Lady in Blue

I played tour guide yesterday, taking Dave's nephew and his fiancee around Westminster for some sightseeing. We walked from Covent Garden in a circle through Soho, and then down Whitehall to Parliament Square, and then over the Westminster Bridge to the London Eye. That was a fair amount of scenery for a single day!

Along the way we passed the newly-unveiled sculpture on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, "Lady in Blue" by Tschabalala Self. It's described on the fourth plinth web page as an homage to a young, metropolitan everywoman.

"Lady in Blue is a woman that many can relate to. She is not an idol to revere or a historic figurehead to commemorate. She is a woman striding forward into our collective future with ambition and purpose. She is a Londoner, who represents the city’s spirit."

I do love her energy. She's very dynamic.

We ate lunch at a dumpling place in Chinatown that was delicious, ordering a variety of little plates that added up to a meal.

Then, last night, we ordered pizza and watched "Chimp Fever," an HBO documentary that the young folks recommended. It's a mind-blower in the tradition of "Tiger King," about a woman who is ordered to surrender the chimpanzees she's keeping in a Missouri shelter to PETA so they can be re-homed at a more suitable sanctuary. Of course she feels she's being wronged and she holds one of the chimps back, keeping it in a cage in her basement. She's quite a character herself, sporting wigs and false eyelashes and a Trumpian spray tan, and the show explores her devotion to the chimps, as delusional as it may be. We watched two episodes and it was fascinating but also kind of sad. We'll certainly finish it, though.

Preparing for Guests

This is a close-up of one of the old zinnias in the garden. You gotta love the multitude of colors in those petals! It's like a floral tequila sunrise.

Dave's nephew and his fiancee arrived yesterday afternoon from Spain, where they've been staying for several days for a friend's wedding. They'll be with us through the weekend and into the beginning of next week, until the day before I leave for Florida.

Of course that meant I was a cleaning whirlwind yesterday. I started by doing sensible things like cleaning the bathtub, but then I would up working on progressively unlikely tasks like cleaning the dusty floor behind the toilets and cleaning the front of all the kitchen cabinets. I know my guests aren't going to inspect the floor behind the toilets, but you know how it goes -- you clean one thing and the thing next to it looks even filthier, so then you have to clean that too.

I also had to re-hang the drapes in the dining room to turn it back into a serviceable guest bedroom. You may remember I took them down in April 2025 because we never used them (they were always open) and they looked terrible. Dave argued that it gets dark early enough that we didn't need drapes, but I said, "You can't have guests sleeping in a room on the street with no drapes." No woman, especially, is going to go for that. (I can hear my mother telling me so.)

So I got up on a chair and managed a fumbling semblance of re-hanging the drapes. Several of the little plastic hooks broke and there aren't enough functional hooks remaining on the curtain rod, so the drapes sag in places and we have to pin them closed, giving the overall effect of a decrepit drug den in a posh neighborhood. But hey, it's only for five days.

I also carefully made the bed, which Bailey promptly trashed by climbing all over the pillows and building a comfortable nest.

Last night we went to the Spaniards Inn, a historic pub next to Hampstead Heath, where foxes were noisily fighting and/or mating in the dark garden of the building next door. Welcome to London!

Bermondsey and Frida

Yesterday morning was bright and clear, and Bailey was out with her dog-walker, so I decided to hit the town and go for a walk of my own. I grabbed my camera bag and took the tube down to Canada Water, in southeast London. I walked from there up through Bermondsey to the Tate Modern, a distance of a little more than three miles.

I finally got to use the new camera while out on the town, and though there are still some things that confuse me about the settings, I feel pretty good about its capabilities.

I stopped for a coffee in Southwark Park, where I came across this very colorful poodle.

And later I walked past this tiny dachshund, barking enthusiastically from the roofop of a pizza restaurant. (Clearly he comes out that window, onto his "balcony.")

Finally, I got to the Tate, where I had lunch in the members' bar. I even scored an outdoor table on the terrace overlooking the Thames, so this was my view:

Not too shabby, right?

I took that picture by kneeling at the safety rail around the terrace and pointing the camera through the bars. When I stood again and turned around, the downside of the outdoor table became apparent -- there were two pigeons IN my lunch! I shooed them off my coronation chickpea wrap, which had been somewhat pecked. Wild birds are filthy and pigeons especially so, but I ate the wrap. C'est la vie.

Then I went to the Frida Kahlo show at the Tate. Several of Kahlo's paintings were on display, including "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird" (above), but there were fewer than I expected. The show was mostly works by other artists paying tribute to Kahlo, or artists -- including her husband Diego Rivera -- who had inspired her or who she had inspired.

Kahlo didn't produce a huge volume of art during her short lifetime (she died at 47), so I assume that's why there's not more of her work in the show. Still, it was packed with visitors, and it did feature some of Kahlo's remarkable Mexican dresses and jewelry, as well as some of the torturous corsets and medical devices she was forced to wear following a near-fatal bus accident as a young woman.

Anyway, it was an interesting show and a good day out, and I haven't died from bird flu yet. (But stay tuned!)

Paint Samples and Bank News

Apparently there's going to be some upcoming paintwork on this wall on West End Lane. Looks like they might go for two colors, one on the top and one on the bottom. Which would you choose?

I see that Blogger still hasn't sorted out the mystery of the stagnant bloglists. I had hope yesterday morning when I noticed that John Gray's "Going Gently" blog jumped to the top of my list with a new post -- but that's the only one that showed an update, and even that is now outdated. It's like Google made a fix and it worked for a microsecond and then died again. Weird.

I spent yesterday morning at home reading, and watching (and hearing) a tree crew pruning a gigantic Leylandii cypress a couple of houses away.

These trees are well known for growing to immense size. This one is usually pruned into a neat cylinder, and yesterday some workers seemed to be trying to reshape it. I heard a lot of commotion and every few minutes a branch would fly out of the top (see pic above) to land with a thud on the ground. The guys doing the work were invisible, buried down in the greenery. It sure made a racket.

After lunch I ran a bag of stuff to our local thrift shop, and took a bag of books down to the used book store in St. John's Wood. Walking back gave me a chance to not only stretch my legs but catch up a bit on my podcasts. I need to figure out if I want to continue these podcast subscriptions. I'm not in a position to listen as much as I did when I used to walk to work every day.

In fact, I keep thinking I need to make a list of all our household subscriptions -- Netflix, Amazon, newspapers, websites, etc. -- so we can keep better track of them. I have a feeling we're paying for subscriptions we don't use that much, and they do proliferate, don't they? Maybe I'll work on that today.

Speaking of money, I called my stepmother's bank yesterday and received the happy news that they processed all my paperwork and I could expect checks for my portion of her estate. Woo hoo! It seems this long nightmare of notaries and apostilles may be coming to an end. I'm still a bit vague on how much I'm due to receive -- the figures they gave me don't quite make sense -- and indeed all my siblings seem to be getting slightly different amounts, so there may be some followup bookkeeping. But we'll see.

These little cyclamens have appeared in the flowerbeds in our back garden. They come up every year with amazing consistency and reliability. We planted them ten years ago at least. There are several plants but some of them have been trampled by the dog.

And speaking of Bailey, she seems a bit under the weather. She wouldn't eat last night. Hopefully just a temporary stomach upset, which Olga used to get occasionally too. (As I wrote this, Dave presented her with her bowl and she got out of bed and danced around, and now she's chowing down, so that's a good sign.)

The Uncaged Birds

Bailey and I found this street art on our walk yesterday afternoon. I'm not sure what it means. Obviously caged birds being released, but why does the cage have an English flag? Something about letting go of far-right nationalism?

We also encountered a gigantic tour bus trying to snake its way through the relatively narrow streets of our neighborhood. It was trying to round a corner from a side street onto our street, and it seemed to be having trouble making the turn. As I walked by, the driver opened his window and called out to me, "Can I go down this street?"

I said, "Well, the street's open, but I have no idea whether you'll be able to get that thing down it. I've never driven a bus before!"

He seemed unhappy with this answer, so he asked the guy walking behind me the same question. I didn't stick around for his response. Somehow he managed to get out of there because by the time the dog and I had circled the block the bus was gone.

So yes, I still walked Bailey in the morning and then I walked her again in the late afternoon, despite the fact that her dog-walker started yesterday and took her out for an hour. So she got three walks. The whole reason we're getting the dog walker is so I'll have more freedom to leave home and not be tied down by canine responsibilities, but so far I'm still trying to figure out how he fits into our daily schedule. She expects a walk when she first gets up, and I think she needs one in the afternoon, so who knows. My ideal would be to have the walker come in the afternoon, but apparently that's not an option. We'll make it work.

She had fun on her walk, if this video by her dog-walker, Josh, is any indication. She took to him right away and didn't show the slightest concern about leaving me behind -- unlike Olga, who used to put her tail between her legs whenever the dog-walker showed up, and never liked to leave home without Dave or me.

I also took down our inflatable mattress from one of the dark hidey-hole cabinets over our hallway and blew it up to make sure it still works. Dave's nephew and his girlfriend will be sleeping on it when they visit later this week, so we wanted to make sure it's functional, and it appears to be. We still have some work to do to get ready for their visit, mainly re-hanging the drapes in the dining room, which also serves as the guest room on the rare occasion that we have visitors, and moving some furniture to make room for the bed.

The last time anyone stayed with us was Dave's parents, I think, and that was back in 2018! Can that be right?!

New Bedspread

Yesterday was the last day of the Royal Photographic Society's street photography exhibit in Mayfair. I had a stewarding shift at the gallery, from its opening at 11:30 a.m. to its closing at 3 p.m. We had pretty steady attendance (about 35 people overall) including my pals Colin and Shannon from the school where I used to work. I put an announcement about the show on Facebook and, lo and behold, they came. There are a host of legitimate ills associated with social media, but it does work!

At the end of the afternoon I brought my mounted photo home, and I must say, I'm happy to put this show behind me. Now we have Dave's nephew and his girlfriend coming to stay with us for several days beginning Thursday, and then I'm off to Florida.

While wandering around Mayfair I came across this building, obviously an old tube station. I don't remember ever seeing it before. It's about midway between the Green Park and Hyde Park Corner stations, on Down Street. Apparently it was only open for tube service from 1907 to 1932, and then used as a government shelter during the Blitz. Nowadays it's open for occasional tours, and I might try to do one of those at some point. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?

I grabbed a quick lunch at Pret a Manger, where the utensils were so tightly packed into a container on the counter that they made intriguing patterns.

On the home front, Dave and I got a new bedspread. The old one, which had pale green, gray and blue stripes, was at least ten years old and falling apart. Now we have a much brighter one which we actually really like, even though, as I told Dave, it's sort of "Laura Ingalls Wilder goes to Bombay."

I finished "Jackass 3" last night, mainly because we rented it and by golly I was going to get my money's worth. It made me laugh, I must admit, but it made me cringe too, and a few of the stunts are indescribably vile. I think I've had enough of that for a while, and possibly for the rest of my life.

Lost or Damaged Balls and Stray Arachnids

While walking Bailey through the nearby housing estate yesterday morning, I noticed these stray footballs on the other side of a very high fence, as impenetrable as a barrier surrounding a prison. It's at least eight feet high with sharp metal at the top to prevent anyone from climbing over. I suppose if your football or basketball somehow winds up on the other side of that fence you just have to live with it, because there's no way to get it back. Of course, my mind immediately set about trying to figure out ways to defeat the system -- a long pole? Chewing gum?

Yesterday was another quiet day at home. I read a New Yorker, including a profile of Johnny Knoxville, the ringleader of the gang behind the "Jackass" films. Apparently there's a new one, which seems improbable to me given that Knoxville is practically my age and thus a little long in the tooth to be pulling Jackass stunts. But it made me think Dave might appreciate this franchise, because he loves juvenile humor and, basically, fart jokes.

Years ago I saw the first two Jackass movies and I thought they were pretty funny -- more so than I cared to admit. So last night we rented "Jackass 3," which I'd never seen, and even though it featured Dave-like humor (one gag involved a guy with a trumpet and the above-mentioned bodily function, which seemed written specifically for Dave), he did not like it at all. We turned it off halfway through. Oh well. I would have finished it, at least -- and might still if I have a spare hour over the next day or two.

It's the lowest of low culture, but hey -- I was inspired to watch it by The New Yorker! Doesn't that count for something? The intelligentsia have taken notice!

Here are the owls that guard our patio from their perch on the fence. I found them both in the cemetery years ago and they've hung there for ages, getting gradually more and more rusty. You can see how bedraggled our climbing hydrangea looks after the dry summer.

I walked the dog in the afternoon and I'm proud to say that once again, she didn't bark at any other dogs. She does this thing where she perks up, points her ears and stares, as if to signal "I SEE YOU and I will CUT YOU," but she's now less likely to let loose with a volley of barking. Some of you have suggested that's because she feels more relaxed and less threatened now, and I hope that's true.

It's so funny because she's the opposite with me and Dave -- warm and cuddly to the point of being annoying. She's in my lap all the time.

It's a gloomy morning here -- we may have had a bit of rain, I can't quite tell. I'm off to Mayfair later today for my last shift of stewarding at the RPS street photography exhibit. It's the last day of the show so hopefully we'll get some visitors. There's a 90 percent chance of rain for the day, so at least I'll be indoors.

Dave snapped this photo of a household visitor on Vivian Swift's watercolor portraits of Olga. Surprise! It is spider season, after all.