Our Parisian finale

We were serenaded below the window of the apartment on our last night

So by Saturday, our last full day on this short trip, our batteries were really running down. After breakfast we pottered off to Musée de Cluny and revisited the famous medieval tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn but even their sumptuous detail and workmanship couldn't hold our attention for long - more coffee was calling.

We wound up at a nearby cafe, sitting outside in the gloom, near a young American couple. They were with a female friend who was hogging their conversation: yak, yak, yak. The guy in the couple seemed to be withdrawing into his coat, his girlfriend was nodding politely - we paid and left.

We realised that there was no hope of finding a post office nearby to send our two cards to our respective mothers so pressed on towards the Metro. Our plan was to trek over to the Hôtel national des Invalides to see the tomb of Napoleon. Something else I've never done. This was where I got really quite excited because, after traipsing around endless tunnels and up and down stairs, we arrived at the B-line platform and got on a suburban train for two stops. These trains have two decks (like double decker buses) and it felt like we were going off on a long trip into the unknown.

Our suburban train ride was soon over. When we were back up on street level we walked down a very long, wide avenue where at the end there is a building that dwarfs everything around it. This, as Graham told me, is the Hôtel national des Invalides. Thinking this was too much to tackle on an empty stomach we headed off towards a district where we hoped to find a restaurant. We found several and enjoyed an excellent meal for a cold day.

Now we were fortified and ready for Napoleon and his tomb. It struck me that to get to any destination in Paris you have to walk miles. Before we could get to old Boney we walked through a gate, along a path, through another gate into a huge courtyard with cloister-like walkways. In the courtyard there were groups of military type young people pacing around as if in rehearsal for some future event - we gawped at them for a bit. Once through the courtyard we carried on walking and walking until we got to the imposing front door of the chapel for Napoleon's tomb.

What a weird place this is. Unlike most Christian churches which run from West to East, this runs from North to South. Napoleon was a short man but you wouldn't know it looking at his tomb which, I understand, has maybe five coffins stacked inside each other, and then placed inside this weird marble edifice. The tomb is in the crypt but can be seen from above. Surrounding the tomb are protective pagan goddesses and plaster reliefs depicting Napoleon in heroic poses. It was well odd but worth one visit.

And that really was enough. Time to return to our friends' apartment for the last time and enjoy the serenade from the band that was roaming around the neighbourhood.

We love the Tuileries

A peaceful pause in the Tuileries

On our second full day of our trip Graham suggested that we visit the Musée de L'institute du Monde Arab. According to the description on our museum pass the institution was planned to raise and spread awareness of Arab culture and it has 500 works which shed light on the history of the Arab world. This sounded like a good start to the day - the sun was out and the institute was a short walk away so off we went with our hosts, Robert and Joan.

We arrived at the building. We were allowed in after a bag check. We walked up to the ticket desk waving our museum passes only to be told that the building was closed for refurbishment. We could see this was happening because there were any number of men feeding cables through ducts. The staff were sorry.

Being closed for refurbishment became a theme of the day. Later on we decided to have lunch at the large airy cafeteria in the Louvre where you can create your own salad but sadly it was closed. For refurbishment. So we made do with a sandwich we bought at a stall on a landing.

Then we thought that since we'd missed seeing Arab art in the morning we would check it out in the Louvre since we were there and we could see a sign more-or-less saying 'Arab art this way'. So we began walking in that direction and got hopelessly lost. We wound up in a gallery describing itself as Graeco Roman and nearly every exhibit was missing (obviously being refurbished).

By now we were fairly sick of the Louvre so headed for the Jardin des Tuileries on our way to Musée National de l'Orangerie. Now our mood changed completely and we had smiles on our faces again. I was fairly staggered by the size of the gardens. I know I have visited them before but they can't have made any impact on me because this felt like my first visit. The French do love their formal gardens. There are wide avenues to stroll along and wonderful arrangements of flowers in the borders. The grass is all roped off so you can't walk on it, unlike at home where we are likely to leave food left-over from barbecues lying all over the place. There are endless numbers of outdoor cafés serving delicious pastries and coffee. After sampling the food and drink we needed to visit the loo. Sorry, it's closed for refurbishment - (go find another one).

Refurbs aside we made it to l'Orangerie at the earnest recommendation of Robert and Joan. They had been knocked out by an exhibition of Paul Klee's art and some very large paintings of waterlillies by Monet. We had a sense of being underwater while we were there and I felt I wasn't so much looking at the paintings as being consumed by them. I could understand it when Robert had said that he had felt claustrophobic when he was in these galleries.

Paul Klee's work was a revelation to me. I have been familiar with his name for decades and really knew nothing about him. He was Swiss, he taught at the Bauhaus until the Nazis made life impossible for him, he was a talented musician and poet as well as a painter. Quite a lot of his work is on a small scale as is mine and I felt I was in the presence of a kindred spirit. He is definitely someone I'd like to know more about and this made me very happy.

Bonjour Paris

A rainy Thursday in May, so much for springtime in Paris

In Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes series of books the characters are divided into clans and because these books combine science fiction, alternative reality and general all-round nuttiness the device these characters employ to move from one world to another, known as world-walking, seems entirely plausible. They stare at a design called a clan knot and before you know it they disappear through a portal and end up in who knows where.

I was reminded of this knotwork device last week as we were about to board Eurostar. We'd printed out our tickets at home and had to hold our own knotwork (otherwise known as a bar code) against a reader before we could pass through our own portal called security and passport control. Our train was on time, comfortable and included genial neighbours and was over before we knew it. Honestly, it takes longer for us to get to Newcastle than it does to Paris and in that sense Paris does not feel as though it is in another country.

Earlier this year I'd enjoyed reading Marta Szabo's account of her recent trip to Paris which you'll find here and it is a fascinating read as it was her first trip to the city. This was definitely not my first visit - and I'm beginning to feel as though it could become a second home - in that it has that comfortable old pair of slippers feel. We were staying with friends from Canada who every year for the last four years have rented the same small apartment in the Latin Quarter and they generously lend us the sofa bed. Whenever we see them, either in the UK or France, we always pick up where we left off. I hadn't seen them for two years but it might as well have been two weeks ago - there's always plenty to talk about.

We always buy a two-day museum pass and belt around the city on foot wearing ourselves out and now I am back home in London I'm recuperating by writing this while camped out on the sofa. One place I have never been is the Conciergerie. It began life as a palace and ended up as a prison that had the reputation for being one of the toughest. It held many people the State regarded as dispensable during the French Revolution including the Queen, Marie-Antionette and Charlotte Corday who murdered Marat in his bath. Most prisoners were there for only a short time before being sentenced and dispatched but Charlotte Corday was there long enough, and was presumably wealthy enough, to have her portrait painted before she waved farewell. Perhaps it took her mind off thoughts of the guillotine.

Only the lower part of the medieval halls exists now and it is a large space with vaulted ceilings built in a warm coloured brick. It is uncluttered by monuments and you can simply sit in it and soak up the atmosphere which is calm and peaceful, nothing like a prison but oddly more like large church.

Anyway, bye for now and more of our trip another day.

Fabiola complaint

Following my blog titled: 'What makes art ART?' (21 May), where I grumbled about the Fabiola exhibition Marta made the sensible suggestion that I tell the National Portrait Gallery what I think about it. So I have and this is my letter to them. I am hoping to get a reply and if I do I will post it here for your amusement. The important thing to me is that I feel better for having written it and I will stop fuming about it.

I have always enjoyed my visits to the National Portrait Gallery which have often been made at lunchtimes or when I've been on the way to somewhere else. The NPG has become part of my cultural life. I have nearly always been favourably impressed with the standard of craftsmanship and appreciate being able to drop in on Henry VIII and people currently in the public eye on the same visit.

So for the first time I have to write and say how disappointed I was with Francis Alÿs' exhibition 'Fabiola'. I find the accompanying leaflet justifying the exhibition both pretentious and incomprehensible. This quote just sums it up for me 'By installing it in the National Portrait Gallery, he solicits the kinds of aesthetic and historical questions typically addressed to Old Master artworks, questions, pertaining to authorship, iconography, function, originality and uniqueness.' I'm sorry, but this strikes me as a load of old baloney considering that the content of the exhibition is a job lot of amateur paintings collected from junk shops and they don't rate such high blown praise.

The leaflet mentions that this installation has also been exhibited in New York and Los Angeles so I can only assume that a good number of art curators in the western world have been collectively conned into thinking this is material worth throwing good money at.

This experience won't stop me from visiting your fine gallery but I will be prepared to question future exhibits more in the future than I have in the past.

Post script written on 24 September: The exhibition has now closed and I never did receive a reply. I wonder if my complaint was even read by anyone - I suspect not.

What makes art ART?

Yesterday I had a job interview and had some time to kill before my appointment so I drifted into the National Portrait gallery near Trafalgar Square. I'd already had my lunch, been to the bank, done some window shopping around Covent Garden and was getting a bit bored and wanted to find somewhere dump my portfolio and have a mooch around. I considered going up to the top floor to look at the Tudors because I haven't seen Henry VIII for really quite a while but chose to stick to the galleries on the first floor since I had my eye on the time.

Tucked away in two small galleries away from the corridor full of photos of famous people there is an exhibition entitled Fabiola. It consists of around 300 paintings, tapestries, and a collage made from beans and lentils of the same subject who was a fourth-century Christian saint known as Fabiola who evidently is the protector of abused women and patron saint of nurses. She is shown as a young woman in profile, facing left and wearing a crimson veil. Apparently all these images are based on a 19th century painting by an artist called Jean-Jacques Henner which is now lost. They were created by anonymous craftspeople and artists who were mostly amateurs and all the pieces on show were made by hand and not mechanically reproduced.

There is a comfy seat in the middle of the first gallery which looked very inviting so I sat on that with several other people and began to inspect the images of this woman on the walls. It was like looking at wallpaper because you are looking at what is basically a repeating pattern, young woman, profile, crimson veil etc which made me feel as though I was drifting into a trance (or perhaps it was the effects of my lunch). I roused myself before I fell into a deep sleep and went into the neighbouring gallery where there were yet more of these images on display and I began to think 'yeah and so what'.

I suppose you could describe this exhibition as an installation because the artist whose name is attached to it, Francis Alÿs, hasn't as far as I could tell actually created anything in these two rooms. It represents his collection which he acquired over a period of 15 years from antique shops and flea markets in Europe and the Americas which for all I know also represented a bit of an obsession. The accompanying brochure seems full of bullshit to me and here is an example: 'In the eyes of its creator, artist Francis Alÿs, this ensemble of artefacts invites investigation as a collection. Bla, bla, bla.'

I like to leave an exhibition feeling stimulated and if possible inspired to go home and produce more work but this left me feeling duped and asking the question 'why did the National Portrait gallery, which has an international reputation, fall for this? It had nothing really to impart about portraiture and if this artist had a collection of used toothbrushes collected over 15 years would they have also put that on display?' It made me think of the 'emperor's new clothes'.

Big day in the US, ordinary day in London

Part of a series of drawings of random domestic scenes

As I write this the good people of the United States are queuing to vote for their new president and I'm following events on BBC24 which is analysing every blessed thing just to fill up the time. I've watched, again, Barak Obama vote (for himself) and seen Sarah Palin's denim clad legs in the voting booth while she voted for herself: it seems that John McCain managed to dodge the cameras as he arrived to vote (I'm assuming for himself). I'm hoping that Barak Obama will win because I have found George Bush's presidency extremely disturbing over the last eight years and I hope for all our sakes that Obama will be a more enlightened president than the outgoing one. And of course it will also be historic to have the first black president of the US.

So what have I done today since I didn't have any good reason for getting up at 6am? Well, I stayed in bed for a start and got up at a civilised hour. I've been working at home for the last couple of weeks and that's included doing a series of pen and ink drawings of random domestic scenes around the house plus building a website. I'm not very experienced at website design yet so I get stuck trying to understand html and css and stuff fairly frequently. That happened yesterday so in the afternoon I took myself off to Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, that great refuge from the rain and yes, it was raining again. My reason for going was that I fancied a walk so wasn't all that bothered by what I might see when I got there. On arrival I was rather tickled to spy in the foyer a modest exhibition of black and white photographs of Edwardian Outdoor Games by Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles.

Evidently the V&A own Pitcairn-Knowles glass negatives and I presume they were just stored away gathering dust in the archives so someone must have decided to haul some negatives out and make prints from them. They've been done on an ink jet printer: we have one of those at home. What I liked most about this small display, besides the charming images, was that Pitcairn-Knowles employed the latest in photographic technology in 1900 and here we are 100 years later reproducing those same images using technology which is common to us today. I also liked the way that a large national museum like the V&A thinks it is worth producing a small exhibition which will be of interest to a small number of people-it makes such a change to the big blockbuster exhibitions crammed with visitors. So that got a big commendation from me.

This afternoon I again got stuck with the website while trying to style up a form and gave up in disgust. So needing to get out of the house I mooched off to Hackney Public Library and popped into the very small museum they have there. (I would have put a link to the museum's website but it is really boring.) Apparently the Saxons were responsible for establishing Hackney way back in the dim and distant past but I was more interested in a temporary exhibition on the right hand side as you go in called Living under one roof-Windrush and beyond. It is part of Black History Month which oddly enough lasts for nearly two months! The exhibition takes its name from the ship called the Windrush that arrived at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948 bringing with her many young men and some young women from the Caribbean who arrived in search of jobs and a better life. This was an important landmark in the history of modern Britain.

On arrival the new migrants encountered racism, conflict and discrimination in a cold, damp country that was still impoverished after WWII: not surprisingly they often felt homesick. They were frequently excluded from the social and economic life around them so in time they adjusted the institutions they brought with them, for example sitting rooms were often used for church services, and at the same time they began to participate in institutions to which they did have access like trade unions and bit by bit over the decades modern Britain emerged. The lives of some of the people who finally pitched up in Hackney, who are by now very elderly, are described in room sets. There is the kitchen, the sitting room and the bedroom and many of the items of furniture and family photos have been provided by the men and women whose lives are being described. I was born in west London in 1956 where many black people settled and I loved looking at these rooms today because they took me back to my childhood. The bent kettle looked familiar as did the gas cooker and the copy of Woman's Realm on the coffe table. The family photos and kid's school satchel lying on the floor in the bedroom, the bedspread and the rug on the floor. I know all these things, I've used all of them in my time. So today I feel I have learnt a bit more about the Windrush generation and I'm grateful to them for establishing the multicultural London I so enjoy living in 60 years later.