I am about to embark upon various medical complications involving things like blood tests, so am rather preoccupied today. I’ll probably manage more later, but meanwhile, since it’s Friday, here are some rabbits I photoed somewhere in the vicinity of Victoria Station, in 2013:
Also plates, a hamper, a sofa, some flowers. But it was the rabbits that got my attention.
More to come, I hope. I don’t actually promise, but I nearly do.
LATER: Another rabbit, made of metal, on a church, in Scotland.
I encountered this amazing place …:
… on account of it being advertised at, of all bizarre places, This Is Why I’m Broke. Not the whole thing to buy, you understand, just a stay there for the night.
It’s a late nineteenth century concoction. Fake Ancientism, in other words, at its considerable and Scottish Baronial best.
The above bridge was attached to Blackcraig Castle, both that “castle” and this bridge being the work of Patrick Allan-Fraser.
Also featured at TIWIB, and changing the subject somewhat, this gadget looks like it might come in rather handy.
A little bit of spotting I mean. The ship itself was rather big.
Remember this map, showing where I went walking from Maze Hill station to YOU ARE HERE, and then went north to the Dome:
The original idea of that posting was to say where I was, and then tell you about something rather interesting I saw from that spot. But by the time I had finished rambling on about the sign of which the above map was a part, I already had an entire posting, about the sign.
But yes, there I was at YOU ARE HERE, and rather than concentrating all my attention on the view of where I was about to go, I also looked west. Here’s what I saw:
That’s right, one of those huge and impossibly top-heavy-looking cruise ships.
I tried to think when I had ever seen such a vessel in London before. I have a very vague recollection of having once such a thing, maybe, but nothing for sure. Well, well.
I then turned right and north, and in among all the photos I took on my way north, I occasionally looked back at this ship:
Those being the same photo, one of the last I took, with, on the right, the bit of the photo on the left which shows the actual ship slightly more clearly.
And this was the very last photo I took of her, maximum zoom:
With that, I took a turn inland, dictated by the path I was following, and I saw no more of her.
When I got home, I became curious about this ship. Name? I look a closer look at one of my photos above, and found this:
The Viking Jupiter. So, basically, that would be: Wotan. Just kidding. Viking’s the line, Jupiter’s the name. Fair enough. Just because an ancient (in both senses) historian might get angry about saddling a bunch of Norsemen with a Roman god, that doesn’t mean anyone else has to fret about this.
Then, in an inspired move, I wondered what Google Maps would have to say about the spot where I saw this ship. Here’s what came up:
And in particular, closer-up, this:
So, not just a pier of some sort, an actual ship. This would appear to be a regular London thing, with a regular pier for the ship to attach itself to in a regular spot.
Google google. Here is a map of the cruise that the Viking Jupiter was about to embark upon:
I had always thought that ships like this confined themselves to places like the West Indies or the Mediterranean. London? Liverpool? Apparently so.
Yet again, what I observed, and photoed with much pleasure, was something I would not dream of purchasing myself. Cruising on a big and over-decorated cruise ship like this is absolutely not my kind of thing. If they paid me £6,340 to do a cruise like this, I might even turn that down. (Probably not, but maybe.) But, I rejoice that London is part of this business.
I was there on the afternoon of July 29th, and “departure” was supposedly the 28th. But I think that may have meant the day when you had to leave your home in the UK, get to London and check in on the ship.
Photo and learn. Blog and learn.
New category, long overdue: maps.
I now rather regret that I didn’t scrap my original plan and turn left, and take a much closer look at this ship. Maybe next year.
I’ve just finished reading Lethal White, the latest Cormoran Strike book by J.K. Rowling, aka “Robert Galbraith”.
The book is very long, nearly eight hundred pages in the paperback version I read, and far longer than its three predecessors (all three of which I also possess and have read with enthusiasm). I’m guessing this was a trick that JKR discovered when writing her Harry Potter books., which I seem to recall got ever more huge both in their size and in their popularity as that series proceeded. If your readers love your stuff, they just cannot get enough of it. As I neared the end of Lethal White, the desire to find out what the hell explains everything vied with the desire to slow down because I didn’t want to be in a position where there was no more of the story to read.
I won’t tell you what I think of the plot, because that would involve revealing the plot, which is not done with detective fiction. Is the senior villain a satisfactory senior villain? Ditto. Why is the book called “Lethal White”? Not saying.
What I can tell you is that Lethal White, like all the Cormoran Strike books, is based in and around London, and the book features a number of locations with which I am well acquainted, including Denmark Street (with its musical instrument shops) where Strike lives and works. Strike and his side-kick Robin Ellacott have one of their close-of-play evening debriefing and note-comparing sessions in a pub near St James’s Park tube (also mentioned) called “The Two Chairmen” (that a “chairman” was a man who carried chairs for a living is explained), in one of the upstairs rooms of which Libertarian Home used to have their speaker events, which I often attended and where I did a few speeches myself. And one of the people whom Cormoran and Robin visit to question has a house in Upper Cheyne Row, the rather off-the-beaten-track street in Chelsea where Samizdata had its HQ until a short while back. There’s no doubt that knowing a lot of the places where this tale unfolds added greatly to the fun of reading it. (The Rebus books must surely sell particularly well in Edinburgh.)
Local appeal to Londoners like me aside, I think that maybe the key quality the Cormoran Strike books possess, and again maybe this one especially, is that the stories are not too carefully contrived. JKR’s imagination, you feel, really flew, when she was writing this one, especially the bits about Robin’s newly acquired husband, that being all part of why the book is so long. (The book opens with Robin’s wedding and its aftermath.) In Lethal White, things get said and things happen, which, you get the feeling, surprised its author, let alone the rest of us. (I was too old to become a Harry Potter devotee, but I suspect that something very similar can be said about those books.)
If a fictional work seems too contrived, too carefully constructed, too mechanically perfect, so to speak, then suddenly all you can see is the mechanism, the formula, the conscious calculation of the creator or creators about what the “secret” of the success of the franchise consists of. At which point this secret is no longer any sort of secret. Disbelief is suspended. The characters degenerate into mere robots. And we readers stop caring about what happens, because it becomes impossible for us to forget, while we attend to the story, that it is all just made up. It no longer even feels real.
I am well aware that Cormoran and Robin are made-up people, and that a lot of contrivance and construction went into the making of Lethal White. But while I was reading it, it didn’t, to me, feel that way.
I like what Jake Arnott of the Guardian says about Strike:
Strike is a wonderfully complex creature, with just the right balance of contradictions to guide us through this labyrinthine world. An overweight former boxer with one leg amputated below the knee, ex-military police – and you don’t get much more authoritarian than that – he grew up in the counterculture of squats and communes with a groupie mother who died of an overdose. He’s one of those lost souls who joined the army in search of family, an outsider who knows the belly of the beast. And the time taken in describing the day-to-day workings of his craft ensures that he’s plausible enough in his occupation. One element of realism is that Strike, having solved many high-profile murders (not something actual private investigators do much in real life), has now become famous and compromised in his operations. His cover is blown and this predicament seems heartfelt to the author. For we now know Robert Galbraith as the nom de plume of JK Rowling, who intended to write her crime novels incognito until someone blew the gaff. The opening line, after a long prologue, is the most quotable in the book: “Such is the universal desire for fame that those who achieve it accidentally or unwillingly will wait in vain for pity.”
Yes, I’d forgotten that first line. Now, I remember liking it a lot.
I have no idea what it was like storming a Normandy beach, on June 6th 1944. I also don’t really know how they do weather forecasting, but in recent years, because of being an amateur photoer, I have acquired a profound respect for those who do know, and who do this for a living.
So, my D-Day blog posting does not feature warriors. I instead focus on this man:
That’s Group Captain James Stagg, Allied Supreme Commander Eisenhower’s D-Day weather man. Stagg it was who advised Ike that the landings should be postponed by twenty four hours, to avoid filthy weather on June 5th 1944 and to take advantage of what Stagg believed would be an interlude of surprisingly good weather on June 6th 1944. Stagg’s advice was taken. To say that “the rest is history” would be to suggest that Stagg’s superbly accurate forecast was not itself history. It very much was.
Such is the internet and such are modern times that if you now do an internet search for “James Stagg”, you get more pictures of the actor and writer David Haig than you do of Stagg himself. This is because Haig recently wrote a play, called Pressure, about the above-described historic episode, and then himself played the part of Stagg in his own play.
James Stagg, and WW2 weather forecasting in general, deserved and deserve to be made much of, so I don’t blame either Google or David Haig for the odd result of this particular internet search. In particular, on the image front, it seems very likely that quite a few more photos were taken of Haig playing Stagg than were ever taken of Stagg himself.
I don’t trust Twitter enough to ever want to rely on it for anything, because it might suddenly turn against me and my politics. (I hate Islam, etc.) But I follow various people on Twitter, and by this means, I recently learned that Glasgow is about to have a new fleet of robot underground trains. The first such in the UK, apparently. I don’t know why this appeared on my Twitter feed, but it did:
Having only very recently taken a couple of trips on the D(ocklands) L(ight) R(ailway), I know that robot trains can work very well, and I wish Glasgow success with theirs.
In one of my recorded chats with Patrick Crozier, I expressed skepticism about robot cars, especially robot cars in cities. The right place for robot vehicles to be making their debuts is in highly controlled and controllable circumstances, in places all owned by one organisation, able to impose the necessary disciplines on all concerned or threatened. We made mention of certain mines, where robot lorries already operate, and of Amazon warehouses, where robot package-fetchers-and-carriers now bustle about successfully. Or, like railway networks.
Then, maybe, any year now, make a tentative start on robot lorries on motorways.
Robot cars in cities? I recommend, and I predict: Not any time soon.
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.