Final days in London

Our final days in London passed quickly.

Wednesday morning we headed off by bus to Islington to visit the Victoria Miro Museum in Wharf Road, a contemporary art venue with a fairly minimalist style. The gallery was presenting an exhibition of Paintings and mirror installations by Yayoi Kusama. The installations were all quite breathtaking, but required the suspension of intellect to allow the imaginative force of the visual spectacles created by mirrors and light to emerge and suffuse experience. I found this harder than one might imagine, but once you let go, the visual panorama created by Kusama has the appearance of infinite presence. In once case, she created an immense world of lit cityscapes, quite amazing. another installation involved scores of floating silver balls slightly smaller than basketballs, al mirroring each other and the gardens and us the observers. Her paintings were very similar to western desert acrylic dot paintings, swirls of abstract shapes and colours.

From there, we walked to Ottolenghi's Islington café for lunch, which was superb.

Then into the city on foot, eventually arriving, almost serendipitously, at the Sloane Museum, a rather idiosyncratic, indeed one might say eccentric or bizarre, collection of statues and objects from ancient Rome and Greece, filling this small three story house near the city to overflowing. Sir John Sloane, who lived and collected in the late 1700s, was an architect, and had a clear passion for classical sculpture and architecture. When I suggested to a young attendant that he must have been quite eccentric, she courageously disagreed with me, quite politely, and suggested instead that as the collection was designed to be a teaching aide for classics students who might not easily get to Rome or Greece, he was clearly very public spirited and not eccentric at all.

That was enough for the day, and we headed home arriving around five pm. The evening was largely spent packing up.

Thursday was quiet. We checked out, dropped our luggage at a storage facility in St Pancras, and then walked to St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square to hear a short choral concert on sacred opera music. It was very enjoyable.

Afterwards, Boronia went shopping for fabric while I paid a short visit to the National Gallery. From thence, we headed back to St Pancras, picked up ur luggage and headed to Heathrow.

Our flight home was unexceptional, albeit very long.

We departed Thursday evening at nine thirty pm, stopped in Dubai for an hour, and then onwards to a very wet Sydney and thence to Canberra. We arrived around nine am Saturday, thirty four hours after we took the train to Heathrow. Despite the wet cold weather, it is great to be home!