Roll of Honour

A long, tiring, but enjoyable day today.

We visited the Victoria and Albert museum in London to see the exhibition of photographs by Horst. Horst was a highly accomplished and very successful fashion photographer for Vogue magazine, both in monochrome and, later, in colour. His studio photographs were largely taken on a 10x8 inch film camera to achieve the quality insisted on by the publisher Condé Nast. The exhibition also showed work influenced by his friendship with surrealist artists like Salvador Dali, pictures of stars of stage and screen, and some fine male nude studies, among other subjects. The exhibition culminated with some large scale and beautifully printed platinum-palladium prints.

After spending some time in the exhibition we were pretty tired and footsore, but after reviving ourselves with a cup of tea in the splendid environment of the V&A cafe, we decided to take the tube across to Tower Hill to take another look at the impressive poppy installation in the moat at the Tower of London. The volume of poppies has grown considerably since my last visit a few weeks ago, and I shall try and find time over the next week to add some more images to my Flickr album to show the changes.

By the time we were ready to leave, it was dusk so we stayed to witness the reading of the daily Roll of Honour - 180 names of Commonwealth troops killed during the First World War, followed by a bugler playing the Last Post.

Home fairly late: just about had the energy to prepare and eat a meal before collapsing into bed.