Lumiere

The brilliantly bright weather of Friday gave way to a very grey Saturday, with rain and drizzle throughout. It made for a slower pace, Roam and I in recovery from the exertions of yesterday. For me, that included more miles run on the road than in many a year, and the muscles were complaining. It wasn't so different for Roam. The moor is a lot more forgiving in that respect, although it was good to be able to stay on my feet with considerably less concentration. I didn't fall over once! The good thing was no bother by the niggles that plagued me all last year. The stretching and strengthening routines are perhaps beginning to work.

Roam whipped me at table tennis again, but it was competitive. Shenny whipped us both at pool, with a little handicap advantage, I hasten to add! I suspect she's a bit of a hustler on the quiet. Shenny alerted us to Lumiere, a public art event going on across London over the weekend, and it made sense to have a look as I was leaving from King's Cross tonight. We hadn't quite accounted for the number of people it was going to draw out on the streets. Neither father nor son cope well with massive crowds (especially on a day when Leeds went 0-2 down against arch-rivals Millwall, only to blitz their way to a 3-2 lead in the second half, with ten men, and then to capitulate at the death to lose 3-4, a rather horrible kind of torture by twitter feed - cloud nine to the sewer in five wretched minutes), making us a both a bit grumpy. To be honest, we found what we saw a little underwhelming, although we only got to see a small number of the total installations across the city.

It did get me to wondering what got so many people out on the streets tonight. Was it really the art, or was it the event itself, driven by the fear of missing out on something that was soon to be gone? Is the real driver not the experience itself but the opportunity to say you were there and capture it and share it on Facebook and Instagram? Actually, it doesn't matter. Anything that gets people out and sharing an experience has got to be a good thing. It's shared experience that unites us - even if it's not a particularly exciting one, or a possibly season-defining defeat for your football team.