus ate my hat

Cromwell Road, South Kensington is rather busy. There’s lots of traffic mostly consisting of tour buses, cabs and white vans. The traffic lights at Exhibition Road rarely give enough time to get across in one go which is always annoying for the thousands of tourists trying to get to the museums.

This morning, my first day back at work since early December, I was standing in the middle of the road on the conveniently placed central reservation when an inopportune wind suddenly whipped my hat from my head and threw it directly in the path of a tour bus which hungrily proceeded to take it away. I was very annoyed but there was nothing I could do. I’ll never see my Panama hat again (real sad face).

It was not the most auspicious start to my day. Things continued to be annoying when my cryptag didn’t work. This wasn’t entirely unexpected given my long absence. After a while, the system just deletes access rights until a person returns. Anyway, it was all fixed up by the end of the day.

Most notable about the trip in were the new concrete blocks along Exhibition Road, clearly meant to stop white van drivers from running people over. I thought they looked quite good actually and lots of people were using them to sit on.

The morning was mostly spent working out how I was going to be working from now on. There were a couple of issues which Nick at Work couldn’t answer so we put in a call to his boss who explained how the process was going to work. She adequately answered my questions by saying that there would be human intervention at some point after the Excel report was sent to MIMSY.

While I think it’s a bit unreliable having an IT person deciding which records need to be updated rather than me, I’ll just have to live with it. Though I know I’ll be double checking uploads every week…because I care.

At lunchtime I popped over to the V&A – I’ve really missed the V&A. And they’ve remade the gift shop. The whole place looks totally different. It’s much more like a boutique now; a lot classier. The new design works really, really well.

While there were a few new bits dotted around (they do swap things occasionally) I was rather taken by the work of Rachel Kneebone who is exhibiting various pieces throughout the museum at the moment. From her monumental 399 Days…

…to her considerably smaller The Solitude in Depth (2014)…

…her ceramic sculptures almost seem to writhe and twist before the viewer. The ‘almost bodies’ are merely parts of the whole, a physical Babel of feet, legs and torsos. They are the sort of works that one could stand looking at for quite a while, always seeing something different. I’d call them ‘arresting.’

Detail of 399 Days (2014) by Rachel Kneebone

After a delightful lunchtime wander (which I have missed…a LOT) I returned to the basement to do some actual research work. And, after deleting half a million emails and answering one query from February, everything returned to normal.

Going home hatless felt very odd.