The village and The Village

Pirbright, 18th September 2006

When stranded at home for a long stretch, one has very few real options for entertainment. Pirbright is a pretty village, but fairly short on things to do. There are only so many times, for instance, that one can walk around a duckpond. And if you eschew, as I have chosen to this time, the brainrotting option of surfing my parents' 300-odd Sky Digital channels all day for half-decent music / Australian 'aerobics experts' in sports bras / catwalk models in their pants then it is fairly clear that in order to prevent one beating oneself unconscious in bored desperation, escape is highly necessary.

Luckily, for reasons historical that I will not bore you with now, the rather large cemetery over the road from my parents' house (2nd largest in Europe!) comes equipped with its own mainline railway station. In just 35 minutes, one can be in the centre of 'The Village' (as our nation's capital is often deprecatingly referred to, at least by my friends) where there is no shortage of anything at all to do, save perhaps breathe clean air. Thus it was that a little after 11 o'clock, I found myself picking a path through a few thousand dead Canadians, Americans, RAF pilots and British Muslims, and thence onto a train to Waterloo.

One hour later, after an amusingly haphazard walk through Theatreland, where although I was largely going in the correct direction, I kept finding myself two streets away from where I wanted to be (who needs an A-to-Z anyway?), I eventually pitched up at Virgin Megastore, Tottenham Court Road. I immediately deployed into grab-and-purchase mode, selecting five DVDs of crystalised Britishness in as many minutes. Meanwhile some load crashes and thuds and geetar noises from the basement alerted me to the imminence of a free lunchtime gig by the unwieldily-named Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. And they were quite good - they had a trumpet, a laptop, and a sound which reminded me somewhat at first of those Noel Gallagher acoustic numbers on old Oasis B-sides (not least because of the chap's voice), but then got faster, more trumpety and more interesting.

After hurtling back across town on foot, a little better directed this time, I romped breathlessly into the Tate Modern and into the exhibition on the 4th floor. Vassily Kandinsky and his 'journey into abstraction' were on the menu today; it could have been baboon arse paintings or another Barnett Newman single-stripe on canvas retrospective, and I still would have gone, mind you (I am still a Tate Member, having forgotten to stop the direct debit, and therefore I must strive to get my money's worth...) Kandinsky is famous for paintings of intricate squares, triangles and blobs and such which are supposed to represent abstract concepts, like motion or whatever. Here they had early paintings of his where he was actually painting 'things' - actual recognisable objects and landscapes. I liked those.

And then there were the ones from a few years later where he had gone semi-abstract, with squiggles and all that business amongst the identifiable people and horses and gubbins.

And then the even later ones where you should just give up trying to work out what the features are and appreciate the 'vitality' and 'movement'. These mostly give me headaches.

After I got myself a proper headache, I retired to the Members' Room on the 6th floor to join my fellow members of the Liberal Elite, sip my latte and gaze, stupified, at the magnificent view of St Paul's.

And that, excepting a nondescript train journey home, was that.