After being given tickets by one of my favorite clients (thank you Clive!), yesterday I took Miss M and her friend Alex to see the Guggenheim Collection at the National Gallery. I’d toyed with the idea of just taking one eight year old, but it seemed like a foolhardy idea. So we set off on a tram after picking Alex up, had something to eat, and went to Fed Square to find the exhibition, which was of course down the road at the “real” gallery.

After spending a lot of time with their hands pressed on the fascinating water wall (and saturating me with as much of the water as they could) we headed inside to get some culture.

Clive had suggested getting an audio tour, or going with one of the guides to get the most out of the exhibition. I have to say my two young companions were probably far more insightful than any guide the gallery could’ve provided. I was fascinated by what they were drawn to - a Jackson Pollock was one of the first things they liked (even I liked it, and I’m not a fan of Pollock), then Alex commented on a huge abstract painting “that must have taken ages to do”. To me it looked as though the artist had banged it out in moments, but when I looked more closely, I realised Alex was right.

We looked at everything (although I skirted around the Mapelthorpe photos - I wasn’t sure if they were PG rated), the kids were intelligent, considered and incredibly well behaved. I asked them questions about everything (the classic “what do you think that is?” served us well for the whole tour), but they volunteered a lot of great comments. We’d decided before going in we’d vote for our favorite, then buy postcards of them afterwards.

Miss M liked the huge Lichtenstein the most (sadly so did everyone else - the postcards were sold out), but Alex and I favoured a giant Jeff Koons painting of sandwich fillings. Seeing the Klaes Oldenbergs in the flesh was also cool, since I’d studied a lot of his work at Art School.

At the end of the exhibition, there was a huge pile of something shiny and black in the corner. Miss M said “that looks like a huge pile of liquorice”. Which was ironic, as that’s exactly what it was. The security guard came over and commented that he’d never seen two children standing in front of a giant pile of lollies and not taking them - then told the kids to take some. So we headed off crunching our interactive art work, and my well behaved art critics spent the next hour running around madly outside.

Today I’m loving: showing Miss M the classic boiled egg gag I used to do when I was a child. She liked it just as much as I did.