Coving; photography; blood-letting

Branched out into some uncharacteristic manual work on the house recently by removing the coving from the master bedroom ceiling. A brief bit of desk research beforehand paid dividends in that it suggested beginning by breaking the coving in the middle with a hammer rather than starting off by trying to prise it off the walls. This proved an excellent suggestion and the whole lot was gone within 3-4 hours, which was tiring but satisfying. Not original coving, but that stuff people put on thinking it adds 'character' (poisoned concept), so I don't feel guilty.

Had unexpectedly solo but surprisingly pleasant trip up to London on Saturday morning, starting off by treating myself to brunch at the Market Place branch of Carluccio’s just off Oxford Street. Then to the Photographers’ Gallery to see American photographer Sally Mann’s exhibition The Family and The Land, which I had been prompted to go and see by a recent Guardian Weekend piece. The exhibition, apparently Mann’s first solo exhibition in the UK, featured four different sets of photographs in four different rooms, one a collection from Immediate Family, one from Faces, a series of close-ups of her grown-up children’s faces using a process called wet plate collodion, the technicalities of which rather passed me by, one a series of shots of landscapes with Civil War significance and one a series of shots of rotting corpses – ‘What Remains’ – taken at the ‘Body Farm’ in Tennessee. All interesting, though the fat corpse was a bit gross. Finished off by visiting the bookshop and splurging on two books, a copy of Immediate Family and one of Mann’s earlier study At Twelve.

Had a nice dinner with Ruth at Bella Italia on Monday evening to celebrate my birthday followed by Amarettos (or is it Amaretti?) at Malmaison.

Decided to do my public spirited bit yesterday by going along to St Andrew’s United Reformed Church to donate blood. Feels like a worthy thing to do but a certain amount of reform of the way data is collected from patients is needed, to avoid the endless repetition one has to go through each time. One of the questions on the Donor Health Check Questionnaire relates to whether one has ever lived outside the UK for a continuous period of six months or more. As I have, albeit as a child, I am obliged to answer ‘Yes’ each time to this, but the National Blood Service appears not to retain any of the information given for next time, with the result that one is questioned each time about the trips in question and the nurse/assistant has to go off and look up the countries concerned in a file. This time, while puzzling over South Korea’s entry, the nurse looked up and asked me “Were you ever in the Demilitarized Zone?”. I was strongly tempted to answer “No, as a seven-year-old Western schoolchild I was, unsurprisingly, unable to slip past the most heavily guarded border in the world”, although my actual response was “No”, albeit accompanied by a minor degree of eye-rolling. Was eventually allowed to donate, once last year’s surgery had also been discussed in some detail. Makes you wonder whether they actually want your fluids sometimes. Once back in the office, I recovered my strength with another slice of birthday cake.

Claire treated me to a birthday lunch at Strada today where we made use of their pre-ordering service though we had to endure a triumphal ‘Aha!’ moment from the smug Scottish git who had justified taking 50 minutes to serve Claire’s lunch the week before by telling her that everyone else had pre-ordered and she hadn’t. Inevitably, these days, we were armed with a ‘2 mains for £10’ voucher, although we did enhance our panzerotti porcini off the set menu with a large glass of wine each.