I will typically avoid the tube if I happen to arrive in London at rush hour. It is not a pleasant experience. I suppose people have no choice. I think this picture was taken after the Rolling Stones concert on the Sunday night at the O2. We just about made the last tube train out of the Greenwich Peninsula. Many didn’t & would not have found it easy to get back to town.
March 12, 2013
K²day: Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey
22h55-23h59, 11-March-2013
There must be no less than twelve things I would rather be doing right now than sitting down to write. Should I list them? Huh? Should I?
I have spent a lot of time driving down Iceland’s Route 1 lately, and like any good highway it has the power in its more mundane straighaways to trigger unexpected thoughts and recollections. For instance, today just after shooting past some outlet glacier tongue of Vatnajökull whose name I have no prayer of ever remembering I found myself dwelling on the latter half of the summer of 1986, when circumstance (and a lightning bolt) finally put ‘Paid’ to a long-held (self-diagnosed) neurosis of mine.
My obsessive fear of house fires began in 1971, immediately after being shown a Walt Disney/Donald Duck cartoon on fire prevention in the 1st Grade during a school assembly (along with at least one other short film on the subject, one that did NOT involve familiar animated characters and was thus a whole heckuva lot scarier). I vividly recall going home that day and immediately checking our basement for oily rags that could spontaneously combust. Also, that night — and countless other nights over the ensuing 15 years — found me lying awake waiting for my parents to turn out their light so I could sneak out of bed to make sure (1) the stove was turned off, (2) that there were no live cigarette embers in the ashtrays strewn throughout the house, and (3) that neither Mom nor Dad had fallen asleep in bed with a lit cigarette between their fingers. The fact is, all thanks for my being the quintessential “night owl” today should probably be set at the webbed feet of Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
Time passes. We move from a house in Hoffman Estates, IL USA (3rd story room, a 30-foot drop) to a house in Richardson, TX USA (2nd story room, window egress to a sea of concrete) to a house in Plano, TX USA (a ground-level room, and a breath exhalation held for nearly six years). I continue to make my tiptoe rounds each night, though, having added fireplace cinder waiting-out and door lock confirmation to my routine (the latter likely tied to Dad’s having made a career shift into the sale of home security systems).
More time. More moves (a subject for other days)…and more ground floor bedrooms. All good. College begins, and full-time residency with the parents comes to an end without my perishing in a blaze brought to ferocious life by a shoddy-wiring-and-insullation cocktail or the superheated creosote of a poorly-cleaned chimney. And of course I am aware that university dormitories come complete with up-to-code fire escape routes and evacuation plans.
And that’s all we have time for today, folks. Do tune in tomorrow, though, for the conclusion of this episode of…”Route 1 Reminiscing”!
March 11, 2013
Cutty Sark seen from below
The Cutty Sark is a brilliant piece of museum design. From below it looks like a huge rowing boat and is pure art combined with maritime engineering.
March 10, 2013
Graffiti with a curious trail to follow – Hayden Kays
I was having a few beers at St Stephen’s Tavern after a bash at the House of Commons Members Dining Room and went downstairs to use the facilities. The toilets had recently been refurbished and the tiles were nice and new (fwiw). I then noticed that someone had scribbled their name neatly into the grouting between the tiles.
Although it was a somewhat dodgy thing to do in the mens loo of a pub I whipped my photographic tool out and took a picture of the graffiti. I didn’t think much of it but later when flicking through the photos on the phone decided to Google the person’s name.
You need to do the same – the name was Hayden Kays. It’s quite a cool way to spread the word about your stuff. I assume it was him wot wrote his name.
Enjoy…
Sunset over Yorkshire
I took this one after a long day on the road travelling to York. Once again after putting up the tent and relaxing with a drink and a meal cooked on my bottle-mounted gas burner.
The campsite was not far from York, I can’t recall the name, but i do recall the high winds and the thousands and thousands of earwigs.
It was my first visit to York. Hopefully not my last.
So tired. Sleep for me
Sounds like the opening line of a song doesn’t it? So tired. Sleep for me. Sung to a similar tune to “willow weep for me” but different. The melody needs to reflect the state of the person saying the words.
The words themselves don’t tell us the whole story. It could be that the person has been working very long hours with still some time to go or it could be that someone has a deeper problem that is preventing them from sleep.
The body keeps going, somehow and the brain which is notionally awake, is in a state of suspension unable to think clearly.
In this case I don’t know the answer. I picked the words up from twitter, itself the domain of the sleepless during the long, lonely, struggling hours of the midnight watch. I could perhaps read the person’s twitter stream for clues but I am happy that it is best left unread, unsolved, leaving us wondering.
Another chink in the curtain of the night.
Coxed four on the river at Durham
Taken whilst visiting our daughter Hannah at Grey College in the Autumn of 2012. It’s a long shot 🙂
March 9, 2013
A picture of the Seine.
I find myself driving to France on a regular basis, and whenever the mood strikes me to visit Paris I stay in a campground by the Seine.
Last time I was there, after pitching the tent in the afternoon summer sun, before visiting the campsite bar, I was struck by the image through the mesh of the chain-link fence.
The light was great, giving a wonderful reflection of the world in the surface of the smooth Seine.
I took the opportunity to take a multiple exposure shot with my camera lens poked through the 8-foot fence and made a nice HDR image while enjoying a cold beer.
I’ve over-saturated the colours so that it gives a wonderfully vibrant feel, which very much mirrors the mood of the entire holiday.
This shot was taken from the following LAT-LONG, for those that are curious. 48.869834, 2.235085.
3rd Law Part 20 – black holes, dislocations, unforeseen effects and the structureless society
Now waiting for the Openreach engineer. It’s 9.32 and he is due sometime between 8am and 12 noon. The VDSL modem is kaput as ve say. No lights. No internet connection. Ach so. The first thing everyone asks upon returning to the house is “is the internet working yet?”. Non, nein, nyet, na, no.
It is if you use your cellular connection but that is when you notice how good our internet access is normally. It’s raining outside. Which seems appropriate. I have lots to get on and do but everything involves going somewhere else and I have to stay here to babysit a defunct modem in case I’m not in when the engineer arrives which would not be good news.
I can’t see why I shouldn’t be able to log on to a portal to see where I am in the queue and what progress the guy is making towards my house. It would be a very friendly thing to offer.
I had considered today to be a job free zone but as the body slowly emerged from overnight shut down and systems rebooted a few tasks became evident. Tonight Johnnyboy is cooking us a barbecue style meal involving ribs, wings, tortilla chips and dips together with boston baked beans supplied by his mother, my very dear wife Anne. All the ingredients need sourcing, from Waitrose. All purchasing must in theory be complete by 12.30 which is the time the young footballer goes to play with his mates.
He has also just had a very good bit of news via a letter through the door this morning informing him of a vacant position as a carrier of daily newspapers to residences in the locale. This will involve a certain element of discipline hitherto dormant in the young lad. It means he has to get up at 6.45 am to go to the paper shop and pick up his literary load for onward carriage to the breakfast tables of Wragby Road.
There are several good outcomes from this newly imposed discipline. Firstly it will mean he spends less time on the Xbox in the morning. Second it will bring in twenty quid a week. Untold riches for someone who has only recently entered his teens.
The downside, and this is the bit that affects me, is that he has just tried to pump up his bike tyres in preparation for the 7am meet tomorrow with the round incumbent and the pump letteth all the air out! Now I have to get that sorted which probably means going to Halfords to get a new pump/valve but of course I have to baby site the modem. Scratch that. Just remembered a known good pump/valve combo in the car and it has worked, hooray.
The problem was going to be time. The lad has to be in Welton for the footy at 12.30. I have to be in the Morning Star for the pre match warm up at 1.30. The rest of the day should be considered a write off, starting that early. In one sense it is a good thing I now have this imposed period of inactivity. The third law book doesn’t write itself you know? It does really. The stuff just comes out. None of this sitting down and planning a structure – plot, characters etc. huh!
Could it be that the whole world is moving to a structureless position. We have “the cloud”. An ethereal entity not physically made of anything tangible that we trust is there but know not where. That certainly has the appearance of being structureless. We still have the order imposed on us by society but that order has been built up over hundreds, thousands of years even, of learning how to create red tape for the “benefit” of the whole.
Maybe the process of unravelling that structure takes a little time. Maybe unravel it will, somehow. The third law has unforeseen consequences. The speed at which everything happens means events happen so quickly that the forces of regulation and stability can no longer have sway. We already see that government struggles to keep up with the pace of technological change. Laws designed for an old world order no longer work. Copyright infringement in a world where millions of copies can be made at the click of a mouse, for example.
There surely has to be some structure. When I go to the Morning Star I stay on one side of the bar whilst Dave the barman, or whoever else is on, stays on the other side. He gives me beer, I drink it. I give him money. The money thing is going to disappear for sure, at least the hard stuff in the pocket. This brings us back to my VDSL modem because without the connectivity to make the electronic transaction happen I won’t be able to hand over my invisible cash and I won’t get my beer.
The dependency on connectivity and all things electronic makes our lives very vulnerable to total wipeout. Just as the music file can be copied at the flick of a switch, our online presence, entity if you like, can also be similarly removed. All backups of all the photos of us ever uploaded gone, kaput, as we have been known to say.
I’m going to insert what is known as a dislocation to the third law here. A dislocation is a time shift. A period in the flow where it looks as if there should be something there but it doesn’t appear to be. A kind of black hole but different. I’ve never known anyone escape the python-like squeeze of a black hole but the dislocation to the third law is a regular phenomenon that sees people emerge on the other side, unscathed if somewhat confused.
It is now 10.37. This hasn’t been a continuous writing session as you will recall that I broke to find the bicycle pump which may well have meant a dislocation but only a very minor one and only visible to the trained eye.
The rain continues. I’d like to have added relentlessly to that sentence, at the end, but I’m not sure whether that would have been an entirely accurate description of the current state of precipitation. There are certainly lots of drops hitting the conservatory roof but they come from the sycamore tree above rather than the actual rain which is usually quieter unless it is if the tropical storm variety in which case it can be deafening.
That tree is toast btw. Our new neighbours have decided it is going and are looking for a sensible quote. I am in favour of this act of forrestial (new word) destruction as it creates a lot of shade and even more leaves and crap on the conservatory roof that then needs cleaning. It will also have the side benefit of generating lots of logs for the fire though in my experience sycamore is a rubbish burner. Not going to say no though.
We are almost at the end of this open fire season. Maybe a couple more fires but then spring should be in full sway. Not that that necessarily means it will get any warmer but psychologically it will mean that we will feel it wrong to have the central heating on, let along lighting the open fire. Ve shall see.
Oops there I go again. Lapsing into German. It isn’t as if I’ve been to Germany much but being born only 16 years after the end of the second world war I grew up with a lot of WW2 fighting in comics. “Hande hoch, Englander schwein hundt” etc. Couldn’t get away with it these days though I do seem to be trying hard.
We will definitely be having an open fire next Sunday as we have some friends coming round to help us eat a goose. V traditional. I have a Delia Smith recipe that involves prunes soaked in Armagnac. I don’t have any Armagnac in so will have to buy some and will inevitably consume some in a non culinary manner (ie drink it) and end up slumping in front of the open fire. Bless ‘im.
We don’t have goose very often. It’s expensive and doesn’t produce much meat though there is always lots of good fat left over for use in cooking roast potatoes. Nothing better, fair play.
10.56 and still no engineer. To be continued…
3rd law Part 19 here
part 21 here
The conversation
They sure as hell aren’t talking about fish – discrete wall hanging from a cellar bar in SoHo.
Photo by Nick Pickles at the Phoenix Artist Club during trefor.net xmas bash 2012.
K²day: Flying a Sane Kite
22h53-23h57, 08-March-2013
So no excuses. I knew that carving out time to write each day while on holiday in Iceland with My Missus and The Boy was going to be a challenge, what with our typically frenetic mornings, the fact that we are driving everywhere (and I am the wheelman), long days packed chock-full with take-a-picture-here-take-a-souvenir (followed at night by three sessions of upload/edit/admire), and blissful unwinding at the end of it all. So no excuses.
Even with the near-religious importance I have long put on food/feating/eeding I still find myself surprised at the sheer might that a good meal can brandish. And I’m not talking about a pizza salve following the loss of the Little League championship in the 10th inning on a walk-off-homer, nor am I referring to a big bowl of chips-n-salsa applied liberally by a pal to help shake off the fact that she wants nothing at all to do with you. There, there? No. NO. Not cross-over grub, but a meal capable of changing the conversation, able to take you from whinging about everything awful that made your awful day the awful day that it was to reveling in the splendor of flavor, the magic of taste combinations, to “Forget about whatever it was I was bellyaching over, you have to taste this bisque, what goes into that coulis, and, no, I hardly ever order dessert but considering how good everything else has been so far, who would’ve ever thought we’d eat like this out here in Wherevertheheck?” The power of love? No, Huey, that’s the power of food.
Talk of “getting away from it all”? Cacophonous. Taking time enough from toil to truly leave it behind? Cliché Cops in hot pursuit. Need a long break? Break this, buddy. So what, then? This: Book a holiday (that’s “vacation” for you ‘Mericans out there) to start at mid-week. Weekend-to-weekend holidays all come complete with a “Next Monday”, as in “I go back to work next Monday.” You cannot get away when you know precisely when you need to get back. “It’s Tuesday. Damn, I have to go back to work in less than a week.” “It’s already Thursday? Where did this week go? Man, that was fast. Tomorrow is the weekend, and next Monday…back to work.” But a holiday that kicks off on a Thursday and ends the following Wednesday? Not only is there reapable benefit to be had in the not-full weeks on the front and back end of your holiday, but the cracking of the norm is sure to levy confusion of the very best type. Take for example La Famille Kessel, which began its happening-now Iceland holiday two days ago (Wednesday, for those of you out there not paying close enough attention)…today My Missus must have asked me what day it was no less than three times, and no less than three times I had to stop and ponder and do a few nano-seconds of actual work to figure out the correct answer.
Next Monday has no hope of finding my ragged ass!
March 8, 2013
3rd Law Part 19 – lowlife, postmen and Winking Owls
Sat in reception of Auto Windscreens listening to some funky music. At first I thought hmm, can they turn this loud stuff off but now I’ve changed my mind. It’s quite uplifting.
I’m here because some lowlife smashed one of the rear windows of the Jeep. The lowlife didn’t get in because they hadn’t bargained for the fact that the knob you use to unlock the door from the inside was broken on that door. I’ve never bothered getting it replaced because it doesn’t stop us from locking and unlocking the car. Hah.
We called the cops who came out straight away fair play. Apparently there has been a spate of such break-ins in town. They know who is doing it. A bunch of junkies looking for something to steal and sell for peanuts to buy themselves a couple of fixes. Been in and out of prison. There was no evidence onsite at our house to say who it was so I guess the forces of law and order will have to wait until the next incident to try and nab em.
We have beefed up our perimeter defences. I won’t tell you what we’ve done – need to know basis. I’d have to kill you. You can be assured however that it doesn’t involve razorwire or vicious killer dogs patrolling between the fences and trained to attack silently and ask questions after. The mind races away here. Picture the scene.
Dog pounces, forces you to the ground by clamping its huge teeth round your throat, shakes its head to rough you up a little and when it thinks it’s broken your resistance, lets go. It then proceeds to interrogate you in a very business-like manner, enquiring as to the purpose of your intrusion into the Davies estates.
Upon hearing that you are the postman and checking out your ID it licks the blood that has started to flow from the wounds in your neck, backs off and lets you know you are ok to proceed.
No that isn’t what we have done.
We interrupt the flow of this story to say btw it’s Radio 1 playing. Not my thing. I’m not in the right demographic.
Coming back to the security stuff, had the postman had his black and white cat with him in the van it would have scared it witless (words modified to preserve the Universal Classification of this work should it ever get to being assessed by the British Board Of Film or whoever does these things these days.
I assume the postman must have been on foot and without cat. It isn’t practical to take your cat with you on a round if you are on foot as they tend to wander off in search of mice or butterflies (other insects are available).
I’m not a cat person. Not a dog person really either. I like the concept of owning a dog. The faithful retainer trotting alongside you obediently, sitting at your feet in the pub gratefully catching the odd cheese and onion crisp thrown for its benefit. I like all that. What I don’t like is the fact that you have to look after it.
Also what do you do with the dog when you go on holiday?
Puts the mockers on that skiing trip or the villa in Mustique doesn’t it? I guess one could leave it with the gardener or the estate manager, or the mother in law though she wouldn’t be much use. Complains too much. Would drive the dog up the wall. It would attempt to escape and try and find you which is going to be difficult if you are in Mustique though marginally easier if skiing, as long as it isn’t in Canada or somewhere like that.
In fact I haven’t been skiing for many years. Not since Bob Madge suggested we popped up to Aviemore in 1984 or 1985. This was a Thursday and after work on Friday afternoon we were headed northbound with someone else whose name temporarily escapes me but which I will let you know if I remember. George it was I think. So we set off on Friday afternoon for the mobile home we had rented in Aviemore. It is a long way from Lincoln and we got there quite late and were starving.
We had been recommended to go to the Winking Owl to eat but we couldn’t find it so ended up having some poxy pub meal which was ok but not as good as we would have had had it been the Winking Owl, apparently. The ironic thing was that as soon as we had eaten and moved on to the next pub the next pub turned out to be, the Winking Owl of course!!
The next day we spent skiing. The one thing I have refrained from mentioning is that I broke my leg skiing at the age of 13 on a school trip to Sapada in the Italian Dolomites. The consequence of this breakage is that my right leg has never quite been as strong as the left. Normally it doesn’t matter but on that day skiing in Aviemore I found that it was weakening and I was beginning to fall even more than normal. I figured that the safest thing to do was get on the drag lift to the top of the mountain and take the chairlift to the bottom. On the way up someone had to sit next to me because I kept drifting off to the right, my left leg now being muscularly dominant.
When we got to the top we found that the chairlift had been closed due to high winds! Nightmare! The only thing I could do was ski down to the bottom. At this point we must remember from my experience on the drag lift that I could easily go to the right but not to the left! So in attempting to ski down the mountain I found that I could zig but not zag. I ended up having to zig, fall over, turn around on my backside (being ever mindful of that “U”), stand up and zig again. This took me ages and was my last skiing experience apart from a short afternoon on holiday in the French Alps.
Radio 1 is getting a bit irritating btw. I don’t mind the music but the mindless inane rubbish between songs is hard going. Bring back Radio2 or Radio4, though not The Archers. I can’t stand The Archers.
At this point I’m going to change the direction of the conversation because it is in danger of getting too negative. I’m going to take us back in time again to another restaurant we were looking for. This one, whose name is definitely lost in the mists of time, was on the seafront in Haifa. We were in Tel Aviv on business, staying at the Intercontinental Hotel on the beach. Very nice.
The concierge had recommended the restaurant and said it was just outside on the promenade. Getting there all we could find was a closed kiosk. Definitely not the posh restaurant. Looking around us there was nothing in sight. Hmm.
Next thing we know is that an ice cream van comes along, music blaring. I flagged him down and the guy inside, thinking he had a sale, eagerly hopped up to serve us. Unfortunately for him I only wanted to ask where the eatery was.
He was a helpful enough chap and pointed to a spot a couple of miles along the promenade. I then cheekily asked if he wouldn’t mind giving us a lift. Glint in eye etc. No problem.
We piled in and had the surreal experience of riding along the Tel Aviv seafront in the back of an ice cream van. It wasn’t a particularly posh one but hey…
After a short while a kid ran out for an ice cream and we pulled over – right in front of the restaurant. Out we got, thanked him and went in only to find it was fully booked! You lose some you draw some 🙂
How about this – the car is ready. I’m off. Ciao.
3rd Law part 18 here
3rd Law part 20 here
bread in Durham Market during the food festival
Bread in Durham Market during the food festival. It was a good day out with lots of interesting epicurean treats to sample.
K²day: Ain’t Nobody Else Gonna Know The Way She Feels
17h39-18h08, 07-March-2013
Settled into our Efsti-Dalur accommodation and biding time until we head over to Geysir for dinner, trying to shut out The Boy’s relentless repetition of a poem he has to have memorized by the time his Vacance d’Hiver ends…in 11 days. And the Airmail beta releases are getting out of hand (not rendering that as a link this time, oh no…not taking bad karma for anyone jumping in who doesn’t want to reinstall their email application 1-2 times a day). And The Missus needs her iPad charged, and this can only happen via AppleKory because she didn’t bring her charger to Iceland. And there I go again, Command+Tab back to Chrome to see if the latest-greatest Airmail beta .zip has finished downloading. And now My Missus has set her Mac up on the desk alongside mine, uploaded her photos from the day, and invited The Boy to scootch in to look the pics over (which I also want to do)… Sod it. Will pick up again after dinner/evening entertainment/family turns in/chaos no longer reigns.
22h00-23h34, 07-March-2013
I’ve always enjoyed driving. Not in a “Man, I feel so alive with the windows down, Def Leppard’s Photograph blaring, and the speedometer topped out with my foot on the floor and my hair on fire.” way (image ROCKS, though), but as a means/manner/venue for feeling good in the world…feeling right. A worthy destination, a reliable car, a full tank, an open road — four lanes good, two lanes better! — and the sun nowhere in sight. Now depending on circumstance, a true companion “riding shotgun” doesn’t hurt, nor does the right mixtape (plural, if the drive is of the interstate variety), however solo-in-silence is the pure sweet stuff, the top-shelf añejo.
I was well into 11 before I ever spent more than 3 hours in a car heading towards a Point B from a Point A (Chicago to Dallas, a ripping out of roots and an attempted transplantation) or crossed more than one state line in the same day’s drive (El Paso to Los Angeles, family holiday fun). Since 1976, though, I have had my wings…uh, fins…uh, well, been significantly more mobile. To recount the more substantial roadtrips to which I have been participant would only be long and boring, and this you can believe because before I performed a monster edit such a recounting was splashed right here, and it was…tragic. Let’s just leave it with “Since I was 11 I have taken many roadtrips across the USA and enjoyed driving holidays in Europe.” and call it a paragraph, OK?
Today La Famille Kessel visited Þingvellir, the Iceland location where the continental drift between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates can be seen and sometimes experienced (earthquakes). In describing the location to The Boy as we made our way there today, he said “Can you tell me when Europe ends and North America begins?” and all I could think, both hands on the wheel staring down Iceland Road 36 was “If only.”
March 7, 2013
Natural Bridge, Qld, Australia
I figured my first post should be something from the heart. So here it is, my favourite image of my homeland.
Where rock has given way to water over thousands of years forming a natural bridge over the water. Hence the location gets it’s name.
A beautiful location, Especially if you like hiking as it’s quite a trek to get in.
