Waving, not drowning
DO you sometimes get that awful slipping feeling, as if your tenuous grasp on reality is about to finally fail? If so, then a trip round almost any contemporary art gallery offers immediate relief. There are many worse off than you. In London, you can stroll across the newly-non-wobbling footbridge to the Tate Modern, where the only two things worth seeing are a Rodin statue in the basement and the menu in the top floor cafe. Between them, pure madness.
Or you can progress downriver to Greenwich, generally a haven of good old-fashioned seamanship and common sense. Drop in at the National Maritime Museum any day after May 9 to see a contemporary art exhibition - "New Visions of the Sea".
Now, hold tight. Star of the show is a new video artwork, specially created for the NMM by Beth Derbyshire. The work, entitled "You and I", involves filming a staged semaphore communication of haiku poems between the rooftops of the Queen's House and the Royal Observatory.
If the thought of that has not got you reaching for the bottle, think about this. The next artist in residence at the museum will be Tim Brennan. He will be building a collaborative artwork with visitors on the theme of a "message in a bottle". Visitors can put a message to Atlantis into a bottle, and add it to a growing collection on the tables.
We are not making this up.