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Lots of people watch the FA Cup Final

Today I watched the FA Cup Final on television, in which Leicester City defeated Chelsea by the momentous margin of one-nil. The one was good, though.

But the reason I watched it was because it had a whiff of more than football about it, because there were, for the first time in ages at a football match, twenty thousand odd people actually in Wembley Stadium, watching it and of course shouting:

The victorious Leicester players there, in confusing brown, acknowledge the cheers of their fans, in confusing blue. Confusing, because the Chelsea players wore blue.

The commentators keep trying to persuade themselves that the FA Cup is what it was, when, for reasons to do with European qualification, it is not what it was. There used to be a European Cup Winners Cup, which you could only be in if you won your local Cup. Not any more. Now, you can be in the Consolation European League just by coming fifth or third or whatever in your local league. The FA Cup has accordingly lost its unique place in English life, and the commentators bang on more and more about its glorious past, which is a sure sign that its present is less glorious.

I seem to remember one year when Liverpool or Man U, or some such club ducked out of it, to play in some game in South America which they reckoned counted for more. “The Cup” was never the same after that.

Nevertheless, this one was a little bit special.

The beavers of Oxford Street

In 2017, I photoed the shadow of an Oxford Street beaver, and in 2015 (scroll down a bit) I photoed one of the actual beavers, from a great distance.

Well, yesterday, I photoed all four actual beavers:

I was in Oxford Street, shopping and then taking a walk from Carphone Warehouse Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Circus Tube, and there they were.

“587 tall buildings in the pipeline in London …”

This fake photo appears at the top of a piece about new building in London, this being how Nine Elms is about to look:

If you regularly travel by helicopter anyway.

Also adorning the same piece is this next view looking upstream at the same point in London, also including the now rather small looking box that seems to have sparked all this building excitement, the recently relocated US Embassy:

The style is incoherent modernism, i.e. the effect you get when you design your tower to be modernistic, and quite tall, and functional in shape rather than weird (which is rather too expensive to always be doing) but in no other way in harmony with the nearby designs. Many hate this non-style, but to me it seems all of a piece with London’s ruling ethos, to the effect that when in London I pursue my business and you pursue your business, and there is no boss of the two of us telling us to do our business is the same way, even though we are right next to each other.

I never trust these fake photos of buildings. This is one of those times when the fact that the internet never forgets can get a bit confusing, because the internet remembers all the various shapes each future building takes as it ducks and weaves its way from initial idea to planning permission to actually getting built. Rather than spending lots of time trying to guess exactly what will be built, I prefer simply to wait and see.

And as it happens I have been recently seeing some of these towers as they rise up, without me making any great effort like going to the river or even crossing the river and seeing it all close-up. My now regular journey back from the Royal Marsden typically sees me getting off the tube at Victoria and doing a bit of shopping, by walking south along Wilton Road to Sainsbury’s.

Looking back towards Victoria, I see Nova, with its weird-style red shape spiking upwards. This is the Carbuncle Cup style that I so relish, …:

… a style that is now being superseded in Nine Elms by a reversion to the more functional verticality of, for example, Docklands (although in Docklands there has been a tad more harmonisation of style between different towers).

Here is what I see when I look south from the same spot:

Which is a bit boring, but as I walk towards Sainsbury’s, things start to liven up, especially when the sky looks the way it did that particular day:

I only photo what is there to be seen. So, that bit of London at any rate continues to build, and continues to contain busy cranes.

And according to this report, that’s about to be the story all over London:

Love them or loathe them, it looks like despite a significant slowdown in building skyscrapers during the spring and summer in 2020, there was not the downturn feared because of the pandemic.

According to New London Architecture’s annual review of skyscrapers over 20 storeys or more, there are 587 tall buildings in the pipeline in London – with 310 granted full planning permission and 127 under consideration. A total of 35 tower blocks were finished last year.

That’s some pipeline. Although I wouldn’t call these new Things skyscrapers, exactly. The sky can sleep unscraped in its bed. More like Things of a Certain Size.

Nevertheless, I love all this. Not because the buildings will be much good to look at. They won’t be, although sometimes in combination they may add up to something quite dramatic. What I like is what they mean: lots and lots of people all living and working right next to each other, and gathering in restaurants and bars to schmooze with each other and to contrive new ventures and adventures, as befits a great city that is still growing as fast as ever it has.

Eat your pretty little heart out, Paris.

Masked beast outside St Ermin’s Hotel

There must be a million statues with masks on them these days, given what these days are still like, but here’s the first one I have actually encountered on my recent photo-travels:

Yet another photo-souvenir of the times we have all lived through (apart from those of us who didn’t).

That particular beast (what exact sort of beast it is I can only guess – Dragon? Bear?) is the one holding a sign, saying nothing at all, outside St Ermin’s Hotel, which is near to St James’s Park tube, which is one of my local tube stations.

One of the arguments I am looking forward to learning more about, as time goes by and as the Covid books start appearing, concerns just how little good and how much harm these muzzles have done, and, crucially, how soon they knew, or should have known, such stuff.

Strange pavement marks

A while back I started noticing occasional strange pavement patterns, which put me in mind of an old toy I once had, way back in the middle of the previous century:

Photoed by me earlier this week. I just did some Photoshop(clone)ping (contrast, sharpening) to make everything clearer, although it was pretty clear to start with.

I’m guessing these marks are made by a machine doing cleaning of some sort. I further guess that something has to be a bit wrong for this to happen. I particularly note how the pattern is in no way impeded by the joins of the pavement slabs, which suggests that quite a lot of power is being applied, by a quite heavy machine which cannot be easily deflected from the path it has been set on.

Crane and shadow outside Victoria Station

I love a good crane, especially in these almost craneless times. And I also love a good shadow. So, you can imagine how much I appreciated what I saw, outside Victoria Station, this afternoon:

Today there was rain around mid day, followed by the brightest of bright sunshine. This is the best sort of sunshine there is, because the rain washes the air before the sun shines through it.

Also present in this photo is Pavlova, the ballerina on top of the Victoria Palace Theatre. This is a very good photo, of the crane and its shadow, but not of Pavlova. For Pavlova, Try one of these.

People gathering normally

Last Thursday, late afternoon, this comforting scene was to be observed (and photoed) by me, on the other side of Victoria Street from me and a short walk from Buckingham Palace. Human beings, without muzzles on, enjoying each other’s company and drinking drinks:

Will normality ever fully return? I’ll believe what I see. But seeing that was definitely something.

Death matters and so does Surrey doing well

Earlier today I had a really serious phone conversation with my Designated Best Friend about palliative care, being kept alive with scary electric shock machines (which my DBF said actually work very rarely and are far more likely to inflict painful and permanent damage like a busted rib). In short, it was a conversation about my death. And I entirely saw the point of this conversation and was very grateful to my DBF for having it with me. I need to say what sort of death I would like, before it actually starts seriously happening and I become incapable of saying anything coherent about what I want. So, important stuff.

Problem was, I had been keeping half an eye on the county cricket, and in particular on this game between Hampshire and Surrey. Surrey have had a wretched season so far, and Hampshire have been doing really well, so that was going to start badly for Surrey and get worse and worse as the next few days went by. But I was paying attention anyway, because, you know, you never know.

So, Surrey had won the toss and had put Hampshire in to bat. But then, after nearly an hour of further Surrey underachievement, and for the first time this season after three dud games, Surrey suddenly started doing really, really well. Right in the middle of the serious phone conversation, this is what I observed, on Cricinfo, being done by two Surrey bowlers called Clark and Clarke to the hitherto formidable Hampshire middle order:

For non-cricket people, that is very successful bowling by Surrey and very unsuccessful batting by Hampshire, who, in the space of thirteen deliveries, went from 44 for 2 to 44 for 6. Until this exact moment, Surrey had not been taking nearly enough wickets or taking them nearly soon enough. Then, in a blink, all that completely changed.

I want to insist that I never lost the thread of the serious conversation I was having with DBF: No please don’t resuscitate me if I have a heart attack in a hospital, but yes indeed, I’d rather die at home but how much might that end up costing, given that professional care will surely be needed?, and no you’re right it’s important to discuss all this beforehand so thanks for doing this. But also, strictly inside my head you understand, I was screaming to myself: Hey look, Surrey are doing really well!!! Look at that!!! Four wickets for no runs!!! On the first morning!!! Wow!!! Yeah yeah, I’m going to be dying soon and I know I have to get that sorted, but … wow!!! I even managed to do the above screen capture, without at any time failing to be conversationally coherent and serious with DBF about my death.

This is what I love about following sport, especially the way I have done for the last decade and a half, at a distance, via The Internet. Great moments in sport, like this moment when Surrey Actually Started Doing Well in 2021, intersect with how your life was at the time. I still remember that 1981 miracle Ashes test match fondly, and listening to it on the radio in a van with which I was (very happily) delivering number plates, a radio which only worked when the van’s engine was not running, which complicated things in a delightful way that I’ll never forget for as long as I live. Well, now, here’s another of these classic sport-meets-real-life moments. Life doesn’t get much more real than when you’ve been told that “for as long as I live” isn’t actually going to be that long, and sport doesn’t get much better than when your team has been firing blanks for a month and then suddenly does something like what’s in the picture above.

By the end of the day Surrey were totally on top. Surrey’s bowlers, particularly Clark and Clarke (there were even three Hampshire batters who got out caught Clarke bowled Clark), were unstoppable, and Hampshire’s first innings total came to a mere 92. Hampshire’s much feared foreign pace men, Abbot and Abbas, then had to bowl in quite different conditions after lunch and achieved only the one Surrey wicket in the whole of the rest of the day. Surrey are already ahead on first innings and should – should – now win comfortably. Even Hashim Amla, who got 0 and 0 in the previous game, got some runs, along with Burns, and both could make more tomorrow.

All my life people have been telling me stories of old men dying with smiles on their faces, merely because their sports team was doing well when they died. Would I still feel that way about sport when death stared me in the face? So far: yes.

Public ancientism and private modernism in Highgate

One of the themes I believe I have encountered in the course of my architecture-spotting is the one I’ve been calling The Triumph of Modernism Indoors. These photos, taken from a piece about a house conversion that’s just been done in Highgate, illustrate that this may not be quite the right distinction.

Here’s a piece of classic ancientist victory, in the form of a deceptively normal looking house in Highgate. It’s had a total makeover, but you wouldn’t know this just looking at it from the street outside:

Indoors, however, modernism reigns supreme:

However, modernism has also made its presence felt out of doors, round the back, in the garden, which passers-by do not see:

The continuing dominance (not total victory by any means) of ancientism has been in “public” rather that “outdoors”, and the triumph of modernism has been in “private” rather than merely indoors. The point being that the outdoor triumphs of modernism are tending particularly to happen also in the private bits of outdoors.

What’s going on here is that the “private citizen” wants modernism in those bits of his place that he totally controls, because modernism makes more sense, and is cheaper and quicker to do. But, “public citizens” don’t care for the way modernism looks, especially if it replaces ancientism in the public realm. So the public bits of a building, if they are now ancientism, cannot be smashed to bits and replaced by modernism, if preserved ancientism is an option, as it was for this ancientist Highgate home. But if the private citizen himself positively likes the public appearance of modernism, he can do modernism outdoors also, provided he only does it in the private bits of outdoors, the bits that he experiences but which passers-by do not.

Everything will hinge on whether an ancientist house with a modernist extension out the back in the garden will sell for the same silly money as a house with no modernist stuff outdoors in the garden.

I’m guessing it will so sell, provide only that the extension does the job without silly things like a leaking roof.

I am zeroing in on another over-arching fact about “private householders”. They’d like a house that looks publicly nice, but when economic push comes to economic shove, what matters is whether their newly acquired house works properly, without having to be expensively mended. For all their aesthetic tastes. their aesthetic tastes don’t actually matter, or rather, don’t matter enough to have real world consequences. What does matter is that their machine for living in should tick over correctly, the way a properly functioning machine should.

This increasingly “private” blogging that I’ve been doing for about the last fifteen years is really starting to achieve things for me.