Dot to dot

It’s exactly a year until Jamie and Kerry’s wedding in New Zealand! I was chatting to Jamie on the phone last night when I suddenly realised it. I got them a wee countdown chalkboard for Christmas, where they can mark how many days until the wedding. They have now moved to Auckland where Kerry already works, and Jamie will start his new job there on Monday. 

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. 

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