B U R N

Loop City by BIG from ArchDaily on Vimeo.

The Underground is full of posters featuring women with perfect lips, noses and breasts. A confidence-building start to a Monday morning, I imagine.

I secretly admire those a(d)ctivists using chewing gum and stickers to ‘customise’ these posters.

This one, featuring a maori inspired monster of a face, was spotted at Old Street.

So, in my view, any kind of appreciation of the Shepherd’s Bush area must be an acquired taste. Like people actually taking a like to playing golf, ‘team building’ or getting pierced in places where the light never shines. Having established that Shepherd’s Bush and I are not exactly ‘buddies’, I found myself walking through that very part of town yesterday.

As is normal in this vicinity, a gentleman carrying lots of plastic bags and wearing a couple of dirty down jackets on a hot summer day attempted to grab a share of my attention. He was uttering something indecipherable in a foreign language and tapping my shoulder repeatedly. I increased my already brisk pace for this ménage à deux to come to an end, but his chasing of me continued for a good couple of minutes. Go away. Disappear now. Please!

Finally, giving in and turning around to confront him, he waved a £20-note that I had just dropped out of my pocket, placed it in my hand and walked away. With a big smile on his face.

Pheeew, I thought I was going crazy. None of my friends have seen this guy, but for some inexplicable reason I keep bumping into him: ‘The Guy with the Rubik’s Cube on the London Tube’.

He enters the coach, starts doing his tricks and then leaves. Never asking for money, just focusing on the cube and chatting away.

Thank god he was caught on camera: (more…)

Overheard on the way out of the Tube station. Commuters everywhere. The lady is walking behind me, she is on the phone.

Her: Hi, it’s me

[the person at the other end starts chit-chatting]

Her: Yes, yes, but listen, I need you to shut up for five minutes and let me talk. You wouldn’t believe what’s happened, I’m on my way to the police station…

And then our ways parted.

Strange things are happening in my area.

A thief jumped the fence and broke into our bike shed yesterday. Not only did he break the padlock, but he removed the entire locking device by pulling out the screws. This must have made an awful noise on an otherwise quiet night. There were three expensive bikes parked in that shed, and it would have been easy to walk away with them. Investing such effort, it would almost seem natural to nick at least one of them (I would!). Still, nothing was missing. Or so I thought until I discovered that my front light had been stolen and the rear light tinkered with. He took the bike light and the holder with him, an operation that requires a screwdriver, fiddling with tiny screws and thus a generous serving of patience. Now, who on earth would do that?

In a completely unrelated event - yet, adding to the mystery - I swear to god I saw a man in earnest discussion with a cat the day before.

The title of this post pays a not so subtle reference to Murakami’s ‘Kafka on the Shore’, a brilliant book whose plot revolves around a man with the ability to strike up conversations with cats and make fish and leaches fall from the sky. It is weirder than it sounds, but all the more compelling.

London has been turned into a gigantic sociological laboratory over the past couple of days: a 48-hour Tube strike went ahead as planned.

Like power cuts, heavy snow fall and other mega-disruptions, the strike has created new forms of community and something for everyone to talk about without really saying a thing (’it’s bad, innit?’). On the other hand, it has drawn up the lines even further between some of those groupings who already thought very little of each other.

Rush hour traffic in London, especially on the main commuter routes, was always a prime example of urban guerilla warfare. It is literally a cyclical war between cyclists and motorists, with pedestrians caught up as innocent victims somewhere in between (tourists are fair game, though). Such is the tense atmosphere and entrenched hatred that the Taleban should probably consider embarking on a daily recruitment spree to hit their ambitious targets.

From a bike perspective, what used to be a matter of struggling with light artillery (scooters), snipers (electric vehicles) and the odd gunship (bendy buses) is now a full-on nuclear disaster. Negotiating Kensington High Street in strike mode - i.e. normal congestion x 2.5 - at 8am is comparable to wearing a pink ballerina skirt while attempting to tiptoe through a phalanx of black cabs. If we could only harvest the bad karma and turn it into electricity, there would be no need for fossil fuels.

There are a number of lessons to be learned:

a) All black cab drivers are idiots. Fact.
b) All black cab drivers are idiots. Fact.
c) London needs more cycle paths (which would have the added benefit of eliminating the widespread tendency for cyclists to routinely dress up as sweded(!) storm troopers).

What better way to introduce Google’s controversial UK Street View service than to show off my new home.

London, here I come.

It is normally quite a delight to step out of the train at Paddington and enjoy the kind of splendour that can only be afforded by a grand railway station. This morning, however, there was something eerie about the light; it appeared more like a tunnel than the usual cathedral of old-style grandeur and mobility.

Hyde Park, on the other hand, presented itself as an all-encompassing source of white, interrupted only by the occasional fellow human being or companion species. A nice but demanding bike ride indeed.

On Trafalgar Square, the Admiral stood in his usual place, silently watching the crowds passing by. When I finally reached the office, I was one of the few people actually turning up. My otherwise reliable colleagues P. honeline and Int Ernet even decided to take the day off so I embarked on the return leg right away.

Sometimes the journey is the destination.

Update: Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece on the ‘day of innocence‘ in the Guardian:

In London, this doesn’t happen often. We trust our dour reflexive, self-poisoning moaning as a lifestyle philosophy instead. We like it that way: strangers are strange and Britain, damn everything about it, doesn’t work. Why don’t the buses run on time? Why are we so hopeless? Why can’t something be done (usually by someone else who we can blame for their shortcomings)? And this chorus of self-immolation is taken up countrywide: why, non-Londoners ask, is the capital brought to a standstill by a little snow? Why can’t you southern ponces get your act together? And the cry is international too: as I walk through the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, a French couple consulting the warnings about the tube, roll their eyes as one. He said: “Typiquement anglais. Rien ne va plus!” They both laugh, as if to say their Gallic expectations had been confirmed.

New Row, Covent Garden.

PS. My Neapolitan colleague tells me that ‘Credito Crunchio’ is not proper Italian.