I went to see the Michael Clark Company show Mmm… at the Barbican last night. It was great in all sorts of ways, including the fact that it left me unable to describe how it made me feel or what it made me think so I won’t try.
It couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the production of Metamorphosis that I saw at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith a couple of weeks ago. That was the worst show I’ve seen for ages: undisciplined, carelessly directed, full of cheap, meaningless acrobatics and crowd-pleasing jokes that the silly audience found hilarious. I felt like I was watching a school end-of-term production in which the Head of English had done his very best to use the performers’ talents in whatever way he could. “Smithkinson is very acrobatic, let’s have him bouncing on a trampoline and then he can do that thing on those BBC ident films where they kind of roll their body down a long length of fabric.” It was one of those shows where it looks like the performers are having a marvellous time, the audience are enjoying the spectacle and I’m feeling like a gooseberry. I got the impression that many of the people watching had come to hear the soundtrack, which was done by Nick Cave and was occasionally OK but generally pointless. I suppose the management at the Lyric think it’s a Good Thing to encourage ‘young people’ into the theatre. Not like this it isn’t. Go and see Michael Clark, young people, even the music’s better.
Archive for the 'London' Category
About a month ago the daughters came running in all excited, trying to tear me away from my computer to come and look at something amazing in the street. It was a vaulting horse, parked like a car in the road, just sitting there. None of the neighbours knew where it had come from. Carol, my partner, wanted us to bring it inside, I was opposed to the idea. In the end I agreed, on the condition that we would freecycle it if nobody had claimed it by the end of the week.
It was really, really heavy, we could just carry it between us. With some manoeuvring it fitted through the front-door, it didn’t fit through any other doors. We left it in the hall.
The horse had a maker’s name on it - Niels Larsen and Son Limited, Leeds. I did a search, they still existed. I asked them to send me a price list. When it arrived I discovered that a modern vaulting horse costs over £700 and isn’t half as charming. Maybe, I thought, ebay would be better than freecycling.
Over the next week I started to get rather fond of the horse. It was a charismatic, bulky and reassuring presence in the hall. I started patting it absent mindedly when I came home from work. The children started climbing up its legs, riding on its back and making up games with it.
Carol rang the police to see if any local schools had reported a missing horse. They checked their database and said nothing had been reported. They said we could do what we wanted with it. We didn’t know what we wanted to do with it.
Today I found a page called Guidlines for Training the Vaulting Horse.
The vaulting horse has to be very obedient and trustworthy. Obedience comes from consistent training, using the vaulting whip in a very meaningful way. It is an extended whip with leather thong capable of reaching the hind legs from the centre of a 15 metre circle whilst the lunger stands still.
The following signals are fairly universal so that anyone taking a trained vaulting horse and using the known signals will have a successful session.
Maybe we’ll keep him after all (I don’t know why it’s a ‘him’, but Carol agrees with me about that), we could train him up, maybe exhibit him after a few months. He’s no trouble, apart from the occasional stubbed toe, and although visitors do sometimes look a bit surprised it’s not nearly as bad as the stuffed Afghan Hound who lived in our previous house. She was called Janet.
I am quite keen on traffic wardens. Even the nicest person is inclined to become pathologically selfish when driving and motorists are inclined to do the most outrageously anti-social things if they get the chance. So if I ever do get a parking ticket I just accept it and pay it as soon as possible without complaining. Same goes for speeding tickets, I don’t think there’s ever a justification for speeding. So when I came back to my car in Brixton last week and saw the ticket on the window I went through the five stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) in record time. I had parked in a parking bay on a Red Route and didn’t notice that it was only a parking bay until 13.00, I should have been more careful. By the time I got home I was keen to pay the £50 and get it over and done with. I went to the TFL payments site and typed in my details and that’s when it got difficult. The parking attendant had put the wrong registration number on the ticket. She had got one letter wrong.
So now I’m in a conundrum. I was quite happy to pay the fine but now that I think I don’t have to, I don’t want to. Since the wrong registration number is on the ticket and that number doesn’t exist, according to www.mycarcheck.com, they can’t send me a Notice to Owner or pursue me for the fine because they don’t know who I am. But if the traffic warden took a photo of my car then they will ultimately still be able to track me down and I may have to pay the full £100 fine. Double or quits. And what about the karma thing? Surely if I think parking tickets are fair enough I should pay anyway. I have until 8 August to decide. What do you think?
There’s a tunnel I walk through every day on the way to work. It leads from Blackfriars underground station to the pedestrian walkway that runs west along the Embankment from Saint Paul’s to just after Blackfriars Bridge. It’s a great tunnel, low and gently curving as it slopes uphill, with a black and yellow tiled floor and long rows of recessed fluorescent lights along both edges of the ceiling. It often has a strong breeze blowing down it, smelling of the river and when you reach the end you have a great view along the Thames towards Waterloo bridge and the Houses of Parliament. I love the drama of that end of the tunnel; you never know whether the tide’s going to be high or low and the weather often seems different to how it was on the railway station.
Homeless people often hang out in the tunnel. That famous knitted-doll making woman is sometimes there and the man with the pointy face and the little dog. For the last week there’s only been the quiet man. He sits on the mandatory piece of flattened cardboard box with his head bowed down and a small cup in front of him. He never asks for spare change, he has no little sign, he never looks up.
On Wednesday I was looking at him from the side as I approached and I saw that he was smiling very slightly, in a bitter sort of way. I never give money to homeless people, for no reason really, but I really felt the contrast between my happiness at the approach of the beautiful view and his static stare at the floor. In my pocket I happened to have an Alprax (don’t ask). As I passed him I dropped it into his cup. I looked back and saw him take it out, pop it out of its blister without looking at it and stick it straight into his mouth.
So, the next day I gave him a microdot that’s been hanging around. He did the same thing. The day after that I wasn’t working but he was still there yesterday and I gave him two Largactyl. Today I only had Co-dydramol. I’m not working again until Friday but I’m a bit worried - I’ve got quite a few Alprax and Largactyl left but I don’t want to repeat myself and anyway, I might need them! I can’t give them all to him. There is half a bottle of Kemadrin at the back of the cupboard but I’ve never even tried those, they don’t sound like fun.
I found a bullet on the pavement outside my house today. It was about 9mm wide and flattened from the side rather than from the front as most spent bullets are. I thought that I’d better tell the police about it so I rang the number in the phone directory. After 15 minutes on hold I finally got through to someone. He wanted me to take it in to a police station. I said that I wasn’t prepared to spend half the day waiting around in Brixton police station so if it was all the same to him I’d just hang on to it and they could contact me if they needed it. He didn’t take my name but then maybe all my details were already scrolling across a screen in front of him.
Is this quite a usual occurrence in London these days? The man from the Met. didn’t seem very bothered about it. Maybe I’ve just been unlucky not to have found one before now. It’s not as though I don’t keep my eyes open; I’ve found loads of 1p coins.
Yes, that’s right, you heard me right. Driving around London in the last few days I noticed that at certain times there was a noticeable absence of scumbags, idiots and unsavoury elements. How useful it would be, I told myself, if one could predict these auspicious moments and arrange to be travelling or shopping when they occurred. Well, it can be done and with the help of a footballing enthusiast of my acquaintance (tip o’ the hat to Joe Lawrence) I have produced a handy chart which will enable you, gentle reader, to take advantage of the eerily empty roads, echoing supermarket aisles and quiet, pleasant high streets which occur during the transmission of certain games of particular interest to our less salubrious co-stakeholders.
The judgement as to whether or not a particular game will be deemed essential viewing is a complex business and depends to a large extent on the outcome of games not yet played so I will be producing a more complete version when my advisors are able to provide more accurate data, probably some time after the 20th of June. If you feel you can provide a more accurate insight feel free to alter your copy of the chart with a pen.
The chart is colour-coded for your convenience and contains no garish graphics or references to football so you can safely print it out and stick it on your kitchen wall without bringing down the tone of the place.
Click on the picture to download the chart.
I saw the aftermath of a serious accident last weekend. According to the people standing around afterwards, a bus had swerved to avoid a pedestrian in the road outside Holborn tube station. It went crashing over a traffic island, ploughing through the pedestrians standing there before coming to rest against a street light. Several people were trapped under the bus, one woman in her thirties died before she could be taken to hospital. As far as I can tell this sad story wasn’t considered important enough to be reported in any national media. It made second item on the BBC London radio news bulletin.
There are a lot of very bad bus drivers in London. I frequently see them speeding, whizzing through red traffic lights, turning without indicating and ignoring people waiting at bus stops. I’d say it’s a miracle that there aren’t more accidents but actually I suspect that there are more accidents; we just don’t hear about them. A while ago, when I had a Land Rover, I was rammed by a bus, twice, because I was driving in a bus lane. Fair enough in a way, people who drive in bus lanes are tossers, but hardly the behaviour of a responsible public servant.
I expect that the drivers are bad because the management is bad. They probably emphasise speed above safety. Even so, a bus driven by a maniac is a very serious danger to the public and so I felt quite encouraged by the news that Transport for London are working on a system that would automatically limit the speed of buses and taxis. I’m completely in favour of a scheme like this, as long as it only affects buses that I’m not travelling in.
BBC NEWS | England | London | TfL looks at car speed limiters
1 Westminster Bridge is a big grey forbidding building that stands in the middle of the roundabout at the southern end of Westminster bridge. There’s no obvious way to get in because the entrance used to be via an overhead walkway from the GLC headquarters at County Hall. It was designed by the GLC’s own architects and completed in 1974 but fell into disuse when Thatcher dissolved the GLC in 1987. It wasn’t a very good building. According to an article in the Independent in 1998:
Every time the sun came out, even for five seconds, the blinds would come down for 45 minutes. Because of this they wore out very quickly and took on a life of their own, going up and down at random all day, and finally got permanently stuck down over the windows. The air conditioning tubes sucked in cold air from above the Thames, so the office became Arctic in winter. And the humidity control was so sensitive that you couldn’t boil a kettle in the building for fear of disturbing the air-cooling system.
Frogmore Estates and Galliard Homes bought the building very cheaply in 1995. The developers applied repeatedly for planning permission for various schemes to develop the site but they were all refused for different reasons.
I seem to remember it being occupied by some anarchists protesting about homelessness in London in the early 90s although I can’t find any record of that. I also remember hearing rumours that it was being used by MI5 for interrogations a little while after that.
Anyway, Frogmore finally got permission to develop the site into a 15 storey, 913 bedroom hotel in 2005. And here’s the exciting bit: The existing building is going to be demolished this week, at 11:00 AM on Thursday 25 May. There’s a big LED timer on the front of the building counting down the seconds until it comes down so I’m guessing it’s going to be exciting. I’m going to try and be there if I possibly can.
I had three votes in the local election. I voted twice for Labour and once for the Greens. Why oh why did I vote Labour? Because my MP, Keith Hill, recently replied to a letter I sent him about Identity Cards and his letter was good and rather persuasive. The other reason is the card which the good people in the Streatham Labour Party sent me on May Day. It was deep crimson with a fist raised in solidarity on the front. Inside it had the lyrics of Billy Bragg’s version of the Internationale and a brief history of International Workers’ Day. That’s all it took. What can I say? I’m a cheap date. Anyway, as a result of my vote Lambeth was the only Labour gain of the local elections and I’m feeling pretty smug about that.
I was thinking just the same thing yesterday when I saw two youths, each with a puppy. They weren’t treating their little pets very well. At one point a puppy strayed into the road and its owner literally kicked it up into the air and onto the pavement.
It’s a tricky thing. The police are making it harder for people to carry knives on the streets so you can see how those people who would have carried a knife would look around for an alternative to make themselves feel safe. A scary dog can be wielded with pride whereas you have to hide a knife away. There’s another advantage for the ne’er-do-well in that taking a dog for a walk is an extremely good excuse for being in any neighbourhood at any time of the day.
There are, however, some terrible flaws in the dog as weapon plan. The first is that you can’t easily get rid of a dog once you’ve used it in a crime. Not only does it leave genetic material all over the place, on you, in your house, everywhere else, but it is also inclined to find you and follow you home if you throw it into the Thames, something a knife seldom does. People are also likely to become sentimentally attached to their dog, even if it does start incriminating them. And even if they do decide to do away with their former pet, it’s not easy. Look what happened with Bill Sikes’ dog, Bull’s-eye.
BBC NEWS | England | London | Dogs are yobs’ ‘weapon of choice’
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