I see this building every time I step outside Highbury and Islington tube station:
I wondered whether such a photo was worth showing here at all; but a friend saw it and liked it, so there it is.
Life for me just now is complicated, There may be quite a few brief and rather perfunctory postings like this in the next few days.
A friend has put this photo that he photoed on Facebook:
If he objects to me using it, I’ll take it down, but I doubt he will.
It illustrates two things.
(1) The arrival of a new kind of skyscraper, the Very Thin Big Thing.
(2) How much less of a nuisance trees are, photographically speaking, when not smothered in stupid leaves. As it is, that photo is a fine addition to the Winter Tree With Big Thing Behind It photo-genre, which is a photo-genre I like a lot. With leaves, it would be significantly duller.
Here is a Guardian piece which explains why these Big Thin Things are now happening in New York. I now intend, although I promise nothing, to do a Samizdata piece in which I expand upon this circumstance. Clue: the provisional title of this piece is “Law and liberty in New York”. The point being that clear law says exactly what you may not do, but by so doing, it also says exactly – exactly – what you may do. Unlike in Britain with its insane “planning permission” system, where you just have to hope that some random assemblage of local tyrants doesn’t take against the plan you’ve been working on for months, and where there’s now no way beforehand of guessing what these tyrants will decide. In New York, if you follow the rules, you know you are allowed to build it. Result: well, New York.
Today a friend needed some rather dramatic medical attention, and I dropped by to provide what I hope was a little moral support. Outside the place where this was happening, I encountered this cute little vehicle:
Two interesting things about this little gizmo. First, there is the way that its door opens. The door on its right is open, in the above photos. Useful in a tight space, I should guess.
And second is what it does, there being a website on it which enables you to learn about this. It takes tissue or samples from sick people to a lab, where the lab decides its opinion about the nature of that sickness.
I like these little cars, which are so small they are almost motor bikes. I certainly prefer them to those huge Chelsea Tractors, which look like they’re for doing bank robbery getaways or off-roading or maybe both at once. Which, let’s face it, most Londoners do neither of, ever.
The summer of February 2019 has now ended, but I still have some photo-memories of it to stick up here.
These photos, for instance, of a man whom GodDaughter2 and I encountered in Hyde Park, back on February 15th. As I have already related, there was a lot of feeding of birds going on that day, but before all that bird frenzy, we had already encountered a guy who had taken the feeding of birds (and squirrels) to a whole new level. He wasn’t so much feeding these creatures as laying on a free canteen for them. And they obviously knew this, and greeted him like a long lost friend.
I photoed him and his friends (who included two green parrots), a lot:
You can see evolution taking a distinct turn towards something different, can’t you? The most trusting and friendly and fearless creatures are the ones who get best fed.
Patrick Crozier and I have just fixed our next podcast, which we will record early next week. Read about and listen to earlier ones here, and in due course this next one will go there too. And for this next one, we will talk about … Brexit. I knew you’d be excited.
Many claim that they are bored by Brexit, and maybe many are. Although I suspect some are really just pissed off with not getting exactly what they want. (And who is getting exactly what they want?) Either that, or actually only bored with other people’s opinions, but not with their own. Me, I find the whole process rather fascinating, now that I have got over having been so wrong about it. I thought that Brexit would lose the Referendum, but it won. And I thought that once it had won, it would happen without too much fuss, because the Conservative Party leavers would mostly bow to the inevitable. As of now, that hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look like it will happen any time soon.
Brexit is a subject that Patrick has strong opinions about, which is good because although this will not stop me interrupting (I’m afraid I always interrupt), it may at least mean that some of the times when I do interrupt, he’ll interrupt back and shut me up until he’s finished the point he was making before I interrupted.
Here is a Brexit photo I recently photoed, of a bus driving around and around Parliament Square, saying Believe in Britain and LEAVE MEANS LEAVE, but with nobody in the bus apart from the driver:
They all left, I guess.
Last night I dined at Chateau Samizdata, which is in the Fulham Road. I always get there early, but like to be exactly on time in order not to disrupt the preparations. So, I typically walk about a bit, looking for photo-ops.
Last night I walked east along the Fulham Road towards the centre of London, and came upon Michelin House, which I knew was somewhere around there, but had never clocked before as being so very near to Chateau Samizdata. This building occurs at the point where the Fulham Road is turning into Brompton Road.
It has a wonderfully eccentric stained glass window, at the front, at the top …:
… which had been thoughtfully lit from behind.
I image-googled this building, and I could not find this particular view of it. There are one or two views to be seen of this window from inside the building, but none that home in on the window, in the dark, from the outside, with that all-important internal lighting.
I think that this window deserves to be viewable in as many ways as possible, from inside, and from outside. As does the whole building.
I considered cropping my photo, but the photo exactly as taken supplies just that little bit of architectural context, so I left it as was.
Yes, a rather excellent James Bond villain cat, photoed in London’s Columbia Road, in the Bethnal Green part of town:
Found in the Instagram feed (click on that for her most recently instagrammed photo) of this lady friend.
Columbia road is, as other photos in this set make clear, noted for its flower market.
Happy New Year to all my readers. Every time I go out to a party, I encounter people who read this thing, despite all its technical stupidities and despite the fact that the subject matter is just me musing aloud. So good morning to you all and I hope that not only I, but also you, have a good 2019. (Yes, I’m managing to keep up, approximately speaking, there also, where my musings are more structured and disciplined.)
This being Jan 1st, I offer you a sunrise:
Usually when the sky is that colour in my photos, it’s a sunset. But it all came back to me when I chanced upon these photos, of an expedition to Alicante. Basically, I visit all the bits of France and Spain that my ex-Quimper friends have or have had bits of property in. And they had a place in Alicante, or they rented it, or something. Maybe they still have it. So, I went to Alicante, in January 2010. And, the above photo was taken by me at a bus stop in Vauxhall Bridge Road, looking back across Vauxhall Bridge, while waiting for a bus to take me and all my holiday clobber in the opposite direction along Vauxhall Bridge Road to Victoria Station, where I eventually caught a bus to the airport. With much confusion, as I recall it, about exactly where the damn bus departed from. Had I not happened upon another traveller who knew, I might have missed that airplane.
All of which clarifies a fact that has for me become more and more clear over the years, that although blogs are not diaries, photo-archives are. I have photoed many photos which I would not even consider sticking up here. But they have all piled up on my hard disc. I live, you might say, a double life. There’s my, you know, life. And then there’s my photoed life, which I can relive any time I want, and see all my friends and relatives and remember all the private things we said and did, the way you people very rarely get even to hear about, never mind learn the private details of.
This blog, meanwhile, is a severely edited subsection of my diary, with some added words, added in a way that I hope doesn’t make me appear too ridiculous. Very different.
To add some words to the above photo, I realise that in addition to loving roof clutter, I am also becoming ever more fond of street clutter, which, due to the anarchic and non-mutually-communicating nature of London’s public sector, London possesses an abundance of. Much of it is, like most modern roof clutter, severely utilitarian, which I like, because nobody is trying to make it look pretty. But much ground clutter is very beautiful, especially London’s more showy street lamps.
Love the new keyboard. So solid and strong. Happiness is being able to check all the letters and symbols on your keyboard, as you type.
At the end of April and the beginning of May of 2018, I visited the city of Quimper, almost certainly for the last time. The friends I have stayed there with several times are now living in the south of France, and their Quimper home is now someone else’s. So, farewell Quimper.
On May 4th, on my last full day in Quimper, my hostess drove me to see the superb lighthouse at Penmarc’h, which is on the south west tip of Brittany. And no, I don’t know how “Penmarc’h” is pronounced, and nor do I know what is really the correct name for this mighty edifice. It seems to have many names. But, it is a lighthouse, and it is in the town of Penmarc’h, so Penmarc’h Lightbouse it is.
Although she needed to get back in quite a hurry to prepare supper, she let me take the time to climb up the Lighthouse and savour the views of the town of Penmarc’h and of the Brittany coast. Which were spectacular, as was the weather that day:
The lighthouse I went up is the furthest from the sea of three structures, which would appear to have been doing, in succession, a similar job. As time went by, they got smaller, nearer to the sea, and more dependent upon electronic technology. Photo 3.1 shows the two smaller ones, as seen from the big one.
That same morning, I also checked out a huge and totally marvellous second hand shop in Quimper, and an equally huge and totally marvellous cheese factory, which was really more like a cheese refinery.
So, a really good day. One of my favourites of 2018. Except that the day after that day, in Paris, was probably even better.
Samizdata Supremo Perry de Havilland likes hippos. A rather disconcerting thing that happens to you from time to time if you are a Samizdata contributor is that if you do a posting, but forget to add categories to it, the default category that gets added automatically is: Hippos.
So, anyway, yes, Perry likes hippos, so a friend of his gave him a hippo for Christmas. It was presented to him at Chateau Samizdata on Christmas Eve, where I was also present.
I photoed it:
Trouble is, the hippo is all black, and my camera didn’t do very well. (The above result reminded me of this Samizdata posting that I did last year, about a very black sort of black.)
I tried lots of photo-editing, but I’m not sure that this was really much of an improvement:
But yes, this really is also a bottle opener. (I’m pretty sure it’s this one.) The friend who got it told me beforehand that it was a bottle opener also. Would Perry really want it, if the bottle opener turned out not to work very well. I said: if it’s a hippo, Perry will want it.