The Victoria and Albert Museum once ran a series of adverts, proclaiming that it was an “ace caff (sic) with quite a nice museum attached“. Since then, it’s become a world-class museum with a really motherfucking swanky café attached.

My plan was that I would hang out during the day, doing some figure studies in the V&A’s sculpture gallery, and then head over to the Science Museum’s “Lates” night in the early evening to catch a lecture. After doing a few pages of chalk studies in my slightly-too-large to scan notebook (doh!) I felt the first pangs of hunger set in. This was bad news, as the V&A café is not only super-expensive and super-swanky, but also not a huge amount of fun to sit in – it’s loud, dim, and a little on the cold side.

However, I managed to get a sandwich and a coffee for under a tenner, and then realised that it was the only place in the museum that I could do a watercolour painting – drawing rules say that only dry media is to be used in the galleries. So in between throwing the sandwich into my mouth, I did a short watercolour of the cafés’ pianist.

Afterwards, I went back to doing some chalk studies. My Edinburgh-based friend Cassandra Harrison had sent the chalk to me, and I urge you to check out her blog to read about her ongoing position as a working artist. I was using them to get a handle on the figure, copying the marble sculpture, and had a really great time – I’ll probably go back next week, with a packed lunch.

Such was my fear of being kettled that I walked the long, non-enclosed route from the tube station to the front of St. Paul’s. When I got there I saw loads of tents, tied down, and a fair few people milling around outside. There was even a guy in a miniskirt doing Irish dancing on the steps of the cathedral.

I sat down and produced my first sketch, below, but while I was doing it a sparkly-looking London researcher came up and wanted to talk to me. I said I’d rather get on with my drawing. Then, after a little while, an aggressive dick with an iPhone tried to ask me some questions about why I was there, but I told him I’d rather do my drawing. Although really I didn’t want to talk to him because he came across like a dick.

Other than annoying media-types, I didn’t talk to anybody else at the protest. A policeman did say that the top sketch was “GCSE-standard” after peeking over my shoulder, but thankfully they didn’t ask to see my artistic license. After a few hours, I decided to go somewhere to warm up (preferably somewhere that wouldn’t make me feel guilty about buying a coffee) before headed to the DACS/Artquest talk about artists in the current economic climate.

(Above: view from cafe near Holborn)

I felt a bit rubbish at the talk, probably owing to sitting outside in the wind for so long, and so I again completely failed at talking to anyone. A regular billy-no-mates, that’s me! The talk was about how recession and government policy would affect artists incomes, and what tactics they should use to maintain income. Bob and Roberta Smith, one of the speakers, was massively scathing of the current government, but also produced the funniest line of the night, pointing out that “if your son or daughter (who is involved in the arts) meets another person involved in the arts… then penury ensues”.

Both in the arts and elsewhere, there is a growing sense that merely being dissatisfied with the current power structures isn’t enough. I’m not sure how that will shake out, with either the people at St. Paul’s or the arts community, but a friend told me that it was important that I stood up to be counted. Technically, I sat down and refused to be quoted, but maybe that’s good enough.  

Last week I went to London to see a gig by the effervescent Merrill Garbus, who performs as Tune Yards. This is really rare for me; I don’t usually go and see any live music, and I don’t usually go out at night. Like I said a few weeks ago, the evening is really the time I knuckle down and start making things, so I like to be at home making rather than out partying. I didn’t take my sketchbook, but I did take my camera. I snapped off this quick shot as we stood outside the gig.

One of the weirder aspects about returning to Biggleswade is that there are almost no people between 20 – 35. Back in Newcastle I  lived in areas that were mostly comprised of people in that age range, but now I’m back in the parental abode I can go days before having a face-to-face conversation with somebody in my age range. I often complain about this to the few friends I have here over a coffee. The Tune Yards gig was, of course, full of people in my generation, making me look like an overly grumpy fool.

About three weeks ago, I went to the SameAs.Us event in London, talking about art and technology. It’s taken me that long to drag my massive 2001-era scanner out of the cupboard and scan in these pictures from the event.

I solved the problem of not really being that good at paying attention to talks by doodling and sketching my way through the whole night – this also solves my problem of having to socialise with people. I just keep sketching when they declare a break for beer. It’s not that I’m shy, I’m just usually extremely worn out by getting to these events, and the evenings are my best time for drawing. I’m useless in the mornings. I usually count it as a success if I make breakfast and coffee before 1pm.

But all the interesting stuff happens in that sweet spot, of evening productivity, so I’m left with the option of becoming a weird bedroom-dwelling hermit or looking like a paint-stained freak in public. For now, I’m flying a small freak flag at some events.

The crowd was especially fun to draw, with the speaker being in the top left (Chris Thorpe of Artfinder, standing next to one of the hosts of SameAs.us, Kaitlin Thaney). Nearly everyone else was sat on the floor, so I had a good view of a wide variety of people, all sitting still. Handy stuff, if you want to do drawings of people. Even better than drawing people talking on their mobile phone – no pacing and hand gestures!

Another odd thing about fatigue is that after a certain point of tiredness, it’s hard to get a good nights sleep. During the night I kept waking up with an enormous headache, like somebody battering me with a steel bar. I woke up at six and fixed myself breakfast, before going back to bed for another few hours. That headache is still lingering around, occasionally rubbing up against the left side of my brain.

When I woke up for the second time, the post had brought my appeal against my medical assessment. Apparently, because my original medical assessment didn’t show that I had fatigue I don’t have fatigue. Yeah, and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club. Thanks a bunch, whoever was in charge of that.

The good news for the week is that I won’t have to pay to go back to university. Huzzah! Lets do a dance. A predator dance:

Truth

We spent a few hours catching up, and then I set off for Camden’s juggling shop, Oddballs.

I’m not really into Camden. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe I’m just not sold on the commercial aspects of the area, but it felt like I was walking into a permanent half-term. Coming up to street level I was looking at the folk heading down into the tube, and by my reckoning it was a ratio of roughly three kids to one tramp. Once I reached the surface I couldn’t work out how to split my ratio between kids, hipsters, tramps and aging punks, so I set off to the juggling shop by walking half a mile in the wrong direction.

After figuring this out the hard way, I turned back and eventually made it into London’s only juggling shop. It’s tiny, and I had to dodge not only somebody flinging some pink fluffy poi around, but a white guy with dreds and a black eye demonstrating the basics of 423. Juggling might be something I do as a hobby, but it really does attract the “skeezy geezer” type. I made my purchases and beat a hasty exit.

This means I now own a total of eighteen juggling balls. Five regular balls, three bouncy balls (one of which has disappeared), four large thuds and my six new regular thuds. Thuds are slightly squishy bean-bags which are named after the noise they make when they hit the ground. Unlike regular balls they don’t roll away, making them easier to find.

Of course, I can’t juggle 18 balls at once. On the Dancey juggling index, 18 balls in two hands has a difficulty of 8.5263. This is determined by the equation

d=b/(h + h/b)

where d is difficulty, b is the amount of balls, and h is the number of hands doing the juggling.

Using this equation, throwing a ball from one hand to the other has a difficulty index of 0.25. Therefore, anybody who learns to juggle 18 balls at once would be some sort of ubermensch of juggling. Anyone smarter than me who wishes to test my maths on this could check out Jack Kalvan’s paper on the subject, but everybody else could just check out this amazing example of teamwork:

After about five hours of being in London I was physically and mentally shattered. I’m still in recovery, and I know the price for this short trip is going to be spending the next few days resting on the couch, despite the fact I did very little whilst in the city. This makes me feel like mild-mannered Clark Kent, only without the interesting day job at the Daily Planet.

As promised, here is my review-cum-grizzle at Mashed08. This is prompted by the excellent Guardian piece here which you should go and read, as it’s not at all as self-interested as what I’m about to write.

Firstly, I don’t live in London. Perhaps the only reason I was interested in going to Mashed was the fact that I could get there for free, via one of the buses that they put on. However, the bus was an epic endurance ride that managed to brake myself, Brian and Alistair for the duration of the weekend, turning us into shallow stumbling wrecks.

The point of the weekend was to actually make something cool with technology, and while I was unable to do that I kind of see how it works. You see, most people who work with IT are phenomenally bright, and their salaried job only covers a small part of what they can do. Events like Mashed allow them to use their other skills to create fun things – which the BBC where hoping would be ‘fun things that have some relation to BBC products’.

There was talk that there should have been a lot more people at the event – at one point, I heard that 400 people hadn’t turned up. I don’t think this can be a fault of the event management team, as attending did involve sacrificing your weekend. Those that did turn up where fully laden with free gifts, up to and including the BBC beanbags that formed the bulk of the furniture at the event.

This makes a huge difference from art conferences that I’ve been to, where you might get a free coffee if you are lucky. Mashed not only had free coffee, but also free food all weekend, making it a world apart from any conference that I had attended before.

Perhaps that’s the rub for me; art is seen as such a peripheral activity that it receives no investment, and yet it is constantly surrounding us. There is obviously huge amounts of money in the combination of broadcasting and IT that Mashed represents, and yet it could be described as a much more selective interest.

(Brian’s short blog-post on Mashed can be seen here)

(Further update: Alistair’s post on Mashed can be seen here)