It's not often one gets to drink a coffee with 1000 tons of ship hanging overhead, but now you can (at a price). The Cutty Sark has been reopened, and I managed to get in with the first group of visitors this morning.

The ship has been raised several metres to rest on a secure steel framework rather than its own keel (which was deforming its shape and threatening eventual collapse of the hull), and the wear and tear of decades (not to mention the damage from the fire during restoration work) has been repaired and refurbished with a degree of care and resort to traditional materials and craftsmanship that borders on the obsessive.

You enter through the lower hold, with the bones of the ship on full display, along with plenty of information about the tea trade (including a special space for the tiniest children).

Then it's up to the tween-deck, a broad open space for cargo (and for the captain to practise his cycling and roller-skating), with most of the crew squeezed into quarters in the bows. Here the focus of the displays shifts to the wool trade and to the experience of working on the ship: there's a chance to practise your skill at steering to catch the fastest wind, and to sit on a seat that rolls while you watch old film of sailing ships in the roughest of seas.

Onward and upward to the top deck, with the officers' quarters, the galley (and pens for pigs and chickens, complete with sound effects), and the masts and rigging towering above. Then you "go ashore" into a staircase and lift block, to take you down to the dry dock itself, and the most dramatic element:

coming out from an anonymous corridor to find the shining brass cladding of the hull and keel lowering above the open space (which will of course be let out for lucrative private shindigs).

Here there is a small cafe, and a striking collection of ships figureheads,

dominated by Nannie, the Cutty Sark herself, clutching the tail of Tam o' Shanter's horse. More displays on the restoration of the ship and its impact over the years of its being a tourist attraction, and then, as ever, one exits via the gift shop.

It's not cheap (and not just to get in - nearly £5 for a coffee and small cake?!), but then neither was the restoration. Worth it? It was for me: but it may be years before I go again.

One thing Barcelona does better than London

Litter bins in the metro, or rather, clear plastic bags on a simple stand - one every few yards, so that no-one has any excuse for not taking those few steps. Granted, in this case it seems to have worked only with those people who had a bag right beside the bench; but rather proves my point - it's got to be better to have that much provision than, as we do, having to call in the station cleaners to build-ups all over the place.

It's not as though Spain has any the less to worry about in terms of security, but I suspect TfL's argument (if it bothered to make it) would be that it's actually more cost-effective to do without bins and just clear up as and when. The problem with that, of course, is the wider social effect of people getting used to just leaving litter wherever they like: who's costing that? (Is that what economists mean by "externalities" - making things someone else's problem?)

Barcelona: the Magic Fountain

This apparent cathedral is the National Palace of Catalonia, set in some beautiful gardens, and now housing the national art museum (impressive Romanesque frescos, big Gothic collection, and a huge central arena that could almost double as a bull-ring, not that Catalonia approves of those now).

For most visitors, though, (and anyone who watched the Barcelona Olympics on TV), it's best known as the backdrop for the Magic Fountain, which puts on a display, to some mostly cheesy music, at weekends. It was too cold to hang around until after dark, when the coloured lights make it really spectacular, but all the same it was impressive:

Cold as it was (well, colder than I expected, especially when a sea breeze blew in and the clouds closed out the sun), it was clear that Barcelona is the kind of city where a lot of life is lived outdoors.

The early Saturday sun brought out children to sardana classes in Plaça Catalunya (sponsored by the leading department store - imagine Harrods sponsoring morris dancing classes on Trafalgar Square!), older people to sit on the Ramblas catching up with the world, and a multitasking busker:



More official entertainment for those who are out and about is offered by the public art in the streets and parks, and even on the water:



You're reminded of what the climate here can do when you see avocados and oranges growing out in the open:


But not everyone wants to offer the tourist a warm welcome:

Barcelona: Gaudi's Casa Mila

Here are some of the most striking chimneys and ventilation shafts to grace a Barcelona roofline, on Casa Mila or "La Pedrera", one of Gaudi's most famous apartment buildings (so famous that you need to get there for opening time or be swamped by the deluge of tour parties and other visitors).

They look vaguely like Dr. Who's latest adversaries - though how many of them are decorated with fragments of broken plates and champagne bottles?. The humanoid appearance is hardly surprising, since his designs are heavily influenced by organic forms: to the point that (if I understood the exhibitions inside correctly) he did not produce fully worked out plans, rather sketches and concepts, influenced by his observations and studies of trees, shells, animal skeletons and so on.

The tour stars on the roof, and then you descend to the attic where all this is explained (there's a similar though, as I recall, less exhaustive explanation of all this at his other great creation across the street, the "gingerbread house" Casa Batlló). Much is made of the "catenary arch", the inverted shape of a suspended chain: turn the image of the chain model in this picture upside down, and you have the outline of the structure for one of his churches, complete with its supports, struts and buttresses. And looking the length of the attic, with a succession of arches supporting a single beam is like being in the belly of a whale.

Once you get down to the apartment on show, it all becomes much more conventional, since the (admittedly flexible and flowing) spaces are organised and decorated much more to the tastes of the early twentieth century. What sticks in the mind is the extraordinariness of what's on the roof, as striking a contrast to today's bland office-boxes as it is to the pomposities of its predecessors.

Rooflines

Somehow it's the rooflines in Barcelona that manage to catch the eye.

It's not just Gaudi (as here, at the gatehouse of the Finca Güell) that created such a striking impression, though he is the best known and most culturally respectable.

Almost wherever I've been walking, buildings seem to have their (often top-heavy) decorative topping, whether it be turrets on the Post Office, chimneys, finials lining up to draw the eye towards Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, a Madonna doing something that looks very dangerous indeed, Christopher Columbus waving mariners towards the Customs House, a pair of daffy gateposts, or a colourful crown to mark an otherwise unremarkable street corner.

Language lessons

An interesting discovery on arriving in Barcelona: the metro's train describer display screen in Catalan reassures you that the next train will be a "PROPER TREN" (but if you should be staying out late, as people in Spain tend to do, you may find yourself relying on a Nitbus).

In that dead spot of the evening when northern Europeans are already winding down but Spaniards are barely getting ready for dinner, I was sitting in a bar, almost deserted but for me and the staff (Chinese, as it happened), and a TV displaying impressive diving skills - for a lower league football match. About half a dozen Scandinavian ladies of a certain age arrived, and started ordering (in English): but "Irish coffee" produced a blank response, as did "ice cream". I tried suggesting "café irlandes", but that was no help. "Café con whiskey" got a bit further, but the idea of putting the two together in one cup was clearly more than strange.

But what really stalled the conversation was "cream", in English or Spanish (someone once told me that a lot of Chinese people literally can't stomach dairy products, so this may not be surprising). Eventually, the barman went to look for help, and came back with an Indian man, who eventually managed to find the right word(s) in whatever common language they could find.

The others had long since settled for plain black coffee, and given up on the idea of ice-cream, when a cup was delivered with some whipped cream floating on top; but, to judge by the expression on her face, the lady in question clearly felt she needed a rather stronger slug of whiskey in it.

Des. res., Docklands, self-build

Finding accommodation in Docklands isn't easy. As the estate agents' begging letters keep telling us, there are prospective tenants and buyers just waiting to snap up anything that comes on the market.

It doesn't seem to be any different for the birds around here. There are "official" nesting rafts on the docks, moored out in the middle of Millwall Dock, where the residents are permanently on show; but there's a quiet, unofficial-looking spot between the moored barges and the dock wall, which many seem to find safer. Here the coots and a pair of swans have been nesting for some years, protected by solid wooden fenders that keep the barges away from the wall: and now a pair of crested grebes are trying to join them, collecting an assortment of junk ("I said it'll come in useful some day!").

But this is not the quiet, neighbourly sort of spot that it seemed to be. At the other end of the fender, a pair of coots seemed to have abandoned an egg, as a handful of other coots swaggered in and started squaring up to each other in the traditional East End "D'yer want some then, eh? eh?" style. One coot, perhaps trying to escape, found its way blocked by the irritated swans, as the confrontation spilled over to the grebes' end of the fender, and a shouting match ensued, just as a police siren went off.

Quite like EastEnders, really.

There's pruning..

and there's this. I suppose this ornamental cherry had got a bit large for a small town garden, reaching to roof level as it had.

But this is almost surreal.

Spring is sprung...

..and if you're wondering where dem boidies is, there are plenty round our way.

We now have at least two pairs of great crested grebes in and around Canary Wharf, and judging by the way the pair I saw this afternoon were throwing shapes at each other, there will no doubt be more before long. Strange to think they were thought to be so rare in my childhood, the combination of Victorian fashion for fancy feathers (and even whole dead birds) in ladies' hats, advancing industrialisation and draining of marshes having reduced their numbers to the brink of extinction in this country. Now they live in the suburbs like everyone else.

And the prize goes to....

..well, that's up to you if you wish to vote for the year's oddest book title.

Cooking with Poo simply turns out to be an unfortunate side-effect of a name in another language, which doesn't seem to me to be quite the point; while A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume 2: The Welsh Coast, A Taxonomy of Office Chairs, Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World and The Mushroom in Christian Art seem unsurprisingly logical and may serve some useful purpose to someone, however specialised they might seem for the general reader.

So we're left with Mr Andoh's Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge, or The Great Singapore Penis Panic, both of which suggest an interesting tale or two.

Seductive?

"All the best things about holidays", cooed the breathy voice on the telly, "begin with S: sun, sea, sand............. and Skegness". How can one resist?

I like pickled onions, I like piccalilli

Or so the old song* goes.

I have no idea why the fancy took me to try making some piccalilli, but it's one way to brighten up a return to cold grey weather. Last time (a long, long time ago) the results were a bit too salty, so a recipe without pre-brining sounded like a good idea (as well as not cluttering up the fridge). The only trouble is, it'll be a few weeks before it'll be clear whether this will be a year's supply or a mess in the dustbin.

Well, almost the only trouble: doesn't turmeric stain? And thank goodness I didn't take a photo of the sauce when the flour and spice paste clumped up.....

*

Some people never learn

On almost every visit to Amsterdam, I take a look at the Flower Market. Much of what it sells is irrelevant to the space-challenged flat-dweller, however impressive and/or beautiful, or just too exotic or weird to be practical. But quite often, the prospect of growing a large and multi-flowered hippeastrum (amaryllis) just can't be resisted: and this time was no exception. Every time I've done this in the past, I've picked out a bulb from the box labelled with what they call the picotee type (a fine red border to otherwise pure white petals) - but, whether it's careless labelling, careless packing or people picking things up and putting them back in the wrong box, probably only on two occasions did the flowers I was expecting appear.

And it's turned out the same this time: but the results are still pretty impressive, don't you think (even if my window-cleaning isn't)?

High life

Not often one gets the chance to hobnob, however vicariously, with the likes of Churchill, Callas and Garbo, but since the yacht that once belonged to Aristotle Onassis is currently at Canary Wharf and open to visitors - well, why not?

One good reason might be the admission charge (almost as much as for the Tower of London and rather more than for the royal yacht Britannia), and another, the fact that it isn't that spectacular in itself, nor is the story it tells that unfamiliar. But I donned the compulsory plastic overshoes and wandered through its main state-rooms.

For a yacht, it's big (converted at huge expense from a wartime convoy escort ship), but the interior is not screaming ostentatious bling. True, there are a couple of soppy Renoirs and some paintings by Lavery, the fussy light fittings on the walls are of Baccarat crystal, there is quite a bit of marble, some onyx and lapis lazuli fittings; and some might consider having three grand pianos on board rather, so to speak, pushing the boat out. But the overall effect is of an upmarket and very, very discreet hotel - which, more or less, is what it now is (I'm guessing much of the moveable furniture and soft furnishings have been hotel-designed accordingly).

Nor do the various photos and mementoes of the people involved in Onassis's life suggest there was much enjoyment to hand, since they focus on the fairly disastrous love-lives that were all over the gossip columns of their day (and on Churchill whiling away his long retirement and decline).

We had as much excitement on the rather ramshackle converted lifeboat that served my parents as a cabin cruiser on the Thames for a year or two. The sight and sound of celebrities clashing egos on whale-foreskin-covered bar-stools would have been as nothing compared to the tale of the Day Dad Dropped The Elsan.

4x16

Much as seemed a neat idea to borrow Ken's way of minimising the passage of time, being sixteen once was quite enough, without repeating it another three times on top. Instead, I merely note that the once unthinkable turns out to be very comfortable, thank you very much, though staying out till quarter to three isn't an option any more, and I'm not entirely sure about the horoscope I noticed on Friko's blog a while ago:
The man born under Pisces shall be a great goer, a fornicator, a mocker and covetous; he will say one thing and do another. He shall trust in his sapience, he shall have good fortune; he will be a defender of widows and orphans. He shall be fearful on water; he shall soon pass all adversities and live seventy-two years after nature.
[Kalendar of Shepheardes, 1604]

Well, that's me told.

De-skilling

It's a staple filler in the newspapers - how computers and the internet are making us less social, worse at extended thought or legible handwriting, more extreme in expressing our opinions, and so on, but here's one I hadn't anticipated.

The people I exchanged homes with in Berlin have a piano. I haven't touched one in decades, and rather doubted if I could even read music any more (not that I've room for a piano in my flat anyway); but one evening, just as an experiment, I plucked up the courage to open up the folder of simple pieces they had lying on top, and approached the keyboard with some care.

As it turned out, there was no problem in remembering the notation or translating it to the right keys: but years of light-touch computer keyboards had simply taken away any sense of the degree of impact needed to get the piano keys to produce the right sort of sound at the right microsecond. No doubt practice would be the answer (it usually is); but it was something completely unexpected.

Now, should I take up the spoons instead?

Berlin (4)

Mentioning the security checks on visiting the Reichstag reminded me I have rather a lot of old photographs of Berlin.

Below, for example, are two images taken from the rear exit to the Reichstag building, on the left from a cold November 1988, with the Wall snaking its way between the Reichstag and the East German government buildings, and on the right the same view in the summer of 1992, with no Wall and only a snaking line of tourist buses in front of the Brandenburg Gate:

And here we are in February 2012, the government and parliamentary buildings integrated, spruced up, and complemented by shiny new meeting rooms and libraries - and directly across the double line of flagstones marking where the Wall once ran, a sign forbidding access to all but officials with the right sort of ID (to be fair, nowadays you'd only be running the risk of a bureaucratic talking-to rather than a bullet):

Berlin (3)

Some random observations:

Strange to think, as I turn off the heating and take off my sweater (so aptly named), that this time last week I was shivering in my thermals and looking at the ice on the Spree and the canals around Berlin:

And isn't advertising in other countries - particularly when it tries to be humorous - sometimes rather strange? I'm used to hairdressers' windows having pictures of the hairstyles they might want you to aspire to, and I've heard of putting on the dog, but would this entice you to trust them to find your look for you?

Berlin (2)

These rather jaunty pedestrian traffic lights are among the few aspects of daily life in the former East Germany to be accepted after reunification (and it took a bit of a battle). Well, that and the cardboard-and-two-stroke Trabant car, which are now to be seen travelling in convoy as a tourist ride.

Which is by way of observing that, yes, even if there are no cars apparently in the vicinity, Berliners stop and wait for the green man before crossing the road. But this isn't necessarily a sign of undue obedience to authority. Many roads in Berlin are broad, straight avenues, and German drivers are keen on the accelerator. If you don't watch the lights in Berlin, you'll find it's even more true than in Britain that, as a learned judge once said, there are two sorts of pedestrians - the quick and the dead.