21 Sunday Nov 2021
Posted in Diversions, London, Photography
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St. Luke’s Church in Charlton opened their tower to visitors a few weeks ago as part of Charlton’s Horn Fair weekend celebrations, so I took the opportunity to take the camera up there for some views I’d never seen before. It was good to be reminded just how many trees there are in the area, but it also brought home just how much the view of the O2/Millennium Dome has been obscured from this direction by development on the peninsula.
27 Sunday Dec 2020
Posted in Diversions, London, Photography
Some photos taken on evening strolls after the work from home shift, coming up to Christmas 2020. A strange time, all round, but we’re keeping safe, staying local, and all those important things. I hope you’ve had a peaceful end of year. Here’s to going slightly further afield at some point in 2021.
16 Sunday Aug 2020
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Away to Whitstable for the week: a summer holiday so unambitious we could have popped home to put the bins out without too much inconvenience. But still, away from home for the first time since March and with low risk of ending up in quarantine immediately afterwards. The weather was too hot for us during the day for much of the time, but the chance to swim in the sea seven days running – with high tide conveniently arriving with the warm evenings – made up for it.
We’d originally thought we’d use the place as a base to explore other parts of Kent, but in the end didn’t get much further than Canterbury and Margate, and found enough to do around Whitstable with various friends either living nearby or visiting for the holiday.
We had no real idea of how busy it would be or how it would feel pandemic-wise, but the weather meant we were outdoors almost all the time we weren’t in the rental cottage and didn’t need to linger in shops or restaurants. How this all works when the weather changes, I don’t know. It was clear that the Eat Out To Help Out scheme was really generating business Monday to Wednesday, but Thursday and Friday felt much quieter, particularly in Margate which felt subdued compared to past visits. Dreamland being closed seemed significant; we saw one amusement arcade open but gave it a very wide berth.
In Canterbury the restaurants seemed busy but the shops were largely deserted. From what I saw this week, I think the food and drink part of our service economy will return fairly strongly unless we have a new surge of coronavirus cases, but the future for retail looks pretty bleak and it’s hard to be optimistic about the future of our high streets and town centres as a result.
It was interesting seeing all the different adaptions to the new way of ordering and paying: standing outside a fish’n’chip shop on the high street trying to phone in an order while four other parties stood next to us attempting to do the same was novel, but not particularly effective. Elsewhere, places were using a mixture of JustEat/Deliveroo and their own homegrown apps; eventually I guess some of these will become standardised and second nature but it all feels a little interim at the moment.
29 Monday Jun 2020
Posted in Diversions, Down by the river
Every couple of years I seem to find myself at Thames-Side Studios in Woolwich with a few minutes to kill (today visiting a man to see about getting a guitar pickup changed in my Gretsch). The Royal Iris – former Mersey Ferry and venue for early Beatles shows – has looked close to sinking for a long time now, and I can’t believe she’s for this world much longer.
Chart the decline of the Royal Iris through past posts here:
21 Sunday Jun 2020
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A non-chronological look back at a week that felt like it was 90% work – but maybe in hindsight wasn’t so bad. I did get out for a couple of walks and bike rides at least.
A Sunday afternoon walk to Greenwich Park to take in the view and have an ice cream (soft serve on a cone, with flake).
View from in front of the Wolf Statue looking over the Queen’s House and Old Royal Naval college towards Canary Wharf
New graffiti on the way to the Met Car Pound – executed a bit better than much of what we see around here.
‘End Boris’A couple of foxes seen on an evening stroll. They’ve always been pretty visible in the neighbourhood but lockdown conditions seem to be suiting them very well.
Taped up artwork on a Westcombe Park bus stop. No other clues to its meaning or provenance to be seen. To be encouraged, though, I think.
‘The It Girls’Closer to home, a Painted Lady butterfly in my front garden, and a new felt ‘pot’ for tomatoes in my back garden. Having had one abortive trip lockdown to the garden centre, leaving after seeing the queue snaking round the car park in the full midday sun, my gardening supplies have come via the internet with all of the randomness and suprise in what actually gets delivered that that implies. It’s worked well enough so far, though. Some new sedums arrived shortly after a 24 hour downpour, leaving me feeling slightly foolish as I went round the garden with a watering can after planting them out.
A short evening walk round the block after a torrential downpour. Nice to see the old phone box light working. 
A Father’s Day morning bike ride with my daughter and a couple of friends along the Thames Path towards Thamesmead and back again, starting in very light rain and ending in full sun as we climbed the hill from the river back up to Charlton. Building up to a longer ride to Erith Pier before the summer’s out, I hope.
A cycling end note: last week I mentioned the scheme to close off Blackheath’s South Row to cars with a note of optimism. That optimism is, like the scheme, now temporarily suspended... In the meantime, Greenwich Council have announced the ‘details’ of the safe walking and cycling schemes to TfL for funding, but so far this just seems to be a list of routes or road names, with nothing to explain to the public what is actually planned. As lockdown eases and the roads get busier, it feels very much like an opportunity to really make the neighbourhood more pleasant for walkers and cyclists is being missed.
14 Sunday Jun 2020
Posted in Diversions
The weeks have been passing relentlessly; each one much like the last with slight variants in the weather. The loosening and somewhat complex relaxing of lockdown rules hasn’t made a great deal of difference to us yet: schools are still effectively closed and likely to be until September at the earliest, working from home continues relatively smoothly, we can’t go and see our parents, we’re getting most of our food and other essentials delivered – and we don’t much fancy going to a theme park, or whatever else of that sort is being reopened with our government’s strange priorities.
Having said that, we have strayed slightly further from the immediate neighbourhood for the first time since early March. A Saturday morning walk around Foots Cray Meadows was nice: sun out, people around but not exactly in crowds, and plenty to look at: the River Cray nice and clean for the 9 year old to paddle in, fish visible, coots, moorhens, ducks, dragonflies and damselflies. We’ll go back.
On Saturday evening I went for a quick spin on the bike to Greenwich Park. I’d avoided it for the last couple of months on the basis that it looked much busier than the surrounding streets when I’ve been running, but I thought I should take a look now things are a little more relaxed. It’s always a lovely place, but removing the through traffic and car park has made a huge difference. To cycle up the main avenue from the Heath to the Wolfe Statue without dodging the traffic and parking cars, and to see it in use by families and kids on bikes was a pleasure. I believe the ban on through traffic may be permanent but suspect that the car park will be back, as a source of revenue for Royal Parks. It would be nice if they at least reduced the size of it, but as with mooted long term improvements to the cycling and pedestrian environment around the borough, I’m not optimistic (though this scheme on the other side of the Heath is a source of hope).
I’ve been cycling more than running, having aggravated a niggling muscle injury. It probably needs some physio but I can’t get a referral until it’s been scanned, and all scans are cancelled for the foreseeable – until the pandemic dies out, presumably. It’s not too big a deal, but does give an insight into the downstream effects of coronavirus on society’s health. What will be the long term effect of all these minor (or in some cases presumably not so minor) issues being put off for months?
This afternoon we sat in the garden and drank wine with friends – who also brought us tomato plants. A good way to round off the weekend; the future may hold more garden drinks than pub drinks for a while (at least while the weather holds).
26 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in Diversions
Indoors for much of this week: working, homeschooling and, most pressingly, looking after a Covid patient (thankfully over the worst and getting better now but – and while I realise this is not especially practical advice – I really, really recommend not catching it if you possibly can).
The pics above and below are from an exploratory go at astrophotography earlier in the week, mostly as an evening distraction once the rest of the family had gone to bed. I’m not sure the conversion to WordPress-friendly jpegs will do the results justice, but I was pleased with what I managed with my Fuji Xt-20 on a tripod, and a somewhat hit-and-hope approach to exposure parameters.
Since the weather’s been dry and the air pollution dropped away dramatically we’ve been able to see the stars in a way I’ve never experienced in semi-suburban south-east London before. The Plough has been particularly prominent so I focused most of my efforts on that. We’re due some wet weather this week; once that’s cleared I might have another go as the constellations move on.
One problem with photographing the sky at night is that, beyond the technical challenges, is that unlike what I usually shoot, where my camera is significantly more than good enough for 95% of situations, a bigger, faster sensor would definitely produce better results in the dark. I’ve probably spent enough money recently, though.
One result of our now-necessary self-isolation is that the horizons seem to have shrunk even further than they had before. Maybe this was a subconscious prompt for looking at the stars… I find that when I’m focused on the day-to-day routine then the upsides of this peculiar moment can seem quite appealing: lunch with the family every day; more time for guitar practise; tidying the garden; the pleasures of regular deliveries to break up the day (this week brought local bread, groceries via friends, a new wireless router, some extension cables, and other domestic items that suddenly seem very important), and so on. When I look beyond the day-to-day, though, I find I’m really badly missing the routine parts of life-before: Parkrun with friends, swimming at the lido, socialising with actual people, popping to the pub and talking about whatever we used to talk about, playing music with other people… Despite some ‘end the lockdown’ noises in the press, I don’t see this ending soon, however. We’ve got to push on and get through it somehow, but I worry that in the necessity of making it happen we underestimate just how strange and unnatural this period of time is, how difficult it is for so many people, and the trade-offs we’re making.
Other news and diversions:
18 Saturday Apr 2020
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A grey day and not much else to do but photograph in the back garden in between half-hearted attempts to tidy and clean the house. We are self-isolating and a day with no real commitments is something of a relief between weeks of juggling work and homeschooling.
Attention is disproportionately focused on deliveries at the moment: what will come to the door today, as we rely on delivery services for food and partly entertain ourselves in a splurge of online consumerism (or attempt to stimulate the economy, I tell myself). This week brought the iMac I’ve been promising myself for some time, a bike tyre, and the new Four Tet record. We hope Ocado will deliver this evening, having given up on Sainsbury’s; sometime in the next week or so we should have some more plants delivered to fill up the borders of the garden (it doesn’t take much in a garden the size of ours). I will probably crack and order a record from Sounds of the Universe or similar, given that it’s virtual Record Store Day.
These ferns grow in the corner of the garden that gets virtually no light; I love the contrast you get between the new bright green leaves and the previous years’ growth.
26 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in Diversions, Down by the river
≈ Comments Off on January’s nearly done
A sculptural skip arrangement in Charlton, southeast London
Some items, actions and events of note from the last week (some good, one bad)
24 Friday Jan 2020
Posted in Diversions, London, Music, Photography, Uncategorized
This week I was lucky to see Anthony Braxton performing at a sold out Cafe OTO, the last night of a three show residence in which he performed standards with a quartet.
It was a great experience, and a treat to sit so close to the musicians and watch them interact through the songs. Not every piece worked, but even those that didn’t had something interesting going on, and those that did – particularly Eddie Harris’s Freedom Jazz Dance – were pretty sublime.
The quartet was:
Anthony Braxton – saxophone
Alexander Hawkins – piano
Neil Charles – double bass
Stephen Davies – drums
NeilClasper 