Category: The old blog

Uninterrupted France blogging feels wrong so here are some football results

I had in mind that the whole of this week would be about my recent trip to France, but I find that doesn’t suit. It feels wrong. This blog usually bounces around between different times and different subjects, and putting that on hold for a week feels, as I say, wrong.

There is also the problem that I don’t like doing long and complicated postings every day, and all the things I want to say about that French trip are quite long and quite complicated, if only because I want to attach copious photo-illustration to each of them. So, today, no France, apart from that observation.

Instead, I will today confine myself to noting with satisfaction that, following a disastrous last weekend, when their rivals Chelsea won and they lost, Tottenham Hotspur, the football club that I like to do well (“support” would be to exaggerate ridiculously – I never actually go to games), earlier this evening defeated Newcastle, while Chelsea could only draw against Huddersfield. All of which means that Huddersfield will not be relegated and Spurs will play in the early stages of the next Euro Champions League, until such time as they get eliminated. But, bright side: Spurs finished top out of the London clubs. Chelsea we’ve covered. Arsenal also got beaten this evening, and are far behind, hence them firing their noted French manager, Wenger.

One of the subheadings in this has Spurs managing to “limp” over the line, by which is meant guarantee to finish at least fourth and definitely ahead of Chelsea. The Spurs pattern seems now to be to have a basically good season, but to end it falteringly. Sounds to me like: they’re tired. Their manager apparently trains them extremely hard, which means they do well. But towards the end, they run out of puff.

I do that every day, just before I go to bed. One other thing about my France trip, I’m going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, than I was, I mean. And I’m trying to keep it that way.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Possible blogging interruptions

Because of how my life is going to be for the next week or so, there may be interruptions to the daily stream of blog postings here, daily in the sense of being something every day however trifling or banal, and daily in the sense also of me doing something before every bed time.There may even be no postings at all, for the next clutch of days.

This particular blog posting is being done before bed time tomorrow evening, and also before bed time this evening. But after midnight, which means it can either be backdated to today or left to date itself as tomorrow, the latter option being the one I select now. All of which is within the rules I choose to go by.

But, be warned. Maybe there won’t be any interruptions. We shall see.

Meanwhile here is a rather randomly selected photo, taken last summer, of the old version of New Scotland Yard in the process of being deconstructed …:

… to make way for this. So far, this (see previous sentence) has yet to become visible. It has yet to show, as they say of pregnant ladies.

In a perfect world, the traffic light in my photo would have displayed a number, denoting the number of seconds that will elapse before the light turns red. But this is not a perfect world, as you have surely noticed on the basis of similar – maybe worse – circumstances that in your life you have experienced. The traffic light had already turned red.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The light and the lights of Victoria Station

Well, I’m making some progress on the WordPress front, and there will be a new BMblog, but meanwhile, the last of the photos I want to show you that I took on Jan 5. I took the tube back home, but chose to get out at Victoria rather than Pimlico, probably to try to buy the Gramophone, which I can now, near to me, only buy there. And because I did that, I was able to feast my eyes on this:

That is the late afternoon sun crashing through where the trains go in an out, and bouncing off various reflective surfaces.

I like how this kind of scene permits bright colours, like those little union jacks, but turns fainter colours monochrome, like when that little girl in a red coat appears in Schindler’s List.

I particularly like this little part of the scene:

What I love about sights like that is the way the sun turns those lights on. No electricity is involved. It’s pure sunlight.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Another January 5th photo – trees and cranes and 240 Blackfriars

All this stressing about having to have a new blog is, well, stressful. So, thank goodness for all the lovely photos I took that day. They have been a great comfort. I have nearly finished bragging about them, but not quite.

This is one is one of my particular favourites from that day:

Remember I said that Windows Photo Viewer is turning everything a bit yellow? Well yes, it is, although a more accurate description would be: cream. And the odd thing is that the above photo actually looks prettier to me in its creamy manifestation than it does here, as taken. But, I still like it a lot. I suppose I could squirt some cream into it with my photoshopclone, but I don’t hold with that sort of thing, which has created another barrier, which is that I don’t know how to do that.

Once more, we see: trees without leaves, and behind them cranes, and behind them, the top of 240 Blackfriars. We are looking along Lower Marsh in a north-easterly direction, towards 240 Blackfriars, and behind that, the City of London and its bigger Big Things.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Today’s error message

Yeah, another. (See also: this one.) This time it was brief, and to the point, whatever point that was:

PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 7C8108EB

I don’t know how long that was the solitary message being sent out by this blog, but that was it.

It has become a priority for me to set up a new blog, powered by WordPress, and I need someone who knows WordPress to help me do that. In exchange for money. Anyone interested? Anyone know anyone who might be interested?

This blog being this blog, I am pretty confident that the answer, here, will be: Comments (0). This posting is more in the way of a memo to self. This is the thing I now need to be cracking on with.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Yes I know – BMdotcom is a mess

By which I mean that the content is what it is, but that the loading up is either very slow or, from time to time, non-existent.

If you had been trying to view this blog today, this is what you would have seen:

I cranked up BMdotcom on my mobile, just to make sure it wasn’t my computer that was in some mysterious way causing this. It wasn’t.

And yes, I cheated with the timing of this posting. I actually stuck this up in the small hours of Monday morning, and backdated the date. If this bothers you, have your lawyers call my lawyers.

Conversations are now ongoing about not only how to get fewer such collapses, but also about how to speed up the loading, to the point where a decent number of people might consider reading it, again, or even for the first time. What I am thinking I will do is set up a new WordPress blog, and leave this as Classic Brian, or some such thing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Getting old – BBC Music – Lego Tower Bridge – etc.

One of the problems of getting old is that it becomes gradually harder to do more than one thing in a day. This being why my daily postings here are often rather perfunctory.

This morning, for instance, I had a most enjoyable meeting with a friend, and then, the weather being so good, I went wandering about in Soho. That’s two things there, right away. Now, all I am capable of is rather incoherent rambling about nothing very much.

I did, while meandering about in the south of Oxford Street area, finally manage to track down the latest issue of the BBC Music (by which is meant classical music) magazine, which is getting harder to come by with every year that passes. Another symptom of advancing years being that it gets harder to buy the things that you particularly like, as others who also like that thing die off.

But, good news: the BBC’s preferred best performance of the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata was a rather obscure recording by the rather obscure pianist, Peter Serkin, who is the less famous son of the famous pianist Rudolf Serkin. I have so many CDs that I often can’t be sure whether I own some particular CD or not, and so it was with this one. But after some rootling around, I discovered that I do possess this CD. I love it when that happens.

And yes, since you ask, I am influenced by critics. If someone who knows the piece in question very well thinks that this or that performance is very, very good, then I know that I will at least want to hear this performance, even if I don’t end up sharing the critic’s high opinion, which often I do. This recommendation means I will now listen to this CD again.

The other thing I did was take a close look at a camera that I have been tempted by, but will probably not be buying, although it was interesting. This was in a shop called Park Cameras in Rathbone Place.

Inside Park Cameras Rathbone Place I also took this photo, with the camera that I already possess:

Good to encounter a new bridge of interest, even if it is only a miniature Lego version of an old bridge. I have no idea why such a bridge was in Park Cameras Rathbone Place, but I wasn’t complaining.

I get the distinct impression that a golden age of bridge building arrived about thirty or forty years ago, but has now departed. I just picture googled new bridge, and I mostly got bridges I have known about for quite a while.

I digress.

Merry Christmas … and …?

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.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Busy

Yes it’s a busy time here at Chateau BMdotcom. I have a meeting here this evening, for which I must now prepare, but, preparations are not helped by the fact that the two biggest supermarkets in my vicinity, Tescos Warwick Way, and Sainsburys Wilton Road, are both now shut, so that they can rearrange themselves, refurbish themselves, in time for Christmas presumably. (And in order to take our minds off the fact that the prices of everything are now shooting upwards.)

This is bizarre. Couldn’t they collude to take it in turns to shut, rather than colluding (I assume) both to be shutting at the same time? I am too busy, doing such things as trying to think where I will be going instead to buy food for this evening, to be able to expand here upon this peculiar matter. Let’s just say it’s lucky for capitalism that I really like it. If I didn’t, this might have tipped me over the edge into full-on Bolshevism, at which point I might have become the straw that broke the camel of capitalism’s back.

After tonight’s meeting, I then have a succession of pre-Christmas socialisings fixed, for over the coming weekend and into next week. All very nice and everything, but a struggle to keep track of, and to fit other necessary things around. Which is why postings here have been a bit perfunctory of late, and why that may continue for a few more days.

Or, it may not. Because actually, the urge to blog is, for me, hard to estimate the strength of beforehand. Often, I think, the feeling I feel when busy that there are Things I Must Do, causes me then to avoid doing these Things by instead … blogging.

Right now, for instance, I am supposed to be preparing for this evening. But instead …

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Leadenhall Market

Yesterday I showed a photo that I actually took yesterday, rather than last year or last decade. And today I’m doing the same. I’m showing you another photo that I took yesterday:

That’s the inside of the domed roof in the middle of Leadenhall Market in the City of London. This is another of those photos which is a lot easier to take if you have a twiddly screen, such as I always now have.

Here is the next photo I took, to show you which place I mean:

To me, one of the odder things about Leadenhall Market is that all the enterprises plying their trade in it would seem to be obliged by the house rules to proclaim their names in the exact same style and size of lettering. This is not what you get in most shopping centres, which is what this place basically is. But, fair enough: their gaff, their rules. And although in one sense this is uniformity gone a bit mad, in another sense it is variety, because this is not something you see very often.

It is clearly a recent thing, and Wikipedia confirms this:

Between 1990 and 1991 the market received a dramatic redecoration which transformed its appearance, enhancing its architectural character and detail. The redecoration scheme received a special mention in the Civic Trust Awards in 1994.

Ah yes. Commercial, you understand, but not too commercial. The subtle business of not being too businesslike.

I passed through this place on my way to Monument tube, having been wandering towards the City and its Big Things from the Bethnal Green area, enjoying the last daylight of a very fine yesterday. Of which maybe more here later, and of which maybe not more here later. (This blog is also not very businesslike.)

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog