I must not stare at too much.

Life  After the attack of nerves which greeted my attendance of the press view for the Tate's Alice in Wonderland, I was relatively at ease this morning, taking time to put my belongings in the basement lockers, remembering to have some music with me to help me concentrate on the work at hand, or rather at face, and not becoming too distracted by the general hubbub of a Tate press view.  I think in general people would have seen me smiling, since it certainly felt like I was smiling a lot.

If nothing else it gave me a chance to add a few more people to the list of those whose work I really admire but I must not stare at too much.  But it really is difficult when someone like Paul Morley is wandering around, someone who probably knows more about music than I've forgotten about film and selected T Rex's Ride A White Swan as one of his half dozen best pop tracks of all time in that programme I once annotated for this blog.  But it would have been wrong to break his concentration by harassing him about the Sugababes reunion.

Similarly at work, and similarly not someone I'd want to harass was Hadley Freeman.  Oh my gosh, I would have wanted to say, I love your blog about 80s films.  I love your fashion columns.  I love Lost In Showbiz.  You're one of my favourite writers and a huge influence.  That would have been entirely unprofessional even if I wasn't technically at my profession.  Instead, I simply tried not to get in her way and just listen to the curator's introduction even when she stepped into my vicinity next to a display case.

All of which sounds like horrendous name dropping but during lunch I was chatting to someone about this blog and talked about how rare it was that I wrote anything "personal" any more and afterwards I realised it something I really should.  Do.  I saw two of my writing heroes today and that's huge and that's just the sort of thing I should be writing on here, even if it's so that in three years I can have a reminder of when it was.  I'll just try and not make too much of a habit of it.