I’ve been glued to the computer more than usual the last couple of days because of the One and Other project on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth (www.oneandother.co.uk). If you don’t know it, one of the 26ft plinths in Trafalgar Square, left empty for years, is now home to specially commissioned works of art. For his turn, artist Antony Gormley decided to put Brits on the plinth, for an hour at a time, round the clock for 100 days.
So over 22,000 people entered a ballot and 2,400 people won. Then they had to decide what to do up there. I’ve been watching the live stream and it’s funny because I usually get to see the graveyard shift and watch as the sun rises. These poor volunteers often only have dedicated family members standing miserably down below, under umbrellas. The person on the plinth has to make the best of it. It’s early days yet and I think the plinth activities will become more outlandish as the 100 days draw to a close. Yesterday a lady took a tree up there and did a nice topiary. Earlier, another lady took her rowing machine and looked quite dramatic from below. You couldn’t see much of the machine, just her scooting back and forth in the spotlight. She kept it up the whole hour too. This morning a guy cut his own hair.
We’ve been trying to decide what we’d do if it was us. Eamon wants to do origami, or make some superior paper aeroplanes at least. Ruby would play basketball, Curtis Lego. I think I’d take my laptop, organise a wireless connection and do something real time – write a blog, answer questions, create a plinth playlist or something. In bad taste, perhaps I’d dress up as Michael Jackson and do a suspended animation version of the moonwalk. Or maybe, if I had an audience, a game of charades would be fun. I’m looking forward to seeing the project in action when we hit London in a few weeks. I foresee us making up many excuses to pass by Trafalgar Square.
I have a lot to catch you up on, so I might split this into two separate entries. We’ve had a few guests in town the last couple of weeks and did lots of fun stuff. Before that, we went to Nikko for the weekend, staying in log cabins in the forest. To get to the forest we needed a rental car and a GPS. It stands to reason that, in Japan, rental cars have GPSs that speak Japanese. The maps are written in Japanese too. This is not such big deal as you can get the rental car guy to program your GPS and then you just try to follow the blue line. You have to be humble though, you must respect the GPS. You can’t then start pressing buttons or touching the screen, thinking you suddenly know how to work it.
We were about 500m from the rental car office when Michael pressed the first button. Another 500m and we pulled over, to focus all our attention on getting it back to where it was. Five minutes later, we decided (wisely) to go back to the office and have the guy re-program it. He also gave us a book of maps and took a photocopy of our accommodation details in case we disappeared off the face of the earth.
Getting out of Tokyo was a challenge similar to navigating the metro here, except instead of holding up crowds of pedestrian commuters as you try to find the right exit, you hold up cars and trucks going motorway speed. The motorways cover Tokyo like spaghetti and you have to pick your way through several interchanges before finally hitting the open road. Japanese service levels hit a new high as we kept driving into the wrong toll lane (electronic chip only, no cash). The operators would sprint across several lanes to our car and collect our cash, without so much as a frown. We just kept smiling and bowing in our seats, apologising yet again for being so clueless.
Eamon threw up about 100 times on the way (car-sick this time, not banana-sick) and once, when I turned to check on him I accidentally put my hand on the GPS screen and it beeped at me. After an initial panic, it seemed okay – we could still see the blue line. Excitement levels peaked as we neared the red dot marking our destination. It turned out to be an empty field. Clearly, covering the screen with my hand, then giving a firm push had changed our course somewhat. By this stage we were on country back roads and made a best guess at where to go. We drove on, did quite a few U-turns and stopped several times for Eamon to throw up again, but finally made it to the Woodsman’s Village. We joined up with some Tokyo friends and had a ball. Here are some photos:
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