Spring! Games, gardens and chocolate.
Spring! It's nice. Here are some nice things about spring so far, though I see that miss_newham has covered most of them already...
GAMES AT THE V&A
You know the V&A Lates, where once a month the V&A is open late in the evening and different things happen? March's Late was themed around games, I curated it with Lizzie from the V&A, and gosh, that was good fun. We got four and a half thousand people (!), which was fifteen hundred more than we'd expected, so it was pretty busy - sorry if you came and didn't get to play anything! But, but, a giant pass the parcel filled with feathers and paper cranes and moustaches! Works of art recreated using huge brightly-coloured cardboard shapes! Fifty two-foot balloons with LEDs in them, and a scavenger hunt where people tried to win string in order to make their balloon fly highest! Football penalty shots as taken by someone viewing themselves in the third person via a camera streaming video into visors! A stealth forty-person choir! And, oh, lots of other things.
The night before I dreamt that all the games had been cancelled and replaced with an interactive art installation named Plieby, which was a pair of pliers with a face that you could talk to; but fortunately that turned out not to be the case.
GARDENS
Our garden is getting pretty ridiculous, all daffodils and chirping tiny birds. On Sunday there was a squirrel eating spaghetti, and a wren. Between them my housemates have covered pots with wire, and sown bulbs, and planted potatoes and strawberries and kept them safe from predators, and made early-morning trips to Homebase, and chosen flowers that will attract cheery bees, and learnt how to prepare raisins for picky blackbirds, and mashed up moss with buttermilk and painted it on the walls of the shed (apparently it will stop looking like bird poo soon). My entire contribution to the increasing loveliness has consisted of going "hey, let's paint some more terracotta pots", which have since been filled (by Kevan) with lilacs (bought and tended by Jo).
EASTER
On Easter Sunday we had:
GAMES AT THE V&A
You know the V&A Lates, where once a month the V&A is open late in the evening and different things happen? March's Late was themed around games, I curated it with Lizzie from the V&A, and gosh, that was good fun. We got four and a half thousand people (!), which was fifteen hundred more than we'd expected, so it was pretty busy - sorry if you came and didn't get to play anything! But, but, a giant pass the parcel filled with feathers and paper cranes and moustaches! Works of art recreated using huge brightly-coloured cardboard shapes! Fifty two-foot balloons with LEDs in them, and a scavenger hunt where people tried to win string in order to make their balloon fly highest! Football penalty shots as taken by someone viewing themselves in the third person via a camera streaming video into visors! A stealth forty-person choir! And, oh, lots of other things.
The night before I dreamt that all the games had been cancelled and replaced with an interactive art installation named Plieby, which was a pair of pliers with a face that you could talk to; but fortunately that turned out not to be the case.
GARDENS
Our garden is getting pretty ridiculous, all daffodils and chirping tiny birds. On Sunday there was a squirrel eating spaghetti, and a wren. Between them my housemates have covered pots with wire, and sown bulbs, and planted potatoes and strawberries and kept them safe from predators, and made early-morning trips to Homebase, and chosen flowers that will attract cheery bees, and learnt how to prepare raisins for picky blackbirds, and mashed up moss with buttermilk and painted it on the walls of the shed (apparently it will stop looking like bird poo soon). My entire contribution to the increasing loveliness has consisted of going "hey, let's paint some more terracotta pots", which have since been filled (by Kevan) with lilacs (bought and tended by Jo).
EASTER
On Easter Sunday we had:
- Egg-rolling, which we didn't really know the rules to, and there aren't technically many big hills in Battersea Park, but still! It all worked out in the end, except the bit where I came last.
- A contest where we tried to eat hot cross buns as they dangled from strings, as suggested to us by archive footage of Hackney during the Silver Jubilee. I won this one, getting my bun down to a mere thirteen grams before it fell from the string! There is no documentary evidence of this, however, as it turns out that pretty much the most unflattering way to take a picture of someone is to do it while they're involved in a bun-from-a-string competition.
- FRED is trying to buy presents for his girlfriend, as it is EASTER and apparently that's what you do at easter. He goes into a shop to buy a rabbit, but oh no! A small boy has just grabbed the last rabbit! Fortunately there are a lot of drums in the shop, allowing Fred to sing that he is "Drum Crazy" until the small boy is distracted by the drums, and Fred runs off with the rabbit.
- JUDY has left a shop, but oh no, it's raining! Fortunately SECONDARY MALE LEAD is nearby, and falls for her instantly based on her hat, and there's an umbrella nearby which he grabs, allowing him to sing that he is "A Fella With An Umbrella" while walking Judy to her next appointment.
- Also every now and again it's arbitrarily EASTER again, so that they can keep singing "Easter Parade".