Genesis

Today a friend and I celebrated (a few weeks late) our almost-mutual birthday by going to see the Sebastião Salgado exhibition, Genesis, in London. My visual cortex is still singing 12 hours later: each one of the 216 photographs makes you look. Salgado combines the abstraction of pattern and form with a profound fascination with the world - mineral, plant, animal and human. A selection: a queue of penguins waiting to hurl themselves off an ice slope into the sea, like children on a diving board; an apparently vertical forest with trunks whitened by light; glistening sea dripping from a whale's tail; a herd of dust that is zebras; a deep valley where Salgado must have waited patiently for the millisecond when a tiny sliver of silver morning bounced off the full length of the river and its tributaries. If he knows how to take a dud photograph, which I doubt, he certainly knows not to show it. Wonderful. If you can reach London, do go.

Then we ambled along the South Bank, part of which has been turned into allotments, window boxes and rhubarb bizarrely growing upside down a metre above head-height. At the Undercroft - a concrete space beneath the concert halls which skateboarders and street artists colonised in 1977 and which has been a vibrant piece of urban life ever since - we came across a man celebrating his 50th birthday by collecting signatures on a petition against converting it into shops. We signed. A bit further east I noticed that the tide was low enough for me to try for a photo I've been wanting for a while. I got a sodden foot but this is it.

I know I said this only two days ago, but this one is better large.