I nipped down to see a brilliant thing at the Barbican the other night - it's a room full of finches playing loud electric guitars, and it's wonderful. This video gives you an idea of what it's like, but add in the 50-odd finches flying around your head from guitar to guitar, plus the fact that the guitars are wired to surprisingly loud amps, and the effect is wonderful and surprisingly musical. It's like a gig and a zoo - together at last.

After a while, I noticed there was a hushed commotion going on next to one of the basses. Turns out, one of the birds had LAID AN EGG ON IT! An egg which was now rolling around perilously on the body of the bass, four foot off the floor. A couple of times it looked like it was going to fall to its certain doom, and members of the crowd lurched forward to stop it, only for it to roll back to relative safety, lodged between the G-string and the pickups.

At one point I went to catch it myself, but was then told off by a bossy lady in the crowd, who said that the smell of my hands on the egg would cause the mother to reject the egg! Argh! It was unbearably tense - since everyone in the room was now watching the bass, the finches flew on to it to play to the crowd, meaning the makeshift Gibson nest wobbled even more...

I alerted a steward about the impending eggtastrophe! He didn't know what to do! He panicked and disappeared to call his supervisor! She took one look at the precarious egg, in its eggstreme peril, panicked as well and disappeared to alert the artist herself! Clearly this sort of thing wasn't supposed to be part of the installation. Although it did make it a lot more eggciting.

Anyway, when the supervisor lady got off the phone, she immediately evacuated the entire gallery! The finches were allowed to stay. But I never found out what happened after that. I hope it made it. That little baby bird is going to be so rock and roll. I subsequently checked and found out that the egg smell rejection thing is nonsense, so IN YOUR FACE BOSSY LADY I COULD HAVE SAVED THAT EGG I WOULD HAVE BEEN A HERO.