No Buyer's Day for me then......

I haz a sad.

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 2011 opens in a few days time and I'm still waiting for my Buyer's Day invitation.  Like I've had for the last two years.  It's still not arrived.  I can only imagine they've somehow forgotten to put it in the post to me.  It surely can't be anything to do with the fact that I've not bought anything directly from the Exhibition for the last two years but have, instead, gone directly to the artists - can it?

Last year when TLH and I went we said we wouldn't go again next year (i.e., this year) because Buyer's Day is always packed and there's no air conditioning, so you're fighting your way through the crowds to try and get into the Small Weston Room to look at paintings/prints that might actually fall within your price bracket, while trying to look at the little catalogue and simultaneously try and hold a pen (to mark which pictures you like in the catalogue) and a handbag all the time trying to ignore the relentless trickle of sweat running down your back and into your bum cleft.  Classy, eh?

But now it's here again, and I don't have a free invitation, and I'm looking at stuff about it all online and feeling terribly wistful.  I also can't afford anything this year as I'm saving up for a new saxophone.  But - dammit - I like looking at art.  And I know that the second most popular blog posting I've done has been to do with the Summer Exhibition, so I know my readers like me going too.  (My most popular blog posting is the one on how to make blackberry vodka, so at last my readers have the priorities straight). 

I do think I want to go, but it will be on an ordinary day.  I'm going to try and persuade TLH that we should drive the Little Car up to the London, rather than go on the train.  This is because it costs so much now to get there by train - easily approaching £40 return for the two of us, yes, that's off peak at the weekend too - and the Little Car is so economical that it would probably cost a quarter of that in petrol.  Even taking into account parking costs, it's got to be cheaper.  However, the downside is that he wouldn't be able to drink so a boozy lunch/dinner would be out of the question.  Still, I'll put it to him and see what he thinks.

We used to drive up to London a lot, in our 'courting' days (what a fabulously quaint expression that is...).  We'd just become a couple and used to decide to go up to London to catch the midnight showing of some film or other on a Saturday night, stopping off at Dunkin' Donuts just off Piccadilly Square at about 2.30am and getting home an hour later.  We've not done that in years, and it was such fun, driving around London at midnight in the summer, with the windows open, listening to the sounds and smelling the smells of a capital city at play.  Anyway, I'll see what he says.  And if we do go, I promise I'll take sneaky photos again for you all.