Twelve Months Twenty-Four Photos. Numbers Thirteen and Fourteen - July

[blahflowers]

Despite living and working in Southwark I have to say, Lambeth have us beat when it comes to festivals. The Bermondsey Carnival and Lambeth Country Show happened with a fortnight between them and I know which one I thought was better. The LCS takes over almost an entire park with a number of different sections for different tastes, the BC is stuck in the corner of one park and is a car boot sale with pretensions. I don't know if it's a sign of different priorities, Lambeth's libraries are rather... stark, shall we say, Southwark cut back on it's funding for public events, causing the shutting down of the Carnival Del Pueblo (sp?) which used to happen up the road. I don't know whether this was a very bad year or whether it's always been shitty in Bermondsey. But to have the kids from Kinetika Bloco sashay past put a smile on my face, even if they'd almost gone before I realised what had happened.

The David Bowie exhibition at the V&A was and stands as probably my high point of the year. The people who put it together deserve an award. I don't go to the V&A that regularly and in the past I've tended to find their exhibitions put style far too high above substance (see especially the Post-Modernism Exhibition from a few years back) but this was putting style to the service of substance. Sure, some of the stuff based on finding your location within the space was a bit tricksy, but there was just so much to see and to play with. And you know they could have easily made the exhibition two or three times bigger because there is just so much there. I left energised.