Tate etc

Did some work this morning, then, after lunch, I took a bus to St Paul's and walked across the footbridge to the Tate Modern. Looked at the giant tapestry in the turbine hall, then the Surrealist collection, in itself a reason to be there. Then the view from the espresso bar across the Thames to the London skyline, with the dome of St Paul's smack in the middle. Sat there and read my book (Eavan Boland's new collection from Carcanet) for a while, before going to see the Louise Bourgeois' works on paper,' which interest me more than her sculpture, I think. They range from some small, early, already sophisticatedly naive pencil drawings (two boys in a bathtub, for example, but the bathtub is transparent) to a patch work composed bits of cloth left over from the family business--repairing tapestries--in Antony, a southern suburb of Paris. Some of the squares of fabric bore stitched-on name tags, of the kind a child going away on a  'classe de nature' might have stitched into their clothing--honest-to-god  machine-embroidered name tags. And buttonholes, beautifully stitched buttonholes. 

Got on the wrong bus to come home.