Go to Euston station and walk past the dreadful Paolozzi gray lump of a sculpture – that’s been sitting there and brooding for the past 35 years – and cross the road to the Wellcome Collection. Hopes of enjoying a peaceful coffee and cake are immediately confounded on finding the café very nearly full. Along with the Tate Galleries, Natural History and Science Museums, this seems to be another of those places to which sensible parents like to drag their children on Saturday mornings, instead of leaving them to sit in front of their computers playing mindless video games and endlessly networking socially with their peers. That kind of parental attitude is all very well but it’s a bit inconsiderate towards the rest of us who, in fact, much prefer children to stay out the way in their own darkened rooms, rather than cluttering up the floors of the capital’s cultural assets. Oh well, the season to be jolly is almost upon us, so I suppose I shouldn’t grumble too much. But then, just as I’m starting to hum a few bars of Jingle Bells – having managed to find a vacant seat in the corner, and settled down with my coffee and cake – a few bites in and…Donner and Blitzen. These blackcurrant and white chocolate muffins, with the little swirls of icing sugar on top, are usually so reliable but somehow today I’ve managed to pick a duff one. Instead of the sponge bit being nice and fluffy, it’s hard and lumpy and I only manage to eat half before giving up. I suppose I could take it back and complain but then I’d lose my seat and I’m not sure the serving staff would appreciate my Bake Off critique. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turns out that the food police have paid a visit and insisted on a recipe change so that in future all muffins must comply to the do-gooders, no-fat, no-fun, austerity version. It’s the kind of thing that would probably go down well with the type of parents who bring their kids to a place like this at the weekend. Call me paranoid but, as I look around, I seem to be the only person even eating cake, everyone else is pretending to enjoy their double helpings of salad, if that’s the word – it seems to be a sad combination of all the bits I’d normally leave out – beetroot, boring beans and black lettuce.
Forget the food, what else is on offer here? Well, the big show, Tibet’s Secret Temple, is all about Tantric Buddhism, a subject of which I know little and about which I’m not all that bothered about learning more. Nevertheless, I decide to take a quick whizz round and it’s full of the usual stuff you’d expect: photos of snow-capped mountains, odd bods and buddhas with limbs twisted into uncomfortable, undignified positions; rugs, murals and manuscripts – all of which are doubtless jolly diverting if you’re aiming to take a hike along that particular path to enlightenment. I suppose those of us who’ve pretty much given up any hope of reaching such a divine destination and, frankly, would settle for getting a decent muffin every so often, aren’t going to find much of interest in this exhibition. Although, judging by the hushed, respectful crowds shuffling round the rooms here, there does seem to be a large, silent majority who do find this kind of stuff absolutely fabulously fascinating.
Upstairs, Ann Veronica Janssens ‘continues her experiments in perception through light and colour’ with yellowbluepink, which is advertised as a gallery full of brightly coloured mist. It sounds enticing but, sadly, there’s a thirty minute queue to get in. And for someone like myself, who couldn’t be bothered to spend more than about ten minutes when offered the chance for full karmic enlightenment downstairs, this is far too long. I’m also slightly put off by the long list of cautions and warnings that the health and safety experts have evidently put up to protect themselves from possible lawsuits following from anyone falling over in the fog or literally suffering a touch of the vapours.
According to my app, it’s going to take me about 25 minutes to get to Somerset House whether I take buses or walk so, since it looks like a straight stroll southwards, I decide on the latter. It doesn’t take long before I realize that I’ve made the wrong choice. It’s not just the blustery wind that quickly drains away the energy supplied by half a muffin, nor the tedium of having continually to swerve round tourists consulting their guide maps and locals gazing transfixed into their iphones, as they simultaneously read the football scores and walk along, expecting everyone else to move out of their way. No, every child not forced to attend the Wellcome Collection or allowed to fight zombies on their playstation machines, seems to have been deprived of their Ritalin and instead had an extra, weekend helping of dangerous e-number chemicals sprinkled onto their breakfast Frosties. Then they’ve been encouraged to express their excitement at the forthcoming celebration of the nativity by running round in circles and jumping out in front of the paths of people like me and then shrieking as loudly as their little lungs can manage. I roll up my copy of the Guardian’s family section and swat a few out the way but this is tiring work and thankfully I make it to the South Wing Embankment Galleries before collapsing in a heap. For £9.50, Big Bang Data promises ‘a major exhibition exploring the big data explosion that’s radically transforming our society, culture and politics’.
As I enter the show, I hear a man behind me telling the attendants that he’s from Barcelona and asking whether he should see the exhibition. Fortunately, I resist the urge to reach for the Guardian and reprise my Basil Fawlty roll on this would-be Manuel. It turns out that the exhibition was designed and produced by the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona and he was wondering whether it was the same show that he’d seen in Spain earlier in the year…it was. Alas this sit-comic prelude turns out to be the highpoint of the exhibition which, considering the nature of the topic, is strangely, boringly analogue. So there are lots of wall panels telling us how amazing is the new interlinked webworld and how there’s a lot of data now pinging around the globe and other things that we already know – what Basil would have called the bleeding obvious. There are even glass cases with examples of things like tape recorder tape, CD discs and a USB stick to illustrate how data storage has changed over the years, and then copper cables and glass fibres to show how the evolution of data transfer has speeded up. Even the video displays are a bit boring, at least the ones I saw were – you’d have to be a real super-nerd to enjoy gazing at the wires sticking out the back of big main frame or watching a never-ending stream of digits rolling down the screen. I suppose I was sort of expecting to see some real zinger spectacular whizzo hi-tech data displays, real digital fireworks that would make me gasp at the amazing wonders of the brave new world in which those of us of a certain age are uncomfortably sinking. But if there was any of this in the show, then I must have missed it as everything struck me as pretty run of the mill ordinary and surely there’s more to our new www.wonderworld than that.
Anyway, I soon give up on that and walk over Waterloo Bridge, get on a bus and have a snooze during the hour-long ride it takes me to get to the Horniman Museum. Inside, Mark Fairnington has been given a pretty big space to show us the modern day bestiary that he’s been painting for the past fifteen years. It’s really quite impressive, ranging from his representations of humble leaf insects that have been magnified to human scale, up to the really impressive, life-size prize bulls. Fairnington’s got a pretty good technique and a bloody great magnifying glass that makes him comfortable whether he’s delineating the hairs on a humming bird or the horns on a hippo – ok, apologies, I came over unnecessarily alliterative there, and actual hippopotami are absent from the show. But I’m sure that, if introduced to one, the artist wouldn’t hesitate to get out his tape measure and brushes and paint its portrait. Fairnington‘s presentation of his four-footed and six-legged friends is much cooler and more clinical than that of both Stubbs and Landseer, the greatest of British animal artists, but for those of us sated by the antics of all the slick performing creatures so familiar from dozens of TV natural history programmes, they provide an attractive, dignified, stationary alternative.