Saved by the Infinity Room

Nicole was off doing something or other work related on Saturday and I wasn't in much of a mood for much. What better idea then than to take two reluctant children to the Art Gallery to look at art and eat rubbish food. I mean with Lyra's recent track record of going where she shouldn't and generally fronting up to security staff and evading parental control, what could be more fun?

Eloise was the reluctant specifically in relation to the Art Gallery, of course, though Lyra was reluctant to leave the house. Both would have prefered to loll slavering in front of whatever happened to turn up on the TV, proclaiming each and every programme to be their favourite. But this was not to be and I was in no mood to tolerate resistance of any kind. It was the Art Gallery or a bike ride.

So we farted around in the Art Gallery. There was an expansive installation-cum-exhibition involving channeling childhood memories into huge Lego walls and actually quite interesting little rooms with seals balancing pianos on their noses and ballet dancers with a huge Kerplunk-stick arrangement nearby. Eloise asked interesting questions of the Grey Guardian while I chased Lyra around and tried to limit the damage. On the other side a huge room with a neon sign overlooking a red piano; a player casting out rills through the gallery of beautiful music. Lyra decided to add to the melodic melange with some vocal stylisations of her own, and had to be forcibly removed.

We played on some computer games downstairs for a while, then watched a version of the Jungle Book in which each character speaks a different language, which didn't seem to put Eloise off, unsurprisingly.

We were all set to leave when I thought we could look upstairs for a bit, and so I dragged the reluctant children up, kicking and screaming, to a room where there was a room, smaller - obviously - with a queue outside. We queued, and then the door slid open, we wandered in, and the door slid closed to make a room whose inside was a perfect set of mirrors, with neon balls within reflected to infinity and the floor a little jetty poking out into mirror-still water creating infinite reflections in every direction.

Eloise thought that that was pretty amazing, and so did Lyra. "That was pretty amazing" she didn't say. "This is my room now" she said.