think of a day

As I saw the hands of Deptford town hall clock hit midnight this morning I realised that I had had possibly the surrealist day I'd had in a long time. Surreal, but maybe just crazy and very long.

At 10am my day started at London Bridge where I bought a homeless guy a cup of tea and discussed how waiting for it to cool down was a better option than asking for more milk. Then I met my friend Dan, the one with whom I talk well and am inspired by. We walked from tower bridge to the Tate, stopping to go up to the top of City Hall, seeing the cannons fire at the tower of london. And as usual we discussed grace. We discussed voices. Voices that tell us different things about God and faith and how it's our task to find our own path (how postmodern does that sound?) through them. At the Tate, we did, literally, bizarrely, that.

The new installation piece in the Turbine Hall is of many voices coming out of speakers and you walk through them, trying to hear. Physically, we were experiencing our conversation.

I left Dan at 1 and met Jon, designer, (hmmm...knowing that he'll read this, what shall I say...) extrordinar and also designs a national christian student magazine. We had coffee-or rather he did and I had one of those raspberry tea things-and discussed stuff. just stuff. Purpose of the meeting was that I'm taking some photos for the magazine and wanted to see a lense he had which, incidently didn't fit my camera.

At 2 I walked over millenium bridge, falling for the 328th time in love with the South Bank and it's concomitance of architectural marvels, and onto St. Paul's where I wandered, saking it in and trying to find the Old Bailey, for photographical purposes. After, going into Clinton Cards (bad publicity coming up...go on, sue me) and being told I couldnt take photos of their teddies for an article on valentines day-boo hiss, I found the Old Bailey and with 300mm zoom, shakily took the statue for a law article.

Down in the tube, I travelled to Tottenham Court Road in search of more places that might have cheesy love type things. No luck. I found myself in Hamleys. Damn it. Such a laborious task. I spent a rather excited hour photgraphing teddies and barbies and discovering that they still sell My Little Ponies. I bought one. And I've decided it would be fun to be 7 again. Doing all this london thing by myself for a couple of hours was the therapy I've been missing. It's possible to spend too much time with people. Even for me.

Whilst waiting for the pictures to develop I wandered. Saw the lights. Saw the crepe man that my friends had crepes from after one awful night out waiting for a night bus. Only the distrctions of the crepes meant we missed the bus and had to wait an hour, got fed up so walked to Trafalgar square anyway. So I saw the same man outside the same shop and relsied I where I was. I randomly laughed out loud. He looked at me with panned expression and said 'Crepe?'

In Borders I engrossed myself in some photography monographs and an incredible book of photos of England. It's meant to be sterotypical cliches and in many ways it is but there's just too mnay things that I recogised as the England I know and I, again, was laughing out loud. Enjoying my day rather too much, I picked up the photos (realised why tripods were invented-for those using long lenses and shaky hands like myself.) and heading bakc to the Tate to meet Jon.

Ok. this story is taking far too long to tell and it's losing it's dramatic appeal and hilarity that actually was. Tomorrow I will finish.