DIY

Off earlier in the week to see Richard Deacon at the Tate, partly because his history in some ways echoed my own: born in the same year, maths and physics for A level, a penchant for collecting odd things (odd in the sense of it being odd to collect them, not that they were odd in themselves) and a penchant for not particularly useful DIY.

In the event, his generally large pieces had been well served by the Tate, being given plenty of space and light. Furthermore, despite it being half term the place was reasonably quiet, which was just as well as I don't think the interest would have survived a crush.

The wooden constructions were interesting and were also rather roughly finished, they did not have the sort of polish one would expect of a sculpture decorating the atrium of a large PLC. There was, for example, lots of glue oozing out of the joins of the laminations - several of the wooden constructions, although not that illustrated - being laminated, after the fashion I first saw on a DIY programme on television presented by Barry Bucknall (who, on looking him up in Wikipeda, is said to be of that odd species, a second world war conchy).

The construction illustrated was made, I think, mainly out of bent beech, in segments joined together by oddly substantial steel collars, perhaps needed to make sure that the thing held its shape. Interesting, but it the end, odd. What on earth would one do with such a thing, it being far too large for the house of anyone other than someone who was very rich? My thought was that it belonged in the garden where it could be used to grow cucumbers or nasturtiums. But even then one would need rather a large garden to show the thing off to decent effect. Perhaps a saving grace would be that it would not last all that long, being untreated and probably quite old wood. Also odd in that it takes a while to notice that the rings are actually pairs of slightly overlapping half rings; the eyes are not drawn to the overlapping at all.

I liked a rather more finished steel construction best: stainless steel and galvanised steel, a rather geometrical affair of interlocking triangular shapes, standing perhaps six or seven feet high, much better suited to a garden, albeit a reasonably large one, that that illustrated. The thought struck me that it must have cost quite a lot in workshop, tools and materials alone, and so must have been made when Deacon was quite rich himself, or getting fancy commissions. I didn't spot it among the large number of pictures offered by Google, but they did serve to show that quite a lot of his work has wound up in public spaces, clearly the right sort of space. There is also a great deal of it. Does the chap have a private income? Was he kicked off with family money?

Followed up by lunch at St. Thomas's where I had intended to show off the dispensary robot which had much intrigued me one evening while waiting there, now sadly consigned to the back of the shed where it cannot be seen, at least by the public. So instead we had our first, very reasonably priced, lunches out of brown cardboard boxes, and then off to the nearby Florence Nightingale Museum, which I had thought would be a museum of nursing generally (we have had at least four nurses in the immediate family, not to mention others on the periphery), but which turned out to be a museum about Florence (named for the town. And her sister was called  after Parthenopolis, an extinct Greek town near Naples). It was also a museum which had been converted from oldspeak brown display cases to something thought to be more suitable for children and there were certainly plenty there. But it was not more suitable for me and I would, I think, have preferred the brown display cases. But there was an interesting collection of photographs and other images with a nursing flavour, including, for example, some rather fetching recruiting posters from the second world war. There were also some devotional books involving Hebrew, although I was not able to find out whether that was among Florence's many skills.

Despite the many skills, for some reason I have a bit of a down on Florence, despite now finding her to have been something of a statistician, having picked up the idea from somewhere that she has had a rather better press than she really deserved, at the expense of others, such as Mary Seacole, a lady of whom I have only heard because one of the blocks in the Home Office building in Marsham Street is named for her. To be fair to St. Thomas's, their museum shop did carry a nice looking Penguin about her, which, on reflection, I should have bought.

PS: I close with a puff for Dropbox, a cloud file service I have used, mainly for backup rather than sharing, for some years. They have just sent out an email covering updates to their terms of service and privacy policy, which last gives fair and reasonable looking coverage of issues arising from the snowdon affair. See, for example, https://www.dropbox.com/transparency/principles.