Mab of Dream

I'm bloody knackered today, but through having lots of fun again. It was Kate's birthday on Friday, but she was out with family that night, so I went up on Saturday. I got her a ticket to see Derren Brown and a REM interview CD; the look on her face for both told me that they were the right presents! :-D Then, after a mad dash around Merry Hill, we went up Brummagen to the Poppies gig at the Academy (ex-Hummingbird).

Now that that great! We all regressed to our early 20s (but without the neurosis) and I became honourary Stourbridge for the night. We canted with one lad who'd come down from Manchester so not to miss it, so it wasn't just a Black Country people-of-a-certain-age reunion. We danced so much that it hurt the next day. My feet were killing me! I'd got new boots to replace the broken ones that morning, and they have an inch high heel on. I'm not used to heels... so I wore them to a Poppies gig and danced like a mad bastard in them. Sensible as always. ;-)

Poor Kate hurt the same day. We were on the train home when she started getting a headache. By the time of the taxi, it was a full-blown migraine, complete with flashing lights and vomitting. She was so embarrassed and saying to the driver, 'I'm not drunk! It's a migraine!' After sitting in the kitchen in darkness for a while, she pushed through the pain/light barrier to get upstairs and into bed. The poor thing appeared again at around 4am, and I heard her so came out.

It was really good actually. It's not often you have unexpected middle of the night meetings like that, but she'd slept a little and awoken with the migraine gone and I was wide awake by then anyway. We sat and had a brew and a fag and put the world to rights for an hour or so. Thinking on, it must have been later, as I didn't go to bed until about 7am; then the alarm was set for 10.

Up we sprang, from our respective rooms, like little spring lambs on a bright Sunday morning... well, it was a bit like that... *grin* However, several coffees later and we were at least able to stand for whole seconds on end without needing to sit down. We met Ian in Birmingham and visited the 'This was Tomorrow' art exhibition. I'm really getting into this art malarkey. I was actually coming out with comments about the art that Kate and Ian were taking seriously, despite the fact that they've been the ones teaching me!

This was all art from the Sixties, including a huge gallery of David Bailey original photos. Several things stood out for me, but the thing I've come away very impressed that I saw was the Yoko Ono footage. It was originally live and involved her sitting impassively on the floor, while members of the audience came up one by one and used scissors to cut chucks of her clothes off. It really did make the point that women were seen as unfeeling, unthinking sex objects at that time, particularly when a bloke got up and instead of sedately taking a chunk (which by then was becoming uncomfortable watching), he cut the whole of her top off, then cut through the straps on her bra. All the time he was grinning at his mates in the crowd, seemingly totally oblivious to the fact that he'd just made her point for her! Yoko carried on looking impassive (occasionally slightly scared), but for one brief flash, you saw her smugness creep through, before she went back to impassive. Then she started to get annoyed, but still held her ground. It was so obvious that she was thinking, 'You tosser', even as she was smug that he'd walked straight into doing exactly what she'd wanted to make her point. It was a great piece of art and powerfully executed, though it was disturbing to watch it by the finish.



After that, Kate took me to see the Bridget Riley painting, 'Fall', that she'd fallen in love with. It was impressive and she was right, it had to be seen rather than described. A series of black and white wavy lines doesn't do it justice. I sat on the floor in front of it and before too long, all three of us were sitting there just staring for ages. It distorted our vision for a couple of minutes afterwards, so the world really did look like a different place.



After the art gallery, we were just 'phoning Jim to see where in the world he was, when he walked down the street towards us! :-o Ok, we were impressed. He didn't even know that we were going to be there! The four of us ended up on the Birmingham Eye, a huge ferris wheel from the top of which we could see the sun setting over the Black Country, whilst also having a very beautiful view of Brummagen.

By the time we'd been to the pub, then back to Ian and Jim's (where Ian and Kate wrote their own Bible), it was nearly 1am by the time we were back at Kate's and nearly 2am by the time we were abed.

'kin Hell, I'm knackered today!

yours
Mab
xxxxx