Category: How the mind works

Collecting footbridges

I am a collector, and a way for me to satisfy this itch without taking up too much physical space is to collect not particular things, but photos of particular things. I collect such photos by finding them in the big wide world, mostly the London bit. But I also find such photos in my already vast but mostly very incoherent collections of photos that I have already taken, stored on my hard disk in directories with titles like “Misc(51)Aug2011”.

Typically, I start collecting a particular sort of photo even before I realise that I am doing it.

Rather recently, for instance, I have started noticing footbridges in a big way, conscious that I am doing this. But in truth, I have always been entertained by footbridges, especially urban footbridges that join buildings together, and have long been photoing them. But the tendency has been, after photoing such a bridge, to forget about it, and to move on immediately to the next photo-op.

Today, while clicking away pretty much at random among my many photo-directories, I came across this photo, in Misc(51)Aug2011:

That particular footbridge connects the back of the Coward Theatre with the back of the Wyndham’s Theatre. I know this because immediately after taking the above photo of the footbridge, taken at 19:58pm, I took the following two snaps, also taken at 19:58pm:


If you look carefully in the footbridge photo, you can see both of these signs, which are on opposite sides of St Martin’s Court, near Leicester Square, in London’s Theatreland. What exactly is transported across this bridge – scenery?, props?, actors? – I do not know. Cleverer and more determined googlers than I could perhaps quickly learn. That these two signs match suggests quite a lot of cooperation, that has been going on for quite a while. Common ownership, perhaps? Sorry about the Wyndham’s photo being so blurry. What matters is that it is legible.

As time passes, I will spend less time out and about taking yet more photos. One of the things I hope then to be doing instead is rootling through my existing photo-collections, collecting, e.g. all the photos I have already taken of footbridges, and putting them into one giant directory, of footbridges, and then showing them here, and thinking about them aloud.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Magnificent The Wires! sculpture gets noticed because of a concrete temple next to it

Yes, a truly wonderful The Wires! sculpture gets long overdue recognition from Dezeen, on account of a lump of religious concrete being put next to it, by an architect.

The photographer clearly loves The Wires!:

But Dezeen’s writers are under strict orders.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful and intricate The Wires! are:

The rule is set in concrete.

Don’t mention The Wires!

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Food memories from the outer suburbs

Photographs are, as all the world has recently been learning, except those whose business – paid or unpaid – it is to complain about what all the world has recently been learning, a wonderful aid to memory.

And many of the happiest memories of our extraordinarily comfortable and frequently very happy times involve food. So – and the complainers complain about it with a venom they seem to reserve only for this, and for selfies – people now like to photo food. Food that they have themselves prepared. And food that others have prepared for them.

And I like to photo them photoing the food. This also makes happy memories.

Man prepares meat: Man photos meat: Man prepares salad: Man photos salad:

These are happy memories from last August. Visit to friends in the outer suburbs.

The outer suburbs? What do they look like? Well, one of the things they look like (horizontalisation opportunity) is this:

That’s the large patch of grass, beyond the back wall of their back garden. And sadly, although those things in the distance do vaguely resemble Big Things, they are actually rather smaller trees.

We are beyond the “Green Belt”. The above photo, especially if clicked on, offers a glimpse of what the Green Belt might usefully be turned into, instead of it remaining for ever the wasteland of pointless open space that it is now. It would need livening up a bit. A bit of open-caste mining, or a temporary phase as a juvenile race track? Then let nature take its course, and you’ll have a lovely place. Apparently some industrial type activity (gravel?) is about to happen in that particular stretch of grass. That will stir up some interesting nature, when the industrialising is done.

Finally, this being Friday, here is a visitor to our jollifications who dropped by that afternoon:

Like many cats in places like this, this cat seems to have a basic home of basic benefactors, and daily rounds to visit other potential and not-so-basic benefactors. This visitor acquired no happy food memories with his/her visit, on the day I photoed him/her. Not that day.

But I have plenty. Without my camera, these memories would soon have gone.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A new Grand Chose for Paris

More Dezeen catching up. And this time the news is that Paris is about to get its first truly Grand Chose since the Montparnasse Tower.

Paris is, in certain Parisian minds anyway, suffering from London Big Thing Envy, and they want to change the place.

“The change in regulations is a historic moment,” the architects told Dezeen. “Paris is cautiously allowing tall buildings back into the city.”

Like Ken Livingstone, who did so much to make London’s recent Big Things happen, some of the Parisians angling most powerfully for Grand Choses are socialists.

But Big Things fit right in in London. In London the antiquarian tendency is weak when confronted by the We Want More Office Space tendency. But in Paris, it is the other way around. Paris already has a look that lots of people like, and scattering Grand Choses all over it will radically change that look. London has always grown in big ugly bursts of money-making, which everyone then gets used to and decides they like, so Big Things are just the latest version of a regular London process. Paris was kind of perfect in the late nineteenth century, and since then it has been half city, half museum. It was then neither bombed nor redeveloped by socialist maniacs, as London was. It will be interesting to see if this transformation of Paris can be made to stick or whether it will be stopped in its tracks once again.

The opposition is gathering. This particular Grand Chose has already been dubbed a poor man’s Shard, and in truth it really does look like a cross between the Shard and this infamous North Korean structure.

See also this earlier posting about Paris here, here.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

What writing for Samizdata should now (for me) mean

This is another of those “memo to self” postings. Well, really, all the postings here are memos to self, but this one is more than usually of that sort.

Earlier today, I managed, at last, finally, to do a Samizdata posting, after a gap of well over a month. It seems to have been quite well received, which is very nice, but really the big thing for me now is that I have done it, well received or not.

And in the course of doing it, I think I have identified an error in my thinking about how I should be writing for Samizdata. I think I was in the grip of what “writing for Samizdata” was supposed to be, for me, and what writing for Samizdata was supposed to be was writing one or nearly one Samizdata posting per day. And then, there came a time when I was unable to do this. And since I couldn’t do it, I pretty much stopped doing it. By aiming at too difficult a target, I was failing, day after day, and that made me just give up totally. That is very silly. But that, I think, is part of what was happening.

But now I think the time has come (in fact the change is long overdue) to revise my model of what writing for Samizdata should now, for me, mean. Me writing for Samizdata means not that I post something on Samizdata pretty much every day, but rather, that I work on my next Samizdata posting, pretty much every day. This means, for example, that by close of play tomorrow, I should have made some headway, not necessarily very much headway, just some headway, towards doing another posting there. The sequence of events will be: decide what to write about at Samizdata, and then start. Make some headway every day. Work at it. Polish it. Try to make it good. When it is good, or seems so, then publish. And if that takes a week, it takes a week. The idea of doing something once a day survives, but not in the form of a finished blog posting once a day, just some work on a blog posting, every day. Believe it or not, I took several days to concoct this latest posting, coming back to it again and again. And that felt like the way I should now be doing it.

The thing is, posting something here every day is quite easy. Not a total breeze you understand, but quite easy. This is because my standards here are very low. When I say something, I do mean something, aka anything. But Samizdata demands stuff that is better than that. It demands stuff that has been polished, worked on, really thought about. In 2005 you could shovel any old junk onto Samizdata and get thousands of readers, and we did, and actually it was pretty good stuff because we had all spent the previous quarter of a century thinking about it, and because we knew that thousands of people were reading it, and commenting in their hundreds. Now, that doesn’t work, or not for me. I now feel that Samizdata, unlike this place, needs better than just any old thing if it is to compete with the mainstream internet media, as it now does.

We shall see.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Out and about with GD1 (3): Baritone borrows my charger

Yesterday I wrote here about the twenty-first century social obligation to use a mobile phone when meeting up with someone, because of the problems this solves and despite the problems this creates. Hence the need for me to take my mobile phone with me when going photowalkabout with G(od)D(aughter) 1.

But, on Saturday evening, the evening before GD1 and I went on our walk, I was very nearly deprived of my mobile phone, by which I mean deprived of the ability to make use of it.

What happened was that, while I was also out and about on Saturday evening, a baritone-singing student friend of mezzo-soprano-singing student G(od)D(aughter) 2, sought the help of GD2. His mobile had run out of puff and needed a recharge. GD2 uses an iPhone, but Baritone has an Android mobile, so Baritone could not use GD2’s recharger. What to do?

Between them they decided that I and my Android recharger might be the answer. I guess that GD2 then rang me on my immobile home number and discovered that I was out. Then, knowing my aversion and incompetence as a mobile phoner, and especially as a reliable receiver of incoming mobile messages, she did not not attempt to ring me on my mobile. Or, she did try my mobile and I did not answer.

For various reasons that I still don’t understand and which in any case do not now matter, Baritone ended up coming to my home, armed with GD2’s key to my home, and having made his entrance, he “borrowed” my mobile phone recharger.

I want to emphasise that the above quote marks are not sneer quotes. They are confusion quotes.

For, what exactly does it mean to “borrow” a mobile phone charger? What GD2 meant, when she assured Baritone that it would okay for him to “borrow” my phone charger, was that it would be okay for him to charge up his mobile phone, using my charger at my home. As indeed it would have been.

However, Baritone misunderstood this assurance to mean that it would be okay for him to “borrow” my charger, as in: take it away and make use it throughout Saturday evening, in other places besides mine. I don’t believe that Baritone would have done this without that assurance from GD2, as he understood it. After all, whereas charging up your mobile in situ is socially very okay, taking a charger away without permission is surely a twenty-first century social gaff of the first order. But, Baritone thought that he had permission to do this otherwise unacceptable thing. GD2 is adamant that she gave no such permission, but I believe that Baritone genuinely thought that this unusual procedure was, in the light of GD2’s assurance, okay. He made this clear in a written thankyou note he left on my desk.

And it normally would have been okay. Had I not been going on an expedition the following day with GD1, then the charger could have made its way back to my home some time on or around Sunday, and all would have been fine. But, for all the reasons that were explained in the previous posting, I needed that charger by quite early on Sunday morning at the latest.

So, despite GD2s protestations, I acquit Baritone of wrongdoing.

But then again, Baritone is a baritone. And baritones often behave very badly, quite often at the expense of notably virtuous mezzo-sopranos. So maybe I’m being too kind.

All was speedily corrected by GD2, who was rather insulted by the profuseness of my thanks when she brought my charger back at 8am on Sunday morning. Of course I got your charger back. (See what I mean about virtuous mezzo-sopranos.)

It was just as well that I did get it back. In addition to using my mobile for all that meeting up at the start of the day, I also used it for its map app, and to tell me how Surrey were doing against Gloucester. Very well, as it happened. Nothing like your sports team winning to keep you going when you are knackered.

However, I now understand better why people have cameras with mobile phones built into them. What with my bag and all, I was having constantly to choose between knowing where I was, and photoing it.

Surrey are on a bit of a roll just now. This evening they beat Gloucester again, in a T20 slog at the Oval. Surrey needed a mere six runs from the last four balls. So, how did they get them? The last four balls went: wicket, dot, dot, six. In English that’s: probable Surrey victory, possible Surrey victory, almost impossible Surrey victory, Surrey victory. I got that off my laptop, but I could have got it from my mobile, if I had been out and about. Provided it hadn’t run out of puff.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Out and about with GD1 (2): How mobile phones both cause and solve meeting up problems

As everyone else in the world found out several years before I did, a mobile phone is now an essential part of the kit you need to meet up with somebody. So, I made a point of having my mobile with me when G(od)D(aughter) 1 and I met up at Manor House tube last Sunday.

When I arrived there, at our predetermined time, I discovered that Manor House tube has three widely dispersed exits to choose from. Now you may say: “But how many ticket barriers does it have? One.” You are right, but what if the mobile phone reception at the ticket barrier, this ticket barrier being below ground, does not work? I needed to be out in the open.

Mobile phones cause plans to be more muddy and last-minute than they used to be, because that is what these plans can now be. GD1 and I had hoped that “the exit of Manor House tube” would be unambiguous, but we took a chance on that, because we would both have our mobile phones with us, and we could make it up as we went along if things got more complicated.

I picked one of the three exits and looked around for GD1. No sign. I left a phone message and a text message for GD1 saying to her: I am in the Manor Park View Cafe, which is next to the big gate into Finsbury Park, which by then I was. Fifteen minutes later, I rang again, and eventually got through to GD1. She said: “I just sent you a text.” Ah. She was running a bit late, which, now that we all have mobiles, is okay because now such information is easily communicated.

Anyway we duly met up in the Manor Park Cafe, and we consumed consumables while deciding to have our walk anyway, despite the weather being vile, but also deciding that we would wait inside the Manor Park View Cafe until it stopped actually raining.

What might have happened had we not had any mobile telephony at our disposal, I do not know. The old method, which is that you decide beforehand to meet at place X at time Y, used to work okay. Whoever got there first waited, and whoever was second said sorry, with whatever degree of sincerity seemed appropriate. But now, if you don’t bring a mobile with you, and if you don’t make constant use of it, you are misbehaving.

I brought my mobile with me to meet up with GD1, but at a critical moment I failed to consult it. “Getting old” will definitely be one of the categories below.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Knackered

I’m now knackered. For reasons too complicated for me to explain in my present knackered state, I didn’t get as much sleep last night as I would have liked. And then today I went on a photo-trek with Goddaughter 1. This was great, and I am entirely glad that I did this, but about two thirds of the way through these photo-treks I typically arrive at a state of knackeredness, and so it was today. Mostly it’s the feet. They ache. But, sitting down and resting only makes it worse when I try to resume.

We both took lots of photos, many of the best ones that I took being after I had become knackered, as also tends to be the rule with these photo-treks, hence my determination, every time, to keep trekking after becoming knackered. This is often because at the end of the trek there is a destination which keeps us going, and which is really good. This time, that destination, it gradually became clear, was Alexandra Palace. And Alexandra Palace is a great place from which to photo London and its Big Things, especially if the light is as good as it was today. The light at the end of the day is often the best, which is another reason to keep going, even if you become knackered before the day ends. So I kept going, and so, a great day.

But a knackering day, and I am now off to bed. I can, or so I hope, write when knackered. But working with my primitive little laptop, I now find it impossible to contrive any links or post any photos, So no links. No photos.

No photos also because, although it was a great day, I don’t know if I took any great (by my undemanding standards) photos. I have looked at them, once, but am now too caught up in what I was trying to photo and am not yet able to be objective about what I did photo and to pick out any truly good ones.

Good night.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoing old Dinky Toys in Englefield Green

Today there was a big old Micklethwait family get-together at the ancestral home in Englefield Green, Surrey. Me, two brothers, a nephew and a niece plus partners, another niece, plus two little kids. I took photos of course, and I wasn’t the only one doing that.

I prefer not to show you pictures of my relatives, but I’m sure that nobody will mind me showing you these snaps:

Those are Dinky Toys, in really quite good condition, dating from the 1950s. I can even remember a couple of the names. The red van (which was my brother’s, not mine) was “Mersey Tunnel”, because it is a Mersey Tunnel police van. And the white car with green on it is a Singer Gazelle. Ah, Singer. Those were the days when Britain contained about a dozen distinct car-makers, with distinct names like Singer.

All these toys had already been extracted from all the other goods and chattels in the house and given to N and NP’s two little kids, before I arrived. Theoretically, three of these four antiquities were mine, or they were mine sixty years ago, but the kids seemed to like them and I was glad for these toys to be passed on. Such things are only worth proper money if the boxes have been kept, and of course they hadn’t been. And although these Dinky Toys, especially the two cars, are in really quite good condition, really quite good condition is not nearly as good as mint condition, moneywise. So, yes kids, you’re very welcome.

But one favour I did ask. Before you take them off to your home, let me photo them, just to remember them. Okay? Okay. So I perched them on my knees and took the shots.

One of the many good things about digital photography is that with it you can store fun memories in two virtual dimensions, rather than in three actual dimensions.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The ROH bar and its floating-in-the-air drinkers

Just before Christmas, Goddaughter 2 arranged for the two of us to see and hear a dress rehearsal of a Royal Opera House Covent Garden production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. This was, for all practical purposes, a performance. I didn’t much care for Verdi before I went to this event, and I still don’t, but the show was at least notable for the outstanding singing of the lead tenor, Joseph Calleja, a new name to me. I was extremely happy whenever he was singing. (He has a blog.) The rest of the show I found somewhat forgettable, mainly because Verdi seems to have been opposed to doing nice tunes that you can remember, unlike my operatic composer favourites, Mozart, Puccini, and Richard Strauss.

But very memorable indeed, almost as good as Calleja’s singing, was the bar we visited afterwards, which is right next to the main performing space.

From the outside the opera house and the bar look like this:

The bar being the thing on the left as we look there.

And on the inside, the bar looks like this:

The ROH refers to this place as the Paul Hamlyn Hall. What regular people call it for real I have no idea, but I like it.

I especially like that disembodied clutch of drinkers, suspended up there as if in mid air, but actually in mid mirror.

Here is a closer look at that same feature:

I know exactly what is going on here, and how this weird effect is achieved, but still I’m impressed.

A bit of hasty googling has failed to tell me what this place used to be and when it was first built. I’m guessing it was at first something to do with selling fruit and/or veg, but that’s only a guess. Anyone?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog