Where's Obama today?

Turns out he's just arrived in Baghdad!! He's really packing it in on this round-the-world trip! There's a headline in K's Economist (April 4th-10th, p. 59) that says, "If atmospherics were all that mattered, the American president would be well on the way to curing the world's ills". It was good to have him in London, and I loved the fact that he gave the Queen an iPod!! There are some amusing track suggestions for her here. Michelle seemed to go down a storm at the inner London secondary school she visited - we heard some very eloquent teenage girls talking on the radio about how her visit had inspired them. (Talking of radio, did you catch K on Today??) I did not go on any protests, and to be quite honest, I really did not see the point of them. "Jobs, Justice and Climate"? Plus the usual add-ons that you get at protests like that. I tried it over Iraq - it didn't work. Its absolutely shocking, though, about that guy who died of a heart attack, on his way home - especially since it seems like the heart attack was set off by police assault.

Call me shallow, but I was frankly more interested in watching the footage of the Obamas meeting the Sarkozys at Strasbourg - Nicolas looked like a cartoon character next to Barack!! And what was Sarkozy doing with Obama's tie?? There was some fascination with the "sartorial battle" between Carla and Michelle ("two fashion titans"!), which is always amusing to read - though I am not sure I approve that you can now post comments at the end of stories on the Guardian website. I find myself reading them almost against my will, in a sort of morbid fascination, though very rarely do you get anything actually worth paying attention to - and how is it that people have time to participate in this kind of online conversation, sometimes several times??

Anyway, book update. I have finished Chapter 2, and sent that off to my readers, but I am having some difficulty getting going with writing Chapter 3. I have decided it's PMT - well, I've got to have something to blame. It also feels like a holiday - all the schools have broken up, and many of my colleagues have taken the week off, so there is a holiday air which is rather effecting. I also feel it's ok to have a little break between chapters - but there's just no time for that, I keep having to tell myself.

I spent this morning in the Baroque exhibition - classic work-avoidance activity. Now, I really do not like baroque as an artistic style - but I liked this exhibition. It is really well laid out, with a simple but effective design - like the section about secular spaces (ie. the palace) being laid out like an enfilade of rooms in a baroque palace, culminating in the king's bedchamber - as you would if you were a courtier visiting. It feels quite empty - though there is not a shortage of objects, though some of them are BIG, but they get a chance to breathe, and so do you - I always find if you're in an original baroque space it is just too overwrought and overwhelming that you just can't appreciate its individual elements, whereas you can here.

The one let-down was that nowhere does it actually tell you what baroque is, or how it develops, or why it spreads as widely as it did - why did it appeal so much? They imply it was through the patronage of the Catholic church and the absolute monarchs of the 17th century - though it doesn't ever really say what they were trying to use this style to express, apart from wealth, and power, which is self-evident. It was also slightly disappointing that - though much is made of this being the "first global style" (because it is the first style to travel out of Europe, though I am not sure this is necessarily something to be proud of, since it's imposed on colonies by European imperialists) this was only represented in a rather tokenistic way, with very few objects (though one of them was, admittedly, again, very large) and just there as "examples", rather than objects in themselves, if you see what I mean.

The theatre section was great - they had found this 17th-century castle theatre in the Czech Republic, which has retained its original stage set and furnishings, and it is obviously still used, since there was a short film of performances underway, and the guys under the stage turning pulleys to change the set. Fascinating. Opera was invented at this time, and much was made about the "total work of art", so that a baroque setting was multi-sensory, and included musical as well as visual stimulation. I really liked the use of music in the spaces, though at certain points these clashed with each other, but I think this experience would have been rather lost on you had you been going round with the audio guide (and you know how I feel about those...)

Anyway I think it has opened this week because of Easter - being, perhaps, the most Baroque of church rituals. And nowhere is it more Baroque than Semana Santa in Seville - of which there were some more film clips. In all my years of visiting Spain, I have never witnessed this, and is something I would really love to do sometime - though I am not sure I could get past been terrified by the penitents in their pointed KKK-inspiring hoods... Some seasonal photos I have enjoyed from the Guardian website (is it obvious which newspaper I read?):

Barbie and Ken go to Mass!