It is Sunday night and time to blog. Sorry!

How was your weekend?

Mine was not too bad,. The weather has been fine all weekend. I should perhaps have got out into the wilderness, done some hiking or some such but instead I went into Newcastle and went to the Baltic Centre for contemporary art.

www.balticmill.com

As the name suggests it used to be a mill. It had lain unused for some time before an ambitious council decided to go for city of culture 2008 (Liverpool got it) and built a whole bunch of stuff including converting the now derelict flour mill into an art centre. That was in 2003.

I go to see most of the exhibits. The last few years have been fairly turbulent on a personal level but for some reason the Baltic is one of the few places where i can leave it all behind. I don't pretend to understand contemporary art and certainly don't see how the pieces fit with the blurb that goes with it but what the heck? I just enjoy being there.

So I went back on Saturday for another look at an exhibit. I had been just the weekend before with my daughter, she tolerates these little trips but has no appetite to really get involved.

On the top floor of the Baltic is a video installation by a geezer called Jesper Just. It is three short films of his and we caught the end of one and started watching the next one. Unfortunately My daughter felt that it was time to go and i didn't get to see the end.

Thus I returned yesterday to see the rest of the films. The Film I was watching, before being ejected was called "Sirens of Chrome". I was interested because I liked the way it was filmed. It starts by following a car with four women in it. The combination of the backing music and the seemingly pointless nature of the journey as viewed in the disinterested expressions on the girls faces was intriguing to me.

You see if we had our lives followed for every second of our lives by CCTV this sort of footage would make up the vast majority of our lives. Out memories just store the interesting bits but there are far more of the bits that connect those memories. The walk to the bus, the car journey to work etc. A case in point was a video recording of a tour of Somerset I undertook with my cricket club back in the mid eighties. My memories are such that it seemed to be an incident packed week with never a dull moment. However the video recording begged to differ. There was an awful lot of sitting around doing not very much interspersed with moments of hilarity. I didn't remember sitting around so much!

I was transfixed by this scene of driving around Detroit. However being an art film I didn't understand the ending, context or point. It was however well shot and staged with a captivating music score. I have seen stranger works at the Baltic. The abstractness of all this fascinates me. Like I said earlier I seem to be able to put all my issues to one side when I am inside the centre. I is like ointment on a wound. It gives instant relief and sometimes even has lasting after effects.

Enough of that.

I had decided earlier in the day that I needed to combine my artsy fartsy trip with a decent amount of exercise. I have largely been confined to a couch this winter. With the return of some nice weather I have no excuse to sit in front of a telly all day long. I took the Metro to Haymarket and then the walk down to the quayside is a good mile and a half and then the walk back up to haymarket includes a pretty good slog up Grey Street. OK so it was only 3 miles but it was better than nothing.

Along Northumberland street I ran the gauntlet of a "Christian Aid" push. Or so they said.

I was first pounced on by a young lady who first of all said that she wanted no money. I became immediately suspicious because if weren't for my money she would not be interested. She just wanted my details so I could receive a mail shot from Christian Aid. She held in her hand a personal organiser and was poised to receive my details. I declined politely. I am not against Christian Aid as such just to be stopped in the street. My thought as I made my way to the station I was struck by the thought that the only ID she showed me was her jacket with Christian Aid written on it. She might just have been fishing for names and addresses in some sort of identity theft thingy!

I was accosted in the same manner 4 times before I reached Haymarket. Each time I told the young lady (I was obviously part of a demographic they were after - lonely middle aged!) I had just been approached by one of their colleagues. For some reason I was blindingly stupid and admitted that I had not given my details and thus was engaged in a conversation as to why not. Why didn't I cross my mind to lie to all the subsequent girls that yes I had indeed given my address to her colleague and I would have been left alone!

Monday beckons and I must away to my bed