Wednesday Window

Watching the window dresser at Fortnum and Mason on Piccadilly.

Cityshapes - Carousels

Towers of London

No reason … I just enjoyed stitching all the photographs together.

Cityshapes - Patterns of Man; Patterns of Nature

Saturday Statuary - Horselips

Look Up

The uncovered and restored ceiling in the Lawyer's Lounge of the Supreme Court (see posts passim). I rather fancy this sort of thing in my bedroom.
The two photos show the way cameras react to differing light (whereas our eyes - or more accurately, our brains - automatically compensate); the first one being lit by the old bronze fittings with incandescent bulbs and the second being reflected daylight.

Beach Hut Art

Wednesday Window - St.Paul's

Cityshapes - Curvaceous

Yellow Dress and Boots

Munch That Lunch

Where better for Tate Modern to advertise its Edvard Munch exhibition than as an eating instruction on the wall of their restaurant?

Saturday Statuary - Bonkers cannon

One of Those

They don't come along very often, so enjoy them when they do: perfect moments.

Breakfast Club this morning and we were thin on the ground, Tony and Terri being in London, but it was a misty-murky, cold autumnal morning; the kind that keeps early shoppers at home and makes for a quiet coffee bar filled with regular readers and with no screaming kids.
Nice.
Phil was reading the rugby pages of the sports section and I was deep in the book reviews, enjoying Virginia Woolf's criticism of Ulysses, smiling at her depiction of Joyce's masterpiece as : "… merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges."
One or other of this week's massed clone army of vaguely folky girl singers was murdering yet another Bob Dylan song in the background and I took the first sip of my second coffee.

Mmmmmmmm …

And suddenly it was 1970 …
Through the dross and out of the coffee shop speakers came - yes, really - the unmistakable sound of Joni singing Circle Game and one of those perfect moments hit me.
The grey world disappeared; the bright, sharp colours of the early seventies (replete with all the emotional baggage of early teendom) flooded over me and for at least half the song I just rode a wave of blissful contentment that only gradually faded.
I tried in vain to hang on to it but those moments are slippery and all too soon it wriggled free and escaped; the people walking past the window swam back into view and the song ended and Joni was replaced by yet another clone trying to sound like Jolie Holland or Regina Spektor; something that merely served to throw into sharp relief the dull, grey-beige soup of nothingness; the morass of worthless sludge that modern 'popular' music has become.
Thank you to whoever does the Pret playlist. More Joni and Bob please, and ditch the clones.

So now I'm home again, armed with a bagful of baby octopus and some crayfish tails and I've dug out my worn vinyl copy of "Ladies of the Canyon" and I'm going to lock the doors and shut out the grey world and wallow in nostalgia (and seafood) all day.

May your weekends contain at least one perfect moment.

The Dark Tower

This is the view from the street (Mincing Lane) of the weird building in yesterday's photo: Minster Court; known to Old Dive as Munster Court because it looks like the kind of place the Addams Family or the Munsters might design as a creepy corporate headquarters.
In reality it is far more scary and evil, being the corporate headquarters for multinational financial monsters.
I hadn't noticed until I looked at yesterday's photo, but it appears to have a kind of cheesy, Las Vegas, Circus-Circus tent affair plonked on the roof; probably where they perform sacrifices.
So next time you're in London, steer well clear of the Dark Tower.

Cityshapes - Guns And Gherkin

Many are the strange and wonderful shapes of modern London. I wonder what those two are saying as they gaze out from the deck of HMS Belfast toward the Gherkin, over the Vegas meets the Addams Family roofscape of Munster Court.
A caption, a story or a comment; what are your thoughts?

Wednesday Window - Shrubbery

Small Change

Machine For Living

WTF Monday - Eejits

 London's South Bank has not been the safest place to walk of late.

They installed a machine for spraying vomit and pee across a wide area.

No, no, a thousand times, no.

Sunday Sequel

Follow-up movies rarely have the same impact as the originals.

Saturday Statuary - Naked Women With Gherkin

 

Hokay, so the post title is going to bring the strange-o perverts out of the woodwork, but what else could I call it? My nerdcounter stats will certainly make entertaining reading tomorrow.

"Felect Cafes"

 Once you've got through the security searches at the Supreme Court, you'll find a pair of glass doors off to one side, with the Magna Carta etched into them (as a record of our first Bill of Rights, but also so you can't see through). Rattle these as much as you like but you won't get in. They're locked and guarded.

Hugh, however, knows the magic password, so we were ushered through into the inner sanctum …

Yay! Books! Welcome to the Supreme Court law library; way off limits to Joe Public. This is where the people who make THE LAW look stuff up (oddly, they don't use Wikipedia).
Reassuringly, this week's Private Eye was tucked away on a back shelf. I even found some books in there that I have on my own shelves, which was kinda cool.

Not as cool as the ceiling, however. Sweet! When this was the council offices, all the stonework was covered up and the place filled with cubicles and filing cabinets. Hugh made a great big hole in the floor, restored the carvings and had new shelves made, together with the lovely glass artwork and inscribed timber panels.

 Here are some of my colleagues looking at the ceiling. It's a beautiful room, made even more beautiful by being filled with books.

The glass art is gorgeous.

And there's even a carved timber phrase that the US of A would do well to read. Might is Shite.

Spiffy, huh? Law reports looked a whole lot better in 1661. This book set me off re-reading Pepys again (a good way to spend the cold winter months).
Law reports actually make really interesting reading. One of my favourite winter books is a four volume set of 'Notable Historical Trials", which is simply the verbatim court proceedings from interesting cases dating from the trial of Socrates through to that of Oscar Wilde. Reading the actual words can be tremendously exciting (as well as utterly horrifying). It certainly hammers home the necessity of having an independent (take note again, America) Supreme Court to kick the Government into line when it gets too big for its boots.
Hope you enjoyed the little tour.

One Of Our Leeks Is Missing

It's not all olde worlde charm and hallucinogenically carved dark timber at the Supreme Court; Court number 2 is bright and airy and modern.
This lovely glass panel is an echo of the etched screen at the start of yesterday's post, only with pretty colours.
Apparently some Welsh folk got uppity because the leek is not in flower while everybody else's emblems are, but that doesn't really matter because in the real world the Welsh don't really matter.

The curtains are spectacularly spiffy; hand made by a Scottish company called Timrous Beasties (check out their website) who I can truthfully say are fucking amazing artists.
That's Hugh, down at the bottom, playing at tour guide as he's the one who did most of the work.

He put a little private joke in the screen at the back of the room: it says "Justice cannot be for one side alone but must be for both", the joke being that it is written so that you can read it from both sides.
I know: Architects need to get out more.

The clock's nice, too. I'd love one of those in my kitchen, but unfortunately there is only one of those and they won't let me have it.

Tomorrow, we'll be exploring the Supreme Court's private law library; a place that's very firmly off limits to the public, so enjoy a privileged peek.

Disrupting The Judicial Process

So, in answer to yesterday's "Where Am I?" post: I was in the Lawyer's Lounge of the Supreme Court. This used to be Middlesex Guildhall, and was a typical English county council office: a mess of cheap furniture, flimsy partitions and overspilling filing cabinets. When Middlesex county council were eventually persuaded to move out to … er … Middlesex, the Government could complete the plan for Parliament Square and convert the place into the Supreme Court.
The Square now has Parliament sitting on one side, Westminster Abbey on another, the Treasury on the third and the Judiciary on the fourth, and is completed by the anti-war protest camp in the middle.

Anyhoo … We're through security, having been scanned, groped, had most of our clothing removed and x-rayed and laughed at Phil who had to hold his trousers up while being frisked. Now let's head up the stairs.
Our London office (the ones to blame for the big crane currently towering over Downing Street) spent rather a lot of years refurbishing this place from top to bottom and we're going to take a look at some of the spiffy things they did, and at the same time poke our noses into places the public never gets to see. Yay!

As the old council - in typical bureaucratic style - had ripped out all the original fittings and replaced them with crappy tiled ceilings and wall-board, we had to use the original drawings and old photos as a basis for putting stuff back. This involved tracking down the firm who made the original lights and getting them to make some more. Ditto the carvings. Spiffy, huh?

This is inside Court No.1. The building is actually a steel-framed structure, dating from around 1909 and lined with limestone. It's in the cross-over Gothic Revival cum Art Nouveau style and the tracery is wonderful. One of our jobs was bomb-proofing these windows. Fun.
Court No.1 was in session but they knew we were coming so they took a recess to allow us to defile their sanctuary. It was strange watching all these Supreme Court judges and barristers filing out of the room and into the lobby just for us.

The carpets were designed by Peter Blake (the Pop artist who did the Sgt. Pepper album cover) and incorporate the English Rose, Scottish Thistle, Welsh Leek and for some strange reason a blue flax flower to represent Northern Ireland. The seats were rescued from the old council chamber, where they were the only remaining bits of original furniture. Love the scary hare hand rest. Very Alice.

This is where the Supreme Court sits to make and amend our laws. And that's Dale, scratching his name into the desk.
More rooms tomorrow.

Where Am I?

Time for another "Where Am I?" post. This one has lots of clues in the photo, but "London" or "Westminster" or even "Parliament Square" won't do (yes, that's Nelson Mandela's statue, and yes, it says "Parliament Square" on the signpost). I'm in a particular room in a particular building and your challenge today is to tell me precisely where.
More on the building coming up later in the week.

The One o'Clock Balloon

Number 36: The Lesser Forkbeard

Just so you know …

WTF Monday - Mudbusker

At low tide, the Thames throws up all manner of wrack.

Look between the jetty stanchions …

… to find that the receding waters have deposited a busker on the mud of the exposed river bottom.

He was pretty awful.

I couldn't be bothered waiting for the tide to reclaim him so I moved on.

I had the added incentive that the weather was turning nasty.
 Look at St.Paul's in the previous post and look at it in this one; they were only taken twenty minutes apart.