So: headline in the Muswell Hill Gazette: ‘Police called to Snow riot in Muswell Hill’. All that joie de vivre, all that bonhomie, all that community ended up with a bunch of kids throwing snowballs at cars and cracking windscreens. Ah, back to the London I know and love.

 

Yesterday we went to the new Saatchi gallery just off the Kings Road. What is it with that man? Why is he spending all his money giving us art to look at in beautiful surroundings? What’s he after? Can it be that he really is just an old-fashioned benefactor, a philanthropist like Sir Henry Tate? I can’t help feeling suspicious.

 

The exhibition of Middle Eastern Art is utterly gripping, very disturbing, seldom beautiful. It’s a must-see. a particular favourite of mine was the room full of representations prostitutes. Apparently there are one hundred thousand prostitutes in Tehran, the capital of Iran. What? That bastion of Muslim fundamentalism? Yes, exactly that place. And a talented female artist called Shirin Fakhim has made lifesize stuffed dolls, their bras filled with melons and other round objects,  pearls and abacuses laid at their feet. Legs splayed, absurd lace thongs around their ample bottoms, they are both humorous and macabre. This says more about the hypocrisy of that society than any text could possibly attempt. And there’s one room full of women made of tinfoil praying to Allah. You can see the shapes of their spines. They foil is just a shell with nothing inside it, and each woman’s posture is different. It’s like a new, shocking take of the terracotta army. Absolutely breathtakingly beautiful and disturbing. Conceptual art at its political best. I would like to write about some of that work, create some ekphrastic poetry (always wanted to use that word!) but I honestly don’t know what I could add to those eloquent depictions of situations almost beyond my imagining.

 

Outside on The Kings Road, the designer people were out with their designer dogs, pushing their designer children in designer buggies or riding their designer cars. I thought Muswell Hill was posh, but compared to Sloane Street, it’s downright shabby and cheap.

 

My work’s been going okay this week, interrupted as it was by the snow. KIds had three days off school, so that didn’t half eat into my time. Still, I managed to do a couple of revisions, and re-working a poem from November, I really was surprised by the turn it took. That’s the joy of poetry. You never know what’s going to happen.