Seeking A Friend In The World
(14.04.2003 - 10:25 a.m.)

I spent the most wonderful weekend exploring Manchester. We visited the Lowry Museum on Saturday morning, and I am very much taken with his sketches and paintings. People apparently used to refer to Lowry as a naive painter, using the term in a derogatory sense. But it is precisely that naive quality to his art that I love.

And his bloody minded subversion of his contemporaries. Particularly his maxim that painting spoils a perfectly good sketch.

And then it was off to the Imperial War Museum, seeming particularly apt in today's political climate. And the building itself was an amazing spectacle, particularly when stood at the top of the viewing tower, looking some 100ft or more straight down through the mesh flooring. Not recommended for sufferers of vertigo.

The evening was spent at the Manchester IMAX, watching James Cameron's Ghosts Of The Abyss. One wonders why he didn't make this film first, instead of wasting time and money on the overblown atrocity that was Titanic. At times Ghosts... seemed a little overwrought, but it was far more moving a portrait of the ship and it's passengers.

Sunday was shop-til-you-drop day, spent avoiding huge crowds of Manchester United, Arsenal and Sheffield United supporters, but it was a good day nevertheless.

Good, good, good.

oOo oOo oOo

Of course, the only problem with this amazing weekend? The overpowering sense of crushing melancholy I feel now, returning to my jobless, pointless existence that is everybody else's working week.

I hate this.

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