Wet in the morning, but not in the afternoon. Stays windy and the park benches are damp, but it's warm. About 18. Can hardly tear ourselves from the telly after lunch. There's a documentary about World War I soldiers who took their cameras to the trenches. Painfully young enlisted men who left haunting black and white photographs, some of which survived the photographers by decades. The program features a German and an Englishman, each carrying his father's photos to the Somme and lamenting the terrible waste of humanity. Most poignant is a picture of a grave, taken by the seventeen year old soldier who had buried his best friend and photographed the burial place.
We go to the Saatchi Gallery, mostly to catch the last of the exhibit of Alaric Hammond's windows - etching and corrosion on zinc and copper plates. The colours are very moving and we're glad to have caught the show. As always, there are other exhibits of interest. Shen qibin has a series of building high relief models, many of them classical buildings with fractures, that are framed ironically with pseudo- baroque frames. And Jin Feng has a series of stylized paintings of ancient Chinese maps, with such a crumpled three-dimensional appearance it's hard to resist running a finger over the surfaces. Jin also has a witty exhibition of wooden doors, where planks and hardware are incorporated into huge portraits on the surface. Fun.
As we leave, Duke of York Square, Chelsea, is crowded. Small children have had their faces painted.booths are selling popcorn and mulled wine - the latter an astonishing £7.50 (€10.73, $15.00 CAD) for a six ounce cup. They're doing brisk business though. A very good choir is providing pre-Advent entertainment with a selection of Christmas carols. And, as we head up King's Road to the Sloan Square tube station, having just admired the second red Ferrari in two blocks, we're approached by Santa in a sleigh-like carriage, pulled in the heavy traffic by two genuine reindeer.
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