Art, or premonition?

Or as this week has shown, both!

I like visiting the Gilbert & George Centre. It’s a short walk from Liverpool Street Station and I try to get there to see each exhibition at least once. This time I took Belinda, who was not impressed and asked what I found so appealing about their work. My reply was that I liked the way they blend social comment with often striking smut. (I’ve never lost my teenage liking for toilet humour.)

This work particularly caught my eye and I sent a photo from my phone to an old friend who shares many of my eccentric tastes. What I did not know, and could not have known, is that the next morning my life would become dominated by shit.

It wasn’t something I’d eaten, but the fact that I have become the person everyone rings when they encounter a problem at the nearby Quaker Meeting House. A series of phone calls and emails, each suggesting increasing urgency, informed me that both toilets were blocked and overflowing. The building is temporarily home to to Leiston’s banking hub and the staff were clearly uncomfortable.

Eventually I gave in and walked down to the Meeting House with plunger and bucket, with a pair of rubber gloves in case it was really nasty. As it turned out, both toilets were indeed blocked, and vigorous plunger pushing resulted in a fountain of dirty water shooting out of the adjacent sink. This I know meant that the problem was in the drain, not the two toilets, so as I no longer have a set of drain rods, and it was raining, I returned home to get back to some real work.

This morning the drains are being jetted and my phone has not rung once. That means, I hope, that the problem has gone away. Next time I’m in London with time to spare, I’ll try to see some landscape paintings, and see if that is followed by an invitation to visit someone in the Suffolk countryside.