We just got back form the O2 Center, where we saw a semi-final match in the ATP Tour finals between Raffa Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Djokovic won pretty easily. Too many unforced error by Nadal. You have to be at the top of your game to stay with Djokovic, and he wasn’t. It was still fun. We were in the Brayan Cave box, with a bunch of lawyers and guests. The O2 Center is pretty unremarkable. A big, typical arena surrounded by new construction. I don’t know what was there before (did they just raze everything that had been there or was there nothing much there?), but it is like a little mini-city rising up along the river. I can’t say it is all especially nice looking and it is a long way from anywhere (except Canary Wharf). I know that China builds entire cities like this out of thin air, designed to hold millions of people. Here they are just building these new, ugly neighborhoods….

After the game, we decided to try taking a boat down the Thames (kind of a huge, floating bus) because they were doing weekend work on some of the Underground and Overground lines and it was really complicated (multiple Tube changes) getting to the O2 for the event. (This comment makes me feel a little like Reginald Perrin. I am afraid that this is an impossibly obscure reference for most people. He was the main character on this old, very odd British comedy, which often began with him arriving to work late-again- and explaining that there was some problem on some road or train line.) Anyway, it was kind of cool taking the boat and we liked it so much we kept going to the Embankment pier, rather than getting off at London Bridge. I think I will add it to London transportation network.

I have been working on a painting for the past four or five days and I got sick of it, so I decided to try something else. I’ll probably get back to the unfinished one at some point. But it felt good to get away from it and  I did the one below in one day. It is also the biggest thing I have done. It’s based on a photo I took of a guy asleep on the Tube. I may call it “Underground Nap”. I find that I work in spurts on these things. When I get excited about something, I can’t stop working on it. The one I stopped doing was starting to seem like work.