In honour of the Olympic torch's progress through the country, the Museum of Miniature Found Objects is delighted to announce the opening of the exhibition, 'Notes from Madras'. Guest-curated by the Biffo Art Collective, it explores a key contemporary dilemma: the urban leisure centre.

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Found objects:
= pink fruit with face: 12.09pm, Wednesday 14 March 2012, Fairholt Road, north London; 
= pink rose: 3.14pm, Monday 30 May 2011, Rue Saint-Lazare, Paris; 
= red polka dot cuff: 10.00am, Thursday 5 January 2012, Lordship Road, north London; 
= red tinsel with hearts: 10.52am, Saturday 18 February 2012, Stoke Newington High Street, north London. (Glass stand: model's own) 

This bold piece of street art is in Bethnal Green Road. It's just along from where the 'Jack the Ripper Car Boot Sale' used to take place.

This is a portrait, in sock puppets, of my colleagues and me. I was asked to do a presentation at a one-day workshop on the usual subjects — future focus and diversity, etc., etc. — and I thought I'd entertain the audience with these. Unfortunately it all ended badly with the puppets taking over the day after a visit to the pub at lunchtime.

In a crowded city where expansion is costly, the Museum of Miniature Found Objects has turned its gaze upwards, to the vast roof space above its galleries. And the happy result is the Farm in the Sky, with planting beds, pasturage, chickens, pigs, cows and fish ponds installed on the roofs. The museum is delighted to announce that this innovative eco-enterprise is already bearing fruit, with all dishes served in the Palm Court Tea Rooms and Michelin-starred bistro having their ingredients sourced from the farm. So, as museum visitors browse amongst the displays in the galleries, above their heads the soil is being tilled and cows milked.

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Found objects:
= felt chickens: 10.49am, Saturday 31 March, Queen Elizabeth's Walk, north London.

Continuing from last week, here are the clasped hands I referred to. It's the detail I like on this particular funerary monument, that one hand is clearly a woman's, with the decoration on her cuff and her bracelet with its locket. And I like the care with which the ribbons have been carved. These hands don't look anonymous — the stonemason has given them lives of their own.

A recent stroll in Abney Park Cemetery produced this image. The cemetery is packed with Victorian and twentieth-century gravestones and memorials, overflowing with religious and classical motifs — angels, broken columns, clasped hands and the like, all anticipating a heavenly embrace. What interests me about the car on this gravestone is that it contains no religious reference at all, if anything it would have been a status object in 1962 when car ownership was not nearly as commonplace as it is today — an aspirational gravestone perhaps?

 

I read recently in the Guardian newspaper that over Easter, British children each consume, on average, the weight of a newborn baby in chocolate Easter eggs.