Sculpture in the Home at Pangolin London

The best thing about working at Kings Place is the art. There are modern statues on the two sides facing the canal, a large gallery on level -1 that often spills over to level -2 and there is Pangolin London too.

Pangolin London is the little gallery on the York Road side that lies between The Guardian and the main entrance to the arts complex and the offices. Because of its street-side location it is a gallery that I have looked in to many times but have only popped into a couple of times.

The current exhibition, Sculptures in the Home, was so striking that I had to go in and have a closer and longer look.

Sculpture in the Home was inspired by exhibitions with the same name from the 40's and 50's. It had a rich feast of sculptures and a nice topping of a few pictures displayed in three period rooms.

Everything about it was brilliantly conceived and executed.

The rooms were as lovely as anything in the Geffrye Museum and it was worth going just to see the two Wingback Armchairs in Sanderson Festival fabric. The furniture and furnishings were part of the exhibition and were included in the catalogue. The chairs that I loved were a tempting £3,000 each.

I would have been quite satisfied if that was all that the exhibition consisted of but there was more to it than that. The real point of the rooms was to show off the works of art.

Discretely sprinkled across the room were 32 sculptures and 21 prints. They were placed so naturally that it was hard to find all of them.

The sculptures were by people like Lynn Chadwick and Elisabeth Frink who even I had heard of.

I would have loved to take all three rooms home with me just as they were but I was about £1m short of the asking price so I had to be content with just looking and dreaming.

The Lost World of Norman Cornish at Kings Place Gallery

Possibly the best thing about working in Kings Place is being in the same building as Kings Place Gallery. I like to pop down there during a break and I have been seriously impressed by several of their exhibitions. Including this one.

Norman Cornish worked as a coal miner in a small village in County Durham and he painted what he saw around him. The exhibition was called "The Lost World of Norman Cornish" because that world been lost with the closure of the mines.

It was a hard world with the miners walking miles to the local pit to work in cramped conditions underground and getting little money for their efforts. And while this hardness comes through so does the character and community. This is a world now viewed through grey-tinted glasses but at that time it was just how things were.

I had seen one of the pictures of coalminers walking to work before (there were several similar pictures in the exhibition) but I cannot recall now where that was, it could have been a gallery, a magazine or a website. However, it did make an impression at the time and that is a good thing.

There were a few pictures of inside the coal mine too including this one of men climbing the gantry at the pit-head and some of men working underground.

Another common theme in Cornish's work was the pub where the men went in the evening. These shared some of the characteristics of the men at work pictures with groups of identically dressed men in long coats and caps usually viewed from behind. The impression was given that the pubs were as cramped as the mines, and the possibly were.

Artistically as well as compositionally the pub scenes looked much like the work scenes with broad shapes in browns and greys and that is the main reason that I have not included an example of one of them.

The third set of pictures were quite different. These were scenes in and around the village that showed people going about their normal business. These were smaller pictures (A4ish) done in watercolour.

There was more actual colour in them too, though I have chosen one of the least colourful examples as it is the one that I liked the most. At least the woman has a blue headscarf that almost makes my point.

The final set of pictures were rough portraits and sketches of people.

It was a large exhibition spread over all of Level -1 with a little overspill on to Level -2 and I liked everything in it. I walked around it twice before heading outside to continue my lunch break.

I think that this was my favourite exhibition at Kings Place Gallery so far. I have really enjoyed some of the others, particularly Ørnulf Opdahl, but I prefer Norman Cornish because of the sense of humanity that they exude. These are pictures of real people in real places.

The Thin White Duke at the Fox and Duck (April 2014)

Let's get the bad news out of the way first as that rather clouds my view of the evening.

I was feeling rather run-down and not really in the mood for a good time. That also made me more susceptible to the irritations of the livelier people in the pub, one of whom was equally loud and annoying the previous week at Echoes. Let's hope that this is not a trend.

The good news is that the bad news stopped me from dancing and everybody else should be grateful for that.

The Thin White Duke are extremely popular and despite arriving well before the 9pm start time the pub was already full and I had to wait a little to get my first of several Doombars. It always helps when the pub is full as the lively happy atmosphere is as important as the music.

There was a change in the ranks of The Thin White Duke this time with the arrival of Sally Knight on backing vocals. Bowie usually had female singers with him so the move made sense though.

Along with Sally came some new songs. We were promised four but only Absolute Beginners was announced as such. The other news ones may have been Sorrow, Sound and Vision (who wrote "Sounds" on the set-list?), and Young Americans, but it would not surprise me either to learn that these are all stalwarts of the band's.

The Thin White Duke did what they always do and that is to get everybody singing and quite a few dancing. Who could possibly resist getting involved with classics like Life on Mars, Starman, Oh You Pretty Things and the set-closer Heroes? Though I would still like to see them do the German version, Helden, one day.

The moans about some of the audience do not detract from the simple fact that The Thin White Duke are a good band playing great songs and this was a fine performance.

Sadly there is some bad news to end with too. They have had to cancel the gig scheduled for August so they will not be back to the Fox and Duck until 6 December. It's in my diary.

Invincible at the Orange Tree

Invincible is my sort of play and the Orange Tree is my sort of theatre so this always looked like being a winner. This was a view that was widely shared and I was delighted to hear that the run had sold out.

I am pretty well organised on the Orange Tree, it's my local theatre and I go to absolutely everything there, so I had bought my ticket in good time and saw it well before the end of its run, so ending my run of seeing plays on the last day of their runs.

Invincible was constructed in much the same way as Torben Betts' previous play at the Orange Tree, Muswell Hill. All the action took place in one room and consisted of a series of dialogues as the characters moved in and out of the room, the scenes varied in mood from the funny to horrific, a lot of the humour came from a clash of personalities, the horror came from the characters' histories that were gradually exposed through their conversations, and the story was set against the back-drop of an international situation (Afghanistan in this case).

The premise for the culture clash was simple and understandable. Guardian reading London couple Oliver and Emily are forced by economic circumstances to move to the North. As part of this they want to engage with "real people", people like their new neighbours Alan and Dawn. It's the World Cup and Emily and Oliver's house is the only one in the street not supporting a Flag of St. George.

The humorous clash of personalities came from four distinct and believable characters and four actors who portrayed them convincingly.

The casting of Alan and Dawn was particularly important as he had to be fat and she had to be sexy, and they were. Emily's first comment on Dawn was that she was "virtually naked" whereas she was actually clothed from neck to knees (it did not even have the v-neck shown in the publicity shot below), it was just that it was a figure-hugging dress hugging an attractive figure.

The couples clashed culturally but there was no animosity or malice there and they were able to carry on talking to each other through their differences. This brought more moments of humour, Emily and Alan both painted, she did abstracts with abstract titles and he did cats. Alan's cat was called HMS Invincible, hence the name of the play.

The small talk also teased out details of their pasts that were sometimes dark. There was a particular horror in Oliver and Emily's past that we only learnt the full details of towards the end. Alan and Dawn's open question was why had Dawn married Alan when she could have had any boy/man she wanted. This was a question that Alan himself asked.

Then some things happened that darkened the mood and some of the relationships. They also provided an opportunity and led the play to its ending.

There were a lot of big laughs along the way. The first scene after the interval was inspired and we all laughed out loud when we discovered what Oliver and Emily's big row was over. Later Oliver got a cheer for his uncomplimentary comments about the North. Even the one of the deaths was funny.

Invincible scored over Muswell Hill, in my opinion, in that it made better use of the layout of the Orange Tree and the dark moments were darker. It was a neatly crafted play, superbly presented and, most of all, acted with passion.

Plays this good deserve to sell-out.

Folking Around with Pig Earth at the Grey Horse (April 2014)

This was one of those nice evenings when came together and then turned out better than expected.

I have been going to the Open Mic nights at the Grey Horse (as a viewer, not a performer) for a while now. They are on every Wednesday and are a nice end to the evening if I am around. So it was a small step from there to go to Folkin Around which is also at the Grey Horse and is held on the first Thursday of the month.

I have known Craig Stratton for some years through our mutual membership of the British Czech and Slovak Association and I even bought his CD From the Homeland, a selection of romantic works by Czech composers for violin and piano. As well as his classical work, Craig also plays in a folk band called Pig Earth.

So when Pig Earth headlined Folking Around I had two reasons to be there.

I did not want a long night in the pub, especially as I had been there the day before for the Open Mic session, so I arrived around 9pm having been told by Craig that they would be on around 10pm. That meant that I caught Graham Russ and Dan Raza. They were pleasant enough but I do not know folk music at all so cannot comment on their styles.

Pig Earth were a very different proposition with five musicians making a fruity sound where, for example, the tinny squeaks of the mandolin and the throb of the double bass providing the textural extremes. Craig, on the far left, was the man on the mandolin, and fiddle and banjo.

They played mostly their own songs. The one cover that they threw in was Whiskey in the Jar and, to be honest, I felt that this was their weakest song. The rest were in a similar jolly mood but with a bit more variety and complexity.

Folk is not my sort of music, nor is Country, and still Pig Earth managed to entertain me for half an hour or so and turned what could have been just a duty or a habit in to a real pleasure. So much so that I expect both Pig Earth and Folking Around to be in my future plans.