-I walk along Upper Street towards the Business Design Centre. There's a full moon. I phone Hannah to come out and meet me with a ticket. Hannah says 'It's spooky' (meaning the full moon) on the phone.
-When she meets me, Hannah says 'Hi' and I say 'I'm fine' before I realise what she said.
-Hannah gives me the wrong ticket and the security guard can't let me in. I wait in the foyer while she collects the right ticket for me.
-The building is sad post-modern nightmare. The front has a vague Crystal Palace/Great Exhibition reference. Everything is made of painted steel and concrete, but in a kind of surface way, like beneath it lies the soul of a 1980s provincial shopping centre
-The foyer is busy with well dressed people, but it's not crowded. And they aren't that well dressed. It's not Frieze.
-There is uplighting in the foyer, and glowing plastic on the desks. It's been done up in the 2000s some time. Industrial/commercial/estate agent chic. The place is filled with surfaces. They've given up on the building as a building, it's just a vessel.
-Inside the fair. Downstairs the Hepworth Wakefield have a large display. It has carpets in muted greys, with a path of cream carpet running through it.
-I get a plastic glass of cava. It tastes bad but I enjoy the frisson of privilege.
-Hannah leads me upstairs, and up again through to where some of my films are being shown as part of a curated programme. The room is empty, the projector is grainy and the speakers are small and tinny.
-I go and speak to a friend at the Bookworks stand and we watch as a waiter drops a whole tray of glasses while standing in a gallery booth. Everyone takes it very well. The waiter looks embarrassed.
-I head back to the screening room and, when no one is in there, I get up on a chair and change the bass and volume dials. It makes no difference.
-I go and see the Space in Between booth. It's in the bit of the fair called Art Projects. Next to them, a gallery is showing an artwork made of a giant magnet that moves iron filings around on the wall. It's like a giant desk toy. Visitors in the booth are encouraged to pick up the iron filings that fall on to the ground and throw them back at the piece of work, where some of it sticks to the magnet again. Six smiling young women work in the booth. They have clipboards. 'Yay' they say, when people throw the graphite. 'Yay'.
-There are people here who are wearing leather trousers in a way that suggests no one has dared laugh at them in a long time.
-A well off woman is dressed as a kind of sexy pirate, in over the knee boots and silken, billowing blouse.
- I walk over to Ceri Hand's booth, speak to Hannah, the gallery manager and look at the work. A man comes over and says 'Hi'. He says my name pointedly. I'm not very good at names. It always strikes me that successful people always remember names. Or maybe, really successful people never remember names. Maybe there are two sorts of success. Either way, I don't remember names.
-The carpets in the Art Projects bit aren't as soft and plush as downstairs. They're stripey in a way that is meant to hide stains. Like the fabric on the seats of London Underground trains, irregular patterning to confuse the eye.
-I walk through to the main part of the fair. Before I go down, I stand at the top of the stairs and look over all the little booths. I'm kind of pissed on the cheap cava.
-The less exclusive evening preview has begun, and the fair has filled up. There are younger, better dressed people here now. Less silk and fur.
-From up here you can see the booths as a planned whole - the structure of the fair. There are metal cables coming down from the ceiling and stretching across the booths in a grid from which they hang the lighting. There are spots and floods, mostly the same type, but occasionally a booth has brought their own lighting for whatever reason.
-There are businesses in the Business Design Centre, as in they are always here. They surround the edges of the main hall. Don't they get annoyed when private events are on? How do their customers get in?
-A technician and a gallery woman in heels carry bubble wrapped paintings up stairs.
-A man stands next to me and eats a pale salmon bagel. The bagel is pale, not the salmon.
-I look at the ceiling and realise that it must be an original Victorian building - all the wrought iron and a curved ceiling like an old train station. They must have just done up the front at some point in the 80s. I ask the guy with the bagel what he thinks and he says it must be Victorian. I google it. Turns out it used to be the Royal Agricultural Hall. It held the first Crufts show.
-I go down the stairs. It's much warmer here. I'm wearing an aran jumper so I try not to walk too fast.
-The cava has given me a headache. Stupid fucking cava.
-A woman takes a photo of a terrible painting on her iphone. I decide straight away not to write any more of these down because, obviously, it is happening several times a minute.
-I take another glass of cava from a man with a tray.
-A woman dressed in a black uniform with dyed red hair sweeps something up off the floor.
-An old man speaks to an intern in quiet, angry tones and the intern looks sad
-A man says to his wife 'I don't like any of this'.
-I take a picture of a giant carved marble gun and a carved marble balloon. I ask the gallery people and they say it took the artist a year to make. I tweet the picture and write 'lol'.
-I lean up against a rail and look down to the ground floor. A man in hi vis sits at a table with a walkie talkie and a bottle of water next to a door. On the door is a sign that says "Exhibitor Storage". He looks bored. Another guy in an outside coat comes over, sits on an unnecessarily high stool and has a conversation on an iphone.
-There's not loads of obvious plastic surgery here, but there is some.
-I keep seeing the same two really posh guys walking round and describing things in terms of drugs. They point at a sculpture on the floor and say 'That's a bit like taking ketamine'. I think one of them friended me on facebook but I've never met him in real life.
-A man wanting to leave a booth says, 'It's just pheasants, darling, pheasant feathers' to his wife.
-I down another glass of cava. I feel drunk and powerful. Also my breath smells terrible..
-I've gone up on to a balcony level. It smells of gravy here.
-There's a weird canteen here with thin women sharing tiny plates of food.
-An American walks past and says, 'Craig's so cute'.
-I've gone back to the ground floor where the Hepworth Wakefield stand is (with the nice carpets). Not sure what the vibe is. Seems to be an excuse for loads of dealers to show modernist paintings and sculptures that they can't sell elsewhere. The carpet is really nice though. I wander back and forth inside, standing near people and listening to conversations.
-I go into the side bit of the ground floor where there aren't any galleries. It reminds me of being on pills in big clubs and being outside the main rooms and sitting down against a pillar at 4am and gurning and smoking and talking shit. Only, of course, I'm in the Business Design Centre, in an art fair, sitting next to a pillar at 8pm, drinking cava and writing notes, alone.
-I see the man who I spoke to about the architecture of the building (bagel guy) he is running down some stairs holding a painting, laughing with another person also holding a painting. He says hi. 'What a nice man' I think.
-I walk past one of the businesses that is based here. It's called Purple Consultancy. It has big plate glass windows and an open plan office. A lone woman sits at a computer. A purple (colour + logo of the company) stressball lays on the tongue and groove wood veneer flooring.
-Back upstairs. I walk past a booth for a street art gallery. There are pictures of the queen with a gas mask on. A screenprint of Andy Warhol crying.
-A booth with paintings of dogs.
-A Barbie hologram where the Barbie goes from being a nurse to being naked.
-I go back to Space in Between and hear someone saying goodbye, 'I've reached my limit I think, I need to go.' I realise I've reached my limit too.