NW6 is Finished!

Well, I did it! After three more photography outings yesterday -- morning, noon and evening -- I officially finished depicting the NW6 postcode for Bleeding London. By my count, I walked 253 streets, alleys and mews in this postcode alone, and took photos of each and every one.

This is the map I carried with me, with the postcode borders shown as a red dotted line. I marked off the streets as I completed them. Those gray lines through the middle that look unmarked are railroad tracks, not roads.

This isn't the first postcode completed for the contest. Other photographers have done theirs, too. It's quite a feat, if I do say so myself.

The photo at the top was taken yesterday on Abbey Road -- yes, THE Abbey Road -- in the NW6 postcode. I like it, but it's not the photo I entered in the contest for that street. I used this one instead:

I mean, what kind of dog is that?!

The much larger piece of Abbey Road in the NW8 postcode, just to the south, is the stretch that includes THE crosswalk. I took a photo of that for the contest, too:

How's that for a London picture? I don't know why any motorists use this road. Getting past this crosswalk, with its ever-present gaggle of picture-taking tourists (and pesky photographers, ahem, taking pictures of the picture-taking tourists) must be a nightmare in a car.

I got home last night to a perplexed Dave, who found that our gas was turned off and he couldn't light the stove to make dinner. Turns out the gas company was working on the meters in front of the house -- and the owner of the upstairs flat showed up and gave them hell for doing work with no authorization. The upstairs flat is apparently being sold, and I think the new buyer may have asked for the meters to be moved -- they're next to the driveway, and he told Dave he thought that was unsafe. But you'd think the gas company would wait for the sale to be completed before acting on his request.

Anyway, long story short, we did not have our planned butternut squash risotto because the gas was out for so long. Instead, Dave baked the butternut squash in our electric oven, sauteed mushrooms and onions when the gas returned (a much shorter process than making risotto) and stuffed the squash. Pretty good pinch-hitting, I'd say.

Yellow Cars

I've noticed a funny trend in my photography over the past couple of weeks. I seem especially drawn to yellow cars.

When I was young, I had a vague idea that I wanted a yellow Volkswagen, and as I recall, yellow isn't a very popular car color in the states. Maybe that's why I still find it so eye-catching.

British people, on the other hand, seem to like their yellow cars.

They can certainly liven up a street...

...or a driveway.

There are old ones:

And seemingly brand new ones:

(Coworkers of mine have nicknamed this neighborhood behemoth the "ice cream truck.")

And how about special credit for a yellow truck next to a yellow house?

It's kind of funny that I shot all these photos over a couple of weeks and only belatedly realized I had a definite theme going!

Olga Threatens the Eternal Rest of the Dead

My computer has really started to drag its heels on some functions. I think it may be nearing retirement age. It's only four years old, but I use it heavily every day, and the ol' girl (or boy?) is running out of steam.

Lately I've been struggling with downloading photos. Used to be, I'd just plug in the camera and they'd all flow effortlessly into iPhoto, as smoothly as a waterfall. Now I have to plug in the camera multiple times before the computer even sees the pictures, and then it often jams mid-download, which means unplugging the camera again. And overall, things are getting quite slow.

Of course, I do ask it to process a hell of a lot of pictures. So there is that.

Yesterday I tried to finish photographing my NW6 postcode for Bleeding London, and I came very close. I walked 37 streets, and I thought I was done until I came home and perused the paperwork. I realized I'm still missing four or five tiny little mews. Fortunately they're all roughly in the same area, so I can polish them off some evening this week. Not tonight, though. Feet are tired.

After my photo outing, Dave and I went to brunch at a nearby deli -- named David's, appropriately -- where I had a Greek scrambled egg/tomato/onion dish that tasted amazing because I was starving. Well, it might have tasted amazing anyway, but being hungry definitely helped.

Then I came home and, suffering from dog guilt, I took Olga for a walk up to Fortune Green and around the cemetery, a route she likes because she can be off leash and the trees in the cemetery are thick with squirrels. She can't reach any of them, but like Walter Mitty, she imagines she can.

Technically, she's not supposed to be off the leash in the cemetery -- a rule I've never understood. I suppose the cemetery folks want to protect the cleanliness of the graves from bad dog owners, if you know what I mean. But we're careful, and if I were dead, I really think I'd find having a happy dog rolling in the grass six feet above me a great honor. (Assuming I could think or perceive anything at all, which I doubt.) Other people run their dogs off-leash there, too, so I'm not too worried about it.

Finally, last night we Skyped with my mom and with Dave's parents, catching up on all the latest news at home. I had just enough energy to make it through a rerun of "The Streets of San Francisco," guest-starring a ridiculously young Martin Sheen, before collapsing into bed. Where I had unsettling dreams about more hidden, tiny little mews that I had failed to photograph.

(Photo: One of our neighborhood cats and its concrete counterpart, on our street in West Hampstead. And a photo-bombing garden gnome, too.)

Little Pink House(s)

Yesterday I was back in East London, photographing near the South Woodford tube station -- not far from where I was last weekend, actually. A group of us met and covered pretty much the entire E18 postcode for Bleeding London.

This pink house was one of my finds. When John Mellencamp sang about "little pink houses" with an "interstate running through (the) front yard," he made it sound like a bad thing -- but this little house, within just a few steps of the A406, part of the inner circular freeway that runs around Central London, is pretty great. You gotta love the pink car with the pink hubcaps.

(Then again, John Mellencamp was singing specifically about American little pink houses.)

I photographed my assigned area within E18 and met everyone for lunch ( coffee with a cheese and pickle sandwich -- the British equivalent of a PB&J -- at an economical £4). Then I kept walking northward to where I was last weekend, thus knitting together the two areas -- which for some reason made sense to me. It gave me a sense of neatness, of completion.

I've had several people come out of the woodwork lately to tell me they've read something or other on my blog. It's great to hear people are reading -- and it's a useful reminder that, yeah, all this stuff is going on the Internet for worldwide consumption. Sometimes I forget that I'm not just speaking to my little group of regular readers! (Yikes, what have I said recently?!)

Awake in a Forest

I awoke with a start in the blackness. Something was moving through the trees behind my tent.

Something big.

I lay listening, my heart thumping, as branches snapped and the small mopane trees shook. The sounds seemed to be coming from different directions, which confused me until I realized there was more than one Something out there. There were several.

And then, a powerful trumpeting sound - the unmistakable call of an elephant. It didn’t sound too close - not close enough to be dangerous, anyway. But I sat up, reasoning in my half-asleep state that if a large animal stepped on my tent, I’d be better off if I weren’t lying down, taking up lots of surface area.

I sat rigid, trying not to move or draw attention to myself. The crashing sounds in the mopane trees began to subside. I began to breathe a little easier. Then I heard more movement outside my tent - and this time, it was much closer.

It was a chilly night in August, and I was in Chobe National Park in Botswana, on the country’s northern border with Namibia. I had come to Botswana, a small sparsely populated nation just above South Africa, with two American friends. We were on a camping safari with ten other people. Our goal: to see animals.

Africa was not new to me. I’d traveled in West Africa and Madagascar, and in fact lived in Morocco for 2 1/2 years in the early 1990s. But I’d never been in a place where I could see zebras and giraffes, lions and gazelles.

So there I was, sitting upright in a tent in a pitch-black forest, a place inaccessible by all but the hardiest four-wheel-drive vehicles. Something was moving around outside my tent, and I was thinking, “This may not be the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

All of my senses were heightened. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more aware. Now that the elephants had passed, the night had grown quiet again - there was no insect hum in the chill night of the African winter, and my fellow travelers were asleep in other tents scattered nearby. I was alone, separated from a mystery animal by a thin sheet of canvas and a few feet of air, and I was brilliantly alive.

I was aware not only of my own breath, but of its breath. I felt its every footstep. I snuffled the ground with its nose.

Sure, I was scared. I couldn’t look outside the tent flaps without moving, and as I said, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Our guide told us the animals wouldn’t bother tents - and indeed, would not step on them - so I probably wasn’t really in danger. But the uncertainty of this presence, this thing I didn’t know, kept me frozen still.

I heard one of my fellow campers suddenly speak to his wife in a tent nearby, and at the sound, the animal moved away. My neighbor opened his tent flap and pointed his flashlight at my tent, lighting up the fabric walls. I released my tightened breath, happy that someone was checking on my safety. I heard the man murmur a few more words to his wife and shut off the light.

When all was quiet again, I lay back down. It took a while, but I fell asleep, and before I knew it, it was morning.

At breakfast we shared stories about the elephant herd, which our guide said moved through the forest about 200 feet from our tents. My neighbor, an Italian man, excitedly told our guide that he’d also seen a black animal in the campsite when he peered out of his tent. I’m sure whatever he saw was what I heard. The guide listened to his description and wasn’t sure what it might have been - he guessed a honey badger.

In retrospect I realized how Buddhist that night was: my hyperawareness, and my feeling of unity with that mystery animal. I heard its presence, breathed its air, felt waves of tension leaving my body and meeting the force of its curiosity somewhere in midair. The fibers of our experience seemed to weave together like cloth.

The fear I felt resulted from my projections of what could happen, what could be true. Was it a lion? A leopard? A rhino?

No, it was a honey badger. It was my own mind.

(Note: I wrote this piece back in 2007, when I was a Zen student, for our Zendo newsletter. I found it a few days ago when I logged into my long-dormant Google Docs account, where I and the other editors of the newsletter used to share articles. The photos are from my Botswana trip, in August 2006.)

Photography Hangover

Yesterday evening I met up with some of the Bleeding London photographers for a wander through Deptford, in Southeast London. It's an area I rarely visit, though I was down there a couple of years ago shooting storefronts. It's an intriguing neighborhood.

On this trip, I initially went to a council estate where I found lots of blocky Stalinist architecture -- albeit in appealing pastel colors -- and the usual suburban fare.

More cats.

I actually resisted photographing the cats -- I am on cat overload -- but this one was posed so perfectly I couldn't pass it up!

After finishing my assigned territory I tried to reunite with the group but got trapped in a maze of construction-blocked streets. Weirdly I ran into another Bleeding London photographer, also trapped in the same vortex of council estate alleyways, and eventually we found our way back to the main group. (I make it sound like there were loads of us -- there were actually five.)

We all walked toward the Thames, and as the sun set I got some night shots like the bar in the top picture. I love that lighting! I wrestled with whether I should color-correct the photos that I took beneath streetlights, which cast a bright yellow light over everything. In the end I left them alone, figuring the odd lighting would help the viewer realize they're night shots. (When you can't see the sky, it's not always easy to tell.)

So, anyway, three of us stopped off at a pub for a pint before catching the train. I belatedly realized that I never ate dinner, so when I got home, I grabbed a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and an ice cream bar. After Dave and I shared stories of our day and he settled in to watch "Star Trek: The Next Generation," I edited and uploaded all my photos, and wound up going to bed around midnight, which is ridiculously late for me.

Hence, the hangover. Which isn't really a hangover -- just a bit of fatigue. Today, I am once again resting my eyes!

Alleys and Mews

This might be my favorite shopfront ever. As I wrote long ago, I love a good accordion. And what about that huge, bent sign? Awesome.

Yesterday was another bonanza day for photography. I went out in the morning, and again at lunch, and again after work. I am trying to hit lots of tiny little streets in many disparate locations that I bypassed on my first walks through our postcode. It's amazing how many little litter-strewn alleys and picturesque mews there are, snaking behind the main avenues. According to the rules of Bleeding London, they all deserve a picture.

I think I've completed about 3/4 of our postcode. One more good outing and I should be done. Tonight, though, I'm going on another meetup with the other photographers, this time in South London -- so NW6 will have to wait until the weekend.

Otherwise, yesterday was very quiet. I sat in the library much of the day and plotted my walking and photography strategy!

Thanks for enduring my preachiness yesterday. I get a bit insane about population issues. It's probably the one topic I feel most passionate about, and one I will continue to study. I'm going to shut up about it now, though.