ganching

Ten Things I Have Never Done

1.   Eaten a Krispy Kreme doughnut.
2.   Visited Italy.
3.   Married someone.
4.   Joined a gym.
5.   Flown on Concorde.
6.   Been to a circus/pantomime.
7.   Got the sack.
8.   Bought The Sun/Times.
9.   Learnt to play a musical instrument.
10.  Written a novel.

Not doing one of these things I consider to be the greatest tragedy of my life, two of these things I intend to do before I am very much older, two others may remain a fantasy and four I have no intention of ever doing.

Ten Professional Chat-Up Lines

Sometimes you have an idea for a post....

1.  I really like your active frontage!  Urban Designer

2.  Hmmm, your bilabial articulation is something else!  Phonologist

3.  Open wide.  Dentist

4.  Is that a modal shift or are you just pleased to see me?  Traffic Engineer

5.  There's a ridge of high pressure coming your way!  Weather Forecaster

6.  Let's trade emissions.  Environmentalist

7.  Would you like to see my incense swinger?  Anglican Bishop

8. Lost diet mixed up (4,2,2).  Cryptic Crossword Setter

9. Would you like me to give you some heads of terms?  Lawyer

10. Oi my friend thinks you've got really nice.......  IT Person

.....that you know really belongs in another kind of blog altogether.  I think you'll need to go here to get an idea of what I mean.

London - Keep Calm And Carry On

  London 
  Originally uploaded by ganching1

London survived the blitz so no doubt we'll cope with having a racist toff in charge of us all.

Maybe you have to live in London to understand why, for many of us, today is a very grim day indeed.  Whatever Ken's faults and he had many, he cared about London and he cared about the infrastructure of this city.  Public transport has improved beyond recognition and he has forced housing developers to up their game significantly in the capital.  The Ken of today is very different from the Ken of GLC days.  He has been quite happy to embrace big business and he didn't stand up to the police following the Stocklwell shooting but he has still remained someone who ordinary Londoners could identify with.  Like all politicians he was arrogant but not so arrogant that he didn't queue in the cafe at City Hall and use the tube to get work. I went to a meeting with him a few months ago and his understanding of the detail of what we were talking about was impressive. He also made us all laugh.

Boris Johnson is clever and sometimes very funny, in a sort of mildly racist, homophobic way.  No doubt his advisors will continue to try and stop him calling black children "piccaninnies" and so far he has been gracious in his victory...but, but underneath it all he's still a posh Eton-educated Tory with little or no obvious interest in London.  As far as I can tell his policies consist of bringing back a new Routemaster bus (which if it actually happens will take at least five years) and putting 400 more police officers on the streets. 

It could have been worse.  Perhaps next time the Evening Standard will be backing Jade Goodie.

On Form Filling

I have worked out why identity fraud is so widespread in the UK. It’s because most forms are so difficult to fill in that only someone with the fiendish intelligence of a master criminal knows how to complete them.  The rest of us just decide that driving or going abroad are very overrated activities and not worth of pain of applying for a new driving licence/passport.  I moved four months ago and have only now got round to sorting out my driving licence  and I'm only doing it because I am planning to hire a car within the next few weeks.

I estimate that so far, trying to get a new licence has taken me about 15 hours to sort out.

1 hour researching what to do if you change address and need a new photo licence.

0.25 hour spent, once form and explanatory leaflet arrived in post, glancing at both items before stuffing in drawer to be dealt with later.

2.5 hours looking for form and leaflet prompted by need to sort out immediately once realised  due to go to Ireland in next three weeks.

1.5 hours trawling up and down Oxford Street looking for some where to have photographs taken.

0.5 hour spent in Jessops having photograph taken.

3.25  hours spent feeling miserable about how unattractive photograph makes me look.

2.5 hours attempting to fill in form including 90 minutes of pulling at hair and crying.

1 hour spent explaining to Traybake how and where to sign photograph and form to verify that I am who I say I am including some shrieking on my part in case he went over the line and invalidated whole form.

2 hours worrying myself sick about the idea of putting my driving licence, birth certificate, p60  i.e. complete identity theft package, in an envelope and sending it through the post to Swansea.

1.5  hours spent travelling to post office and taking advice from post office employee on where I had filled in form incorrectly.

Now all I can do is wait.

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Very depressing day in London.  Everyone, with a modicum of wit, spent the day looking suspiciously at fellow Londoners wondering which of them was stupid enough to be taken in by the racist toff, although results still not in so there is still a glimmer of hope that whiny yellow-tied Ken may come back to fight another day.

A Dirty Clart

  Borage 
  Originally uploaded by ganching1

Yesterday was a really beautiful, early summer day in London.  The temperature hovered around 22C, there was a gentle breeze and the sun didn't stop shining all day.

I spent 3 hours in the garden weeding.  Mostly I was trying to get rid of borage which I used to think was quite an attractive plant until I saw swathes of it in our garden and on every piece of uncultivated land within a mile of here. It is very, very invasive and I assume is native to South London. We certainly never had it in Islington.  It is a typical South London species in that it is tough, hairy and everywhere.  The delicate little flowers are like a tattoo on the upper arm of a bare knuckle fist fighter and bear no relation to the thick root of the plant that lurks underground resisting all attempts to dig it out.

In the afternoon I accidentally went for a 6 mile walk.  I was feeling a bit cabin feverish and decided to go somewhere.  I rang Traybake who was at his Institution experimenting on small sentences and he suggested we meet at Borough market.

The idea of Borough Market is wonderful  but the reality of it is something else.  It is always hideously packed with jostling people and there are massive queues everywhere. 

TB and I managed to find each other and I persuaded him it would be  a good idea to walk part of the way home.  We were strolling past some not too bad, recent housing developments when TB asked me if I had listened to a programme on R4 about people with OCD.  I hadn't heard it but according to TB it was about how a perfectly normal woman had been fooled into thinking there was something wrong with her behaviour.  I asked for an example.

TB explained that one of the "symptoms" or examples of ritualistic behaviours the woman exhibited was an inability to put her shopping bags on the kitchen counters or table when she was unpacking her food.  The reason she had to put them on the floor was because in transit between the supermarket and home the bags would have come into contact with dirt and she couldn't cope with the idea that this dirt might get on to the counters or the table. TB believes this to be normal behaviour and anyone who doesn't do this is a dirty clart.  Hmmm.

We kept on walking until we were lost although as we always had the Thames on our lefthand side we were never really lost.  This stretch of the Thames is almost completly lined with new housing and most of it is awful.  We went through Bermondsey, Rotherhite and Deptford where we veered away from the river.  We were walking up Deptford High Street which is very narrow and full of the kind of little shops where you can buy pie and mash and pigs' trotters and skin lightening treatments when Traybake reminded me of the high crime rate of this neighbourhood.

"You'd be taking your life in your hands going into one of those pubs.  Look what happened to Christopher Marlowe!".

Today I am in agony.  Every muscle aches and I am herpling about the place like a woman twice my age.

Barriers

I did something for the first time ever on Sunday; I went to see the  Thames Barrier close up.  Traybake, Soda Farl and I had a plan to go for a walk outside London but because I have had serious manflu for weeks I didn't feel up for the level of anxiety walking in the country with TB and SF would cause me.  Instead we all set off to go to the Thames Barrier.  Like most normal  women I am fascinated by engineering and in particular engineering projects from the 1960s and 70s.  The Thames Barrier was conceived in the 70s although didn't become operational until the early 1980s.

There was a time when London flooded regularly.  A friend of mine who comes from New Zealand, told me her grandmother, originally an East End gel, was really concerned when she heard she was moving to London because of the dangers she was facing due to imminent drowning.

Three of us started on the trek along the Thames but only two of us completed it.  Following two glasses of wine at lunchtime SF gave up and walked home.  The intrepid TB and I carried on.

The Thames is very wide at the point where the barrier is and it looks as if someone has come along, dismantled the Sydney Opera House and deposited in the river.  I think it is stunning.  TB was less enthusiastic.   I have noticed that academics don't like these kinds of things being naturally inclined towards  Ludditism.  I am sure if someone tried to give TB a newfangled piece of technology, for example a solar powered pocket calculator, he would have no idea what it was but he would know that he didn't like it.

We caught the river bus part of the way home and I have decided that I am going to start using this service if I'm in central London at the weekend. 

Tonight I have a date with Tony Curtis.

  Thames Barrier 
  Originally uploaded by ganching1

Poetry By Numbers

A welcome weekend
with Mister David,
adventurer, stargazer.

In the pantry
cream, baked cherry,
pea-green olive oil,
shrimp pink
on bone china blue.

Garden with stock, hollyhock,
a lemon tree,
a stone-pale-cool sundial.
Cricket whites.

Under the gentle sky
the echo of a linnet.

I am beginning to think about decorating.   When I got the flat the decor was in reasonably good order in the sense that it was clean and there weren't too many marks or lighter squares where pictures had been hung.  The problem is the colour.  Apart from the living room which isn't too bad, the rest of it is painted the sort of pinkish-yellow hue that your skin takes on just before you are about to be sick.  I am tempted to  paint everything white but I  am trying to resist .  I have been perusing paint charts.  In particular the Little Greene paint company colours.

A welcome weekend
with Mister David,
adventurer, stargazer.

In the pantry
cream, baked cherry,
pea-green olive oil,
shrimp pink
on bone china blue.

Garden with stock, hollyhock,
a lemon tree.
a stone-pale-cool sundial.
Cricket whites.

Under the gentle sky
the echo of a linnet.

Bad News

I went to the health centre today and got some bad news.  I had to see the nurse for a routine test and she decided, while she had me in there, to check my general health.

The first thing she did was test my blood pressure.  I do not understand blood pressure and please, don't attempt to explain it to me because I never will understand it.  It was either 60 over 120 or 120 over 60 - whichever one of those which means you are not already dead.  I have to say at this stage I was feeling a little bit smug to have such a good result. 

Next she asked me about how much I smoked and drank. (This reminded me of the time that Soda Farl was taken into hospital to have emergency surgery.  The young doctor who was admitting him asked how much he drank and SF told him about 20 units.  The doctor looked almost as ashen as SF who was suffering from appendicitis at the time, and wrote in the form, 20 pints a night. Luckily SF could read upside down and was able to correct him.)  I told the nurse that I didn't smoke or drink at all.  Now, it is a well known fact that everyone lies about how much they drink and, as a rule, medical people double the amount that you tell them anyway so I have no idea what double nothing is in this context.

The next thing she did was measure me and I have to say I was devastated by the results.  For the last 150 years or at least since I was 14, I have been 5'8". I always knew that I was actually a fraction under that but that was my business.  Today the nurse told me that I am officially 5'7".  I have lost an inch.  In my book this makes me a shortarse.  I will probably have to start buying my clothes in the petite ranges in department stores.  But no, there was more bad news to come.

"Just pop on the scales for me."

I have never voluntarily "popped" on to weighing scales in my life. Rather I've approached them with a degree of dread and the certain knowledge that I am going to feel worse in a couple of seconds.  The nurse told me my weight.  I am not completely delusional and I know there has been a certain broadening of the beam in last few years so I am not surprised that the number is bigger than it was the last time I weighed myself in 2001.  The nurse then checked her BMI chart to see what category I fall into.  It appears that I am two slices of cream cake or a sliver of cheddar cheese away from falling out of the healthy range. I will have to start buying my clothes in the "short 'n sturdy" section of the department stores. 

I went out for lunch with Mars Bars afterwards and complained bitterly to her about my experience.  I also had one of the unhealthiest lunches that I've had in a long time - with chips.  Tomorrow a new regime begins.

Nightly Bile Beans

  Nightly Bile Beans 
  Originally uploaded by ganching1

I enjoyed my little trip to York despite the terrible weather and the rather eccentric B&B that I stayed in.  The bathroom was unbelievably tiny and the toilet was so close to the wall that it was only possible to have a wee while sitting sideways.

As always I was reminded of how different London is to the rest of the country.  Yorkshire was several degrees colder than here and spring is at least two or three weeks behind us.

They also have a slightly different attitude towards security.

In London it is becoming increasingly more difficult to take photographs in public places due to "terrorism".  The following would be a typical scenario:

A woman in her early 40s and her daughter are walking through Kings Cross station. The girl is chattering excitedly to her mother while clutching a copy of Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen.  The two of them stop between platform 9 and 10 and the woman takes out her camera and begins photographing her little girl.  In a flash the pair are surrounded by three police officers dressed in boilersuits and with truncheons, handcuffs and radios swinging from their persons.  The policemen are all shouting, the woman is shaking, no doubt being painfully reminded of the days of the Stasi, and the little girl is crying.  The officers make the women hand over the camera and begin deleting her photographs.

Meanwhile at York station

Two Japenese women are taking photographs inside the station within sight of a policeman who is chatting to the man behind the information stall.  I notice the policeman looking at the women and begin to feel nervous on their behalf. I am momentarily distracted and when I next look the policeman and the two women are talking.  I overhear the policeman say, 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to charge you!' The policeman is exceptionally tall and looks even taller because he is wearing a pointy Yorkshire policeman hat and the Japanese women look very small and vulnerable beside him. 'This is Yorkshire and in Yorkshire you get owt for nowt!  It'll be a fiver or a tenner if you want me to smile.'  Everyone starts laughing, the two women stand on either side of the policeman  linking arms with him while the information man takes their photographs.

Aren't our British policemen the best in the world?

A Seat With A View

Two Korean men photographing each other between platforms 9 and 10; the Emirates stadium gleaming in the mid-morning sunlight; Ally Pally up on the hill; suburban houses with Volvos parked outside; blossoming cherry trees; dying daffodils; cheap developer housing with meanly proportioned windows and stripy brickwork;  a grey church marooned in a sea of green fields; a silver, straight as a ruler canal; a field full of  half-blooming yellow rape; a man ploughing with a vapour trail of seagulls swirling behind his tractor;  gigantic distribution sheds; a town river dotted with swans; rows of poplars; rain clouds; wilows with new leaves as pale as lettuce; a Victorian arched bridge; hawthorns white with blossom and the promise of bad luck; a pheasant foraging in a hedgerow; wet, shiny tarmacademed roads; damp washing on a back garden clothes line; yellow whin bushes; black and white lapwings semaphoring across a field; blue and red daubed lambs; pylons marching cross-country; a Nissan hut; a dead crow strung between two poles in a newly-planted field; an Asda with every space in its car park filled; a GNER train rattling past; builders' yards; buddleia bushes still covered in last year's dead flower heads; scrubby land; an oxbow lake; fishermen next to squat green tents; a miniature windmill in a garden; a lone heron; five kilns like oversized upside down terracotta flower pots; steam belching on the horizon; cars waiting at a level crossing; spindly ash trees with pale, peeling trunks; reed beds; black-headed gulls; men on the tracks with orange waistcoats and white helmets; edge-of-town business parks; tower blocks; daffodils still in bloom; a man pushing a woman's bicycle; trainspotters with digital cameras; a man wearing an anorak over his suit with a red tie resting on the curve of his belly; a multi-storey car park next to Debenhams; a long, concrete road bridge spanning half a dozen railway tracks;  industrial buildings; low-slung ponies grazing next to a caravan; flat green fields; red-brick tall-chimneyed houses; the name York painted in white letters next to the railway line.