Wherever I lay my towel is my home

The towels draped on the bollards belong to one of the many hairdressing salons in Peckham. It was a sunny day, so this is a reasonable way to dry them. What I hadn’t counted on was the action stage left.

Art's riposte to financial gloom

Look how threatening the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protesters are. This young woman is painting a bright new floral dawn on her tent. Makes you shiver with fear, doesn't it?

Winter of our discontent

The anti-bankers’ demonstration close to St Paul’s Cathedral looked fine to me when I visited yesterday. The tents are one- or two-person size and are contained in a couple of small areas, a sign requests that no more people join in. The food tent is well stocked, there’s an information tent, a media tent, facilities for First Aid, and rubbish is recycled. I saw a circle of demonstrators just finishing an outdoor meeting: democracy in practice. And the message of anger on behalf of the 99% of us who have been shafted is delivered with a great big dose of Dadaism. Accessibility to the cathedral certainly didn’t appear to be a problem since many people were coming and going. The police were low-key, although one looked bemused when a frantic woman asked: ‘Do you know where the nearest Next is?’ 

Go to work on a Rothko

I used to work in an office close to Tate Modern. I know, we all used to work… reminds me of a postcard from the 80s: ‘Daddy, what did you do when there were jobs?’ asks a young girl of her father sunken into an armchair. At the time (back to the 80s) the building which is now Tate Modern was up for demolition. Yes, it was about to be razed, probably to make room for snazzy apartments. In my lunch-hour I would sometimes come and pay respect to the building. I didn’t just mourn its imminent destruction, I would will it into life. And like all good fairy stories, it ended happily ever after. So happily, that one woman is able to immerse herself in a Rothko painting in Tate Modern to the exclusion of all else.