It’s been stupidly hot here recently. Wednesday was 27°C (like 80°F) and I’m not going to lie, revision’s been awful.
I was supposed to post some pictures of the beach from when I went to visit my nephews, but I procrastinated. I can’t seem to force myself to do anything these days… term time has just flown by.
Things aren’t going so well, love life wise. It ended predictably. You’d think I’d learn from a pattern, but noooo, every time I end up feeling stupid emotions that I shouldn’t. Having a bunch of emotional baggage doesn’t help. I really do annoy myself sometimes. I did some really bizarre stuff this term as well, like showering on stage in a gay bar… it was fun but I only really agreed to do it as an excuse to spend time with the Roman. It was really nice and for that night I kinda got that vibe he was into me (as in actually into me, rather than just some sort of fuckbuddy relationship) but we were both drunken messes and then I let slip about my “problems” so that put him off me. I saw him the other night and he said, you know, “It was one time. I’m sorry but I don’t find you attractive…”. I’m no fool, he doesn’t exactly have exacting standards so it’s not a matter of physical attraction. He was on it, and then I let slip about my issues and now he’s not on it. I don’t blame it, nobody wants a fuckbuddy with this many hangups, let alone anyone else. I had to leave, though, because he was so apologetic and nice about it and when I looked in his eyes I could see pity which I just couldn’t deal with. Pity comes from a kind place and he meant well in pitying me, but I’m not an object of pity.
Ugh… enough about that. The last few days have been really fun. I’d forgotten how beautiful England can be in the summer. Most of these photos show the results from a late dusk stroll. I’ve been sunbathing in the day and then trying to do work in the evenings, but that night I opened my window and the smell of Summer just hit me and I had to go experience it.
Walking around campus in parts feels like walking around a vast country estate… it’s quite surreal. I think there’s a shot of the woods in there, as well, in full sunlight. There’s so many bluebells in there, although they’re dying off. There’s another shot of the lake with a May tree. May is one of my tea dipped madeleines… we used to have a massive May tree outside our house back home that was probably planted when it was built in the 20s. The council’s cut it down now, but as a child I remember the smell wafting in the windows on hot days, watching the flowers progress as Spring turned to Summer. “Don’t cast your clout till May be out” is what my Dad used to say, the saying’s been in our family since before we moved to London away from Hampshire several generations ago.
There’s also goslings. They’re not as cute now, but it’s still fun to watch them. I really love geese because unlike ducks (which, by the way, are raping each other left right and centre; it’s really distressing to keep stumbling across scenes of duck rape) they’ll come up and eat out your hand.
Oh yeah, one other thing. Because the Queen’s Jubilee is coming up (and also I suppose the bloody 2012 Olympics - I’m really not a London 2012 fan because it’s ruined the summer of all Londoners) all the branding has gotten really patriotic. It’s strange wandering around during the weekly food shop and seeing Union Jacks just EVERYWHERE. We’ve decorated the kitchen with pictures of the Queen and Union Jacks just as something to do.
I’m going to a Eurovision party tonight, even though I’ve still got lots of work to do. I got really drunk last night in a park and vented to some people who don’t even know me that well… they said that I’m too forgiving; that the Roman’s a dickhead who’s treating me like shit, that I don’t deserve it. It made me feel strange. But people judge other people harshly all the time. I like to think most people are fundamentally good. When I meet someone dodgy, I can usually feel it in the air, like a greasiness. It’s not common but there’s people I’ll just feel are bad. But I don’t get that with this guy, he’s a good person. He was just so nice about it… it wasn’t politeness, it was like he was genuinely sorry.
8:36 am • 26 May 2012
Sometimes my camera’s phone goes a bit funny.
I’ve restarted my essay on organelles six times now. I can’t do this subject.
12:07 pm • 13 April 2012 • 1 note
The first shot is a bombed out Church near St. Pauls. They’ve made it into a rose garden and I think the steeple has apartments in it. I used to get drunk here sometimes when I was younger, but the cops are tougher on street drinking now.
It’s weird to talk about the war so much. The city I go to University near was basically completely destroyed in bombing raids and walking around London you see a lot of old buildings still have shrapnel marks. Nobody really thinks about it that much but it really is surreal to think that 70 or so years ago bombs were raining down on the houses around here. They dug up an unexploded bomb down the road from me recently as well when they were re-doing a car park… my Dad was born after the war in the 50s but he says well into the 70s you’d see random flat patches of land where there’d been houses or offices destroyed in the blitz that people were just using as car parks. When he was little he used to play in the garden of a ruined house; the people who lived there had died in the bombing raid so nobody really did anything with the land. They used to grow a lot of fruit in their back garden (everyone “dug to victory” back then; my Dad’s family kept chickens to help with rationing) so during the summer there’d be all these raspberry bushes to feast on. This isn’t ever really discussed; everyone just sort of moved on.
I remember reading about the new Steve Reich album being really controversial because it was about 9/11 and featured the Twin Towers on the album cover. (btw it’s a really good album, go check it out) He had to change the album cover in the end because people got so mad about it… I don’t think he was trying to profit off of it, but people accused him of that. I never really got that. There’s an American football team here called the London Blitz and if you go in some bars you can order a mixed drink called an “Irish Car Bomb”. Up until the late 90s there were IRA bombing raids - we never had it as bad as Northern Ireland, but there were a few times it got hairy. I remember after 7/7 there was a cartoon in The Metro about plans to track terror suspects with GPS chips or something and one policeman looking at a computer screen and going “Everything’s under control - we know exactly where he is. He’s on the tube”. 9/11 was a terrible, terrible thing but I’m sometimes a bit mystified at how reverent some American people seem to be about it (although one of my American mates sent me a picture of the Twin Towers with the caption “I’m falling for you” on Valentines day. I’m fond of sick jokes - I’ve heard some cracking Madeline McCann ones which I feel guilty about telling e.g. “What’s the difference between Madeline McCann and Madeline McCann jokes? Eventually, Madeline McCann jokes will get old”).
Rambled a bit there. Anyway, I walked into Paternoster Square just as St. Pauls was chiming 5 o’clock. A bus drove by and I clocked the advert on the side - there’s a lot of those “Some people are gay. Get over it” ads from Stonewall but this one was different. It was Thames Water saying “We’re officially in a drought now”. The second attatched photo wasn’t taken by me, but it’s the advert. You can order free stuff off their website, like a bumper sticker saying “Proud to be dirty” because you’re not wasting water by washing your car, or tap and showerhead attachments that reduce the amount of water that comes out of them. You can even get special crystals to put in your toilet cistern that reduce the amount of water per flush.
They’ve switched off the fountains in Trafalgar Square because they’re so concerned about this drought and they’re suggesting they might not be switched back on until next year. The hosepipe ban is in full force, although I bet you any money that the Olympics Park is exempt. Some political commentators have wryly noted that the official Trafalgar Square announcement left room to switch the fountains on during the Jubilee and the Olympics.
11:43 am • 11 April 2012
One of my favourite things about London is the architectural variation you get. There’s a lot of cool buildings to see - especially if you look up! Buildings that are just shops at eye level are suddenly revealed to have exquisite little carved faces under their first floor windows - something you associate more with Paris - or have cosy Victorian façades of warm brick, or streamlined 30s terraces… any number of things. The only big exception to that is The City. The financial district has a lot of new skyscrapers being built that look really really cool in the skyline, like The Gherkin or The Shard, but when you get up close it’s pretty soulless. I mean, they tried to make The Gherkin seem cool at street level, but those giant glass buildings just don’t really look as nice up close. Also the huge numbers of skyscrapers block out the sun, so while you get cool reflections from windows, it’s rare to get actual sunshine reaching you.
Anyway. The first photo is a random thing I stumbled across. I’ve probably drunkenly staggered past it at some point (it’s not exactly tucked away) but never really looked at it. It’s a big column with some non-functional drinking fountains. The Victorians loved building water fountains - you see a lot of them about. None of them work, though; probably disconnected due to health and safety.
The next two pictures are of the Barbican Estate. Given my little rant about The City, you might be surprised to hear that I actually have a soft spot for Brutalism. I mean, those towers are pretty cool to look at in a sort of Blade Runner cyberpunk kinda way… but if you read up on Brutalism, it’s like a window into post war optimism. They had all these bright ideas about “streets in the sky” and little communities but it just didn’t work out… like having large exposed park like areas between towers didn’t prove to be a nice place for the community to organise picnics, they just made people feel unsafe at night. Also a lot of the people who pioneered Brutalism had designed it with sunnier climates in mind, so it didn’t really age that well in drizzly Blighty.
Tucked within the confines of The Barbican Estate is Ironmonger’s Hall - it’s not as old as it looks, being built in the 20s, but is one of the few buildings in the area to have survived the war. It’s mildly interesting to read about here:
http://www.ironmongers.org/company_history.htm
The whole area was pretty much levelled by bombing, but in true British fashion buildings were rebuilt to the EXACT SAME ROAD PLAN. As a result it’s still quite twisty turny and there’s a road that basically follows the old Roman city wall. You can see bits of the wall sticking out here and there (often with ruins of Victorian warehouses built into the wall) but you can see some proper excavations of old London in The Museum Of London. That last shot is of a sunken garden that the public aren’t allowed access to. I wish I’d written down the inscription on the slab thing; it was really bizarre but you can’t make it out in that picture.
11:05 am • 11 April 2012
After I left the gallery, I decided to go for a walk. Sometimes you hear people say “I like to go on walks” but they never usually mean it. When I go for a walk, I go for a walk. London’s one of the biggest cities in the world and boy, do my calves know it. I kept wearing out the heels of my shoes.
I walked up through Brick Lane. I realise now that I’ve never really posted that much about East London on this blog. I love it. This part of London is sort of hipster Mecca, which is an appropriate pun because the area is also home to a lot of Bengali Muslims. In some of the shots you can see they’ve got their own gate and lamppost styles going on; it’s a bit like Chinatown. A lot of the street signs are also in Bengali. The fact that there’s a road called Bacon Street in a very Muslim area cracks me up every time I see it.
That shot of the lamppost also shows off the cool metal minaret thing on the Brick Lane mosque; it used to be a Church and then a Synagogue. The East End has been home to a lot of immigrant populations over the years - East End Jews were a big thing before the war, and before them was the Huguenots; French Protestants who fled religious persecution. Gradually as different immigrant groups get wealthier they move out, but this has been a bit of an issue for the Bengalis, because while they make a fair bit of money from some of their restaurants (people love popping down to Brick Lane for a Ruby (Ruby Murray = Curry)) hipsters are sort of pricing them out of the area by gentrifying it.
The amount of retro clothes shops is actually a little bit terrifying. They’re all massively overpriced as well - it’s not really “thrifting” if t-shirts start at about £15 ($23). They buy clothes up in bulk from car boot sales Up North and whack a 500% markup on them. Mind you, there’s a few good places and when one of the vintage clothes shops inevitably closes down, they have good sales. I got a pretty cool flannel shirt for a tenner from a shop that was closing down.
Anyway, there’s some tensions going on. Nearby is Shoreditch, which has a fair few gay venues. This is also near the financial district of London (“The City”) so as a result you have some wealthy gay bankers splashing their cash about in very close proximity to impoverished Bengali Muslim kids… there’s a certain amount of resentment that goes on and there’s been allegations that the local Mosque sometimes preaches in a rather homophobic manner. Either way, there’s been a few violent incidents and recently some nutter went around with stickers on lamposts declaring certain areas to be a “Sharia zone” and a “Gay free zone” - I think they caught one of the people who did it and fined him.
Oh yeah, they’ve got those cool video screens you see in Tube stations and bus stops. I can’t get over them - I sound like such a tourist, but I love riding the escalator up out of a Tube station and watching animated adverts. It feels like being in the future! Anyway, they’ve had to mount them up high here because the area’s a bit rough - the photo was supposed to be showing the Met Police Announcement saying “This is a drinking control area” but it changed to an advert right as I snapped it. That and the CCTV would have looked proper Orwellian! I think the high mounted video screens were giving me flash backs to Half Life 2 heh.
Anyway, it was a really weird day - at times it was beautifully sunny, but later on it started pelting down with freezing rain and then hailstones. But that was later. I think those last few photos were just me going “Oh! It’s a lovely day today! I’d better take photos!”. Oh and the alleyway had some cool light reflections going on.
Doing another post with the other pictures my phone had the memory to take. I’m actually getting into the swing of this Tumblr lark, I should keep this pace up.
7:30 pm • 10 April 2012
I was supposed to be meeting with a friend today for a catch up, but Polish families drink a lot over Easter so… circumstances required she stayed at home. On a whim, I went to the Whitechapel Gallery.
I’m so glad I did. I’ve been a few times before and they always have interesting stuff going on. This time it was an exhibition by one of the Young British Artists, Gillian Wearing. You get given a sticker when you buy entry, and I think the guy said “Don’t stick it to your arm” but I was so entranced by his cheekbones (seriously, there are some painfully attractive people working in galleries) that I thought he said “stick it to your arm”. It burned. I’ve only just managed to peel it off.
Anyway, the second photo is a sneakily snapped pic of part of her piece “Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say”. Basically she went up to randomers, gave them a pen and paper and told them to write down what they were thinking. Some of them are really touching (like a seemingly happy woman holding a sign about how she’s depressed, or a homeless man calling for “Mary” to come back to him… there’s a really iconic one of a bobby holding up a sign just saying “Help”) but lots of them are just really funny. That one was my favourite. She likes exploring the secrets of strangers.
My favourite part of the exhibition was this eight minute piece called “Bully” which was this guy directing an improvised piece that re-enacts this time he got bullied when he was a kid. It was so emotional, and the guy gets to say to the bullies what he’d kept pent up for years. He was crying by the end. I watched it four times. There were so many installations! There was a great one showing an abusive mother/daughter relationship by switching between the mum hugging and kissing her daughter or laughing together and her beating her up. Oh man, I could go on for ages, but I’ll move onto the next blog post about the rest of my day.
Anyway, here’s one of the videos.
http://vimeo.com/23362925
It’s the only one online - there were some I found better, like these monologues of children with issues acted out by older adults. I can’t explain them. Yeah, moving on…
6:58 pm • 10 April 2012 • 1 note
Tumblr’s servers are playing up.
11:41 am • 9 April 2012 • 2 notes
The pressure dropped so suddenly here that it unstuck our barometer. It’s a lovely old carved Arts and Crafts thing, my Dad got it in an antiques fair in Ally Pally, but ever since we’ve had it the needle’s been stuck to “Change”. It’s colder now.
We’ve had the driest March here since the 1920s and the last two winters have been some of the driest on record, so we’re semi-officially in drought. There’s a hosepipe ban on at the moment. The pond in the second picture used to be around about the level of the roots of those trees, like in a mangrove swamp. Now there’s so little water that the ducks can’t even dabble, they just sort of half paddle/half walk around rather pathetically.
Nevertheless, Spring is still resolutely in the air. The third photo doesn’t quite communicate how vibrant the greens are at the moment; all the new growth is such a fresh colour.
But the main point of this post is daffodils. The University Campus near me has closed (the University has relocated) but they’re keeping the premises open to accommodate all the extra police London is getting for the 2012 Olympics. The campus itself has been converted from a lovely old manor house and every spring there’s so many daffodils there that you can’t believe your eyes.
The other pleasure of the fields of daffodils is the smell; you can normally smell a daffodil when you sniff it, but the sheer quantity of daffodils (plus the fact that there was a lot of moisture in the air that day) meant that the breeze smelt of them. It was fantastic.
8:24 pm • 7 April 2012
It’s just turned Easter Sunday here. These eggs have been all over London - they’re hidden around various backstreets and side turnings. I think by now they’ve all been relocated to Covent Garden Piazza, but there was some sort of competition where if you scanned in all the QR Codes you could enter a prize draw; it cost a certain amount of money to do this, and all the money went to charity. They’re also auctioning off the eggs, but some of them appear to have been nicked.
These photos were taken about a week ago. It was the last really nice day; it was a bit brisk, but still sunny. My friends and I went to Golden Square to drink Absinthe (I also edited these photos quaffing/grimacing, explaining their over-photoshopped nature; I think absinthe me thought himself terribly artistic) and while we were there, we got collared for some new TV Show. That’s my friend pouring what she thought was a “shot” of orange juice. I also took part, tipped way too much in and downed it. I think the point of the show is to demonstrate that British people are alcoholics. Considering we were street drinking absinthe, they may have a point.
8:00 pm • 7 April 2012
Sorry about that last post, it was probably proper whingy. I’ve been back a couple of weeks, mainly trying to do revision and write an essay. I’m revising Biological Statistics and it’s been doing my head in, but it’s open book so I can bring all my notes into the computer lab with me. I’m planning to draw myself a flowchart for answering questions.
The essay’s actually really interesting; it’s about endosymbiotic theory (it’s a “theory” like how evolution’s a “theory” - accepted fact) that the organelles in eukaryotic cells (like mitochondria - the energy factories in your cells - and chloroplasts - where photosynthesis in plant cells occur) are the results of cells having taken up bacteria. Mitochondria, for example, have a special membrane around them which you usually only find in bacteria, and they have their own DNA and special ribosomes and stuff. Some bloke in the 1890s clocked that chloroplasts look like free living cyanobacteria! The only issue is backing this all up with references, which is proving to be quite difficult because my University login to Nature isn’t working so I can’t read the Scientific papers! Also the essay is basically “Write about endosymbiotic theory” which is hard to argue, and I have to write an abstract that summarises the main points but also a conclusion that summarises the main points, but they can’t be the same so wtf. Ugh. If they sat me down and let me talk to them about it, I’d do well, but when it comes to answering questions or writing an essay they’re always so ambiguous so I always end up writing the answer which is technically correct but not quite what they’re looking for. I could talk for Britain, though, so… getting off topic.
Anyway, it’s been lovely the last couple of weeks. Highs of 21 degrees here, I’m not sure what that is in Americanese - in the eighties? It’s like a coolish Summer day, warm enough to wear just a t-shirt, but not sweltering so you won’t sweat in the sun. It’s awful being cooped up! So I’ve been going out a bit, not to bars or clubs, but just to hang out.
Today I went into town, got a haircut (the top’s way too short, but it’s in the right top:side ratio so it’ll grow out well) from this cool place in Neal’s Yard, just off Seven Dials. Then I nipped in to Topman and picked up this really awesome tribal print t-shirt (money I don’t have!) and met up with Robyn. We picked up some lunch and just lay down in Soho Square. It was so crowded; it always is when it’s sunny, and we just had a lovely chat. We went for a bit of a wander - American Retro is this really neat shop, but it’s closing down, so I bought one of those Mixtape USB sticks you can get from Suck UK but at like half price, so that was cool. We went for a wander around Carnaby Street; I stumbled across this bijou little tea room just off of it, which we briefly considered, but tea for two was about a fiver for a pot… £2.50 each doesn’t sound that bad in retrospect and they had a wide selection of really fancy teas so I might take someone there in future if I’m looking to impress them - it really was lovely! They had clotted cream scones as well, so if I wanted to push the boat out I could take someone for High Tea. Totally didn’t imagine doing this with that Italian guy. I don’t know why, but whenever I “English it up” (usually a weird hybrid of going more Cockney whilst doing stereotypically upper class things) foreigners love it. I showed the Roman some traditional English folk music drunkenly the other night (“Bushes and Briars”, as performed by Julie Christie in Far From The Maddening Crowd - when my brother was a baby, he and my Dad were going for a walk and passed her, and she gave my brother this massive beaming smile, so my Dad says) and he was entranced. After going to this tea shop, I nipped into this cute, like, design/art/toyshop and bought some alphabet flashcards for my nephew’s 3rd birthday. I’m a bad Uncle - this year, I missed my nephew’s Christening and 1st Birthday because I was snowed under with work, and I’m missing my other nephew’s 3rd birthday due to exams! I’m dropping them up some presents during Easter when I go to see them.
But yeah, then we decided to just kotch in St. James’s Park. I love sitting there - Dillon, I recorded that message to you on the roof of the café in St. James’s - because you can hear Big Ben chime quite clearly and also it’s a beautiful park. I don’t know why I like Big Ben so much, but it stirs up some bizarre form of micro-patriotism in me. I have a lot of happy memories from Big Ben (usually just on New Year’s) and when I was up at Uni, hearing the news get rung in on BBC Radio 4 by Big Ben gave me this odd stirring in my chest, London Pride. But anyway.
We were lying in the sun - it was starting to get on, about six o’clock - and this bloke walks by hollering out something about love. We both ignore him and look vaguely into the distance. He was clutching a bottle of Strongbow but was quite nicely dressed, so my first thought was he was a nutter rather than a down and out. You see nutters about every now and then due to “Care In The Community” and they’re usually harmless provided you blank them. I remember Robyn, John and I got chatting to this Carribean woman once and she turned out to have a vendetta against the Chinese - allegedly both George Bush and Obama were Chinese, the Chinese were instituting an aggressive breeding campaign so as to amass numbers to kill all the non-Chinese, and Chinese people would break into her house, disguise themselves as her and then Skype her husband, saying awful things to him and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Also they were posioning her because she knew too much. I’m not going to lie, I was very glad our friend who was Chinese had just left. But I’m getting off topic. So, this guy comes over to us though and starts being all “Is this your grass? Are you going to permit me to stand here?”. But although he was confrontational, he wasn’t really being aggressive, so we humoured him.
As it turns out, he wasn’t a down and out or really a nutter either. He was quite well spoken, bit of a Northern twinge, and he claimed to live around the corner in a £500,000 flat. He had a lot to say. He assumed Robyn and I were a couple, which I didn’t bother correcting. I can’t remember a lot of what he said, but he was quite insightful - I realised what he’d been doing was culture jamming. You sort of get lulled into blanking strangers when you’re a Londoner - you don’t really talk to people on the Tube. It’s different up North - random old ladies will sit down next to you on the bus and if it’s raining they’ll say “Nice weather for ducks, isn’t it pet?” or something like that and they’ll just start chatting away. But in London, people don’t. It’s not because Londoners are less friendly, it’s just we’re usually in a rush and also it pays not to talk to strangers in case they’re a bit suss, or a nutter. But this bloke was intentionally not doing that, he (admittedly he was drunk, but still) was going up to people and bellowing “HELLO THERE!” in a Brian Blessed-esque manner, or loudly commenting on something like “YOU’RE WALKING TOO FAST! SLOW DOWN AND ENJOY THE WEATHER” and people almost always blanked him. But I could suss him out, could see he was harmless and we got chatting. He had lead an interesting life, was a Grandfather three times over (he didn’t look that old) and had lived in Saigon, Melbourne, Johannesburg and somewhere in Brazil (I forget where).
He told us about his ex-wife; he made love to her in the boughs of a tree. He said he was still in love with her (I’m guessing this is why he had drunk a litre of Strongbow). He mainly went on about love being like a tree, and if you’re filled with love it branches out and touches other people. He said we really got what he was going on about, unlike most people, and he turned to me and said “Your eyes are really filled with love, I can see it”. Which was nice although odd to hear. I had a Slovenian guy tell me that unlike most English people I “have a lot of warmth”, which was really flattering (although a small part of me was offended on the behalf of all the English people he had just condemned as cold; we’re not, honest!). It’s nice to be told that! :D
Park guy also told us a poem for the price of £2 and then went off to bum a fag off this guy who was smoking, which lead me back to suspecting he was a down and out rather than someone who lived in a half-a-million flat, but he was still very interesting and fair play to him, he walked around for ages looking for a bin for his Strongbow bottle (he found one eventually, most of the bins have been removed due to terrorists wanting to hide bombs in them or something).
But yeah, it stirred up all these silly notions of love and relationships in my head, hence the last post. I wish I’d recorded his poem, it seemed at least semi-spontaneous and had a good meter, rhyme and overall message. You get the oddest thought provoking conversations from randomers sometimes. I remember after a crappy night in G-A-Y with a German leather daddy (I guess he was nice enough, but it was really sleazy even if he claimed to have come all the way from Berlin to meet someone as “charming” as me. I snuck out) I got chatting to this girl who was handing out leaflets in Covent Garden. She was the same age as me and again, we had this really intense conversation about relationships and by the end, we were both sat on the sidewalk in bits, she was crying and I was just hugging her and rocking back and forth (she was OK, though, and we parted smiling). Sometimes if I see sad people on the Tube or out and about, people who look really upset or sometimes people who are crying, I ask them what the matter is. Usually they seem a bit freaked out that a stranger’s talking to them but open up. Often I don’t, though, which worries me about myself. Same with homeless people - there’s so many homeless people that what you’re programmed to do is just blank them and walk on by, but I always feel a stab of guilt when I do this. But I can’t give every homeless person money. I do sometimes and I also give to St. Mungos. But it’s not enough. If they come up to me I’ll often say “Oh, sorry, I don’t have any change” but both of us know I do and I’m not giving it to them. It’s dreadful. Sometimes I just stand under the shower and think about it. I’ve got a good memory for faces so I’ll recognise the same homeless people if I see them a couple of times. I remember this girl and her dog always seemed to be around Leicester Square for a bit, but then they just vanished one day. She could have gone to a homeless shelter, but equally she could have just been stabbed, or overdosed or froze or anything really. There used to be a bloke by the cash points in Leicester Square as well, he’d holler and SCREAM at people to give him money, he was so angry all the time. Angry at life. A lot of homeless people are ex-servicemen who’ve left the army, couldn’t get a job… maybe they were traumatised by war; our army is really bad at helping people with PTSD. I remember hearing about a case of this man had come back from Iraq and was doing the washing up and his wife came up behind him and hugged him, only he wasn’t expecting it, so he turned around and stabbed her out of instinct and when he realised what he’d done he killed himself. Or like there was this episode of one of those “We fix your house if you’ve had shoddy renovations done to it” programs and the husband was ex-military and his nerves were shot to shit. He was a loving husband and a wonderful father, but he couldn’t work and couldn’t really do any work to the house either. They only explain what’s up with them half way through though, so the first bit of the program he comes across as a layabout and you don’t realise he’s traumatised, so you judge him, you judge the family, and then you see the wife crying that her husband’s back from war but he’s not really completely back and you just realise you’ve been judging them wrongly and you’re a bad person. But yeah, there’s very little help for soldiers. Sometimes I wonder if that shouty homeless guy was a soldier. He vanished, too. The boy around the corner has been dispatched to Afghanistan, I think he’s only a year older than me. He was in Beavers and Cubs with me. I hope he makes it through ok.
God, this has taken a dark turn, hasn’t it? I didn’t mean to go on. The pictures. Right, so the first shot is Robyn looking at the flowers in St. James’s Park (I wish I could have photographed the smell - a lot of blossom is coming into bloom and smells amazing!). The second photo is Robyn (if you can see her - she’s in the bottom left) by the Duke of York Monument (as in the Grand Old Duke of York, marching up and down hills etc. That guy). See the blue ring around it? That’s part of this new installation work by an artist - there’s a ring around Paternoster Column in Paternoster Square (by St. Paul’s Cathedral) and around the sundial pillar in Seven Dials as well. They show the projected worse case scenario of sea level rise, if all the ice in the Artic and Antartic melted. It’s called London 3012 I think; the rings glow blue at night. They’re quite cool really, and they help you visualise how much of London (and everywhere) will probably be lost to sea if we don’t reinforce The Barrier or build a bunch of dykes or something. Looking around at the Portland Stone buildings was strange, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Government would leave them or demolish them in the event of wide scale permanent flooding. When they were building resevoirs up north during the 40s and 50s, they evicted a lot of villages and demolished them before flooding the vallies; there weren’t just submerged villages. I think it was mainly so there was no risk of contaminating the drinking resevoirs with bits of old house, but I suppose if you wanted to re-establish the Thames basin as a shipping area you couldn’t really have bits of old London jutting up above the surface of the sea, waiting to collapse on a passing boat, or lurking beneath the waves waiting to rip open the hull of a tanker. If it was deep enough underwater they might leave it; I remember they didn’t demolish a 12th century Church when they flooded one resevoir and in the last few years because of drought the steeple and later the whole Church ended up above water during summer. They think there’s going to be a really bad drought this year actually - it was a dry winter, and there’s a hosepipe ban in force from next month. But yeah, I looked at the flood maps and most of London would be gone. I’d be OK, I’m on a really high point - so I suppose my house would remain into the future, assuming they didn’t bulldose the coastlines to resettle all of London. I think I prefer the BBC to a lot of other channels because they don’t beat around the bush with this sort of thing. I was listening to an interview with a female comedian who was revisiting her childhood in South London and she was saying Croydon would probably suffer greatly when we hit peak oil and people couldn’t afford to drive anywhere. There was none of that “Well, peak oil probably won’t happen…” bluster you get on some channels. It was refreshing. But anyway those rings are an absolute worst case scenario and it’s unlikely to be quite that bad, although I daresay Big Ben’s a goner.
I’ve really rabbited on, haven’t I? I’ll stop now. But oh yeah, that last photo is a cupcake someone made for me on the last day of term. It says my name and has my favourite beverage on it! I love the girls at Uni, they’re such a laugh.
8:16 pm • 28 March 2012
