Me Vs Banksy

So after absorbing weeks of saturation coverage and more hype than the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive unit, I finally made it to the Banksy exhibition at Bristol Museum.
Several attempts have been made, which have mainly involved trying to get out of bed early at the weekend to beat the queues, then deciding against the whole idea of standing in the rain for three hours and ended in going back to sleep.
But we headed down there on Wednesday after work, which was a beautiful sunny city evening. In fact it was so warm I dared to leave the house without a coat or jacket of any kind, not even a thin waterproof kagool. Pretty brave in this country I'd say.
We expected to age a little in the queue before getting anywhere near the world-famous exhibition, but to my sheer relief it was actually pretty quick moving and we were inside within half an hour. I'd have gone before if I'd known.
We shuffled along patiently with the crowds looking out for all the irreverence and cheeky artistic equivalents of one-liners. But I just felt like I'd seen the whole thing before, which of course I have, in every paper, on every website and on every television news programme.
There was very little which I hadn't already seen and I came out feeling a bit, well, underwhelmed by the whole thing. Had you collared me at the moment that I stepped out of the gloomy museum building into the setting sunlight, and asked me my opinion of this most trendy of urban/arty events, I would only have been able to muster a non-committal shrug of the shoulders and utter a barely audible, and less than enthusiastic "It's alright I s'pose". A bit like a 14-year-old boy who's been dragged around the Uffizi gallery in Florence while on holiday, when he's far more interested in playing football outside in the square. Which was also me.
This may say more about my ignorance than anything else, but I do wish I'd made more of an effort to see it earlier and perhaps could've been a bit more impressed by it.
Putting the grumpy old man to one side, I did think it was entertaining and once or twice kind of thought provoking.
I don't think he is the coruscating political commentator who can bring shame upon the ruling elite with a single flourish of his spray can, nor do I think he is the most original activist drawing peoples' attention to the absurdities and injustices of the world. But he is very good at taking a thought and summing it up in one clear image which provokes and entertains.
My favourite is the I Hate Mondays image above. That totally sums up our Western pre-occupation with the trivial nonsense of day-to-day existence, confined in that rigid pattern of work, home, work, home, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, while these kids a world away starve in slums.
The presentation of these political themes is obviously the key to his success. I find myself thinking of the gulf between rich and poor much more looking at that image, than I do listening to Bono or Bob Geldof guffing on about it.
It's undoubtedly a great thing for the city though, and I'm reliably informed by my friend Claire that trade in the surrounding area is up by 24 per cent as a result of the exhibition. For a start there's the enterprising ice cream van parked up by the queue, a modern day 'cut me own throat' Dibbler if there ever was one. The queue itself has become a daily fixture, and I wonder how many people made friends or even sparked new relationships and love affairs while standing for hours in that line. Fate has a funny way of bringing people together. Personally I couldn't think of anything worse than having to start polite conversation with a complete stranger, but some people seem to thrive of that kind of thing. Good luck to them.
The best thing of all is that it is here in Bristol in the first place, rather than London. I always like to argue that living in Bristol is great and that I wouldn't swap it for London for so many reasons, and now I have a genuine one. If the exhibit was in the capital, Banksy would have definitely 'sold out'. But keeping it in Bristol means he's true to his roots, and all those councillors who campaign for anti-graffiti measures and make community service kids scrub it off the walls, can claim him as one of the city's beloved sons.
So anyway, after all that malarky we went to Gourmet Burger Kitchen where I enjoyed a buffalo burger, with cheese and onion rings. It was proper gert lush.
I did play tennis for over an hour this morning to work it off, and I appear to be staying at the 16 stone level, according to the dodgy scales in our bathroom.
I'll need to draw on all that energy tomorrow in any case as I will be attempting an 8 mile plus run, possibly 9. Looking forward to it, will let you know how I get on, if I don't get distracted trying to analyse a Banksy mural on Gloucester Road in the meantime.