In Bradford

We went to Bradford this afternoon, and saw a lovely exhibition at the Media Museum. Simon Roberts travelled around England for six months with his wife and child, taking photographs of landscapes with people doing stuff in them, from hill-walking to sun-bathing in their socks, mud-racing to hood-chasing, celebrating a birthday to playing golf in the shadow of a power station. It all felt so, well, English, indeed the show was called We English. Like a mirror held up, I found I didn't know how strongly I knew what that meant until I looked into his great big panoramic pieces and saw so much that was so deeply familiar.

I must also tell you that the almond slice and decaff latte in the cafe were to die for.

I was less moved, slightly shocked by the work of Robbie Cooper. His show, entitled Immersion, fetaures full-face images of children and adults immersed in front of screens, watching TV, or playing computer games. The intense energy racing through the bodies of all these people, especially the gamers, almost entirely channelled into their facial muscles, otherwise just a few arm movements, or a slight bouncing, made me feel overloaded somehow just looking at them. Longing for some kind of discharge. The isolation of these activities, and the unconsciousness of so much that is going on in them, I found really quite disturbing.

And this afternoon, hail stones bouncing about outside in the sunlight! Good Friday tomorrow and we shall go to see the Pace Egg Play. I'll put you in a link tomorrow to an amazing piece of film of this ancient local 'mumming' type play being performed in the '60s. We shall also lay in stocks of food, as you do, for the Bank Holiday weekend. Tonight it's rare breed pork chops from the freezer, and a lovely bottle of tempranillo.

Going to exhibitions is good for me. So much better than working, which I seem to have opted out for for a while, as it's the school hols... Looking at photographs - good ones anyway - makes me see the world afresh. I sat on Tyrrell Street in Bradford, eating a tuna and cucumber sandwich, while L was opening an ISA at the building society on Hustlergate, and enjoyed light and shadows. Bradford is steep with imposing Victorian buildings, sometimes a bit evocative of gothic German public buildings, and so there's lots of shade in the steep narrow canyons between them in places. And lots of people of many sorts to watch. Windy too, so the temperature as well as the light kept changing. Then I had to go and buy chocolate. One shop I went into called itself a 'smoking shop', and it didn't have chocolate, so I only stayed long enough to see some teenage girls being shown a large bong from the window, excitedly saying 'yes, that's the one'. In a Turkish newsagent's I bought a Twirl. They had pistachios on the counter, and a tank of fish with a submerged plastic skull sunk into the gravel.