Nude Magazine's 13th Issue Party

It would have been hard to imagine a better venue- the Horse Hospital behind Russell Square has to be one of the weirdest spaces in London. In 2000, I went there when I was foraging for venues for Voxpop Puella. It was interesting to see the same seedy dark red velvet sofa leaning against the wall, ageing like a good whine.
You walk up the horsy gantry with strips of wood nailed across it to stop the horses' hooves from slipping/trip up humans (delete that which does not apply), hanging on to a black tasselled handrail. There is an exhibition by Mark Pawson on at the moment- it's wonderful! At one point, when I was gazing at his collection of little plastic baby dollies i wondered if he was actually me, because we definitely have some duplicates, and swops too Mark, in the unlikely event of you ever reading this. He also collects something I'd completely forgotten about- those little wooden Vikings with white fluffy rabbit-fur beards and hair, made of different sorts of wood, with spears and shields. I remembered having a salt and pepper set in the Viking stylee when I was a teenager, completely useless to a teenager and totally unhygenic because of the hair. Those little vikings used to be everywhere and then completely disappeared. Now I know where they went to- Mark Pawson collected them all!
The party people were all stylish and buzzed like a hive of arty bees; I had been curious to see what sort of person reads Nude or contributes to it, and it was as though the pages had leapt to life and congregated for one night only in the perfect mad environment; there was a running projection of cool 60s films featuring slightly louche-looking stars and a very glamorous bigfoot truck (you know, there's a dancing bigfoot show that does the rounds of the Highland games in Scotland!), and bless me, the DJ played 'Is That All There Is?' by Cristina. I didn't know anyone else had that record. It was banned at the time. (Actually, I think the rock critic Simon Frith has a copy because he's a secret Cristina fan).
It was a swell do and I'm glad I went; Ian, who edits the magazine, was talking about doing a music night and asked if I would like to play.
Yes I would!
I went back home, passing through Russell Square Tube Station. There is something spooky about it, with its ghostly lifts. It probably disappears into the fog at dawn before the sun comes up.