Last Saturday
was a cracking day to celebrate my 42nd birthday. The sun was
beating down from a clear blue sky and just as we were leaving the house, the England
cricket team was regaining The Ashes, Stuart Broad’s incredible bowling figures
on the previous Thursday, will live long in the memory. A short train and tube
journey brought us to Bermondsey and in no time we were at Maltby Street
Market. This was our first visit to the market and it is a really good place to
hang out. The cavernous railway arches house specialist food stores, including
coffee companies, a honey manufacturer and a bakery, from which we bought a
croissant loaf – nice. There are also cheese experts, micro breweries (home brew
specialists) aplenty – beards ahoy – and a wicked little Japanese food counter
selling Gyoza. There is a bustling street food market known as Ropewalk, which
is jam packed with stall holders and punters which had a buzz and busy-ness
about it that reminded me of how Camden used to be back in the day, albeit on a
much smaller scale and minus the rare grooves. A toasted cheese and onion
sandwich, served up by a chirpy vendor, was washed down with a bottle of mead.
Mead, indeed!! I had bought the bottle thinking it was lager but I can now
claim to have drunk a honey-based concoction, which is closely associated with
medieval banquets. Pigs head on a platter anyone? The mead was extremely sweet
and whilst not bad, I shan’t be rushing to drink any more of it.
Next on
the agenda was a walk along the Southbank to the Hayward Gallery and the
Carsten Holler exhibition ‘Choice.’ The
most memorable moments were entering and leaving. Everything on show is part of
an immersive, interactive installation and your first choice is to walk through
one of two doors, into a pitch-black tunnel. The occasional dim LED light or
faint crack in the wall, allows your eyes to readjust momentarily, so you can
find your way through the twists and turns. My youngest son was in front of me,
so I could use him to identify any hazards or tricky moments en route. To exit
the exhibition, the only way out is down, with a choice of one of two slides,
which have been attached to the Gallery wall. Looking down from the top, I
momentarily thought ‘what am I doing?’
But not wanting to put any doubt into the minds of my boys, down I went, in
what turned out to be a peaceful swirl to the bottom.
A beer
and some nachos were what a blazing hot day called for next – and to recover
from the effect of the upside down glasses - which were part of the Choice exhibition. After taking in the
day, the sounds, the river and the people, the thought of sunburn and a lack of
sun cream, sent us on our way once more and soon we were crossing the Thames
over Hungerford Bridge, buying a Big
Issue from a bridge vendor, who looked as though she was going to pass out
with heat exhaustion. We headed towards Soho, pausing to check out the
Brazilian party, arranged by the Brazilian Embassy, which was going full swing in
Trafalgar Square.
Our final
destination was Polpo on Beak Street for some Italian style tapas and a bottle
of house red, before the train home and back to where we had started ten hours
earlier...
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