Good for morale

It is true, the giant neon says so.

(Apols for the crap quality - didn't have a tripod with me)

Because I haven't killed for a while...

I took my bike out to East Street Market to buy some flowers for the minibalcony.  It's a nice, unreconstructed tat-and-veg market off the Walworth Road.  It's a bit like how I imagine the Blitz to be.  But with more old mobile phones and N64 games for sale.

Like all good middle-class boys, I affected a slightly cockney accent when buying things, lest they recognise me as a member of the gentry, steal my bike and chuck me in a canal.  

They are Flowers.  I know nothing more.  They will be dead soon.

Whilst I'm (diagetically) around Elephant and Castle, I'll include a picture of the tank (yes, tank) that is parked just off the New Kent Road.

If I knew how to link to a Google map, I'd do that.  But I can't.  Anyway.  Clearly, given London is drowning in the July downpours, I didn't take this picture over the weekend.

Doing society a service

Now they don't even need to open their mouths

 for you to know they're Northern.

Please refurbish my mouth

Erm.  Are they experts in refurbishing dentists' surgeries, or people's mouths?

Yourselves is the new you

I have a story to tell.  It's about you and Pippa Middleton and Shakespeare and chavs.

Are you sitting comfortably? It all began when the phone rang...

Patronisingly literal visual accompaniment.

"Was that yourselves I was speaking to earlier?" asked the caller, shortly before I reached through the telephone and punched him so hard in the face that his face, and then the entire universe, collapsed in on his face.

That reflexive pronoun is immensely irritating. Particularly in the plural. Yourselves?  Massive idiot. But then, gasp, I heard myself say it. At which point, of course, it shifted from unforgivable grammatical transgression into credible and incisive demonstration of the zeitgeist.  So - and I do this not to defend the use of bad English, only to defend my use of bad English - I herewith suggest a vaguely-credible excuse for my actions.

Let me take you back to slightly before Shakespeare's time.  Please.  Go on, it'll be fun. Thenabouts, the English language did the 'you' thing by:

Singular - thou / thee
Plural - you / ye

But, about Shakespear's time, 'you' could be used to mean the singular or plural (like today), and also had an additional special role.  I draw your attention to a bit of Henry IV, pt 1.  You may have been made to read this at school.  But, because I can't differentiate between the singular and plural 'you', you don't know how many of you I am talking to.  Do you?

Anyway - I digress.  Henry IV, Pt 1, Act II, scene 3.  You will of course remember it well.  Hotspur has to leave his wife that night (played in my imagination by Pippa Middleton) and romp off.  She, however, just wants her husband to stay with her.  She is probably wearing quite a slinky nightie.

Kate:  Do you not love me? do you not, indeed? Well, do not then; for since you love me not, I will not love myself. Do you not love me? Nay, tell me if you speak in jest or no.

Hotpsur: Come, wilt thou see me ride? And when I am on horseback, I will swear I love thee infinitely...

Kate, as befitting an inferior (ie a lady), is using 'you'.  Hotspur is brushing off Kate's pleas for intimacy, and demonstrating his superior manliness by using the more formal 'thou'.  But, at the very end of the scene, Hotspur leans in to Kate's ear and whispers:

But hark you, Kate.  Whither I go, thither shall you go too;  To-day will I set forth, to-morrow you.  Will this content you, Kate?

So, here, Hotspur's 'you' is an intimate, placatory moment with his wife.  He lowers himself to her level. And then he romps off <spoiler> and gets killed </spoiler>.

He is also imagining Pippa Middleton.

What's my point?  Well, today, we only have 'you' - there is no 'thou'.  Which means that we can't use that distinction to indicate subservience / dominance.  And we English are unconsciously very careful about breaking social rules / causing a scene / being impolite.  We don't want accidentally to say 'thou'.

Which is where the earlier 'yourselves' come in. It's being used like Kate's subservient 'you' above. 'Yourselves' is the new 'you' - it's the only plural version we've got left.  This stress is particularly important over the phone, where we are robbed of various non-verbal indicators (apologetic smile, upturned palms, friendly lick of the face).  'Youselves' is a defensive, diffuse, offence-avoiding 'you' - 'Was it someone, somewhere, quite possibly not you personally, in your office to whom I spoke before...?'

Does this mean that you (pl.) should all use 'yourselves' at every opportunity? No, please, please don't. But, perhaps, you (sing.) may understand why certain weak-minded fools might. Even if it does make them sound like utter plebs.

Kate:  Does yourselves not love myselves? does yourselves not, indeed? Well, do not then; for since yourselves loves myselves not, I will not love myselves. Does yourselves not love myselves? Nay, tell myselves if yourselves speak in jest or no.

It's the sort of thing you might hear in an Elizabethan Gregg's the Bakers.  In Skelmersdale.

Foreign: Stockholm 2

Got the opportunity to explore a bit of the Stockholm metro system, which markets itself as a huge art exhibition.  The lines in green on the metro map are vaguely New York-y, with one station jazzed up with crazy neon.

The Blue Lines are quite different, however.  They seem to be (perhaps because they are) hewn from rock.   It's like installing a metro system in Wookey Hole.

Solna Centrum in particular has been given a fetchingly vibrant paint job. 

The escalators are gorgeously glossy, and look like a Art Deco Christmas installation.  

I suspect that, at 22 quid, a three-day metro pass might be the cheapest thing you can actually buy in Stockholm.

Google+ sexytime

Cripes.  A multimedia groinathon.

I +1 you

Cheerful, advert-packed and privacy-invading Facebook.  The addictive hashtagging stranger-stalking fun of Twitter.  The gleaming white and gaping white and empty white of Google+.  And now this very blog.

So, accepting that I can only wring a finite amount of amusement from my just-in-Zone-1 existence, where should I put the best bits?  Should I scatter the jokes and highlights around each of them?  Or should, say, Twitter be a masterwork of vas deferens-damaging chortledom, whereas Facebook could house all my upsettingly prosaic mind-jetsam.  'I seem to have run out of milk'.  'I quite like some of Coldplay'.  'At what point should I go to the doctor with it?'.  Etc.

Or should I post the same thing on all of the platforms, ensuring that every single person I electronically know is exposed to the same level of brain-alteringly witty give-that-man-more-sex banter?  This would however mean that anyone who knows me on more than one forum would get bombarded by a face-hurtingly repetitive barrage of identiupdates.  YES I KNOW YOU HAVE RUN OUT OF MILK.

And this leads to the problem of terminology.  I follow people on Twitter.  People can be my friend on Facebook.  People, very few, very damaged people, are the audience of this blog (or, as I like to call you, traffic).  Not sure what it's called on Google+.  Perhaps you circle people.  But, given Google+'s design ethic, any text describing this would be in white on a white background.  It's sooo empty.  It's like spending a Wednesday in a caravan filled with foam.

So, anyway, I have decided that where I place things will depend entirely on their length.  Tiny thoughts: Twitter.  Mediocre-length updates: Facebook.  Cascading logorrhea: here.  Which leaves what for Google+?  Quite.

Yes, you *do*.

Very Good Things about London: #2 Battersea Power Station

Roofless.  Listed.  Utterly lovely, and utterly unloved.

I suppose I was always going to love the building (BPS, to those of its friends who like making up acronyms).  The outside was designed by the same Gilbert Scott who did Cambridge's University Library.  The North Wing Floor 3 of which being my second home for my final year (and, quite co-incidentally, where the very fittest girls in Cambridge hang out.  True dat).

There's something reassuring about the weight and scale of the building, compounded by the use of those small, densely packed 30s bricks.  And it's pretty much impossible to photograph if you ever do get into the grounds - it's simply too large.

It seems currently to be held together by an internal scaffold made from the girders which once supported the roof.

I can track my progression through cameras by looking at my huge number of BPS photos. The earliest, from 2003, are wet-film, using a Canon 300V SLR.  Then, a series of experiments with early Olympus digital cameras (one or two of which were excellent, but laughably boxy, ugly and battery-thirsty by today's standards).  For some reason, although everyone tells me that Nikons are better, I have stuck with Canon, and now lug around the heavy and simply great 40D.

BPS is partly famous for its Art Deco control room.  I suspect that this come in part from the mystery that surrounds it: given the building is no-that-far from falling down, few people are allowed inside the building and into the control room.  I, clearly, am special.

There are, consistently, plans afoot to regenerate the place.  One - which thankfully has gone away - would've seen BPS dwarfed by an incongruously massive glass ecotower thingy (more evidence of my fetish for models of London).

Most recently, a consultation doc popped through my door, seeking locals' views about getting the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line to perform a handbrake turn at Kennington, and spin off westwards to Nine Elms and then BPS itself (details here, in case you were wondering).  This would, excellently, make the Charing Cross branch less rubbish (other option: rebuild / destroy Tottenham Court Road station)

As a side thought, I suspect that BPS might've been quite horrid when it was a working coal-fired power station.   But, it's now half derelict, like a tragic hero improbably and unfairly crippled by the caprice of the guy who owns Alton Towers.

Passive agressive: Mexico

Yes, Mexico is *still* waiting.

Foreign: Stockholm

Things I have learnt about Stockholm:

1)  Do not refer to the below as 'the Ikea flag'

2)  Kök is, apparently, not hilarious to the locals.

3)  They make proper coffee and use fresh milk.  Win.

4)  Beer / alcohol / everything is cripplingly expensive.  Fail.

5)  'Normalms polisen' does not mean 'normal police'.

6)  Ö is Alt+0214.  Obviously.

Very Good Things about London: #1 The Building Centre

I stumbled across this place quite accidentally, trekking back to the Tube after infiltrating Senate House with my SLR (win).

I'm actually not sure what the Building Centre does, or why it's there.  But the foyer houses a brilliant exhibition on new buildings in London, and a huge (and very detailed) model of the city.

Wonder if the Shard will actually look like that when it's finished.  And what's that Helter Skelter building to the left of the Gherkin?

The model also shows the DLR (tartrazine orange) and mainlines (dayglow yellow), along with the nascent Crossrail (dark blue).  Crossrail is another Very Good Thing.  Wonder if they'll take the opportunity / excuse to rebuild / destroy the current vile and Lilliputian Tottenham Court Road station.

Here's the Building Centre's website.  There's also a bookshop, the delightful contents of which left me in priapic raptures of engorgement.  Not cheap, though.  

According to Google Maps, the Building Centre is on the B506 (oh, there).  The nearest Tube is Goodge Street, which at least isn't Tottenham Court Road.

Eltham: City of Mouthbreathers

Took the bike out to Eltham last weekend.  Ostensibly, I was off to see Eltham Palace, but it was shut when I got there at 11am.  So I amused myself by looking at the lovely 30s houses round there.  A particular and pink one caught my eye:

A magnificently horrid mess (marvel at the curved once-suntrap windows that arc round to the garage extension!  Gasp at the pink, Old Worlde porch extension!  Feel slightly nauseous on behalf of the neighbours and their unruined house on the left).  Oh, those lanterns.

Anyway, whilst taking pictures and chortling in a horribly superior way, a young skinheaded chap stopped his van and asked me if I was trying to break into his Mum's house.  Least he asked, I suppose.  Anyway.  I had to claim to be admiring the stylish architecture.  And then I ran away on my bike.  

A test picture - what fun!

Just want to see how this works...

A first posting

So...  How does this work...?  Let's see.

Anyway - this blog will probably host some pics of mine, and some SCWiTS stuff.  Let's see.