This may be old news for anyone more switched on or plugged in, but I was surprised to see a crowd gathered around the steps at the southern end of London Bridge this afternoon, watching skateboarders attempting a few manoeuvres as they jumped from the top. I've seen people trying to skateboard around the interestingly modern sloping feature at the top, but never an audience, as though it's an established event:

Commemorating Mr Brunel's Great Eastern

We're rather proud, where I live, of being on top of a piece of maritime history, namely the site where the biggest ship of its day was built. There was quite a shipbuilding industry here, though it seems hard to believe nowadays, being so close to central London; but just across the water was the old Royal Naval Dockyard at Deptford, where Pepys came to check up on the builders, fitters and ships' captains (and their wives), Peter the Great came to learn shipbuilding (and like a modern rock star, trashed his host's home and garden), and Captain Cook set sail for Australia. Our side of the river was known for more mundane sorts of ships - until the Great Eastern.

This is a model of the construction site in the National Maritime Museum - the building with the tower still exists in the middle of our estate, and is something like four storeys high:

Part of the slipway from which the ship was finally - and with much difficulty - induced to slide into the river remains on display, though those parts that remain in the river are slowly disappearing, from the action of the tides, passing washes and a wartime V1 flying bomb.

Today, the Thames Archaeology Group marked the 150th anniversary of the Great Eastern's first successful (technically, if not financially) voyage across the Atlantic by marking out on the ground the size of the ship and the position of its various important bits. It's hoped eventually to make something more permanently commemorative out of the site.


A small group of locals joined in to stand where the funnels stood, and to re-enact the turning of the paddles, under the direction of Mr IK Brunel himself, complete with his distinctive stovepipe hat.

The people in the middle of this photo show where the funnels - known by days of the week - would have been; in the distance, two groups of people to either side show the position of the turning paddle-wheels.
The cold and damp weather showed me up to be made of less solid and weatherproof stuff than the original builders. And just as I drifted away, so, sadly, did the shipbuilding business: and what killed it was Brunel's success in demonstrating here that you could make a huge ship out of cast iron. Until then, ships had been made of wood, which was easy to get into London; but cast iron and coal in quantity came from elsewhere, and it was easier and more profitable to build the ships nearer the supply of raw materials, along the sides of the Tyne, the Tees, the Mersey and the Clyde rather than Old Father Thames.

Deciding what to do on one's last day away is never quite relaxed: this day's timetable has a fixed end point that must not be missed. But while there's time, what better to do than stroll along the Promenade Plantée - a lovely place for a quiet read, joggers permitting - and then the Sunday market on the nearby Boulevard Richard Lenoir, a classic general market.

In among all the usual market noises was a constant background of amplified announcements, the reason for which became clear at place de la Bastille, for once closed to traffic. There was an organised walk setting off around Paris, and maps, snacks and water were being handed out by the sponsors.

Thousands of people were putting their best foot forward for the next 18km or so, cheered on by some very jolly Savoyard cowbell-ringers:





(PS: the bald man in the video didn't have a heart attack, he was just taking a breather)

Somehow, Saturday always seems to be shopping day, but when in Paris, it isn't stocking up at the supermarket that's compulsory, it's a gander at BHV.

The Bazar de l'Hotel de Ville is reminiscent of John Lewis, but is much bigger and, well, Parisian. It may sound a strange suggestion, but it's well worth starting in the basement DIY department. Of course, hammers and nails are just dull in any language, and others (like plumbing and electricals) too dependent on local rules and customs to be of any great interest to the passing visitor, but there are many other household items that are fascinatingly different. For example, on this trip, there was a large display of leather toolbags (or should I say, tool-satchels) in all the most fashionable citrus shades of lime and mandarin (a snip at €134, with a free can of WD40 thrown in). Somehow I think that's for the kind of DIY that requires the mysterious round tuit that too many people never seem to get. And did you know the French for a bungee-cord was "un sandow", presumably by extension (geddit?) from the old-fashioned chest-expander?

Upstairs, there is more to arouse the interest. Pictured here is a display of wash-basins. Wandering around the variety of styles in the different household and interiors departments (over 1000 different sorts of cupboard and drawer handles and knobs), it's easy to start re-imagining one's own home. Indeed, there were a couple of Australian ladies looking over the ready-made curtains and trying to remember between them the sizes of their windows at home. But looking at some of the more fanciful chandeliers, I could just hear my mother's voice snorting "It'd be a bugger to dust".

Around BHV, the crowds flock to the narrow streets of the Marais on a weekend to look at the more chi-chi, whimsical and extravagant products in what were once baker's and horse-butcher's shops.

In the middle of all this is an old building now converted to a community hall, which hosts all sorts of different events - on this weekend a fair devoted to crime novels. It isn't until you see the complete ranges of several publishing firms all together that you realise how much, and how odd it looks, that people like to have their crime stories attached to particular contexts. Here were regional and local publishers offering crime in association with cookery, or in different historical contexts, or set in every part of Paris, every region of France, indeed in what looked like every seaside resort in the country, no matter how tiny. Come for a relaxing holiday in our idyllic village (and imagine gruesome murder going on all around you)!

I'm not exempt. In my efforts to keep in touch with the language, I'd bought a detective story set in the Butte aux Cailles. As it turned out, among the authors corralled behind the displays were the two sisters who, as Claude Izner, had written it. So now I have a signed copy (so there are no excuses for not finishing it).

In my wanderings around the Marais, I was struck by some more examples of imposing doorways. I liked this contrast between the door and the informality of the chair on the balcony above:

while I simply have no idea what the architect of this office building was hoping to achieve:

"Hurry up, Glad, me arms are killing me"

"Well it was your idea to wallpaper the bloody thing"

An unexpectedly sunny and hot day (French weather forecasters are no more certain than ours) - so what else to do but get on a bike and wander?

Motor scooters seem to be much more in fashion than in previous years, silencers, sadly, rather less so, or my tolerance levels have gone down. A style note (a pity I couldn't get to my camera in time): a young man easing to the front of traffic queue on his scooter - the clothes and the beard said "earnest student revolutionary", but his scooter looked to have been styled by not so much a friend as a fanatical devotee of Dorothy, painted as it was in ruby red glitter, with the helmet to match, and a scruffy scrap of a dog to complete the ensemble. Definitely not in Kansas any more.

Eventually I arrived at the Grand Palais. The place was surrounded by police, as today was the grand opening of the Russian National Exhibition, and Vladimir Putin was in town. Crowds were gathering across the road at the Petit Palais, but it seemed most of those were waiting, somewhat impatiently, to get into the Yves St Laurent retrospective.

Through the glass doors of the Grand Palais, one could see some sort of skating show was in progress. Various flunkeys bustled in and out with the kind of self-importance only minor flunkeys display; gradually, they started to wave up cars from the long line outside. The stretch limousine with the flagpole oozed away around the back of the building. The police relaxed. To one side, a group of cops gathered round a van from which emerged trays of heated takeaway boxes. Show over.

At the side entrance of the Grand Palais, Russia had familiar neghbours and rivals: the exhibition of Chinese Taoism is in its last days, with no waiting queues, so I dropped in.

Taoism's longevity, the beauty and intricacy of the art it inspired and its influence on science and medicine all impress; but the complexity of the legends around the pursuit of immortality do confuse a little. The three pure breaths, eight immortals, five acred mountains, eight trigrams, five elements - museum fatigue begins to set in.

But I was quite taken by the Queen Mother of the West, keeper of the Peaches of Immortality: "dishevelled, with the tail of a leopard and the teeth of a tiger, she excelled at whistling."

I'm on another weekend home exchange in Paris. This time, my usual exchange partner is bringing a friend to London, and I've been offered the friend's flat.

It's in the 13th arrondissement, in south-eastern Paris. It's an ordinary residential district, and the immediate surroundings include the full complement of "proper shops" - bakers, patissiers, florists, as well as a wet fish shop (try finding one of those in London) and a surprising number of hairdressers. All the sort of thing that makes Paris so very much itself.

This particular area is also known for the Butte aux Cailles. Up the slope, you come to a sort of mini-Montmartre. Apparently (according to the helpful history notices the City authorities post around the place), this was the place where the first hot air balloon crash took place, hitting a windmill in the 1780s. Later, industrialisation saw the area sink into poverty, as it became known for ragmen and metal-bashing.

Nowadays, it still has little streets of two-storey cottages, some with gardens drenched in flowers.

As in so many other places, colonisation by the arty crowd has been followed by gentrification. Of an early evening, as rather older and more well-heeled folk peruse the menus outside distinctly upmarket restaurants, the earnest and scruffy-looking spill out of tiny bars down the side-streets.

But the influence of the artists remains much in evidence. This - I suppose one has to call it an installation - hangs over the middle of the road.

Elsewhere, Jeff Aerosol and Miss Tic compete to be the local version of Banksy:

Cheapskates

I am a guinea pig

I'm not allowed to give blood (some teenage jaundice), and I doubt there'll be many takers for my clapped out old organs by the time this cadaver is ready for disposal, so the invitation to contribute medical research data to the UK Biobank came as a rare chance to demonstrate a little altruism.

In one of those depressingly anonymous office blocks in Croydon, I joined a fair number of other people passing through a (very efficient) conveyor belt of assessments and tests.

Signing away all rights to my urine (the commercial possibilities of which escape me for the moment) and blood samples (no more than three teaspoons, they assure you, which neatly stops anyone making jokes about "very nearly an armful"), racking my brains trying to remember, amongst other distant history, just how many childhood episodes of sunburn I suffered (a lot, I think, but is that just the memory of the stories we tell ourselves?) and happily punching the screen through the computerised hearing and mental recall puzzles, I passed along the chain of technicians and their various physical assessments.

There were the familiar weight, lung volume (the lady in the next cubicle was having an operatic time of that), exercise and bodily fluid tests (blood comes next to last, no doubt in case of fainting fits, and the - ahem - other samples discreetly round the corner).

I see medical people so rarely, there is always some amazing new equipment, and for an operation like this, even more so: scary machines to photo my retinas, pocket-sized computers linked to a plastic clothes-peg on my thumb that between them graph out my blood circulation. And the output from everything is automatically stored on a simple pen-drive to carry on to the next technician.

After a last bout of confessing shaming truths to the computer about diet and physical activity (How many minutes a day do I actually walk anywhere, and does shuffling to and from the kettle count? What exactly was in that sandwich I ate yesterday?), I collected the only visible token of my contribution to science, a printout of the immediately available vital signs (no, not even tea and biscuits). Hardly surprising to be told I can afford to lose a bit of weight and need to watch my blood pressure, but reassuring that my heart and lungs are sound. I'll probably be bulking out their averages column for a few more years yet.

Rearrangement

The prospect of yet another grey and gloomy Bank Holiday (pray, whom do we sue?) seemed the perfect incentive to have a look at the Museum of London's remodelled Galleries of Modern London.

It must be some years now that its displays on twentieth century London have been mostly packed away. The last few times I've been, it looked as though it had little or nothing to say about it, let alone about the twenty-first century. No doubt there has been a lot of curatorial debate about how to squeeze an ever-expanding story into the space (to judge by the credits listed in various places, there must have been quite a fundraising effort too). It felt even more squeezed with the crush of people attracted by the publicity for the re-opening (including, I noticed, our former, and wouldbe once again, Mayor).

The upper floor retains the chronological flow from prehistoric times to the Great Fire. Here there's a much quicker canter than there used to be through the Saxon, mediaeval and Tudor periods, and what was once a whole caseful of the Cheapside Hoard is now shrunken to a single necklace, pending a complete exhibition in 2012. The old favourite model panorama of the Great Fire is still there, but has been amplified by a film projected behind it, with other contemporary accounts added to the Pepys version.

The new galleries are downstairs, where "modern London" begins with the rebuilding of the 1670s onwards. Chronology is downplayed, the story being split into main thematic segments (Expanding City, People's City, World City) that take a broad period of time each. Major structural features (the Victorian street of salvaged shopfronts and interiors, the Selfridges lift, the 18th century prison cell) remain where they were, but within each main segment, there are themed sections (for example, Empire, War, Struggle) displayed through a kaleidoscope of vignettes, rather than an extended narrative.

Every inch of space is used, with old newspapers, posters and playbills all over the walls; detailed timelines are relegated to translucent window blinds showing significant events and personalities.

The need to make room for new material means that a lot of older material is skated over or barely mentioned. The suffragettes seem to get far more coverage than the labour struggles of the nineteenth century, the General Strike and the First World War seem barely to have happened, and a great deal seems to have been designed to give teachers something to work with, rather than to explain itself in context. There is an alcove papered all over with the Booth poverty map, and a Googlemaps-style interface to let you examine different parts of London in more detail. But the basic description of what it is, and what is was for, is on a very modest wall plaque that, on a busy day, was easily overlooked, leaving a visiting French couple completely baffled.

But even without much traditional explication, there is an exhausting amount of content to inspect - not just to gawp at in cases or on the walls, but to explore interactively.


Explanatory text and lots of labelled examples of individual items are often replaced by film - as in this case showing a model of the Skylon at the Festival of Britain in 1951, or the recreation of the 18th century pleasure garden, where some of the fantastical costumes of the period are framed with video of fops out on the pull, and nearly coming to blows with their white-painted ladies crying out the Georgian equivalent of "Leave 'im, 'e ain't worth it!". The frontage of a 1920s Lyons teashop has a lifesize video of a smiling nippy delivering the same scone over and over again, while outside the café tables give puzzled children the chance to learn the mysteries of the rotating dial on old telephones. A 1930s-costumed attendant by the Selfridges lift explains what's in the store and what it's like to work there.

Elsewhere, there are touch-screens to allow adults to persuade themselves they're not playing, but exploring information in more detail, while below the 1920s taxi, there's a very conceptual model of an underground railway at toddler height.

That, by the way, seems to be as much as is said about transport, nor is there much about housing, or the usual demonstrations of how the city has grown and what that meant for public services and government.

But there needed to be space made for all that's been happening in the last few decades. How odd to think that one's own lifetime is now museum material: clothes, posters and pamphlets from the 60s, 70s and 80s, early desk-top computers, the posters and leaflets of the "Less Passion from Less Protein" campaigner, the passionate debates about race, identity and diversity.

At last one catches sight of the café, and passing through some samples of London-inspired art and a special section for the star attraction (the Lord Mayor's coach, now surrounded by some - but somewhat limited - information on the City of London rather than, as I remember it, marooned in a corner) you come to a section on Londoners, with projected videos of a succession of people talking about their lives, and finally an interactive section asking for opinions on future London issues like housing, transport and so on. In the café, you're surrounded by a scrolling display of random statistics to inspire some "well, fancy that" responses while you recover, over a cup of tea:

The world's most expensive karaoke night

Well, that's over with for another year.

Despite the attempts to add a little local folk touch to their songs, this year more than ever, the finalists all seemed to come from the mysterious world of Popland. Forget Molvania - this is the land that time didn't exactly forget, it merely distorted, in a way one could only explain in one of those warp-speed pseudo-scientific gabbles with which Dr Who gets over an impossibility in the plot.

This is a land where the most banal of sentiments requires firework displays, wind machines and striding about self-importantly. If, that is, one can actually make sense of the sentiment. Almost all the songs are now sung in something that sounds like a Babelfish translation into English; the phrases make a sort of sense, but somehow don't belong together. To add to the phenomenon of Chinglish, you could call it Ponglish.

But never mind, the spectacle has taken over. Leather catsuits, double-keyboard perspex pianos (eat your heart out, Udo Jürgens) and the usual complement of fey young men and fine big women (I could have sworn that Armenia's backing singers included Montserrat Caballé's stunt double) to add to the succession of identikit magazine cover models in interchangeable floaty dresses.

And the BBC's instant subtitling had its moments. According to them, the commentator described the Icelandic entry as "a big blubing anthem", and its singer (a classic Fine Big Woman, in a volcanic explosion of maroon chiffon) as dressed "to go to a welding".

The UK entry, competently about twenty years behind the times, left us once again in Millwall mode (for non-British readers, that's a football team whose supporters regularly chant "No-one likes us, we don't care").

The result was less incomprehensible than in some years - the winner's already been a big hit across the continent, it seems:

Sunday in the Park

Last Sunday's blazing sun and somewhat discombobulating heat meant only one thing for most people - get out into the open air.

Along the Regent's Canal, narrowboats were working the locks; with the new student residences has come a faint echo of Oxbridge, as the industrial surroundings now frame the sight of nervous people getting used to a punt:






To add to the gentrifying atmosphere, there were people clearing litter from the bushes along the canal; but they would have trouble shifting this evidence of a not uncommon use for London's canals.

Everywhere, patches of greenery were attracting people to sit and enjoy the long-delayed warmth.


Regent's Canal also borders Victoria Park, a masterpiece of nineteenth-century concern for the overcrowded and unhealthy poor.

Divided into two by a main road, the Park has a western end with the full complement of elegant iron benches and lamp-standards, and the obligatory lake and fountain:

Here the lawns, trees and flowerbeds were almost swamped with people. Picnicking, lazing, reading, setting up volleyball nets and dozens of barbecues, seemingly half of East London was out for a good time in the sun:





If most of the people had squeezed themselves into the western section, the east seemed less crowded (though no less noisy as most of it's given over to playing fields, and half a dozen matches were in progress).

But there was space to move, and to admire a now rather dilapidated memorial to Victorian philanthropy and a couple of recycled shelters from the eighteenth-century version of London Bridge:

On this side, the Park stretches along the Hertford Union canal to almost within touching distance of the Olympic Park. Come 2012, visitors to the Olympics will have a huge bike park here, and a walk along the Greenway into Olympic Park. The two together will make an eastern "green lung" to match the Royal Parks in the west: something the founders couldn't have dreamed of, but would surely have won their approval.

It's that time of year again

Yes, the Eurovision Song Contest is almost upon us. But it appears the Russians decided not to send us their Spice Girls tribute band:

I'm not, by nature, particularly demonstrative. In all my time as a student in the 1960s, the only time I took part in a demonstration was an accident (I was waiting to cross the road and realised the blockage was due to a protest march about the visit of a particularly execrable politician; so I joined it). And it's taken me half a week to write up the fact that I actually joined a demonstration last Saturday (having been busy redecorating, but there's nothing interesting about the trials and tribulations of that - such as why it is that one doesn't discover the bit one's missed until after everything's put away and cleared up).

Organised by a coalition of various worthy organisations concerned with electoral and constitutional reform, Take Back Parliament has been organising a petition for a change to the voting system - the major reason why I was for quite a time an activist for the Liberal Democrats (and the Alliance before it). When I stumbled across their first demonstration last week, it seemed like yet another lost cause, given that the Conservatives were in the driving seat after the election. But in the coalition negotiations, they were induced to at least offer a referendum on a change to the Alternative Vote (a preferential voting system, but not a proportional one), so it's a live issue once again.

The problem is that our First Past the Post voting system is really designed for a two party system, when the voters no longer want one. Since the 1970s, voters have been drifting away from the two main parties, not only to other parties, but even more to not voting at all. As a result, we've now had three elections in a row in which the two main parties together got less than half the electorate out to vote for them, and the "winning" party had fewer people voting for it than didn't vote at all. This time, over a third didn't vote, less than a quarter voted Conservative, less than a fifth voted Labour and just more than a fifth voted for some other party. A tiny proportion of MPs won more than half the votes of those who did vote in their constituencies: but far too many constituencies are still considered "safe" for one party or another. The system, basically, is broken.

And this is the best chance for decades to change it: hence the excitement.

It wasn't the most revolutionary of atmospheres. There were people from Class War around the fringes, but their efforts seemed to be confined to politely asking if one would like a poster calling the new Prime Minister rude names (probably nothing he hasn't heard plenty of times before and may well hear again from his own back-benchers). Some people seemed to be there to protest that the new coalition wasn't what they'd voted for (forgetting that any reform is likely to make it impossible for anyone to get exactly what they'd voted for - nor should we if we continue to divide much as we have done). Only one speaker seemed to focus on the need for the system to be fair to voters' wishes rather than on the outcome for parties. The speeches from various luminaries were interspersed with slogan-chanting, but alongside the obvious "Fair Votes Now" and "No More Wasted Votes", proceedings were lightened by the surprising precision with which "What do we want?" was answered by "Electoral reform!" and "When do we want it?" by "Subject to referendum!"

The gathering was colourful and loud enough to attract plenty of attention from both locals and tourists on passing buses.

The main business of the day was to make a mark on Parliament and then present the petition at Downing Street, so after all the speeches, the crowd moved on.

No chaining ourselves to the railings (yet?), but there was the less inconvenient tying on of ribbons and banners (which no doubt disappeared by the time the MPs actually turned up on Monday)


And eventually the meeting reconvened opposite Downing St (clearly we were on the late shift, as there was a collection of pro-Palestinian banners gathered up on one side), with some more sloganeering as the petition was delivered, with plenty of passing tourist cameras clicking:
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Highways and byways

Even traffic jams have their advantages. Finding my usual route off Tower Bridge blocked, I had to explore some different Bermondsey backstreets.

First, Druid Street became Crucifix Lane, a fairly standard row of Victorian terraced shops

You might think the transition from one name to another justified ponderous musings about historical symbolism, but it seems these are Victorian whimsies - the "crucifix" apparently referring to an old pub sign.

However, layers of history are revealed, if you look.

In the typically grimy and gloomy railway arches in Druid Street, some 50-odd people taking shelter during the Blitz were killed by a direct hit.

Round the corner, in Bermondsey Street, an archway opening into the remains of a cobbled lane suggest the hugger-mugger of a Dickens novel, but the lane points to one of the many postwar public housing estates of the area.

Further on, the romantically named Snowsfields, and Ship and Meadow Row, show different ways, from mid- and late Victorian times, of dealing with the difficulties of life in what was then, and until relatively recently, an area of some poverty.



Nowadays, this is the kind of "bourgeois bohemian" area that boasts the Zandra Rhodes Fashion Museum, where young adults zoom to work in some media-related office on shiny children's scooters without a trace of self-consciousness, and even the security grilles have the arty designer's touch: