I love the ICA. Ever since Charlie introduced me to London’s underground mainstream arts centre I’ve been a regular visitor, in awe of the £15 magazines and the often insane exhibitions that they put on. Though the gallery has had some difficulties in the past few years, mainly involving losing lots and lots of money, there has been some good news. For one, it’s now open on Tuesdays.

Sadly, though after visiting the gallery on a recent Tuesday it seems that opening hours may be the least of the ICA’s worries. Unlike when I first visited five years ago, the ICA feels more like a museum than a contemporary art gallery. Their current exhibition: ‘Remote Control’ explores the way that television changed the art world. Great, right? The only problem is that all the videos shown were recorded circa 1979. I guess it’s not a problem if a gallery wants to focus on the past; but the ICA feels out of touch, rather than offering a considered retrospective. Gallery visitors watch the videos as a novelty- often only watching each video for 15 seconds or so. And, to be honest, who cares about TV when art is facing its biggest challenges today from the Internet and modern technology. Though there is some engagement with these new technologies, it is limited to one of the most cynical pieces I’ve seen in some time. Called ‘Red Alert’ it is three apple branded screens side by side, all showing red. Just red.

The ICA’s new pride and joy, the studio, is meant to be the engine room of the gallery, igniting and encouraging debate. To understand the problems with the ICA and to an extent the problems with contemporary art in general you only need to have one look at it ; lying empty and bare, with 1970s press cuttings describing how radical and free thinking the establishment is. In essence, the gallery’s past success has prevented it from being radical today. Today, they cater mainly for tourists and old Guardian readers, pretty much as bourgeois as it gets.

Link: http://www.eliots100.co.uk/

Looking at the side of the Edan Dolly homepage, it suddenly dawned on me that Ed and I have been posting on this blog for three years. When we started we were 18, and by the end of this month we will both be 21. Though it doesn’t seem like 3 years when I look back it seems like an eternity. I know I’m wrong, because I study psychology, but it feels as if the last three years have been the most eventful of my life. In February 2009 I knew I was going to Cambridge, but I was still at school, wondering what the point of life was and in love with a girl who didn’t love me back (worst thing ever….!). Though excited about the future I didn’t really see the point: if everything ends and life has no meaning then why bother. Better never to have been born, huh? Now, in February 2012, I am in my final year of university, have a job for September, and am in love with a girl who loves me back. And though I’m still as unsure of the real point of life, and whether I am doing the right thing, I can safely say that I am the happiest I have ever been.

The happiness isn’t because everything is OK, though. I miss Jonny and my grandparents every day. People I loved have left, and at the time it was really difficult to deal with. But, I guess, what the past three years has taught me is that life isn’t about what happens to you, but how you feel about what happens to you. Being able to study the Negativity Bias for my dissertation has confirmed this: people aren’t happy because good things happen to them, they are happy because they have a positive mindset and believe in getting the most out of life. Every day I try to remember how lucky I am, to be studying with great people, to have so many amazing friends and to have a brilliant family. And though life and the future is scary, really really scary, I know that because of them I will do the right thing. The memories I have of Jonny and my Grandparents mean that they’re not gone. They’re as alive in my mind as they could be. I know exactly what Jonny would say about everything I do: mostly ‘dude…’, and I can imagine sitting endlessly with my Grandfather in front of the fire talking about the meaning of things, and making meringues with my Granny.

What else has changed? I still don’t know what I want to do, though I think now I know the sort of thing I want to do. It’s stupid, really, because I knew it all along but just never realised it. Though Compelling Illusions, looking back, was devastatingly pretentious, the aim was to make people realise how similar they are to everyone else. You are not alone. In Cambridge I just keep doing this again and again. I love anonymity because it means you don’t have to be afraid being who you are; it means you can be honest without being judged. And when people are totally honest they show that we all are scared of the same things. We all have the same hopes and dreams, and we all want the best out of life.

Most importantly, though, these three years have proved to me that being alive is absolutely incredible. It can be incredibly depressing and awful, but it gets better. Things change and things get better. Three years ago, when I started this blog with Ed, I could never have imagined that things would be like this now. And now they are, I couldn’t be more grateful to everything and everyone who made it so, and continue to make it so.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

I am far luckier than most men, for I have been able since boyhood to make a good living doing precisely what I have wanted to do—what I would have done for nothing, and very gladly, if there had been no reward for it. Not many men, I believe, are so fortunate. Millions of them have to make their livings at tasks which really do not interest them. As for me, I have had an extraordinarily pleasant life, despite the fact that I have had the usual share of woes. For in the midst of these woes I still enjoyed the immense satisfaction which goes with free activity. I have done, in the main, exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects on other people have interested me very little. I have not written and published to please other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don’t care. The world may take them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them.

Got up at 6am today so could only catch a few updates from North Korea on the news. After breakfast we took a taxi to Mount Faber where we got a cable car across the harbour to Sentosa, the island of ‘peace and tranquility’. (Singaporeans are amazing marketers, not only did they turn an ex-British fort into ‘Asia’s playground’ but they also breed hybrid orchids so they they can name a new orchid after almost every foreign politician who visits..). After arriving on the island we queued up for a go on the ‘luge’ which is basically like a to kart but instead of an engine you just use the gravity of a hill to give you power. It was pretty great, though in another clever marketing move ‘once is never enough.’ The luge led us to the most crazy beach resort ever. Though the sand was soft and the sun was hot there was still something strange about the Sentosa beach resort. I think it might have been than , when looking out to sea you get a great view of one of the busiest ports in the whole world. From oil tankers to container ships it was a ship-spotter’s heaven but though they were interesting the heavy shipping lane didn’t really sit that well next to a load of resort hotels.

From the beach we walked to the remains of the WW2 fort, the site of the biggest ever capitulation of the British army (Churchill’s words not mine). Not only did the Japanese beat the British with half the number of men but as a result 1/3 of the men who surrendered died as PoWs because of the terrible conditions. Looking round the fort was interesting, though the wax models of the generals were definitely the best (..and hilarious..). Dad stepped into a pool of stagnant water to much amusement, and I got the worst whiplash I’ve ever got by trying to use a water fountain as a hose to soak Ben. We had a quick look round the aquarium and then went back to the hotel where I had to rest because of my terrible whiplash. Went out for dinner in a wierd but not that great Singaporean place. Walked down Orchard road and noticed how well behaved everyone was- apparently all the police are plain clothed so you can never tell who’s watching. Pretty sinister.

Woke up really early because of the jet lag so watched the only English channel (BBC News) for a long time as they went on and on about the death of Kim Jong Il. As no one really knows much about him there wasn’t really any news, apart from the fact that everyone hoped there would be a ‘smooth transition.’ Went out to breakfast, and then to Singapore’s biggest attraction: the botanical gardens. Featuring an orchid garden, ginger garden and swan lake it was pretty exciting. However, due to the intensely white sky everything looked sort of dull and samey, nothing compared to Kew Gardens. It was pretty impressively clean and tidy though, and the path through the rainforest was amazing.

We walked back and then I went out on the MRT to try and find the biggest Buddhist temple in Singapore. I found it on ‘Race course road,’ pretty much the most English sounding road in the whole place, yet ironically it looked the most foreign as there were actually a few market stalls unlike everywhere else in Singapore. The Buddhist temple had a really big Buddha inside it, pretty standard, but I was told that I could go inside it and round the back you could step inside the Buddha and see another Buddha reclining before he died. (The story of the Buddha’s death is amazing, he had a meal given to him by an inn keeper, and then fell ill. Whilst he was really sick he spend most of his time ensuring that the inn keeper knew that it was not the food that made him ill but just that it was his time. What a great guy.) The person who looked after the temple talked to me, and told me that all the monks who were usually at the temple had traveled to Thailand to help rebuild a monastery after the flooding. He also asked a lot of detailed questions about the NHS, such as whether you could have a hip operation if you were not a citizen.

Had ‘afternoon tea’ and went for a swim at the hotel. Then went to the ‘nocternal zoo’ one of Singapore’s other MASSIVE attractions. It was a zoo, mainly filled with deer, that was lit with light that looked like moonlight. The fire show and the bats were a definite highlight. I literally saw a fruit bat hanging upside down eating an orange. It looked so happy, and I never thought I’d ever see a bat looking really happy in my life. Got back and went to bed.

What is nice about Singapore is that you never feel like a foreigner. Because there are so many languages spoken, all the signs and everything are in English. As well as this, because it is such an international place no one ever even looks at you like you’re a foreigner. However, though it is such a varied society there doesn’t really seem to be much culture– there are more Starbucks than temples, churches and mosques put together. And everyone here LOVES shopping.

Flew to Singapore at 11am English time on our way to Australia. Arrived and it was worse weather than England. Rain and no sun. It’s like being in a really mild tropical storm. Had breakfast and a sleep for three hours and then got the shuttle bus into town, straight into one of the million malls. Stopped in Starbucks for a coffee and the found the metro stop. The trains are exactly the same as in Japan apart from if you eat or drink on the train you’re not just frowned at but you get fined 1000 Singapore dollars (£500). Arrived at the city hall stop and walked through 3 more malls. The rain got heavier. Everything here is cheaper than in England, though I think it’s just because there is absolutely no tax on anything. There are also really big tower blocks but it is no way as built up as I thought it would be. After getting lost in a mall with a ‘fountain of wealth’ at its centre we got two taxis back to the hotel for dinner and bed.

Singapore is a strange place. One: all the signs are in English. Two: all the streets sound like Milton Keynes roads: orange boulevard, orchard way etc. Three: there appears to be no traditional religion here; there is only one church in the city centre. Money is sort of like the religion here but there is something that seems pretty vacuous about it, the only thing to spend your money on are western luxury goods like diamond encrusted Rolex watches. On flying into Changi airport there were so many ships going into the port, and it feels like a modern day Venice but devoid of any culture or belief about anything. I can feel a project about weird signs coming on too, some so far have been brilliant.

The mist is incredible, though I’m hoping that the weather tomorrow will be little brighter!