Went to the V&A yesterday with Louise. I’ve been doing so much stuff on Hype we haven’t really been spending so much time together and it was our three year anniversary! We’ve also been talking about going to the V&A for ages, having lived about ten minutes down the road from it for a year and a half.

We didn’t stay for very long as we did the usual Saturday thing of rolling up at about half three. We then went into the Bill Brandt exhibition that they’re showing pretty much straight away. We quickly detoured around some exhibits from China and Japan though. They had some lovely traditional Chinese furniture and a whole load of Japanese armour and weaponry. They had an unsheathed, dehandled katana blade. It was amazing. I’ve never seen anything like that. It was so flawless and singular and obviously very dangerous indeed. They had a range of other daisho, katana and wakizashi and some cool suits of armour.

The Brandt exhibition was quite interesting, but quite small. It was chronological as well, so by the time we got to the interesting portraiture and the surrealist nudes our attention spans were waning a bit. Although it was nice to see a side of him that I didn’t know.

Brandt started out as a documentary photographer and I found his images of 30s London and the North of the depression very interesting. The pictures of the North on the way out of the industrial revolution were particularly moving. The difference in scale between the people and the world they lived in was crazy, like the people were just crawling between the teeth of cogs in a giant machine. Or as if the technology wasn’t capable of building things small enough for humans. It was all really very crude and slightly monstrous.

In the evening we went to dinner with Louise’s family at the Bluebird for Louise’s Mum’s birthday. We had a nice meal with a free glass of champagne, which went straight to my head. Afterwards Louise and I watched Girl With A Pearl Earring which was a nice period movie, but not particularly engaging, the plot was a bit light. Boy is it great to able to plug my laptop into the TV though, much better than watching stuff on a monitor. And the sofa is definitely a far better place to sit still for that amount of time.