A plan emerges. There are slides posing as art rather than just carnival silliness over at the Tate. Plan is to met up early and go whizzy whizz as much as possible. We decide that walking to the Tate from St Pauls will both collect St Pauls and allow us to play at Cybermen along St Paul's Vista. Sadly this second objective scotched by the inconsiderate building of a bridge, so scenes like this:


are gone forever. But then, after the recent reboot to the series, Cybermen aren't Cybermen anymore. If they ain't from Mondas they just don't count, she says, nailing her nerd colours to the mast. Dejected I hum the Tomb of the Cybermen theme as we cross the bridge..."brr buh buh brr, buuuh buh buuh", lovely creepy brass.

Sigh...



( a digression into lost memories )
At the Tate there is text to explain the art of going down the slides:

"For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend."

In other words, it's fun to slide down the tude yelling 'wheeee', but you also feel a little queasy. T'was also a little bumpy, and I feared actually puking on the biggest one, but comforted myself with the thought that being in head-to-toe pvc and rubber at least I was easily wipe-clean.

After some too-ing and froo-ing, our party then headed to Baker Street via the Jubliee line at Southwark in the gathering gloom:



to be proper tourists and visit the surprisingly entertaining Sherlock Holmes Museum . Much giggling and trying on of hats.

( Baker Street )