Was out in Bermondsey today, and as usual photoed lots of photos. But the light was dreary, so here is a photo I took in the same place just under a month ago, on February 19th:
Vapour trail weather, which I love. And not just for the vapour trails. In such weather, everything looks good. Those two birds, for instance. They look very good.
Ah, the Summer of February 2019. They don’t make them like that any more, except that they just did.
The job of sports fan internetters like me is not to just wallow in the mere news that the commentators have just been reporting and to repeat their opinions about why it all happened (although that can be fun to look back on, in the years to come). It is also to notice the daft things that commentators sometimes say. The above gem of verbal inappropriateness came, from ITV commentator Nick Mullins, after just 13 minutes of the England Scotland rugby game at Twickenham, just after England scored their third try. England really don’t look like they’re going to lose this one.
The basic reason England are winning is that Wales, earlier this afternoon, dessicated Ireland. That actually is not a bad word for what Wales did to Ireland. Ireland didn’t score any points at all until the clock had gone past 80 minutes, Wales having already scored 25. This meant that Wales already had the Grand Slam, and that meant that Scotland would not now be working themselves into a frenzy of Scottishness to deny England, who were undone two weeks ago by a frenzy of Welshness (which did deny England the Grand Slam), the mere winning of the tournament.
And now, on the half hour, England have just scored their fourth try, making it 31-0 to them.
And what did Nick Mullins say about that?
This:
“Scotland are being drowned.”
When you get dessicated, what you want is water. But not that much water.
I feel sorry for Scotland. If you’re an England rugby fan, feeling sorry for Scotland is great. Scots never feel sorry for us, which is how they torment us. We feel sorry for them every chance we get, which is our way of tormenting them. All I am missing now is a Scotsman for me to feel sorry for in person. They must really hate that.
But hey, Scotland have just scored a breakaway try.
Said the moisture-obsessed Mullins, switching metaphors:
“A shaft of light.”
If you’ve been desiccated but then drowned, a shaft of light is probably what you want. 31-7 to England at half time.
I am going to miss the end of this game because I am off out to dinner. Fine by me. My guess is that the second half of this game will be rather an anti-climax, like the second half of the England France game. The only thing that could make it interesting would be a couple more shafts of light for Scotland at the start of the second half. If that happens, I would have to stop feeling sorry for Scotland, which would be terrible.
And Scotland have indeed scored, 7 minutes into the second half. Just before they did, Mullins said:
“Scotland are beginning to throw some coals on the fire!”
Said a colleague:
“Can that be the spark?”
Scotland not drowned after all.
Well, well, well. Two shafts of light it is. Two Scotland tries at the beginning of the second half. Suddenly I am starting to regret that dinner date, and to stop feeling sorry for the Scots.
And another. 31-19. It’s a game.
Another Scotland try. 31-24. If Scotland win this, they will be as insufferable as I was being half an hour ago.
I’m off to dinner. Thank goodness for mobile phones.
Another Scotland try! Under the posts. 31-31.
Mullins:
“Are you not entertained?”
I think I am. Four shafts of light, in the second half alone. Five, if you could the one in the first half.
England’s defence is being desiccated.
LATER (i.e. after I got back from my dinner party (very enjoyable)): England 38 Scotland 38.
Some close- and closer-ups of the Optic Cloak:
What these photos, photoed just after I’d photoed these photos, only show a few glimpses of is how different the OC looks, depending on the light’s strength, its direction, and its colour. All of the above photos were photoed from the western, upstream side of the OC, as I moved from north to south, and all on the same day. There’s a whole different set to be taken from the east, or from the West on a different day.
This is something that all the best London Things, Big or, as in this case, not so Big, have in common. (I’m thinking in particular of the Shard and of the Walkie Talkie and, more recently, of the Scalpel (which is only very small in that photo, but which does wonderful things with the light).)
My expedition to check out the Optic Cloak got me appreciating the new version of the Greenwich Peninsula, the post-Dome version, that is now taking shape.
Here is a picture of it, one of those computer fake photo things:
The Optic Cloak is an invisible smudge of grey, just after the C of OPTIC and just above the K of CLOAK. That’s because this picture is not about the truth as such, but about new tall buildings, and the Optic Cloak, although quite tall, is not a building, so, in this picture, it is ignored.
However, what the above photo does show is the big double-barrelled road which takes traffic into and from the Blackwall Tunnel. And you get a great look at this mighty traffic artery if you climb up onto a footbridge that takes you over it. Over it if, for instance, you are walking south from North Greenwich tube station, in order to get a closer-up view, from the West, across the big road, than you’d get otherwise, of the Optic Cloak, as I was when I went there, however many weeks ago it was.
You can just about make out this footbridge in the picture above, just above and to the right of the C of COPTIC.
Here are a couple of photos that I photoed of this footbridge:
And here are a couple of views from it, of the Optic Cloak:
But I especially liked the sort of views you get from this footbridge, looking north, towards the Blackwall Tunnel:
Most of the towers in the distance there are across the river, in Docklands, and already that view, as you approach the Blackwall Tunnel is quite something. As the Greenwich Peninsula itself fills up with more towers, it will look even more mini-Manhattan-ish.
Here are photos I took from the bridge of a couple of interesting vehicles, going north (left) and south (right):
Plus, here is a close-up of that roof clutter, in the left hand of the two looking north photos, above:
This roof clutter makes a point, as do those two views looking north, and the traffic. This new Greenwich Peninsula has the feeling of old-school work getting done, just as I presume the old one had. Stuff that really hurts if you drop it on your foot is being made, modified, bought and sold, in this particular part of London, just as it always was. Noxious gasses and fluids are being propelled hither and thither, in pipes and cans and lorries. You get the feeling that this isn’t going to stop any time soon, the way it has in Docklands.
It could just be all that Blackwall Tunnel traffic thundering by which gives off that feeling. However, I don’t think so, if only because the thundering traffic creates the sort of place where the Financial Services Industry wouldn’t want to be.
Here, finally, is the kind of close-up of the Optic Cloak that I had come for …:
.. with a lorry roaring by, full of noxious fluid.
There can be no higher praise for the Optic Cloak than to say that it fits right in with all this hustle and bustle and noise. Indeed, it dominates it. It presides contentedly over it. Most “Art” in such a place would look ridiculous.
Yesterday, as already noted, I was out and about in London. And another interesting thing I photoed was this, also healthcare-related:
I photoed this photo with his permission, by the way.
I guess that the purpose of this gizmo is to enable the knee-joint to keep moving, while remain in its correct state, without putting any (or at any rate undue) strain on it, the strain being taken by the gizmo and the bits of limb it is attached to rather than (only) by the joint.
But, truthfully, I don’t really know. What I do know, just from looking at this photo, is that there is a definite plan in action, and that it is helping a lot, far more than one of those big old rigid plaster caste monsters would have.
Here is a close-up of the name of this contraption …:
… which enabled me to find some produktinformation. What the gizmo does is Führung und Stabilisierung des Kniegelenks. Which is, I rather think (guess), pretty much what I just said.
Today a friend needed some rather dramatic medical attention, and I dropped by to provide what I hope was a little moral support. Outside the place where this was happening, I encountered this cute little vehicle:
Two interesting things about this little gizmo. First, there is the way that its door opens. The door on its right is open, in the above photos. Useful in a tight space, I should guess.
And second is what it does, there being a website on it which enables you to learn about this. It takes tissue or samples from sick people to a lab, where the lab decides its opinion about the nature of that sickness.
I like these little cars, which are so small they are almost motor bikes. I certainly prefer them to those huge Chelsea Tractors, which look like they’re for doing bank robbery getaways or off-roading or maybe both at once. Which, let’s face it, most Londoners do neither of, ever.
On Sunday evening, and then again yesterday during the day, my water supply was interrupted. This has never happened before. Electricity, yes, that has been interrupted, I seem to recall. And once, my hot tank refused to stop heating its water, which was alarming. I had to switch off all my electricity myself, to stop my boiler boiling itself and perhaps exploding like a steam locomotive having a crash. But, no water? That was a new one for me, here.
When my taps first ran out of puff, I didn’t know what was causing this. At first, I thought the problem might be my own personal arrangements, as it had been with that over-eager heating system. But, I knocked on the door opposite and discovered that my neighbour had received an email threatening water disruption, and it all started to make sense. One of our neighbours was having work done which necessitated a block-wide water switch off. This was on Sunday evening, but the email concerned threatened disruption on Monday, disruption that duly occurred.
I wasn’t even completely sure if the water, when restored, would automatically fill up my pipes again, once it had abandoned them. You know how you can get water to to go up and down in pipes, in school physics lessons. What if interrupted water supply created a permanent unwillingness of the water to travel along my personal pipes, to my personal taps?
When the water returned later on Sunday evening, it was quite a relief to see it gushing out of my taps again, of its own accord, with no suction pump needed to coax it back into action. But then, disruption happened again, exactly as threatened, on Monday.
It’s only when you are deprived of something you are used to having that you realise how much you depend upon it. For washing, of me and of the things I eat from and off. For flushing the loo. There was an event I wanted to attend on Monday evening. No go. Unclean.
I had never had anything to do with my lady neighbour before this little water drama. Interesting that things not working properly and “community” go together like this. When the great machine we all depend on stops working, we suddenly become more dependant upon each other, if only to find out what the hell is going on and when it is likely to stop.
The Park Tower Knightsbridge Hotel is what Wikipedia calls it. Sheraton now calls it the Sheraton Park Hotel. Whatever we call it, this is one of my favourite London buildings from the concrete monstrosity era, partly because nobody who worries about being aesthetically elevated likes the work of its architect Richard Seifert. Such people also do not like One Kemble Street, or Centre Point, also by Seifert, either. Too commercial. Too brash. Too assertive. Too symmetrical. Starchitecture before Starchitecture became chic, and not chic enough.
All the photos you see on the internet of this Park Hotel tend to look like this …:
… i.e. photoed from nearby, so that you can’t see the magnificence of the Roof Clutter on the top.
So now I will correct this regrettable imbalance, by inserting these views of the Park Hotel photoed by me last Friday from way off in the middle of Hyde Park, into the vast ocean of internet imagery, in the hope that public attention will be drawn to this wonderful and spontaneous assemblage of roof sculpture:
I especially like that last one. Trees, mist, and then Park Hotel, in soft focus. Or, out of focus, as we digital snappers say.
Norman castles were evil stone monstrosities when first inflicted upon this green and pleasant land. But as that style retreated, they turned into picturesque ruins. The Concrete Monstrosity style is already in headlong retreat, and I like it more and more.
Memo to self: check out this car park, before they destroy it, which they have now decided that they will.
Last Thursday afternoon, I emerged from North Greenwich tube/DLR station, and started getting my bearings. Dome right here, there, so that’s north, so south is the other way, and somewhere around there ought to be the Big Thing itself, called (it has to be called something) The Optic Cloak. (If it has a local nickname, I am unaware of it.) Because it’s a Big Thing vaguely shaped like a domino, and because it takes itself very seriously and because it’s not for people to live it, it reminds me of the Big Thing at the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey, despite its ziggy zaggy surface.
And very quickly, after hardly any walking south at all, I got my first sightings of the OC.
Here are nine of the first lot of photos I took of the OC:
All of these photos have something else in them besides the Optic Cloak itself, and this is deliberate.
Real Photographers are very clever at screening out all irrelevancies, when they photo a Thing like this. They go for the special effects that the Thing itself contrives, with no lampposts or surveillance cameras or cars or general crap inserting themselves into the final photo. The results often (a) are very beautiful (provided the Thing itself has something beautiful going for it), but (b) in no way prepare you for how the Thing actually looks, in its actual setting, when you actually get there. Real Photographers, to generalise, are better at lying with their cameras than snappers like me are, which means that snapper-photos are often superior, as actual guides to what Things really look like.
I especially like the trees, through which Things may now, at this time of the year, be seen, unlike in the boring old summer.
And I especially like all that blue sky.
Here. The verdict is: They knew what they were moving into. They should install blinds or net curtains.
Or, turn the viewable-from-the-Tate-Extension living rooms into art installations. The judge didn’t say that; I’m saying that now.
I’m rather surprised by this verdict, but also pleased. Because this is now one of my favourite London photo-spots, and there is lots to be seen looking south, besides into other people’s living rooms.
From this spot I have photoed many, many photos, of which these are just four, taken in July and August of 2016:
Those photos all illustrate the problem that the flat-owners now have.
But, this next little clutch of photos, taken at the same time, illustrate what could be another answer:
In these photos, what dominates is the way that light, rather than coming through the window from those living rooms, is instead coming from outdoors London and bouncing off the windows. At the time I took these photos, I was thinking about that (to me) rather appealing crinkly brick surface that this Tate Modern Extension is covered in.
But now, it seems to me that I was photoing another sort of answer to the problem that these flat-dwellers now have. Could the glass windows be replaced by glass that is more reflective of light, while still letting the outside view in? Or, could the existing windows have some sort of plastic film or sheet stuck on them, preferably on the inside but maybe on the outside, that would contrive the same effect?
A problem stated is often well on the way to being a problem solved. The judge said: It’s up to you to stop the light bouncing off the interior of your home from zooming up to the onlookers at the top of the Tate. You knew this was going to happen. Sort the problem yourselves.
It will be interesting to see how things change with these windows, and inside these living rooms, in the months and years to come.