Harvard and Yale

Not far from our flat -- on the wonderfully named Honeybourne Road, where I found that '60s chaise longue discarded a couple of weeks ago -- are two block-long apartment buildings, known in London as mansion blocks. On one side of the street is Harvard Court. On the other, Yale Court.

These seem like fairly old buildings, I'm guessing Edwardian or slightly later. Yes, such was the mystique of the American Ivy League, even 100 years ago.

Our house backs up to the rear of Yale Court. The other day, Olga and I were playing fetch with her Kong in the back garden, and I threw the toy only to see it bounce and fly over the back garden wall.

Olga, who is very possessive of her Kong, ran in circles with her tail wagging furiously -- like, "What do I do NOW?!"

I snapped on her harness and we walked up the street to the corner. I counted my steps, so that on Honeybourne Road we could walk down the same number of steps and know, in front of Yale Court, that we were roughly across the back wall from our house. There, happily, we encountered Yale Court's caretaker, working out on the sidewalk. He let us go to the rear of the building, and Olga sniffed out her Kong, nestled in a patch of garden flowers.

Whew! Emergency averted.

Jellied Eels

I was off to London's East End yesterday, taking photos in the neighborhood of East Ham for Bleeding London. I met up with the same two photography pals, Susi and Greg, who accompanied me on a past walk. We figured we could quickly document life on the streets of the E6 postcode.

We met for coffee to chat and plan a strategy, and then we split up, with Susi and Greg taking one side of a main street and me taking the other. We followed that plan throughout the day, and at the end of the day I had 48 streets finished. Assuming Greg and Susi had a similar number, we did pretty well.

Trying to photograph with other people is not the most efficient means of individually knocking down large quantities of streets, because you spend time socializing and backtracking to meet up with each other. But cumulatively, with any luck, you wind up with more done than one person could manage.

For lunch we stopped at a pie and eel shop (a place I've photographed in the past, coincidentally). Eels are a traditional working-class food in East London, and you can get them either hot or cold and jellied. I decided to try them. Upon the advice of the counter lady, I got the cold option, accompanied by plain ol' buttered bread.

Before I saw them I couldn't even visualize what jellied eels would look like. Well, there they are! I ate the fish and the bread but I left behind the surplus jelly -- I'm not sure whether I was meant to consume that or not. Tastewise, they're a lot like sardines -- oily and salty. They weren't bad, and I'm glad I tried them, but I wouldn't say they're my new favorite food. You can see a bit of Susi's beef pie to the left, with the green "liquor," a parsley sauce.

Apparently wild eels are not as abundant as they once were, but fortunately they can be farmed, and my eels came from a farm in Northern Ireland. Wild eels live in the Thames and many other bodies of water in Britain and northern Europe -- which is how they became an inexpensive working-class food -- and apparently they swim all the way to the Sargasso Sea in the mid-Atlantic to breed. Which is pretty amazing.

Anyway, after our day out and about, I got home around 4 p.m. Dave went to school to work with some students, so I didn't miss much around here! Just Olga snoring!

(Top photo: A chicken shop on Barking Road. This is NOT where I got the eels! You know I love my America-themed chicken shops, and the guy waving at me cracks me up.)

Four Mysterious Chums

While I was walking the IG postcodes on Sunday, I found this old photo near Redbridge, sopping wet and lying in the street -- just as I photographed it, above. Because I can't stand to see old photos lost and forgotten, I picked it up and tucked it loosely into my camera bag, in a compartment where it could dry out.

I wonder who they are? They look like military buddies -- I think the second guy from the left has bars on his chest. Those uniforms are seriously ill-fitting. Unfortunately, there's nothing written on the back.

It's a mysterious little piece of history!

My guess is someone died -- maybe one of the guys in the photo, or his spouse -- and the picture was thrown away. It somehow fell out of the trash can and blew down the street, where it lay in the rain and dew until I picked it up. Allow me to preserve it for posterity on the Internet!

In other news...

With some recent incentive -- nights with temperatures in the mid-40s F -- Dave has figured out how to operate our heating system. We now have the radiators turned on and the house is much more comfortable, both warmer and drier. I let Dave work it out because I don't have much experience with radiators -- in New York I always had building heat, which came on in October whether I wanted it or not, and I never tried to regulate it. (And in Florida, no one has radiators.) My solution to a cold house is another layer of clothing!

Yesterday was a rainy day made for nesting. I read half of "Gone Girl," which is a great page-turner, and I took Olga to Fortune Green and the cemetery when the weather lifted a bit. It felt very English to walk around in the blustery gray cemetery, the wind whipping at the stone-faced angels and headstone of the "master of Heatherleys," wherever that was. Dave, meanwhile, stayed on the couch, adapting a Mahler piece for his band. We didn't even try to make dinner. I ate a peanut butter sandwich and watercress salad, and some cheese and crackers, and ice cream for dessert, all while curled up watching two episodes of "Downton Abbey."

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Dave and I have yesterday and today off from school because it's October break. We return to work on Wednesday. Today I'll be back on the photography trail!

IG Crazy Day

As we prepare to wind down Bleeding London,* there are still many postcodes with no representation in the contest. I guess no one likes to photograph the suburbs; they seem to be especially neglected.

I think we ought to have at least a handful of photos from every postcode. Londoners should be able to look at the results of our efforts and see their neighborhoods, or at least somewhere close by.

So I've combed through the spreadsheets of the streets photographed so far, and found several IG and HA postcodes -- that's far east and northwest London, respectively -- that have not been covered at all.

I've made it a mission to visit those areas and collect at least ten photos from each postcode.

Yesterday I went out to east London and shot most of the IGs. I couldn't even begin to tell you how far I walked! I ambled through five different postcodes and collected photos from each one -- about a hundred pictures in all.

It was very suburban, and quite chi-chi in some areas. I heard one woman calling to her husband inside their posh house to "go see why that bloke is in the street taking photos." (I wasn't even photographing their house!) I called out that I would be happy to answer any questions, but no one ever emerged to ask them.

As it was suburbia, there were tons of inevitable flowers...

...and there was discarded furniture...

...and of course, there were cats.

It was also staffy dog territory, as you can see from the dog photos above. Seems like every dog owner had a staffy. I think we found Olga's ancestral home!

Anyway, I was out literally all day -- eight hours. Hopefully all the walking did me good, but then I ate a greasy fish & chips lunch at a neighborhood chippie, and that probably counterbalanced any healthful effects.

Today we're going to have rain, supposedly, so I'm staying home and resting.

*The organizers have announced that Bleeding London will have a "soft ending" at the end of October. Apparently we can continue to shoot for some weeks after that, and contribute photos from uncovered streets. But I'm still trying to do as much as possible by the official deadline.

Domestic Dumpster Diving

After writing that unhelpfully grouchy post yesterday -- and thank you all for enduring it -- I decided to take the situation in hand. I could let the overfull wheelie bins sit in front of the house all week, but they would just make me angry every time I saw them. So late yesterday morning, I went out and put them away.

Then I got to looking at the neighbors' bags of stuff -- and I thought, you know, I am going to resolve this problem too.

The neighbors had moved out a few hours earlier. They were gone. The coast was clear.

I pulled the bags out of the bin and around to the side of the house -- which is behind a gate, so I couldn't be seen from the street -- and I went through them. From five garbage bags full of stuff, I extracted three bags of clothing, apparently in great shape except for the fact that it had been wadded up in a bag, and three shoe boxes containing pristine shoes still tenderly wrapped in tissue paper from the store. Oh, and a coin purse full of coins.

I looked over the clothing just enough to make sure I wasn't dealing with anyone's unmentionables -- I wasn't! -- and also to make sure there were no stray pieces of kitchen waste. God forbid a hambone should be wrapped in one of those shirts.

Then I took the whole lot to the Oxfam thrift store, two blocks away on the high street.

Perhaps I am an unreasonably nosey neighbor, but I feel so much better about this situation now. The good stuff isn't going to waste. It's not clogging up a landfill. It might actually make some money for Oxfam. Our trash can is still full, but at least now I'm certain it's full of actual trash, and next Friday, we'll be rid of that, too.

As for my role as garbage manager, I guess I just have to accept it. I got a handful of Euro change and British pennies as payment!

(Photo: Streetlights in Deptford, in early September.)

The Overfull Wheelie-Bin Blues

Our upstairs neighbors appear to be moving out. That in itself is not a problem -- we barely even say hello to them. The problem is that they're throwing away massive quantities of stuff.

We share garbage and recycling bins with them, and we have weekly garbage pickup on Friday mornings. For the last two weeks, Dave and I have contended with an overfull garbage bin that we regularly have to tamp down in order to cram in our little grocery bag of garbage. Eventually it's so full that the lid stands open and the garbage protrudes (like the bin on the left in the top photo).

This has been only a mildly irritating temptation to neighborhood foxes -- until yesterday. The garbage men came about 7 a.m., and I thought, "Whew! We finally have an empty garbage bin." And then, when I left for work at 8 a.m., I went to move it back to its position in the alley beside the house and it felt really heavy. I looked inside and it was full again.

I was furious. Why, if our neighbors had more bags of garbage, didn't they get them downstairs before the garbage men came -- rather than making us live with it for another week?

Not only that, but they seem to be throwing away everything. Perfectly good towels. Shoes still in boxes. A tennis racket. Stuff that could easily be taken to the charity shop. The waste makes me insane.

And another thing -- why is it always my job to put the trash cans back into the alley after the garbage men come? Otherwise they'd sit on the sidewalk in front of the house all week. Far be it from the neighbors to touch the garbage cans after they have filled them to the brim.

I take comfort from the fact that this situation ought to end fairly soon. But we have a neighbor on the other side who also uses our recycling bins, because she believes her alley is too steeply paved to contain a bin of its own. I don't know where she puts her garbage -- maybe it goes in our can, too.

So I'm basically managing the garbage cans for three households.

How did this happen?

(Photo: These bins look like ours, but they're not ours -- they're for an apartment complex in North London that I came across on one of my walks.)

Garden Update, with Rose-a-palooza

Here's the state of the garden at the moment. The lawn needs mowing, but as you can see we still have an abundance of flowers to offset the slightly shaggy, unraked grass. The cosmos are still going strong, and the yellow dahlia between them -- and then there are all the roses. They're like a colorful constellation of stars, scattered across the back yard.

We aren't sure what we've done to make these roses like us so much. Maybe they're blooming despite us. Dave did feed them several weeks ago, and we've given many of them more sunlight, as I've written -- and maybe that's all it takes.

Here's a rose from the side of the garden that we hadn't seen bloom before now. I'm not a huge fan of this one, which is disconcertingly beige. I call it the "flesh rose."

And then there's this little orange number, blooming out on the lawn.

So much variety! And we still have a couple of bushes, heretofore unseen, with buds on the way.

Not everything we've planted has prospered. Some of the salvia is struggling -- I think our soil is too wet and clayey -- and our lilies-of-the-valley look really pathetic. (The jury is still out on whether they're experiencing seasonal or permanent die-back.) Our verbena and speedwell have been dusted by a white powdery blight, although in the verbena's case it doesn't seem to have hurt the plants. Dave plans an attack with garlic spray this weekend.