2nd April 2010, ART: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, The Barbican

You might know this as the thing with the birds that play musical instruments. That's all I knew anyway. We arrived at the Barbican to find a quite huge queue, backed up to a sign that said it was one hour's wait. We joined. An hour didn't seem too long since we'd made our way there. Two hours, however, did seem too long. And it was. Two hours. Boring. Once in though, it is fun. In the enclosure are a load of extremely cute zebra finches and some upturned guitars and cymbals mic'd up and often with bits of foliage on them. When the birds land on said instruments, they inadvertently make 'music'. The birds love getting up and making a bit of skronky avant-garde noise it seems. They also enjoy landing on people's shoulders and shoes. They are really cute, honestly. There was an amusing/borderline-horrifying incident when one finch landed on Mary, causing her to trap the poor little blighter between her coat and neck, as she flinched in fear. That would've been an awkward situation, had death occurred. After 10 minutes of amusement, we were done. Worth going to see. Not worth queuing 2 hours for.