Seeing ourselves

Today I was in an 'In London, Do Lots' mood and went to the V&A Fragile Beauty exhibition, drawn from Elton John's and David Furnish's staggering photography collection.

I've never paid much attention to fashion or celebrity photography and I should have done. There are lots and lots of creative, beautifully composed, perfectly lit pictures/portraits of people already famous or on their way to being so. My picks were by Melvin Sokolsky, Frank Horvat and Herbert List (Young Men Under a Reed Roof - wow!) but there were many more. I was entranced, then walked on to the reportage rooms which I found so engaging I failed to record any names. There was even a section on abstract photography, as well as plenty of pictures of sculpted men. The exhibition is too big (apparently John and Furnish buy pictures they like for their walls, not to store somewhere as an investment, and it is hard to imagine anyone bar the V&A owning enough walls for this vast collection) and towards the end quite a lot of people were exhausted and giving up, but if I'd been curating it, I wouldn't have known what to leave out.

I got lost trying to leave the museum and realised that one day I'm going to visit the V&A and just wander round looking at its astonishing architecture and interior design. Beauteous building.

This evening I went to see the RSC production of Buddha of Suburbia, adapted for stage from his loose autobiography by Hanif Kureishi. He and I are almost the same age and while he was trying to get known as a writer (at that stage a playwright, mostly), I was learning how to teach disaffected, unemployed 16-19-year-olds in Brixton, mostly Black or Asian. Our team-taught 'Communication, Social and Life Skills' classes included drama and, although I don't remember what, I know we used some of Kureishi's writing and I remember feeling less enthused than my fellow teachers. Later, I watched My Beautiful Laundrette and was won over. Very much later I watched it again and wondered why I'd been won over. I've never read Buddha of Suburbia (set in my bit of London against the late 70s political activism that Kureishi and I shared) and I wanted to be re-won over. The set was imaginative, witty and very versatile, the acting was superb, there was the anguish of recognition and there were laughs. But mostly I bounced off the writing. Too arch, too knowing, too... arrogant? I think I was alone - the production got rapturous applause from almost everyone.

Very unusually, I got chatting, separately, to four women around my age today; three in the exhibition and one after the play. In each case, it was triggered by the novel excitement of seeing our times and our concerns represented.