Along the South Bank late yesterday afternoon. I photoed, among other things, food and drink emporia, mostly of the motorised or at least transportable sort:
My favourite by some distance is the one selling CLIMATE POSITIVE BURGERS.
Capitalism, eh? It gives you whatever you want.
Quota photo time. Need to get out and enjoy what could be the last day of summer.
So, a posh car:
I definitely wouldn’t want the bother and expense of owning a posh car, but I do like to photo them.
That bit of heraldry you can just about make out on the roof of this roller tells us that actually, this is a Westminster City Council car, with “WE” standing for Westminster.
But at first I thought that “WE1” meant something much more boastful and private sectorish. (See the title above.) This number plate is rather wasted on the Council, I think. Or then again, maybe the boss of Westminster City Council does like reminding people that him and his team won.
That was photoed just after Christmas 2015. More to come this evening, I hope. With maybe a photo or two actually photoed today. I hope.
Indeed. There I was, in 2005, out and about in London, photoing things like this:
… which even by 2005 was fairly routine for me. But then, later the same day, in Battersea, walking beside the River with a friend, I photoed this:
That was with my old Canon A70. But I didn’t get properly interested in taxis with adverts until a decade later. Why not? Don’t know. Ancient cars like that Austin A30 (I think), I was already obsessed with photoing.
The advert in the above taxi-with-advert photo was for a West End Show, which The Guardian approved of. I probably wouldn’t have, because that’s the stand-up and stomp-about-all-over-the-stage-like-a-lunatic comedian Lee Evans there, on the taxi. I found his comedy performances frenetic, in a bad way. He would sweat appallingly when performing. So, it was the comedy of embarrassment, and I was just embarrassed. I didn’t even smile, so I stopped watching him. Is he still doing this?
Perhaps he was better than that in The Producers, having been told to calm it down a bit.
Same formula as the previous post. Ooh that’s nice:
But puzzle. What is it? We see the Shard there, but where are we? What direction are we looking at the Shard from?
Context:
We are at the Dome end of the Dangleway, looking across the Greenwich Peninsular towards the towers of Docklands, with central London beyond. The City cluster is not visible, but the Shard is.
I still don’t know what that blob in the middle of the sky is. Mercifully, it isn’t to be seen on any of the other photos I photoed at this time.
The tall pole with sticking out bits in the original photos is for hanging banners, saying things like: “London Olympics 2012”, 2012 being when all these photos were photoed. Now, there are Machines-For-Living-In Things in the foreground, next to and just south of the Dome, and a great many more bigger Things in the Docklands Tower Cluster.
The photo on the right, featuriing the Dome, was photoed as I began a Dangleway journey across the River to Victoria Dock.
I love that part of London. An essential part of that being because it keeps on changing.
As I said, I didn’t do much photoing when I met up recently with GodDaughter2. But I did do some. Of this dazzling object, for instance, in a shop window:
This is why I love digital photography. I would hate to live with that Thing on a permanent basis. But photoing it was great fun, not least because I had no idea how it would turn out, what with all those reflections.
I called the photos “Silver+White”. But … silver? Is “mirror” a colour? It is, see above, now.
I made me think of Jeff Koons, whose work is of this same sort of tastefulness and restraint, is it not? Has Koons ever done a car like this? I googled “jeff koons silver car”, and got the answer. No, he has never done a car like this. But, he has done a car like this. A BMW as it happens. Again, glad someone photoed it, even if not me. But, definitely wouldn’t want to own it.
Badly needing to get out and exercise, so quota photo, of the above mentioned ladies:
Photoed with my old Canon A70, way back in 2003. Behind the two yellow ladies, you can just make out the Wheel.
I do miss them, and their various Shakespearian sisters. They were driven out of business by the Big Sewer.
This photo already had a name in my archives, so I wondered if I’d shown it here (or here) before. But all I found was mention of a Beatrice (Rana) who plays classical piano, one of many.
See also this recent posting, for my take on why you don’t often see boats with wheels, even though this is technologically very easy to contrive.
My thanks to Facebook and Actual Friend Tim Evans for alerting me to this:
It’s Britain’s First Robot Ship. The coolness of that fake-photo is a big reason for this posting, but not the only reason. I am actually interested in robotised transport.
For some bizarre reason I found I was able to read the article linked to above, but then I wasn’t, and so far I’ve only skimmed it.
So what follows is speculation that could well be answered in the very article I’m linking to. But here goes anyway.
I sense a certain confusion about what a robot ship actually is. Is it a ship that is told where to go and from then on makes all its own decisions? Or is it a ship which is just as much commanded by a human commander, but is merely commanded by a commander who is using a radio link rather than being on the bridge of the ship? My guess is that there is quite a lot of the latter sort of human commanding going on. On the other hand, warships don’t like revealing to the enemy things like their location by sending or receiving radio signals, so maybe the ship really can command itself. But whichever it is, I’m impressed.
Ships now have expensive crews. You don’t need an onboard toilet in a car, or beds for everyone, or an elaborate food supply system. But on ships, you need all that and more for that crew. So, not having people on board is a big deal. Especially if you are sending the ship into battle.
But there are bigger issues than toilets and beds and canteens. The more I ponder the contribution of “robots” to transport, in the form of robot cars especially, the more I am sure that everything depends on a predictable and controlled environment, with the necessary infrastructural back-up. The DLR, with its centrally controlled “robot” vehicles, works a treat, because people, at any rate in Britain, are already well schooled in not wandering onto train tracks, and if they do and get themselves killed, nobody blames the trains. But cars in city centres trying to avoid disaster are a different story altogether, as the delay with robot cars is now proving.
And the sea, rather oddly, is a more controlled environment than a city centre. Although sea dramas can be very dramatic, they are mostly dramatic in a predictable way. Other ships are much more tightly policed than are all the things that can happen on the roads in cities. So robot ships, for war and for transport, make a lot of sense. They are yet another fun thing to be keeping an eye open for, during the next few years.
Today, GodDaughter2 and I finally met up with each other. The timing changed again, from yesterday afternoon to this afternoon, but the location was as previously rearranged, Acton Central railway station.
Once in Acton and wandering around therein, I did little photoing. Surprising though it may appear to many regular readers of this blog, I focussed almost all of my attention on GD2 herself. We did take a few photos of each other, but I did little in the way of photoing the many attractions of Acton.
However, once I got into the train back home from distant Acton, normality reasserted itself, and in the train I sneaked a few photos of something I’ve not seen before, namely a guy with an e-scooter, on a train:
I’m surprised I’ve not seen this sooner. I thought I had spotted one a week ago, but the guy said it was a mere scooter.
But this e-scooter was the real thing, and it wasn’t the only e-scooter I observed, as GD2 and I wandered around seeking an eatery, and then a drinkery. I reckon there were about half a dozen, all told, although I wasn’t counting at the time. Including another e-scooter mate of the guy in the picture who turned up just after I took the above photos. But we were all then getting off at the same stop, and I wasn’t able to photo the two of the together.
As a modified version of Lockdown persists, e-scooters are multiplying in London. But will they survive the return of traffic normality?
Glad to see that this project is making progress:
The Camden Highline project, planned to open in phases from 2024, will create a new central London park and linear walking route – inspired by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s New York High Line – featuring seating areas, cafés, arts and cultural interventions and spaces for charitable activities.
Cultural “interventions”? Does that mean sculpture and stuff? People wearing daft costumes? I guess I’ll have to wait until 2024.
I had already noticed this Camden Highline notion back in August 2017. I even included a map.
About a fortnight ago now, I suddenly started feeling pains in my lower back and stomach. They kind of meandered around, but centred on a spot just above my right buttock. After a few days of this not getting any better, I rang my GP – well, my “Medical Centre” – and described my symptoms to a receptionist. She promised that a doctor would ring back around midday, and when a doctor duly rang back and I again described my symptoms, he said, can you come in and see me in half a hour? Bending down to pick things up was very painful, but standing upright and merely walking I could do. So, I walked over to the Medical Centre, and within a few hours of my first call, I got the verdict. (There are lots of complaints doing the rounds now about how the NHS has been bent out of shape by the Plague, but for me, when it came to the NHS at least paying attention to me and my discomforts rather than just telling me to come back in a couple of months time, it seemed to be working pretty well. Maybe it was the hint of a possible emergency about my symptoms that got their interest.)
So anyway, yes, the doctor duly examined me and bent my legs around and checked how it felt. Doctor stuff. And his verdict was: Nothing serious. Just a strained muscle. Me: How soon will it stop hurting? A week? Doctor: A bit more than that I’m afraid.
Basically what he was saying was: It’s nothing serious. You’ll get better soon. Not as soon as you would like, but soon.
For the next few days, the pain continued, and I put up with it as best I could and as I had to, learning new skills for moving myself up and down by the use of my still fully functioning arms. Getting out of bed and into an upright position when I got up in the morning was the trickiest and most painful manoeuvre. Anything which required my stomach to exert itself, like putting on trousers or shoes, was hurtful. Getting up out of a chair meant pushing myself up with my hands and arms. I adapted.
But then, right on time and as if hypnotised by the doctor, my body checked the calendar, noted that the ordained time of somewhat more than a week had now elapsed, and I started getting better. Yesterday was painful. Today, it was just a dull and diminishing ache. This afternoon, I went out shopping in Tottenham Court Road. I did things like sit down in a tube train, get up out of a seat in the tube train, walk briskly along Tottenham Court Road. No problems. The worst thing was that it was raining, and the few photos I took were rather gloomy and blurry. Also, the tube train back was too hot, which doesn’t go well with being a bit damp when you get into it.
The relief I felt at this moderate but definite improvement in my bodily circumstances was considerable. When you are young and you get an illness or injury, the only question is: When will it stop? That it will stop and that you’ll soon be back and firing on all cylinders is not in doubt. But when I started recovering today, I realised that I had been semi-fearing that … this was it. This, the pain I had gone to see the doctor about, was what living inside my body was going to feel like from now on. The only thing that would change this would be when things took another turn for the even worse. That is what, in a dull, getting old sort of way, I had been fearing. I wasn’t caste down into utter gloom. After all, you expect this sort of thing as you age, and so far in my life I’ve been very lucky with such things. But, I had feared that this episode would go far worse than it now seems to be going, that is, that having gone rather bad it would stay rather bad from then on, until such time as it got even worse. What if the doctor had been sparing me the worst about how it could all go? What if he was simply wrong? But it now seems that not only was his speed in seeing me very speedy; he also judged my condition accurately.
And the relief I’ve been feeling today, also in a dull, getting old sort of way, has been, as I say, considerable.