Pity about the art

At the beginning of the week off to inspect the newly opened extension to Tate Modern.

Onto the beach at Coin Street, from where we were able to walk all the way to the Tate. There were not as many bones as I remember.

Amused to notice, as we arrived, the tug Forth Trojan and the barge Forth Olympian arriving, perhaps to do something with the four pile cases piled up on a barge on our side of the river, just visible on the right of the snap above. Would we carry on contracting out such stuff to the Scots if they were to do a bunk? Also a reminder of a similar view of his river by a chap called Vermeer.

Barges led on to thoughts of fuel. There used to be - perhaps still are - cranes and wharves outside Battersea Power Station to handle all the coal. Nothing of that sort here, so was it all swept away at the time of the first conversion? Was it oil fired by some huge underground pipe?

Handsome new extension to Tate Modern, inside and out. Fine views from the viewing gallery, although I failed to muster the nerve to actually go outside. Perhaps that will come. We passed on the rather expensive looking and near empty restaurant. Moved onto to inspect some art which struck me as pretty rubbishy. Perhaps we missed the good stuff.

Next thought was that while the new extension was very handsome, with its odd shape it did not actually provide that much more gallery space - not that that is really a problem if what we saw was a fair sample of what they have been keeping in their cellars. Was it really worth the £250 million the Standard claimed to have been spent on it? What did the other 100,000 visitors over the first two days think? Clearly a success as far as feet on floor is concerned.

Back to Coin Street for lunch where I took linguine with red meat sauce is the style of Bolgona at the Gourmet Pizza outlet there. Restaurants are usually quite good at this sauce, with the water content generally being spot on, that is to say quite low, and this particular sauce was indeed quite good. Friendly foreign staff, as is usual in such places. What will become of them all if we really do dump freedom of movement of labour? What will become of all the restaurants which depend on them? Will they suck in shed loads of unemployed youngsters from somewhere up north?

Inspected, for the first time in a while, the books under Waterloo Bridge, but failed to find either Tolstoy or Chekov. The latter was also absent from Epsom Library - world famous writer of short stories though he may have once been.

PS: the Standard did not like the restaurant either. Going so far as to describe the puddings as nonsense.

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