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.

Highgate Cemetery

Can you believe that until a couple of weeks ago I had never been to Highgate Cemetery? I'm pretty sure that back in the day the Kool Kids went there to get stoned appreciate the calm, spiritual atmosphere. I used to live about a mile or so from it, on the other side of Waterlow Park, for heaven's sake.

There are East and West Sides of the Cemetery. The East side is well-kept and mostly 20th-century, overwhelmingly of arty-types, scientists and the big statue of some bloke with a beard, but much more importantly, this guy...

The West Side is mostly pre-WW2, with some modern exceptions, one of whom is Alexander Litvenenko. It's a very different experience. Those sepulchres and tombs...

The tombs, the massive headstones and statues. Family gravestones with parents who lived to be 60+, one child who died at 25, and two who died before they were 5. Mostly solid, middle-class merchants, judging by the size of their statues and tombs. And all were clearly designed to be visited. Like this site

I didn't think people did that anymore. Visiting and maintaining graves feels like something out of an earlier age. Our family cremates. All of the fumerals I've been to have been cremations. But some still want to remember and visit the dead.

The Lads on Vauxhall Station

 I was messing about with the new camera and took some photographs from the train. Why I do this I have no idea. Sis gets good photos from trains and buses, but I get nothing.

Except this one by sheer chance.

Snow Shadow

 or you can be arty and have it in black-and-white

Votes in the comments!

How to Maintain Emotional Sobriety

"Emotional Sobriety" sounds fairly deep or scary or spiritual or all of those. If physical sobriety is not letting booze mess with the way we feel and how we act, then emotional sobriety is not letting people, places and things mess with the way we feel.

Notice the verb is "mess with".

We still mourn when someone dear to us dies. We are still delighted by the happy laughter of our children (if we have them) and we are still concerned when the teenage daughter is late home. We are pleased when a friend does well, and when we do, but modest in our celebration of it. We are angry if someone steps over our boundaries or we do not get the recognition we deserve for the work we have done.

We still feel the emotions that regular people feel.

What we don't do is respond to the drama queen. We don't fall for the manipulations of users and abusers, and we don't spend time feeling bad with the losers. We don't jump in to rescue people who dived into the lake of their own free will. The second time someone gets wilfully drunk and hurts themselves, and it's clear this is a pattern, we call a taxi to take them to hospital and ask them if they have the fare. We don't act out when someone tugs at our co-dependent heart strings. We try to stay calm when the boss punches our buttons or someone at work lets us down and makes us look bad. We don't make events about our reaction to them, we understand that almost nothing is 'about us'.

Staying away from wet places, and from heavy drinkers, is one way of reducing the need to manage our physical sobriety. Reduce the temptations.

The same applies to emotional sobriety. Stay away from the crazies, the emotionally needy, the users, losers and abusers, the emotionally volatile, the people who use their feelings to manipulate those around them. Do not become one of the consequences of people who made bad life choices.

I know what you're thinking.

If you're an ex-drunk, that's a lot of people. And nearly all the ones who turn us on.

It is. I'm not going to pretend there aren't days when life seems a little dull.

It's why a lot of people don't go for emotional sobriety. They still want some physical attraction, and they know that drama goes with that.

If the sex is worth the drama, go ahead. But you're just being dumb if the drama isn't worth the sex.

Which sounds a lot like MGTOW (or WGTOW).

Because it's the same principle. If it doesn't work for you, stop doing it, and do something that does.