Sower of London

Effectively, with extra days up our sleeve here in London, we could give ourselves a more languid pace, slow down a bit and just take each each day as it comes. That's a nice way to travel.

Clerkenwell is just across the railway bridge from Farringdon where we have elected to stay this trip. We walked there each morning for a cofffee and croissant at our favourite cafe Knockbox.

Today however, we dropped some washing off at the local laundrette in Clerkenwell, and proceeded to Cafe Fidelio (named of course after Beethoven's only opera). Cafe Fidelio is covered in pictures of composers and its walls are wall-papered in musical score. I felt very much at home as I drank my latte and read the score to some Schubert art song that he probably wrote when he was four. A couple of pics.

After, we tripped off to the Tate Art Gallery on the Thames just down from the Vauxhall Bridge. We didn't make it to the Tate last year, so I was pretty keen to get there to check at least part of its permanent exhibition. That's the thing with these large galleries here. They are so big that you cannot really take them in in one day. You have to pick a wing or a set of rooms and 'do' them and resolve to come back another day to 'do' the rest.

The Tate is the gallery that is devoted solely to British art. And there's plenty of that, so there's lots to see, going way back to the medieval period through the 18th and 19th centuries and up to the modern era, 20th century and beyond. We had a wonderful time there. We generally separate in any given room, maybe go in the same direction around it with one of us in front the other behind, or sometimes going in opposite directions.

The building itself is a work of art. It's all domes and arches, and beautiful corridors. A lovely place in which to house precious art. Of course, dealing, as it does, with those periods mentioned above, there is no getting away from the British Empire. And that means entering into an uncomfortable space these days as new ways of thinking of colonialism are now paramount in historical epistemology.

We are definitely in the post-colonial era, and post-colonialism is the lens through which we look at Britain's history with her former colonies, including of course, Australia. I was glad to see the Tate own this, acknowledging slavery, theft, dislocation, even murder in its official writing.

One young twink who clearly had a major in art history and who apparently worked for the gallery gave a talk about one of the major pictures of this era, The Death of Major Peirson 6 January 1781 1783 by John Singleton Copley. It was a good talk, and the young man delivered it with great panache.

He did think however that the inclusion of the one sole black person in the large painting was maybe a sign that the Empire was generous and magnanimous in its attitudes to colonials. They were not his words, but the feel was there nonetheless. I wanted to offer an alternate suggestion, but there is always one person in an audience like that, and on this occasion, I did not want to be that person, so I left it.

Some shopping and lunching in the city was followed that evening by a trip to the Hampstead Theatre in Swiss Cottage to see a performance of Anthropology, a very timely play about the presence and potential influence in our lives of AI. A cast of four women, written by an American playwright, this was an excellent night out at the theatre. Wonderful perfomances and some very chilling scenes were brought to life and really challenged us to think about the future with AI.

The story centred around a young computer scientist whose younger sister had gone missing a year before, presumed dead. As a way to cope she downloaded her sister's entire digital life into an AI program that could act and sound like her sister. However, things get very complex with the entry of the mother, the girlfriend and ultimately the 'dead' sister herself, 'miraculously' found by means of the AI. Spooky and troubling things ensue.

The theatre is a moderate sized auditorium with comfortable seating and a stage that you feel close to. A wonderful asset for that local community. Some pics.Read more