Tarting around at the Tate

20 March 2007

Walking along by the river Thames we stopped here and there to admire various sights such as a big pirate ship, our own shadows and the Globe Theatre. Despite having studied English Literature to A Level and being fairly down with the Bard, I’d never seen the Globe in real life. It’s big, white and round.

Lauren took me to the Tate Modern, an enormous brick building on the river bank, with an even more enormous chimney stuck on the front of it. Like the world’s biggest crematorium, I thought. The building used to be a power station, so my formidable powers of powerfulness suggest to me that this somehow explains the chimney. We went in to the building, but not before I had made a lame joke about photographing large erections.

In the big foyer are three enormous spiral slides. They’re art, but art you can slide down. Having read about them in the paper some time ago (I’ve got my finger on the pulse) I thought it might be rather fun to experience, but the moment I saw the tallest slide that idea left my head. It was unbelievably high and (crazy) people were whooshing down it at great speed before being spat out of the end. I was content to just watch them before wandering off with Lauren to the restaurant on the nth floor.

We decided against the wait for a table, but took advantage of the amazing view of the London skyline through the glass wall. Bridges across the Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Gherkin were all in beautiful March sunlight. We’d been creeping up on St Paul’s during the day and each took home about a bajillion photos of it. The first photos were a bit “hey, look there’s the top of the cathedral, barely visible between those other buildings” and gradually we got closer and closer as we walked around before we were finally standing right in front of it, so close that we couldn’t fit it all into the frame.

But anyway, back at the Tate we went down a floor or two and grabbed ourselves a couple of bottles of pop at the coffee bar and rested our weary feet a while. A quick stop to spend a penny (actually not that quick because I feel the need to take pictures in bathrooms nowadays, thanks to Rayne) and then onward. In a gallery overlooking the foyer and slides was a bright red plastic desk with pencils and postcards. The Tate wanted to know what else we the visitors would like to see and invited us to drop our postcards into the box with our ideas and our own art. At this point I would like to apologise to the Tate for the rubbish we dropped through the slot.

Don’t forget: 7 Days starts on Saturday 24th March!