DRAFT

In which the park turns to toast and the pints multiply

An unhurried 9:30, a building that plays tricks on the eye, and an afternoon that never quite decided to go back indoors.

Nine-thirty in the morning is, by the standards of any self-respecting holiday, practically the crack of dawn — and yet there we were, assembled outside at the appointed hour with the grim discipline of people who had, at some point the night before, agreed to this in writing. The plan was modest: walk toward Marble Arch, pause for coffee and the sort of small breakfast that exists purely to justify the coffee, and arrive in reasonably good order. Modest plans, executed exactly as drafted, are rarer than one would like, so this alone felt like a small triumph.

We were booked for Frameless at 11, and turned up, naturally, an hour early — a very British instinct that the venue rewarded by simply letting us in at 10 anyway, as though it had been expecting our impatience all along. I won’t attempt to explain what Frameless actually is, partly because I’m not sure a straight explanation would survive contact with the experience, and partly because some things are better arrived at unbriefed. What I will say is that it reorganises the business of looking at art into something genuinely novel, and that I intend to do it again — in London next time, or perhaps in Paris, where I gather the same trick is on offer.

Some experiences resist explanation on principle. Frameless is one of them, and I respect it too much to spoil the trick.

Aperitif was with our friend Gary, booked for 12:30 at the Chesterfield Arm pub ” in this case, being a technicality, since the entire arrangement took place resolutely outdoors. It was warm enough that being indoors would have counted as a lifestyle choice nobody was prepared to make.

To get there we cut through Hyde Park, which was not, as advertised, green. It had gone the colour of digestive biscuits, scorched into a uniform yellow-brown I don’t think I’ve ever seen on it before — the sort of thing that makes you briefly reconsider what “typical British summer” is supposed to mean.

We arrived early at the pub — early appears to be the running theme of the day — and got a couple of real ales in before Gary turned up, at which point it became, inevitably, round two. Round two, for reasons I can’t fully account for, didn’t sit quite right with me, so the diplomatic solution was to relocate entirely: a couple of hundred yards down the road to a second pub, also outdoors, also perfectly content to let the time simply happen to us.

And that, really, was the whole of the busy morning: a pint in hand, the news exchanged in no particular order, and the world going by at exactly the pace it’s supposed to when there’s nowhere else you’re meant to be. Some days are built around a single spectacular thing. This one had its spectacular thing early — a building that reinvents how you look — and then had the good sense to spend the rest of its hours on nothing more ambitious than good company and cold beer. That was however just the beginning