Travesty

The big treat of today was spending it with my two children, my sister, Tivoli, and our mum. Months and months ago, when I booked the tickets, I thought the big treat would be the Van Gogh immersive exhibition. Oh dear... The first room made me apprehensive - with appalling reproductions and a banal commentary, the second room was a bad mock-up of that famous bedroom, then the immersive bit, which I thought might redeem it, just bored me. The animations of Starry Night, of the Room (again - see extra) and of, I assume, the asylum crashing around our ears, felt a bit like an upmarket version of the early days of Powerpoint, when people whizzed their italicised scarlet or cobalt titles in from left or right, simply because they could. Tackiest of all were the self-portraits crumbling into dust, presumably to represent the self succumbing to madness. What would poor Van Gogh have thought?

But it was great to have lunch together in Spitalfields Market. Tivoli gave me most of yesterday's hamper for our family Christmas and donated the shortbread to Son, who then went off to queue for a walk-in booster because where he lives he was unable to get one this side of the new year. The rest of us ambled round the market, then headed our separate ways. At 3.15 Daughter and I got a text from Son, despondent that he'd been told he would have to queue for "over an hour". So rather than heading back to Oxford together we caught a painfully overcrowded bus (and Covid?) to Son's queue. The three of us proceeded to stand in it until almost 6pm, when he was finally let in. He was allowed to spend his 15 minutes' waiting time back outside with us so, professionally trained vaccinator that I am, I diagnosed the need for restorative shortbread. As blipped, but this is partly so that Tivoli can see the injury added to yesterday's insult - ten small shortbreads in a box well over double their volume.