Of Dead Cows, Guns and Popcorn

ST LUKE'S: At work doing O/T again. What did I do on the weekend? Seven hours of O/T on Saturday then a visit to the Wallace Collection. Flo, Lou and baby Milo came over to eat pizza and watch Glastonbury on Saturday night. Well Milo didn't eat pizza and it's debatable whether or not he was watching Glastonbury. Not enough drum n bass for the tot.

Yesterday we stayed in all day and watched films. Four in a row to be exact. Well it was raining. I haven't had a weekend, or even a day, at home in soooooo long that it just felt right to veg out in front of the couch. We watched the second Indiana Jones film, Elizabethtown, The Prestige and The History Boys. I also caught some of An Inconvenient Truth. Then we went to sleep. One long day of doing nothing.

The Wallace Collection was quite good. It's a relatively obscure little gallery tucked away behind a private garden just off Oxford St. towards Bond St. More like a stately home than a gallery, the collection includes some remarkable china, furniture, some Rembrandts, Dutch masters, some nice Reynolds and a few others, and the most amazing collection of weapons and armour I've ever seen. It was quite unexpected but very cool to inspect case after case of helmets with hawk faces, barbarous looking maces, daggers of every persuasion, swords from every army of the pre-Industrial world and full sets of armour.

On the subject of art work I visited one half of Damien Hirst's latest show at the White Cube on Hoxton Square on Friday. It was quite cool. I've never seen any of Hirst's stuff so even though the concepts are being repeated they didn't feel tired to me. There are sheep kneeling in worship, a cow imitating Saint Sebastian, and three Golgothan cows crucified at the back of the gallery. There were some abstract paintings on the wall that had razor blades, glass and blood embedded in their wild red paint and upstairs there were some life like paintings of Hirst's wife in the moments after she'd given birth.

And now here I am. Wasting somebody's time as I do O/T and wonder if the weather will pick up enough for me to run home.