Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 May 2005 19:12:49
So, I woke up to a variable weather forecast, and decided that I would risk it and do some outdoor culture. About 5 minutes after making the decision, the heavens opened. I wobbled, but decided to still go for it - if the weather wasn't too bad (it was forecast to improve later in the day) then it wouldn't be so crowded, and after all it *is* a Bank Holiday, and we don't have another till August (speaking of which, I bought my Greenbelt ticket yesterday, hooray!).
So off I toddled, to the ultimate London garden: Kew Gardens. I'd been there once before, but that was a good 20 years ago, so it was as good as going there for the first time. Being only an occasional tube-traveller these days I'd forgotten that Bank Holiday means a ton of engineering works, so it took me nearly two hours to get there, but once I got there boy was it worth it! I got a guidebook and decided to do the long summer walk, which takes in most of the park and all of the well-known sites. I took lots of pictures, but haven't put them online yet (I took so many it will take absolutely ages to download, but I will link to them later). I felt very similar to when I went to places like the Eden Project and the Natural History Museum - there's so much there you can only take a fraction of it in (even if you walk past absolutely everything), but there was a much larger feeling of looking round something incredibly significant and important. Of course the plants were the real stars, and my favourite bits included the rock garden, the Palm House, and the walk by the lake (though I was disappointed to miss the compost heap, which is somewhere near the lake but wasn't well-signposted). I also enjoyed that I was following a path and wasn't sure if I was on the right one, trying to find the Lilac Garden, and then I realised I could smell it before I saw the signs! Stunning (I love lilacs, though they had only just started to come out - I bet it'll be gorgeous there in a couple of weeks). I also really liked the Marianne North Gallery - she was an amateur painter who painted flowers in the 19th century all over the world. The walls of the gallery were absolutely packed with her paintings and she gave the impression of being gloriously eccentric, and even though the style wasn't particularly my cup of tea I loved the overall effect.
There was also a lot of glass about the place - they have just installed an installation by glass sculptor Dale Chihuly (details here) which will be there till the beginning of next year. Installations are in all of the main glass houses (Palm House, Temperate House and Princess of Wales Conservatory) and also in some other outdoor areas of the gardens. Some of them I really liked, and I thought worked really well in the midst of the plants (particularly his "reeds" and "herons"). But others I found a bit intrusive, in particular an installation in the Temperate House which looked like a load of balloons which I thought looked very out of place. But it was definitely very interesting.
The walk took in total just under 4 hours, as I took it quite slowly. So I still feel like I've had a good workout - my legs and feet are certainly aching for England! Although I possibly negated the effects by sitting in the cafe at the entrance and having a (rather large) chocolate brownie before I headed back home. Whoops.
The long tube journey gave me the chance to really get into my current read: Vikram Seth's "An Equal Music". I'm having an interesting reaction to this book, for long drawn-out reasons (!). In counselling recently my counsellor suggested that a lot of the emotions and general crap I'm beating myself up with is not so unusual (I'm convinced I'm the only weird one!) but features a lot in literature and art, and that perhaps I should think about immersing myself in a good novel or epic film and let myself feel the emotions from the point of view of an outsider and realise it's more universal than I give it credit for (that's the basic gist of it anyway, she put it a lot better than that!). I've been a bit reluctant, but decided to give it a go, and decided on this book for a number of reasons. Firstly, his previous novel "A Suitable Boy" is just about my favourite book ever, and secondly I've only ever heard rave reviews of "An Equal Music", and thirdly both of those things meant that I know that Seth is a profound enough yet approachable enough author that I could trust him to be wise and sensitive with the very raw emotions that are not that far from the surface with me at the moment (oh that sounds so poncey! lol). Anyway, I've now started it, and I've been amazed at how I'm relating to so many of the characters. With "A Suitable Boy", the characters were so out of my own experience (based in newly independent India, coming up to partition, the whole cultural thing around arranged marriage, plus it was such a long time ago that I read it that I had next to no relationship experience of any sort myself then) that I could read about them, and really care about them (in fact I couldn't put the book down as I so wanted to know what was going to happen to all of them) and get totally immersed in their lives, but I was still somewhat separate from it. With "An Equal Music", there is an awful lot that I'm much more familiar with (the whole classical music scene, the aftermath of breakups, awkwardness with family, all sorts of stuff) that with almost every page I'm feeling "I know exactly", and not just with one character but several of them, which means that I only ever dare read a bit at a time - there's only so much I can cope with, and although I do really want to know what's going to happen, I'm also really apprehensive about what might happen so always pick the book up again with trepidation. I don't know if I'm explaining it very well to be honest - anyway it's helping me to see, if not that I'm normal really, at least that I'm not the only one who's too complicated about things! I also think I'm glad to have read it now, rather than when it came out a few years ago - I think as a result of my own experiences and development I'm a lot more sympathetic to the characters and the situations they're in than I perhaps would have been a few years back. I'm having a week off counselling this week, which means that by next week I should have finished it, so I'll have to have a think about the stuff it's brought up and try to condense it into something meaningful for me.
Hmmm - not sure if I'm really selling reading for therapy here (think I'll go for something a bit lighter for the next book)! So to say: it's a brilliant book, beautifully written, and for a non-musician he writes just beautifully about playing and appreciating and loving and living music. Another one I'd recommend adding to your "Read This!" list if you've not already read it, for sure.
And going back to culture - just as a teaser, let's just say I've got a real treat lined up for June (I'm taking the last week off and staying in London, so inspired by Diamond Geezer who spent his annual leave last month doing loads of London culture I've got a number of things lined up). Really looking forward to it, and I've discovered a couple of places very near where I used to work that I didn't know existed which I can't wait to see. Watch this space :)