Photoed by me earlier this evening on my way to a superb evening at Chateau Perry and Adriana, at the 55 Broadway Shopping Mall, aka St James’s Park tube station:
And from BMdot com.
I failed to photo the last thing they wished us, so I say: choose whatever else you would most like.
Not long ago, Perry de Havilland told me what sounds like an old, old joke, about the difference between dogs and cats.
We feed and pamper and love and look after dogs, and from this, dogs conclude that we are gods. We feed and pamper and love and look after cats, and from this, cats conclude that they are gods.
As I say, it sounded old, but I liked it. And I remembered that joke when, this evening, searching for quota cats or quota other creatures, I encountered these photos, of books, in the British Museum. Including a book about a cat …:
… and of that same cat, celebrated on a clutch of mugs:
I took these Gayer-Anderson Cat photos in Feb 2010, but I doubt it’s moved since then.
Read about the Gayer-Anderson Cat, which actually was a god, here. Gayer-Anderson wasn’t two people. He was just the one, a certain Major Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson.
Get your own Gayer-Anderson Cat, for £450. (£405 to members.) Or, you could 3D print your Gayer-Anderson Cat.
When I took these photos, I was in point-shoot-forget mode, and have given them no further thought until now.
I love the internet.
Bad news: water continues to drip from my kitchen ceiling. Good news: I have contrived a way to divert it onto my draining board, using the lid of one of those big transparent plastic boxes, upside down so working as a shallow water capturer, with a hole drilled into it to let the water out, this side of the shelves below, all now evacuated of course. This means that I don’t have to get up every hour of the night to empty a bucket. The water finds its way to my sink automatically. Good.
Two further bits of good news. Good, relatively speaking. Good compared to how things might have been.
One, it turns out that the paper they use to print the sleeve notes of CDs doesn’t stick to itself when wet. It does stick, a bit, to plastic. But not to another bit of paper similarly soaked. This is good news, and will significantly reduce the total damage compared to what I had feared. This was why I said “Bugger” yesterday. Unbugger.
Two, it turns out that the guy living above me, who I had supposed to be the guilty party in this, what with him finding a dodgy-looking connection in the pipe attached to his washing machine, is another victim of this atrocity, rather than its perpetrator and perpetuator. So, instead of being on my own in a fight with my neighbour directly above me, he is an ally in a battle we are both now fighting with whoever, above the both of us, is responsible for this crime against humanity. Since he is an assertive, capable, early-middle-aged, educated Scotsman, I’m very glad indeed that he is on my side rather than my potential adversary.
A mixed day. In the morning, Australia won the Ashes back. And in the evening, when I got back from a photo-expedition, I found water trickling down the wall of my kitchen, the wall in question being the one behind me in the picture at the top of this blog, a wall filled with CDs, a quite large number of which had their documentation soaked. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, but it wasn’t at all good. I have just spent most of the evening trying to sort that out, but probably not accomplishing much. Many pages of musical info will be stuck together irrevocably. Bugger.
But in between those two disasters, the photo-expedition was pretty good. I will surely show more of its results here Real Soon Now. For the moment, following an evening spent fretting about those CDs, here is just one such result:
I tend not to like sunsets, by which I mean that I tend not to like the photos I take of sunsets. But if there are cranes involved, that’s a different story. Also, for the cricket, a sunset is all too appropriate.
My camera is pretty good, but it isn’t ideal for me. I only use a bit of it at all regularly, the automatic bit. So if, on a rainy day, I push, by mistake, some stupid knob on it that tells it to stop being automatic, it stops being automatic. And, the automatic focussing refuses to work the way it should. That’s what happened when I thought it had conked out. It’s fine. It was simply obeying orders.
I tried photoing the relevant knobs, first with mirrors and then with my mobile, but the results of all that were a blurry mess. Have you ever tried getting a camera to photo its own arse? And photoing with my mobile is something I need daylight to do half decently.
I got a much better picture of the back of my camera by going to this.
In particular, I draw your attention to this bit:
The knob with AF/AE LOCK on it needs to be pointing at AFS/AFF, and absolutely not at MF. MF means, I presume, Manual Focus. AF means automatic focus. S and the other F mean whatever they mean.
The problem arose when, in the rain and needing to possess three hands, one to hold my bag and two to operate my camera properly, I try to look at the photo I just took. That involves pressing the button with the green arrow on it. To get back to photoing, press DISP. But, what with all the rain and the confusion and only having one hand to both hold the camera and press the knobs on it, I accidentally pushed the AF/AE LOCK knob, and got it pointing at MF. By mistake. I’m guessing this would be why the AF/AE LOCK button includes the word “LOCK”. And this works a treat. I know this now.
Anyway, the upshot (metaphorically speaking) of all this is that my camera went from photos like this, just before I met up with GD2 the day before yesterday …:
… to this, not long after that, after the knob disaster had occurred …:
… and then back to this:
… when I met up with a friend yesterday, in: Hither Green.
So, panic over.
It’s an odd feeling, partially the feeling of massive relief that I won’t have to spend Christmas trying to turn whatever guarantee came with my camera into another camera, and partially the feeling that I am an idiot and that I should pay more attention to the knobs on my camera. Delight and embarrassment all mixed up together.
This is what Americans would call a “learning experience”, and although often all that this means is “total cock-up”, in this particular case they would be right.
My camera has conked out. The autofocussing is refusing to autofocus. Which is nasty. And even nastier given that I only found out about this when I was trying, with it, to take photos, this afternoon, like this one:
That’s from the top of Primrose Hill, as photoed by my mobile phone, which is a Google Nexus 4. That one wasn’t too bad, but most of the phone-photos I phone-photoed with this annoying gadget, truly good only for telling me where I am and how soon I will reach my tube destination and what the cricket scores are, were rubbish.
Here is one of the few other good ones, taken from one of the bridges over the Regent’s Canal:
That red boat is the Feng Shang Princess.
GodDaughter 2 was with me. Since I couldn’t take lots of photos, there was nothing for it, I had to make do with talking to her. And also listening to her. Which worked out quite well.
Today I was in central London. It wasn’t good photoing weather. Grim and grey and wet. But I did take this photo:
At the time, I thought I was photoing an army of Santas. For some reason I find the photoing of large numbers of similar or identical objects, in a big clump or clutch, to be rather satisfying.
But it turned out I was photoing two British Personal Brands With Huge Global Reach, namely The Queen, as performed by Elizabeth Windsor, and Mr Bean, as performed by Rowan Atkinson.
A lot of their appeal is that these are both characters who do a lot of physical stuff, rather than characters who talk a lot. Neither Elizabeth Windsor nor Rowan Atkinson are stupid or inarticulate people. On the contrary both are notable wordsmiths, blessed with famously subtle senses of humour. Nevertheless, the Queen’s daily repertoire of stuff is adopting Royal poses and walking or being driven about Royally and making Royal gestures and doing Royal things like shaking hands with a line of lesser celebrities. And Mr Bean mostly makes faces and does pratfalls. These are things that anyone on earth can see – see – the point of with great ease. You don’t have to know a word of English to get what The Queen or Mr Bean are all about. And if only a tiny percentage of the world’s populace like what they see of these two characters, that is still a lot of people.
You see Queen and Bean together, in effigy, in tourist crap shops, a lot. That I photoed the two of them accidentally is no, as it were, accident.
Despite googling it, I still don’t understand what this is about.
There are two places in London where I regularly encounter antique cars, in other words the sort of cars that were new at the time when I was a new human being. One of these places is Lower Marsh, where there are regular convocations of such cars, which I have regularly bumped into when shopping at Gramex for second hand CDs, which was until very recently in Lower Marsh.
And the other place where antique cars can often been seen is outside the Regency Cafe, which is about two minutes walk away from where I live. Antique cars congregate there in order to contribute to television shows or films set in olden times, the self-consciously dated Regency Cafe being a regular location for such dramas.
I recall being rather surprised to encounter these two ancient Austins, even nearer to where I live than the Regency Cafe, in the summer of 2013. What are they do? Answer: they had been or were about to be performing outside the Regency Cafe. Enjoy:
I am meeting someone tomorrow morning at the Regency Cafe. I haven’t actually used this place very often, other than to photo old cars and showbiz activity outside it, but I think I will eat in it rather more in the future.
Yesterday’s panda posting had all the appearance of a quota panda posting. But it wasn’t because there’d already been a posting earlier. Who could forget those Thameslink Seats?
But this really is a quota posting. It features a photo of plants in summer (the summer of 2012 as it happens) that are pretending to be a trees in winter, by having branches but no leaves. That means you can see through them to the Big Things in the distance:
That wasn’t in the I Just Like It directory, but it could have been, because I do really like it. The view is looking back across Victoria Park, which is out east, the other side of those Big Things from me. The Big Things are way out of focus but still clearly recognisable, which is just what you want from Big Things. The rule is: a photo is fine if something in it is in focus, like these plants. If everything is out of focus, well, that’s a problem. But even that can sometimes be quite good.
In a few years from now, that view will look very different, with several more really big Big Things, two in particular, now at various points in the pipeline.
Seeing a how this is Friday, and Friday is my day here for cats and other creatures, I don’t want to just leave it at train seats. I have an Other Creature to show to you, that I photoed earlier this evening. This was at Victoria Station, so this is also train related.
The Other Creature was, I am almost certain, a panda:
A few moments after the moment captured above, I actually asked this guy if he’d object to me photoing his panda. I said “bear”, but it didn’t matter. Not him, I said, just the bear. He was fine with this, so I took another photo, of the panda. But the above photo was better, if only because in it, the railway connection is better communicated.
And yes, the panda has stars in its eyes. How about that?