Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Crane – scaffolding – roof clutter

And all in the one photo:

Also, trees without leaves. Taken in January 2009. On my way home, looking out towards Vauxhall Bridge Road and beyond, in the general direction of Battersea.

At present, sofas are more important to me than blogging, as the above blatant quota photo well illustrates.

This morning, the new sofa finally arrived. It is my hope, and the promise of Westminster City Council, that the old sofa will depart tomorrow.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Books and a telegram

I just posted something at Samizdata about a talk I’ll be doing for Christian Michel this coming Sunday, i.e. January 6th. A rerun of this, basically, but with my thinking somewhat further advanced.

In the course of my homework for this posting, and for the talk itself, I came across these two rather fine images, which nicely illustrate the two history dates loom large in my story, the invention of the printing press …:

… and the invention of the electric telegraph:

I found these images here, and here.

Note how all the books are German. A major impact of printing being nationalism.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Sunrise on the way to Alicante (etc.)

Happy New Year to all my readers. Every time I go out to a party, I encounter people who read this thing, despite all its technical stupidities and despite the fact that the subject matter is just me musing aloud. So good morning to you all and I hope that not only I, but also you, have a good 2019. (Yes, I’m managing to keep up, approximately speaking, there also, where my musings are more structured and disciplined.)

This being Jan 1st, I offer you a sunrise:

Usually when the sky is that colour in my photos, it’s a sunset. But it all came back to me when I chanced upon these photos, of an expedition to Alicante. Basically, I visit all the bits of France and Spain that my ex-Quimper friends have or have had bits of property in. And they had a place in Alicante, or they rented it, or something. Maybe they still have it. So, I went to Alicante, in January 2010. And, the above photo was taken by me at a bus stop in Vauxhall Bridge Road, looking back across Vauxhall Bridge, while waiting for a bus to take me and all my holiday clobber in the opposite direction along Vauxhall Bridge Road to Victoria Station, where I eventually caught a bus to the airport. With much confusion, as I recall it, about exactly where the damn bus departed from. Had I not happened upon another traveller who knew, I might have missed that airplane.

All of which clarifies a fact that has for me become more and more clear over the years, that although blogs are not diaries, photo-archives are. I have photoed many photos which I would not even consider sticking up here. But they have all piled up on my hard disc. I live, you might say, a double life. There’s my, you know, life. And then there’s my photoed life, which I can relive any time I want, and see all my friends and relatives and remember all the private things we said and did, the way you people very rarely get even to hear about, never mind learn the private details of.

This blog, meanwhile, is a severely edited subsection of my diary, with some added words, added in a way that I hope doesn’t make me appear too ridiculous. Very different.

To add some words to the above photo, I realise that in addition to loving roof clutter, I am also becoming ever more fond of street clutter, which, due to the anarchic and non-mutually-communicating nature of London’s public sector, London possesses an abundance of. Much of it is, like most modern roof clutter, severely utilitarian, which I like, because nobody is trying to make it look pretty. But much ground clutter is very beautiful, especially London’s more showy street lamps.

Love the new keyboard. So solid and strong. Happiness is being able to check all the letters and symbols on your keyboard, as you type.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Penmarc’h Lighthouse

At the end of April and the beginning of May of 2018, I visited the city of Quimper, almost certainly for the last time. The friends I have stayed there with several times are now living in the south of France, and their Quimper home is now someone else’s. So, farewell Quimper.

On May 4th, on my last full day in Quimper, my hostess drove me to see the superb lighthouse at Penmarc’h, which is on the south west tip of Brittany. And no, I don’t know how “Penmarc’h” is pronounced, and nor do I know what is really the correct name for this mighty edifice. It seems to have many names. But, it is a lighthouse, and it is in the town of Penmarc’h, so Penmarc’h Lightbouse it is.

Although she needed to get back in quite a hurry to prepare supper, she let me take the time to climb up the Lighthouse and savour the views of the town of Penmarc’h and of the Brittany coast. Which were spectacular, as was the weather that day:

The lighthouse I went up is the furthest from the sea of three structures, which would appear to have been doing, in succession, a similar job. As time went by, they got smaller, nearer to the sea, and more dependent upon electronic technology. Photo 3.1 shows the two smaller ones, as seen from the big one.

That same morning, I also checked out a huge and totally marvellous second hand shop in Quimper, and an equally huge and totally marvellous cheese factory, which was really more like a cheese refinery.

So, a really good day. One of my favourites of 2018. Except that the day after that day, in Paris, was probably even better.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

City views from 2004

In search of worthwhile photos to show here, I find myself digging further and further back in the archives. I looked for photos taken a decade ago, but found nothing that stirred any thoughts. However, these four, from over fourteen years ago, do now seem to be worth showing.

The first is of the ghostly pillars of the old Blackfriars Bridge. These are still there, looking now just as they looked then. But, then there was no Blackfriars railway station on the more recent Blackfriars Bridge. Blackfriars Station then only happened on the far side of the river, as we look north.

Second, a rather striking view of the City Big Thing Cluster, the striking thing being that most of the City Big Thing Cluster had not yet happened. The Gherkin stands in almost perfect isolation, visible from all directions. No Cheesegrater. No Walkie-Talkie. And definitely no 22 Bishopsgate, already the biggest of the lot of them so far.

The third of these photos I include simply because I like it, or at least I like what it shows and how the photo is composed. (Technically these photos are all very blurry and primitive. The Canon A70 is the cheapest camera I have ever owned and used, and it shows.) In particular I like how we see so clearly the truncated end of the Millennium Footbridge. (I should have a go at that view again, with my current and much better camera, on a much better day.)

And finally, the grey of the dying light suddenly looks blue, as grey did look with that Canon A70. Tate Modern was there, of course it was. It isn’t that modern. But, the Tate Modern Extension, which now stands behind Tate Modern itself, is still way in the future.

I show this photo because it very clearly says “Collection 2004” on Tate Modern. Windows Image viewer, cross-examined, also says 2004, January 17th, and I am a lot more inclined to believe that, given that I know that the 2004 bit is right. I’m guessing that Jan 17 is right also. Goodness knows, it’s gloomy enough to be January. So, nearly fifteen years ago.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Advent of a new keyboard

Below, on top, the old keyboard:

Above, at the bottom, the new keyboard.

Below, a close up of the problem with the old keyboard:

Below, the solution with the new keyboard:

There was a problem. I tried sticking new labels on the keys. Didn’t work. So, I threw money at the problem. Problem solved.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Hippo bottle opener

Samizdata Supremo Perry de Havilland likes hippos. A rather disconcerting thing that happens to you from time to time if you are a Samizdata contributor is that if you do a posting, but forget to add categories to it, the default category that gets added automatically is: Hippos.

So, anyway, yes, Perry likes hippos, so a friend of his gave him a hippo for Christmas. It was presented to him at Chateau Samizdata on Christmas Eve, where I was also present.

I photoed it:

Trouble is, the hippo is all black, and my camera didn’t do very well. (The above result reminded me of this Samizdata posting that I did last year, about a very black sort of black.)

I tried lots of photo-editing, but I’m not sure that this was really much of an improvement:

But yes, this really is also a bottle opener. (I’m pretty sure it’s this one.) The friend who got it told me beforehand that it was a bottle opener also. Would Perry really want it, if the bottle opener turned out not to work very well. I said: if it’s a hippo, Perry will want it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A flash photo of Stephen Davies

I just spent all my blogging time on another Samizdata posting, about Stephen Davies, the historian, who works for the Institute of Economic Affairs.

I included this photo in that posting:

I took this photo with my very first digital camera, a Minolta Dimage EX.

I chose this camera because it offered the strange – then or since then – feature that you could separate its flash … thingy, from the bit of the camera that did the actual photoing. I had to have flash, because indoor photoing of the people I wanted to photo without flash just did not then work. Direct in-your-face flash was a feature of photo-portraiture at that time, and not in a good way. But with my Minolta Dimage EX, I could hold the lens out to the left, at the other end of a length of wire, and thus light my victim not from head on. I could shift the shadow from directly behind to off to the side, as in the above photo of Steve Davies.

I still have this old Minolta, somewhere. I must dig it out, and photo it. But not tonight. Tonight, early (ish) bed. Tomorrow, a party, for which I am very late with the preparations. So, that is all.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Boxing Day posting

And here, as promised yesterday, are the other dozen of the Christmassy (Google reckons it’s double ss at the end there rather than the single s I used to name the photos) photos that I was gathering together yesterday. They, like the previous lot, are shown in chronological order, the first one being from 2015 to now, the most recent from earlier this month:

I used half a dozen of these two dozen photos to concoct a Merry Christmas photo-posting at Samizdata, in the small hours of this morning, what with there having been nothing there yesterday, until I did that. And then faked the timing. Just like I often do here.

Which means that, for the last week, I have not only done something for here, every day, but have done something there, every day. More on the thinking behind this sudden burst of Samzdating here, some time soon, maybe, I promise nothing.