Babs

Our flat inspection happened yesterday, but from what Dave said, it was more of a walk-through than an inspection. And really not even that.

In the morning I got a WhatsApp message from "Babs," the management company's inspection clerk, saying she would arrive between 1 and 3:30 p.m. ("That's an interesting name," I thought, imagining that I was about to be met by a Realtor from Long Island. I was picturing Barbra Streisand, honestly.) I arranged to leave work at 12:30 in order to be home for the first part of that window of time; Dave's day was ending at 2:10 so he could take the second shift. I got home just in time to welcome Olga back from her walk, and we hung out together until about 2:30, by which time Babs had not arrived. When Dave got home I went back to work.

As Dave related later, it turns out that Babs -- who showed up near the end of the window -- was actually a black man. And apparently he was terrified of dogs. He did a cursory inspection of the flat, taking note of a few things that Dave pointed out, but he wouldn't even enter the living room, where Olga was lying on the couch. Dave went to sit with her and hold her so Babs wouldn't be nervous, and tried to explain that Olga is ancient, partially toothless and not at all a threat, but of course Olga didn't help the situation by getting excited and wanting to get off the couch to go see the new visitor. (Everyone is a potential playmate.) Babs steered clear.

I suppose the inspection served its purpose, in that it proved to the property managers that we are not destroying the flat or running an illegal enterprise. But it doesn't sound like we're going to see any movement on our minor maintenance issues as a result.

On my way back to school on the tube, I noticed that Homebase, the big-box home improvements store where we used to buy all our gardening and household stuff -- and also King Zack -- has been torn down! It closed several months ago and the whole site, including an adjoining mall and movie theater, is due to be redeveloped. We now get our household stuff from a much smaller DIY shop on the high street (and if they don't have what we need, we go online).

I also noticed this rather interesting advertisement in the tube station. How do Muslim ideals of modesty intersect with a trip to the beach? Apparently by everyone staying entirely clothed -- everyone except Mom, that is, who doesn't go to the beach at all. (Or maybe she's taking the picture, while clad in a Burkini?)

Speaking of religion, I was perplexed by all the outrage from Republicans over the inaugural sermon given by Bishop Mariann E. Budde at the National Cathedral. Budde dared to ask Trump for "mercy" on behalf of several minority groups who feel threatened by his presidency. His reaction was indignation, demanding an apology and calling her "nasty," one of his favorite insults. But it's not like what she did was so shocking. A plea for mercy on behalf of society's downtrodden, the potentially fearful and insecure figures relegated to its fringes, is inherent in Christian teaching. What she said was consistent with every Christian message I ever heard when I went to church.

What this kerfuffle actually shows is that Trump and his followers don't have a clue what Christianity is about.

(Top photo: The red hellebore in our garden, finally blooming!)

School Decor

The kids in the Lower School have created another interesting series of artworks. I'm seeing cats, bears and various cylindrical, box- and cone-shaped objects. Once again, I wonder what they used for inspiration? Anyway, the art makes a colorful display.

I don't have much to report from yesterday. Work, work, work. Our new assistant has started but she's still learning the cataloging system and the lay of the land, so I don't have a real sense yet of how her presence will affect my workload.

The seniors have decorated their gathering space beneath the stairs for Spirit Week, including papering over the light for a groovy red effect. You can barely see it, but there's a green bean bag at the left beneath the giant green banana that says "SENIORS." That bean bag used to be in our dining room! But it was too big for our flat so I gave it to the school, and I'm glad it's being used.

As for the big banana, which I blogged previously -- a second one has appeared, in rainbow camouflage. The mysteries proliferate!

Dave and I had a Zoom call last night with the lawyer who's helping with our estate planning. That was a barrel of laughs. We sent him back to do some revisions but I think the process is almost done.

And today we're supposed to have our annual flat inspection. The managing agent sends someone each year to check the place over and note anything that needs work. I have a few items to bring to his/her attention! In fact I should probably be cleaning right now.

Looking Forward and Looking Back

I came across these Picasso-esque figures on a wall between Belsize Park and St. John's Wood. (I'm not sure Picasso would agree they're Picasso-esque, but you know what I mean.) I think whoever drew them may have been following existing cracks or contours in the wall. Or maybe shadows?

Dave and I have ironed out our plans for February break in a couple of weeks. We are indeed going to Florida, and our friend Warren, who has stayed with Olga in the past, will dog-sit for us here in London. We're going to fly into Tampa on the 15th and fly out on the 22nd. In between I'm not sure what we're doing. Dave will spend the bulk of the week in Bradenton with his parents, and I hope to get up to Jacksonville to visit my brother, and we'll see my step-sister just north of Tampa.

It's good to have a plan. I haven't been back to Florida for a year and a half, and I think we both felt like we were due for a visit.

Last night I was re-reading some posts from 2013 when we first got Olga. It's so funny to read them now, when she is so thoroughly Olga to me, with all her quirks and personality traits known. Back then she was a blank slate, a question mark. I remember when I picked her up I was surprised by how big she was, and she was wearing a studded leather collar that frankly made her look thuggish. We got rid of that right away. She was called Tinsel by the shelter where we adopted her, and it took us a while to settle on a new name -- Mona was the most viable secondary option, but when we chose Olga we did it with certainty. And Olga she has become, through the subsequent 12 years of our shared life together.

When I got her I remember thinking, "We're going to have this dog for at least ten years!" That seemed like such a long time. But it went by in a flash.

Anyway, I'm not sure what prompted this retrospection. Olga's health seems more or less fine; she's just doddery and slow. She's 14 or 15 years old now. Maybe I'm a little uncertain about leaving her when we go to Florida. But we've gotta have lives, too, right?

Remember those violas I found on the sidewalk in St. John's Wood last November? They're blooming away, despite our near-freezing nighttime temperatures. Rugged little things.

So Trump has pardoned most of the January 6 rioters, as expected. I'm not too worked up about this, given that many of them have already served their sentences and punishment has been inflicted. I was on the fence about prosecuting them in the first place, and I still think the Biden administration, by vigorously doing so, missed an opportunity to extend an olive branch and ease the grievances of the MAGA crowd. The prosecutions turned them all into martyrs in the eyes of some Americans. (I do think some of the leaders of alt-right organizations -- like Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes -- were rightly imprisoned as instigators of violence, and I'm sorry to see them get off.) Trump declined to pardon the rioters in the waning days of his first term, so if I were them, I'd be saying now, "Too little too late!" But of course he can do no wrong in their addled eyes.

I can't even talk about all the other stuff Trump is up to. We are in for a world of crazy.

By the time I went to work yesterday morning, two of the abandoned chairs in my previous post had been taken -- the two on the left. I would have adopted that middle one if it had still been there. Dave can thank his lucky stars it was gone!

Garden Drama and a Surreal Movie

Olga surprised me yesterday morning with a youthful burst of energy. We went walking to the housing estate, where we haven't been in months, even though it's not that far from our flat. She usually prefers to go around the corner and sniff garbage, so this was a welcome change.

When she was younger we walked here almost every morning. I hope she enjoyed it for old times' sake.

I texted Dave: "Free stuff!" He texted back, "No."

That middle chair is pretty cool, in my opinion, but I suppose we do have plenty of chairs.

I spent the day reading and doing some stuff around the house. Mrs. Russia met me outside to have a conversation about the front garden. Remember how we got an estimate for having it pruned? Well, it won't surprise you to know that the Russians have come up with an alternate plan that involves ripping out several large bushes and basically replanting the whole thing. These people! They can't just let things be! They have to renovate EVERYTHING!

I said no, that is not what I want, and I wrote our landlords to that effect. The ultimate decision lies with our landlords and the Russians, who co-own our house together, but our landlords may regret involving the Russians in this project. Which is what I told them. In the past the landlords have paid to trim the garden using our maintenance company's handyman service, and I don't know why that wasn't good enough. I even offered to split the cost with them. But they appealed to the Russians to share the cost, and now that the Russians feel they have an ownership stake in the front garden I'm afraid we will never hear the end of it.

In the evening we Skyped with Dave's mom. His dad has been ill and is now getting rehab for some back problems, and we're still considering going to see them in Florida next month. Dave has been on the fence about going, given his own recent surgery, but I think we're going to do it. Hopefully the Russians won't seize that opportunity to pave the front garden and turn it into Red Square.

We also watched "Mulholland Drive," David Lynch's mysterious movie about Hollywood, from 2001, to mark Lynch's recent death. I've been a Lynch enthusiast for years, ever since I saw "Blue Velvet" in the mid-'80s. Here are a couple of screen shots showing his mesmerizing style.

Lynch loved to put people in front of microphones. That's a common feature in several of his films. "Mulholland Drive" is all about identity and duality, and I think Lynch liked the idea of characters being on stage, performing, in an exaggerated semblance of how we all perform in real life.

Soon after we started the movie, Dave turned to me and said, "This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen."

And I said, "Yep. That's David Lynch!"

You Should Have Gone Up

Here's another photogenic rail station from my walk on New Year's Eve. The modern station is located across the street from this one, which doesn't appear to be in use. The four posters on the doors are part of a public art project. They say "the person behind wants to talk to you," "ideally this poster would show you the way," "this poster saw you coming before you looked at him" and "you should have gone up."

I spent yesterday morning gardening and cleaning. I say "gardening" but really all I did was cut some plants back. I did some reading about avocados, and found that the variety I think we have is more cold-hardy than I thought. It's not the West Indian type that I grew up with in Florida, which is quite tender. It's a Guatemalan species that can handle chilly weather, being native to high altitudes in Central America. It would still suffer in particularly cold weather or snow, but that explains why it came through our recent cold spell with nary a wilted leaf. (Except the ones I managed to damage while covering it!) So I guess I don't need to be as paranoid about protecting it as I have been, which is good news.

I cut the yellow rose in our garden and brought it inside to brighten up the kitchen.

In the afternoon I read "The Bee Sting." I've hit a rough patch in this book. The story is told in the voices of several characters, and the sections narrated by the mother are written with minimal punctuation. There are apostrophes and question marks, but nothing else -- most crucially no periods. It is a nightmare to read, and it's a 165-page section of the book. And we return to her later in the narrative, too.

I was annoyed at first because it seemed utterly purposeless, but then I read in online reviews that it's meant to show the mother's lack of formal education and her manic mindset. I still think it's gimmicky and it's giving me a headache. I am dying to get back to the sections voiced by the other characters.

Speaking of books, how do we feel about the demise of TikTok in the United States? I don't use TikTok at all so I don't really have a horse in this race, especially being here in the UK. But I do wonder about its effect on book sales and the publishing industry. The "Book Tok" community on TikTok has turned some books into best-sellers, and without that marketing tool I suspect some authors will suffer.

Here's an architecture/planning fail on our high street. That building on the right is brand new, and when it was built, it was left with a sloping sidewalk in front. The slope is quite dramatic and, as you can see, someone (presumably the local council?) chose to erect unsightly barriers rather than have people walking on it. I guess they don't want people tumbling sideways into Five Guys.

I wonder how they're ever going to fix this and how it was allowed to happen in the first place. It's unfortunate because it's a very busy stretch of pavement and having such a big section blocked off is inconvenient, to say the least.

A Panda and a Flea

A few days ago I passed the cubbyholes at school where some of the students store their belongings, and saw this little panda peeking out at me. It's wearing a little sash with words on it but I didn't stop to read them. Something about being cared for? A hospital gift, maybe.

I hate to say I had a busy day yesterday, because I say that all the time and it's not very inspired blogging. But holy cow, this whole week has been busy. For one thing, I've been helping to process probably a hundred new books, which means adding stickers, stamps, covers and labels to each and every one. (Well, some come pre-covered, which always makes my heart sing.) Covering books is kind of an enjoyable task, like vacuuming -- I can mostly turn off my brain and I'm left with a satisfyingly improved product at the end. It does take time, and I'm not sure it's my life's purpose, exactly, but I don't mind it.

Besides, who says life has a purpose? As I've always said, I'm not a deeply philosophical person -- I don't spend a lot of time pondering the mysteries of the universe. To the extent that I do, I believe we're all basically happy accidents. Nature is chaos, a primordial stew of chemicals and DNA, and from that emerge all the ever-evolving life forms that surround us, including us. And I could just as easily have been an entirely different person, if a different sperm had connected with my mother's egg, or if the same gametes came together in a slightly different way. There is no grand or divine plan.

I was listening to my QAA podcast last night and they were talking about the Religious Right, and how evangelical Christians really do believe that this world is merely a veil overhanging the real, spiritual world beyond. That we're all in a sort of Holy Holding Pattern, waiting to begin our real existences in the Great Beyond. I just do not understand this kind of thinking. I see how it can foster a conspiracy mindset, because then you don't need evidence to believe anything -- people who are heavily spiritual can take information on faith and stand by it as their reality. I'm not saying all Christians are conspiracists, and in fact I grew up in a liberal Protestant church and absorbed none of those tendencies. But there's definitely a link between evangelical, faith-based thinking and Q-Anon and other forms of political mysticism.

So, yeah, that is not me. I am an evidence-based person, and I suppose I'm a bit nihilistic. I don't think we have a purpose at all as individuals, beyond the biological imperative of perpetuating the species. (And I've even failed at that!) I do believe we have a moral responsibility to be kind to each other and to the creatures with which we share the planet. That's not a divine imposition, though -- that's just our human responsibility as self-aware beings who have evolved beyond beetles and fleas.

Does that make any sense? Maybe not. That podcast got my mind spinning and this is where it took me.

Speaking of fleas, I passed this disgusting, wadded-up bag on the sidewalk on my walk home, and it immediately reminded me of one of those electron-microscope images of a flea. Can you see it?

Right?!

Olga was a complete pill last night. She decided at 3:30 a.m. that night was over and it was time to get up. After lots of whining and licking and carrying on I got up and let her out into the back garden, and when she came back in I went back to bed. She eventually joined us for another hour or so, but at 5 a.m. she was raring to go again. I think she'd completely forgotten that she'd already been out just a short time earlier. She's a very sweet dog but her brain is not very big.

Dave's been saying for years that we need a new light fixture for the dining room. Last night I passed this one sitting on someone's wall next to the rubbish bins. I texted him: "Do we want this light fixture?" I'm thinking with some black paint it could be pretty cool, maybe a bit like the one that cast shadowy lines on the walls of our cabin in Whitstable.

But Dave texted back an understated "no," which probably actually meant "NO!" So I left it.

And now the dog is being a pill again, wanting her walk. We shall philosophize again another day.

Kit

When I was walking on Holloway Road a couple of weeks ago, I passed this ornate, tile-glazed tube station, part of the Piccadilly Line. I rarely use that line, and never in this area, so it's not a station I'm particularly familiar with. I immediately noticed that peculiar yellow thing hanging off the pole at the left. Is that a human figure? With a Santa hat?

And sunglasses, no less!

Apparently these foam figurines are by an artist named Kit, who has been working in this area for years. Here are articles about him from 2016 and 2017. I thought the yellow foam was a swimming pool noodle, but it's actually used to wrap scaffolds, to make the pipes at street level more visible and softer (in case people walk into them, I suppose).

Here's another foam guy, sitting atop a post on a traffic island. He looks like he's wearing one of those '70s fringed suede jackets, but apparently it was originally an angel with another figure on its shoulders.

Not surprisingly, according to the articles, opinion is divided over Kit's artworks. But I admire anyone who can muster the energy to make and install creations like this. It makes our neighborhoods a bit more unique and distinctive.