HMS Illustrious at Greenwich November 9, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a commentUpon alighting from the Docklands Light Railway at Cutty Sark, Greenwich on Friday the view of the Thames was dominated by a huge warship.
HMS Illustrious is moored in the Thames off Greenwich for a week to help with the Royal Navy’s participation in Remembrance Day commemorations in London. This year is the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
HMS Illustrious was also used as a platform for the November 6TH Fireworks display which by all accounts was quite spectacular, being accompanied by the dramatic sounds of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.
Photo derived from one by Simon Starr
Walkway Closed - No Pavement for Pedestrians October 26, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : food and drink, transport, video, London , add a commentBack in the old days, before you could do any kind of building or digging work that required a temporary closure of the pavement, it was necessary to erect a proper cordon with signs and diversions including a clearly marked safe route for pedestrians. But now we seem to get all sorts of obstacles places in the way making travel by foot an increasingly hazardous venture. It’s not like this is some American city where everybody is expected to get around by car and walkers are treated like weirdos. No this is in central London where crowds of people get about using shanks’s pony on a regular basis.
And it’s not just builders, scaffolders, road maintenance and utilities crews. Where I live, a bit further out, parked cars are often left straddling the pavement blocking the right of way for pedestrians. Other obstacles are provided by roadside businesses who decide to expand outwards from their shop front onto the pavement. Hand car wash services for example seem to use the pavement, kerb and bus lane as part of their workshop area. Then there are the tressel tables of vegetables in bowls, all at £1 each which are spreading like potato blight in front of all kinds of non-food related shops, to the extent that proper greengrocers are going out of business unless they join in the bowls system as well. So now you can’t buy two lemons you have to have five, and a bowl of tomatoes is expensive at £1 whereas three aubergines might seem like a bargain until you notice that the two underneath are going brown.
Tags: pavementclosed, no pavement, walkway obstacles, vegetable bowls, hand car wash, rant
What’s odd about this Dartboard? Found in an East London Pub October 2, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , 9comments
Do you notice anything odd about this dartboard seen in an East London pub recently? Most darts boards look a bit like this, but different.
How on earth would you ever end a game of 301 on such a dart board?
Loading Up The Lobster Pots September 16, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : UK , 1 comment so far
Lobster pot fishing
Loading up a small boat with lobster pots ready to put out from Anstruther in the East Neuk of Fife.
I’ve always been fascinated to watch the comings and going in these little fishing village harbours in Cornwall, France, Spain and now the east of Scotland.
“We watch the working boats come in,
to see what they have caught”.
Lobster Pots in Cornwall
The lobster pots in Cornwall landed in little harbours such as Coverack but also Newlyn used to be made of wood and wire but now they seem to be mostly plastic. The mouth lets the lobster enter a funnel shaped tunnel into the main chamber where some enticing bait is waiting. Then they can’t find a way out again. Small boats drop the lobster pots several at a time over the sea floor in known lobster feeding places, marked by a floating buoy so they can be picked up later. Those floating buoys used to be made of coloured glass and many found their way into Cornish pubs as ‘tasteful’ decorations.
Lobster Pot Fishing
Lobster Pot fishing is all about setting the baited pots in a known lobster habitat and then coming back in a boat to see what’s crawled in. This video “Mark & Dennis Chapter 2 Lobster Pots” taken in Dorset off West Bay captures some of the excitement of hauling in the lobster pots and seeing what’s there.
August Rain and The Harvest August 19, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : UK , 2commentsWith the August bank holiday weekend coming up soon, the end of summer looms large ahead and I for one shall be welcoming it with open arms. Just a few years ago at this time of year I would have been sitting in a tent in a field somewhere like North Wales enjoying the outdoor life but for the past two years the traditional holiday month of August has been a washout and it has been just as well to stay at home and get some work done.
The real summer of course invariably takes place in June and early July and this year was no exception so why are the school children, parents, students and education workers forced to take their annual rest time in August, the damp chilly fag-end of the season? Well legend has it that it all goes back to a time when the youth of nation were required on the land to help with bringing in the harvest. I was even involved in that particular agricultural tradition myself as a lad, picking up potatoes in the fields of Shortlanesend near Truro.
John Richards had a small mixed arable farm, a couple of old Massey Ferguson tractors, a hay barn and two daughters. So labour intensive was the work required at specific times of the year that small armies of child workers were recruited, happy to be exploited for a small pittance per hour in the name of doing some real, grownup work, passing the endless boring long days of summer and earning a bit of pocket money. In order to join in I had to cycle a small pushbike down the hill into town and steeply up the other side for a couple of miles just to get there. Upon arrival at the proper start time there was always a lot of waiting around to be done before you even knew what was happening. Some crucial piece of machinery would be waiting to come back from a neighbouring farm, or the key to the diesel pump shed had gone
missing, we were waiting for a field inspection or somesuch holdup. Eventually perhaps just before lunchtime we might actually get out onto the field and do some potato picking. The old red tractor chugged down the length of the field for once row at a time, pulling an attachment called a spinner which was like a big circular rake. It dug through the soil, scooped up the densely grown ripe potatoes and flung them up into the air. What happened to them next? They fell back onto the ground of course, and our job was to bend down and pick them up and put them into buckets. It was back breaking work in the summer sun, hour after hour. The buckets of potatoes were tipped into sacks, then the full sacks tied up with twisted wires and loaded onto a trailer. At the end of a good day, the trailer would be stacked full of half hundred weight sacks of good quality clean potatoes, but only if conditions were perfect. There was one thing that was guaranteed to scupper the whole process and that thing was rain.
A little bit of light rain and we would carry on harvesting the potatoes. Never mind if we all got a bit damp, it’s was Cornwall so we were used to that. A sudden shower and we’d take cover hoping it would pass over. If the shower eased up we’d be back out again, even if only for a quarter of an hour before it got worse. But once the serious , persistent rain started up that was it. You can’t harvest potatoes out from muddy fields, at least not with the equipment available to a small family farm in those days. If it rained overnight there would be no work the next morning, then maybe not for the next week if it kept up. Maybe even a fortnight! Eventually in a bad year the potatoes would be left in for so long after they were ready that they’d just rot in the soggy ground, abandoned until it was time to plough them back in again, a breeding ground for blight and other fungal diseases.
So there’s nothing new about rainy, washout weeks in August, that’s quite normal and yet so often we feel cheated when the sun doesn’t shine endlessly through the summer season like in Portugal or the Mediterranean. Where does that expectation come from I wonder?
London Bloggers new venue, competition and pubs July 29, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers, London , 2commentsI’m looking forward to the London Bloggers meetup tonight at a new venue near Blackfriars Bridge. Organiser Andy Bargery says there will be “plenty of space and cracking views over the Thames” which sounds good.
With it being a larger venue, I noticed on the meetup site that there are still two places left at the time of writing, which would be unusual this close to the event normally. So the London bloggers group is slowly developing into an enjoyably friendly and interesting regular event, with occasional sponsorship, some presentations and now even a competion with a great prize. It’s a trip on an Airship no less., something I’ve always fancied but unfortunately the deadline has passed - doh!
Actually one of the reasons I missed the date was because entry to the London Bloggers competition was by writing about your local pub and why it’s so good. Where I happen to live, all the local pubs are pretty dire right now so it’s hard to find inspiration on that particular topic. Local pubs are an important community resource in smaller towns, village and city centres as well but in London they tend to be more like retail outlets which happen to sell some drinks or else shabby old buildings with few customers where the manager is just keeping things ticking over. So we tend to have to get on a bus or train to visit a pub which we’d want to be in and that actually sells something we want to drink, and if you’ve taken transport to go out of your own borough then that hardly counts as local does it.
Even if I’d decided to write about say the George at Wanstead, which was lovely and cool inside on the hottest day of the year and sells Westons Old Rosie and Organic Vintage ciders on draught, I’d have had to mention the funny group of old men who hang around on weekday afternoons, the Friday night meat market, the gauntlet of smokers crowding the entrance and the highly strained relations between bar and kitchen staff which ought to put you off eating anything that comes out of there.
Greenwich Naval College - A fine Greenwich College July 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a commentThe Naval College Buildings at Greenwich College
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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. So the ones atop this Greenwich College were kind of prototypes.
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.
This is just opposite the Greenwich College site, more or less.
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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”.
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