Bye Bye Britain - The Unnatural Bits

London is a lot. Everywhere I look there is an iconic statue, a landmark site, a creative endeavor and people of all nations, living their lives. I sink into this city and love the anonymity of just being one more global citizen. A citizen who has however been spoilt by friends who have shared the creative riches of the city with me, beginning of course with the West Ham/ Fulham match in the London Stadium, an Olympic forum which was meant to be dismantled but lives on as West Ham`s home ground. The view was amazing, the barracking, questionable and the walk by the canals to the train, colourful. West Ham lost.

The Tate Modern was an altogether different experience with an interactive exhibition by Yoko Ono dominating the gallery. Her work still feels as vapid as I experienced her, all those years ago when she shared a peace bed with John Lennon. The video of that event was running on a never-ending reel and there were instructions to interact in the most unusual places and in the most vacuous ways.

I did however like her room of blue scribble with boat and added my own as I did when confronted by a vast wall of post it comments dedicated to mothers. I couldn`t help but be captured by the amount of sharing represented in these art pieces.

More exciting were two illuminations created by the Japanese Artist who usually specialises in dotted art works. They required that we walk through them and be magically entranced. My friend said it was like being in the centre of a Christmas tree. It was and I was entranced.

As I was that same evening when in a theatre off Drury Lane, I saw the musical, Standing at Sky`s Edge. Wonderful seats in the stalls and a poignant depiction of the lives of three generations in a landmark Sheffield high rise. And as I was, several days later when at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre at Stratford Upon Avon, I saw the Buddha of Suburbia, a play adapted from a book by Hanif Karesh. The play explores themes of identity, class, and race in 1970`s London. It was strange to see a time, so central to my own life depicted on stage, a little haunting.

And woven throughout everything and almost everywhere, there is more creativity. At Burgh House, a Hampstead historical home, where woman artists are featured, and Bohemian gentility of another time is evident in the works.

And at the National portrait gallery where efforts to redress the gender gap with portraits of women amid the plethora of worthy gents are on display. My favourites, Vanessa Bell by her husband Duncan Grant and Viginia wolf, by Vanessa Bell, her sister. These three were all members of the Bloomsbury Group, for whom I have a long-held fondness.

I spend my final day in the city centre, watching a young man from Glasgow, busk in Trafalgar Square. He is very good and says that busking has made him a living for which he is very grateful. The crowd around him come and go as the statues surrounding this iconic place look on. I too have loved looking on in London.