A City Walk

Had to go into the City on Monday - around Mansion House - and was reminded how beautiful the old streets can be. You have to look along the curve and twist of the lanes, squint, then try to ignore many of the most modern buildings and attempt to see the City as it once was. Some new projects seem to be trying to obliterate the past with agressive bombast, like the 1990s No.1 Poultry, which was ugly (but not even good modernistly ugly) to begin with and has not improved with age, its creator perhaps obsessed with Battenburg Cake due to a moment of Prousian recollection with his sketch pad.

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I worked in the City for brief periods in the late 80s, including a stints temping at Warburgs, the Financial Times, BP and a couple of others whose names I can't remember. As a computer input drone my mind was free to explore and after work I could drift anonymously around the alleyways and lanes, imagining, then sit in old pubs and try to guess which era particular people would look best in.

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I love the 60s/70s building at 30 Cannon Street. Although bursting with crazy 60s humour it gives a substantial nod to medieval architecture of the past in the way it seems to get bigger the higher it gets. There's something edible, biscuity and Italian about it. (for more info see http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/United%20Kingdom/London/30%20Cannon%20Street).

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The names of the streets around here are magnificent. Old Jewry. Ironmonger Lane. Poultry. Cheapside. Walbrook. Garlick Hill. They give you the sense of rapidly changing environment, something London can still offer in pockets. Old Jewry is now slabs of concrete, expanses of glass, but a vision of the past can be found in an old plaque embedded into the wall telling of the synagogue that stood until the late 13th Century around the time the Jews were expelled from England.

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And one suprising thing is the amount of small, old fashioned shops in this part of the city - tailors, cobblers, cafes, galleries, old restaurants, hats, umbrellas. Everywhere you look, fragments of the past are still woven into the fabric of the streets. Tiny churchyards. Old houses next to office blocks. Ancient coats of arms peeing out from the roof of a bank.

 

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Cheese sandwiches in the fairy fields

Coast1  A walk down to thefairy fields at the end of the Cahermacrusheen boreen where we have a grand picnic of cheese sandwiches and Tayto crisps and a flask of tea. The sea is still and the Aran Isles look very close. Most of the land around North Doolin is parched and the grass dry and brownish as if this was August rather than early April. But here, on the way to the rocks at the edge of the Burren, the turf is thick and wet like black gold and little patches of intense green burst out from beneath the stones.

The kids do a cow attracting dance that achieves its objective, expect these are bullocks not cows. On the way back we see a thorn tree decorated with ribbons, materials, toys, holy water and candles. Next to this is the dry stone wall part of which is made up of massive horizontal stones, which I have a feeling had once been the lost Cahermacrusheen dolmen.

The acne red faced bloke dogshit incident

The bloke was in his early 20s and had a stripey t-shirt and a spotty red face. He swaggered out of the King's Head with his dog then watched, transfixed, as the dog did a big runny shit all over the pavement. He was about to swagger off in the direction of Finsbury Park when I announced that if everyone acted like him the whole world would be covered in dogshit. He looked at me in disbelief. How will I clear it up? he whined. I pointed to the paper bag he was holding, which contained a brand new tube of what I presume was acne cream. The dog looked up at his master as if to say "want me to bite his gonads, master?" but the bloke in the stripey t-shirt still seemed confused, as if he had never realised that leaving dogshit in the middle of the pavement was wrong. I left him standing over the pile of crap, wondering what to do, though my daughter informed me that as soon as my back was turned he had swaggered over to the bus stop as if nothing had happened.

North London Fathers' Triathlon

One of the main reasons to stay fit is so you can run for a bus and catch it. I've always prided myself on being able to catch just about any bus I want -  even if I miss a stop I'll sometimes run for the next one. In the last couple of years this has been getting harder. But recently I tried the North London Fathers' Triathlon, in which one runs for a bus after completing two even more gruelling events. 

1) Getting to school to pick up kids while pushing a pram and you're a mile away and five minutes behind schedule. 
2) Trying to find every overdue library book in the house within a 15 minute period (at advanced level, there'll be two or three toddler books hidden behind bookshelves)

Is it too late for this to be included in the 2012 Olympics? It could be a gold medal bonanza for Britain...

Goodbye Football Tree

TreeA while ago (I can't remember - was it three years or six months?) a wicker sculpture was placed on top of the remains of one of the old trees that had died after the 2003 drought. It seemed to be saying that the tree could continue to have a life after it had died.

Every day my two year old son and I walk through Clissold Park and go up to touch the Football Tree.

"Football Tree!" my son will say. We'll then both have a quiet think about how great football and trees are, and walk on.

But the Football Tree is no more. The other morning as we approached it as part of our daily pilgrimage, we saw the wicker sphere lying smashed on the ground. Next to it was an iron pole, part of a nearby fairground display. Still fresh in the air was the sense that someone had decided that good stuff was rubbish and had to be ruined. Was this part of the artist's planned trajectory for the sculpture - to hire a gang of bored and drunk idiots to destroy it?

My son said he wanted to fix the football tree. I told him that it couldn't be fixed because it was a metaphor for the world's problems. Or the problems of bored and drunk idiots hanging around in parks at night. Or the England football team's problems. Or the problems of sentimentalising outdoor installation sculpture