Visit the jigsaw

Given that we could not afford the painting, clearly time to visit the actual scene painted (see 27th December last for the last such visit to a place rather than a painting), only to find that the painter must have done something a bit tricky. We did not think that his scene was possible from the southern embankment, the angles being all wrong. But we were impressed by being under the wheel, it having been some time since we had been there. I wondered when they would have to do some maintenance on the axle, which some engineer told me was a marvel of steel forging, probably not something that we could still manage at home in the decline of our manufacturing industry - but at least it was pulling in lots of foreign tourist dosh to make up. So long, that is, that it does not all leak out to some shady haven in BVI, rather than swelling the national coffers.

But we decided to get to the jigsaw via Vauxhall Bridge where we were treated to the sight of a heron dozing on a bank. Just upstream of the heron there was an outfall, discharging something pretty brown and grotty looking into the Thames - a grottiness which was clearly in the eye of the beholder as a flock of terns thought it was just the thing for a spot of late breakfast. Pushing on we took our late breakfast in the relocated members' café at the Tate Proper, where my tea might have been made with leaf rather than bag but was pretty foul. The lady next to us thought that this was the result of using far too many leaves.

Next we paid a visit to the Lowry exhibition, taking advantage of our member's ticket which gets you in with neither ticket nor queuing, quite a big plus. Crowded, but not unpleasantly so. I did suspect one of the crowd of having having their earhole commentary turned up too loud, but it turned out that the curators had seen fit to include musak in the mix and the noise was coming out of official loudspeakers rather than unofficial earholes. Should they ask for my comments, which they sometimes do by email, I shall make a stiff complaint. I might also take the opportunity to ask if they could not find something better to do with the former sculpture hall than pretend to be the turbine hall downriver.

The paintings were much better than I expected, much more main stream, although I thought that sometimes he was being a bit lazy and just whacking them out by rote to pay the bills.

Many of the pictures were composed with sky at the top, mills in the middle and people scurrying along the bottom, the whole being framed by a strong kerb running along the very bottom. Strong horizontals to balance the verticals of the mills and their chimneys. Diagonal smoke to give the composition a bit of variety.

The people in some of them reminded me of Jack the Dripper. You need to be maybe 12 feet away to the get the effect.

Many of the frames were unexpectedly grand.

He must have made the most use of black of any famous painter. He must also have been rather odd, a thought which was subsequently confirmed by Wikipedia. Which also told me that Salford have seen fit to spend more than £100 million on a gallery to hold their holdings of his paintings: I wonder if this figure is right: it seems an awful lot for a cash strapped council to knock out on the local dauber. Has Wikipedia slipped up for once?

A lot of funerals.

We shall be back.

Thought to go to lunch at the restaurant in the entrance hall of No. 4 Millbank, a place at which I had been lunched by salesmen on several occasions in the past. I should have been alarmed by it not having a web site, although it did have a web presence, and when we got there found it had been rebadged as 'The English Pig' and was just shutting for the day, this being followed by permanent closure on Friday. But they do have a web site at http://theenglishpig.co.uk/. So no lunch there. Luckily there was the 'Quirinale' (http://www.quirinale.co.uk/) just around the corner, a very pleasant establishment in a sub-ground which gave us an excellent lunch at a reasonable price. A place which sold a good range of wine and a good range of Italian cheese. In fact, I don't remember being in a restaurant which took its cheese so seriously. They also served their cheese in small doses with a larger dose of bread, that is to say the right way around; so often you get a refrigerator cold brick of indifferent cheese with just a morsel of indifferent bread.