Barges, baas and bells

It was a dull grey morning, with nothing much to look forward to but some rain, when I heard hooting and sirens from the river, which usually means something at least worth a look. It turned out to be the start of the annual Barge Driving Race, in which teams manhandle (there's no other word for it) lighters from Greenwich to Westminster. Two oarsmen run up a slope to get the angle to heave the lighter forward, while another team of two wait to relieve them - this is a long race and these are both bulky and weighty craft ("lighter" only in the sense that their predecessors were used to make larger ships lighter by taking on their load for onward transport):



Feeling energised, I went to see some sheep on London Bridge. In times past, it was a valuable privilege of "Freemen of the City" to be able to drive livestock over London Bridge free of tolls: for the 800th anniversary of London Bridge this year, the Lord Mayor's charity appeal was combining a re-enacted walk of sheep across the bridge with an "Anniversary Fayre".

My heart had sunk a little at that. A "Fayre" suggests an event with the wrong sorts of pretensions, the "fête worse than death" where the home-made jam (sorry, preserves) comes with a mark-up for the lacy doily tops on the jars, and there is gimlet-eyed pricing on the bric-à-brac and vintage clothing ("This isn't a jumble sale, you know"). The weather was looking like a good excuse to ignore it.

But in the event (and I notice there seems to be some backtracking about the spelling), it turned out to be a collection of stalls and tents displaying mostly the crafts of some of the City's livery companies and various other heritage-related organisations - bricklayers and "tylers", stained-glass makers, painters, calligraphers, playing-card makers, assorted vintage vehicles and demonstrations of blacksmithing by the bus stop. Sundry people in robes of office and other sorts of fancy dress added some colour to the event.

But the sheep were the main attraction: and groups of people were taking occasionally reluctant animals for a short walk before handing them on to the next group (I'm assuming they'd all made a suitable donation to the Lord Mayor's appeal).

And all the while, the bells of the City churches were ringing - because yesterday was also the 150th anniversary of Big Ben.

Recycled

I have a cabinet full of assorted screws, nails, nuts and bolts and bits and pieces that I've saved in the course of DIY over the decades. Since I moved to a modern flat, it's hardly been looked at in its dark cupboard corner.

Recently, I noticed that the endless bumps and potholes must have shaken out the bolt holding in place one of my rear panier's supports. This hasn't had an immediate effect on my ability to get the weekend shopping home on the bike, but it can't be doing any good to have all the load carried on one side. So it was time to try to find a screw of the right thread, thickness and (crucially) length to fit the slot. And sure enough, after much delving and sorting, I found it: I have no idea what it was saved from, but it was a perfect fit.

Thirty years of hoarding to save a pound. My Dad would be proud of me.

Hot enough for India

On a free afternoon this week, it seemed only fitting to the weather to visit a bit of India in London, at the British Museum.

In the courtyard outside, the sun was beating down on a small collection from Kew of Indian plants - some familiar favourites like rhododendrons, some less so (at least I now know what a banyan or a peepul tree looks like). Inside, the Garden and Cosmos exhibition of court paintings from Jodhpur was in a blissfully air-conditioned room.

The display moved from lively paintings of seventeenth century court frolics, via late eightennth century representations of the universal Ramayana story, to increasingly austere and formalised paintings from a time in the early nineteenth century when the maharaja was under the influence of a particularly abstract brand of yogic cosmology.

You could just lose yourself in the colours; but I couldn't help noticing that while in the earlier paintings the people, not to mention the birds and animals decorating the scene, are shown in many and varied activities, in the last, they are all arranged in strict and formal, even totalitarian, patterns. And at the very end, there's a room of paintings showing three holy men, in the same relationship but with two supported by different animals, on differently coloured "cosmic oceans" - so abstracted that no-one knows what they mean. No wonder the maharaja's nobles finally revolted.

Not wailing but gnashing

My dentist obviously believes in patient involvement. Last time I went to see her, she insisted on showing me digital images of a crack in one tooth (how comforting to see it Grand-Canyon-size on the TV screen). Now she's rigged up a mirror over her inspection light, so that the patient can see exactly what she's up to in there.

No doubt there's plenty of clinical evidence that this reduces anxiety, and the good Liberal Democrat in me is all for empowerment: but I'm not that keen on seeing exactly what each pointy, shiny, whirry implement is doing as it prods, chips, scrapes or polishes away.

My teeth aren't something I can view with any degree of detachment: not while they're still attached to me.

New balls

WUH! [plock]

AARGH![plock]

[shoesqueak, shoesqueak]

ERRRFFF! [plick]

OOOHHH! [applause]

AAAIYEEEE! [plock]

ITE!!!! [thud]

I really can't be bothered about Wimbledon. At all.

Festival frolics

You can't move for festivals and events at the moment. Round our way, as well as all sorts of events in and around Canary Wharf, the Spitalfields Festival has just finished, and we now have the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival. Last night, a group of us went to see Fous de Bassin, which is un spectacle in the French sense, as well as a spectacle in the rather more disapproving English sense. I've just come back from a second visit, this time a bit closer to the action.

In the Millwall graving dock, where one of the first new housing developments in the area gave each resident a mooring pontoon (virtually never used), there were some strange sights. As dusk fell on the main dock, the point of them became clear.

To whimsically tinkly music, a street scene such as you might see in a classic French comedy film unfolded: a car slowed down and stopped, enveloped in steam, the passenger (wearing a striped jacket that from a distance looked like pyjamas) got out and was apparently abandoned by the driver, so opened up a folding chair and sat to read a newspaper, a street cleaner with his wheely-bin came past and offered advice (and incidentally magicked up some lamp-posts as he passed), a pregnant lady sauntered past greeting everybody, and returned surprisingly quickly with an apparently occupied pram. An officious looking person (a postie?) on a bicycle pedalled very fast to go nowhere, blowing a whistle the while; and then an oversized bed appeared. Since, by the way, all this was taking place on the water (everyone floating along presumably with their own hidden electric motor), the bed was being rowed along by its occupant. As you do.

A female figure with an eighteenth-century wig and a huge red ball-gown came slowly into view, perched on top of a paddle wheel, five metres above the water, the wheel being powered by a slave caged within like a hamster. The occupant of the bed having for some reason torn it open and thrown around its feather filling, the surface of the water was now strewn with feathers which took on rainbow colours in the lights.

Then, as the darkness became complete, there was thunder. Flames began to appear, and the music became menacing. Two angel-like creatures zipped around jousting with fiery lances, and the wings of one caught fire (as did the hair of the man reading a newspaper). A Viking-esque longboat with a series of flaming flares along its length appeared, bearing an exuberantly priapic demon-king figure gesticulating among his acolytes, along with a Tinguely-like machine with a series of water-scooping wheels: they swooped around as what looked like a battle developed, and fireworks shot up from the water. As the fireworks reached a climax, the longboats and the angels weaved around each other and all the other participants, who were shouting incomprehensibly; the ball-gown woman writhed in artistically-posed agony on top of her paddle wheel. The street-scene had become a nightmare: the postie was now a sinister-looking clown, the mother now had a child and a creepily military mannequin in tow. As the fireworks reached their climax, the car now re-appeared towing a caravan.

There was music; there was fire; there were fireworks; it was on my doorstep; and it was free.

I seem to be even more lackadaisical about planning holidays than I used to be (and that's saying something). I've never been one of those people who sits down on Boxing Day to plan their upcoming summer, nor to stick to the same old place (no "good old Broadstairs!" for me - though I do seem to have been to Paris a lot recently); but this year I really haven't given the matter much thought. Perhaps it's something to do with working on short-term contracts at a job which isn't particularly stressful, but I'm not panting to get away.

I do like reading the travel supplements, if only with relief that I now know enough about more and more places to be sure I don't particularly want to go there. Après-ski (and indeed avant- and pendant-ski)? Pfui! Stretching out in the sun on a tropical beach? Not likely. Adventure camping in South America? Nada y nada. Luxuriating among the glitterati in some achingly up-to-the-minute boutique hotel? Per-leese.

But my eye eas caught by a piece in last weekend's supplement about the joys of Mechelen.

Hmmm... It's easy to get to by train - Belgium's practically next door; and it boasts a high and mighty tower, with an inspiring view. According to the (presumably much esteemed) local scribe Libert Vanderkerken: "Filled with joy, you look around and greet the fields, the woods, the moon and stars. A grandiose sight unfolds and fills your eyes and heart with overwhelming joy, and in this mood you'll find that precious peace of mind." How can one resist? And who couldn't be charmed that the aforesaid tower celebrates St Rumbold?

London can be quite surreal at times.

Yesterday I went to have a look at the "Tudor river pageant" (part of the commemoration of Henry VIII's accession - the bit when he was a Good Thing rather than the monster he became). Nothing too surreal there - we like a bit of re-enactment, even if the dressing-up is just a little ridiculous.

So I hung around on the Millennium Bridge (since it would be easier to run from one side to the other to take photos); eventually the procession appeared, and a burly "King Henry" bade us all a suitable stentorian "Good day" with all the flourishes.

So far, so ho-hum; but running for a bus to catch up the procession nearer Parliament, I passed a Japanese tourist hammering out (more than competently) the tango Por Una Cabeza on one of the street pianos scattered around London this weekend for our general amusement and edification.



And as the bus passed the brick and brutal balconies and walkways at the back of the City of London School, there was someone standing, surveying the street, in a Guy Fawkes mask. No-one else; no sign of any other activity: just standing there blankly as the bus swept past.

I just made it to catch the pageant passing Westminster, to the sound of boat whistles and police sirens (before my return to the normality of a Saturday date with Waitrose):

Some things I won't take lying down..

I've often wondered about trying out a recumbent bike. This morning I saw one crossing Tower Bridge*.

The rider's head was nicely placed at the height of the bumper behind and the exhaust in front, with nothing that might indicate his presence at the eye-level of any driver (or indeed cyclist).

So if I do give it a try one Sunday morning in Dulwich Park, that'll be the end of it.

*Yes, I know this picture shows one at the Arc de Triomphe (and I bet she didn't ride the recumbent round it), but it's the only picture I could find that shows one in relation to a car (now I wonder why that could be?).

Uneventful

Just another Saturday.

But my usual shopping trip to Canary Wharf included a diversion among all the indistinguishable shiny objects in their annual Motor Expo: Land Rovers performing gravity-defying dressage. Quite why people would want to sit in a car doing all this, rather than watch it from outside, I don't know, but they were queueing up:


And then, a gentle bike ride across London, along the river and through the parks coincided not only with a party of Horse Guards ambling back to barracks along the Mall after the Trooping the Colour parade, but also with the first arrival of some fancy-dressed cyclists for the Naked Bike Ride:


No, I didn't join in (the world isn't ready for that, nor am I); actually, nakedness wasn't that much on display at that point. On my way home later, I did see a few crinkly-bottomed old gentleman starkers around the Wellington Arch (why does that sound like a euphemism?); but mostly, there were people with various sorts of fancy dress and decorated bikes (and one young woman promoting a cycling website with the banner "Powered by cake").

I was on my way to see a different sort of decoration, in the the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, almost hidden down a mews in Notting Hill.

It's a series of packed display cabinets taking you through products, packets, adverts and toys in their (lightly-outlined) social and political context from late Victorian times to the present day. The further away they were in time, the more outlandish they seem: Aspinall's "Neigeline", anyone? Ramsay's Spice Nuts (for eliminating all species of worms), Co-operative Liver Salt (what on earth would the unco-operative sort do?), the Bloomer Polkas. But as you move forward through time, nostalgia creeps in: the place must sometimes echo to "Ooh look, we had one of those" - there was a glove puppet of Sooty that I'm sure I had as a child. And then there are cases devoted to how individual brands have altered their appearance over time, how packaging is made and what the manufacturers (several of whom are sponsors, wouldn't you know) are doing to lessen the environmental impact.

As you might imagine, they're not short of themes for scrapbooks, postcards and souvenirs in the shop: but they also had books on how to achieve the look of different past decades, and, for the scholarly, I noticed a history of Australian apple labels (I am not making this up).

Anorak time

I like to think I'm grown-up and matter-of-fact when it comes to machinery, especially the small stuff, gadgets and the like: it comes from strange bits and pieces my father used to bring home, like the thing that rolled cigarettes, a sort of miniature reverse-churn device for mixing butter and milk to make cream, and the heavy-duty spike and blade on a handle that clamped on to a table so you could peel apples and potatoes without having to hold them (provided of course they were perfectly smooth and regular in shape).

My mother, on the other hand, swore by (and not too often at) the pressure cooker that looked like a weapon of war, and her heavy old sewing machine; so perhaps it's not so odd that big machines still inspire a certain awe. Which is why it's still a bit of a thrill to be stopped on Tower Bridge while the road swings up to let a ship pass through. It's happened twice this week. The first time I didn't have my camera with me, so I can't show you how tenaciously the abandoned newspapers clung to the railings as the road swung towards the vertical, and the wind made a tissue scramble up. By Thursday, someone had swept the road; but you can see the mad dash of pedestrians who can't wait three or four minutes:

I watch too much television:

Back at work..

(actually, I'm beginning to think of it more as a day centre)... today's canteen menu offered us "Fussily pasta": and they lived up to it.

While you make up your own jokes, I'm posting a couple of photos I took yesterday. The first was in a charity shop window (bear in mind, this is in Notting Hill, where the charity shops stock designers, and the clientele quite possibly speak of nothing but karma and the like):



and this was on a house in Portobello Road:

Just at the moment, the BBC is running a poetry season, across seemingly all of its outlets, with documentaries, readings and participatory events all round, and some striking promotional trailers on TV, where TV faces you might not necessarily associate with poetry respond to some everyday situation with a poem. Unfortunately, the best of these don't appear in the BBC's own Youtube videos, so you'll have to take my word for it that somehow it works when the presenter in the video below, out on a shopping trip and asked what she'd like for her birthday, launches into this, or this comedian, asked for directions, gives the first verse of this.

One thing I have been struck by is that poets don't always seem to be the best readers of their own work. Over the last couple of weeks of programmes, I've noticed a tendency to adopt an oddly incantatory "poetry voice" which favours a sing-song rhythm that seems to swamp the sense of the words (even when the poet has perfect diction, which - naming no names - isn't often the case). I much prefer readings by people trained to communicate what they've understood from a poem:

Of the making of books, there is no end..

Slightly befuddled by today's sunshine, I found myself, a little like the solitary bee who's been visiting my window-boxes, bumbling around town, and as the bee is drawn to my flowers, so I am drawn (despite the couple of dozen accumulated books on my "to read" pile) into the shops to dip into more and more books I will probably never have time to read.

What is more, Blackwells on the Charing Cross Road now has a print-on-demand machine. I can see the attraction (particularly for somewhere out of the way, without space for a big stock and facing high delivery charges), especially if the necessary deals have been made for access to otherwise out of print material.

It all comes down to the balance of price, convenience and quality. I could only see on display the prices for self-publishing (£15 plus £5 a copy: not a lot for anyone who might otherwise be tempted by a vanity press, but if that's the price for something from an archive, perhaps quite a lot). As for quality, the covers of the samples on display had a uniformly shiny photocopy quality (or looked like bound proofs with rough-and-ready covers); on the other hand, the paper seemed to be better quality than the average paperback. Then again, the text of some of the reprinted classics (for example, a copy of Pride and Prejudice, as if one couldn't already get cheap editions of it all over the place) had, at the bottom of every page, a credit to the Google digitisation project: intrusively large and in their house font and style, irrespective of what the rest of the page looked like. I wonder what Jane Austen would have made of that?

Seen from my window..

Aaahh....

With a long weekend coming up, what to do? Shall I go to the Tate Modern to play, or to join the Big Scream? Since it's just been trailed on the TV evening news, I rather suspect there will be a bit of a crowd, so maybe not. There's some ironing to do, after all.

Maggie and Dennis*

*(no, not her husband)

I was almost forgetting, I went to see the Cartoon Museum last weekend.

It's a small space in Bloomsbury. Sadly, it doesn't display what you might call a comprehensive collection, though it has a research library of several thousand images.

On the ground floor there's an overview of the history of caricaturing from the eighteenth century onwards, with some built examples of Heath Robinson machines. At the moment, there's a special exhibition on cartoonists' views of Margaret Thatcher - both for and against. Strange to look at the ups and downs of her public image as though it was ancient history, and surprising to view it so dispassionately.

Upstairs, there's an even smaller space devoted to comics in barely a dozen display cabinets (as well as a room for visiting school parties to draw their own comic strips). Not a sign of the French worship of the "bande dessinee", but some moments of nostalgia as I revisited Korky the Cat, the Bash Street Kids - and (who else) Dennis the Menace (no, not the American one).

Not to mention some fine examples of the oeuvre of Donald McGill.

Dahn the Elephant

I work at Elephant and Castle. On hearing that, any Londoner will probably emit a small and uncertain sound from a face halfway between a smile and a grimace. It's known as a series of large traffic junctions surrounding a 70s era shopping centre that's the nearest I've seen to the department store I visited in Prague not long after the end of communism (but with a cracking cheapo household shop).

So you can understand why tonight's TV news programmes were more than slightly (even incredulously) agog to report that current ambitious redevelopment plans have been endorsed as an example to the world by Bill Clinton, and his vague promise to visit (mind you, that was only a way of avoiding a question about his attitude to Boris Johnson).

Eurovision again

I seem to remember anticipating that this year's Eurovision entries would feature various anguished young men with bare midriffs. Somehow it looked as though obvious attempts to replicate previous winning formulas weren't that many, and didn't get very far either. Ukrainians flashing flesh? Romanian party girls mashing-up Balkan dances? A soulful Bosnian looking like a footnote in Krafft Ebing with an incomprehensible ballad? A plea for peace? Out of luck, all of them.

Which is not to say there weren't some distinctly familiar sounds: I didn't mind (for nostalgic reasons) Estonia's partial reprise of Reach Out, while Germany seemed to be trying to do a Tom Jones-style remake of Minnie the Moocher without Tom Jones's macho credentials, despite importing Dita von Teese, who wandered around the stage as though she'd forgotten what she was looking for (most of her clothes).

Was it a new trend to re-import some more or less traditional ethnic element? Not just Moldovan hora dancers leaping around like sugar-crazed toddlers, or Armenia's drumming and elaborate costumes: the Norwegian winning song had a touch of antique fiddle-playing too (I leave it to you to make up your own jokes about antique fiddling).

ooowowayhayayay

I may or may not have some thoughts on the Eurovision Song Contest (on first impression, the "Oh dear" and "What the..??" quotients seemed rather low this year). But one thing that struck me was the irritation factor of all the "sincere emotion" quirks, the pants and puffs around every distorted warbling vowel. Our own dear contestant seemed particularly prone to it: "Ha-hah'll show you what Ah'm mayeyade ahv" and so on: but I thought I noticed some oddly American vowels in Patricia Kaas's French accent too (and is such extra aspiration on a "t" quite the thing in French? I'm sure she didn't do that in her earlier years..)