Interior omphalomancy

Or... navel-gazing from the inside. Which is by way of explaining the fetching photos of my innards I was given yesterday afternoon, my doctor having decided that thorough investigation of my recent indigestion required an endoscopy.

Not an experience anyone would want to repeat (unless they're really peculiar), but not as bad it might have been - I was in and out within the hour. And the upshot appears to be that there's nothing that requires treatment beyond carrying on with the pills (or, in the words they've managed to avoid saying, just something one has to expect with increasing years).

I did think it might be a good omen that, when I arrived, the TV in the waiting room was showing Brief Encounter.

Less so, perhaps, the way someone in the waiting room tried to explain to a nurse that his daughter's sleepiness might not just be down to her sedative:

"She's got slight necrophilia".

Edinburgh again

Between us, we'd been to Edinburgh often enough and over so long a period that we've almost forgotten our last visits to the most obvious tourist sights: so no apologies for joining the throng to catch up on our Scottish history at Holyrood Palace and Abbey, and the Castle, once again.

Dundee

Dundee doesn't exactly spring to mind as a tourist destination, but the lure of family history drew my sister-in-law to investigate life in the jute industry, so there we went: and the trip turned out to be well worth while.

First to the Verdant Works, whose name belies the noise and unhealthy working conditions of Victorian jute processing, but whose contents outlined both the industrial processes and their social context and consequences.

One such was a sort of female emancipation (despite the demanding disciplines of the work), since it was women workers who, commanding less pay than adult men, predominated in the factories, and often the men who stayed at home and became "kettle-biler" househusbands.

Another was the immense wealth of the "jute barons", fed back into examples of civic pride and improvement, amongst them the other surprise of this trip, the McManus Gallery. Here local history (back even to the prehistory of the Picts), improving tributes to the local great and good such as the missionary Mary Slessor, combine with art collections, not on a big scale, but with enough variety and welcome to draw in the visitor and stimulate the mind.

How many other such institutions start with a gallery asking the visitor to consider, with various examples of the things they work with, "What is a museum?".

Passing on, by a statue commemorating yet another product for which Dundee is famous, we came down to the waterfront, where Captain Scott's Discovery is open to visit (we didn't), guarded by these unusual-looking bollards.

From here one can see the long expanse of the railway bridge, not perhaps as beautiful as the first such bridge here, but more longlasting as it straddles the Tay (which is still silvery):

A weekend in Edinburgh

For a Londoner born and bred, it would be a bit hypocritical to make a great deal of my Scottish ancestors. I have been to Edinburgh plenty of times to find out more about them (and for what it's worth, as is no doubt statistically probable with most people, there is much more geographical and ethnic diversity the further back you go, of which more later); so while my sister-in-law looked up her family history this weekend, my brother and I went along just to visit.

After I arrived there was time for a lung-stretching stroll up, round and down a bleakly wet Calton Hill for its perspective over Edinburgh city centre before meeting their train, and an evening stroll to catch a view of the Castle by night:


Friday saw us checking out the Surgeons' Hall museum: not just body parts in bottles, but an overview of the development of surgical techniques, with a detour to explore the origins of Sherlock Holmes, and a chance to test your skills at manipulating remotely-controlled instruments. Fortunately I already known I can never get the teddy bear in those things on seaside piers, so there'd be no chance of my killing someone trying to do a similar job in surgery. Then we stretched our leg muscles down the Royal Mile and up again, calling in at the Parliament for coffee (the Debating Chamber wasn't in use, so visitors could walk in, admire its light and functional interior - and note that, if debates become too heated, the Presiding Officer has a fire extinguisher within easy reach), peering down narrow closes (and discovering the charming Dunbars Close Garden), stopping off to visit St Giles's Cathedral, the Writers' Museum and a very windswept Castle Esplanade. A chance glance at the posters outside the Canongate church revealed a concert that night by the Kammerchor Chemnitz and an Edinburgh University choir, which turned out to be an unexpected treat.

Not so recent history

A week gone since the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable St, and more than that since Wilton's Music Hall had a weekend of commemorative events to mark the anniversary. [I've had a cold and the dog ate my blogging kit - well, that's my excuse].

Nowadays, Cable St is a quiet side-street, almost entirely lined with housing estates and best-known as one of the few cycle lanes that approaches continental standards: hardly a battleground. But in October 1936, a planned Fascist march into the heart of the East End was halted by crowds of residents, backed up by barricaded streets. In those days, it was still legal to dress up in military-style uniforms for a deliberate act of coat-trailing through an area with a strong Jewish and trade union population. So, even though the BUF was known to chant anti-Semitic slogans, and even gloried in violence against their opponents, the march had not been banned, despite requests from the local councils, and the police were deployed to try to clear the street. Hence the battle. The residents kept this up until late afternoon, at which point the Police Commissioner advised Oswald Mosley, the Fascist leader, to give up the attempt: so off they went to march along the Embankment while there was still some daylight. So much for Mosley's attempt to be a Man of Destiny, and the Great Leader like his continental models; if he'd ever represented anything significant, he didn't now.

There's a permanent commemoration in the mural on the side of St George's Town Hall, a little further down Cable St, which is reproduced on the poster above for the weekend's events. Wilton's air of slightly melancholic delapidation seemed to suit its nostalgic elements, with its exhibition on the British and Irish contribution to the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (in its opening stages in the autumn of 1936), reproduction posters from Spain to accompany the 19th century Indian dancers on its crumbling walls, historical documentary rehashing the old debates between the local and national left-wing parties about how to deal with the Fascists, talks on the literature and performances of the music of the period. Outside in the sudden late hot spell, the alleyway hosted a few stalls for various leftwing and community causes, with the compulsory jazz band. I'm assuming the man with the tray of "Fairly Fresh Fish" (that suddenly sprang into mechanical life when approached by the unwary) was there to entertain.

There were talks, films and exhibitions on present-day Cable St, and its challenges too, not least the latest incarnation of the resentments that fed the BUF. Are such bullies deterred, or encouraged in their pre-emptive sense of grievance and martyrdom that they direct against "the other", by being banned, or by being confronted and chased away?

Belgium invades!

Being a bit slow on the uptake this week (that hot weather managed to bring a cold with it, can you imagine), it's taken me until now to react to the startling news that Belgians have taken over British territory, albeit temporarily.

I can't think why (though I suppose the absence of a government in Belgium let them think they didn't need permission) It isn't as though there's a brewery or a chippy there. It's not called Rockall for nothing.

Politely apocalyptic

They get a different class of slogan scrawler at Watney Market:

Too hot to do much more today than stroll round to the farm for a coffee

The squirrels are used enough to people to scout around any visitor hopefully:

though not as much as this cheeky chappy in Haggerston Park last weekend:

Moving Planet

This is a picture of one of many eye-catching stunts dreamed up around the world last Saturday for Moving Planet. Rehearsals for the "bike" were well under way by the time I got away from my Saturday chores to make my way up to Haggerston Park, but eventually we latecomers made up the numbers, lining up along the banner.

That left me time to wander around taking photos of all the action (and, as is the way of such events, inaction, since the organisers had been efficient enough to get all their photos taken before the press arrived, and everyone had to wait a while before doing it all again).

The end result may not have been as spectacular as Melbourne's; and one has to admit that, actually, bikes do need a bit of oil to keep moving (not to mention the fossil fuels involved in manufacturing them and getting them to market, since so many like mine were made in Asia); but people got to make a bit of noise and a point, of sorts. The odd thing is, there don't seem to be any aerial videos of the "wheels" going round, so you'll have to imagine it from mine.

Oh, and I got a puncture on the way home. Heigh ho.

Serendipity

Or, things that happen by chance. One sunny day last week invited a bike ride, so off I set to the Victoria and Albert Museum (of which more later), through the parks wherever possible - a route that I had quite forgotten goes past the Serpentine Gallery and its pavilion, which had still been building last time I was that way.

A forbidding and closed-looking exterior takes you into a dark and even more depressing corridor, from which there is access to a cloistered garden that might have been there for a thousand, or even two thousand, years (such is its mediaeval, or even Roman, feel), instead of barely few months. This is "Hortus conclusus" by Peter Zumthor. Nothing remarkable about the plants or layout, perhaps, but all the more peaceful a sanctuary for the dramatic contrast of the fact of its enclosure - and of the fact that, like all the previous pavilions, it's purely temporary:



Back to modernity and industry for the visit to the V&A, which was prompted by a news piece about a competition to find a new standard design of electricity pylon. The shortlisted proposals were rather tucked away on a landing upstairs. You might, by the way, think that anything would be better than the great Stalinist robots that currently march across the countryside, but the glumness of the people watching a computer simulation of those that didn't make the shortlist tells you they could be much, much worse. No doubt there are all sorts of technical and cost considerations that outweigh the aesthetic, but I thought the "Y pylon" was a clear winner, for sheer simplicity. You can make your own mind up.


Serendipity might as well be the V&A's alternative title. It was the place to come for surprises on a wet day in the school holidays: you might think you wanted to look at one thing, but it's so easy to take a wrong turning and find yourself moving from stained glass to metalwork to Buddhist sculpture to musical instruments. This time, the pylon competition turned out to be a minor part of the Museum's contribution to London Design Week. On the ground floor is "Power of Making", all about new developments in craft and skill as new technologies and markets develop. Here there were bicycles in mahogany, or nylon, or covered in Swarovski crystals, a surfboard based a cardboard frame, a Polish lace manufacturer's sideline (to its usual Church vestments) in skimpy undies (presumably for a different market), various sorts of wacky furniture and a thought-provoking demonstration of 3D printers. These can create any computer-based design in plastic: as they get cheaper and more sophisticated, how soon will it be before you can have customised designs of whatever you can imagine run up in a local high street printshop?.

After all that, what better than a relaxing new way to contemplate the Raphael Cartoons, courtesy of this installation for Design Week:

Another of life's little embarrassments

What is the world coming to, when you remember the name of your neighbour's dog but not of the neighbour?

What a gent

Mildly narked by the presentational changes to Radio 3 this week, I emailed their Breakfast programme to suggest that reminding us of the news headlines barely fifteen minutes after the half-hourly bulletin was a bit too like the doom-and-gloom of a Radio 4 morning for a predominantly music and arts channel. Within minutes (even before their auto-reply), Petroc Trelawny himself emailed, promising to make sure the producers considered it.

Now, how do we get them to drop the "classical charts" stuff?

Reverse psychology - or trying to have it both ways?

The window of the Water Poet pub in Shoredith.

Detective work

Mumblety years ago, on a brief trip to Munich, I heard in the distance some buskers playing a tune that took me in a Proustian rush back to my childhood: my mother sang it going about the house, as I recalled, and I hadn't heard it since. I had no idea what it was, though it was clearly Irish in origin. The buskers had gone by the time I got near them. There was no internet to track it down: nor were there any words I knew to look up anywhere.

Rather more recently, it suddenly appeared again in an old film from the 1950s on the TV one rainy afternoon, but it was only a fragment, gone too quickly to note down any words. But when I signed up to a DVD library, that was one of the titles that went on the reservation list.

And today the DVD turned up; a few words noted, the internet searched, and bingo: "The Gentle Maiden", a traditional tune to which sentimental words were added in Edwardian times, and an even more soupily sentimental recording made by John McCormack. That's probably where my mother got it from, and no doubt it's well known to those who knew it all along. Since McCormack's style doesn't appeal to everyone these days (and certainly not to me), here's a purely instrumental version:

Doppelgänger

I could have sworn I saw Angela Merkel on the bus the other day.

But then, there was a time when a regular commuter on my bus looked just like one of the prominent leaders of the Lithuanian independence movement (who had seemed to be very visible on the late-night TV news discussions during the great changes of 1989).

It's strange which faces one's memory chooses to carry about and which to forget (well, that's my excuse); it struck me not so long ago (somewhat later than quite a few other people, it would seem) that no-one's likely to have seen Vladimir Putin and Nasser Hussain* in the same room:

*For non-fans: commentator and former England cricket captain. Cricket fans can make up their own jokes about shadowy oligarchs.

If only it were that simple....

What does your Web look like?

I know it's an advertising stunt for the new release of Firefox, but ingenious. Though I have to say I don't really recognise "mine": it looks much more tidy than I'd ever thought myself. And what's with the pincushion and knitting needles?

Useful reminder

Spotted on the deck at the Grapes - just in case anyone might be thinking of diving in for a refreshing swim at high tide one evening:

Floral bicycles and rainbows

It wouldn't naturally occur to me to decorate a bike. Mine's plain (and rather scuffed now) black, with some fairly prominent police markings for security*. So Sunday's Floral Bicycle Parade at the South Bank seemed an interesting photo-opportunity, if not necessarily something to participate in (it looked like rain anyway).
*(A thought: does having your postcode on your bike advertise to burglars that you're not at home? But I suppose it also suggests a skinflint unlikely to have much at home worth nicking anyway).

The space underneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall had attracted a fair number of people to pick up flowers, leaves, balloons and other bits and pieces to prettify all kinds of bikes (a tandem, a Borisbike, even an acrobatic loon on two unicycles), to whatever level of extravagance or restraint people chose.

It has to be said that not everyone there seemed that enthralled: but in the end the final Parade made a reasonable show.

The most striking visual effect of the day came from the weather. The on-off showers gave rise to one of the most vivid rainbows I've ever seen and some dramatic sunset skyscapes:

Carrying on with the "seen through windows" theme, here's a snatched shot of the Olympic Park from a DLR train. You'll see that the observation tower thing is well on its way to completion.

The official name is the ArcelorMittal Orbit. I can't imagine what, if anything, it will actually come to be known as (anything with an orbit like that in space would surely be on the way to a very bumpy re-entry). The Curly-Wurly? The Boriskelter? Sadly, it will only be possible to walk down, rather than slide on a mat: someone missed a trick there (though, come to think of it, the exit velocity from 115m up might be just a little too exhilarating).