Manuscript of poems, (January 1936), by Pablo Picasso, facsimile. Exhibit included in Theatre Picasso, 2025-26, Tate Modern, London.
Field notes
After an early start meeting a friend online, awake and refreshed after two previously sleepless nights, I set off for that London to visit the Theatre Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern. It's been unseasonably warm this November, temperatures reaching 15-17 degrees Celcius in the afternoon. Saturday was dry and filled with fog, a premonition of Storm Claudia bringing mayhem and arctic temperatures.
Saturday 15 November 2025
Tea in the Members' Room on the first floor of the Tate Modern. Due to the record numbers of younger people (hurrah!) visiting the Tate, it has started opening until nine o' clock every Friday and Saturday evening.
The tea is made in a squat glass pot, like a cafetiere that was subjected to an anvil or maybe extraordinary gravity. It's posh tea, great torn shreds of leaves that swell in the hot water floating in centrifugal force like a dark possessed snow globe.
Perfect for telling fortunes, if you could somehow bypass the filter separating the hot dark tea from the muddy sodden leaves. It only works if the leaves were in the cup you drank from, your spirit, biome and very essence permeating the tea and telling your secrets:
Whispering grass, the trees don't need to know"
The train was busy, so was the strange ...
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... transit station on the road to nowhere. Lads trying to make head or tail of the ticket machine, juggling a four-pack of lager from arm to arm, lad to lad.
A smart couple passing, by myself and the family with the granny, mum and two teenage girls in a waft of gloriously scented, tantalisingly expensive perfume. They went to the far end, away from the hoi polloi, families and lads and their empresses.
Langorous soul music starting up in the Members' Room, quietly seductive in the minimalist bar with black tables and distinctive Tate font. I watch the icons recognising only Steve McQueen and Andy Warhol through my office glasses with optimal focal point at the distance of a computer screen.
Outside, an acrobat enthralls passers by, draws first one, then another and finally five children into his act, a London Pied Piper. He has a great build-up, cajoling the audience into singing, coming closer to the orange markers he has laid on the ground, drawing ...
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... them into his magic, the children's eyes growing big as saucers.
Next door, an elderly chap on a stool with a chessboard set up in front of him, a game in progress ...
Tina singing softly in the background, "What's love got to do with it? What's love but a secondhand emotion?"
Do you remember her bursting back on the scene with big hair my hairdresser would never allow me to emulate. I think only asking for a Rod Stewart mullet would have caused her more offence.
London immersed in fog, towers diappearing in miasma, the Shard fading beyond its midriff. Bare beaches exposed beside the low tide Thames, foreigners down by the water's edge, Dickensian scavengers looking for sea-glass, broken shards of clay pipes, a severed hand? Two swans, familiar with people, wander among them, alert to the opening of bags and the possibility of food.
I make my way to Theatre Picasso. What has Pablo got to say to me today?
Field Notes
I continue to be entranced by the handwritten, the desire to write and having very little idea of what will come out. I love the way the words and the images form on the page and the pleasure of writing, pausing to enjoy my posh tea and a pear and almond frangipane tart with biscuit crisp pastry. I discovered afterwards, through John Rogers' good offices, that those people on the foreshore (the land between high and low tide) are mudlarkers and you need a licence to be one. There's four thousand available (and thirty creative permits) from the Port of London Authority, and a waiting list of ten thousand.
References
Whispering Grass, (1940), by The Ink Sports - a song that I knew through the sitcom "It Ain't Half Hot, Mum". Here's the Windsor Davies/Don Estelle version from the show.
What's Love Got to Do with It?, (1984), by Tina Turner.
Theatre Picasso until 12 April 2026, Tate Modern, London. Exhibition Guide.
Secrets of the Thames: Watermen's Ceremony and Bermondsey Riverside Walk, (2025), John Rogers.
Previous Posts in This Series
On Loss, Grief and Origin Stories - Monday 20 October 2025
On Pens, Diaries, Mrs Dalloway and Oliver Cromwell - Friday 10 October 2025
On Rain before the Code - Friday 3 October 2025
On Transitions - Friday 26 September 2025
On Bringing New Audiences - Saturday 20 September 2025
On Liminal Spaces - Saturday 13 September 2025