Goodbye Sandy Heath

The planets finally aligned yesterday -- the rain stopped for several hours and the dog felt energetic enough to go for a walk -- so we went to Hampstead Heath. We hadn't been on our West Heath route in a couple of months and I was missing it.

Here's the kind of day we had:

Not exactly bad weather, but definitely wintry-looking. The temperatures are warmer than usual, but supposedly that will change after New Year's Day.

We passed the pond on Sandy Heath, and rather than get in with the other romping dogs, Olga stayed on shore and kept an eye on...

...the ducks, occupying a little marshy island of reeds in the middle of the pond. That single Mandarin duck stood out like a jewel among all the mallards.

We walked all the way to Hampstead Heath Extension and returned via Golders Hill Park, where the Kong Pond is once again full of water. (You may remember it had been drained, I assume for maintenance work.)

I found a few pottery chips to add to my stash.

Overall it was a fun walk but it carried a tinge of sadness, too. Olga dragged, particularly toward the end, and I have to think harder about her needs. Are her walks more for her or for me? I know I've said this before, but I think doing that full loop -- West Heath, Sandy Heath and Extension -- is just too much for a canine lady of her advanced age. She could barely walk last night, she was so sore.

In the future, we'll stay closer to home, maybe sticking to the West Heath and Golders Hill Park -- if we go to the Heath at all. Olga is now 11 or 12, and I can't pretend she isn't aging. It's not fair to her.

Last night Dave and I watched a fascinating documentary on Netflix about Joan Didion, who died last week. Called "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold," it came out in 2017 and was directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, and it offered an affectionate, respectful overview of her life and work. I've long been an admirer of Didion's and already count "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" among my favorite books; I got on Amazon and bought "The White Album," a later book of essays, immediately after seeing the movie. I still need to read "Blue Nights," as well, but that we have in our school library.

Not My Pictures of Morocco

When Dave and I walked Olga to the cemetery on Friday, we passed a blue Ikea bag sitting on the sidewalk next to some rubbish bins. The bag contained numerous framed photographs. The rubbish had already been collected, but perhaps the trash guys didn't take the bag because they weren't sure whether it was trash. I said to Dave, "If that bag is still sitting there when we go home, I'm picking it up."

Well, it was, and I did.

When I got home, I looked through the six framed pictures. My intention was just to donate the frames -- black Ikea frames mostly in good condition -- to a charity shop. But I was surprised to find that all the images appeared to depict Morocco.

As many of you know, I lived in Morocco as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer from 1992 to 1994. Of course it's just coincidence, but it felt like these pictures -- which admittedly could be of another North African country like Algeria or Tunisia -- had been sent especially to me. A gift from the Universe.

(I've previously blogged some of my favorite Morocco pictures from my own camera.)

I don't think these images are very old. They were printed by Snapfish in 2017, according to the back of the photos. But the frames were very dusty, which makes me think they've been sitting in a closet or some other storage space for a while.

I cleaned up the frames -- I had to discard one, which was broken beyond repair -- and I left the pictures in them. I may go ahead and donate them in the hopes that someone else will like them as much as I did. In any case, they have a second chance and hopefully won't go to a landfill.

Wing and Flame

We had more interesting visitors to the bird feeder yesterday morning. I'd just been telling Dave that I hadn't seen many tits around recently, but then this blue tit showed up -- and it shared the suet balls with a great spotted woodpecker, which was exciting.

Not long afterwards, Dave looked out the windows and back toward the maple tree, and said, "What IS that out there?" It was a big brown bird and at first I thought it was a small hawk or raptor. But when I looked at it through my zoom lens I realized it was a European jay. It was probably looking for the peanuts I set out on our garden bench one day last week when I cleaned out the feeders.

Once again I tried unsuccessfully to take Olga to the Heath. I think she would have gone if it hadn't started raining about ten minutes into our walk, which prompted her to turn right around.

On the way home we passed a box of discarded CDs in front of a shop. I looked through them -- Ray Charles, James Brown, Bob Marley, some more modern bands I hadn't heard of -- but didn't see anything I wanted.

And then we passed this shop nearby:

Obviously there'd been some drama here, as the door and window were smashed and the interior was blackened and full of ash. I got home and found this maddeningly non-specific story that I assume must be about this incident. (It would help if the reporter had said exactly WHERE that fire occurred and WHO occupied the shop in question, among other things. What about witnesses? Neighbors? A statement from the shop managers or owners? It seems she didn't try very hard.)

Anyway, assuming this is indeed the fire that occurred in the early morning hours on Wednesday, Dave and I had no idea. And we only live a couple of hundred feet away, as the crow flies.

Last night we watched "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain," which I enjoyed a lot, especially after seeing the exhibit of his work just a few days ago. It was well-acted and full of interesting visual effects, including an animation sequence showing how Wain himself may have been experiencing his own psychedelic cat art.

Boxing Day

This is the Churchill Arms pub in Kensington, all decked out for the holidays. It's known for its all-consuming exterior decoration, from flowers in the summer to Christmas lights. I've photographed this place before but I've only ever been there two or three times; if I remember right, it's much smaller inside than it looks.

As anticipated, not a whole lot happened around here yesterday. I plowed through three or four magazines and opened the rest of my magazine stash (still sealed in their postal mailers), revealing four more to finish before I can say I'm caught up. Argh! I'd also like to start another Newbery book and I need to get off my butt and do some walking.

I did try to motivate the dog for a walk yesterday. I remembered taking her to the Heath at Christmas last year, so I thought we'd go there -- but she was having none of it. I got her down the front steps and then she dug in her feet and turned for home. She barely touched the street.

Sometimes she's just not in the mood -- and it is rainy out there, which is always a deal-breaker for her.

The downside of having a less active dog, though, is that I am also less active. She used to run me ragged, but it was good for me. I suppose I could just go to the Heath myself, but that seems kind of pointless.

We had this very handsome visitor at the bird feeder. Look how colorful his feathers are -- that flush of blue at the back of his head and the distinct pink and black ring. (I'm thinking it's a male, as is generally true of the most colorful birds of many species, but I'm just guessing.) Often these parakeets are just various shades of green, with indistinct neck rings, but this one is a real Beau Brummell.

Dave and I watched "Don't Look Up," on Netflix, a brilliant portrayal of the human capacity to get distracted and ignore bigger problems. We loved it! And we also Zoomed with his family, which was chaotic (as his parents had a terrible time managing the technology and connecting to the call) but we finally got everyone together. My brother doesn't particularly like Zoom and my mom wouldn't really understand what was happening anyway, so we didn't try to connect with my family, but I sent them greetings. (And my brother said the box I mailed to my nieces almost two months ago without tracking arrived as expected, so that's a relief.)

Also, my mom got my flowers and candy, and my brother e-mailed me a picture showing that they'd arrived, so I was glad to see they weren't misdelivered and sitting forlornly somewhere else in her retirement center. As I told him, "Yay! My hundred bucks didn't go for nothing!"

Festive but Rainy

I think this may be the first Christmas when I have absolutely nothing to give Dave. (And as far as I know, he has nothing to give me.) It's a strange feeling of lightness, of freedom. I think we may have finally done the holiday right this year!

Not that we're not celebrating. As I've already written, we put up our colored lights in the avocado tree, and Dave is going to cook a few special things, including a meat paté that has him very excited. I'll do the cleanup, as usual, but otherwise I'll probably read and watch television. Oh, and walk the dog, as Dave and I did together yesterday.

I did have a special holiday outing yesterday afternoon. My boss had tickets to a sing-along Christmas carol event at Royal Albert Hall featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Choral Society, National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and the British Imperial Military Band. Dave ultimately decided not to go -- he was too concerned about Covid -- but I went. We sat in a box so we were somewhat distanced and shielded from other people, except when I stood in line for the bar at intermission behind a woman who could not stop coughing.

("I swear it's not Covid," she said. "I already had that three weeks ago!" Remarks that did not exactly inspire confidence.)

Plus we were all masked and had to show proof of vaccination or a negative test to get in. It's not easy to sing through a mask, but I gave it my best shot. The wine helped.

Here's a little taste of what the event was like:

The emcee had everyone raise their illuminated phones, which is a pretty clever way to reproduce that candle-like glow. (If my phone has a light I have no idea how to turn it on.)

And this was the big finale featuring soloist Zara McFarlane -- and, briefly, Santa.

Finally, here's a video on Twitter of the entire crowd doing what the emcee called a "Mexican wave" (I can't imagine why it's Mexican, but whatever). I'm in there somewhere, in one of the boxes near the top of the screen.

By the time the event let out around 5 p.m. it was dark, and as I walked through rainy Hyde Park to the bus stop, I began to think maybe it wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done. An urban park at night?! Plus I found myself in a corner of the park where the gates were all locked and I had to backtrack to an open stile to get out. But I eventually made it home with no drama.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

(Photos: Day and night views of a tree on the high street near our flat.)

Wow, a Snowbear

Some more pictures from Croydon today. This is another overly optimistic shopfront. Doesn't that launderette make you want to go "Wow"?!

Nearby, this was someone's holiday (or at least winter) decoration. Is it a bear? Is it a snowman? A snowbear? It looks like they had plans for another one but ran out of canned snow.

We are definitely moving into winter. Here's our weather forecast for the foreseeable future (in Fahrenheit, obviously). Looks a bit monotonous, doesn't it? At least it's not going to freeze, which means the geraniums and the sage can stay outside.

Do you remember our friends Chris and Linda, who lived across the hall from us in Notting Hill? I've mentioned them several times here on the blog, mostly during the Brexit campaigns, when they were pro-Brexit and we were anti-. We used to get together for dinner every couple of months. Well, we got some bad news about a week ago. Chris, who was well into his 70s and has been in poor health for some time, died on Dec. 13 -- from Covid, which he presumably acquired in the hospital. He was vaccinated, but as I said, he had other health issues.

Of course we're sad about it -- mostly for Linda, who now must adjust to life on her own. (Chris and Linda used to bicker all the time, and Chris once told me that despite their decades of marriage he thought they were ill-matched, but you know how relationships are. No matter how fraught, they're bound to be mourned when they end.)

We bought Linda a card, and a co-worker who also knows them got them a card and gave it to us to deliver. Several days ago, I put the two cards in a single envelope and took them to the post office to mail. I even had the guy at the counter weigh them so I could be sure they had adequate postage. Imagine my surprise when they came back through our letter box a day or two later!

I could not figure out why. Frustrated, I took them back to the post office yesterday morning. The clerk looked the envelope over and said cryptically, "Sometimes they just don't read." She wrote TO above Linda's address and FROM above my smaller return address on the back of the envelope, and threw the whole thing back in the mail bag. So, fingers crossed, Linda will get it this time.

We're planning to go visit Linda after Christmas.

On the way home from the post office, I had a pocket full of change, so I decided to pop into a local bakery and spend it on some kind of sweet treat for dessert. I had £1.69, and I spied a chocolate cornflake bun -- sort of like a Rice Krispie treat -- priced at £1.60. Perfect! I chose it and paid the guy at the counter with my miscellaneous coins.

He looked at me with a confused expression and said, "It's £1.20."

I looked back at the sign in the display case, which definitely said £1.60, as did all the signs for the muffins and gingerbread cookies on that shelf. But I couldn't very well argue that I wanted to spend more, could I? So I'm still left with 49p in spare change. In the states I could have thrown it into the bucket of a Salvation Army bell-ringer, but we don't have those here. Back into the change bowl it goes.

Magic and Insanity

Yesterday I went down to Croydon, in far south London. I was not in search of a magical haircut (given my hairline any haircut I receive would have to be REALLY magical) but I was in search of this shopfront. I saw it from the car when my friend Chris and I drove to Hastings in August, and ever since I've meant to photograph it. I'm always struck by overly optimistic shop names, and this fits the bill -- especially given the condition of the shop.

As it turns out, though, it's still possible to get a magical haircut in Croydon. The business appears to have simply moved across the street. Here it is in 2018 on Google Street View.

Now -- assuming it's the same business -- it's in a third shopfront, right next to the second one, and called Magical Barber. Which isn't quite as good a name, in my opinion, but maybe they were trying to point out that they do more than haircuts and your shave or your beard trim would be equally magical.

Having satisfied my interest in the supernatural barbers of Croydon, I walked along the high street and through the downtown shopping area, taking lots of pictures. Then I hopped a bus and rode out to the Bethlem Royal Hospital, where there's a museum exhibit I wanted to see.

Bethlem, from which the word "bedlam" is derived, is a psychiatric hospital that has existed since the 1200s in several different locations in London. As you can imagine, back in the old days, mental health care was pretty primitive and the place had a horrific reputation. Now it's a modern research and patient care facility on a large campus with spreading lawns and its own museum.

One of Bethlem's patients, back in the 1920s, was Louis Wain, a Victorian artist who was famous for his fanciful portraits and drawings of cats. If you're like me, you'll remember Wain because his artwork was often used in textbooks as evidence of the effects of psychosis. I specifically remember reading about this myself, in college -- his cat portraits were shown in a series, from easily identifiable to wildly abstract, with the contention that they got more and more fanciful as Wain's schizophrenia progressed. I found it scary that someone could so lose control of their mind and their perceptions.

Well, Bethlem now has an exhibit of Wain's works, and I wanted to see those kaleidoscopic cats in person. As it turns out, the idea that they depict Wain's psychiatric illness is something of a myth -- or at least conjecture. None of the drawings are dated, so no one knows the order in which Wain produced them, and he was always interested in textile patterns and embroidery and other artistic imagery that might have lent itself to such abstraction. In fact, there's doubt that Wain was psychotic or schizophrenic at all, although he did live the last years of his life in mental hospitals.

Anyway, it was an interesting exhibit, made all the more timely by the imminent release of a movie about Wain's life, called "The Electrical Life of Lewis Wain," with Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy. It comes out around New Year's Day and I'll definitely go.

My bus ride was interesting, too. I sat next to a woman who yammered on her cell phone with a friend about the intimate details of a third person's relationship. "Just because he loves her don't mean he likes her," she said at one point.

I took a few more pictures in the Shirley neighborhood of East Croydon, and then caught a train back to London. Thameslink trains run directly between Croydon and West Hampstead, making it incredibly easy to get down there and back with no faffing around on the tube.

Finally, and speaking of Benedict Cumberbatch, last night Dave and I watched "The Power of the Dog," Jane Campion's new film on Netflix. It's slow-paced, but I enjoyed it and it definitely left me with images and ideas to ponder -- some of them relating to mental illness, incidentally. If you haven't seen it yet, give it a go.