Around Fitzrovia Goodge St

Fitzrovia is the area north of Soho and south of the Euston Road, though the bit between Oxford Street and Goodge Street around Charlotte Street  is a kind of "North Soho". Fashion wholesalers, hospitals, the University of Westminster, plenty of residential buildings, and restaurants. Lots of restaurants. And design, media and web companies. 

Will someone tell me how those back-rub places make money? Or what they are really a front for? On days like this one, London looks clean and almost welcoming. Like a city you can breath in, whereas for much of the last twelve months, we've been scurrying through it to get out of the cold and rain.

Newman Passage Soho

When the sky is blue, every little side-street and passage in London looks like somewhere you might want to live or work. I've never walked along this little diversion before and probably never will again. 

Those look like plastic model V2-rockets to me, but I could be wrong. The bicycle. The rooftop garden. The GPO tower. Ah, London.

Hanway Street, London W1T

There's a little nook off Tottenham Court Road called Hanway Street. It has Spanish bars, Korean restaurants, DJ shops and guys who will unlock your phone. It's been like that forever. Only the people who work on it or the Close behind it seem to know it's there. The shop selling old LP's is now for rent. 

June Vacation Post

I'm on holiday this week. I'm futzing right now, having just read The Bitter Truth About Sugar and Fairytale Physics. I think I know how Roch thought about one-forms and functions, but I couldn't really presume. The weather is great, and I've touched up the paint in my bedroom (Dulux Trade White forever) and tackled the out-of-control shrubs around my garden. I'm close to some kind of change of heart / revelation / understanding, but not there yet.

And I've decided that Bishopsgate isn't really that much better than Docklands. So if Docklands is where the money is - because it isn't in the West End, except Mayfair - for people who do what I do, then Docklands it is.

In the meantime, here's a nice little ditty from Seether.

May 2013 Review

When I list it all out, May looked like an active month My impression is that May sucked badly. Yet it started with a sunny and warm Bank Holiday, and ended with another one. Now if only the twenty days in between had not been grey, rainy and cold. (Mid-forties Fahrenheit at 07:00 is not warm.)

My family concluded some semi-complicated arrangements to reduce the tax bill on my Mother's estate, and the progress on my pensions crawled along slowly, this time with my own employer playing dumb about addresses and contacts. I should have done that years ago, but good financial advisors are hard to find. Sis and I had a lunchtime in Camden Lock for the first Bank Holiday Monday - photos already posted. I helped gather together some people for a colleague's 30th birthday supper at Mon Plaisir in Covent Garden, and a very pleasant evening that was. Sis and I visited Notting Hill that Saturday lunchtime and I introduced her to Books For Cooks. I visited my friend in Utrecht the next weekend, and we spent Saturday walking around Amsterdam, deciding not to stand in long queues to see the newly-refurbished Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, opting for a wander round the Steidlijk Museum (modern and contemporary art) instead. I signed up to Air BnB and found our merry band a place in Rome for the end of June, after all of us were blown out by dozens of owners. Yet more involvement with the Internetz and Modern World. I watched series one of Homeland and Justified, Died Young, Stayed Pretty, Who The #$&% Is Jackson Pollock, and The Art of Rap on DVD; Beware of Mr Baker with the Q+A with The Man Himself, as well as Something In The Air at the Curzon Soho, and the Bernadette Corporation show at the ICA. I bought a whole bunch of books on the Kindle and three more noisy guitar band albums for the phone. I added a Creek OBH-11 headphone amp to my hi-fi toys, and just as the man who has the headphone booth in Stables Yard said, it has indeed brought a new lease of life to my Sennheiser HD580s (headphone technology seems to have reached a plateau about ten years ago when these were made. The latest 650's a different, but not better, according to the reviews). And I finally took the car into a Fiat dealership to get the funny noise seen to: this gave me the rare experience of taking the Hounslow loop train at 06:30 on the morning I left the car at the garage. 

Then came The Cold and Fever. The one that knocks me out for three days and leaves me low on the fourth and fifth. The sixth day was the second Bank Holiday. I've had five sick days this year, and it's partly due to the weather. Talk to people and they will agree that, yes, they find this endless grey depressing, and that the pollen is silly this year. My eyes stream at 06:30 in the morning and it's not from the cold. My gym routine was blown, and I'm just getting back into it. My weight is up a bit, and I am convinced that's the effect of the pollen on my metabolism, as well as The Cold and Fever. 

And it was my birthday month, which causes all sorts of stock-taking I've already done. Since then, I've loosened up a bit. Saturday now looks like my new Training and wandering Day, and I may try going in on both days. What made it feel scrappy was the cold grey weather and the pollen, which makes my eyes itch, sneeze at random and also very drowsy in the afternoon. By two o'clock I feel like the life has been drained out of me, and that despite taking glutamine before the gym. Oh yes, I've been trying the supplements. Glutamine (seems to do something), carnitine (supposed to help with fat burning, not noticing) and of course the protein powder (now and again, it does make me feel fuller). But I feel like I've fallen down a snake.

Sunbury Lock, Island and The Weir Pub - Bank Holiday

Now we know when summer 2013 was: 26th-27th May. I could actually sit in the garden and read: Avatal Ronell's The Test Drive, since you ask, or at least a chunk of it. Anyway, Monday I went with my family (of origin) for an outdoor pub lunch at The Weir, by Sunbury Lock, in a very pictureseque setting, but also between an oil refinery / store one one side and a gasworks on the other. Neither are visible from the pub. When the sun is out and the sky is blue, all sorts of places in this country can be pleasant. But England's green land is pleasant only when the sun is shining, otherwise it's grey and grim. Anyway, this is what Monday lunchtime looked like.

Patio Close-Ups: Homage to Teller and Tillmans

So at the start of May there were, oh, twenty minutes of sunlight and I fired the DSLR up, not really knowing what I wanted to do, but oddly taken by the weeds growing on my patio. Then I came all over Wolfgang Tillmans (in landscape rather than people mode) for about half-an-hour taking these and more. I've liked Tillmans ever since he started publishing, though I can live without the live nude disks. Like the other 'T' - Jergen Teller - his work is immediately recognisable no matter what the subject is and he manages to dodge the genres, or maybe he and Teller just invented their own. Has anyone come along since with the impact the two T's had?