Edward Gorey

The most interesting thing happened yesterday. I checked my mailbox at work and found a slim parcel. This was inside -- a book of fascinating and curious little stickers that I never ordered. There was no note.

It came from Blackwell's, a book shop in Oxford. So I called Blackwell's, thinking there had been some sort of mistake. They confirmed it was ordered for me, but would not reveal the sender -- they said only that it was someone with a Gmail address (like half the planet).

I have no earthly idea who might have sent me this or why. I love the little drawings, but I've never expressed an affinity for Edward Gorey, who was an American author and book illustrator. If you'd asked me before yesterday, I could have told you he was an artist, but that's about it.

Turns out he's known for his whimsical, vaguely unsettling depictions of Victorian and Edwardian characters and fantastic creatures, like someone's nightmare "Downton Abbey."

So I'm thinking there are a couple of possibilities here. One, it's a mistake -- someone ordered it and accidentally had it shipped to me rather than its rightful recipient. Somehow I think this is most probable.

Two, it's an anonymous gift -- in which case it's AWESOME but I wish the sender had given me a hint who sent it! I would love to thank that person for an interesting present that has made me learn more about an intriguing artist. (If it's someone out there in Blogland, THANK YOU!)

One of the stickers, by the way, does look a bit like Olga. And Olga does love her skateboards -- though she prefers chasing them to riding them. I'm not sure she appreciates bugling, though.

Broccoli Socks

Dave ordered a bunch of new socks online and got me a pair featuring stalks of broccoli (one of my favorite vegetables). The day I first wore them, they happened to match my lunch!

And thus we begin another assortment of random recent photos...

I came across these two dead/dying box bushes lying in the road. I guess they fell off a truck. I put them on the curb, so cars could at least get through. Last time I looked, they were still there.

A quick selfie in the window of a closed flooring shop near our flat!

These are some of Dave's new socks. I know -- SLOTHS!

Olga and I found some mirrored debris on the street the other day -- always good for a photo opportunity.

I see this woman walking her huskies many mornings on my way to work. I asked her for a picture and she happily complied, but the left-hand dog was more interested in something in the hedge.

I came across this stencil on the sidewalk yesterday. Kind of an odd message. And what's with the bottle rocket? It reminds me of the "skyrockets in flight" from the song "Afternoon Delight," which is just...wrong.

And finally, this guy was waiting for a bus when I walked past this bus shelter yesterday morning. I could not resist taking a surreptitious picture of that fabulous jogging suit (or whatever it is) while he read his newspaper. That outfit is made to be noticed!

The Purse

When I was a kid, I lived with my mom but I stayed with my dad and stepmother on Friday nights and Saturdays. Every Saturday morning we'd go grocery shopping, which could be a pretty complicated affair because my stepmother was adventurous and skilled in the kitchen and a member of a gourmet cooking club. While Dad and June shopped, me, my brother, my stepbrother and stepsister were turned loose in the shopping center and allowed to explore.

We shopped at Food World, which doesn't exist anymore, located in a strip mall off Florida Avenue in north Tampa. There was also an Eckerd Drugs, a Hallmark card shop, a laundromat, a Radio Shack. We'd go to the Danish Bakery in Food World and get a free cookie. We'd sit in Eckerds and read comic books and magazines with our sticky fingers until the employees kicked us out. We'd go to Sherry's Hallmark and admire the ceramic animals and glassware and whatever else glittered on the shelves. We'd go to Radio Shack and dream about stereos and video games.

One day, when we were about 11, my stepbrother and I got especially adventurous and went through the laundromat and out the back door, to the back of the shopping center. I suppose we just wanted to know what was behind the building. Nothing but a strip of asphalt and a swamp, as it turned out, but there was a big trash dumpster. Of course we looked inside it, and what did we see? A woman's purse, lying on top of the debris.

One of us climbed in and retrieved the purse, and we carried it over to the curb, sat down, and started going through it. There was a blue leatherette case containing a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, a pair of sunglasses, and some other stuff -- but no cash. If there was a wallet, it was empty. It seemed strange that someone would throw all this in the trash, but we figured it was ours now. Finders keepers, right?

Suddenly a very angry woman stormed out of the laundromat and began yelling at us. Of course it was her purse, which someone had taken from the counter in the laundromat -- and of course she thought we were the thieves! We tried to explain we'd found it in the trash, but she was hearing none of it. She said she was calling the police. My stepbrother and I had our standard default reactions -- he got angry, and I cried.

Finally she let me run to Food World to get our father. I remember running up to him in the store, blubbering away in a state of panic. He came back to the laundromat and calmly defused the situation. I don't remember what he said to the woman, but he must have been convincing because eventually she collected her plundered purse, the cigarette case, her sunglasses and whatever else we'd found, and she let us go.

It's funny how it never occurred to us that purse might be stolen. We thought someone had simply thrown it away!

It wasn't the first time we found suspicious stuff at the shopping center, either. A few years later we were exploring some adjacent woods when we found a photo album full of nude pictures -- and we recognized the guy in the pictures as a neighbor! (Dad burned the album.)

Who said suburbia was boring?

(Photo: A self-portrait in a reflective globe on a fountain, a couple of weeks ago.)

The Greyhounds

This is the top of a building on Lea Bridge Road in Leyton, which I noticed when I was visiting the Magic Fish on Sunday. That entire area was familiar -- I walked through there when I was shooting pictures for Bleeding London years ago -- and indeed the greyhounds at the top of this structure were familiar, too. Turns out I photographed them back then, in September 2015.

They haven't changed much. I wondered why they were up there. The building is used for car sales now, but I suspected it used to be a pub -- The Greyhound is a fairly common pub name. Sure enough, Googling tells me it was a pub that closed in 1997, after about 150 years at the site. (Apparently in its later years it was a nightclub with a "dodgy" reputation.)

There's pub history at every turn in this town.

I don't have much news from yesterday. I spent most of my spare time reading "Lethal White," the latest Robert Galbraith book. It was good, but dear God, it was long, too -- about 650 pages. I finally had to just sit down and focus on finishing it because I was sick to death of carrying it around! And job done. Now I can move on to something else -- hopefully something more compact.

Rules

On Sunday night we went to dinner with our friends Chris and Linda. We often meet them at a pub in Notting Hill, but this time we wanted to try something different. While watching "Downton Abbey" recently, Dave and I saw Lady Mary have dinner at Rules in London. Dave looked it up and we discovered it's a real restaurant -- ostensibly the oldest in London, in fact, having been established in 1798!

So of course we went to Rules, in Covent Garden. I expected it to be a bit fusty and touristy, but it's actually a beautiful restaurant, with walls covered with art and memorabilia, pictures of the royal family and Winston Churchill, and everything steeped in tradition and yet bright and pleasant. We had an excellent meal. I had a nectarine salad, a lamb chop and a peach parfait for dessert; Dave had Jersey oysters, pork cheeks and sticky toffee pudding. I also got a proper martini, rather than one of those watery restaurant martinis made with one shot of gin and a lot of water. I would go back in a heartbeat.

This was the scene in our dark living room at 6:15 this morning, with Olga keeping watch over the garden from atop her stack of pillows. (And our angry Donald Trump doll keeping watch over her from the back of the sofa.) I got that bright red dahlia just outside the back door at Homebase over the weekend -- it was on sale, and I love the color. The purple loosestrife is still blooming away too, as you can see.

As Paul McCartney sang, it's just another day!

In Search of the Magic Fish

Some of you may remember that a few weeks ago, while I was walking the Capital Ring, I spent a good long time in a wildlife refuge searching for a sculpture called "Rise and Shine Magic Fish," by pottery artist Kate Malone. My Capital Ring map mentioned the sculpture and it sounded intriguing, and I was disappointed when I couldn't find it. I later learned it had been moved to another nearby park in Leyton after a piece of it was stolen.

Yesterday, I decided to go back to Leyton and find those fish in their new(ish) home, the WaterWorks Centre Nature Reserve.

It took two tubes and a train to get there, and I marched confidently into the reserve, certain that I had found the fish's true home. I crossed a bridge over one of the many channels of the River Lea and found myself on a path between fields, forest and a small pasture containing a couple of friendly cows.

I found several of the park's artworks quite easily, like "Jump," a mosaic bench by Norma Vondee (above)...

...and some bright handmade tiles lining the paths of a wildlife garden...

...and a bench featuring a giant carved lizard.

But I could not, could not, find those darn fish! I wandered every path, ventured out on a boardwalk into a forest, and walked out to the center of the filter beds -- which used to be a huge natural filtration system for London's drinking water, and now consists of a series of ponds. The ponds are screened from the path by wooden walls, and visitors have to open little cabinet doors in the walls to peer out into the ponds. (I think this is meant to keep wildlife from being frightened away, but it seems a bit fussy and unnecessary.) I opened a few doors at random and found no fish sculptures.

I began to wonder, have any human beings ever actually seen these fish? Are they so magical they are invisible and/or imaginary?

But no -- I'd seen photos on Flickr. I knew they physically existed.

I walked back to the visitors center and asked a woman behind the counter where I could find the Magic Fish. To my surprise, she directed me back to the location where they used to be, along the Capital Ring. She handed me a clearly outdated map that showed them in that location, too. I told her I was certain they'd been moved from there. "Oh, they never tell us anything!" she said. (I wasn't sure who "they" were. Presumably whoever's in charge at WaterWorks.)

She got someone on the phone who apparently knew the fish had been relocated, and eventually I was directed back to the filter beds and told how I could find them -- go to the middle, turn right and open the second set of little wooden doors overlooking the pond.

I did so, and -- although it turns out a left turn was necessary, not a right -- I finally found "Rise and Shine Magic Fish."

This probably isn't the best time of the year to see them, because the pond is waterless and they're peering up out of a field of dry grass.

But at least I got a sense of what they're supposed to look like.

You can see pictures online of them at a wetter time of year, when their fishiness is more apparent.

Good grief! What an odyssey! Hopefully, if anyone is interested in finding "Rise and Shine Magic Fish" in the future, they'll read this blog post first.

Harpenden

A few weeks ago, when I first wrote about taking foxglove seedlings to some of my co-workers, blog commenter Frances said, "If you would like to come to Harpenden....easy on the train and Olga would be welcome....I would love some foxglove seedlings!"

Operating on my general principle that I will happily go anywhere I have never been before, I took her up on the challenge. Yesterday morning I hopped a train in West Hampstead and rode 15 minutes or so north to Harpenden, a town in Hertfordshire.

I took Olga with me, as well as eight foxglove seedlings, and Frances met us at the train station with her schnauzer, Alexi.

Olga was fired up at being somewhere new, and was about to pull my arm out of the socket, so we went to nearby Rothamsted Park where I could let her off the leash to chase her Kong and blow off some steam. We admired the stately avenue of lime trees planted by Sir John Bennet Lawes, a Victorian agricultural scientist who founded a nearby farming research center that not only still operates but is apparently quite famous.

We also visited the churchyard of the local Anglican church, where Olga did her best to catch some Harpenden squirrels. Just like London squirrels, they're way too fast for her.

(Alexi, meanwhile, was being much better behaved and seemed content to stay by Frances' side.)

On the Harpenden high street, with its many small parks and green spaces, we found this exhausted and possibly narcoleptic bulldog in front of a cafe. It didn't even stir while I took its picture.

We looked for a place to have a drink. Olga had a suggestion...

...but alas, the Mad Squirrel didn't appear to be open.

Instead we went to the Cross Keys pub, which has a little beer garden in the back. I had a pint. (Hey, it was noon! Almost!)

Frances and I talked about our families and compared notes on other blogs we read (we have several in common). Frances doesn't write a blog herself but she's a regular reader, which is great -- it seems fairly rare to meet blog readers who aren't also writers!

Then I headed back to London, in time for a late lunch with Dave, and spent the afternoon on household tasks. I still haven't planted our own foxgloves. Frances said she's going to put hers in pots to grow on before transplanting to the garden later. I may do the same. They still seem awfully small to simply surrender them to nature now.

In the evening, Dave and I continued watching "Top of the Lake," a Netflix series set in New Zealand and produced by Jane Campion (of "The Piano" fame). I'm really enjoying that series. It's got great atmosphere -- a dark plot set against the grey skies and mountainous wintry landscapes of New Zealand's South Island. Check it out if you haven't already!