This isn't about the memorial service, though. This is about where we went before then: the Art of the Brick exhibition in (appropriately) Brick Lane.
I've wanted to see this for ages, but it's a touring exhibition so you can only see it when it's touring somewhere convenient. It consists of works of art rendered in Lego. Most of the art is original, with The Human Condition being the most famous exhibit:
There are works that are basically digitised images rendered using Lego bricks as pixels. This one of Andy Warhol is my favourite:
You could probably get robots to make those from photographs now, to be honest. There's a business proposition for anyone who has an interest in robotics (hmm, maybe I should mention it to some of my work colleagues).
There are also copies of existing works of art. The painting ones are usually 2D like the Warhol image, but some are 3D in alarming ways. Here's what Munch's The Scream looks like from the front and from the side:
The sculptures reproduced are a bit hit and miss. The legs are a bit too short if you ask me. Also, if you're going to reproduce a sculpture, you should go the whole hog and not chicken out:
Oh, here's a dinosaur. The tail isn't self-supporting and needs bits of wire to hold it up, but it looks pretty impressive.
Overall, it was well worth a visit, although at £18 it was a bit pricey. Annoyingly, though, there are a number of works that I know exist but that weren't on display (a reproduction of the Friends Central Perk set, an Easter Island head, a tiger, a rhinoceros, a winged Superman). Maybe there's only one copy of each and they're on display elsewhere.
Pleasingly, each work comes with a card saying how many bricks were used to make it. There are 80,020 in the dinosaur, for example. The cards could be lying for all I know, but having them there must save hours that would otherwise be spent answering emails from visitors.
The carrot cake at the memorial service was the lightest I've ever had.