Dank and dreary..

As must be obvious, I really haven't found much to write about recently. It's that time of year. And though there are plenty of things to see and do in London, as at any time of year, a couple of weekends of wretched weather have combined with the kind of bad posture while doing necessary odd jobs that seems to seize up my back muscles. So a brief sciatical totter to the City Farm café and back was the sum total of this weekend's outings.

The only consolation to Sunday afternoons at this time of year is drawing the curtains to cocoon with something toasted and a detective story, but otherwise:

No sun, no moon!
No morn, no noon!
No dawn, no dusk, no proper time of day,

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! -
November!

Dear Mr Tourist..

I know there's a lot to learn about London, and especially the Tower and Tower Bridge, but if you're walking across the bridge approach road in the gloom of the evening rush hour, do you think you could actually take your nose out of the guide-book before stepping into the road in front of me? I wouldn't want you to get a bad impression of Britain, but I don't honestly feel inclined to apologise for swearing at you.....

Hoots

I tend to screen out most TV adverts, especially those for the Christmas market (those bizarre perfume ads!) and compilation records - and above all compilation records for the Christmas market.

But tonight I couldn't help noticing that one of this year's offerings of quasi-religious sentimentality - according to Morrison's - includes Lesley Garrett singing about that well-known Scotsman, Angus Dei.

Lolling idly....

... in front of QI last night, it struck me that in almost all panel games and comedy quizzes of this kind, on radio or TV, there is only ever one woman "contestant". Not only QI, but The News Quiz/Have I Got News For You, Just A Minute, Never Mind the Buzzcocks (so it's not just the BBC), whatever.

I'm sure that in the prim and conservative 1950s, programmes like Twenty Questions and What's My Line routinely had two men and two women taking part.

Is this something to do with a change in the perceived audience? But doesn't that become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

And relax...

The cycle path along Cable Street is unbelievably bumpy by comparison with the road surface: but this morning it allowed me to sail past a caterpillar-tracked earth-mover trundling slowly along - the driver blissfully stretching with his hands clasped behind his head......

At last!

I've spent the afternoon playing with my Winkku*.

Since it's an extension to be added on to one end of the handlebars, it's a bit inclined to wobble on its own, which means the rear-view mirror doesn't always give the clearest picture. Of course, that might be because I'm currently using the strap-on** - I'll wait to see if it's any better if I use the version that has to be actually inserted*** into the handlebar.

The lights are bright. From the rider's viewpoint the indicator doesn't seem so, but it would be different from the perspective of a following car-driver. I'm not sure if it makes a great deal of difference to how drivers respond: they seem to have been giving me a wide berth anyway, for whatever reason. I'm not sure I trust it enough to do without hand-signalling for a right turn, just yet, at least; but it's handy that it also makes an extra set of front and rear lights.








*Oh do stop sniggering.
**Look, I won't tell you again.
***Oh for heaven's sake...

Home thoughts

Dear me, isn't it amazing how quickly one forgets a trip away once the normal daily habits of home are picked up again?

I managed to get in a quick look at the free exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville on Jacques Prévert; to do it justice would need a couple of hours, there are so many film clips and examples of all the different art forms he tried (some fascinating collages, for example). Ah well, it's on till February, so I might get another chance.

The train trip home gave me an opportunity to listen to a couple of records I'd got round to buying in Paris. I can't remember how I came to hear about the Gotan Project, though I soon found I recognised one of their pieces, as I think would a lot of people. They perform tango music (tango/gotan - geddit?) with various bits of additional electronic trickery: FNAC has them filed under electronic music, but it's the hypnotic melancholy of the tango music that gets me. What really intrigues me is trying to imagine how anyone came to think the tension, the attraction/repulsion, domination/submission, love and hate, the sheer passion of tango the perfect music to sell.... dishwashing tablets:

Armistice Day, a public holiday in France. I've said all I want to say on the subject, and since it was a beautiful day and the museums I had it in mind to visit were closed today, I decided to take a bike and explore Auteuil, passing the Arc de Triomphe en route to see if there was anything happening. The main national event of this 90th anniversary was a ceremony combining commemoration and (since France is currently presiding over the EU) reconciliation at the vast cemetery at Douaumont near Verdun, so the only sign I saw today was a blaring police escort for what looked like the Australian Ambassador.

Auteuil retains something of the air of the village it once was, attracting litterati away from the smoky, dirty city in the 18th century - there are traces of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams here. Now it is an upmarket residential area, with most of my guidebook's interest focussed on architectural details, with examples from Guimaud (who designed the iconic Metro entrances) as well as some extraordinary 1920s flights of fancy, and some (currently inaccessible for repairs) Le Corbusier.

But other things caught my eye as well:

- a family making the most of a no doubt rare midweek opportunity for papa to take the children to buy the day's baguette (baguette safely stowed across the hood of the buggy; but the toddler, allowed to stand on the back axle, surreptitiously nibbling at it)

- an ornate but (I suspect) futile sign forbidding people to play ball games against the wall of the church

- an interesting opportunity for deconstructing a trade name

- that apparently in France there aren't so much beauty parlours (too frivolous?) or clinics (too medical?) as Instituts de Beauté: serious enough to be reassuring without being forbidding, perhaps

- more and more museums: in the immediate vicinity there's a Balzac museum and the museum of Radio France, and on the way back to the centre, I spotted a sign for a Musée de Vin (on rue des Eaux, ha ha ha), and near les Halles there's also a dolls museum.

And in the evening, I actually went out to dinner with some other people (this is rare for me), with whom I'd been sharing facts and opinions on an internet messageboard for years, and a very pleasant meal it was too.

Till I dropped...

A grey and drizzly day, and a Monday, when most of the museums are closed. My exchange partner had mentioned that one of the buses from here goes all the way south of the river to near the Bon Marché department store. I'm not normally one for drifting round the shops for the sake of it (I make an exception for bookshops and the DIY basement at BHV, which is full of interesting examples of how the French do household things), but on a morning like this, doing the old lady thing seemed to be a sensible option.

The nearest bus stop is at the other end of the Rue de Babylone, which belies its name to be about as genteel as you could imagine, offering a glimpse of an interesting courtyard or two.

Arriving at Bon Marché, I saw why my guidebook says it's not only the oldest department store, it's considered the most chic. Even the tea-towels cost €16.50. Passing through the lighting department, I was struck (almost literally, it was hanging so low) by an Italian designer's sprightly take on a chandelier, ready-wrapped in a fibreglass web for that "Voilà! Instant Miss Havisham!" look - a snip at only €2910 (must be a bugger to dust). But the Christmas tree decorations department glittered, and in haberdashery you could probably find any sort of button you liked. I did buy a book (what else - and of course it's one of the season's priwewinners, though I might not get round to reading it till Easter, knowing me), and a coffee and a very nice cake in the basement café, but on the whole I find the world of people who fall for the glitz (or worse still, take it for granted) stifling.

Coming out, the narrow passage between road works was blocked by two young firemen inviting donations for their calendar. How could I refuse? It is of course the season - I've just been interrupted by a knock at the door by a representative of the binmen and roadsweepers, but I said to call back when my exchange partner returns. I always used to say you know you're getting on, not when the policemen look young, and not when they start calling you "Sir", but when you expect that as your proper due; but it was much more disconcerting that these firemen looked to be about 16.

As it happens, I know just the person it'd be a handy gift for, but now I needed a postal tube to keep it in good order. None for sale in the post office; the stationery shop they recommended only had them about four sizes too big. So I thought I'd look in BHV, since I was planning to visit the (free) exhibition on Jacques Prévert at the Hotel de Ville, which was open today. No, only huge ones there too, and a huge queue for the exhibition too. I ended up walking all the way to the Pompidou centre thinking that somewhere round there would have a better choice: no luck, huge is clearly this season's must-have (or rather, can't have anything else).

No, I'm not much of a shopper - except for the chocolate eclair I now felt entitled to.

Doh!

This morning I finally worked out which bit of indistinguishable black plastic touchpad on my exchange partner's computer actually makes it go (well, I've never used one before). So instead of cursing Acer, TeaTimer (which uses a lot memory at some moments) and Firefox, I spent the morning catching up on tidying my photos, video and posts so far. Perhaps I'm moving into the phase of needing things clearly labelled, like the "Drink me" and "Eat me" labels in Alice. Now there's a novel theory: was Carroll writing Alice not for a little girl but for a demented elderly relative?

I pootled down to the Marais on a bike, had terrible trouble finding free Velib spaces to park it and consequently was in no mood to take photos or do anything worth writing about.

Porte St Denis to Montmartre

As the sun was shining this morning, I followed a walk suggested on (of all places) the French railways website.

Starting at the Porte St Denis (a proto- Arc de Triomphe from Louis XIV's time, featuring this distinctly unmartial lion), the walk starts with some of the less swish "passages": Passage Brady, famous for Indian restaurants, the Passage de l'Industrie (where the industry seeme to be hairdressing supplies, and if ever I'm in need of a wig, I'll know where to come, as this is Syrup City). Doubling back along the rue Château d'Eau, the route passes salons that use all that equipment, with a gathering of Afro-Caribbean girls all making that Saturday do a social highlight.

On past this saucy-looking frontage on rue d'Abbeville, past Tati at Barbès-Rochechouart, and up the hill towards Montmartre.

Skirting Sacré-Coeur and the "instant heritage" demonstration vineyard of the Clos Montmartre, the route passes the Musée de Montmartre, currently featuring an exhibition on the life and work of Jean Marais. I had no idea he became an action hero later in his life, as well as a serious classical actor - and an art potter to boot.

Sun or no sun, a definite chill in the air encouraged a return to the flat for a welcome cup of tea, but climbing down towards the metro station, I stopped for an attempt at an atmospheric black and white photo that quickly turned into a "Don't Look Now" moment. Passing the funicular station, I came across an exuberant medical students' band, Les Plaies Mobiles:

Ouf! Part Deux

Barely had I got back from my jaunt to Paris in August when I received a proposal for another home exchange, from someone else in Paris, this time as far to the north-west as I was to the north-east last time.

So here I am in a sixth-floor flat in a solid 1920s block (complete with wardrobe-sized lift) at the Porte de Champerret.

It's just up the road from the most extraordinary church - Ste Odile, an Art Deco frontage in vaguely Dutch-looking brick, with Byyzantine domes and a Ghormenghast tower topped with a patriotic cockerel. If my memory's correct, the 1920s was a time of conservative re-assertion in France, not least in the position and status of the Catholic Church: and it shows.

I was up at 5am to be sure of getting the train this morning, and it's starting to catch up with me. Which is why I'm in a mood to rant about coffee culture. I've been peeved for years about people taking an age to get their cappuccinos and fancy skinny frappé latte mochaccino with a caramel shot or whatever, when all I want is a plain black coffee. This afternoon, a new bugbear: a modish takeaway deli-café which handed me a cartridge (in one of those adult-proof foil wrappings) and pointed me to a sleek machine in the corner: so sleek, so beautifully designed and engineered that there was not the slightest indication of how or where to insert the cartridge. I was on the point of suggesting somewhere to the people behind the counter when they took pity and explained how to find the magic lever and which way round to put the cartridge. In which time, of course, they could probably have served an office party's worth of cappuccinos.

Welcome back, America!

My facetious query about Obama's prospects turned out to be resoundingly inept (there might be a connection with my having spent far too many years beavering away for the party that can never quite).

This looks at one level like our 1997 election: a predictable and predicted landslide against a discredited and exhausted government, where the winning campaign was predicated on a considerable amount of caution and dampening down of expectations. At another, it's more like our 1945: a wholesale rejection of the conventional thinking of decades, even generations, with voters fully conscious of how historic a shift they were creating.

I'm in the middle of reading his early book about his search for identity. I'm not bothering with his campaign-y book, since manifestos are a recipe for disappointment, and the really interesting thing about any politician is what they will do when confronted with the unexpected and unhoped for, the kind of thing you don't want to mention in manifestoes.

So far, I'm getting a strong sense of someone having to invent himself in a way most people don't have to: something he might have in common with Tony Blair, who might not have had to, but certainly did, invent himself. I just hope Obama's obvious ability to connect isn't just Blair's ability to make himself a receptacle for people's hopes. And thank goodness he has verbs in his sentences.

Style

Champagne corks as handlebar end-stops.

Seen outside (where else?) Waitrose.

You don't get this on the tube...

My new trip to work takes me through some places I already know quite well, but also to some complete surprises.

First, I go up the only main road off the Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf and round the huge roundabout built in under the new developments. This manages to act as a gigantic wind-funnel: a headwind, naturally.

Coming up and out of the roundabout, there's a slightly hairy choice of lanes before ducking out of the main flow of traffic into Narrow Street in Limehouse.

Before the Victorians, this was a base for sailors, often of dubious reputation. Later, warehouses were built along the river; some survive, converted into expensive housing, rubbing shoulders with a converted shop or pub sporting this cherub, model workers' dwellings from a century ago (now gated off and renamed upmarket) and a pub that claims to have been the model for one in Dickens.

A sharp turn comes up to the main road by the Limehouse Tunnel; there's a wait for the roaring flood of traffic to halt a while before you can cross and turn off along Cable Street and its bumpy cycle-path.

This runs almost all the way to the Tower of London, past clumps of social history: a short terrace of two-up, two-down cottages, solid blocks of public housing from slum clearance programmes of the 1920s and 1930s (but mostly of course post-Blitz reconstruction), a Catholic church, and one of those pocket palazzos that the Victorians created for public buildings (now a rather neglected looking base for a number of small community organisations, with a convenient side wall for this mural commemorating the anti-Fascist "Battle of Cable Street" in 1936).

Then there's a longer, older terrace of Regency/ early Victorian houses for the middle class, a corner pub which is now a private residence (next to the halal butcher and a few steps from one of Hawksmoor's "coal churches") and on past slabby and brutalist 1960s concrete and system-built tower blocks. One thing I notice more and more is the waste of odd left-over spaces around these estates - a bit of pointless grass, at best, with little sign that anyone ever uses it. But here and there, some have been taken over, officially or otherwise, for little vegetable gardens, many with the kind of trellis pergola for growing squashes that I take to indicate some initiative by Bangladeshi residents.

On down the nondescript Royal Mint Street, with the apparently prettily-named Rosemary Lane restaurant the only reminder that, in the days when that was the street's name, this was one of the poorest and most destitute streets in London. Here Mayhew came across people who lived by collecting and trading in street-waste - bones, cigar-ends and "pure" (dog dung, used in tanneries).

Here the route turns into the main stream of traffic squeezing its way over Tower Bridge; once over, a lot of traffic is lining itself up to turn left at successive traffic lights, and some decisive judgement is needed to get into lane to turn right, down Tanner Street and into Leathermarket Street (do you see a theme here?). Here's another area gentrified apparently and mercifully without (so far) massive rebuilding: the Morocco Store and the Leather Exchange buildings are still in use as offices for small businesses. Crossing Bermondsey Street you see the greasy spoon is still doing business, even as the kind of sports shoe shop that wouldn't look out of place in Covent Garden has opened up (it's called "United Nude" - nope, me neither) and the pubs have spruced up: "ever popular" the estate agents call it (i.e., property prices beyond the imagining of people who knew it 40 years ago).

This is Dickens territory. A little to the East was Fagin's lair, a little to the West, the Marshalsea debtors' prison, as featured in Little Dorrit (and David Copperfield, and Dickens's own life). And here, all down the side of a building, is a quotation from "Pickwick Papers".

Over the next main road, you're into Chaucer, as the streets in the Tabard Gardens estate (another 1930s public housing development) are all named with reference to the Canterbury Tales (Pilgrimage, Pardoner, Manciple): the pilgrims would have set out from the Tabard Inn on Borough High Street nearby. With wide quiet streets shaded by full-grown plane trees, it looks closer to the planners' pictures than their 50s or 60s equivalents do today.

Crossing over Great Dover Street (the main road to Canterbury and the coast - you see why the pilgrims set out from Borough), the route comes back into Dickens's time, passing a side street of plain Victorian workshop buildings, and turns into the grand, elegant 1830s Trinity Church Square with a church (now a recording studio) at its centre:

I could imagine Dickens's not quite upper crust settled here: enclosed among their own kind, but close enough to their businesses to keep an eye on their workers. Apparently it's owned by Trinity House, which operates the nation's lighthouses: this might account for the austere and uniform external decoration.

Turning south again, and past the mosque on Dickens Square (now what would he have made of that?), avoiding a dustcart (or is it a work of art?), it's a short run down and round past the Salvation Army headquarters - how appropriate - to the Elephant and Castle:

And in the evening, I get to do it all again in reverse.

How true....

Seen on Silversprite's interesting blog.

I was also very taken by his experience of the American elections on the ground.

Life's too short

There are too many lists. You can't move for lazy TV programmes about the umpteen best/ worst/ funniest/ most irritating whatevers. And now the Guardian's producing a list of a thousand artworks to see before you die. Well, that's one supplement that goes into the bin unread. I see what I can when I feel like it(and vice versa) - and that's it.

On the other hand, I did enjoy their article on costume drama (the latest BBC offering, Little Dorrit, looks promising):

"Generally speaking though, costume drama acting is about demonstrating supreme bonnet control in devastatingly posh circumstances. This is why it is known as Dench warfare. "

Generation gap

Today I saw a young woman jogging along the main road with a black armband. How unusual, I thought, you don't often see that sort of mourning convention these days.

It was, of course, her music player.

I'm surprised I didn't wonder if she was monitoring her blood pressure.

I blame the weather.

Recently, I just haven't been to any special events or places to write about. Just catching up on the stuff that's accumulated on my TV recorder (that "series link!" facility has a lot to answer for), and the reading matter that piles up on my kitchen table. I need to clear a bit soon (because I've had another offer of a house swap to Paris in early November - the other side of the city this time), but first I've been wading through Martin Amis's "House of Meetings", which someone at our book club brought along but couldn't persuade the rest to select.

I say "wade through" advisedly. Somehow I just cannot get along with his style. The subject matter - the love and rivalry of two brothers standing as a metaphor for different responses to the experience of Stalinist repression - interests me, and the writing style is great deal less florid than in other novels of his I couldn't finish: but something in the voice of the narrator (the ruthless, shameless survivor of the two) just didn't take life. It's not that it's overwhelmed by the detail of the research - it's a short book - but I was just too conscious of the author describing, to the point that the characters seemed merely schematic.

On the other hand, I am enjoying "The Clothes On Their Backs", one of the Booker Prize finalists. For this month, the book club agreed to choose whatever we liked from the shortlist, and to be honest, it was the shortest and cheapest that I could see in the shop. As good a principle as any (I remember a bookstall in North End Road market in Fulham with the sign "Thick books £1, thin books 50p"). This is a tale of family secrets, and how refugees responded to life in Britain. I don't know yet what the secret is, though I can guess there might be a plot element in common with "House of Meetings".

Inspiration

One of my parents' more gnomic sayings was "If we had some ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some bread". I can't remember if this was a comment on privation or improvidence, but catering just for oneself at a supermarket tends to the reverse.

Inspired to try Ken's "smoked potatoes" (I prefer to call it bacon hotpot), I realised I would still have about half a pack of lardons left. What to do? Easy, fry them off and have them with some scrambled eggs for Sunday breakfast (I don't usually have a cooked breakfast, but on Sundays - especially in the winter - I might make an exception). But what to do with the rest of the half dozen?

Which is how I came to indulge myself with a proper sponge cake on Saturday afternoon (and it helped use up some marmalade that's been hanging around for far too long). And I might make an almond soufflé topping for some gooseberries that have been cluttering up the freezer. If I had some ground almonds.

They teach you more than they know, do parents.