Greenwich Naval College July 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a commentThe Naval College Buildings at Greenwich
Viewed from Island Gardens at the tip of the Isle of Dogs across the river, because the DLR train service to Cutty Sark was suffering from delays on Sunday. The buildings were designed by Sir Christopher Wren just as he was limbering up to build an even bigger dome on top of St Paul’s Cathederal.
The aim of our trip was to enjoy an evening cruise but that was cancelled too, never mind. Another surprise was to see a giant ferris wheel next to where the Cutty Sark is meant to be.
Captured on canvas - I’m in a painting from Bastille Day June 6, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, London, cider , 2commentsThursday is the weekend
Yesterday was a Thursday but I decided to declare it a weekend day and take a day off since it the weather looked very promising. We went for a pleasant canalside walk, explored Islington’s Chapel Market, visited the canal museum and had a smashing lunch at the Charles Lamb inn.
Bastille Day
I first discovered that particular pub on Bastille Day least year, July 14th when a celebration of the French holiday was organised in conjunction with the review site Trusted Places and sponsorship from Ricard. So this is where the painting comes into it. The event made a colourful street scene with petanque being played in the road outside the pub, an accordian player and an artist painting with oil colours. So yesterday after ordering my smoked trout with beetroot and horseradish I notice a painting of that very scene hanging up on the wall inside the pub. “Ah that’s the painting we watched being half finished on Bastille day. Wait a minute, that’s me !” How did I know it was me? Well I was still wearing the same jacket. So here it is:
Nick Botting
The artist is a renowned portrait painter, local to Islington, Nick Botting who once painted a portrait of Ian Botham and has been one of the Artists at Kew.
Linda dug out her photos from the event last year, which show the painting at an earlier stage, before the man in the beige jacket was added.
Gare du Nord in Paris May 17, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Paris Breaks, UK , 1 comment so farIf you’ve ever been on Paris breaks by eurostar then you’ll be familiar with the Gare du Nord mainline railway station because that’s where you first arrive in central Paris and it’s where you have to get back to in plenty of time for the train home. You’ll have waited in line there to be ticked checked and processed for immigration to the UK, through customs, police etc and then taken a seat in the lounge, on the other side, where you are no longer in France effectively. Sometimes that can be a sad place, depending on the circumstances, or it may be exciting.
** book online Eurostar breaks with central Paris hotel**
Do you have a special railway station?
I’ve no idea how many of my readers will understand what I’m talking about if I try to explain a sort of emotional response to specific large terminal railway stations. Perhaps if I begin by saying that I was brought up in Cornwall, so when I leave London from Paddington Station that’s like already being on the ‘last leg’ of a journey which marks a kind of homecoming.
So for me, Paddington station is not a part of London, it’s almost a part of Cornwall through association, anticipation and all those memories of being away from home and then returning. You can almost smell the seaside there, well you can definitely smell the pasties these days!
People from the southeast of England might have a similar association with Charing Cross, Waterloo or Victoria stations. Northerners with Kings Cross and Euston. And so it is with Gare du Nord in Paris, the arrival point from Calais, the Dover ferries and now eurostars from St Pancras, Ashford and Ebbsfleet. Eventually, hard as it is to imagine, Stratford International Station will become a little door to France, implanted in East London.
Gare Du Nord, Paris
I arrived at Gare du Nord from Rotterdam on my first visit to Paris. I had no idea where to go, so I walked out of the station, crossed the road and walked slightly downhill for ten minutes. I needed to find somewhere to stay, and down a sidestreet spotted a 1 star Hotel, booked in, and stayed there for six months. That was in the Rue Faubourg Poisonniere, just off the main Rue LaFayette so I got to know the area around the Gare du Nord pretty well. The big boulevards Magenta and Madelaine, the pretty little churches and small leafy parks. The little north african grocers shops, bakeries, bars and tabacs, and further down the main road the magnificent Galleries LaFayette. I had little reason to visit Gare du Nord during day to day life except on occasion to visit the bureau de change which was the only one I knew about, open on a Sunday at that time. It was on one such visit that the idea of planning a trip home occurred to me after many months away, such can be the effect of being in the presence of one of these special stations.
Gare du Nord is not only an arrival point for Brits taking Paris breaks but also the departure point for Parisians visiting London for the first time, or perhaps on a weekly basis for those who work in the City finance industries and go home most weekends. There are about 300,000 French people living in London now, that’s a lot isn’t it! And I suppose for them, the new St Pancras eurostar station will eventually trigger a familiar sensation of being almost back to France.
Which is your special station?
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That photo in Here Comes Everybody May 8, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Flickr, London , 2commentsThanks to Frankie for first noticing it and Shirlyearly for tracking the page down for me in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Here Comes Everybody
Please do not inform children of the explosions
This is the picture referred to in the book, and it came in for a lot of attention on the day itself, July 7th 2005.
The book relates directly to the topic we’ve been discussing in the “End of Organisations” debate, and there’s also a blog by Clay Shirky which recently published an insightful article about the cognitive surplus caused by forty years of watching crap TV, which I can relate to. It’s called Gin, Television and Social Surplus although the permalink reveals a subtitle “looking for the mouse”.
Bank Holiday Weekend - 10 things to do in London May 5, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London, UK , 3commentsIt’s a May Day bank holiday weekend here in the whole of the UK, so a lot of people who do ‘jobs’ will be looking to make the most of the time off work. Trips away to the countryside, coast and abroad such as short Paris breaks are popular, as is staying at home and doing DIY, house hunting, gardening etc. Here in the capital, there ought to be lots of alternative opportunities but sometimes it’s hard to get inspired so I’m going to start up a list. I’ll edit this later to add more things, and will of course be very grateful for any suggestions contributed by readers.
So here’s a list of at least 10 possible things to do in London on a Bank Holiday.
Art
There are plenty of art galleries and sculpture installations to see in London, both permament displays and visiting exhibitions. Tate modern is a favourite but there are many other less well known gems.
Parks
If you ever take a flight on the London Eye, you’ll be surprised to see how green a city London is, with lots of parks and open spaces. Hampsted Heath and Kenwood House offer long walks amongst wildlife and more art. Primrose Hill is another location in the north of the city, with a fantastic view back over central London and an opportunity to enjoy Sunday lunch with live Jazz music at The Princess of Wales pub.
The river
The Tate to Tate fast catamaran is the quickest way to get a feel for what a longer boat trip on the river Thames might be like, with a return trip on the boat from Westminster to Hampton Court taking up the best part of a day out. By night the riversides between Tower bridge and London Bridge and the Southbank are all worth exploring.
Greenwich
You can also depart from Greenwich with river trips into Central London or out to the Thames flood barrier. Back in Greenwich there are some fine walks up the hill, in the park or along the river bank. There’s also the National Maritime Museum, the grounds of the Naval College and a good selection of noodle bars and vietnamese restaurants.
Pubs
Choose one of the great pubs in the London Cider Pub Guide. You can always drink beer if you haven’t yet learned to appreciate real cider and perry.
Eat
London has the best selection of international cuisine in the World and traditional british cuisine is becoming popular again too. Two of my favourites are Japanese Habibi Sushi and South Indian (Masala Dosa)
Football
Important local derby football matches are often played on bank holidays, but May is in the off season apart from the FA cup and FA trophy finals at Wembley.
Banger Racing
Banger Racing is a cheap and cheeful form of motor sport which makes for a great family day out and there are often special events for bank holiday mondays eg at Wimbledon.
Theatre
For top West End musicals or new fringe plays in theatre pubs, the full range is available in London and the suburbs. Some of the stars are on holiday this week which means last minute theatre tickets might be available for otherwise sold out shows. If you’re visiting though, it’s better really to have booked one of the best value theatre breaks in London.
Kew Gardens
Big enough to find solitude on a busy day, Kew Gardens is an all year round spectacle with the plantlife taking centre stage even when temporary art installations and photography exhibitions are first class. Visit the new alpine house now that it’s been populated with tiny wonders subsisting in cracks on the tufa rock.
Internet
Catch up on email from the Apple store, Regent Street or use your own laptop in the city with free wifi hotspots. Alternatively, stay at home and get the best out of your home broadband connection by using it all day long.
Camden Lock
If it’s trendy goth clothing and techno punk disco ware that’s important then Camden Lock market is where all the young continentals go to grab the latest London scene paraphanalia. There’s also a good selection of street food stalls and a great walk along the canal to Little Venice.
Things to beware of on Bank Holidays
Public transport may be limited to a Sunday service, or worse because of planned engineering works in the London area. Check alternative routes such as the London Overground.
Some places will be more crowded than usual, while others are closed on a Bank Holiday.
Habibi Sushi - new Sushi bar in London April 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : food and drink, video, London , 2comments
I spotted a brand new sushi bar called Habibi Sushi which only opened last week, so we went back a couple of days later for lunch. The location is great, in the narrow Artillary Passage just a short walk from Liverpool Street station, fork left at the Seven Stars in the direction of Brick Lane or Spitalfields, so very handy for having a bite on the way home, or maybe picking up a takeaway box which looked great. Conveyor belt Sushi bars are great fun, and the original “Moshi Moshi” inside Liverpool Street station itself seems to have gone downhill a bit recently, so some competition in the local area is most welcome.
The food was very good, with some unusual variations on the usual sushi dishes, and about the right proportions of raw fish and cooked meat dishes. The only slight niggle I would have is with the stools which swivel in all directions including up, down and side to side. That might help fit everything in to a narrow shop, but it does make sitting down and staying on a bit of an effort after a while!
From their website at www.habibisushi.co.uk you can download pdfs for either the eat-in or takeaway menus, which is handy if you want to memorise the colour coding dish scheme for pricing conveyor belt choices.
Verdict: Well worth a try if in the vicinity or even making a special trip to visit. I hope Habibi Sushi keeps up the good standard and stays in business for years to come.
Best Broadband deals - Virgin BT Tiscali or SKY April 17, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : best broadband deals, UK , 4comments
When you look at the newest cheap broadband deals or the latest supercharged fast connection with unlimited downloads promised, it’s hard to tell which broadband provider’s connection will be reliable and up to scratch until after you’ve already signed up for a 12 month contract or even longer.
But the great thing about the internet is that we no longer need to rely on advertisements for all the information that’s necessary to weigh up a service or product before buying. With a little bit of digging around, or just by keeping up to date with what friends are saying, it’s possible to get direct reports from real customers experience of a product, good or bad. In the past this would all have been screened out, and the only source of advice away from the salesmen in the shop would have been “the man in the pub”.
For example, Steve Purkiss had a very bad experience with Virgin Broadband and published about it on his blog where anybody can see:
http://purkiss.com/2008/04/14/virgin-unlimited-broadband-one-week-was-all-i-could-take/
I’ve just cancelled my broadband service from Virgin after only one week. Why? Because today I woke up to find my ‘unlimited’ service had been throttled because I apparently used it too much. I’m now getting less-than-dial-up speeds and the service is all but useless to me
That’s just one really valuable piece of consumer generated information which can help anybody trying to work out which is the best broadband deal out of many under consideration with the main contenders being probably Virgin, BT, Tiscali and SKY.
Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube? April 9, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Flickr, video, London , 3comments
Video uploading to Flickr went live earlier today so it’s a big topic of conversation, especially the inevitable comparison with youTube the leader in the field.
My first reaction was delight to discover that the flickr video upload and sharing is totally integrated into the photo sharing community aspect of flick that made it so successful. Videos appear in the photostream alongside stills, and can be community tagged, commented on, sent to sets and groups, and blogged using “blog this” which is fantastic. The quality of the video and audio is superior too, with up to 150MB file sizes acceptable for a 90 second video. Why the 90 second limit? Well this is to avoid the problem of being used as a file download service for copied music videos, TV clips and films etc and to encourage home made movie clips from digital cameras, phones etc. So Flickr can avoid the enormous copyright problem that google inherited when they bought youTube.
“long photos”
Central to Flickr’s philosophy for introducing video is the concept of the “long photo” which kind of fits in with the use of digital still cameras that have the capacity to take video clips. This service is for genuine user generated video, short clips about everyday life, surroundings, little art videos and so on. Not so much about long videos of talking heads recorded straight from webcams saying “um” and “ah” a lot either.
London Video group
Flickr groups by default can accept both pictures and video but I thought it might be useful to have a group for London Video that focusses on video only, still linked to the London photo group, London Flickr meetups. I’ve invited some flickr contacts from London and from the social media cafe as well, but anybody interested in video is welcome to join and upload anything vaguely London related.All in all, it’s going to be very interesting to see how creative people use the opportunity that Flickr video is offering.
To give an idea, here’s Billy’s bacon video from Flickr, embedded on this wordPress blog.
I know, you can already do all that with youTube but I feel there are some significant advantages with the Flickr Video implementation, aren’t there?
Snow after Easter April 6, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : randomness, wildlife, UK , 2commentsIt was difficult to take the severe weather warning seriously on Friday when the forecasts indicated serious snow over large areas of the UK for the weekend but here it is on Sunday morning. White stuff. Lots of it.
More pictures added to the Flickr set Snow after Easter
Is it snowing where you are today?
New UK statistics authority web site April 2, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wildlife, politics, UK , add a commentUK Statistics Authority
A new independent body to oversee the quality of UK quantitative statistical data publication was launched yesterday.
The UK Statistics Authority run by Sir Michael Scholar is outside of government control, (like Torchwood) being answerable directly to the elected Parliament, not to ministers or any single government department. The USA has a remit to restore public confidence in the neutrality of government statistics, an urgent task since a survey revealed that only one citizen in five actually believes them! A poll by the European Commission about public trust in 27 member countries’ government statistics ranked Britain 27th out of 27.
USA can issue and take away a “kite mark” of quality assurance to each of the 28 UK Goverment departments which issue statistics, and will also act as a central reference for the vast amount of data which gets published. The website at www.statistics.gov.uk publishes a link to any new statistics which have been released daily at 9.30am, which is also available as an RSS feed
As another gesture towards open government, the USA will publish the minutes from their monthly meetings onto the website as well. Other plans for the website appear to include a new taxonomy and some kind of maps mashup.
What new figures are out today?
Today’s new stats include a tour of emergency services in Wales, Scottish manufactured exports for the last quarter of 2007 and a survey of construction industry materials but the one which caught my eye was a publication of UK Sea Fisheries Statistics for 2006.
United Kingdom Sea Fisheries Statistics
UK Sea Fisheries Statistics provides a compendium of statistics relating to the UK fishing industry. It includes information on the size of the UK fishing fleet, the number of fishermen, key economic indicators and the quantity and value of sea fish landings, imports and exports. Comparisons are made with the fishing industries in Europe and the rest of the world. The level of exploitation of the main European Union quota stocks is also considered.
It’s interesting to me for example, to see how Newlyn in Cornwall compares with other large fishing ports but there’s also an overview of the world fishing industry:
The world catch figures from marine fishing areas fell by 2 per cent from 85.5 million tonnes in 2004 to 83.7 million tonnes in 2005. In 2005 China caught the largest volume of fish, 14.7 million tonnes. Peru had the second largest annual catch at 9.3 million tonnes. The USA, Japan, Indonesia and Chile each caught between 4 and 5 million tonnes. Of the 83.7 million tonnes of fish caught in 2005, 63 per cent were caught in the Pacific Ocean, 26 per cent were caught in the Atlantic and 11 per cent in the Indian Ocean. Marine catches from the Pacific Ocean have shown a long-term gradual increase reaching a maximum of 53.6 million tonnes in 2000. Landings in 2005 were 52.5 million tonnes, a decrease of 1 per cent on 2004. In the Atlantic, the 2005 catch is 12 per cent lower than in 2001.
Here are some more tasty extracts:
In 2006, the UK fleet landed 21 thousand tonnes of cod (26 per cent of the 1996 level) and 40 thousand tonnes of haddock (44 per cent of the 1996 level). This represents a combined decrease of 109 thousand tonnes. Landings of the relatively low value blue whiting have increased over this period from 14 thousand tonnes to 82 thousand tonnes.
Herring landings by the UK fleet were higher than mackerel landings for the first time in over 10 years. Since 2002, mackerel landings have decreased by 49 per cent while herring landings have increased by 50 per cent.
In 2006, 41 thousand tonnes of nephrops were landed, a 35 per cent increase in two years. Landings of cockles fell to their lowest level for over 10 years.
This is all fascinating stuff but some of the vocabulary is unfamilar so I welcomed the opportunity to learn:
Nephrops are lobsters, langoustines, dublin bay prawns, scampi etc
What are Demersal Fisheries?
Demersal fisheries target species which live on the or near the seabed and feed on bottom-living organisms and other fish. Although fisheries may be directed towards particular species or species groups, demersal fish are often caught together and comprise a mixed demersal fishery.
In 2001 the total landings by the Scottish demersal fleet were in excess of 130,000 tonnes and had a first sale value of around £150 million. Cod (Gadus morhua), haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus), whiting (Merlangius merlangus) and monkfish (Lophius
What are Pelagic Fisheries?
Oily fish generally swim in the pelagic zones of the oceans.
So to the consumer or cook, roughly speaking demersal = “white fish” and pelagic = “oily fish”. The oily fish live in the deep cold waters (clue) and the demersals are more coastal, except that the continental shelf extends a lot further out from some coastlines than others. And the Mackerel do come in close to shore in large numbers at certain times, as witnessed in Lekeitio recently:
Back to the UK Statistics authority website, as you can see it has the potential to provide considerable distraction as well as having great educational and informative uses, quite possibly marketing and business use as well. Perhaps one day it will also be considered to set up an authority site for aggregating national qualitative data in a similar but appropriate way.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
