City skylines are always so inspiring - where the big clutter meets the wide open space. Stopped at a traffic light near St Pauls this morning, I watched a crane slowly life a plum-line over Farringdon. Grace and beauty, in stark contrast to the snarling clutter of random traffic and people scuttling below.
Archive for February, 2001
Went to visit John & Sue last night, also met Sarah there. John told us about his father, showing us the many mugs commemorating trades union activities, the womens movement and the Spanish Civil War which he had made or commisioned. John told us of when his father worked somewhere (glue factory??) along with 30 women. One day, a woman came down to the shop floor in tears - it turns out the lift operator had been harassing her (and all the other women there), groping them in the lift. John’s father said “well, you know what to do?” - “No” - “Well, there are 30 of you” - “So what do we do?” - “Do I really need to spell it out???”
The lift operator was subsequently hospitalized - they had to get his testicles unglued somehow. Come February 14th, John’s dad got 30 valentines cards.
This morning’s dream - I wanted a computer game, needed a computer game. I think it was some Tekken-style combat thing. I sent Hannah to buy it, but told her to get something as close as possible if they didn’t have the exact one - for some reason I just had to play something new. She came back with something very disappointing - must’ve been written around about the time when 286 PC’s were the latest thing and Windows 286 was the hottest operating system in town. Couldn’t bring myself to play it. Oh well.
Had planned to see Caroline and John play last night. As the gig didn’t start until 8.30pm, I had time to kill beforehand. Hung around in the bar at work with Niina for… too long, probably. Had 1 too many drinks, probably. I finally donned my cycling hear and headed for the gig around 9pm.
At least that’s where I tried to head. I found my way to Vauxhall OK, then checked the MapBlast! directions I’d downloaded to my Handspring earlier. I’d forgotten to include the bloody map, and the text directions were quite useless. Cycled around and around Vauxhall in ever-decreasing circles without ever finding the venue.
So instead, I decided to take the Zen route home. Headed off into South London, tacking from street to street like a demented sailing boat. I felt certain I was headed in the right direction, but before I knew what was happening (could it be that I blacked out while cycling for a while there?) I found myself at a crossroads on the South Circular, with Crystal Palace signposted straight ahead, Dulwich and Lewisham to my left and Clapham to the right. My rudimentary geography of South London told me that I had probably gone too far South. I took the East turn, towards Dulwich, and soon found a signpost to Dulwich Village. Never having seen our former prime-minister’s former home, I thought I’d spin off in that direction.
Dulwich Village was a bizarre anachronism - twee rurality dumped into the heart of London. It had the feel of Highgate Village or Petersham, wide gravel pavements edged with chain-linked white concrete posts and banking grass verges, neo-Gothic shopfronts and pubs spaced out by parks and footpaths. It seemed fairly naff, but at the same time reminded me of “Grandpa’s London” - Highgate Village, so self-assured in its high status that it’s not ashamed to be musty, dusty, fraying at the edges. Perhaps that was because I caught that time during a decline, but that’s how it always seemed to me. I prefer this kind of comfortable lazy affluence to the noveau-noveau riche need to showcase the latest polished clinical fashion in every aspect of their lives.
Dulwich Village gradually turned into Red Post Hill; they even have a hill here, like Highgate and Petersham and unlike most of the rest of London. Not a proper, Sheffield hill, but steeper than anything I had encountered in my last few weeks’ cycling. Does the money follow the landscape, or does the ground swell up wherever old money is to be found?
I emerged in Herne Hill, which sounds like it ought to belong somewhere in Suffolk, but was actually far more urban than Dulwich. I headed towards Camberwell (and almost back to Kennington, where this whole crazy adventure had started). At Camberwell Green, hunger finally got the better of me - despite having eaten a healthy dinner, the number of curry and chip shops passed on my route had exerted an irresistable pull on my stomach. I managed to save my conscience and my guts by sticking to houmus and salad, which I tried to keep in my mouth and off the floor while pushing my bike along Camberwell Church Street. I passed the gallery - was it really only today that Niina and I discussed this place, seems like lifetimes ago.
The landscape started to get familiar once again - unavoidable Peckham! Just as any random North London trip draws one into the unrelenting clutches of the Stoke Newington triangle, so visitors to the South of the river must be wary to avoid getting sucked in by the Peckham tug. I worked up enough centrifugal force to slingshot myself out of its evil grasp, and meandered safely again through New Cross, past the pub where I saw John when he played with the Revs all those years ago. Finally made it into the Greenwich one-way, up onto the Cutty Sark Gardens and down Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s wonderful Greenwich Foot Tunnel. Cycling down the (mile-long?) tunnel is strictly forbidden, so I felt rather nervous sitting on my back, shuffling along in front of a bunch of engineers who were doing overnight work on the lifts. Needn’t have worried - as I passed, one called a friendly “watch yourself at the other end mate, there’s a box up there”.
Emerging onto the Isle of Dogs, a clock stuck - I sat still and listened to the 11 bells while gazing at the night river skyline. From here the 3 miles or so back to Bow seemed like nothing compared to the distance I had already covered. One Canada Square watched over me, steaming benevolently, from Canary Wharf, while two towers alongside struggled to be the highest in Europe, but failed. An old man hobbled across the pavement in Canning Town, mumbling forgotten thoughts to himself. The flat door opened, I went in and shrunk into the bed, where I lay writing letter for the next hour before sleeping.
Walking down the King’s Road at lunch time, saw an old woman standing on the very edge of the pavement, facing along the road. She was stiller than a statue, stiller even than a street performer pretending to be a statue. Her eyes were trained on the traffic at a fixed point in the distance, scanning the incoming data for a pattern matching that of a London cab. Her arm was raised to a horizontal in front of her, minimizing the time and effort required to lift it up 45 degrees once a taxi came into view. Arresting.
Luckily not arresting were the many yellow-coated policemen scattered in front of shops at intervals along the King’s Road. Obviously something big about to happen. Two of them, a short one and a tall one, reminded me of the two stupid policemen that used to crop up from time to time on the Young Ones making inane comments:
[Two policemen are standing guard.]
COP #1: ‘Course you see, I look at life like this. <TILTS his head>
COP #2: Why’s that? Problems?
COP #1: Yeah. Had a heavy bust-up this morning with my lady.
COP #2: W. P. C…?
COP #1: Dunno, I never could remember her name… umm… it’s got a four in it, it’s got a four, ’cause I remember, it was a round one, like that. <DRAWS circle in the air>
COP #2: Has it got a tail?
COP #1: Yeah.
COP #2: <PAUSE>That’s a Q.
COP #1: Yeah?
COP #2: Yeah. Pretty sure.
COP #1: We’d been goin’ out ‘kin years.
COP #2: <PAUSE>How long?
COP #1: ‘kin years…I reckon if I played me cards right, I could’ve, you know…<BENDS his knee inward>
COP #2: Kneed her in the groin?
COP #1: No, the other one.
COP #2: Slept with her?
COP #1: Yeah.
COP #2: Yeah.
COP #1: I reckon I could have slept with her, if it wasn’t for something I said. But we had a row, and uh… I said something about the Pope.
COP #2: That’s a bit stupid, you know she’s Catholic.
COP #1: Yeah, I know she’s Catholic, I didn’t know the Pope was.
COP #2: Heh. That’s a laugh, eh, ain’t it?
COP #1: What?
COP #2: That noise you make in the back of your throat when you hear a joke.
COP #1: Yeah, that’s a laugh. <NODS>
COP #2: <NODS>
[The shot of the cops freezes and expands, as it becomes a photo on
the front page of The Guardian, which RICK is reading. The headline says, “POLICE I.Q. SHOCKER”.]
Aargh! Crisis to deal with! But it took me about 2 minutes to get to the root of the problem (and 100 seconds of that was finding the right file to look in) while everyone else had been staring at it for ages - nice to be reminded that I do have a use once in a while.
The problem was on Chewchat - people were receiving the wrong messages! Aargh - our worst nightmare! Turns out, Guy who wrote the code made it insert each new message into the database, and then retrieve the message by selecting the most recently inserted item in the database - fine while you only have a few entries going in, but when (as now) the site goes ballistic and loads of people are sending messages, the last message inserted is not guaranteed to be the message inserted by the current process.
Got Tim fixing it now. Thanks god.
Had a wierd, wonderful and detailed dream - perhaps only remembered because I had to wake up at 4.30am to catch the train to London, and doing so caught me mid-dream. As is always the case, I remember very little of the details or the early stages of the dream, more of the feel of it. I was together with my family - extended version, the same people who accompany us to family camps (Gill, Rowan and Morgan, obviously, plus my Mum & Dad, Lib, John & Alice. I don’t remember whether Hannah and Jon were also there).
Our group had all been for a meal at some wonderful but bizarre restaurant - the restaurant was largely open air (or under that type of clear-plastic tent that you might find used to cover a patio). It seemed to fill a whole forest (of the old English beech variety - lots of big leafy spaces and a carpet of rust-orange leaves glowing from the floor) and other areas of countryside. We had finished our meal and paid, and were in the act of leaving when I discovered from the waiter that Guy & Annick were eating at the same establishment.
I had wanted to see Guy earlier, but he had told me that he had a prior engagement. Now I knew what it was. Of course, only being happy with the finest things in life, he had opted for the prime table in the restaurant - which was also the table deepest into the woods. Now, this restaurant you see played a little like an adventure game - to get through it you had to solve certain tasks and dodge certain adversaries. Some of these, of course, I was already familiar with, having dealt with them in the trek to reach our own table. But I was concerned at what challenges I might face later on in the game (and, of course, being an adventure game, the puzzles got tougher the futher one went). My family were disparaging, wanting simply to leave quickly, but they allowed me my whim. I gradually realised, with growing fear, that it would be more than this - it could take me hours, days, weeks to solve the remaining puzzles, and there was no guarantee that I would return alive - perhaps some cunning wood goblin would pick me off with an arrow, or another foe would vanquish me with similar ease.
But set off I did. The early puzzles, which I had solved once already, merely served to bore me. I remember cycling with Lib, John and Alice for what seemed like miles, up and down hills, waiting for the slower cyclists to catch up at the crest of every hill. Later parts confused me, and merged one into another. The restaurant’s mysterious gardener seemed to appear in many of them; a dark, mysterious figure in thick soiled gloves, he spent much of his time loitering in a greenhouse, and would not have looked out of place inhabiting a Thomas Hardy novel, the author giving him an unusual name such as Zadoc which sounded both noble and low.
Sadly, just as this dream starts to sound interesting, my memory begins to fade and merge. I did complete many tasks, got scared out of my wits on a number of occasions, puzzled over seemingly insoluble problems, but ultimately didn’t reach Guy & Annick (although I did find time to imagine their surprise on seeing me - “wow! We never expected to see you here, so glad you managed to track us down” - but tempered with a little uncertainty - they had obviously been dwelling on deeply personal matters and were somewhat uncomfortable at having their summit interrupted at a crucial stage).
beep beep Beep Beep BEEP BEEP BEEP! The alarm on my phone went, I leapt out of bed, and the mystery adventure restaunt in the woods disappeared into the back of my mind forever.
I’m currently busy trying to learn that a thing doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth doing. I waste most of my life on projects that I never finish because I’m not happy to release them to the world at large.
My epitaph should be as a Failed Perfectionist
Just as Gödel showed that any sufficiently complex mathematical system is not complex enough to describe itself (or something like that), so any sufficiently worthy human endeavour is doomed never to meet its objectives, although it may well do plenty of worthy things on the way.
Yesterday, after a leisurely shopping trip around Sheffield (leisurely mainly because we had to stop off at a café every 20 minutes or so, to allow Gill to breast-feed Morgan), we popped into the Graves Gallery. One of their exhibitions was of the work of John Hoyland; it was wonderful - huge, huge canvases (in an almost suitably large space) splatted with simple bright colours. I wrote in the guest book that it made me want to dance. Almost everyone else who had written seemed to love the show too, although one person said that it was an “insult to call this art - a 3 year-old could do better”. Rowan seemed to be of a similar opinion: her very words were “I could make a painting like that - it’s not very special, there’s nothing clever about it, just colours”.
Also in the gallery was “Changing Galleries”, a workshop event. Visitors were given cardboard boxes and encouraged to fill and decorate them using the large array of materials on hand. I think Rowan’s attempt was more guided by her abilities than her favourite things - she stuck coloured material and tissue paper on the surface of her box (as well as sticking a cup cut from an egg-box inside, which she said was a nutshell) and she told the helper that her favourite things were “yellow, red and green”. I scrawled “Snuggles” on the big roll of paper hanging from the wall, and made a person - body of 2 egg-box cups, head of another, covered in felt and with arms & hands of rolled up felt. The arms I then wrapped around another, smaller person - body of 1 egg-box cup, head of a smaller cup from between the eggs. I stuck my snuggles sculpture into Rowan’s box, and felt a glow of creativity - it was the first “thing” I had made in years, really made me feel good to do something with my hands for a change. Photos of us artists holding our creations will be made into a montage for the opening of the new Millennium Galleries.
Found this card from Alison & Nic today while tidying up - beautiful. Makes me want to visit the Lost Gardens but at the moment I’d find it easier to get to America than to Cornwall.
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