Favourite long saturdays, Botanical Gardens and modern art encounters.

Spoiler alert: this day is not for vegetarians. This day may include distressing scenes of pointless modern art being in turn abusive and abused.

The day started well, botanically speaking. It was pleasant and nearly sunny, and with Skinnytoes we headed to the Botanical Gardens, to make the most of the weather before it turns. There were few people about, and I felt as if we had the place to ourselves. The other day a colleague at work had showed me how to work the macro setting on my new camera, and Skinnytoes unleashed its awesome powers on the orchids in one of the greenhouses.

I read somewhere their procreative technique is to look like a female of a certain insect. Is it just me, or can you imagine that too?

Rather scary for a flower.

I admit, I have enhanced these digitally a wee bit. It's Scotland, it's dark.

My favourite, so emphemeral.

A magnolia tree in bloom.

A sea of rhododendrons.

Curiously photogenic shrub.

So beautiful in their green, spiky way!

There were no cats to be pursued in the garden this time, but we did come accross a real cat street on the way to lunch: each door on the street had a cat sitting on it, all female, and all curiously bulging, as if pregnant. A cat harem possibly?

After having eaten a massive and surprisingly 'real' tasting pizza at Jolly on Elm Row, we found another Italian place for a very 'real' and extremely bitten espresso. It was an Italian kind of day, I guess, and we got extra big smiles from the very Italian, very complimentary waiter.

Espresso yourself everyone!

The weather was turning nasty, so we visited a few favourites at the National Gallery and then crossed over the square to see an exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. Sadly, it turned out to be an exhiibition of first works by modern artists. What a waste of oxygen. The first work exhibited just as you entered the gallery was a set-up of three surveillance cameras and a plan of London. As Skinnytoes pointed out, this may have worked in the 70s as a prediction of an Orwellian future, but what kind of sense does this have in the modern world? Remember you're being watched? Oh please, how lazy!

In fact, lazy is a pretty good description of most of the 'works of art' on display there. The one that enraged me most was this pathetic excuse for the practice of taxidermy.


The blurb next to the display said it was 'a comment on the dangers of a GM future'. To quote Bernard from Black Books, 'Don't make me sick into my own scorn'. If you want to practice your disgusting and morally questionable taxidermy hobby, do it in the privacy of your own cellar, but don't put it on display and call it art. Oh for God's sake, I should have done art, I would have
ROCKED.

A screen in a tube, making an annoying noise. High art.

In a fit of rage, I attempt to eat what I assume is a sculptre. Now that is ART.

The only piece of work I found in any way interesting was a series of paintings on board by a female artist. She painted following the grain of the wood, using it as part of the composition, and actually engaging with her material and subject matter.


And it's not even that I am particularily close-minded. No. It's just that after having seen the world, I say - be botanists, be gardeners, do something that produces real beauty and changes peoples lives you pathetic excuses for artists! There, spleen vented.