A visit to two private art galleries in London today. Marcin Dudek in Fitzrovia has a clapped out smashed up graffiti-ridden bus with Steua Bucharest football insignia all over it. You enter the broken bus and walk down the aisle past the ripped-up seats. Dudek is a former hooligan recalling the glory days with a set of exhibits of daubed violent pieces accompanying the headliner bus in the window of the petite gallery on Little Titchfield Street. The other side of Oxford Street in Mayfair an exhibition of photographs by Thomas Struth of the chaotic inside of the Cern Collider in Switzerland, a hotch-potch of wires, tubes, concrete bars and cable trays. Chaos is pleasing to the eye. We need it, which is why a complex forest is so relaxing. This is a less interesting exhibition than the Dudek collection, but it is interesting (isn’t it?) that our contemporary hyper-controlled world needs a bit of the dark side, escape from the deep facile-virtue channelling we are constantly sujected to. I have nostalgic thoughts about the central Manchester of my youth, a dangerous place of slum clearance and broken bottle-strewn wasteland. What is now the Manchester Exhibition Centre and before that G-Mex in those days was the gutted skeleton of the old central station, a looming gothic presence to a 17-year old. The area was fraught with menace with the isolated pub stood upright on the bleak terrain and so-called clubs which were dingy dives where you could drink after hours. It was a threatening and dangerous place to knock around in. I have a lot of nostalgia for it.

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