Alastair Upton, Chief ExecutiveYoko Ono was remarkable. As I watched her perform I thought how she was the same age as my mother and my mother hadn’t done things like that in the 1960s let alone in her sixties and Yoko is actually 75. She bent herself in all sorts of shapes to ‘find her relationship’ with a metal chair and then took a break and showed lots of film of her at the Bluecoat in 1967 and then bits with her and John all the while sitting on stage knitting. The ending was her getting everyone up on stage dancing along to an extended remix of ‘Give peace a chance’. I think you had to be there and I was pleased I had been.

She then stayed for dinner. She was clearly exhausted and had given all she had to the show and presenting her engaging, knowingly naive and simple message about peace. It was infectious. I now know how she keeps in shape too as she ordered two starters, a main and a pudding and had just a mouthful or two from each. Actually that is not quite true as she wolfed all the pudding.

Yoko was the first event of Happenstance our Live Art weekend. Life Art is a hard to define art discipline that sits somewhere between visual art and performance. Much of it would be seen at first glance as plain weird. There was a letter in the Daily Post at the end of last week when I was too wrapped up in preparations to respond that was saying how they hated the Yoko piece in the gallery (and the video of the 1967 performance). That is of course fine but they ended with the sentence ‘I know what I like and I don’t like that’. This sentence needled away with me for a few days as I really wished I had written back ‘Knowing what you like limits your life. Open yourself up to new things.’

My new thing at the weekend was ‘7 minutes in heaven’. My phone, watch and shoes were taken from me and I was zipped up in a tent for seven minutes with someone I had never met before. 

Yes, it was weird, and all sorts of thoughts go through your mind but if I had thought ‘I know what I like’ I’m sure I wouldn’t have done it - but I did - heaven.