Dot to dot

Today we set off to London to see Ally and Cat, our journey enlivened by delays on the motorway and booking tickets for Kelvingrove Bandstand while in the queue for security! And then we booked a boat trip on Loch Katrine while we were on the plane, before we took off! (a lovely birthday present to James from Heather and Ewan.) 

Arriving in London we went straight to the National Gallery and had a delicious sandwich lunch in Supporters’ House, before going to see the Neo-impressionist exhibition “Radical Harmonies: From Seurat to Van Gogh.” I was pleased to see it because Heather and Ewan enjoyed it and I thought that I would be too late, however it’s on for one more week. The paintings, whose genre I was taught at school was called “pointillism” * were pleasant, especially from a distance, and I can see that it’s a sort of progression from Impressionism. However it did seem that they were restricting themselves by this method of painting. James said that the paintings were “the occasional triumph over technique” - in other words he thinks that they went to a lot of effort without matching results. I concur with this, although I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition. 

In the evening we phoned Kerry in New Zealand to wish her a Happy 30th Birthday. It’s still 30th January here in the UK but they are 12 hours ahead in New Zealand so it’s already her birthday (31st) there. We were pleased that our card and present had arrived in time to their new Auckland address. Kerry already works in Auckland, and Jamie will start his new consultant job there on Monday. Excitingly it’s now a year until Jamie and Kerry’s wedding in New Zealand. I got them a wee countdown chalkboard for Christmas, where they can mark how many days until the wedding. 

 * Apparently the neo-impressionists hated being called pointillists, probably because they felt that there was much more to their work than dots!