Snowday

Really not very much and it didn’t hang around long.  And full disclosure I didn’t take this picture, Vikram did but it’s better than anything I took today so Blip’s getting it!

I went up to London again and met with Andrew for a chat about the future and with Ari for lunch at Kettners.  I also went into Uniqlo and bought from the new Anya Hindmarch collection, sold out on line but available in bulk at the shop in TCR.  Bought for Rachael and Noemi as well. 

Walked down to the Courtald to see Monet’s paintings of London; mainly of Waterloo Bridge and the South Bank painted from the Savoy, plus a few of the Houses of Parliament.  It was fascinating.  That bridge was replaced in 1934 as it had structural problems and the pictures are of the diffused, changing light through the smog, which is of course what the famous London Fog really was and that came from the heavily industrialised South Bank. Monet talked endlessly about how he loved London light but he actually liked the pollution and what it did to the light.  

Amazing to be standing in a building, Somerset House,  on the other side of that bridge, although it of course predates the paintings,  and to realise that nothing of what he actually painted remains, the factories, the bridge, the Thames Barges, the pollution, except the River Thames, still rolling along,  as it will be long after we’re all gone.