Walking Through Hampstead Woods and Heath (Part 1)

Daffodils in Highgate Woods

Nothing says Spring like blue skies, warm weather and daffodils

Taking (Personal) Stock After The Lockdowns - Part Two

What did I do before the Great Void that is still worth doing?

I was whinging about the cost and content of movies, and the cost and quality of eating out, before 2020. My ability to leave almost all of it on the gym floor and still make the commute home was waning. Millennials have been ruining the workplace, and everywhere else, with their virtue-signalling and bullying since about 2010. Corporate hypocrisy has always been strong, but for an employer to claim it cares about my `well-being' while moving all the desks closer together and turning the aircon down...? And TV programmes, even the police shows, featuring strong independent women being irritated by dumb, insensitive men? Puh. Lease.

Movies. okay, a new one now and again when I like the idea. Most of my movie watching will be at home. Let's try finding some of those 70's movies I liked and seeing them again. MUBI has a reasonable good selection of art movies. What I miss: going out to the cinema.

Restaurants. Apparently lots of chefs have lost their sense of taste because of the Virus. Sit-down meals are pretty much out at these prices.

Sadlers Wells. Just booked some shows in the 2022 Flamenco season this June.

Gym. Replaced by light exercises at home. As befits my years.

Museums and Galleries. Now that they are abandoning advance booking, and have dropped masks, this is back on. Let's have a project to go round all the ones I never had time to get to.

Foreign trips. Entirely dependent on other countries and airlines getting the message.

Hanging out in cafes. Sure. Not writing though. Don't like shlepping a shoulder bag everywhere now.

What do I do instead?

Snacks in bijou cafes.

Walks and trips to places in London I haven't been to for years.

More housekeeping and gardening. (Care for your house, care for yourself.)

For the moment that will do.

Taking (Personal) Stock After The Lockdowns - Part One

Sunday will be the second anniversary of the UK Lockdown.

Just to be clear: f**k everyone who imposed, administered or enabled lockdowns. A special Circle of Hell is being dug for them now.

It's supposed to be over now. I will believe that when we get through Winter 22/23 without any backsliding "Plan B's".

Anyway, let's take stock (*).

I've been trying to work out if I'm suffering from any kind of Post-Lockdown-Stress-Disorder. After all, I keep reading that I should be. Everyone else is, if they are a journalist.

I wasn't scared of The Virus. I had a laptop job and I live on my own, so I wasn't ever going to get close enough to anyone to get it.

I was concerned about a bogus stay-at-home order from some bored track-and-tracer having a lark.

So I took sensible precautions: no Track and Trace app, no signing in anywhere, no PCR tests, get the jabs to avoid pariah status, stay away from travel, and have nothing to do with people in the NHS (hospital workers are a primary vector of contagion, because hospitals are where all the sick people go).

I walked every day. Still do.

I did not put on a `lockdown stone'. Nor did I binge-watch anything. Well, unless you count You Tube. I did not have problems sleeping. I did save a bunch of money.

Basically, my strategy, after the first six or so weeks I spent in mild shock, was: wake me up when this b**ls**t is over. It seemed to have served me well.

Eventually I got into ordering stuff online and that is not going to change. I still shop for food, and I shopped for headphones, and I prefer to buy books and CDs from actual shops. Not going back into department stores unless it is utterly unavoidable.

What did I miss?

I used to go to Sadlers Wells, to a good gym in the West End, to the London art museums and galleries, to restaurants, and the Curzons and Everymans, to the big London bookshops. I used to walk in the parks, travel on the buses. Sit on the platform at Barons Court on a warm summer evening waiting for a District Line train. I used to sit in cafes reading or writing for half-an-hour, watching the people go by, feeling the atmosphere. And I'd take a foreign trip now and again. There were some light social interactions with various people, usually behind counters.(**)

Not much, but it was enough.

But I didn't miss it, because you can only miss something that is happening without you. The Lockdown cancelled everything like a hyperactive Millennial on Twitter. Nothing was happening, so there was nothing to miss.(***) The Lockdown was a two-year void.

What did I do before the Great Void that is still worth doing?

What do I drop?

What do I do instead?

It occurred to me after a while that I would have been asking those questions last year in a no-Virus alternative universe, because those questions aren't about the Virus, but about retirement. Under the circumstances, the two have been a little muddled for a while.

(*) This is about my life. If you lost a loved one, or a job, or a business, or your children were badly affected, or you got divorced, or your health was compromised, my condolences.

(**) For complicated but tedious reasons, office socialising was de minimus.

(***) This only makes sense if you live One Day At A Time. Normies can miss things that used to happen, but don't now. But that's Normies for you: they don't make sense.

Things You Never Thought About 743: Carriage Ramps

Carriage ramps. The thing that station staff occasionally put put onto a train so someone in a wheelchair can get off or on. It's probably a generic thing, right? Mark One carriage ramp, for use on all occasions.

Nope.

Carriage ramps are special. You can't use a class 458 ramp on class 707 stock. Not and keep your job anyway. Station staff have to know what class of stock is pulling in so they can get the right ramp. And heaven help them if the first four cars are different from the last four, and the ramp is for the last four. I just somehow doubt that level of train formation information gets sent anywhere.

(You may have to enlarge to see the details.)

Sir John Soane's Museum

This is one of those places I have been meaning to get to for years and years. Just because... it's a terraced townhouse on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, which is behind Holborn. Wikipedia has all the details you might want. Soane was a Victorian architect and collector of (mostly) sculpture, though the museum has a couple of the Hogarths you always see in books. It's small in the way that Victorian houses are now: people were smaller back then. It's also too dark, though I get they have to do that to stop the light bleaching everything out.

But mostly it is stuffed to the gills with bits of sculpture. These photographs only begin to give you an idea of how many bits of stuff there are.

It's worth one visit. If you like bits of rock, you may be entranced, but I'm a paintings man. What I didn't get was a picture of the books, which are behind glass doors and can't be opened by the public. None of them are currently available on Amazon, and while I could live without the Blue Books for some decade in the nineteenth century, some of the art, architecture and travel books should surely be scanned for posterity.

(You can tell I'm still getting used to taking photographs. I promise to do better as the year goes on.)

Compulsory Queueing Buses Photograph, Richmond Bridge

 

Where three or more buses are in a queue, especially when being held up by road works on historic bridges into fancy London suburbs(*), it is compulsory (Street Photography Act (1978) as amended) to take a photograph of said buses. Failure to do so may result in the revocation of one's Street Photographer's status.

(*) Actually, Richmond is south of the river, and therefore cannot be fancy or posh. But for some reason everyone seems to forget this fact. 

A Little Bit of Toast

Okay. Here's the first Art Photo. It looks better if you turn the brightness up.

And here's a video of the single.

Yes, there is a song about toast. It was released in 1978 and played off the fact that toast had been a Cult Thing amongst a certain class of schoolboy / undergraduate for a few years. Even Stephen Fry mentioned it in, from memory, his novel The Liar when one character is suffering from overdosing on toast. It's really one of those things that is incomprehensible outside England and maybe to anyone born after about 1965.