Dad, a fellow Doctor Who fan, asks if the Gormley statues moved when myself and Mum were looking at the nude bikers, and thus not looking at the statues. He’s referring to the Doctor Who story that evening, “Blink”, where the monsters are the kind of stone angels found in cemeteries. They move and get you whenever they’re not being watched, or even if you blink. Truly gripping in the old-fashioned 70s Doctor Who style (even though it involves the world of DVD extras), well-written and beautifully acted. One can certainly imagine the army of bronze Gormleys going after people. I imagine his big box of fog is a particularly good place to attack victims.
***
Sunday afternoon – to the Wolseley in Piccadilly for afternoon tea. I always have Earl Grey with scones. Present are Xavior Roide, Suzi Livingstone and Hazel Barkworth. Suzi and Hazel have tickets to the Princess Diana memorial concert, at which Duran Duran and the Spice Girls are playing. Xavior still has a seemingly charmed if deeply unusual life where strange men he found on the Internet come round and pay him for the pleasure of cleaning his flat. It’s their fetish, their sexual kink: cleaning the flats of young men, and paying for this pleasure. Like a naughtier version of the Tom Sawyer fable. Apparently these men don’t even wear special clothing in which to do it.
Everything is sexy to someone: you just have to find them. There must be people somewhere in the world who derive erotic pleasure from filling out other people’s tax returns. Though there is always a line drawn somewhere. “I’m only attracted to filling out the tax returns of buxom blondes between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who wear opera gloves. Nothing strange.”
***
Mum and I walk through the courtyard of Somerset House, as we’ve never seen it outside of winter when the famous ice rink is in place. On this scorching June day, the courtyard is host to a grid of fountains set in the ground. A few brave tourists walk through the narrow gaps and take photos of each other, fully-clothed. Small children in swimsuits jump about in the jets with their Dad, while their Mum sits at the side with the piles of shoes and clothes. It’s the sort of thing one sees on the front of newspapers the next day, always with some caption about record temperatures. The hottest June on record. The hottest day of the year so far. The hottest day since last Tuesday.
Many of the offices around the courtyard still belong to the Inland Revenue. For years this space of ice rinks and fountains and simple joy was a car park for tax inspectors. I like the juxtaposition of these eternal extremes: uncomplicated children’s happiness against complicated adults’ grumpiness. If you do have to work in a tax office, I imagine there’s worse sights to look out of the window at in between all those forms and filings. Beats car parks, anyway.
