Wine Zoo

Animals, animals, animals...I really am on a roll here.

So what about animals on wine labels? I'm a sucker for interesting wine labels. These are all examples of wines we've recently bought. My favorite was the Chat-en-Oeuf, a dry rose that sells for only about £5 at the supermarket.

These others were good, too.


Flaxbourne, from New Zealand (Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand is always reliable)


Porcupine Ridge, from South Africa (with art by South African wildlife artist Zakkie Eloff)


Southern Right, also from South Africa

An Architectural Ode to Cats

Here's a peculiar building I came across last week. It's called Greater London House, and it's a brightly-accented Art Deco behemoth decorated with, of all things, cats.

Two cats flank the front door:


And up near the roof, medallions feature black cats peering out at the street:




Turns out this is the former Carreras Cigarette Factory, built in 1926-28 in a style known as Egyptian Revival. (Hence the cats, although those black cat medallions look less like Egyptian felines and more like my childhood cat, which I tried to name Midnight but my family insisted on calling Black Kitty.)

The building now houses offices, and although it was stripped of its original Egyptian detailing in the early 1960s, the ornamentation was restored in a renovation slightly more than ten years ago. For details about the architecture, here's the Wikipedia page for Greater London House.

Elephant & Castle

To continue our recent zoological theme -- we've had posts about goats, cats and fish -- let's move on to elephants.

The end of the Bakerloo Line, one of the tube lines in London, is a stop called Elephant & Castle. When I visited London as a tourist I used to stay at a hotel near a Bakerloo stop, so I often rode that train and heard Elephant & Castle announced as its ultimate destination. It became a sort of mythical place in my mind. What does it look like? Are there elephants? Are there castles?

Yesterday I decided to solve the mystery. So I rode the Bakerloo line to its southern terminus, and was surprised to find there are, in fact, a few elephants hanging around.

The tube stop is near a downtrodden mall called the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre -- that's its sign up above. There's also a large new building nearby called Strata, topped by three wind turbines and justifiably nicknamed The Electric Razor. The development company leasing out this building uses an elephant as its insignia:


And then there are the arches over the tube entrances -- which here say "subway," a word I rarely see in London:


The Wikipedia entry about Elephant & Castle includes some theories about the source of the name, which apparently dates to the 1700s. The area was a trade center for knife-making, and the knife-makers, or cutlers, used an image of an elephant and castle because elephant ivory was used for handles. The castle might actually be a howdah, a carriage mounted on the back of elephants in India.

There's also a suggestion the phrase is a corruption of "La Infanta de Castilla," which could refer to any of several Spanish princesses connected to English royalty. If true, I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate that over time they've gone from being infantas to elephants.


After checking out the scene, I decided to walk toward home. I wound up walking all six miles back to Notting Hill (map above), running a few errands along the way. It was beautiful weather and I had a great day!

Goat

I couldn't resist a few more photos of the Goat of the Empire at the Spitalfields Market. (That's my name for it. The statue's real name is "I Goat," by Kenny Hunter. Kind of like "I, Claudius," I suppose?)

You may remember that I first posted him at the end of July, just after we moved into our new place. But when I went back to Spitalfields this week I was struck by the way the light illuminated just his head -- like a spotlight for the noble star that he is. Later in the afternoon, when the light had changed, his reflection seemed equally impressive.


I dig this statue.

Wabi & Sabi

Allow me to introduce Wabi and Sabi.

As I walked home on Portobello Road on Friday after one of my photography excursions, I browsed through the detritus at the outdoor flea market. I wasn't looking for anything; I was just killing time and seeing what was available.


However, Dave and I had been bothered by a blank spot in our living room, next to the fireplace. We want to avoid clutter, but at the same time, that area was just too white, too bare. We wanted a fairly tall object for the shape of the space. When I saw these two cats for sale at the flea market -- the largest about 2 1/2 feet tall -- I immediately thought, "They're perfect!"

I paid £10 for them -- about $15 -- and brought them home.



I really thought Dave might hate them. But to my surprise, he approved enthusiastically. We both like their weathered imperfections. I think they may have been decor in some public establishment, like a restaurant, based on the amount of damage they've sustained. It's entirely possible the flea market guy got them out of the trash somewhere.

Dave wanted to name them. We tossed around a couple of options, but when I said I liked their wabi-sabi type of beauty, Dave said, "That's it!" So now we have Wabi and Sabi.

Wabi-sabi, as you may know, is a Japanese aesthetic concept that relates to an object's imperfection and transience. It's seeing beauty in the wear and tear inflicted by everyday life. Or, as Wikipedia puts it: "Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs."

I can't think of better names!

Fish Pedicure

And now for something completely different, as the guys in Monty Python used to say.

Dave and I went to see a movie ("The Inbetweeners") on Saturday afternoon. We walked over to a shopping center on Queensway called Whiteleys, which isn't far from our apartment, and once there we had a little time to kill. So we walked around the mall and came across a curious kiosk called "X Feet," which consisted of benches set up above several aquariums full of fish.

Turns out, these fish actually eat the dead skin off your feet. For about £1 per minute, you sit on the bench with your feet in the aquarium, and those little suckers eagerly swarm all over them. We had to try it!

Here's Dave giving it a go:

And here's my experience:

The fish, called Garra rufa, are apparently from Turkey, where they're used in this treatment. (The attendant at the booth said there's even a full-body option offered in Turkey, but I think I'll pass on that.) It was amazing how the fish zeroed in on our feet. They were not swimming lazily about. They were hungry.

It felt kind of good, but mostly just weird. Kind of tingly, like my feet had fallen asleep and were just regaining circulation. I can't imagine those tiny fish had any real effect on my skin, at least not in the 10 minutes I paid for, but it was an interesting experience and oddly relaxing.

Mourning a Neighbor

Almost immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, this flier appeared on walls in my neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. While lower Manhattan was virtually wallpapered with fliers of the missing after that horrible day, very few people bothered to post fliers uptown. So this one stood out, especially with its headline, "Missing neighbor."

I didn't know Gregory James Trost, who was 26 when he died. As far as I know I never saw him on the sidewalk or in the grocery store. But the flier brought home the seemingly obvious fact that people who lived next door to me, or down the street, or who went to my dry cleaner or gym, were among the dead of 9/11. My neighbors.

Trost worked as an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette and Woods, an investment firm on the 89th floor of the South Tower -- just above the floors hit by United Airlines flight 175.

He became a sort of totem for me, a way to mourn, to have a connection. Having read so many peculiarly intimate details of his life on the poster -- his size 11 shoes, his scarred leg, his black onyx ring -- I even felt like he'd become something of an acquaintance. I was 34 when 9/11 occurred, and it seemed incredible that someone eight years younger than me could have died.

The New York Times wrote brief profiles of each 9/11 victim and ran them during the following year. Trost's profile called him a "human jukebox" who knew the words to a wide range of songs and performed silly dances at parties.

"He had a sense of humor that set the gauge for everyone else," Jeanne Trost, his younger sister, told the paper. "What he found funny, it somehow always became funny."

I see now that Trost's family has organized a golf outing and reception to raise money for a scholarship in his name at the New York high school he attended. The web site for the event includes a profile of Trost here.

As for me, whenever I pass a 9/11 memorial, I'll continue to take a minute to find the name of Gregory James Trost, my forever-missing neighbor.