Gauguin Exhibition

15 Dec '10: We enjoyed a day in London, at the Tate Modern... rainy, cloudy and cold getting there, but the Tate Modern is always worth a visit - the restaurant is a great place to meet people even if you are not seeing the art exhibitions.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gauguin/
The exhibition is expertly curated, with a very clear range of Gauguin's paintings, drawings, woodcuts, pottery and sculpture, and supported by a lot of photos of contemporary Brittany, Tahiti or the Marquesas; and books, posters and letters from the time. The tour guides were adapted iPods with a good App on them that you can actually download from iTunes if you want to hear commentary on the paintings.

We also saw Ai WeiWei's  'Sunflower Seeds', the millions of tiny ceramic particles individually hand-painted by a team of chinese women. My idea is that they should allow Every visitor to have ONE seed, so part of the art idea is that we could see it go down slightly, and there would be no waste - it would be distributed to thousands, sorry, millions of homes, and continue to live somehow.

Buses
 The buses in London are really good, always friendly to wheelchair users. We only use buses as the London Tube is impossible for disabled access. Boris is mad to be trying to bring back rear entry buses, this is like 'war on the disabled'! The classic double decker bus is now the Leyland/Daimler one with front and centre entrance (and rear engine) and it has been evolving for 50 years everywhere else except London, and the proof of its excellence is that it is used in Hong Kong, home of the best public transport in the world. How can bringing back the early 20th Century 'London Routemaster' design be an improvement?
I know his motivation was to replace the Bendy Buses, but it must be said that Bendies are excellent on routes with long straight roads, and extremely good for disabled and elderly access - being a rail-less substitute for a tram. And as the standard double decker bus can only take one wheelchair or pushchair, there are often people left in the rain at bus stops because the bus already has one. This has happened to us sometimes, and today, we were the lucky ones on the bus, and a poor woman and child had to wait in the rain for the next bus to come by.
Boris's proposal for a new Routemaster will be absurdly expensive, and it still requires a side entrance for a single wheelchair, so no improvement there! Is it part of a Mayor's job to be inventing new types of bus that no other city in the world has found a necessity for? His motivation seems to be nostalgia.

Tall Building Students for lunch!

14 Dec '10: We invited the Tall Building students for lunch at Peveril. We couldn't do it earlier because the term has been so busy, and then we have some weeks of snow and icy roads making the house somewhat inaccessible.
It was a 'bring your own', so there was an interesting variety of food, and some students brought flowers - Thankyou!

One of the purposes was to discuss interseasonal storage, heat pumps, photovoltaic and underfloor heating all of which have some relevance to the high rise we are designing for New York.

Pre-Christmas at Wrington

12 December 2010: We plan to spend Christmas with Sophie in Norwich, so we did a short weekend visit to Oliver and Philippa in Wrington.

Bell's Walk is a welcoming house, not only for us but for many in Wrington	Oliver likes to make sure our tires and lights are in good condition before a long drive

Ruby is still in regular use