The V&A is a very nice museum. There is a mad hanging thing made of glass from the ceiling. We queue and I stare at it. (There is another ceiling made from flattened trumpets in a different hall which we’ve seen something similar to in the Tate and disliked its new art status but we like it at the V&A.) It warrants spectacles. After admiring the stairs and finding the toilets, which we admire slightly less, we hunt out Decode.

The entrance has lights on the end of sticks that react as you make noise and rattle them. “Ah, art” I revel gleefully. It is full of good things.

There is a board which creates a shadow on itself when you stand in front of it. I peer at the side of the board; a whirring weave of light-reactive electronics which pulls strips of light/dark material back and forth to form the shadow.

The best part is outside around the corner in a modern tech section where I find a big table-sized machine that makes music (it looks a bit like something very expensive used by very rich musicians I’ve forgotten the name of). I have a play, and the man who made it explains it brilliantly.

“Oh,” I think as I listen. “This would be ace if I’d got a recording.” My powers of foresight avoid me for the rest of the day but I make haphazard video clips left right and center. And now I put them on youtube. Tada! They are in order of favourite bits – the shadow-making machine and the musical thingummy are best, and there are lots of colourful things (hit HD for decent quality).

I went last month but Decode finishes on Friday, WEEP WEEP! So you must go now! That said, I liked Kinetica a bit more (where I was given EVEN MORE brilliant explanations of things I don’t have clips of) because it was so mad and busy and bustling. I suppose that’s the difference between a weekend event and a three-month event.

A wonderful Kinder Surprise advert from the 80s Have a good chocolate haze-filled Sunday. We are off to the pub to get rid of our hangovers.

I am at Glug, media learning-but-mostly-social thingummy at some point last week. There are two talks, both potentially really good but they suffer from booming mics and reek of reverb in the squashed venue. There is also a wall in the middle of the audience, which unsurprisingly gets a bit in the way what with people’s inabilities to see through walls.

The ceiling is brilliant-ish and is made of lightbulbs, organised in glowing clumps. There is also an illustration wall, full of petite and detailed drawings. I go to investigate it.

A girl draws on the wall and steps back looking bashful but pleased. “It’s not great, but it’s the only thing I can draw,” she says. I smile. “Most people have that one thing they can draw” I say. Teachers though, in my experience, are famed for their inability to draw horses.

“Show me yours!” She says. “What’s your one thing?”

Shit, I think. What can I draw? I was just trying to sound philosophical and clever. Finally after stalling with my face for a while, I remember.

My skill is in the league of dinosaurs and lions. Both look as though they’ve been drawn by kids – probably just a brilliant excuse to avoid any drawing skill, for I suspect there is not too much money in doing kid’s drawings.. The dinosaurs are 2D and the lions have funny back legs. Though not massively original, these are their characteristics and make me smile in their silly way.

I draw my Lion. It is garish and brilliant. Someone points out that the back leg is wrong.

“That is the point,” I say.

“Ah,” they say.

I step back and suddenly all the drawings come into my line of sight. They are delicate, careful and planned. My lion has some whiskers. Artful, nice things surround my orange lion and put it in context. My lion looked like the best ever thing up-close, context is a horrible thing.

“It’s not great” I say, immediately the perfectionist and looked bashful, suddenly understanding her. I still love it though.

This is really cool!

A steampunk musician called Yoshi Akai has made a magical lego music-making machine. It’s called the “Sequencer MR II” and turns coloured lego blocks into sound:

“A contraption that uses three-dimensional Lego structures to emulate a three-channel, eight-step sequencer, where each differently colored plastic brick produces a different sound and complex combinations (including tremolo and overdrive) are possible when the blocks are stacked. Akai tells us it works using resistors embedded in each and every block, with parallel networks of resistors formed as the bricks pile up, equalling lower resistance and thus a higher frequency sound generated by the contraption. Akai says he’s building sound more than playing sound.” – engadget

I want a play..