Weekend Away
blogHaving used the majority of my annual leave getting married, these days my only relief from the bleak monotony of Glasgow life is the occasional weekend away.
So I rushed home from work on Friday night, packed my bag, gavaged some leftovers down my throat, did the washing up, and trotted down the road to get the bus to the airport where (of course), because of delays, I had to wait an hour and a half to get the plane to Gatwick.
It sometimes feels like modern air travel is designed to be as horrible as possible, but when you are equipped with ear plugs and Ray Kurzweil’s book on the singularity (my new obsession), it is just about bearable.
It has been over three years since I moved from the capital and each time I visit it becomes more exotic. One is struck by how overcrowded it is and by how many foreigners there are. On the bus to Peckham, I didn’t know where to look as hardworking immigrants with bloodshot eyes competed with schizophrenic afro-caribbeans for grimey seats on the number 36.
On Saturday we got soaked as we walked from the NFT to Tate Modern, which was rather appropriate given that Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster installation in the Turbine Hall is an imagining of the year 2058 in which rain and damp is destroying world culture. All of my favourite books are on the 200 iron bunk beds: Drowned World, Lathe of Heaven, Ficciones . . . it’s almost as though she had read my mind. Alternatively, that which was once wild science-fiction is now considered a realistic forecast of what is to come.
In the evening we went to Cay Tre, a Vietnamese restaurant in Hoxton, where I was served a magnificent tofu soup and an interesting Heaven and Earth pork dish that had some kind of gelatinous pork scratching thing in it. Yum.
Some people, when they get bored of contemporary music, stop going to gigs and start going to restaurants. The restaurants are the venues and the dishes are the bands, it is a pretty neat transition I think. On Sunday, however, we went to Leighton Buzzard, where a man interested in contemporary music cooked us the best roast I have had for ages. It was the perfect way to end what was, despite modern travel, a lovely weekend.