Gs

So we were walking along Fournier Street on our way to Ottolenghi Spitalfields for breakfast (verdict: decent without being owt to rave about tbh) when I noticed Gilbert & George walking towards us. Gilbert smiled, George gave us a cheery "Good morning" and I thought that was a pretty nice way to start the day. Googled them just for the sake of it and found that they have their own gallery now just off Brick Lane, so we nipped there after food and, really, it was bloody great! Really. And, if we had any sort of baggage allowance for our flight back on Tuesday I would have bought at least one of their signed posters. At the bare minimum.

We walked down in to the city area for a double dose of Roman ruins - first The Mithraeum at The Bloomberg Building (an unearthed Roman temple beneath a modern office building basically), followed by the Roman amphitheatre ruins at The Guildhall Art Gallery along with an excellent guided tour of the various Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (The PRB no less, sounds like my kind of industrial techno outfit for sure). Also on show there was a terrific exhibition of prints by Anne Desmet - some beautifully intricate linocut and wood cut kaleidoscopic collages. Blimey, I need to up my game.

A quick pit stop/caffeine fix and then the walk down to London Bridge and on to the White Cube Bermondsey for an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Tracey Emin. I'd never been to Bermondsey before (vibrant as you like, loved it) and so obviously had never been to that gallery before either. It's huge! An incredible space full of rooms with very, very high ceilings and vast white walls - perfect for Tracey's large canvases to really work, they pack quite a punch. I know she's not everyone's favourite but, for me, I think there's real substance there, I was pretty thrilled by the whole experience of the work and the gallery as a whole. Oh, and free to boot (as indeed was all the other stuff too today).

Bus to Waterloo for food and drink and the evening's entertainment -  'The Real Thing' at The Old Vic. I'd read a very good review in The Guardian some weeks back, it had a decent cast including Bel Powley and James McArdle, plus I'd got seats up in the balcony for what I considered a very reasonable £15 a pop. But, as much as I enjoyed being out and about in London on a Saturday night and having a nice theatre experience...the play didn't really do it for me to be honest. Tom Stoppard? Maybe he's just not my kind of thing.

Tube home, a quick pint in Spitalfields on the way back to the hotel and, phew, that'll do it for today I reckon.

PRB? 

BBR